Archive for 2022

OPEN THREAD: What’s your take on things?

DEAD DEMOCRATS HAVE PROGRESSED FROM BEING VOTERS TO ACTUAL POLITICIANS! Deceased State Rep. Tony DeLuca Reelected in PA Month After Death.

Related: Question asked and answered by Stacy McCain: “What kind of people would elect John Fetterman? Short answer: The kind of people who live in Philadelphia, a city that has become America’s Mos Eisley, a ‘wretched hive of scum and villainy.'”

But what’s next for Fetterman? The sky’s the limit!

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Delivers Clueless Response to Voters and Midterm Results:

Notice how suddenly there doesn’t seem to be a threat to “democracy” anymore? Funny how that works.

As noted above, we don’t know yet for certain, but it looks like the Republicans could win both the House and the Senate. You can see the predictions at the bottom of the chyron with 51 in the Senate and 218 in the House. We’ll have to see how it continues to shake out.

So did Biden take away anything to learn? A reporter asked him about the one thing everyone seemed to agree on: the wrong direction of the country under him. Biden’s response showed he wasn’t even pretending to have learned anything.

Reporter: “75% of people say the country is heading in the wrong direction. What do you intend to do differently?”

Biden: “Nothing because they’re just finding out what we’re doing.”

How horrible is that answer? He’s unabashedly going to continue along the disastrous path he’s been following.

Americans who voted for Democrats or who were fooled into believing Biden had achieved something by his sleight-of-hand tricks over oil and gas are about to get a rude awakening. Prepare for the oil and gas prices now to start going back up once the releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve stop. The railroad strike Biden put off? That may hit now in December, in the holiday season. On top of all that, here comes the diesel shortage as well. Prepare for all that, because it’s coming.

The grinding down of the middle class will continue until morale improves.

More from Biden’s press conference: Nasty Deranged Tyrant Joe Biden Promises to Use the Government To Go After His Political Enemies, Such as Elon Musk, “In a Lot of Ways,” Eyes Twinkling Maliciously. “As he vowed: Democracy was on the ballot. And democracy lost. Now it’s time for fascism.”

JOEL KOTKIN: The Democrats’ false victory: A progressive bloodbath has merely been delayed. “For all their cautious optimism yesterday, a mild Midterms victory may prove the last thing the Democrats need. If they had performed as predicted, the Democrats and their media adjuncts would now be busily dissecting their defeat. But what has to be considered a lost Republican opportunity — gaining little in a country where lifespans are now dropping — also means that the Democrats will be slower to address their weaknesses, and may be forced to accept the unpopular Joe Biden as their leader in 2024.”

I’M PRETTY SURE I SAW CRIMSON HELLSCAPE OPEN FOR OZZY AT THE PHILADELPHIA SPECTRUM IN 1985: Christina Pushaw points and laughs at South Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial on Florida’s new ‘crimson hellscape.’

Nice knowing you, Florida.

After Tuesday’s stunning election results, the state’s political transformation is now nearly complete, from deep purple battleground to crimson hellscape, an ideal launch pad for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential aspirations. We now await a second-term agenda that may feature an open-carry gun law, tighter abortion restrictions, new strategies to suppress the vote and more charter flights for out-of-state migrants, presented with even more of the governor’s trademark hubris.

And who can blame him? DeSantis’ 19-point blowout victory was historic and nothing short of astounding. Best of all for him, he’s not Donald Trump.

He carried 62 of 67 counties, including Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, leaving Broward isolated as a blue island surrounded by red. Besides Broward, the only counties that Democrat Charlie Crist carried were Orange and the medium-sized trio of Alachua, Gadsden and Leon, a sea of red reflecting an epic Democratic collapse.

They’ve since changed it “crimson landscape,” but the original sounds much more metal.

#JOURNALISM: A friend writes:

Curtis Sliwa’s coverage of this election from his perch at WABC-Radio illustrates a couple of things:

1. That age, experience, and knowledge of history MATTER….deeply
and that

2. What they **used to** preach at Columbia J School is so true: You have to GO THERE. You have to see everything from ground level, you have to walk the streets, you have to wear out your shoes, you have to keep your eyes and ears open.

Sliwa, aged 68 (and 3/4), is the only talking head I know of who was skeptical of a Zeldin victory and his analysis this morning outlining how he arrived at that prediction is full of concrete, ground-level anecdote and knowledge of New York gubnatorial races past.

To any one I know who’s “getting up there” or is “up there” and worrying that you are irrelevant: The eternal verities ARE the eternal verities. Krime Wave Kathy Hockum won, he says, because she salted money all over upstate and then brought a ferocious old-fashioned, door-knocking ground game to “hipster millenial” (Curtis’s term) neighborhoods in Brooklyn. He saw both of these strategies in action with his own eyes because he’s not afraid of hard work and because he’s insatiably curious. His body is a wreck. He still lives with the effects of being hit in the gut at close range by a Mafioso’s exploding bullet, but he is driven by his soul.

So do not be intimidated. OWN your time on the planet with the arrogance it deserves. Sliwa does everything with a “listen to me” swagger and he gets so much air time at top-rated WABC that he jokes “ABC” stands for “Always Broadcasting Curtis.” They’ve ceded him so much air time because of predictions like this.

And, well, don’t get cocky.

Related: Salena Zito: Trump’s shadow loomed over Pennsylvania’s Republican bloodbath. She, too, actually talks to people.

DON SURBER: Life after Trump. “Dr. Oz showed how it went with Trump. That’s how poisonous he has become in purple America. We, his fans, see the good in him and the evil in his enemies. But the majority doesn’t and never will. It is a sale that cannot be made. There will be no second term from The Donald. It breaks my heart to see this. I wrote three books on the man. Looking for someone else — likely DeSantis — will cost me readers. As I said about the covid vaccine, you do you. But Trump failed. He cost America the red tsunami we need to rein in Democrats.”

ROD DREHER: The Red Wave That Wasn’t.

To the MAGA diehards, I say: is this really what you want? A Republican Party that can’t decisively whip the Democrats even in an extremely favorable year? Because this is what you are going to get if you keep sticking with Trump. Like it or not, a lot of independents just hate the guy, and that’s never going to change. Conservatives like me would vote for him in 2024 just to keep the Democrats out of office, but in that case I would vote knowing I was checking the box for a big mouth who won’t get much done, because whereas Ron DeSantis would actually govern, Trump would do nothing but preen and talk about himself.

But as Stuckey and Walsh say, the normie Republican Party doesn’t give people much reason to vote for it, other than its not being Democratic. That’s enough for a lot of us, but not enough to win big, and certainly not enough to deserve victory.

The future of American political conservatism is Ron DeSantis, J.D. Vance, and National Conservative-style Republicans like them. Not MAGA. Not the Bulwark sad remnants of the pre-Trump GOP establishment.

I’ll update this as we get news about Georgia and Arizona. Hoping hard for Blake Masters and Kari Lake wins. Hey, at least we no longer have to hear from terminal losers Stacy Abrams and Beto O’Rourke again.

As Steve writes in his requiem for Trump’s political future in his column for PJ Media VIP readers: So Long, and Thanks for All the Judges.