IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:
Another Babylon Bee prophecy fulfilled. pic.twitter.com/kUyxzFp9Rz
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) July 8, 2024
Archive for 2024
July 8, 2024
A LESS-THAN-EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Low-intensity explosion caused Russian satellite to spew debris.
JIM GERAGHTY: The Biden Family Tries the Ralph Northam Strategy.
Every now and then, some elected official gets caught in a serious scandal and then attempts to just wait out the storm. Sometimes they hang on because enough time passes between the revelation and their next election; sometimes they hang on because their state or district strongly prefers one party over the other; and often they survive because they’re incumbents who have been around forever, know where all the bodies are buried, and bring home the bacon. Think of Ted Kennedy, John Murtha, Barney Frank, David Vitter, or Charlie Rangel. Idaho GOP senator Larry Craig rescinded his resignation and finished out his term.
And in my home state, we had the egregious embarrassment of former governor Ralph Northam. As I wrote at the end of Northam’s term:
It’s no big mystery how Northam remained in office. If Northam had resigned or the state legislature removed him from office, the lieutenant governor would take over – and the lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was facing two serious accusations of sexual assault. (The Virginia House Democratic Caucus argued that “the allegations against Lieutenant Governor Fairfax are extremely serious,” and also that the state legislature should not investigate the allegations.) If Northam and Fairfax resigned, then state attorney general Mark Herring would be governor — and Herring admitted he had worn blackface to a college party in 1980.
If Northam, Fairfax, and Herring had all resigned simultaneously, then the speaker of the House of Delegates at that time — Republican Kirk Cox — would become governor. And Virginia Democrats believed that a Republican governor was much worse than blackface, wearing a Klan hood, or allegations of past sexual assault.
We are witnessing the Biden inner-circle attempt the Ralph Northam maneuver. Sure, the president had an abysmal debate, didn’t do a sit-down on-camera interview until a week later, and his staff is telling radio interviewers what questions to ask. But Biden has all the delegates he needs to stay the party’s nominee in 2024, and it’s exceptionally difficult to remove a president who doesn’t want to leave office. Eric Felten contended in the Wall Street Journal last week that the current circumstances are proving that the 25th Amendment “is practically useless when a president is incapacitated and won’t admit it. . . . Cabinet secretaries are chosen by the president and serve at his pleasure. What politician is going to kick to the curb the man who gave him his high office?”
Ralph Northam was a Democrat governor, whose party, as Geraghty wrote above, decided was the least worst choice of all their options. So it was relatively easy for his state’s media to simply go to ground shortly after the scandal around him broke. The implications of a single state’s media being in the tank for him weren’t as noticeable to the general public as the blob of journalists who cover Capitol Hill. Or as Victor Davis Hanson writes:
Biden’s dementia has become so overt and so impossible to hide that the entire “crooked deal” has blown up. As a result, in the eleventh hour, there are very few pathways to salvation—as there never are when everything is birthed on a lie and its media-assisted cover-up.
Bidengate is far worse than Watergate. The media this time around was not exposing the wrongdoing of a conservative president but instead serving as a force multiplier in deceiving the very American people it was supposed to inform. “Democracy Dies in Deceit” is now the Washington Post’s de facto motto.
Remember, the left is worried only that Biden is so challenged that he cannot win an election. But they are not bothered that he has no business continuing in his dementia as commander-in-chief and putting the country in real danger each day he occupies the oval office—a bitter paradox that is beginning to infuriate the American people.
So, can Joe Biden just press ahead, sleep more, and fulfill his Faustian obligations? Or is he not in a doom loop? The more he rests, sleeps, and avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate, one-quarter president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, interviews, press conferences, debates and town halls, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent to the public. So, his handlers haggle over the choice between an ensconced virtual president versus an all-too-real, obviously senile one.
Earlier: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
EDITH WILSON INSTRUCTS HER OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Angry First Lady Jill Biden Rebukes a Reporter for Asking a Simple Question.
Dems get 10 seconds of adversarial media coverage and immediately crack under the pressure lol https://t.co/5CC7DREQr3
— Michael Duncan (@MichaelDuncan) July 8, 2024
“Screaming?” That’s not exactly the sort of “What about your GAFFES!!!!!!” DNC-MSM freakout that Romney received in 2012:
‘NO ONE IS PICKING UP THE PHONE:’ Joe Biden’s fundraising confronts new hurdles after debate.
President Joe Biden’s fundraising operation started showing cracks in its once formidable armor, almost 10 days after his disastrous presidential debate performance.
Some of Biden’s campaign bundlers have stopped making calls to potential donors since the June 27 debate, according to people familiar with the matter.
“No one is picking up the phone,” said a well-connected Democratic fundraiser, who raises money for Biden and the Democratic Party. This person and others were granted anonymity in order to speak openly about private conversations on a sensitive topic.
A few of his bundlers are limiting their outreach to people in their personal fundraising networks, after they either received no response at all to asks, or else they received furious replies from people who questioned why they should give money to Biden after his substandard debate performance, according to people familiar with the matter.
I’m not sure what the problem is, when CNBC assured me last Sunday that the issue with Biden was: ‘Preparation overload:’ Democrats defend Biden after debate flop as voter support flinches.
NEW FROM PJMEDIA: Be sure and check out “The Intersection of Faith & Politics,” with PJMedia Editor-in-Chief Paula Bolyard and writer Lincoln Brown. Paula and Lincoln will be probing all of the sundry issues suggested by the title and much more, beginning Wednesday, July 10.
MATT TAIBBI: Details On the Proposed “Blitz Primary:” The oddest primary season in modern times may take an even stranger turn, as calls for Joe Biden to step down as presumptive Democratic nominee grow louder. “This story is happening so quickly it defies analysis, but this crisis has a clear Gilbert Gottfried death-or-Ugu type of vibe to it for Democrats. If Biden insists on staying in the race, as he seems determined to do, he’ll be automatically in conflict with a growing roster of elected Democrats who’ve called for his ouster. If he does change his mind, insiders seem set on fashioning a nomination process that would only include Democratic voters in an ominously indirect way. A ‘blitz primary’ in which celebrities like Taylor Swift and Stephen Colbert engage in ‘positive only’ banter with candidates chosen by Biden delegates could permanently saddle Democrats with an entertainingly hideous celebrity-and-insider template for a voterless nomination process. Either that, or such a gambit could be a brilliant means of gobbling enough public attention to turn disaster into PR triumph just in time for the Republican convention. Either way, we’ll find the plan out soon.”
I’VE READ ALL 480 PAGES SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO: Fauci’s Master Class in Deception. Some excerpts of my book review in the Wall Street Journal:
At the end of his memoir, “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” Anthony Fauci laments: “We are living in an era in which information that is patently untrue gets repeated enough times that it becomes part of our everyday dialogue and starts to sound true.” He’s right about that, and he has inadvertently produced a 480-page master class in how to get away with it.
The memoir chronicles Dr. Fauci’s rise in Washington from an obscure researcher to his fame during the Covid-19 pandemic, when he became, as he writes, a “hero to the millions of Americans who saw me as a physician bravely standing up for science, truth, and rational decision-making.” This image bore no relation to reality, given the evidence that the lockdowns and school closures accomplished little or nothing while causing unprecedented social and economic damage.
So how did Dr. Fauci spin it into a personal triumph? The memoir chronicles the development of his techniques. He tells how, after becoming director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1984, one of his first “crucial lessons” was “how important it was to cultivate relationships with people who are in a position to make things happen.” These people included politicians in the White House and the Capitol, activists demanding bigger budgets, and, especially, journalists eager for stories that would terrify their audiences.
In the memoir, Fauci proudly details the budget increases he received as a result of the false alarms he helped spread: the AIDS “heterosexual breakout,” the bioterrorism attack on America supposedly imminent after 9/11, the doomsday pandemics of bird flu and swine that never arrived.
He went on seeking more funding to prepare for a future catastrophic flu pandemic, a threat he considered so dire that it justified “generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” as he argued in a 2011 article in the Washington Post.
In retrospect, given the mounting evidence that Covid-19 was created by just that sort of gain-of-function research in China, does Dr. Fauci have any second thoughts about advocating such a risky endeavor? None worth mentioning in this memoir. In dismissing the “smear campaign” to link him to a lab-created virus, he ignores the obvious possibility that the Wuhan virologists exploited knowledge acquired in the lab’s previous bat-virus research funded by his agency.
Nor does he regret his pandemic guidance, despite the vast collateral damage of lockdowns and the evidence that nations and U.S. states that shunned Dr. Fauci’s advice fared as well or better than the ones that locked down. Sweden experienced one of the lowest rates of excess mortality in Europe while keeping businesses and schools open and urging its citizens not to wear masks. Nowhere in Dr. Fauci’s memoir is there a mention of Sweden or other such counter-evidence.
The glaring omissions confirm the criticisms of Dr. Fauci in Dr. Scott Atlas’s pandemic memoir, A Plague Upon Our House.
At the White House Coronavirus Task Force meetings, Dr. Atlas recounts, Dr. Fauci never presented scientific evidence in favor of his policies, refused to respond to the contrary evidence that Dr. Atlas presented, and never considered the collateral damage from the policies.
In fall 2020 there was ample evidence that schools could reopen safely, but Dr. Fauci kept offering reasons to keep them closed. When Dr. Atlas argued that Americans were irrationally frightened, he writes, Dr. Fauci replied: “They need to be more afraid.” Dr. Fauci’s determination to panic the public astounded Dr. Atlas, but it’s understandable after reading “On Call.” For Anthony Fauci, fearmongering was always an excellent career move.
And never mind at what cost to everyone else.
AMERICA SIGHS IN RELIEF, AT LEAST THE PARTS OF IT THAT AREN’T ASKING “WHO?” Whitmer: I’m Out. “Gretchen Whitmer–the decidedly ‘meh’ Governor of Michigan, has been one of the favorites for donors and political insiders for the nominee of the Democrat Party should President Biden step down or be forced out of the race. Early on in the post-debate saga, she was clearly angling for the job, but as the Biden Crime Family run by the triumvirate of Joe, Jill, and Hunter made clear that Slow Joe wasn’t leaving, she has begun to backtrack. Now she is shutting down the speculation that she is open to the job, although there has been no Shermanesque ‘If nominated I will not run’ pronouncement.”
LIMITED TIME DEAL: EF ECOFLOW Portable Power Station DELTA 2. #CommissionEarned
HMM: 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning XLT Long-Term Verdict: Right Truck; Bit Early. “Our 2023 Ford F-150 Lightning XLT yearlong test truck might just have landed a year or two early here in the nation’s midsection. As it was, Tesla’s Supercharger network opened to Ford vehicles just before our truck left us. Perhaps having access to 15,000 additional (vastly more reliable) chargers might have eased the substantial pain of road-tripping.”
DANGEROUS ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC. WE CAN AND MUST DO BETTER THAN THIS, TEAM BIDEN:
Old enough to remember when politicians talking about “targets” and the like were called extremists inciting violence https://t.co/3JsOubRd57
— Sunny (@sunnyright) July 8, 2024
Flashback to January 2011: Sarah Palin’s ‘Crosshairs’ Ad Dominates Gabrielle Giffords Debate.
Crosshairs is a political phrase that emerged from Palin’s political action committee SarahPac that targeted congressional districts for the Tea Party campaign in the last election, including the district of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Although Palin later denied she meant the graphic over the districts to look like a gun sight, it is part of the hunting lexicon that critics say she prefers.
Comedian Frank Conniff tweeted: “Hey, Sarah Palin, hows that hatey, killy, reloady, crosshairsy thing working out for ya?”
Facebook executive Randi Zuckerberg said many people on the social networking site are asking whether Sarah Palin is to blame.
According to Zuckerberg that is the #1 question on the social network behemoth following the Tucson shooting.
Like so much with Palin, the roots are on Facebook. On her Facebook page last year when she posted the a map of 20 congressional districts targeted by SarahPac, the headline of the map: “It’s time to take a stand.”
At the time Giffords reacted to the map in an interview on a cable news program.
“When people do that, they’ve got to realize there are consequences to that action,” Giffords said.
I eagerly await ABC News’ similar attack on Biden for using similar rhetoric.
STEVEN MALANGA: Biden’s effort to use pandemic failures as a weapon against Donald Trump risks reminding voters of how much they dislike the president’s own policies.
In retrospect, what’s striking is how quickly Biden’s credibility on Covid eroded. When he took office, his favorable rating on Covid policy stood at a robust +27 points, according to YouGov’s historical polling data; just a year later, in January 2022, that figure stood at –12 points. By then, many Americans had grown weary of lockdowns and enraged by continued school closures as evidence mounted that they were unnecessary and harmful. Migration data showed a huge upswing in Americans moving from locked-down Democratic states to reopened-and-thriving Republican states. The press increasingly referred to a “post-pandemic” America even as Biden kept wearing his mask. Covid rapidly receded as an electoral issue.
Perhaps more significantly, as Covid faded into the background, voters’ perception of Biden on other matters soured. By September 2022, polls rated the president’s performance on a dozen issues—including the economy, education, foreign policy, government spending, immigration, and crime—even lower than his work on Covid. This may tell us something about why his campaign wants to talk about the virus again.
Biden’s latest gambit seems an exercise in wistfulness by his campaign, which managed to pull off an election victory that seemed unlikely early in 2020 thanks to a once-in-a-lifetime crisis. The Biden campaign is counting on Trump to ignore its attacks because what the former president once touted as his biggest Covid success—the fast-track campaign to develop and approve vaccines—is now regarded with much more public skepticism, something he doesn’t want voters to remember as they cast their ballots this fall. Even so, stressing how bad pandemic life was under Trump may serve only to remind voters of how much they’ve despised Biden’s Covid sequel.
Not least of which, this showstopper from Biden’s former chief of staff: White House Christmas message to unvaccinated: You’re looking at a winter of death for yourselves and your families:
From earlier in December of 2021: Biden’s Chief of Staff Can’t Stop Embarrassing Himself On Twitter:
The president’s chief of staff is arguably the most demanding job inside any White House. President Joe Biden’s top staffer, Ron Klain, isn’t making things easier for himself lately with the absurd things he’s posting on Twitter.
Klain is what we can only call a Very Online person. He is constantly tweeting and sharing other people’s posts to his half-million followers in an incessant effort to cheerlead for his boss and the Democratic Party more broadly. While this is the role of any outward-facing political staffer, Klain is taking his shilling so far that he’s now just making embarrassing public statements on the regular.
For example, Klain recently tweeted that “America is back at work” alongside this graph, which shows the opposite.
The Biden staffer boosted the graph hoping to show that the labor force participation rate, the percentage of people working or seeking work, is back to normal after the pandemic. Yet it actually shows that it’s still significantly below pre-pandemic levels, even a year and nine months later. Anyone with eyes can clearly see this.
In actuality, we are 8.2 million jobs below the pre-pandemic trend, according to economist Aaron Sojourner. So much for America being “back at work.”
But hey, Barry sent Joe to Detroit to fix things during the pandemic. Problem solved!
Joe Biden says he was Vice President during covid and President Obama sent him to Detroit to fix it. His brain is mush. I don’t even know what he could be trying to say here: pic.twitter.com/xHE9Ln4ypn
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 20, 2024
OUT ON A LIMB: Europe Doesn’t Want to Be Saved.
Keir Starmer is the new far-left prime minister, and oddly enough, his plan to release tens of thousands of criminals didn’t make it into the platform he ran on. Couple that with continued mass migration of Islamists, and you can guess how things are going to turn out long term. As bad as things have been in the United Kingdom over the last decade, the decline will accelerate.
Then there’s the French. After a surprise first round elevated the right-wing National Rally Party, the country’s far-left, from Emmanual Macron to the literal communists, colluded to win the second round. That included pushing hundreds of candidates to strategically drop out of their races to ensure the left wing held enough seats to form a coalition. French voters happily played along.
As in the UK, the results were predictable. Win or lose, there were going to be riots because that’s what European leftists do, with Palestinian flags marking the pro-migration messaging.
I wish I could say there’s hope for Western Europe, but the sad reality is that Europeans don’t want to be saved. These elections weren’t rigged. Voters chose this path, and now they are going to get the consequences good and hard.
Mark Steyn adds: Always the ‘Far Right’ Bridesmaid…
It is the same conundrum for Mme Le Pen and Geert Wilders: as unwinnable as French and Dutch cities are now, they will be even more unwinnable half-a-decade hence – when there will be even more “university students” like Mlle Bennani, and the establishment will still be urging us to unite even more unitedly against the scourge of hijab-grabbing.
So the “far right” will continue to make “historic gains” that are never quite historic enough. Because as I wrote on Friday our rulers have decided that no changes to anything that matters can be permitted.
Many years ago, the late Martin Amis put my demographic thesis to the then British prime minister:
When I interviewed Tony Blair earlier this year I asked him if continental demographics had yet become ‘a European conversation’. He said: ‘It’s a subterranean conversation.’ And we know what that means. The ethos of relativism finds the demographic question so saturated in revulsions that it is rendered undiscussable.
And, like that BBC reporter on the streets of Saint-Denis, that’s how they intend to keep it.
Flashback: “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”
UPDATE: French Election Upset Should Remind Republicans They Can’t Afford To Be Complacent.
More:
Excitement Builds For First Olympic Games Held In Muslim Country https://t.co/c8Wgiqmm9s pic.twitter.com/G7jdxLhxfl
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 8, 2024
POSTED ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT YOU REQUIRE MORE CONFIRMATION THAT AMERICA’S ELITES ARE ANYTHING BUT:
Whoopi Goldberg says she would still vote for Biden even if he poops his pants and can’t put a sentence together because she also has “poopy days” pic.twitter.com/zHETuC2WAG
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 8, 2024
The punchlines almost write themselves and the replies on X are full of them.
UPDATE (From Ed):
Never forget that Whoopi Goldberg wanted Jill Biden to become the Surgeon General because she thought she was a real Doctor.
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 8, 2024
IT’S A SMALL STORY WITH BIG IMPLICATIONS: Guess What Happened to That Radio Host Who Revealed White House Gave Her the Questions…
BIOSPHERE III: Scientists re-emerge after a year in Mars simulation project. “The mission was the first in a series called Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA). Its goal is to help NASA prepare to send humans back to the moon and, one day, to Mars.”
If they wait a little while longer, NASA could just ask the folks living in Elon City.
PRIME EXCLUSIVE DEAL: Callaway Golf 300 Pro Laser Rangefinder. #CommisisonEarned
BIDEN’S WHITE HOUSE STAFF BIGGEST SINCE NIXON:Yes, even bigger than that of the man under whom Joe Biden served as Vice-President. And Jill Biden’s staff is just as big as Michelle Obama’s bunch. Maybe Biden always seems confused because he’s got 565 bosses? It’s my latest column on PJMedia.
RIOT WHEN THEY LOSE, RIOT WHEN THEY WIN: French elections: Riots erupt after left-wing coalition projected to win plurality of seats.
ANTI-SEMITISM IN HIGHER ED IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM… but the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” is unconstitutional.