PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: Dear readers: Please stop calling us ‘the media.’ There is no such thing.

Folks, I know a lot of you don’t like the people who work in my chosen profession, the news business. I’m aware you think we’re lazy and unfair (yes, I got your emails and tweets on this topic — a few thousand of them). Of course, I disagree with you. I know a lot of fine people in the newsgathering arts and sciences. But that’s not why I’m writing.

I’m writing because I have a request: Please stop calling us “the media.”

Yes, in some sense, we are the media. But not in the blunt way you use the phrase. It’s so imprecise and generic that it has lost any meaning. It’s — how would you put this? — lazy and unfair.

As I understand your use of this term, “the media” is essentially shorthand for anything you read, saw or heard today that you disagreed with or didn’t like. At any given moment, “the media” is biased against your candidate, your issue, your very way of life.

But, you know, the media isn’t really doing that. Some article, some news report, some guy spouting off on a CNN panel or at CrankyCrackpot.com might be. But none of those things singularly are really the media.

Fact is, there really is no such thing as “the media.” It’s an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can’t be bothered to make distinctions.

—Paul Farhi, the Washington Post, September 23^rd, 2016.

Chaser: The Media Are Getting Easier to Push Around.

—Paul Farhi, The Atlantic, today.

DISPATCHES FROM THE HOUSE OF STEPHANOPOULOS: Rep. Nancy Mace bashes ABC anchor for rape-shaming her over Trump support in fiery interview.

Rep. Nancy Mace scolded ABC host George Stephanopoulos and accused him of rape-shaming her during a fiery exchange about allegations against former President Donald Trump.

Stephanopoulos grilled Mace (R-SC) about how she could back Trump despite a jury finding him liable for sexual assault against advice columnist E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her.

“I was raped at the age of 16. And any rape victim will tell you I’ve lived for 30 years with an incredible amount of shame over being raped,” Mace began on ABC’s “This Week.”

“It’s a shame that you will never feel, George. And I’m not going to sit here on your show and be asked a question meant to shame me about another potential rape victim. I’m not gonna do that.”

Stephanopoulos countered that “it’s actually not about shaming you,” and said he was trying to understand why she endorsed Trump despite the allegations against him.

Does George Stephanopoulos realize that he’s George Stephanopoulos? “The little guy cut his teeth managing ‘bimbo eruptions’ when Bill Clinton was running for president. His job was to destroy and discredit anyone who could make his boss look bad. (Good thing for Monica Lewinsky’s sake that her scandal broke after Georgie left.)”

SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: AOC’s hypocrisy exposed in viral video.

In fact, Ocasio-Cortez is such a fan of aggressive protest tactics that she was even arrested in 2022 while she participated in a protest that blocked the street in front of the Supreme Court amid outrage over the court’s abortion rulings. She apparently believes that it’s perfectly fine to block traffic but unacceptable to yell at someone outside a movie theater. Huh?

This viral incident puts Ocasio-Cortez’s galling hypocrisy on full display. Hopefully, she will learn from this and realize she was wrong to defend invasive and aggressive protests. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Ocasio-Cortez to see her own inconsistency — or you might pass out.

Riots for thee, but not for me, to coin a phrase.

MARK JUDGE: Revisiting Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”

John F. Kennedy was such a figure—a politician, but also a war hero and a man with a genuine aura of grace, sexiness and danger. He’s the “Superman who comes to the supermarket,” a dashing and epic figure who met with shoppers while he was campaigning. Kennedy’s connection to sex, violence, art and “the dream life of the nation” made him powerful, mythic. It was archetypal, deeper than mere politics.

Over the decades such a figure has continuously reemerged in American culture and politics—much to the dismay of those who would keep him down. Two from the world of politics since Kennedy are Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Reagan, renounced as a psychopath by the left, came from the West and movies—two archetypical places. Mailer argued that when the West was settled “the expansion turned inward, became part of an agitated, overexcited, superheated dream life. The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing his own archetype of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun.”

Then there was Obama. As a black man Obama was conversant in the dream world of the nation—the place of jazz and soul and Ralph Ellison. There was no way that Hillary Clinton, a dry and calculated politico, could compete with that. It’s important to emphasize that Mailer’s Superman isn’t a messiah. He doesn’t promise salvation. Reagan told us the government could not save us. Kennedy openly acknowledged that “we are all mortal.” Obama was treated like Jesus by the left, something he played off of but knew was a scam.

What about Trump? Trump comes from the worlds of New York business and Hollywood. He’s perceived by many Americans as a glamorous success story. That’s probably why all attempts by the left to shut him down have failed. Trump doesn’t have Kennedy’s sexiness or Obama’s soul. What he does possess is what other Supermen have—the unstoppable will to live freely despite what the mob thinks. For this he remains impossible to euthanize.

Over six decades ago, Mailer saw this: “This myth, that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the nation’s regulators—politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, idèologues, psychoanalysts, builders, executives and endless communicators—would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not die.”

Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” — not to be confused with that time the socialist came to the supermarket: When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake. “‘When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,’ Yeltsin wrote. ‘That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.’”

BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Biden Apologizes for ‘Disrespecting’ Accused Laken Riley Killer by Calling Him ‘Illegal.’

Joe Biden did an interview with Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC that aired on Saturday.

Biden made multiple delusional statements, including on illegal aliens and the murder of Laken Riley at the hands of an illegal.

He’s made some bad comments already trying to downplay her death, claiming there are thousands of “legals” who are also killed in this country—as though somehow that justified the very preventable murder by an illegal alien.

Biden apologized for calling the accused killer of Laken Riley an “illegal,” saying he should have said “undocumented.” Listen as he rushes to say that.

Biden said he wouldn’t “treat any of these people with disrespect.” “Look, they built the country,” he said.

Which is quite an interesting gaffe in and of itself:

Is he confusing an imported migrant class with a former slave class, because that would confirm some pretty big things about what we've been saying about why they are doing this.

Nice of Capehart to just skip over that one.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) March 10, 2024

In 2004, Diana West wrote: The importance of this crusade.

It’s possible President Bush didn’t drop Ike’s language himself. Indeed, his speechwriters might not have given him the choice. They well know that “crusade” was officially outlawed long ago. And by “crusade” I don’t mean Christendom’s medieval battles to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim rule. But, of course, neither did Gen. Eisenhower (not in his D-Day remarks, and not in his popular account of the war, “Crusade in Europe”). Neither did President Bush, for that matter, when, in the week following Sept. 11, 2001, he said that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” Speaking in terms of a cause may have steadied most Americans at home, but it drove Muslims, Europeans and political correctniks everywhere crazy. A headline in The Christian Science Monitor on Sept. 19, 2001 said it best: “Europe cringes at Bush ‘crusade’ against terrorists.”

It didn’t have to cringe long. Rather than inviting citizens of the world to join the new “crusade” against Islamic terror networks — the successor to earlier, victorious crusades against Nazism and Communism — Ari Fleischer, then the president’s spokesman, immediately expressed “regret” over unspecified “connotations” the word “crusade” might have had “for anybody, Muslim or otherwise.” In other words, America was officially sorry if anyone out there — and I mean “out there” — believed, five days after the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center, that the president of the United States was going send an army of barons to take Jerusalem for the Pope.

In 2004, the 56-year old Bush knowingly memory holed a line from of Eisenhower’s most important speech as a general for PC reasons. Twenty years later, a dissipated 81-year old Biden is forced by his handlers to make an after-the-fact PC clean-up of his own. Bush could have pushed back; Biden is too far gone, and in Biden’s case:

He apologized for insulting the murderer https://t.co/DkvEtObH7r

— Sunny (@sunnyright) March 9, 2024

Hey, you know who didn’t?

💔 Trump consoles Laken Riley's family and friends backstage at his rally pic.twitter.com/iN1HEv7Z3V

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 10, 2024

UPDATE: Past performance is no guarantee of Trunalimunumaprzure:

What a stutter https://t.co/vLzhponiMU

— Vanessa (@Nessakins_) March 10, 2024

Flash-forward to today:

Andrew Sullivan on Joe Biden is quite something pic.twitter.com/8x7Ga2MXcW

— Freddie Sayers (@freddiesayers) March 8, 2024

“Joe” Rivers? Forget it — he’s rolling.

(Classical reference in headline.)

ROGER KIMBALL: The Treason of the Intellectuals & ‘the Undoing of Thought.’

“When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning.”
—Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought

“Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re- establishing our former ignorance?”
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99)

In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des clercs. I said “famous,” but perhaps “once famous” would be more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. “La trahison des clercs” is one of those memorable phrases that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term “clerc” in “the medieval sense,” i.e., to mean “scribe,” someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are, in this sense, “clercs.” The English translation, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” sums it up neatly.

The “treason” in question was the betrayal by the “clerks” of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda’s terms, they were understood to be “all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short, in the possession of non-material advantages.” Thanks to such men, Benda wrote, “Humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

Read the whole thing.

INSIDE THE SURPRISE EFFORT TO FORCE TIKTOK’S DIVESTITURE:

“I will kill you if you f**king shut down TikTok,” a teenage boy warned to a member of Congress in a voicemail reviewed by The Spectator. “I will really really f**k you up. So don’t shut down TikTok. Bye bye!”

This week, Capitol Hill was inundated with a series of unusual callers — children, some as young as six years old. They had been enlisted by TikTok to forcibly push back against a bill that’s on track to sail through the House next week which forces the divestiture of a series of companies owned by foreign adversaries, like China in the case of the globally popular video app. TikTok is regularly accused of everything from feeding eating disorder content to girls to spying on journalists to extensively tracking user data — at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party, no less.

The aforementioned assassination threat was far from an isolated incident. That office received around a dozen; at least one other House office confirmed that they too received a threat to murder the member. “It turns out threatening to kill members is not an effective or persuasive tool,” a staffer for one of the offices noted. “In fact, it really seemed to backfire here.”

Beyond the assassination threats, offices of both parties were flooded with tens of thousands of calls, directed in part by TikTok itself, when it urged users to “stop a TikTok shutdown.” Countless kids took time out of their school days to tell their representatives that they will kill themselves if the government bans TikTok.

The mass freakout goes far to prove its critics’ point: TikTok May Be A Chinese Superweapon.

UPDATE:

In America, TikTok pushes videos to kids that promote self-harm, eating disorders, and suicide.

In China, the version of TikTok available there, the app shows young kids science experiments, museum exhibits, and other educational material. pic.twitter.com/221TwerTb0

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) March 10, 2024

TikTok does have some curious defenders though: Kellyanne Conway advocating for TikTok on Capitol Hill. “Both Conway and Club for Growth confirmed the working relationship. A spokesperson for TikTok declined to comment. Billionaire investor and Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass holds a 15 percent stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. Club for Growth leaders have been vocal opponents of moves to ban TikTok. Former President Donald Trump praised Yass as ‘fantastic’ when they were both at a Club for Growth retreat as the presumptive Republican nominee courts Yass to help his presidential campaign…It appeared to be a sudden change of heart for Trump, who, as president, tried to order TikTok removed from app stores because of its connections to China.”

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Liz Cheney, January 6 Committee Suppressed Exonerating Evidence Of Trump’s Push For National Guard.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee suppressed evidence that President Donald Trump pushed for 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the nation’s capital, a previously hidden transcript obtained by The Federalist shows.

Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.

Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.

He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021. Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.

Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review. On top of that, committee allies began publishing critical stories and even conspiracy theories about Ornato ahead of follow-up interviews with him. Ornato was a career Secret Service official who had been detailed to the security position in the White House.

As Matt Vespa adds at Townhall, “This anti-Trump circus has many twists and turns. Trump is a moron but so crafty he orchestrated a violent takeover of the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transition of power. He’s irresponsible with state secrets but is the greatest known threat to the republic. He wanted to foment a rebellion but requested 10,000 troops to secure the Capitol. He’s a fascist who willingly left office in January of 2021.”

Emmanuel Goldstein could not be reached for comment.

THIS IS CNN: ‘They Won’t Even #SayHerName’: CNN Refuses to Air State of the Union Ad Blaming Biden for Murder of Laken Riley.

CNN refused to air a conservative group’s State of the Union ad that blamed President Joe Biden for the murder of 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who was killed by an illegal immigrant.

Building America’s Future said Friday that major media networks, including Fox News, MSNBC, and Newsmax, all accepted the ad. CNN ultimately rejected it, however.

Even in their commercials, CNN remains true to form:

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: The Agony of Ellen Page.

Last year, Ellen Page—now going by ‘Elliot’ and identifying as a man—released the memoir, Pageboy.

* * * * * * * *

After moving to Toronto from Nova Scotia at age 16, Page was stalked by an older male fan and feared for her life. Upon arriving in Hollywood, she was, as The Guardian put it, “the perfect target for predators.” A director groomed Page, took her to dinner, and then began stroking her thigh under the table, telling the teenage girl, “You have to make the move, I can’t.” Others were not so reticent. Reviews of Pageboy describing this grooming carefully refer to Page as a “he”; doing so undermines the power imbalance of the predation as well as the gut-wrenching, very female fear Page experienced. She was targeted because she was Ellen, not Elliot.

In a chapter titled “Leeches”—a telling reference to the slimy, bloodsucking parasite worm—she described how another male actor abused her. She had thought of him as kind, and thus she took him up on the offer of a drive home one day. Once there, he took her by the shoulders, guided her firmly into the bedroom, laid her on the bed, took her clothes off, and forced himself on her. She describes being paralyzed with fear; only after it was over did she regain her voice and order him to leave. She was only 17 years old, a short, slight teenage girl whose acting career had just begun to take off.

The following year, she starred in Juno (2006), earning an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Page played a 16-year-old who gets pregnant, goes to an abortion clinic, and changes her mind at the last moment after one of her classmates who is protesting outside the clinic tells her that her baby has fingernails. She decides to give the baby up for adoption instead and begins to spend time with the couple she has chosen—until the middle-aged husband hits on her. Knowing now what Page was enduring in Hollywood at the time, the storyline is eerily apt. Unsurprisingly, she writes that some of the films she acted in traumatized her because they were, in many instances, far too close to real life.

Nobody knew, as Page’s fame grew, what predatory men in Hollywood were doing to her. She had a waif-like, vulnerable, wide-eyed demeanor that should make men feel instinctively protective, but to a certain sort of man marked her as prey. Her vulnerability as a teen girl in a cutthroat industry should have gained her protection; instead, it made her a target. When she came out as a lesbian, a famous actor—whom she does not name—told her, drunkenly, that he would “f**k” her to prove to her that she was straight and graphically described the things he would do. “He was, and still is, one of the most famous actors in the world,” Page wrote, but provides no further details.

It’s like the city’s chief industry operates as a sex grooming gang or something.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The disgusting defacement of Lord Balfour’s painting.

There’s a new movement in town: Philistines for Palestine. Not content with traipsing through the streets every other weekend to holler their hatred for Israel, now ‘pro-Palestine’ activists are taking aim at art. Witness yesterday’s fevered attack on the painting of Lord Balfour at Cambridge university – an act of petulant, self-satisfied philistinism that will do precisely nothing to help people in Gaza.

The slashing of the painting was carried out by a member of a group called Palestine Action. She walked up to the 1914 portrait and sprayed it with red paint before wielding her knife to cut it to shreds. Why target Balfour? Because he played a key role in creating the modern state of Israel. And to the manically Israelophobic left, there are few sins as grave as that.

There was something deeply unsettling about this Taliban-style assault on a piece of art. It had a medieval feel. A clearly riled individual, under the spell of some kind of fear or animus, using violence to try to cleanse the world of a sinful image. It feels like Year Zero fanaticism, a Red Guard-style effort to scrub ‘the problematic’ from public view.

Such wanton cultural vandalism is not ‘progressive’ activism. It’s the rage of the entitled. It’s the nihilism of bored bourgeois youths who crave something to hate in order that they might feel more alive. We’ve already seen the sons and daughters of eye-watering privilege glue themselves to art in the name of ‘saving the planet’. Now they’re upping the ante and destroying art in the name of ‘saving Palestine’. That their antics will do nothing to ‘save’ either Gaia or Gaza matters little to these people. All that matters is that they get to make a public spectacle of their personal angst.’

There’s no doubt that England’s pro-Palestinian vandals are taking their cue from a more modern fundamentalist religion. But to be fair, the bar has been razed significantly in recent weeks though:

Self-immolation is the new standard. This is weak shit. https://t.co/7mkbHe5Z8F

— Vanessa (@Nessakins_) March 8, 2024

TIME HAS COME TODAY: What time does daylight saving time start? What is it? When to ‘spring forward’ this weekend.

This Sunday, the majority of Americans will “spring forward” and set their clocks ahead an hour, losing an hour of sleep as the annual tradition of daylight saving time begins for the year.

Daylight saving time will end for 2024 in November, when we set our clocks back and gain an extra hour of sleep.

The time adjustment affects the daily lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, prompting clock changes, contributing to less sleep in the days following and, of course, later sunsets.

Those disruptions may have contributed to public sentiment souring on the time change in recent years, but legislative moves to do away with daylight saving time have stalled in Congress.

Even ahead of the time change on Sunday, there are already cities in every continental U.S. time zone that are reporting sunset times after 6 p.m. as the Earth and the Northern Hemisphere begins its tilt toward the sun and summer approaches.

Here’s everything you need to know about the start of daylight saving time.

Classical reference in headline:

FROM RAGING BULL TO OPPENHEIMER: The 40 greatest biopics of all time, ranked.

OH, THE HUMANITY! How the breast was won: The week Sydney Sweeney’s boobs exploded.

“SO MANY PEOPLE LOST THEIR GUITARS. I LOST 44:” Peter Frampton recalls how he lost and recovered guitars through floods and plane crashes as he shows off his eye-watering gear collection on Gibson TV.

As far as guitar collections go, Frampton’s is especially steeped in history. Not only did he effectively have to restart his guitar collection after losing 44 individual guitars – and numerous pieces of other gear – in a flood in 2010, he also experienced what has become one of the most famous tales of lost-and-found guitars in history.

To that end, the most notable instruments in Frampton’s episode of The Collection are the ones whose histories are interwoven with such stories.

The “Phenix”, for example, takes center stage. The mid-’50s era triple-humbucker Black Beauty Les Paul Custom needs no introduction: as seen on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive!, it is one of the most iconic Les Pauls of all time, and made its way on “just about every track [Frampton] recorded between 1970 and 1980”.

However, in 1980, the “Phenix” went down in a cargo aircraft – which crashed while taking off from Curaçao – and it was believed to have been lost forever. Miraculously, 31 years later, the Les Paul was reunited with its rightful owner after it had been picked up and played over the years by a local musician.

“It was just one of the best feelings in the world,” Frampton recalls of being reunited with the “Phenix”.

For guitarists (particularly electric guitarists), this is 90 minutes of pure pornography:

CHRISTIAN TOTO IS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1999: The Very Best Movies from 1999.

The tail end of the era when Hollywood still had stars, and could make films that weren’t all sequels and superhero movies.

For a contrary take on the current state of Hollywood, Kurt Loder explores: Sunday’s Oscars: Some Worthy Candidates from a Pretty Good Movie Year.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

Meteorologists Call For Rain Showers This Weekend And A Slight Chance Of Getting Crushed By A Falling Boeing Airliner Part https://t.co/BREdMpGYjK pic.twitter.com/sqSC2UG5Kj

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 8, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: Trump’s White House Was ‘Awash in Speed’ — and Xanax.

—Rolling Stone (which morphed into those squares at the Moral Majority so slowly, I hardly even noticed).

The New Hotness? Need More Proof Biden Was Drugged for the State of the Union? Here It Is.

A great deal hinged on Joe Biden’s performance during Thursday evening’s State of the Union address. The White House knew more than anything that Biden had to dispel concerns regarding his age and cognitive decline. Naturally, the mainstream media did its part to help in shore up this narrative affirming Biden’s presidential competence, and wound up choosing the same entry from the thesaurus to characterize his delivery: “fiery.”

I’m sure it was just a coincidence.

But, it didn’t work for those of us who saw and heard Biden’s loud and angry delivery, which was punctuated by constant slurring and slip ups. One expert says that Biden’s performance featured the telltale signs of being medicated.

Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in elderly dementia patients, pointed out that Biden’s increased speed and volume during the address, contrary to his usual slow and stumbling demeanor, could be indicative of stimulant usage, potentially Adderall or another amphetamine.

“[Adderall]’s given to focus someone’s attention so if you give it to someone who is not focused and give it to them ahead of a big event like the State of the Union, it will improve their focus,” Lieberman told the Washington Times. “But it’s treating the symptoms rather than boosting the brain and it’s addictive so it’s dangerous.”

As compelling and convincing as Lieberman’s theory is, there’s actually more evidence Biden was not his usual self during the State of the Union.

I previously pointed to Biden brief encounter with reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews, where Biden had curiously become his trademark low-energy, glitchy self. His explanation for his use of the word “illegals” to describe an illegal immigrant—which irked many in his party—was, to say the least, unimpressive.

But, even more indicative that something had changed in Biden was during his campaign speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Friday, which was virtually a carbon copy of his State of the Union speech, and yet it was a disaster.

At one point in the speech, he declared, “Pennsylvania, I have a message for you: send me to Congress!”

I’d take this as another cry for help from Joe — if he’s feeling overwhelmed by the duties of the White House and wants return to the Senate in November, I’m sure that can be arranged. As P.J. O’Rourke once wrote,“The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.”

But I don’t think we can blame alleged drug usage on Kamala’s gaffes:

Ah-mazing. https://t.co/sEp2td7n3F

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) March 9, 2024

Related: Byron York: Biden ‘yelled’ through State of the Union to ‘seem younger.’

“Democrats were extremely happy. They were relieved. He stood up there and talked for 68 minutes. And he seemed to yell a lot. Personally, I thought he was yelling a lot. He thought, ‘Well, maybe if I really yell, it’ll make me seem younger,’” York said. “I don’t think it convinced anybody who’s concerned about his capacity to serve till age 86.”

As Jim Geraghty wrote yesterday: President Steroids Shouts His Way through the State of the Union. “Taken as a whole, Biden’s speech started to sound like Howard Beale’s monologue from Network. But keep in mind, the number of Americans who watched the whole speech, beginning to end, is considerably smaller than the number who will see brief excerpts on the television news, or YouTube, or other social media. By shouting through almost the entire speech, Biden maximized the odds that any clip or segment that went viral would have him looking fired up and impassioned rather than like the sleepy, whispery, mumbling octogenarian that Americans have soured on so thoroughly.”

MH370’S SUICIDAL PILOT ENTOMBED PLANE AND ITS 239 PASSENGERS AT BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN AFTER PERFECT DITCHING, SAYS FLIGHT EXPERT 10 YEARS AFTER PLANE DISAPPEARED:

The ‘suicidal’ pilot of the MH370 Malaysia Airlines flight perfectly ditched the plane into the sea, entombing it and the 239 passengers aboard at the bottom of the ocean, a flight expert has claimed ten years after it disappeared.

British pilot Simon Hardy has said he believes that the plane was sunk into the ocean at a spot that has never been searched before.

The Boeing 777 aircraft vanished from radar while en route from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Satellite data showed the plane deviated from its flight path to head over the southern Indian Ocean, where it is believed to have crashed.

There are fears that pilot Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, was responsible for deliberately crashing MH370 in a murder-suicide of a shocking scale, which he committed because of problems in his personal life.

Shah had allegedly split with his wife Fizah Khan, and was said to be furious that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing. But the pilot’s wife has angrily denied any personal problems, while other family members and friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

Don Lemon could not be reached for comment.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Bang-Pop Edition.

JAAAAAAAG GOES ROGUE! Driver of £80k Jaguar I-Pace reveals moment he realized electric vehicle had gone rogue as it raced down motorway before police rammed it (and this isn’t the first time it’s happened).

A driver who was trapped behind the wheel of an out-of-control Jaguar I-Pace has revealed to MailOnline how he cheated death as his car accelerated up to 100mph on the busy M62 motorway without brakes.

Nathan Owen, 31, was on his way back from his first day at a new job when his 2019 electric car started malfunctioning, sparking a huge police operation to bring his car to a stop after 35 minutes of hell.

But he told how his car had also gone rogue on the motorway in December, this time reaching up to 120mph. He claims Jaguar handed him his car back 24 hours after he had taken it in to be looked at.

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline about his latest run-in, the crisis support worker admitted: ‘In the back of my mind, I was thinking I’m going to end up crashing the car, I’m going to kill myself or I’m going to kill an innocent person on the roads.’

Mr Owen, originally from North Wales, added: ‘The car was in its own world – it just had no brakes. The worst thing about it is that it’s happened before.’

In 2024, Jaaaag owners long for the days when the poor Lucas Electric build quality prevented their cars from becoming self-aware and roaming the countryside looking for paintings to burgle and banks to rob.

MARK FELTON ON NASA’S ARMORED CORPS:

Given the massive risks of each Space Shuttle launch, NASA’s use of armored personnel carriers made sense — if the astronauts had a chance to actually survive the time it would take in a rocket malfunction on the pad to get out of the cockpit and onto the zip lines to take reach the APCs. But as Mark Steyn has written, maybe it would be easier to list which federal agency doesn’t have its own paramilitary arsenal?

JON GABRIEL: Sinema exits, leaving behind a divided Arizona.

Sinema joins a long list of frustrated Republicans and Democrats abandoning elective office to the cable-news shouters and ineffectual ideologues. Her own position was previously vacated by Senator Jeff Flake, who couldn’t get a hearing during the Trump era.

Her likely replacement will better fit the angry public mood, whoever wins. Republicans will nominate failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who is currently running against a smattering of barely-knowns. Since her narrow 2022 defeat, Lake has spent most of her time insisting the election was rigged, losing court cases and posting selfies from Mar-a-Lago.

Representative Ruben Gallego, a four-term congressman from a deep-blue urban district, will represent the Democrats. He’s far less known, even in-state, but raised his profile with withering attacks on Sinema. He basically begged her to leave the party then got upset when she did.

Gallego seems an odd fit for Arizona since his progressive views are more in line with the Squad than an average Democrat. His X (formerly Twitter) feed is replete with profane tirades, dropping more f-bombs than Donald Trump on a bad-hair day.

In one of many soliloquys he intoned, “Just to be clear f**k you @tedcruz you f**king baby killer.” Not exactly the Federalist Papers, but that’s politics in the Year of Our Lord 2024.

So where does Sinema heads next? Why not aim higher than the Senate? “What’s next for Sinema after her Senate term runs out this year?… A vanity presidential campaign from corporate-backed No Labels…?”

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: The ‘special relationship’ under pressure: Are Biden and Netanyahu on a collision course over Gaza?

Visible tensions are appearing in the historically close relationship between the White House and Israel, as the war in Gaza becomes a worsening humanitarian disaster and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu resists the Biden administration’s push for a change in course.

While Biden vocally supports Israel’s stated goals of defeating Hamas and rescuing the hostages that the Palestinian militant group took captive during its Oct. 7 rampage in southern Israel that killed some 1,200 people, he and other administration officials have expressed increasing criticism of the way in which Israel is carrying out its operations in the Gaza Strip.

“Visible tensions?” This moment would have stopped traffic on CNN had Reagan, Dubya or Trump been caught on a hot mic uttering it:

Telling Jews to come to Jesus is A+ diplomacy. https://t.co/raHHjyo75f

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) March 8, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA:

NEW: Students in Oklahoma schools have come forward and describe a culture of bullying, hazing, manipulation, and pressure to participate in disgusting dares like licking toes and armpits, spitting in people’s mouths, and having garbage thrown on you.

This has been going on for… pic.twitter.com/VJbV4OGppB

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 8, 2024