GREAT MOMENTS IN GASLIGHTING: Bulwark writer says it’s a ‘straight-up lie’ that Joe Biden said Mitt Romney would re-enslave blacks.
As Miller responded, “This is hands down, one of the best ‘Akshully’ I’ve ever seen. ‘Biden said they would all be put back into chains, not that he would re-enslave them.’”
TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL, DAILY MAIL. Christopher Stevens reviews The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power: No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerizing awfulness of Amazon’s billion dollar Tolkien epic.
America’s Newspaper of Record wonders if that really is the author’s name: Negative Rings Of Power Reviews All Being Posted By One User ‘peterj4cks0n1337.’
And they sneaked some exclusive footage out before its official premiere:
MOVIE PRODUCER PLEADS GUILTY IN PROSTITUTION PROSECUTION:
Dillon Jordan was permitted to enter the plea remotely and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to operate a prostitution business.
U.S. District Judge John P. Cronan scheduled sentencing for Dec. 12.
A plea deal Jordan signed with prosecutors recommends that he serve between 21 months and 27 months in prison, and pay a fine between $10,000 and $95,000. It also calls for him to forfeit $1.4 million.
Jordan, 50, of Arrowhead Lake, California, was arrested last summer on charges that he used a movie production company as a cover for running a prostitution ring.
Jordan is listed among dozens of producers on films including the 2018 film “The Kindergarten Teacher,” which featured Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the 2019 movie “The Kid,” which starred Ethan Hawke.
It’s a good thing that nobody has ever accused Hollywood of being a sex-grooming gang, or anything.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE:
Watch: @KariLake Destroys A 'Journalist' In 90 Seconds… pic.twitter.com/XSDBKP8iSo
— Spiro (@Spiro_Ghost) September 2, 2022
IT WAS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT THERE WOULD BE NO MATH: WH Press Secretary says Biden created “10 Thousand Million Jobs!”
YOU GO TO WAR WITH THE PEOPLE YOU HAVE: Biden declares war on half the country.
What we are seeing, in fact, is the promulgation of a neo-Manichean philosophy. That heretical sect, named for a third-century A.D. Parthian seer called Mani, was an astringently dualistic creed that divided the world into light and dark, the saved and the damned. According to the creed of Biden and the elites who formulate his thoughts and speeches, the radical Democratic agenda of climate change, “green” intimidation, wealth redistribution, and sexual perversion is the gospel of light. Outer darkness is occupied by people who espouse such traditional American values as hard work, frugality, patriotism, individual liberty, and the canons of private property that guarantee those rights. It is a strange and unforgiving religion, one whose primary sacrament is excommunication. Ultimately, as some wag put it, its goal is a world in which everything that is not prohibited is mandatory.
That is the background. You often hear the world “democracy” uttered in these heady precincts, usually in the now-noxious phrase “our democracy” (translation: their prerogative”). As I note in a column on “Joe Biden and the Sovietization of America” for the October edition of the Speccie, it is a world in which “democracy” really means “rule by Democrats.” To the question “was the election fair,” what you need to know in order to answer is who won. If it was the Democrats, then the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then the election was stolen.
In any event, Biden’s speech consisted of a series accusations directed at “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans [who] represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”
Lest you think that attack on 74 million Trump supporters was an aberration, note that a week earlier at a Maryland fundraiser, Biden had insisted that the problem for those wishing to conserve the “soul of America” was “not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the…semi-fascism” of the MAGA agenda.
To be fair, Biden did say “nevermind” yesterday: ‘I don’t consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country’: Now Biden walks back his attacks on MAGA Republicans — and insists he was talking about people who call for ‘use of violence’ and reject election results.
People who reject election results are the worst:
Just ask President Klain:
DON’T GET COCKY: NYT Hurls Cold Water on Senate Democrats’ 2022 Hopes.
BYRON YORK: Biden’s American carnage speech.
That was the conventional campaign part of Biden’s speech. Next came the abortion part. And no, Biden did not say the word “abortion.” Instead, in attacking Republicans, he harkened back to one of the ugliest speeches ever given in American politics — the “Robert Bork’s America” speech given by Biden’s old Democratic Senate colleague, Ted Kennedy, in 1987. Back then, Biden and Kennedy were working to block the Supreme Court nomination of Bork. Kennedy’s speech, delivered as Biden looked on, has become legendary for the sheer number of false charges it contained. Here is an excerpt:
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens…
It would be hard to equal that, but on Thursday in Philadelphia, Biden tried. He was never the speaker that Kennedy was, and now he is old and slow, but he still managed to evoke the spirit of “Robert Bork’s America” when he said: “MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”
It was an old-fashioned Democratic attack ad. It could have come from 1992. But Biden slapped a MAGA label on it and tied it to Trump, even though the issues had been litigated long before Trump ran for president.
The true darkness in Biden’s speech came in his long attacks on Trump and Trump’s supporters, whom he sometimes called “MAGA Republicans” and sometimes called “extreme MAGA Republicans.” In all, the acronym appeared in Biden’s speech 13 times.
“MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution,” Biden said. “They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself. … They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”
So you’re saying they view the Constitution as a living, fluid document? Liberals Confirm They Hate the Constitution. “Apparently it isn’t ‘living’ enough for the left, so they want to kill it completely.”
LATE STAGE SOCIALISM: Biden and the Dems Are Skipping Straight to the Final Stage of Socialism.
SAM HARRIS: Biden’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad speech is a window into Trump’s soul.
Osama bin Laden could not be reached for comment.
REPORT: Fuel leak delays NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission launch. The next launch attempt of Artemis 1 could occur as soon as Monday (Sept. 5).
DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Joe Biden’s Blundering, Insincere Philadelphia Speech.
Joe Biden’s speech last night at Independence Hall in Philadelphia was a disaster — several bad ideas terribly executed at once. It was a speech that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, delivered by a man who didn’t believe it. And it will come back to bite him in court and on the campaign trail. Let us count the ways.
Problem #1: Giving the speech at all. Biden’s greatest political asset is when Americans are focused on Donald Trump and not on the bumbling, rambling fossil in the White House and his overreaching and under-delivering presidency. A big, set-piece Biden speech that was supposed to highlight Trump instead consumed media attention that would be, for the Democrats’ interests, better spent on more news cycles about Mar-a-Lago and Trump talking about holding a do-over election.
Problem #2: The title. Biden’s speech was entitled “The Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation.” If Biden is trying to present himself as a unifying, back-to-normalcy figure who can calm the waters — a guy who, in the words of the speech itself, wants to “see politics not as total war but mediation of our differences” — talking about a “continued battle” won’t help. If he wants to reassure us that the president is sticking to his day job, talking about how he wants to shape “the soul of the nation” won’t help. And really, talking about a national crisis of soul is reminiscent of nothing so much as Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, which is remembered today simply as the “malaise” speech. The scorched-earth partisanship of the speech is a replay of his disastrous Georgia voting-rights speech.
Problem #3: The staging. Independence Hall was lit up as if somebody directing one of the later Star Wars sequels said, “We want the new Empire to look just a little more Nazi.” The building was dark, but with blood-red eagle wings and Marines flanking an angry, fist-shaking Biden. The photos from this speech are certain to be used by a lot of campaigns this fall — none of them Democrats. Even aside from the politics, if Biden wanted to reassure ordinary Americans that he isn’t declaring some sort of war on his political enemies — taking a page from the Democratic Party adviser who declared that “the Republican Party is basically a domestic terrorist cell at this point and they should be treated as such” — he accomplished precisely the opposite. The best thing you could say about the staging is that it reminds us that this White House is run by incompetent amateurs who couldn’t get jobs on the Obama team.
And focus on the hyper-online, politics-obsessed segment of Twitter as their intended audience. The “Dark Brandon” meme is amusing if you’re in on the joke — but imagine how bizarre Thursday night’s clusterfark appeared to the average low information voter who isn’t politics-obsessed. Fortunately for Biden, the original big three networks avoided it: Broadcast Networks Pass On Carrying Joe Biden’s Primetime Speech. “ABC ran Press Your Luck, CBS went with a Young Sheldon rerun and NBC with a Law & Order replay. CNN and MSNBC carried the address, as did news division streaming channels, but Fox News stuck with Tucker Carlson and his critique of the speech as it was happening.”
THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES:
UPDATE: Gina Carano’s Twitter Account Deleted as My Son Hunter Launch Nears.
The Twitter account of actress Gina Carano, who plays a leading role in the upcoming movie about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, My Son Hunter, has been deleted.
Twitter users navigating to the actress’s page, @ginacarano, are met with a message that “this account doesn’t exist.”
This indicates that the account was not suspended by Twitter’s content moderation team. Suspensions normally come with a different message: “this account has been suspended.”
In the case of temporary account lock-outs, another tool used by Twitter to crack down on dissident speech, the user’s tweets are still visible, but they are unable to access their account until the time has expired or they meet some other condition of Twitter’s — usually deleting an offending tweet.
However, just because Carano’s account is deleted does not necessarily mean the actress did it herself. Accounts can be deleted wholesale by Twitter, although this happens rarely.
Stay tuned.
(Updated and bumped.)
ED MORRISSEY: WaPo columnist: Biden delivered a great “wartime address,” eh?
Question: With whom is the United States currently at war?
Joe Biden bugged out of Afghanistan almost exactly a year ago while leaving 14,000 Americans and many more of our allies behind Taliban lines. At that time, Biden himself celebrated that he had given us peace for the first time in twenty years, apparently forgetting that we’re still conducting hostilities in the Syria-Iraq desert.
So if this is a “wartime address,” as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson described it to Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, who’s the enemy?
In an administration chock full of Obama retreads, they’ve returned to The One’s favorite past-time. As I wrote in 2009, “President Obama has demonstrated that he’s always eager to view American politics as the continuation of warfare by other means, to flip von Clausewitz’s axiom on its head. Certainly class and culture warfare at least. It’s the Chicago way, after all.” Biden’s handlers have dusted off Obama’s old playbook, and with the midterms rapidly approaching, our sclerotic one-time “President Unity” has no qualms with putting it to work.
Curiously, while Robinson views Biden’s speech as a “wartime address,” another ponders why those on Biden’s enemies list feel like they’re under attack: WaPo national correspondent Philip Bump reports ‘a Trump-led movement centered in victimhood sees Biden’s speech as an attack.’
ROB LONG: The Lord of Leftovers.
Amazon Studios had a problem. It wasn’t money, of course. Amazon Studios’ parent company (and for that matter its actual parent, Jeff Bezos) has, to use a technical term, money out the yin yang. What Amazon needed was intellectual property with major nerd appeal. HBO has Game of Thrones, which is already being multiplexed into a Game of Thrones Cinematic Universe—a GOTCU, if you will—and Netflix has a reliable competitor in its Stranger Things series. They set their sights on The Lord of the Rings.
There’s a huge amount of published work by J.R.R. Tolkien—novels, maps, songs—and an even larger amount of unpublished material controlled by the Tolkien estate. Then there are the Peter Jackson–helmed movies, which together add up to about 47 hours of motion-picture content. (Could be less, but they sure seemed long to me…) All of that material is under the control of the Tolkien estate, which is run by the author’s heirs, who have tenaciously guarded the creative and subsidiary rights to their forbear’s body of work.
They’re not nuts, though. When Amazon offered $250 million for the rights to certain parts of the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe, they struck a deal. But the deal is as complicated and Byzantine as the endpaper maps on my (mostly unread) edition of The Lord of the Rings. Amazon Studios has the rights to produce a film version of the events in the appendices of the novels but is mostly restricted to those and whatever pieces of the unpublished material the estate wishes to share. The series, which premieres in September 2022 and will cost more than $1 billion to complete, has to stick to that material and the events of something called The Second Age, which takes the idea of “nerd appeal” to a new level of intensity.
Which is to say: The studio committed $1 billion to buy the rights to the bits and pieces of the story around the bigger, more well-known story. They spent $1 billion dollars for four very expensive words. Not exactly a leftover pickle and mustard sandwich.
So how is that working out for them? Impressive: Amazon’s $1-billion LOTR flop currently has a lower audience approval than Joseph R. Biden.
If you aren’t aware, the Tolkien fandom isn’t happy with Amazon’s new work of “art,” the $1-billion-a-season “Rings of Power.”
There are a lot of reasons why the show is being criticized so heavily – most of them having to do with post-modern, feminist, Marxist ideology that the showrunners are trying to impose on a franchise that is utterly opposed to such things – but I’ll let you sift through those in-depth reviews for yourself.
As for right now, let’s just glory in the fact that somehow, despite the beloved franchise having oodles of source material to work with, the creators of this hot garbage managed to get a worse initial rating than the current approval ratings of the most unliked President of the United States.
If you’d like an in-depth look at (some of) what went wrong, YouTuber “The Critical Drinker” (aka Scottish novelist William Jordan) has you covered:
NEWSOM FAMILY THANKSGIVINGS MUST BE FUN: Gavin Newsom’s in-laws fled from California to Florida during the pandemic, records show. Fox News Digital previously learned the Siebel family trust made a donation to a Ron DeSantis PAC.
JIM TREACHER: Biden Wants to Unite Half the Country Against the Other Half.
Why is this Alzheimer’s patient yelling? It’s like America is a lawn and he wants you off it.
If the Republicans don’t use footage of this crazy old man screaming in front of a blood-red hellscape, they deserve to lose.
I mean, just look at this:
* * * * * * * *
I’m not a big MAGA fan, but this stuff is just nuts. Biden’s polls are tanking, his administration is panicking, and now he looks and sounds like a tyrant in a bad movie. He says he wants to unify the country by destroying anybody who disagrees with him. He wants to stifle dissent to quash “fascism.” It’s at least as crazy as anything Trump has ever said.
It’s time to start seriously talking about impeachment.
Oh, that’s coming: The Democrats damned Biden by impeaching Trump.
Today, Biden is walking back his rhetoric from last night:
Biden today: "I don't consider any Trump supporter a threat to the country."
Biden last night: "Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic." pic.twitter.com/lO8rVceUQd
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) September 2, 2022
Assuming he hasn’t simply forgotten what he said last night, that’s a curious retraction. The president had a career defining visual last night, on par with Gerald Ford stumbling, Clinton posing next to Monica Lewinsky, Obama in Muslim togs, or an out of touch Richard Nixon walking on the beach in bluchers. Why is he backpedaling now? Why did he give the speech in the first place?
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: How Bad Was Biden’s Oppressive Stage Presence? CNN Altered the Video Feed to Soften the Dire Visuals.
This is both amazing and rather disturbing. While all other networks showed the harsh-hued backdrop in all of its oppressive glory, CNN – quite literally – opts to cast Joe in a kinder light. It appears that newly arrived CEO Chris Licht has a long way to go with his effort to move his news network closer to the political center.
Although there is a bit of progress there: Another one bites the dust: John Harwood announces that today is his last day at CNN.
Flashbacks:
● CNBC Hack John Harwood Is Really, Really Upset That Al-Baghdadi Was Killed.
● NYT/CNBC’S John Harwood Advises Hillary Campaign, Gloats About Provoking Trump At Debate.
● CNBC’s John Harwood Has No Business Moderating A GOP Presidential Debate.
● CNBC Alters Transcript of John Harwood Question About Hillary’s Email.
● “Everyone in the [CNBC] newsroom knows [John Harwood is] extremely far left.”
● CNN Brings on Hard-Hitting White House Correspondent to Join Jim Acosta. “Harwood is a well-sourced veteran of Washington who can appeal to the leading experts for their insights. For instance, on Sept. 21, 2015, Harwood emailed Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta for advice on what to ask Jeb Bush during his interview the following day. Incredible access!”
● CNN’s John Harwood used to think that higher inflation was a bad thing (guess what changed).
HOW IT STARTED:
“We are a city that is a sanctuary city. We have immigrants from all over the world who call Chicago their home. They’ll continue to do that, and we’re going to continue to make sure that this is truly a welcoming community for those immigrants and we want them to come to the city of Chicago.”
—“Chicago Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot Says Immigrants ‘Welcome’ Despite Donald Trump’s Remarks on Sanctuary Cities,” Newsweek, April 13th, 2019.
How it’s going: Lori Lightfoot Calls Greg Abbott A Racist For Sending Illegal Immigrants To Chicago.
—The Daily Wire, today.
Which is quite a stance, considering Biden’s polling is currently at about 38%:
QUESTION ASKED: Why won’t journalists ask Karine Jean-Pierre about her election denial history?
We’re often told in hyperbolic terms that Trump’s denialism is a very grave threat to the republic. Yet, it’s also apparently such a grave threat that not a single reporter will ask the current White House press secretary about her past statements denying legitimate election results.
In December of 2016, Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted , “Stolen emails, stolen drone, stolen election. … welcome to the world of #unpresidented Trump.”
Jean-Pierre also tweeted in 2019 about the Georgia Governor’s race, contested by Democrat Stacey Abrams, who did not concede the race. “Yes — the race was stolen,” she said in response to another Twitter user’s post. Jean-Pierre repeated the claim in April of 2020, tweeting, “Reminder: Brian Kemp stole the gubernatorial election from Georgians and Stacey Abrams.”
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their amnesia makes perfect sense.
ED MORRISSEY: CNN: Biden used Marines “as a political pawn” for his campaign speech.
Kudos not just to CNN’s Brianna Keilar, whose New Day show is reportedly on the Warner/Discovery chopping block, but also to Allison Jaslow for taking a principled stand on this point. Jaslow worked at the upper levels of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and fully endorses Joe Biden’s execrable speech last night on substance. However, as an Iraq War combat vet, Jaslow took offense to the stagecraft of the speech that included the Marine guard at Independence Hall as a backdrop.
“Somebody made a decision to put those Marines in the shot,” Jaslow points out, “and the reality is those Marines didn’t have a choice whether to be there or not.” Their presence undermined the entire point of Biden’s speech, which was — according to Jaslow — supposed to return America to political normalcy (via Mediaite):
Allison Jaslow, combat vet & former top @dccc official on the Marines at Pres. Biden’s speech: “Some people might see this as small ball” but “if you don’t want the so-called MAGA Republicans or any Republicans to be politicizing the military… then you shouldn’t do it yourself.”
Exit quote: “Kudos again to Keilar, Zeleny, CNN, and especially Jaslow. We’ll have lots of disagreements with Jaslow in the future, and I vehemently disagree with her take on the speech itself, but she has guts — and guts is sometimes enough.”
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Biden Condemns Fascism In Speech While Also Debuting Attractive New Mustache.
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