Tag: 2024 elections

Leave That to the Dreamers

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I could be wrong but I believe that this election represents an end point for a lot of people.  My viewpoint on politics and our society has changed to such an extent that many of the things I thought were real I no longer do.  And one of those things is the outcomes of elections.  2020 proved to me that election outcomes were one of those things that can be fabricated.  So, worrying about them is a foolish preoccupation.  And that goes even if Trump is allowed to win.  To convince me that elections are legitimate again I would first have to see all of those who rigged 2020 indicted, convicted and imprisoned for their crimes.  And we all know that has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever occurring.

And so, when the inevitable 2026 banter begins about saving the House or the Senate from the midterm slump or the even more inevitable panic about preventing Gavin Newsom in 2028, I think I’ll just concentrate on preventing the government from stealing my stuff and harming my grandkids.  We all have plenty to do in our real lives and ranting and raving about imaginary battles that we could win is a serious waste of time and stomach lining.

And honestly, I’m not feeling particularly bitter about all this.  Knowledge is strength.  I blame myself for being as gullible and lazy as to not see how things really were.  As the song says, “I was blind but now I see.”  And that’s not a trivial thing.  I can avoid all kinds of trouble by virtue of not believing in fairy tales.  George Bush and the rest of the establishment Republicans are not on my side and they are not my friends.  They’re just the flipside of the managerial elite who run this country and make sure they always will.  If anyone emerges who claims he wants to change that, he’ll have to do a lot more than make noises about it.  He’ll have to prove he’s stronger than the gang running things now and he’ll have to spell out what’s in it for me.  And that’s a pretty tall order.

So as the next two months play out, I expect all kinds of entertaining hijinks.  This week’s debate has the possibility of being highly entertaining theater.  It’s not guaranteed.  ABC could rig it for Kamala so that Trump doesn’t get to say anything at all.  But it’s just as likely to be a fitting sequel to the Biden meltdown with Kamala screeching and running off stage.  So, there could be all kinds of fun coming up.  But I’m under no illusions about how the extra week of ballot manipulation will end up in Pennsylvania and Arizona.  And I won’t be upset about it either.  It’s as predictable as sunshine in the Sahara.

And come November, I have the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays coming up and every reason to look forward to get-togethers with family and friends.  So, life will go on and new projects will present themselves but worrying about President Harris won’t be among them.  I’ll leave that to the dreamers.

Trustworthy

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Bash:  Hi, I’m Dana Bash and I’m here with Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Walz and this is the first CNN interview for her presidential campaign.

Walz:  That’s right Dana.  It’s the first!

Bash:  That’s right Governor.  That’s right.  Madame Vice President, how would you describe the direction that your campaign is taking now that the convention is over?

Harris:  I would describe it as joyful Dana.

Walz:  That’s right Dana, joyful.  Full of joy.

Bash:  Okay.  Full of joy.  That’s good.  But is there any more, uh, concrete policy statement or theme to the campaign.

Harris:  Yes Dana.  Without a doubt.  My administration will use all of the resources of the federal government to find, prosecute and imprison that guy that made the compilation of me saying, “unburdened by what was.”  Anyone who would belittle and mock a woman of color who is also Vice President of the United States is obviously a racist and a misogynist.

Walz:  Uh, wait a minute.

Harris:  Hey, I’m talking here Tim!

Walz:  Yes, Madame Vice President.  But…

Harris:  But nothing!  And not only will we convict and possibly execute this monster…

Walz:  Execute?  Wait a minute.

Harris:  Shut up Walz!  I’m going to find everyone who shared this video and arrest them.  And then I’ll find anyone who watched it and arrest them too.  They must all pay.

Bash:  Madame Vice President, maybe you remember how President Biden’s debate performance had a very deleterious effect on his re-election campaign.  Basically, not being able to answer simple policy questions or even speak in complete sentences caused the American people to doubt his competency to continue as president for another term.  What the American people want to know is how they can trust you to tell them the truth about all the important events and policy questions that presidents handle if you withheld the important fact that Joe Biden was a dementia patient for most or all of his term?  How can they find you trustworthy?

Harris:  Trustworthy.  When we say that someone is trustworthy, we are saying that that person is worthy of trust.  And a person who is worthy of trust is trustworthy.  And that is what I am.  I am a trustworthy person who is worthy of trust.  That’s what I am.  And the American people can see a future of me being trustworthy unencumbered by a past where I didn’t tell them that Joe Biden was a little bit demented.

Walz:  Okay, that’s enough.  I can’t do this anymore.  I’m willing to do that tour in Iraq now.  Anything rather than listen to any more of this.  I thought I could just ignore the idiocy.  After all I made believe that BLM was a legitimate cause and that letting them burn down Minneapolis and St. Paul was a reasonable thing for a governor to do.    But listening to Kamala Harris for four years would land me in an asylum.  (STALKS OFF STAGE).

Bash:  In light of current events should we maybe postpone this interview until a later date?

Harris:  I can imagine 2028 unencumbered by memory of this interview.  Maybe 2032?

Reality Returns to the 2024 Election

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Mark Halperin is a left journalist but he has been running an independent zoom-like network with both Republican and Democrat journalists called 2-Way which has been analyzing the race.  This video seems to be preparing his friends on the Left for some new polling that will let some of the air out of the Harris “Joy” campaign that been unleashed on the world during the Dem convention.  It sounds kind of grim despite his best attempt to sugar-coat it.

I’m interested to see what those Fox polls coming out tomorrow look like for the battleground states.

RFK Jr.

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I watched RFK Jr.’s announcement.  His pulling out of the swing states is a very interesting tactic.  I guess it’s possible he might nudge enough voters into Trump’s column to swing a few of those swing states.  Wouldn’t that be crazy!  From everything I’ve read about Kennedy he seems like a very strange man.  I think I read that he may have pushed one of his wives to commit suicide.  So, like everything else about the American political scene, Kennedy is another weird enigma that makes it easier to believe we’re living through some kind of apocalyptic end time.

But when you separate the man from the message, I have to think that his reasons for opposing the Democrats mostly rings true:

  • Free Speech
  • Ukraine
  • Public Health

And especially the first two issues are so clearly aimed at the disastrous policies that the Democrats have allowed the Deep State to foist on the country.  The campaign by the intelligence agencies to dictate to the social media sites what they can and cannot allow to be said is such a transparent violation of the first amendment that it’s shocking that the Supreme Court hasn’t already taken some direct action against it.  I’m guessing it’s through fear.  After all, where exactly is the Supreme Court’s army?  After the Supreme Court tells the CIA to cease and desist who exactly goes down to the CIA and frog marches them to jail?  Nope.

As for Ukraine, I listened to Kennedy’s description of how the State Department initiated the war and it was spot on.  He might as well have had me write it for all the difference in our ideas about it.  He’s right and unless the Democrats lose the chances of a shooting war with the Russians is probably 100%.

So even though I think RFK Jr. is a weird unsympathetic character (a Kennedy) I agree with his reasons for not supporting the Democrats and hope that his support for Trump will be enough to throw one or more swing states into the Trump column.  I wondered if maybe Kennedy has someone else who does his thinking for him.  I’m not implying he isn’t intelligent but the fact that the issues he is championing make perfect sense to me doesn’t jibe with the reputation he has for adopting weird fringe causes.  If he had said that he was opposing the Harris campaign because of their stance on alien abduction and probing that would feel like an RFK Jr. signature move.  But I believe in taking the W when it presents itself.  And if a kook suddenly stops spouting gibberish and wants to help my side, I’ll gladly hand him a shovel point him toward the front lines and tell him to start digging foxholes.

On a personal note, I find listening to his horrible voice impediment almost impossible to do.  It’s like listening to someone scraping a steel nail against a slate chalkboard.  It’s physical and mental torture. But regardless of my personal feeling I say, well done Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior.  You have proven that the Kennedy family isn’t a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time.  You’ve done one useful thing in your time on this Earth.  Kudos.

Unjustified

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So, the Democrat Convention is in full swing and Obamas and Clintons and other non-human lifeforms have been paraded onto the stage and allowed to jabber on about this and that.  Now I’m not crazy enough to actually listen to even ten seconds of this kind of thing.  But I have seen some headlines and it’s as expected.  Everyone loves Joe Biden and respects the hell out of his completely voluntary decision to step down from the presidential race.  And the ones who love him the most are the ones who shoved him off the cliff.  Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

And then they let Joe himself speak and it was apparently a very long and incoherent tribute to himself and his struggles.  Well, hopefully that’s the last time he’ll have the chance to do that.

I guess tomorrow they’ll let Kammy talk.  Of course, it’ll be scripted and tele-prompted so even an idiot like her will be able to bumble her way through it with all kinds of inappropriate pauses and cackles along the way.  It will be about all the free stuff she’ll be giving us that somehow won’t make inflation even worse somehow.  And then she’ll stand there grimacing while the non-player characters applaud thunderously for whole quarters of an hour at a time.  And of course, the whole process is an abomination against actual democracy because none of the Democrat voters voted for Harris.  They voted for that other brain-dead idiot Biden.  But because he already revealed to the world at large that his cerebral cortex has rotted away something had to be done.  And because the only other person who could use the money that the donors have given to Biden is Harris it had to be her.

So here we are.  For the second time in four years a candidate who is dumber than dirt is likely to be installed in the White House and given control of the United States nuclear arsenal.  If that doesn’t give you pause when considering what kind of world we are living in, I don’t know what will.

We have a little less than three months until the result will be announced to us.  That even takes into account the now obligatory extra week for Philadelphia to print up an extra million ballots for the Democrat.  In less than three months we will know for sure if we are living in a banana republic like Venezuela.  Either that or the majority of American voters are criminally insane.  Either way we will have to recalibrate our lives to take into consideration that assumptions based on this being the old American republic are completely unjustified.

In a banana republic it is completely unjustified to assume that the money in your bank account won’t be stolen by the government.  Likewise, assuming that you will receive justice in a court of law is equally unwarranted.  And believing any statement made by any of the organs of the federal government is equally foolish.  What is needed is a new set of rules.  Probably “1984” would be a good primer for reeducating yourself into the dos and don’ts of living in a banana republic.

So that’s what the publicity around the Democratic convention got me thinking.  What I haven’t figured out is how to react if somehow Trump is declared the winner.  Somehow, I have to believe that something really sinister would be waiting for us in that unlikely eventuality.  My guess is COVID 2.0.  Only this time they’ll use the real bioweapon.  I guess I’m just an optimist.

Thursday’s Surcease of Sorrow

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I had today off.  Ah, the glory.  But I still had to get up early because we had visitors and as pontifex maximus I have prescribed duties that include invocations and vague mumblings that render me canonically relevant but still slightly insane.

But it was good to be free for the day.  I spent time with the grandchildren and Camera Girl as she presided over mass quantities of juvenile comfort food (macaroni with cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches) and really bad kids’ movies (the 2021 “Tom and Jerry” movie and that monstrosity, “Ants” that Woody Allen, of all people, was in).  They taught me a game called, “Swim, fishy, swim” which is basically a version of tag or red light, green light.  Then we broke out the card games but other than war I didn’t know these other games.  They used non-standard decks of cards and weird rules.

While playing war I discovered that their reaction time is a lot faster than mine is now.  It is humbling to be in the presence of neurons that fire perfectly.  Old age is not for sissies.  But at least I was able to correct them in their use of the subjunctive mood.  Of course, I don’t think the subjunctive is still acknowledged anymore in grammar school.  In fact, I don’t think they teach grammar in grammar school anymore.  But I digress.  It was good to be among the young and away from Dunwichian responsibilities.  I still have five or six days of horror beginning tomorrow but a day off was great.

Of the various things going on I thought the most interesting development was the background on Gov. Tim Walz’s military service.  From what I read Walz retired out of his National Guard unit after he was notified that his unit was being deployed to Iraq in 2005.  And at the time he was the ranking non-commissioned officer in the unit.  I listened to a video where Megyn Kelly interviewed Tom Behrends, another non-commissioned officer from Walz’s National Guard unit, and he basically called Walz a coward for refusing to lead his unit into combat.  Never having served myself I’d be very interested in getting the opinions of those on this site who have served as to whether what Behrends says is reasonable.  What is the moral responsibility of a National Guard leader when his unit is called up for war?  How prevalent would this kind of reaction to deployment be?

Now I dislike Walz because he was the governor during the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis and he never ordered the National Guard to halt the rioting, arson and plain murder that went on during those riots.  I think he should be prosecuted for that.  But apparently in Minnesota they’re alright with that sort of thing.  So, they should get as much of that as is humanly possible.  In that sense it’s like California or New York.  But if Walz is running for Veep then his actions as governor should be fair game.  So, reviewing what he did during the Floyd riots makes perfect sense.

As for his refusal to be deployed to Iraq, I’m interested in what knowledgeable have to say about it.

Well, I better get some sleep.  More fun and games tomorrow.

Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe

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The horror continues unabated.  Thursday will be a respite, and I will use that day to try to reestablish my sanity (whatever that might be).  We have corroded away the first inch of the First Selectman’s outer scale layer.  This will allow the boiling sulfuric acid to percolate through and diffuse into his circulatory system and act as a revivifying tonic.  This is an especially dangerous part of the procedure.  The effect of the tonic is to pique his appetite.  In years past we have lost several members of the de-lousing team at this point in the procedure.

Of course, he’s always very sorry afterward and apologizes profusely to the surviving members of the crew and speaks very appreciatively of the dearly departed and of all their good qualities; their diligence, their team spirit, their crunchiness and full-bodied flavor.  He never stints on praise.

Because of this unfortunate tendency during this part of the procedure I find myself unconsciously moving toward the First Selectman’s left side.  It’s a little-known fact that he’s blind in that eye and so less likely to reflexively snap his jaws and swallow someone standing near that side of his head.

In the big, beautiful world outside of Dunwich all sorts of unimportant things are going on.  The Olympics grinds on with no detectable interest by most of the population.  Kamala and her new running mate are making the rounds of the friendly news shows and touting their wonderfulness.  But I don’t know.  This guy seems to have a bunch of skeletons rattling around in his closet.  Did he refuse to serve in Iraq?  Did he normalize pedophilia.  This guy may be a disaster waiting to happen.  Well it couldn’t happen to a nicer gal than Kamala!

The Ukrainians have opened up a new front in their war by invading Russia on the northern front to the west of the Kharkiv area.  And some of their new F-16s have been spotted flying in the western Ukrainian skies.  There looks to be a major event in Ukraine very soon.

During a particularly slow point in the work, I was talking to a co-worker and he was talking about raising a family in the early 1980s.  A lot of what he said rang true for me too.  There were major financial problems like the very high mortgage rates but people went ahead with their lives taking risks and betting on their luck.  That’s how I remember it too.  The first time I got laid off with a mortgage to cover it was pretty scary.  But if you looked around, something would turn up even if it was only contract work.  The difference between then and now is there is a culture that discourages optimism.  Nothing can be done and nothing is anyone’s fault.  The default assumption is that it’s society’s fault and it’s not worth trying.

This attitude is a death sentence.  The world is the same as it ever was.  Effort and extending your reach beyond the minimum are rewarded.  Regardless of recessions and inflation, striving for what you want isn’t an extraordinary idea.  It’s the normal circumstance for Americans.  This has always been the land of opportunity because it’s the land of hard work that rewards the achiever.  So let the young ones you talk to know this.  Struggle and survive is the order of the day.  And they come from ancestors that did just that.

Now back to the vat.  By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.  Oh well.

Tuesday’s Take

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Another day in purgatory.  But I heard the news that Kamala picked Walz.  Ah, the perfect choice.  This was the guy who allowed Minneapolis and St Paul to burn down while the Summer of Floyd was just getting started.  What a perfect symbol for the American people to choose.  The final capitulation of our freedom would be choosing a low-grade moron to be our leader while her stooge will be the man who decided that trumped up racial grievance supersedes law and order and justifies unleashing a murderous mob on innocent people just trying to live their lives.

Today I was trapped in an area where two true believing women were listening to Kamala’s introduction of Walz as her running mate.  They were enraptured listening to the Dunce reading a speech off of the teleprompter.  Kamala was singing his praises both as a high school coach championing some gay/straight alliance group in his school and as a member of the Army reserve.  It probably ended with Walz announcing that he had begun a course of trans-affirming hormones enroute to putting on a wig and dress.  But luckily the two listeners had to get back to work and turned off the show before that point.

If Trump is looking for a perfect symbol of what’s wrong in Joe Biden’s America, he couldn’t ask for a better example than the Harris/Walz ticket.  Both of them stand for a definition of justice where the criminal is protected from prosecution and the victims are criminalized.  Let Walz explain how he allowed the looting and arson to spread across the twin cities and held his state hostage when he could have had the National Guard stop the lawlessness and prevent the rioting from spreading across the country.  That should be Trump’s headline tomorrow and the basis for a whole host of advertisements targeting Walz and his woke running mate.

But what was really interesting about this little tableau, was the comments by the listeners.  They were trying to convince themselves that Kamala was a new woman.  She was no longer a babbling idiot spouting trite pablum about yellow school buses and futures unburdened by something or other.  She was a mighty orator like Obama who would captivate her audience and inspire the nation to support her to victory in November.

They were trying to convince themselves of this narrative.  But it didn’t sound like they were quite convinced.  It seemed like they were pinning their hopes on Walz being the adult in the room to convince the country to ignore reality and put this overwrought nut in charge of our lives for another four years of bad economy, rising crime and moral confusion.

My takeaway was they’re really scared.  The Joe Biden debacle was an existential crisis and they’re still slightly giddy from dodging that bullet.  But now they’re looking around at where they are and realizing that their hopes are pinned to another candidate who is also constrained to reading from a teleprompter.  And unfortunately, there is an enormous amount of recorded video of her talking utter nonsense.

They’re scared.  And they should be.

Monday’s Done

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

After a hard day of de-lousing a 600 ft tall squid-headed dragon you’d think I could relax and eat my supper in peace.  Instead, I’m confronted with a thousand-point drop in the Dow.  Back during the Black Monday crash in ‘87 a five-hundred-point drop was a catastrophe of mammoth proportions (about a 20% of the Dow).  Now double that drop is just a few percent of the DJIA.  But it certainly makes the talk of recession sound a lot more ominous.  I have to assume that Kamala, Queen of the Cat Ladies, will throw a hissy fit and demand that Dopey Joe threaten to fire everyone at the Fed if they don’t lower interest rates.  Well, sure.  That will fix things up, won’t it?  Well at least until November anyway.

Everybody is thinking that Iran will attack Israel and we’ll get dragged into it.  Well, I hope not.  I’m guessing that Iran will work through Hezbollah to harry the Israelis in the north, but not attack them directly.  Netanyahu has quite a problem on his hands to neutralize Hamas.  It’s almost as if his only option is to separate the women and young children from the adult make population and fight the men without inflicting casualties on the innocent.  Well, if he figures that one out, he deserves a Nobel Prize for War.

The Ukrainians have installed their new F-16s in Odessa and I guess hope to use them to attack Crimea, Zaporizhzhia and maybe elsewhere.  It remains to be seen if Ukraine can change the status quo of Russian dominance in air defense over Eastern Ukraine.  The F-16s are supposed to be superior to the Russian fighters.  But ground-based defenses are a serious threat to even an advanced aircraft like the F-16.  We shall see.

I saw that Real Clear Politics has shifted the polling to a Kamala Harris lead of a point or so.  Well, never underestimate the number of blue-haired cat ladies in the American population.  Imagine Commander in Chief Kamala Harris reviewing the troops in Iran or Venezuela or Mexico by Zoom call and giving a rousing speech about the new battery driven aircraft carrier painted green and “manned” by a wholly trans crew.  Or imagine Kamala giving a speech at the United Nations outlawing “whiteness” and pointing to the success of post-white cultures like Zimbabwe and South Africa.  Or just imagine Kamala dedicating the addition of George Floyd to Mount Rushmore.  Well, not exactly an addition.  More like replacement.  Those dead white guys would have to be erased to make room for Floyd’s head.  Now that’s progress alright.

Looking around at what’s going on so far this week makes me nostalgic for my time at the de-lousing procedure at the boiling acid vat of Cthulhu.  Sure, the sulfuric acid fumes are lethal and the parasites are the size and ferocity of wolverines but the mission is simple and words still have their real meaning.  The same can’t be said for the “real world.”  In what universe is Kamala Harris a world class leader?  By what objective standards are the results of Bidenomics prosperity.  By what double-speak was Kamala’s handling of the border crisis a success?  Bring on the acid vat!

Pools and Fools

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Just to let me know what she thinks of my July as the end of New England summer theory, Mother Nature has been laying on the torrid heat and drenching humidity.  ¡Ay, Chihuahua!

Fine.  I glory in the heat.  Although it did make a moving job, I was stuck with a wonderful excuse to sweat like a pig.  Well, that’s what showers are for anyway.  Today I got the swimming pool back in line.  We’ve spent the last two months trying to find a leak that has been draining about 700 gallons of water a day.  I was getting ready to switch pool companies when they sent their heavy hitter back with a mandate “to make the crazy old guy happy.”  Well, whine bitterly enough and you get some action.  So, after convincing myself that the leak is at least 80% fixed I refilled the pool from my poor abused well and adjusted pH, chlorine and added the algaecide and voila, Princess Sack of Potatoes has a cool place to splash around in for the week.

Camera Girl will be in full charge next week because I will be incommunicado.  Tonight, I will load up the photos and quotes needed to get me through the next week and a half.  Then tomorrow I’ll try to get a couple of posts done ahead of time to minimize the dead air on the site.  If I’m lucky World War III will break out and spare me the annoyance (bad joke).  But maybe they’ll be some really big news that will make it easy for me to generate copy.

I read that Trump is talking about debating Kamala on Fox News.  Now wouldn’t that be a hoot!  If there weren’t any ringers in the moderators to protect her, I imagine Kamala would come off sounding like a mental patient.  I mean she is a mental patient and without a teleprompter or someone to keep Trump from attacking all her weak spots she just might run off the stage screaming by the ten-minute mark.

As I posted on earlier, Zelensky is now preparing his countrymen for the reality that they will have to come to terms with Moscow.  Putin is laying claim to all the areas with majority Russophone populations which I think is about 30% of the Ukrainian land area.  And he is demanding the neutering of the Ukrainian army, along with a constitutional amendment forbidding NATO membership.

Along with Zelensky’s fear that Donald Trump will cut off his weapons supply, the recent Russian success along the combat line in Donetsk and the difficulty his army is having locating and keeping recruits is bringing home to Zelensky that pretty soon the current terms that Putin wants may look like a bargain a year from now if his military collapses and the Russians can walk into Kiev.

Well, you never know how a war will turn out but it is starting to look like Joe Biden’s war is coming to a disastrous end.  But naturally, for Biden that would be par for the course.

What a shame that the Democrats have made home ownership an impossibility for millions of young couples who want to start a family.  You’d think for that reason alone, the Zoomers would all vote for Trump.  Well, time will tell.  For their sake I hope Trump wins and actually has the smarts to fix the economy.  I don’t assume it’s guaranteed that he can fix it.  Our economy and the government’s finances have been tricked up by the geniuses in Washington for a couple of decades now.  Things may be so fouled up that fixing will take a decade to accomplish.  Well, Donald, good luck.