13MAY2020 – OCF Update

Looking around it looks like we’ll be hearing about the same issues for the foreseeable future:

  • The Blue and Red States will be touting their opposing strategies for weathering the COVID-19 epidemic. Currently the Blue States have selected as their strategy of inflating the death toll to include anyone who dies in their states.  Along with this they are dragging their feet on re-opening their businesses.  The Red States are moving ahead with normalizing life in their states.  Interestingly they are not seeing large numbers of deaths like we see in New York and New Jersey.  And even with the death toll inflation in the Blue States it appears they haven’t been able to hide the fact that the epidemic is receding.  I’ll predict that in a couple of more weeks even the blue States will be anxious to declare victory and start opening up their businesses and try to salvage their economies.
  • The Flynn prosecution will spawn a controversy with the Right touting the DOJ investigation into the illegal basis of the Russia-gate prosecutions and the Left condemning Barr and Durham as partisan hacks motivated by allegiance to the Trump administration. With Durham releasing information about the scope of the conspiracy this may quickly turn into the most interesting story of the summer and fall.  If the DOJ decides not to prosecute the conspirators but instead expose and embarrass them through publication of their dishonest actions it could have the effect of vindicating President Trump and vilifying Obama and his whole administration.  And that would be very bad for a Biden candidacy.
  • The Trump and Biden campaigns will spar ceaselessly over any and all issues. What you will hear endlessly is that Joe Biden is ahead by some number of points, between 5% and 10%.  It’ll never be explained how someone as universally disdained by even the Democrat voters as Biden could manage to remain perpetually popular and ahead but that is their story and they’ll be sticking to it.
  • Currently the Tara Reade story will be a lightning rod allowing the Republicans to brand anyone who condemned Justice Kavanaugh on the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford but disbelieves Reade about Biden as hypocrites. If Reade begins to gain traction with women voters, I think we’ll finally see the Democrat party either convince Biden to step aside or begin the process of selecting an alternate candidate.  And that will be a difficult process.  Bernie Sanders will be bypassed again and that is bound to alienate his many staunch supporters.  If Bernie is left waiting at the altar again the Bernie Bros will stay home in droves, or even worse, a bunch of them will vote for Trump.
  • Nancy Pelosi has assembled a three trillion-dollar bill that would allow the bankrupt Blue States to stick the federal government with the cost of the public sector union pension funds. The Senate Leader Mitchell McConnell isn’t interested in funding this.  But President Trump may be interested in additional relief for small businesses that have been crushed by the long shutdown.  He may try to broker a deal between the House and Senate.  I know that the President also favors some kind of public works projects.  This will be a large story in the fall.
  • The China story will be a continuing saga for the Trump re-election campaign. The President has indicated that he holds China responsible for the outbreak and the subsequent damage to the American economy.  It remains to be seen if this translates into a specific policy or policies.  You could imagine some kind of incentive for American companies that relocate industrial capacity from China to the United States.

As you can see these are interesting times but currently all of these issues will be moving forward in fits and starts.  Right now, none of them has a blockbuster event occurring so there will be a lot of opinion stories producing a lot of smoke and heat but little light.  I’ll try to restrain myself from piping in on every little ripple in the pond.  What I’m hoping to see is something from Durham.  As I’ve said, I don’t think we’ll get anything too spectacular.  But I would like to see something before summer.  Failing that I’d like to see the President formulate an economic rescue plan for small businesses that is more comprehensive and fairer than the halfway measures we’ve seen so far.

So, there’s my update.  Stay tuned for whatever is breaking next.

Mika Brzezinski Versus Joe Biden, Clash of the Mindless

I was watching a video clip of Joe Biden being “grilled” by Mika Brzezinski over why he would not allow a search through his document archive of sealed Senate records at the University of Delaware.  I suppose in some sense there is some importance in the outcome of the “investigation” of Tara Reade’s assault charges against Biden.  Biden was categorical during the Kavanaugh investigation that a woman must be believed when she makes a charge of sexual harassment.  And he made it perfectly clear that in his mind Title IX demanded that any man in a college that was accused of sexual “crimes” should have all his rights to due process stripped away by the college administration and be subjected to summary expulsion at the whim of any woman who chooses to make an accusation.

For those reasons I guess I should enjoy watching Brzezinski ask Biden over and over and over why he won’t allow his archive to be searched for evidence on Tara Reade.  But it’s just so painful to have to listen to the two of them monotonously make the same points endlessly.  It’s like one of those Three Stooges routines where two hoodlums have overpowered Moe and Larry and are preparing to beat Curley to a pulp but somehow he and one of the gangsters get tangled up and are both wearing one half of a coat, each one of them has an arm in one sleeve and so Curley will swing and punch the other assailant and as the force of the blow pivots him around the guy he punched swings and hits the guy in the coat with him.  And the force of that blow pivots Curley back around again and he punches the same guy again.  This goes on ad infinitum until both gangsters are beaten to a pulp.  As humorous as this might be the first couple of times, after that it starts to get annoying.

I’ll give Biden credit.  In his present state of demented senility, I wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to keep track of the argument.  Granted they were the exact same words repeated over and over but based on what I’ve seen of Joe lately I assumed he would have been worn down and just started going into details of his assault on Reade and tried to justify it based on his importance as a Senator and her job description.  But somehow, he managed to repeat his talking points with only short lapses into incoherence.  Not once did he drool or stick his finger in his ear.  It was a virtuoso performance.

As for Brzezinski, I can’t stand looking or listening to her.  Everything she says and does is painful to sit through.  I consider her to be one of the stupidest or the most dishonest individuals in media.  It’s got to be one or the other and possibly it could be both.  But looking at her vapid face while she parrots whatever drivel she’s been handed is just too much for me.  When I started writing the Morning Shmoe parodies of Scarborough and Brzezinski I tried to make Lycra Spandexy as over the top as I possibly could.  But I don’t think I ever made her more absurd than the almost-real-world model she was based on.

And so, it was astonishing to me to note that I was rooting for Creepy Uncle Joe to somehow manage to escape from the mindless hectoring of Mika/Lycra.  I could hear myself thinking, “No Creepy  Joe, don’t get your arm tangled up in that coat with her.  Don’t slip on that banana peel.  Put your hand between your eyes before they get poked!”

It’s such a strange world.  In a sensible world I’d want Biden, Brzezinski and Jim Comey to be eaten by zombies searching for their non-existent brains.  Or at least I’d like to see them performing the work their talents qualified them for, namely picking up trash on the side of a highway with a pointed stick while wearing an orange jumpsuit.  But we live in a fallen world.  So, I guess it’s a good thing when MSNBC and Joe Biden are at an impasse as to which is stupider.

Friday Always Seems a Little More Optimistic

Yesterday I commented on William Barr’s lack of concrete progress in prosecuting the cabal of Deep State actors in the intelligence agencies that had tried to pull off a coup in 2017.  I was feeling pretty depressed about the whole thing.  Maybe it was a combination of being part of the ridiculous blue state cower-in-place strategy over the Wuhan flu and knowing just how much damage that policy has caused to millions of people across the country.  But today in the light of day and with a weekend coming up to enjoy I feel a little less gloomy.

After all I think about the things, I can be grateful for.  One of those things is Joe Biden.  If you could choose anyone to be the Democrat contender in a presidential race could you find anyone better than Creepy Uncle Joe?  If you go over his resume it’s simply breathtaking.  Here’s a man who comes ready made with quotes, video footage and democratic personnel who go on record disparaging his intelligence, his competence and most importantly his ethics.  Think of what can be done with hair sniffing, shoulder kneading, head nuzzling footage and a quote of what Tara Reade says Joe did to her back when she worked for him.  I can only imagine that will have a chilling effect on the suburban professional women’s vote in November.  I no longer think the Justice Department will do anything about Hunter Biden but what’s already out there should be enough to allow plenty of linkage to the whole China story.  Between the Wuhan flu and the past administration’s complicity in the off-shoring of American jobs to China it should be a very useful exercise to tie Sleepy Joe to China.  And finally, how easy will it be to take a few minutes of Joe’s verbal gaffes and nonsensical utterances to convince any but the most committed ideologues that Joe should be in an assisted living space and not the Oval Office.

And as the reports from various medical experts keep coming in it becomes easier to look beyond the confines of my blue state lockdown bubble and realize that for a large majority of the country, life will be returning to comparative normalcy very soon and with the help of the federal stimulus money economic recovery will be dramatic in many parts of the nation.  And that recovery will be exactly the right scenario to highlight the goals that the President stands, a strong American economy based on industrial capacity within the United States.  This can be contrasted to the Democrat strategies of elite prosperity coupled with universal unemployment underwritten by tech oligarchs who allow the poor to subsist on a UBI that robs their lives of dignity, purpose and hope.  And looking at the champions of this Orwellian future, at the Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s of the democratic world, it looks easier and easier to provide the contrast needed to allow the voters the chance to choose.  Admittedly the American voting population is not uniformly rational and in fact there are whole swaths of people, especially in the blue states that will jump at the chance to institute the UBI and the Green New Deal.  But in the final analysis the Electoral College should still have sufficient actual Americans with enough intelligence to choose sanity instead of Democrats.

So, forgive my dark mood of yesterday and take heart.  President Trump is still in charge of the executive branch and William Barr isn’t the last word on justice and if he doesn’t get the job done he will be replaced by a less timid soul and I can still hope to see James Comey wearing the old timey striped pajamas working on that chain gang and using a sledge hammer to break the big ones into little ones.  O Brother, where art thou.