Last night’s Democratic debate
I didn’t watch it. I’m not a masochist. And I dislike debates anyway, no matter what side they’re on.
But I hear tell about it. Sounds like the highlights (or low lights, depending how you look at it) were Beto O’Rourke’s “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15s” and Joe Biden’s “Nobody should be in jail for a non-violent crime.”
Bernie Madoff will be very pleased to hear it.
Now I realize that Biden probably didn’t mean that, but he said something so stupid that it’s really quite mind-boggling. I don’t think that particular remark reflects senility, either. I think it’s just the way his mind works and has always worked.
I find the Democratic field very depressing. One of these people will be the nominee (no, I don’t think any rescuer like Michelle Obama is riding in at the 11th hour). All of them are dreadful in a variety of ways. There is a chance one might be the next president.
Even the press seems a bit disgusted at the prospects.
I cheer on the candidates in their efforts to be the farthest to the left.
Bernie Madoff! Zing, rimshot!
My wife, the diligent citizen, watched the whole thing. My brain tuned most of it out.
I think they are just throwing spaghetti against the populism wall. Imagine how frustrating it must be for them that Trump has real traction as a type of populist. Campaign promises mean nothing to a Dem.
The scary thing is that Dems never seem to care about the damage done by policies they put in place once in office. In office, they float some trial balloons, let the media hash it over, and if the poll numbers are good they vote/sign it into law. Screw ’em if it’s a rotten law, the poll numbers said they wanted it. Republicans care about leadership (maybe), not us.
My only takeaway is that Joe seems to have gotten his meds straightened out. Skip the half a Valium or Xanax, and the two martini dinner, but do grab the Venti dark roast before the debate.
Besides the two low lights Neo mentioned, they also all went on, and on, and on and on about how we’re all going to die from climate change unless we do something NOW!!!. No one mentioned China or India’s emissions. The US is all white supremacists, full of endemic racism, people dying from lack of health care….all I could think is why anyone from Latin America would even want to come here if it’s so bad..
Castro trying to paint Biden as senile was pretty amusing.
All of them, however, are batshit crazy.
I’m baffled by Kamala Harris’ demeanor. I personally find her tone grating and arrogant. Her laugh creeps me out, particularly when it comes at inappropriate moments. And it blew my mind when she defiantly declared that Trump has broken promises. Of all the presidents in my lifetime, he stands out as the one who achieve more of his promises than anyone else, and that was in the face of insane resistance from both parties. I just wonder what her point was in making such a refutable statement. I think most of the crazy left base would admit that the reason they want to get Trump out is that he’s been effective at completing his agenday, not the opposite.
I went to the Reagan Library to hear a conversation with James Mattis.
It was a very enjoyable evening.
And then Biden’s teeth “fell out.”
Good times. Good times.
Swalwell shoulda nuked the debate.
Seven hours for the Climate Change debate, then three hours for this debate. Are the Democrats masochists?
The DNC seems to be acting out Robert Conquest’s Third Law:
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
…they also all went on, and on, and on and on about how we’re all going to die from climate change unless we do something NOW!!!.
physicsguy: I find it interesting that Democrats are suddenly so gung-ho on pressing climate change. Of course, climate change has always been an item on their agenda, but now it’s front-and-center or we are all going to die in 12 years.
My guess is its part of their campaign retooling after the RussiaGate / Mueller / Impeachment effort failed.
Where the hell did Bernie get the statistic that the U.S. had the world’s highest rate of Child poverty?
Did some staff member of his find some crackpot lefty website that threw this statistic out there, tortured some actual statistics to achieve their desired result or, as seems most likely, did Bernie just make this shit up?
Only saw the last half of the debate due to “technical difficulties” getting used to using our new Roku, but what I observed was a bidding war, one in which each candidate tried to top the others in terms of how much money (our money, by the way) and goodies they were going to throw at the voters to bribe them.
Gothamite:
Please see this.
Michelle Obama as a ‘rescuer?”
Please tell me you are joking.
Aside from her academic achievements (which are questionable due to racial preferences granted to “approved” minorities; claim you are Cuban or Asian and see how far that gets you) what has she accomplished?
(read her senior thesis at Princeton and you will see what I mean).
Then again, one can say the same for Biden, Warren , Buttigieg, the unrepentant communist Sanders, the sleep your way to the top Harris, et. al.
What exactly have they accomplished in the positions they held??
Really, other then taking up space, nothing at all. (Ditto for Barack O) .
The BIG BIG problem in the USA – not just the demokrat party – is that many/most/all of those seeking political office have never in their entire adult lives held a real job; e.g., outside of govt. jobs, political jobs or foundation.
Check out the “experience” of the demokrats running.
A job that if done poorly gets you fired; not re-appointed to some other job in which your past performance is irrelevant or one obtained by someone who knows you or your political affinities.
Honestly, the voting age needs to be raised to 35 years of age and anyone running for office needs to be at least 45 years age AND had NEVER worked before in any political or political campaign or lobbyist organization or held any political office of any type or worked in any govt. agency at any level.
We need representatives that have real world experience.
JohnTyler on September 13, 2019 at 5:18 pm said:
…
We need representatives that have real world experience.
* * *
I might not go quite as far on changing the qualifications for elected office, but we are on the same trail.
Check out this article by Angelo Codevilla on America’s Ruling Class
(I excerpted it on the Democrats’ Quest thread, but the whole thing is worth reading). He saw what we were coming to politically at least a decade ago.
https://spectator.org/americas-ruling-class/
America’s Ruling Class And the perils of revolution.
by ANGELO CODEVILLA, July 16, 2010, 4:20 PM
It’s entertaining watching all of them claw and scratch to “out-Progressive” each other.
That dog won’t hunt at election time. The GOP campaign commercials are writing themselves as we speak…
(no, I don’t think any rescuer like Michelle Obama is riding in at the 11th hour).
neo: But you can’t be positive and that’s my point.
It still makes sense to me as a low-probability possibility — if the convention is dead-locked and if it looks like Michelle Obama could win against Trump.
Those are big ifs, but if they are granted, I say MO would run. All I hear from participants here is they don’t believe she wants to. I agree, but I give MO credit that she would stoop to being POTUS if it were a pretty sure thing.
Tell me otherwise.
AesopFan: That Codevilla article is an oldie-but-goldie. He was one of the first recent commentators I read who sliced our politics up as Ruling/Ruled instead of Left/Right.
Though Hermann Kahn, the think tank guy who wrote “Thinking about the Unthinkable” about nuclear war, hit the same note back in 1977 at an after-hours salon for Jerry Brown and friends while Brown was governor of California for the first time.
Kahn used the term, “New Class,” to refer to our new overlords. I notice that term is being resurrected by InstaPundit among others:
Think of a group of people who come from upper middle class backgrounds, from families who are largely education-oriented, so they see that the children go to the good schools and who, after they get out of the schools, earn their living by the use of academic skills, language skills, aesthetic skills, analytical skills. They don’t earn their living by being entrepreneurs, businessmen, engineers, laborers, clerical workers.”
–Herman Kahn, “The CoEvolution Quarterly,” Spring 1977
Kahn is a lost resource for libertarian/conservatives. If you get the chance, look him up. While everyone else was gloom-and-doom, Kahn was writing about “The Coming Boom” (1983). Kahn got it right and overall I think he has been our best future-teller from those years.
Now I realize that Biden probably didn’t mean that, but he said something so stupid that it’s really quite mind-boggling. I don’t think that particular remark reflects senility, either. I think it’s just the way his mind works and has always worked.
Yes, indeed. It is no accident that many call him “Slow Joe.”
Something in the spam filter won’t let me post. Any ideas? Is it links?
At last night’s debate (transcript), Booker said:
[W]e know Donald Trump’s a racist, but there is no red badge of courage for calling him that.
Courage. Such a quaint, old fashioned word. It’s a quiet word, you know. At least among the courageous.
I was born during WWII and I spent my childhood surrounded by those who bore the wounds, both visible and not so much. I myself wore the uniform. It was after Korea and before Vietnam. Every once in a while we had to get all dressed up, Class A’s, and you’d see the decorations. Combat Infantry Man’s Badge at the top. Always at the top. Purple Hearts, lots of those. Stars, Silver, Bronze. Unit and battle ribbons. Then there were the war stories. We drank a lot and after a few at the club they would start. Houses of ill repute, poker games, liberty ports, a night sleeping it off in the stockade. Buddies you’d lost track of, maybe bought the farm. Never, ever, ever about the sound of the guns.
You know, we never lost that. It just kind of went out of fashion. It came back, briefly, after 9/11. I cry when I think of the police and firemen who ran up the stairs past those coming down.
Now we may need that again. We are facing an enemy from within. They are evil and demonic and they are trying to take from us everything. Everything that we have fought and died for. They stood on a stage last night and damned our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights to Hell. All for a mess of pottage.
Bill Whittle wrote an essay shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. It is called “Tribes”. It is rough and raw. It is offensive, both in language and meanings. It needs to be read anew.
Please tell me which truly capable leader and chief executive (of whom the United States has many) would be willing to subject themselves to the ravages of that pack of hyenas that we call a Press?
Roy Lofquist:
I got it out of the trash and restored it here. But I haven’t a clue why it went into the trash in the first place. There was nothing there that should have caused that to happen. Sometimes it’s just a fluke.
Neo,
Fluke? Yup. It was much better in the old steam powered days.
I’m going to try again with the link to Whittle’s essay which should have appeared at the end of the post.
https://www.defensivecarry.com/forum/law-enforcement-military-homeland-security-discussion/19268-tribes-bill-whittle.html#/topics/19268
So much crap was thrown in the air as a result of this debate that I’m still trying to find my way thorough the cloud of manure dust.
Thus, after trying to wrestle with crazy, cranky, manic Bolshevik Bernie’s assertion that the U.S. has the highest percentage of Children in poverty, I am just starting to process Biden’s claim that poor kids are exposed to four million less words than kids who aren’t poor, and that the solution is to crank up the ol’ family Victrola each night, (in China/Slow Joe’s case he probably does mean one of those old timey hand crank Victrolas with the great big trumpet shaped megaphone) so that these poor kids can try to make up their almost insurmountable word deficit.
Next, to somehow work through, I guess, is ol’ phony Hispanic Beto’s dropping of any carefully constructed “nuance” or ambiguity, any pretense about supposedly “moderate,” “sensible” intermediate steps like “background checks,””plugging loopholes,””Red Flag”laws, and his outright admission that, all along, behind all of these weasel words is the ultimate objective of outright come to your house and take ’em gun confiscation, and he’s gonna jump over all these purely for voter consumption, phony, intermediate steps, and to quote Chris Cuomo’s favorite phrase, “get right to it. “
I was wondering which of the candidates was going to start in on misgendering pets by using the wrong pronouns or free gender reassignment surgery for non-binary animals.
I think that, given their performances the other night, the term “clown car” has to be retired, to be replaced by the much more evidently correct collective description for this crew of “freak show.”
The Boomers took over the Democratic Party with Clinton. Trump will destroy Warren, the last Boomer candidate, in 2020 and probably take back the House, but GOP control will be temporary, part of a much larger realignment.
Yang will emerge from 2020 with a lot of solid support for the future. The real change election will be 2022 with a new Democrat Party.
The single issue Pro-Life takeover of the GOP will be a major factor in 2022. GOP Primary voters will choose only unapologetic social conservatives and may lose both houses to a new Democrat Party typified by candidates like Dan McCready.
I see the GOP after the 2020 wipeout against Democrats going to similar extremes on Conservative issues that the Democrats are now doing on many Liberal issues. Not much will be enacted but they will lose the middle.
Trump will probably succeed in getting us out of and keeping us out of wars but a likely recession, automation, the debt including skyrocketing consumer debt, and the huge waves of old Boomers needing care will make for an uncertain and chaotic period.
The new Democrats will talk like Republicans used to but will support Choice and probably a basic income.
2024 will usher in an entire new world. The period starting in 2025 will be a repeat of the late 1940’s and 1950’s.
Aside from her academic achievements (which are questionable due to racial preferences granted to “approved” minorities; claim you are Cuban or Asian and see how far that gets you) what has she accomplished?
(read her senior thesis at Princeton and you will see what I mean).
Young women of 22 seldom produce impressive expository writing. Why would you fancy she’d be an exception. She did major in black studies, something few people do. I’ve got a shirt-tail who insisted on art school. She passed the bar exam, so she likely has some baseline of competence. AA will get you into a fancy private university when your best match might be one of the research campuses of the Illinois state system. It doesn’t confer unlimited advantages on applicants. What’s notable about Mooch has been that she had no real technae (she quit practicing law after three years) and that for a dozen years people were willing to pay her handsome salaries for no-one-knows-quite-what. (Do you hear Fred Rogers’ voice saying ‘Can you say that, ‘launderthebribes;?). It’s a reasonable wager that if she’d had her druthers, she’d have been a housewife with a side business in interior design or in retailing antiques. She couldn’t do that because relying on BO’s earnings meant more of a cut in her standard-of-living than she could tolerate. She’s not a dope. She’s a Material Girl.
Then again, one can say the same for Biden, Warren , Buttigieg, the unrepentant communist Sanders, the sleep your way to the top Harris, et. al.
What exactly have they accomplished in the positions they held??
Really, other then taking up space, nothing at all. (Ditto for Barack O) .
Sanders was a seminal figure in Burlington politics. There’s ‘before Sanders’ and ‘after Sanders’ there. Can’t take that away from him. What’s odd about Sanders is that he found his niche in municipal government when he failed at everything else. Booty-gig failed at salient tasks while Mayor of South Bend; it’s a reasonable wager that, like Michael Dukakis, he simply has no interest in street crime as a social problem.
The Boomers took over the Democratic Party with Clinton. Trump will destroy Warren, the last Boomer candidate, in 2020 and probably take back the House, but GOP control will be temporary, part of a much larger realignment.
I have no clue from whence comes the obsession with ‘Boomers’. Jesse Jackson, Richard Gephardt, Albert Gore Jr, Dan Quayle, Bilge Clinton, Roger Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey, Tom Harkin, Steve Forbes, Pat Choate, Bill Bradley, Joseph Lieberman, George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Hellary, Newt Gingrich, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and John Kasich were all born after 1938 and prior to 1958. I’m not seeing the significance of that, bar that they’re more likely to have had military service than someone born later and less likely than someone born earlier, more likely to have been divorced than someone born earlier (and more likely by a modest amount than someone born later).
And I’m not seeing why you’re so sanguine about next year.
Some amusing autophagy:
https://freebeacon.com/politics/new-dccc-chief-wants-to-cancel-male-candidates/
they see that the children go to the good schools and who, after they get out of the schools, earn their living by the use of academic skills, language skills, aesthetic skills, analytical skills. They don’t earn their living by being entrepreneurs, businessmen, engineers, laborers, clerical workers.”
We listen to audio books on long drives. We are now in California to visit children and grandchildren. We have been listening to the book, “Bad Blood” about the Theranos case. What an example of the “Educated Class” gone wrong ! I highly recommend that book. The young woman, Elizabeth Holmes, sounds like a very bright young woman who was obsessed with getting rich as an entrepreneur but did not wait to build a skill set. Her father was a bureaucrat and descendent from wealth that was dissipated by his father and grandfather. Worked for Democrats and was unemployed after 2000. Interesting values. We have not finished the book yet. We got back to our hotel, last night and my wife was reluctant to turn it off.
It still feels rather early for this sort of thing, but it looks like the top three contenders may be Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.
I have resolved to find the fun aspects in this sort of thing, and to get into the pageantry of the election season, instead of worrying about what I can’t control, or about what may or may not happen.
Besides, a lot can go on during these coming months, as in the news just yesterday from Saudi Arabia.
Well, now that I’ve heard Biden tell how, in his younger days, he faced off in the mean streets against gang banger leader “Corn Pop,” I guess it looks like the Democrats have found the “street fighter” they need to oppose “street fighter” Trump.
See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/09/joe-biden-tells-bizarre-story-about-how-he-once-faced-down-a-gang-leader-named-corn-pop-video/