‘Orange Man Bad!’ Trump Still Living Rent-Free in the Left’s Collective Head

Posted on | June 14, 2022 | 1 Comment

Linking to an article about internecine conflict in “progressive advocacy groups,” Glenn Reynolds notes the real source of their problem:

Woke white people are annoying, stupid, and frequently vicious. Fortunately they’re also usually self-destructive and incompetent. But ultimately, this is just Trump exercising a magical power to destroy his enemies via their own ideology:

Sooner or later, each interview for this story landed on the election of Trump in 2016 as a catalyst. Whatever internal tension had been pulling at the seams of organizations in the years prior, Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike. The institutional progressive world based in Washington, D.C., reacted slowly, shell-shocked and unsure of its place, but people outside those institutions raced ahead of them. A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist. Spontaneous women’s marches were called in scores of cities, drawing as many as 5 million people, a shocking display of force. (Their collapse in a heap of identitarian recriminations is its own parable for this moment.)

Indeed. Trump Derangement Syndrome exacerbated the worst tendencies of the worst people in politics. The RINOs and neocon grifters — e.g., Steve Schmidt — exposed themselves as cynical frauds who had never believed in anything except their own careerist ambitions. On the Left, the desperate panic of the #Resistance sent emotionally fragile people searching for saviors, thus creating opportunities for crooked hustlers like Michael Avenatti and Patrisse Cullors, to say nothing of the “cabal” that foisted President Joe Biden on the nation. The very worst people, motivated in various degrees by selfishness and paranoid fear — “Orange Man Bad!” — were to be found in the anti-Trump mobs. They deserve whatever misery they’ve created for themselves because, God knows, they’ve created enough misery for the rest of us.

Category: Economics

‘The NPR Tote Bag Set’: Liberal White Guys and Their Target Audience

Posted on | June 14, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘The NPR Tote Bag Set’: Liberal White Guys and Their Target Audience

One of the things about performative liberalism that must be understood is the desired audience for the performance. When those in the media — including people with large social-media followings — spend so much of their time virtue signalling and expressing concern about The Current Thing (e.g., Ukraine, J6, #MeToo), it raises the question, who is this for?

Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy distilled to its essence the psychological basis of liberalism, namely the belief of liberals that they are more enlightened than — morally and intellectually superior to — ordinary people. Once you recognize this as the emotional core of liberalism, everything they say or do makes a lot more sense. The “anointed” must continually demonstrate their superiority by advocating for causes and issues that contradict the values and beliefs of ordinary people. Although The Vision of the Anointed was written in the mid-1990s, and the examples Sowell uses to illustrate this tendency are some 25 years out of date, we still see the basic point confirmed daily, on issues ranging from violent crime to energy policy to transgenderism. On all these issues and more, the Anointed view the basic purpose of political engagement as creating opportunities to congratulate themselves for their manifest superiority.

These latter-day Pharisees are always righteous in their own eyes, and like to believe they are admired by others. This is why liberals are always attending annual events where they hand out awards to each other, to confirm their status as members of the Anointed elite. In fact, liberals will often take over otherwise non-political organizations and convert them to such purposes, which is why events like the Hugo Awards are now just a ceremonial celebration of liberal activism. You can’t get an award for science fiction writing unless you’re a liberal, in pretty much the same way that the Oscars and Emmy awards are just festivals of liberalism.

Life has gotten rough out lately there for one important segment of the Anointed. Because of the identity-politics madness that they’ve encouraged, white male liberals find themselves increasingly marginalized by their own movement, and their efforts to remain relevant are sometimes comically desperate, e.g., “Charlotte” Clymer.

Circa 2013, Charles Clymer was running “a rather successful feminist page on Facebook called Equality for Women” where, among other things, he presumed to lecture women who were doing feminism “wrong.” His “creepy” behavior attracted critical scrutiny:

Despite all this, Clymer desperately wants to be in the feminist spotlight. . . . He is expressing to you, he is demanding that you understand: Charles Clymer is dedicated to the cause of feminism and you and your magical vagina are going to believe him, like it or not.

Feminists started the hashtag #StopClymer to alert women to this problematic “male feminist.” Eventually, and perhaps predictably, Charles “came out” as transgender in January 2018, and now “Charlotte” Clymer is such a celebrated activist that “she” got invited to this year’s White House “Lesbian Visibility Day” event. Clymer’s trajectory is perhaps the most extreme example of the desperate measures by which white male liberals seek to remain relevant in the Age of Wokeness.

Freddie deBoer lampoons the somewhat less desperate, but nonetheless laughable, posturing of those he deems “Good White Men”:

These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so. . . . These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.

The target audience of these guys is what deBoer calls “the NPR tote bag set,” as for example his description of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes:

The only man who talks more about Donald Trump than Donald Trump himself, the living picture of the media liberal who’s compelled to outwardly disdain Trump but whose continued professional existence depends on him. . . . I would like to underline that he was once a genuinely interesting lefty writer who was willing to skewer liberals. . . Now Chris flatters people who have a favorite “podcatcher” app for a living, telling the world’s Sarah Lawrence graduates that when they feel better than everyone else, they’re right. He’s a living, breathing laundromat for the post-collegiate elite’s ugly feelings of superiority, reassuring them every day on his show that their snobbery and self-obsession are justified thanks to their superior moral virtue. . . .
He has tweeted 160,000 times; I challenge you to find one that dares to be anything less than perfectly anodyne to the median suburban liberal Democrat. This is what Hayes has done with his very rare opportunity as a cable news host, fixated relentlessly on Big Orange in order to juice ratings sufficiently to afford his affluent Brooklynite lifestyle. Otherwise, he’s simply avoided giving offense like it was the plague, specifically to the NPR tote bag set who keep him solvent. Imagine climbing your way up the totem pole in media and, having reached the top, using your perch to tell Montgomery County soccer parents that yes, the problem with our country is poor white people, and doncha wish we could all vote for Obama a third time?

And about another, less prominent, “Good White Man”:

This man is the basic bitch of Good White Men, a computer-generated NPC of a Noble Ally. Everything about his performance (and, if you’ll forgive me, his face) is so perfectly in the center of Good White Manness, I half suspect he’s been created by a creepy machine learning algorithm designed to mimic embittered social studies teachers who always told themselves they were destined for more. Everything about this dude is so bland and so utterly dedicated to not giving offense that I’ve forgotten what exactly it was that he was bitterly droning on about recently to inspire his inclusion in this list. Suffice to say that his tasteful crewneck and Warby Parkers are indeed emblematic of his politics, which amount to an NPR tote bag brought to life by a mischievous wizard that dreadfully recites tiresome woke cliches about standpoint theory and constantly says “my fellow white people, listen up!”

Someone should have told these guys that one of the risks of following the herd is that you become a stereotype, a caricature, a cliché. Conformity is not a virtue, nor is popularity-seeking, but liberals typically lack the kind of self-awareness necessary to avoid this trap.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Liberals

Max Boot and Allahpundit Are Very Worried About Our Friends in Ukraine

Posted on | June 14, 2022 | Comments Off on Max Boot and Allahpundit Are Very Worried About Our Friends in Ukraine

Allahpundit’s headline at Hot Air:

Ukraine is running out of ammo
and taking heavy casualties

Max Boot’s headline at the Washington Post:

We can’t let Ukraine lose. It needs
a lot more aid, starting with artillery.

These alarming headlines are at least three weeks too late, really, and part of the reason is that Ukraine has been too good in the information warfare game, successfully convincing Westerners that everything was going fine in their war against the Russian invaders, even as problems were becoming apparent to those who scrutinized the maps.

By mid-May, Ukraine had clearly won the Battle of Kharkiv, and the Russians retreated from Ukraine’s second-largest city. With the threat to Kharkiv eliminated, I focused my attention on the Donbas in a post featuring a Ukrainian bikini model and this map:

[T]he main battle front in the Donbas, in the vicinity of Lysychansk, continues to be very active. Thursday, I blogged about Russian forces attempting a river crossing near Bilohorivka, east of Lyman, that went disastrously bad for the Russians. There are reports that the Russian invaders tried to cross the same river again on Thursday, with similarly disastrous results. . . .
Severodonetsk is on the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets River, across from Lysychansk on the west bank. Bilohorivka is about 12 miles west of Lysychansk, so if the Russians could cross the river there, they would threaten the flank and rear of the Ukrainians at Lysychansk, and force them to pull back from Severodonetsk. However, about 25 miles west of Bilohorivka, the Ukrainians still hold Lyman, from which they could advance eastward to threaten the Russian forces attempting to flank the position at Lysychansk. Therefore, if the victory at Kharkiv has freed up Ukrainian troops to fight elsewhere, this region between Lyman and Severodonetsk may present the most pressing emergency.

My point was that the Ukrainians held the eastern (or northern) bank of the river at exactly two points — Lyman and Severodonetsk — and the failed attempts by the Russians to cross the river showed how important it was for Ukraine to maintain those footholds, from which counterattacks could be launched against the Russians. Two days later, on May 16, I expanded on this idea:

If the Ukrainians could reinforce Lyman and launch a counterattack toward Zarichne and Kreminna, this would force the Russians to retreat from the river at Yampil and would also relieve pressure against Sievierodonetsk. Clearing the Russians from the north bank of the river would then allow the Ukrainian forces now holding the south bank to cross over and join the counteroffensive. . . .
So the question is whether Ukraine can assemble a strike force for the kind of breakthrough effort I’ve described. Something like this must be attempted somewhere in the Donbas theater, because Ukraine can’t keep playing defense and let the Russians have the leisure to pick and choose their points of attack. That’s a formula for slow-motion defeat.

If a civilian amateur could see this, certainly it must have been obvious to military professionals. As I said at the time, however, the question was whether Ukraine had reserves available to mount such a counteroffensive. In his post, Allahpundit writes:

[N]ow that the war has shifted to the east and become a long-range slugfest in open terrain, the forecast has shifted. Unable to match the range of Putin’s artillery, it’s the Ukrainians who are taking horrendous casualties while Russian soldiers remain out of reach. One advisor to Zelensky told reporters this week that around 150 Ukrainian troops are dying each day and another 800 are being wounded. That’s a thousand men off the battlefield every 24 hours among a total force of maybe 500,000. And not just any men: Their troops in the east have combat experience. Replacing those soldiers with new conscripts isn’t a one-to-one substitution.

Really? Does Ukraine actually have 500,000 troops? I strongly doubt it. Certainly we have seen no evidence in the past month that Ukraine has at its disposal a spare brigade of reserves that could be used as a strike force to mount a serious counteroffensive in the Donbas. Instead, they lost Lyman in late May, and are now on the verge of being wiped out in Severodonetsk. It is apparently the belief of Max Boot, et al., that these reversals are a result of Ukraine’s shortage of military equipment and supplies, which may be the case, but no amount of Western aid will help if the actual problem is a shortage of Ukrainian manpower.

Does Ukraine have “enough” artillery and ammunition to match the Russians? Of course they don’t, and never have. If the war was to be decided by who has the most artillery, there is no doubt the Russians would win. What made Ukraine successful in the first 10 weeks of the war was that they successfully struck Russia’s supply lines, causing logistical problems that forced the invaders to retreat. Why have they been unable to repeat that feat in the Donbas? Why has Russia been able to advance from Izyum and Popasna, rather than being compelled to protect their supply lines against Ukrainian attacks? Why was Russia able to capture Lyman, instead of facing counterattacks from that key river outpost?

Since mid-May, Ukraine seems to have suffered either (a) a failure of strategic thinking by its military leadership or (b) the effects of exhaustion aggravated by a shortage of trained troops. If they had enough manpower and intelligent leadership, they would have located some weak point in the long Russian front that stretches about 100 miles around from Izyum to Severodonetsk to Holubivka and struck that weak point with a brigade-sized attack. Smash through the front and go driving deep into the Russian rear, wrecking communications and supply lines — force the invader onto the defensive, and never mind whether you can hold onto any of the territory you’ve gained. What Ukraine needed to do was to seize the initiative and upset the apple cart, so that the Russians would not be able to continue their pound-and-ground slow-motion offensive.

There are limits to what the West can do, at this point, to help Ukraine. Yet here comes Max Boot with his Christmas shopping list:

The most obvious Ukrainian need is for more artillery tubes and shells. The Biden administration has already provided 108 M777 155mm howitzers and more than 220,000 artillery rounds. More recently, it promised to send four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (Himars) and ammunition with a maximum range of roughly 45 miles. That is wholly insufficient; even the 220,000 rounds would not last five days at current rates of use.
The West should be sending hundreds of howitzers and multi-launch rocket systems, thousands of rockets and hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds. This should include Excalibur GPS-guided rounds for the M177 (range: 24 miles) and Army Tactical Missile Systems for the Himars (range: 186 miles). Those longer-range munitions would enable the Ukrainians to target Russia’s artillery, rockets and supply lines without risking their new weapons close to the front lines. Of course, it will take time to train Ukrainians on these systems, but they have shown they are fast learners.
Ukraine is also in desperate need of more aircraft to stop Russian airstrikes and to mount its own attacks on Russian ground formations. Biden made a serious mistake in March when, because of overblown fears of Putin’s reaction, he refused to facilitate the transfer of Poland’s MiG-29 fighter jets. But it’s not too late to rectify that blunder.
While the MiG-29s would still be useful, in general we should be transitioning Ukraine to NATO equipment such as MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones, F-16 fighter jets, A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack aircraft and Patriot air-defense systems.

While I am certain that U.S. armament manufacturers would be glad to get the contracts to supply Ukraine with all these goodies, (a) it’s going to cost money and (b) it’s going to take time. If Ukraine were to place an order today for “hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds,” when would the desired product be delivered? Even if the U.S. and its allies just happened to have a bunch of spare shells lying around in their arsenals, shipping them to Ukraine in massive quantities would take time, and I’m under the impression that we don’t have sufficient ammunition manufacturing capacity that we can just crank out a few hundred thousand extra rounds quickly to meet Ukraine’s emergency needs.

Even if Uncle Sam were willing to play military Santa Claus for Ukraine — “Ho! Ho! Ho! Here’s a brand new fighter jet for you! And a Patriot air defense system for you!” — the question is whether we have the ability to supply everything on Max Boot’s list quickly enough to make a difference in the Donbas. Even if we could magically conjure up these supplies overnight, however, wouldn’t NATO aid to Ukraine on such a massive scale run the risk of provoking a wider war in Europe? So far, we have been lucky in that regard, but there’s no telling when our luck might run out. Certainly, I would like to see Ukraine emerge victorious in its war against the Russian invaders, but if it requires the kind of massive aid demanded by Max Boot (much of which couldn’t be delivered until three or six months from now, if that soon) doesn’t this start looking like the kind of “escalation” that preceded the Vietnam War?

Max Boot doesn’t have answers for that. He’s spent his entire career advocating war everywhere, and we’re tired of his one-note-Johnny act.

Category: Russia, Ukraine

In The Mailbox: 06.13.22

Posted on | June 14, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 06.13.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Cowboy Bebop – How To Kill A Show In Five Easy Steps
EBL: Licorice Pizza and The Card Counter
Twitchy: Karine Jean-Pierre Is Not Having A Good Day, also, Here’s What Christina Aguilera Wore For Her “Family Friendly” Pride In The Park Performance (NSFW)
Louder With Crowder: Elephant Stomps Woman To Death, Then Shows Up At Her Funeral Because He Wasn’t Done Yet, also, Researchers Get $500 Million Of Your Money To Study “Whiteness In Physics”
Vox Popoli: Sabers Rattling In The South China Sea, Switzerland’s Return To Poverty, and Knock Off The Retardery

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #154 – The Alphabet Soup Agency Episode
American Conservative: Wish List Of A Swing Voter, also, Are Sanctions Hurting Russia?
American Greatness: Judge Dismisses Home Depot Employees’ Pro-BLM Complaint, also, The Selfish Californian
American Power: AMLO Brings Back Mexican Nationalization Of The Economy, also, “That Doesn’t Feel Like $150 Worth Of Groceries”
American Thinker: The Democrats – A Criminal Organization, also, The J6 Committee’s Real Target Is You
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: The Castro Dictatorship’s Social Media Promotions Include Sex Tourism, also, “Havana Is Falling Down & The Government Doesn’t Care”
BattleSwarm: Shanghai Locking Down Again, also, Chinese Corporate Scam+Green Subsidy Scam=Mountains Of Abandoned New Cars
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted American, FAA Finally Releases Environmental Assessment Of SpaceX Boca Chica Facility, and Roscosmos Gets Permission To Negotiate Astronaut Barter Deal
Cafe Hayek: More On The Folly Of Price Controls
CDR Salamander: A General’s Progress
Da Tech Guy: Yes, Trying To Murder Kavanaugh Was Bad, But GOP & GUNS!, Opioids Are No Joke, and “Centrist Uprising” Against Boudin Shows How Extreme “Ultra Left” Democrats Are
Don Surber: The Democrat Plan For America, Yellen Should Do The Honorable Thing & Resign, and California Is Too Communist For Red China
First Street Journal: Locking Themselves In Their Own Little World, also, Max Boot, The Neocons, & Endless War
Gates Of Vienna: German Greens Swoon Over Ukraine, Terror In Tarragona, and Murphy Rears His Ugly Head Yet Again
The Geller Report: List Of U.S. Food Manufacturing Plants Destroyed Under The Biden Administration, also, J6 Committee Pulls Dismal Ratings For Prime-Time Show Trial
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day, A New Acronym Appears On The Interwebz, and A Cluster Of Galaxies
Hollywood In Toto: Breakdown – A Surprise Sleeper In ’97, A Masterpiece Today, also, Was Timothy Dalton The Beat, Most Accurate James Bond?
The Lid: FBI Knew Russiagate Was A Hoax By January 2017
Legal Insurrection: Gibson’s Bakery Wants Ohio Supremes To Restore Full Punitive Damages Against Oberlin College, Administration May Penalize Colleges Not Deemed LGBTQ Inclusive Enough, and #ShutDownDC’s Attempt To Shut Down SCOTUS A Flop
Michelle Malkin:
Nebraska Energy Observer: Random Observations – For Men Only, also, Spiritual But Not Religious?
Outkick: Stephen A. Smith & ESPN Are Lying About J6 Death Toll, Son Of Ex-Dodger Steve Sax Among Marines Killed In Training Flight Crash, and Jack Del Rio Deletes Twitter After Social Media Controversy
Power Line: A Heartwarming Headline, Five Observations For Monday, and Show Trial Ratings Are In
Shark Tank: Sabatini Lies About Trump & Mills
Shot In The Dark: Results, Plan D, and Governor Gaslight
This Ain’t Hell: Russians Standing Up Replacement For McD’s, Iwo Jima Skipper Takes Whole Crew To See Top Gun: Maverick, and Two More Are Known
Transterrestrial Musings: NASA & UAPs, Inflation, and “Social Justice” Advocates
Victory Girls: Drag Queens In Kindergarten – The New Normal? also, Taylor Lorenz Loves To Fly And It Shows
Volokh Conspiracy: State Trooper Suing Andrew Cuomo For Harassment Can Be Pseudonymous, also, The Ukraine vs. Ukraine, Kiev vs. Kyiv, etc.
Watts Up With That: German Economics Expert Sees Six Problems With Germany’s Green Energy Push, also, Energy Crisis is Just A Taste Of What The IEA Has In Store
Weasel Zippers: NYT – Democrats In Congress Concerned Over Biden’s Leadership, Stacey Abrams Says “The Bible Is Nothing But A Political Thriller”, and Now We’re Short Of Tampons
The Federalist: Clinton’s Russia Hoax Was Far Worse Than J6, Many Potential Problems With The Potential Bipartisan Gun Deal, and Now Would Be A Good Time For The Real Fiscal Conservatives To Stand Up
Mark Steyn: The Least Worst Man, The Sincerest Form Of Flattery, and Oogie Oogie Wa Wa

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

‘Far-Right Extremists’ Alert!

Posted on | June 13, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Far-Right Extremists’ Alert!

Readers may be wondering, what have “far-right extremists” been up to lately? Torching synagogues? Assassinating opponents? Advocating genocide? No, they’ve been “storming” a public library in California:

Drag queen speaks out after far-right extremists storm children’s event at Bay Area library

SAN LORENZO, Calif. (KGO) — A children’s story time turned into a nightmare Saturday afternoon at the San Lorenzo library.
Bay Area drag queen, Panda Dulce, was co-hosting a kids’ reading event in celebration of Pride Month when suddenly the unthinkable happened.

(Because I’m an old guy who has never been to Alameda County, maybe it’s just me, but why isn’t letting your kids hang out with drag queens the truly “unthinkable” part?)

“Eight to ten Proud Boys marched in with their cameras blazing, point at me, jeering from the back,” Dulce said.

(A “nightmare” in the Bay Area — normal people show up!)

A group of men believed to be affiliated with the far-right extremist Proud Boys group stormed the event.
They made white power hand gestures as they began hurtling homophobic and transphobic insults at Dulce.
“They said who brought the tranny. It’s a groomer. It’s a pedophile. Why do you bring your kids to this event,” Dulce said.
Dulce was then escorted by security away from the men, and law enforcement was called.
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office says they’re investigating the incident and have activated their hate crime protocols.

(Shoplifting is legal in California. You can defecate on the sidewalk and shoot up heroin in public parks. But cause a disturbance during “Drag Queen Story Hour”? Unthinkable! The sheriff’s department have “activated their hate crime protocols,” whatever that means.)

[“Panda Dulce” is] calling on all those opposed to stand up to extremism.
“I think now is the time to unite and to come together as a united front,” Dulce said.
Not just for her, but also for the children.
Dulce, who is Ivy League educated and has over a decade’s experience in social work says, many of them were terrified.
“I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to tell you a story. That’s it. I just want to tell you a story,” said Dulce.
The event has come under heavy scrutiny from both local leaders, as well as the San Lorenzo library.
“I really believe that libraries are places where everyone is welcome. We are open to every member of our community, and we can’t be bowed or intimidated by these kinds of threats. This is not what we’re going to stand for,” said Alameda County Librarian, Cindy Chadwick.
And while it’s left it’s mark on Dulce, “A lot of people are asking me like, do you feel safe? Are you okay? And the answer is no, I don’t. I don’t feel safe in my own home,” she said.

This person went to an Ivy League university and their idea of a fun Saturday activity is dressing up in drag to prance around in front of small children at the local library. Which should give you an idea of what an Ivy League education is worth. Have I mentioned lately that Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard alumnus? But the whole point of this TV “news” story seems to be that anyone who doesn’t enthusiastically support Drag Queen Story Hour is an “extremist.” Don’t like it? You’re literally Hitler!

“I don’t feel safe in my own home,” says the drag queen, because of those “far-right extremists” at the local library. But don’t worry, Bay Area parents — police are fighting to guarantee that drag queens can safely access your children. The “hate crime protocols” have been activated!

Category: California, Crime, The Transgender Cult

Inside the Biden Bubble

Posted on | June 13, 2022 | Comments Off on Inside the Biden Bubble

A foolish boast from Biden’s chief of staff:

Less than three weeks after the White House claimed President Joe Biden’s approval ratings were on the upswing, an average of recent surveys show more Americans disapprove of his job performance than ever.
According to a RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls from May 18 to June 9, just over 39 percent of Americans say they approve of Biden’s job as president. That number marks a new low for Biden, who has not seen a poll showing his approval rating above 44 percent since the first week of May.
The poll stands in direct conflict with the claim put forth by White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a 2021 Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year, that Biden’s poll numbers were looking up. “I hate to spoil the narrative but this poll shows @potus approval rating moving up,” Klain wrote.
Klain celebrated a May 22 poll from CBS News finding that just 44 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s handling of the presidency. Despite 56 percent of respondents saying they disapprove of Biden’s job performance, Klain tweeted that the poll showed “public confidence on the two biggest problems [Biden] inherited: COVID and jobs.”
While Biden claims in interviews that he doesn’t follow or “believe” polling, his chief counselor Klain regularly remarks on and shares them on social media. In private, Biden “has expressed exasperation that his poll numbers have sunk below those of Donald Trump,” Politico reported earlier this month.

The reality of Biden’s historic unpopularity:

On May 7, Biden was about 10 points underwater — 52.7 disapprove to 42.5 approve — in the RCP average. At that point, Biden had been less than 10 points underwater on four consecutive polls — Economist/YouGov (-4), Reuters/Ipsos (-6), Rasmussen Reports (-8) and IBD/TIPP (-8). But there is such a thing as a “dead cat bounce” in polling. No matter how unpopular you may be, when you get near the absolute bottom, you’ll have occasional upticks. And 40% approval is pretty much rock-bottom for any president. To get lower than that, not only are you hated by the opposition and most independents, but even your own partisans start hating you. So as any president’s approval number approaches 40%, he’s going to experience a few “good” days when this or that poll has him at 43% or whatever. And that was what Ron Klain was looking at when he proclaimed on May 22 that the latest CBS Poll was “good news” for Biden. But this “dead cat bounce” could only last so long in a political environment where inflation is raging out of control and the president doesn’t seem to have a clue. Sure enough, when the next Reuters/Ipsos poll came out, it had Biden 23 points underwater — 36% approve, 59% disapprove — a number so shocking that you might suspect a sampling error. Biden’s slump was confirmed, however, by several subsequent polls: Politico/Morning Consult (-19), Rasmussen Reports (-20) and Quinnipiac (-21). And apparently nobody in the Biden White House understands what happened, least of all Joe Biden himself.

Just how out of touch is Biden? On Tuesday, there were primaries in several states, but the big news was in California, where San Francisco voted to recall their Soros-sponsored left-wing district attorney Chesa Boudin. It wasn’t even close — 55%-45% — a shocking result in one of America’s most liberal cities. So the next day, as Biden prepared to board Air Force One, he gave the press this statement:

I think the voters sent a clear message last night: Both parties have to step up and do something about crime, as well as gun violence.
And I sent, as you recall — with the first major bill we passed, we gave the states and localities billions of dollars — billions of dollars they have — and I encouraged them to use it to hire police officers and reform their police departments. Very few have done it.
In addition to that, I sent to Congress a request for $300 million in this year’s budget to deal with hiring cops, to retrain cops, as well as to make sure they are adequately dispersed around the communities.
It’s time they move. It’s time to states and the localities spend the money they have to deal with crime, as well as retrain police officers, as well as provide for more community policing.
It’s time to get on with doing that. And that’s what I think the message last night from the American public was in all the primaries.

Are you freakin’ kidding me with this? “Both parties”?

Pray tell, can Joe Biden name a single Republican official who lost last Tuesday over the issue of crime? And where was the evidence that what got Chesa Boudin thrown out of office had anything to do “states and localities” failing to spend the federal money to hire more cops? In point of fact — although I’m sure whoever wrote that little speech for Biden doesn’t care about facts — the problem in San Francisco was not so much that they didn’t have enough police, but rather that Boudin’s office kept turning loose the criminals that the cops arrested.

Inside the Biden bubble, however, either they don’t know the facts or they think they can get away with this kind of dishonest spin, and one gets the impression that Biden is so completely out of touch — so insulated from reality — that he doesn’t even know what the problems are, much less have any idea how to fix them. Consider the problem of record-high gas prices, which Biden bloviated about again last week:

Pressed to explain the supposedly unexpected further increase in the rate of inflation, Biden offered a couple of golden oldies from his basket of distractions. . . . Biden trotted out his “Putin price hike” excuse, even though Biden had been in denial for most of 2021 about inflation running away in the US — offering lame excuses that had even tired out the Washington Post editorial board by early January, well before the invasion.
Biden spent even more time on his “corporate greed” attack lines, undaunted by their failure for the last several months. He went out of his way to attack ExxonMobil specifically, who he claimed not only “made more money than God” but also didn’t pay taxes:

“Why don’t you tell them what Exxon’s profits were this year? This quarter? Exxon made more money than God this year,” he said in remarks at the Port of Los Angeles. “Exxon, start investing. Start paying your taxes.”

I doubt Joe Biden even knows what ExxonMobil’s taxes or profits are, but it’s easy enough to check.

Read the whole thing because the truth is almost diametrically opposite of Biden’s assertion. Exxon pays billions in taxes, and their profit margin is lower than many other companies, e.g., Goldman Sachs. Is Joe Biden going to start publicly chastising Goldman Sachs? I don’t think so.

The larger point, however, is that Joe Biden doesn’t understand economics well enough to know what causes inflation. He thinks it’s just a problem of political perception, and that as long as he can deflect blame away from himself, then it doesn’t matter what the real problem is.

They tell me 81 million people voted to elect Joe Biden, and certainly not all the clueless fools in America are in the White House.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Category: Joe Biden

Rule 5 Sunday: Atago-sama’s Wedding

Posted on | June 13, 2022 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Best heavy cruiser waifu from Azur Lane.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.
NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1743, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Higher Education Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: MAGA – J6 Show Trial, June Is Bustin’ Out All Over, Liz Cheney, Global Warming? It’s Freezing In Australia!, Kid Astray, Cassandra Chastain, Felicia Sonmez, Dirty Art Club, and Gone Fishing

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Globe Trotting with Christina Cindrich, DNR Proposes to Bring Back Severn Brookies, Fish Pic Friday – Shesla, Tattoo Thursday, Wednesday Wetness, Angry Old Man Wants More Solar Panels, Run To The Hills, The Monday Morning Stimulus and Sunday Sunrise

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious links!

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts

Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Rubycon

Posted on | June 13, 2022 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Rubycon

— compiled by Wombat-socho

A mixed bag this week for the Senators; first we got swept in a three-game series by the Orioles -and only one game was even close; the first two games were textbook examples of Earl Weaver’s walk/walk/three-run homer offense while the O’s pitchers shut down our bats. Third game went to 11 innings before Rick Reichardt jacked one into the stands off Vicente Romo, and that was all she wrote. Came back to take two out of three from the Dodgers, but that still leaves us 2-4 for the week, 7-10 so far in the season, and a three-game series against the Red Sox coming up.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.