Jul
12
2020

The Phony Campaign

2020-07-12 Update

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

Our Amazon Product du Jour is an actual book. The list price is $19.99, but Amazon has it for $17.99!

And at 48 pages (and apparently only 27 pages containing text), it's a ripoff at just about any price.

Before hitting that "Buy Now" button, though, you might want to check out the review from Andrew Stiles at the Free Beacon. Andrew notes that Dr. Jill dedicates the book to "[her] grandchildren", but only lists six, omitting Hunter Biden's illegitimate child, who's coming up on his or her second birthday.

But Wheezy Joey continued to expand his lead in the betting markets, and even narrowed the phony gap a bit:

Candidate WinProb Change
Since
7/5		 Phony
Results		 Change
Since
7/5
Donald Trump 37.9% -0.4% 1,520,000 -290,000
Joe Biden 58.1% +1.0% 481,000 +8,000

Warning: Google result counts are bogus.

In honor, we'll do an all-Joe linkfest this week:

  • Our state's onetime senator, Judd Gregg, is not too polite to point out the glaringly obvious in his Hill column: The coming Biden coup. He's talking about the "socialist/progressive movers who now control the board in the game of Democratic Party politics" who "have no ethical tether." Their past performance is pretty much a guarantee of future results. Assuming they get one of their tribe in as VP:

    They will not tolerate for long not being in total control. They will have their vice president, but not their president. And they are a very impatient people and movement.

    Since their goal is power and their purpose pure, why should they wait?

    The path to total control is clearly there once they have the vice presidency.

    It is the 25th Amendment.

    Within a few months of assuming the presidency, Biden may find himself being the next statue toppled as the socialist/progressive movement moves closer to power.

    Similar to an argument I've made myself. Judd only errs (I think) in overestimating Biden's willingness and ability to obstruct the "socialist/progressive" agenda? Why should he want to? And even if he did want to, are we going to assume his dwindling mental powers are up to such a task?

    I think a more likely scenario is that Biden will be removed because once he's served the purpose of getting Democratic Party control of the executive... everyone will claim to be "shocked, shocked" to find that he's not firing on all mental cylinders. And they already have the 25th Amendment memorized.

  • Biden's riding high in the polls, but that could all come crashing down if he's forced into generating coherent English without a teleprompter. Like in an unscripted debate. Fortunately, as Ann Althouse notes, there's now a movement to make sure that doesn't happen: The effort to rescue Biden from the demand to debate continues apace.

    I was just talking about this a couple weeks ago, when WaPo had a column "It’s time to rethink the presidential debates." The columnist, I said, was "only proposing that the debates take place in a TV studio with no audience, but I expect to see a push to eliminate the debates. Not campaigning has been working well for Biden, and not debating is another step in the do-nothing game. Will he look worse doing the debate or worse avoiding the debate? I think the press will do what it can to make him look especially principled, lofty, and judicious as he declines to appear in the presence of the orange monster."

    I worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump. He should do it only under two conditions. Otherwise, he’s giving Trump unfair advantages.
    The first condition has nothing to do with the nature of the debate. It's just a demand that Trump release his tax returns, so that just seems like generating an excuse not to debate. Friedman tries to make this demand relate to the debate by saying that Biden has released his tax returns and that was  "gifting Trump something he can attack." It's not a level playing field, you see.

    The second condition is a ridiculous proposal — "a real-time fact-checking team approved by both candidates be hired by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates." Friedman imagines that these beings would — "10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies either candidate had uttered. That way no one in that massive television audience can go away easily misled."

    Scenario: the Biden camp and its media lapdogs escalate demands for favorable debate ground rules until Trump says "no".

    And then: "See, we tried to have a debate, but Trump said no."

  • Once a plagiarist, … Steve Guest, a Trump flack, actually read some Biden campaign effluvia and found: Joe Biden’s Unity Task Force recommendations copy and paste word-for-word from Bernie Sanders quite a bit. Example:

    And more at Twitter, but you get the idea.

    The sycophants at Vox, by the way, view the result of the "Unity Task Force" as enabling a "bold progressive agenda". (And they say it as if it were a good thing.)

  • But for even more depressing news, see Kevin D. Williamson at National Review. Joe Biden’s Economic Plan: Substantially the Same as Trump’s.

    A promise of economic nationalism, an expensive infrastructure bill that’s really a make-work program, prejudice against foreigners, denunciations of Wall Street — Joe Biden is running the 2016 Trump campaign against Donald Trump in 2020.

    Joe Biden gave a big economic speech in Pennsylvania yesterday, and his economic agenda has three parts: 1) a $400 billion federal-spending spree with some additional “Buy American” rules attached to it; 2) a somewhat-more-modest ($300 billion) raft of subsidies for politically connected industries (electric vehicles, telecoms) that we are going to pretend is a research-and-development program; 3) a very large tax increase (by some estimates, the largest proposed in modern times) to pay for No. 1 and No. 2. You will recognize this as approximately the same bullsh** that Donald Trump was peddling in 2016 and Barack Obama was peddling in 2008 and 2012. It is the same crap that has at various times been peddled by figures such as George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan, and by relatively minor figures such as Ted Strickland. It is nonsense, but it never goes out of fashion.

    Kevin was not the only one to notice. Politico reports: Trump accuses Biden of plagiarizing his economic proposals.

    It's Politico, of course, so there's paragraphs devoted to "but, no, they're way different."


Last Modified 2024-01-23 5:07 AM EDT