Pun Salad

And that is: Joe's got us in the plane with him.

But on to this week's standings, from Election Betting Odds:

The big loser this week is President Wheezy, although he's still the favorite among the bettors. Our big gainer is that slick California phony Gavin Newsom. Draw from that whatever lessons you would like.

• If you say "His lips are moving" one more time, I'm gonna scream. Back in a previous decade, I had some fun with President Obama's persistent use of "dime". As in "This legislation is fully paid for and will not add one single dime to our deficit." I called it "a reliable signal of dishonesty, deception, delusion, or general incoherence."

  But now it's 2023, and we have a new Liar-in-Chief. Noah Rothman performs an invaluable service in listing All the President’s Tells: How to Spot a Biden Lie. (But it's more like "Some of" instead of "All".)

  Joe Biden is a serial fabulist, habitual plagiarizer, and a reliable falsifier of facts great and small alike. But while the president is a known liar, he’s not very good at it.

  Biden has developed a series of verbal tics that tend to either precede or follow some of his more flagrant mendacities. One way to tell that the president is pulling your leg is that he is quick to assure you that what he has just said is “not a joke.”

  “I may be a practicing Catholic, but [I] used to go to 7:30 Mass every morning in high school and then in college before I went to the black church,” Biden told the congregants of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., during a service honoring Martin Luther King Jr. in January. “Not a joke.” This isn’t the first time the president has claimed, “I was raised in the black church politically,” adding, “not a joke,” but longtime attendees of the Union Baptist Church in Wilmington, Del., have no recollection of the president’s attendance.

  And more.

  There are, as I type, 360 comments on Rothman's article. And it's only a slight exaggeration to say that most of them make the same, lame, joke: "How can you tell if Biden is lying? His lips…"

  Not sure why I bothered, but I added one tell in the comments: Joe's verbal tic "literally, not figuratively". It's (literally) Googleable. An example from 2012:

  “We now find ourselves at the hinge of history, and the direction we turn is not figuratively, it’s literally in your hands.”

  And (hooray for consistency!) last month:

  "I was able — literally, not figuratively — talk Strom Thurmond into voting for the — the Civil Rights Act before he died."

  Not even the Associated Press bought that one.

• Lord, he was born a ramblin' man. Dan McLaughlin takes to the NYPost to tour Joe's Fantasyland: Senile Joe Biden rambles about pony soldiers, Vietnam and lies about 9/11. While talking in Hanoi:

  Biden, a day after his visit to India, told a rambling story about a John Wayne movie where an “Indian scout” tells Wayne an American soldier is “a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.” Biden has used the line before, but nobody’s ever been able to locate a movie with that scene.

  Even with his usual prepared list of which reporters would be allowed to ask him questions, Biden got lost. “I’m just following my orders here,” he pleaded, then asked after a long pause, “Staff, is there anybody I haven’t spoken to?”

  He then turned down a reporter not on the list: “No, I ain’t calling on you. I’m calling on — I said there were five questions.”

  Biden then repeatedly had to ask reporters to repeat what they said, and his stammering often rendered his answers incoherent.

  Protesting that “I don’t want to contain China,” Biden explained, “It’s about making sure the rules of the road — everything from airspace and — and space and in the ocean is — the international rules of the road are — are — are abided by. And so — and I hope that — I think that Prime Minister Xi — I mean, Xi has some — some difficulties right now.” I’m glad he cleared that up. Now, how about actually containing China?

  I think the official transcript cleans that up a bit.

• 

  The selling of the President 2020. Joe McGinnis had a hit book back in 1970, describing the 1968 campaign that brought us the Nixon presidency. Which (according to Amazon) examined "mysterious space between image and reality".

  Charles C. W. Cooke notes that the more things change, the more they stay the same: The Biden We Were Told about Never Existed.

  The gap between the image of Joe Biden that is peddled in the press and the reality of Joe Biden as he exists here on earth has always been uncomfortably wide, but, as we hurtle toward the end of the third year of his presidency, the gulch has come to resemble the Mariana Trench. There is a point in every breakup at which the partner who has fallen out of love comes to realize that, for some time now, he has been more attached to the idea of his paramour than to the actuality. It has developed in fits and starts, and been a long time coming, but, at long last, the American electorate seems to have reached that point with this president. On the questions that matter, there will be no more fluctuations. They know who Joe Biden is, and who Joe Biden is not, and, after extended consideration, they do not like him.

  Most "journalists" apparently couldn't figure this out during the campaign.

• But enough about Biden. Should we put a conspiracy theorist in the White House?

  Um, I mean, another one?

  Kevin Carroll thinks that would be a bad idea: Conspiracy Theorists Need Not Apply.

  Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s remarks last month about the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that took the lives of 2,977 innocents afford us an opportunity to end a harmful trend: allowing public figures who indulge in conspiracy theories and make outrageous statements to be deemed fit for high office.

  Ramaswamy asks, “How many police, how many federal agents were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers?” and “Do I believe the 9/11 commission?”—answering the latter question, “Absolutely not” because “there are lies the government has told about 9/11” regarding Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the attacks.

  No serving law enforcement officers were on American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175. However, 37 Port Authority police officers, 23 New York City police officers, three New York State court officers, an FBI agent, and a Secret Service agent gave their lives rescuing about 47,000 civilians from the World Trade Center.

  I wanted to like Vivek, but…

• Yes, I have a mything link! And it's right here, pointing to an article by Wilfred Reilly: Model Minority 'Myth': There Are Model Minorities.

  A popular recent Vox article, “Vivek Ramaswamy and the lie of the ‘model minority,’” gets its central premise backwards. In fact, the so-called model-minority myth is no myth at all. By any empirical standard, there actually are model minorities — and model majority groups too.

  On September 5, one of the left-wing magazine’s stable of writers, Prachi Gupta, argued that current GOP presidential contender Ramaswamy is dangerously and “pernicious[ly]” using his own success to “perpetuate the myth of America as color-blind” and to argue for the existence of a meritocratic U.S. By so doing, Gupta contends, Vivek (“like cake”) perpetuates the old MMM, ignores the fact that minority immigrants like himself sometimes succeed only despite America’s “expansive wealth gap and staggering inequality,” and minimizes the reality of historical discrimination against Asians in immigration policy.

  Gupta goes on to engage in some increasingly common critiques of the claim that U.S. Asians in fact represent a unique success story at all. Among these: Asian Americans have the “deepest income inequality” of any broadly defined racial census group in these States United, and Asian-American youngsters are the only group for whom the leading cause of death is consistently suicide. Harsh stuff.

  However, all of these arguments are fairly easily revealed to be just typical leftist wordplay. To take them one by one: The “racial wealth gap” in the U.S. exists, but it does not disadvantage Asian Americans relative to whites or anyone else. The median Asian-American household outearns the typical white household by roughly $26,000 per annum — $100,572 to $74,932. Similarly, the United States does have a racist history, but American immigration policy has — if anything — favored minority immigrants from Asia and Latin America since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.

  Not really about the campaign, but Vivek was mentioned.

• Look out below! Matt Vespa of Townhall tells us that The Calls to Drop Kamala Harris in 2024 Are Growing.

  It’s not just Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) who thinks Kamala Harris isn't Joe Biden's best vice-president choice. The California liberal credited Harris for being politically astute, which isn’t accurate, but failed to deliver a ringing endorsement of Ms. Harris heading into 2024. She’s been a trainwreck for this administration, a source of mockery due to the endless word salad episodes and awkward behavior. It’s why she’s kept out of the spotlight as much as possible. 

  While word on the street is that Democrats quietly admit that Joe Biden is too old, one would guess a healthy number thinks that Harris is unqualified for her job. Several columnists have written pieces about dumping Harris, which is something to consider, albeit in an academic exercise only. There’s no way Harris gets booted unless Joe Biden and his staff want to infuriate the black community.

  Vespa links to this Politico article, which, among other observations, says "dumping Harris could come with significant backlash among Black voters."