Where We Are This Week

Kamala cows to pro-Hamas protestors, surges in the polls, and the inclusivity crowd gets exclusive.

Good As Gold

In Joseph Heller’s Good As Gold, he ‘parodies’ the incompetence and idiocy of the United States government.

The main character, Bruce Gold, is a writer and college professor who is regularly teased with the prospect of a job in the president’s administration. Repeatedly, Gold is tantalized by the opportunity — despite despising the president and the federal government — but never seems to find himself on the payroll. His hopes of speaking with the commander-in-chief are always dashed because the big man is too busy writing his second book or napping.

Ralph, a high-ranking official in the president’s cabinet and a childhood friend of Gold’s, constantly reassures Gold of the president’s interest in him and pleads with him for his input as a writer (who once favorably reviewed the president’s first book.)

In one of these instances, Gold — who is so reprehensible a character that he can hardly be described as the protagonist — uses the phrase ‘boggles the mind.’ Ralph is incandescent, he’s never heard such a phrase before and asks if he can use it. ‘You’ve really boggled all of our minds,’ he later tells Bruce.

In no time at all, everyone in the White House uses the phrase, publicly and privately. Most of them have no idea where the phrase came from but are happy to be part of the craze. This happens over and over throughout the novel as the executive branch of government continually outsources intellectual property and passes it off as germane to the office.

At first, I thought that this was exactly what was happening when I heard every member of the Democrat Party and establishment media call Donald Trump and JD Vance ‘weird and creepy.’ Surely, there must be better adjectives to describe Vance’s suggestion that parents should wield extra votes for each child they have or should receive preferential tax treatment based on how many children they have. The criticism of the latter of the two is based solely on politics, not substance, as it is virtually no different from the very popular Biden child tax credit.

I mean, it is that. I’m sure some backroom staff writer at the Washington Post ran ‘weird and creepy’ up the flag pole until it reached the ears of KJP, the White House Secretary, and she thought it was the most brilliant thing she’d ever heard.

But before I started writing this week’s newsletter, I realized it was a much larger phenomenon. No one knows how anything gets done or by whom it has been gotten. Official press releases have Gold’s words in them but there’s no mention of the writer who popularized them. At one point, Gold gets promoted within the administration but neither Ralph nor Gold knows what his previous position was or what his next one will be — just that he’ll be making more money.

I realized it wasn’t just the perfect analogy for political phraseology and the abundance of intellectual theft that pervades our ruling class; it epitomizes the Kamala Harris bid for the presidency.

---

Kamala’s Lucky Number

We didn’t talk about this enough when it happened which is odd because it’s sort of the thing I’ve been banging on about for the last two years.

Trump may have not debated anybody but at least all those GOP suckers voted for him to be the Republican nominee. I think the MAGA crowd and traditional Republicans like JD Vance fine as a VP pick, but what would their reaction be if the head honcho bowed out suddenly? Would they — should they be satisfied with Vance just moving up to the headliner spot?

If you bought tickets to see Dave Chappelle at a small theater but he couldn’t make the trip to your town and tagged in a pal, is that really the same show you bought tickets for originally? Sure, you may like Donnell Rawlings but you would’ve purchased tickets for his show if that’s who you wanted to see.

This is what the Democrat Party did with Joe Biden and Kamala ‘Momma Coconut’ Harris. For those of you who don’t spend every waking moment numbing yourself with American politics, the last sentence wasn’t racist. It’s a combination of the pet names and media crazes that have been devoted to Kamala, our next dear leader.

Inconveniently for Americans, neither party serves as a (d)emocratic institution. They essentially are sanctioned cartels, extracting insurance payments and fealties from their constituents in order to promote themselves as the ‘elected’ leaders of this once great nation. So terrified are we from opposition parties that when the mob we pay taxes to takes advantage of us, we thank them for the service because just think about how bad those other guys would be.

Republicans still hold the delusion that their vote matters and would be rife with indignation if Trump was vanished by party authorities and re-appeared as some desperate surrogate. Democrats, on the contrary, have largely succumbed to the domestic abuse that their cult leaders so affectionately dole out that with bruised faces they admit that those in charge really do know what’s best.

DNC party officials were adamant that they’d find some creative solution to make sure the voices of the people were heard if the unlikely circumstance of Joe Biden dropping out of the race should come to pass. It seemed unlikely, that is, until Pelosi, Jeffries, and Obama in a clandestine meeting told the president that ‘them’s the breaks,’ so to speak.

And wouldn’t you know it? Through extortion and manipulation, the old dinosaur finally made way for the asteroid.

Unfortunately, party officials were less adamant about fulfilling their promise of democratizing the process of electing a new nominee, and within a few short hours, prominent delegates, donors, and Democrats had all thrown their hefty weight behind the celestial body that is current Vice President Kamala Harris.

If Biden is the dinosaur who gets clipped by the great big ball of fire from the sky and Kamala Harris is said ball, then who are we, you ask? The dull, slow-moving reptiles who didn’t notice everything just got unbearably hot.

Turns out we like her. The vice president isn’t an elected office — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — and dropped out of the 2020 election race four months before the first primary because of how much everyone hated her. Also, having to debate Tulsi Gabbard a couple of times didn’t help her case. Oh, what we could have had.

Americans have a short memory and are maybe too well adapted to evolve quickly to new circumstances. For the past two weeks, Harris has been beating Donald Trump by an increasingly large margin in the polls. This is the same woman who was polling at like 2% in her home state of California in 2019, and the same politician who’s serving in an administration with a 37% approval rating.

Yet, we repeat her name in laughter as if she’s a fresh face spreading joy across the land. Hope! Change! Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. No one had any say in bringing her to the fore of the Democratic party — save for the oligarchs and political elites lest we forget about them — and no one seems to care; just swapping names for new names and gleefully shouting banal, insipid slogans into the idiot wind.

It truly boggles the mind.

---

White Guys Are Back!

Short as it was, the Democratic VP race has ended. For a moment, the sky was the limit. It could have been Gretchen Whitmer or Pete Buttigieg. It might have been Georgia’s Raphael Warnock or Kentucky’s Andy Beshear. It was, however, almost certainly Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro. It should have been.

Shapiro is the rational, broad-appeal choice for VP. He’s an overwhelmingly popular Democrat governor of a purple, swing state and a polished politician. His state is one that Harris will certainly need to win come November and as silly as it sounds, having their governor on her ticket would actually help. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

It was that obvious to everyone else as well. By Monday of this week, Shapiro had virtually locked up the nomination. All the rumors suggested his announcement wasn’t a question of if but of when. There was only one problem with Mr. Shapiro. Don’t make me say it.

The ‘leaks’ of his pole position to the nomination came out too early and reached the ears of the Democrat party’s antisemite coalition. Naturally, it will be Shapiro’s ‘pro-Israel’ position that is touted as the problem but Tim Walz, the confirmed nominee for veep, has essentially the same stance on Israel that the Pennsylvania governor does so…

Don’t take my word for it. Take CNN’s Van Jones’, the man who was in tears after Joe Biden’s most recent debate performance. After the Walz announcement, Jones said,

“You can be for the Palestinians without being an anti-Jewish bigot, but there are some anti-Jewish bigots out there,” Jones said on Tuesday. “And there has to be conversations about how much of what just happened is caving into some of these darker parts in the party. So that’s going to have to get worked out. It’s going to have to get talked through.” 

So, yeah. He gets it. Kamala Harris wants zero part of that conversation.

At a rally on Wednesday, Harris was interrupted by pro-Gaza protestors to which she responded by recapitulating another one of her famous phrases, “I’m speaking.” Saying to the activists in the crowd, “You know what, if you want Donald Trump to win, you can say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Cue raucous applause from the audience as she continued to leer at the party-poopers for the next thirty seconds. omg, total girl boss energy.

I don’t mean to be too persnickety about her reaction but just telling the people who want Israel to be wiped off the face of the planet to not interrupt you and nothing else is sort of like saying, “You’re going to get us caught!”

---

My first edition copy of Good as Gold, and a vase made by a potter who advocated against the ‘Israeli genocide.’ You win some, you lose some.

The American electorate is oddly reticent to support other religions and ethnicities at the highest rungs of power.

It’s wild that it wasn’t until 2008 that a non-white candidate was the presidential nominee of a major political party — a full 44 years after the Civil Rights Act. You would’ve thought white guilt would’ve possessed the bodies and minds of the progressives back then and forced them to elect the find ex-Black Panther they could find — but even that cultural malady was a slow-burn.

If you’re quietly pushing back on what I’m saying, keep in mind that it was a really big deal that John F. Kennedy was elected president. Not because of his atrocious Boston accent but because of his Catholicism — he would be the first non-Protestant to hold the executive office. (Jefferson and Madison notwithstanding.)

It’s strange to me, not because I think a focus on religion is necessarily a negative thing, but the fact that we believe any of those people have any religious convictions to begin with. Joe Biden is as about as Catholic as birth control, and I doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney were consulting their preachers about how many dead, innocent Muslims were too many.

I was pretty certain that no matter how much Vivek Ramaswamy embodied the America First message, the conservative GOP couldn’t rally behind a devout Hindu. It matters much less to me which god a political candidate prays to than the fact they pray to one at all — Harris might think she’s the second coming, who knows.

I never really thought it was Sanders’ socialism that would prevent him from being elected president but his Jewishness. And turns out, so far, I’m right.

Tim Walz, a self-described socialist, who uttered the bizarre phrase, “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness,” — hello, it’s me! your friendly neighborhood stasi! — is the white dude who could be one breath away from the presidency. No one slows the march of bigoted progressivism.

In Heller’s Good as Gold, he asserts as much. An American Jew can be just about anything he wants, a professor, a writer, a senator, or even the Secretary of State. Just not President — or in Shapiro’s case, Vice President.

To a better next week,

Cheers,

~FDA