Five Quick Things: Thank You, Vivek!
Unlike almost all of you, I watched that NBC News presidential debate from Miami Wednesday night. And while this column isn’t all about that two hours I’ll never get back, most of it does concern what happened on that stage.
If you listen to the legacy corporate media, what you’ll find out is that Nikki Haley was the “winner” and Vivek Ramaswamy was the “loser.” This is nonsense — there was no winner of that debate for the simple reason that Donald Trump was not there. Therefore, the debate wasn’t relevant to the question of who will be the Republican nominee for president next year, and it’s increasingly impossible for a modern presidential candidate to “win” one of these debates, anyway.
Oh, but the New York Post found some political consultants you’ve never heard of who will inform you that Ramaswamy sounded “stupid,” and that Haley “shined.”
Whatever.
It would be wonderful if the current debate format was blown up and banished from the political scene. With the tiny amount of time allotted for answers and the food-fight format a multitude of candidates are shoe-horned into, the candidates certainly don’t benefit — and the voters surely don’t, either. These debates are built to serve the needs of the legacy corporate media organs that put them on, and those organs stopped pretending to serve the voters a long time ago.
Which is why regardless of what the Post might think, we owe Ramaswamy a debt of gratitude for the things he said at that debate, especially for two of them in particular:
1. Running Ronna Through
After Tuesday night’s rotten GOP performance, in which an opportunity was blown to take the governor’s mansion in Kentucky and Republicans were outspent and out-hustled in Virginia’s legislative elections, not to mention the pro-life movement taking a beating on a ballot measure in Ohio, the “smart set” among the party is now digging trenches for internal warfare over the cause. On one side you have those screeching that pro-life stances are a loser, and on the other they’re blaming Trump.
But until Ramaswamy took the stage, nobody put a pin on the real cause — namely, the person responsible for the same GOP underperformance we’ve seen time and again since 2016.
None of the Powers That Be liked hearing that, and McDaniel especially didn’t:
A source who was sitting near @GOPChairwoman at tonight's debate told Timcast News that she called @VivekGRamaswamy an “asshole” and declared that the party would not be giving him “one cent.”
“He’s an asshole. Total asshole,” McDaniel said. “He’s desperate because he’s doing… pic.twitter.com/7yZ5cQHCRk
— Cassandra MacDonald (@CassandraRules) November 9, 2023
But he said what needed to be said.
Yes, Trump has endorsed McDaniel as RNC chair three times. Trump doesn’t actually have a great record when it comes to personnel. And right now there are lots of people jumping on Ramaswamy’s bandwagon in calling for McDaniel to go.
So good for him. No, he probably won’t get elected this time. But it’s overdue for the people trying to win elections to speak out about a party establishment and infrastructure that is getting murdered cycle after cycle in the block-and-tackle of those elections by a group on the other side that is literally incompetent at everything else.
It isn’t that the Democrats are that good. It’s that the GOP is that bad. And McDaniel is the head of the party. This isn’t complicated, it just takes stones to say it. Maybe Ramaswamy ought to have her job.
2. The Hard Truth About That Other Ticket
The last column in this space referenced both my forthcoming book Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama and a very good Substack post by Don Surber, discussing the likely soon-to-come denouement of Joe Biden’s reelection aspirations. This has been talked about with increasing volume in the last several days, but yet from Democrat officialdom … not very much.
So at the end of the debate, Ramaswamy pulled the pin and lobbed one more grenade at the ruling class…
Deee-licious.
This didn’t get a whole lot of buzz in the mainstream media because of course it didn’t. But it’s the truth, or at least it’s more likely than not the truth.
Let’s be honest — you can’t run this for president…
What’s Joe Biden thinking here? pic.twitter.com/TIWLWwVI1v
— TEAM USA (@__TEAM_USA) November 9, 2023
…and in six months, it’s almost certainly going to be worse.
The insider consensus seems to be that the Democrats will stick with Biden, at least publicly, through the primaries, and then he’ll make as graceful an exit as possible before the convention. And that’s how Kamala Harris, or whatever other machine hack pol they decide to offer as the Team Obama puppet du jour, will float to the top.
Call them the undemocratic party.
Ramaswamy did America a service calling out this fraud, and it’s appropriate for him to do so. After all, every presidential poll you see is a matchup involving Biden, and yet fewer and fewer people either want or expect him to be the Democrats’ nominee. As a candidate, you’d say Ramaswamy is entitled to at least a discussion of who might be his opponent were he to win the nomination. But of course, we’re not allowed to know.
And that’s BS. Hopefully people pick up on that grenade he threw from that stage and make sure it lands in Team Biden’s camp. Because the identity of the Democrat candidate for president is the biggest question going in American politics right now, and none of the ruling class even wants to talk about it.
3. Nikki Haley? Enough.
I never really had a burning desire to eliminate the current presidential debate format until I saw Nikki Haley in it. But an exchange between Haley and Ramaswamy over TikTok just calcified my revulsion.
If this doesn’t give you a migraine, congratulations.
If you watched the debate, you’ll know that TikTok was one of the sponsors of it. Then NBC’s moderators proceeded to demand that the candidates account for their positions on a Chinese data app and psy-op that is actively making American kids dumber and more unstable.
Yes, Ramaswamy uses it. No, that’s not awesome, though he does have a point when he says engaging with younger voters where they are is a deficiency of GOP politics. But Haley sanctimoniously bashed him for being on the app when her 25-year-old daughter is quite active on it.
Was it rude for him to note that? Probably. Not as rude as Haley calling him “scum.” It’s not like he attacked Haley’s daughter, he just pointed out something obvious — her own daughter is on an app she’s beating him up for using to spread his message.
Then the lady who called somebody else on the debate stage “scum” had the temerity to then scold people on the right for being judgmental.
Please, no more of these debates. Please.
4. Climate Activists Killed While Blocking a Road
How many times have you struggled to stop your blood from boiling while seeing those videos of snot-nosed punks sitting down on a roadway to protest some iteration or other of normal society?
The worst of them are the “stop oil” idiots, who don’t just block streets but deface priceless works of art. But you have the Black Lives Matter hooligans and others plopping down in the middle of the road and holding motorists hostage to their stupid causes.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve overheard people reference this species of protester and make some variety of these prediction: “It’s just a matter of time before somebody kills one of these stupid kids.”
We’ve all been waiting for it, we’ve all known it was inevitable, and now it’s here…
A 77-year-old man shot dead two environmental protesters on Wednesday in an apparent outburst of rage over a roadblock in Panama.
The gunman was named in local media as Kenneth Franklin Darlington Salas. If he is convicted, Mr Salas could be sentenced to house arrest rather than… pic.twitter.com/6iIX2BNX4S
— David Brian (@KingLeo16296) November 9, 2023
5. Oh, They Don’t Like Jeff Landry at All in New Orleans
I’m having a ball watching Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s governor-elect, put his transition team together. Landry seems to be one of the few Republican politicians who understands and appreciates the Barack Obama maxim that “elections have consequences.”
And the Left in this state, who have been so thoroughly and completely routed as to call into question whether Louisiana even still has a functioning Democrat Party, cannot stand it.
Here’s an excerpt from a post that ran at my site the Hayride on Thursday:
The transition team has a committee dedicated to dealing with the problem of New Orleans, and Landry stocked that committee with a whole lot of people who are from New Orleans but don’t exactly ply their political trades there. And the city’s ruling class, the people most responsible for the deplorable condition the city is in at present, are absolutely furious that they’re being left out of the transition team’s deliberations on how to address potential fixes in the Landry administration.
Today, governor-elect Jeff Landry’s transition committee on New Orleans meets for the first time, in Lafayette — but is the committee just a political middle finger to the Crescent City?
“It seems like a big flip-off,” said WWL TV political commentator Clancy DuBos. “It looks like he wants to change things from the outside.”
DuBos says the committee that Landry put together includes very few elected leaders from New Orleans, and none from New Orleans City Hall or New Orleans law enforcement.
“This committee is somehow going to address the problems of the city and I’m not sure how you do that without engaging anyone who has authority in the city,” said DuBos. “He has to engage the folks who the citizens of New Orleans have elected to solve the problems of the city.”
DuBos says otherwise, it looks like Landry is at best grandstanding, or at worst, plotting a political takeover like Huey Long attempted nearly 100 years ago.
They’re furious that LaToya Cantrell, New Orleans’ troglodyte mayor, and J.P. Morrell, the chair of the city council, weren’t invited to be on the transition team. If you’ve been to New Orleans lately and you’ve seen what those two and their friends on the Hard Left have done to that city, you’ll understand both why there is a special transition committee on trying to solve the problem of New Orleans and why they’re not on that committee.
But what they’re really screeching about is the realization that Landry and his team don’t give a tinker’s damn about their feelings, don’t actually need to work with them, and — and this is the important bit — have just as much disdain for them as they have for him.
Jeff Landry only got 10 percent of the vote in Orleans Parish. He got 51.6 percent of the vote statewide in a jungle primary election with 15 candidates in the race, and he was above 40 percent in all but one of the suburban parishes that make up the New Orleans metro area. He represents the suburbs taking power over the failed city, and he seems pretty serious about making that stick.
This is going to be very interesting to watch.
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