First, thank you for the prayer and kind thoughts about our convalescing pup, Rocco. He’s a good boy.
Secondly, lit’s Monday and I’m already fed up with the week’s allotment of primary tantrums.
RFK Jr. isn’t a thing and his family is still the same as they ever were
Imagine being so thirsty for clout that you’ll run down your family in public for it:
Joe and his other clout-chasing family members are seeking attention over RFK Jr.’s comments on COVID where he said “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” at a dinner party.
You know why he said that? BECAUSE HE’S A KOOK. Also because I wouldn’t put anything, no matter how racist, antisemitic, or crazy, past the Communist Chinese Party.
But I always thought RFK Jr. was a kook and he treated his dead former wife like garbage. It’s amusing that Junior’s comments are inexcusable but driving a woman into a pond and leaving her for dead was OK.
Let’s not beat around the bush: I don’t care about RFK Jr.’s campaign. I am not going to celebrate the guy like some welcome challenger for Biden. Literally anyone can beat Biden. A hobo from Skid Row could beat Biden. A half-empty bottle of Axe body spray could beat Biden.
The planets aligned and I fell into agreement with Junior on the singular issue of the clot shot. Great. That doesn’t mean he’s a Republican, a moderate Democrat, or even a serious challenger to Biden. RFK Jr. is similar to Trump in absence of message discipline when it matters the most.
What is the goal anymore?
Vance would not have won had Republicans not bailed him out — and by Republicans, I mean the Senator everyone loves to hate, Mitch McConnell, who out-spent Trump on Vance’s race, bailing out a win. Acknowledging this doesn’t make someone a McConnell stan, it means the person acknowledging the financial reality is economically literate and can count. Vance has the security of five more years before his reelection bid, so he can talk smack about imaginary offenses until he needs help to make him competitive in a purple state again, which he will require.
I think a lot of people have over-romanticized how they define a political “hardass” and lost the plot in the process. What’s the point of messaging in politics if not to be persuasive? There’s a time to be hard and a time to not be hard. It’s the James Dalton lesson of “be nice, until it’s time to not be nice.” If the goal is just to boost one’s fragile ego with exercises designed to inflate Twitter tuff-ness, then the messenger is in it for their own purposes, not the country’s.
The race
Let’s be real: This is a two person primary. It’s between Trump and DeSantis. Everyone else has too much baggage to be in the top two. So much of the polling is garbage it can’t be considered. Fundraising is the best measure at this stage. The GOP is aimless in terms of party leadership so don’t look for any assistance there. The media wants to ignore DeSantis’s major wins while simultaneously law-faring the former president into oblivion. Money-hungry consultants further fuel the flames.
The press is also helping. They want Trump as the nominee because Biden is only competitive — not inevitable, just competitive — against Trump. Gavin Newsom is waiting in the wings in the event that Trump isn’t the nominee or Biden falls up the stairs one too many times.
Everyone knows who I like, I made it clear that I prefer DeSantis in the primary. I don’t string my audience along as other commentators do, people who pretend to be Switzerland and think they’re too crafty for you to discover their leanings while they try to shape your opinion by the manner in which they present the headlines. I’m simply honest about where I’m at and why. You cannot have a relationship with your audience and not be such. You also cannot be afraid of your audience to the point where you cannot be honest with them. I’ve always been straight-no-chaser about it and my audience trusts me for this consistency. I don’t expect you to share my decisions and don’t fault you for thinking differently because we’ve all been faulted enough by the press and the left. I’m going to vote for the nominee in 2024 regardless, just as I did in 2016 and 2020, despite the spin from grifting political pulp-pushers who benefit from selling cheap misrepresentation.
I am entirely transactional in my support in that I want the maximum for my vote: Who will leave me alone the most? Who will give me the smallest government? And a big one: Who will give me the most time? No one says it, but we’re choosing between only four OR four-to-eight years with the top two primary candidates. That factored into my decision. It may not factor into yours. I won’t think you’re a communist if it doesn’t.
It’s also why I don’t necessarily want to beat the hell out of other candidates who may not be my first choice because I don’t want just a Plan A, I want a Plan B and a Plan C. I want a backup for my backup and a backup for that, as I’ve discussed on my radio program. This isn’t a concern with the neo-establishment K-Street wannabes, bonafide grifters who are doing everything they can to keep the gravy train going because when the election is over they have to look for work.
In a primary, it’s not personal, it’s politics, and the biggest losers forget this. They want you to forget it, too.
Ah, the candidates
I feel like this begs for an explanation:
Through a partnership with Snowflake, a San Francisco based cloud computing company, Ramaswamy wanted to “fight covid-19” by manufacturing a “single repository of all the real-world medical data” thanks to the production of a “national data infrastructure” of private and public patient records, all without the consent of the actual patients.
[…]
“Datavant’s proposed registry would be free for government and academic researchers to access, and would aim to include every patient who has been tested for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus,” The WSJ story reported. “The consortium is aiming to have data covering 80% of U.S. medical claims, including those submitted to private insurers as well as Medicaid and Medicare Advantage.”
I’ve had Ramaswamy on the program and am inviting him back to discuss this, because whisky tango foxtrot? How do you sell yourself as a limited government politician after doing this only a beat ago? No shade, just a real question.
This is the first post-Fox primary landscape
I think it’s a bit hyperbole to proclaim the end of Fox’s influence — but after Tucker’s Q&A in Iowa, it’s fair to state that their influence has been diminished with the most hardcore section of the right. In radio those folks are referred to as “P1s,” the most hardcore, repeat listener — or think if it as the top level of a fanbase. P1s are your bread and butter. This will be the first political contest post-Tucker where that influence is measured — and this isn’t even about Tucker, it’s about questioning institutions.
I have zero vested interested in defending any person or entity as I have worked hard, sometimes backwards, to maintain my independence, but I will caution folks to not allow the left to turn you against long-supported avatars of the conservative cause. That’s a real coup for the left. It doesn’t help when certain entities don’t help themselves, but never assist your opponent in scoring.
Ya , you got the Cranky part right .........Geez
Corporate media, Big Tech, and our corrupt administrative state have already made certain that Republicans - and especially conservative Republicans - have an uphill climb in every election. Let’s not help them by being stupid and forming a circular firing squad.