Opinion
By Jeff Childers
09-11-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Today’s roundup includes: the Trump-Harris-ABC debate goes about how you would expect, with a couple great moments for the President; aging pop star endorses the Cackler; U.S. officials plan an intervention with Ukraine’s former president and war administrator Zelensky; House covid committee roasts Love Guv; and the media questions barbaric illegal immigrant animal killings, but the ‘no evidence’ gag isn’t working as well this time.
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🔥🔥 Last night, President Trump debated two ABC moderators. One of the many post-debate stories in the New York Times was superciliously headlined, “ABC’s Matter-of-Fact Moderators Built Factual Guardrails Around Trump.”
Here’s a 100% accurate recreation of how the debate pretty much went:
TRUMP: “…and on the day they shot me, the sky was blue.”
DAVID MUIR: “Mr. Trump, excuse me, ABC contacted climate scientists who said the sky is black. Colors are just artifacts of light bending through the atmosphere.”
LINSEY DAVIS: “Plus clouds are white. And the Sun is yellow.”
MUIR: “And, FBI Director Wray said investigators were unable to determine whether it was a bullet, so it is inaccurate to conclude you were shot.”
DAVIS: “You know you faked it.”
And so it went, around and around, President Trump verbally sparring with ABC’s frenetic, over-caffeinated fact-checkers. Meanwhile, candidate and face actress Kamala Harris practiced looking like a mime being tortured to death with a dull potato peeler.
Kamala also said some totally forgettable stuff, not one sentence making a headline or going viral, for two reasons. First, the patently partisan moderators failed to ask Harris anything that anybody would want to know, like why she flip-flopped about some of the race’s most important issues. Even the New York Times was forced to admit the laughing candidate got lame questions and zero fact-checking that produced a boring slog:
Second, despite getting nothing but squishy softballs, rambling Kamala still could not answer the questions. It went kind of like this:
MUIR: “Vice President Harris, this year you took bold action that resulted in significant reductions in border crossings. Why didn’t you act on the border sooner?”
HARRIS: “You should ask Trump! He said the Ku Klux Klan were very fine people. And he said he would call for a bloodbath if he loses the election. That’s a fact. I’m not joking.”
MUIR: “Thank you, Vice President Harris, that cleared things up. President Trump, to Ms. Harris’s point, when did you start loving Adolph Hitler?”
Trump got the ‘best zinger’ award when the first time Kamala interrupted him, he snipped, “Wait a minute. I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please. Does that sound familiar?” In the debate’s second-best moment, Trump flat called Harris a marxist — one of the few things he said last night that David and Linsey did not fact-check.
Finally, according to reports, President Trump stayed after the debate answering reporters’ questions for an hour. Cowardly Kamala fled, refusing to answer any question she hadn’t rehearsed. Fake faces, fake answers, fake performance.
The bottom line? With a boost from ABC, Kamala won the debate overall by a nose, by not imploding. Trump won every other way. This morning, Polymarket’s betting site shows the candidates back even, 49% to 49%.
But given the event’s insubstantial nature, it feels more like a media-fueled bump than any kind of shift.
🔥🔥 Immediately following the debate, popular music star and aging spinster Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris on Instagram, surprising nobody. She signed her post, “Childless Cat Lady.”
It made sense. The Democrats’ largest single voting group is unmarried women, like Swift. The only issues the billionaire pop star named in her endorsement post were “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body.” So there you go.
The endorsement’s timing was not coincidental. If Democrats believed Kamala did well, they wouldn’t have rushed out the Taylor Swift endorsement so fast.
🚀🚀 Meanwhile, smothered under all the debate coverage, the Wall Street Journal ran a Proxy War story yesterday headlined, “Ukraine Pressed to Think About a Plan B for War With Russia.” At first, I thought they were talking about sending Kamala “Plan B” Harris to the front lines, but sadly, no.
It’s an intervention. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and “senior U.S. and European officials” will meet with former comedian and war leader Zelensky today in Ukraine. The Journal reported the agenda will include how best to define a Ukrainian victory and exactly how much aid would be needed to get there.
The article meandered through various baffling questions, like whether and when Ukraine should negotiate for peace, and/or whether the U.S. should green-light missile strikes deep into Russian territory. But the two most important questions posed in the article, were —two and a half years into the war— what does ‘victory’ look like, and what would it cost?
Usually, most people start with those questions.
It reminded me of that gentle conversation one has with a teenager who just declared their career goal is to become a social media influencer and asked you to buy them a home studio. Okay, so what exactly is the plan, and how are you going to earn the money?
In bad news for Ukraine, the article was sprinkled with phrases like “Ukraine needs to be more pragmatic” and “the military reality on the ground.” It used a completely different tone than the normal bellicose articles, which never fail to mention the next shipment of wonder weapons that are certain to turn the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor.
For a quick example, take the much-vaunted F-16 fighter jets, six of which were delivered to Ukraine last month, with one already destroyed. Consider this ridiculous headline from a Fox op-ed, just two days ago:
That kind of logic, the ‘logic’ that Russia and China should be “scared” by the explosion of one of Ukraine’s few F-16s, reflects NATO’s perverse approach to the Proxy War. That’s the logic that got us to this point of finally asking where this train is headed.
💉💉 Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Skeptical House Panel Grills Cuomo on New York’s Covid Response.” The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic grilled to perfection New York’s disgraced former ”Love Guv,” Andrew M. Cuomo.
Alarmingly, the Times reported that Cuomo has been thinking about running for office again. He might run for New York City Mayor next year, or even for Governor again, versus Kathy Hochul in 2026.
The Republicans did their best yesterday to squash Cuomo’s poorly considered ideas of re-running.
Cuomo is a skilled politician who received a Daytime Emmy for his daily covid briefings, and who wrote an awful book extolling his pandemic management (for which he got a $5M advance). He skillfully evaded answering any hard questions about his murderous nursing home policies. He avoided answer questions even better than Kamala Harris did last night.
Cuomo blames Trump. For everything.
The survivors of Cuomo’s nursing home catastrophe watched grimly from the gallery as Cuomo blamed pandemic chaos and the fog of viral war for fake numbers reported by his closely supervised Department of Health. Hopefully the roasting was some small comfort to them.
It’s encouraging the covid investigation continues. Maybe, just maybe, it will get somewhere someday.
🔥🔥 ABC’s effete debater John Muir primly fact-checked President Trump last night, claiming there was ‘no evidence” that any immigrants are killing anybody’s pets or any other animals. But just three days before on Saturday, the New York Post ran a story headlined, “Animal sacrifices on the rise in Queens with chickens, pigs being tortured in ‘twisted’ rituals.”
In a story that sounds like a script to a Steven King horror movie, the Post described a long series of ghastly incidents in New York City of residents encountering evidence of grotesque animal sacrifices in local parks, like Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge and Spring Creek Park in Howard Beach.
According to the Post, members of “the Hindu Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean diaspora” living in nearby neighborhoods have turned Jamaica Bay into a popular pagan religious site. “It’s continually getting worse. The animal sacrifices are happening more repeatedly, more times a week,” Sloane Quealy, president of Zion’s Mission Animal Rescue, told The Post.
It’s not just Ohio’s Haitians. This time, surprisingly, it’s Hindus. New Yorkers are reportedly confronting “a sect of Hindu devotees who worship the goddess Kali.” But there were also many reports of Santeria and voodoo rituals, so it could also be Haitians.
ABC’s fact-checkers must be sleeping on the job. On top of the New York story, two weeks ago local Ohio WOWT 6-News ran this shocking headline:
Investigators with the Canton Police Department in Stark County, Ohio, told reporters Telia Ferrell, 27, killed the cat by stomping on its head. She then went on to eat the poor animal “in a residential area in front of multiple people” at a housing complex on 13th Street.
The hungry Ohio immigrant was arrested for animal cruelty, and her bond was set at $100,000. Media has quibbled over whether Ferrell was a Haitian immigrant, and tried to pick the story apart every way they could think of.
Despite all that evidence, last night CNN interviewed Senator JD Vance (R-Oh.), pushing him about there being “no evidence” of illegals eating innocent animals. Vance pushed back, saying “if we have to meme about cats to get the media to care about an issue, we’re going to keep on doing it.”
CLIP: CNN finds out as Senator Vance holds his own (1:43).
But obviously, Senator Vance doesn’t need to meme about cats. Police records should work fine. The recent ‘urban hunting’ trend seems to be well documented. Yesterday, Donald Trump, Jr., posted audio from an August 26th call to the Springfield, Ohio sheriff’s office reporting Haitians harvesting local geese for their supper.
One way of looking at it is, free geese down at the park! Another way of looking at it is: gory animal sacrifices, innocent housecats stomped for dinner, decorative city pond birds hunted for snacks: Where is PETA? People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is scarcer than a Springfield duck. (PETA is obviously a scam.)
Those are all interesting questions. But are these man-bites-dog stories the canaries in the civilizational coal mine?
Western Civilization has produced benefits too innumerable to mention, lifting mankind from mudlike “tooth and claw” existence (ahem, Haiti) to the magnificent heights of Michelangelo and Monet, and the beauty of Beethoven and Bach. But what we enjoy as Western Civilization is being diluted, watered down, by a massive barbarian invasion, eerily reminiscent of the Fall of the Roman Empire.
According to Brittanica.com, the causes of the Roman Empire’s fallwere remarkably similar in many ways to our own times, particularly regarding the key facts of a dwindling native population combined with an invasion of barbaric immigrants, what you might call iron mixed with miry clay:
How much easier is it for us now to understand how the Roman Empire impotently watched itself gradually falling into ruin, letting it happen? Our own self-centered officials and sold-out media are letting it happen, lying about our barbaric invasion, just to protect their scraps and stakes in the narrative. It’s so short sighted. The same Springfield officials now banking federal immigrant subsidy payments fail to imagine how badly their own economic prospects will be after the tiny town’s tipping point teeters over.
There is some good news. The good news is found in the fully-justified outrage at all this barbaric conduct, which itself is a kind of civilizational antibody. The question will be whether a majority of us wake up before we reach the late-stage collapse of Empire.
And that, my friends, will be partly up to us.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Then return back here tomorrow morning, for another injection of civilization and light-hearted news and analysis.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
