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Dunce
Michael P. Ramirez, March 03, 2024
Super Tuesday is around the corner. Expectations are that both Trump and Biden will wrap up their respective primary campaigns, although I’m not quite sure if any word with “respect” in it should be appropriately applied to either candidate. Super doesn’t fit, either. This election is more cartoon characters and less superheroes.
Polls continue to show that a wide majority of voters prefer NEITHER candidate.
There was a recent UMass Amherst/WCVB national poll that showed if Trump won, just 19% of Trump voters would feel a sense of pride. With a Biden victory, just 13% of his voters would feel a sense of pride.
Worse, when given a range of emotions voters would feel after a victory by their candidate, which included; fear, hope, happiness, relief, anger, sadness, pride and disappointment, the latter emotion, disappointment outpaced them all… except for fear. Fear was a little closer.
I feel their pain.
In a nation of almost 332 million people, is this really the best America can deliver?
Most voters feel the nation would be either better off, or much better off, if neither candidate ran in 2024. Less than a third of respondents thought the 2020 rematch was a good idea.
The question is whether this will be a rematch of 2020, where 43% of Democrats did not vote for Biden but voted against Trump, or 2016, where most Republicans voted against Hillary and for a conservative Supreme Court rather than Trump. The lessor of evil vs the evil of the lessors. In either case, voters are more likely voting against the other candidate, rather than supporting the person they will be actually voting for.
Both candidates have questionable cognitive abilities. Biden referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the president of Mexico. Trump called Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader of Hungary, the leader of Turkey. Trump referred to his primary opponent, Nikki Haley as Nancy Pelosi, while Biden confuses his European counterparts as their dead predecessors…
Yup, Biden sees dead people.
Both candidates have their diehard fringe supporters. The sound emanating from them on social media seems loud, but it is just an echo chamber of noise.
I told a reader at an event in Las Vegas this weekend, that in the past, you would have one village idiot spouting nonsense while walking down the street naked and the townspeople would just ignore him. Now, he is joined by thousands of other naked idiots from thousands of other villages on social media, and it seems more like a parade… but it is still just a bunch of naked idiots.
How on earth did we get here? When did politics get to be so crazy?
When Marjorie Taylor Greene is used as a legitimate spokesman for your party, you have major problems. It reminds me of a joke a friend shared with me recently, “If you took all the village idiots from all the villages and made a village of village idiots, she would still be the village idiot.”
If we got into crazy Democrats, it would take ten more pages, and well, I’m too tired.
While it seems like Trump is dominating his primary, the GOP constitutes less than 24% of the electorate. That may work for the primary, but how well it will translate in the general election is the important question. I have my doubts.
As I said before, it’s a numbers game. 24% of the electorate are Republicans. His diehard supporters constitute about a third of that. You can’t win the general election with just 8% of the electorate.
He will need to pick up the support of a majority of the 45% of independents to win and hope a significant number of the Republicans will actually show up to vote. You see, most Republicans will not vote for Biden, but they just won’t show up to vote, and a considerable number of independents are ex-Republicans or lean conservative.
It made a significant difference in the Georgia special election to replace Senator Johnny Isakson in 2020-2021. Republicans had more votes than Democrats in November of 2020 but failed to get their candidate over the 50% threshold. In the January runoff, Republican voters failed to show up, and Democrat Raphael Warnock won.
Fortunately for Trump, there is Joe Biden. He has the same problem but even worse. The latest polls have shown that he is so unpopular that the only way Hunter can sell influence now is to distance himself from his dad.
The best thing Trump has going for him is a rapidly aging Joe Biden. Joe looks more frail and sounds less coherent with every public appearance. It’s like I’m witnessing that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where the guy looks into the Ark and decomposes, but now, in super slow motion, right before our eyes.
Biden has been under the 40% approval mark for most of his term.
The best thing Biden has going for him is Donald Trump. In fact, Trump’s biggest adversary isn’t the DOJ, it’s Donald Trump. He has Tou-rump syndrome, except his outburst of obscenities, nonsensical absurdities, vapid narcissistic imprudence, socially inappropriate, and derogatory remarks are NOT involuntary. He’s about as honest as he is humble.
Trump’s unfavorable numbers continue to surpass his favorability by a large margin as well.
Trump and Biden are lucky there is no one running named “none-of-the-above.” Instead, you have another conspiratorial knucklehead running as an independent.
There are no real conservatives in this race.
There are no real constitutionalists in this race.
There isn’t even a real supporter of free trade or free market economics in this race.
Bidenomics is just the third installment of Obamanomics and a massive expansion of a centralized redistributive regulatory state. Biden actually believes government is the solution.
But so does Trump. His call for a 10% tariff on imports demonstrates an imbecilic lack of understanding of even the most basic economics. People accuse me of being anti-Trump, but I’m really just anti-stupid.
Both candidates suffer from a disturbing lack of mental acuity.
So, when I saw the poster for the movie Dune, showing the two main characters posing for battle and “part two” of the franchise, the 2020 presidential rematch immediately came to mind… hmmm, RFK may be the sandworm. You can barely understand what he is trying to communicate, he’s not really a main character, but he could play a decisive role… if not in this election, at the very least, in the comeback of the Measles epidemic.
The word that actually came to mind was doom, not dune… But since dunce was merely one letter away, and it seemed appropriate for both candidates (and the electorate that put us in this position), well, that worked too.
I may resurrect “doomed” for another cartoon.
Interest payments on our national debt will soon hit $870 billion dollars. That’s a 32% increase over last year’s debt payments. To put it into perspective, we are now paying more for the interest on our debt than we are on our defense.
Our debt has doubled in a decade, $7.8 trillion during the Trump years and another $6.25 during the Biden years… so far.
It’s pretty amazing when you think about it; it took 198 years to break the trillion-dollar debt ceiling. Our national debt increased from $33 trillion in September to almost $34.5 trillion in just FIVE months. In 1981, our debt was about 25% of our GDP. It now exceeds 100% of our GDP. In fact, the forecast for the U.S. GDP in 2025 is $29.25 trillion.
You don’t need to go to the big screen to see an apocalyptic future, it is unfolding before your very eyes. And if we don’t start taking these elections seriously, it will happen sooner rather than later.
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