What Just Happened?

Comments on the week that was. Some lessons, explanations, and things worth paying attention to. It's not what you think.

Last week, there were no airline crashes, no Parkland-style school shootings, and no major stories other than an “atmospheric river” in southern California, to which there is a small upside for the frequently-drought-ridden once-Golden State. Israel announced that they want Gazan refugees to leave before they finish their mission against the evil Hamas. The stock market did fine, and no new wars were started (we have enough, thank you).

It ended with one of America’s culturally iconic events, the Super Bowl, and it helped that the game was competitive. The commercials were a pale comparison of those from past years - mediocre at best - and America displayed its distractedness with more commentary on a popular singer and her boyfriend and the politicization thereof than the game itself. I admittedly cheered for both teams to lose.

Congratulations, Kansas City. You were fun to support in your prior wins until “Tay Tay” showed up. We are so done with you now. You may now have eclipsed the Dallas Cowboys as America’s most hated team, except in Philadelphia. But stay tuned.

Your biggest sin isn’t winning. You’re boring. And that’s a killer. Bad TV, you know. Your fortunes are about to change.

This is the best Superbowl ad of all time, from 2011 when the 10-6 Green Bay Packers defeated the 12-4 Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25. Nothing has come close.

Volkswagen did a sort-of reprise of their commercials from past years overlayed with Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said,” including a cameo of the above. It was okay and the game’s best commercial (a low bar).

The worst series of commercials, by far, were the “He Gets Us” pseudo-Christian ones that were mocked on the right and the left. The Federalist.com has a great take, and I’m sure there will be others in the days ahead. I had my own.

Political commercials are rare during the Super Bowl. They’re expensive, costing millions for 30 seconds while you’re in the kitchen grabbing more wings and guac or dispensing with that first six-pack. But sure enough, we were feted to this gem, courtesy of a Super PAC, American Values, for independent-maybe-libertarian Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Unless you’re over 80 years old and have a brain that functions better than Joe Biden’s, you likely won’t get the historical references. A colossal waste of money.

But political implosions were on massive display this past week, leading with Joe Biden in the pole position and GOP House Republicans close behind their counterparts in the US Senate. The Senate may not have a Freedom Caucus like their House brothers and sisters (they do and meet on Wednesdays), but a rare open revolt against the Senate’s leadership has broken out.

It was an ugly week in official and political Washington (not that there’s much difference). But why be different? It was worse for Joe Biden than is being portrayed, not as bad for the House GOP as initial reports suggest, and not that abnormal for the Senate.

Let’s start with South Carolina, which held the Democratic presidential primary on Saturday, February 3rd. That wasn’t “last week,” but it started things off. You probably ignored it because Biden won 96% of the vote, with self-help guru and Oprah spiritualist Marianne Williamson finishing a distant second and suspending her campaign. Gelato magnate and retiring third-term Congressman Dean Phillips (D-MN) finished an even more distant third but is taking his campaign to Michigan in hopes of a better result. It can’t get worse.

Here’s what the media largely didn’t tell you. Only 131,000 people voted in the Palmetto State’s Democratic primary - a four percent turnout. There are nearly 4 million registered voters in South Carolina.

It makes me wonder: South Carolinians don’t register by party. They get to vote in the presidential primary of their choice. The GOP primary is on Saturday, February 24th. Ninety-six percent of voters - including many Democrats - are eligible to vote. Does it give native daughter Nikki Haley a glimmer of hope when she trails Donald Trump by double digits in polls among Republicans? Doubtful, but watch this space.

Suppose I were Haley’s consultant (I’m neutral but will be voting in Virginia’s March 5th “Super Tuesday” primary). In that case, I’d be dusting off my voter file of registered Democrats and conducting some serious targeted anti-Trump voter contact and messaging, especially in and around cities and suburbs, where it’s a little easier to mobilize turnout. It presumes Democratic voters would be open to voting for Nikki because of Trump—a bold, if desperate, strategy.

Haley doesn’t have much of a choice.

Remember, primaries are expectation games. Haley doesn’t have to win. She has to beat expectations to stay alive to Super Tuesday when expectations are uber low. You still have to win delegates, however.

House GOP and Mayorkas - and losing two valuable House leaders

Much was made of the House’s failure to impeach the nation’s most incompetent, if not malevolent, Secretary of Homeland Security, Anthony Mayorkas. A Utah Congressman changed his vote at the last second to preserve his procedural right to offer a motion to reconsider. Officianados of Roberts Rules of Order (and Senate and House procedures) know that for a motion to reconsider a vote to be in order, you must have voted for the prevailing side on the previous question. The resolution looked doomed to fail on a 215-215 vote until that happened.

When Scalise returns, Mayorkas is likely to be impeached by one vote in the House, followed by quick dispatch in the Senate, where the Obama-era Homeland Security official who cut corners to obtain visas for rich Chinese investors will not be convicted and removed. He is a bad man, but he’s doing what Joe Biden promised to do - open the border.

Despite the guaranteed legislative defeat, it’s not entirely a waste of time. The matter has finally drawn attention to the debacle at the southern border, which the legacy media has ignored for so long. So there’s that. Our porous southern border is now a top issue among voters, driven by the lower wages that come with increased immigration. Of course, that’s not stopping corporate sycophants from extolling the virtues of the Southern invasion for the same reason.

Why Speaker Johnson and his leadership team (looking at you, Whip Tom Emmer, R-MN) allowed the vote to occur when Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) was away for cancer treatment remains a puzzle. They knew Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and two others were solid “no” votes, with vacant seats in New York and California.

The GOP lost three votes, including that of Gallagher, chair of a Select Committee on China, a former Marine intelligence officer, and considered a rising star. If Trump wins, look for him to serve as Secretary of Defense or possibly as CIA Director. His Wall Street Journal op-ed challenging the impeachment resolution on constitutional grounds was persuasive.

He reprised his vote and oped by announcing his retirement from Congress. That alone should ring alarm bells in Congress. This week, the retirements of Gallagher and House Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), another prodigious and thoughtful workhorse, is bad news for House Republicans and America.

Our most serious legislators are leaving Congress when we need them most.

We need more, not less, of the Gallaghers and McMorris Rodgers. Instead, we get more of Matt Gaetz’s, the clicks-for-cash congressman whose Ethics Committee investigation into his sex trafficking accusations continues and may hit a crescendo soon.

The US Senate and the border

This was quite the drama. As Joe Biden sent foreign aid requests for Ukraine ($61 billion), Israel ($14 billion), and Taiwan ($5 billion), plus humanitarian aid for Hamas Gaza and elsewhere, among others, Republicans demanded legislation to fix the open southern border through which as many as ten million illegal immigrants have poured during Biden’s presidency - over 300,000 alone in December.

Fair enough, Democrats quickly concluded, seeing their opening. They read polls better than Republicans do and saw a chance to coopt, at least if not put Republicans in a box. Agree to a bipartisan compromise that the Biden open borders crowd would largely ignore. Or, criticize them for wanting the issue more than a solution (a Democratic specialty).

I sense that GOP leader Mitch McConnell knew that it would probably fail. It failed in 2007 and failed again in 2013. He dispatched Senator James-not-Jim Lankford (R-OK), the Senate’s lone ordained Baptist minister, a solid conservative, and a workhorse knowledgeable on the issue, to lead GOP negotiations.

I suspect McConnell invited Sen. Marco Rubio, who helped lead the 2013 negotiations, to reprise his role. He is more senior and was just reelected (important!) to spearhead the discussions, and likely said, “No way in hell.” The more junior Lankford grabbed the third rail and marched to visit with open borders champion and far-left Senate negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Democrat-turned-independent lefty and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), along with Obama’s third string the Biden Administration.

Lankford rues the day, but the experience will make him a better Senator if he survives politically and wants to hang around.

It took four months. Lankford did his best but failed to secure construction of the wall and ran smack into the open-borders religiosity of the White House and Senate Democrats. They gave him enough to show that they could restrict the flow and tighten “asylum” rules while building a massive “asylum corps” to process requests and issue work permits immediately. The compromise contained enough loopholes and figleafs to make the snake in the Garden of Eden blush. It was rejected.

So the Senate GOP descended into recriminations and finger-pointing and tossed Lankford under the proverbial bus. Unable to help himself and politically unsophisticated in Senate ways, Trump jumped in to denounce the deal. That gave Senate Democrats the perfect talking point - Trump told the Senate GOP no, losing their chance to fix the border. You now co-own the border, GOP.

Most voters know instinctively that this is hogwash. Biden ran in 2020 on 1) not being Trump, 2) bringing “unity,” and 3) opening the border. He’s proven to be more of a dictator and anti-democracy than Trump and divided us a never before, but by golly, he did open the border.

What really happened was classic legislative machinations. A border compromise, in this environment, was never going to be accomplished, even though the GOP held the cards. Let’s see how the 2024 elections change things. They may.

Lankford’s career will probably be fine - he’s a terrific and effective Senator and fits his state well - but he has repair work if he wishes to seek reelection to a third term in 2028. I doubt he will, after this experience. Would you?

Biden goes terminal

But no one had a worse week than 81-year-old Joe Biden. The special counsel report into Biden’s mishandling of classified documentation may have declined prosecution but clearly did not exonerate him and referred to his lapses in memory about when he served as Vice President, the year his son died, and his communications with his biographer. It was a damning report.

Not mentally competent enough to prosecute. But competent enough to serve as President?

White House counsel and long-time Democratic party legal operative Robert Bauer went on the Sunday shows to defend Biden and trash special counsel Robert Hur and his report. Scores of other Democrats followed, from Vice President Kamala Harris to Obama’s Attorney General - held in contempt of Congress for lying - Eric Holder. Former US Attorney Chris Christie said Hur’s report was within bounds. After all, Hur had to explain why he wasn’t recommending prosecution because of obvious violations of federal law. Wow, did he.

CBS Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan asked White House counsel Bob Bauer to share the transcripts of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur since his and Hur’s interpretations differed. He refused.

Therefore, I accept Hur’s interpretation. Biden is a well-meaning elderly man with a bad memory.

If levels of panic can be measured in Democratic headquarters, it would be DEFCON5 (the highest - nuclear war imminent). One can imagine phone calls to DC resident Barack Obama to beg and plead for him to persuade Biden to drop out of the contest and let an open convention pick the nominee in August. It’s too late for new entrants, given filing deadlines. Vice President Harris no doubt has thoughts.

Nothing screams “threat to democracy” more than letting 4,000 party insiders pick a president, including a thousand or so “super delegates” like Jeffrey Epstein’s pal, Bill Clinton.

Let’s go to the way back machine in 2018 when then-private citizen Biden was asked whether his age was a legitimate issue. Then, compare his performance to the abovementioned video less than six years ago. Do you think he can serve a second term? I don’t. You’ll have to go to X to find this video since CBS Morning News has apparently removed it from their archives. I can’t imagine why.

https://t.co/wimnHHgRqQ">pic.twitter.com/wimnHHgRqQ</a></p>&mdash; RNC Research (@RNCResearch) <a href="https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1756821031413497947?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February

He refused to do a now-traditional (since Obama) Super Bowl media interview, but he did push out this crazy and stupid video about shrinkflation. More about this in a future post. All the input costs into snacks he’s driven up, and this is what he focuses on. And picking on my former employer is over the top.

A vote for an infirm Joe Biden in 2024 is for Kamala Harris for President. We are losing the wrong people in Congress. And someone other than Kansas City must win the Super Bowl in 2025.

Quite a week. I can’t wait until next Friday. Or next year.

Wake me when it’s over.