Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
I’m almost young enough to be Joe Biden’s son. (But I’m not.)
When I see the doctor for my annual physical, she typically tells me at the outset that she wants me to remember three arbitrary words – something like “elephant, ice and automobile” – and intends to ask me what the three words are at the end of my examination.
I always see it as a challenge. At the end, I’ll remind her impishly, “Didn’t you intend to ask me what the three words are?”
“Oh, right,” she’ll reply.
That’s my cue: “The words are ‘elephant, automobile and ice’ except you asked me to remember them in the order ‘elephant, ice and automobile.’ By the way, did you know that elephants are closely related to mammoths, and that mammoths survived almost into recorded history? It’s thought that humans coming to the New World were responsible in part for their extinction – they hunted the mammoths to extinction. Those native Americans weren’t living in such harmony with nature after all.”
She’ll roll her eyes, convinced that I’m not senile but might well be something worse.
I report this because Joe Biden has doctors too. As an 81-year-old, he’s undoubtedly given at least informal cognitive tests by those doctors, similar to the one my doctor gives me. In view of his significant seniority over me, and the apparent diminution in his cognition, he’s probably given tests more formal than mine. It would be medical malpractice not to give him such tests.
Donald Trump appropriately noted in the debate that he himself has taken and aced such tests, and released them to the public during his presidency. That is true.
But Trump uncharacteristically understated his case in challenging Biden to take such tests too.
The fact is, almost certainly, that Biden has indeed taken such tests. The fact that he hasn’t released the results tells you volumes. As if you need to be told anything more after his performance last night.
The debates will be interesting this time, because both candidates have the opportunity to change some minds. Joe Biden could change some minds that have decided he’s too old to be president. Donald Trump could change some minds that have decided he’s too much a jerk.
Will they succeed?
Probably, to some extent. In Biden’s case, it’s because expectations are extraordinarily low. Even Democrats think he’s too old. Republicans think he’s so old that he’s likely to forget where he is (as he appears to do from time to time), fall down (as he has done several times on camera), and perhaps sniff Trump’s hair.
But he won’t fall down, he won’t forget where he is, and he won’t sniff anyone’s hair. In fact, he’ll be so pumped up with pharmaceuticals – as he apparently was at the State of the Union Address a few months ago – that he won’t appear sleepy at all. He’ll be preternaturally charged up.
It’ll be spooky. Think Energizer Bunny with hair plugs and tooth caps.
Despite Biden’s meme that he’s running again because he’s the only one who can beat Trump, his handlers know the truth. He’s about the only Democrat who can lose to Trump – mainly due to concern among even Democrats and certainly Independents that he’s too old and too far gone.
The handler’s efforts this week will focus on dispelling that concern. With the aid of pharmaceuticals and low expectations, they’ll succeed to some small degree.
As for Trump, most Republicans tend not to have much personal affection for the man. If Dan Quayle was no Jack Kennedy, Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan.
Democrats loath (and fear) Trump to the point they think he will appear on horseback with three other riders, or perhaps with a chain saw in-hand, or might spin his head 360 degrees on his shoulders and vomit at the camera.
I predict Trump will not do any of that.
The man seems to have changed a bit. If Biden appears chemically stimulated, Trump appears slightly sedated in comparison to the Trump of the past. Moreover, even the experts are surprised at the quality of his campaign. He’s getting good advice, and seems to be taking that advice.
The 2016 election was a lark for Trump. He surprised everyone – including himself – by winning. Unfortunately, what he learned from that was to ignore the advice of seasoned politicos in the 2020 election – and so he lost (probably).
Some of the advice that Trump is taking this time is about his debating style. In the 2016 and 2020 debates with Hillary and then Biden, he misapprehended the nature of a debate. He thought a debate was an argument. He repeatedly cut off Biden even as Biden was stumbling and mumbling. The effect was to save Biden from himself.
This time, Trump appreciates that a debate is not a personal argument with his wife. It’s a moderated show with a television audience.
Trump at heart is a showman, perhaps the best in politics since that professional showman Ronald Reagan. This time, he knows to keep quiet to let the stumbling and mumbling Biden continue stumbling and mumbling. Moreover, under the rules of this particular debate, Trump will not be able to interject even if he wants to because each candidate’s microphone will be muted during the other’s response to moderator questions.
It could be painful to watch, if you’re a Democrat. At least until the moderators interject to save Biden. Trump’s microphone will be muted during Biden’s stumbling and mumbling routine, but the moderators’ will not be.
Here’s another thing Trump will do, as any seasoned performer would. He’ll use a little self-deprecation. He’ll use it well, because people won’t expect it from him. If Trump pokes a bit of fun at himself, it might be the most memorable moment. It will either be a hit or, without a live audience, it could fall flat. If it falls flat, don’t expect the moderators to bail him out Ed McMahon style.
So . . . next week we’ll have a new race. The senile incumbent will have a bit of a pulse and the a-hole challenger will seem not quite so bad. America might survive another four years.
At places we used to call institutions of higher learning, ignorant kids who don’t know any better and their ignorant professors who should, but also don’t, are trespassing in support of the raping, beheading, kidnapping, burning alive hostage takers of Hamas.
It’s a revolting scene. Even in Nazi Germany they tried to hide their atrocities. In contrast, Hamas posts them on the internet, and their sympathizers at American universities embrace both the terrorists and their terror like the latest hula hoop fad. (Watch out, trannies, you’re so-o-o-o 2023. And watch out, BLM, you’re so-o-o-o 2021.)
Much as these terror-sympathizers disgust me, and much as I’m rooting against the terrorists with whom they sympathize, and much as I’m rooting for the Israelis in their existential struggle to survive, I hope the university protests continue.
Here’s why.
Because the protests are revealing the rot in American universities. The system that used to be the envy of the world – the best and brightest everywhere came here to learn – has strangled under the stultifying, anti-intellectual yoke of DEI, wokeism, anti-merit, one-party rule that is delivered by greedy, wasteful, heavy-handed, over-numerous, group-thinking bureaucrats.
College tuition has gone up at double the rate of inflation for as long as I can remember. Students pay far more than ever before, even after adjusting for inflation, and get far less. At Columbia, tuition alone is $67,000 a year. Nobody gets charged the sticker price, of course, except the Jews.
American parents and their kids can now plainly see what many of us have known for years. Unless you want to be a doctor or lawyer, college is a monumental waste of time and money. It’s a scam.
Good careers are available without a college degree. In Switzerland – which is not exactly a banana republic – only a third of kids go to college. The rest find interesting work as electricians, carpenters, programmers and tradesmen. They make a good living at those professions, and are not looked down upon. They’re respected, they’re happy, and they’re debt-free.
Here in America, the industrial-education complex contrived to convince the people that they’re losers unless they spend a couple hundred thousand dollars for a useless degree. And they convinced voters to support that scam with taxpayer dollars, and, now, to use taxpayer dollars to forgive outlandish unpaid loans to the foolish people who were scammed.
These protests offer a moment to reconsider all this destruction and waste. Barack Obama in a different context called such moments “teaching moments.”
Speaking of whom, here’s an added benefit to the protests: they’re embarrassing to the Democrats. Most Democrats know that the Hamas terrorists are worse than animals, but they are reluctant to say so because the Hamas supporters are mainly Democrats. These protests pressure the Democrats to take a side, publicly.
Because Mr. Biden knows there are voters on both sides, he has tried to side with both. That doesn’t work for long in wartime.
This week was the ridiculous annual spectacle where the president is supposed to tell us the state of our so-called union, as if we don’t already know. That’s a particularly appropriate topic for the current president who was elected on the promise that he would be a “uniter, not divider” who would bring normalcy and decency back to the office.
A few seconds into it, this “uniter, not divider” was implying that the people who currently disfavor his re-election, a cohort comprising over half the country – and especially his “predecessor” whose name must not be spoken – were in league with Vladimir Putin.
It almost made me miss the good old pre-1989 Democrats who liked Russia.
The cabal that calls itself the Democratic Party of Colorado nearly pulled a coup last fall. Unburdened by any inconvenient process that might have been due, a Democrat state judge decided that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. Therefore, under a clause of the 14th Amendment designed to prevent former Confederates from running for federal office, Trump was ineligible to run for president.
Never mind that Trump had never been convicted or even charged with the crime of insurrection.
On appeal, four of the seven Democrat-appointed justices on the Colorado Supreme Court agreed. The other three in their strident dissent all but wondered out loud what kind of Colorado-legal weed the majority was smoking.
My book about the decline of Aspen was published last year, entitled “High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen.” It debuted at Number 6 on Amazon in its category of political books. That put the book in rarified air with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters (who helped me promote it when I appeared on his show).
Although I’m no longer in the stratosphere with Tucker and Jesse, sales are still climbing and, more importantly, so are royalties. You can get the book at Amazon or Barnes and Noble for $18 or $8 for the e-version.
Meanwhile, here’s a teaser. It’s Chapter Two, about the odd period between the silver boom and the post-WWII boom, entitled “Cows, Potatoes and Ghosts — the Quiet Years.”
Many Black activists are agitating for two things.
One, they want reparations for the enslavement of some of their ancestors centuries ago, a small fraction of which is to be paid by the people whose ancestors were the enslavers, and a large fraction of which is to be paid by people like me whose ancestors back then were raiding rival clans in the Scottish Highlands without ever setting eyes on a Black person in their entire poor, nasty, brutish and short lives.
Two, they want to reinstitute racial segregation. They want Black dorm buildings in college, Black classes, Black this and Black that, all because the White man is not to be trusted. Who knows when he’ll break out a noose?
I do not think slavery reparations, standing alone, would do much good in elevating Black achievement. Trillions spent on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, three generations of welfare, and 40 years of Black favoritism in job applications and college admissions have done little good for Blacks, and arguably a lot of harm.
And I think segregation, standing alone, is an equally bad idea. If the races are ever to get along and start to trust one another, they need to spend time together.
Hunter Biden is the gift that keeps on giving. And I’m not talking about the STDs he’s probably given and received from his “lady” friends.
This president’s son, who has absolutely no business skills and typically is not even sober, has collected tens of millions from foreign governments and businessmen. Some of that money has found its way through labyrinth shell corporations and into the hands of the “Big Guy.” Some of it has not found its way into the hands of the Internal Revenue Service, though it should have.
Republicans want to learn more about this. Or as the New York Times would put it, “Republicans pounced.” That’s because the media which back in the days of journalism would itself pounce to investigate such suspicious activity was instead still navel-gazing about the laptop computer aka “Russian disinformation.”
The Republicans used the tool available: a Congressional subpoena to Hunter requiring him to give sworn testimony in a deposition on the subject. What he gave them instead was the finger.
After Joe Biden was purportedly elected president of the United States, he moved into the White House and still spends a good – some would say bad – 60% of his time living and “working” there. It’s convenient because it’s also the preferred residence of his make-shift physician, make-shift policy advisor, make-shift stair-assister and make-shift stage-navigator, “doctor” Jill.
The White House has also been the dog house of several canine companions of Joe. The first First Dog went by the name of Champ, until he lost his title. He died and went to the White Dog House in the sky.
It was the best thing any Biden dog has ever done.
The Colorado Supreme Court yesterday decided that Donald Trump “engaged in an insurrection or rebellion” on or about Jan. 6, 2021. Under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, he is therefore ineligible for the presidency and would be removed from the Colorado ballot.
A few points to consider:
The Court on its own volition stayed its order until Jan. 4 to give Trump an opportunity to appeal the case to the real Supreme Court, the United States one. If he does so, and he will, and the Supreme Court decides to hear the case, and they will, then the order is further stayed until the Supreme Court issues its decision this spring or summer.
The Colorado Supreme Court is comprised of seven justices. All seven were appointed by Democrat governors. The U.S. Supreme Court has a materially different composition. Six of the nine justices are Republican appointees.
the Aspen beat 