193 Comments

Obama was the original word salad, but he had a nice voice that made it sound much better than Kamala. He will regret making fun of Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner for the rest of his life. "Qualified" for the left means you are a regime bootlicker.

Expand full comment

Goddamnit! No!

Obama did NOT have a nice voice. He also delivered speeches as if he was reading aloud in an 8th-grade classroom.

Not sure why people keep perpetuating that myth—maybe they never really paid attention to him, only to what was said about him.

Expand full comment

I couldn’t stand listening to Obama’s condescending tone. Simply a manipulator.

Expand full comment

Many (most?) people, if you scratch the surface, really crave being told what to do. They won't admit it, but it's true. Can't have leaders without followers, you know.

Expand full comment

I went to NYU in 1985 and down the street from my dorm was a night club for which people queued up around the block. While waiting in the long line, in the cold, dressed in their short skirts and other weather-inappropriate attire, the doorman, a dwarf with a top hat, berated them mercilessly. They voluntarily stood in the cold to be ridiculed and judged whether they were worthy of entering the club.

Expand full comment

Says it all!!!

Expand full comment

Most of the 'leaders' are followers. If you really want to know what's up, check out the people that our 'leaders' are following.

Expand full comment

What is with everyone "following" someone? I don't even know what that means. What is following? Yuk. Sounds really servile; do persons do that? Does Substack actually ENCOURAGE this type of behavior!!!!#

Expand full comment

Perhaps there's different kinds of following. We can follow a writer but that doesn't necessarily mean we believe what they tell us or behalf how they'd like us to.

Then again, there are real, neurotic followers who take what their leaders tell them as gospel. Thos are the dangerous ones.

Expand full comment

💯

Expand full comment

[I wrote this in 2011. Still stand by it.] Obama: Arrogant, smug, petty, incompetent, childish, narcissistic, delusional, misguided, deceitful, hypocritical, amateurish, ignorant, autocratic, disingenuous, self-absorbed, sanctimonious, vengeful, aloof, obtuse, preening, prickly, starfucking, demagogic, bloviating, shallow, megalomaniacal, cloistered, irresponsible, feckless, overrated, naïve, tone-deaf, grating, anti-Semitic, spineless, unpresidential.

Expand full comment
founding

Let’s add “condescending.” The WSJ actually published an article last week entitled, The Tiresome Obamas, about their tone deaf lecturing to black voters.

Expand full comment

I think you left one very important attribute out: Racist.

As I believe he was the MOST racist president of my lifetime.

Expand full comment

I’d add hate/envy-filled and fueled.

bsn

Expand full comment

If Obama’s the answer, the question’s really stupid!

Expand full comment

He was a terrible speaker really. Although I agree he had a listenable voice. His ‘Yes We Can’ was a great speech. It really was. But it wasn’t his. It was a staple of black churches. Word for word. His speeches were boring, pedantic, but also fear filled. The first ten speeches he gave in his Presidency were always said to be ‘missing was his lofty and inspiring rhetoric. It is as if the Presidency and the problems we face as a nation is weighing him down….

Etc. No. He was a lousy speaker. And the first two or three paragraphs of each were fear filled. I remember one hearing him say ‘We are in a crisis and I am trying to prevent a catastrophe’!!! Can you imagine a leader saying that? ‘Gee, should we invest in America right now?’ ‘Uh…Maybe we should wait until things smooth out’. He kept talking the economy down.

We

Expand full comment

"Hegseth, who routinely inveighs against 'woke generals' on television, publicly pushed for clemency toward war criminals in Trump’s first term; more recently, he has advocated that Trump should fire C. Q. Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who is Black, in order to show that he would no longer support diversity-and-inclusion efforts in the military."

Oh, no! Please don't get rid of C.Q. Brown, who introduced racial and gender quotas in the Air Force to specifically reduce the number of white male officers. 😱

Expand full comment
author

And I love the framing in which Hegseth is making some bizarre argument out of nowhere, ignoring the evidence of what Brown has actually done. Same for the "war criminals" thing, in which Hegseth and others expressed concern about the fairness of the military justice the accused war criminals got, not enthusiastic support for war crimes. Just a thick stew of dumb unexamined premises.

Expand full comment

"Unexamined premises" are the explanation for the climate change modeling that rules the environmental groups' false solutions. False premise, false result. Garbage in, garbage out. That's about it for my cliches.

There are rather undeniable weather extremes (see Southern Spain and Sicily currently). The problem as seen by many is not the CO2 myth, but geoengineering operations. There's enough evidence by now to support that claim.

Now the powers are openly touting stratospheric aerosol injection and solar radiation management. The fact they've been doing that and it has intensified since 2020 is of no consequence. Here's another cliche. Buckle up, baby.

Expand full comment

The Earth’s climate changes are a natural and historically proven process- she is living and instead of fighting to force her to slow down and do what “man mandates” her to do, we need to learn to adjust to it and change with it. Solar, wind, electric vehicles, are all simply a money grab and a format for comfortable elites to be hysterical and fear monger those easily manipulated to wreak havoc for the common sense that see reality.

I mean seriously, a monstrous turbine in the ocean? For cryin’ out loud if one cannot see the environmental problems associated with that, they truly cannot see beyond their own nose!!

Expand full comment

The weather events issue is a rather inevitable problem with human heuristic perceptions spotting patterns once they've been told to look for them. If one looks at statistical analysis (and not over a date range which has been selected by journalists looking to write a story), then one finds that for many of the types of weather events which have been linked to climate change (and many haven't to any great degree- forest fires for example), then what one finds is that there has usually been a low single digit percentage rise for frequency, magnitude or both.

A couple of other things to watch out for. A lot of sources don't fill-in blank data retroactively. So they will measure hurricanes in the past versus hurricanes in the present, which include hurricanes which never make landfall (in the past they weren't included). Another relates to the issue I previously mentioned- magnitude. Recently, parts of Europe experienced a once on a 500 year drought. Without the effects of climate change, it might have been only a once in a 100 year drought- a couple of inches difference.

Don't get me wrong. Climate change is real and its a serious problem. But it's nowhere near the world's worst problem (poverty), it's a long-term problem, and not one which will end civilisation (although climate policy might). If one plugs economic growth into the Nordhaus DICE model, one finds 2.5C to 3.0C of warming by the end of the century, which includes all warming thus far. By 2100 this will mean around 4% of global GDP will need to be devoted to climate mitigation measures, but at the same time the world will be a much richer place (if we don't blow it).

Both lab leaks and AI have a far greater chance of ending human civilisation.

Expand full comment

Climate change is largely due to climate manipulation. It amazes me, as I am not religious, to see terrible once-in-500-year floods in Dubai, Mexico, Spain, Sicily, Roswell, NM(!), and other places all taking place within the past few months.

I was a data analyst, not a modeler in my career. I worked peripherally with modelers. A modeler can control the outcome of their work by using a few "unexamined premises". As I said, garbage in, garbage out. But it looks good, especially to those who fund and desire certain results.

Climate change can and does drive poverty. The Indians cannot grow crops as they once did, Spain's crops have been devastated with the on gong sun dimming and so called cloud seeding operations. Northern UK has had crop problems. Drought in Africa. I know versions of those conditions have been going on for years (since WWII). Of course, so has climate manipulation.

As for human heuristic perceptions - we call it the red car syndrome. You have a red car and suddenly it seems everyone has a red car. Statistical analysis supports the theory that the earth is not warming to dangerous levels, and that we are coming off a cold period.

Stop gain of function studies and the lab leaks issue might not be so dangerous.

Expand full comment

Red Car syndrome. Believe it or not I actually had it in real life! The first car I owned was a Red Fiesta- however, a huge number of people bought that make and model in that colour. The Ford Fiesta topped the list for most popular car driven in the UK for over a decade, and red was a particularly popular colour!

My brother worked as an actuarial technician, as well as studying for a time for an actuarial science degree. Before he showed me some of the Maths and we worked together to solve a particular problem, I had never worked on Maths problems which were incomplete, without sufficient points of data to solve an equation. The only answer we could come up with modelling something very similar and then using the parallel solution to infer a possible model. We got the idea from the old Texas Instruments calculator graph modelling function!

The real bitch of British Actuarial exams is they will never tell you whether you were on the right track or not.

The situation re: Global Supply is unusual but explainable. Increased unpredictably of weather patterns has led to local and regional disruptions in farming, but higher CO2 in the atmosphere has led to higher yields globally and 2022 was a record year! We need better transport and logistics, particularly ports and rail in Africa.

Expand full comment

For a quick look at how geoengineering can fix what God does, watch the movie SNOWPIERCER.

Expand full comment

I hope Hegsmith gets a recess appointment and he removes all the incompetent and perverted fools that Biden put in place.

How can anyone suggest that Trump's team is inferior to Sam Brinton, Mark Milley, and anyone in the State Department?

Expand full comment
founding

Is anyone else overwhelmed by the democrats projection? Everything they accuse Trump of they’ve committed - IN PLAIN SIGHT. These people vacillate between the emperor has no clothes to the tell tale heart - they are so fucked up they are madly raking the chair across the floor boards. And, to top it off, they think we are too stupid to see their idiocy - well fuck them too, and didn’t we just on 11/5/2024?

Expand full comment

Perfect!

Expand full comment

"And I probably wouldn’t deal with bad behavior in a puppy by shooting the puppy"

You have never lived on a farm. Sometimes you have no choice.

BTW you can bet these evil leftists "euthanize" pets all the time, abandon them, r take them o the pound. But they don't have the balls to shoot.

Which is fine. We do.

Expand full comment

I grew up on a farm as well. If you didn’t, you won’t understand practical realities.

Expand full comment

The painful reality that those who raise animals is that if you have livestock you also have deadstock. Those who know animal husbandry are vastly under appreciated by those buying lamb chops.

Expand full comment

IIRC, it is on the record that Obama, at some point in his life, ate dog.

What say you, Ms. Glasser?

(cue crickets)

Expand full comment
20 hrs ago·edited 20 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

Cue mournful string section as Ken Burns pans across a sepia-toned image of the same generic Civil Rights footage we've been watching for 50+ years:

“Maybe we pushed too far,” he went on, according to a memoir by one of his advisers, Benjamin Rhodes. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

Because liberals aren't quite sure if they're practicing politics or religion (usually when they're discussing one they mean the other), they broadcast public exhibitions of cognitive dissonance that, while invisible to them, are glaringly obvious to the rest of us.

The one that sticks out to me lately is their imagined repudation of tribalism—We are the universalist saviors of all humanity! We prize nothing more than a diverse rainbow of all races and genders! Our wisdom and reason transcend all boundaries!—that is obviously belied by a tribalism so intense that the first thing they need to know about every person, place or thing, living or dead, is what tribe it belonged to aka Friend or Foe, along with their constant angry threats of disowning and denouncing anyone they know who may have a sympathetic thought for the other tribe—even parents or children!—not to mention their foundational belief that anyone not in their tribe is dangerous and suspicious, either stupid or evil or both.

American liberals, esp their political, academic and journalistic leaders, are so deeply sealed inside a cocoon of sanctimonious certitude that nothing short of a combined exorcism, reeducation and cult deprogramming could get them to climb down off their high horses—which means it's never happening. Trump has broken all their brains irreparably.

Expand full comment
18 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

I worked in DC for one summer during law school. My midwestern sensibilities were completely unprepared for the savagely efficient methods for identifying tribes and summarily dispatching non-members. Every person introduced himself with name followed by what makes them relevant ie. “John Smith, Chief of Staff, Senator Jones”. When I responded “summer associate, x law firm (a well respected national law firm, by the way), the big, fake smiles dropped and any handshake that was not fully executed was aborted. No excuses or courtesies to which I was accustomed were required or expected. The person might bump your shoulder to blow past you, smile and extend their hand to the next person, as if to say “how dare you get in my way when the person behind you may be someone worthy of my handshake. This is not an exaggeration. I have never been in a more brutally dog eat dog environment (including NYC and many of the biggest cities in the world).

To some extent I can understand how that environment creates the mean-spirited, hyperbolic, lying, thieving, psychopaths who run the government (and DC media). They are so abused and inundated with lies, I would guess their brains (and consciences) lose any ability to discern the difference between lies, truth, good, bad, real, made up, rational or insane. They literally have no role models for normalcy. That’s why they’re so dumbfounded by November 5.

Expand full comment

Never forget, for all practical purposes, it's only Democrats who care about skin color.

Expand full comment

Tribalism with pronouns. Though that trend is waning- AOC removed hers from her X account. What’s next - quitting X?

Expand full comment

You would think a Hitler type would be all for gun control. To some extent, Trump is nominating people to head organizations who have been victimized by those organizations. Lawfare against Gaetz. Dangerous to all soldiers woke military decisions against Hedspeth and all other soldiers. Gabbard put on watch list. And they are not dependent on the swamp, the real problem,

Expand full comment
20 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

I'll try to set the stage here: my wife and I are watching "The Wizard of Oz" while I am letting my dog lick out my ice cream dish. Suddenly, I am laughing out loud. My wife looks over: "Oh, you're reading something! I was wondering what was funny about the movie or if the dog did something." Yes, dear, Chris Bray is extremely good.

Expand full comment
20 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

….. none of them can hold a candle to Mayor Pete…..

Expand full comment
author

When he shows up at the office

Expand full comment

Even when he shows up at the office he has to take a break to chest feed . . .

Expand full comment

And where'd that candle go? Pete's version of Clinton's cigar?

Expand full comment

On his bicycle.

Expand full comment

If he shows up.

Expand full comment
20 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

Ha, I was thinking the same thing. Mayor Pete and Biden’s other illogical pick Xavier Becerra, who like RFK Jr. is also a lawyer running HHS. Unlike RFK Jr., Becerra had zero background in health or environmental issues. And of course Karine Jean Pierre… totally qualified…

Expand full comment

Seeing Sideshow Bob's diversity-hire doppelganger at the WH press room podium is something I will not miss.

Expand full comment

Right there, is Newton Baker 2.0.

Until Pete, the Department of Transportation didn't attract attention to the point that people actually recognize who the SECTRANS is at the time ... and the attractive attention today is not flattering.

Expand full comment

He’s been pretty busy these days: https://x.com/anthonyg0528/status/1857546758919958655?s=46

Expand full comment

I’m lost for words, so “Ugh” will have to do.

Expand full comment
20 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

I really love your writing style. I read this part way through, and then I started over again and read the whole thing aloud. My side was splitting from laughing. You have an excellent grasp of your voice and a viciously sharp wit. Keep doing the Lord’s work ❤️💯❤️

Expand full comment
20 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

These people are like screaming children with their fingers in their ears that don’t want to hear the message the American people just delivered. Guess we will have to come up with more forceful communication methods to ensure even they can’t ignore or deny it. The next four years are going to be delicious.

Expand full comment
20 hrs ago·edited 20 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

The thing is we've tolerated, if not embraced, mediocrity to such a degree we think what's ruling over us are the best we've got.

Here in Canada, just pick most of Trudeau's Cabinet selections or Ministers and take a look at their qualifications. I'd trust a manager at McDonald's more. Our Foreign Affairs Minister - one of the most prestigious of all portfolios - is a failed Mayoral candidate in Montreal. I remember when she ran and saying to myself, 'Who the heck is this ditz?' Alas, Malibu Melanie Joly somehow failed upwards into this position. And acts accordingly.

By addressing MPs by their first names she A) displays utter contempt for citizens and B) reveals a lack of decorum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLtU1opIe6g

Yes, to bring it back to the USA, because Levine, that idiots in the dress, Granholm, Buttegeig right up to Harris are sooooo stupendously qualified. GTFOH.

I'm sure there's much to discuss and criticize about Trump's selections but the over the top hysterics continues the "dangerous rhetoric" they were supposed to tone down.

Expand full comment
author

Granholm, yes. A joke.

Expand full comment

Ahh the old Michigan governor, horrible…. Then came the witch … is worser a word.

Expand full comment

Correction: Three witches. The Vajajay Mafia!

Expand full comment

The witch, who gave MI a new motto in 2020:

YES TO LOTTO - YES TO WEED - NO TO SELLING GARDEN SEED!

Expand full comment

No boating! But hubby gets his dock installed!

Expand full comment

No. Worser isn't a word. 😉😊😋

Expand full comment
19 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

And a Canadian import, btw, just to tie it together

Expand full comment

Michigan endured a one state recession under her tutelage.

Expand full comment

Conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. once said, “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory, than by the Harvard University faculty.”

He has a point. The West's reverence for education, and its "bigger is better" mindset, combine to pull us more towards strings of credentials than common-sense competence.

We forget that the highly-credentialed are still subject to human limits of perception, judgement, and virtue ... while the less-credentialed are often closer to the problem, and more directly affected by both the problem and the effects of any attempt to resolve it; insights that the credentialed often lack.

I've seen that in my own career as an engineer - early-on, I learned to respect the insights of the assemblers and technicians I work with; they provide experience-derived knowledge that never appears in any textbook or course - and have kept me from professional embarrassment on multiple occasions.

If I had my way, I would select candidates for public office at random; if they choose to serve, give them a Substack (or equivalent) to convince us why we should vote for them, and cut out the parties (which are highly susceptible to Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy) from the process.

Expand full comment

Just back from the Big White. Canadian dollar 70 cents to the US dollar. Bring your own money. Lots of it!

Expand full comment
20 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

Obama. Great statesman. He made it legal to propagandize (lie) to the American public and he repealed habeas corpus. We don’t have right bestowed to peasants in the 1500’s.

Expand full comment

Great statesman! Right?! He went ‘round the world apologizing for the USA being the greatest country on earth and the place where a vast majority of people in other countries want to live! I can’t stand to hear him speak. I m not sure there’s another person who hates whitey more than Obama Hussein. If I were Trump I’d figure out a way to deport him and his he/she wife!

Expand full comment

The diddy tapes may do the trick.

Expand full comment

George W. Bush did a fair amount of making straight that particular way for the messiah who followed him

Expand full comment

It's 'cause he's so damn brilliant! 🙄🤢

Expand full comment

My favorite articles are those that reference career "civil servants" considering leaving their agency because of Turmp's proposed appointees It as a very X feel to it, much like when the celebs act like it is an airport and they announce their departure. My immediate reaction is , great one less guy DOGE has to eliminate. In fact, I am at the point that if there aren't at east 30 articles written on how bad an appointment is, I assume the person is probably a terrible pick.

Expand full comment

Of course we have rapists in the USA. If you don’t believe it, just read all the articles and posts written by those that think restrictions on abortion are the worst thing to happen since… well, Hitler. Their current argument is that 65,000 women have been raped and force to carry the resulting babies to term in the less than 2 years since the Dobbs decision and resulting changes to State law. So, I guess Trump is correct once again, the country is full of rapists… who are conceiving a lot of babies.

Expand full comment
author

You mean "rapists." New Yorker style book.

Expand full comment
19 hrs ago·edited 19 hrs agoLiked by Chris Bray

As long as they keep using the diaeresis in words like “reëlection” it counts as a high-quality periodical, no matter how stupid the articles get

Expand full comment

I had to look that up🥺 excellent word.

Expand full comment

Surely a better indicator of pseudo intellectual superiority and arrogance has never been found. I noticed that too, and was impressed and the pretentious deployment of class signaling.

Expand full comment

I saw that and my eyeballs are still sore from how hard I rolled them. Good lord, the pretentiousness.

Expand full comment
founding

Magnum Opus!

Expand full comment

Kristi Noem is the only one that makes me cringe. And it's because of the dog.

Expand full comment

But there is also a kind of image sense to it isn’t there? Someone capable of that kind of direct action is not likely to put up with a lot of nonsense from you the would be homeland security threat. Just optics, but, optics are real. Also…just sayin’…the lovable dog breeder who lives down the street from you probably put down half of that dogs siblings down before they were 3 months old to achieve canine racial purity and no one seems upset by that?

Expand full comment

True! If you don’t live on a farm, please don’t judge farm ways.

Expand full comment
founding

Yeah, killing a dog, that’s a family pet, is really bad juju. Don’t think I will get past that - sociopath is what Noem is.

Expand full comment

Animals are food, my friend. Just because a particular species is allowed to live in some folks’ homes, doesn’t elevate them above the rest.

Dogs, cats, raccoons, cows, pigs, whatever, they all equal protein.

Expand full comment

I don't like that either, but she won't be in charge of the Department of Doggy Affairs. Someone that hard and cold should be fine in Homeland Security.

Expand full comment

Have you never taken a pet to the vet to be "put down"?

Expand full comment