TOTAL MONETARY DONATIONS FROM THE TRUCKING INDUSTRY FOR EACH MAJOR PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, 2024 CYCLE as of April 10, OpenSecrets.Org:

Joe Biden, $68,871

An awful lot in the life of a nation depends upon Fate. At any given time, Destiny may or may not have delivered to either or even both parties struggling for political power the kind of leader who can be elected.

When one party or the other is reduced to candidates wholly lacking that certain special quality, that combination of good looks, speaking ability, personal stature, and charm we expect in a president, that unlucky party and its supporters are staring electoral doom in the face.

in 1980, the priggish scold Jimmy Carter wound up facing a veritable demigod in the person of Ronald Reagan. I was shopping in a used record store on 7th Street in NYC, and overheard a couple of old Jewish radicals building themselves up to pull the GOP lever for the first time in their lives. “Reagan was head of a labor union.” observed the first reassuringly. “And, you’re right! You know, I’ve heard he was a communist back in the 1930s.” added the second. It was easy to predict that Carter would wind up a smoking hole.

Our turn came in 2008. George W. Bush failed to participate in the defense of his own foreign police, and was leaving office in disgrace. The market crashed six weeks before the election. And, there we were: running wrinkly, geriatric, and inarticulate John McCain (who was not even our guy) against the Magic Negro who talked like a smooth Ivy Leaguer, whose election would, it seemed to the public in general, heal America’s racial divide forever, and whom the worshipping and adoring media puffed up to a level of popularity resembling the Beatles in 1965.

So, this year, the unlucky democrats have senile Joe Biden whose popularity in office is getting to resemble that of the Asian Flu, and whose gross financial chicanery and corrupt abuses of power become more evident every day. Kamala, ugly, inarticulate, rancidly leftist, and dumb as a rock is basically useless as an alternative. When democrats think further down the list of possible candidates: Hillary again! Michelle Obama! they shudder with good reaon.

So, along comes the dark horse from Ancient Camelot. None other that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

In his favor is the fact that he is a maverick and an outsider. Personally, I like the fact that he is a keen falconer. However, he is, alas! a tree-hugging enviro whackjob, a back-to-the-Stone-Age, Luddite friend of Greta’s. He has also got a major bee in his bonnet about Coronavirus vaccines. So, he’s crazy like a Berkeley, California beatnik as well as crazy like a fever-swamp-dwelling Alt-Right buddy of Pat Buchanan, all at the same time.

But he’s working this gravel-voiced Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington shtick that is not entirely ineffective. You can just bet that the K Street back room pros are soiling their drawers at the prospect of him as a spoiler Third Party candidate.

He has one other really interesting and distinctive signature feature, which I think needs real investigation.

It may be part of some kind of deliberate and calculated Mr. Smith act, but every time we see him, he’s wearing a worn and gnarly, incredibly narrow, early 1960s vintage club tie. If you watch “Dr. No” (1962), you’ll see James Bond wearing similarly narrow ties.

The one in the photo above, forsooth! has a Skull-and-Crossbones emblem. RFK Jr. went to Hahvahd, so he cannot possibly be a member of a certain society headquartered on High Street in New Haven.

And, he’s clearly got more than one necktie of the same vintage. He himself was born in 1954, so it’s hard to imagine that he was shopping at J. Press when he was between 6 and 11 years old. By around 1966, the music had changed, boys were growing long hair, and ties were growing much more generously wide.

So, we have a mystery here. Is it possible that RFK Jr. is such a hippie dippy boho pothead that he never ever bought a necktie of his own while at Georgetown Prep or Harvard or as an adult? Has he laid hands on some New Frontier Yale man’s antique tie collection? If so, who could it be? Sargent Shriver went to Yale, but he was Keys, not Bones. I’m not aware of any special connection to John Kerry, and I just can’t picture Kerry holding on to early’60s ties.

If any readers of mine are journalists attending RFK Jr. press events, do ask about the ties! Inquiring minds want to know.

The crying and gnashing of teeth from far left progressives, their orgs, news outlets (and strange bedfellows) after hearing DeSantis will announce his presidential bid tomorrow is delicious. #GatorsEatSwampCreatures pic.twitter.com/2FEaYSU24m

— Chris Loesch  (@ChrisLoesch) May 23, 2023

————————————–

I like it!

Babylon Bee:

1: Spray Febreze on the Oval Office curtains to get the old man smell out: Step one to draining the swamp is giving it a flowery scent.

RTWT

Andrew Sullivan goes back and forth between being a totally dishonest noisy shill for the Community of Fashion Left (Homintern Division) and being a fair-minded and accurate editorialist and acute observer.

[I]nterest rates are headed back up — just as the massive debt incurred by the federal government is compounding. In this climate, the idea that you can pass a big Covid stimulus, a huge infrastructure bill and a massive new spending bill with a 50-50 balance in the Senate seems, to put it mildly, overly-ambitious. And all along, Biden has shown himself unable to sell what he was proposing even to his own party, let alone the country. He even stepped on his sole bipartisan triumph. At the very moment he could have declared he’d done what Trump couldn’t on infrastructure — Trump’s core issue — Biden bungled it. I’ve never witnessed a president announce a breakthrough in a major bill and then, in the presser for it, swear he wouldn’t sign it any time soon.

The source of this drift, in my view, is that the administration made a huge miscalculation at the very beginning. They somehow interpreted a modest victory in the Electoral College, shocking losses in the House, and a fluke tie in the Senate as a remit for a big government revolution. And in their media cocoon, no one was going to tell them otherwise. Over-promising and under-delivering is bad politics. That may be one reason support for Biden among the young has plummeted 13 percent since the spring to below 50, and his support among Independents has cratered as well. He has the lowest ratings of any new president since polling began — apart from Trump.

We need also to be frank about Biden. He’s too old to be president, and most people sense this. He was elected because he was someone clearly not as toxic to the electorate as most of the other more radical Dems. But in office, this has been shown to be a chimera. There is nothing to distinguish him in policy from the far left.

His administration has embraced race and sex discrimination in every part of the federal government; he has endorsed the subordination of biological sex to gender identity in the law; his goal in immigration policy is to enable mass migration, not stop it. His administration routinely deploys the hideous acronyms of woke language — “equity,” “Latinx,” “BIPOC,” “LGBTQIA+” — and any return to plain English and common sense violates their commitment to “social justice.” Just watch Biden repeat the nonsense word “LatinX” in public. It’s pitiable.

Just yesterday it was reported that his administration will offer bonuses to Medicare doctors who “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” An “anti-racism plan” means doctors must now view “systemic racism” as a health issue, and deny any biological differences in health between human genetic sub-populations. This is ideology, not science. Biden views people as groups first, individuals second. That’s why he decided on the racial and gender identity of his vice-president and his top Supreme Court nominee before he even considered the individual pick.

The Democrats are a party fronted by an exhausted generation in their 70s and 80s — intimidated by an elite class of indoctrinated twenty-somethings. The idea that Biden can run again in 2024, when he would be 82, and be able to run the country even when he turns 86, is a non-starter. This is Andropov territory. The idea that Kamala Harris could succeed him and win is more preposterous yet. And this is a major problem.

A first-term administration with no credible candidate for a second term is the lamest of ducks. It quacks and flaps and flails and never gets off the ground. If the Dems lose the 2022 midterms in a landslide, as seems more than a little likely, the duck will have expired completely. In my view, the Democrats need to start looking frantically for a standard bearer who stands a chance in 2024. Biden doesn’t. Harris has lower approval ratings as veep than anyone in 30 years.

The Biden administration is weakest, it seems to me, on the issue of competence. This was one central reason people voted for him — to move past the improvised chaos of the previous four years. But in several key areas, incompetence seems more accurate a description. Inflation has emerged as a big issue, and Biden just keeps saying it isn’t happening, is the fault of greedy oil companies, or will soon go away. The chaos of the Afghanistan withdrawal — however defensible — self-evidently caught the administration off-guard. The Southern border — where almost two million migrants tried to enter this past year — is a shit-show. The pandemic remains a wild card.

Well, there’s no denying it. The democrats have screwed the pooch and even Andrew admits as much.