Hall of Shame Induction

 

The Weekly Bystander has been content to let former President Joe Biden and his wife Jill slide into oblivion since the last election, but the recent publication of her memoir has brought them into the limelight again. I have not read her book and don't intend to, but reviews make it clear that it has tarnished their reputation even more.

It is now time for Jill Biden to join her husband in The Weekly Bystander Hall of Shame. Five years ago, after a disastrous first year in office, President Biden was inducted. Here is a link to a post that gave the reasons even before we knew what the rest of his term would bring.

Now, after the startling admissions in her memoir, it is Jill's turn. It's not just that she claims that during the infamous debate of June 2024, she thought Joe was having a stroke, but that she also claims that before or since, she has never seen any sign of mental decline in her elderly husband. 

Even more deceitful was her performance after the debate when on national television she effusively praised her husband's performance despite what she had seen with her own two eyes. She now says that she was using a technique employed by educators to encourage schoolchildren who had failed at some task.   Maybe so, but treating the President of the United States as if he was a schoolboy was disgraceful as well as deceitful. What kind of a woman is she? What kind of a wife is she to think he could have served four more years in such a demanding office? Check out this link to a brief video of her post debate reporting.

Below is an excerpt from my account of the June 2024 debate that treated Joe Biden with more compassion than Jill did.  

"My wife and I watched the Presidential debate last Thursday night, and it was obvious that President Biden lost. I rate his performance as a “D” because he at least completed the grueling ordeal. My impression was confirmed by watching the spinmeisters discuss the debate afterwards. Even the most die-hard Democrats admitted as much. It didn’t take words. Their faces told the story.

It was not that you could point to a blunder or two. President Biden looked and sounded weak and infirm. One Democratic commentator noted that there is only three years difference in their ages, but Trump looked and acted thirty years younger.

 

Joe Louis, one of boxings greatest champions, once said of an opponent that “he can run, but he can’t hide.” Well, President Biden may be running but he couldn’t hide during the debate. We finally saw the real Joe, or what was left of him at age 81. Finally, he stood alone without even Jill at his side, and we saw him without teleprompter or prepared remarks although he had spent a week preparing. It was sad, even sadder when you consider that he is the President of the United States.  

 

President Biden’s deportment during the debate would make you think that we have not really had a President for the past three and a half years. I would go even further and say that he appears like a figurehead or puppet, and that during his term I suspect that the country has been run by a secret cabinet of non-elected Democratic bureaucrats and advisors working behind the scenes. 

 

For three years Jill and the others in his inner circle must have observed that he was suffering from old age, and that he was no longer fit for the job. Along with a cooperative media, they have perpetrated a colossal fraud on us. They have hidden the real Joe from us but in the debate we could see and hear the truth with our own eyes and ears."

 

By coincidence, when I wrote the June 2024 debate post I found a letter by an eighteenth century critic of the British government on the eve of the American Revolution. In one passage the letter discussed the Duke of Bedford, an aging aristocrat and minister whose policies contributed to the American war and the eventual loss of the American colonies.

“ Let us consider you then, as arrived at the summit of worldly greatness; let us suppose that all your plans of avarice and ambition are accomplished, and your most sanguine wishes gratified… can age itself forget that you are now in the last act of life? Can gray hairs make folly venerable? And is there no period to be reserved for meditation and retirement? For shame, … let it not be recorded of you, that the latest moments of your life were dedicated to the same unworthy pursuits, the same busy agitations, in which your youth and manhood were exhausted. Consider that, although you cannot disgrace your former life, you are violating the character of age, and exposing the impotent imbecility, after you have lost the vigor, of the passions.”

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Hall of Shame 2021

  

        

We are in the award season. There are the Oscars, the Emmys, the Golden Globes and others where entertainment people appear dressed to the nines to pat each other on the back. Major League Baseball has just conducted its annual voting for its Hall of Fame. Time Magazine has recently named Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, as its 2021 Person of the Year.  

Since 2014, The Weekly Bystander has been nominating  qualified candidates for the  “Bystander Hall of Shame.” As usual there can be many nominees for 2021. New York seems to be a spawning ground for nominees starting with disgraced  former governor Andrew Cuomo, and his brother Chris Cuomo who lost his coveted post at CNN for ethics violations, both personal and journalistic.  Of course, former NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio has finally departed with the reputation as the worst mayor ever to serve in the Big Apple. 

But why bother with nominations when the clear winner for 2021 is President Joe Biden whose first year in office has been truly shameful. Actually, Biden has practically nominated himself. You may recall that during the 2020 Presidential debates he blamed President Trump for the Covid deaths of over 200,000 people, and insisted that “anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America.” 

 

A few weeks ago an editorial in the Wall Street Journal pointed out that there have been over 400,000 Covid related deaths during the first year of the Biden administration. Nevertheless, the President refuses to remove himself from office.

I am not blaming President Biden for the Covid deaths during his administration but his induction into the Hall of  Shame is due to his blaming others, and then not taking any responsibility himself. 

Just as shameful is his consistent refusal to give former President Donald Trump any credit for the development of the vaccines that he now believes should be mandated for every American.   It is as if Operation Warp Speed never existed. 

 

A few days ago he put the icing on the cake by claiming that dealing with the pandemic was not a matter for the Federal government but should be left to the states.

 

Blaming President Trump for Covid deaths will go down as one of the most shameful deeds  not only in Joe Biden’s long career, but also in the history of the USA. He could have gone a long way to heal the Nation’s divisions by awarding former President Trump and Vice-President  Mike Pence the Presidential Medal of Honor for their efforts in promoting the speedy development of the vaccines.

 

At a rare press conference yesterday, President Biden claimed that he had accomplished more in his first year in office than any other President in history. This rank hyperbole can only be viewed as a shameful attempt to cover a variety of misdeeds that would have led Democrats to impeach President Trump over and over again.

 

Who can forget the chaotic manner in which our troops withdrew from Afghanistan? Who can overlook the chaos on our southern border that Vice-President Kamala Harris was supposed to take care of? Policy mistakes and failures are not necessarily shameful, but failing to acknowledge that inflation exists or that the government has anything to do with it is shameful. President Biden wants to tax the rich, but inflation is a cruel tax on everyone, rich and poor.

 

Finally, President Biden came into office last year after winning a narrow victory in a hotly contested election. His party had a slim margin in the House of Representatives, and a 50/50 Senate.  He claimed that he wanted to heal and unify the Nation but then went on not to court the opposition but to vilify his opponents. Senator Mitch Mc Connell said after President’s Biden’s recent speech in Georgia that he did not recognize the man he had longed worked with in the Senate. It is hard to say whether the President’s failure to seek compromise is his fault or the fault of his handlers, but it is a shameful departure from the long course of  American politics.

 

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Hall of Shame 2020

I have been holding off on nominations for this year’s Hall of Shame even though there are numerous candidates. But Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has just earned an early nomination. In his speech at the virtual Democratic National convention, he blamed the Trump administration for its handling of the coronavirus. What can we make of this charge coming as it does from the man whose state leads the nation by far in coronavirus deaths?

As of August 19 there have been almost 5.5 million reported cases of coronavirus in the USA and 175119 deaths have resulted. A little over 3% of the reported cases have resulted in death. Another way to look at it is to say that there have been 529 deaths per million in the USA.

In New York State, there have been 457000 reported cases that have resulted in a nation leading 32932 deaths so far, a figure that far exceeds New Jersey which comes in second with 16030 deaths. The number of deaths in New York is more than the combined totals of California, Texas, and Florida, the three most populous states in the country. Even after the recent surge California has only 292 deaths per million, Texas 355, and Florida 455. Although the virus has apparently run its course in New York, Governor Cuomo’s state has an astounding 1693 deaths per million.

I have tried to avoid blaming politicians for what I consider a natural disaster and it will take months if not years to sort out what really worked and what did not work. Nevertheless, when politicians start blaming each other, they become fair game themselves. As I’ve said before, if Donald Trump had been governor of New York and achieved the same results as Governor Cuomo, he would have been impeached months ago. 

Moreover, has Governor Cuomo forgotten how quickly President Trump acted to provide New York city with a hospital ship and the transformation of the Javits center into a hospital during the height of the crisis? Back then even Democratic governors like Gavin Newsome of California praised the President for his quick action. 

It is clear that Democratic politicians mean to make the coronavirus a major issue in this year’s Presidential race. They will continually point to the death toll which now exceeds 175000 but fail to point out that about 50000 deaths have been recorded in New York and New Jersey, both Democratic strongholds. 

They will also point out that the USA leads the world in cases and deaths but fail to point out that the percentage of deaths in the USA is much better than in other countries. The 175000 deaths in the USA is about 3% of the total reported cases. In countries with national health systems like the United Kingdom and Italy, the death rate is over 12%. Of course, we have no way of knowing what the full impact of the coronavirus has been in China where the Communist government has obviously been withholding information. 

There must be a psychological term for what Governor Cuomo and other Democratic politicians are doing to deflect attention from their own guilt and mismanagement and blame others. It is hard to believe that a Governor whose state was on the verge of bankruptcy even before the pandemic, and whose medical system was woefully inadequate has been praised as a hero by his supporters.

Moreover, New York city is now undergoing a virtually unchecked epidemic of burnings, lootings, and shootings that are unprecedented even in its history. Even if the Governor will not take the blame for what has happened there, he does have it in his power to remove Mayor Bill De Blasio, the incompetent ideologue who has brought the once great city to its knees.   

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Hall of Shame Induction

Although the year is not quite over, here are the nominees for induction this year into the Weekly Bystander Hall of Shame.

First: Hillary Rodham Clinton. She earns the nomination not for her second failed attempt to become President of the United States. That can happen to anyone. She earns the nomination this year for her refusal to accept the outcome of the election, even after conceding on election night. 

With a word she could have put an end to all the recount nonsense and just accepted the verdict. She could have dissuaded Democrats from supporting Jill Stein’s recount attempts, or the even more nonsensical attempts to persuade members of the Electoral College to ignore the will of the voters in their states.

In 2000 Al Gore wisely acted for the good of the country when he accepted the decision of the Supreme Court in the Florida recount dispute. Forty years earlier in 1960 Vice-President Richard Nixon also acted in a very statesman-like manner when he refused to contest the election results in Illinois where the Daley Democrat machine in Chicago was believed to have stuffed the ballot boxes to win the State and the election for John f. Kennedy. However, Hillary Clinton has steadfastly refused to step forward and help to unite a deeply divided country.

Second: John Kasich, the current Governor of Ohio. Kasich earns the nomination not for his failed campaign to win the Republican nomination nor for his refusal to support the party’s nominee to the bitter end. He is nominated because on Election Day he wouldn’t even vote for himself. He chose to cast a write-in vote for Senator John McCain. After spending all that time and effort asking people to vote for him, he couldn’t even vote for himself. The people in Ohio voted for Donald Trump despite their Governor. Kasich began the campaign as a man of dignity, experience, and accomplishment but ended looking like a foolish has-been.

Third: Anderson Cooper of CNN, the so-called Cable News Network. Actually, Cooper gets the nomination on behalf of all those political commentators who got it wrong in 2016. They are nominated for the Hall of Shame not because they failed to predict the outcome. Anyone can make bad predictions. They get the nomination because of their refusal to open their eyes and actually report on what was happening in the country.  It is amazing to consider how shocked these pundits were when Trump in one of the debates declined to say that he would accept the result of the election.

Now that the election is over and Trump has won, where is the shock and amazement of these same commentators over the Democrat refusal to accept the outcome of the election?  Such hypocrisy. Who blames Jill Stein, a candidate who got 1% of the vote for demanding recounts? Who blames demonstrators in front of Trump Tower? Who blames those politicians still plotting to overturn the election results by manipulating the electors in the Electoral College? Do these people actually think the country will accept peacefully an overturn of the election result?

Fourth: Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Supreme Court Justice. RBG gets the nomination not so much for threatening to leave the country in the event of a Trump election, but for failing to follow through on that pledge now that the election is over. Actually, this is also a group nomination since RBG represents all those celebrities who have said that they would depart from the USA in protest against Trump.

And the winner is: Hillary Rodham Clinton. It is fitting that she gets to join her husband, William Jefferson Clinton, in the Hall of Shame. They deserve each other. I’m sure this year’s award will not tarnish Hillary Clinton’s reputation or damage her in any way. Like her husband, she will eventually rise from the ashes.  

The Clintons have always reminded me of Monsieur and Madame Thenardier, the sleazy, conniving innkeepers from the hit Broadway show, Les Miserables. The show was based on Victor Hugo’s famous novel of the same name. In both the book and the theatrical adaptation, the Thenardiers play leading roles. No matter how often they get exposed, knocked-down, or humiliated for their nefarious behavior, they always get back up again and rise to new heights.

Here is a link to a 5 minute clip from the concert performance of the play featuring the Thenardiers singing the hit song, "Master of the House." At the four minute mark we can see what Madame Thenardier thought of the scoundrel she married.The video can also be viewed below.

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Political Hypocrisy

The Lady in Red with Mother and Daughters

The White House is not providing any information on the cost of the trip to China by Michelle Obama, her children, her mother, and her usual entourage. It does seem clear that most of the cost, probably totaling in the millions of dollars, will be borne by the American taxpayer. The trip is being cast as not a mere spring vacation but as a kind of diplomatic mission that could potentially bear great fruit politically and economically.

Be that as it may it does seem kind of hypocritical for the Obamas, who pride themselves on their concern for the poor, and who pose as crusaders against income inequality, to publicly flaunt such opulence. We shouldn’t be too surprised though since almost the first thing the Obamas did on assuming the Presidency was to enroll their two daughters in one of the most exclusive private schools in the country. I am aware that they did so out of “security” reasons in the same way as the Clintons did for daughter, Chelsea.

No one can blame them for wanting their children to receive the best education possible but hypocrisy rears its head when President Obama refused to support a voucher program in Washington D.C. for other families who would have liked to send their children to private schools rather than to the notorious Washington public schools. He thinks nothing about insisting that poor children be subsidized so that they can have the same health care as his children, but then will not allow them to have anything like the education his children are getting.

I hope in the future we will not hear the Obamas and their lackeys bemoan the poor conditions in the D.C. schools or the shortage of essential materials like textbooks.

With the money the President and his family have spent on overseas junkets in the past five years every student in the D.C. schools could have been provided with brand new textbooks as well as lap top computers.

The Clinton reference above calls to mind a story in the NY Times a little while ago about the financial difficulties of the Clinton foundation, the large non-profit organization set up by former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton. Apparently, the Clinton foundation has largely exceeded its budget and finds itself millions of dollars in the hole. Even though many of the Clinton family’s old political cronies are on the payroll, the Times reporter insisted that most of the staff works for sub-par wages. I guess people must count it as a privilege to be associated with the noble causes espoused by the Clintons.

Anyway, the Clinton foundation appears to be planning some major changes. Significantly, it would appear that it is planning to concentrate its future efforts on the most important cause of all: the election of Mrs. Clinton as President in 2016. Poor Bill will have to double his efforts on the speaking trail in order to bring in the additional funds necessary to fund the cause. Despite the subpar wages paid to Clinton foundation employees, I’m sure Mrs. Clinton will also bemoan American income inequality when she runs for the Presidency.

This obvious politicization of a so-called charitable organization would appear to be the latest and greatest of all the acts of self-service performed by this hypocritical couple form Arkansas in the name of humanity. Mrs. Clinton’s is now approaching her husband in craven effrontery. Her remark about the four murders in Benghazi—“what difference does it make”—will go down in history alongside her husband’s—“ I didn’t have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

After the end of his Presidency, the Clinton’s decided not to move back to Little Rock but instead settled in Chappaqua, one of the wealthiest towns in New York’s exclusive Westchester County. I suppose Mrs. Clinton’s famous book should have been titled, “It Takes a Village, as long as it’s Chappaqua.” Coincidentally, census figures indicate that about 1% of Chappaqua’s population is black or Hispanic.

It would seem that a primary qualification for a Democrat politician seeking high office must be hypocrisy. The word hypocrite means actor and it refers to someone who says one thing but does another, or who pretends to be some thing that they really are not. Al Gore attempted to succeed Bill Clinton in 2000 but failed after the most contentious election count in history. Florida got all the attention in that election but few noticed that Gore failed to carry his own home state of Tennessee. Perhaps the people of that state were better acquainted with him than the rest of us.

After his defeat in 2000 Gore became the high priest and greatest promoter of the Global Warming crusade. He claimed that the science was settled and that there was no point in even debating the issue any more. There is no need to go into how lucrative this stance has proven for this man who was already one of the richest in America to prove his hypocrisy. One only has to do a Google search for Al Gore’s Pool to discover that the large heated pool on his huge estate uses more energy in a month than the average homeowner will use in a year.

The above hypocrites can now be inducted into the Weekly Bystander’s Hall of Shame, whose motto is,

“Do what I say, but not what I do.”

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Hall of Shame

                                             

This time of year usually features all kinds of award shows. There are the Oscars, the Emmys, the Globes and others where entertainment people appear dressed to the nines to pay each other on the back. Major League Baseball has just conducted its annual voting for its own Hall of Fame. In this spirit I would like to inaugurate a new feature on the Weekly Bystander called the “Bystander Hall of Shame.” We will begin the nomination process this month and continue throughout the year. The new year has already produced some good candidates.

New Jersey Governor, Chris Christie, tops the list so far this month with the now famous “bridgegate” scandal. Although he has apologized profusely for the political decision that caused massive traffic jams at the entrance to the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey, he insists that he knew nothing about the decision of his underlings to punish the Fort Lee Mayor for his failure to endorse Christie.

A couple of aides have been dismissed and Governor Christie can only hope that his run for the Presidency has not been damaged too badly. Despite his apology the Governor still deserves nomination to the Hall of Shame. The deliberate traffic jams did last four days and occurred four months ago. It took him that long to realize that something was wrong. Also, he was the one who appointed the nefarious aides who have now been thrown under the bus. He must have hired them for a purpose. It is hard to imagine that the Governor’s aides would have had the authority to direct the New Jersey transportation authorites to set up phony construction sites in Fort Lee without knowing that the Governor would have no objection.

Perennial candidate Hillary Clinton earns the second nomination this year for the revelation in a new book by Robert Gates, the former head of the Defense Department, that she opposed the 2008 military surge in Iraq only to head off the candidacy of Barack Obama before the Iowa primaries. This is not as bad as her Benghazi blunders of 2012 and 2013 but we will see what develops.

The third nomination goes to the group of more than 100 New York City policemen and firemen who managed to scam the City with false disability pension claims. A disability pension will not only often result in higher benefits but it also has the advantage of being free from Federal income taxes. New York pensions are already free of state and local income tax. These nominees apparently employed two octogenarian former state officials to show then how to make their fraudulent claims for largely psychological ailments. Some even had the gall to claim 911 trauma when they had been nowhere near the scene.

Senator Richard Blumenthal and Wife

Finally, another nomination goes to the Connecticut Post, the newspaper of Connecticut’s Fairfield county. The editorial page of the paper continually runs cartoons depicting Republicans as wealthy fat cats. However, last Sunday’s front page led with a story about the multi-millionaire status of Connecticut’s all Democrat Congressional deligation. Senator Richard Blumenthal led the list with a net worth of around 120 Million although he did explain that most belonged to his wife. He was followed by Rosa Delauro ($26 Million), Jim Himes (9 Million), and Elizabeth Esty (5.6 Million). I don’t complain about the wealth of these public servants. It is important to hold office to protect and enhance your wealth. They might earn a subsequent nomination for the fact that they will receive pensions and medical subsidies but for January the nomination to the Hall of Shame goes to the Connecticut Post for constantly portraying the Republicans as the party of the rich.

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