About Last Week...

Confirmation Bias

So Tulsi Gabbard – the Russian Agent – and RFK Jr. – the anti-vax lunatic – were confirmed for their respective cabinet positions last week.

Neither above description is true, of course, but they were what the Democrats hung their hats on in trying to find a vote or three to stop Gabbard from being put in charge of national intelligence (I know, an oxymoron, but oh well) and Kennedy from being put in charge of the nation’s health octopus.

By the way, the nation spends one-seventh of its entire gross domestic product on health care so Kennedy’s gig is actually even more important than people think.

Both Gabbard and Kennedy held all but one of the Republican votes and neither got a single Democrat nod - turns out Bernie Sanders’ previous statement of support and Sheldon Whitehouse being RFK Jr.’s roommate in law school did not help at all.

Of course, Sanders tried to tag/tar/embarrass/confuse Kennedy and befuddle the rest of the world with his onesie rant, but that, in the end, came off more poorly than Malory Archer’s mention of the particular garment.

Starts at the 38 second mark and is not suitable for work or being a proper human even:

The lone Republican vote against both nominations was Mitch McConnell – he and/or it doesn’t matter and his votes were only the political equivalent of a kidnapping victim holding up today’s newspaper in a ransom demand photo to prove they are still alive.

Which, technically, McConnell is.

Deeper inside the DC blob than an Annie Sprinkle show, McConnell (along with scourges like Dick Cheney) is one of the people that needs to be held responsible for the state of government today.

Democratic pet projects aside, the billions that the Musk Oxens have found to be definitively wasted each year can all be laid at McConnell’s feet as he was one of the was one of the polestars of the DC uniparty.

Even CNN is trying to say nice things about him now, though they stop short of using words like courageous and brave because even they know that’s ludicrous.

From a post-vote piece:

McConnell, who also opposed the confirmations of Hegseth and Gabbard, has undergone an evolution in his party, moving from establishment leader to a key swing vote. McConnell has had a strained relationship with Trump and others in the MAGA sphere for years, in part due to his opposition to the Republican party’s growing isolationist streak.

“Key swing vote” was meant to be a compliment, a signal to Crypt, sorry, Mitch, to keep up the good fight but even CNN could not come out and say McConnell’s not an awful human they have railed against (who, oddly, they shouldn’t have because it turns out he really was on their side) for years.

And it’s false anyway – “key swing votes” are neither ‘key’ nor ‘swing’ if they are on the losing side each and every time.

Moving forward, I think one of the reasons RFK Jr. got through relatively unscathed is that everyone knew that people like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (pending confirmation) were already on board to run the sub-agencies like the National Institutes of Health.

Kennedy more than flirted with extreme vaccination theories but unquestionably understands the difference between the success of the polio vaccine and the egregiously harmful covid non-vaccine.

Kennedy will set broad policy and tone and somehow try to figure out how to convince all of us to lose 30 pounds each without sounding like the ultimate nanny/nag, but the real grunt work will be done by people like Jay.

As for Gabbard, revenge is a dish best served on a surfboard. In other words, I would not like to be the person who put her on the “no fly list” right about now.

Speaking of people I would not like to be right about now is the guy who booked Vice President J.D. Vance to speak at last week’s euro-secure conference.

That’s because Vance did not deliver a speech, but a (hopefully not entirely prescient) eulogy for democracy in Europe.

You can read the text of the speech here, but in a nutshell he told the Euros to stop being, well, fascists.

It reminded one of an actually honest funeral oratory for an evil but rich great aunt and – like repeating how she said she hated Jews but liked now they made her money so Hitler should have killed the rabbit-breeding Catholic instead and meant it.

In other words, the speech was more than tough – it was honest.

The Euros were aghast, somehow managing to forget the trillions of dollars and the millions of gallons of blood America spilled to defend the very concept of democracy they are now tossing away.

How dare he?!?

Imagine much of Europe being run by Washington Democrats utterly beholden to the nomenklatura of the state – that’s what is the reality right now.

Note – with (now the shirts are green and not brown anymore ) Germany voting soon, I would highly recommend following Eugyppius for at least the next few weeks. The stories out of the center of European power will astound you. Same with The Daily Sceptic – though there is no election looming in Britain, watching what is happening in the Otherverse never hurts.

This week’s epigram is actually an epigram!

When in a group situation in which a person embarrasses themselves (been on both sides of that equation) you can always say this:

“I wasn’t laughing at you, I was laughing with them.”

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