I’m probably going to date myself with the reference in the title, but then again the Louis Prima song it references is way before my time anyway.
But as this is a Five Quick Things, two things are necessarily true — one, we’re almost at the weekend, and two, your author is loopy and nearly out of gas.
So Louis Prima singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” is quite appropriate. Except Joe Biden is clearly bananas, so we actually do have bananas.
What we don’t have is…
Did you happen to catch that embarrassing mess of a “press conference” Biden subjected the White House press corps to on Thursday? If you didn’t, and based on the viewership for the State of the Union last week, most of you have pretty much given up listening to him, here’s what you missed:
Biden says the three objects that he ordered shot down last week after they let the Chinese spy balloon fly across the country were most likely weather balloons. pic.twitter.com/RvePtENh21
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 16, 2023
SIMPLY DISAPPOINTING: "Give Me A Break!" President @JoeBiden blasts journalists, laughs at reporters for asking him questions on Chinese spy balloon and other flying objects, then walks away. WATCH. pic.twitter.com/kX0WRK6PHX
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) February 16, 2023
The entire purpose of this press avail was to answer questions about the balloons and “objects” our pilots have been shooting down over the northern reaches of the country/continent ever since his administration let a Chinese spy balloon traverse from Alaska to the Carolinas and out over the Atlantic before finally shooting it down.
Then we began waging full-scale war, it appears against such global malefactors as the Northern Illinois Bottle-Cap Balloon Brigade, whose heretofore unidentified flying object met a gruesome end in the tundra of the Yukon Territory.
So we’re now shooting $400,000 Sidewinder missiles at $12 hobbyist balloons, while practically everyone in Congress — and not just the Republicans — is openly asking what in the hell is going on. Queen Karine Jean-Pierre and John “The Kalorama Kid” Kirby have been trying to put out the media fire on this for a whole week and failing miserably, so now it’s The Big Guy’s turn, and…
This was all he could do. Mumble out a pre-written statement saying nothing, and then scoff and turn his back at questions from a disgustingly docile White House press corps that is finally interested in standing up for itself and getting a few answers.
Here’s how bad this administration is on the balloons/objects they’re now shooting down:
💥 Sen. John Kennedy on the Senate’s briefing
“This has been going on for a long time… & we don’t know what most of them are”
“The President & the DNI… need to explain… what these things are, who put them up there & do they pose a threat”
h/t @HighPeaks77#ufotwitter #ufo pic.twitter.com/cGXLy4CPMC
— UAP James (@UAPJames) February 14, 2023
Sure, Kennedy tends to the theatrical when he assesses things like this, but the problem is he isn’t alone.
We have an administration that floats on the wind just like those “objects” it’s busily shooting down to show us how tough it is. And the man fronting that administration is an empty suit of the most egregious kind.
Yes, we have no president. All we have is bananas today.
How Pete Buttigieg appears to be surviving the administration’s utterly failed response to the Norfolk Southern train derailment is, let’s face it, downright inexplicable.
Or it would be in a sane America. But this is not a sane America. Buttigieg survives for the same reason he was hired — identity politics and pandering to Democrat constituencies, and obnoxious gay leftists are at the very top of the post-republic totem pole.
Even so, it’s damned hard to reconcile this with any sort of American standard any of us grew up with:
The Mayor of East Palestine DID decide to take questions at the “open house” last night. Resident: Where’s Pete Buttigieg? Where’s he at?
Mayor: I don’t know. Your guess is as good as me. Yesterday was the first time I heard anything from the White House. @LucasFoxNews pic.twitter.com/TXuKFPg9Cx— Dagen McDowell (@dagenmcdowell) February 16, 2023
Where’s Pete? Why he’s on TV letting you know that train derailments are as common as COVID cases during Bear Week at Provincetown:
Buttigieg: "While this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing."
pic.twitter.com/q51ytsBb4f— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 16, 2023
And just to prove it, there were train derailments in South Carolina, Houston, and just outside of Detroit on Wednesday and Thursday — though, thankfully, the response to those derailments didn’t involve burning vinyl chloride and thus creating a cloud of phosgene gas.
Pete Buttigieg continuing as secretary of Transportation makes an utter mockery of the agency. Congress should defund the Department of Transportation and begin offloading its functions and appropriations to the states unless he resigns. Most of that should happen anyway, because if someone so grossly incompetent and inadequate to the job can be appointed to his position, then clearly we have a problem around the allocation of power here.
Get rid of him. Yesterday, if not sooner.
Pete Buttigieg and his identity providing cover for his ridiculous incompetence seem like a nice little segue into Don Lemon, right?
Given the cable-access-level ratings of Lemon’s new morning show that he shares with Kaitlan Collins and Poppy Harlow, neither of whom can stand him (and the viewers clearly can’t stand any of the three), you’d be excused for missing this, but Good Lord what a dunce Lemon is.
Let’s set this up: Nikki Haley is doing everything she can to gin up interest in her fledgling 2024 presidential campaign — or, as Clay Travis put it on Wednesday, her vice presidential campaign, because the chances of Haley getting the nomination over either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis are nearly nil and frankly her message just isn’t all that interesting (at least not compared to Vivek Ramaswamy, if we’re going to talk about long-shot candidates). But give Haley credit for trying — in a speech earlier this week, she suggested mandatory cognitive tests for officeholders 75 years old or more, which is a political shot at both Biden and Trump, but has nice facility as applied to the Lindsey Grahams, Mitch McConnells, Nancy Pelosis, and Patty Murrays of the world as well.
But Lemon didn’t like that. And he used it to put on one of the most self-destructively stupid spectacles in the history of cable news by saying Nikki Haley is past her prime at 51 years old.
I dunno. There’s just something about an aggressively (and by aggressively, I mean “criminal charge-worthy”) gay guy dropping the “past her prime” bomb on a 51-year-old woman. Collins and Harlow weren’t impressed by that — they tried to pin Lemon down on what he meant by women being in their prime in their 20s and 30s, and he didn’t have much of an answer for it.
Hey Don, they’re in their prime at that age if you’re trying to wife them up and get a couple of kids out of them. But we know that isn’t what you’re after, so what in the hell are you even talking about?
I’d say this has to be the last straw and he’s got to be cooked after this idiocy. But Don Lemon should have been busted down to local news years ago and he’s still there. So maybe not. His camel sure has a strong back, I’ll give him that.
When I wrote The Revivalist Manifesto last year, I was talking about the coming (we hope) cultural and political revival America needs. Most people think of “revival” in religious terms, though.
And that’s just what’s happening at Asbury University, a small Christian institution in Kentucky, where for more than a week an old-fashioned Christian revival has broken out and seems to be going strong, attracting pilgrims from all over.
A religious service and revival meeting at Asbury University, a private Christian school in Wilmore, Kentucky, has continued without stopping for over a week.
The service started on Feb. 8, and continued as students decided to stay after the scheduled end of the event.
The revival, having now attracted national attention with the help of social media, has drawn visitors from across the country. The service has, by lasting longer than a week, gone longer than even the 1970 revival at the Methodist school, which lasted 185 hours straight.
“No big lights or big media or anything like that. It’s proof the Lord is working. Right now. Amazing to see. We just wanted to be a part of that desperately,” Aniston McClellan, who traveled to Wilmore from Nashville, Tennessee, told WKYT-TV.
The throngs arriving at the school have grown so large that there are lines of worshippers waiting to enter the service as of Thursday afternoon.
It’s an amazing thing to see…
It’s an incredible phenomenon, and it might just pop up around the country soon.
A Christian revival on a college campus is a revolutionary act in 2023. One can’t help but imagine the ramifications if this should catch on and become a true national movement.
And I would point out that Christian revivals are a long cyclical tradition in America — and we are well past overdue for one.
Watch out for this. It could be something.
And here’s your grand finale, which is that in this age of social dysfunction and moral decline, you can’t always assume a dead body is a dead body.
A silicone sex doll “used for self gratification” was found by Pennsylvania authorities after it was initially believed to have been human remains, police said Monday.
The Tunkhannock Township Police said officers were dispatched over a report of possible human remains inside a bag Sunday found by a man and his son. They were retrieving a ball from a creek when they found a black plastic bag with a foot sticking out.
…
“We’ve seen this item referred to as a mannequin online,” the police department said in a Facebook post. “That really isn’t accurate. This was a lifelike silicone item used for self gratification. It’s the size of a small child, weighs about 50 pounds and is anatomically correct.”
“The foot we were able to observe through the bag was extremely detailed all the way down the French pedicure it had,” the post said.
Perhaps this is a new public policy crisis that the Biden administration might sink its teeth into. It’s clear that we need a federal solution to the problem of environmentally sustainable used sex doll disposal. We need a sex doll disposal czar, and it had better be someone suitably sensitive to the unique problems of sex doll users who’ve lost that lovin’ feeling — and specifically those sex doll users of color and who might be gay, lesbian, trans, or nonbinary.
This could be Don Lemon’s next gig, now that I think about it. He seems to be an expert, or at least he’s about to be, on the subject of what to do with things that are past their prime.
Let’s just say it’s a good thing that revival is going on in Kentucky. We need it.
via spectator