Programming note: Please join Mark later today for a brand new Tale for Our Time. If you missed last week's airing of The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, that can be found here.
~I can't even remember what pitiful Joe Biden embellishment prompted my riff below with Tucker. But way back in 2019 he was still just about semi-functioning, and it was still just about possible to parody him:
Here is the best I have seen by @MarkSteynOnline about Biden serial exaggerations. Hilarious must watch. pic.twitter.com/n7QKq2l6pf
— MAX_HEADROOM (@MaxHeadroom) April 18, 2024
Ah, but that was five years ago. Now, whatever satirical fancy you concoct, the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet gets propped up at the podium and effortlessly outpaces you. Did you know Joe Biden's uncle was eaten by cannibals?
Joe's fantasy life is so rich and vibrant he recalled it again the same day:
As is traditional in a Biden anecdote, none of the supporting details make any sense: all Joe's uncles apparently shot off to the recruiting station to sign up the day after D-Day. It's like Saving Private Ryan if all four Ryan brothers had waited till the final reel to enlist.
[UPDATE! As Biden pledged in 2020, America's back:
'They wouldn't just eat any white men that fell from the sky': Outraged Papua New Guinea academics lash out at Biden's 'unacceptable' suggestion that cannibals ate his WW2 pilot uncle]
Meanwhile, in the current wars breaking out hither and yon, Joe has warned the Israeli government that under no circumstances are they to attack ...the third biggest city in Israel:
BIDEN: "I made it clear to the Israelis — don't move on Haifa!"
Haifa is a major city *IN* Israel. pic.twitter.com/BdNgoDlGkM
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 18, 2024
Haifa has been over the millennia variously Canaanite, Phoenician, Babylonian, Persian, Roman, Ottoman and British. But, were the Israelis to take it from the Israelis, the entirety of regional stability could crumble. Netanyahu would gobble it up like a New Guinea village headman wandering into his favourite eatery and finding oncle du jour on the blackboard.
For the moment, preventing the Israelis from taking Haifa remains a Biden policy priority. But the consumption of his uncle in the jungles of New Guinea has been walked back. Headline of the Day:
White House admits Biden uncle wasn't eaten by cannibals
By "White House", they do not mean the guy who lives there (well, most Monday-to-Thursdays). Joe Biden hasn't walked anything back. A fellow who can barely walk forward doesn't do walking back. There are supposedly 335 million people in the United States. The only one of that third-of-a-billion we know for certain is not running the executive branch is the one chap who holds the title of head of the executive branch.
Which of the remaining 334,999,999 is actually in charge of the joint is an ongoing mystery. The four-star tranny? The non-binary kleptomaniac with the radioactive waist?
But they're doing this to you to get you used to it - to self-government as a charade, behind which the real, permanent state gets on with doing what it does, regardless of anything so footling as elections. When those Korawai headhunters have finished chowing down on their Boeuf Bidenonne, maybe we could bring them over here to hunt down the actual head of government.
~On last week's Clubland Q&A, I referred en passant to the US federal debt being $30 trillion. Granted that I was speaking in round numbers, I think that risks giving a false impression. In fact, it's $35 trillion, so we're already halfway to the next landmark of $40 trillion.
As recently as the beginning of the century, America's federal debt was a mere $5 trillion. Dubya launched the forever wars and gave up on his domestic agenda, and so doubled it to $10 trillion. Then came Obama: the 111th Congress (2009-2011) ran up more debt than the first one hundred Congresses (1789-1989) combined. By the end of the 111th Congress, I was working on my bestselling After America and doing debt shtick, as you'll know if you saw me live on stage in the second decade of the third millennium:
"America has to pay off $14 trillion just to get back to having nothing in its pocket. Nobody in human history has ever done that before."
"America has to pay off $15 trillion just to get back to having nothing..."
"America has to pay off $17 trillion..."
In the years since I began doing that gag, America has increased the federal debt by over $20 trillion. Which in other countries would be a lot of money. Interest on the debt is now about fifteen per cent of the federal outlays - and (as predicted all those years ago in After America) more than the Pentagon budget.
And that thirty-five trillion is just federal government debt. The actual total indebtedness of the American nation is $100 trillion or so. It took two-and-a-quarter centuries to pile up the first five tril. Currently we add that to the tab every couple of years.
Back when the debt climbed over ten trillion, politicians used occasionally to pretend to take the subject seriously. Now it's closing in on forty trillion, you never hear a word about it in Washington from one month to the next. This is going to end very badly - ruinously and violently and convulsively. There is nothing holding the country up.
~I thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly couple of months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead. And, as I said above, I look forward to bringing the UK state censor Ofcom into court on June 11th.
See you tonight for Tales for Our Time.
