☕️ DOOM LOOPS ☙ Monday, July 8, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Biden's political strategy boomerangs and hits Dems in the head; cheesy French election surprise for lockdowners; Boeing pleads guilty again and somebody gets fined; great Texas legal news; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! We are off to a rollicking start with today’s essential news roundup: Joe Biden throws political boomerang and it throws democrats into a doom loop of political tailspin, or words to that effect; French elections eke out leftwing victory but Macron’s pro-lockdown party crashes and burns in a riot; Boeing pleads guilty to criminal conspiracy and so the DOJ fines taxpayers; great legal news from Texas, where state supreme court justices agree kids are not Mr. Potato Head dolls.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Over the weekend, a prodigious amount of discussion emerged on the unlikely subject of the President of the United States’ brain. Specifically, whether or not the presidential brain works any more. So far, domestic and foreign media have been delicately asking that question (and sometimes dropping snide hints). From that target-rich environment, I selected one of the very latest, a New York Times story posted at 5am this morning headlined, “Biden’s Strategy to Make the Race About Trump Is Suddenly in Doubt.” Suddenly! And unexpectedly! The sub-headline explained, “The Biden campaign’s effort to raise questions about Donald J. Trump’s ability to be president has boomeranged into a referendum on the president’s own competence.”

Haha, boomerang, good one. The Times writer wasn’t done, though, and described the problem that is really bugging democrats and creating a civil war inside the party. “There is no doubt in Democratic circles,” the Times explained, “that Mr. Biden must make the election about Mr. Trump, as he did in 2020.” But now, Biden’s remaining grey matter has suddenly become the main story. But Biden was never designed to withstand the limelight. Thus, explained the Times, democrats are stuck in a political tailspin and a doom-loop, which is not at all like a fruit loop:

“We’ve got to stop talking about this!”, exasperated Representative Debbie Dingell (D-MI) cried on a CNN Sunday panel, according to the story. “We need to get back to talking about Donald Trump.” The Times, ever optimistic, described Biden’s 7-minute, unscripted, no teleprompter speech in a black Philadelphia church this weekend. The story reported Biden was 100% “gaffe free!” But the Internet disagreed.

CLIP: Biden thanks Philadelphia for its support while running for the Senate (0:37).

The problem of course, was that Biden ran for the Senate in Delaware, not Pennsylvania. I suppose there might be ways black churches in Philadephia helped elect Biden in Delaware —cough, mail-in ballots, cough— but somehow I don’t think that’s what Joe was getting at. Not joking, seriously, he means it, Philadelphia in particular got Joe across the Senatorial finish line. Okay, Joe.

In its op-ed headlined, “The Almighty Calls for Biden,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board also had a fun time, since there was no shortage of fine Biden rhetorical clay that can be molded by a skilled writer into a club. The Editorial Board selected an answer from Biden’s big post-debate interview. After George Stephanopoulos asked Biden what went wrong?, Joe said:

The entire world holds its breath, on pins and needles, waiting to watch the astounding sequel. What will happen in the next episode of the U.S. presidency? Because, astonishingly, Biden’s Brain is literally the biggest story in the whole wide world right now, hogging the top headlines in every major paper. My goal is to pick a few stories each day best illustrating where we are on now, the Democrats’ timeline of turning the election back towards Trump.

🔥🔥 At first, French President Macron’s hasty decision to hold snap elections seems to have paid off. The New York Times reported the story last night under the headline, “French Election Yields Deadlock as Left Surges and Far Right Comes Up Short.” The sub-headline added, “The outcome left no party with an absolute majority and France bracing for potential political paralysis.”

In a close, difficult election, France’s leftwing parties united under a brand-new coalition called  “the Cheese Monkeys.” The new Cheese Monkey party bravely held off Marine Le Pen’s “far right” pro-citizen party. Le Pen’s group came in second, falling away after a last-minute Le Pen gaffe enraged French people. (She called the Eiffel Tower “a rusty relic” or something.)

So French leftists were understandably overjoyed about their unexpected victory, and celebrated their happiness in high French Revolutionary spirit by attacking the police and going on a rampage.

As in Britain’s recent snap elections, the biggest loser in France was the previously dominant Republican* party (*a cheap Chinese knockoff) of Emmanuel Macron, which came in third, in spite of the fact that Macron closely resembles a nocturnal rodent. As in Britain, French voters punished the ruling party that held power during the pandemic, which ran under the slogan, “if they don’t want to take the shot, let them eat fondue,” or words to that effect.

Although the left won the most seats, none of the parties won a majority. Under the French system, which was invented by drunk frat boys in a moment of “enhanced cognition” during a Thai vacation, the lack of any majority leaves the hapless country “ungovernable” and potentially facing a “constitutional crisis.”

Despite the abundant hot takes deliriously celebrating the left’s shock victory, President Macron, towering over his fellows at an impressive five-foot-six, did accomplish stopping the right from taking power. But in hindsight, his politically self-destructive decision looked like something President Turnip might have come up with on a good debate night:

Putin! That rascal. You find the man everywhere you look these days. You’re minding your own business, innocently reading an article about French Elections and before you know what happened, boom, just like Russian clockwork, the Kremlin appears faster than the Spanish Inquisition at a witch trial.

What the Times was getting at was that, because the French elections might help Russia somehow, somebody should send Ukraine more high-tech weapons. Or something like that.

✈️✈️ The Wall Street Journal ran a story about flying the friendly skies yesterday headlined, “Boeing Agrees to Plead Guilty in 737 MAX Criminal Case.” The plane builder was already laboring under probation for its previous 2021 plea deal for criminal fraud, after regulators discovered that Boeing engineers substituted out critical but expensive engine parts for much less costly used needles and chewing gum.

Boeing had another chance, but it just couldn’t help itself. As part of its second criminal plea bargain in three years, Boeing has now agreed to pay another whopping $244 million dollar fine, and to increase its spending on “safety programs” by a gigantic $455 million dollars over the next three years. “Diversity,” Boeing has explained, “is critical to our safety programs.” So.

346 people died in two crashes.

But don’t worry. After the airline —still on probation— pleaded guilty to “conspiracy” for the second time in a row (now don’t start theorizing), the government has put its foot down, by transferring nearly a billion dollars from airline passengers to itself, which will teach Boeing’s crooked engineers a lesson they won’t soon forget.

The lesson is, lie, cheat, and steal, and the government won’t just sit around idle. It will shake down passengers for millions.

Not just passengers. Taxpayers. To put the fines in closer perspective, the Journal reported that last year, Boeing got defense contracts valued at $22.8 billion. So three years of criminal fines amounted to one-thirtieth of just one year’s defense contract revenue. (The Journal hinted that Boeing’s DOD contracts could be in jeopardy after its second consecutive criminal conviction. But if you believe that, I have an experimental mRNA injection to sell you.) I would also not object if you concluded that this year’s DOD contracts with Boeing will end up costing the government around $244 million more than usual.

The surviving family members’s lawyers were not amused. They’d asked the court for much more, but Biden’s DOJ attorneys, who brokered the plea deal, explained that Boeing was just a doddering old man with a declining memory who would probably seem sympathetic to a jury. Oh wait, that was a different deal. Anyway:

No evidence! Now, don’t start complaining in the comments about Boeing executives getting off scott-free. Why punish executives, when you can much more easily collect a cool billion dollars from taxpayers and travelers?

🔥 Finally, some more great legal news quietly appeared last week in the Associated Press, under the headline, “Texas Supreme Court upholds ban on youth gender transitions. It's the largest state with such a law.”

In the nearly unanimous 8-1 ruling, Texas’s conservative high court let stand a law in effect since September 1st, 2023, when Texas became the largest of at least 25 states that have now adopted laws restricting or banning so called “gender-affirming care” for children, which involves surgically treating kids’ bodies like plastic Mr. Potato Head dolls. Switch and swap!

The 2023 Texas law bars children under 18 from being injected with sterilizing hormones and puberty blockers, or going under the knife for permanent body modifications their deluded parents for some reason want. Kids can’t smoke cigarettes, but in some states they are allowed to lop off parts of their bodies that most adults eventually find they enjoy having around, and usually put to enthusiastic use.

But they can’t lop them off in Texas anymore.

Still, the war continues. About two weeks ago, the AP published a related story headlined, “Supreme Court will take up state bans on gender-affirming care for minors. We pray the U.S. Supreme Court echoes the Texas Supreme Court’s sanity, and does the right thing, which is protecting children from a mass delusion. To be honest though, the Nation’s highest court has been pretty wobbly on medical freedom issues. So we wait.

But for now, last week’s decision in Texas was great news. It is another decisive battle the good guys have won in the conservative counter-revolution. Keep the doom loops and boomerangs coming!

Have a magnificent Monday! C&C shall return tomorrow morning, with another terrific installment of essential news and commentary.

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