#139 - Democracy '24: Factional Idiocracy

This is the President of the United States calling from planet Earth. We read you, Mr. President. Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with, look, if we finally beat Medicare. Thank you, Mr. President. Neutralize the electroscan. Electroscan neutralized, sir. Well, what is it they say about life imitating art?

Hmm. Yeah. Welcome to the Escape in the Cave podcast, episode number 139. I believe the recorded date on this bad boy is July the 1st. Happy July, everybody. 2024. Wasn't planning on doing one of these. I think I told you last week I wasn't going to do one. Well, here I am. I couldn't. I sat on this all weekend. Last time I really released an episode was Thursday. And Thursday night. Did you watch it? 51 million people apparently did. Music.

Really? Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can't get any more ridiculous than it already is.

Oh my god! We have a choice between Don Vittario, if you've seen The Sopranos. Music.

I've been saying for a long time, I've been calling Joe Biden Dementia Joe since at least 2020. And I didn't even realize, despite some of the video evidence that we've seen over the last six months or so, the last year, maybe the last couple of years, however long it's been, him freezing up on stage, having his staff surround him so it doesn't become a spectacle when he walks to the helicopter from the White House. I don't think a lot of people understood how bad off he really was until that

debate. And it was obvious. It was painfully obvious, disturbingly obvious within the first few minutes. One of the first exchanges they had. He was not there. He is not mentally capable of this job anymore. You know, I don't want to be too rough on the guy. I went back yesterday and I found a video comparing Biden in, I think it may have been 2012, when he was debating Paul Ryan. He was doing the VP debate.

And the difference is just stark. Now, I understand it's 12 years, but still, still, the job has not changed. I don't care if he's gotten older. I don't care if it's aging. I don't care if it's natural that this happens, the job, the stakes have not changed. He was a sharper, more coherent, he was almost obnoxiously sharp in that debate against Paul Ryan. Go find it. I'm sure you can find the video online. Smooth, quick biting.

Paul Ryan couldn't keep up with him very well. Paul Ryan. it. And now you compare that to the man that we saw on stage last week. The weak voice. You couldn't understand half of what was coming out of his mouth. That wasn't stuttering we were seeing. I know he has a stutter, and I wouldn't condemn the man for that. If it were just a stutter. The stuttering was his mind. His mind was halting. He couldn't hold a train of thought. He would vapor lock mid-thought.

Now remember what he was talking about. Not be able to complete a thought will complete a sentence. That is not stuttering. We were not seeing a stuttering man on stage last week. This is a pattern. We saw it with the teleprompters more than once. This has been an ongoing issue, an ongoing situation with this man for a long time. And it was finally laid naked for the entire world to see, unedited, on live television last week. There's no getting around this.

There's no way for the media to—well, they're trying. Some of the media are trying. Some of the Democratic machine are still trying. I'll get to that here in a little bit. And there's no way to get around this now. You can't cover that up. Everybody saw it with their own eyes. Now, you can Winston Smith this if you want to. The party told you not to believe your own eyes. Again, like I said, some people are doing this. A lot of people are trying.

They're desperate. There's no getting around this, though. This is a full-on crisis for the Democratic Party. And since he is the only alternative to Trump, some of you may have gotten the impression that I'm a Trump supporter. I'm still not. That is not my guy. I'm not happy to see Donald Trump on the ballot come November. I was hoping that somebody like Nikki Haley would cut through the muck. Of course, that didn't happen. So here we are. Here we are with the shell of Joe Biden.

Basically, a Jeff Dunham puppet, a presidential puppet. Somebody else is running things over there at the White House. Let's say as of two years, who's running things over there? Who? It isn't him. It was hilarious this week. The Democrats, somebody in the campaign or the administration somewhere is like, well, you know, Joe's fine usually between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. And then he gets a little tired. Uh-huh. So we have a president six hours. Who is running things? Who is in

charge? Who's responsible for things the other 18 hours of the damn day? I don't believe it. I don't believe you may have good days. I don't care. I don't care about his good days. I don't care about his good, his peak hours, the parts of the day that he's awake. I don't care. I don't care that he's a good man. I don't care that he has given decades of meritorious service to the country. I don't care about any of that.

I care that he is the only thing standing between the country and another Trump term. He shouldn't have been the only thing anyway. And more than that, we survived the first Trump term okay. But more than that, more than just being able to beat Donald Trump in November, say he does, then what? What is that man, who is that man going to be in three years? If he's alive, even if he survives, what's he going to look like at the end of 2028? Four more years of decline.

This is the starting point, and it is. If you believe that Joe Biden should be president, should be elected president in November, this is the starting point. What is that going to look like In four years time, There's no way That you can responsibly With a straight face Say that this Is the direction The country should be going, And yeah the alternative Trump. How did we get here? I want to ask how did we get here, but we all know how we got here. We watched it happen in real time.

Something happened back in 2020. I'm going to say this again. I'm convinced of it. I'll never be able to prove it. You can agree with me, disagree with me. I don't really care. But the only reason that the woke flake faction, the far left faction of the Democratic Party stood down and stood by in 2020, a guy behind Joe Biden was because some deal was made. That if they just would let him be, let him get past Trump, get into the Oval Office, somebody else could be running things.

Or partially running things, have a hand in things, and then slowly, as Mr. Biden declined, maybe take things. I don't know. I was screaming about this a few months ago, asking who the hell's running the country. I think I said on the show that, you know what, if he's got the presidential meth lab in the basement, maybe it's an Adderall factory down there. Maybe he's got a direct link to Pfizer and he gets his whoever makes Adderall and gets his Adderall from them, his medicine, whatever.

I'd be okay with that. I would rather have that man on Adderall or meth than whatever it was that we saw on Thursday. But there's no way that you can make an argument that that man should be in the Oval Office.

You can't make that argument to me i keep thinking to myself you know the the democratic party the democratic party the democrats democrat is the root of democracy right they're supposed to mean the same thing democracy woo that's when we choose our leaders we shouldn't be in this damn situation as the democrats once biden uh went against his word that he was only going to to be a one-term president and decided to run again, the Democrats should have had a primary.

R.F.K. Jr. wanted to take part. I'm sure a lot of other people would have come out of the woodwork. Can you imagine if we had had a primary process with Biden over the springtime? This probably would have come out a long time ago, and he probably, we wouldn't be in this situation. Democrats wanted nothing to do with an R.F.K. challenge or anybody else. They wanted Mr. Biden anointed. It's been going on for a long time. It's not brand new this year. We know that.

But if they knew that Biden was in this condition and decided to install him, anoint him, tradition or not, knowing that he was cognitively impaired, compromised, there has to be something else going on behind the scenes. There has to be something happening beneath the surface. And somebody else has their finger on everything. Maybe it's a group of people. I don't know. The administration? Is it the shadow state? The shadow government? They running things?

A lot of tinfoil hat stuff. It's the corporate cabal, the corporate global cabal that runs everything. Okay, whatever. Whatever. Thank you. We shouldn't be here. How many times have I said that in the last 10 years? We shouldn't be here. Thought a lot about factionalism this week. Thought about going back and reading some of the stuff from the founders, from George Washington in particular. Warnings on factionalism that he gave in his farewell address.

Don't let the country fall prey to the poisons of factionalism. Party passions. Tribalism. I was watching the debate last week and i'm like this guy cannot be president and i was just sitting there kind of wasn't really cheering trump on i was like this is an embarrassment as far as biden goes and i started watching the debate from a different sort of perspective, i think it kind of suddenly dawned on me where i started to understand i got Not Donald Trump's appeal, maybe for the first time.

Why people liked him, why they would put up with the torrent of lies. And, you know, the media is right about that. He was spouting them off left and right. Joe Biden did, too. You know, the whole thing about everybody wanted Roe versus Wade overturned. No, everybody did not. But, you know, I found myself like just laughing. This is comical. And it struck me that everybody, I think maybe Trump's supporters, know he's full of shit.

They know he's a liar. They see him sort of as a stand-up comic, almost like Triumph of the Insult comic dog, and just love the way that he goes about and pokes and prods and pokes and prods and just gets everybody, just gets under everybody else's skin. I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're full of shit. This guy isn't even home. You may be full of shit. he's not home who's in there. As soon as the debate was over with, I left it on CNN. I don't watch CNN much,

not anymore. But I wanted to see what they thought of this. And they had their little panel, like six or eight analysts. And oh my God, it was like somebody had died. It reminded me of the day after the 2016 election. I'll tell you that story. I'm sitting in a subway out in Colorado Springs. I was hitchhiking. Watched the election returns on my iPhone in my bivy sack in a field across from Cheyenne Mountain. One of the most interesting experiences of my life.

And I was pissed off. I was like, oh God, I cannot believe that he won this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I get up. I go into my subway there at the truck stop to get breakfast and kind of sit and just see, get the vibe, get the feel for everything. And people were just walking in, just you could tell whether or not they voted for Trump just based on their countenance, the energy they were putting off.

Trump voters were like, we got you Hillary voters, not so much They didn't even look They weren't looking anybody in the eyes. And they had CNN on the television at this subway And I remember the tone The looks on the faces of the talking heads The day after Trump's election It was almost like 9-11 It had that sort of devastated, sad, tragic vibe to it. That's what I saw with that panel on CNN following the debate last week.

John King sounded like he was given a eulogy. He was the first one that spoke. When they came back from the coverage, sounded like he was burying his friend. And they started talking about what they had heard from contacts, various party people. He has to go. Oh, my God. And it continued. Van Jones. I thought he was literally, I thought Van Jones was going to break into tears. I have to speak from the heart. Okay.

Some people saw that, saw this sort of coordinated change in the way that the media turned on Biden. The liberal media, the left-leaning media, meaning CNN, maybe MSNBC, I don't know. But they saw it coordinated like it was a planned thing. Maybe it was. Maybe they had a contingency plan in place because the media has had to have known about this.

He's got enough people around him, enough reporters around him that have had to have seen Joe Biden unscripted, unedited over the course of the last couple of years. They have to know. The cheap fake video thing they were talking about, these reporters knew that there was nothing cheap or fake about it. So maybe they knew, not stupid people, maybe they knew and they had a contingency plan in place in case Biden vaporized. locked for two hours.

And when he did, everybody else saw it. It was all over social media, all over all sorts of electronic media. Maybe that was what they had in place. To sort of move the country in another direction. I don't know. But I'd never seen it. I'd never expected it. I expected complete and total bullshit spin from CNN. But they were done with him. Just about every person on that panel, David Axelrod, all of them, In the immediate aftermath of that debate, they were done.

They didn't think there was any way that Biden could beat Trump based on what they saw. And they didn't think that he should stay in the race based on what they saw because they know that the rest of the country finally saw it too. And that in a race as close as this, make all the difference in the world. So that's been the last couple of days. You've seen it. I've seen it. Things have sort of calmed down in the last couple of days.

The Democrats are trying to circle the wagons now on some of the stuff on X, Twitter, these operatives. John Fetterman, he's telling everybody to calm the fuck down. His words. He's using his experience, I think, with the stroke and bad debate performances. He used that. Saying, no, he can rebound from this. Just calm down. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, that isn't the question. This isn't a 52-year-old man having a bad performance.

This is a person whose physical mental health is in question now. Nobody recovers from this. I feel for Fetterman. I think he empathizes with this because he lost some cognitive ability, at least his speech ability, in the wake of that stroke. And it came back. Biden didn't have a stroke. People don't come back from dementia.

People don't improve it's a one way street, and what's going to happen again this isn't just between now and the election this as I said before is the starting point this is the new baseline where is he going to be in four years. He's not going to be running a damn thing in four years he may not be wiping his own ass in four years if he is now Now, I don't say that with total disrespect, a little maybe, but people don't come back from this.

People don't get better as they move from their early to mid-80s. If they've already gotten some sense of some kind of senility, they don't improve. So the baseline has been set. We're seeing it. We saw it live for 90 minutes the other day.

And to try to sell us a bill of goods, a four-year bill of goods, to give us a product with some kind of four-year guarantee on it, you've got to be an idiot, A, to try to sell it, and you've got to be really delusional to buy it, to think that that is going to last four years. It can't even hold steady for four years. It's virtually impossible. It's not going to happen. You know it. I know what everybody knows that he is going to have.

Think of the last two years. Think of how far he's declined in the last two to four years. Add another four to it. It's incredibly irresponsible of the Democrats, incredibly irresponsible of that party to leave him in place, and they know it. So, not dumb people. These aren't stupid people. So what's the plan? Maybe he can win. Maybe he can beat Trump. Okay. Then what?

What you're really voting for when you vote for Joe Biden is someone to defeat Donald Trump, but you're actually voting for Kamala Harris to run this country. Even if he survives for the next four years, do you really expect that he's not going to resign? That he's not going to be removed? Incapacitated somehow, some way, shape, or fashion? What are the odds? I'd love somebody to get a hold of Las Vegas and find the odds, what the odds are, that Joe Biden is still president of the United States

in four years. at the end of 2028. And he survives the next election. The odds are very slim. I'm not going to say it's impossible.

How old's Clint Eastwood, right? He could survive. He could live. Is he going to be capable of doing the job, capable of even pretending to do the job? Can you see the State of the Union in three to four years? How much Adderall is it going to take to prop him up to energize and make him coherent in three years? Can you see him sitting down to negotiate with somebody like Putin or Xi in three years? To handle a negotiation with somebody like Hamas or ISIS.

In three years, after three more years, I can't get past that, man. They're acting like this is going to be, oh, it's just a big deal until the election, and then everything freezes. No. This is a roller coaster. The decline continues. It doesn't stop.

The man has to be replaced He has to And I don't know how you do it, That's the thing I don't know how the Democrats can do this I'm not a constitutional scholar or anything like that I admit that But I don't know because the primaries are done, How are the people who voted for him going to react When you go through the primaries Well, no, never mind We're going to choose our own Can you do this later?

Is this going to be like an every four years? We don't like the guy you picked. We'll pick our own. There should be a primary every four years for both political parties. There should be no automatic incumbency or incumbent nomination. Trump should have had to go through an actual real primary in 2020, and Biden should have had to do that this year. That's the one thing that I hope comes out of this. The one change that I hope

comes moving forward. You know, if everything sort of levels itself out, everything survives. That's the one thing I hope comes out of this, is that we have actual primaries for both political parties, regardless of somebody who's hit their term limit or not. Every single four years, both parties have a primary. Go through the process of vetting who's going to be in charge, whether they were elected before or not. NBC had the headline, I think, Saturday. This was great. It's a mess.

Biden turns to family on his path forward after his disastrous debate. This is NBC, the parent company of MSNBC. Not exactly a conservative outlet. I was just sampling what you were hearing. They were talking about how Biden is going to meet at Camp David. But I think he was going to sequester himself away with advisors, family, and discuss how things were going to go moving forward. That was the gist of it. Not that official, but that's what we were all told.

That supposedly happened yesterday as I record this early morning hours of July 1st. Nothing's come out. Haven't heard anything other than, you know, rah, rah, he's going to go forward. He's going to come back with us. You'll fall down. You get back up. That kind of crap. But we don't know. Now, of course, they're going to say that until he ends up withdrawing, if he does. And that hasn't happened yet, as I record this. But let's say he does.

Let's say, manage to convince him to avoid this crisis. And he just steps down and they have to go through it, whatever. Doesn't he have to resign? If he's dropping out of the race because of the country and everybody thinks that he is mentally compromised, he is the ultimate lame duck. Wouldn't it be better for him to resign? Let Selina Meyer have her moment as the first female president.

Let people see her in the job, I guess, for a few months and just ride off with Jill into that long good night. What use does he have? What benefit is he to the country, to the Democratic Party? party. He's just going to be a reminder of where we are and who he is and who they nominated and the entire process of why we are where we are. Because they didn't have the foresight. He didn't have the foresight to move on.

How can he stay in office? I don't know. He probably Probably will, but it seems to me the smart thing, dude, give Kamala her time. Here, kid, take the wheel. Try not to put us in the ditch. If he stays in office, my opinion, I loathe Kamala Harris more than I loathe just about any politician. She's right up there. I mean, right up there with Sarah Palin. You remember me talking about her once upon a year, once upon a decade, called her the Alaskan road whore. Oh, I hated her.

This woman is right there with her. That voice. Oh, my God. She is a cringe machine. And somehow, this goes back to 2020, to 2019, I'm sorry. Do you remember the primaries, the 2019, the 2020 primaries, Democratic primaries? She didn't get out of 2019. That's how poorly she performed in the primaries. She could not get to 2020. 2020, she was that disliked by the Democrat base, the people voting. Her and Cory Booker were all, it was like a competition, like a competition.

I'm a person, I'm the only woman of color on this woman of color, of color, of color. And then there's Cory Booker, oh man, of color, of color. It was like the of color coalition. I started calling her Kamala of Color because every two minutes, every answer, every other sentence, I'm a woman of color, as if that were some fucking qualification. This was the DEI candidate, along with Cory Booker. This is my qualification. Look at my skin and my breasties.

Oh, that's why I should win, because I'm a woman of color.

She doesn't get out of 2020 I'm thrilled I'm like oh thank god The Democrats they have some sense, And then what is this Hmm I pledge to nominate A woman of color for vice president This is part of the I think this is part of the deal he made, Keep the woke faction The woke nut fringe, Contend happy I think that he He agreed to nominate her as part of an exchange, as part of an exchange for their silence to keep the democratic socialist communistic hordes off of his tail in 2020.

That was where he started to lose me. You remember what I said? Were you listening back in 2020? I'm like, hey, Biden, maybe he can't do it. Maybe he can't bring the country together. gather, but he's the only one that I see who's moderate enough. Silly me to do it. Then he did that. I'm like, you son of a bitch. I can't stand her. She couldn't even get out of the primaries. She was appointed, shoved in as a DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion.

It's a woman of color's turn appointment into the vice presidents. And now. Biden's holding on, hoping to win real. Maybe he didn't expect to survive. Maybe he expects something. I don't know. I don't know what the fuck he expected. But she's there to take the reins. That's her only role. She is less popular than he is. I am not the only one who feels this disdain for this woman, this disgust, this racially entitled loathing for her.

And by racially entitled, I say I'm a woman of color. It's my turn. Fuck you.

If there's one place meritocracy matters it's that job if it doesn't then what does it matter if donald trump gets re-elected if he doesn't if it doesn't matter that you're qualified why do you keep saying that donald trump is a threat to democracy and a threat to the world, When you've got a DEI appointment standing there, frothing at the mouth, ready, eager, just almost you can see it in her face like, I'm going to leap as soon as he's out of my way.

If there's one place that a DEI appointment should never be able to threaten a position is president of the United States, and she has been installed in that position, ready and waiting in the wings for four years, and she's still there.

This man is still running. It's obvious that he is not qualified, that he is not going to complete the second term, and then Selina Meyer gets her moment. Completely unchosen. How do you feel about that? Are you a woman? How do you feel about the first woman president not being elected. Do you think that's an accomplishment? Are you going to celebrate that America finally has a female president when she was installed because of her black vagina?

Her of-color vagina. Her vagina of color. And not because the people actually elected her. Did you really accomplish anything? you think? No. Hope you don't take too much satisfaction in that. If anything, I'd be offended that they think that that's the only way that a woman can or should be elected. Has to be shoved in there like Gerald Ford. Can't stand her. I loathe not only her, but what she represents. And she's still there. Bellowing and belching and bellowing and belching.

Unburdened by what is and blah, blah, blah, blah, what could be. That's her catchphrase. I'll see if I can find the audio sometime. It's precisely the opposite of the Lenny Bruce quote that I love to use on this show. What should be is a fantasy. The truth is what is. What should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie someone gave the people long ago. And that's her catchphrase. Her catchphrase is the terrible, terrible lie someone gave the people long ago. What should be?

What could be? Oh, it's a fairy tale. It's utopia. We're off to see the wizard. Not a fan. Yet here she is. About to be maybe installed. You know, that's less. That's a little bit better. If she gets installed onto the ballot, maybe at the convention, all right, at least it's being put to a vote. Still don't like it, but it's not going to be any better or any worse than whoever else they put on there.

The party machine is going to have to choose it because they failed to go through a primary process this year. Because Joe Biden acted like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, didn't know when to step the fuck down, move aside. So that's better. But if he gets through the election and she's still vice president and then he resigns, has a stroke or the 26th of the 26th Amendment, the president's incapacitated, so they have to step down and she's just installed. Oh, boy.

It seemed obvious to me, seemed clear to me what was going on with that woman for the last four years. If it works. Grab your wallets, grab your crotch, because something's coming. I don't know what I'd like to see. They're talking about Gretchen Whitmer, our governor. I would like to invite you to temper your expectations of Gretchen Whitmer. They seem to think she's the great vagged hope.

She has a Palin voice, kids. She's got this thick Michigan accent that if you're not from here, if you're from this state, maybe you don't realize that we Michiganders have an accent. We do have an accent. If you're not from here, you probably hear it in my voice. I do. We do. She sounds like, a little like, Sarah Palin when she talks. Not a fan of hers either, particularly after COVID, but she would be an improvement over Kamala of color.

So they're talking about her, Gavin Newsom, obviously. This guy is sharp. I can't stand him. I don't want him anywhere near the White House. I don't want him doing to the White House and doing to the country what he did to California. His policies, can't stand him. But this man is a politician. Rhetorically sharp as a tack. You put him on a debate stage with Donald Trump, he'll emasculate Trump.

He's the one guy that if you really want to humiliate Donald Trump in public On national television Nominate him, put him on that debate stage in September, I'd be surprised if Donald Trump would actually debate him, He's the guy that I think could probably In this environment and culture that we live in Television culture, entertainment culture He's the guy that looks presidential, sounds presidential And is sharp enough, to at least stay on the entertainment stage with Donald Trump.

Regardless of who they choose, it all comes down to this. And this is the best argument I've heard for Biden stepping down, that if they think that Donald Trump, if they really think that Donald Trump is this existential threat to democracy, they've been saying he is for, what, 10 years now. If they really believe that, then there is no way that Joe Biden can stay in this race. He must be removed or stepped down if they actually believe that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.

If Biden is electorally compromised, has compromised himself by showing who and what he is, the condition he's in. If he is a threat to democracy, an existential threat to America, Biden has to go. Otherwise, they don't really believe that, do they? Either they don't really believe it or they don't care. They're just concerned about steering the ship.

But which is it? You can't have it both ways. You can't call him an existential threat and leave somebody who's cognitively impaired on the ticket when everybody's seen it. Good luck squaring that circle. I don't think you can. One other thing about Kamala. There's a small, I mean, it's a microscopic part, but it's a small part of me, that kind of wants to see her on the ballot in November and then just get destroyed by Trump.

Because she may be the final epitaph, the final, the obituary for DEI. She is the symbol figure for DEI appointments, for DEI selection, DEI employment. Being given a position because of her sex and her race, because of her diversity, inclusion, equity, determined outcomes. He sure as hell didn't get there by the vote.

That's equity really in a nutshell right she didn't get elected she didn't get selected she was appointed to this position and biden resigns dies whatever she slides in didn't earn the position she wasn't picked in this democracy by the vote the only time she tried to win a vote she couldn't get out of 2019 for the 2020 election she was humiliated, If that's not a DEI hire, we don't know what is.

She may be the DEI effigy that we can finally burn if she gets on the ballot in November and gets destroyed. Small part of me that wouldn't mind seeing that. America, oh say can you see.

It really feels like idiocracy, though. Factional idiocracy It's shameful I mean we can do better than this We have to figure out a way to do better than this At some point right Grandpa Simpson, Or Don Corleone I'd take Don Corleone over Trump At this point Has to be a way. Music. Episode number 139 in the books. Sort of a surprise episode. Surprised myself by it, really. Music. Escaping the Cave podcast. That's what this is. Also the Tanzila X-Pod.

I guess. Might be again one day. I keep saying that. Check out the YouTube channel if you want. I'm on the social media stuff. Tanzila X-Pod over at X. Formerly known as Twitter. Check out, did I tell you to check out the YouTube channel? Oh, if I didn't check out the YouTube channel. No, I think I did. Did I just say that twice? Well, give me two clicks. Give me two clicks, baby. Give me two clicks towards the door, damn it. Music. A Leonard Skinner reference.

Anything else I got? No. I don't have the website. The website's still there. Go read the Joan Didion episode, or essay, escapingthecave.com. No. Do my best to talk to you next week. Until then, happy Fourth of July, kids. We'll talk to you next time. So long.