I'm starting to feel like George Jetson stuck on the moving sidewalk. "Jane, get me off this crazy thing!"

All day yesterday, I hoped and prayed that Democrats would pull themselves together for my sake as well as the country's. By mid-afternoon, I was breathing a little easier, thinking that I'd fall short of a robust top ten list without having to pad it. Alas, several late contenders crossed the transum, and some of them are absolute beauties. 

This may seem like Groundhog Day, but it's an entirely different collection of dumb things said by a Democrat, all within the confines of Thursday, January 16th. 

I pinky swear this will be the last one of these types of columns I write for a while. But my staff (my adorable wife), and I have agreed that going forward, I'll begin working up a podcast version of the top 10 list of the dumbest things said for the week. It'll be available at Duane's World beginning next Friday. 

In the meantime, to complete the column trifecta, this is what you might have missed on Thursday. 

[Get ready for the stream of biased reporting on this, as well as on Republicans taking control of Washington, by taking advantage of our new Inauguration Sale for VIP memberships! Use the code POTUS47 to get 74% off of the usual rate, for new memberships and upgrades! This week will prove the necessity of having independent voices to report and analyze the news, from the wildfires in Los Angeles to the meltdowns in Washington DC over the change of administrations. Be sure to check out our new VIP Platinum level for the best value!]

#10

Lloyd Austin - He refused to hand the Afghan war over to another president, but...



Perhaps the families of 13 American servicemembers, along with families of thousands of Americans and Afghani allies left behind and abandoned by this administration probably wish Biden wouldn't have handed the war off. 

By the way, war is still going on in Afghanistan. It was handed off...to the Taliban, the terrorist group we lost so much blood and and treasure fighting. The dumb thing about this is this didn't happen decades ago. This is recent enough that everyone not suffering cognitive decline like Joe Biden remembers fully how disastrous this withdrawal was conducted. At the time of this bug-out, we were suffering zero casualties and gradually handing off all offensive operations to the Afghanis. We just provided training, materials, and back-up support as needed. An entire generation of Afghani women and girls were allowed to go to school for the first time in decades. Our presence there was making a difference. Joe Biden couldn't let that stand, and handed the keys to the country to our enemies, and eventually Bagram Air Force base to the Communist Chinese Party. And Secretary Austin thinks this is a good thing? How can someone that dumb have lasted long enough in uniform to have four stars put on his shoulders? 

#9

Joe Biden - Barack Obama used to get mad at me when I was a kid...



Joe Biden was 18 years old when Barack Obama was born. Joe was 66 years old on Inauguration Day, 2009, which is the earliest possible day President Obama could technically get mad at Biden, a very likely occurrence. So Joe Biden, leaving the White House after the set of circumstances we've experience this past four years, making age jokes is actually pretty dumb. But then you get to what he said that was meant to be serious. 

"He said, 'I know, I know, all politics is personal.'"

Technically, Obama never said that. Obama used to say, "All politics is local," but that line was actually plagiarized from Late House Speaker Tip O'Neill. 

As for Joe's faulty recollection, columnist and pundit Mark Shields used the phrase, "All politics is personal" in describing Donald Trump on PBS' News Hour with Judy Woodruff in 2017 after President Trump had nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. So Biden not only had his attribution wrong, both what he said and what he meant to say were both coined by other people. It's a multiplicity of dumb stuck in a memory fog. 

#8

Bernie Sanders - But what about the oligarchs? 

Give Bernie credit where credit is due. There's never been a billionaire he didn't demonize and try to tax into oblivion. That's the heart of socialism. Keep taking other people's money until it's gone, and then find the next richest person in line and attach the siphon. 

Bernie, of course, was trying to dig at Elon Musk, who he cannot believe is going to have an active role in this administration. He's not at all pleased that Mark Zuckerberg has apparently kissed the ring as well. He still believes to his core that class envy is what will energize progressives and propel the party back into power. But Bernie is so short-sided that he didn't see the obvious counterattack coming a mile away from Treasury Secretary nominee Scott Bessent. 

Bessent rightly accepted the premise of what an oligarch is - a very wealthy business leader with a great deal of political influence, and said under your terms, Biden just hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the necks of two oligarchs. Bessent had the good taste not to mention them by name, but they are Tim Gill of Quark and George Soros, the Sheev Palpatine of American politics. 

Bernie's goose was immediately cooked. That's why he raised his voice and yelled, "I'm not talking about any one individual." Of course, you aren't, Bernie. Hot tea with honey and lemon, Senator. If the next four years go down the way I think they will, your voice will be hoarse from all the yelling.

#7 

Gavin Newsom - I bail out red states all the time.



Ever notice the poker tell with our governor here in the Mount Doom State? The wilder his hand gestures, the bigger bag of fertilizer he's trying to sell you. It's like he's got Tourette's Syndrome of the limbs. 

Oh, sure, his lips say 'I've bailed out plenty of red states,' but his hands say '23 Skidoo.' 

As for the substance to his flailing, the majority of both houses of Congress are not keen at all about flushing a bunch more relief money down the tubes. And especially not forking it over to a group of people that have demonstrated on every occasion they cannot manage money in a fiscally responsible way in the slightest. Newsom drew out House Speaker Mike Johnson as well as his constant 'I will not be ignored, Dan' diatribe aimed at President-Elect Trump. So far this week, Trump has ignored him. Johnson, on the other hand, bodied him from the top rope in two sentences on X.

Instead of making highly produced clap back videos with social media influencers, you should get to work helping Californians.

You’re the leader of a state in crisis, and you should finally start acting like it.

— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) January 16, 2025

Just treat the fires like tallying elections, Governor. No rush. They'll get put out eventually. 

#6

Ron Wyden - If only one person is running, is it really a race? 

Back at the confirmation hearing for Treasury Secretary nominee Bessent, Oregon's Ron Wyden attempted to get him to accept the premise that every other economic concern pales in comparison to the clean energy race we're in. The problem, of course, it it is a race in which no one else is running.


 
Honestly, where does Wyden go after getting dunked on that hard? There is no race, other than an energy race to develop enough electricity to power artificial intelligence advances. That's a race we cannot lose, and no amount of wind, solar, or kale can generate it. China is the top polluter in the world. Bernie Sanders and Wyden will be quick to point out that we're number two. China churns out three times the carbon we do, and the difference between first and second place is widening every year. Our footprint is declining every year through innovation and efficiency, not because of government standards. By the way, any clean energy advantage California tries to claim by having more electric cars on the road than any other state, well, that's now gone because the carbon in the air from the fires will hover in the atmosphere for years over the western half of the country. And the fires still aren't even halfway contained, yet. 

If Bessent had been wearing sunglasses, sporting a mustache and wearing a cowboy hat, he'd have been the lead in a Taylor Sheridan series. Wyden is just a goofball who can't even bring himself to accept nuclear power as a viable alternative, and this exchange showed he's out of his depth in a kiddie pool.

#5

Ed O'Keefe - The big question is will Biden be in the same conversation as Washington, FDR, or LBJ?



Uh, no. If there's a list of presidents that's being talked about, Biden will be mentioned solely because he technically was one. The only other presidential subset where Joe Biden gets a mention is the worst of all time. Jimmy Carter, James Buchanan, Woodrow Wilson, and Andrew Johnson are usually right up there at the top of worst executives this country has sent to Washington. Biden may outrank them all, save for Buchanan. 

O'Keefe had three options of conversations with which history would talk about Biden's legacy. One bucket is the most famous ones that did great things. Biden will never be in that bucket. O'Keefe's conjecture is easily one of the dumbest takes I've heard all week.

The second bucket is contenders to do great things, but we'll never know because they fell ill and died in office or were assassinated. We're still being told by Chuck Schumer Biden's at the top of his game, but he can't judge his fitness. Kamala Harris still maintains he's as sharp as ever. That makes it hard to put him in that pile. 

And then there's bucket three, which only has Washington in it, who voluntarily gave up power when he didn't have to. Yes, Ed O'Keefe theorized that maybe historians would view Biden's voluntary withdrawal from consideration in that same heroic, patriotic way. It's a total crock, because everyone in that town, including O'Keefe, knows the reality. Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer came to the White House after the debate performance followed up by the disastrous George Stephanopoulos interview with a lead pipe in her hand to break his leg if he didn't step aside. There was nothing heroic about it. It was a dumb segment made longer by even dumber analysis by someone who knew four years ago the President had burned up his clutch.

#4

Ed Markey - It's the EPA's job to keep the fiery embers of climate change under control.



Poor Lee Zeldin really drew the short straw in his confirmation hearing for EPA Director. Ed Markey is Ron Wyden without the lisp or the mental acuity. Power plants - bad. Lighting and cameras so he can be seen on televisions and cell phone viral videos - good. 

The wind speed in the nation's capital Thursday was around 2 miles per hour. Try turning a wind turbine with that. It was 33 degrees and partly cloudy. It'll snow on Sunday. That takes a little oomph out of the efficiency of the solar panels. 

Zeldin really didn't get an opportunity to get a word in edgewise, but honestly, it won't matter. He's in, despite the theatrics of Ed Markey. No one in his own conference takes him seriously. He's got his eco hobby horse he consistently rides, but so long as he's a reliable left-wing votes, nobody really cares.

The larger point, one I wish Zeldin would have but didn't make, is that agencies like the EPA, along with dozens of other ones, have hijacked the charter legislation that created those agencies and expanded well beyond what they were intended. And once you're several decades removed from the original intent of the original statutes, politics creeps in and weaponization takes place. If you substitute the Endangered Species Act for the Environmental Protection Act, those are different bureaucratic departments, but still make rules and enforce them. The weaponization, and the negative impact on the country, is identical. 

Here's Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum talking about that with Senator Tom Cotton today. 



That's a serious conversation. To be fair to Zeldin in his hearing, even if he went down that road with Markey, the Massachusetts Senator wouldn't have understood a word of it. It's like reading a chili recipe to a tuba. It's not going to get you anything you can use, nor will it give you anything good to listen to in the process. 

#3

Mazie Hirono - Have you ever asked anyone besides your wife or girlfriend for sex as an adult? Inquiring minds want to know. 



I'm really trying here, as hard as I can, to come up with what she hoped to glean with this line of questioning. She's asking these questions of Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota, who has, *checks notes*, exactly zero allegations of any personal impropriety thrown at him in his entire life. He is trying to get confirmed as the nation's next secretary of the Interior department. Perhaps Hirono is concerned he's going to engage in a little interior decorating with his secretary? Otherwise, when it was her turn, she should have just passed. 

#2

Kamala Harris - I'm not going quietly into the night. 



Yeah, I've heard that about her...from Willie Brown. 

But in all seriousness, actually she will go quietly into the night. If she doesn't, she's an insurrectionist. And I'm reliably told we like to file lawsuits, seek criminal indictments, attempt to incarcerate, and otherwise cite Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to prevent them from coming back out of the night. 

Kamala Harris - what else can I say? Same number two, different day. 

#1

Joe Biden - so me and John Rich went to see the conservative pope about Poland leaving NATO...



This is why I had to write the third installment this week. I was compelled to after Joe uncorked this one on Lawrence O'Donnell's The Last Word on MSNBC Thursday night. 

To save you the trouble of replaying it, here's what he actually said. 

It’s a little bit like, you may remember, uh, um, I found myself, uh, with, uh, the former Pope who was much more conservative. And he wanted to see me after, uh, uh, after, uh, I spent some time in Poland, because I said, remember John Rich? You knew John. Great guy. John and I went to Poland, and I came back and said they’re going to leave the Warsaw Pact. They’re not going to be, a year from now, there’ll be no, they’re not going to be part of NATO. He said, “don’t write that. You’ll ruin your reputation. You’ll ruin your reputation. Don’t write that.” And I was confident it was true.

If this were an onion, the greatest chef in the world could not peel it fast enough to keep from bawling their eyes out. This is so densely-packed with bovine scat, I'm enlisting the aid of Grok, X's artificial intelligence, to work through this. 

First off, the only data point with which we can plot on a timeline, is Poland leaving the Warsaw Pact. That happened in October of 1990. Joe Biden was Senator from Delaware. Poland didn't, and hasn't left NATO. 

Second, Joe Biden is a Catholic. For him talking about a period of time when the Pope was John Paul II and he couldn't recall the name, he has no business being president. He doesn't have the mental acuity for the hardest job in the world. 

Now we go to AI to comb the world's combined database for fact-checking. 

Hey Grok, did Senator Joe Biden ever visit Poland as a sitting Senator?

Grok: Yes, Senator Joe Biden visited Poland while he was a U.S. Senator. In October, 2009, he traveled to Warsaw, Poland, in his capacity as Vice-President under President Barack Obama. But there are also records of him visiting Poland earlier in his career. Specifically, posts found on X indicate that 25 years prior to his 2022 visit as President, which would be around 1997, Senator Joe Biden visited Warsaw and commented on Poland's democratic roots.

Yes, he went to Poland, but in 1997, seven years after Poland left the Warsaw Pact. Kind kills the whole Nostradamus predictive abilities, doesn't it? 

Hey, Grok, did Senator Joe Biden ever visit John Paul II as a sitting Senator? 

Grok: Yes, Senator Joe Biden visited Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in April, 1980.

Huh. So Biden went to see JPII in 1980 right after the Pope knew he went to Poland, in 1997. 

Now comes the John Rich connection. John was playing bass in Lonestar as a 23-year-old in 1997. He probably wasn't touring Eastern Europe at the time. He was six when Biden visited the Holy See. It had to be another John Rich.

Hey Grok, was there a politician or diplomat named John Rich? 

Grok: Yes, John Treadway Rich was an American politician who served as a U.S. Representative and the 23rd governor of Michigan. His government service spanned from 1873 to 1897.

No other John Rich types. Yet Larry O'Donnell was nodding along as if he knew exactly what Biden was talking about. 

Finally, he said he found himself with the Pope after he got back from Poland. Okay! Maybe we're onto something here. Maybe the Pope met up with Joe while on a trip to the U.S. 

Hey, Grok. Did Pope John Paul II ever visit Washington, D.C.? 

Grok: Yes, he made two visits to the city during his papacy. The first was in October, 1979, and the second was in October, 1995.

The first visit would have been before Biden went to Poland, and 11 years before Poland left the Warsaw Pact. The second trip was 15 years after the Poland trip, 5 years after they left the Warsaw Pact. 

As Joe Biden stories go, this is a viral outbreak at an oil spill on a previous Superfund site, airdropped into East Palestine, Ohio. There's no evidence any of this is true, and I pity poor John Rich and his bass guitar playing at the time. 

Well, that's it. Three days, 30 different dumb things said by Democrats, and I still have reserves in the tank if necessary. Which one was the dumbest? Your mileage may vary, but since we finished today, and the trifecta of columns with the Big Guy, can we just remind ourselves of the axiom of life offered by the Boss whenever Joe Biden is concerned? 

Joe Biden is 20 pounds of bull excrement in a 10-pound bag. 

Have a great weekend. Inauguration Day is right around the corner.