“I’m appalled by the choice that we have been delivered,” political humorist P.J. O’Rourke told Reason TV last week, referring to the two major-party presidential nominees.
“Biden’s campaign platform is 564 pages long. It promises everything to everybody,” bemoans the 72-year-old author of a new book of essays, A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land. “It’s full of unicorns and flying ponies and candy-flavored rainbows and pixie dust.”
As for President Trump, “I think we’re done with this experiment of having the inmates run the asylum,” O’Rourke jabs, calling Trump a “dangerous and unpredictable man” and “rude.”
“It isn’t so much exactly what Trump has done,” admits the comedic writer, who while panning Trump’s immigration policies, lauded his lowering of corporate tax rates and his raising of “awareness that China is not our friend.”
Instead, O’Rourke argues “it’s a matter of what [Trump] can do” in a second term, calling him “a toddler at the top of the stairs.”
Speaking of … P.J. turned back to the Democratic ticket: “They seem to be wrong, all wrong, quite wrong, about everything.”
He’s not wrong.
“But” of Biden and Harris, O’Rourke contends they are “wrong between normal parameters of wrong.” Adding that, “There’s wrong and there’s damn wrong.” Meaning Trump is “damn wrong.”
But not wrong on taxes, right P.J.? Or China. Or picking Supreme Court justices — Trump has the best batting average for nominating to the High Court of any president in the last five decades.
And Mr. Trump is the first president in two decades not to drag the U.S. into a regime change war.
“Wrong on everything” or “a toddler at the top of the stairs”?
This P.J. thinks the better choice is Common Sense.
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2 replies on “Right at the Top of the Stairs”
“But not wrong on taxes, right P.J.? Or China.”
Wrong on both. He’s raised, not lowered, taxes (his tariffs come to more than his miniscule income taxes and his ObamaCare penalty relief combined), and all he’s done with China is use it as an excuse to reward (“protect”) some US businesses at the expense of every American taxpayer, consumer, and worker.
The problem with Biden isn’t that he’s different from Trump. It’s that the’re peas in a pod.
Yes and no. Trump has done thing I agree with and things I’ve not liked at all. Biden? Don’t think I can name anything he has done that I like.
As for protectionism, that’s a key problem area for Trump. And Biden. But here is a link to a story where Trump went to bat for US businesses in a way that was unusual and ridiculed, but turned out to be the right thing to do and not protectionist — but ending our coddling of Chinese businesses at the unfair expense of our own.
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2020/06/09/president-goes-postal/