Hello and welcome to Friday, May 22, 2026. Toes Go In First (TGIF). Today is National Maritime Day, National Road Trip Day, National Vanilla Pudding Day, National Buy A Musical Instrument Day, Sherlock Holmes Day, and — Chris Queen, take note — National Craft Distillery Day.
1761: First life insurance policy in North America is issued in Philadelphia.
1807: Former Vice President Aaron Burr is tried for treason in Richmond, Va. (acquitted).
1843: First wagon train departs Independence, Mo., for Oregon with 700 to 1,000 migrants.
1892: Dr. Washington Sheffield invents the collapsible toothpaste tube.
1954: Robert Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, is Bar Mitzvahed.
1962: Netherlands telephone network becomes completely automated. (A M00se once bit my sister — oh, wait, that’s Sweden. Never mind.)
1965: The Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” single goes #1
1977: Final European scheduled run of the Orient Express (after 94 years).
1980: The video game Pac-Man, created by Toru Iwatani, is first released in Japan.
1998: Monica Lewinsky scandal: A federal judge rules that United States Secret Service agents can be compelled to testify before a grand jury concerning the scandal, which involved President Bill Clinton.
And now, the much-desired return of Birthdays today, including: Richard Wagner, German composer, noted chiefly for his operas (The Ring of the Nibelung, The Flying Dutchman); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author who brought Sherlock Holmes to life; Sir Laurence Olivier, stage and screen actor (Rebecca, Hamlet, Henry V); Johnny Olson, radio personality and television announcer (The Price is Right); Quinn Martin, American television producer (The Fugitive, Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco, Barnaby Jones); T. Boone Pickens, businessperson and oil tycoon; Kenny Ball, English jazz musician (Midnight in Moscow); Bernard Shaw, news journalist (CBS, ABC) and first anchor of CNN; Ted Kaczynski, serial killer and terrorist known as the “Unabomber”; Bernie Taupin, British lyricist (Elton John); and Stuart Elliott, British rock session drummer (Alan Parsons Project, Al Stewart).
If today’s yours also, Happy Birthday!
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Much has been written about the Democrats’ “autopsy” of their 2024 campaign to haul Giggles Harris into the Oval Office. The party finally coughed it up through DNC Chair Ken Martin, who slapped a disclaimer on the thing before anyone even opened the cover. That alone told you everything.
I haven’t bothered to write anything to it until now, because my initial reaction was to wait until some Democrat or other had the courage to call out her own party over it. I should have known that wouldn’t happen. I suppose I might not have written to the subject right away anyway, because I usually wait for stuff like that to settle in the mind before writing to it. Maybe that earns me the label of “lazy,” I don’t know. But in any event, now is the time, particularly with the midterms coming up, and since saving the midterms was always what that report was supposed to be about.
But the report clearly won’t do that. In fact, it will damage the Democrats further. Indeed, Chairman Martin (can we still call him chairman, or is that sexist?) tried to throw the report under the bus before reporters could quote page one. Smart move, really. Nobody wants fingerprints on a document that reads like a coroner’s report written by the getaway driver. He probably still bought himself enemies anyway, but at least he can whine that he hated the report, too. In Democrat politics, that apparently counts as courage, now. (Shrug)
Most of those articles on the subject contain more substance than the report itself — which isn’t much of a hurdle, given the report still limps around in unfinished form. There’s even a completely blank page under the heading “Conclusions.” I was going to add a witty comment here, but in looking at it, I don’t think I need to; I can let the humor of the thing stand on its own.
The sharper takes came from our own Rick Moran and HotAir columnist Ed Morrissey.
Every piece I’ve read, including Ed’s (which I’ll bounce off of here), circles the same two facts: The report remains unfinished, and Democrats seem about as eager to release it as a teenager is to hand over a phone during a police stop. Neither point is at all mysterious. They couldn’t bend the obvious conclusions into political cover, much less a political advantage, so now the report sits in bureaucratic purgatory while party operatives pray the news cycle develops ADHD and forgets the thing exists. Sadly and to a large part, it has, for the “reporters'” own politically motivated reasons.
Perhaps this is because they know the voting public, including members of their own party, have already come to their own less-than-complimentary conclusions.
As Ed says:
People can directly access the 192-page report, but it’s not easy to parse, thanks to the lack of effort in finishing the product. It’s unfinished in another sense, too: there is apparently no mention of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline or the effort to cover it up in the autopsy. The words “cognitive,” “dementia,” “senile,” and “mental” make no appearance in this document. The June 2024 debate barely gets a mention at all, and the report completely ignores its impact and what it revealed about Democrats’ attempts to sell a sick old man as “Sharp As A Tack”.
Ed quotes the report itself further to make his point:
Before the candidate switch, the pollsters never reviewed ad copy or content – and commented how they did not see ads until after they were airing, in some instances reading about the ads in the media. They also reported they had little insight into the data provided to leadership from the analytics team.
As the June 2024 debate neared, there were discussions about polling around the debate and after the convention. The polling team was informed the plan was for them to poll three times during the general election, and the post-convention polling would count as one of those three polling waves. They attributed this minimalist approach to research to members of the media team not believing polling data was essential to decision making.
The debate obviously changed many things. The dial-testing during the debate demonstrated the weakness of the President’s performance, and a post-debate survey was scrapped.
Exactly. They had 18 months to finish the report, which ostensibly was crafted in an attempt to right the mistakes and allow them some positive direction into the mid-terms.
Massive fail.
Then again, let’s be fair: Nobody could sell that train wreck as a Democrat success story unless they hired carnival barkers to write the press releases. Both the incompleteness of the report and Dems’ reluctance to release it are driven by their inability to spin the thing. What little is there, without saying it directly, still manages to make clear that Creepy Joe Biden didn’t suddenly become a disaster after the polls collapsed or the donors panicked. He was the disaster from day one, exactly as critics such as myself warned while the media and party operatives performed synchronized backflips to pretend nobody noticed that dumpster fire in the Oval Office. And the thing is, when the polls collapsed, the game was already up. The voters knew very well they’d been lied to about Biden being numb from the shoulders up. That broke a trust, the replacement of which still eludes the Democrats.
So, seeing there was no way they could drag Biden over the finish line, they switched candidates — without any formal process. Funny how the party that spent years sermonizing about “free and fair elections” suddenly decided its own primary voters could sit down and shut up. They bypassed the entire process without a flicker of embarrassment—a detail the report somehow manages to glide past like a drunk driver missing a telephone pole. They never even mentioned it, and apparently, they hoped nobody would notice. People did, which caused even more damage to that trust.
And after all that? Replacing Mumbles Biden with Giggles Harris changed absolutely nothing. Neither candidate could generate real enthusiasm outside the hard-core anti-Trump crowd that would have voted for a traffic cone if it promised to sneer at Republicans. Their entire campaign boiled down to two slogans: “We aren’t Trump” and “Orange Man Bad.” That wasn’t a platform. That was a group therapy session with campaign funding. (Group therapy — now there’s an idea. Hmmmm).
Now, the report strains to slap a hopeful gloss over the wreckage, but it can’t defend the failures. It can only manufacture excuses for them. As an example:
Democrats will have a rigorous, efficient, and fair nominating process for 2028, but it is entirely possible there it will be a protracted contest – perhaps finally resolving in a July convention. If this is the case, Democrats may have a nominee who needs to bring the party together, a staff and team exhausted by the process, and urgency in standing up a national campaign.
This is exactly what occurred in 2016, when Secretary Clinton cinched the nomination in Philadelphia 104 days before the election and then discovered there was little infrastructure in place to help her win.
So, that Clinton was a seriously bad candidate with more baggage than an Amtrak Train had nothing at all to do with her loss? I mean, was it really a lack of infrastructure, or is it closer to the truth to suggest a lack of enthusiasm? Understand my referring to this passage clearly: If this is the kind of judgment Democrats are bringing to the midterms, we might as well write them off right now, even before the other factors, like redistricting and the Democrats’ wild unpopularity, are considered.
Related: Looking at the Primaries so Far
So where does all this superior judgment lead, going into the mid-terms? No place good, really, at least for them. There’s about as much enthusiasm about Democrats this midterm as a mandatory three-hour workplace seminar on “Why the Coffee Machine Is Not a ‘Team Resource’”
Well, looking at the Democrat candidates, one can understand why. But that’s another column, I guess. For now, speaking of coffee, I need another.
Thought of the day: The true damage of regulation is not what we can see; it is what we will never see, advances we will never have.
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I’ll see you here tomorrow.
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