THE TAOS TATLER.

The President opened his mouth again.

From PJ Media:

Joe Biden embarrassed himself (yet again) on Thursday, proving once again that he should never try to riff during a public speech.“I just want you to know, I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid,” Biden quipped during the Annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon. “I married Domenic Giacoppo’s daughter.”

As it happens, the man who just insisted that he isn’t stupid confused his wife’s father and grandfather.

First Lady Jill Biden was born to Donald Carl Jacobs and Bonny Jean Jacobs…

Correction, Mr President: you were stupid and for a long, long time. Now you’re an imbecile and sadly headed downward.

Two-and-a-half years to go: Deus adiuva nos omnes.

A Ukranian woman plays her piano one last time before quitting the wreckage of her home.

(After false start, Chopin: Etude No. 1 in A-Flat, Op. 25.)

Whether coincidence or not, the pianist’s choice of Chopin is telling, as the composer was half Polish and much grieved by the brutalization of that Slavic nation by more powerful oppressors, including Russia.

Has anybody looked around Turtle Bay recently?

Remember the United Nations? Or, if you are younger, have you heard of the United Nations? Believe it or not, once upon a time the UN was regarded as a big deal. By “regarded,” that is to say it was the great darling of the old-time liberal elite in this country, who actually believed the toothless organization could bring about world peace (seriously). Formed in the aftermath of World War 2, the UN originally comprised 51 countries whose purpose was the prevention of future wars, a preposterous idea even then, as included in that gathering of the world’s peace loving nations were the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc (each of the latter having its own vote, in addition to their superiors, the Soviets).

Nevertheless, for years the UN was the institution the United States and other western powers immediately turned to when there was trouble in the rest of the world, despite its only major “accomplishments” being the Korean and Persian Gulf Wars. Thus, for example, when Iranian revolutionaries invaded the American embassy in Tehran and took the entire staff hostage in 1979, the Carter administration chose not to take military action, rather to bring the matter before the UN. Your Tatler remembers hearing daily reports coming out of the UN about the arguments, resolutions, vetoes etc. (by the Arabs and commies of course) until after several long weeks, the UN finally managed to accomplish something: a resolution signed by all nations urging that “both sides show restraint.” Our ambassador at the time, Andrew Young, as well of course, the media, hailed that as a victory.

Nothing much occurred in the UN after that concerning the Iranian crisis, except for the vetoing of any measures with teeth in them. The crisis finally came to an end with the election of Ronald Reagan, who indicated he would take firmer action on the matter (joke at the time: Q. What’s black and glows in the dark? A. Tehran, the day after Reagan takes office).

Your Tatler could bore you to death (and himself) with a colossal list of failures the UN has chalked up over the years. Let it suffice to say the organization has little to show to for its credit.

Yet still, even up to a few years ago, the UN always would get some kind of mention as the various crises emerged over the decades even if just pro forma. Not so now. Though one might think the ignoring of the institution began with the Trump Administration, this writer seems to recall it began toward the end of President Obama’s reign. For all his flaws, he must have come to the conclusion many others did long before, the UN is impotent and just not worth wasting time on. Should Donald Trump become president in 2024, he would be wise to simply pull the US out of the UN, which would effectively kill it. It won’t be missed.

It will fail like the last time.

Nearly 50 years ago, in April 1973, President Nixon (during an OPEC oil embargo, no less) signed a bill from Congress enacting a renewable one-year trial of permanent daylight saving time. It was much debated, with opponents in and out of Congress arguing it would lead to, among other things, children having to walk to school in the dark, putting them in danger (which turned out to be deadly true). Commuters complained, especially those in northern states, about having to go to work in the dark and construction workers complained of having to work in the dark. By the end of the trial there was little support for permanent DST and it was not renewed.

Now, our sages in Congress have passed another permanent daylight saving bill, only this time it’s not a trial so we’re stuck with it. Your Tatler cannot see how, come winter, all the problems of the first permanent DST will not recur, yet this time the vote was unanimous (not to mention it having huge popular support, even from people who should know better), which if nothing else, serves to show our Congress today is even dimmer than it was half-a-century ago.

A better solution would be eliminate daylight saving time entirely. There’s an old saw of the old Indian being told about daylight saving time and responding: “Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.”

Holiness, whose side are you on?

From the Catholic News Agency:

After the legislature of the Mexican state of Sinaloa voted to legalize abortion up to 13 weeks (emphasis mine),the Diocese of Culiacán announced that Catholic politicians who voted in favor of the law will not be able to receive the Eucharist or be godparents.

In  a statement, Father Miguel Ángel Soto Gaxiola, director of the Culiacán Commission for Life, Family, Youth and Laity, officially announced that Catholic lawmakers who voted in favor of abortion that the decision to deny them Communion is “the recognition of the objectively unworthy state of a person to receive the Body of Christ.”

[snip]

In the letter addressed to Catholic politicians, Father Soto Gaxiola pointed out that “today we have many people scandalized by the public betrayal of the Church’s teaching on faith and morals by those legislators who call themselves ‘Catholic’.”

From the putative Paper of Record:

ROME — President Biden told reporters on Friday that Pope Francis had called him a “good Catholic” and said he should keep receiving communion, an unexpected development that appeared to put a papal finger on the scale in a debate raging in the United States’ Roman Catholic Church over whether the president and other Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should be denied the sacrament.

To reform something you must destroy it.

Comes word the President’s puppeteers have decided he should decide to again open wide our borders with Mexico. The contrived rationale is somewhat complex (if you wish to slog through it, click here), but it hardly matters; the sole purpose is bringing in thousands or millions of illegals so to bring our already overloaded immigration system to a crashing halt.

The scheme of the Democrats bringing down governmental institutions by overloading them has a long history. It was the brainchild of a husband-wife team of social activists at Columbia University, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, in 1966. Their idea was to apply their plan to New York City’s welfare system, overloading and bankrupting it so the Federal Government would be forced to bail it out and fund it. Amusingly, Cloward and Piven claimed this would end poverty. The then bizarre notion found a receptive ear in the newly elected Republican(!) mayor of New York, John Vliet Lindsay, who hailed from an old New York family and had both movie star looks and brains. He probably did more damage to the City than any other mayor, before or since, including de Blasio.

Lindsay embraced Cloward-Piven with gusto. The one possible hitch in those days was, if you can believe it, the stigma still attached to being on the dole. He ordered city social workers to go door-to-door in poor neighborhoods and urge every person they encountered to sign onto the welfare rolls, stressing that regardless what they were taught or heard preached, there was no shame anymore receiving other people’s money, for as long they wished.

The campaign was a brilliant success, if you can call it that, and the percentage of souls on relief increased astronomically and remain at those levels to this day. No coincidence was the number of single-family households headed by women also soared; it was no longer necessary to have a man in the house. Along with the attendant woes of rising crime, gangs, dropping out etc., New Yorkers still pay the price of Cloward and Piven’s “reforms.”

Why our putative president and his associates have chosen to apply Cloward-Piven strategy to our immigration system, a seemingly suicidal move in an election year where democrat prospects look disastrous, is certainly puzzling .The only explanation your Tatler can come up with approaches the tinfoil hat category, but, for better or worse, here it is. The idea could be to get these zillions of illegals, using every conceivable manner of cheating the Democrats have so ably mustered over the years, onto the electoral rolls nationwide and have them “vote” democratic. If the scheme actually proves successful, things could get extremely ugly in the United States, but Democrat leaders long ago quit caring about the consequences of their actions, as well the reactions of their opponents.

No more needs to be said.