Jeffrey Wells

For the good of the country and our currently fragile tradition of democracy, President Joe Biden really, really has to do a Lyndon Johnson as soon as possible — “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of the Democratic Party for another term as your president.”

Because while he may be able to muddle through, Woodrow Wilson– or Ronald Reagan-style, between now and January 20, 2029 if re-elected, Biden is obviously too old and diminished to run against The Beast.

C’mon, man…wake up. Johnson read the writing on the wall 56 years ago and right now there are only two people who can’t read the present moment — Joe and Jill Biden.

It’s possible that Biden might be able to squeak through to a micro-slender victory in November…maybe…but nobody believes this to be a likely scenario. People are finally starting to realize that it’s actually, truth be told, unlikely.

If he comes to his senses and throws in the towel, Biden’s reputation will suddenly become that of a noble statesman.

Spoken two nights ago on Real Time with Bill Maher but for some reason not on YouTube:

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I never laughed at the original James Carville joke of ruthlessness, to wit:

But I just heard the same line tweaked by The Warning’s Steve Schmidt — he omitted “sonuvabitch” and changed “anvil” to “fucking bowling ball” — and suddenly it was funny.

Anvil = not funny. Bowling ball = funny. Probably because most of us have never even seen an anvil but everyone knows how heavy a bowling ball is

Funny Judd Apatow line from last night’s DGA Awards: The 2024 Presidential race is going to be between “a guy old enough to have met Hitler and a guy who wishes he had.”

Without getting into details I’ll be submitting to an examination procedure this morning around 10:30 am, and that’s all I’m going to say. Nothing wrong — just something I have to do. I’ll be out of it and presumably recovering by 12:30 or 1 pm.

All this time I had somehow failed to realize that Jack Arnold’s It Came From Outer Space (‘53), which is based on a Ray Bradbury film treatment called “The Meteor”, was a clear forerunner of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (‘56).

Both were black-and-white chillers about bucolic, small-town communities besieged by aliens with the power to surreptitiously replace residents with creepy, emotion–less substitutes, the difference being that Arnold and Bradbury’s visitors aren’t aggressively evil or looking to harm anyone and certainly don’t serve as metaphorical seed agents for ‘50s-era conformity, as they did in Body Snatchers.

And both focused on a cerebral alpha male hero figure (Richard Carlson, Kevin McCarthy) and nearly identical brunette wifey-girlfriend love partners (Arnold’s Barbara Rush, Siegel’s Dana Wynter) who are taken over by aliens in the third act.

There are too many scenes in which Carlson tries and fails to persuade fellow townies that some kind of alien invasion is actually happening. Over and over and over. Charles Drake’s Sheriff Warren finally comes around toward the end, but by then the skepticism horse has been beaten to death.

I was expecting to engage with Kathleen Hughes, the blonde on the 4K Bluray jacket cover, but she’s only in one brief scene.

I was delighted by the relatively recent digital restoration of It Came From Outer Space. Clifford Stine’s cinematography looks about as proficient and ace-level as this kind of boilerplate big-studio monochrome effort gets. At times the image quality seems as clean and rich as, say, the VistaVision lensing of William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (‘55), especially during the outdoor-simulating sound stage scenes.

We all know the great-grandfatherly Joe Biden, 81, “looks like his own skeletal remains,” as Bill Maher remarked on a 9.30.23 “New Rules” segment, and that he almost certainly lacks the mental agility and high-octane strength to run an effective campaign against the insane but grotesquely resilient, fat-as-a-cow Donald Trump, 77.

Every American of voting age, in short, has locked into “Biden is too old to serve another term,” so it was no shock to read that special counsel Robert K. Hur has noted, in his just-released report about President Biden’s occasionally errant handling of documents, that he comes off as a “sympathetic, well–meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — basically a rote confirmation of what everyone has long perceived or suspected so what’s the biggie?

But during Thursday evening’s impromptu press encounter at the White House Biden intensified the over–the–hill impressions by angrily barking at and sneering about Hur’s observations…a gruff and blustery short-tempered response that failed to exude even a semblance of the usual cool poise and confident assurance that Presidents have routinely been associated with.

My father used to behave like this in his 80s…grumpy, hair–trigger, junkyard dog–like.

Bill Maher on 9.30.23:

N.Y. Times:

…when I was 12 or 13. Like Truman Capote I also was more into movies, reading books and drawing stuff than girls (the hound-dogging didn’t start until I was 23), sports or, God forbid, school studies.

When I was 16 or 17 I was putting much more time and energy into typing a socially satirical hand-out (circulated among my ruffian friends) than doing homework. I surely could have refined my writing skills by attending journalism school in my late teens or early 20s, but I’ve always been a do-it-yourself type.

Speaking of Hannah Arendt…

However jarring or chilling Jonathan Glazer ‘s The Zone of Interest may seem to some, one thing it’s clearly not is thematically complex. Write “the banality of evil” a thousand times on a blackboard.

As we speak there’s only one copy selling on EBay, but there are quite a few more available in Russia.

Posted on 4.2.20:

The great John Waters on the nonbinary sexual revolution, as reported last week by the Desert Sun’s Ema Sasic:

For two or three weeks I’ve been watching a brief YouTube solicitation for donations to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign.

The spot might persuade a certain percentage to donate, but it mainly reminds that Joe Biden is too old and over-the-hill to be an effective campaigner.

Can Joe do the actual job? Mistakes and elite woke allegiances aside, he’s shown that he’s a moderate veteran who knows the ropes and can handle the demands after a fashion.

Does Joe project prime-of-life strength and hard-snap vigor? Please.

The 62 year-old guy on the left is clearly attractive, mentally sharp and possessed by natural charisma. The pale 81 year-old guy on the right is squinting too much — obviously in a state of natural great-grandfatherly decline — and he hoarsely mumbles more than enunciates.

I used to visit my late mom in an assisted living facility so don’t tell me.

This ad is telling us, in short, that the guy on the left has it and the guy on the right mostly doesn’t.

I want Biden to be re-elected and yet it’s obvious that he might not make it, as Steve Kornacki and that recent, seriously stunning NBC News poll suggests.

If Biden loses next November his name will be mud until the end of time.

Rather than accept reality and strategically step aside, historians will lament, he arrogantly insisted that he was the best candidate to defeat The Beast, and in so doing plunged the nation right back into another four years of deranged, law-defying chaos and neo-totalitarian horror.

Substitute Michelle Obama for Kamala Harris and the whole picture changes. People despise Harris and are terrified of a succession scenario, but the same folks would be down (or at least a lot happier) with Michelle.