BUCK: Joe Biden we’re talking about in the first segment today, and I don’t know what to do about this, Clay, ’cause you keep going back and forth. There’s a part of me that thinks this guy reminds me of some of the seniors I’ve known in my own life where they’ve reached that phase where they need care, comfort, and family taking care of them. So I don’t want to be mean about it because obviously we’re all going there. We’re all gonna be there.
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: Then there’s the other side of it. They’ve made this guy the president, right? We’re not making fun of somebody who’s at a family occasion or something or who’s spending… This is someone who has the nuclear codes and is clearly not up to the job. However, then you look at his VP, Kamala Harris, who is definitely not too old for the job. We can say that. But when you hear things like this — and this is important too. This is about the doubling down in the face of covid that’s going on right now. Here is Kamala Harris when asked on NBC News about their covid strategy, and this is her response.
CRAIG MELVIN: At what point does the administration say, “You know what? This strategy isn’t working; we’re gonna change strategies”? Six former administration officials last week wrote that open letter urging the administration to change course, to change strategy. Is it time?
HARRIS: It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day. Every day. It is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.
BUCK: It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day. What does that even mean, Clay?
CLAY: Well, first of all, it sounds like Veep — for anybody out there who is also a fan of Julia Louis Dreyfus — the dark, satirical comedy on HBO. Also, it reminds me of someone who has been trained in how to to respond to questions but has no confidence whatsoever in their ability to respond to questions. Sometimes I’ve seen this, Buck, ’cause of my sports days.
Young athletes who were 18 and 19 years old are sometimes repeating the question that you ask them as a part of answering the question, right? So it sounds like she’s been overly media trained. But I wonder, on some level, how much of this is just… This is what one-party governance does. Kamala Harris came out of California where the Democrats have complete control of that state.
And as a result, she never really had to get in the trenches and throw punches in a real campaign. We saw when she tried to do it for president, she dropped out before we even started voting, and Democrats had soundly rejected her as a presidential candidate because of answers to questions like those. And remember — it’s crazy to even think about now, Buck, but — the idea back in the day when Joe Biden added Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate was, “Well, Biden’s gonna step down at some point and hand the presidency to Kamala Harris and allow her potentially to run as the incumbent.”
BUCK: I thought that was the plan. Did you think…? I thought initially that was the plan.
CLAY: I felt like in many ways that it was, and what we’ve seen at least in the first year of the Biden administration is, as incompetent and out of sorts as Joe Biden is, Kamala Harris is worse. And at least Joe Biden you can point to and say, “Well, he is 78 years old. He’s past his prime. He no longer has it.” You should say like when an athlete is aging, “Hey, he doesn’t have his fastball anymore.” I’m not sure Joe Biden even has a change-up anymore. He doesn’t have a pitch — and Kamala’s worse, which is an unbelievable indictment of her, because she doesn’t have the 78-year-old excuse.
BUCK: Here she is — speaking of worse, right — and I really do reiterate what I said yesterday here because I think it resonated with some folks and I put it out on Twitter. If this was the Trump administration, they would impeach him over what’s happening right now for dereliction of duty. Is that even an impeachable offense? Doesn’t matter. They would impeach him. Nancy Pelosi would 100 percent billion percent impeaching him.
CLAY: If covid was the exact same way, Trump would have been impeached at least for a third time.
BUCK: And it’s also amazing as we see Biden stumbling and bumbling around us that so many of the chattering classes of the Democrats were obsessed with talking about the 25th Amendment with the last president. You and I do a lot of live performance, Clay, and we know who’s good at this and we know who’s got skills. Trump live in front of 40, 50, 60,000 people for hours at a time?
That guy is at another level from other politicians that we’ve seen and they’re saying the 25th Amendment should be invoked. Meanwhile, with Joe Biden, they’ve forgotten what the 25th Amendment is. It’s stunning when you see the lack of consistency. But then again you have Kamala Harris, to your point about Veep. Here she is asked about the testing shortage, which would be a huge issue if it were Donald Trump, but it’s of course Joe Biden.
CRAIG MELVIN: The 500 million tests that have been ordered that are being sent to every American. Do we know when those are going out?
HARRIS: (pause) Shortly. They — they’re —
CRAIG MELVIN: Next week?
HARRIS: They’re gonna go out shortly. They’ve been ordered. They’ve been ordered. We… I have to look at the current information. I think it’s gonna be by next week. But soon. Absolutely soon. And it is a matter of urgency for us.
CRAIG MELVIN: Should we have done that sooner?
HARRIS: (long pause) We are doing it.
CRAIG MELVIN: But should we have done it sooner?
HARRIS: We are doing it!
BUCK: (laughing) She’s terrible.
CLAY: So bad.
BUCK: She’s terrible.
CLAY: And I’ll just speak to myself ’cause some people said, “Hey, why did you decide to get tested for covid at all it?” The answer’s because I wanted to be able to say with certainty to the audience that I had it, but also there’s no tests anywhere, right? That was the criticism that we got of Trump. I know Biden tweeted about it. “Where are the tests, Mr. President?”
The idea that these 500 million ordered tests followed by 500 more million tests are gonna somehow alter anything is fundamentally not true — and I wish, Buck, they would stop saying that these tests are free. They aren’t free. Our tax dollars are paying for them. It gets me so frustrated every time when I hear them say, “Oh, these tests are gonna be free!
“Oh, you can go get the covid vaccine; it’s free!” No. We’re paying tens of billions, if not trillions of dollars mortgaging our future as a nation. These are not free tests. We’re all paying for them. You’re just not having to pull the money directly out of your wallet, so people are dumb and they don’t realize where the money’s coming from.
BUCK: Can we all be honest too? These tests are going to arrive maybe hate February, early March.
CLAY: Well, after Omicron’s done.
CLAY: I don’t know. I legitimately don’t know what the purpose of these tests are at all. And, by the way, the people who were the most neurotic are not going to be satisfied by the tests. Let’s say you have a sniffle, and you take a test and it’s a negative. Well, let’s say the next day your sniffle is worse. Are you telling me those neurotic people are gonna say, “Hey, I don’t need to test again”?
In general, testing doesn’t make a lot of sense. I looked up the free testing in my neighborhood. In order to get a free testing appointment in my neighborhood, I would have had to wait ’til Monday. Well, by that point, Buck, I would have been back to a hundred percent — or else I’m so severe ill that I would have to go to the hospital, which is unlikely. But it makes no sense.
BUCK: When I had the upper-respiratory thing we were talking about — we were both real sick in the October, November time frame — and I went to get the test around then, I remember… It was actually right before Thanksgiving, I think. I remember being told at the testing center, “Oh, you can go with the free city test. You just won’t find out what your results are for two or three days.”
CLAY: Yeah, right.
BUCK: I’m not gonna find out…? So what am I supposed to do? So I had to go to the like fancy, expensive test place and pay $250 out of pocket to get a normal test in 15 minutes, which is obviously what everybody needs, but it’s all…Friends, they’re just lying to you all the time about all this stuff, ’cause they’re incompetent.
CLAY: That’s right. I paid a hundred bucks for a test. They called me 15 minutes after they swabbed me and told me I was positive.
BUCK: Yeah, that’s the Nashville price.
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