“I never said most of the things I said,” claimed the eminently quotable Yogi Berra. And he’s right: Although his (many) malapropisms were legendary, there’s also a large category of “things that kinda-sorta sound like stuff Yogi would say” that also gets lumped in. But that’s how pop culture works: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
The same applies to Ben Franklin, America’s first super-genius entrepreneur. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, and swimming fins and discovered electricity. So whenever a hack writer wants to bestow an idea with extra credibility, they manufacture a Franklinesque quote to support it.
One idea that’s still falsely attributed to Franklin is switching America’s symbol from the bald eagle to a turkey. In 1784, he wrote a letter to his daughter in which he claimed the bald eagle was a “Bird of bad moral Character.” By contrast, he spoke more highly of the turkey: “For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America… His is besides, though a little vain and silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”
But he never lobbied Congress to name the turkey our national bird! That never happened. Like Abraham Lincoln always used to say, “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”
And that’s a very good thing, too: If the turkey was our national bird, we couldn’t eat it on Thanksgiving. (And mankind cannot live on stuffing, gravy, the Dallas Cowboys, and pumpkin pie alone.)
Furthermore, we wouldn’t be able to use “turkey” as a euphemism for a stupid or foolish person. That only started in the 1950s — and if the turkey was our longstanding national symbol, this association would (probably) never have been made.
But due to good fortune, the turkey became our Thanksgiving dinner instead of our national bird — and “turkey” became shorthand for a dunce.
With this in mind, we hereby present the PJ Media “Turkey of the Year” award to… drumroll, please…
The leadership of the Democratic Party! C’mon, guys — take a bow!
When 2024 began, Joe Biden was young, spry, and in the best shape of his life. (Wait: That’s not true at all.)
Anyhoo, with 2024 being an election year, the Democratic Party stood before two paths. The choice was entirely theirs.
The first path was to be honest and transparent: President Biden is an octogenarian with poor approval ratings, so let him earn his Democratic nomination in the primaries and prove his stamina and endurance to the American people. May the best man win!
The second path was: LOL, screw that! We’ll hide Biden, block challengers like RFK Jr., and just keep on insisting he’s “sharp as a tack.”
Obviously, they took the second path.
A few months later, President Biden blurted, “We finally beat Medicare!” during his one presidential debate.
Uh oh.
The Democratic Party panicked, pushed Biden out, and searched for his replacement. Time for someone new.
But who?
The Biden administration was extraordinarily unpopular. The American people kept telling pollsters over and over again that they were unhappy with the direction of our country — that inflation was out of control. “We don’t care about pronouns! We care about groceries!”
At this point, the Democratic Party should’ve realized that its best bet for retaining power would be to nominate someone from the outside — a person wholly disconnected from the failures, ineptitude, and shortcomings of the Biden years.
Instead, they nominated Biden’s vice president.
But really, they didn’t have much of a choice: He who lives by identity politics dies by identity politics! And after so many decades blasting the GOP for being anti-woman and anti-minority, the Democrats couldn’t bypass the one minority woman who was already VP.
They were stuck.
Ah, but not all hope is lost: Donald Trump was weakened by lawfare and other controversies! Surely, a smart, targeted presidential campaign that focuses like a laser on the issues bedeviling the American people would be enough to extend the Democrat’s control of the White House. Right?
So which issue should Kamala Harris accentuate first? Her solution for sky-high inflation? How she’ll fix the housing crisis? Maybe her cure for the still spiraling cost of living?
Nah. Instead, the Democrats ran on two key issues: Abortion and Trump being “literally Hitler.”
Of course, Trump isn’t “literally Hitler.” He’s a left-of-center Republican who just appointed a bunch of ex-Democrats (Tulsi Gabbard, Scott Bessent, RFK Jr.) to his cabinet. By the standards of George W. Bush, this is probably the most liberal Republican cabinet since the Nixon years.
Optically, while Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were calling him a Nazi, Trump was flipping McDonald’s burgers, driving a garbage truck, and launching America’s next dance craze. It created a perceptual disconnect: The American people listened to Harris, looked at Trump, and thought to themselves, “Not only is this guy not Hitler, but if the Democrats are lying about that… what else are they lying about?”
It was clear that their strategy wasn’t working. Even internally, the Harris-Walz campaign knew they never once had the lead. Yet they stubbornly — and inexplicably — refused to modify their strategy, blowing through $1.5 billion in just 15 weeks!
Talk about gobble, gobble!
Take a bow, Democratic Party leadership. You didn’t deserve to win the 2024 election, but you’ve certainly earned the PJ Media “Turkey of the Year” award.
And then some.
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