This has been one of the weirdest weeks in recent memory, so it seems weirder still to say as we near the end of it that it’s been — on balance — a pretty good one.

Conservatives are winning at the box office with a $14 million movie the Left cannot stand and tried to kill topping $100 million in gross receipts, and a song atop the music charts (a bit more on that below). Republicans in the House are forging ahead in fulfilling their promise to conduct real oversight, despite some of the most egregious squealing imaginable from the stuck pigs in the ruling regime.

And there’s a lot else, obviously not all of it good. But at the very least we are getting clarification nearly across the board, and clarification is a key component of vindication.

And those people on the other side, without even trying to do it, are letting their masks slip for all to see. To wit…

1. Let’s Just Say They’re Not Taking the House Oversight Hearings Very Well

Our readers know I’m not shy about identifying mental defectives when I see them. This week the outward evidence is so voluminous that what might come off as shyness is simply a lack of time and space.

Almost every Democrat in politics lost his or her mind at least once between Monday and Thursday. For example, the unhinged blue-haired crone Rosa DeLauro on Tuesday denounced Republicans as “terrorists”  because Tom Cole, the chair of the appropriations subcommittee for Transportation and HUD and related agencies, brought an amendment that would block federal funding for earmarks related to LBGT-oriented projects as well as “extraneous flags” like the “gay pride” flag from being flown at departments or agencies.

Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro comes unglued during a committee hearing and says Republicans are "terrorists" for disagreeing with her pic.twitter.com/iicvCRq53o

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 18, 2023

That outburst caused a two-hour recess thanks to GOP demands that DeLauro’s invective be stricken from the record.

For another example, here was Debbie Wasserman Schultz in a hearing about censorship berating her fellow Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an anti-Semite because of a COVID study he’d referenced, only to get blown to smithereens by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Tries to Further Discredit Robert F. Kennedy Jr But Rep. Thomas Massie Brings the Receipts ????

Schultz: "You did not cite any study like you are citing here now"

Massie: "I ask unanimous consent to introduce into the record a study that Mr. Kennedy just… pic.twitter.com/2gqpAaw5MZ

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) July 20, 2023

And then there was the screeching by Stacey Plaskett, the Democrat representing the Virgin Islands as a delegate, who decried Kennedy being given a chance to speak because of his “idiotic bigoted messaging.”

Stacey Plaskett Dedicates Her Opening Statement to Smearing Robert F. Kennedy Jr pic.twitter.com/6RcsO9iTN1

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) July 20, 2023

Ultimately, RFK Jr. had his turn to speak, and that resulted in a spellbinding, if probably futile, complaint by an old-school liberal about the mess the leftist progressives have made of the First Amendment. He denied the smears made against him and decried the fact that reasoned, polite debate is dead in this country — all of which are points well made, but what they illuminate is the fact that the liberals like RFK Jr. allowed themselves to be routed out of the institutions they formerly controlled by the Hard Left, and they’ll never get them back. (READ MORE: The GOP Hates You, and Lisa Murkowski’s Not Hiding It)

So what happened next? Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, found a podium to call Kennedy a living, breathing false flag for Donald Trump and called a House investigation of government censorship that has already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it’s endemic within this regime a “malignant clownshow.”

There is a big difference between legitimate congressional oversight.

And a malignant clown show. pic.twitter.com/8l0xd8HKMD

— Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) July 20, 2023

Guess Jeffries would know about those. It’s really instructive, though, to see how somebody who has done more to fight for core left-wing causes like “climate change” and other environmental concerns (I know, I’m being very generous in assuming a nexus between “climate change” and the environment, but just bear with me), not to mention wealth redistribution and the rights of criminals is all of a sudden a right-wing plant and a dangerous extremist in the eyes of the Democrats’ leader in the House.

As a matter of basic strategy, you’d probably want to go a little softer on a guy who’s got the most famous name in Democrat politics, particularly when he’s holding some 15–20 percent of the Democrat electorate in presidential primary polling. Calling him names like they’re doing is what the GOP establishment did to Donald Trump in 2016 and all it did was harden his support.

It’s not that RFK Jr. is going to unseat Joe Biden as the Democrat nominee next year. It’s that treating him this way is likely to send his supporters elsewhere. Smart political operators have to be looking at this and wondering what the hell is wrong with these people.

What Jeffries really did was concede that committee chair Jim Jordan made an absolutely brilliant move by giving Kennedy the floor and that he and his pals took the bait and turbocharged his relevance in ways that engaging him in honest debate never would have.

And of course there was also the House oversight hearing at which a gay Democrat IRS agent put his politics aside to blow the whistle on DOJ misconduct in throttling investigations of the apparent influence-peddling and bribery scheme Hunter Biden was running on behalf of his father. For some reason this was a platform to talk about … slavery?

Democrat Rep. Summer Lee:

"My Republican colleagues seem to think that using criminal law as a weapon or a political tool is objectionable only when directed only when directed…at someone too rich, too powerful, or too white to be charged!" pic.twitter.com/vutmIldSCy

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 19, 2023

Summer Lee is apparently too stupid to understand that she’s making the majority’s case for them — there is no better example of white privilege in a two-tiered justice system in America today than Hunter Biden. Just ask Kodak Black, for example.

And lest we run too long, we’ll close this out with Dan Goldman, who has to be the dumbest member of Congress. If this guy came from a family of sanitation engineers instead of the Levi Strauss fortune, he’d be lucky to hang on as an alderman in some suburban enclave of New York or Chicago. Instead, he’s a member of Congress and, well, let’s just say he doesn’t really belong:

Thank you, Democrat Representative Dan Goldman, for helping expose another lie told by Joe Biden! pic.twitter.com/Sho4zFEs2s

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 20, 2023

Those hearings on censorship and the Biden bribes were an utter and complete disaster for congressional Democrats and virtually all of it was self-inflicted. Stupid and unhinged really is not a great formula for retaking power even if you’re more into harvesting ballots than attracting votes.

2. Escalation Upon Escalation

It isn’t just the Democrats’ political class who have taken to behaving badly in the face of their opponents fighting back and speaking out. On Tuesday in Louisiana, the Republican-dominated state legislature voted to override the veto of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards on HB 648, a bill banning pediatric sex-change surgeries and sterilizing “puberty-blocker” drugs. The override actually had bipartisan support in both houses, and it’s so popular in Louisiana that most people think it’s going to be a clarifying campaign issue in legislative — and maybe even statewide — races in this fall’s elections.

One of the Republicans who voted for the override was Sen. “Big Mike” Fesi, a conservative Republican from Houma. And after his vote was recorded and the results published, this is what showed up on his voicemail:

That rather unpleasant voice belongs, we’re told, to one Marcus Venable, a graduate student and teacher in the sociology department at LSU whose research interests include “Criminology, sexual assault, sex-offender recidivism, sex-offender registries.”

The thing is, this isn’t just one unhinged nutter. It’s a culture, and it’s fostered and fomented at the top.

A recent column of mine talked about escalation as a strategy of the Left, and that’s what this is an example of whether Venable, who doesn’t come off as particularly intelligent or a deep thinker, even understands what he’s doing. This is about making it so unpleasant for people on the right — whether in politics, culture, or business — to stand up to the Left’s aggressions that most people simply won’t do it. It isn’t just that his feelings were hurt that the veto override vote went the wrong way for the groomer side; there had to be intensely negative consequences for it right away.

This stuff can no longer be seen as harmless, by the by. Not after the James Hodgkinson experience. Did anybody on the left even slow down after that? No. There was a brief moment of pretending to care about Steve Scalise, and then it was full speed ahead.

Mike Fesi didn’t run for the state Senate so that he could have death threats issued to him by mental defectives from public college payrolls on his voicemail. Nobody would blame him if he said “take this job and shove it” and didn’t run for reelection in the fall. Fesi has a successful business and a large circle of family and friends back home. He doesn’t need to be a state senator.

But if you look at all the people in the videos above, their lives would literally end if they couldn’t have power over their fellow man.

And that’s what’s so dangerous about this. The Left has no limits in either their personal conduct or their political activism, and they see that as their decisive strength. So it’s nonstop escalation all the time, and as they make the lives of those who disagree with them more and more unpleasant, they think they’re winning.

When in fact what they might well be doing is training the Right to act in exactly the same way.

What does that get you? We might be about to find out.

3. Don Elliott Is So Right It’s Scary

If you read nothing else at The American Spectator this week, E. Donald Elliott piece titled “Biden Must Pardon Trump to Avert Civil War” ought to be it:

Then-President Gerald Ford’s explanation of the Nixon pardon sound prophetic today: “The tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” President Joe Biden must follow Ford’s example and pardon his predecessor so that the country can move on.

And if he doesn’t, Biden runs the serious risk that events spiral out of control and violence is instigated. Trying to put a former president and your leading opponent in the next election in federal prison is a serious business that could literally tear the country apart.

You really should read the whole thing. Elliott’s reasoning is flawless even if it turns out we’re more fortunate than he warns we might be; in his telling, a Trump indictment in a D.C. court could pit state governments, like in Trump’s home state of Florida, against the feds, but more importantly it could pit a very large segment of the population against the government under circumstances resembling an open powderkeg surrounded by lit candles in a windstorm.

I’ve got two reactions to this. First, Elliott’s warning isn’t going to be heeded by the people in power — both because of the escalation addiction discussed above and also because of the calculation, recognized by many, from Team Biden that the state-sanctioned criminal lawfare against Trump both solidifies him as the GOP nominee and kneecaps him in the general election. Whether or not that turns out to be true isn’t important; they believe that it is and the question of whether their perceived political advantage is worth the risk of civil strife never even factors into the equation.

And second, doing this is going to result in very bad things. Because if you’re a Republican governor of a red state, let’s say, and you see a federal government willing to go after a former president you probably endorsed on charges that are nakedly political, you’re going to recognize that this current regime doesn’t respect the Constitution or the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and has been so politicized and corrupted that it’s no longer a legitimate sovereign. Not only that, the people who elected you will also recognize it and they’ll be awfully vocal about that.

And that’s going to mean you’re going to find ways to fight back against the feds. There are lots of them for governors willing to get their hands dirty.

4. What Makes You Think Biden’s Descent Will Be Gentle?

One thing that is especially perplexing, particularly with respect to some of the polling that popped Wednesday and Thursday showing Donald Trump 5–7 points behind Joe Biden, is this assumption that the presidential race will look next year like it currently does.

After all, you have Biden on camera trying to eat a child in Finland, you have him skipping state dinners to go to bed, you’ve got him wearing sneakers instead of dress shoes for fear he’s going to fall down, and you have him using lower staircases to get on and off Air Force One.

And he can’t speak anymore, hardly at all. He fell asleep during a photo op with Israel’s leader, which might have been an intentional slight but probably wasn’t.

We’ve talked in this space about how he’s crying out to be put in assisted living. As Ace of Spades notes, they just announced his house in Wilmington will be the campaign headquarters, which is bizarre.

People just assume, though, that Biden’s mental and physical state will be more or less what it is now. Maybe that’s inertia, but it’s probably not reality. Dementia and Alzheimer’s, or whatever debilitative condition Biden actually suffers from that’s being hidden from the public, typically don’t progress in a linear fashion.

It’s entirely likely something disastrous will happen reasonably soon.

Here’s an example: Alzheimer’s patients frequently break out in cursing fits. It’s reported Biden commonly launches foul-mouthed tirades at his staffers. It’s merely a matter of time before he goes there in public, and then the media cover becomes impossible.

Particularly when said tirade includes racial references of an unfortunate character. And they certainly might, seeing as though even a more lucid Joe Biden of yesteryear couldn’t stop making racist remarks.

What happens then? And what do you think those polls will look like?

Yes, yes, Fetterman. I’ll stipulate to the brain-dead loyalty of your typical Democrat voter. But consider the primary. How long do you think the hyper-lustful Gavin Newsom, at least where power over his fellow man is concerned, will sit by the sidelines after a disastrous Biden gaffe?

Making assumptions about the 2024 race is pointless right now. You have no idea who’s even going to be in the field.

5. Jason Aldean and Sheryl Crow

I’ll make this quick, because we’re long on the serious topics today, but the No. 1 song in all genres on iTunes’ music charts is this one:

Jason Aldean’s song is a paean to traditional American law and order and an argument that it survives in the exurbs and rural areas. It never mentions race and nothing in it glorifies or advocates violence. Totally to the contrary.

But among the unhinged reactions to it came from left-wing rocker Sheryl Crow, she of the advice that people use just one sheet of tissue while on the porcelain throne, who called the song “lame.”

.@Jason_Aldean I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence.There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting.

This is not American or small town-like. It’s just lame https://t.co/cuOtUO9xjr

— Sheryl Crow (@SherylCrow) July 19, 2023

Crow is quoting Shannon Watts, who is an utter buffoon — a trip through her Twitter is an exposition of the subjects discussed above.

There is really only one proper reaction to this, and I had to offer it:

Hey Sheryl, which one is your new #1 hit song?

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) July 20, 2023