Turkeys and Drumsticks 2024

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography from USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Over at the old Right-Thinking blog, I would take advantage of the Thanksgiving Holiday to give out my awards for Turkeys of the Year and Golden Drumsticks. The latter are for those who exemplify the best traits in our public sphere. The former are for those who exemplify silliness and stupidity. I sometimes give them out to someone who is evil, but they are mostly reserved for those who regularly make me shake my head and wonder what they’re thinking. It’s a sort of “thank you” for making snarky tweeting easier. Past winners can be found here.

This post is a little late, for reasons I will get into next week. But the year has also been so stuffed with turkeys, I was overwhelmed. Every time I’d think, “Oh, yeah, that dude will be Turkey of the Year”, someone else come gobbling up, being publicly stupid in such a spectacular way, I’d have to reformulate my entire list.

Donald Trump is now permanently ineligible for these awards since he was the first recipient of the lifetime achievement award last year. This year, I’m going to add another name to that list: Elon Musk. What Musk is doing with Space-X is nothing short of amazing, as I’ve written many times on these pages. How he is conducting himself outside of that narrow parameter space is absurd. And now he’s pretending he’s the co-President, running this DOGE thing and promising to cut $2 trillion in fat from a federal budget that doesn’t have that much room. I expect Trump to tire of him and throw him out on his ear at some point.

And then things really will get interesting.

Anyway, when it came to picking my turkeys, I ended with one choice for the top spot. And I hate to do it to the guy, but this year’s Turkey of the Year is:

Joe Biden: I happen to think Biden’s presidency was moderately successful. The inflation wasn’t entirely his fault — it was mostly pent-up COVID demand and we got it under control faster and better than any other country. He passed some big bills that will be paying off in the out years. He got NATO expanded and seems to have worked a good Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire. The economy is good, crime is down and border crossings have crashed in the last year.

But the fact that I have to tell you all these things is part of the problem. His comms team was terrible. And his ability to communicate any of his successes (and Trump’s manifest failures) to the public is a big reason the latter is going back into the White House. Biden’s legacy will forever marred by clinging to the office too long, until it became obvious in the most public and alarming way possible that he was no longer up for the job.

And no, I’m not going to shift blame for this onto staffers, Jill Biden or the Illuminati. They helped conceal his decline but he must have known he wasn’t up to the job anymore, let alone a campaign and four more years. Imagine if he had announced in 2023 that was wasn’t running for re-election. A full Democratic primary takes place that pulls attention away from Trump and the age issue flips to being a reason to vote for Democrats.¹

I understand why he didn’t want to leave. But in doing so, he hurt the nation.

Trump Voters From primary voters who picked a deranged criminal over a half dozen more worthy candidates to general election voters who think the leopards won’t eat their face, the ability of the public to recast Trump into … whatever they want him to be … is impressive. Post-election surveys have shown Hispanic voters shifted to him because they though he would only deport criminals. Blue-collar voters are being surprised by warnings that incoming tariffs will raise prices. Union members are soon to be surprised when Trump (and his compliant judges) destroy the NLRB.

People voted for Trump for various reasons. But time after time, over the last eight years, we’ve seen people insist he won’t do the things he says he will do and then be shocked when he does them. The people who voted for Trump are about to Find Out in a big way. Unfortunately, so will the rest of the country.

The Harris Campaign On election night, I said that she’d run a good campaign. But I’ve come to believe they made several critical errors over the short campaign that cost them the office. Probably the biggest was simply refusing to run on Biden’s record. In fact, the Harris campaign fed votes to the Trump campaign by promising to tackle inflation (which has already been under control for two years). At time, it almost seemed like Harris was running against Biden, rather than Trump. One of the most effective Trump commercials simply played video of Harris talking about rising prices. A campaign that should have been about taking credit for successes and promising to address the failures was almost entirely focused on the failures, as if they had taken place under some other Administration.

In the end, this election was close — if a quarter million votes in the midwest had gone the other way, Harris would have won.² And she did outperform her national pull in the swing states, indicating she was doing something right. It’s very easy to play Wednesday Morning Quarterback.³ But this campaign was winnable.

Hezbollah: Taking advantage of the ongoing Gaza War, Hezbollah decided to get frisky. Their confidence was bolstered by sizzle reels of their supposedly impregnable underground bunkers.

They immediately regretted it. Israel blew up part of the Hezbollah leadership with exploding pagers like something out a James Bond movie. They then blew up the rest with precision strikes. The war went so badly that Hezbollah have now agreed to a ceasefire that will push them out of Southern Lebanon (which they technically should have left in 2006) with their departure enforced by the Lebanese government itself. We’ll see if the ceasefire holds, but they seriously miscalculated what was going to happen.

Trump Cabinet Nominees: When Kristi “Dog Shooter” Noem and Vivek “Dennis the Sorta Menace” Ramaswamy are your less stupid nominations, something has gone quite badly wrong. Many of Trump’s nominees are hilariously unqualified, with their experience consisting of appearances on Fox News. Of course, the joke will be on us when the Republican Senate approves them all.

Dishonorable Mention: J.D. Vance, Ann Selzer, Nikki Haley, Kristi Noem, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Johnson, Kari Lake, Sean Coombs, Andrew Tate, Drake, Kristi Noem, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nancy Mace, the site formerly known as Twitter, Crowdstrike.

(RFK, Jr. is his own special category, which we’ll get into in a throughput. See above about how turkeys are supposed to be more comical than evil.)

Ok. Let’s hose that filth out of our browsers and look at what went right this years for our Golden Drumsticks:

Election Workers In the face of a sustained campaign of lies and calumny, they did their jobs. They endured bomb threats and ignorant MAGA minions screaming in their faces. But the votes were cast, the votes were counted and we knew who’d won before the clock struck midnight. US elections are not perfect but they are a darn sight better than the media would have you believe. And that’s because of thousands of people out there just doing the best they can to keep this clattering shambling democracy going.

Olympic Athletes: Once again, they won with grace and style. While the games didn’t lack for controversy, little of it was generated by American athletes who simply dominated.

The Onion A late entry, but their attempt to purchase Alex Jones’ Infowars and turn its money hose over to Jones’ victims is both wonderful and hilarious. Jones is fighting in court, trying to get a judge to turn over his bankrupt company to an ally who will then give it back to Jones. We’ll see what happens. But at least for now, the biggest factory of lies on the internet is owned by the biggest factory of satire.⁴

Hakeem Jeffries: While the Republican caucus was tearing itself apart and failing to pass anything, Jeffries kept his fractious party in line, got the tiny legislative victories he could and gave the Republicans enough rope to hang themselves. It will be interesting to see what happens when he becomes Speaker in 2026.⁵

Space Flight: This was another great year for spaceflight with NASA, Space-X and Blue Origin scoring victory after victory in the stars. As I have argued before, we are in a new golden age of spaceflight.

Honorable Mention: Taylor Swift, Josh Shapiro, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, John Fetterman, Pope Francis, Bluesky.

1. Or not. As Andrew has pointed out repeatedly, the Democratic coalition is more fractured than it looks and Biden was holding it together. Anti-Trumpism has taped over the cracks, but they are still there. And might have blown apart in an open primary.
2. Although, rather hilariously, while losing the popular vote.
3. Fun too.
4. Honestly, the entire court battle has me mystified. Jones is claiming it’s unfair that the Onion “colluded” with the Sandy Hook families to make sure they got the best settlement out of the purchase. But… it is fair for the company to be purchased by one of Jones’ buddies to give right back to him? There really is a different law for the rich.
5. Assuming we have an election.