Five Quick Things: Joe Biden’s Legacy Of Suck

I say all the time when I write these 5QT columns that I want to make them actually quick, and I often fail miserably in that endeavor.

But suffused with an added vigor for the task, and more importantly an impatience to get this week over with, we will try again. I’m at least getting this down under 2,000 words, for your benefit and mine.

Starting with the over-abbreviated intro, as you can see.

1. Oh, Yeah, He’s Got a Legacy, All Right

On Wednesday night, Joe Biden took to the airwaves to babble away at his fellow Americans, touting his “legacy” as president and then whining, in a style he attempted to steal from Dwight Eisenhower in the same way he pilfered Neil Kinnock’s speeches all those years ago, about “oligarchs” in Big Tech whom he was perfectly happy with until a year ago.

At The Hayride and RVIVR, I put up a post in response to that. I don’t care about anything Biden said in his speech; those aren’t his words and he barely comprehended them as he read them off that teleprompter.

But he’s got a legacy. That can’t be denied. The problem is that his legacy isn’t what he thinks it is. Biden thinks he’s a progressive zero, but what he really amounts to as a president is such a colossal failure as to actually end a political era.

If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know the structure of American political history I talk about often (it’s a major theme of The Revivalist Manifesto, as you might know). Which is that we’ve had three major eras in American politics. I get into the details of that more in the Hayride/RVIVR piece, but my thesis for a while has been that the third of those eras is ending.

And the previous endings of political eras in America have come courtesy of disastrous presidencies. John Adams’s brutal term before Thomas Jefferson blew him away in the election of 1800 precursed the beginning of the major political eras in our history was the first era and then came the fiascoes of James Buchanan, who ended it, and Herbert Hoover, who ended the second.

That brings me to Joe Biden.

Biden’s presidency has all the hallmarks of the Adams, Buchanan, and Hoover disasters. And the shift in public preferences evident last November and in the time since begins to look like a whole new era is beginning.

You can discount this coming from me because I wrote an entire book predicting the fourth era was coming. I actually wrote that book in advance of the 2022 midterm election, in which the Republicans were supposed to do a lot better than they did. When I wrote Racism, Revenge and Ruin: It’s All Obama shortly after The Revivalist Manifesto, what was unsaid in that book was the thought experiment that maybe the fourth era had already begun and it was 2008 which was the pivotal election that brought it to life.

But I don’t think that’s true. I think it was November. I think Joe Biden is the James Buchanan or Herbert Hoover of today.

Feel free to read the whole thing. Time will tell if I’m right about Biden. I’m pretty confident that I am, though.

2. Done With Trump, Or Done With Barry?

You might have seen this Michelle Obama press release dressed up as a news story by the Hill…

Michelle Obama is done with President-elect Trump, if her decision to skip next week’s inauguration means anything.

The former first lady, who once called on Democrats to go high when Trump’s Republican Party goes low, will not be going to the Capitol to watch Trump take the presidential oath for a second time, leaving her husband, former President Obama, to go it alone.

Longtime allies of the former first lady say she is sending a powerful statement by skipping the event.

They say she wants nothing to do with a man undeserving of the presidency and is making no effort to hide her disdain for Trump.

“She meant every word she said on the campaign trail with every fiber of her being,” one ally said. “And she’s no hypocrite.”

Right, whatever. OK. Michelle Obama is no hypocrite. The global warming loon who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, and the race-hustler who had a job shuffling poor black people to dingy medical clinics so that the University of Chicago hospital wouldn’t get inundated with Medicaid patients and the indigent.

Please.

Michelle isn’t just skipping Trump’s inauguration. She skipped Jimmy Carter’s funeral, too.

So what else is going on? Well, there’s an awful lot of this out there…

There are strong rumors circulating about a possible divorce between Michelle “Big Mike” Obama and Barack Obama.

Speculation is growing as Michelle has already missed Jimmy Carter’s funeral and will once again be skipping Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration, which Barack will… pic.twitter.com/qP3V7jqh14

— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) January 16, 2025

Wayne Allyn Root reacts to speculated news that Barack and Michelle Obama may be headed for divorce. @realwayneroot pic.twitter.com/L0agkTuJmI

— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) January 16, 2025

‘Trouble in Paradise’: Are Barack and Michelle Obama on the Outs? https://t.co/lOowrfqQy5

— Headline USA (@HeadlineUSA) January 10, 2025

Hey, I’m just passing along what others are saying. I have no dog in this fight. If Michelle Obama wants to ban herself from public view regardless of what circumstance that flows from, I’m all for it.

3. The Tip Wars Are Heating Up

You may have noticed that you are now being demanded to leave tips for practically everything nowadays. It isn’t just restaurants and bars and coffee shops anymore.

And it’s understandable that these demands are being met, because the people expecting a tip tend to be on the lower end of the economic food chain, and with Biden’s campaign of predatory inflation over the past four years those folks have been devastated in their ability to make ends meet without heroic effort on the job(s).

The problem is that the public is squeezed as well. And with the various companies out there getting more aggressive about demanding that you tip their employees — because they’re squeezed, too, and they’ve got to find a way to avoid labor costs kicking them in the teeth — the inevitable pushback has begun.

The size of tips left by American restaurant-goers has shrunk in recent years.

Across the country, the overall tipping average for restaurants came in at 18.8 percent in the third quarter of 2024, Toast data based on U.S. restaurants that use its systems showed.

While that rate remained steady from the prior quarter, it has declined from 19 percent in the third quarter of 2022 and from 19.2 percent in the same period in 2021, the data indicated.

For full-service restaurants specifically, the average rate for tips was 19.3 percent, lower than the 19.6 percent rate seen in 2022’s third-quarter and the 19.8 percent tracked the year before that, per Toast.

The percentage that people typically tipped when visiting quick-service restaurants in America has experienced a decrease, as well. It hovered at 15.9 percent in the third quarter of 2024, marking a decline from 16.1 percent in the third quarters during the two years prior to that and 16.5 percent in 2021’s third quarter.

Tipping rates for both types of restaurants in 2024’s third quarter were also down compared to the same period in pre-COVID 2018 and 2019, Toast data showed.

Some experts attributed those decreases in average restaurant tipping rates, earlier reported by the Wall Street Journal, to “tipping fatigue.”

“Consumers have reached something called ‘tipping fatigue,’” Ted Jenkin, co-founder of oXYGen Financial, told FOX Business. “Americans do want to tip a job well done, but they don’t want to be told what they should tip while someone watches them enter their tip. It’s that tipping pressure of the automated systems that is creating this counterculture of people wanting to tip less.”

And here’s the big piece…

The share of American adults giving tips every time to hairstylists, food delivery people, baristas and certain other service workers has declined between 2021 and 2024, Bankrate’s survey showed.

For baristas, the share went from 23 percent in 2021 to 20 percent last year. Forty-one percent “always” tipped their taxi or rideshare drivers in 2024, a decrease from 48 percent in 2021, according to the survey. It also found the share of people tipping hairstyles every time dropped 8 percent over the same period.

Rossman pointed to inflation impacting Americans’ wallets as the “main explanation,” but noted other things have been at play as well, leading to “tip fatigue.”

“Many people are annoyed with tipping culture,” he said, adding that 59 percent of American adults hold “at least one negative view” about tipping.

This looks for all the world like a vicious cycle. When your government wastes too much money on wealth redistribution you get inflation, which is too much money chasing too few goods. The way inflation is supposed to be remedied is with an increase in production and that creates an equilibrium. But Team Biden never got out of the way and let the production increase happen, so what ultimately happens is that the production shortage makes people begin hoarding what money they can.

And tipping is the ultimate luxury item.

Another way to explain this is that when government overtaxes you, or even when it drives prices up and thus reduces your economic freedom, you inevitably become less generous. Call this Biden’s legacy if you want, because it certainly qualifies.

4. On the Hamas Deal

I don’t have a ton of particulars on this cease-fire arrangement that Israel and Hamas agreed to, except that it looks like a bad deal for Israel. I suspect that Bibi Netanyahu agreed to it because (1) the Israelis have been at this war in Gaza and elsewhere for well more than a year and they’re tired of fighting, and (2) Netanyahu knows that, unlike Biden, he can actually count on Trump for support if and when a cease-fire deal is broken.

But 33 hostages, some if not most of whom will turn out to be dead, for 1000 Palestinian terrorists is a terrible deal.

Worse is the knowledge that whatever cease-fire gets announced isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

No “deal” you make with Hamas is going to stick.

Hamas doesn’t honor deals with infidels.

Israel knows this. They’re tired of fighting. But Hamas won’t abide by any deal they strike with Israel, and Biden trying to take credit for this one will only make him look like more of a…

— Scott McKay (@TheHayride) January 16, 2025

5. Landman

My friends who work in oil and gas, and especially the few of them who do it in West Texas, have mixed opinions, at best, with Taylor Sheridan’s hit Paramount Plus show, the first season of which ended with Sunday’s episode.

Their objection is that, no, this is not an accurate depiction of what oil drilling in the Permian Basin is like. There is a little bit of chaos, and some of the man-camps that have been put up in Midland and Odessa are a bit on the rough side as folks of every economic strata are in the oil patch making a fortune working blue-collar jobs, but negotiations with drug cartel bosses and National Guard air attacks are not common to the everyday experience.

And the final episode of the season, though certainly climactic, isn’t within the bounds of plausibility even if you’re not in oil and gas.

That said, there are some absolutely golden moments in that season, and for those, it’s definitely worth watching.

I could show a number of them. But this, from the episode of a week and a half ago, is the best one.

To set the scene, Billy Bob Thornton plays the main character, a field executive for a mid-size independent oil company operating in West Texas. Jon Hamm plays his boss, the founder and president of M-Tex, the company in question. But Hamm’s character is laid up in the hospital after a heart attack which leaves him in very bad shape, and he has a visitor, a fellow oil and gas tycoon, who drops by his hospital room to lend him some life advice…

Most people — hell, most Dallas Cowboys fans — could do with less Jerry Jones in their lives rather than more. But this Jerry Jones doesn’t fit that impression at all.

It’s a great scene. And if you watched the show all the way to the end of the season you’ll be even more impressed with it given what happens after Jones leaves that hospital.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Woke Has Gone Broke at the Confirmation Hearings

BlackRock and American Airlines: Is Larry Fink the New Sam Bankman-Fried?

Five Quick Things: The Sum of All Frauds in Los Angeles

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