Today is Wednesday, March 6, 2024. I’m sorry I didn’t mention that I would miss yesterday’s blog since I was attending my gay men’s reading group discussion on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and staying out late schmoozing with new members at Julius’s after the meeting. When I got home, I began watching 1984’s Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leon’s paean to Jewish gangsters in the 1930s and 1940s. That’s another reason why I didn’t write my blog.

Boy, what a difference a day makes! So the results of Super Tuesday are in and we have, not surprisingly, a no-holds-barred rematch between President Joe Biden and the Orange Hemorrhoid. What a total surreal situation for this country! We all know in our hearts of hearts that one of these candidates should have been banished to some remote island years ago, well, at least after January 6, 2021. He should NOT be running again for president since he has violated his oath of office once already! But here we are! It’s totally screwy. And tomorrow Biden will deliver his State of the Union address. This will be Biden’s night to remind amnesiac voters that we were not better under the Orange Hemorrhoid just 4 years ago. Hell, we were in the grip of a raging pandemic – with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying as a result of Trump’s gargantuan negligence. How stupid are we that we will have forgotten this already?

All Biden has to do tomorrow night is to remind voters that Herr Drumpf was single-handedly responsible for appointing three far-right jurists to the Supreme Court who eventually overturned a woman’s reproductive rights. And now Republicans are responsible for the terrible Alabama Supreme Court decision to outlaw in vitro fertilization (IVF) in that state. Those two facts alone should create a tsunami of ballot box repudiation of all Republicans on the ballot. I can’t believe this won’t bring out tons of voters in November.

Now that Nikki Haley is officially out of the race, the Dumpster known as Donald Duck did not acquit himself so magnanimously when she announced her departure from the race because he decided to insult Haley’s supporters, even though he desperately needs them in November. So this stupid act by a buffoon running for president was highlighted in a Business Insider article by Brent D. Griffiths entitled “Trump can insult Haley’s supporters all he wants, but he’ll need them in November.”

So as he usually puts his foot in his mouth, Donald Duck couldn’t help himself yesterday when he announced on his asinine Truth Social platform, “Nikki Haley got TROUNCED last night.” He did include a lukewarm brief plea for Haley voters to back him, but he also insulted some of them. “His decision to offer a parting blow to former UN ambassador Niki Haley might satisfy his current appetite. But the reality is simple: The former president will need Haley’s voters come November.”

A large percentage of Haley voters, 79 percent, have said, according to ABC News, they would be dissatisfied with Dump as the GOP nominee, per a combination of all the available entrance and exit polling data. The Washington Post cited Quinnipiac University, which found that while a larger portion of Republican and Republican-leaning Haley voters would back Drumpf, 37 percent would vote for Biden. That is a significant margin, in my mind.

Unlike the Orange Whiner, Biden quickly offered an appeal to Haley’s voters, which is what Drumpf should have done immediately, but his damn arrogance got in the way.

Biden said, “Donald Trump made it clear he doesn’t want Nikki Haley’s supporters. I want to be clear: There is a place for them in my campaign.” The president offered this in a statement released by his campaign.

The GOP primary showed how Drumpf continues to struggle in suburban areas that often have more educated voters, which is not his usual base.

In many ways, Americans have never seen an election like the one that will now unfold in earnest. A former president has never been criminally charged – until now. Trump faces 91 criminal counts. Also, only a handful of former presidents have ever flirted with trying to retake the White House. Only Grover Cleveland has succeeded. And Drumpf will not, in my opinion.

However, after watching MSNBC tonight, I’m just as disappointed in the former female candidate for president as I’m disappointed in the “Turtle,” “Bitch” McConnell who threw his lily-white support behind Chump as the putative “Reputin” nominee for president. What a bastard! Instead of urging her supporters to throw their support behind President Joe Biden, Haley wrongly urged them to support a democracy-destroying candidate. I hate her now! Even though she didn’t outright endorse him, she actually did, by saying, “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it who did not support him, and I hope he does that.” She decided to choose a corrupt party instead of country! Damn her!

As for my discussion group yesterday, I dare say I received an illuminating overview of the novel we were there to discuss, Woolf’s 1928 gender-bending “biography,” Orlando. I am always awed by the number of men who decide to come to a monthly meeting and am awed by their erudition. I wonder if anyone writes there as a profession. Last night was no exception; we proceeded to practically closing time at the library, which is 8. I didn’t think we had it in ourselves to discuss the book for that long a time, but we did. We rarely went off-target. At the beginning, we all introduced ourselves by mentioning some cultural event we attended like a play or movie or dance recital. When it was my turn to talk, I mentioned the play we saw in February, Prayer for the French Republic. For most of the ninety minutes, I listened to my more intelligent colleagues discourse on Woolf’s book, a book that I struggled through. I did make a statement, though, when I mentioned meeting the group of seniors last week on the Upper West Side and talking to the one elderly member who wrote a paper on color in Woolf’s novels.

Not that I’m going to reread the novel because of my newly enlightened view of it spurred by the men’s discussion of it, I would possibly consider the notion of rereading another Woolf novel, and the one I’m thinking of rereading is Mrs. Dalloway. This novel was published before Orlando, in 1925. Of course, I’m committed to now reading our next book: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. I won’t start that until the middle of March.

After the meeting, a group of us walked around the corner to the oldest gay bar in New York, Julius’s. There I stood in a cluster of about three members to discuss everything from the latest FX series on Truman Capote and his “swans” to a member’s intriguing new venture, giving guided tours of New York’s history. He gave me a brochure advertising his tours with a picture of him on the back. This man’s name was “Jerry,” and I left the bar with him after 9 where we took the E together. He got off at Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street while I continued toward Forest Hills.

Tomorrow will be a big night then for the sitting president. Watch his speech, everyone.

Stay safe and be well.

Can you see the cat stuffing himself under the dishwasher here?