Bezos and Musk Sound Just Like Us on Clueless Joe

CLAY: Buck, I love doing this show. We have a lot of fun.

BUCK: We do have fun. That’s one thing that we do that I feel like a lot of radio shows just pound the table and that. We have fun.

CLAY: Yeah, we do have a really good time, and increasingly I love to see our talking points circulating through the media, even if they’re not saying, “Hey, this is an argument that Clay and Buck have been making, when I saw Jeff Bezos come out, Buck, and say basically what we have been saying, which is that Joe Manchin saved the Democrat Party from double-digit inflation, I thought that was a great argument for him to be making.

It evokes an argument we’ve been making, which is a reasonable, rational analysis of what the data reflects and calling to account the party that has led us to the worst inflation in 40 years. And so this morning when I got up and I saw this quote start to circulate, I thought, this sounds a lot like Clay and Buck too. So, if Elon Musk and some of the people around him are listening to the show, we welcome you into the Clay and Buck family because we want as much sanity out there regardless of where it’s coming from. And this is Elon Musk saying basically the same thing we’ve been saying for a while, which is whoever controls Joe Biden’s teleprompter, it is a Ron Burgundy-level presidency. And if you don’t get that reference, I’ll explain it in a moment. But first here is Elon Musk talking about Joe Biden’s incompetence.

.@ElonMusk: “It’s hard to tell what Biden’s doing, to be frank. The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter … The path to power is the path to the teleprompter … If someone were to accidentally lean on the teleprompter, it would be like ‘Anchorman,’ ‘UUASDF123’” pic.twitter.com/2qJKbaWXNr

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 17, 2022

CLAY: And he then goes on to say it’s a Ron Burgundy presidency. Now, for those of you who don’t get that reference, one of Will Ferrell’s best roles ever was playing a San Diego-area 1970s I believe it was, Buck, local newsman, Ron Burgundy, and the conceit of the joke is, if you put in a teleprompter, Burgundy will read it. And it’s a really pretty fantastic, enjoyable movie, Anchorman. I think they made Anchorman 2, which I’m not even —

BUCK: I heard that was not so good.

CLAY: But this is a talking point that you and I have been embracing. I hope somebody like Elon Musk’s gonna start talking about the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency as well and the Weekend at Bernie’s II. But everyone is seeing this. And we even talked, Buck, was it last week or the week before about not only is it a teleprompter presidency, it’s like a full projection screen teleprompter ’cause Joe Biden can’t even read a normal teleprompter. They can’t even use the Oval Office for him.

BUCK: I mean, I’ve referred to him as Mr. Magoo before, which I felt like some people, the younger folks, may not catch that. But that’s an old cartoon about a guy basically, you know, is always confused and… Did you ever see Mr. Magoo, the cartoon —

CLAY: I don’t remember Mr. Magoo. I mean, I know the reference but, I don’t remember watching it a lot.

BUCK: You know, he’d walk up to a bulldozer and think it’s a cow. I mean, that was the old cartoon. Look. I remember early on the primary, this is one of those times that I was wrong but I was wrong for a good reason, and I think that’s worth noting as we do a lot of analysis and things. Sometimes you’re wrong but you’re wrong for a reason that it illuminates something worthwhile anyway.

I assumed early on in the Democrat Party primary there’s no way they’re actually gonna make Joe Biden president. And that was because my assumption was, we can all see this guy is too old for the job. He was a mediocre politician at best. He was a last-minute add-on to the Obama administration so they could claim they had a steady hand in foreign policy or something.

But nobody cared. And Obama, you know, obviously could have had Hillary as the vice president but chose to have Joe Biden as the vice president. I mean, he could have switched it around if he had wanted to. And I think what we’ve seen all throughout this is that I overestimated the Democrats’ seriousness as citizens voting for a guy that they should know isn’t up for this.

At the very beginning of the primary, I was like, it’s not gonna be Joe Biden because… Obviously, I got that wrong. But as I look back at this, I realize that was because I thought that we were kind of operating in the same basic universe of reality. And they want to tell you that somehow this guy — no one thinks he’s good at this job. I mean, I haven’t met a Democrat who will make a compelling case for Joe Biden as a good president.

They may like him better. It’s always, “I like him better than Trump! Trump is a insurrectionist, white nationalist,” all that stuff. There is nothing to point with Joe Biden that is impressive. There’s never been anything to point to with Joe Biden that is impressive. And I think that everything that we had anticipated, Clay, it’s all playing out exactly as we thought. Let me ask you this.

CLAY: It’s worst. I think it’s… Yes, you knew it was gonna be bad. I didn’t think it was gonna be this bad.

BUCK: Right. Has anything…? When we look at the border, at the border, the economy, everything that’s going on right now, has anything surprised you where we are now versus what you would have expected in January of 2020? I feel like we’ve been sitting here — and I don’t just mean us. I mean the right, conservatives, you know, commentary in general, largely.

Not the ones that just attack conservatives on MSNBC for the amusement of libs, but people that actually care about the movement and the country, they’ve been saying this is what’s gonna happen, and it has all happened. Everything from vaccine passports to inflation to a wide open border to the rise in violent crime all across the country. It’s all played out exactly as we said. So it’s almost disorienting because you’re like, so we’re right about everything. How is there even a discussion here? This presidency is horrible!

CLAY: Yeah, and, by the way, the presidency would be even worse if Joe Biden had gotten what he wanted to its full fruition which I think is actually underdiscussed and underanalyzed. And this is the other thing that Elon Musk said, which is you’re seeing guys like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk start to take potshots at Joe Biden. The point here is he has no idea how to solve inflation. And everything that he’s talking about doing would actually make inflation worse. Listen to Elon Musk, a guy who knows a little bit about how business and money works, analyze this.

BUCK: Can I say that the Venezuela example is particularly poignant here because not only is printing currency in excess. Remember, it’s underlying productivity that gives your currency value. And what we decided as a country — and I’m gonna say this. I understand it’s a pandemic year or whatever, but the whole shutdown, send people checks to stay home thing, was a bad idea.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And it happened under Trump. Now, I met with President Trump in, what was it, June of 2020 and by that point he had already said, look, we didn’t know. Now we know. We’re going in a different direction. So, you know, he deserves a little bit of criticism maybe, comparatively to the criticism that I think not just the Biden Democrats but also Fauci and the whole health apparatus gets. But, Clay, in Venezuela not only do they print a lot of money, price controls.

There’s been some really interesting analysis of what happened, because with inflation and also the prices start rising dramatically. They have lower productivity. It really creates a cyclone of economic deprivation. And they said, “Well, now, a washing machine instead of costing, you know, however many…” I think it’s bolivars, right? Instead of costing a thousand bolivars we’re gonna say it costs 500.

Well, then there’s no washing machines in the stores. And then what the government there did was say, well, now the government’s going to actually seize some of the washing machine factories, and it just spirals down and down. And I bring it up because you have Elizabeth Warren saying we should have a commission to look at whether corporate profits right now are acceptable.

I mean, we’re actually talking about putting caps on profits. It’s really not a big leap to start to talk about price controls because that’s effectively… If you’re saying that, you know, we’re gonna limit how much money you can make as a company, you’re gonna have to say we’re gonna limit how much you can charge for your services.

CLAY: No. I mean, it is an outlandish idea for anyone to be floating at this point in time. And that goes to my point, everything that the Democrats are trying to do right now would make things worse, which is, Buck, why we need to hold the line and not allow that to happen.