Advice To New Parents

 

This week's big news is Tim Andrews, the man of a thousand voices, has become a father at the age of fifty.

Tim is a radio guy for those of you that don’t know, providing spot-on impressions of just about everybody on WSB's "The Von Haessler Doctrine"  He’s very talented, and I can’t tell how many times he’s caused me to spew my coffee.  When Tim’s on the radio, I become a regular Redd Foxx drinking ripple.

Fifty is long of tooth to become a Dad for this first time. Oh sure, I know of guys who have traded in Wife Number One for a Newer Model only to have the Newer Model pop out a couple of kids.

But in the Old Dad-New Family paradigm, this old Dad has some experience raising a rug rat.  

Having a kid is one of the most rewarding experiences a person can have.  It is also the most exhausting.

My son was born in 1991. I was thirty-one years old. I’m not sure what happened in the years 1991, 1992, or 1993.  It was all one big blur. 

I know The Braves went from Worst to First, and the country hired someone from Arkansas to be the most powerful person on earth. Something called "Garth Brooks" became famous. That''s about it.

My first bit of advice for a new parent is to sleep as much as possible.

My son, for various reasons, didn’t sleep through the night until he turned one.

We had a friend whose baby slept through the night from day one. My advice:  find a baby like this.

The second bit of advice. Do not compare other kids to your kid.  Girls are generally more advanced than boys, and by more advanced I mean, more human. 

They learn to do potty stuff way sooner than boys. A lot of boys are still pooping in their pants at 15.  (Not true, but it sure seems that way.)

Girls learn how to write and speak very early, while boys mainly communicate using underarm fart noises.

Now, it is not all bad with boys.  Boys generally have better toys than girls, and at least you won’t have to watch many DVDs of girls becoming empowered to be President of The Solar System.

One thing Tim will have to deal with is being The Oldest Dad At Little League.

Back when we were doing rec league baseball, we would run into these Dads who could have been my Dad. I remember one Dad in particular who I thought resembled Grandpa Walton before discovering he was the boy’s father. 

My favorite old dad moment was when the kid ask his old dad for a Powerade. If you do anything semi-athletic with boys under the age of ten, they have to have a gallon of sports drinks close by on the off-chance the boys might dehydrate and die.  The Old Dad's response to the request:  "I'll power your ade."

Finally, my final bit of advice to any new parent is to take a breath and try to do your best.

It takes a village to raise a child, and unfortunately, the village is wrong a lot of the time.

One of my brothers had dyslexia.  When he was in the second grade, my mother went to the principal of our elementary school. She said, “I’ve had Donald (she never referred to him as that unless she was mad at him or it was in a formal setting) tested, and he has dyslexia.”  The principal said, “There’s a lot of that going around,” and proceeded to say that there was something wrong with the way she was parenting.

By the way, before he died, he earned a Master’s Degree.

People will always, happily, give you advice on how to raise YOUR child but for some reason do not want to hear anything you might say about the subject.

This is because their child is the greatest, and yours just happens to be there.  My mother always said, “Every crow thinks theirs is the blackest".

That’s why you never comment on how another child is being raised.  If the parents want to raise him as Amish and teach him his life’s work is building a barn, that’s no skin off your nose.  Let those people raise their kid, and you raise your own.

I think my wife and I have done a pretty good job with our son.  He has a job, a wife, and a house. He calls his momma at least twice and week.

And he gave me this really cool “Buckee” t-shirt I’m wearing right now.

 

Plenty Of Fish

 

The saga of Liz Cheney, the Congresswoman from Wyoming, was a major news story this week if you don't count:

 1) A cyberattack on an oil company that caused long lines at the gas pumps with a sudden jump in prices.  It also caused a jump in the number of memes shared on Facebook showing people hoarding gas, including a new way by putting it in clear plastic bags.

2) The CDC finally granting us poor peasants the privilege of walking around naked-faced if we've had our vaccines.

3) Chick-fil-A limiting the number of dipping sauces they will hand out per meal. I reacted to this news like your grandparents responded to Pearl Harbor.

The saga was an inside baseball Washington story about another mean old Cheney and how she didn't do her job as the number three person in the Republican House leadership.   I'm not sure exactly what that job entails except keeping her lips firmly pressed up against former President Donald J. Trump's tuckus.

It all has to do with Dumb Donald and how he reacted to the attack on The Capital.  

The former President’s reaction to January 6th has been, “What?  Something happened on January 6th?”  He has dismissed it as no big deal as if every losing side has tried to disrupt the official certification of The Electoral College.

I thought after Trump left The White House, he would slowly and surely fade away.  Wrong.

Trump has been squirreled away in Mar-a-Logo, appearing at the occasional wedding reception and reminding the happy couple of how the election was stolen from him because there’s nothing a wedding reception needs more than a lecture about the Dominion voting machines.

Speaker of squirrels, the House of Representatives led by the primary nut, Nancy Pelosi, decided to impeach Trump one week before he left office. 

Liz Cheney was one of the Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump.

All across the land, my fellow Republicans jumped to their feet to applaud one of their own, voting her convictions and standing up for the rule of law.   

Um, this did not happen. Instead, old Liz became number one of the Hit Parade and not in a good way.

President Reagan created “The Eleventh Commandment,” which said, “Thou shalt not criticize another Republican.”  As we all know, President Trump took that commandment and stomped that sucker flat. It all began in 2015, even before the 2016 campaign, Trump pooh-poohed John McCain’s stint in a North Vietnam prison camp during The Vietnam War.  Trump spent The Vietnam War traipsing around New York with his four foot deferments, trying to avoid catching the clap. (His words, not mine.)

You can say what you want about McCain. But you can’t sneeze at his service as a Prisoner of War.

The new Eleventh Commandment appears to be “Thou Shalt Not Criticize President Trump” because your life will be miserable if you do.

It is still early, but there appear to be many people who think this 74-year-old man is the party's future.  He’s not.

 
At least, I hope he’s not.

The GOP has a pretty deep bench, and there’s a lot of good candidates for 2024 out there.

Ron Desantis, the governor of Florida, is almost like Trump except he is smart, articulate, and actually wins arguments with the smarty-pants press when they get stuck in their "Republican Are Evil" mode.
 
Speaking of smart, Tom Cotton, the senator from Arkansas, was a student of Elizabeth Warren’s at Harvard.  He's not Dan Quayle trying to diagram a sentence.

Senator Tim Scott proved the other day that he deserves to be on the national stage.

There are others, but you get the point.  The House GOP Members are still goo-goo-eyed/scared poop-less over Trump.  They are like some boy who is still pining after a girl after she dumped him at the drive-in. Give it up. Trump is old news. He caused the GOP to lose the House, Senate, and The White House. 

There's plenty of fish in the sea. Leaders of a political party are like a bus, and there will be a new one to come along. Get over Trump and move on.

Besides, I haven’t heard one word from Mar-a-Largo about the Chick-fil-A dipping sauce crisis. Whoever can solve that has my vote.

 

 

 

To Cap It Off

 

 

 One of the things about being an old fogey is that you tend to “wax nostalgic,” whatever that means.

Things were so much better in the old days. Let me tell you, sometimes things were not so good.

My parents would tell me stories about having to quit school to get a job to help make ends meet around the house.  I know this is a golden oldie, but my dad told me that when he was 13 years old (this would be around 1930), he walked to Maryland from East Tennessee to look for a job.

I talked to an old-timer one time about the “old days,” and I asked him if he missed them. He said, “NO!  I don’t miss getting up in the middle of the night to go out and sit in an outhouse”.

So I appreciate people when they cut through the misty water colored memories of the past and let you know that some things are better now.

What got me thinking about this was this:

 

I read a lot of articles about baseball caps. I know, I party all the time.

 

I just like baseball caps, and I collect baseball caps. I have favorites.

I like the Boston Red Sox cap. It is simple and elegant. If it was good enough for Ted Williams, Yaz, and Mayday Malone, it is good enough for me. 

 

 

 

I like the blue New York Mets cap over the black ones they wore for a while. The cap is a homage to the Brooklyn Dodgers and The New York Giant-the hat is blue (Dodgers), and the emblem is orange (Giants).

 

 

 

I must say the world went back on its axis when the Milwaukee Brewers went back to their old “glove” hat. The glove is an M and B mushed together.

 

 

I love the Minnesota Twins TC (Twin Cities) cap. When I was a kid, The Twins were on TV a lot. They had Rod Carew, Tony Olivia, and Harmon Killibrew. There is only one thing a man named Harmon Killebrew could do: hit home runs.

 

 

 

 

 

My wife got me a Montreal Expos hat for Father’s Day last year. It always looked like a hat that was designed in Paris. I think the emblem stands for Montreal Expos Baseball, or it could be a dirty word written in French.

 

 

 

I read an article that said the 1973 Atlanta Braves hat, which features a small “a,”  is the best looking hat in Atlanta Braves history. 

It wasn’t.

The reasons had something to do with the 70s, which I lived through.  It wasn’t like walking to Maryland, but it was no day in the park.

As James Lileks points out, the 70s were sandwiched between landing on the Moon and the Space Shuttle. The only thing going on overhead was Skylab, which was also being worked on like a car parked in the backyard.

The country was in a “malaise” back then.  Our President, Jimmy Carter, said so.

We had disco, but, as you might have heard, disco sucks.  There were gas lines, but it wasn’t too bad around here in Georgia.  People got naked a lot. They ran through the streets without any clothes on.

 

It was called "Streaking" and even some members of my saintly class of 1977 went streaking.  I could name names, if I could remember them.  I just hope Ethel didn't look.

It had its good points. “Saturday Night Live” was funny. People didn’t go into a conniption if you told a joke. As far as I remember, nobody was ever canceled

Traffic in Atlanta still stunk, but Atlanta seemed smaller and, in some ways, nicer back in the 70s. 

I’m sure that’s my age showing.

The Braves teams stunk to high heavens back when they were wearing those hats. The only good thing that happened was when Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run in it.

You can keep that cap. I like the one the Braves wore when they won the World Series.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meditations At The End Of The Emergency

 

 Since nobody else is going to say it, I will.

It is over, guys.  The Covid Emergency in the United States is over.

We were assigned the task of flattening the curve. Well, we took that curve and stomped that sucker flat.

 
We are going to have to shout that the pandemic is over because Lord knows nobody else will.

Just this past week, The CDC graciously lifted the guidelines of wearing masks outside.  President Sominex held a special event on the White House grounds to announce that we could go naked face if we were outside.

Of course, he walked to the podium wearing a mask. This after being vaccinated and being in no danger of giving or getting Covid.  Last week, he met with the Prime Minister of Japan, and he wore a double mask. Everybody in the room was vaccinated.

The double mask was the last of Fauci’s greatest hits.  He told us that wearing two masks would give us more protection than wearing one.  Why not three? Wouldn’t that be better than two?

Like The Edsel and New Coke, double masks didn’t catch on, mainly because it was stupid no matter how well-intentioned.

Unlike some folks in my tribe, I do not doubt that Fauci was sincere during the pandemic.  I don’t think he created Covid so he could inject people with a tracking device that would let the Anti-Christ know where they are at.

 
(However, I will say that if you think the vaccine will plant a tracking device in you, you should probably not get the vaccine. You have other pressing issues to take care of.)

While I’m talking about vaccines, can we just give one high five to the former President?

I am the first to admit that President Orange is a world-class (word that rhymes with “gas pole”) and spent way too much of his time trying to prove how tough he was.   However, he did push and fast track the vaccines.

Kyle Wilson of The National Review said, “Last March 5, nine and a half months before FDA approval of the first shot, Trump asked his experts whether we might see a vaccine “within a few months,” and Anthony Fauci instantly corrected him: “A year to a year and a half.” When Trump said in August that he was hopeful we’d see a vaccine by November — it would be November 20 that Pfizer submitted its data to the FDA to request emergency approval — CNN got so far over its skis that it actually ran a bizarre Fact Check of the Future upbraiding the President, pointing out that the obviously irrefutable and always-correct super-duper expert Fauci was still insisting the vaccine “would likely not be available widely until ‘several months’ into 2021.” Say it with me in Trump voice, friends: WRONG.”

The administration has been all over the place when it has come to the vaccine.  They have urged everybody to get one, which is good. But then the President, Press Secretary Red, and Fauci trot out and tell us that we still have to wear our masks and social distance and wash our hands while singing “In A Gadda Da Vida" because there may be a variant out there so life isn't going to go back to 2019 until we give the all clear.

Then they look around and wonder why there is vaccination hesitancy.

Things are beginning to open up. Next week, the Braves will allow full capacity at their games. Concerts are slowly coming back. People are still wearing their masks in Target, but you can tell it is not a sincere. Plus, a lot of people never got the memo that the mask is supposed to go over your nose.

The President needs to go on TV, and instead of urging patience, he should declare victory.  Maybe he could propose we spend another Trillion dollars on a new project like light rails which always fills a Democrat's heart full of joy.

 

Church Chat

 

 

I am one of those awful “Evangelical Christians.” 

 

But first, let me give you my definition of Evangelical Christianity. But before that, let me explain that you can pronounce it “E-vanglical” or “Evan-gelical.” When I'm talking around the house, I say “E-vangelical,” but when I’m talking to others, I say “Evan-gelical” to sound snooty.

 

My definition of Evangelical Christianity:  Christians who believe in the central tenants of Christianity. There is a God, Jesus is the Son of God, The Bible is the written revelation of God, and man was made for potluck dinners.

 

Okay, I made that last one up. My definition of an Evangelical Christian is anyone who can repeat The Apostles’ Creed without crossing their fingers.

 

Evangelical Christianity is a broad, diverse group of people who believe all of this God stuff. God is here, and he is not silent, as one famous Evangelical writer said.

 

While every Christian denomination cannot be described as Evangelical, you can find Evangelicals in every denomination.  Therefore, I believe there are Evangelical Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Mennonites, Free Will Baptists, Churches of Christ Without The Piano, Churches of Christ With The Piano, and the various churches that sound chill like The Wear Your Pajamas Fellowship.

However, when the national news media refers to Evangelicals, they are only thinking about one denomination: Southern Baptists.

Nothing makes The New York Times happier than to find something goofy out about a Southern Baptist leader like Jerry Falwell, Jr.

You might have remembered last year it turned out Jerry wasn’t exactly “saintly” when a picture surfaced of Jerry, Jr with a comely young lady, not his wife, and they looked like they were drinking real wine and not grape juice (you Southern Baptists know what I’m talking about).  The top of their pants were not buttoned, and it looked like it was a post-coital to me. Others may have thought it looks pre-coital.  Anyway, coital was in there somewhere.

It was a huge scandal made even bigger by Falwell’s association with a certain Big Orange Man. 

Falwell was influential in helping Trump with Evangelicals even though Trump didn’t know his Corinthians from a hole in the ground.

Not all.  I repeat. Not all Evangelicals were on The Trump Train.  However, a lot were mainly because the other party decided that the best way to unify the county was to make fun of people they disagreed with.

Sure, it sounds simplistic (and maybe it is), but at least to this Evangelical, the Democratic Party decided the problem with the country was all of the dumb hicks in The Southern Baptist Convention.

  
Then something stupid came on the horizon.  Qanon.

Qanon is a conspiracy group that popped up on 4chan (a message board) that said there is “a cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles running a child sex trafficking ring,” (all Democrats, by the way) and their enemy is Donald J. Trump.  “Q” is  supposedly someone with high government clearance that has access to classified information and because of that has to be anonymous.

Agent One:  “Hey, after the Satan service, can we check on our trafficking ring?.”
Hillary Clinton:  “Sure!"
Barack Obama:  “I’m in!”

There was supposedly a pizza place in Washington, DC, that allegedly held children in the basement for the trafficking ring.  A guy drove to Washington to free the children.  Guess what?  The pizza place didn’t have a basement.

There have been other boneheaded ideas from Qanon, like Trump would be inaugurated on March 4th, 2021 (don’t ask).  When that didn’t happen, then Qanon said he would be inaugurated on March 20th, 2021.  That didn’t happen either if you didn’t notice.

In my circle of Evangelicals, I didn’t hear much about Qanon.  But there are many people out there who think we open every meeting with prayer and a message from Qanon.  We don’t.

Here’s why I never fell for that nonsense:  the “anonymous “part.  If you “can’t” tell me who you are, then I’m not all that interested in what you have to say.  It is as simple as that.  By the way, all of the anonymous and unnamed sources in the various Russian scandals were why I didn’t buy those reports, either.

The bottom line is QAnon has hurt conservatives and Evangelical Christians in particular.   I wonder if QAnon wasn’t something a liberal comedy writer came up with to see how many suckers are Conservative.  Too many.

Yet, I’m not worried about Evangelical Christianity.  We’ll get through this because we can say The Apostle’s Creed without our fingers crossed.

35

  "A man and a woman. A woman and a man.
   Some can. Some can't.  And some can."  ~ Roger Miller

Two weeks ago, my wife and I went to Birmingham, Alabama, for our nephew's wedding.

Our nephew, who was born at Kennestone Hospital, like the rest of us, went to Birmingham-Southern College and met a young lady from New Jersey. They fell in love, and they decided to get married.

For any of you that had young people getting married recently, you know what havoc COVID-19 played with the proceedings. I know young people that had to put off their wedding for several months until it became comfortable to bring Mee-maw and Pee-paw to the ceremony.

Well, my nephew's wedding went on without a hitch. Except, of course, we had to drive through a Category 12 tornado to get to Birmingham.

From Atlanta, Birmingham has always been a reasonably easy drive. It is not a reasonably easy drive when the weather is described as "Armageddon" by AccuWeather Laser Doppler Radar.

The sky was pitch black,  and the rain was coming down in buckets. But, and this is important, from my crack geography skills, I ascertained that the tornadoes (yes, there was more than one) were both north of  Interstate 20 and south of Interstate 20.

So we were able to scoot through the tornado conditions and make it to the hotel without being taken up into a funnel cloud and landing in the Land of Oz. ("Listen, fella, there's only room for one person without a brain.")

To me, this trip is an almost perfect analogy about marriage.

My wife and I celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary this week.  In my college years, I never thought I'd be married 35 minutes, much less 35 years.  I had a unique ability to repel women.

They all had this checklist of qualities: looks, brains, muscles, height,  and money.  I had none of those qualities. However, I was short and had pimples, so I had that going for me.

I had a checklist too.  I insisted that all of my applicants have breasts.

I have friends that had a type of girl they liked.  I did not. To quote Hank Williams, Jr., I liked them tall, I liked them small, and I liked them all.

Well, Lori and I married, and I think we've had a really good marriage.

I don't know how we did it. We just did.

 I don't claim to be a marriage expert.  I am an expert on how to be married to Lori.

I give young men several pieces of advice.

One, the days of this wallflower wife that bows and scrapes to everything the husband says has been over for years.  You can't push her around, and you can't bully her.  It won't work.

You have to figure out how to persuade her without being a total jerk. And that's different for each woman. So good luck, guys!

Two, and this is important, make sure you are on the same page regarding money.  You have to work together on this.  Sometimes the tightwad marries the spendthrift, and that causes a lot of stress.

Being on the same page is probably the glue that holds together many marriages.   You have to decide on so many things in marriages it saves a lot of time if the husband and wife are going in the same direction.

This means you have to agree on things like how many kids to have, homeschooling, who gets to drive the nice car, which church to go to, and what TV show to watch.

One question young couples never think about but will follow them throughout their marriage:  where do you want to eat tonight?

I would probably eat at the same two restaurants every day of my life. My wife likes a little variety.  However, my wife won't eat Chinese food in the summer. I've been working on that for 35 years.

My last bit of advice is about SEX. 

The best quote I've heard on sex in marriage is that men are like light bulbs while women are like ovens.

Men are socialized to look at "girly magazines" for the articles on stereo equipment. If there just happens to be a picture of an airbrushed model buck naked, so be it.

We read "letters" from "real" men that begin with "I never thought it would happen to me" and ends with, "She said I was her most skilled lover, and that included the Florida State football team."

While women watch Hallmark Channel movies that deal with the topics like "Christmas," "Love," and "Love At Christmas."

 Lastly, men do not make love to anyone else besides your wife.  They (and I mean all women, including Hillary Clinton) find this offensive.

No marriage will be without its tornadoes.  

Eleven years ago, it was my brother's death. Then it was my wife's breast cancer. Then her mother died. Then our son graduated from college and married his girlfriend, and we became empty-nesters.

Last year, my wife was diagnosed with AFIB and had a heart ablation. Meanwhile, my blood pressure went out of control, and I was given medicine that made me fall asleep while channel surfing.  

But, we've come through that, and we are a lot wiser than we started.

Now, if we could just figure out where we are going to eat tonight. 

 

 

When Chevy Became Jerry

 I've been thinking a lot about President Gerald R. Ford lately but you don't have to keep me in your thoughts and prayers.

President Ford was the President while I was in high school. Well, he was President most of the time I was in high school. Here's a little history lesson.

As you may remember, there was a President named Richard Nixon.  While he was President, there was a scandal called "Watergate" because the Democratic National Committee headquarters was located there and Nixon sent some toadies to break in and steal all of the Democrats secrets. 

Before you get all interested, there was no sex in it at all.  But there was a lot of lying and a "cover-up."  Since people didn't trust Nixon because he had a fantastic ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth, at the same time, it wasn't long until "Watergate" engulfed the nation. You would not believe what a big deal this was, and this was before social media.

About this same time, Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew (that was his name, honest), had his own problems involving bribes and kickbacks.   Agnew eventually resigned.

So Nixon had to find a new vice president.  That's where Gerald Ford comes in.

Ford was the House Minority Leader and well-liked by both Republicans and Democrats. Nixon chose Ford to replace Agnew.*

Eventually, Nixon had to resign, and on my fifteenth birthday, Ford became President.

There was a brief moment in time when everybody loved good old Jerry Ford. He seemed normal after Johnson and Nixon. That was a definite plus.

The man made his own breakfast. History shows he had English muffins

You couldn't see the other two making English muffins.  Johnson would fire somebody for not making his English muffins, even though he didn't like them.  Nixon would probably set the toaster on fire and deny that the muffins were burnt.

Then came The PARDON. 

 President Ford pardoned President Nixon for the crimes, and the basic Nixoness Nixon did in office.  After the pardon, nothing Ford did was right.      

People started saying Ford wasn't up to the job and he wasn't very bright. Ford was a Yale Law School graduate, but that didn't matter because Lyndon Johnson once said Ford couldn't "walk and chew gum at the same time." (Actually, Johnson said Ford couldn't "fart and chew gum at the same time".  We were still censoring back in the '70s.)

Then Ford, the All-American Center for The Michigan Wolverines, slipped down some steps while exiting Air Force One. 

That was all she wrote because a new television show would soon air that would change comedy.  It was: "NBC's Saturday Night".  We know now it as "Saturday Night Live."

"Saturday Night" featured "The Not Ready For Prime Time Players."  You know their names: Belushi, Ackroyd, Radner, and someone who was Chevy Chase because you were not.

It is hard to describe how big "Saturday Night" was and what a colossal breakout star Chevy Chase became.  Chase had two bits: "Weekend Update," which "Saturday Night Live" still does, and President Ford.

Chase's President Ford was nothing you have ever seen before or since. He didn't try to "imitate" Ford's voice or mannerisms as Dana Carvey did with Dad Bush or Darrell Hammond did with Bill Clinton.  He didn't do anything to "look" like Ford except to do "pratfalls" and generally act like a doofus. 

Imitation was not the highest form of flattery with Chase. He said, "Ford is so inept that the quickest laugh is the cheapest laugh, and the cheapest laugh is the physical joke."  Chase had Ford falling down because he thought Ford was falling flat on his face as President.**

Unlike a certain recent former President, you never would have known that this bothered Ford.  However, in his autobiography, Ford says, "The news coverage was harmful, but even more damaging was the fact that Johnny Carson and Chevy Chase used my ‘missteps’ for their jokes. Their antics — and I’ll admit I laughed at them myself — helped create the public perception of me as a stumbler. And that wasn’t funny."

Ford lost his attempt to become an elected President to Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia.  Chase spent one season at "Saturday Night" and left to become a movie star. He made some good movies, "Caddyshack," "Fletch," "Christmas Vacation," and a boatload of awful movies.

In his old age, Chase is dogged by injuries he suffered doing to the Ford pratfalls and by rumors that he doesn't play well with others. (In fairness to Chase, my son's father-in-law has met Chase and said he was a great guy.)

I started thinking about Ford when I saw President Joe fall up the stairs going into Air Force One.  That story lasted a couple of days. I'm not so sure it should have.  After all, "falls" are a big deal when it comes to the elderly.

There's a couple of reasons for the lack of staying power over Joe's trips.

One, of course, is that Biden has been around forever and a day and is a well-known commodity.  Even though Ford was a well-known person, he was mainly prominent in Washington and Michigan.  Back then, the average American didn't know Ford, and the Ford they knew soon looked like Chevy Chase.

Two, Ford had an (R) beside his name, and Biden has a (D) next to his.

Ford said Poland was free which at the time wasn't free at all. Biden said, "I have never been particularly poor at calculating how to get things done in the United States Senate. So the best way to get something done, if you, if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to, anyway,” 

I would think the Biden comment would send up flares to our ever vigilant Fourth Estate.  But it didn't.

Yet.

Biden cannot afford too many more gaffs or trips.  It will soon define him.   Ask President Ford.

 

*After the Kennedy Assassination, the Twenty-fifth Amendment was added to the Constitution allowing a President to chose a new Vice President if the something happened to the old one. This allowed Nixon to select Ford which led to Ford becoming the First President of the United States that was not on an elected ticket. If there was no Twenty-fifth Amendment, the President would have been Speaker Of The House Carl Albert.

**Ford and Chase did meet on several occasions. They seemed to get along pretty well. It is hard to imagine someone, oh, like Trump being civil to Alec Baldwin.  I will add Ford once said "Chevy Chase is a very funny suburb" which is a great put-down.