WAS VANCE FOLLOWING TRUMP'S ORDERS WHEN HE REFUSED TO APOLOGIZE TO CAITLIN UPTON?

While waiting for CNN to air its interview with Kamala Harris on Thursday, J.D. Vance tweeted a cruel and dated meme:

Caitlin Upton was 18 and competing in the Miss Teen USA 2007 pageant when her stumbling response to a question about why some Americans couldn’t find their own country on the map became an early viral sensation....

So bad was the mockery that followed, she told New York Magazine in 2015, that she contemplated suicide.

But on Thursday, 17 years after Upton’s moment, Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance posted a video of Upton’s humiliation with the caption, “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.”

Upton -- now 35, a mother of two, and a Trump supporter -- tweeted this, then deleted her X account:

It’s a shame that 17 years later this is still being brought up. There’s not too much else to say about it at this point. Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying needs to stop.

Asked about this on CNN, Vance refused to apologize:

“Politics has got way too lame. You can have some fun while making an argument to the American people about improving their lives,” he said. “I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke but I wish the best for Caitlin and hope she’s doing well.”

He said a lot more than that, and most of it was not empathetic:

"Look, I've said a lot of things on camera, I've said a lot of stupid things on camera. Sometimes when you're in the public eye, you make mistakes and, again, I think the best way to deal with it is to laugh at ourselves, laugh at this stuff, and try to have some fun and politics. I posted a meme from 20 years ago, and I think the fact that we're talking about that instead of the fact that American families can't afford groceries or health care, young families can't afford to buy a home to raise their families, and those are the real crises that we should focus on, and there's nothing that says that we can't tell some jokes along the way while we to deal with a very serious business of bringing back our public policy."

Somewhere in there was a shred of humanity -- "I wish the best for Caitlin and hope she’s doing well." But an apology? Vance said, "I’m not going to apologize."

I assume he's not allowed to apologize.

Vance is Donald Trump's running mate. We all know that one of the principles Trump learned from his mentor Roy Cohn was "Never apologize." Years ago, Trump acknowledged this in a conversation with Howie Carr, a right-wing columnist and radio host: "Whatever you do, don’t apologize. You never hear me apologize, do you?"

When Trump was considering Vance for the VP slot, I assume that the two of them didn't have many deep conversations about policy. But I'm sure Trump told Vance never to say he's sorry. A story in The New York Times tells us that Trump is watching Vance respond to controversies, many of them self-inflicted, and the former president likes what he sees:

Mr. Vance’s relentless pace of full-throttle performances as Mr. Trump’s well-trained attack dog has pleased the former president....

Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations, according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

It's hard to measure up to Trump's sheer lack of empathy -- we saw that recently when Trump posed with a grin and a thumbs-up while standing over a grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Vance seems almost as cold and unfeeling as Trump, but he did know enough to wish Caitlin Upton well. It would have been a short step from there to an apology, even a perfuctory one. But Vance is an ambitious guy who knows how to follow the rules set down by his patron of the moment. Right now, that patron is Trump. I think Trump ordered Vance never to apologize on the campaign trail -- and I think Vance is following orders.

TRUMP'S ARLINGTON STUNT REVEALS HOW MUCH REPUBLICAN VOTERS HATE US

Here's an exchange I saw at Bluesky in response to stories about Donald Trump's decision to film a campaign video at Arlington National Cemetery, in defiance of military regulations and federal law:

I agree that Republican voters don't always value what they claim to value. Many of these voters claim to believe in traditional Christian sexual morality, but I don't think they really object when a man they admire has sex outside of marriage, as long as it's heterosexual and there are no obvious consequences. I think Christians who preach sexual purity have no problem with Trump's sex life.

In some cases, I think their values come with obvious exceptions. For decades, Republicans have claimed to value the military and U.S. troops -- but it didn't surprise me when Trump got away with attacking John McCain in 2015. McCain was widely reviled on the right for supporting immigration reform. At Free Republic, where I lurked regularly at the time, he was frequently referred to as "Juan McCain." So the GOP rank-and-file respected the troops -- but not him.

Nevertheless, I think these voters are sincere about many of their beliefs. I think they're still pro-military. I think they sincerely oppose abortion. And I think they're extremely anti-vaccine.

Yet Trump brags about how quickly COVID vaccines were developed on his watch. He's been backing away from support for strict abortion bans. And he routinely denigrates the troops.

Yet his voters love him anyway. Why? Because even if they hate abortion or COVID vaccines or disrespect for the troops, they hate us more.

They love Trump even when he violates their principles because no one seems to hate liberals, Democrats, the media, LGBTQ people, Blacks, Hispanics, and feminists as much as he does. No one seems to enjoy hating all those groups as much as he does. So his transgressions are forgiven.

Republican voters aren't lying about their values -- they simply value their hatred of their enemies more than anything else. And there's no one in politics right now who shares that value more clearly than Donald Trump.

WE KNOW THE MOTIVE OF THE TRUMP SHOOTER. WE SHOULD STOP SAYING WE DON'T.

Yesterday The New York Times reported this about Donald Trump's would-be assassin:

The man who tried to kill former President Donald J. Trump in July first showed an interest in committing acts of public violence in 2019 but narrowed his focus to Mr. Trump after the announcement of his rally in Butler, Pa., according to an F.B.I. analysis of his electronics.

Investigators — who performed an exhaustive search of his devices and online accounts — do not believe that Thomas Crooks ... was motivated by a specific political ideology....

Starting as a teenager in 2019 through this year, Mr. Crooks progressed from searching “detonating cord,” “blasting cap” and “how to make a bomb from fertilizer” to seeking detailed information about the activities and whereabouts of politicians in both parties. By late 2023, his search history included queries related to Mr. Trump, President Biden and both parties’ conventions, the officials said.

The Times story says (emphasis added):

While Mr. Crooks’s motive remains opaque, his online searches reveal someone who was looking for an opportunity to pull off a spectacular attack that would garner widespread attention, by either inflicting mass casualties or killing someone famous. Thus far, that profile more closely resembles that of a mass shooter than a politically motivated assassin.

UPI's story adds:

Crooks is reported to have conducted "more than 60 searches related to former President Trump and President Biden within the month leading up to the attack," according to the FBI.

Other online searches included, "How far was Lee Harvey Oswald from John F. Kennedy" and "Where will Trump speak from at Butler Farm Show?" according to officials.

According to UPI:

The FBI said the 20-year-old gunman was "hyper-focused" on a "target of opportunity," rather than any political ideology.

Yet the UPI story bears this headline:

FBI reveals new details, no motive in Trump assassination attempt

Why do we keep saying we can't determine Thomas Crooks's motive? The desire "to pull off a spectacular attack that would garner widespread attention" clearly was his motive.

And he wasn't just focused on the presidential election, as we learned from earlier news reports:

The gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump searched online for a member of the Royal family as he was planning his attack, FBI investigators have said....

He also searched for Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, and Merrick Garland, the US attorney general.

And:

Investigators said Crooks appeared to be worried about his mental health, searching for “major depressive disorder” before carrying out the attack.

Crooks didn't need a political motive to take a shot at a prominent politician, any more than John Hinckley did. He was a lost boy who thought he could give his life meaning by killing someone famous. So we have our answer.

The media's insistence that Crooks's motive is still mysterious gives fuel to Republican conspiracy theories. To the GOP, it's a simple statement of fact that "they" -- meaning we -- tried to kill Trump for political reasons.

At a rally in NC, JD Vance stated, "They tried to kill him," referencing an assassination attempt on Trump.

However, the suspect was a registered Republican, contradicting Vance’s implication. Such dangerous rhetoric fuels stochastic terrorism. @atrupar pic.twitter.com/aUMadauTun

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) August 21, 2024

Maria Bartiromo on Trump: "They tried to even kill him."

(The guy who shot at Trump was a registered Republican with no known political motive, so this is some highly irresponsible shit.) pic.twitter.com/71y46cfqYT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 28, 2024

We know that Crooks registered to vote as a Republican but also once gave $15 to a Democratic get-out-the-vote organization. The New York Times quotes Kevin Rojek, an FBI special agent in charge:

An analysis of his search history, and several encrypted email accounts, has revealed no “definitive ideology,” Mr. Rojek added, “either left-leaning or right-leaning — it’s really been a mixture.”

So he wasn't a political assassin. His motive was his own pain. Republicans are deceiving is when thay say his motive was politics.

MORE ON HARRIS, TRUMP, AND INCUMBENCY

I'm back -- thank you, Yas and Tom, for some exceptional posts. I'm still thinking about the concept Yas discussed on Monday -- "afterwardsness" -- and wondering whether Kamala Harris's campaign has gotten us there yet. I think she may have persuaded voters to believe that we're turning the page on Trump, though I wonder whether some voters still feel they can't move to a period "after" the inflation of President Biden's first two years. (Compound interest is a bitch.) Maybe Harris can give voters more hope.

I'd also like to talk about Tom's last post. Marc Thiessen is an old-school GOP propagandist and rarely worth taking seriously, but it's true that, as he says, only one sitting vice president has won a presidential election in the past 188 years. That was George H.W. Bush in 1988. VPs tend to look passive and weak when they're in office, and Bush was no exception. He trailed badly just after the Democratic convention in '88. So why did he win?

He won because his campaign made the '88 election a referendum on his opponent, Mike Dukakis, rather than on his own administration. If you remember that election, what do you remember? Mike Dukakis in a tank wearing a helmet that made him look like a dorky alien. Dukakis giving a cold, clinical answer to a truly horrifying CNN debate question about whether he'd support the death penalty if his wife were raped and murdered. (The "liberal" media was known to amplify right-wing talking points during presidential campaigns long before Donald Trump.) And probably the most easily recalled image of that campaign was a still of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who committed further violent crimes while on furlough in Dukakis's Massachusetts.

Buash won because the entire general election campaign was based on Republican messaging about Dukakis: that the cerebral Massachusetts governor had no foreign policy experience and would be no match for foreign foes, and, especially, that he was too liberal on crime. Only a small percentage of the country had lived in Massachusetts under Dukakis, while we'd all lived under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but America voted based on Dukakis's record, or at least the GOP's narrative of that record, not on Bush's.

What Republicans did to Dukakis that year will be relatively easy for Harris to do this year. Trump has been president. He's associated with genuinely radical policies and appalling ideas about how to govern that we've seen in some form.

As Tom says, Josh Marshall is right: Trump struts around as if he's never stopped being president, and much of his agenda is retribution for what he regard as mistreatment he suffered when he was president.

But there's more than that. On abortion, we still live in Donald Trump's America. The attacks on school libraries and the backlashes against trans people, workplace diversity, and school curricula that are honest about America's racial history are all the work of Trumpian Republicans -- and they're happening now. We know that America became a meaner and more bigoted country when Trump was president, and the rage and bigotry haven't gone away. We also know that Trump plans to make America even meaner and nastier. So in many ways it still is his country. In many ways he really is the incumbent.

So Harris can make this election a referendum on Trump -- and she can win that way.

The Incumbent Trap

Today Marc Thiessen, former spokesman for Jesse Helms and defender of torture, tries to throw some cold water on Kamalamentum with a piece titled A sitting VP has won once in 188 years. Harris isn’t likely to be next.

The piece overall amounts to this never happens, therefore this isn't happening, and eventually Thiessen arrives at an historical analogy he finds suitably comforting:

The closer historical analogy to Harris’s bid is...1968, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey ran to succeed the deeply unpopular Johnson amid crushing inflation, global turmoil and antiwar protests. The difference between then and now is that Biden is almost 10 points less popular today than LBJ was in 1968, when voters rejected Humphrey as his successor.

Of course it escapes Thiessen's notice that Humphrey 1) was kneecapped by Johnson, 2) was beaten up in an acrimonious nomination process, and 3) almost won anyway.

But his real point is to emphasize that Harris=Biden, something the Trump campaign has been woefully unable to do so far. The subhead says it all ("Voters should realize: A Harris presidency would be a second Biden term."), and conveys Thiessen's palpable frustration that the voters just don't get it. The closing graf is part plea, part attempt to make it so by saying it's so:

Trump needs to make clear that Harris not only helped craft those Biden catastrophes, but also she plans to double down on the administration’s failures — and that a Harris presidency would be a second Biden term. Because history shows that when a sitting vice president runs to succeed a sitting president, the election is a referendum on the current commander in chief.

 But the election currently isn't a referendum on Biden, and that's the subject of an excellent piece by Josh Marshall last Friday:

This morning on Twitter, Tim Murtaugh, a former Trump campaign spokesman, concluded a tweet attacking Harris by writing: “Her whole vacant message sounds like it’s from a party that’s out of power. But they’re her messes.” Through the spittle and frustration you can see him making a point which quite understandably has Trump’s campaign angry and bewildered. Harris has made Trump into the incumbent with her as the challenger running on a campaign message to turn the page....The Trump campaign itself is telling us this, almost in spite of itself. And it’s worth taking a moment to consider how exactly this manages to be the case. Since Harris is...literally the incumbent Vice President.

 Of course there are good reasons to consider Trump the incumbent: he has actually been president, and as Yas notes we've been living under his threat for a long time now. And $540 million says people are pretty fucking sick of it.

But Marshall makes another point, which is that if Trump is seen as the incumbent it's his own goddamn fault:

But there’s another paradoxical way that Trump himself laid the groundwork for this campaign, and made it possible for Harris to turn his own political heft against him. The centerpiece of Trump’s post-presidency is the wicked conceit that he never stopped being president at all. At the most basic level he never admitted that he lost the 2020 campaign....He still calls himself president. He demands and universally receives that billing from his followers. He moves through the country with the trappings and insignia of the presidency. He continues to meet with foreign heads of state, not as an elder statesman but as though he never left office. He even argues that national secrets and presidential documents are his personal property....If Trump and his toadies are now complaining that Harris is treating him like the incumbent it is because in ways vast and small he has acted like one and demanded to be treated like one for almost four years. She’s taken his most perverse and vainglorious conceit and turned it into a massive liability.

The policy agenda matches this. A challenger talks about a new future. Trump hasn’t done that at all....Trump’s entire platform is retribution — retribution for his 2020 defeat, which he lacks the character to recognize, and retribution for what he considers his mistreatment during his term as president....Trump’s true second term agenda is undoing and getting even for what he’s mad about from the first term.

Hence the futility of Thiessen's position. Trump can't frame VP Harris as the incumbent because it goes against everything he's campaigning on, against his very definition of himself.  Events could occur that refocus the race and tie her more closely to President Biden. But it isn't going to be the Trump campaign that does it. 

Joe Did What? Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

Of course we had a lot of other things on our minds in January 2021, with the pandemic raging and the schools in crisis and the economy in collapse and the criminality of Trump unrebuked, and a lot of work to do, which we certainly set about doing, under the cool and imaginative leadership of Speaker Pelosi and President Biden (and maybe less from Attorney General Garland). Now we've gotten rid of them, or they've gotten rid of themselves, depending on how you look at it, and to some of us it almost looks as if that's what we were celebrating, the demise of our own beloved old folks, which can't really be what we mean, can it?

And it struck me that the Lacanian theory I'd just stumbled over offered an alternative way of looking at it: that we've been living with a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder from the horror that begins with Donald Trump's inexplicable election to the presidency in 2016 and ends with his flight from Washington on Inauguration Day 2021, which we are only now, literally après coup, able to emerge.

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades.

The Border Patrol endorsed it.

But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign. So he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.

Well, I refuse to play politics  with our security. Here is my pledge to you:  As President, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed.  And I will sign it into law.

I think it should be noted, in the first place, that the bill in question, mostly written by Senator James Lankford (R-OK) and introduced in February, wasn't intended to "close the border" but to bring it under control, especially by hiring a lot of border patrol officers and legal personnel, including judges, to speed up the processing of the asylum claims so that the claimants can leave the border area, some of them getting deported and others getting approved on the spot instead of being sent to join families and friends to await their hearings, scheduled years away, as in the old system. It was kind of offensive to those of us who take a more "progressive" or "liberal" view on immigration, in its failure to engage on the more important issue of the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants who have been living here in many cases for decades, including the "dreamers" who have never lived anywhere else. Those are the ones Trump has promised to expel in the "mass deportations" that were such a hit in the Republican Convention in July, except he keeps saying there are 20 million or more. 

It's nothing like the comprehensive approach we've been waiting for for 15 or 20 years. I don't love it, certainly, and wish Biden and Harris wouldn't act like it's a solution to all our problems. But it really would have alleviated the chaos at the Mexican border, and it's really disgusting that Trump was able to kill it by ordering Republican senators not to back it (poor Lankford himself had to vote against his own bill).

The Lucky and the Doomed

 Back in the Reagan era, trying to make sense of political realities that made no earthly sense to me, I came up with a theory of politics I called The Lucky and the Doomed. My theory was that for many or most people voting was a superstitious act; that people wanted to associate themselves with the lucky, and voted accordingly, in the hope that some of that luck would rub off on them; and that conversely, they shunned the unlucky--the Carters, the Mondales, the Dukakises--to avoid being tainted by misfortune.

It's glib, sure, but it fit the facts at the time. 

I thought about that theory when I saw the clip of J.D. Vance visiting a donut shop.

JD Vance buys donuts in Holt’s Sweet Shop in Valdosta Georgia pic.twitter.com/xOO2j3AoRf

— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) August 22, 2024

W. Kamau Bell has an extended critique of this ("Fire your whole team. They clearly hate you. This is TV production 101, and they failed it."), with which I largely agree except that I'm not sure Vance even has a team. I feel like Trump just said "do we have any interns who aren't doing anything? Good, they can babysit Vance", partly to make sure Vance doesn't upstage him, partly as passive-aggressive revenge for Vance making him look bad, and partly because he's too damn cheap to hire anybody who knows what they're doing.

This comes on top of a bunch of sad JD events, from sparsely attended rallies to his inability to answer the world's most softball question.

Meanwhile, Trump called in to Fox last night and came off as a cross between Norma Desmond and Rupert Pupkin.

Trump on his strategy to stop Harris's momentum: "She's not having success. I'm doing great with the Hispanic voters. I'm doing great with Black men. I'm doing great with women because women want safety." (In other words his strategy is do deny reality.) pic.twitter.com/QMrMt3Jp4A

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 23, 2024

I'm not sure who's more desperate here: Trump, or the Fox hosts trying to get him to shut the fuck up with the delusional ranting so they can ask some softball questions that will make him look good. 

And on the other side? A largely glitch-free convention (yes, everything went late, but that always happens) with a staggering lineup of talented speakers and a feeling of overwhelming joy (best illustrated by the celebratory roll call, especially when contrasted with its RNC counterpart). I'm a sucker for Democratic Conventions, and I'm always excited whether the nominee is Obama or Kerry, but still: I can't remember a convention as happy and successful and (I think) effective as this one. And by the way, it got higher ratings than the RNC. 

And Harris's speech? Despite attempts to raise the bar by the drama-loving press corps--to make the standard of success an "Obama 2004 moment"--the consensus is that she nailed it. The sheer depravity of the Trumpists set up a huge and difficult task for the Democrats in general, and Harris in particular: they had to articulate a whole ethos in opposition to the moral inversion on the other side. They had to start from zero and make the case for kindness, empathy, decency, and all the democratic values like rule of law and the consent of the governed. And they in general and she in particular pulled it off. 

VP Harris came into the race with a vast amount of goodwill based on relief at a new candidate and President Biden's swift endorsement. But sustaining and building on that goodwill? That's her. In her rallies, in her interactions with regular people, in her big speech last night, we're seeing the talent some of us saw back in 2019 but in a much more fluent and confident form. 

I think she's going to win. 

She might even win big. Obama big, conceivably--certainly not Reagan big--but big enough, ideally, to make all the Republicans' scheming and infiltration of the system futile and irrelevant. And yes, it's a margin of error race right now, but still: I'm getting a distinct feeling of the Lucky and the Doomed.

Nothing is a foregone conclusion. We need to fight like hell until election day, and maybe after. Trump still has powerful allies, some of whom have the resources of a nation-state at their disposal. So, no complacency. But I feel good about this.

As Doc Cochran says, I'd rather be lucky than smart. So far VP Harris is both. 

ETA: Here's a concurring view from the right.

Fmr Fox & Newsmax host Eric Bolling w/an epic rant today: “We’re losing the race! We’re losing the presidency..The enthusiasm level on the Left is overwhelming..They’re trying to say Democrats are the patriots! They’re wearing camo hats with Harris’ name on it! Camo-that’s ours!” pic.twitter.com/H33lKYSFU0

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 23, 2024

TRAVELING AGAIN

I'm going to be away from blogging again for a few days. Sadly, I won't get to post about the Kamala Harris speech, or whatever the hell Donald Trump and RFK Jr. have planned. But I think Yastreblyansky and Tom Hilton will be here, so stop by. See you on Wednesday.

HEY, TIM WALZ, YOU KNOW WHO'S WEIRD? FUTURE TRUMP ENDORSER ROBERT KENNEDY JR.

Tim Walz gave a great speech at the Democratic convention last night -- forceful, direct, concise, and heartfelt. He's known for calling the current crop of Republicans "weird," but he used that word only once, in reference to Project 2025.

I hope Walz hasn't retired the word, because I think he's the perfect person to take on this guy, who might be the weirdest person in MAGA Nation (a very high bar to clear):

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. intends to end his independent presidential campaign and endorse former President Donald Trump, according to two sources familiar with the plans....

Kennedy’s campaign announced he will hold the event in Phoenix on Friday. Trump, meanwhile, is also set to host an event on Friday night, in Glendale, a Phoenix suburb.

Tim Walz is actually a hunter, so I'd really like to hear what he'd say about the bizarre incident in which Kennedy, a dilettante pseudo-outdoorsman, found a dead bear on a road north of New York City, packed it in his trunk with (he says) plans to skin it and eat it, then somehow remembered that he was meeting friends for a meal at a steakhouse (in Brooklyn), after which he'd be taking a flight (from an airport in Queens), so he changed his plans and dumped the bear in Central Park (in Manhattan).

That was weird in a way that didn't hurt too many people, apart from the blue-collar park workers who had to clean up the mess left by the spoiled rich kid. But it seems likely that Kennedy could do untold amounts of damage to America if the reported quid pro quo he seeks from Trump in return for his endorsement actually happens. NBC reports:

For weeks, Kennedy’s campaign has floated his interest in a Cabinet position in a future Trump White House while publicly denying he would accept it....

On Tuesday, Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, told an interviewer the campaign was weighing whether to “join forces” with Trump and suggested that Kennedy would do an “incredible job” as secretary of health and human services. Trump later told CNN that he “probably would” appoint Kennedy to some role.

And what would Kennedy do as HHS secretary?

HHS oversees 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. On the campaign trail, in podcasts and in news interviews, Kennedy has described wanting to dismantle those offices and rebuild them with like-minded fringe figures.

The agencies have become “sock puppets” for the industries they regulate, Kennedy told NBC News in an interview last year, in which he laid out his plans for public health if he were elected president. Faced with another pandemic, Kennedy said, he wouldn’t prioritize the research, manufacture or distribution of vaccines.

Let me repeat that last sentence.

Faced with another pandemic, Kennedy said, he wouldn’t prioritize the research, manufacture or distribution of vaccines.

Bird flu? SARS? COVID? Mpox? If we have a worldwide outbreak of any of those diseases, Trump's HHS secretary will discourage a ramped-up campaign of vaccination.

“The priority should be finding treatments that work and building people’s immune systems,” he said, falsely adding that “vaccines have probably caused more deaths than they’ve averted.” He mentioned ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments — which he says worked against Covid, even though numerous studies say they didn’t.

And last November,

he said he would stop the National Institutes of Health from studying infectious diseases, like Covid and measles, and pivot it to studying chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy believes environmental toxins, a category in which he places childhood vaccines, to be the major threat to public health, rather than infectious disease.

Emphasis added.

Although he's denied it, Kennedy has a problem with all childhood vaccines. In July of last year, he said as much on Lex Fridman's podcast:

Fridman, July 6: You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro-safe vaccine. Difficult question: Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

Kennedy: I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

Again, let me repeat that last line.

There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

Even the polio vaccine? Here's Kennedy on that same podcast:

... if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, Yes. And if you say to me, “Did it kill more people ... did it caused more death than averted?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”

And can we talk about the time Kennedy encouraged a measles outbreak?

Appearing in Shot in the Arm, a 2023 documentary about vaccine opposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was asked about the deadly measles outbreak that occurred in Samoa in 2019 and claimed the lives of 83 people, mostly children. Kennedy, a leading anti-vaxxer who had visited the Pacific island nation a few months before the outbreak, replied, “I’m aware there was a measles outbreak...I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate. I didn’t go there with any reason to do with that.”

Kennedy was being disingenuous, sidestepping his connection to that tragedy. Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit anti-vax outfit he led until becoming a presidential candidate, had helped spread misinformation that contributed to the decline in measles vaccination that preceded the lethal eruption. And during his trip to Samoa, Kennedy had publicly supported leading vaccination opponents there, lending credibility to anti-vaxxers who were succeeding in increasing vaccine hesitation among Samoans. Moreover, in early 2021, Kennedy, in a little-noticed blog post, hailed one of those vaccination foes as a “hero.”

Tim Walz talked a lot last night about freedom. How about freedom from preventable diseases? It's weird to be against that.

If Walz does go after Kennedy, there's a risk that Kennedy will target
Walz's son. I wouldn't put it past Kennedy to do an armchair diagnosis of Gus Walz (who has ADHD, anxiety, and non-verbal learning disorder) and conclude that these are all the result of childhood vaccines -- Kennedy's one-size-fits-all conclusion whenever someone has health issues in childhood. It's also possible that Kennedy's running mate, billionaire Nicole Shanahan, will criticize the Walzes for conceiving their two children via intrauterine insemination, a fertility process similar to in vitro fertilization. For years, Shanahan has denounced IVF, calling it “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today,” while advocating crackpot science to prolong women's fertility:

... she has also been a vocal proponent of and financial backer for unconventional research into the possibility of helping women having children into their 50s and exploring no-cost interventions to help women conceive, such as exposure to sunlight.

“I’m not sure that there has been a really thorough mitochondrial respiration study on the effects of two hours of morning sunlight on reproductive health. I would love to fund something like that,” Shanahan said at the 2023 panel that she had pledged to donate $100 million to the cause of “reproductive longevity.”

... The statement was met with chuckles, “Yeah, let’s do it,” she added. “I just have an intuition that could be interesting and maybe work.”

Weird.

DOES J.D. VANCE KNOW WHAT LOVE IS?

Barack and Michelle Obama delivered the key speeches last night at the Democratic convention, but I keep thinking about dorky, endearing Doug Emhoff, who really seems to love his wife:



(His daughter, Ella, thinks this is adorable, as you can see at about 0:40.)

Emhoff isn't the only genuinely besotted husband in the Democratic Party. I know that there are a couple of canned lines in what President Biden said about his wife at the beginning of his Monday-night speech, but the bit about the heartbeat seems real:

And especially our rock, Jill, who is, those of you who know us, she still leaves me both breathless and speechless. Everybody knows her. I love her more than she loves me. She walks down the stairs and I still get that going “boom, boom, boom.” You all who know me know I’m not kidding.

It's easy to say that you can't imagine Donald Trump having a moment of vulnerability like this. He's too narcissistic. He's regarded all of his wives as trophy wives and all of his other sexual partners as conquests. But I'd say the same thing about J.D. Vance. Part of Vance's problem is that he's so tightly wound (and so full of bottled-up rage) that he can't seem to access normal human joy.

Journalist: "What makes you happy?"

JD Vance: "A lot of things, including bogus questions from the media."

That Q was the perfect setup for Vance to talk about something he loves, that would humanize him — but instead he made fun of the Q and then talked about being angry. https://t.co/ySWhqaz9oK

— Natalie Fertig (@natsfert) August 7, 2024

As for love, marriage, and child-rearing, Vance seems to regard the whole process as nothing more than a battlefield in the culture war, a social-Darwinist way to own the libs, or at least the neoliberals. He sees having and raising children as purely mechanical, as evolution and the culture working out imperatives. Instinct and cultural mores enter into the process, but human feelings seem irrelevant.

Or at least that's how Vance comes off in Jonathan M. Katz's report on the 2021 Eric Weinstein podcast in which Vance seemed to agree with the premise that babysitting for grandchildren “is the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female.”

Vance ... tells Weinstein that liberal cities like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are “bizarre ... wasteland[s] with no children.” Ignore for a second that the statistics contradict this. Also forget that the CDC has found that U.S. birth rates have been falling everywhere since the mid-2000s — in big cities, rural areas, and small towns alike. Vance doesn’t care about the facts; he sees liberals as a class of child-hating people who lack “what makes life worth living,” resulting in an “entire world of professional America” that is “kind of sociopathic and icky.”

The opposites of this are, of course, JD and Usha Vance. The lead-in to the “post-menopausal” comment was Vance recounting the couple’s decision to have the first of their three children in 2017. It was a busy time: Vance was a newly minted bestselling author and professional Trumpism explainer; Usha was about to start her job as clerk for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. As he says: “In hindsight, maybe it [getting pregnant] was a little stupid.”

Then Vance shared his secret: His wife’s mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri took a year-long sabbatical from her job as a biology professor and provost at the University of California, San Diego, to move in and help them raise their newborn son.

This is when Weinstein interrupts with his “post-menopausal female” observation — the second time in the course of an hour that he has stated the only reason human women survive past menopause is to serve as “grandmothers and great-grandmothers.” (And the second time that Vance either tacitly or verbally agreed.) Weinstein further calls Chilukurki’s decision to move in with the young couple, “this weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.” ...

Vance one-ups the racial essentialism, saying that marrying an Indian woman was “in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family.”

(Wow, this guy really knows how to sweet-talk a woman.)

He then half-jokes that Dr. Chilukuri’s decision to take a year sabbatical was “painfully economically inefficient” — that it would have made more sense from a neoliberal standpoint for her to simply keep her job and pay for a nanny.

The reason Vance and Weinstein believe she didn’t, it should obvious by now, is their understanding of biology: That women care more about raising children than men is simply an “obvious biological difference,” as Vance explained earlier in the interview.... (Or, as Weinstein puts it, upping the weirdness quotient on cue, because: “sperm is cheap and eggs are dear and paternity is uncertain.”)

The [future] vice-presidential candidate concludes:

VANCE: Just to sort of bring this full circle to where we started, is that the economic logic of always prioritizing paid wage labor over other forms of contributing to a society is to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately gonna unwind and collapse upon itself. It has to. I think it's, yeah — it’s the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market.

Vance is ... not entirely wrong here. Capitalism values whatever makes capitalists money; it doesn't value ordinary people having the wherewithal to raise their children well. (Vance might actually believe that he's fighting the power by saying this, but he's a member of a political party that always wants the rich to get richer. So either he cares more about his own advancement than he does about fighting neoliberal hypercapitalism or he's deluding himself into believing that he can be both a Republican in good standing and a capitalism skeptic.)

But when you step back from that aspect of what Vance is saying, you find yourself asking: Does he love his wife? Does he love his kids? Or is he just using them to make himself the embodiment of his own ideas? Does he care about anything apart from his own blather and the blather of all the theorists and crackpots he admires? Does anything else make him smile?

This isn't what I see in the Biden marriage, the Walz marriage, or the Harris/Emhoff marriage. These people think about the politics and economics of reproduction -- but they also have feelings. They feel love. They feel joy, and not just the joy of imagining a New World Order run according to their theories of correct generative practice. That might be all the reason you need to vote Democratic.

STEP ASIDE, LITTLE LADY, AND LET A MAN DO THIS!

CNN's story about the emotional speech President Biden delivered the Democratic convention last night is headlined "Biden Tells America ‘I Gave My Best to You’ as He Places His Legacy in Harris’ Hands." The Washington Post went with a similar headline: "Biden, Surrounded by Family, Speaks at the DNC: ‘I Gave My Best to You.’ "

But The New York Times still hates Biden, in part because he won't kiss A.G. Sulzberger's ring and in part because he doesn't want to build the America hedge-fund managers want. Here's the Times headline:

Yeah, Joe, Democrats are just like us -- they can't wait to get rid of you. That's the message.

I'm annoyed by that. For a different reason, I'm annoyed by this Times piece about tonight's key convention speaker:

Why does Kamala Harris need Obama to "resurrect a movement"? She already has a movement, at least in the sense that Obama did in 2008. (After he won that first election, he didn't actually keep the "movement" going.)

Occasionally you'll read a headline that was chosen poorly and doesn't really reflect the story below it. That's not the case here. In the story, David Sanger writes:

... Mr. Obama’s mission on Tuesday evening will be far larger than what he sought to accomplish in 2016. Then, he was handing off a baton, with the strength of the presidency behind him. This time, it will be his job to resurrect, and then reassemble, the kind of movement that propelled him to the White House.

And after President Biden’s farewell speech to the party on Monday, it is Mr. Obama’s job to separate Ms. Harris from the Biden years, while making the case that she was central enough to the Biden administration to slip seamlessly into the job — essentially the argument he made about Mrs. Clinton’s role in his own administration. And then he must seek to transfer to Ms. Harris the sense of endless horizons that surrounded his own first run for the presidency.

No, it isn't his job. He can certainly help get the job done -- but it's the job of the candidate, her running mate, and the entire party to give undecided and wavering voters a reason to vote Democratic. They've been doing a great job without Obama for several weeks now.

The next sentence makes clear what we're reading:

It will be a tricky combination, people close to Mr. Obama said, a transition moment that the convention planners deliberately placed in the hands of the party’s greatest living orator.

David Sanger has the byline, but this story was dictated to Sanger by Obama bros -- "people close to Mr. Obama." Sanger didn't have to give us their version of the story, but that's what he chose to do.

Sanger quotes David Axelrod saying a whole lot of nothing:

“President Obama spoke as an incumbent in 2016 in favor of one of the most familiar brands in American politics,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s chief strategist for his political campaigns and a senior adviser who sat just down the hall from the Oval Office, where Mr. Obama would sometimes come in, in his stocking feet, to mull the political quandaries of the moment.

“He will speak Tuesday as someone who also once was a turn-the-page candidate, just as the party is showing signs of renewed energy behind Kamala Harris,” Mr. Axelrod said. “It’s a very different scenario.”

Then Sanger tells us:

The Democrats are betting that if anyone can pull it off, it will be the man who burst into the consciousness of many Americans at the 2004 convention in Boston.

Actually, Democrats are betting that it will be a joint effort. AOC will help. Shawn Fain will help. Many, many other politicians and operatives and volunteers and staffers will help. Obama will help a lot -- I'm sure he'll deliver a barn-burner of a speech tonight. But he's not the main character right now, even if he will be for a moment tonight. (And Michelle Obama, who's also speaking tonight, will be just as well received.)

In the remarkable week of July 21, Kamala Harris's campaign began to catch fire days before Obama deigned to endorse her. So please, bros, don't tell us she can't do this without him.

TRUMP ISN'T THE ONLY REPUBLICAN WHO'S ADDICTED TO FAN SERVICE

The Democratic convention begins tonight. What does Donald Trump's campaign plan to do in order to draw attention from Kamala Harris and Tim Walz?

Republican Donald Trump will travel to the US-Mexico border later this week, part of a push by his campaign to ratchet up political pressure and steal attention from Kamala Harris as Democrats celebrate her presidential nomination at their national convention in Chicago.

That's the Trumpers' best idea -- a visit to the border, the most boring and predictable political stunt imaginable?

There are a few things the Trump campaign could do that might force the Harris campaign to share the headlines. Trump could dump J.D. Vance and announce a new running mate. He could tell us that he's getting a divorce. He could be the target of another assassination attempt.

But another visit to the border? Nobody cares -- except Trump's base, and the media outlets that cater to that base. The Trump border visit will be the lead story at Fox News, One America News, Breitbart, and Gateway Pundit. Trump needs voters who aren't superfans, but this won't impress them. It will impress only voters who are already on his side.

This is fan service. The campaign is titillating the fans (who get an almost sexual pleasure from hating immigrants) while ignoring the imperative to tell a story that motivates undecided voters to vote for Trump.

You might think Trump is overemphasizing outreach to already committed Trumpers while the people trying to get him elected quietly fume, but check out the rhetoric from the people running his campaign:

“While Harris dodges questions from the press and tries to walk-back her extreme policies like the Green New Scam and bans on American energy, President Trump and Senator Vance will bring their America First message to voters in battleground states across the country,” Trump aides Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles said in a statement.

"Green New Scam" is just embarrassing. Trump says it regularly, but apart from politics junkies, does anyone outside the Trump fan base even know what it refers to? Do voters in 2024 remember the Green New Deal, which was widely discussed five years ago and is rarely talked about in mainstream political coverage now? It doesn't matter to Trump's campaign bosses, because grievance-collecting Republican voters still remember. This is more fan service.

And what are Republicans in Congress doing? Even more fan service -- they're talking about impeaching the lame-duck president:

House Republicans on Monday formally made the case for impeaching President Biden, releasing a lengthy report accusing him of corruption and seeking to allow his family to profit off his office in connection with foreign business deals made by his son Hunter, who has been charged with felony tax crimes.

... But the report contains no proof that Mr. Biden, when he was vice president, engaged in any corrupt quid pro quo to benefit his son’s business partners, and Republicans admit they have no direct evidence that he ordered any interference into a Justice Department investigation into Hunter Biden.

House Republicans know, or ought to know, that this sort of thing impresses no one other than committed Republicans. The GOP-led House actually impeached Interior Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in February, and Democrats paid no price when the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected the impeachment without a trial two months later. But they keep trying the same thing, always expecting a different result. Or maybe they watch the worshipful coverage on Fox and think, The people are with us.

But not all the people. And they never seem to notice.

THERE IS A WAR FOR THE CULTURE, AND IT INVOLVES TACOS

Normal people thought the exchange between Tim Walz and Kamala Harris about "white guy tacos" was funny:



But right-wingers lost their shit, in the most obvious way:

It's a truism on the right: The only racism that matters, or even exists, is anti-white racism. But there's something else going on:

It's not just that mockery of white people is the worst possible form of bigotry, even if the mocker is white himself (Walz) or has clearly been invited to join in the mockery by a white person (Harris). It's also that white people must be the best at every worthwhile human endeavor. We can't admit that the food in non-European cultures is often more flavorful and enjoyable. Hey, we like spices, too!

(Pizzagate guy Mike Cernovich's big gotcha in this faux-controversy is the unearthing of a previously published Tim Walz recipe for "Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish," which includes such highly piquant ingredients as onion powder, garlic powder, chili powder, and paprika. As the Daily Wire's Michael Knowles said in response to this Pulitzer-level moment of investigative journalism, "That is four separate spices"! And that's not even counting the olive oil, which Cernovich also highlighted! Is it time for congressional hearings? What did Tim Walz spice and when did he spice it?)

What makes white people, or at least conservative white people, superior in all things? Ben Shapiro suggests one factor: induced anhedonia that makes life grim, humorless, and utterly lacking in simple pleasures, like Harris-Walz jokes, or tacos (white-guy or otherwise).

Harris/Walz "white guy taco" joke sparks bizarre Ben Shapiro rant on the danger of experiencing happiness: "you should not find joy in your politicians... movements that seek joy via politicians are generally really really ugly" pic.twitter.com/ix1NYmt5Yv

— Ari Drennen 🍏🌴 (@AriDrennen) August 16, 2024

It's all stupidity, and it's all meant for the consumption of morons. And if you buy into the joy, if you buy into the Barack Obama-like selfie-stick presidency, H.L. Mencken suggested that democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. All right -- if this is what you want, this is what you're going to get. But we should mention something about this whole joy routine: You should not find joy in your politicians. You should not. That is not where joy comes from. Joy comes from your family. Joy comes from your community. Joy comes from your religious commitment. Joy comes from your virtuous action in the world, with meaning and purpose. That's where joy comes from. Movements that seek joy via politicians are generally really, really ugly. The joy is a cover for control.

When Mayor Fiorello La Guardia read the comics on the radio to New York City kids during a newspaper strike, in order to provide a simple joy to them, was that "a cover for control"? (Oops, I forgot -- La Guardia was a New Dealer, so Shapiro would undoubtedly say yes.)

Oh, and imagine still being angry that Barack Obama used a selfie stick one day nine years ago.

TO MAINTAIN ACCESS, THE NEW YORK TIMES PRINTS THE LEGEND

I'm back. Thank you, Yas and Tom, for some great posts while I was away.

Today we learn from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times that Donald Trump has brought in someone new to help him with debate prep -- which he totally doesn't do, at least not in the traditional sense, Haberman and Swan insist:

Former President Donald J. Trump has begun preparing for his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris and has brought in the former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to help sharpen his attacks in a recent practice session at his private club and home, Mar-a-Lago, according to two people with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s schedule....

Mr. Trump likes to say he doesn’t need to prepare for debates, and his team is under instructions to use the term “policy time” to describe their sessions....

He still doesn’t do traditional debate prep. Nobody played Mr. Biden in his sessions ahead of their CNN debate on June 27. Instead, he sat with advisers for blocks of time or informally on plane trips and discussed potential topics and lines of questioning. In more formal sessions at Mar-a-Lago, aides have sat in chairs opposite him, playing the role of moderators.

Should we really believe this? Trump is about to debate a dark-haired, very self-possessed female Democrat, and in anticipation he's brought on ... a dark-haired, very self-possessed female ex-Democrat. And we're asupposed to believe that Gabbard isn't playing Harris in mock debates, just because the Trump campaign insists she isn't?

I don't need to do traditional debate prep is just the kind of empty boast you'd expect from Trump, who always wants the rubes to believe that he doesn't have to work hard because he has so many natural talents. He understand military issues more than the generals! His uncle taught at MIT, so he's an expert in geopolitics and "nuclear"! The message is always that Trump comes by his skills effortlessly. He's genetically superior to mere mortals.

I could be wrong in assuming that Gabbard is playing Harris in Trump's debate prep -- I'm not there, so I don't know for certain. But presumably Haberman and Swan aren't there either. They're just assuming that they're being told the truth by close allies of a pathological liar.

I guess they really believe that their sources wouldn't lie to them about this, and if they do, it won't matter in the end. Meanwhile, they retain access to Trump. And isn't that all that matters?

The Other W Word

I am all in on the One Weird Trick Democrats have found--calling Republicans "weird". It works because the GOP ticket is, let's face it, a couple of fucking weirdos, but it goes way beyond them to encompass the party as a whole: their weird conspiracy theories, their weird obsession with children's genitalia, their weird and creepy compulsion to control women.

 
But I'm wondering if there might also be gold in another, more Trump-specific line of attack. Because the thing is, Trump is just really, really whiny.

Trump complains a lot. Like, all the fucking time. He complains morning, noon, and into the wee hours of the night. He complains about being held accountable for his numerous crimes, and he complains about anyone mentioning his convictions. He complains about the polls. He complains about the fact that things change in a campaign, then he turns around and complains about his own campaign's inability to force him to adjust to change. He complains about the microphone, his teleprompters, sound system, and imaginary supporters being denied entry at his rallies. And yesterday he complained about "audio issues" on the X call that, he claims, were responsible for his lisp. There's a case to be made that Trump is the whiniest whiner in the whole whiny history of whinerdom. 

For a long time, especially back in the '80s, the Democrats were widely seen as the party of complainers. This had a lot to do with the racial (and gender, etc.) differential in how white people perceive complaint: white grievance is just people expecting what they're entitled to, while marginalized people stating the facts of life are whiners. Democrats have overcome that perception in various ways--Clinton's triangulation, Obama's Hope--and now the Harris campaign has, in various ways (a candidate who actually laughs, a VP nominee who's Mr. Geniality, the fine-honed mockery of their social media team) recast this race as (in Josh Marshall's phrase) Team Happy vs. Team Mad.

Which I think makes it possible to twist the knife by labeling Trump as the whiner he is.

What "weird" did was crystallize what may have been just a vague sense that a lot of people had. Put a word to it, and you can't not see it. I think we can do that with "whiner". (Imagine a supercut of a bunch of his most stupid, peevish, trivial, or crackpot complaints.) And if it works, the beauty of it is that it's a feedback loop: the worse he does, the whinier he gets, and the whinier he gets, the more unappealing he is. 

I don't know shit about politics. But hey, I think it's worth a try. 

Weaky Leaks. II: Interviews With a Vampire Squid

...Which was the detail emerging from the WikiLeaks dump if you happened to read it instead of screaming about it, on October 16.

I had no idea, but there actually is such a thing as a vampire squid, Vampiroteuthis infernalis. Not because it sucks blood, it doesn't, but because of its red eyes and the webbing on its tentacles, making it look as if it were wearing an opera cape. Threatened by predators, it "inverts its caped arms back over the body, presenting an ostensibly larger form covered in fearsome-looking though harmless spines" in what is known as a "pineapple" or "pumpkin" posture. So it's actually kind of cute! Image via Wikipedia.

Everybody knows Hillary Clinton refused to release the speech transcripts because she didn't want us to see her cozying up to those bankers (and cardiovascular researchers, Canadians, Jewish organizations, Silicon Valley women, and pro-camping lobbyists, among many others, who also paid her upwards of $200,000 a pop to address them in 2013-15, as we know thanks to the fact that she released complete tax returns in July 2015). But it's possible that she was really much more worried about somebody entirely different seeing the transcripts, like Xi Jinping, you know, or King Salman.

Or Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Donald Trump, who still wields real power in Italy as a news magnate and opposition politician. Speaking of that third Chelsea Manning dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables in late 2010, she told an audience of Goldman Sachs "builders and innovators" three years later,

Weaky Leaks

 In the context of Politico, New York Times, and Washington Post being in receipt of what may be an Iran-hacked file of possibly derogatory information about Senator JD Vance and keeping it secret from the public, a lot of folks are finding themselves vaguely remembering the Russian-hacked file of possibly derogatory information on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stolen from campaign manager John Podesta in 2016, which WikiLeaks published on October 7 2016, shortly (I'm talking about minutes, at most a couple of hours) after the revelation of the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape in which he revealed his penchant for grabbing pussy and how when you're a star they let you do it.

"What was in those emails?" somebody wondered, unable to come up with anything other than the idea of Podesta sharing a risotto recipe. "Was it really damaging?" 

I think it was, in fact, but in a very carefully targeted way, at students, through the Trump campaign's Facebook operation (whether or not it was helped out by the Russians, or Cambridge Analytica, or whatever), aimed especially at persuading students of a leftish persuasion in Michigan and Wisconsin not to vote.

Anyhow, I thought I'd re-up my piece, from October 10 2016, on how it went down.

The Lincoln cabinet as pictured by the pro-slavery press in 1864; drawing by John Cameron, via Wikipedia.

When WikiLeaks sends out a new document dump on a Friday evening, also known as the "death slot" because it's where you make a news release when you're hoping nobody will read it, that could be a sign that the organization doesn't have a lot of confidence in the news value of the material.

That seems to be the case with this latest dump released Friday night (shortly after the Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing video, I think), featuring emails presumably hacked by Russian intelligence personnel and associated with John Podesta, chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign (and not, contrary to Julian Assange, in "control" of the Podesta Group lobbying firm, which he co-founded with his brother Tony in 1988 but hasn't been involved in for years). There isn't a whole lot of thereness there.

The centerpiece of the thing is a document apparently collated by or under the direction of Tony Carrk, research director of Hillary For America, in 2015 during the Democratic primary campaign, consisting of passages from some of those 2013 paid speeches of which the transcripts have never been released, though the Sanders forces kept demanding it. The excerpts flag moments that might look to the left opposition like evidence that she's in cahoots with the forces of corporate evil: telling the banksters, in particular, what she really thinks while publicly telling all us liberals she's one of us, so it looks as if the campaign gathered them as part of the process, maybe, of deciding whether to release them or not—how damaging would it be? Or maybe of preparing for the storm that would follow after they were released; each passage contains some phrase or clause that could be pulled out of the context to make it seem as if she was revealing some horrible secret plan to her audience, and there's a helpful headline telling the reader how opponents will read it (could be the headlines were supplied by the hackers, though):

Hyperreality 2024: Assassination

 I've had the hardest time thinking of a way to cope with the abnormal events of the past month in American politics, not just because of the way they've thrown themselves at us one after another, without giving us a chance to reflect on one before we're fully occupied with another one. My machine is full of false starts abandoned when I thought I had to move on to something different, right away. I also find myself assaulted with a bunch of philosophical, often postmodern thoughts about what's going on. Looking at one of those drafts, I'm thinking, instead of trying to "cover" the situation, maybe I should be trying to look at one thing at a time, before I start trying to pull it together.

 

AP Photo by Gene J. Puskar.

One of the strangest things about the attempt on the life of Donald Trump that started off Crazy Week on July 13, I guess it was, was how weirdly hard it seemed to take it seriously.  I mean, technically it was extremely serious, if you accept the story we've been given, as I have no good reason not to do. It was (apparently) a round from an AR-15, of a kind that instantly killed Corey Comperatore, sitting a couple of rows behind Trump, when a different round hit him in the head during the attack, and if Trump's bullet had hit him less than half an inch further to the left than it did, or (perhaps) if he hadn't woggled his head in that parrot-like side-to-side way he has, at just the right moment, it would have more or less blown his head off. That's pretty serious!  

But I watched that video, or side-eyed it, so many times, as all the TV stations turned into CNN imitators and tried to keep the story going, the way they do with a school shooting or earthquake porn, as the Secret Service agents lift him (it's pretty heavy) from the stage, with the blood dripping from his right ear, photobombing his way from among the agents trying to protect him, and makes that upraised fist with a furiously angry face, mouthing the words, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" (I read his lips as "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"). Trump didn't look scared, he looked really angry, And I'd seen video of Trump experiencing physical fear, that time he was threatened by an annoyed eagle, so I had an idea what it would look like,

AWAY FOR A FEW DAYS

I'll be away from the blog for a few days, but please stop by -- Yas and possibly Tom should be here to keep you edified and entertained. See you Saturday.

LET'S GO RETCONNING WITH KATHLEEN PARKER

Donald Trump says that Kamala Harris "has a very low IQ." Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post's moonlight-and-magnolias version of Peggy Noonan, says essentially the same thing, but politely, bless her heart:

Without her beauty, Harris might be joining Biden in retirement. All you have to do is imagine her spoken words coming from a less-attractive package. Or put her on radio.

(Really? I like her voice. I think it has a Lauren Bacall quality to it.)

Harris is no Barack Obama, Harris writes:

As New York magazine heralds “Kamalot” on its cover, The Movement is being sold as Obama 2008....

Strategy isn’t policy and, except for Harris’s radiant smile, 2024 is nothing like 2008. Obama was more than just a pretty face. He brought a keen intellect to the arena and remains the most eloquent, effective orator of our time. Harris remains the person she has been for the past 3½ years: a sometimes bumbling beauty with a stride that conveys confidence if not precisely competence.

Did Parker always feel this way about Obama? She insists that she did.

Twenty years ago, at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Barack Obama, then merely a state senator from Illinois, stepped out onto the stage, a lanky vision of grace and beauty, and mesmerized the crowd with his message: “There is not a liberal America, and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a Black America, and a White America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There is the United States of America.”

Spellbound as anyone else, I elbowed fellow journalist Carl Cannon and said, “We’ve just heard the first Black president of the United States.”

Parker did write a column praising Obama for that 2004 speech, singling out (of course) that moment of outreach to . But did she spend 2008 praising Obama for his intellect and eloquence? I hope you're sitting down for this one: She did not.

Here's Parker in January 2008:

Whatever his qualifications for the job, the crowds chanting "O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma!" betray an undertow of hysteria. This is not the candidate of reason, but of passion. Of emotion. Sen. Good Vibes.

... Obama's [Iowa victory] speech was grandiose prose and inspiring rhetoric. But what does it mean? It means nothing, but it sounded so good, who wants to cause trouble? We're feelin' good for the first time in a while and that's what matters.

Obama isn't just the inevitable dream candidate. He is the self-object of Oprah Nation, love child of the therapeutic generation. What he brings to the table no one quite knows. But what he delivers to the couch is human Prozac.

He may or may not be the right man to fill the Oval Office, but Americans will feel too good to notice.

The following month, she took the word "hysteria" and spun it into a column full of misogyny:

Reports of women weeping and swooning ... have become frequent events in the heavenly realm of Obi-Wan Obama.

... "We are the ones we've been waiting for,” he said on Super Tuesday night. And his people were glad.

Actually, they were hysterical, the word that best describes what surrounds this young savior and that may be more apt than we imagine. The word is derived from the Greek hystera, or womb. The ancient Greeks considered hysteria a psychoneurosis peculiar to women caused by disturbances of the uterus.

Well, you don't see any men fainting in Obi's presence.

And as for Obama's "keen intellect":

So what is the source of this infatuation with Obama? How to explain the hysteria? The religious fervor? The devotion? The weeping and fainting and utter euphoria surrounding a candidate who had the audacity to run for leader of the free world on a platform of mere hope?

... Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent — hence thousands of years of religion — but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.

Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church. Global warming is the new religion. Vegetarianism is the new sacrament. Hooking up, the new prayer. Talk therapy, the new witnessing. Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.

And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.

Here's how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling: "When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa ...”

... Whatever the Church of Obama promises, we should not mistake this movement for a renaissance of reason. It is more like, well, like whoa.

This is standard-issue conservatism in our time: The current top Democrat is a sworn enemy of civilization or reason or logic, not like Democrats of the past, who were actually decent people -- except that when those past Democrats were new on the scene, they were the existential threats. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was a drug-addicted commie America-hater; years later, Barack Obama was the great menace, not like that nice Bill Clinton. When Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee, we were told that she was the radical leftist in the family. And now Parker remembers Obama as a towering intellect, not like that ditzy broad Kamala. But in real time Parker thought Obama was leading a movement of ditzy broads. She can't retcon this.