Pun Salad

This gets my goat: an envelope with vague, but official-sounding text (oooh, "documents"!) and no indication of the sender. A candidate for immediate shredding without opening!  

But I opened it, in the interest of reporting the to you, dear reader, and (slight surprise) it's not from a Republican candidate; it's from the Heritage Foundation, writing to express their concern about voter fraud. A blue sheet describes voter fraud cases in nine different states. The survey has the usual pushy questions ("Is it important to you for our nation's leaders to pass legislation that secures our elections against fraud? ☐ Yes ☐ No ☐ Not sure/No Opinion") and also the usual money plea at the end ("☐ $25 ☐ $35 ☐ $50 ☐ $100 ☐ $150 ☐ Other $      ")

You can peruse the Heritage Election Fraud Database here.

Okay, now it can go into the shredder. Bzzzzzt!

For the record, I have no problem with making it difficult to vote fraudulently. My big gripe in New Hampshire is that we allow dorm-living students at the University Near Here paying out-of-state tuition to vote locally.

But in other news, Daniel J. Mitchell is not a fan of the major party candidates: The Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Big Government?.

I'm in violent agreement with Mitchell here.

It's been a couple weeks since we looked at the betting odds, and things have swung toward Tweedledum:

A bad couple weeks for the Donald, as a significant fraction of people in swing states seem happy to vote for any major party candidate as long as they are not named "Trump" or "Biden".

Also of note:

• But not a marvelous universe. Kat Rosenfield claims that The 2024 Election Is a Marvel Universe. It's paywalled beyond a certain point, but here's a snippet:

  Donald Trump has a promise for Christian voters: if they vote for him, just this once, they’ll never have to vote again.

  “Just this time!” Trump squawked last month, as the crowd cheered. “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you.”

  Here, his voice grew wheezy; he had started to run out of air. “In four years you won’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

  As Trump speeches go, this one was par for the course: meandering, nonsensical, grandiose. But it caught the attention of critics on the left, who interpreted it as a dog whistle betraying Trump’s true plan: to become a dictator.

  Over-the-top examples follow. And why is this like the Marvel Universe? Click on through.

  Of course, if Trump did plan to become a dictator, he would definitely reveal that to a bunch of Florida Christians.

• "Lazy, stupid, and childish" explains a lot here. Jonah Goldberg doesn't buy that Trump has an advisor problem: Trump’s Getting Good Advice. He Just Refuses to Take It.

  Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors, and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.

  [… examples elided …]

  Obviously following this advice would be better than Trump’s current approach—race baiting, election denial, whining about Biden’s defenestration, attacking fellow Republicans, crowd size boasts, etc.—all of which is clearly ill-advised.

  But “ill-advised” is the wrong word, because pretty much everybody advising Trump is telling him to stop. In other words, the conventional wisdom is well-advised, it’s just that Trump can’t or won’t follow it. This is not a new phenomenon. Expecting Trump to “pivot” or “act presidential” has been a political pastime for almost a decade. It’s like betting Godot will be punctual or Lucy won’t yank the football from Charlie Brown.

  But what’s interesting to me is not the tiresome assumption that Trump can be anything other than who he is; rather it’s the assumption that if he ran the focused campaign his boosters favor, it would guarantee success. It would certainly improve his chances. But as a subscriber to the view that “vibes” have supplanted substantive issues and personal character as the decisive factors in elections, I’m not so sure.

  Me neither. I think Trump's best bet is for Kamala to do a photo op in a tank with a huge helmet. That's what worked in the past.

• Isn't it ironic, don't ya think? River Page at the Free Press thinks The J.D. Vance Couch Thing Was Funny, Until the Harris Campaign Co-Opted It.

  Democratic Party elites are approximately one month into their coordinated bullying campaign against J.D. Vance. In addition to calling him weird, Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), and the official Kamala HQ X account have all made joking reference to the idea that Trump’s VP is—and there’s no polite way to say this—a couch fucker.

  Allow me to explain. This all started last month when an X user alluded to fake passages in J.D. Vance’s best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy describing the Ohio senator humping a latex glove lodged between two couch cushions. Then, the Associated Press made matters worse by publishing a fact-check of the obviously satirical claim in an article called “No, JD Vance Did Not Have Sex With A Couch,” and then retracting that article the next day, claiming it hadn’t met their “editorial standards.”

  Is this funny? Kind of. But that’s beside the point. There’s something deeply ironic about the Democratic Party, which has spent years working itself into a frenzy over “disinformation,” pointing to an entirely made-up, sexually explicit joke about their opponent. Imagine if the roles were reversed, and Tim Walz was facing couch-fucker allegations. There would be hearings, MSNBC specials, and FBI special counsel inquiries: Is the person who made this up working in a Russian troll farm? No? American? Well, has he ever been to Russia? Has he ever met a Russian? Does he enjoy borscht? Sources in the intelligence community say the X poster was spotted with Lev Parnas at an El Paso McDonald’s. Representative Schiff, is that something you’re looking into?

  To quote an ancient philosopher: "That's different, because shut up."

• Strange but true. There's a local angle for Minnesota-based John Hinderaker here: Walz Busted By…CNN?

  In 1995, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, then a resident of Nebraska, was stopped while driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone. He failed a sobriety test and was charged with speeding and drunk driving. Walz has been lying about the incident ever since, as CNN rather surprisingly admits:

  When Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz first ran for Congress in 2006, his campaign repeatedly made false statements about the details of his 1995 arrest for drunk and reckless driving.[…]

  There was nothing stopping the Minnesota media from pointing this out years ago. Hinderaker's reaction: "Walz is a notorious liar. It is interesting to see how his elevation to the role of vice presidential candidate has caused the national press to shine light on some of his misdeeds that the local press has long been happy to ignore."

• Don't forget, Jeff: also lazy and childish. Jeff Maurer considers Trump's meandering train of thought: Trump Probably Knows What “Asylum” Means and Is Just Broadly Stupid.

  Trump says a lot of insane things about immigrants (the sentence “Trump says a lot of insane things about _______” is a Mad Lib with no wrong answer). Recently, one of his favorite riffs has been about illegal immigrants coming from insane asylums. Here he is at a rally last fall:

  “They’ve allowed, I believe, 15 million people into the country from all of these different places like jails, mental institutions, and wait till you see what’s going to happen with all those people.”

  That’s an absolutely bonkers things to say. There aren’t even 15 million illegal immigrants in the country (best estimates are around 11 million), much less 15 million who entered under Biden, much less 15 million who entered under Biden and came from jails or mental institutions. But when Trump talks about illegal immigration, he often mentions insane asylums, which, by the way, is the best answer we’re ever going to get to the question: “Why in God’s name is Trump talking about Hannibal Lecter?” The connection seems to be: When Trump riffs about insane asylums, his brain says “you know something that’s kind of related to that,” so he proceeds to talk about The Silence of the Lambs for the next five minutes.

  I checked two online dictionaries, and they both claim that the use of "asylum" to refer to nuthouses is "dated". (So is saying "nuthouses", probably.) Couldn't prove it by Trump!

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