Sep
4
2024

The Better to Eat You With, My Dear

A tweet from Jeff Blehar:

I know, making judgments based on a split-second physical appearance is unwarranted and juvenile, but … geez louise.

Blehar's associated text is at the NR Corner where it may be paywalled. Excerpt: Kamala Harris Campaign Stall Reflected by Non-Scandals It Promotes.

Trump may be a sui generis phenomenon, but I believe that the way the 2024 race has been conducted by Republicans, Democrats, and the media alike is a Dickensian vision of the Ghost of Campaigns Future. (That is to say, the most horrifying one.) So as we roll boldly in this home stretch toward November, let’s begin by discussing some tiresome, completely meaningless campaign nonsense. Yes, let’s talk about how Donald Trump supposedly defamed the memory of all 400,000 veteran souls buried in Arlington National Cemetery by taking a photograph with some Gold Star families.

Gold Star families are the surviving relatives of service members killed in the line of duty. Trump met with them at Arlington Cemetery on the anniversary of their loved ones’ loss — the Kabul airport suicide bombing during the disastrously incompetent August 2021 surprise evacuation of Afghanistan — and posed for pictures with the families. This was apparently in technical violation of a federal Park Police regulation that says you cannot take photographs in one specific area (“Section 60”) where recent U.S. war dead are buried. Only federal staff members are allowed to do so — and they have done so frequently for Biden, Harris, Trump, Pence, Obama, Clinton, and many other political eminences (and for their reelection campaigns as well) over the years. But Trump, of course, is (currently) not president, just a nominee. So what Biden or Harris can do, he cannot.

Isn't there enough actual stuff around to get outraged about, we have to get outraged about the phony stuff too?

For example, Matt Welch recalls just a few weeks ago When Biden's 'Bubble Wrap' Burst.

The political/media establishment that lied to you about President Joe Biden will lie to you about the new Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

When Special Counsel Robert Hur in February declined to prosecute Biden over his technically illegal mishandling of classified documents, in part because a prospective jury would be disinclined to convict an "elderly man with a poor memory" who has "diminished faculties in advancing age," the reaction from the White House was swift and terrible.

"They don't know what they're talking about," the president snapped to reporters that evening. "My memory is fine." (Alas, not fine enough to prevent Biden at that same brief press conference from mixing up the presidents of Egypt and Mexico and falsely accusing Hur of bringing up during questioning the subject of his son Beau's death.)

Hur's assessment of the president's memory, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre charged the next day, was "gratuitous," "unacceptable," and "does not live in reality."

But the most over-the-top administration attack on the Department of Justice messenger, and on a message that would be so undeniable by July that Biden felt impelled to drop out of the presidential race, came from Harris.

"The way that the president's demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and [is] clearly politically motivated," Harris claimed at a community forum the day after Hur's report. "We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw."

Had the "liars and hacks" Welch describes, above and later in his article, decided to be honest and non-hackish, we might have had a more "democratic" outcome, where the voters had some say in the Democrat-side nomination. Instead… well, see above, Welch's first paragraph.

Also of note:

  • If you don't express yourself, ain't nobody gonna give a good cahoot. Kevin D. Williamson says we face A Nonbinary Choice in the voting booth.

    […] there are a couple of ways of approaching a vote in a presidential election. The first and most obvious—and the one I recommend—is: voting for the candidate you prefer. (A subset of that approach is not voting if you don’t like any of the candidates: That, too, is usefully expressive.) The second is: voting to send a message to one party or the other. If (to stick with the earlier case) Trump’s vote share in Texas declines a bit more in 2024, then that will tell Republicans something. But—and here is where I suppose my Bulwark friends and Joe Scarborough et al. really have their heads—it makes a difference whether Harris’ share of the vote goes up, too, or if Trump simply bleeds votes to the Libertarian Party or to Mitch Daniels or whomever it is my friend in Tarrant County is writing in. A voter who goes from the GOP to the Libertarians is a loss of one vote, but a voter who goes from the GOP to the Democrats is, in effect, a two-vote loss: Minus one for Trump and plus one for Harris. And if that is the message you want to send—or if you are a Democrat who wants to vote for Donald Trump to … I don’t know, maybe punish your party for failing to stage a coup d’état the last time it lost an election?—that’s how you do it. You add your voice to the other voices making the same point or a complementary one. 

    That’s all good.

    But don’t inflict your “binary choice” horsefeathers on your friends and the general public. There are lots of ways to use your vote, many of them effective as political expression and almost none of them likely to be very consequential in determining the outcome.

    I'll figure out some way to express myself in November. Probably not until then.

    And yes, I mashed up lyrics from Sly and the Family Stone and the Staple Singers in this item's headline. I swear, that's how I heard them in my head.

  • Writing in "Nikki Haley" perhaps. The WSJ editorialists are disappointed in Biden, Harris, Trump, Vance and the Dumbest Economic Idea.

    A sign of the rotten political times is that President Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and JD Vance all agree on the dumbest economic idea of the presidential campaign so far: opposing Nippon Steel’s $14.1 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel.

    We’ll admit that the competition for the dumbest economic policy is fierce these days—with prices controls on food, a 10% across-the-board tariff, and national rent control on the table. But opposition to the Nippon deal deserves careful consideration for this distinct dishonor given the deal’s manifest benefits and nonexistent harm.

    Ms. Harris is apparently undaunted by economic illiteracy, telling a Monday rally in Pittsburgh that “U.S. Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated.”

    A politician with the U.S. national interest in mind would celebrate the Nippon Steel deal, which would boost U.S. manufacturing. The Japanese firm has promised to spend $2.7 billion refurbishing the Pittsburgh steel maker’s aging plants. It has also agreed to honor U.S. Steel’s collective-bargaining agreements with the United Steelworkers.

    I aassume there are economists advising both campaigns that are holding their noses real tight about this.

  • A question that needs to be asked. And Jeff Maurer asks it: Is the GOP the Stupid Party Forever Now?

    This is something I’ve touched on before: Both parties are in something of an unnatural state right now. The so-called “conservative” party has the judgement of a goldfish who just tried cocaine for the first time. Meanwhile, the liberal party — which is supposed to be the domain of hippie freaks — has a sizable contingent of left-brained squares who like to talk about Ukraine and interest rates. It’s weird. And what I wonder is: Is this a temporary situation, and things will go back to normal after Trump? Or is this the early stages of a massive political realignment like what happened in the century after the Civil War?

    I dunno, but Maurer lays out the arguments for "just temporary" and "maybe not" with his usual R-rated gusto.

  • More "studies" that you should have ignored. Geek Press wonders Are Blue Zones Of Longevity Based On Bad Data? Summary of an article that caught his attention:

    Blue Zones -- geographical regions that supposedly have the world's most long-lived people -- are dubious. Whether it's Sardinia, Okinawa, or Greece, the numbers of old people are wrong, due to census mistakes or "pension fraudsters". These errors propagate false claims about the benefits of wine-drinking or plant-based diets. Researchers seriously interested in longevity must look for better data.

    I decided long ago to pay strict attention to that wine one.

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Last Modified 2024-09-05 6:22 AM EDT