Pun Salad

Robert F. Graboyes has already written his Presidential Election Pre-Postmortem so it will be ready to go on November 6. Sample:

And here's our weekly look at what the bettors are saying:

Yeah: it's still close, but that's quite a swing to Kamala since last week. What happened? Oh, right: the debate. You can actually see the odds flip around 10pm last Tuesday using the Election Betting Odds graphing function.

Also of note:

• She's still a nitwit, though. Jeffrey Blehar paints an unappetizing picture: Kamala Harris Spits Up Word Salad All Over Her Lapels During Interview.

  Big news in the world of politics: The Democratic nominee finally spoke to the press! Yes, Kamala Harris took her first-ever one-on-one interview with a mainstream-media outlet yesterday afternoon, and don’t be shocked if it’s her last, because I am at a loss to tell you how bad it was.

  The interview was with Philadelphia’s local ABC affiliate, and credit to interviewer Brian Taff: He asked straightforward, no-nonsense questions like a professional journalist aware he might be giving Harris the only serious ten minutes of her entire campaign. What Harris did with those ten minutes was cringeworthy beyond belief, revealing every single one of her flaws — her inability to complete a basic sentence or answer even the simplest of questions about policy that haven’t been pre-rehearsed with Philippe Reines for a week in advance. I am only going to print here Taff’s first question to Harris, and then I will simply transcribe for you Harris’s response. May God have mercy on your soul after you read this.

  (And I beg of you: Watch the full ten-minute interview. Don’t deny yourself.)

  TAFF: At the debate the other night you talked about creating an “opportunity economy” — what if we can drill down on that a little bit. When you talk about bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people, what are one or two specific things you have in mind for that?

  HARRIS: Well I’ll start with this. I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother raised my sister and me, she worked very hard. Um, she was able to finally save up enough money to buy our first house when I was a teenager. I grew up in a community of hardworking people, construction workers, and nurses and teachers, and I try to explain to some people who may not have had the same experience, you know, if, but, a lot of people will relate to this, you know I grew up in a neighborhood of folks who were very proud of their lawn. [smiles and nods with hands upheld] You know? And, um, and I was raised to believe and to know that all people deserve dignity. And that we as Americans have a beautiful character. You know, we have ambitions and aspirations and dreams. But not everyone necessarily has access to the resources that can help them fuel those dreams and ambitions. So when I talk about building an opportunity economy, it is very much with the mind of investing in the ambitions and aspirations and the incredible work ethic of the American people, and creating opportunity for people, for example, to start a small business. Um, my mother, you know, worked long hours, and our neighbor helped raise us. We used to call her, it was, I still call her, our “second mother.” She was a small business owner. I love our small business owners, I learned who they are through my childhood, and she was a community leader, she hired locally, she mentored, our small businesses are so much a part of the fabric of our communities, not to mention, really, I think the backbone of America’s economy.

  Blehar praises interviewer Brian Taff for his questions; I praise him for his restraint, in not begging Kamala to shut up already.

• "Might" does a lot of work here. Steve Chapman speculates Kamala Harris Might be Less Injurious to the American Economy than Trump.

  Many Americans have fond memories of the state of the economy during the Trump presidency and in the last debate Donald Trump reminded them of that: Until the Covid pandemic hit, inflation was mild, unemployment was low, growth was respectable, and the stock market hit 126 all-time highs. According to a pre-debate poll by the Pew Research Center, 55% of registered voters place greater trust in Trump than Harris on economic issues. Whatever his faults, they regard him as clearly preferable to his Democratic opponent when it comes to economic issues. They are, however, badly mistaken.

  It’s not that Harris harbors a secret fondness for Atlas Shrugged or that she is a market enthusiast. She generally mentions corporations only when she’s accusing them of shafting consumers, abusing workers, or crushing competition. Despite majoring in economics at Howard University, and despite declaring “I’m a capitalist,” you will wait in vain to hear her celebrate the vital role of markets in satisfying consumers, generating innovation, and raising living standards.

  Still, contrary to MAGA caricatures, she’s far short of a progressive darling: After veering leftward in her 2019 presidential campaign, Harris has moved back to the center, firmly abandoning her endorsement of “Medicare for all,” a ban on fracking, and higher taxes on everyone making more than $100,000 a year. Although her campaign has been light on specifics, it’s safe to classify her as a standard Democrat, not the rabid leftist who inhabits GOP fantasies. And given that she seized the presidential nomination without a fight, she owes nothing to the party’s ultra-progressive faction.

  I think Chapman is too confident that Harris's current positions are her "true" ones, not the ones she espoused during her 2019 "veering leftward" days.

• The obligatory "to be sure" item. Robby Soave notes the disparate treatment afforded the candidates during the debate: ABC’s Moderators Failed to Fact-Check Kamala Harris.

  This week's first and possibly only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was not nearly as consequential as the June debate, which ended President Joe Biden's political career. It also differed in another key way: The moderation was incredibly one-sided and unfair.

  This was not true of the previous debate, between Biden and Trump. CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash asked questions but did not interrupt or attempt to fact-check the candidates—they left that to Trump and Biden. Such an approach is preferable; politicians make so many incorrect statements that if the moderators really felt the need to intervene every single time, debates would devolve into showdowns between the moderators and each candidate, which isn't the point. There are also frequent examples of moderators asserting that a given claim is abjectly false when it may be complicated, ambiguous, or a case where reasonable minds disagree.

  ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis thrice followed a remark by Trump with an attempt to fact-check him. These fact-checks introduced valid, conflicting information; Trump said violence in the U.S. was out of control and the moderators pointed to FBI data that contradicts this, and Trump said that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—a completely erroneous claim.

  But when Harris made statements that could have been fact-checked, the moderators declined to do so.

  Trump could have done his own fact-checking on Harris, but… no, he couldn't. That would have required some mental discipline.

• More people are noticing what Kevin D. Williamson points out: The Anti-Americanism of Donald Trump.

  Donald Trump is a funny kind of patriot. 

  He loves America—except for the cities, the people who live in the cities, about half of the states, the universities, professional sports leagues, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the legal system, immigrants, the culture. He thinks the Capitol Police are murderers and that the FBI is a gestapo, that the government is an illegitimate junta maintained through election fraud, that the January 6 rioters are political prisoners, that the nation is a ruin, that it is “failed.” And when it fell to him to explain to Tuesday’s debate audience why he should be president, he spent most of his time repeating the praise of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán.

  Trump’s enemies are all Americans, his friends are all foreign dictators, and his money lives in Dubai and Indonesia. Some nationalist. 

  Trump lives in a very strange little bubble: His world is Palm Beach, a handful of golf courses and hotels, and Fox News. The smallness of his frame of reference is a problem for him: Trump’s remarks about the 2017 fiasco in Charlottesville really are routinely misrepresented, and he is right to try to correct the record, but going on ABC and insisting that the story had been “debunked” by “Jesse”—and expecting the ABC debate audience to know that he meant Jesse Watters of Fox News—is just one example of Trump’s inability to speak to any constituency beyond the one he already has: the constituency that is holding him hostage. 

  I don't know how much you can see of KDW's rant if you're not Dispatch-subscribed, so…

• And KDW didn't even mention Laura Loomer. But Jeffrey Blehar (yes, him again) does: Laura Loomer Is a Visible Symptom of Trump’s Problems, Not the Cause of Them.

  As a general rule, I prefer to ignore repulsive internet cranks and lunatics until forced by events to take notice; Greta Thunberg barely interests me anymore, and Tucker Carlson morally and intellectually wrote himself off with his Russia trip — until his transparent “Nazi-curious” antics got entangled with a presidential race and forced us to pay attention to him for a minute longer. But now I guess I have to talk about another despicable internet nutjob, because Laura Loomer is making real news now, not merely “extremely online” news. It is incredibly difficult to do proper justice to how full-tilt insane and repulsively cheap Loomer’s entire public adult life has been, and to recount it would be to list one shockingly vile or comically stupid act after another.

  So let’s do it! Loomer is but one representative of an entire toxic ecosystem of online fanatics known for their alt-right associations, contempt for the truth, and undying loyalty to the person of Donald Trump. Loomer herself is completely a product of the Trump era: In mid 2017, she invaded the stage to protest a performance of Julius Caesar in New York City where Trump was portrayed as Caesar, and she became a viral news story for it.

  She has been on a nonstop quest for online relevance ever since, and has dived happily into the filthiest toilets of right-wing politics. The spread of pure misinformation and paranoid conspiracy theories has historically been her bread and butter. The idea of 9/11 being “an inside job,” which Loomer has endorsed (of course), is only the beginning of it; in 2018 she repeatedly claimed, Alex Jones–style, that the victims of both the Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Tex., mass school shootings were in fact “crisis actors” staging an assault on gun rights. (She also averred that the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooter was in fact an ISIS plant and the truth was being covered up — a conspiracy theory she fought with fellow lunatic Jack Posobiec over for proper “credit.”)

  That's a "gifted" link, so check it out. As his headline indicates, Blehar's real target is not Loomer, but Trump. Specifically, what Trump's inclusion of Loomer in his "private entourage" indicates:

  Trump knows by now the kind of people he wants surrounding him (see: Roy Cohn). And the reason Trump prefers mindless flatterers and psychopathic attack dogs to sober and loyal employees is because Donald Trump does not want to be — and cannot be — saved from himself.