The smirking condescension of Julia Roberts' Kamala ad is off the charts:
Impressive, in a way. Julia murmurs to her audience: “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want.”
Yep. We let the ladies out of their Handmaid's Tale dystopia for a few minutes every four years to go down to the one place they can finally wiggle out from under the oppressive thumbs of their slack-jawed, stubble-chinned, vaguely homicidal-looking husbands and ink in the Kamala oval.
Damn! What were we troglodytes thinking when we allowed this?
Commentary from Liz Wolfe at Reason (part of her news roundup): Democratic Strategists: Husbands Are Bullying Wives To Vote For Trump.
Oppression at the ballot box: "What does it say about gender relations in this country that so many leaders are telling women not to fear retribution from their husbands because their ballots can remain secret" asks Washington Post journalist Catherine Rampell, referring to the wave of ads (watch here and here) that claim Donald Trump voters are being somehow bullying or pressuring their wives and friends to cast a vote for the man.
The answer to Rampell's question is that Democratic strategists seem to think this is how normies' marriages work, or that this ginned-up oppression will appeal to fence-sitters. It's the line Democrats appear to be taking in the lead-up to the election, but it strikes me as manufactured at best, insulting at worst.
"I certainly have many Republicans who will say to me, I can't be public. They do worry about a whole range of things including violence, but they'll do the right thing," said former Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) recently.
"You are a woman who lives in a household of men who don't listen to you or value your opinion. Just remember: Your vote is a private matter. Regardless of the political views of your partner, you get to choose!" said Michelle Obama last week.
David R. Henderson comments: Julia Roberts Makes a Ridiculous Statement. Yes, her ad is ridiculously patronizing. But also:
At the start Roberts states, “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote anyway you want.”
The one place in America? Has she been to a grocery store, a restaurant, a car dealership, a dry cleaner? Has she been anywhere? Women—and men—still have a right to choose from many options virtually anywhere they go.
It would be a grim day indeed if the only place women had a right to choose was where their individual choice makes the least difference: the polling place.
Actually, I do want to point out one other thing. It’s trivial but telling.
The woman looks gorgeous. The man? Well, let’s say that he is somewhat short of handsome.
Well, actually, a lot of guys are uglier than their wives. That's one reason they're called "my better half".
But, yes, it seems that Julia, and anyone involved in producing this ad, don't get outside of their bubble much. Was there nobody saying: "Well, wait a minute…"?
Finally, Jim Geraghty notes The Julia Roberts Political Ad Is a Jenga Tower of Faulty Assumptions. Prefaced with: "I presume Lyle Lovett will not be giving the rebuttal."
(In case you had forgotten: Lyle and Julia were married for nearly two years back in the 1990s.)
Anyway, Jim presents an interesting factoid:
Left-of-center analysts love to talk about the gender gap, because it represents one of the major advantages for the Democratic Party. (“Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, with the turnout gap between women and men growing slightly larger with each successive presidential election.”) I suspect this is one of the reasons why one of the dominant narratives in our culture is “What’s wrong with men?” The subtext is often that men are a defective form of women who require some kind of fixing, rather than their own thing. (As one essayist noted, the women in our cultural and social elite love dissecting the topic of “What’s wrong with men,” but men seem to be much less enthusiastic about hashing it out.)
But there’s a thorny complication in the Democrats’ happy narrative, and it’s that married women vote Republican in much higher numbers than single women do. Married men vote Republican more than single men do, too.
The whole Handmaid's Tale narrative explains that, of course.
Let's pull up, one last time for this election, the current state of the betting market:
| Candidate | EBO Win Probability |
Change Since 10/27 |
|---|---|---|
| Donald Trump | 52.1% | -9.4% |
| Kamala Harris | 47.5% | +9.5% |
| Other | 0.4% | -0.1% |
The Donald lost a lot of ground, mostly since yesterday. So it's back to basically a coin flip.
Also of note:
-
Readers of 1984 will recall this was Winston Smith's job. James Freeman looks at Biden, Harris and Misinformation. And he even uses the O-word (emphasis added):
The White House’s alleged rewriting of the official record of the president’s remarks probably won’t go down in history as Joe Biden’s most consequential manufacturing of misinformation. That distinction likely belongs to his denial and suppression of accurate reports about his family business, his pressuring of social media firms to enforce his Covid narratives, or perhaps his habitual telling of an economic fairy tale. As for perhaps the greatest misinformation of the Biden-Harris era—that he remains sharp as a tack behind closed doors and is fully capable of handling the rigors of the presidency—Mr. Biden’s level of involvement in that particular manufacturing process remains unclear. Nevertheless, this week’s Orwellian story of allegedly editing a White House transcript invites further scrutiny of the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to control and manipulate information.
We have always been at war with Eastasia. Or maybe Eurasia. It's hard to recall…
-
Unfortnately, there's no widely used term for "government by bullshitters". So we'll have to go with the more popular term used by Noah Smith: Trumpism is kakistocracy.
One particularly noteworthy thing about Donald Trump is how almost all of the people who work for him seem to end up hating him. When Trump was in office the first time, he hired a bunch of military and ex-military men (despite being a draft dodger himself). Almost all of these men ended up despising him.
Hey, but Nikki Haley likes him!
Smith inserts numerous quotes from men and women who worked for President Bone Spurs, uniformly negative.
Well, "negative" is an understatement.
The only thing missing: a convincing argument that Kamala would be better.
-
"Dangerous" meaning … Kevin D. Williamson is suitably ominous in describing The Most Dangerous Job in the World.
Specifically:
Not for the one who wins the election—for the rest of us.
So, what do you think, KDW?
Donald Trump cannot legally own a firearm. There’s a good reason we bar felons from doing so. And next week, Americans might very well give him the keys to the most dangerous arsenal in the world—the one belonging to the U.S. government.
Nuclear weapons? I don’t think the man should be allowed to vote.
Partisan feelings are running strong right now, with the election coming on Tuesday. But I’d like to invite readers to set aside those sensitivities for just a few minutes and think about the presidency itself.
Many Americans—somewhere between most and practically all, depending on whom you ask—believe that the coming election will be the most consequential of their lifetimes. According to Rasmussen, only 16 percent of Americans think otherwise. I’m in that 16 percent—a percentage that may very well make that the most popular political position I hold. There are many Americans who sincerely believe (and many more who pretend to believe) that this election is in fact an existential crisis, that, should it go the wrong way, that’s the end of the republic, of American democracy, of the Constitution, etc.
If you believe that this election could mean the end of the country, then you should conclude, as I have: The United States does indeed have a Donald Trump problem or a Kamala Harris problem, but those are near-term and relatively minor. The long-term, major problem is the presidency itself.
Yes. I will spare you the usual libertarian lecture on this. KDW is more eloquent on this that I could be, anyway. Subscribe if necessary and Read The Whole Thing.
-
Bone Spurs said what now? Trump’s ‘Chickenhawk’ Attack on His GOP Critics Is Dumb, but Not Evil. Noah Rothman makes that distinction:
Donald Trump has once again deployed an asinine attack against his detractors — one that was formerly a staple of Democratic rhetoric and doesn’t get any sharper when it comes out of Republican mouths. But we’re in the incandescent heat of the final days of a general election, and spectators to it demand partisan superlatives. Nothing can simply be stupid. It must be dangerous, inciting, and a reflection not just of the rottenness of the candidate’s soul but of the malignancy of his movement and all its works.
That’s roughly how Democratic loyalists responded to Trump’s latest jab at his most vociferous Republican critic, Liz Cheney. She is “a very dumb individual, very dumb,” Trump said. More to the point, “She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it — you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
"Dumb but not evil" isn't exactly the best slogan for a political campaign.
Also weighing in is Jacob Sullum at Reason: No, Trump Didn't Say Liz Cheney Should 'Go Before a Firing Squad'
Trump's remarks about Cheney reflected a standard complaint about armchair interventionists: that they are insulated from the consequences of the wars they support and do not give adequate consideration to the human costs. Although he may have expressed that point in especially vivid terms, he did not argue that Cheney deserved to be shot or killed.
Cheney nevertheless joined other Trump critics in portraying his comments as a death threat. "This is how dictators destroy free nations," she wrote on X. "They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant."
The blatant distortion of Trump's comments is part of a pattern, and it reflects a broader problem. With four days to go before the presidential election, people who rightly worry about what a second term for Trump could mean might have a chance to persuade on-the-fence voters that his authoritarian instincts, reflected in his frequently expressed desire to punish his political opponents after he regains power, make him unfit for office. But when Trump's critics try to do that by misrepresenting easily checked facts, they encourage potentially persuadable voters to dismiss the case against him as mendacious fearmongering.
Reminder: William F. Buckley Jr's PBS show was titled "Firing Line". Nobody managed to accuse him of wanting to shoot liberals.
-
In other news, Trump has proposed changing the Great Seal of the United States to a cuckoo clock. Ronald Bailey is dismayed and impatient. One More Damned Time: Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.
Yesterday, Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team, revived the myth that vaccines cause autism spectrum disorders (ASD). During an interview with CNN's Kaitlan Collins about what role Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might play in a future Trump administration, Lutnick took a strange detour into the bogus claims that childhood vaccinations cause autism:
I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy and it was the most extraordinary thing because, let's face it, we've all heard on the news all sorts of snarky comments about him. I said, "So tell me how's it going to go?" And he said, "Why don't you just listen to me?" And what he explained was that when he was born, we had three vaccines and autism was one in ten thousand. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines because in 1986, they waived product liability for vaccines. And here's the best one, they started paying people at the [National Institutes of Health], right? They pay them a piece of the money from the vaccine companies. Wait a minute, let me finish. And so all of these vaccines came out without product liability. So what happened now is that autism is now 1 in 34. Amazing.
During a Fox News interview in 2023, Kennedy reiterated, "I do believe that autism comes from vaccines." Despite the claims by Kennedy, now being echoed by Lutnick, years of research have turned up no evidence that childhood vaccinations cause autism spectrum disorders. Of course, nearly any medical treatment will have some adverse side effects in some people. However, a 2021 comprehensive analysis of vaccine safety by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found "no new evidence of increased risk for key adverse events following administration of vaccines that are routinely recommended for adults, children, and pregnant women."
And of course:
At his Madison Square Garden campaign rally, former President Donald Trump said he is going to let Kennedy "go wild on health. I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on the medicines."
I am sorely tempted to drive down to East Coast Cannabis and stock up on edibles for the next few days. Or weeks. Or…
![[The Blogger and His Dog]](/ps/images/me_with_barney.jpg)
