James Gillen

The last presidential debate (with Kamala Harris) reamed Donald Trump about as hard as his behind-the-scenes meeting with Vladimir Putin at Helsinki in 2018, and I don’t think he enjoyed it as much. In fact, the only reason that that debate didn’t kill Trump’s campaign the way the Biden-Trump debate killed Biden’s campaign is that Biden was running mainly to keep Trump from being president again, so once he became a liability to that, he deferred to his running mate, whereas Trump is running mainly to stay out of prison. So given that Trump is just as timid in regard to a rematch as he was with Putin at Helsinki, the main suspense in the 2024 race came from anticipating the vice-presidential debate of October 1, between Vice-President Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio.

I did not really get to see it, because I work from home, and as is often the case on Tuesday evening, and especially on the first day of the month, the entire population of North America was maniacally cramming the call queue like it was a 24-hour McDonald’s drive-thru and emergency calls were Big Macs.

The most controversial aspect of the whole thing was that after ABC anchors made some mild fact references against Trump in his last debate, the Trump Party worked the ref in complaining about “bias”, and the mainstream media, as it does, caved. CBS announced prior to the event that their journalists, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would not engage in live fact-checking. Which as at least one comedian put it, is like running an NFL game without referees. But this was probably because CBS assumed that if the journalists had to ask questions AND fact check Vance, they’d be there till Election Day. This was not a very good idea. Especially towards the end of the debate when Vance said it was rich that Walz was calling Trump a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully left office like every other president in history. AFTER January 6. Saying Trump peacefully left office after that is like asking Mrs. Lincoln, “Other than that, how did you like the play?” In fact earlier, when Vance continued to blame illegal immigrants for the problems in Springfield Ohio – after he and Trump were brought up on charges for harassment and menacing by a Haitian community group – CBS moderator Margaret Brennan said, “And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status, temporary protected status”, Vance immediately complained, “Margaret, the rules were that you were not going to fact check and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on” – and this led to so much cross-talk that CBS cut the candidates’ mics. Which only confirms that Vance and the used-to-be Republican Party saw the no-fact-checking pledge as intended to be in their favor, which in itself is an indication that they see an advantage in lying.

You would think, given that Walz was the guy who popularized calling Trumpniks “weird” and was on board with that whole JD Vance/Couch thing, that he would be at least as forceful as Kamala Harris was in her debate, but the impression I got from commentators was that he was too “Minnesota nice.” Whereas Vance made a positive impression not so much by real virtues but the simple fact that he is not Donald Trump, does not mug for the camera when the other person is talking and does not act like a brain-damaged orangutan, only without the maturity and sense of grooming. As one pundit put it, maybe Walz was assuming that if he really ragged Vance, when Vance does a better job of presenting as a Homo sapiens than Trump does, it might backfire. Indeed, most commentators were pleasantly surprised that this debate marked a return to mutual civility. Which is good in and of itself, but not so good when both sides agree that the enemy is going to destroy the republic and one has a lot more evidence for that theory.

Walz did at least get the line of the night, in reference to that last election that JD seems to think went swimmingly, when he said, “When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election – that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”

One thing I saw on MSDNC after the fact was where they had a group of college voters and exactly one of them said he got a better impression of JD Vance from the debate, and even then he phrased in terms of Vance coming across a lot better when he has time for preparation.

But given that CBS by and large did not fact check Vance’s smarmy bullshit, and Walz was mostly not inclined to do so, this just confirms my suspicion that the media is setting this up to be a horse race to the very end, despite the fact that the Democratic ticket is composed of normal people with political credentials and the opposition is composed of JD Eyelashes and King Bingbongbingbangbing.

On presentation it was a draw. On substance, it was leaning Walz. Walz started slow but frequently made eloquent cases in his favor and against the Republican position, even if a lot of us thought he could have gone for the jugular. Meanwhile JD Vance came off as just presentable enough to be an acceptable substitute for Donald Trump as President should Trump keel over and die, which I imagine Republicans are praying very hard to happen right now. But then again they have probably given up assuming that God will answer their prayers, since Trump is still alive.

So of course after Labor Day, the political ads are out in force. The other day I saw one of the few non-attack ads, where they were promoting Kamala Harris for President. The ad announced, among other things, that Harris is going to be the first president to push for a program of national price controls. (Not quite true.)

And I thought to myself, “But I don’t WANT price controls. I don’t think they work.” Any more than Trump’s wonderful “plan” to shift from income taxes (on the rich) to national tariffs (affecting goods for the middle class and poor) is going to work either.

But how we should run the economy or how government should get revenue are policy matters on which people can agree to disagree. But since 2016, one of these parties, the Democrats, is run by the sort of career politicians that MAGA populists justifiably rail against, but they’re still trying in their own way to keep the system running.

Meanwhile since 2016, the only opposition presidential candidate is a racist, convicted felon, also found guilty in a defamation case involving sexual assault, only three years younger than Biden but still has half as many brain cells, and at this point everything he says is like a turn in Cards Against Humanity. “I have a Plan to save Isreal from Hamas and it involves DAVID BOWIE RIDING A TIGER MADE OF LIGHTNING! Meanwhile, cause of Komrade Kamala, immigrants in Springfiled Ohio are filming TWO MIDGETS SHITTING IN A BUCKET!!!!”

And in his (Republican) party, there may indeed still be some people I like. Such as Joe Lombardo, the current governor of Nevada, who was a fairly good Sheriff in the Las Vegas area. Or Sam Brown, who’s running against incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen for US Senate. Brown literally went through fire in Afghanistan, was permanently scarred but rebuilt his life and became a success. (This would also mean he’s one of those veterans Trump wouldn’t want to be seen with, cause ‘they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.’) But I didn’t vote for Lombardo as Governor and I’m not voting for Brown as Senator, cause they’re both in the Trump Party, and that means that they have to do any fool thing that Trump wants if they wanna stay in the He-Man Woman Haters Club.

And just as Trump’s tariff position means that no longer are Republicans the fiscal conservative party (to the extent that they ever were) there aren’t any good alternatives in “third” parties even if you could somehow wish that your vote was the only one that counted and wouldn’t be cancelled by everyone else in your state. For years, I was a vocal Libertarian, but in the past few years alleged purists took over because they saw how Trumpism had purged all the moderate conservatives and gay-tolerant people in the Republican Party and brought them into the Libertarian fold. These are the same people who in 2022 killed the Libertarian Party position that “we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant” because apparently they wanted to attract bigots, not to mention the irrational and repugnant. Some of these people were sincerely trying to purge the “normies” but others were more openly aligning the party towards Putin’s Russia. That’s why the “free thinkers” in party leadership invited Donald Trump to the 2024 LP convention, where he openly demanded that they nominate him. That’s why the Party leadership is not supporting their own nominee, Chase Oliver, because he isn’t on board with the new agenda. Even though Party Chairwoman Angela McArdle tried to rationalize the party’s rejection of her favored candidate by saying the goal is to stop the Democrat (at the time, Biden) and get Trump elected. The irony being that in getting rid of the right-wingers who rejected Trump in order to recruit the “freethinkers” who like Trump, the LP is either not going to get any votes at all (because the fans already have Trump) or they will attract voters who might prefer Trump to Harris and therefore make a Trump victory less likely. Which is why the “freethinkers” got Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to drop out.

And then you have Jill Stein’s Green Party, which always WAS a fellow traveler.

So pretty clearly the party politics structure is not working, even for those parties outside the duopoly. In the case of the Democrats, it’s easy to see why. Government is their business. One might say racket. And they’re trying to protect their institution. But in the case of parties more motivated by ideology, namely the Republicans and Libertarians, it becomes a question of what you have to do to be a party member. In the case of the Republicans, if you believed in certain things, like being “pro-life” and pro-capitalism, you were in the club. If you were a constitutionalist, you were in the club. That is of course the point of a political party: To make sure that everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goal. But if the party gets taken over by some outside force for the sake of one of its political goals, then said force can change the definition of who’s a “real” party loyalist. In this case, being “pro-life” meant that the Republican Party changed into the Trump Party, and went back on pretty much everything else that it meant to be Republican, like being pro-capitalist, pro-Constitution and anti-Russia. Likewise (L)ibertarian suspicion of government COVID mandates (almost all of which were instituted by state governments rather than Washington, ironically) meant there was an opportunity for takeover by people who go for all the alternative-to-being-right positions, like saying that the Federal Reserve “brainwashes our children to not know the difference between boys and girls” (from a Libertarian Party of Nevada post that I got the other day).

And as long as who you are and what you believe matters less than what party you belong to, we’re going to be stuck in this system where Republicans and “third” party candidates have to appeal to the biggest whackjobs to win primaries and Democrats can just mope along cause they have no incentive to compete intellectually. Since parties are now less a means of enforcing party function than a guarantee of party dysfunction, they need to be de-emphasized in the election system, which after all is supposed to supervise the campaigns rather than the other way around.

There have been various attempts to reform things on the state level, some of which got farther than others. This year, on the Nevada ballot, we have Question 3.

The ballot question was already passed in the 2022 election, but in Nevada, any ballot question has to have two successful Yes votes in two successive elections to become law. This is on one level a good security measure, but in practice what it means is that a popular proposal can pass in one election and then the special interests who don’t like it will have time to mobilize and get enough support to get people to vote it down the next time. This is how a previous Question 3, requiring an open energy market and removing the monopoly of NV Energy, could get supported in 2016 and then voted down in 2018, after NV Energy spent twice as much money against it as the supporters had to promote it.

So now we have a fairly similar situation coming up, with far more “No on Question 3” ads slamming the media than there are ads and articles explaining it or promoting it. And with early voting coming up, I need to go over 2024’s current Question 3.

This is the text of the ballot question:

Amendment to the Nevada Constitution:

Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to allow all Nevada voters the right to participate in open primary elections to choose candidates for the general election in which all voters may then rank the remaining candidates by preference for the offices of U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, State Controller, Attorney General, and State Legislators?

According to Ballotopedia, Question 3 greatly amends Article 15, Section 17 of the Nevada Constitution, stating first, “The primary election for partisan offices must be held on the date and time as provided by Nevada law.” Which right there challenges the current default where either of the two big parties can schedule a primary or even a caucus completely independent of what the State dictates. (Strange that no one complains about how confusing THAT is.) The main change is that the primary round would no longer be a party primary; “any registered voter may cast a primary ballot for any candidate for partisan office regardless of the political party affiliation of the voter”. Only the names of the five candidates receiving the greatest number of votes will advance to the general election.

It also creates a Section 18 detailing the process of ranked choice voting. It starts by saying that “The general election ballots for partisan office shall (be) designed so that the candidates are selected by ranked-choice voting.” Voters can mark (up to) five candidates in order of preference. It is not mandatory to mark more than one, but voters cannot assign the same ranking to more than one candidate for the same office. If no candidate is highest-ranked on a majority of ballots, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and votes for that candidate will be counted towards each ballot’s next highest continuing candidate and a new elimination round is held until a clear majority is achieved.

Pretty much every organized Democratic interest in Nevada is against Question 3, but not Republicans. Interestingly, the state Libertarian Party is also against it, saying in a September 3 news email, “Question 3 needs to be defeated! The “Top-Five Ranked-Choice Voting Initiative” doesn’t guarantee that Libertarian candidates will be on the ballot. You can kiss checks and balances on the two-party system goodbye. Right now, a Libertarian candidate can run in every race, but if this abomination passes this won’t be the case.”

Which especially in comparison to the status quo is just as illogical as every other objection to Question 3.

One of the objections is that Question 3 would force people to learn about (oh no) up to five candidates in a race. I mean, heavens forfend that people actually make an informed decision while voting. And I say it’s up to five candidates because that assumes there will even be more than the two major party candidates or more than one per party. (One of the reasons I think the Libertarians protest too much about Question 3 is that half of the time when I have a general election ballot, they don’t even have any candidates in most of the down-ballot races.) And if, as is probably going to be the case, there are more than two candidates but they are only in two parties, then yeah, you’re actually going to have to do your research and not just trust someone cause the ballot says R or D.

Another objection is that the system would eliminate the choice you made. This is in fact what the proposal is intended to prevent. If (hypothetically, because Question 3 would not apply until after this election, and the wording specifically excludes presidential races) you’re Libertarian sympathizing and your choices for a hypothetical race are Chase Oliver, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, along with the other “third” party candidates that you don’t care so much about, you can prioritize. If you think Harris is the lesser of two evils, you can set your top three priorities as Oliver, Harris and Trump. If you really think Harris’ agenda is more of a threat to liberty than Trump’s, you’d pick Oliver, Trump and Harris. Assuming of course that you ARE a capital L Libertarian and not just a willing tool of Trump and his boss. If you’re a Von Mises “libertarian” it’s probably going to be Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and I-guess-I-have-to-pick-Oliver. In the current system any choices other than the big two are eliminated automatically, so if you had any sympathies outside the big two, you either eliminate your preferred choice before even voting or the system does it for you.

But the fact that this does involve a more extended decision process is something that is picked on by Democrats in particular, with their campaigns assuming that voters simply can’t sort through them all. Garbage. How do we know Democrats in Nevada can sort through a longer selection process with ranked voting? Because they already have.

In the 2020 Nevada Democratic Caucus, the party experimented with a ranked-choice system for selecting the Democratic nominee for President in the early voting period. I have already gone over how it worked. Interestingly, that contest ended up with independent Bernie Sanders winning over Joe Biden, 40.5 percent to 18.9. Now that was a closed Democratic caucus, but again it included Sanders who is technically not a Democrat and businessman Tom Steyer who had previously never run for office.

To sum up, if Question 3 passes, Nevada’s election system would change in two major respects: elections for partisan state office (including US Senator and Representative but not including President and Vice President of the United States) would be effectively open primaries in which all voters can participate, as opposed to being restricted to members of one party. This would produce up to five candidates in a general election, who would be ranked by voters so that if no one candidate has an absolute majority in the first round of votes, the ranking order creates elimination rounds until that majority vote is achieved.

This is important for at least two reasons. The first, again, is that the process would be under the control of the state government as a whole as opposed to being an internally controlled party affair. Whereas when Hillary Clinton’s people were in charge of the Democratic caucus in 2016, they basically threw out votes for Sanders and when Nevada law was changed after 2020 to eliminate party caucuses and set a date for the 2024 Republican primary, the Trump Party held a caucus anyway, basically so that they could guarantee the result.

Second, ranked choice voting in the general round addresses the point that while the practical default in this country is two-party voting, Americans are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with both Democratic and Republican institutions. It certainly does not guarantee that a “third” party politician would win state office, but it greatly increases their chances of advance (that is, above zero). The fact that up to five candidates can participate addresses one issue with our region’s other alternate model, California’s ‘top two’ runoff system, where you could have two Republicans against three or more Democrats splitting the notRepublican vote and end up with a general election where the two choices are Republicans.

So, Question 3 addresses the problems with independent voters being shut out of the primary process and the general election, and makes the process less dependent on the control of partisan organizations.

No wonder some people want to kill it.

Again, an issue with ballot initiatives in Nevada is that the need for them to pass twice in two elections means that people against the change can simply hoard their assets and create an opposition in the second election that wasn’t there when the question passed the first time.

It is true that the “Yes” campaign is being funded by both millionaires of both parties in Nevada as well as both Democratic and Republican donors from out of state, but their efforts haven’t been nearly as visible as the “No” campaign. Pretty much every TV ad on the subject in Las Vegas has been a No ad, and that would be one thing, but most of them are written on the lines of a few specious and just plain wrong arguments. Such as, you have to vote for more than one candidate (you don’t, but if you do, you have to assign each a different rank), your vote will be thrown out (when again, if you’re a ‘third’ party voter, your vote will almost certainly not count at all in the current system) or it’s just too hard to go over five picks (when again, Democrats in Nevada have already done so at least once).

What it is is that certain people, including in the “third” parties, are interested in brand protection. The Democrats, at least in Nevada, like things the way they are. And the one grain of truth in the No arguments is that since “third” parties effectively do not even have a primary process, since there aren’t enough people involved, the open primary system where only five advance might eliminate a third-party candidacy. But I’ve already given my personal response to that: In most general election ballots I’ve seen, “third” parties are only running for President (which isn’t affected by Question 3), or maybe Senator. By and large they haven’t been fielding candidates under the status quo, and only when they do would such objection be relevant.

And to review, this whole process, explicit or otherwise, is going to make party affiliation less relevant. Because when the election system is run by the parties, it is gamed to their benefit, which is a large part of why we have sought out “third” parties as an alternative to the duopoly. And frankly, that hasn’t worked, both because our first-past-the-post standard has made a “third” party candidate irrelevant at best and a “spoiler” at worst, and because what happened to the Libertarians and Greens demonstrates that Republicans are not the only ones vulnerable to a hostile takeover that obliges party voters to choose between what they thought their party was and what it is now.

And that gets to the big point which is relevant to America in general and Nevada in particular:

In Nevada as of July 1, there are 685,459 non-partisans compared to 608,048 registered Democrats and 578,365 registered Republicans. Being “politically homeless” is more and more of a thing, because the Republican Party has made itself more and more repellent, and that has not in itself made the Democratic Party better at government nor made other parties more attractive. And none of this changes the fact that in any given election, one candidate is going to win. Anything that creates more participation in the process can only help, given that the dysfunction in the current duopoly is based on their closed participation systems, which are becoming more and more unrepresentative of a country where fewer people can identify fully with either big party.

The current system is a trap, it’s only going to lead to increasingly negative returns, and the best way out is to de-emphasize party loyalty and have people vote for whoever the best candidate is.

You know, like in a democracy.

The big news leading up to the next presidential debate was that not only did Liz Cheney (former Republican Congresswoman of Colorado) announce last week that yes, she was voting for Kamala Harris, she said on Friday that her Dad, Dick Cheney, was voting for Harris too. Which seems like a big deal, given that the Cheneys are so conservative that they kinda started the Iraq War and everything. But I am reminded of when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately urged Parliament to send military aid to Stalin, his political arch enemy. And when asked why, Churchill said, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least put in a good word for the Devil in the House of Commons.”
That’s where we are now. Not that I am comparing Trump to Hitler. Hitler at least had an infrastructure program.

On one level, this is meaningless, just as Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. endorsing Trump is meaningless, because just as those two represent the kind of Democrats whom the Democratic Party as a whole has rejected, the Cheneys are the kind of Republicans whom their party has rejected. But this is less a matter of “conservatism” (whatever that means) and more loyalty to the Mob Boss. And the Cheney endorsement just goes to show that leading up to this debate, whatever one thinks of the two parties, only one of them actually IS a political party. However dysfunctional and feckless the Democrats are, they at least think they’re supposed to be running a government. Whereas the Republicans are a combination Mafia family and religious cult that believes in leeching the taxpayer for all they can get while worshiping a criminal as God.

And if you want to play both sides-ism, both of these parties started off with a presidential candidate who is clearly too old to compete, but the Democrats actually acknowledged that in their case. And not only is Trump completely unqualified on a performance level, he has disqualified himself with his criminal activities to stop the 2020 election result, not to mention his hoarding of classified documents since leaving office, a point that neither Republicans nor the “liberal” media will emphasize.

And since the Trump Party IS a Mob, and have already announced that they’re going to try and interfere with election results, the best way for Kamala Harris and Democrats to win is to do what Joe Biden did in 2020: Win enough states by big enough margins that Republicans can’t steal enough elections to change the outcome.

And as with the DNC, which certainly pumped up the Democrats but doesn’t seem to have created much momentum in the polls, Democrats were looking at the debate as a means of shifting the momentum, whereas with all the advantages Trump has – namely a “news” media that wants a demented goon back in the White House cause he’s “great for ratings” – all Trump really needed to do was hang on and hope that his blind-faith cult can carry him the rest of the way.

Well, as Trump would say, “We’ll see what happens.”

Keep in mind, I only got to check so much of the debate in real time because I work at home, at night, and I was taking calls. But I noticed a couple things. Most of the people calling customer service had the debate on, which I could hear on their line while I was watching with the sound off. The other thing I noticed is that we weren’t getting quite as many calls as we usually do on a Tuesday evening. Of course as soon as the debate was over, every property in the United States suddenly started having emergencies again.

Just as well that I couldn’t hear most of it. I am not a fan of Harris’ voice, and even less a fan of Trump’s whiny-Mafioso-with-sleep-apnea voice. So as with Kennedy vs. Nixon, the visuals are everything. And the main visual I got watching this on TV was Trump on the left going off while on the right Harris was watching with an actively bemused, trying-not-to-laugh expression on her face, like you might have if your friend invited you to their house and you watched their four-year-old child try to recite Gilbert and Sullivan. Much more pleasant than watching Trump on the left as he Gish Galloped across the Pecos while Biden stood there wondering what the hell he was seeing, let alone Trump’s reactions to Harris, which were basically a sulky little boy hoping that if he frowned hard enough his stare could break a hole in a mountainside. That is, when he wasn’t rolling his eyes and pursing his lips in contempt, or grinning like a toad who’d just been given a lobotomy.

Not that the moderators didn’t ask questions that could challenge the Biden-Harris Administration. But you know what? She answered them. In regard to the Biden Afghanistan pullout, she pointed out that it was Trump himself who made the plans with the Taliban in 2020, bypassing the Afghan government. And as much as Trump hammered on immigration, and “border czar” and all that, she pointed out that there was a border bill written by a Republican that he told his Party to kill. And in regard to immigration, Trump repeated the racist-as-fuck story that Haitian immigrants in some communities were eating people’s dogs, which running mate JD Vance has also spread. In response, ABC news anchor David Muir said ABC did reach out to the city manager in Springfield and confirmed they had no such reports.

Co-moderator Linsey Davis also fact-checked Trump, noting that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born.”

BREAKING NEWS: JOURNALISTS ACTUALLY DID THEIR JOBS

And when the debate turned to climate change, Trump blamed Harris and Biden for taking money from Ukraine.

Which only goes to show that Trump has his invincible bond with his voter base because he IS his voter: A belligerent dumbass who parrots any conspiracy theory you feed him cause he can be exploited by con men that much more evil than he is.

It went further. On the subject of Ukraine, Harris said “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe. Starting with Poland. And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” She also said earlier, “And it is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.” Trump later said, “Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men — they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid. And I don’t like to use the word afraid but I’m just quoting him. China was afraid of him. North Korea was afraid of him.”

Kinda proves her point, don’t it?

And Harris also said in regard to world leaders, “And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.”

Well, he IS a disgrace. Just this week, he continued to insist that he’d never met E. Jean Carroll, refusing to say her name, while also going into extensive detail about the number of times they’d met. He also denied guilt in her sexual assault case, saying “she would not have been The Chosen One.” At the press conference, he also had two of his lawyers flanking them while he said, “I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you.”

It’s like he was designed in a lab to be the most disgusting humanoid imaginable. I mean, Lenin and Hitler would look at him and go, “DUDE.”

And just after the debate, Taylor Swift posted on Instagram, announcing that she was endorsing Harris, because we need “calm instead of chaos.” She signed it “Taylor Swift Childless Cat Lady.”

Now here’s the real fight: Trump vs. Swift.

One is an Aryan tycoon with millions of fanatic worshipers who will kill you for disrespecting their idol. The other is Trump.

So, that’s it, then. It’s over.

I mean, it shouldn’t be that simple, but it probably is.

But then again: It should have been over in 20 fucking 16 after the Access Hollywood tape. It should have been over when Trump tried to kill his own Republican Congress on January 6, 2021 cause not enough of them would go along with his election steal. They all fluttered, and huffed, and then they all took Trump’s side in impeachment, and came crawling back to their Master anyway.

What else are they going to do?

Voters, Republican voters in particular, are like football fans. Everyone’s got their team. And as I’ve said before, it’s like if you’re a Dallas Cowboys fan from back in the glory days, and then Jerry Jones bought the team, and the very first thing he did was to fire Tom Landry, and every rotten thing that’s happened to that team since stems directly from that decision, but what’re ya gonna do, quit being a Cowboys fan?

And a lot of it is also “moderates” who want an alternative to the “socialist” party that’s raised inflation everywhere, but then who’s going to be the alternative to the alternative when the Republican cure for social democracy is a lot worse than the disease?

We are never going to be rid of these two parties because, for one thing, they need each other for their suckers to have someone to vote against. Also, no matter how dysfunctional one party becomes, its formal collapse would mean that there’s only one national party in this country, and that’s really not feasible. But what that means for the moment and the foreseeable future is that the Republican Party will just continue to deteriorate without dying because there will always be a need for an alternative to the Democrats, no matter how broken and evil it is.

The only way to get out of this trap is to break people of their football-team loyalty to party and de-emphasize parties in the election system, just as they have largely ceased to exist as governing bodies against their own politicians. You need things like open primaries and ranked choice voting. This ought to be damn obvious by now, and yet certain people don’t want their little system to change. And there’s a particular example of this that I will deal with in my next column.

Leading a race does not mean you will win it.

– African proverb

Hey, so what did you think of the Democratic National Convention this year? When they had a DJ? When they had Stevie Wonder? When people were singing, and happy, and it almost felt like a concert every night? Did you see how Tim Walz’ son was crying because he was so proud to see his Dad become the Vice Presidential nominee, and his Dad gave that love right back? Did you see how Kamala Harris surprised everyone by actually giving a great speech? Did you see how fired up everyone was? Did you see all those Lamestream Media people using words like “happiness” and “joy”? JOY?

Nauseating as fuck, wasn’t it?

What you need is to get grounded back in the reality of the last eight years of the Trump Era, in which you grind out day after day in a paycheck-to-paycheck job expecting the government to engineer some giant catastrophe (or stumble into one by sheer accident) while the Boss and his cronies continue to grift off the taxpayer and dodge prosecution, and you go to bed at night waiting for a sadistic God to grant you the sweet mercy of Death.

So let’s see what’s been happening in Trumpworld since Harris and Walz teamed up.

First, the big earth-shattering, game changing news: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump. AND so did Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah, he should start picking out the drapes right now. These are the two people whose whole cultural role is being the people in traditional Democrat demographics who were never going to vote for Democrats anyway, and those people were never going to vote for Kennedy as an “independent” if it meant that Biden (now Harris) wins their state.

There was this one opinion column, I think it was from USA Today, but I can’t find it, where the guy talked about how the Kennedy family has gotten involved in all kinds of drug abuse and adultery scandals, but they act like Robert is a disgrace to the family, just cause he endorsed Trump?

Well, YEAH, guy. That’s just it. Do you know what it takes to embarrass the Kennedys?

I’m sure they wouldn’t appreciate a Kennedy endorsing any Republican, but there’s a qualitative difference between endorsing (say) someone in the Bush family and Trump. There are some Trumpniks who want to declare that the endorsement of RFK (and Gabbard) indicates that the Greedy Old Puritans are still a “big tent” party because they have the support of these very nominal Democrats, but in this case big tent just means tolerance to any crackpot theory or mental dysfunction, not just the ones Trump likes.

Kerry Kennedy, RFK’s sister, had said months before the open alignment to Trump, “I strongly condemn my brother’s deplorable and untruthful remarks last week about Covid being engineered for ethnic targeting,” Kerry Kennedy said at the time. “His statements do not represent what I believe or what Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights stand for, with our 50+-year track record of protecting rights and standing against racism and all forms of discrimination.” And then there’s the fact that RFK Jr. is just totally what-the-fuck even by modern Republican standards. In addition to his own drug abuse, diagnosed mental and physical problems and multiple admitted abuses of dead wild animals, the news recently requoted RFK’s own daughter going over another story of how her Dad used a chainsaw to sever the head of a beached whale when they were at Hyannis Port, then strapped the head to the family vehicle for the five-hour drive home, saying “every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car” and that they “had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
But as Bill Maher said Friday, maybe RFK just has this weird attachment to decaying and bloated corpses. Which would also explain the endorsement of Trump.

And then there’s the big issue with the veteran community.

Trump, who is such a Macho Man that “Macho Man” is actually part of his campaign theme music (along with ‘YMCA’) apparently didn’t realize that saying the Congressional Medal of Honor isn’t as good as the Presidential Medal of Freedom “because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, [but] soldiers ‒ they’re either in very bad shape, because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead” was not a good move for his reputation as a Real American Hero.

So Monday August 26, with the invitation (or pretext) by a family of the deceased, Trump and said family posed at the graves of servicemembers who died guarding the Kabul airport during America’s final evacuation of forces in 2021. Smiling with his shit-eating grin and his thumb up, the way he says “Happy Good Friday!” to commemorate the myth of Jesus dying in agony and harrowing Hades.

The reason this was a big deal is because apparently it’s against the law. The Army said in a statement, “Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign.” The other issue being that when a cemetery official pointed this out, Trump’s “staff” decided to have an altercation. But Arlington National Cemetery also stated: “An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside […] the employee subsequently decided not to press charges. Therefore, the Army considers this matter closed.” So Trump got away with it.

Because of course he did. The Boss always wins. The Boss always gets his way. Laws don’t apply to the Boss. And if you got a problem with dat, we’re gonna make it real ugly for ya. Ya don’t want it to get ugly, DO ya, America?

Then there was the third issue this week, where Special Counsel Jack Smith had the Department of Justice reintroduce charges against Donald Trump regarding the January 6 insurrection with a superseding indictment.

Because as we know, the last decision of the Supreme Court’s last term was Trump vs. United States, in which the United States lost. In said decision, Chief Justice John Roberts unilaterally declared that the president can commit any crime he wants as long as he calls it an “official act.” It still raises the question of whether this applies to parts of Trump’s New York fraud coverup that he committed after getting elected, or whether it applies to Trump’s pressure campaign on a different official (Vice President Mike Pence) to throw the election result to him. And that’s because Trump, like Dobbs vs. Mississippi, was made up with no regard to precedent, let alone consequences, and like Dobbs is a piece of shit ruling that’s not worth the toilet paper it was wiped on, and ought to be overridden just like the Dred Scott ruling.

But this being the standard for now, Jack Smith rephrased his case to an untainted grand jury, this time changing various terms so as to refer to Donald Trump as an individual, rather than as the president, and referring to his January 6 speech to the mob as a campaign event – which you can seriously argue that it was, given that the whole point was that Trump was not conceding the election.

It is of course certain that if this case gets anywhere in the next few months and goes against Trump, his lawyers are once again going to climb the ladder to get Trump’s pet judges to save their boss from himself. They probably could, cause they’ve gone this far, but then again they’ve pushed their luck so far that President Biden actually started pushing Supreme Court reforms, including term limits, and Roberts probably doesn’t need to give Democrats any more ammunition, especially if Democrats win. And maybe Roberts ought to consider that he shouldn’t have decided that Presidents can do anything they want if right now Biden is President and Harris is in charge of certifying the Electoral result, and they are in charge of Washington DC security and can do all of that stuff that Trump wanted to do to stop a loss. Unless Roberts wants to step in and say “Wait, I meant only OUR guy can do that”, but that would give the game away, wouldn’t it?

I saw some self-described “libertarians” bitching on Facebook that Smith’s move is another case of the mean ol’ Democrats trying to eliminate any competition – although in other cases, this is a very real problem.

My reaction is: Grow up. Thanks to Trump’s various enablers, up to and including the Supreme Court, Smith’s case is never going to be decided in court before this election. If I were you, I’d be more worried about the sentencing in the already decided New York fraud case, which itself has been unnecessarily delayed. And even if your hero does get a prison term there, he can always appeal, and even if he went to prison, there is nothing stopping him from continuing to run for office. And if Trump wins his election, he can make Smith’s case go away permanently, and probably make Smith go away permanently too.

Because we should not forget the real reason Our Lord and Savior is making us all suffer for his sins:

TRUMP 2024: I’M TOO PRETTY FOR PRISON

Since I really don’t have time for everything I want to do in a week, I couldn’t both state my opinion on new Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and respond to the Andrew Sullivan opinion on Harris, “The Kamala Chimera.” So I’m doing both here.

Dear Andrew,

In your July 26 piece, you said that the news media and social media swing of support toward Vice President Kamala Harris in the wake of President Biden’s endorsement was a pivot that reflected “amnesia.” Certainly amnesia towards Harris’ pre-2020 career is not the only example of media amnesia. For instance, the fact that the media successfully leveraged Biden into quitting the race because he is visibly aging and seems therefore unqualified for the job begs the question of why no one in the media or the Republican OR the Democratic Party is questioning the qualifications of a Donald Trump, who is not only visibly aging and increasingly incoherent – like Biden – but tried to strongarm both Georgia’s Secretary of State and his own Vice President to “find” him the votes he needed to skew the result in 2020 and then incited an armed mob to kill said Vice President when he wouldn’t do what he wanted. You would think that Biden’s level of disqualification on top of that one would be a bigger issue for Trump, but everyone just seems like they forgot about it. That level of amnesia makes the contrast with Harris’ past and present kind of trivial.

Indeed, the contrast between Harris and Trump points out the real problem for Republicans. Democrats could switch horses because they had other options. Republicans in the Party of Trump cannot switch because they have no other options, because no one else in the party would be seen as credible, with the possible exception of Nikki Haley, whom not enough people voted for.

Harris could still lose. The Electoral College is still not looking good, and Democrats need Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania, otherwise the math gets too hard. Which is why I think Harris’ best bet for running mate is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. In 2020, he was popular with the sort of ticket-splitting moderates and conservatives that Democrats will need now. Plus, he’s Jewish, which will really make the MAGAts go nuts.

Kamala Harris was not my first choice for Democratic nominee in 2020. That would have been Pete Buttigieg. Or maybe Sanders. In fact, Harris wouldn’t have even been my last choice. And I suspect, as do you, that most of the reason Biden held out this long is because he knew Harris’ weaknesses and suspected she would be even weaker against Trump than he is. But then Trump himself demonstrates the problem with picking a VP based on loyalty and demographic appeal rather than confidence that they would be a good replacement. But you knew that was the alternative you had, if you wanted to keep picking apart Biden, because just handing over to the VP who is already on the ticket is preferable to a substitute that could be challenged in the Republicans’ pet courts, or an open and potentially fractious Democratic Convention. Which just happens to be in Chicago. I mean, assuming you don’t want Trump to win.

As they say, Andrew, be careful what you wish for. You got what you wished for. Be happy.

Even if we, unlike much of the media, have a mental age above four and are capable of looking at how “cringe” Harris was, and remains, the reason things are different now – and so far seem to be different than they were for the last female presidential candidate – is because, to use that phrase of hers that’s been making the rounds, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

I mean, obviously we didn’t see this on Friday, but on Saturday Trump made a speech to a Christian group in Florida and told them, quote: “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore … You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”

Raising the question, what kind of “fix” are we talking about that changes the process of government to make voting irrelevant?

I have joked that the premise of Republican voting is “Vote So You’ll Never Have To Vote Again.” Now they’re just coming out and saying it. And don’t rationalize by saying that Democrats take Trump literally but not seriously and Republicans take him seriously but not literally. When Trump slumped up to the podium on January 6, 2021 and told his audience, “You’ve got to fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore”, and then they fought like hell for him, were they taking him seriously or literally?

These are not Ronald Reagan’s conservatives. They do not want a republic, they want a monarchy. Not even a monarchy. Even King George III was limited by Parliament. What these “post liberals” want is an absolute monarchy, like the Czars of Russia had. Or should I say, like the Czars of Russia have.

What are our objections toward Kamala Harris compared to that?

“She’s not a serious person.” What, compared to Donnie “Bingbongbingbangbing” Trump and JD “I Can See Russia From My Bank Account” Vance?

“All-Drama Kamala.” See, that’s a good one. That’s an insult with wit. I mention this because as you know, Trump always invests much of his very little brainpower on coming up with the right demeaning nickname for his current political target, like how he calls Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy”, he calls Nikki Haley “Nancy Pelosi” and he calls Vladimir Putin “My Precious Lord and Master In Whose Name I Live and Serve.” What’s he calling Harris? “Laffin’ Kamala.” Always making sure to spell out the “Laffin'”, with the apostrophe, to emphasize that he can’t spell correctly.

Lame. “Laffin’ Kamala.” Not as good as “Meatball Ron.” That one just rolled off the tongue, so to speak. Trump’s clearly losing his touch. He needs help. Really, Andrew, you should apply for a job with Team Trump. You’re giving him better advice than he seems to be getting from them.

Even if everything you’re saying about Kamala is true, and I agree with most of it, she is a Goddamn ray of sunshine compared to Trump, this whiny, dumpy little brat who will never go away, will never stop demanding attention and who expects to be treated like God, despite his manifest lack of qualifications for the job. Unless you count his desire to annihilate anyone who’s outside his chosen tribe. Anything that’s wrong with Harris is a fair price to pay for making that brat shut his puckered little mouth once and for all. And of course, making his death cult that used to be a real political party cry. And I suspect there’s a whole bunch of people, who used to be conservative before Trump bought out the definition of the term, who feel the same way as I do, and we now have the best chance to make that happen. And if that’s how we feel, you can imagine how energized Democrats are.

The real problem, if you’re in that rare species called “libertarian” and the now hunted-to-the-point-of-extinction species of moderate conservative, is BOTH these major political parties suck Jalapeno pickles. Both of them will not leave you alone. Both of them demand to micromanage your life, it’s just a question which aspects they prefer to micromanage. And frankly, both of them are socialist. It’s just that since Trump is a self-described nationalist, his socialism is more of the national type. And what really sucks is, no matter how much you want to get away from the fact, ONE of these political parties IS going to win the election. So make up your mind which socialism you prefer: The one that promises national health care or the one that wants to send your gardener to a concentration camp?

Ever since 2016, the situation has been that the Republicans are Nazi Germany, the Democrats are Soviet Russia, and America is Poland. And we know that Poland eventually managed to get out from under 50 years of mindless left-wing collectivism, but it would not have survived 50 years of mindless, exterminationist, right-wing collectivism, and that is where we are now. No, I am not saying that the Democrats ARE Communists or the Republicans are Nazis. Yet. But you have to admit, even you have to admit, Andrew, that the Republicans are a lot closer to being Nazis than the Democrats are to being Communists. At worst, the situation with Kamala is going to be the same as if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. And as the late great P.J. O’Rourke said of Hillary, “She would be a terrible president, but she would be terrible along conventional parameters.”

Sincerely,

James

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was born November 20, 1942, almost 82 years ago. And while his body is in fair shape for a man his age, his political career was assassinated on July 21, 2024, not by Republicans, but by his ostensible allies in the “liberal” media and the Democratic Party itself. His presidency has not yet lasted four years.

On Sunday, President Biden officially announced that while he is serving the rest of his term, he will not continue to campaign and is asking his primary delegates to support Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic Party nomination for president. On Wednesday 8 PM he gave a short speech from the Oval Office stating: “I believe my record as president, my leadership in the world, my vision for America’s future all merited a second term, but nothing, nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy, and that includes personal ambition.”

As I have said more than once, I think the reason Biden ran for re-election in the first place (and held off this long despite his unpopularity) is the suspicion that Harris would be even more unpopular.

The reason that we have been in this horrible situation with the 2024 election, with a rematch of two candidates that no one wanted to see run the first time, is because of the truly horrible truth of the Republican Party: Donald Trump really is the best candidate they have for president. Because he is a sinner and a joker, he is the best candidate to push a theocratic agenda compared to the sincere fanatics who would otherwise be running in his absence. We all know Trump isn’t sincere about anything, so (it’s assumed) he isn’t going to be serious about Project 2025, either.

Conversely, Joe Biden, the other old, politically incorrect white guy, was thought to be the best choice to sell a Democratic Party that is still associated with DEI, Palestine protestors and Defund the Police, even though most mainstream Democrats don’t believe in such initiatives. The problem is that that June debate really killed him. Everyone knew that Joe was old, but some people saw that and thought, “Wow, I knew he was old, but this is ‘should we put Dad in a home?’ old.” I think overall he has shown himself to be lucid, but not consistently enough, and not without even more flubs, such as mixing up his running mate with Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy with Russian President Putin. And then of course there’s this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vpIF65ISZU

I had thought that as with a whole bunch of candidates, including Barack Obama in 2012 and the now Senator John Fetterman in 2022, that one bad debate was not and should not have been enough to pronounce final judgment on the Biden campaign. And it didn’t. Most polls after the debate showed Biden at least holding his own, even if he was a couple points down in some instances, but certainly not by so much of a margin that it ended the race. What took Biden down was the campaign from within, as Democratic Party insiders and the Washington media – same thing, really – spread rumors about Biden’s lack of support even as big money donors openly declared they were withholding contributions. Meanwhile bigwigs like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and even Barack Obama were non-commital in public even as they were pressuring Biden to drop out behind the scenes, and letting their contacts in the press know all of this even as they refused to say so on camera. The threat being that if Biden didn’t drop out, those people and others like Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries would speak out openly this week. And that sort of no-confidence gesturing did a lot more to kill Biden’s polls and position than the Trump debate itself. So while at one point after the debate Congressional insiders said the push against Biden was dead, and he was continuing to gain public support at rallies, the impression among the Inner Party was that his continued presence at the top of the ticket was only going to endanger their own priorities.

Like, didja notice how the Democratic insiders only started renewing their push for Biden to quit once he announced his idea of reforming the Supreme Court?

But then, a good definition of irony is Adam Schiff publicly saying that Biden needed to step down, then sending me a fundraiser email saying that Trump doesn’t want to unite the country.

If nothing else, this disloyalty is at least a contrast to an alleged political party that could watch Trump get convicted of sexual assault and fraud and become that much more loyal the more unsavory he got. The Democrats do seem to be individuals and not a hive mind. They are in fact so individualist that they are willing to throw away such political planning as they have.

The other angle being that Trump and his pet party have invested their campaign money and their dwindling reserves of intellect and creativity in bashing Joe Biden as Trump’s inevitable opponent: “Sleepy Joe, Crooked Joe, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden, Hunter Biden… if I say Hunter Biden enough times, Michael Keaton will show up and save the day with his magical ghost powers.”

Now at least they can’t do that. The spanner has been thrown into the works. And it’s obviously made Trump and his servants mad, with House Speaker Mike Johnson telling the press that it would be “unlawful” to replace Biden. Says the guy who supported January 6.

This change also means that in the two-party race, Donald Trump is now the only candidate who can be credibly accused of being too old and senile to do the job. Presumably the press will be just as obsessed with that issue as they were when Biden was running.

Which leads to the separate but very much related issue that the “liberal” media are nobody’s friends. This is something that I would like to detail at another time, but right now it’s not as important. Suffice to say here that they did everything they could to shift the course of Biden’s decision, and now that they’ve successfully couped a president their own self-importance will swell even further and make them even more insufferable than they already are.

And it goes without saying that this only confirms the Democratic Party is simultaneously feckless and untrustworthy and for all its preening demonstrations of altruism, it was, is and always will be primarily concerned with preserving its privileges in the system, and if doing the right thing gets in the way of that, they get the right thing out of the way.

But they’re NOT Project 2025. Which Trump is now committed to even if he actually knows better.

And likewise, I am even less a fan of Kamala Harris than I am of Joe Biden, but compared to Trump, Harris looks like fucking Eisenhower.

In any case, in the short span of time since Joe’s announcement, polls of Kamala Harris against Trump are no worse than Trump’s polls against Biden, with one notable poll showing Harris ahead of Trump, 42 to 38 percent with Robert Kennedy Jr. getting 8 percent. Without Kennedy included the poll showed Harris up by only 2, 44 to 42 percent. (So at least in this poll, Kennedy is taking votes away from Trump. Something to think about if you were only supporting RFK to spoil the Democrats.) The race is still close, especially in Electoral College terms. But until now, all other things were equal and a lot of people thought it was going to be the same two old white guys running again, and now you have the potential of a female president, with Black and Indian roots at that. The Democratic base is energized now, probably more than they would be if Biden had won that debate.

In Wednesday’s speech, President Biden reviewed what he is continuing to do and what he has done: “I’ll continue to lower costs for hard-working families, grow our economy. I’ll keep defending our personal freedoms and our civil rights, from the right to vote to the right to choose. … I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world. We’ll keep rallying a coalition of proud nations to stop Putin from taking over Ukraine and doing more damage. We’ll keep NATO stronger, and I’ll make it more powerful and more united than at any time in all of our history. I’ll keep doing the same for allies in the Pacific.

“You know, when I came to office, the conventional wisdom was that China would inevitably surpass the United States. That’s not the case anymore. And I’m going to keep working to end the war in Gaza, bring home all the hostages and bring peace and security to the Middle East and end this war… You know, we’ve come so far since my inauguration. On that day, I told you as I stood in that winter — we stood in a winter of peril and a winter of possibilities, peril and possibilities. We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in the century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War, but we came together as Americans, and we got through it. We emerged stronger, more prosperous and more secure. Today, we have the strongest economy in the world, creating nearly 16 million new jobs — a record. Wages are up, inflation continues to come down, the racial wealth gap is the lowest it’s been in 20 years.”

Coming from his career politician background, serving as US Senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009, then serving eight years as Vice President under President Barack Obama, using his Senate connections to negotiate crucial budget bills and presenting a foreign policy perspective that was otherwise lacking, Joe Biden had every reason to be proud of his life in public service even before becoming President. He had famously decided not to run in 2015 in the wake of his son Beau’s death, and was considered only one of several contenders to run against Trump in 2020, with the press focusing on his personal behavior and the scandals of his son Hunter. But Biden’s Party connections paid off again, with the support of Congressman Jim Clyburn helping him win the South Carolina primary and gaining him the momentum he needed for the Super Tuesday primaries to cinch the nomination.

Biden had promised to correct many of the mistakes from Trump’s time in office, and did so. But he made mistakes – notably collapsing our position in Afghanistan before a troop withdrawal – and is blamed for inflation, although many other factors are involved. He believed in 2020 that he was the only candidate who had the position and reputation to beat Trump, and he was right then. He still believed he was the only candidate who could beat him this year, but just as President Obama was often too passive in dealing with both foreign and Republican threats, Biden did not properly acknowledge that his challenger, the former incumbent, was a criminal who was a threat to national security, starting even before Biden’s inauguration, when on January 6, 2021 he incited a mob to break into the Capitol and kill his own Vice President when Mike Pence wouldn’t change the results of the Electoral College vote for him. Because Biden and his even more timid Attorney General, Merrick Garland, did not act to investigate and prosecute Trump until about the midpoint of his presidency, this gave Trump’s various allies in government and the courts the ability to delay judgments until after the election, when depending on the result, they will not matter. Because of this, Biden and the Democrats did what everyone has always done: They normalized Trump. They made him seem like a legitimate candidate, and having been made equal to the current president, the fact that the current president is also old, slow and forgetful seems to matter more because he’s the old, slow and forgetful guy who’s in office now.

Several times on Wednesday, Biden used words like “America is at an inflection point” and that the election is about choosing “the course of America’s future.” He used the old Benjamin Franklin quote about the Constitutional Convention where Ben was asked if the new government was a republic or monarchy, and Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” He held on to his campaign because he thought that it was the only thing stopping Trump from taking over, and when his own Party made it clear they would not support him anymore, he realized that the main thing that would allow Trump to take over is to keep going the way we have been. His decision was called “selfless”, “heroic” and all those things by Washington insiders because such sacrifice is completely alien to themselves, so they know how hard the decision must have been for him. But he quit the race for the same reason he ran in the first place: Because Trump must be stopped.

You cannot say that Joe Biden didn’t do everything he could to make that happen.

“Great liars are also great magicians.”

• Adolf Hitler

JUDAS: Lord, if you were me, could you betray your Master?
JESUS: That’s why God gave me the easier job.

– The Last Temptation of Christ

Let me just repeat, for the record, that violence is never the answer, and it should never be a solution to political issues, and it was a real bad thing that almost happened to Donald Trump…

…I GUESS…

I actually liked that one post in the Progressive Libertarianism Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=progressive%20libertarianism asking “I wonder how many Republicans secretly wished that shooter hadn’t missed.” That’s a good reason why so many of them don’t believe the shooter was a Republican. Because every one of them are looking at that tape going, “I coulda MADE that shot! Why’d they send a fucking amateur??”

I ask again, Why? Goddamn WHY? Why does he always get away with it? How could whatsshisface kill one person in the bleachers by Trump but miss the guy right up on the stage by inches? Why can we NEVER be rid of this political cancer?

Because God is real, and he hates us all. That’s why.

Boy, when Trump celebrates his 112^th birthday in the White House, you’re gonna have the last laugh on your granddaughter when she asks you how the world got so fucked up, and she has to work three jobs to support her eleven children (and one in the oven) while her husband is fighting in Korea (in support of the North).

“Because Joe Biden looked SOOO OOOLLD in that debate”

you will say, behind the barbed wire at the internment camp.

Jesus Fuck, people. Yes, Biden is real old. So who should be running this country, Olivia Rodrigo?!?

But apparently the guy who wallows in violence and popularized the phrase “stochastic terrorism” is suddenly a martyr AND he also gets the benefit of living. We don’t know if this event is actually going to tilt the election, but Biden’s kamikaze debate didn’t (completely) tilt the election, either. Nevertheless, the Trump Party now treats him more like Jesus than they already did. In their continuing quest for maximum tackiness, vendors at the Republican National Convention set up a raffle to win an AR-15, just like the one that shot Our Lord and Savior. I think I now see how Christianity came to be symbolized by the cross, when you would think that if Jesus came back, that would be the last thing he’d ever wanna see.

So maybe we should review the events. Maybe we should ask why the Secret Service and FBI couldn’t secure the roof where the shooter perched. Maybe we should ask how they got wind of the shooter on the roof 20 minutes before the attack and no one followed up.

And then you have the transcript of the event, which you can visually confirm if you look at the tape:

00:32-00:39 – Secret Service: “ … We’re good. Shooter’s down, are we good to move? We’re clear. Let’s move. We’re clear, let’s move. We’re clear ”

00:40-00:41 – Secret Service: “Hold that in your head [inaudible] bloody.”

00:41-00:44 – Secret Service: “Sir, we got to get moving to the [inaudible].”

00:44-00:45 – Donald Trump: “Let me get my shoes.”

00:45-00:48 – Secret Service: “OK, are the shoes down … [inaudible]? Get the shoe.”

00:48-00:48 – Secret Service: “Watch out.”

00:50-00:51 – Donald Trump: “Wait, wait, wait, wait.”

00:52-00:57 – Donald Trump: [inaudible] mouths “fight” three times while pumping fist in the air

00:58-00:59 – Secret Service: “Move now, we got to move. We gotta move.”

Raising the question, if you were in fear for your life, and you didn’t know if it was a lone gunman, why would you spend 13 seconds (after getting your shoes back) telling your security to wait so you could pose for the crowd? More to the point, if you’re the Secret Service, why would you go with that request if you still had reason to fear for the life of your charge?

Damn right, I’m saying this thing was staged. I’ve seen moon landings that were less fake than this assassination.

“But James”, you ask, “Didn’t the shooter die? Didn’t he kill an innocent bystander and wound other people?” Well, the fact that the shooter was himself a Trumpnik actually makes sense in that context. Who would be more likely to see Trump as a Messiah? Who would be more likely to sacrifice himself to bring about his Lord’s ascension? I mean jeez, apart from the exceptions you can count on one hand, you don’t see liberals taking AR-15s and shooting people.

And then, let’s make this even more suspicious. Why did Trump spend the next day Sunday golfing, as opposed to, say, calling the wife of the murder victim? (As I say, ‘Priorities.’) Just how bad was that shot to the ear?

Bad enough apparently that lots of people at the Trump National Convention had to wear their own Vincent Van Gogh ear pads once they saw Trump wear one on Monday, even though apparently he didn’t need one while he was carried off and didn’t need one to play golf.

Ah, yes, the Trump National Convention. Which led to the even more nauseating news from Trumpworld this week, as the inevitable nominee officially chose Senator J.D. Vance (B.R. – Ohio) as his running mate.

It’s not bad in that it proves my prediction wrong, it’s bad in that it’s still a bad move for Trump to make, specifically in that in politics a Vice President is supposed to appeal to the people who don’t already like you, and either Doug Burgum or Tim Scott would have had more appeal to Republicans and independents who still identify as Homo sapiens sapiens. Because of this announcement and the previous rumors leading up to it, we have gotten to see a lot of JD Vance’s previous appearances on TV, and the main thing I noticed is that he wears the same eyeliner Mark Hamill had in the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Vance is firmly of the belief that we ought not be supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russian genocide, and that Putin’s campaign against them was provoked by NATO expansion (as opposed to former Warsaw Pact nations asking to join NATO because of Putin’s transparent demands for expansionism). Vance has spoken out against divorce even while acknowledging spousal abuse exists: “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term”. Needless to say, he’s also not only against abortion, he wants to re-enforce the Comstock Act to prevent abortifacients from being sold though the Post Office. And on the economy, Vance is himself a venture capitalist but in his Vice Presidential acceptance speech said “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street.” He actually co-sponsored a bill with Senator Elizabeth Warren to cancel pay bonuses for the heads of failed banks. And he’s also completely on board with Trump’s broad-based tariff proposal, which would amount to an across-the-board tax on consumers without necessarily reducing our dependence on imports.

All of which is not necessarily popular with the public at large. So that, combined with the fact that Vance is a rising star with ambitions of his own contrasts with people like Scott or Marco Rubio who know they cannot be in a position to lead and only seek to serve. Trump would clearly prefer such an underling, but that’s not what he picked. The choice of Vance is dangerous not only in that Trump picked somebody who can credibly replace him – which he would prefer not to do – but that he, or his people, are thinking of Trumpism beyond Trump, which he would also prefer not to do.

Not only is the fix in for Trump, with John Roberts, Aileen Cannon and other judges crafting exceptions in the legal system to make Trump invincible, the fix is now in ON Trump, as he is obliged to take the running mate that the bigwigs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel want, at risk of losing their financial support. This is the signal that Trump HAS to enact Project 2025, even though with his idiot-savant grasp of politics, he actually knows better than his patrons that a lot of it just isn’t going to fly. But, once you’ve destroyed the premise of a democratic republic, the fact that your agenda is massively unpopular won’t matter any more.

In the meantime, Trump and Vance have to go through the pretense of an election, in which even under Electoral College terms, you still have to be more broadly popular than the other side. And that is undermined not only by their own unpopularity, but by the fact that Vance in his earlier phase of conservatism had spoken out very clearly against Trump. Like the fact that Vance had called Trump an “idiot” and thought that he could be either another Nixon who was reactionary but competent, or “America’s Hitler.” (Which would make Vance America’s Goering.) But the nature of his former opposition compared to his current servitude illustrates the strongest example of how Republicans in general have not merely indulged in hypocrisy for Trump but destroyed their very souls.

Because Vance, prior to becoming a Republican politician, had critiqued both Democratic elites and Republican plutocrats, from the perspective of his “Hillbilly Elegy” autobiography where he talked about growing up poor with an addicted mother and only able to make something of himself through the support of his grandparents. He continued that critique well into 2016. In July 4, 2016, he wrote a piece for The Atlantic titled “Opioid of the Masses” in which he compared the heroin overdoses of people in his hometown to the overall cultural situation and Americans’ need to escape reality: “Of course, the pain itself has increased in recent years, and it comes from many places. Some of it is economic, as the factories that provided many U.S. towns and cities material security have downsized or altogether ceased to exist. Some of it is aesthetic, as the storefronts that once made American towns beautiful and vibrant gave way to cash-for-gold stores and payday lenders. Some of it is domestic, as rising divorce rates reveal home lives as dependable as steel-mill jobs. Some of it is political, as Americans watch from afar while a government machine that rarely tries to speak to them, and acts in their interests even less, sputters along. And some of it is cultural, from the legitimate humiliation of losing wars fought by the nation’s children to the illegitimate sense that some fall behind only because others jump ahead.

“…During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump.

“…The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”

Of course they did not realize it, Trump won that election, and Vance himself ran for Senate in ruby-red Ohio just two years ago, and won – with 53 percent of the vote.

This essay was actually of a piece where at least one other arch-conservative made a similar observation, specifically when Kevin Williamson wrote for National Review in 2016 that the poor White communities of rural America where Trump derives his base (and from which Vance obtained his cultural moment) are a lost cause: “There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.”

The analogy goes perhaps even deeper than either man realizes. Because if you know anything about Al-Anon, it’s an Alcoholics Anonymous offshoot for families of people who are not users themselves but have a relative who is addicted. I am not a fan of their “Twelve Steps” psuedo-religion, but they at least acknowledge that addiction must be confronted and that an addiction undermines not only an individual but the family and loved ones of the person addicted.

Like, if you don’t make enough money for an apartment, and your Mom is retired, so you’re living together, and you’re also living with your older brother, who is a heroin addict, and even though he has the skills to work a good union job, he doesn’t, because he’s on heroin, and it is basically all a heroin addict can do to score the money to get heroin on those occasions that they are still awake. So he needs a support system of enablers. He needs you and your family. And the more he eats you out of house and home, the more he “borrows” the car you need to work, for days at a time, the more he undermines your household standard of living and the more you scream to your Mom to cut off this monstrous leech and, in the immortal words of Dan Savage, DUMP THE MOTHERFUCKER ALREADY, the more she refuses to do so, because he can’t (or rather, won’t) clean up and take care of himself. And your only way out is to cut losses and move, except that this very family situation is a primary factor in your inability to achieve financial independence.

And no, maybe he doesn’t deserve death, but he does deserve to get his ass thrown in fucking jail, yesterday, so he can be properly punished and start making restitution for the harm he inflicted on everyone around him with his life of constant crime.

BUT NO, the people in your life want to keep this person around and want to keep enabling him to be a criminal, so that your family is sent further spiraling into poverty and you are trapped in a screaming, bloody, intolerable yet inescapable LIVING HELL.

See, some of us have experience with this sort of thing.

And so does JD Vance. Which is why he was able to make such a metaphor because he realized that the effects of Donald Trump on his community could be described in such terms. So you would think that if he was accurate then he would be able to continue speaking out. Instead, like the rest of his Party, for the sake of money and power he decided to tie one off and start mainlining Trump.

Which is why I think the sentiment of the week was actually pretty well summed up by Marjorie Taylor. Because on Day 1 of the Trump Convention, she gave a speech and said that Trump was “the leader America deserves.”

Indeed. Because if Americans could watch Trump kill over 100K Americans in one year with Trump Virus ™ then watch him send neo-Confederates to kill his own Vice President for refusing to sign on to a coup, withhold federal documents from the government, get convicted on sexual assault, get convicted on 34 felonies, and see his handpicked judges absolve him of accountability because they want a government with no laws, and hand over the greatest country in the world to him again because Biden is SOOOO OOLLLLD, then America deserves every Goddamn catastrophe that will happen to it as a direct result.

Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.

He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

• William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

NOTE: I came up with the base outline of this piece before Saturday July 13, when a gunman shot Donald Trump at the campaign podium, grazing his ear but killing at least one innocent bystander before the Secret Service took him down. So let me preface this and subsequent remarks towards Donald Trump by saying I do not endorse violence as a means of achieving political goals. Except of course, the American Revolution, World War I, Dresden, and Hiroshima.

As many have pointed out, while President Biden tries (with mixed success) to rebuild his credibility with the media and his own party, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and challenger, is laying low and actually following the wise axiom, “Never interrupt your enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake.” But then he may have other priorities. This coming week is the next Republican National Convention, which is always comedy gold, but this year, Trump, who is not the incumbent (NEWS FLASH: TRUMP LOST THE LAST ELECTION) has not yet picked a running mate. And in his theatrical way, Trump is apparently setting up his running mate’s coming out party for the Convention floor, and even though he’s apparently nominated three, or four, finalists to be his (A)pprentice, it’s going to take all the concentration he can muster with his very little brain to make the final choice.

The finalists in question are Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott and Doug Burgum, Governor of North Dakota. Or some other state. To address Rubio first, there’s the slight issue that Trump and Rubio are both Florida Men, and according to the rules of the Constitution, the President and the Vice President can’t both be from the same state. But like Trump cares about the Constitution. If he has to, he can make Rubio solve the problem by moving somewhere else, and Rubio will just go “Yeh, boss. Whaddeva ya say, boss.” But that gets to another reason Trump probably won’t pick up Rubio. He’s already clashed with him in 2016, and essentially broken him. He’ll be no fun to play with anymore.

The other Senator, J.D. Vance, has also opposed Trump within his party, and more forcefully. He made his reputation with the book Hillbilly Elegy, describing his hard-knocks childhood in rural poverty, and the pathologies affecting many of our white poor. Given that he later served in the military, got degrees and became a successful venture capitalist, he was in position to describe how the traditional conserative virtues of hard work and education could get poor people out of the trap of dependency. And he did. And as such a person, he realized early on that Trump was bad news for what used to be conservative values of integrity and self-reliance. Apparently at one point Vance told an acquaintance that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” All this changed, coincidentally when Vance ran for the US Senate as a Republican in Ohio in 2022. Since then he’s been one of the more loyal and radical Trumpniks in the US Senate, to the extent that despite his heresy, Trump hasn’t felt the need to go after him. But that just indicates that Vance’s posture is exactly that, a posture. It’s what he needs to do to get over in what his Party has become. On many levels Trump would be well-served by having Vance as his running mate, or at least in his Cabinet. He is well-spoken, well-read and capable of articulating the Republicans’ new “postliberal” philosophy better than most other people in the Party. Including Trump. Which is the problem for him. Vance is not a Lindsey Graham or Rubio hanging on to his career. He is not a broken toy. He is a rising star. Potentially, a rival.

Which is part of Trump’s well-deserved reputation for bullshit. He keeps saying he hires “the best people.” No. The best people would not work for Trump. And even if he somehow bribed them to do so, he would find some reason to antagonize them and get rid of them, because he knows what a true failure he is, and can’t stand to have anyone around him who is better than he is at anything – which is most people. Except cringing worms and people so lacking in ego and soul that they will deny reality itself to be next to power, which means that any advice they could offer will always be undermined by their need to stay in proximity to power. But such people have no ambitions in and of themselves, which is why Trump feels safe with them. He would not feel safe around Vance. Nor should he.

So I still think that Trump is most likely going to pick the candidate who is most submissive and inoffensive, which is either Scott or Burgum. As I just said, for practical reasons you’re supposed to pick the Vice President who would do the best job of succeeding you if it ever comes to that, but clearly that’s not how either party wants to do it. It’s not like we even need a Vice President anymore, it’s just one of those holdovers from the Constitution that we keep holding up even though we don’t have any use for it. Such as, the rest of the Constitution. Politically, the reason you pick a Vice President is to shore up your “base” by appealing to the demographics you don’t naturally appeal to. In Biden’s case he picked Kamala Harris to appeal to women, Black voters and Asians. And we can see how well that’s worked out for him. In his first term, Trump had picked Mike Pence as his Vice President, mainly to appeal to the Evangelical types. This turned out not to be necessary, as the last eight years have proven that as long as you help the Evangelicals kill abortion rights and turn America into a country that makes Gilead look like Rio, they’ll support you even if you got convicted of sexual assault, got convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, and were frequently seen in public with Jeffrey Epstein. So that’s not the problem. Not only does Trump not want a “postliberal” ideologue like J.D. Vance, he doesn’t need one. What he needs is somebody who is normal and likeable, which both Burgum and Scott are, and Trump is not. Also, Trump is memorable and (to some people) charismatic, while Burgum and Scott are not. Again, there’s no room for competition on Trump’s stage.

So that would be the conventional way to do it, if you expect that you’re going to live forever and will never have to give up power, which Biden seems to and Trump certainly does. But as we can see from Biden, that’s not necessarily the best idea, otherwise people wouldn’t be panicking at his apparent unreadiness when he’s had an understudy waiting in the wings. Trump could die any minute, but as we can see lately, he might live forever, despite all logic. If he gives a damn about a movement that is greater than himself and is going to live beyond himself – y’know, I’m speaking hypothetically here – he would pick somebody who would be a credible face for Trumpism beyond Trump, and J.D. Vance is that guy. But that also means that Trump would have to keep somebody in his Cabinet who has clear ambitions to replace him, and to avoid that he has a paradoxical inclination to pick somebody who would be incapable of succeeding him, despite the Social Darwinist mentality of his own Party.

As much as Trump clearly wants to be so, he’s a pretty bad Sith Lord.

I had said around the time of Ash Wednesday that I told my conservative Catholic uncle that I don’t see the Biden-Trump race as a race between two men to be President. I see it as a race of two men against Entropy, and I told Uncle Joe that Biden was likely to win because Trump is going senile that much more clearly and that much more quickly.

Figures that even as the “liberal” media wants to make this contest more of a horse race than it deserves to be, Joe Biden and the Democrats all decided to help.

Joe Biden’s first 2024 debate against Donald Trump was such a catastrofuck that many insiders in the Democratic Party and political media sphere (same thing) were both implicitly and explicitly calling on him to resign and let Kamala Harris, or anybody, take over. Nancy Pelosi, who is herself real old and has retired from party leadership but not from her Congressional seat, came on “Morning Joe” for MSNBC Thursday to make the case that Joe should reconsider his candidacy. This despite the fact that he has not only repeatedly reaffirmed his case and gone back on campaign tours, other Democrats in Congress have had their own internal debates, and realized that they weren’t going to take Biden out. “On Monday evening, Biden joined a call with Congressional Black Caucus members, his strongest base of support on Capitol Hill, to cement their backing. Late Monday night, a House Democrat who is deeply skeptical of Biden acknowledged to Axios that Democrats were “folding all over the place” and “becoming resigned to Biden holding all the cards here, and us having no real say in the matter.”

Maybe because the polls, which everybody seems to care about despite their recent lack of accuracy, are still showing Trump barely leading, with third-party votes factored in. Real Clear Politics for July 10 shows Trump with a one point lead if Jill Stein, Cornel West and Robert Kennedy Jr. are counted. With just Trump-Biden, it’s a tie. Whereas in the same polling with the hypothetical of Vice President Kamala Harris versus Trump, she leads him by 2. According to Newsweek, “in Georgia, (Biden) has increased his share of the vote by 0.9 percent since the debate, though the Republican Party is still ahead by 3.5 percent.”

The worst you could say was that Biden needed the debate to be a game-changer in his favor, and it did cause him to slip, but not nearly as much as Trump needs to confirm a general election win.

Probably because the main thing going around in social media is quotes from Project 2025, which Trump swears he’d never even heard of and has nothing to do with, this despite the fact that most of the people involved in it or promoting it are at least tangentially associated with his four years in the White House. (It defeats the purpose of the word to call it an ‘Administration’.) Most of the things quoted from it seem like cartoon exaggerations of modern conservatism, which is why you need to actually read the thing to confirm, YES, this really is what these people want to do. Most people don’t quote extensively and in context because the thing is over 900 pages long. But here it is: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

And if you read it, you will see that Project 2025 is just as much a spiteful, empty-headed exercise in right-wing political correctness as you would expect from these people by now.

Pages 51-52: “(National Security Council) staff leads, under the direction of the NSA, should have the discretion to reduce the number of positions that need high-level clearances, and the NSC should be adequately resourced and authorized to adjudicate and hold security clearances internally with investigators who work directly for the NSC and whose sole task is to clear NSC officials. If certain staff are determined not to need high-level clearances, the question becomes whether they should be part of the NSC at all.” Pages 79-80: “An autonomous bureaucracy has neither independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms … the Trump Administration issued Executive Order 13957 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the competitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. The order was subsequently reversed by President Biden at the demand of the civil service associations and unions. It should be reinstated, but SES (Senior Executive Service) responsibility should come first.” Pages 102-103: “Improve military recruiters’ access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)—the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding … Entrance criteria for military service and specific occupational career fields should be based on the needs of those positions. Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service.” Page 450: “The Secretary (of the Department of Health and Human Services) should pursue a robust agenda to protect the fundamental right to life, protect conscience rights, and uphold bodily integrity rooted in biological realities, not ideology. From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.” Pages 878-879: “The dominant internet platforms have disrupted democratic deliberation, as is evidenced by the Hunter Biden laptop story. They have a propensity to collude with government to advance political goals, as documents unearthed by the Missouri and Louisiana AG suits concerning the COVID response demonstrate. And they play a pivotal role in our economy. … As Judge Frank Easterbrook famously suggested, regulators should look at the cost of error in their judgments. This argument has usually been used to buttress a tentative and hands off approach to antitrust because judicial error in antitrust will persist (Type II error) and continue to damage markets, while failure to take antitrust action (Type I error) will correct itself in the long run as competitors challenge monopolies. However, failing to take antitrust enforcement action (Type I error) includes the possibility of real injury to the structure of important American institutions such as democratic accountability and free speech. If so, a more proactive approach may be warranted.”

That IS what you’re going to get if Trump is elected, especially since a lot of these people did work in his White House and in the text, they frequently refer to the actions that Trump took in office to enact their 2016 Heritage Foundation “mandate.”

All these scaredy-cat Congressional Democrats who are pushing Biden out saw Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell freeze up on camera (not just mumble through a debate, but freeze up) twice, and neither their party nor the Trump Party demanded he leave office. Though Mitch DID promise to leave his leadership post, after this year.

Which leads to another question that nobody is asking the Trumpniks: If you can see what Joe Biden looks like now and he’s only three years older than Trump, what’s your Messiah gonna look like in three years?

As Keith Olbermann put it Tuesday, “the worst outcome of the Biden situation is that there IS no outcome. That we stay here in the middle somewhere wondering if it was just a bad night.”

Spoiler, Keith: You’re going to keep wondering until he dies. Because when you’re that old and you have that obvious an episode, wondering if Biden is going to have another such episode is like wondering whether Trump is going to do something stupid and criminal.

But that goes back to the question of why everybody is so panicky at the idea that Joe Biden might have to leave office before 2025 or would die or have to retire before 2028.

It seems from my perspective that just as unwritten institutions like the filibuster are intended to prevent legislative action rather than facilitate it, the choice of Vice President seems intended to forestall a succession rather than prepare for one.

I am reminded of an Eddie Murphy routine he did about the prospect of a Black Vice President. (Years before Barack Obama, obviously.) “The President could ride through Dallas, all day, all night, with the top down. There would BE no shooting.”

That might seem racist in regard to Kamala Harris, but y’all remember Trump’s first impeachment? When all the good little Trumpniks in Congress and the Senate screamed and wailed that Democrats were trying to overturn an election? Well, they couldn’t have, because a guilty verdict on behalf of the Senate would have only acknowledged the obvious. And secondly, if a president is impeached and removed, that doesn’t invalidate the people’s vote, because his ticket running mate, the Vice President, immediately takes over, just as Ford took over from Nixon when he resigned. And you remember how everybody in the Trump Party acted like Mike Pence being President would be the worst thing in the world, worse than Adam Lambert becoming Secretary of Defense and changing all our military uniforms to mauve? That it was a fate to be avoided at all costs, certainly including what little moral credibility they had left?

That seems to be the Democrat position with regard to Harris. There already is a succession in place if anything happens to this current president either this year or in his second term. And yet Democrats are scared to death of acknowledging it.

And yet all these people who are clucking about Biden’s performance had no problem supporting him in his primaries, which were a usual exercise in an incumbent running unopposed, and everybody knew even at the time that the best case scenario is that Biden serves one more term, actually acknowledges the concept of Constitutional limits on his term (unlike Trump) and turns leadership over to Harris. That was the best-case scenario in any event. The worst that could happen is that Biden has a health issue before the end of this year, or before the end of 2028, and Harris has to take over, and everybody already knew that was the worst-case scenario, and in that event, the Administration (and Biden’s campaign funding) would continue. And yet the Democratic political-media complex wants to have a problem with that now.

News media are going to keep hammering on Biden’s debate as though exposing Trump’s embarrassing conduct for more than eight years has really hurt his support, and yet when people actually give their opinions, Biden at least fares no worse than he did. The social media feedback, contrary to CNN and MSDNC, is on the lines of, “Fuck the media, Joe had one bad night at a debate nobody watched, he’s still better than Trump on balance, I’m voting Biden.”

In fact, when I say I would vote for Joe Biden if he was in a coma, I am quite serious. Mainly because Joe Biden in a coma wouldn’t cause as much damage to the country as Donald Trump on Trump’s best day. And from my center-right perspective, Joe Biden in a coma wouldn’t cause as much damage to the country as BIDEN on his worst day.

Because while there are several Biden policies I disagree with, like his inflationary “Bidenomics”, he isn’t trying to destroy the country. Trump is. You know how the United Kingdom is the United Kingdom and not “Windsor”? Because the UK is an actual conservative country and it holds to traditions of nationhood that precede the current dynasty. Whereas Saudi Arabia is called that because the Wahhabi fundamentalist House of Saud took over the majority of the peninsula including the Two Holy Cities and decided to run it not simply as a hereditary kingdom but as their personal possession. That’s what Trump wants to do to America if he wins. And that’s the BEST case scenario.

The worst case scenario is Project 2025.

That is the “choice” you have, kids, because the “third” party candidates are unfeasible, not just in the sense that no one will vote for them, but because Robert Kennedy claimed to have a worm in his brain, the Libertarian Party got taken over by people who think Lyndon LaRouche was too liberal, and the Green Party is led by Jill Stein, who, like former Trump official Michael Flynn, actually is a Russian asset.

So your “realistic” choices are, Donald Trump: A corpulent swine that somehow learned to walk on two trotters, wear a business suit and make almost human-like whinnies and oinks that some interpret as speech. A pathological criminal who has been convicted of 34 counts of fraud, and, lest the media forget, sexual assault.

Or, Joe Biden. Who really is too old for the job of president. Or frankly any other job besides Walmart exit greeter. And yet, he’s doing it. And our economy is recovering from COVID. We have reaffirmed our international alliances, which are more important than ever thanks to threats from Vladmir Putin and Xi Jinping (y’know, Trump’s friends). And we got through four years without the president threatening to leave NATO, without Hunter Biden getting appointed Minister Without Portfolio in the White House outside congressional approval, and without the president starting another nationwide pandemic because he didn’t want to admit it was happening. And four years ago, Joe Biden ran against other Democrats for president because he knew he was the only candidate with the resume, the name recognition, and (unlike the Clintons) the reputation for normalcy to counter Trump. And Biden beat them, then he beat Trump.

As inadequate as Biden in particular and Democrats in general are, Biden can easily step over the limbo bar of Trump’s behavior, and that means every other Democrat can too. And yet, Democrats themselves seem to think that’s not enough.

But as Gary Johnson said, some day the Sun will swallow the Earth. And lately, I take great comfort in that thought.