“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse.”
Barack Obama, at the 2024 Democratic Convention
I can’t go to a bad movie by myself. What, am I gonna make sarcastic remarks to strangers?
Jerry Seinfeld
2019’s JOKER, starring Joaquin Phoenix, attracted intense controversy upon its release but also praise for Phoenix’ performance, and the direction of Todd Phillips. As I said at the time, it is not a “good” movie in the sense of being entertaining and uplifting, but it was good in the sense of being a film maker’s vision that was expertly presented. This year’s sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Lady Gaga, hasn’t even gotten that much respect. In fact the level of negative press and word of mouth was so hard that I thought: I just have to see this.
“Folie à deux ” is French for “a shared madness”, like two people having the same hallucination. As Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) is put on trial for the murders he’s committed, he is still in Arkham Asylum among the general population. His lawyer offers an insanity defense saying that Arthur is not culpable because “Joker” is a shadow personality who took control of his actions when he killed five people. Arthur is put in a musical therapy class by one of the guards, where he meets “Lee” (Lady Gaga) who followed his case on TV and says she’s a big fan. They bond when she sets the music room on fire in order to attempt an escape. Despite this, she gets released on her own recognisance and becomes one of the people pleading Arthur’s case to the media. Arthur, previously broken down by prison, starts to become more “normal”, which for him means swaying to imaginary music and hysterically laughing until he cries.
This love affair spurs several moments where Arthur (or Lee) breaks out into song, sometimes leading to fully orchestrated bits where they sing popular songs or musical numbers. This is one the elements that most turned critics off to the film. If anything, I find this the most realistic aspect of the movie, precisely because in the real world, nobody acts like that. In real life, if you see everyone around you singing and dancing like they’re in a Broadway musical production for no good reason, that should indicate that you’re suffering a psychotic break.
In the trial, Lee’s encouragement, and the support of fellow inmates and court crowds, causes Arthur to embrace his Joker personality and turn the trial into that much more of a circus, eventually firing his lawyer and successfully petitioning to represent himself in full Joker makeup. But things turn when the prosecution brings in Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill), who confesses how he saw Arthur kill a fellow co-worker. In cross-examination Arthur berates Gary, and the authorities, and his guards, saying they never really knew the real him. And Gary confesses that Arthur was the only guy in the clown company who didn’t make fun of him for his height, the only one who was nice to him, but now he’s become terrifying. Arthur is hauled back to Arkham and abused by the guards for badmouthing them on TV. And when Arthur’s best friend in the ward tries to speak out, they end up killing him.
This death finally breaks Arthur, and in court he finally takes responsibility for his acts, confessing not only to five murder charges, but to smothering his own mother, which appeared to be a natural death. This causes Lee, and several other fans, to leave the court in disgust. Arthur is shortly found guilty, but then some other fans blow up the room with a car bomb outside the courthouse, and help him flee. Arthur goes back to his old neighborhood, where Lee told him she was staying, and finds her, saying they can run away now. But she refuses, saying “all we had was the fantasy” and he ruined it.
Arthur is then captured and sent back to Arkham. One day he’s in the hallway and a fellow inmate comes up and tells him a joke. A psychopath sees a clown in a bar. He comes up and tells the clown, “I used to be a big fan of yours but now I realize you’re a fucking disappointment.” Then he offers to buy the clown a drink and says “I’m going to give you what you fucking deserve.” And then the inmate shivs Arthur in the gut. And as Arthur bleeds out, the psycho is in the background, slicing his own face with a knife.
Odd, isn’t it, that when you give people license to be irrational and violent, that sometimes they direct that violence at the person who inspired them?
As in the first movie, Folie à Deux is sold by the intense performance of Phoenix as a physical and mental wreck, whose circumstances are that much more grim than before. Meanwhile Lady Gaga’s character is a literal embodiment of the love affair Arthur has with his fan club, people choosing to spread his insanity to the outside world and then turning on him when he no longer wants to be the star of their show.
With the first movie, a lot of critics and pundits complained that Phillips was glorifying his anti-social “incel” subject by making him a protagonist. And yet when Arthur receives his comeuppance, no one wants to see that. At the end of it, he’s basically just a sad clown, who was never good at anything, has never accomplished anything, and for all the chaos and destruction he caused, has to be rated as a total failure.
JOKER, the original movie, was deeply unpleasant, by design. Folie à Deux is even more deeply unpleasant, by design. I guess I read more worth into these movies than a lot of people. But whatever value is in these movies may not be enough for you to watch. If anything, the overwhelmingly negative reaction to JOKER: Folie à Deux tells me that Americans don’t want to bring back a deeply unpleasant, psychotic clown in unnatural face paint four years after he left the stage.
One way or another, it won’t be long now. And as we go into the last few days before Election Day, things are still too close to call in the presidential race, and, after all we have seen of Trump, he is still gaining in some polls and early voting. How could this be? Well, two causes come to my mind:
One, God is real, and he hates us all.
But even more important than that, it’s because the American public is deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply,
D
E
E
P
L
Y
STOOpid.
If you don’t believe me, just check out those Jordan Klepper interviews of Trump voters on The Daily Show or YouTube. Or even better, look up the “Jaywalking” segments of the Tonight Show. Jay Leno left TV years and years ago, but that was also years before Trump became a politician, so all you have to do is look at those interviewees and realize that the American public has become even stupider than that.
But the impression I’m getting in all this is actually the same as I got in the last midterms, namely that the press, in its coverage and its polling, is engaging in malpractice, and yet even with them doing their damnedest to sell Trump, the other half of the problem with Kamala Harris and the Democrats not being able to sell the deal is that Americans can’t stand her party, for reasons completely independent of how bad the Republicans are. In 2022, the “red wave” turned into more of a trickle. But now the party of lemmings has their Hero God Emperor on the ballot, and if the Lamestream Media is not clearly declaring the danger in this, it’s because Trump is largely their creation, as is his audience, which they are loathe to lose.
Journalistic Malpractice
It should be obvious why we use terms like “the rule of law” and say that the premise of a democratic republic is that people respect the results of elections. You can’t have a government otherwise. You certainly can’t have a democracy, OR a republic or whatever you want to call a free country if a minority seizes control by force. Yet that is what Trump tried to do in 2021, and ever since he has been saying the election was rigged and stolen, despite all legal recounts and evidence to the contrary. And instead of removing him from office after January 6, Republicans now hold his position as the core profession of faith that you have to believe if you want to stay in the religious cult that used to be the Party of Lincoln.
There is a reason that Nazis and Communists don’t win elections in this country, because everyone realizes what their end goal is, and even if they did get some voters, they certainly wouldn’t get any media support. But because Trump and his sponsors have done a takeover on our only “real” notDemocrat party, everyone in the establishment thinks that they are now obliged to treat them as legitimate when their Leader has not exactly been hiding his sympathies with Hitler and with modern dictators, and the thought leaders of his party are basically the right-wing version of a Leninist cadre that works with the system only until they can control the instruments of force.
Therefore given Trump’s demand to throw out the results of elections and surrender everything to his authority, he should not be given any official legitimacy as a candidate, and the mainstream media organizations (and non-mainstream podcasts) should not be giving him or his campaign any coverage or audience. And that means not letting them do interviews or go on your TV shows, and YES, that means all the members of a previously respectable party who are still going along with the lie of their leader.
In a free country, you can’t ban those parties, prevent them from holding rallies or stop people from voting for them if they get on the ballot, but you don’t give them any comfort or legitimacy. Moreover, every public resource has to be devoted into educating people as to why voting for a communist or Nazi lover is bad and why history shows such politicians are bad for the countries that vote for them, not to mention their neighbors.
(If you’re wondering why this needs to be hammered into everybody’s heads, go up and see the point after ‘God is real, and he hates us all.’)
But in the past month, we have been getting increasingly frequent news of Trump cancelling interviews and engagements, as well as refusing another Harris debate and an interview with 60 Minutes. And then there was that thing where he was supposed to be holding a town hall with Kristi Noem but when people started fainting in a stuffy room, he decided to turn the whole thing over to playing music on the PA system while he alternated between swaying in place and doing his jerking-off-two-men-at-once dance. For about 40 minutes.
If we kept getting news like this about Joe Biden, the “liberal media” would be on a non-stop agenda to pressure him to end his campaign. We know this because they DID.
If the media culture insists that there are some rules that everyone has to follow, and there are some red lines that cannot be crossed, and YET they let Trump cross them with impunity, that is if not overt bias, cognitive dissonance.
But then you look at some of the actual early voting returns, which can’t show how people specifically voted but do show party registration… and it’s STILL tight. The Nevada Independent has been showing rural Republican counties outvoting Democratic Clark County (Las Vegas area) in early returns, and it’s looking like all Democrats can do to maximize turnout in the next week and Election Day, cause that’s what it’s going to take to win the state for Harris.
Because the Democratic Party under Biden was not that popular going into 2024, the main reason Joe won in 2020 was cause of Trump Virus ™, and while Harris has done a great job of presenting herself to the media and her supporters (compared to Biden), she is still running into the sexism that helped Trump win against Clinton and the anti-black racism that inspired Trump to run in the first place.
That would be one thing if there weren’t so many Black and Hispanic voters who have turned off to the Democrats because the economy that Democrats say is so great for Wall Street isn’t working out so well for the working class. In 2022, the middle 20 percent of income earners were down 1 percent in income from 2000 after adjusting for inflation. And recent ads have been hammering Harris on support for immigration, and for supporting the right of transgender prisoners to get gender reassignment on the public dime. That isn’t necessarily popular with non-white demographics either.
At the same time, while Republicans want to project their opponents as being some tranny Muslim commie conspiracy organized by George Soros, if Democrats keep the Senate they probably wouldn’t even do anything so radical as eliminating the filibuster. Which they would need to do in order to do practically anything else.
But if Democrats are as horrible as Republicans say they are, then Republicans should be pulling away with this, and not just in Nevada. And if Republicans are as horrible as Democrats say they are, Democrats should be pulling away with this. In fact, they ARE that horrible. As to why Democrats aren’t pulling away with this, see above for the advantage the media is giving Republicans by presenting them as still being a legitimate alternative. The problem for Republicans is when the rest of the country looks at their positions, and the policies they enact when they’re in charge, and decisively reject them.
That doesn’t change the fact that the Democrats are objectively insufficient, but their incompetence and passivity mean that if they win this election, it will be mainly because voters are trying to restore the balance of power that Republicans did so much to destroy in only four years. If there’s anything that we should ponder, it’s that in the three years since the Dobbs decision, pretty much every state election and referendum to limit abortion rights has been defeated and every election to assert abortion rights has succeeded, even in states like Ohio where Democrats have been marginalized. A lot of these referenda are on the ballot this year, in states like Florida and Nevada. And it’s a little hard to believe that people who vote for abortion rights are going to vote in Trump, the president who is the direct reason Roe v. Wade no longer exists in the first place.
Conclusions
No one can safely predict how this is going to turn out. I would think, given Trump’s increasingly obvious senility, given that his tariff policy would undermine “conservative” positions on the economy, and given that his supine posture towards dictators would undermine our military strength by sabotaging our alliances, that Trump would be getting fewer votes. However, there’s all the people who were reluctant to vote for a woman in 2016 being that much more reluctant to vote for somebody who’s both female and black. And then there’s the growing suspicion that as Trump becomes more ridiculous than he was, that JD Vance is being presented as the brains behind the throne while Trump rules as a dumbass figurehead for public amusement, and a lot of “conservatives” seem to be on board with that idea. Except that Vance’s “post-liberal” statism would be almost as destructive to the economy as Trump’s tariff agenda, and his social policies would actually be worse.
Which again brings us back to the fact that it never should have been this close, even if Democrats win. That would be the problem even if there were no Electoral College, because Trump represents an anti-rational view that has hold of most of the Republican Congress and affects policy between elections.
In the present moment, some ask, “how did they let the Nazis come to power?” And the answer is clear: Because Hitler played a billionaire on “reality” TV and people thought, “This guy must know how to run an economy.”
There was an article from Vox I read recently that’s about a completely different subject: How AI is standardizing our cultural experience of the fall season. “AI-generated content is now infiltrating social media in ways that have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. Knitters and crocheters hoping to craft fall sweaters are being inundated with nonsensical AI patterns and inspo images on Reddit. An entirely fake restaurant has gained 75,000 followers on Instagram by claiming to be “number one in Austin” … Meanwhile, folks hoping to curl up with a cozy fantasy novel or a bedtime story for their kids are confronted with a library of ChatGPT-generated nonsense “written” by nonexistent authors on the Kindle bookstore, while their YouTube algorithms serve them bot-generated fall ambiance videos. Autumn, it seems, is being eaten by AI.”
This is what happens when people not only don’t know the difference between reality and media, but don’t want to know. So no surprise that maybe half of the country seems to think that politics is just some iteration of pro wrestling, about “owning” your enemies and scoring scripted victories. So no surprise that the people who (rightfully) scorn empty-headed Hollywood liberals who think their political opinion matters just cause they’re from Hollywood will worship an empty-headed East Coast celebrity because he was created for them, as Trump might put it, by Central Casting.
Something I saw on Facebook recently that summed the whole thing up:
2 died of Ebola – they said Obama should resign
4 died in Benghazi – they had Hillary testify for 11 hours, held 33 hearings and launched a 4 year probe
Over 300,000 Covid deaths (in 2020), an armed insurrection and theft of classified documents – they cheered, and want Trump as dictator
There is no “both sides” on that shit.
Trump, like other pathological liars, actually seems to believe that lying magically creates external reality, that if you get enough people to believe in your falsehood, that not only convinces them but makes the laws of physics and causality conform to your fantasy. It’s like being God, only better, cause God has to be celibate.
The Trump Virus of 2020 proved, or should have proven, that reality exists outside perception after all. You cannot bribe, bully or bloviate a virus. You cannot make a virus go away by calling it a “Democrat hoax.” And because Trump would not acknowledge reality – which would mean admitting he’d made a mistake – 350,831 people died, which could have included him.
The real joke is that Trump’s virus was what wrecked the economy that he says was so wonderful and led to the Biden corrections that caused inflation (after several markets in 2020 crashed for lack of demand). People lost friends, family and neighbors. And yet, lots of voters want to go back and give Trump back the White House, so he can do it all again.
But if Trump wins, he is either going to start World War III or another global pandemic, and that will cause a mass die-off and technological collapse that will make all that media fakery history. I will probably be dead because of it, and that will be something to look forward to. If anything this is why I still believe Harris will ultimately win this election for the establishment, because if there is anything this world has taught me, it’s that you don’t get out of it that easily.
The Nevada mail-in ballots finally came in the mail this weekend. I got to look them over on my day off and now I’m taking my ballot in to the drop-off site.
Hey kids, guess what day it is? It’s FUCK TRUMP DAY!
But as I do during elections, I want to go over the various ballot questions each cycle in Nevada, just in case anybody is reading this. And I want to do that before going over the partisan races, because there is less and less suspense each election cycle as to which party to vote for.
Question 1: Shall the Nevada Constitution be amended to remove certain provisions governing the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education and its administration of the State University and certain federal land grant funds to provide additional legislative oversight of public institutions of higher education through regular independent audits, without repealing the current statutory election process or other existing statutory provisions relating to the Board of Regents?
So right here, you’re going to see that you will need to consult the election sites – I recommend Ballotpedia – to go over these ballot initiatives, cause the first two at least are wordy, vague and confusing as all hell. Almost as if they were phrased to inspire a negative result.
The Nevada Board of Regents, under the state constitution, is an independent entity that governs the state’s university system, whose members are elected by the public. According to Ballotpedia, a “Yes” vote would remove the Board as a protected entity under the state constitution and render it subject to oversight from the state legislature. The actual amendment would affect Section 4 and Section 8 of Article 11 of the Nevada Constitution, removing Section 7 entirely.
Question 2: Shall Section 1 of Article 13 of the Nevada Constitution be amended to: (1) revise the description of the persons who benefit from institutions that the State is required to foster and support; (2) replace the term “institutions” with “entities”; and (3) add entities for the benefit of persons with intellectual or developmental disabilities to the types of entities that the State is required to foster and support?
This is another case of vague phrasing where the question is fairly straightforward if you already know the context. The amendment refers to phrasing in state law regarding the care of disabled persons, changing the term “institutions” to “entities” because the former word has a punitive or carceral association. Likewise the wording of the actual amendment removes “the Insane, Blind, Deaf and Dumb” from Article 13 of the Nevada Constitution.
Basically, this is changing the phrasing to more politically correct language. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. For one example, “idiot” was once a clinical term for patients of subnormal intelligence, but is nowadays just considered an insult. So since this will be of some benefit and do no harm, I voted YES on Question 2. It’s the sort of thing even Republicans can get behind, given that they have been increasingly described with words like “insane”, “dumb” and “idiot”, so continuing to use these terms in a clinical context may make them feel like they’re singled out.
Question 3: 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?
I voted YES on Question 3. I have already gone into great detail as to why I advocate it. But let me make one more point here: We are going to need an alternative to closed primary rounds in partisan elections, not just in Nevada, but in America, because one way or another, after this election, we really won’t have a two-party system anymore. Either Trump will become God-Emperor, and Democrats will be house slaves for the plantation at best, or Trump will lose, and what used to be the Republican Party will lose that much more of its credibility, perhaps permanently. So you’re going to need a process in which an increasingly independent, non-partisan voter base can review candidates without thinking that their party affiliation will matter, because after this year, it won’t.
Question 4: Shall the Ordinance of the Nevada Constitution and the Nevada Constitution be amended to remove language authorizing the use of slavery and involuntary servitude as a criminal punishment?
Much like Question 6 (below) this is a case of state advocates heading off a changing federal standard. In fact the current wording deliberately parallels the US Constitution’s 13th Amendment Section 1: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” That middle “except as a punishment for crime” part has historically been used as a loophole to enforce compulsory labor by another name, and in that regard it’s no surprise that the land of the free has 20 percent of the world’s prisoners, and why both Blacks and Whites each make up 40 percent of the prison population even though at the time of study Whites were 64 percent of the American population and Blacks were 13 percent.
Therefore, several states, not just Nevada, have been petitioning to remove the “punishment for crime” clause of their constitutions that forbid slavery. In the context of history, I voted YES on Question 4. Anything that makes this country less of a police state is a good idea.
Question 5: Shall the Sales and Use Tax Act of 1955 be amended to provide an exemption from the taxes imposed by this Act on the gross receipts from the sale and the storage, use or other consumption of diapers?
This is one of those things where you have to get into policy and revenue. It’s fairly relevant. During the presidential campaign Trump declared that he was going to get rid of federal taxes on tips, which is an obvious pander to labor in general and Nevada workers in particular. Harris, who is just as shameless in her own way, quickly followed suit. All of which raises the question of the consequences, such as, wouldn’t businesses just change all jobs to tipped labor, or how you’re supposed to cover the lost revenue.
This gets into the broader question of how taxes are applied. “Progressive” leftist policy has generally been to soak the rich and impose ever-increasing nets of taxes on the grounds that those who have more income can pay more. Trump, meanwhile, is now besotted with the idea of broad-based tariffs on all foreign goods, which are essentially taxes on import businesses that inevitably pass down to the consumer. He and some other right-wingers have stated that US tariff policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries were able to produce prosperity and government revenue without a personal income tax. However the costs to the consumer were such that they helped justify the federal income tax amendment, while later tariffs, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, led to trade wars that were a direct factor in the Great Depression.
So it’s one thing to say taxes should be this or so high, but it matters where they are derived and whom they affect. I voted YES on Question 5. It is of course a question on how the State will make up the revenue from diapers, but they ought to be able to get it without grabbing at young mothers or senior citizens.
Question 6: Should the Nevada Constitution be amended to create an individual’s fundamental right to an abortion, without interference by state or local governments, whenever the abortion is performed by a qualified health care professional until fetal viability or when necessary to protect the health or life of the pregnant individual at any point during the pregnancy?
Pros: Why not? Cons: Why THE HELL NOT?
Question 7: Should the Nevada Constitution be amended to require voters to either present photo identification to verify their identity when voting in-person or to provide certain personal information when voting by mail ballot?
In other words, this is the “Voter ID requirement” question. I voted NO. It’s not that big a deal, since most of us have ID, but by the same token, it raises the question of why we need this. Especially since the state already mandates sending mail ballots and that in turn indicates that the state has already verified you as a voter. Really, what this is is another attempt by the Trump Party to corner the market. Since they can’t win by majority vote, they have to change the definition of “majority” and pick the voters instead of the other way around. This is especially obvious since, again, we have mail ballot voting and that is designed to address many of the legitimate voter ID issues. The second matter of “provide certain personal information when voting by mail ballot” just makes it that more obvious that they’re looking for a pretext to throw out politically incorrect votes. Now that I think about it, I shouldn’t have voted No, I should have wrote in FUCK NO.
Speaking of the Trump Party, this is where I have to get to the partisan federal races. And obviously, I recommend that people vote for Kamala Harris and the Democrats all the way down ballot. Not cause they’re any GOOD, but because they’re not robots of a Sundown Clown and Russian tool, and those are the only two parties that have a chance of winning. That being the case I shouldn’t need to go over the bleeding obvious, but given the polls in this country, and Nevada in particular, apparently I have to.
And that means I have to address the Republicans first. The only reason that things are this fucked up. Not just in this election, but, in analysis, on almost any other public issue you could raise.
It used to be there were a lot of issues I could agree with you on, but in retrospect it seems to me that there used to be issues that you agreed with me on. Like just for one, having a frothing mob of collectivists trying to break into the Capitol to stop an Electoral College certification just cause they didn’t like the result is a bad thing. And you know this cause I’m sure that in 2017 if all the leftists in pink pussy hats had broken into the Capitol waving Soviet flags and screaming to kill Joe Biden for certifying the vote, you’d be screaming bloody murder and demanding that the people who put them up to it be tried for treason. And I’d be there with you. But when the thugs are waving the Stars and Bars, and it’s your hero they’re doing it for, merely trying to impeach him over the affair isn’t just taken as a personal insult to you, but as blasphemy to your god. And apparently the rest of us are supposed to be okay with that, cause Trump is still getting to run.
So please don’t tell me that the system is rigged against you, please don’t tell me you don’t have a choice, and PLEASE don’t tell me that this is a republic and not a democracy. Because a, you don’t want this to be a republic, and b, it clearly is a democracy. Donald Trump tried to destroy the Electoral College process itself, and he’s still getting to run for president. This is not a country where candidates run on qualifications, but on popularity. The only reason a demented career criminal gets to run as a major party candidate for president is because you wanted him there. Despite all the evidence against him on performance and all the expert opinion telling you that he shouldn’t be sent back to the White House and would be better sent to prison.
Because liberals, if you want to know why we have an Electoral College, it’s because the Founders didn’t want stupid, emotional people deciding who is the next president. And conservatives, if you want to know why we need to get rid of the Electoral College, it’s because that institution is the only reason that that result ever occurred.
Now given the weight of factors, especially the early turnout in places like Georgia, I have reason to believe that Harris will eventually win the right number of Electors, but I can’t be certain that she will win state majorities big enough to avoid serious challenge by various Trump Party organizations, most notably the House of Representatives (which would vote for Trump if the Electoral College is hung) or the Supreme Court, which has intervened for Republicans before.
And that just gets to the point that the problem isn’t just Trump, but an entire party that follows him as a political role model. Because as I’ve said, if he didn’t have a cult that wanted him in politics, he’d be just another ratty old bum at the gas station screaming conspiracy theories at you while begging you for change. At least he’d have an excuse for that haircut.
So, Republicans, believe me when I say this. From the bottom of my heart: Fuck you.
Fuck y’all.
All y’all.
Up the ass. Fuck your entire party with John Holmes’ dead, AIDS-ridden dick.
So now liberals, Democrats, all of that means that if you don’t want even more violence, if you don’t want Dobbs vs. Mississippi all over the country, on steroids, if you don’t want JD Vance waiting in the wings for when Trump swallows a chicken bone sideways, quit ANY AND ALL OF YOUR FUCKING EXCUSES for why you don’t feel like voting for Harris or voting at all. I don’t care. You think the Palestinians are getting screwed with Biden, you’re gonna love when Trump brings Jared Kushner back to handle Mideast policy. If you’re Hispanic, and you think the Trump economy was better, you’re not going to enjoy it, cause he’s gonna deport you. What? You’re a citizen? You were born here? It won’t matter. I don’t care if you think the economy sucks. I don’t care if I think the economy sucks. Just vote. And get everybody you know who’s not already a Trumpnik to vote Democrat with you, because that’s what it’s going to take to keep the gangster party from stealing this. Make it clear that they will not be able to gin enough states to change the outcome. There are more of us than there are of them, and if we do not wish to live under occupation, we need to prove it once and for all. Just vote. If you’re in Chicago, vote twice.
Vote, Goddammit. Vote these Trump slugs out. ALL of them.
Vote like it’s the last time you’ll ever get the chance.
If there is anything more embarrassing than Howard Stern and Stephen Colbert fangirling over Kamala Harris in their interviews, it’s you fangirling over a candidate you say you’re voting against. Like when Trump describes his word salads as “the weave.” You really think that’s clever? When I think of “the weave” in relation to Trump, I think of something else coming off the top of his head. It’s like a thatched-roof cottage up there.
And when you say Harris’ answers to substantive questions are generalities like “I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus”, quite so, but at least air is a substance. As opposed to Trump, who in his Detroit speech said: “I said who the hell did that, I saw engines, about three four years ago, these things were coming, cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace, with the, circle, boom, reminded me of, the Biden circles that he used to have, right, he’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill them up, but then I heard he BS with the popular vote, I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the eight circles, I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, they were so beautiful to look at, in fact the person that did that, that was the best thing his, the level of that circle, was, great, but they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the Press, stand in for the circles, because they couldn’t get the people, then I heard we lost, oh, we lost, now we’re never going to let that happen again, but we’ve been, abused, by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians really more than other countries.”
He’s winning this right now? What kind of country is this where he COULD be winning right now?
I agree with you on some points. Like, Pennsylvania being as central as it is, Harris’ running mate should have been Josh Shapiro and not Tim Walz. But exactly what “bold and risky” thing do you propose she do that wouldn’t piss off her voter group, which lest we forget, is basically everybody in this country who’s not already for Trump, and can’t agree with each other on everything, maybe not anything?
We can’t get Obama back. For various reasons, we couldn’t get Pete Buttigieg to run, and I think both of us would prefer that. But Harris would have both of them in her corner. And as I said: We could have Biden, and we all suspect how that would play out. When you said he should bow out, you knew what the options were. This is what we’ve got. And if you can’t back Harris, you know what you’re going to get.
I know Harris’ problems. But it’s a little odd that the Michiganders who hate how Biden-Harris have not stood up for Palestinians think that Trump and Jared Kushner would be any more sympathetic. I find it hard to be believe that all the people who voted against abortion bans and supported state abortion rights in the midterms would go along with a guy who is going to support a national abortion ban. (And don’t say he wouldn’t. I actually believe that the guy who was in the Jeffrey Epstein Frequent Flyer Club doesn’t really care about banning abortion, and I can believe that the guy who had Elton John perform at his wedding party doesn’t really care about persecuting gays, but he caters to the people who DO.)
Is Trump really that popular and Harris really that unpopular? I wouldn’t doubt it. After all Trump was unpopular enough that he lost to Biden even though Republicans made some downballot gains in 2020. But Harris is certainly not as repellent as Hillary Clinton, and neither is Biden, though you seem to be actively repelled by both of them while you almost seem to admire Trump’s skill (or chutzpah) and obviously admire Vance.
But the “Lamestream Media” wants to make this a horse race to the very end, and Nervous Nellies like you are part of the project. If anything that might help Democrats get out the vote. After all, everyone thought Hillary had it in the bag, and we know how that played out.
Like I said, Andrew, you should really apply for a job with Trump’s campaign, or apparently, his Cabinet. Cause you’re giving him better advice than he’s getting. Or seems to follow.
Or, Donnie can just go along like he has been, like going to the Detroit Economic Forum and telling all the people in Detroit what a terrible city Detroit is. At this rate, he’s gonna win Michigan by 5 points. Not because Trump is so wonderful or because Harris is so terrible, but because no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
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.