James Gillen

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.

As the Trump Era drags on, I find the interesting thing is that it makes liberals more conservative.

First, they’re starting to realize the value in preserving institutions and traditions, as opposed to replacing the entire government with radical ideologues and cronies, not to mention, having a Supreme Court that takes the plain text of the Constitution and says “this just means whatever I want it to mean.”
Second, they’re starting to realize that an all-powerful government that can do anything (to anybody) is a danger to liberty, at least as long as they’re not running it.

Third, they’re realizing they can’t trust the mainstream “liberal” media. And this at least is consistent with the leftist point that the media is just another Big Business that is out to promote its business model and keep access to power. And since the business model of “news” is less information than entertainment, it’s in the MSM’s interest to have an entertaining buffoon in the White House as opposed to a dull functionary like Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton.

The problem for them is that the buffoon in question is a dysfunctional man-baby who would put them in jail for making fun of him, and if he gets re-elected, there’s not going to be anyone who will stop him from doing it this time.

But then our media wouldn’t be the first would-be stringpullers who enabled a pathological demagogue in hopes that when they’d helped him remove all the guardrails against absolute power, that they’d be able to control him.

Everyone could see that not only was Biden having a truly terrible night at the CNN debate, but the two “journalists” they hired to witness it would not even attempt to fact-check Trump in real time, even as they ran interference for him by cutting Biden off for time, among other things. We can say that, but nobody forced Biden to go to that debate and stare wide-eyed and slack-jawed every time Trump was on the mic. Granted this is a natural human reaction at Trump’s capacity to machine-gun hose the air with bullshit. But as someone who’s watched TV debates, let alone participated in them, Biden should have known the cameras were going to show him and his opponent side-by-side for contrast, cause that’s what they do.

Trump is a vicious little bully who lies with every word that comes out of his mouth, including “and”, “the” or “Donald Trump.” It would be more instructive to recount those blue-moon occasions where Trump says something objectively true (like, Hillary is crooked) or that he sincerely believes (like, Putin respects him). As Bill Maher said, “he never would have been able to get away with that if Joe Biden was there.”

It was so damn bad that the New York Times – which apparently is still mad Biden wouldn’t give them an interview – felt compelled to present an Editorial Board opinion that Biden had to step down. So, after a whole weekend, what is the public’s opinion of this crushing media offensive on Biden?

USA Today showed Trump up three points where the candidates had been virtually tied. Data For Progress showed Trump up three points against Biden (and incidentally, in hypotheticals, he was also up 3 against Kamala Harris and more than that against other prospective Democrats). The NYT itself was still showing Trump only 1 point ahead of Biden in Wisconsin. In the Morning Consult poll, Biden’s numbers actually went UP.

And I have no doubt that the Biden-Harris campaign is raising more money than ever, if only because it is now impossible to avoid the fact that our nation is just one step away from answering the question, “What if we had a dictator who was written on ChatGPT?”

How? How is it that this debate hasn’t killed Biden? Well, I’m starting to think that the defining aspect of the Trump Era, Trump’s completely unjustified capacity to avoid the political consequences of his actions, is finally starting to accrue to the other guy. Just as everybody knows that Trump is a racist, rapist, Russian-sympathizing, pathological liar, mental defective and career criminal who wallows like King Pig in a pool of his own shit, and that’s why we love him so, Joe Biden is real old and that’s built in to his position. Criticizing Biden for being real old is like saying Bill Gates is real rich. It’s almost beside the point now. Expecting him to have a “senior moment” is no more momentous than Trump zoning out in the middle of a speech. On balance, it happens a lot less often. And every time the media exposes Trump’s malfeasance, his fan club rallies around him because the collective “They” are picking on their sweet little boy when it’s only pointing out the obvious. Well, now you see Biden getting people to rally around him because it seems like the media are picking on him in his moment of weakness. It’s not like they don’t have evidence. After all, it’s not like the Times told Trump to quit the race after he was convicted of 34 felonies.

But it’s probably a case of the same motive that the Trump club has in standing by their man no matter what: Because they’re scared to death of what happens if Those People win. And in the case of the Left (which now means anybody who’s not a Trump cultist) they have far more cause.

One of my friends told me the other day that “now I’d vote for Biden even if it was a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ thing.” I said, “it may come to that.” I don’t know if Biden will even get past 2025. But just as long as he gets past 2024, I’m still voting for him.

But we need more than that. After all, the whole reason that Trump won the first time is that being “not as bad” as Donald Trump was simply not enough. And we’re going to need more than that if Republicans are going to keep raising up people like J.D. Vance who are just as unethical as Trump but younger and smarter.

You would think, with the backbench that the Democratic Party has, can’t they find a national candidate who isn’t corrupt (like Bob Menendez), a dull political hack (like Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris), incredibly old (like Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders) or all of the above (namely, Hillary Clinton)?

This matters for the coming election, not to mention the next one after that, assuming there is one. Because this is all affected by the big news from Monday. The Supreme Court finished its term, a good weekend past the last Friday in June, and waited until July 1 to display its conservative consensus on the question of Trump’s presumed immunity from prosecution and investigation, waiting that long possibly because they knew no one would like the result.

In the case, aptly titled Trump v. United States, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf the Samuel Alito Court ruled for Trump, and therefore, against the United States.

The Court has made a blanket ruling that anything the president does as an official act – by his own definition – cannot be prosecuted, and materials related to such action cannot be used as evidence against him. As others have pointed out, this ruling would have invalidated US v. Nixon.

However SCOTUS remanded to the District Court the question of whether “a prosecution involving Trump’s alleged attempts to influence the Vice President’s oversight of the certification proceeding would pose any dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Thus not exactly killing, but also not disputing, the premise that a president who is sworn to uphold the Constitution can, let alone must, use his authority to overturn a lawful Constitutional election just cause it didn’t go his way.

The Chief Justice (technically John Roberts) wrote in his opinion for the Court that “The president occupies a unique position in the Constitutional scheme.” “Then, misreading the design and purpose of the Constitution itself, he argues that the Framers “sought to encourage energetic, vigorous, decisive and speedy execution of the laws’ by placing in the hands of a single, constitutionally indispensable individual the ultimate authority that, in many in respect to the other branches, the Constitution divides among many.” that there “exists the greatest public interest’ in providing the president with ‘the maximum ability to deal fearlessly and impartially with the duties of his office…. (T)he nature of presidential power,” Roberts explains, “requires that a former president have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the president’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute.” That immunity would ensure that “when the president exercised… authority, he may act even when the measures he takes are ‘incompatible with the expressed or implied will of the Congress’…. And the courts have ‘no power to control the president’s discretion when the acts pursuant to the powers vested exclusively in him by the Constitution.’”

Thus presenting the truly astounding theory that the legislature is exercising too much power, while the president, be he Republican or Democrat, is not exercising nearly enough.

The party of constitutionalism and small government, ladies and gentlemen.

And in order to assert this “decisive” agenda, the Alito Court – the ‘textualist’ and ‘originalist’ Court – is asserting a premise found nowhere in the Constitution, not even implied in the Constitution, not even in the common and dangerous civil tradition that the president should not, and therefore never will be, investigated for suspicion of real crimes. Now even that tradition is replaced with the force of a ruling that comes not from the legislature or executive order, but the judiciary.

In other words, they are legislating from the bench, which apparently is the worst thing in the world when a liberal judge does it but seems to be the expected function of a conservative justice.

This was pointed out by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent, pointing out the very nightmare scenarios raised by her, and by the lower court justices, in their questioning of Trump’s attorneys, on questions that the majority has just decided in the affirmative: “Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

Left unsaid in Sotomayor’s dissent was the obvious: If the president fires Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas, or for that matter, Sonia Sotomayor, he’s immune.

You might say, the president doesn’t have such power in the Constitution, but what difference does that make, when you, the Court, have decided that anything the president does as an official act cannot be challenged except by impeachment and then a two-thirds conviction vote in the Senate, which will require at least a third of the president’s own party to defect, which is NEVER going to happen?

What is the argument against the point that you, the Court, have declared that Article II in fact DOES mean the President can do anything he wants?

The fact that the conservative majority seems to think that Joe Biden will not abuse the power they have just given him before he leaves office only betrays the bad faith of their argument: Not every president can be trusted with such power.

This only confirms that we are never going to get justice against Donald Trump from the judiciary, which had always catered to Trump in his civilian career even before he had the power to appoint his own judges. Which means the only chance of holding him accountable, whatever one thinks of Joe Biden’s more-obvious-than-ever weaknesses, is to vote for Biden against Trump. After all, if Trump is above the law while in office and can do anything he wants while in office, the obvious step is to make sure he never gets back in office.

As you know by now, June 27, incumbent President Joe Biden had his first 2024 debate against once and possibly future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump, and the universal consensus is that Joe did not have a good night. Which is a polite understatement on the level of “Maybe the Germans should have brought more winter supplies to invade Russia”, “Napoleon was a pretty good artillery captain” or “Michael Ironside has been in a few bad movies.”

If nothing else I got an answer to my question as to why so many people hate Joe Biden and can’t give him credit for anything his Administration does, because Americans can only see the superficial and optics are everything. And Donald Trump understands this better than anyone else. And that is why he has been leading Biden, because Biden actually looks his age while Trump wears a Tribble on his scalp and paints his face the same color they gave David Soul in that one Star Trek episode with the giant lizard head.

But Biden’s age in itself isn’t an insurmountable issue. It’s been the given for quite some time. And he has proven to be pretty sharp on several occasions this year, notably the State of the Union speech, though I recall his voice was going out there too. But in this week’s debate, Joe just seemed out of it. Like, he’d been roped into a Juneteenth celebration and he had no idea what that music was. Sure he focused and started swinging back at Trump by the second half, but that didn’t correct the lethal first impression, especially if you, like many viewers, watched for five minutes, shot your TV and then started looking up prospects for a work visa in Ireland.

The point is, Biden’s performance was so bad that after the debate, all through the night various insiders with ears in the media started making noises to the effect that Democrats need to replace him at the Democratic National Covention.
Guys: Are you really going to go there? Because if you’re serious, you need to explore just how serious your options are.

First off, as I have said, if the president dies or has to retire, he already has a replacement set up, and in this case the replacement is Kamala Harris. And frankly: If people thought Kamala Harris was up to snuff, Democrats would not be in a state of total panic right now. Indeed my position is, and has been, that Biden is only running for a second term because he knows Kamala Harris would be even less popular versus Trump than he is.

And then the second question is not whether they can pull off a brokered convention. If that decision is made, then the process is secondary. The question is who they nominate. Because just as the awful truth of the Republican Party is that there is nobody (except maybe Nikki Haley) who has a chance of winning a national election other than Trump, there is probably no one in the Democratic Party with the national profile and popularity to win the race other than Joe Biden – except perhaps Bernie Sanders, who like the running candidates is real, real old, and technically not a Democrat.

The people with the strongest profile are in different categories. First, Senators like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. In these cases, that would be taking an incumbent Senator away from the Democrats when their margin is only technical, one seat is guaranteed to flip Republican because Joe Manchin isn’t running in West Virginia, and Democrats are going to need a Senate majority if they win the White House or especially if they don’t. Then you have some non-elected people who are prominent Democrats like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, but in his case, he ran for President as an openly gay man and found out that certain demographics of Democratic voters aren’t as “progressive” on that issue as he needed them to be. And then of course you have Gavin Newsom, Governor of California. I’m sure he’s sincere when he says he’s supporting Biden, if only because of the practical issues involved in switching horses mid-stream. But if someone gave him a serious transition plan, I’m also sure he wouldn’t turn it down.

And then there’s Biden himself. All the news insiders are saying that the only one who can make him step down is him, and the only people who might convince him to do that are people of the same stature whom he respects, namely: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But then, they’re the ones who decided Hillary Clinton was a better candidate than Joe Biden in 2016, so how good is their judgment on this matter?

On an online forum for The Bulwark staff, Bill Kristol declared his position by saying, “If there is no solution, then there is no problem.” You just go with what you have, which is still the most realistic option.

And it just points out the critical difference between liberals and “conservatives” – liberals still act like facts matter. They still act like they have standards. When Biden or some other Democrat is stupid or incompetent, they will actually call it out. They may try to spin somewhat, but they don’t deny what they see. Whereas for the past few weeks, at least, Trump’s fan club and pet media have seen him on the podium insult his own audience or go into a fugue state, and they still act like he built the Pyramids, wrote the King James Bible and invented sliced bread.

Maybe Democrats need more of that. And I think I saw some of that when I looked at the YouTube comments on various people’s pages. I saw people saying basically the same things: “I’m worried, but I can’t vote for Trump.” “We can’t let Trump win.” “I’d rather vote for a ham sandwich than Trump.”

Wishful thinking and denial of reality. Democrats ought to try it out. It’s worked great for Republicans so far!

The June 27 CNN debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was already expected to be a low point in the history of our republic and the choices it allows itself to have in government, and if anything, it exceeded expectations.

Leading up to this debate, Republicans seemed so eager to talk down expectations that they almost seemed scared of Joe, like he was going to stage the same comeback he did at the State of the Union speech, cause he was on COCAINE! You’ve heard of Cocaine Bear? This is Cocaine Biden!

If Joe had been coked up, he might have been better off.

For the first time, I actually saw what all the Biden-haters have been seeing in him: Joe looked scared, and lost, and OLD. Meanwhile, Trump was doing his usual rambling, evading, bragging Gish Gallop, but at least he seemed to know where he was, which is more than you could say for him in the last few weeks. As many people pointed out, shutting off the other candidate’s mic was assumed to kill Trump’s main weapon, but it actually served to his advantage by allowing him to focus, and made it that much harder for Biden to counter him, when he actually did.

And after the fact I saw a whole bunch of commentators like Keith Olbermann say that the CNN anchors did not challenge Trump on his various lies and evasions about January 6 in particular, but the thing is, it is not the job of reporters to hold Biden’s hand – or the voter’s hand – and point out the stuff that everyone knows isn’t true. Saying “that’s not true”, like Kaitlin Collins did in rump’s townhall lovefest, isn’t enough. What matters in a debate is FIGHTING BACK, and fighting back twice as hard. Imagine if Joe had been just as forceful and direct as Trump was, but with facts on his side. Of course the facts were on his side anyway, but in a TV debate, everything is optics. In this particular case, facts don’t matter. Certainly that was Trump’s strategy. What you need to do is win the day, and as we have seen with the Republican Party, far too many people who know better are willing to meekly surrender and march behind a moronic, dick-swinging bully who shits on everything he touches, as long as it seems like he’s winning. And right now, it seems like Trump’s winning.

And Biden’s performance was the sort of thing that has caused people like Bill Maher to say that Joe shouldn’t be running, and it’s “selfish” of him to hold on when he could die any day. For one thing, there’s a big difference between the President and Ruth Bader Ginsburg: If the president dies, or has to retire, there’s already a replacement set to go. In this case, that replacement is Kamala Harris.

NOW do you see why Joe is still running?

Because if you tell most Americans the choice (if they can’t stand Trump) is either Biden or Harris, most Americans would prefer Biden, probably including a majority of Democrats. After all, if Democrats had preferred her in the 2020 primaries, she would probably be president now.

But that means the issue is both Biden and Harris. You would think that with all the advantages of incumbency, which Trump no longer has, that Democrats would be able to put off the issue of whether they wish to be led by Harris, and if not her, whom, until after they win in 2024, but now more and more Democrats are starting to wonder.

The Telegraph: “White House aides have spent the last three weeks claiming that any stories about the US president’s age and mental capacity were manipulated “cheapfakes” or outright lies. But those at home watching the two men on stage tonight were left with an unavoidable conclusion: Mr Biden struggled to hold his own, and Donald Trump wiped the floor with him.” Reuters, quoting “Top Biden Donor Who Did Not Wish To Be Named”: “There is no way to spin this. His performance was disqualifying.” Analyst Amy Walter: “To be sure, Trump did not ‘win’ this debate as much as Biden lost it. Trump lobbed multiple falsehoods and lies. He failed to make a positive case for his second term, spending more time litigating Biden’s failures. But, Trump is leading in the polls and doesn’t need a ‘rest’ in the way Biden does.” USA Today: “That’s a good man. He loves his country. He’s doing the best that he can,” said Van Jones, a Democratic political analyst for CNN. “But he had a test to meet tonight to restore confidence in the country and of the base, and he failed to do that.” Jones added: “We’re still far from our convention. And there is time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that.”

Jones was not the only person to say that. And indeed, the Democratic National Convention is not until mid-August. But what are we saying? Are we saying that a party convention isn’t the de facto coronation of the guy who’s got all the organizational bigwigs on his side? Especially since he’s the president?

People say that this election, and this debate in particular, go to show us how screwed this country is, but if the United States is to truly be a representative republic, it has to be led by the people who matter the most: Really old white guys who have no clue what they’re doing.

Are we going to say that Democrats aren’t going to do what they’re “supposed” to, that they’re going to do what they did before the 1980s, and actually get people on the floor to put younger, newer leaders forward and let the community decide, on the basis of who the best choice really is???

What kind of Commie un-American idea is that?!?

May 30 is a new national holiday in America:
Fuck Trump Day.

Donald Trump, former Viceroy of Russian North America, on May 30, 2024 anno domini, was found guilty of all 34 criminal charges against him in a New York court. Politico:

“Just minutes before jurors revealed they had reached a decision, Merchan was preparing to send them home for the day with instructions to come back in the morning to continue deliberating. Trump appeared jovial, his allies predicting that the lengthening deliberation might signify a real battle in the jury room.

But then the judge announced that the jury had given him a note. They had reached a verdict and were in the process of filling out the verdict form.

In an instant, the smiling stopped, a smattering of gasps could be heard, and then a heavy silence filled the room. Reporters who had been packing their bags jolted upright and waited in agonizing suspense for the jury to enter the room.”

Oh, frabjous day! Callou, callay!

He chortled in his joy.

Now I know the various monsignors and cardinals in the Church of Trump have been directed to spread the dogma that this makes Trump a “political prisoner.” Well, so was the Marquis de Sade, and at least he could write books. I’m sure all the good little Trumpniks are gonna tell us the trial was “Rigged” and “STOLLEN.” Here’s at least two things to consider in regard to how the American justice system actually works, at least unless Trump gets re-elected:

One, this is a common-law system of justice in this country, where a criminal defendant has a presumption of innocence, largely because the balance between the government and one individual is necessarily unequal, no matter how much money or power the defendant has. Thus, knowing that this is necessarily the case, the English-speaking world has decided that the defendant must have factors in their favor.

Second, related to the first, is the jury system. I am not going to debate the validity of the premise of “jury nullification”, but it is always possible for a juror in any case to simply hold out and prevent a unanimous verdict against the defendant, which would ultimately lead to a mistrial that would not acquit the defendant, which could lead to a retrial but in this particular case that might have not been practical, especially if it dragged out past November, Trump got re-elected and he sent a CIA hit squad to kill Attorney General Alvin Bragg. Which he could do, if you believe his lawyers at the Supreme Court.

The verdict only ended up taking less than two full court days before deliberation, and that much time probably because there were 34 charges, which was only possible because Trump committed that many crimes. The fact that he got convicted on all charges, with no exceptions, that quickly, just confirms the immortal verdict of Mark Slackmeyer: “That’s guilty! Guilty, Guilty, GUILTY!!!”

I mean, never mind that Trump is right in that there is a two-tiered justice system in that not only does it cater to people who have money and power, it does so in his case to a truly ridiculous degree. The Sackler family has real money and power, and they didn’t get to jerk the system around as much as Trump does. As with OJ Simpson, when you’re a star, they let you do it.

Which right there is why, all the Mainstream Media whining aside, it was a good thing not to have live cameras in the court.

Since no one was able to play to the cameras and try a court case in the realm of public opinion, everyone had to focus on the facts, and that is never good for Trump. The premise, from the start, was, if what Michael Cohen did (paying Stormy Daniels to not reveal an affair with Trump during the 2016 election, thus committing election fraud, and then covering up the event and his payoff thereafter) was a crime that deserved a prison sentence, why was it not a crime for Trump, who ordered the actions?

The prosecution started with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who like a couple other people might be described as a hostile witness – he was still fond of Trump, but told what he knew. Specifically, Pecker confirmed that it was the business of his company to publish stories about embarrassing celebrity scandals, such as with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s affairs, and also worked on Trump’s behalf to release negative stories about political rivals like Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. But when presented with the real gold mine of Trump’s sex scandals, Pecker deliberately took a financial hit to squelch them, not just out of friendship with Trump, but to help him win his election campaign (NOT to protect the feelings of Trump’s wife, given that nobody cared if the information came out after the election). Hope Hicks, another close friend of Trump, gave her assessment that Michael Cohen wasn’t the kind of guy who would just pay Trump’s paramour money from his own pocket without compensation, out of the goodness of his heart and without recognition. Which led to the testimony of Cohen himself, which was necessary because he was the only witness who could establish that Trump paid Cohen to pay Daniels and approved the scheme to reimburse Cohen in such a way that it would square with his taxes. (The only other potential witness who could corroborate this being Trump financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who is in prison on other fraud charges and even less credible.)

So after the defense challenged Cohen’s credibility, saying for instance that he misrepresented the nature of a phone call to Trump’s aide, prosecutors showed a photo of aide Keith Schiller with Trump just before the phone call was transcribed, demonstrating that Cohen could have had Schiller bring Trump to the phone at the same time. Then, after the prosecution rested, the defense brought one fact witness and the only other defense witness, Robert Costello, a lawyer who previously advised Cohen and had sought to represent himself as Cohen’s attorney in proceedings after the 2016 election. And this guy Costello started off by muttering contemptuous statements in testimony and then saying “strike” when challenged by Judge Juan Merchan, when only a judge can strike testimony and only the lawyer on the floor can withdraw his own question, not the testimony of a witness. (You would think an attorney would know that.) Then the next day in cross-examination, prosecutors entered evidence of conversations where Costello was acting with other members of the Trump team to keep Cohen from revealing what he knew after the election.

“Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving him the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the president,” Costello wrote in one 2018 email, referencing Trump and the then-president’s close aide Rudy Giuliani.” Thus giving further evidence to the assertion that this whole thing was a coverup of a crime, not simply “hush money” over a consensual affair, and that Trump committed the acts knowingly and willingly.

In one-and-a-half days of testimony, Costello was a better witness for the prosecution than Michael Cohen was in three days.

But that’s what you would expect, because Trump doesn’t hire attorneys to be attorneys. An attorney would counsel the client on his best interests and run the case in that regard, trying to appeal to the judge and jury. Trump hires attorneys to be his legal mouthpieces and say the belligerent stuff in court that he says outside the court, only with the official veneer of a law license. That’s why defense attorney Todd Blanche theatrically accused Cohen of lying – allowing a redirect that affirmed the prosecution’s position – and why the defense called Costello, who was only there to denigrate Cohen, the judge and the process, and also prompted a cross-examination that further confirmed the prosecutors’ case. Certainly a real defense team would have counseled Trump not to spend so much time sleeping in court, which he had done so consistently that it came off as a power move to show contempt for the trial, not to mention the judge and the jury who had to be there. Maybe that explains why just before the verdict, Trump whined that he didn’t know what the charges were. Well, Donnie, maybe if you’d been awake for any of that you would know. Of course it doesn’t help that you’re a natural simpleton who’s going senile on top of that.

Now that the jury is dismissed, Judge Merchan set a sentencing date for July 11, one week after Independence Day and just four days before the Republican National Convention, where Trump is the presumptive presidential nominee. So of course his attorneys are whining for a delay in the sentencing hearing so that the convicted felon’s schedule will not be interrupted. But it’s not like Trump is actually going to go to prison yet even if he is given that sentence, since he has the right to appeal. And some people, a few of whom are actually credible, thought that there were serious issues with the prosecution’s case, and that Trump has grounds for appeal.

Now as has been pointed out, Trump can still run for president and win, even if he’s sent to prison. This is actually a good thing. As I have said elsewhere, if this were a real dictatorship or one-party regime – like the countries Trump emulates – the party in charge could slap criminal charges on an opposition candidate who threatens to win, and simply eliminate the problem that way. It’s what Putin always does and what they did in Brazil to Lula da Silva, among other examples. Plus, if this country, including the various power elites that have been propping Trump up all this time, are still going to elect Trump after all THIS, frankly, this country will have failed the Darwin Test and won’t deserve to exist.

But, in the meantime, we have a new national holiday. Next May 30, I want to celebrate by having a party with lots of hamburgers, KFC and Diet Coke. Unless Trump actually does win re-election, in which case I will either be dead, eating prison food, or underground, eating rats.