Pondering how much of what to “defend” within the mass of JD Vance material. The Democrats have it trickling out, toss it into the ether at sporadic moments to prolong the political agony, knowing we don’t really need Iranian hacking of Republican research and media leaks to get at this stuff. The new item — Vance sliding right past the “purpose of post-menopausal women” — is a sentiment of armchair biology whose basic terms I have heard more from women than men — obliged to sit it all out. I suppose this may mean that Vance would have been better off in some trad-woman’s podcast on this sphere of thought than an obnoxious bro — but I gather the fallout would be about the same.

Roadkill has become another issue in this political campaign. Not quite at the point that cannibalism had and has been in the campaign — Biden’s random cannibalism anecdote no longer anything to mull over given he has left the campaign which has left Trump alone with his stump speech reference to a fictitious cannibal, he now has cannibals all to himself. Roadkill was on my mind because of a comment made by a Democratic congressman to the biggest and most immediate Republican congressman who said Harris was a DEI hire — “this from a person who supported legalizing keeping roadkill”. I am stuck on the question of how to approach when you respond to one but if nonsense from a political opponents by reference a sane point of disagreement s/he has with them as though it is of the same type of nonsense. I would not exactly trust someone who campaigns on roadkill as a central platform issue, but it is a matter that needs to be adjudicated and I have no interest in prosecuting everyone, hailing tgem, and throwing away the keys. As it were, I have not interrogated the matter of Robert F Kennedy Jr and his dumped bear at Central Park — I am lead to believe that it is transparently false — but Kennedy may have been weaving the story in just such a way as to keep the taking of roadkill into the bounds of acceptance in New York state law.

Fox News, ladies and gentlemen.

I stare at the Trump press conference. The whole thing is untethered by reality. Like, this differs from, oh, Bill Clinton and sexual relations with that woman — which is a lie tethered to reality — you can connect its falseness to the truth that he is evading. Or the Bush Administration and a large constellation of war propaganda, that I have to equovicate on what are actual lies in the 2000s era speeches and what were conclusions fitting priors makes the difference here. On Trump in this year 2024, the old man lives in a myopic fantasy world and he has dragged us all along with it. I really don’t know what to say or do with it, but let us see what is animating Rod Dreher.

This is a hell of a lot more leeway than what either EW Erickson granted Biden post debate (or any other showing his age moment) on how that man could “reset” his campaign. It kind of throws me back to Nikki Haley’s campaign drop out race speech comment that “now hopefully Trump will earn my voter’s support”. Somehow after everything there is no “I’ve seen enough”. No permanent statement is permanent — no “I’m done with this guy” ever sticks.

And Erickson’s “reset”, simply looking at what Dreher has clipped here, is a little bit off kilter from the baseline Republican cries that he needs to get back to messages of the onerous regulation state and tax and spend inflationary big government! — in that what he wants is for him to pound the names of every undocumented / illegal immigrant who committed a violent crime, a matter of demagoguery that though at least tethered to reality — stems from something, anything — still cannot be cut off from the rest of Trump’s spiel. A guy who does that is going to be the same guy who goes after a party member, a guy who does this makes hay over Kamala Harris’s mixed race background — that mean tweets that are your static noise.

Still, I am always trying to find a “something sensical” in the insane morass. By way of contrarianism if nothing else — let’s debate the merits of water storage policy or something. The illustrious reporters here a tad tied down to horse race coverage, I do find myself in agreement with Trump’s sneering of “what a stupid question” on why we are not seeing him campaigning. It is ultimately nothing that should concern me or you — spectator sports are all good and well but I am wanting and hoping for a mass re-conceptualizing of it all. And maybe we see it anyways — the broadest part of the populace only tunes in now. After this statement, Trump makes no sense and then bobs back into sense. He is filming ads on a level you have never seen from right here. Nonsensical statement. He shuffles away the statement “Montana is a swing state” by offering, sanely, he is out campaigning for Senate candidates. Though, he throws in what is apparently a stop-over in Wyoming, which I assume there are rich jackasses there to meet and raise funds out of, but in political terms other than maybe trolling Lynne Cheney there is not much political point. A Republican primary is set, but he is just endorsing the incumbent. Like, I am sure there are elected Democrats somewhere in the state, but I have to squint hard to figure out where this dirty trick flier is even aimed at.

Well. We need to know the evil that lurks in Tim Walz.

I see the National Review has Rich Lowry land him as a combination force of Blagojevich and Menendez. There was a third name but it evades me. At least more interesting a charge than radical leftist, but I kind of figure that their worldview is one that views any expansive government run program as corruption defacto. But the bigger issue here is that on Lowry, he already said multiple times he is done with Trump and yet… Nothing sticks.

Oh great. It’s that high school football coach calling everyone a little different from him and his “weird”. But, you can’t stick to that — he was the guy who spear-headed the school’s new “Gay Straight Alliance”. Oh, great. He’s the high school football coach who thinks all the “weird” kids are gay.

There is a limit to the “weird” line. It encompasses too much, somewhat predictably overlapping Clinton’s “Basketful of deplorables”, gets shoved into the policy matters as he lays down some absolutes. We can’t clutch too many pearls on it, going up against some clown who defenders always dismissed problems with as “mean tweets”, Bringing in early JD Vance promoter and superfan Rod Dreher to this parade:

Yeah, this is a guy who had (still is?) for the past decade or so been posting to “libs of tik tok” and Andy Ngo various bizarre and self centered terminally online sexual micro-minorities, specializing in ever so exotic and meaningless pronouns. This is presented as though it is bigger than it is, and the main problem with most is a terminally online nature. His response to them is to shout that they are weird. Dhrer’s guy, meantime, does his terminally online act, spouts his mouth off for… Um… podcaster “Bronze Age Pervert”, and Dreher is horrified that some peoples outside of the political and cultural mainstream but in his direction (with certain contradictory caveats on that) are called “weird”.

I hope we can somewhat shuffle from this line, but it is hardly a concern. More irksome is that the man threw out a line about “couch”, a premise of immaturity I don’t know what I am supposed to do with and whose proliferation moves me away from having any strong attachment to this Harris / Walz cause beyond my bottom line “they’ll do”. The problem of presidential campaigns is everyone becomes irritating.

Gee. I don’t kniw, Rod Dreher. Must be something endemic to Trump’s thinking, you know the mastermind of the “Beer Belly Putsch” of January 6, 2021?

Yeah must be horrible. But have to wait and see when this madness begins before we demand that it stops. I have not been watching a second of Olympic Action, but apparently the big right-wing cause celebre is against the big dominant winner in woman’s boxer who was born with two “x”-chromosomes and never at any minute transitioned, and who despite have two x chromosomes could pass by the eye test as being a man — which, strictly speaking, might indeed benefit her in the world of woman’s boxing — but today instead of early 80s un-pc jesting at some female abnormally heavy-set athletes as “that’s a man!”, they just declare her an ex-man anyways. I knew something was off here when I saw the nationality of the boxer — oh, sure. Algeria. Okay, yes, I know it is not the end point for Matt Walsh’s search for “What is a Woman?” – – and then I would just dumping the Massai people’s with the nation of Algeria, but you know — we are not terribly progressive here on this one.

Trump is plucking his way into weird Internet streamers — accidentally a 23 year old kid whose trademark is that he smells the chairs of the peoples he interviews after they leave. Also he apparently can’t define fascism — to be sure I can’t give a straight forward definition either — and has trouble reading it off the Internet and has never heard of Mussolini. Trump is evidently making an appearance in Montana — big Senate seat available, I guess he may be thinking down-ticket and figure his niche targeting will lift him up in the swing states? JD Vance — not too much to say on this — the friendly network has dropped the image out lest the only visible word you get is “Kamala” — and looking over the tens of people in this crowd — I do highlight the woman, third from the right, too row, floof of hair, looks a week away from dying her hair green, looks like she should own a number of cats.

Well that’s super.

The 2024 presidential election throws a number of mini or micro stories to jump in and out of or follow. I guess the Biden Zombie campaign is over and done with, and watching the post debate Biden campaign had an appeal all its own — points of desperation, telling into a void, politicians flaking away. I do stand amused a story that Jill Biden warns that the Biden will not remember the Democrats who orchestrated his ouster — which, a similar story about the Clintons following 2008 has its meaningfulness — watch out in post 2010 redistricting primary battles with Obama endorsing Democrats — but in terms of Biden… Yeah, Pelosi and Axelrod are shaking in their boots.

Another story keeping an eye on, and I did drop out of looking at the National Review sensing a pointlessness because they were pontificating on a scene that you knew was about to change, is people who I some level know the follows of Trump and do see Authoritarianism in him, but are talking their way right back into voting for him. Here Biden offered a convenient back-way: would vote for the Democrat against Trump, but he is old, frail, and doddering into senility and forgetfulness, so it is Trump. If the Democrats had gone with literally someone, anyone else. And now watch a line change. Would vote for the Democrat over Trump, even a dead rock like Biden, but now we have (litany of liberal crimes) supporter Kamala Harris — so no thanks on that! The game continues.

Item three, and this gets a little hard. I want to take a look see on JD Vance fanboy Rod Dreher as the wider public pours over Vance. And this is going to get illuminating.

The battle over “normie” status continues unabated, a man who decried the decadence of American culture to the point where he fled to Hungary cries out over the implications on this term. I will go ahead and say that some Democratic Party discourse leaves me flat and dead — something I noted in Biden’s state of the union address as it moved to its litany stage, and something I saw in presumed Democratic Vice Presidential pick Josh Shapiro (The announcement has made that she is going to announce the pick at a Pittsburg event on Tuesday — I can do the math and read the tea leaves)’s stump speech for Harris. There is a blind spot, one a Republican in the Virginia gubernatorial race will waltz right in on, in this framing as they catapult through the list of “freedom”s the nasty Trumpists and Republicans under away of Agenda 2025 want to destroy — “the right for children to read what they want”. Yeah, I know, Tipper Gore has long left the stage — as much as you may mock the old “Parental Advisory” labels as “greatest promotional tool ever” for the albums, they did serve as useful guidelines for parents to know that — at the very least, the kids are listening to some things now — should steer them to some fuller understanding on meanings. We are past an era on v-chip arguments. The “TV-7” ratings I never knew what it meant. Perhaps the right now hates these things and thinks it is coddling “trigger warning” adjacency. But you stare at the easy line from Governor Shapiro and see it falls into the line of books accepted and not accepted into school libraries — and I don’t want to stuck crying “censorship!” because a school library has dropped a graphic novel coming of age memoir from a gender non-comformist expressing graphic lust regarding illustrated genitalia.

But it is that thing where The Moral Majority was founded, with assumptions inherent in its name, and then as they progressed they had to share down at the reality that — they weren’t in the majority. And the fight for normalcy continues, unwinnable by anyone, as it should be.

Jimmy Carter was blasted away with a “weirdness factor” question. In some part, I guess Dreher ought relate to that. America was not used to vote for born again Christian, as I guess they aren’t Catholics – – or church going Catholics such as our elderly president who I see in other tweets I can see Dreher mocking away at in terms of the terms of his Catholicism. It figures. I am almost giving JD Vance too much credit is placing it into some cultural points of what a same conservative parent might object to in current liberal assumptions. Because when he asked about the great “unmarried cat lady” policies, and spit-balling notions that parents ought get extra votes for children they have — the line he took went to economic and tax policy, the sane point where we actually do make way for parental burden which does do some of the “ought tax the childless more” idea — the child tax deduction. He lied and said Harris opposed this, sought its removal. At this point I almost feel like the man no longer deserves my defense and call out of his inane and stupid the couch thing is — and it is further exasperated that the man at the top of the ticket wants to move to a nineteenth century system of financing by tariff anyways.

I don’t know who the man on the lower left is. This clip has thehost, upper left, turning to Allan Lichtman at the lower right, he of the “13 Keys”. James Carville in the upper left can not hide a certain disdain,Though he sits silently and lets him ramble on. Carville has long been of the opinion the Democrats need to get a new candidate for 2024 and let Biden retire, Lichthman believes they have just thrown away one of the keys. To be sure, he still sees the Democrats as holding the correct number of keys.

I imagine Obama’s endorsement is of zero significance. It would be significant only if he didn’t, or he endorsed Trump or Jill Stein.

At the moment and for the rest of the election JD Vance has bestowed upon the Republican a “weirdness” factor, a repellent toward normies, swimming in a pool of odd sub-cultural squares that speak a language middle America does not understand. Should Harris win the election, and should the Republicans clean themselves up even a tad, and makes some kind of breaking retiring Trump from their active roster, it is worth marking a ride turning. Looking over to the next Hunter Bidens —

An entrepreneur and social media influencer, I suppose. It is a misnomer to say that the Democrats have won all the elections in the past four years. They did lose the Virginia gubernatorial election, on issues that burble into people’s lives — education policy — and have some cultural clashing undercurrents in it, one side gets a little smug in its perception of where the normies are at.

Reportedly Manchin, not a Democrat, called Donna Brazille, not an official with the DNC, on how to run in the post Biden world. A wacky asterisk if there ever was one.

The Internet has lots of opinions. Though are they any more insightful than the Old Media figures?

A step down from Trump’s previous tendency to call all the Dems “marxist”s.

I want to tell everyone to knock it off on the couch thing. I don’t even really understand it. It is not true, verifiably not the case — supposedly in the book and look in the book and it is not there — and if it were the case that it is in there, would be a thing that is… I don’t know… Humanizing the jackass? Kind of? At the very least hanging it over him leads to more risk-taking in book writing — see too why Obama’s first book is an actual book and after winning any election nothing he puts out reads as anything worth reading. I can’t even see how this idea gets at some “hypocrisy” angle — it is a weird dunking of a political foe which when it evaporates muddied the water for things that are legitimate — an escape clause to point to immature lies the liberals are promulgating and justify their own distortions with a “whatabout”ism. I hope to find out that the source of it was apolitical and “in it for the lulz”, because this meme is just kind of annoying.

The “childless cat ladies” thing is a lot serious in part because it is not a one-off, there is — as everyone is finding out now — a good deal of policy proposals spouted off off of this frame of mind. (Some of which, in some variant, championed as mildly liberal politicians, or if you want to propose an expansion of the child income tax credot, go at it, cause “it takes a village” after all.) And I am not the person who posited this thought but — I pity the Democratic OPPO worker who are now having to sit through right wing podcast interviews with Vance, and ensure the thoughts of variants of trad Catholics and neo-paleo con whatevers. Vance emerges as a bizarro-version of the problems that inflicted the lot of 2020 Deocratic presidential aspirants in 2019: forgetting that the Internet is not the realworld. Or, in his case, thinking he can bum-rush the world y amassing these podcasters.

There is one thing more that strikes as I in a very second hand fashion reassess his once broadly touted book. The cat ladies comment can essentially be taken as another version in that “basketful of deplorables” comment that oh so doomed Hillary Clinton. But, taking another gander at what I understand on his book — he basically took that line as well. Fled the area and declared them all drug addicted laggards. Coming and going! The most Elitist of Populists!

This assessment: Good at pandering up, but not down.

Peter Thiel is getting all the attention relation to the selection of JD Vance, and as a matter of actual policy implications he probably ought to. The cultural debris will land with a thud. But the Silicon Valley Crypto Currency design could work it’s way in through its sheer degrees of separation from mass understanding. Still. I do come right back to Rod Dreher, sitting and it has been a while since I read the stimulating and varied comments section under his not much interesting (or sometimes too damned interesting) blog column at the American Conservative, wandering away when the comments section went away, then of course completely as he headed off to Hungary under his favored leader Viktor Orban. Dreher considers himself a man instrumental to Vance’s rise, promoting his “at one time universally” or largely so “praised book”, praised before he took that step into electioneering and you you had fuller reason to interrogate his politics and concern yourself with more than just passing input on his book. And we see him, alongside Thiel, in “the seven intellectual forces behind JD Vance” politico article. He heard the speech. Thrilled to it, I guess.

I think the phrase is “playing to the base”. You can take it as an amusing anecdote and eccentricity. Or you can ask if we really want to be that turbo-paranoid.

You have to pay for his substack, or get a free week, but i do see he spent the last week on the JD Vance train, posting old photographs of him next to him. A title, “Reagan of the Milennials”. And I am not wholly sure of the Vanity Fair article, seeing that he now is in charge of “The European Conservative”, where we find Dreher chomping at the bit on behalf of Vance, and explaining that he hated Trump too but then that Covington Kid thing happened. And then changed everything. Not mentioned in the article, but from my reading it changed again on January 6. But then there was a book in a school library somewhere that has a drawing of a penis, and that changed that. The penis book is more important than January 6.

It is interesting that The Nation magazine has an article up which pulls the latest found epithet on “childless cat ladies” — a category which includes step-parents such as Kamala Harris and gay men such as Peter Buttigieg — back to Rod Dreher, because I was thinking about this independent from The Nation. I am not even dipping far into fullest explications, but I do recall Dreher tossing the phrase about here and there — a jeering reference to jezebel-ish publication article excerpt that a litmus question in a relationship should be asking your would-be partner what the legal state on sex workers should be. “How to secure ‘Cat Lady’ status”. I would be one to think you make up what litmuses work for you. Beyond this, I am curious to see how he treats the misinformation about JD Vance and his couch — “lust in your heart?” – – but have a pretty good idea that he thinks on the rest, pontificating wildly on divorce and abortion laws and extra parental voting to subdue these cat ladies — just clueless liberals that don’t get the real America, or have closed their minds to new ideas. Or, as I see, a “and you???” , long held outrage on the big “mostly peaceful protests” — interesting diversion, cultural cross current battle. It will be worth poking at Twitter for this all.

That weird dynamic where I watch a badly delivered mostly boiler plate White House … concession the right word… speech from Biden and then turn to the cohorts of MSNBC talk this up as historic and grandeur-ous, pulling apart each sentence as though it was a paradigm of wisdom and as though this will go down as — oh, something that will replace the Gettysburg Address as a speech my 6th grade teacher will assign writing out for punishment (double with each and every back-talk.). Lawrence O’Donnell then starts his show on the same foot, and we get an overview of the Biden political history, and his four runs for the presidency. What is hilarious is the white-washing of his 1988, with more to the point I am fairly certain an actual inaccuracy as opposed to obvious elision in staying he dropped out after Iowa, as he showed the man give his speech dropping out (1987 I do believe) with no mention on the plagiarism and resume enhancement scandal that doomed his bid.

I do wish there were a way to get more circumstances of the sort that pluck Harris into the light — ie, the 100 day sprint. Like, next time out can both parties set their candidates up like this — so it gets us like every other Democratic nation does it? The somewhat cheery mood of Democratic politics gives me a few senses of dread. Hollywood and show biz pulls in for a show of support, and good for your Beyonces of the world. The hipness dries out, though, and this is a double edged sword. We have ginned up youth for a 59 year old woman barely known — unreliable voters who need to stay ginned. Meantime the reliable old white men and their wives out in the rust belt and Sun belt and never say at the cool kids table in high school so traded in for their own bunch of celebrities are being informed that “Kamala Harris. Is More Liberal than Bernie Sanders”. Yeah, I heard that one before. That was John Kerry in 2004 as opposed to Ted Kennedy. And with that, you roll the dreary 2019 primary campaign footage of a bunch of Democrats who forgot that internet social media is not real life. I suppose the good news as against 2004 the youth were never going to flood the zone for Kerry, and see too Biden. But as the likes of James Carville and Stephen Colbert get distracted into mocking the war on plastic straws or JD Vance and his promotion of that “Diet Mountain Dew” song (Hey! I like that song!), I have the sense that we do not have the eye on the ball here. Hopefully Kamala does.

It becomes somewhat clear on Alan Lichtman that the quick message to him from — when I looked the name up it was a “former” Biden advisor –that “he’s staying in” was a last ditch point of desperation, line up all the allies you got. But how much is he aligned? Lichtman’s magical “keys” insist Biden resign so that Harris can maintain that “incumbency” key off of 100 days of office. The good news at the moment is that just about everyone is rolling with the great “who will Harris pick as vice president?”, a matter that the likes of Licthman believe is irrelevant. My vote, just for giggles, is John Fetterman — we can move from one off-voice to another, and a man who recovered from a stroke and had enough of a period of visible shaking to convince the National Review crowd and on to Fix News of cognitive decline. How will this work against JD Vance at the vice-president debate? Hilariously.

The bad news is that there are still need reports surfacing about — “who will be challenging for the Democratic nomination?”. Yeah, sure. Damned if Harris isn’t losing another one of those keys! A nomination fight! Let’s see if Tulsi Gabbard takes the fight to the convention, and looking her name up I see she is on Fox News pissing all over Harris right now, because – – why not?

The disappointing thing, I guess, is if Biden — in his lame duck presidency– brokers a cease fire in Israel. Harris will not pick up that key. And everything goes for naught.

The Biden campaign is apparently enthralled in Alan Lictman’s magical “14 Keys”. Or so goes the quicker-YouTube snippet he dropped, some Biden figure dropped him a message ending in a “all hail the 13 keys” (sic). Though there are things to mock with it — the road map is not the terrain — there is one essential element in his tight construction that points back to Biden — even as it is all of the Democrats making. There I go over to two people and their presentations out of connections with elected Democrats’ behind the scenes yammerings. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and Joe Walsh. Narrative wise and stylistically they have entirely different approaches here, yet the core is the same. The problem with these Democrats is that they hold to dropping Biden and dropping Harris — which is the one thing you can say on Lichtman — completely bonkers — there is no path out of Biden or Harris, if it is not Biden It is Harris, and any other path is convoluted and destructive. But the reason they can do so is in their own self interest and a maybe losing any interest in the 2024 presidential election — a look ahead at their 2026 Senate election with the standard party dynamics of a midterm election or ahead to the 2028 presidential election where they want to shuffle Harris away. I am mostly indifferent on who is helming the Democratic ticket — I always hoped there was a way Biden could bow out and declare his one term a success — but if this is the attitude amongst the Democratic office holders, stick with him. He is down in the polls? Of course he is –the Democrats have been running against him for the last three weeks. In a very passive-aggressive manner, which to be sure gets him to worst results than if it were aggressive – aggressive. All the while I have seen the worst of him and the best of him — that debate (which, needs to be pointed out, Trump was just as awful performative-wise) and the NATO summit press conference (on the headline of “One Adequate Press Conference Does Not Change Things”, I am pondering the question ” Yeah, but what about an exceptionally good one? “) Now, if everyone there were on that same page of — “if it is not Biden, it is Harris” — then the grand “burn it down and tear him out” game would at least make sense.

I watched that Hulk Hogan rnc speech. I had listened a couple times in the last few years of old broadcasts of a radio host who was commenting on the “idiocracy” element when candidates Obama, Hillary, and McCain dropped in to run a “vote outreach” on wwe. And now here we are even further into the muck. I am, by way of jumping around on commentary, somewhat assured that I need to watch Tucker Carlson’s speech, understanding that it is pure fascism. The term has kind of lost most meaning, and the best I can suggest in an academic frame is that Mussolini lays down what is closest to pure definition and everything else (including Hitler) is a derivation from it, but broad strokes are acceptable here. I did not watch Trump’s speech — and do not know how to approach it — but understand enough to see that the headlines along the lines of “Trump calls for Unity Before Pivoting to Familiar Attacks” are b.s. — or, if I am now your annoying Biden-stan, “malarky”. The actual headlines ought be “Trump Heaps Praise for Hannibal Lector” (a key part in his stump speech) and, if we go to dip into policy and substance — “Trump Calls for Re-Implementation of ‘Operation Wetback’ Program”.

And to be sure, you are walking on eggshells on Biden. There is a bit of a Trump 2016 that will occur — which saw Paul Ryan stumping for Republicans, mostly hoping to keep the down ballot up — by encouraging all the Republicans to “Vote for Pence”. Which is fine here, because old white people in the Rust Belt not all that enthralled with Hulk Hogan and wanting to keep NATO will be to Biden above Harris. You would like to think there are a few Pence / Trump voters, but we will see won’t we?

There is a number of haunting dilemmas that abound.