Chumps

The good news is that 1 in 10 Republicans aren’t buying what Trump is selling. The bad news is that 9 in 10 Republicans are chumps.

Think about it: Trump says something stupid, the newspapers report it, and he insists it’s “fake news.” Trump is behind in the polls, and he insists they are “fake polls.” The election comes out the same way the polls did—with Trump losing—and he insists it’s a “rigged election.” As the political philosopher Raylan Givens put it, “You run into an a–hole in the morning, you ran into an a–hole. You run into a–holes all day, you’re the a–hole.” Maybe it’s the case that the news is all fake and the polls are phony and the elections are rigged and we’re having all these hurricanes because shadowy Jews control the weather and the Bilderbergers put that worm in Bobby Kennedy’s brain … or maybe—hear me out!—Donald Trump is a loser, a charlatan, and an incompetent who won in a freak election in 2016 thanks mainly to his status as a genuine celebrity among the merely “Fox News famous.” You don’t have to be Occam and you don’t need a razor to cut through the bulls—t.

Look at the Republican Party today: Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Hulk Hogan, and Donald Trump. For Pete’s sake, if I were to write that the Republican Party needs to get rid of that handsy weirdo, you’d have to ask: Which one? It’s the only way Republicans know how to reach across the aisle, as it were.

No wonder that 1 in 10 Republicans say they’re going to vote for Harris in November. One wonders a good bit about the other nine.

Kevin D. Williamson

Cheney’s argument for Harris is a classical liberal version of the GOP’s “Flight 93 election” reasoning from 2016. It’s a basic matter of proper prioritizing: Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy. If you hand power back to Trump, he’ll crash the constitutional order. The conservative thing to do under the circumstances is to storm the cockpit by backing Harris, who’ll at least keep the plane in the air.

…

Nothing about Democrats’ Supreme Court “reform” nonsense is going to land Kamala Harris or Chuck Schumer under federal indictment for numerous felonies. Nor would anything prevent voters who dislike seeing Congress tinker with the judiciary from punishing Democrats severely at the polls. If, on the other hand, Trump had successfully connived, defrauded, and intimidated his way into remaining in power for a second term after losing an election, all institutional checks designed to make the executive accountable to the people he serves would have been defeated. What he did wasn’t just a difference in magnitude relative to what Democrats hope to do with the court—it was a difference in kind.

… Trump has actually tried to overturn a presidential election. For all her faults, Kamala Harris has done nothing remotely comparable. Right-wingers keen to draw civic equivalencies between the two have a knack for glossing over that. Both nominees have proposed certain indefensible ideas; only one has taken America to the brink to show that he means business.

Frankly, Trump is so manifestly unfit for office in ways that Harris isn’t that basing the case against him on his 2020 coup plot arguably does him a favor by overlooking what a full-spectrum cretin he is.

…

Defeat Trump, save the plane, and then get ready to start barking at Captain Kamala Harris on which way she should steer. It’s straightforward from here.

Nick Catoggio

Lawless

Trump’s rejection of the rule of law is comprehensive: He’s upset that people suspected of crimes like shoplifting aren’t prosecuted, yet he’s also furious that he is himself subject to prosecution when accused of crimes. Earlier this month, he promised retribution for those members of the law-enforcement community who have tried to hold him accountable, “which will include long term prison sentences.” In other words: They would lose not only their pension or car, but their freedom. He also promises to pardon those who ransacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Policing is only for those Trump hates. He and his friends get a pass.

David A. Graham, Trump’s Dark Turn Toward Police Violence

Of promised retribution

Another person wrestling with it is Mitt Romney, who’s on his way out of the Senate and into an uncertain future. If ever there were a man teed up for a happy retirement, it’s him; he has money to burn and a famously big, loving family to enjoy. But he doesn’t sound happy. “How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group,” he complained with exasperation recently to The Atlantic.

The person his kids and grandkids might need protecting from is the Republican nominee for president. Mitt is so worried about Donald Trump abusing executive power to harass the Romney family that it’s contributed to his decision not to endorse Kamala Harris, according to the Washington Post. When Trump talks about “retribution” against his political enemies, Romney takes him literally and seriously.

Should he? Is Trump’s “retribution” chatter an empty threat designed to motivate his fans to vote? Or is he bonkers enough to order a revenge campaign from the Oval Office?

“It doesn’t matter,” you might say, fairly enough. Whether Trump’s demagoguery is strategic or proof of insanity, he’s unfit for office either way. And American voters seem to agree that it doesn’t matter, as there seem to be enough of them who don’t care about either the question or the answer to reelect him. “Affectation or bonkers?” is a question for serious citizens, not ours.

Nick Catoggio.

Trump’s promises of retribution against his political opponents is classic autocratic behavior and utterly plausible, especially insofar as he plans to avoid having any “adults in the room” in his second term — only ass-kissers. Please do not vote for this monster.

Be it remembered

When he was governor of Indiana, Mike Pence was widely hated, and I couldn’t understand why, let alone share the hatred. Now, because he obeyed the law , instead of obeying Trump, on 1/6/2021, there’s a tendency to imagine him with a halo.

But until he apologizes convincingly for a preplanned stunt at taxpayer expense during his Vice Presidency, he’ll get no more than tepid support from me.

#hypocrisy #retribution #policing #Mitt_Romney #Mike_Pence #costly_stunts

Fat Bear Week postponed after fat bear murdered: Fat Bear Week, the annual celebration of animal obesity at Alaska’s Katmai National Park & Preserve (an event commonly confused with San Francisco’s Pride Parade), was delayed this week after a male bear, identified as 469, fatally attacked a female bear, known as 402, in a shocking display of toxic masculinity and male violence that was captured on the park’s widely viewed livestream. In response to the tragedy, park officials said that they have no plans to enact justice for 402, stating that this is simply part of what bears do. When reached for comment, Bear 469 stood on his hind legs and growled. Voting for the fattest bear resumed on Tuesday.

Katie Herzog

I rise to defend my smart phone against the partisans of flip phones and Light Phones.

On my smart phone, I can:

Listen to podcasts.
Send and receive emails on multiple accounts
Read books and blogs
Keep a journal that synchronizes with my desktop computer
Check the weather for wherever I happen to be
Take remarkably good photographs
Do my bookkeeping or at least enter transactions that will synchronize with my desktop
Scan just about anything into a PDF
Connect to a continuous glucose sensor to monitor my blood sugar
Easily earn loyalty points at my favorite restaurant chains
Innumerable trivial things (e.g., Solitaire) including things that as a practical matter I never do, though I haven’t deleted all the apps.
Make and receive phone calls and texts, including end-to-end encrypted texts.

I am not evangelizing, but I am explaining why you’re not going to shame me out of my smart phone.

Special Counsel proposes making public more evidence from Trump election case. Trump plans massive shake-up of US Justice Department. Trump threatens to prosecute Google for showing ‘bad stories’ about him.

John Ellis News Items

How can anyone who passed high school civics consider voting for this man?

Nick Catoggio, on Trumpworld rallying around newly-indicted NYC Mayor Eric Adams:

The cultiest element of Trump’s very culty political movement is that it has its own internal morality that supersedes traditional morality. That’s why so many creeps, crooks, and kooks are drawn to it. Like any cult leader worth his salt, Trump offers acceptance and community to those who find such things hard to come by in respectable society.

MAGA’s internal morality is based on two principles. First, Trump’s needs trump all other interests, political, moral, or legal, without exception. Second, one’s moral worth is measured by how antagonistic one is toward the enemy. No one who hates the right people can be truly “bad,” no matter how badly they’ve behaved in conventional moral terms.

You see, Eric Adams is not happy with all the immigrants in New York City. The enemy of my enemy is my friend — conditionally, of course.

A datapoint or two

CNN: Study Asked 10 And 11-Year-Olds About Trump And Harris. These Are The Themes That Came Out

Interviewer: “What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?”

Fourth grader: “Liar”

Interviewer: “What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear Donald Trump?”

Different fourth grader: “Pure evil.”

JD Vance Doesn’t Regret His Blood Libel

As the claims about the Haitian immigrants and their pet-munching ways began imploding this weekend, J.D. Vance turned up on the Sunday shows to declare that he regrets nothing. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Springfield’s representative in the Senate boasted to CNN.

Nick Catoggio

Trump is a would-be caudillo, but his cowardice has largely spared us having to fight him, because he prefers to hide behind lawyers and then, after his lawyers get laughed out of court, to rage about the judges from the safe remove of social media. He is the Walter Mitty of Augusto Pinochets.

Kevin D. Williamson

On abortion, to take a representative issue, Trump looks unlikely to take any affirmative act at all: His position—to the extent that one is discernible somewhere in that Hefty SteelSak full of meth-addled New York City subway rats that he calls a brain—is that he has done everything that needs to be done on the issue by appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who voted against Roe.

Kevin D. Williamson

→ Lauren Boebert rival accuses her of “melting down” at debate: Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert, best known for giving her boyfriend a handy at the Beetlejuice musical, debated rival Trisha Calvarese on Tuesday. Afterward, Calvarese posted on Twitter that Boebert “melted down on the debate stage.” She also accused Boebert of disrespecting veterans and failing to help lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Now, I do not want to be fair to Lauren Boebert. Even if it was above the pants, no one who performs any kind of sex act at the Beetlejuice musical has a place in public office. Cats? Sure. It’s sexy. How could you not? But Calvarese’s claim of a meltdown isn’t really supported by the clips the candidate herself posted on Twitter. A meltdown is a tantrum. It’s shrieking, it’s crying, it’s banging your fists against the floor. It’s what happens when I don’t get rush tickets to Cats.

But Boebert just looks like a non-tantruming idiot because that is, in fact, what she is.

Katie Herzog, filling in for Nellie Bowles.

The Battle Cry of the Gullible

The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand. A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.” (Source: wired.com, bold added)

News Items

For the Washington Post, David Ignatius spoke to former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin about his decision to resign from Congress in April. “The story turns on a gruesome moment the night of Dec. 30, 2023, in Gallagher’s hometown of Green Bay,” Ignatius wrote. “The local sheriff had received an anonymous call claiming that Gallagher had been shot in the face and that his wife and two young daughters, 3 and 1, had been taken hostage. A SWAT team arrived at the house to find Gallagher and his family safe. His anguished wife, Anne, somehow had the presence of mind to ask the SWAT team to take their shoes off before they searched the home. But for the young couple, trying to build a family in the town where they were born and raised, the cruel hoax was a deeply upsetting event. For Gallagher, it proved to be a breaking point. … ‘I signed up for this, but my family didn’t,’ he told me in one of a series of interviews. ‘That was a moment when we felt we needed to make a change and take a step back from politics.’”

TMD

Mark Twain on lemmings

The loud little handful—as usual—will shout for the war. The pulpit will—warily and cautiously—object . . . at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.” Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men. . . . Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

William T. Kavanagh, The Uses of Idolatry (quoting Mark Twain).

Trump as of Labor Day Weekend

I get the sense that the assassination attempt spooked him more than he’s willing to admit and also slowed him down. And yes, there are those niggling details about him being a nut, a narcissist, a boor, a bigot, a blowhard, a tornado of baloney — a man who, to borrow from an old joke, could commit suicide by leaping from his ego to his I.Q.

Bret Stephens

…

Two things about the image stood out. One is the preposterous idea that “America” is accurately represented by five populist edgelords, all of whom live in close proximity at the ends of the proverbial horseshoe. But that’s in keeping with modern Republican mythology about Trump’s movement reflecting a supposed silent majority: If the only people who count as “real Americans” are those on Team MAGA, then sure, a coalition that runs the gamut from left-leaning Putin apologists to right-leaning Putin apologists is a fair portrait of America.

The other thing that struck me was that Republicans evidently believe this image benefits them politically. Somehow we’ve arrived at a place as a country where Donald Trump is no longer weird enough in his own right to lock down “the weird vote” this fall and needs cover on his weirdo flank from the likes of Kennedy and Gabbard. Worse, he and his party seem to think there are more votes to be had by appealing to that weirdo bloc than there are to be lost among normie voters by doing so.

Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters was convicted on Tuesday of seven criminal charges—four of which are felony charges—after a jury concluded she permitted unauthorized access to election voting machines as part of a broader effort to falsely claim former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. The 68-year-old former county clerk was found to have hired a technician to steal information from Dominion voting machines—information that was later publicly leaked at an event organized by Trump ally and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell—and is scheduled to be sentenced in early October. “Today’s verdict is a warning to others that they will face serious consequences if they attempt to illegally tamper with our voting processes or election systems,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement. “I want to be clear—our elections are safe and fair.”

TMD.

Odd, ain’t it, that with all Trump’s kvetching about stolen elections, the only election crime convictions seem to be against his toadies?

Shouldn’t we just let natural selection take its course?

From my bank when I logged on:

⚠️ 𝗪𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗮𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘂𝗱 𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘀. Members have reported receiving phone calls claiming to be [our] fraud investigators. The caller is claiming that they have detected fraud on their account and directing the member to leave their card and PIN in their mailbox and a member of fraud will come pick up the card and issue a new card.

𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗡𝗢𝗧 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 [us]. Do not trust these calls. [We] will 𝗡𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗥 ask you to do this.

If someone reaches out claiming to be from [us] and you suspect it may be a scam, 𝗱𝗼 𝗻𝗼𝘁 share your personal information with them. You can email 𝗳𝗿𝗮𝘂𝗱@[us].𝗰𝗼𝗺 or call us at 𝟴𝟬𝟬.xxx.xxxx to report it to our fraud team.

𝗜𝗳 𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝘂𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗱 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 [us], 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗹𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗖𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗿 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁 𝗮 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗵 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗳𝗳 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗳𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂.