Graveyard Scene

Screen capture from Trump's Tik Tok campaign video shot illegally in Arlington National Cemetery, via. Just for the record, I know you probably know this already, there were 45 combat deaths of US troops during Trump's presidential term, 18 "non-hostile" deaths, and no 18-month period during which there were no deaths at all. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but there actually were about 18 months with no US deaths in Afghanistan after Trump signed the deal with the Taliban in February 2020, but Biden was the president for eight of those months. (This is a key reason why Biden honored the deal, because he knew if he didn't the Taliban would go back to attacking and killing Americans.)

On that story about the shoving match last week at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony meant to honor the last Americans to die in the Afghan War, with presidential candidate Donald Trump as a guest, was marred by the behavior of members of Trump's gang entourage, who insisted on violating the rules (and the law) by filming the event, for what turned out to be a Trump campaign Tik Tok commercial, to the point of using violence against the official who tried to get them to stop (it's not clear exactly how, whether they pushed her to the ground or just punched her—the Trump team apparently has some video, but they don't seem at all eager to let it out)—there's an angle that hasn't been covered directly, which has to do with the mourners, family members of the American dead.

There were 13 Americans, 11 Marines and one man each from the Army and Navy,  killed on August 27 2021, among 180-some deaths altogether in a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where desperate crowds were trying to get flights out of the country as the US forces packed up and left under the disorderly arrangements negotiated by the Trump administration the previous February, and the Taliban assumed control. The Americans were there, at least some of them, to help Afghan evacuees process their papers to get out. The attacker detonating the suicide belt was affiliated with the Taliban's enemies from Isis-K (the Islamic State in Khorasan), but it's not ruled out that panicked American troops killed some of the victims as well. It was a terrible mess.

Joe Did What? Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

Literary Corner: Did Trump Close the Border?

 

Screenshot from Newsweek.

The former president responds to the Democratic candidate's acceptance speech, in a call to Fox News, which the network cut off after ten minutes, claiming they were out of time:

I Didn't Have a Bill

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

Why didn’t she do the things
she’s complaining about?
She didn’t do any of it.
She could have done it
three and a half years ago.
She could do it tonight
by leaving the auditorium
and going to Washington, DC,
and closing the border.
She doesn’t need a bill.
I didn’t have a bill.
I closed the border.

It's almost endearing how he still hasn't found out what vice presidents are supposed to do for a living, even though he had one of his own for four years. 

Or is this something I've been missing? Did Pence use to pop over to the White House and issue executive orders while Trump was in the East Wing watching Fox & Friends? Or does he think Harris is already the president? He's often suggested in recent months that the presidency is a very slippery kind of identity, sometimes suggesting Barack Obama is still in office (and likely to be responsible for a nuclear war, because Putin doesn't respect him), sometimes hinting that he believes he's still president himself. 

Here's the passage from Harris's speech:

Pre-DNC Pep Talk

Trump "Freedom Cities" affordable housing proposal, via Raw Story.

By the way, I still think Biden would have won the election, when it came down to it. I still think there was a majority who would be happy to vote for him but told the polls they didn't want to because they'd heard he was unelectable, and were afraid if Biden was the candidate Trump would win. Fear of Trump won out.  But it certainly wouldn't have been as much fun as this looks likely to be. As Josh Marshall (gift link) is saying, it was going to be a slog, weary work, not happy. And now we're talking joy!

I also still think Biden made that happen, defeating the timid centrist plan to run Some White Dude chosen by some improvised set of reality-TV rules, with his endorsement of Kamala Harris as his successor minutes after he left the race (the centrist plan was specifically meant to exclude her, as too "controversial"). And it was clearly a great decision, as was his naming Harris in the first place, back in 2020. If anybody engineered a "coup" it was Biden himself, ensuring his post-neoliberal "legacy" by naming the candidate most representative of the Biden coalition and most likely to continue along his policy lines. As Harris has confirmed in her own naming of the most Biden-like of VP candidates, Tim Walz, the lovable non-rich white guy, mainline Christian, tell-it-like-it-is orator (Biden could easily have invented the "these guys are weird" line himself), simple but extremely sharp, with a genuine fund of out-of-country experience (in China, where he taught English for a while and used to bring his American high school students on trips every year) and an unshakable commitment to kindness and understanding. 

(I also should add, contra Peter Beinart's "Joe Biden Is Not a Hero", that I still think Biden has been doing everything he believes is possible to stop the killing in Gaza, and continues to work tirelessly at that at this late date. I think he's literally hoping to have the permanent ceasefire announced at the Democratic convention. Biden may well be wrong on the hopefulness of this approach, but I'm certain an arms embargo wouldn't have succeeded any better at stopping the killing, given the mood in Israel and the criminal intransigence of the prime minister and his party, intent on saving his own bacon; it would have left Netanyahu feeling even freer to ignore US entreaties. Meanwhile, as I type, FWIW, Blinken has just announced that Netanyahu and Gallant have accepted his "bridging proposal" for getting from here to there, though the details remain thin.) 

Weaky Leaks. II: Interviews With a Vampire Squid

...Which was the detail emerging from the WikiLeaks dump if you happened to read it instead of screaming about it, on October 16.

I had no idea, but there actually is such a thing as a vampire squid, Vampiroteuthis infernalis. Not because it sucks blood, it doesn't, but because of its red eyes and the webbing on its tentacles, making it look as if it were wearing an opera cape. Threatened by predators, it "inverts its caped arms back over the body, presenting an ostensibly larger form covered in fearsome-looking though harmless spines" in what is known as a "pineapple" or "pumpkin" posture. So it's actually kind of cute! Image via Wikipedia.

Everybody knows Hillary Clinton refused to release the speech transcripts because she didn't want us to see her cozying up to those bankers (and cardiovascular researchers, Canadians, Jewish organizations, Silicon Valley women, and pro-camping lobbyists, among many others, who also paid her upwards of $200,000 a pop to address them in 2013-15, as we know thanks to the fact that she released complete tax returns in July 2015). But it's possible that she was really much more worried about somebody entirely different seeing the transcripts, like Xi Jinping, you know, or King Salman.

Or Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Donald Trump, who still wields real power in Italy as a news magnate and opposition politician. Speaking of that third Chelsea Manning dump of 250,000 diplomatic cables in late 2010, she told an audience of Goldman Sachs "builders and innovators" three years later,

Weaky Leaks

In the context of Politico, New York Times, and Washington Post being in receipt of what may be an Iran-hacked file of possibly derogatory information about Senator JD Vance and keeping it secret from the public, a lot of folks are finding themselves vaguely remembering the Russian-hacked file of possibly derogatory information on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton stolen from campaign manager John Podesta in 2016, which WikiLeaks published on October 7 2016, shortly (I'm talking about minutes, at most a couple of hours) after the revelation of the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape in which he revealed his penchant for grabbing pussy and how when you're a star they let you do it.

"What was in those emails?" somebody wondered, unable to come up with anything other than the idea of Podesta sharing a risotto recipe. "Was it really damaging?" I think it was, in fact, but in a very carefully targeted way, at students, through the Trump campaign's Facebook operation (whether or not it was helped out by the Russians, or Cambridge Analytica, or whatever), aimed especially at persuading students of a leftish persuasion in Michigan and Wisconsin not to vote.

Anyhow, I thought I'd re-up my piece, from October 10 2016, on how it went down.

The Lincoln cabinet as pictured by the pro-slavery press in 1864; drawing by John Cameron, via Wikipedia.

When WikiLeaks sends out a new document dump on a Friday evening, also known as the "death slot" because it's where you make a news release when you're hoping nobody will read it, that could be a sign that the organization doesn't have a lot of confidence in the news value of the material.

That seems to be the case with this latest dump released Friday night (shortly after the Access Hollywood pussy-grabbing video, I think), featuring emails presumably hacked by Russian intelligence personnel and associated with John Podesta, chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign (and not, contrary to Julian Assange, in "control" of the Podesta Group lobbying firm, which he co-founded with his brother Tony in 1988 but hasn't been involved in for years). There isn't a whole lot of thereness there.

The centerpiece of the thing is a document apparently collated by or under the direction of Tony Carrk, research director of Hillary For America, in 2015 during the Democratic primary campaign, consisting of passages from some of those 2013 paid speeches of which the transcripts have never been released, though the Sanders forces kept demanding it. The excerpts flag moments that might look to the left opposition like evidence that she's in cahoots with the forces of corporate evil: telling the banksters, in particular, what she really thinks while publicly telling all us liberals she's one of us, so it looks as if the campaign gathered them as part of the process, maybe, of deciding whether to release them or not—how damaging would it be? Or maybe of preparing for the storm that would follow after they were released; each passage contains some phrase or clause that could be pulled out of the context to make it seem as if she was revealing some horrible secret plan to her audience, and there's a helpful headline telling the reader how opponents will read it (could be the headlines were supplied by the hackers, though):

Hyperreality 2024: Assassination

I've had the hardest time thinking of a way to cope with the abnormal events of the past month in American politics, not just because of the way they've thrown themselves at us one after another, without giving us a chance to reflect on one before we're fully occupied with another one. My machine is full of false starts abandoned when I thought I had to move on to something different, right away. I also find myself assaulted with a bunch of philosophical, often postmodern thoughts about what's going on. Looking at one of those drafts, I'm thinking, instead of trying to "cover" the situation, maybe I should be trying to look at one thing at a time, before I start trying to pull it together.

 

AP Photo by Gene J. Puskar.

One of the strangest things about the attempt on the life of Donald Trump that started off Crazy Week on July 13, I guess it was, was how weirdly hard it seemed to take it seriously.  I mean, technically it was extremely serious, if you accept the story we've been given, as I have no good reason not to do. It was (apparently) a round from an AR-15, of a kind that instantly killed Corey Comperatore, sitting a couple of rows behind Trump, when a different round hit him in the head during the attack, and if Trump's bullet had hit him less than half an inch further to the left than it did, or (perhaps) if he hadn't woggled his head in that parrot-like side-to-side way he has, at just the right moment, it would have more or less blown his head off. That's pretty serious!  

But I watched that video, or side-eyed it, so many times, as all the TV stations turned into CNN imitators and tried to keep the story going, the way they do with a school shooting or earthquake porn, as the Secret Service agents lift him (it's pretty heavy) from the stage, with the blood dripping from his right ear, photobombing his way from among the agents trying to protect him, and makes that upraised fist with a furiously angry face, mouthing the words, "Fight! Fight! Fight!" (I read his lips as "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"). Trump didn't look scared, he looked really angry, And I'd seen video of Trump experiencing physical fear, that time he was threatened by an annoyed eagle, so I had an idea what it would look like,

Too Left or Not Too Left

Photo by Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters, via.

One thing on the selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as the Democrats' vice presidential candidate that I think it's up to me to say, because it's about one of my hobbyhorses, in the face of the fatwah issued by ayatollah Jonathan Chait:

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Need to Pivot to the Center Right Now

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. (I guess Chait means "the center right! now!" rather than "the center! right now!", but both are problematic.) 

He doesn't bother to specify what exactly they need to do in terms of policy, other than suggesting that Walz needs to back off of "providing free health care to unauthorized immigrants"—because Chait thinks it's politically more advantageous to punish the undocumented than it is to protect the broader public against the spread of a deadly pandemic ("Healthcare exclusions contribute to extreme inequities...Latinx Minnesotans have died of COVID-19 at twice the age-adjusted rate of white Minnesotans and their age-adjusted ICU-admittance rate for COVID-19 is nearly four times higher"). It's "moderate", for Chait, to force a susceptible subgroup of the population to seek care in the emergency room or just die untreated, and what you need right now is that kind of "moderation":

NABJ: The First Six Minutes

Via Threads.

I don't think Trump precisely means to praise the fictional criminal; I think his idea is that Lecter is a typical example of a border-crossing asylum seeker, which is equally nuts. But he can't help showing the appreciation for Lecter's comic stylings.

TRUMP:

First of all, I don't think I have ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, first question. You don't even say "Hello, how are you."

In fact, Rachel Scott began the Trump interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention by thanking the former president for showing up.

SCOTT:

Mr. President, we so appreciate you giving us an hour of your time.

Only then did she ask her question (given his long history of racially insensitive remarks—such as telling congresswomen of color to "go back to where you came from", calling Black district attorneys "animal" and "rabbit" and Black journalists "losers" whose questions are "stupid and racist"—"why should Black voters trust you?") That's the first lie in the first six minutes of the transcript. More, big and little, follow.

***

Literary Corner: Ripcord

Image via Kalson.

In Conclusion, America Has Always Been a Nation

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

.....But with voting, one of your most important things you can do, maybe in many ways, your most important, they don't want to approve voter ID. That's because they want to cheat, But until then Republicans must win, We have to win this election. Most important election ever. We want a landslide that's too big to rig. If you want to save America, get your friends, get your family, get everyone, you know, and vote, vote early vote, absentee, vote on election day, I don't care how but you have to get out and vote, And again, Christians get out and vote just this time, you won't have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what? It'll be fixed, you won't have to vote any more. My beautiful Christians. I love you Christians, I'm a Christian. I love you. Get out. You've 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. In conclusion, America has always been a nation, one built and sustained by Americans of faith. It was faith that led the Pilgrims to cross an ocean and settle this majestic continent. It was belief in our creator that led the patriots to defend their liberties in the war for independence. It was faith in America's God-given destiny that pushed the pioneers to journey west and it was trusting God that led generations of American believers to end slavery, defeat fascism and communism, and make this into the greatest and most exceptional nation in the history of the world. But now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower, and its strength.......

This somewhat longer piece of the transcript than you may have seen before provides a lovely illustration of how Trump's strange rhetoric works like a parachute jump, with the teleprompter text, in this case clearly by Stephen Miller, serving as a kind of ripcord to break his free fall and float him safely to earth.

He's clearly exhausted at this point in the speech—he's been going on for nearly an hour—and he's tumbling into truly insane-sounding babble; there on the screen in front of him is the rescue message: "In conclusion..." and he leaps for it, almost coming to grief at the complicated grammar of Miller's first sentence ("America has always been a nation built and sustained..." breaking him after the first six words) but recovering quickly enough and finishing the peroration on how America will become great again on November 5 without serious mishaps.

I think people have been overinterpreting the apostrophe to the beautiful Christians here, by the way, when they tell us it's Trump confessing to his evil plan to cancel the 2028 elections, and maybe all future elections. He may have such plans, and JD Vance's monarchist mentor the former Mencius Moldbug certainly does, but that's not what Trump is talking about. 

To know that, you have to do something the political reporters aren't willing to do, which is to look above the particular soundbite to the speech as a whole. Trump's speeches, in the long, improvised solo riffs outside the frame Miller or another writer has provided for him, are chaotically disorganized, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a particular idea he wants to push forward—it's just that he can't put it together in a coherent way, because he's so distracted by his other obsessions.

In this case it's two things he's associating, that came up a bit before the halfway point: one fact, about the relatively low propensity of a big component of his base, Dominionist Christians and gun nuts, to show up at the polls ("And by the way, Christians have to vote, you know, I don't want to scold you, do you know that Christians do not vote proportionately? They don't vote like they should. They're not big voters") and one piece of paranoid fiction he's been retailing for at least eight years, that our elections are plagued by illegal or somehow just bad voting, because our laws on who gets to vote, after the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, are too lax in some way he's not really able to clarify, but when he says he's going to "fix" it, what he means is explained earlier in the speech ("But I say look, we got to fix our laws on voting. We have to start with voter ID"). The beautiful Christians must put themselves out now, even if it means indulging in the suspect early voting and absentee voting, precisely so he and Congress can change these "ridiculous" laws—

Christians are a group that's known not to vote very much. You have to go out at least this election. Just give us and get us into that beautiful White House, vote for your congressmen and -women, vote for your senators. We will change this country for the better, this country will be great again like never before. You've got to vote and I've said it before and I'll say it again. November 5th, which is a period really because you're allowed to vote early, they have early voting, late voting. Everything is so ridiculous. We should have one-day voting, paper ballots, voter ID, and certification of citizenship, and that's what we're striving for. But voting actually starts on September 6th in North Carolina, a great state. We're doing very well there....Then it's Pennsylvania toward the end of September and it's various states in September...

—and in 2028 beautiful Christians won't have to stress themselves out any more. That's the message Trump is trying to convey: please ignore all that stuff I told you about early voting, that is, I was right, but you should do it this year anyway, and if you do enough of it this year you won't have to do it again.

The program he's hoping to implement being very precisely the one proposed in this year's Republican platform, almost as if he was reading it off the teleprompter (as he may well have been)

We will implement measures to secure our Elections, including Voter ID, highly sophisticated paper ballots, proof of Citizenship, and same day Voting. We will not allow the Democrats to give Voting Rights to illegal Aliens.

(solving the imaginary problem of noncitizen voting, which almost never happens, but of course making huge trouble for the 10% of US citizens who have trouble proving their citizenship, who are of course mostly relatively poor, and therefore more likely to vote for Democrats). The standard Republican effort to reduce turnout.

This isn't, again, to suggest that no Republicans are plotting to overthrow the US electoral system altogether, as we know they are. Though they aren't the same as the ones working to overthrow it now, in case Democrats win in November: 

The campaign involves a powerful network of Republican lawyers and activist groups, working loosely in concert with the Republican National Committee. Many of the key players were active in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

But unlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.

Mr. Trump’s allies have followed a two-pronged approach: restricting voting for partisan advantage ahead of Election Day and short-circuiting the process of ratifying the winner afterward, if Mr. Trump loses. The latter strategy involves an ambitious — and legally dubious — attempt to reimagine decades of settled law dictating how results are officially certified in the weeks before the transfer of power.

What I think we need to understand is that Trump Republicans are working now not just on the "two-pronged" effort to plan for whether they win (Project 2025) or lose (January 6 redux) but on a whole layer cake of strategies, to which Trump himself is not entirely privy; he is personally too stupid to play a decisive role, though he is enough of a loose cannon that he might wreck their plans at any moment. You can't take anything he says seriously, let alone literally, though you should always look in what he says for evidence as to what the state of play is, as far as he's been allowed to see it by the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society and Claremont Institute and other intellectual stakeholders who are squirreling over the actual work. Trumpism is more than poor Trump, the grinning pumpkinface, their only representative of 2020s rizz. He himself is more like a kind of stochastic candidate—you never know what he'll come up with next—but it's never as interesting as it looks.

DEI

 

IDK I really like women who laugh. Talking to UNITE HERE at Culinary Union Hall, Las Vegas, photo by Ellen Schmidt/Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Mrs. Vance isn't laughing:

Here's somebody who went to Yale from freshman through J.D. and picked up an M.Phil. in modern history from Clare College, Cambridge, along the way, and has clerked for Judge Kavanagh before he was elevated to the Supreme Court and Justice Roberts after he was, and has been a really high-powered lawyer with a bicoastal practice (Los Angeles and Washington) at the firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, described as a "top contender in the cool, woke category" of law firm in 2019, when

Munger has elected eight new partners, and 60 percent of them are women or lawyers of color. What’s more, three of the new partners...took parental leave during the year they were up for partnership—and one of them is a male. The audacity!

(She quit the firm last week after her husband was nominated to be the Republican candidate for vice president in the November election, not because it was too woke there, but maybe to get more in line with her husband's well-known policy positions,

It turns out that normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more "freedom" in the paid labor force.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 29, 2021

so she could spend more time with her kids in the family's third home, in Ohio, the state for which the husband has been serving as freshman senator since January 2023. Of course their kids' daycare isn't crap, but the finest money can buy.)

I don't know that you'd want to call her a diversity hire herself, though she is a woman of color (Dravidian by "race", the child of Telugu speakers from Andhra Pradesh). I'll bet she has had a terrific work ethic and fabulous grades throughout her education and career, and I'm told her admired writers include Zadie Smith and Vladimir Nabokov. I have no doubt she's fully qualified for every school and every company that's taken her on.

Nevertheless, when she's thinking about civics, as in the tweet above, it's pretty much at a mediocre seventh-grade level. I mean it's embarrassing. 

I know it's common for presidential candidates to claim their VP choice is just the best possible person for the job, as if there was a qualifying exam and they just picked the one with the highest score, but are you seriously believing them? Dan Quayle? Sarah Palin? 

That isn't how it's done. Picking a vice president is a complex job, weighing a number of different factors. First and foremost, of course, should be whether the person is qualified, in intellect and temperament, to step into the presidency in the event of a disaster, as Quayle and Palin really weren't, and Democratic candidates generally are, like Mondale or Gore (though there was the Eagleton blunder, really an injustice, willingness to seek help for mental illness should be taken as a good sign, not a bad one; and John Edwards turned out to be an awful blunder, though the guy did give great speeches). Then, it's nice if they bring some political benefit to the ticket, typically geographical: John Kennedy, the Massachusetts Catholic, went for Texan Lyndon Johnson to help quiet the nation's Know Nothing fears (though Johnson also brought extraordinary influence over Congress, which greatly helped him, after Kennedy's killing, to push through the JFK agenda). Johnson in turn chose the Minnesota hyperliberal Hubert Humphrey, as Carter would later choose Mondale.

Then there are ideological contributions: Reagan picked G.H.W. Bush to appease the people who feared his ideas on economics were too crazy ("voodoo economics", as Bush had called it during the campaign), Obama picked stalwart old Joe Biden in part for similar reasons, reassuring the public that the Black man wouldn't be too radical (ironically, Biden as president was able to bring much more radical ideas forward than Obama had been). Trump is too stupid to be able to think this way, but Paul Manafort (not just a grotesque criminal but also a skilled Republican operative, which is not a contradiction) did him a solid in 2016 by literally forcing him to pick the pious Indianan Mike Pence, bringing across the white Evangelical community that has become the most loyal component of the Trump coalition, with its bizarre but sincere belief that Trump is what Jesus wants—Trump really wanted an outer-borough insult comic like himself, New Jersey's Chris Christie, I believe because he thought standing next to Christie made him look slimmer. 

Freed from the restraint of people who know what they're doing, this year he's made a historically bad choice, chameleon JD Vance, performing as Trump's Mini-Me (a different approach to accessorizing Trump, perhaps), and bringing in not a single vote over and above the votes Trump was already guaranteed to get, and a résumé considerably thinner than Sarah Palin's was (we like to call her a "half-term governor", but that was her fourth election, after one for Wasilla city council and two for Wasilla mayor, while Vance is as of yet a one-third term senator who's only ever gotten elected, and barely, in a thoroughly red state against that idiot Tim Ryan, once), and apparently a colossally bad public speaker (unlike Kamala Harris, whose much-maligned laughter is generally associated with something that's funny, his seems to be a response to losing his train of thought as completely as Biden did that one time during the "debate", and he did it a lot more than once). But he's descended from Kentucky "hillbillies", and that's what he was chosen for. That's the opposite of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. But it certainly is what it looks like when you go with race instead of qualifications.

Starting with Bill Clinton, and it's something we ought to give him serious credit for, even Carter didn't really think of it, presidential candidates have typically sought vice presidents who could find something to do with their time while they waited for the president to die. His choice of Al Gore, another wonky white guy from the non-deep South, was wildly unconventional, but the two complemented each other, with their different temperaments and subjects and their similar culture, and formed a real partnership, and Gore's signature initiative, "Reinventing Government", really did something [though as commenter Aardvark Cheeselog suggested after this was posted, the hollowing out of the civil service and massive privatization that ended the "era of big government" was not a great thing]. W. Bush's equally out-of-the-box naming of a fellow Texas oilman pretending he was from Wyoming, Dick Cheney, to compensate for his own lack of education and experience and interest in the job, didn't work out so well, of course (I always say Bush really wasn't such a terrible person, but in so far over his head it took him six years to realize how badly he was doing, when he got his father's lieutenants in to rescue him from Cheney and Rumsfeld, and by then it was too late to save the presidency, as the mortgage-backed securities crisis loomed), but it reinforced the pattern.

Obama's selection of Biden in 2008 seemed like an attempt at a conventional response to an extraordinary situation ("here's an old white guy to calm you down, we won't do anything that Black"), but it was also meant to compensate for real gaps in Obama's preparation, in foreign policy and national security questions, not that those were the only ones where Biden played a role, and it was extraordinary. Biden deserves credit for it too, for his willingness to look like the administration's comic relief; he was an essential element in Obama's thinking, as a matter of fact, but he wasn't that interested in glory—he was interested in making the policy work.

And Biden's selection of Kamala Harris is on that model: he certainly chose her for her political reach into a world no US presidential candidate had ever tried to reach before—not only women, as Mondale had tried to do in 1984 with the choice of Geraldine Ferraro, but Black women, the element of the party to which he owed his own elevation after the South Carolina primary in 2020; but also for a personal reason, as we know, because his son Beau, as Delaware attorney general, had really partnered with Kamala Harris, as California attorney general, to get stuff done, during the foreclosure crisis of 2011-12:

In her memoir, Harris called him an “incredible friend and colleague” who became a close collaborator. “There were periods, when I was taking heat, that Beau and I talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day,” she wrote. “We had each other’s backs.”

Biden chose Harris for an extraordinary reason: not just for the obvious reasons that had prevailed, I don't know, since 1832, when Andrew Jackson picked New Yorker Martin van Buren; because he knew her as a family connection, with his beloved dead son. If a "DEI hire" is a bad thing, that's not what this was.

Which is more than can be said for the vice presidential candidacy of "JD" Vance, now acknowledged in the Trump camp (writes Tim Alberta) to be a dumb, arrogant political mistake

born...of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter

(the "base" being that white working class that Vance, the rich Peter Thiel protégé, supposedly represents), which Trump is now regretting, while he unexpectedly faces Harris, who I'm sure he sincerely despised as a "DEI hire", as a skilled, smart, vigorous opponent. LOL.

Joe Did What? Trafalgar Edition

The Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805 by Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, via Wikipedia.

 Well, I guess this certainly does change everything, and that's refreshing. 

I'm going to stay angry for a long time at The Times and Politico and other big media and the "liberal" tech billionaires for the dishonest backdoor trick they pulled, when they couldn't succeed in turning the public against Biden and shifted instead to convincing us that we had turned against Biden by ourselves, or rather that our neighbors had, through the bogus "age issue", warning us not that Biden was a bad president, but that he'd lose because other people thought he was too old, and our punishment for supporting Biden would be another Trump term (on the basis of a polling model that has consistently failed by underestimating the Democratic vote for six years now). They recognized our deep fear of the consequences of another Trump term and exploited it, in a way that actually made Trump's reelection more likely, using the debate disaster as evidence of a permanent degeneration (which it obviously wasn't—Biden had never showed up in that condition before and never has since). It was irresponsible and disgusting.

I'm not too angry with the congressional party leaders, or the "centrist" representatives in their precarious suburban seats, or even the bedwetter commentariat. The fear is real, and it's justified. What could be lost in another four years of Trumpery is almost incalculable; I'm thinking especially of the backsliding in the elimination of fossil fuels, but the "deconstruction of the administrative state" as prefigured in the Project 2025 document turns the entire civil service into an easily corrupted tool for tearing down regulations, and reduces the Justice Department into the president's personal police agency. It really is the end of the republic, alongside plans for a federal ban on abortion, vigilante takeovers of school libraries, the insane powers for evil conceded to the presidency by the Supreme Court even as it strips the office of its power to do good. The thing is, fear is a lousy counselor, and their Fantasy Politics League plan to get rid of Biden by obliterating the primary results with some kind of pantomime competition, before or during the Democratic convention, as somebody leaked the plan to the abominable Mark Halperin (now working for Newsmax), was a terrible, senseless plan that would have flung us into even worse uncertainty than we already had. Don't panic.

If You're a Star They Let You Do It

 

Poster for The Frogs, Trinity College Dramatic Society, Toronto, 1902, via Wikipedia.

My theory of what makes Biden the best candidate to beat Trump is pretty simple, and ought to be cynical enough for anybody: it's that he's the only possible candidate at the same level of celebrity as Trump, with the same degree of star quality and a similar ability to work an audience, his reducibility to a three-stroke line drawing or a meme image (as the smiler in the aviators), or a comic book hero (Sunny Joe as the secret identity of Dark Brandon). Elections are reality shows now, and while that's deplorable in many ways it's where we are at the moment, and the only way out is through.

Kamala Harris comes closest to Biden in reality-show capacity, as she has become in the last months, with the fiery oratory and that warm relaxed laugh, and I'm very glad she's there, but she hasn't been exposed enough, and there are the other issues to consider (is she entirely ready for the racism and misogyny she'd have to cope with at the top of the ticket? Is it even fair to her?). The nice governors seem nice, if you're enough of a news junkie to know, but they don't have any established character as performers; we haven't seen them campaign, and still less have the people who count, the members of the electorate. And there's so little time to do it in! (A season of American Idol takes about eight months to put together, from auditions to finals.) And so little evidence that any of those supposed candidates are even willing to jump in—people, that's not because Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker is too shy, or afraid of looking disloyal, they're politicians; it's because they've calculated they'd be most likely to lose, they're young enough to save themselves for a more auspicious year, and I think they're almost certainly right.

If Biden were really seriously diminished in capacity to the point where he couldn't do the job, it would be different; it would be his duty to resign (and President Harris, I would add, would be a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Harris), but everybody knows that's not the case—that's why there've been no calls for him to resign. All the more since his meeting with the press after the NATO conference on Thursday, which took a remarkable turn; it seemed to be going the way you'd expect, a debate between Biden and a Greek-comedy chorus—

FROGS

Do you really believe you're up to the job? You think you can convince us?
Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx! Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx!

BIDEN

Look, I'm doing the job right now! I'm not being facetious!

—when rescue appeared from an unexpected deus ex machina, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, David E. Sanger, who came up with an idea I'd had myself

My fantasy for tomorrow's presser Biden: OK why don't you test me? Ask me a substantive question and see if I'm capable of answering. Press corps: Biden: OK, person, man, woman, TV, camera, that good?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Jul 10, 2024 at 1:22 PM

and asked Biden a question about the policy environment of the NATO summit, as a way (as he later explained it to CNN) of testing his cognitive capacity:  

The Rules of the Game

 

So French voters did that thing they do periodically, usually in a presidential election, and rejected fascism decisively in the second round of the snap legislative election. Somewhat grudgingly—they don't want the candidates they voted for to think they're impressed, but they know their duty.

As did the parties, which showed commendable discipline in carrying out the program of dropping out candidates to turn every race into the two-person race in which they had the best chance of defeating the Rassemblement Nationale. But it was the massive turnout that completed the job and defeated not just the fascists but the pollsters as well, who kept predicting a majority for the Rassemblement well into yesterday afternoon,  even as they noticed an unexpectedly large number of voters.

I couldn't help thinking I was seeing a repetition of a pattern we've been seeing a lot of lately, of voters breaking the poll predictions when they're voting to say there's a degree of authoritarianism they can't tolerate, in Brazil and in Poland, Spain and Iran, even when it's not enough to really change anything, as in the losses endured by authoritarian rulers of India and Turkey, and Hungary (in June's EU election), and of course in the United States of America in elections going back to 2018 reacting against the chaos of Trumpery, the terror of the incompetent COVID response and the racist violence of police forces, the overturning of Roe and rush to outlaw abortion.

I mean, it's not just heartening, but it's also interesting that the polls keep erring in that direction, with authoritarians underperforming. It doesn't happen when authoritarianism isn't a primary issue, like in Germany in June (where the appeal of the fascistoid Alternativ für Deutschland is still only in the former East Germany, while voters in the former West were punishing the sort-of leftist government by voting for the normie conservatives). Though in Britain one survey had Nigel Farage's "Reform Party" winning 18 seats in Thursday's general election (they won four).

The Gaza News Is Biden News

All of a sudden this morning the Gaza ceasefire seemed to be back in the air. I was determined not to let them sucker me again

but right now an awful lot of things really seem to be happening, starting with yesterday morning's Biden-Netanyahu call, which went on for half an hour, according to NPR, and during which, according to the White House readout,

President Biden and the Prime Minister discussed ongoing efforts to finalize a ceasefire deal together with the release of hostages, as outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council, the G7, and countries around the world.

The leaders discussed the recent response received from Hamas. The President welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to authorize his negotiators to engage with U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian mediators in an effort to close out the deal. 

or going back beyond that to Tuesday's reports in The New York Times and Jerusalem Post that the Israeli military leadership is starting to get seriously fed up with Netanyahu's apparent insistence that they should have to fight two wars simultaneously, against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and demanding that the government start prioritizing getting the hostages back, even if it means accepting Hamas's terms and withdrawing from Gaza entirely, and apparently saying so sort of openly, to The Times:

I happen to have Alexander Hamilton right here with me...

Drawing by David Levine, New York Review of Books, 1964.

 

It's a little amusing that Roberts is citing Breyer there, in Clinton v. Jones, that's the Paula Jones case, where Breyer is arguing, in a unanimous decision (Democrat Stevens wrote the opinion), that Clinton was not immune (from civil lawsuits based on private conduct), in spite of the fact that Clinton was indeed the president at the time and the case was certainly "distracting his time and energy", the thing the Framers are said to have been so particularly tender about, and in spite of the fact that this was only the third time in American history that such a suit had been filed against a sitting president. Clinton had failed to prove, Breyer thought, that the US government needed for Clinton to have the immunity:

As Madison pointed out in The Federalist No. 51, "[t]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack." Id., at 321-322 (emphasis added). I agree with the majority's determination that a constitutional defense must await a more specific showing of need; I do not agree with what I believe to be an understatement of the "danger." 

It seems to me that with Trump v. United States the Court has turned this upside down, shifting the burden of proof from the offender to the offended. Henceforth (I once knew a cat called Henceforth, and a pretty good cat too), it will just be assumed that the president shouldn't be asked to answer any questions, even after they've left office, nor should his White House employees, even when they're glorified nursemaids for the cranky old psychopath, like poor Hope Hicks helping him ride his way through the scandal of the Access Hollywood video. She was part of the apparatus enabling Trump's "energetic, vigorous, decisive and speedy execution of the laws" when he was paying his hush money debt to Michael Cohen with $420,000 in checks disguised as legal fees so nobody would know about it, so it looks like her testimony in the New York case should not have been given, and his conviction now seems likely to turn into a mistrial, even though you'd be hard put to name any occasions when he executed any laws at all beyond his photo op bill-signing moments with the presidential Sharpie.

It would be fun to put that on trial, wouldn't it?  "Do you recall faithfully executing any laws in 2017, Mr. Trump? Can you list some of those for the jury?" But of course it's unimaginable.

It's also difficult to imagine a Supreme Court majority now citing Federalist 51, with its focus on checks and balances among the three branches, and Madison wistfully letting on how much he wished he could have had the president and Supreme Court justices directly elected:

Kenobi v. Vader

Image via Lovepop.

I. Senility

Tim Miller of The Bulwark, a month ago:

Biden didn't do that on Thursday, though he did really lose the thread for one awful moment early in, trying to process this torrent of falsehood, delusionality, and incoherence from Trump supposedly explaining the enormous budget deficits of his time in office

Because the tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen just prior to COVID, and even after COVID. It was so strong that we were able to get through COVID much better than just about any other country. But we spurred – that tax spurred. Now, when we cut the taxes – as an example, the corporate tax was cut down to 21 percent from 39 percent, plus beyond that – we took in more revenue with much less tax and companies were bringing back trillions of dollars back into our country. The country was going like never before. And we were ready to start paying down debt. We were ready to start using the liquid gold right under our feet, the oil and gas right under our feet. We were going to have something that nobody else has had. We got hit with COVID. We did a lot to fix it. I gave him an unbelievable situation, with all of the therapeutics and all of the things that we came up with. We – we gave him something great. Remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it. More people died under his administration than our administration, and we were right in the middle of it. Something which a lot of people don’t like to talk about, but he had far more people dying in his administration. He did the mandate, which is a disaster. Mandating it. The vaccine went out. He did a mandate on the vaccine, which is the thing that people most objected to about the vaccine. And he did a very poor job, just a very poor job. And I will tell you, not only poor there, but throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership. They don’t respect the United States anymore. We’re like a Third World nation. Between weaponization of his election, trying to go after his political opponent, all of the things he’s done, we’ve become like a Third World nation. And it’s a shame the damage he’s done to our country. And I’d love to ask him, and will, why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country

When Tapper asked Biden to respond to "this question about the national debt", he managed to remember more or less what the question had been two minutes earlier, and started off fine, too, answering the question as he'd expected to get it, with the right numbers, though he sometimes struggled for them:

Ask Etty Kett

Dear Etty,

I know a bunch of people who would like to be ambassador to Uruguay, and as President of the United States I'm definitely entitled to give one of them the job. But I can't give it to all of them. So I had this brilliant idea that I could auction it off to the highest bidder, like give me a billion dollars and I'll name you ambassador to Uruguay?

Only my lawyers think I might get into trouble for that, and to be honest I've had some bad experiences with stuff like this recently. Like I had this charitable foundation where I used to get people to make me payments so I wouldn't have to pay income taxes on them, because I'm smart that way, and this stupid state attorney general, a colored lady by the way, this is what affirmative action gets you, said I was violating the law on charities and closed the whole foundation down and made me pay a big fine. And then this actress I banged years ago wrote a whole story about having sex with me and could have published it in the middle of my presidential campaign and I had my other lawyer pay her a hundred thirty large to keep it to herself and then when I was paying him back I kind of structured the payments to make them look like normal legal fees and now I'm stuck with a 34-count criminal conviction from yet another colored prosecutor for falsification of business records for which I can't even pardon myself since it's not in a federal court.

So I thought it would be best if I just took the money straight, like a billion-dollar check, and deposit it, not in the superPAC or whatever, but right in my own account. Will that work?

Blessed in Bedminster

Lampenfieber

 

Cast party at the Waffle House, via New York Times.

John Ganz:

Still, there’s a lot of time before the election. Maybe Biden will spring miraculously back to life and thrash Trump in a later debate. Maybe one day we will all laugh about how everyone pissed their pants. But then again, maybe not. God does have a sense of humor, but it often seems at our expense.

He sprang back to life the minute it was over, at least if your TV was tuned to MSNBC, which showed him glad-handing the entourage and giving a brief improvised speech. Even his voice was back. He was a happy warrior. He looked positively joyous.

The commentators don't seem to know what was wrong with Biden during the "debate", but it was obvious to me in the first, and as it turned out only, sentences I typed about him in the notes I started taking:

Biden seems pretty nervous, his voice is so hoarse and he's speaking so fast it's not fully intelligible. Better in the follow up when he's not reciting from memory.

(I took more notes after that, but they were all about Trump’s stunning torrent of lies and misdirections.)

Performance anxiety. Stage fright. Le trac. Lampenfieber ("spotlight fever"). He's not really good at this bizarre ritual of American politics, though most of the time he's good enough. It's what sunk him in his first presidential run 36 years ago (he was talking too fast then too, spitting out memorized bits of his stump speech, which included those quotes from the UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and he left out Kinnock's name in the rush, leading the press to accuse him, ridiculously, of plagiarism, as if they hadn't heard him attributing the material a dozen times before), and the memory of that failure only serves to make it worse. And this time the stakes are incredible. It's him or it's Project 2025! It has little or nothing to do with his age!

I've been there. I did a bunch of acting in my youth, which I was not too bad at, and a certain amount of music, in which I was not so good, and I know how it feels. One real disaster: accompanying a British baritone in a song by Ralph Vaughan Williams which was probably not too congenial to me. The piano part was mostly not that hard, but there was a solo bit at the end, after the singer's part was finished, that I could not master; I choked there at the actual performance and couldn't go on—banged out a C major chord (at least it was the right key) and stopped, and I never played the piano publicly again, which is probably a good thing.

In Biden's case it unquestionably has to do with the stutter. He literally choked (now I know where the expression comes from), which is why he was so hard to hear.

The worst is what a stupid ritual it is, as Lawrence O'Donnell was saying. The TV debate is in every way irrelevant to what presidents do, which is with a roomful of advisors expected to remember everything you might not remember, and not in 60- or 120-second bursts. (I'm pretty sure the time limits were a real difficulty for him—it seemed to me the moderators were cutting him off a lot more than they were Trump, and probably with cause, because Trump doesn't need a lot of time to do what he does, tell a lie or violently change the subject, while Biden needs to work his way through a thought, because thinking is one of the main things presidents have to do, and Trump wouldn't even know where to start on that). There is no reason to ask candidates to do it, nothing about it that relates to a qualification for the job. It's no more relevant to the presidency than a hot dog eating contest.

I don't know what should happen now, other than hating the whole thing. It seems to me that the mechanics of finding a new candidate now, with all the primaries over and all the delegates committed, are just insuperable, unless they choose Harris, and the sniveling centrists producing most of the calls for Biden to step down—Claire McCaskill to Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof—won't like her either. Krugman, no centrist, is an exception:

Joe Biden has done an excellent job as president. In fact, I consider him the best president of my adult life. Based on his policy record, he should be an overwhelming favorite for re-election.

But he isn’t, and on Thursday night he failed to rise to the occasion when it really mattered....Kamala Harris was, by all accounts, an effective district attorney and attorney general, and she has also been quietly effective as vice president, promoting Biden’s policies. Choosing her as his successor would in no sense be settling for less.

It’s true that she didn’t do well in the 2020 Democratic primaries, but her problem then, as I saw it, was that she had a hard time making the case for choosing her over other candidates. She would have no problem making the case for choosing her over Trump.

Biden is the best president of my adult life too, and it kills me to think we might give him up over such idiocy as this. I love the thought of a Harris presidency too, especially as associated as she is now with Biden's agenda, but I have little hope that she can defeat a tag team of American racism and American misogyny, especially in the tumult you can expect within the party if Biden drops out. I don't know what happens next, but I kind of hope it's nothing.

Another Day, Another Annoying Poll

 

Seeing some terror in the ranks over this poll of six battleground states issued by Washington Post (with the assistance of the Schar School of Government at George Mason University), particularly this result:

Even though these same respondents also seem to think Trump is a serious threat to democracy himself; a huge majority predicts that he will refuse to accept the results of the upcoming election, and a very substantial plurality believe Trump will "try to rule as a dictator" (while just a fifth, well within the crazification factor, suspect that Biden will do that).

I'm not going to be able to tell you what's going on here, because I'm stuck on a still more insane feature, which is what it's a poll of—it's a poll of particularly unlikely voters, designated as "The Deciders" for a fairly good but confusing reason, because they're in fact people who find it particularly difficult to make up their minds, don't know for sure whom they are going to support, and are just as likely to decide not to vote at all. Assuming, though, that the electorate is extremely tightly polarized to the point where the likely voters are almost equally divided, which is not an unreasonable interpretation of the normal polling data, it's the unlikely voters who will actually make the decision, for better or for worse or at random, by the way they sort themselves out in November. That's insane as a fact, that the decision is going to be made by the people with the least ability to even think about it, but it is a kind of a fact, and I ought to feel kind of flattered by the Washington Post for working on it, because, as I wrote for the first time in 2017,