You must embody a great reserve of self-abasement to be the wife of a VP nominee in the Republican Party. Easy for Mrs. Pence: she liked baking cookies. But for Usha Vance, a bit of a challenge. You get to give up your stellar career, revert to “Mrs” VP instead of Ms, act like you truly, really respect the megalomaniacal pussy-grabber at the top of the ticket, and be prepared to explain to your friends why the 1950’s was such an awesome time in American history and worth going back to and that you really, truly enjoy baking cookies and hosting teas– far more satisfying than your boring previous work litigating cases for Disney or the Regents of the University of California. And you also get to explain how your husband, who used to brag about being accepted at Yale and served on the Law Review now mocks his own alma mater and pretends to be just folk (with very, very rich friends in the Tech Industry to subsidize his career). And carefully avoid mentioning that his “military career” consisted mostly of pushing paper and taking pictures. Honorable but skimpy and no match for John McCain whom your boss derided as a loser. Watching “Mrs. Vance” on stage at the convention was dispiriting. As Roger Ebert said, commenting on the wonderful film “Junebug”, we all make our own private accommodations in life.
The Republican Convention 2024
JD Vance is a dud.
The CNN & PBS panelists need to sharpen their wits. If Biden is responsible for inflation why did all the developed nations have it? Inflation in Biden’s first year was about 6.0%. None of Biden’s policies could, at that time, have had an impact. Unless you believe presidents can go back in time, what he inherited was Trump’s inflation.
The Teamsters (Sean O’Brien) did NOT endorse Donald Trump. He has offered to speak at both conventions.
Unreported crime is up. Think about it. (The crime rate is actually down).
Real household income has increased significantly under Biden, even in Vance’s home town!
Trump endorsed the Iraq war before he changed his mind much later.
Home prices went up 27% under Trump.
Trump had initiated the plan to leave Afghanistan before he left office and Biden essentially merely enacted it. What is not often remarked upon is that the U. S. had been losing that war badly by then and short of an injection of 100,000 or more troops, could not have changed the outcome. Evacuations under those circumstances are always going to be horrendously messy.
Unemployment under Trump was 6.7%. (Biden: 3.6%)
Yes, Trump tore up NAFTA… and then replaced it with an almost identical trade deal.
The most promising move to counter China was Obama’s Asian-Pacific trade alliance … which Trump tore up, clearly out of spite.
Most economists predicted that battling inflation with higher interest rates would increase unemployment and slow GDP growth. Biden, remarkably, reduced inflation without the expected recession. Why don’t the Democrats talk more about that? It really was quite remarkable.
The Republicans at the convention keep alluding to decaying infrastructure; Biden is the first president in decades to pass a substantial infrastructure bill.
Trump was a failure in business. He took a large capital stake from his daddy, blew it all on bad real estate deals, built casinos and golf courses that failed, owned a football team that failed, created Trump University (failed again), all while selling his image to gullible fans as some kind of business genius. He finally made money parlaying his fake image to a TV show (“The Apprentice”) which did, finally, make him a lot money. As H. L. Menken (maybe) observed, nobody every went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
The most striking thing about the convention so far is how the party has become the Trump Family Compact. Everything is Trump. Every speaker is required to genuflect to Trump. Every statement is calibrated to flatter and wheedle the divine leader. For a party that used to brag about being “rogue” and thinking independently, this slavish adoration a single personality must be humiliating.
One does begin to shed a few tears for how sensitive they are: they constantly whine about the “media” being mean to them and hurting their feelings. Poor Sarah Huckabee could hardly bear to be insulted by a TV hostess. I guess they all missed Politics 101 in which you learn that politicians should probably have some backbone, or find another profession.
Will Biden Drop Out
I suspect, at this moment, that Joe Biden will drop out. And it will be astonishing.
Why will he drop out? Because his blundering performance at the debate was not an anomaly, and, even when confronted with a very, very serious crisis in his candidacy, he is still unable to present a coherent, assertive presence to the media and public.
It wasn’t Biden being caught in an unexpected situation for which he was unprepared and then responded with a poor choice of words or lack of command of the facts of the circumstance. He had all the time in the world and all the staff in the world and all the resources in the world to prepare for the debate and he still managed to muff it on a ridiculous scale. Then, after creating a dire crisis for his candidacy, he could not even muster a credible display of recovered command and assertiveness to even begin to counter-act the devasting effect of his debate performance.
He has offered excuses: he had a cold. He had jet lag. He works too hard and doesn’t get enough sleep. The fact that he even feels the need to offer excuses in very telling. He knows he has a serious problem.
Both Nancy Pelosi and James Clyburn have indicated some reservations, when one would have expected fulsome support and a strong assertion of confidence.
There will be, in the coming days, a monumental clash between the insular coterie of family and friends surrounding Biden and the wider world of Democratic donors, strategists, Congressional delegates, party apparatchiks, and others, who will quietly begin to insinuate the obvious. Will it penetrate? I suspect it will, eventually.
And then… chaos. Representative James Clyburn will surely expect Kamala Harris to replace Biden, but others in the party will be hesitant to back the loser of the 2020 primaries, someone the party has had persistent doubts about, and the challenge of a black woman winning a presidential race in America, particularly after the Hilary Clinton fiasco in 2016.
But what if, instead, they turn to Gavin Newsom, or Josh Shapiro? Will this alienate the black voters the Democrats depend on to win elections?
More dangerously, a segment of the voting public has clearly shifted their support to the repulsive Donald Trump. Having overcome their rational hesitation to adopt him as their candidate, will they, once they have overcome those reservations, hesitate to return to the Democratic candidate? Will an embittered Kamala Harris withdraw from the campaign? Or will she accept a VP nomination with the new candidate?
I doubt we will get a really great replacement like Sherrod Brown or Sheldon Whitehouse. Getchen Witmer would be a terrific replacement. Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar would be viable. Newsom? Probably. Shapiro? Maybe.
Trump is very vulnerable to attack by a vigorous, smart opponent. The Democrats owe it to the world to find one.
If they don’t, history should be as unkind to Biden as it is now to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at least among the more sophisticated observers. He will be the man whose bungling missteps and selfish narcissism gave us the worst president in the history of the United States, again.
Divas about Divas
Join us for SIX: The Musical, a 90-minute extravaganza inspired by the queens of pop – Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Jennifer Lopez, and Rihanna.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a less promising enticement. I’m impressed though at the remarkable collection of seven of the most inconsequential talents in the pop universe, seven of the singers I would least likely want to hear, all of them making extensive use of Autotune, all of them products, all of them narcissists of the highest order.
On the same day, someone else on Facebook posted a photo of Taylor Swift at some football game with the comment that she did not “ask” to be on TV at the football game.
On the contrary, all she does is “ask” to be on TV.
The Traditional
My response to this column in the NY Times by Ross Douthat.
“a mechanism to constrain sexual misbehavior that’s more effective than the traditional emphasis on monogamy and chastity.” I like how you sneaked in there the phrase “the traditional”, as if this was some kind of monumental edifice of unquestioned provenance. As if it was not a social mechanism for the control of women’s bodies by patriarchal “authority”. A social mechanism inevitably dispensed with for themselves by privileged men in power. Whether you personally or not love Donald Trump, your side owns him and you could not invent a more ragingly hypocritical avatar of “traditional” values.
Free Speech at the ACLU
Really, really disappointed to read this account of the ACLU’s firing of an employee for using language that in some subtle way– too subtle for most of us to grasp– implied a racist attitude.
In one instance, according to court documents, she told a Black superior that she was “afraid” to talk with him. In another, she told a manager that their conversation was “chastising.” And in a meeting, she repeated a satirical phrase likening her bosses’ behavior to suffering “beatings.”
There are multitudes of progressive organizations out there ready to attack anyone who dares oppose their advocacy of nothing but rainbows and flowers for those of minority sexual preferences or racial identity. The ACLU, until now, has been generally willing to fight for everyone’s right to speak truthfully even when expressing unpopular opinions. But the entire story about the firing of Kate Oh over statements that only in the mysterious realm of paranoid ultra-sensitivity constitute any kind of racial animus is truly discouraging. It’s not about a weird deviation from their core values. It’s about the corporate culture at the ACLU becoming mind-numbingly parochial.
One of the things I had always liked about the ACLU– and which I agree with wholeheartedly– is that unpopular speech has a right to be heard. And then mocked and ridiculed, if necessary, but heard. And the mockery and ridicule itself must be protected. When a university bans a speaker because they are not politically congenial with the culture of the administration and faculty, we all lose, even if we hate the speech. Let them speak. If they are idiots, we can let them know after we know what they are actually saying.
But– this is important– please take care to note when these speakers are not actually banned (as Anne Coulter claimed to have been from a Canadian University) but merely playing the martyr for their home-town crowd. Conservatives seem to adore this trope and play it for all it’s worth in their own media echo-chambers.
I am even opposed to “hate-speech” and “hate-crime” designations. Either it is a crime or it isn’t. “Hate” is an entirely subjective pejorative. Inciting violence is a crime. Libel is a crime. Fraud is a crime. Shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre can be a crime. But making something a “hate” crime is being a nanny.
Harrison Butker’s Beautiful Nobody Wife
Someone on Facebook posted this, in response to the ridiculous controversy over the speech made by football player Harrison Butker of the Kansas City Chiefs to the graduates of Benedictine College in Atchinson, Kansas.
Oh no, a catholic gave a pro catholic speech with catholic views to catholic students at a catholic school, the horror, the misogyny, the… idiots love to go out of their way to be offended. The same crowd that preaches acceptance cannot stand living in a world where other people aren’t like them apparently
I responded:
Agree. The same way a male state legislator with no medical training or background and expertise in psychology or physiology should not be telling parents what they can or cannot do to address a child’s issues with sexual identity. Nor should the same state politicians be telling libraries what books they can stock on their shelves. Or if people who are fearful of communicable diseases can wear a mask. Or if teachers can teach about the fundamentals of the U.S. economy before 1865. Idiots love to go out of their way to be offended.
I initially thought the entire “scandal” was just media masturbation: a trivial event and a trivial offense sparking trivial outrage and then trivial blow-back, and so on, with everyone losing sight of the utter triviality of the original event along the way. Harrison Butker is a nobody, a fucking football player, of no particular consequence, and certainly of no importance to culture or intellectual life in the U.S.
His comments were not as anodyne as his defenders would have it, nor as caustic as his critics would have it. They are just unbelievably mediocre. Seriously? In this day and age? Women should stay home and cook and clean and have babies?
He says:
On the day before Mother’s Day, he said, “I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.
I can’t think of anything more deeply insulting to Isabelle. You had no life before you met the wondrous Harrison Buttkiss? You were not a whole person, because this amazing, virile, intelligent, paragon of testosterone had not yet laid you?
He went further, attacking diversity and inclusion in general, gay marriage, and so on– the usual litany of ignorant white male grievance. He attacked abortion, which is odd because his party has left him in the dust on this issue. Have you checked with Mike Pence lately? And what other bedrock principles are you and your party eager to shed the moment they become politically inconvenient?
Shame on you Benedictine College! Not because Butkisser gave you a mind-numbing divisive grievance-laced litany of intellectual dishonesty, but because you chose an athlete of mediocre intelligence to give your graduation address. Someone who is famous for one-dimensionality, or achievements in the stupidest, dullest major sport in the world. Please– the entire secular, consumerist, celebrity-addled world worships these masters of inanity. Can’t a college — especially a Catholic Christian College– stand up and say, we will be different! We will not kowtow to the worldly vice of idolization of professional athletes and materialistic success! No, we will invite someone with real achievements in really important, consequential areas, like literature, journalism, painting, music, engineering, science, social services, or perhaps even ministry.
But then the administration of Benedictine College wouldn’t get to go home and tell their wives and mommies, “Guess I got to meet?” and really impress them.
Trial by Innuendo
To any casual observer, Mr. Weinstein’s history of accusations of abuse seems as though it should be admissible, and yet it was not. NY Times (here)
A New York Times reporter is appalled that the conviction of Harvey Weinstein of rape was overturned. I am not.
At the time of his conviction, I was rather shocked that the court allowed numerous women–who were not the victims in the case– to testify that Weinstein had treated them very badly. I don’t doubt that he did. I also think it’s likely he was guilty of rape and I would not have been displeased to see him convicted of it in a fair trial. But what the prosecution did was unethical and unfair. They lined up numerous witnesses who all agreed that Weinstein was an asshole. Then they essentially said– “see what a horrible person he is? He must also be guilty of rape.” Of course, they used artful language to make it sound more sophisticated than that. They said it showed a “pattern” of behavior, an MO, that corroborated what the actual victims experienced.
I don’t think it’s even close. That was an indefensible tactic and both sides knew it and most informed observers were certainly aware of it. The prosecution thought, well, this is special. It’s a new era. It’s “me too”. The justice system should change to accommodate this new sensibility.
None of those additional witnesses laid charges against Mr. Weinstein. All of their allegations were made without any attempt to prove them, and without giving Weinstein the opportunity to rebut or challenge them. Some of them brought cases that were rejected because of police misconduct. Presenting their untested evidence in court poisoned the well.
If any of those women had valid charges to make, make them, and take him to court, where you can attempt to prove your case and Weinstein can be given a fair chance to rebut your accusations. If you can’t or won’t prove them, you have no business testifying in a case you are not involved with in order to smear the defendant.
Complicating the matter is that many of these women did have consensual sex with Weinstein. At least some of them, were hoping to advance their careers in the film industry as a result. Even the two actual victims in the case who allege that Weinstein raped them also had consensual sex with him. This raises the possibility that many or all of the damaging character witnesses may be experiencing something like buyer’s remorse. They consented to sex on the expectation that Weinstein would advance their film careers. When he didn’t fulfill his side of the deal, they came to believe that the sex was, in some sense, less consensual than it was when they consented.
That’s not a crime. It’s just contemptible. Or, if it is a crime, the victims are the actresses who were unwilling to make a pact with the devil and, therefore, lost opportunities for a career in film and were replaced by actresses who were willing to trade sex for opportunity. It is also contemptible for aspiring actresses to use sex to curry favor with producers and other powerful insiders in order to get juicy film roles.
Similarly, in the Bill Cosby case, the victim had agreed to a cash settlement with Cosby for which, as part of the agreement she voluntarily signed, she agreed to never again bring charges against him. She didn’t have to take the money. She didn’t have to sign the agreement. The agreement was actually supervised by a judge through the court system. So when the authorities decided to charge Cosby anyway, and she testified– breaking the agreement– I thought immediately that a judge should have thrown it out (or demanded that she return the money she received from Cosby). I thought that was obvious. Eventually, it was obvious and the case was thrown out.
Reporter Jessica Bennett seems to believe that a bedrock principle of justice– a very important principle– should be dispensed with so it would be easier to convict someone based on flimsy evidence (what could it be if not “flimsy” if it’s not strong enough to support a conviction on its own). In a sense, it is the principle of having the right to confront your accuser. The additional women who testified against Weinstein denied him the right to “confront” their accusations by making them in court in a case in which their charges were not being tested. That is an afront to fundamental justice.
His conviction in California used the same approach. And I hope that the higher courts throw out his conviction there as well.
Then I hope both systems re-try him and come up with a fair judgement based on the facts of the case– not on his reputation.
The Elusive Joy of Apocalypse
“The crowd, too, seemed electrified in a way I had not seen for years. The lifting up of the martyr, the processing of her death into rage, the processing, through Trump, of the rage into joy — the old alchemy was working again.” NY Times
I don’t think I personally give enough credit to the “joy” aspect of finding out that your worst fantasies about global conspiracies (the Democrats, the Ukrainians, the French, the Pope, the sex traffickers, the Fairies & Orcs, Mike Pence– whomever) are likely true, and that a savior– with his own custom leather-bound bible to offer– is bravely defying the courts and politicians and judges (even the ones he appointed) who are out there serving the interests of the international pedophile conspiracy by bringing him down. The swagger, the mocking, the insults (even of Jimmy Carter as he mourned the death of his wife), seem tasteful to you, hallmarks of virtue and moral courage and dignity. Surely he would have served in the military had he had the opportunity– okay, maybe he did dodge it– and surely some of those wounded veterans like John McCain deserved mockery, but he is sure to restore military spending to its normal level of ten times what everyone else in the world is spending combined, and he will stop crime, invent manufacturing, prove that all the world’s climate scientists are liars, put Stormy Daniels back in her place, pay the money he owes the National Enquirer, eliminate the deficit by cutting taxes (after increasing it massively his first term), stop abortion (unless the polling shows it’s a loser of an issue), cure cancer, and maybe actually go to church some days. Whatever he says, even if it’s the opposite of what he said yesterday or the day before that, or tomorrow, believe it, deliriously. You know in your heart that to do otherwise will bring not a rational, creaky, imperfect but functioning state; no, it will bring the apocalypse.
Socialism for the Rich
In the contest for dumbest government programs, state funding of Hollywood productions must rank near the top, along with sports stadiums.
‘After a state economist determined that “the film incentives represent lost revenue” and that their economic benefits were “negligible,” Michigan, which cut funding for the police and schools while facing a severe budget deficit, eventually decided to end its incentives.’
Now Michigan wants to restart the program. Because Georgia and Indiana do it and we must compete in this race to the bottom! Both parties do it while selling the myth that these productions generate local jobs and increased tax revenue. Clint Eastwood, hard core self-reliant pull-your-bootstraps up Republican, is more than happy to take advantage of this welfare program for actors and directors.
‘A recent report prepared for state auditors in Georgia estimated that the tax revenue returned on each dollar spent on incentives was 19 cents. A similar report from New York determined the return was between 15 cents and 31 cents.’
Socialism for the rich.
It is very disappointing, to say the least, that taxpayers who are outraged by this or that or everything completely miss the biggest spending scandals happening right in front of them.