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Let us now take just a moment to reflect again on the fact that we dodged quite a bullet when Harris/Walz were defeated — 40 Comments

1. Well, obammie was chosen because he’s a black something or other, so not without precedence.

2. And Walz is saying he was chosen because he’s some sort of rural macho white guy and therefore could talk the language of rural macho white guys, all while not talking their language at all. People who say “code talk” and “permission structure” aren’t likely to appeal much to that particular demographic.

   At first glance, the word “code” in the Waltz quote made me think he was talking about “learning to code” for a living. No, it’s much more stupid and deceptive than that.

   He’s not an actual rural white guy, but he’s got enough familiarity with them that he can fake it. Of course, he’s also got the desire and need to be a faker. And it assumes that a significant number of people are gullible enough to buy into the fakery.

   We’ve entered an era where nearly everything the Dems and left talk about publicly is some sort of swindle.

3. See Wm. Schneider on this point. Your single best guess is that your VP candidate will net you 2% of the vote in his home state. Minnesota was close enough that he might have been consequential in securing those electoral votes. Schneider also notes that there is downside risk if the VP candidate proves a distraction, as Geraldine Ferraro did in 1984. Per Schneider, there’s not much electoral advantage to be had from VP selections. (Schneider was writing a generation ago).
   ==
   Gerald Ford in 1976 offered his staff that he would select a VP nominee taking account of three considerations: (1) the capacity of the subject to take over as chief executive without missing a beat; (2) general agreement on policy; and (3) skills as a campaigner. (Whether he made the right selection is another matter).
   ==
   The Harris / Walz campaign was the most intellectually underpowered national ticket in God-knows-when. It’s a reasonable inference that both Harris and Walz have a history with the drink. The two have minimal history with private sector employment. Walz is a manifestation of the pathology of the public schools. The man’s tertiary schooling consisted entirely of time in teacher’s colleges. He has no academic degrees, yet he was employed not as an elementary teacher or a special ed teacher, but as an academic high school teacher.

4. The two ‘blacks’ the Democratic Party has nominated include a woman whose ancestry is modally East Indian, who spent the longest segment of her upbringing in Montreal, and who was publicly rebuked by her mulatto father. It also includes a mulatto who spent his formative years in two loci (Java and Oahu) notable for an absence of American blacks and whose father was a Luo from Kenya whose understanding of American blacks was limited to those he met on university campuses. BO’s actual relationship to the domestic black population was that he married into it. Good enough for Democratic voters.

5. Timpon is a deluded and very weird guy. How TH did he become the MN governor?

6. The mere suggestion that there is a “code” men use in their lives tells me Mr Walz is probably gay and knows nothing at a visceral level about men. Similarly seeing The Magic Negro hold his “beer summit” with the white cop and black formerly drunk and disorderly black professor told me about his inclinations. Adult males cosplaying manhood would be funny if they weren’t serious in thinking they pulled it off and if it weren’t so blatantly obvious.

7. It’s not shocking they got the votes they did. A large portion of the country has TDS and would have voted for literally anyone the Ds put up, no matter how bad. Harris/Walz are about as bad as they come.

   From my lib friends now posting a screed about how stupid all Trump voters are. So they are just as shocked by us.

8. The mere suggestion that there is a “code” men use in their lives tells me Mr Walz is probably gay and knows nothing at a visceral level about men. Similarly seeing The Magic Negro hold his “beer summit” with the white cop and black formerly drunk and disorderly black professor told me about his inclinations. Adult males cosplaying manhood would be funny if they weren’t serious in thinking they pulled it off and if it weren’t so blatantly obvious.
   ==
   No, it tells you he listens to Krack Kampaign Konsultants and imbibes what they say, which tells you his capacity for critical thought is underpowered. He’s a 60 year old fat slob who has been married for 30 years and has two children. None of his known diversions have a gay vibe.
   ==
   Gates was rude to a Cambridge police officer. No indication he was drunk. Gates and Obama are both decades married with children. Obama’s only known avocational interests are basketball and golf. Gates’ are genealogy and transcendental meditation.

9. Let’s not forget what “permission structure” was:

   Think back to a time when you’ve tried to convince someone with an entrenched point of view to change their mind. You might have presented compelling data, conveyed rational arguments, offered supporting facts, and it was all likely a huge waste of time. That’s where this model, first popularised by the Obama administration, might help.

   A Permission Structure provides an emotional and psychological justification that allows someone to change deeply held beliefs and/or behaviours while importantly retaining their pride and integrity.

   MAKE CHANGE, DON’T MAKE SOMEONE WRONG.

   Popularised by US Democratic Party operatives such as Dan Pfeiffer and David Axelrod, and eventually Obama himself (see Origins below for more), there has been surprisingly little written about this approach. In our opinion, it’s based on an understanding that radically changing a deeply held belief and/or entrenched behaviour will often challenge a person’s self-identity and perhaps even leave them feeling humiliated about being wrong. It’s not rational, it’s not necessary, and it happens all the time.

   Permission Structures serve as scaffolding for someone to embrace change that they might otherwise reject. An effective Permission Structure helps someone move to a new point of view in a way that feels rational, justified, and consistent with their existing core values. It’s the justification of doing something counter to their past beliefs, that still allows them to sleep at night and hold their heads up high during the day.

   If you think of the electorate as meat robots that occasionally go out of order, rather than as people with agency, there’s a big chance that you are going to lose the election.

10. In answer to Marissa, who declaimed, “Timpon is a deluded and very weird guy. How TH did he become the MN governor?” He apparently appealed to and received the deluded, very weird guy vote.

11. AD…both are effete males cosplaying at a cartoonish version of machismo. Like Biden’s “take him out behind the woodshed” nonsense…

    Think…Obama on a bike…throwing out the first pitch…playing basketball…the college photo with aviators a joint & panama hat.

    Walz on a hunting trip…for goodness sake!…lucky no one got shot. Watching football…playing video games & his “Pick six”…puhleeze!

    It’s all an act to hide from the fact that at a visceral level they have no bloody idea what men think or do…that’s it’s some secret “code” that they’ve deciphered means they haven’t got it at all.

12. It’s all an act to hide from the fact that at a visceral level they have no bloody idea what men think or do…that’s it’s some secret “code” that they’ve deciphered means they haven’t got it at all.
    ==
    Here are three men between the ages of 60 and 75 who have been married for 85 years in sum and have fathered six children. On the other hand, we have your imagination . Thanks for your wisdom.

13. @Art Deco:who have been married for 85 years in sum and have fathered six children.

    Worth unpacking–I don’t think most gays have it in them to do what would be needed to father children, as many times as that process typically takes in a marriage. (As opposed to in the back seat of a Camaro after the big game just before going away to college/Vietnam, which as we all know from after-school specials, practically guarantees conception).

    I used to say the same to people who snarked about Michele Bachmann’s husband: you might think he’s light in the loafers, fine, but he has apparently sired five children, and that’s a lot of time to spend doing something he has a fundamental disinclination to. It’s not like they got five kids by having sex five times.

14. He may not be wrong even if we think he was ineffective. Why do you think Biden got put on the ticket with Obama?

15. I take the “code talking” stuff to refer in some sense to “code” as the sociolinguistic concept. “Code-switching” is a thing I find interesting to contemplate once in a while. It isn’t that nefarious.

16. Tim Walz has the code talk down pat?? Remember him prancing and dancing on stage at rallies (with a montage of 8-9 instances and ABBA’s Dancing Queen accompanying the clips)? Him walking with that shotgun and desperately fighting to load it would have terrified any normal hunter who was in range of him and his rebellious firearm. Sorry Tim. We didn’t buy it.

17. Philip Sells:

    My guess is Walz is referring to the Navajo Code Talkers in WW II. The USMC added Navajo speakers to units in the field who would handle communications in their native language.

    The Navajo language was unwritten and unintelligible to the non-Navajo, so it worked against the Japanese.
    ______________________________

    Once the code talkers completed training in the States, they were sent to the Pacific for assignment to the Marine combat divisions. In May 1943, in response to a request for a report on the subject, the various division commanders reported to the Commandant that excellent results had been achieved to date in the employment of Navajo code talkers in training and combat situations, and that they had performed in a highly commendable fashion. This high degree of praise concerning the Navajos’ performances prevailed throughout the war and came from commanders at all levels.

    https://www.usmcu.edu/Research/Marine-Corps-History-Division/People/Navajo-Code-Talkers-in-WWII/
    ______________________________

    So Walz is equating himself to a Navajo Code Talker except with the language only real males understand. Well, if there is such a language, I doubt Tampon Tim is fluent.

    More stolen valor!

    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/tim-walz-heckled-veterans-stolen-valor-claims-china-connections

18. Short version: “Since we don’t have a coherent program, well…except that Trump’s Hitler, let’s spew word salad as our election strategy.
    “Tim, you spew at White males; me, I’ll spew at everyone else.
    “The people we want to reach will know EXACTLY what we’re trying to tell ‘em.
    “We’re a shoo-in, Walt!
    “No way we can lose this muthah…”

    (“And just in case, let’s spread around several good billions of buckeroos nice ‘n thick…. There. THAT should do the trick…”)

19. Let’s not forget what “permission structure” was: — Niketas

    While I did know roughly what “permission structure” meant, that was a particularly nice overview of it.

20. Assuming the various men referred to in the comments actually fathered the children in question. Walz had medical help so…

21. AD — “I don’t think”

    Yep…I agree with you there. That, you got right.
    The rest is opinion vs opinion. I’m ok with differing perceptions. I still contend leftists cosplay, virtue signal, lie, pretend & project as easily as they walk upright.

22. The (quite nice) house next to the (fairly humble) church I attend displayed a large “Veterans for Harris” sign until November 2nd. I know all military people are not conservative, but I metaphorically shook my head every time I drove by the sign.

23. Code??!!!??!! Lolololololo, does he have any idea how he was perceived? Lolololololo, I wish I had been there!

24. It’s just like articles of faith, the opposite viewpoint will be there( doesn’t mean it’ll be successful) it will always be there.

25. My AWFL sister, one of the kindest and most generous people I know, has a case of TDS so severe that she paid to fly her 24-year-old daughter from California to Pennsylvania (where she is registered to vote) so she could cast a vote for Harris/Walz. I don’t think my sister or my niece took candidate qualifications (or lack thereof) into consideration at all.

26. https://redstate.com/bonchie/2025/04/30/kamala-harris-gave-her-big-comeback-speech-and-holy-cow-n2188555

27. The thing I remember most about Walz was his very “timely” retirement from the Minnesota National Guard just before his unit was called up to Iraq. Cowardice is not a very manly trait, Timmy, and you are the personification of cowardice.

28. I’m with those who believe Walz was talking about code switching, and with neo’s view that his comment is an inadvertent admission that identity politics is still on the ascendant in the Democrat party.

    I didn’t watch or listen to much of either ticket last year; I already knew (too much) about Trump’s manner, and Harris/Walz’s manner was unimportant to me (because Trump’s manner had proven to be unimportant to his actual governance in his previous term). But on those few occasions that I did see Walz speaking, I was astonished that anyone could have believed he was “macho” or “America’s dad” or any of the other middle-America things they tried to paint on him (much the way they tried to paint “Joy!” on Harris).

    NTTAWWT. I have known three couples, at least, whose marriages may be of the lavender variety; it works for them. All three have children. Of course it’s also 100% possible that they’re straight as the proverbial arrow and just fall on the feminine end of the stereotypically-masculine-behavior spectrum. Whatever.

    The point is, Walz is apparently very self-aware about the very one-dimensional role he was brought on to play. Whereas Vance – what box do you put him in?

29. With luck, Trump will save America by winning the midterms, and focus on enhancing Vance’s electability (and STFU about third terms).

    If by some miracle, we can stand on the head of the Dem snake for about 12 years, maybe we’ll kill the damned thing!

    My idiot SIL will still vote for them no matter what.

30. Southern MN is a land of Leftism, and that is the large majority of MN’s population. The rest of the state is redneck hard-ass Paul Bunyan and Babe The Blue Ox country.
    Walz is a brainless non-thinking toad from the Southern MN region.

31. Dems are the party of mental illness. It will get worse. Art Deco posted that Harris/Waltz had minimal experience in private sector. Soon it will be any taint of private sector experience is grounds for elimination. The candidate must come entirely from the government/NGO axis.

32. I was astonished that anyone could have believed he was “macho” or “America’s dad” or any of the other middle-America things they tried to paint on him (much the way they tried to paint “Joy!” on Harris).
    ==
    Walz is a normal range schlub. The most notable thing about him is premature aging, which is what you see with alcoholics.
    ==
    Marcus Bachmann has a reedy, sibilant voice of a sort you commonly see among homosexuals. Barack Obama never played baseball. Henry Louis Gates is a slightly built man who has a neuralgic reaction to being pestered by cops. Obama, Gates, and the clueless copper were willing to be roped into a PR project cooked up by some clown on the White House staff. Therefore they’re all sexual deviants. This whole conversation is too stupid for words.

33. The thing I remember most about Walz was his very “timely” retirement from the Minnesota National Guard just before his unit was called up to Iraq. Cowardice is not a very manly trait, Timmy, and you are the personification of cowardice.
    ==
    What indicts Walz in that case is that he made a commitment to the Guard he did not want to keep. Few civilians in his situation (41 years of age, out of shape, married with dependent children) would have enlisted in that situation or any other. The share of the 1902 cohort who had military service during the 2d World War was small. No one born prior to September 1904 was subject to conscription. Men with dependent children during the 1st world war were excused by draft boards as a matter of course. Men over 35 with dependent children were categorically excused during the Civil War.

34. But most Democrats were fine with Biden even if he wasn’t really functionally POTUS; they just want their side to be in charge. They don’t really care about foreign policy only about domestic control, and they trust their fellow Democrats in the government to run things.

    Their support for Biden was based on him delivering the WH again. They stopped supporting him when it became obvious he wouldn’t.

    They would run a trained chimp if they thought it would win.

35. Why do you think Biden got put on the ticket with Obama?
    ==
    If you want to hack off a partisan Democrat, recite Barack Obama’s employment history from 1983 to 2008. He was lighter than air. A man whose accomplishments sum to passing the bar exam and getting elected might just be a man who does not want people around him who make him feel inadequate. Biden filled the bill.

36. To even things up here, just to be fair; I had a high school classmate who seemed effeminate. But he was straight, afaik. Played football, married, had kids. But he grew up without a father, the man having died early in my friend’s life.
    So his mannerisms, from vocal inflection to eating in the lunchroom to being bothered by little stuff–us guys were too studly to be concerned about such trifles–was, I suspect, a matter of not having a male model in his life.
    That said, anybody who thinks I can be code-talked-to by Walz is insulting me.

37. @ Jamie > “Of course it’s also 100% possible that they’re straight as the proverbial arrow and just fall on the feminine end of the stereotypically-masculine-behavior spectrum.”
    @ Richard > “I had a high school classmate who seemed effeminate. But he was straight, afaik.”

    I know several very fine straight men who are on the far-end of the behavior spectrum, whether from nature or nurture.
    Just like I know several very fine straight women on the far-end going the other way – dirt, guns, and all.
    Most people don’t realize that the full spectrum of behavior for men and women overlaps to a great degree, and the median points are not very far distant from each other.

    This is a common scale for morphology, but I’ve seen similar ones for psychological characteristics. (morphology: The branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of organisms without consideration of function)

    (Yes, I know I can shorten the URL, but I prefer to see where I’m linking and suspect others do to.)
    https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FEc_DVxRWsAIFhvH%3Fformat%3Djpg%26name%3D4096x4096&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=584fbb2d65a4fce49b1b1e57ad1554f00126f79dd260f3d47287cc69c478361e

    Personality traits.
    https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178/full

38. @AesopFan:Yes, I know I can shorten the URL, but I prefer to see where I’m linking and suspect others do to

    You can do that, and still protect yourself, by posting only clean links. Anyone who wants to see where you are linking can of course mouse over a link if they wish.

39. Walz is a dorky schlub who was chosen as Harris’s running mate because he’s the governor of what might at one point have been thought of as a borderline “battleground” state, and he was willing – maybe even eager – to run with Harris. End of story. Speculation in a comment thread about his sexual behavior is, to say the least, in poor taste. By 2030 he’ll be the answer to a trivia question.
    On the other hand, I don’t think I’d let him babysit my grandkids.

40. Think back to when the Dems were reminding women, in 2024, that they could vote for Harris in secret and not have to worry about violence from the menfolk. That was a real gambit, and it reflected the thinking of the modern elite Left. There must be SOME reason people don’t gravitate to them, fear of violence, fear of seeming unmanly, something. They really are that self-absorbed.

    Many of them don’t have the slightest clue how people outside their bubble think. So they tried to position Walz as a ‘man’s man’, if he can be a Dem, any guy can vote Dem and still be manly! Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but they really were thinking that way. They’re that clueless.

    Remember this infamous Harris-allied ad?:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk4ueY9wVtA

    When I first saw it I assumed it _had_ to be a right-wing-made parody, but no, it was for real. That’s the level of cluelessness.

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