Pointing out that the empress has no clothes:
CNN contributor stunned his fellow panelists by bringing up a simple fact:
Democrats have been in charge for 12 of the last 16 years yet they’re still blaming Trump for everything. pic.twitter.com/hgo2osZowu
— Brandon Morse (@TheBrandonMorse) August 21, 2024
This has been quite a campaign season so far, hasn’t it?
Now we have this:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign said in a Pennsylvania court filing Friday that he’s endorsing Donald Trump for president.
The campaign also requested that he be removed from the Pennsylvania ballot, though it wasn’t immediately clear that he was officially dropping out of the race. It came a day after he sought to be removed from Arizona’s ballot. He is running as an independent.
Kennedy is set to speak in Arizona shortly “about the present historical moment and his path forward,” according to his campaign. Hours later, Trump will hold a rally in neighboring Glendale. Trump’s campaign has teased that he’ll be joined by “a special guest,” though neither campaign responded to messages about whether Kennedy would be that guest.
The art of the deal, indeed.
More:
Speaking at a news conference, Mr Kennedy said Democrats were no longer “champions of the constitution” and had departed “dramatically” from the “core values” he grew up with. …
He criticised the Democratic Party, saying it had waged “legal warfare” against him and Mr Trump.
I can’t argue with that. It seems self-evident.
Democrats treated RFK Jr. so badly that he has allied with Trump. I’m not saying it’s the only reason he’s on the Trump train – promises were almost certainly made – but the Democrats’ behavior towards both men has made for a natural bonding experience.
And this statement by Kennedy was a perfect description of the Democrats’ campaign tactics/strategy: “Who needs a policy when you have Trump to hate?”
NOTE: RFK Jr. was fourteen years old when his father was assassinated during a presidential campaign. This year, the Biden administration wouldn’t assign Secret Service protection to him until after the Trump assassination attempt. It all might have been stirring some pretty intense memories – and anger – for RFK Jr.
One of my very favorite poems. I chose this rendition because he also provides a good translation:
So, what will RFK Jr. do tomorrow? He is slated to make some sort of announcement.
Darned if I know, but here’s something to ponder:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to drop out of the presidential race by the end of this week, sources familiar with the decision tell ABC News.
Sources tell ABC News that Kennedy plans to endorse Donald Trump — but when asked directly by ABC News if he will be endorsing the former president, Kennedy said, “I will not confirm or deny that.”…
Sources cautioned the decision is not yet finalized and could still change, with one source adding that Kennedy’s hope is, in part, to finalize things quickly in order to try to blunt momentum from the Democratic National Convention.
If this endorsement happens, what will RFK’s erstwhile supporters do in terms of voting? They seem to me to be an independent lot who don’t like to be told what to do, and so the endorsement wouldn’t necessarily have them flocking to Trump. Then again, it seems to me that in general Trump would tend to be closer to their political viewpoints than Kamala would, so it could benefit Trump somewhat. And since the race seems close, this could matter.
Kennedy has good reason to be angry at the Democrats and want to shaft them. For him, it’s personal:
Kennedy told ABC News regarding the Democratic convention and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, “I think it was a coronation, it’s not democracy. Nobody voted. Who chose Kamala? It wasn’t voters.”
He also complained about the way his campaign has been treated. …
For weeks, Kennedy, buried under an avalanche of lawsuits brought by Democratic groups challenging his place on state ballots, has accused Democrats of acting undemocratically by trying to strip his supporters of the opportunity to vote for him.
Shanahan on Wednesday said, “We’re getting prosecuted politically right now. This is not normal for democracy.”
Ah, but it’s the new normal for the Democrats. They’re been doing it to Trump for years.
Recently Israeli forces located the bodies of six male hostages in a hiding place within a Gazan tunnel, and the bodies were brought back to Israel where they will receive burials. But first, there have been autopsies to indicate cause of death.
Hamas usually blames such deaths on Israeli attacks, although even if that were true the responsibility would rest with Hamas, which precipitated the current conflict and kidnapped the hostages in the first place. But here are the forensic findings so far:
IDF representatives showed the families of Alex Dancyg, Yagev Buchshtav, Chaim Peri, Yoram Metzger, Nadav Popplewell, and Avraham Munder the findings from the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute.
According to the institute’s report, the bodies of the six hostages all have signs of gunfire, likely indicating they were killed by their captors.
Channel 12 reported that the military believes that they were executed by their captors during an IDF operation near where they were being held, with their guards possibly believing a rescue operation was underway. …
The bodies were located in a 10-meter-deep tunnel shaft hidden behind a false wall.
Many (not all) hostage families blame the Israeli government for not making a deal earlier, because these men were known to have been alive at least for a while after being abducted. I have nothing but sympathy for the hostage families, and so am loathe to criticize them because their suffering is so intense that of course they would do almost anything to have gotten their loved ones back alive. However, the idea that Israel could have done something to get these men back alive – other than a complete surrender to Hamas and its further empowerment – is wishful thinking. That the wishful thinking is understandable doesn’t make it any more logical.
However, I think some of it is a reflection of a more well-deserved rage at the government’s failure earlier to prevent the attack in the first place.
(1) Oprah speaks at the DNC to enthusiastically endorse Harris, and Trump replies with something from the past:
The Trump War Room account dropped a letter from Oprah where she says it was one thing “to live a life of integrity — still another to have people like yourself in office…Too bad we’re not running for office, what a team!”
Those were the days.
(2) I wrote this post yesterday in which I discussed the scale-down of the jobs report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The news was pretty well-covered (even the Times had a piece), but somehow our brilliant Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo failed to get the memo.
I kid you not. This is extraordinary. At first she tries to say it’s a Trump lie, of course:
The reporter played a clip of former President Trump talking about the report at his rally in North Carolina on Wednesday. “The administration padded the numbers with an extra – listen to this one – 818,000 jobs that don’t exist. So they said they existed and they never did exist. They built ‘em up so they could say what a wonderful job they’re doing,” Trump said.
Raimondo appeared to dismiss the news as Trump spreading misinformation and when asked if the revision could be a liability for Democratic presidential nominee and Vice President Harris, she said no.
“No. When I hear that, first of all, I don’t believe it because I’ve never heard Donald Trump say anything truthful,” Raimondo said.
“It is from the Bureau of Labor,” Whitworth responded.
“I’m not familiar with that,” Raimondo said, despite the report having been released several hours earlier.
Arrogant and ignorant – a winning combination.
(3) Here’s quite a trend:
"Depression increased the most among liberal young women, where it went from 15% in the late 2000s to 46% in 2021-22 — more than tripling in a little more than a decade."
— Jean Twenge pic.twitter.com/5VOeE2NIo5
— Paul Graham (@paulg) August 21, 2024
(4) On Kamala’s liaison to Jews:
Previous Jewish liaisons were usually involved with Jewish communal life and could speak to a variety of issues. Goldenberg is simply an anti-Israel activist whose only issues are empowering Iran and Hamas.
Instead of selecting someone from the Jewish community or any of her political aides, Harris chose someone whose sole function will be to justify her anti-Israel policies to the Jewish community, and who will filter any efforts by the Jewish community to push back against them. …
The appointment of one of the most persistently hostile foreign policy figures as a ‘liaison’ to the Jewish community sends a powerful message that this administration will be as anti-Israel as him and that Kamala will reconfigure her relationship with American Jews around her anti-Israel policies. Not even Obama went that far. What does it say that Kamala is already doing it now?
(5) It occurs to me that it’s possible that one of the threats from Democrats that got Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race may have been that they would join Republicans in impeaching him when this report was released that provides convincing evidence of his corruption. How likely do I think that Biden was threatened in that manner by Democrats? Not very. But it’s certainly a possibility, and would act as a potent motivator, much as it did for Richard Nixon at the hands of Republicans – for far less serious offenses.
[You can find Part I of “The Selling of Kamala” here.]
At the DNC they’re trying to perform an amazing sleight of hand that’s supposed to get people to believe that two plus two equals five. Virtually every sentient being in the US is aware that Kamala Harris has been the vice president for the last three and a half years – that is, for the duration of the entire Biden administration so far – and so it takes some doing to divorce her from responsibility for those years. But the Democrats know it’s necessary for them to perform this piece of revisionist history.
Enter the master Democrat magician: Barack Obama. He said many things last night at the convention. But among them was this:
“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse,” [Obama] said. “America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.
When Obama refers to years of “bluster and bumbling and chaos,” we on the right might immediately perceive that as an excellent description of the Biden administration’s record, particularly on the economy and the Afghanistan withdrawal. But the right is not Obama’s target audience. He isn’t trying to conjure up that image except as a description of the Trump years for his base, although he’s probably also trying to appeal to the independent voters who see Trump as a problem and have bought much of the MSM/Democrat description of him.
But even more striking to my mind is Obama’s use of metaphors of narrative, of both movies and books. A sequel. A new chapter. A new story. It’s a reliance on what author Milan Kundera called “imagology” in his book Immortality [emphasis mine]:
For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.
The Democrats are banking on the fact that for the majority of Americans imagology will be stronger than reality. The actual story of the moment is not a “story” at all, it’s the reality of what Americans are experiencing: inflation, wars, crime, homelessness, unchecked illegal immigration, mental illness, addiction. And another reality is that Democrats have been in power for nearly four years, and the number two person who’s been in power during that time has been none other than Kamala Harris. To pretend otherwise is definitely to create a story – a fiction. But the Democrats are counting on voters wanting that story to be true, and desiring so very much for the story to be true that they believe it rather than their own lying eyes.
This emphasis on stories and narratives – and empty vague rhetoric – was one of the first things I ever noticed about Obama. And whenever things got rough during his presidency, pundits and politicians who supported him would talk about how the Democrats just hadn’t gotten their narrative out to the public properly. All failures were treated as failures to communicate rather than actual failures in the real world.
I’m in awe of how sickeningly brilliant and transparently emotional the current Democrat approach to Kamala Harris’ candidacy and record is. There’s no pretense of talking to the whole country; the goal is to super-energize the Democrats’ base and pull in a certain percentage of the middle (we’ll leave aside for now the question of whether fraud will be involved as well). The idea is not just to regard the Trump years as a strange yet temporary halt to the progress the Democrats have made; it is also to forget the reality (as opposed to the revisionist narrative) of the Biden years, even though Kamala Harris is practically an incumbent who is deeply connected to the Biden administration.
It’s almost a form of hypnosis, a willed amnesia.
Reading about it is enough to remind me of the deep duplicity of the Obama years, as well as what was to me the inexplicable worship of the man. As of this moment, I see that I’ve written 1,722 posts on Obama and this will be the 1,723rd. And yet his influence on this country and the world has been so large that the high number of posts doesn’t seem excessive. Reading about his speech reminds me how he managed to make so many people believe that his sonorous voice and the slogans of hope and change would lead to something wonderful, a quasi-spiritual awakening and finally – finally! – the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
And now they’re singing that old song, eight years later, in order to elect a person incredibly ill-suited to convey the magic, a magic I never could perceive but which I know affected many people so deeply that they must be nostalgic for it.
Or maybe, reading between the lines, the Democrat listeners understand that Kamala Harris will only be the figurehead, much like royalty in Britain, and that the real power will remain in the Obamas. And if so, that’s perfectly fine with most Democrats.
On this administration’s jobs creation:
BREAKING: 818,000 jobs that the Harris-Biden administration claimed to have “created” aren’t actually there, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This is the largest downward revision to employment in 15 years. pic.twitter.com/6ryjKs5kbK
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 21, 2024
Even the NY Times covered the story, but in a very low-key “not much to see here” way, and without mentioning either Biden or Harris at all.
Was this a case of outright deception on the part of the admininistration?:
Although it’s impossible to know whether the BLS’s misstatement of employment data was intentional or simply an error, given the drastic lengths to which Democrats have already gone to keep Trump out of the White House — the 2016 Russian collusion hoax, two Trump impeachments, the October 2020 letter signed by 51 former intelligence community officials declaring the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign, the government’s insistence that the COVID-19 lab leak theory was a conspiracy, four bogus Trump indictments, two spurious civil lawsuits in New York, concerted efforts to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in several blue states, and the Democrats’ extraordinary efforts to hide Biden’s deteriorating cognitive health — it’s become more and more difficult to trust this administration.
I would say that long ago it became impossible to trust this administration. Then again, you can also trust them to be incompetent as well as to lie.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Here’s an interesting piece by Robert Graboyes, who calls attention to this NY Times article from last February which discussed a poll taken at the end of 2023, in which 154 political scientists ranked the U.S. presidents in terms of greatness. The Times article had the following title and subtitle:
Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last: President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.
Let that sink in: Biden was ranked as the fourteenth greatest president in our nation’s history, mostly for the supreme feat of keeping Trump from getting a second term. Meanwhile, Trump was dead last on the same list – the least great president ever, in their opinion.
And these are professors engaged in molding the minds of our young people. Is it any wonder we’re in big trouble?
Here are some of the details of the poll:
Respondents included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics, as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses. 525 respondents were invited to participate, and 154 usable responses were received, yielding a 29.3% response rate.
Hmmm; not the greatest response rate. Perhaps those with a bone to pick were most motivated to fill in the form:
… Abraham Lincoln again tops the list (95.03 average), followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90.32), Teddy Roosevelt (78.58), Thomas Jefferson (77.53), Harry Truman (75.34), Barack Obama (73.8), and Dwight Eisenhower (73.73).
The most notable changes in this ordering are Franklin Delano Roosevelt moving up to #2 from the third spot last year, and Dwight Eisenhower falling back to #8 from #6 last year. The bottom of the rankings is also relatively stable. Donald Trump rates lowest (10.92), behind James Buchanan (16.71), Andrew Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6), William Henry Harrison (26.01), and
Warren Harding (27.76).
That tells you more about academia than it does about presidents. In no universe – even one composed of Democrats – should Obama be number seven, and in no universe should Trump be last.
One of the strangest and most depressing things about the survey is that, when the results were broken down by the politics of the respondents, there wasn’t all that much difference between most of the rankings from self-reported conservatives versus self-reported liberals. For example, Obama was rated almost as highly by Republicans as by Democrats, and by conservatives as by liberals. Go figure. And Trump was rated almost as low by all those groups, although the difference between left and right was a little greater for Trump. But he was rated universally very low by all political persuasions.
Does this mean that most college professors who call themselves “conservatives” or “Republicans” are of the NeverTrumper variety? Probably. Academia is a club of sorts, and it tends to be a snobbish one at that. Or perhaps those who might disagree with the low assessments of Trump were among the ones who didn’t return the survey.
The number of respondents on the right was especially small. Here are the figures:
Democrats – 95
Republicans – 15
Independents/Others – 44
Liberals – 98
Conservatives – 20
Moderates – 36
Trump is certainly and intentionally a polarizing character—a provocateur. But how does one justify 170 votes for Trump as “Most Polarizing,” versus only 33 votes for Abraham Lincoln? Inexplicably, Lincoln also received 60 votes for “Least Polarizing” president.
I think I might be able to explain the contradiction in the “polarizing” numbers for Lincoln. They make some sense if the group rating him most polarizing was speaking about opinions of Lincoln in Lincoln’s own time, and the group rating him least polarizing was speaking about opinions of Lincoln in recent times.
Biden got only 36 votes for “most polarizing” – and he is in fact extremely polarizing.
This is academia today.
I didn’t watch the DNC last night, but apparently the Democrats gave Biden the honor of addressing the crowd. That was rather magnanimous of them, considering he’s still the president and that he had won the primaries and was their designated nominee for 2024 until just a short while ago.
Someone also scheduled Biden’s speech for 11:30 PM, which seems exquisitely cruel considering that he tends to fade far earlier than that.
I forget what article I read it in, but a pundit on the right described the speech as Joe delivering his own eulogy. He had to pretend that all of this was just fine with him – that it was his own choice, really, to suddenly give up the office he’d pursued for so many decades, finally achieved, and had clung to tenaciously right up to the point when he was forced to let it go.
Here’s a description of the speech:
If the Harris campaign had any hopes that Joe would let them get distance from his record, they were dashed. “When I say we I mean Kamala and me,” he emphasized, reminding voters that there’s no turning the page by voting for Harris.
Biden tried to play the old hits, but they ring hollow now. He talked about Charlottesville and how he claims Trump as president “emboldened” and praised anti-Semites. “Hate has no safe harbor” in America, he says. But we saw how anti-Semites have safe harbors – literal encampments on college campuses, immune from the law – in Joe Biden’s America. Biden even said of the pro-Hamas protestors, “Those protesters out in the street. They’ve got a point.”
It’s sadly appropriate that Biden invoked ye olde Charlottesville hoax at this point, since that’s the way he kicked off his 2020 campaign as well. So the Charlotteville hoax is a bookend to his campaigns. And at the same time that we see Biden’s mendacity about what Trump meant by the phrase, we see his deep hypocrisy when he sympathized with the “point” of the anti-Israel “demonstrators,” which he mischaracterized as wanting the killings of innocents on both sides to end.
And the following just drips with stagy falseness:
Of course, the pretense of one big happy family had to be maintained. Biden denied that he was angry at the Democrats who forced him off the ticket. Nancy Pelosi stood in the front row holding a “We Love Joe” sign, just weeks after wielding the knife. She came to bury Joe, not to praise him.
What a travesty.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have issued their report on Biden’s corruption, which comes a mite too late for anyone to care. Not that more than half the nation would have cared anyway, even if Joe were running again. Andrew C. McCarthy writes:
It is an important summary of the Biden Family Business, as much accountability as the public can expect given the limitations of congressional investigations that are stonewalled by an incumbent administration.
It is, moreover, a useful record of that stonewalling — very much including the corruption of the Justice Department — which connects the current Biden administration with the tireless self-dealing of Biden’s career, culminating in his term as vice president. …
Comer’s committee traces the money trail from Hunter, to Joe’s brother Jim, to Joe Biden himself.
All of this monetization of Joe Biden’s political power should be part of the criminal tax trial Hunter faces in about two weeks.
Why isn’t it? Because the Biden-Harris Justice Department buried it.
Of course they did. Integrity is in short supply these days.
And meanwhile, from a speech by Tim Walz at the DNC delegates’ breakfast yesterday:
We get an opportunity tonight to say a thank you to the best president of my lifetime that I’ve been able to witness, to someone who’s delivered time and time again, someone who made the selfless act of handing that torch to an incredible leader.
You need a strong stomach to listen to that sort of thing, especially while eating.