Today's Word Safari

Given Trump's lack of verbal discipline, it may be a bit of a stretch to latch onto "We vs They" as an absolute. 

But also given Trump's predatory cunning, it's hard to avoid concluding that's exactly what he meant.

Oy

Trump lies, and the whole world has to stop for a beat or two while normal people assess and rebut.

This is not how it should be, but that's how it's been anyway.

That's what most people have expected. But now it seems like the lies are being exposed fairly quickly, and by more people, to a point where the norm is becoming a matter of most folks just dismissing it as bullshit almost nonchalantly.

Seems like a bit of a shift.

So what we have now is a campaign of "Yuh-Huh vs Nuh-Huh."

Considering that Trump and the MAGA gang have to be getting worried now that the same old shit ain't workin' as good as it used to - so they're turning up the volume, which is starting to have the opposite effect of what they need - I think I have to call this a win right now.

BUT ...

Don't get cocky

Get together

Get to work

Get shit done

A Question

Q:

How did you go broke?

A:

Gradually at first, and then all of a sudden.

A guy like Trump - somebody with lots of charisma, and so devoid of honor and principles that he has total confidence in every horseshit thing he says - he's unbeatable. Until he isn't.

And we already know he can be beaten because Joe Biden did exactly that by getting 81 million of us up off the couch, and rallied us to a worthy cause - in the middle of a pandemic that was killing people by the thousands every day just because they got off that couch and mingled with a few others at the grocery store for 20 or 30 minutes.

Also, remember Biden nearly got his face torn off by a very aggressive Kamala Harris in the first debate in 2020 - which I think made her the obvious choice for VP (because Joe is kinda savvy like that), which put her in position to learn everything she needed to learn, and to learn it from a true master of the political arts.

Now we've got a trained and ready Kamala Harris at the head of a political coalition that runs from Bernie Sanders

• to AOC
• to Jasmine Crockett
• to Stanley McChristal
• to Bruce Springsteen
• to Magic Johnson
• to Jeff Flake
• to Taylor Swift
• to Christine Todd-Whitman
• to Chuck Hagel
• to Dick Cheney

Dick-fucking-Cheney!?!

So, god willin' and the crick don't rise, Trump is about to do what he's always done eventually - he's about to go broke.

Believe it or not, I'm not all giddy and shit - plenty of bad things can happen in the 30 days we have left before the election - but there's a shift happening.

The American Voter is an odd duck. Aggravating as hell, because sometimes we act like a bunch of high schoolers trying to make up our minds about Homecoming Queen, and should we go with the girl all our friends say they're voting for, or maybe we'll write in Betty Boop, or maybe we just turn up our noses because who wants to play this fuck-around game anyway?

All that said - feel the wave.

Be the wave.

But -

Don't get cocky.

Get together and do the work.

Send those fuckers packin'

Ass-Kickin'

Highlights

Even WaPo Gets It

Trump is very worried that Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets in Ohio, so I guess he'll be leaving Lindsey Graham at home on his next trip up there.

Opinion

Fox News cleans up another Trump mess

After the debate, the network worked to keep the MAGA faithful in a state of blissful ignorance.

The reviews were almost universally savage after Donald Trump’s debate debacle, in which the former president ranted about migrants eating pets while getting his clock cleaned by an opponent he had insisted was “stupid.” Even the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing editorialists thought that Vice President Kamala Harris “won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity,” while Karl Rove added in a column that the night “was a train wreck for him, far worse than anything Team Trump could have imagined.”

And then, in a universe all its own, was Fox News.

“All the memorable lines were from Donald Trump,” host Jesse Watters proclaimed after the debate ended. (He specifically cited Trump’s “eating the pets” line.) “He just had some great knockouts,” Watters added. “And so this race just got tighter.”

“That’s probably true,” anchor Bret Baier agreed.

An ebullient Harris campaign immediately called for another debate. (Trump, who once called for debates “ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, ANYPLACE,” eventually refused the challenge after much hemming and hawing.) But Harris’s gesture of confidence prompted Fox News’s Laura Ingraham to argue: “They don’t think she won. They don’t think she’s in a position to win this race.”

Sean Hannity interviewed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who claimed Trump notched “a big win.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Trump had “the best closing in presidential debate history.”

Trump himself joined Hannity in the spin room. “I think it was my best debate ever,” he said.

And that was just within the first 75 minutes after the debate. The next morning, Trump was back, on “Fox & Friends.” “I won the debate by a lot,” he said, and “every single poll last night had me winning like 90-10.” The hosts did not contradict him. At the same time, Trump argued that ABC News should lose its broadcasting license, because “they had a rigged show with somebody that maybe even had the answers.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Watters returned to the airwaves. “I found [Harris] evasive, found her unlikable, preachy and, instinctually, I don’t know that’s going to play with men,” he said. “The signature moments that you see on the internet after this, she didn’t have any. … Trump had them all.”

On Thursday afternoon, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt announced on Fox that Trump “is in the process of winning the debate” because “a debate isn’t over in a day” and “upon further review, the American public has decided that debate was rigged.”

It was a case study in how the dominant “news” organ of the right cleans up Trump’s messes. When President Joe Biden had his disastrous debate, liberal outlets and commentators panned the performance and ultimately helped to force him out of the race. But when Trump had what was, objectively, a bad night, Fox News led a movement to claim it didn’t happen.

Sixty-seven million viewers saw an out-of-control Trump claim he won the 2020 election, complain that those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were “treated so badly,” argue about his crowd size, assert that he had read that Harris “was not Black” and that Biden “hates her,” admit that he still only has “concepts of a plan” on health care, make odd statements such as “I got involved with the Taliban” and “she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” and utter this ludicrous slander about Haitian migrants: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Fox News then told its viewers (14 million people watched the simulcast on the network) that they had not seen what they just saw. Unless I missed it, viewers also weren’t told the other news of the night, that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris after the debate.

Often, after my weekly cataloguing of Trump’s madness and mayhem, readers ask why his followers don’t see that he is off his rocker. This is why. Fox News sane-washes him — and it sets the tone for the entire MAGA social media ecosystem.

The main disagreement on the network seemed to be between those who believed the debate had been a triumph for Trump and those who believed the two ABC News moderators denied the GOP nominee his rightful triumph.

“Tonight’s debate was three on one,” proposed Hannity.

“Yes, it was a three-on-one debate,” chorused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“Three against one,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.).

“It was three on one,” said Lara Trump.

“We had three against one,” said Trump himself.

During a commercial break came, in at least certain markets, an ad from right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein’s super-PAC blaming Harris for “murders, rapes, attacks on children” and for being “a complete failure.” It was difficult to distinguish the news coverage from the attack ad.

Fox News host Sean Hannity in the spin room before the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on Tuesday in Philadelphia. (Matt Rourke/AP)
If Fox News viewers were listening carefully, they could have heard snippets of reality. Brit Hume acknowledged that “Trump had a bad night” and that Harris was “a different person from the absolute dunderhead so many of us thought she was during her conduct as vice president.” And a token Democrat, former congressman Harold Ford, politely disagreed with the general tenor of things: “I just think she won.”

But after 15 minutes of this post-debate “analysis,” Hannity took over the anchor chair and ended all dissent. He said Harris had presented nothing but “pre-rehearsed, memorized platitudes” and “lots of kind of weird faces and expressions.” He then went after the “left-wing moderators. The biggest loser of the night, ABC, Disney, Bob Iger’s network. It was a disgrace.” Hannity was upset that the moderators had not brought up the vice president’s position on “banning plastic straws,” among other things.

“It’s an embarrassment to journalism,” said Rubio.

“The ABC moderators were complicit in her running a completely fact free debate performance,” submitted Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.).

Trump running mate JD Vance, also joining Hannity, agreed that the moderators “did a terrible job” while “President Trump did a good job.”

Hannity was upset that Harris “wasn’t fact-checked.” (Maybe this was because Harris hadn’t claimed migrants were eating people’s pets.)

Hannity decided to “dip in” to post-debate remarks by Harris to supporters but cut that off after 31 seconds, just as she was about to give her assessment of the debate. Then he tried to broadcast an unannounced appearance by Trump in the spin room. But this didn’t go well, either, because, while it was difficult to hear Trump, reporters’ questions were loud and clear:

Why didn’t you look at her?

Did she get under your skin?

Why not let the performance speak for itself?

Why not have a second debate?

Trump made his way over to Hannity for some gentler treatment. The former president informed his interviewer that he had “won the debate” and “we’re getting great reviews.” As evidence, he cited viewer surveys from right-wing sites. “We looked at one poll, it was 92 to 7,” he said. “We looked at another, 86 to 3.”

“Wow,” Hannity replied.

At one point, Trump started to veer into repeating his claims that migrants are eating pets — and Hannity cut him off.

“Your people are calling for you to roll,” he said.

The next morning on Fox News, Trump was still maintaining that “every single poll had us winning by a lot, despite the fact that it was an unfair debate obviously.”

And the Fox coverage continued to support that view. “It was a disaster for her last night. … Donald Trump did far better. … Who the hell do they think they are fact-checking?” House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), on Fox Business Network, cited the same “polls” that Trump did, saying, “he clearly prevailed.”

Vance, in another interview with Fox, said voters “are not going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans.” (He was talking not about his boss but about Taylor Swift.)

In one lonely corner of Fox, host Neil Cavuto tried to preserve an island of sanity: “He says … he won the debate and all the polls show that he won the debate. I haven’t seen a single one show that,” he remarked to Trump surrogate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“They’re polls that you see on the internet and a lot of them probably have statistical problems with them,” Kennedy acknowledged. “I would suspect that the polling over the next week is going to show probably a slight drop in his support, particularly among independents.”

Trump responded as though Cavuto had just eaten his pet. “Neil Cavuto, Fox’s Lowest Rated Anchor, is one of the WORST on Television,” he posted on social media.

Of course, Trump doesn’t have a real pet. Fox News is his pet. And if he’s to keep the MAGA faithful in a state of blissful ignorance, he’s going to need Fox to roll over — again and again.

ICYMI

"They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets." - Former President Trump
byu/iforgottoshutthegate inThatsInsane

Ka-Boom

Today's Jen

Some good points here:

1. Trump shits on veterans, first by comparing the CMH with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and then mixing that one up with the Congressional Gold Medal
2. Then he gasses on about how CMH recipients are all fucked up physically and eww - nobody wants to see that.
3. The kicker there is that we all know he has to elevate the Presidential Medal over everything else because only he decides that one, and nothing is allowed to be better than anything he does.
4. And yes - he did call service members suckers and losers.
5. He can't articulate whatever "policy" he's lying about at the moment - not even when his staff has it all written out for him.
6. To reiterate: He don't know jack shit about jack shit.

Jen Rubin 'splains it all.

Note the overall theme here that hits on good salesmanship - which is what politics really is all about. Rubin goes after Trump - hard - and drives up his "negatives", and then segues into some very positive reinforcement for Harris. It's exactly how they teach it in the seminars.

Today's IG

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Reecie @BlackWomenViews (@reeciecolbert)

Quick Reminder

1. Guilty
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34. Guilty

Trump is out on bail, and may become a serious flight risk.

Kamala is an experienced prosecutor who knows how to deal with lowlife perps like Donald Trump

Good Reason

Today's Fucked Up "Attack"

Toons Toons Everywhere There's Toons

click 'em

⬇︎ ⬇︎ ⬇︎

Why Politics?

Because the people who decide what you pay in interest on your credit card, and your mortgage, and your car loan are involved in politics.

The people who set your rent and your base pay - they're involved in politics.

The people who tell you to shut up and live with it when your water looks like piss, and your air makes your kids gasp for a breath, and the food you eat is both too expensive, and too poisonous - they're involved in politics.

When you complain about having to choose

between the lesser of two evils,

and that means you stay home,

refusing to participate,

you're letting someone else choose

the greater of those evils for you.

Kamala's Resumé

Outa The Shoot

★ VOTE ★

Like your ex has gone batshit crazy

and you're gettin' a restraining order

Kamala v Trump

Kamala Harris’s Harsh New Trump Takedown Cleverly Flips Script on GOP

When it comes to abortion rights (or lack thereof) in the U.S. today, Trump and the Republicans represent the status quo.

As Republicans scramble to attack the youthful, energetic Vice President Kamala Harris, after spending months hammering President Biden’s age and infirmity, they’ve hit on a new argument: that Harris owns her boss’s record of failure from top to bottom, so running against her will involve only minimal repurposing of the ongoing GOP indictment of Joe Biden’s America.

“This is the essence of what Trump’s campaign believes—that any Democrat who picks up the party’s banner will inherit the baggage that made Biden unelectable,” reports The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta. The campaign wants this election to remain a referendum on the status quo under the unpopular incumbent, allowing Republicans to continue exploiting deep voter dissatisfaction with the country’s direction.

But Harris’s maiden speech as the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday shows that she may be able to flip this script in a surprising way—thanks to the national debate over abortion.

It’s often said that Harris can “prosecute the case” against Trump on reproductive freedom. But there’s far more to it than this: As a skillful communicator on the issue, she can also argue that if voters elect a Democratic president and Congress, they will codify protections for abortion rights nationwide—and argue it far more compellingly than the devout Catholic Biden ever could.

If that were to be accomplished, it would actually constitute a dramatic redirection of the status quo that now reigns in post–Roe v. Wade America. Importantly, it would reverse the status quo wrought by Trump, who brags about appointing the Supreme Court justices that struck down Roe—a status quo that will be perpetuated into the indefinite future, and likely made much worse, if Trump is elected to a second term.

That’s why some of the most important moments in Harris’s speech—delivered at campaign headquarters in Delaware—came when she contrasted two sharply opposed visions of our country’s future through the prism of reproductive rights.

“If Trump gets the chance, he will sign a national abortion ban to outlaw abortion in every single state,” Harris said. “But we are not going to let that happen.”

Democrats, she added, will work to elect congressional majorities “who agree that government should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.” When Congress passes a measure “to restore reproductive freedom,” she said, “as president of the United States, I will sign it into law.”

Much has been made of the hardest-hitting portion in Harris’s speech, in which she described her previous work as a prosecutor going after “predators who abused women,” before adding: “Believe me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.” The suggestion, of course, is that the prosecutor is well positioned to challenge the sexual predator.

But when placed alongside the abortion contrast—codified reproductive rights versus a national ban—that broadside takes on sharper meaning. Harris, whose speech linked reproductive freedom to other fundamental liberties, is campaigning on a promise of a freer society for women, a place where self-determination flourishes. After all, control over family planning and bodily autonomy are essential if we are to live as free equals.

By contrast, Harris said, Trump promises an America awash in “chaos, fear, and hate.” The post-Roe regime has indeed unleashed darkness and turmoil: women everywhere wondering if they will get emergency reproductive care in red states that have banned abortion, even as doctors operate in perpetual fear that treating women in dire conditions could violate the law.

What has gone largely unnoticed is how this could address Harris’s profound political challenges. She does face deep vulnerabilities related to public perceptions (often highly inaccurate) of the current state of the country, particularly on the economy and immigration. Nate Cohn of The New York Times made the serious version of this argument, concluding that Trump will be tough to beat for deep structural reasons:

In fairness to Ms. Harris, it would be challenging for any Democrat today to advance a clear agenda for the future. Mr. Biden struggled to do so in his re-election campaign. The party has held power for almost 12 of the last 16 years, and it has exhausted much of its agenda; there aren’t many popular, liberal policies left in the cupboard. As long as voters remain dissatisfied with the status quo and the Democratic nominee, a campaign to defend the system might not be the slam dunk Democrats once thought it was.

But there’s another strange structural fact about this election: Trump is a kind of “super-incumbent,” as Biden adviser Ron Klain recently told me, one who is in no small part responsible for creating the status quo on abortion. It’s a despised status quo too: Large majorities oppose Roe’s demise, and state-level referendums enshrining abortion rights keep passing by large margins, including in red states.

A promise to codify Roe gives Harris the opportunity to campaign on an agenda of change. Whether or not Trump would sign a national abortion ban—he likely would if a GOP Congress sent him one—red states will continue imposing ever more onerous reproductive restrictions, regardless of the awful consequences they continue to unleash. Codifying national protections would counter that.

From the 2022 midterms and the fall of Roe to the present, Harris has been out there arguing the case on reproductive freedom, acquitting herself particularly well when calling for the codification of Roe. This often received little press attention given her vice presidential status. But now that she’s the presumptive nominee, that well-honed case will get wide elevation in the national media.

“The analogy I use is that she’s like a Dave Chappelle-level comedian doing basement shows,” Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki told me. “And now she’s ready for her network special.”

On top of all this, as Ron Brownstein points out, Harris’s energy and fluency on the issue enable her to use it to appeal to core constituencies that Democrats are struggling with. These include younger and nonwhite voters, particularly women, as well as educated and independent women in the battleground states.

Indeed, this is a key reason why Trump’s choice of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as running mate now looks questionable. Vance is supposed to maximize appeal among blue-collar men, but he has endorsed a national abortion ban. And Vance has had some ugly moments linked to his vision of the proper place of women in familial and social life:

JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” and have “no direct stake” in America. pic.twitter.com/3DJY3pQTGe

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2024

That contrasts rather sharply with Harris’s new speech linking reproductive rights to a freer, more accommodating society, doesn’t it?

It would be folly to be confident that all this will outweigh Harris’s other liabilities. She is nationally unpopular, though not well known. She is likely vulnerable to attacks over her liberal pedigree, handling of immigration for Biden, and the unpopularity of Biden’s presidency. And for the incumbent vice president to indict her opponent as the architect of the hated status quo is counterintuitive and challenging to offer persuasively.

But this could constitute a powerful argument, one that might make the campaign about starkly opposing visions of the future. And it’s one Harris is uniquely positioned to make.

Love The Ad

This is from a while back. It hits, and hard.

Kamala Rising

If you're worried about Biden's longevity, or his capacity to serve - just remember Harris is on that ticket too.

If you don't like Biden, or you think it's time to hand things off to a younger warrior, then vote for Kamala Harris.

Can you think of a better way to extend the winning streak?

BTW, MAGA - if government shouldn't be deciding which toilet you can install in your bathroom, then government shouldn't be deciding when or if you can have kids.

The law cuts both ways. Handing government the power to prohibit abortion is handing it the power to require abortion.

I realize that doesn't fit with your Daddy State mindset, but you'll eventually have to let that go. Authoritarianism carries the seeds of its own destruction just like all the other ideologies - but nowadays, destruction comes quicker for fascism than it does for democracy.

Today's PG

Best explainer I've heard in a while.

The Dems have a good bench, guys. Stop worrying about what happens if Joe stumbles.

• He's good.
• She's good.
• We're good.
• It's all good.

As good as it ever is anyway.

Everybody take a deep breath and let's get to work.