Featured work of the … week? — again, from my earlier period. When I croak, you'd regret not having bought this.
Acrylic on canvas, framed, 10" x 8": $115 (includes shipping). I cannot recall its source; it's been years. Payment may be made via PayPal (see sidebar). First come first serve, but first email me (pmcarp at mchsi.com) so that I know it is no longer available. I'll mark it "SOLD" upon the initial, emailed buy.
In the political press, one does what one can when such little historical drama reigned in the matchup of presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
The NY Times decided on this script: Although yesterday, on stage, they "project[ed] warmth toward each other," Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were "once-bitter rivals from opposite coasts and different generations."
From that latter passage, one might assume — if one did not know better — that between Biden and Harris there was once a burning antipathy equal to that of Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's.
Just what was this once-bitter rivalry — a phrase that carries with it the implication of yearslong dueling?
For maybe 48 hours, Harris' assault on Biden's busing record consumed the punditry, which instantly pronounced Ms. Harris a leading contender and possibly unstoppable force. Yet ...
… in hour 49, Harris stopped herself cold and thereupon became an also-ran. And that was it. A tempest in a thimble.
But, as already noted, in the political press, one covers imaginary wars with the lexiconic army one has.
Featured work of the week — from my much earlier period — taken from a Cézanne:
Acrylic on canvas, unframed, 11" x 14": $90 (includes handling and shipping cost, which means Trump's 2-day USPS priority mail, which means "whenever" — and that I cannot help). Payment may be made via PayPal (see sidebar). First come first serve, but first email me (pmcarp at mchsi.com) so that there are no duplicate sales. I shall swiftly mark it "SOLD" upon the initial buy.
Oliver Darcy, of CNN and Brian Stelter's "Reliable Sources," reports on weekdays' Hell Nights, during which, last night, "Fox News was in full attack mode..., throwing everything but the kitchen sink at Kamala Harris." (I'm still undecided: Who is more deserving of capital punishment? Every Fox News executive or any professional journalist who lazily uses clichés, such as "throwing everything but the kitchen sink"?)
Darcy issues his frightful bill of particulars:
"While her show isn't technically in a prime time slot," he writes, "I thought it was noteworthy how Martha MacCallum … noted that black leaders had urged Biden to select a woman of color as his running mate. MacCallum commented, 'I think, in a way, as a woman, it takes away from some of the selection in some ways.'"
Only the perspicacious Ms. MacCallum could "think" that limiting Biden's selection to less than 14 percent of the US population diminished his running-mate options "in some ways."
MacCallum's semi-primetime howler failed to deter Darcy from enduring more. He continues: "Tucker Carlson started his show attacking Harris as a 'one-dimensional' candidate who [sic] he described as perhaps the 'single most transactional human being in America.' Carlson said that 'there are time-share salesman you could trust more' than Harris and 'payday lenders who are more sincere.'"
It seems horseshit salesman Carlson, who "repeatedly mispronounced" Kamala, provided no source for his rather harsh assessment of Sen. Harris. It's just a right-wing tic, like always saying "Democrat Party" instead of "Democratic."
Darcy boldly persevered. "Sean Hannity's opening monologue was fairly predictable…," framing the moderate Ms. Harris "as a supporter of socialism with a 'radical extremist record' that is 'atrocious.'" Further declared Hannity: This "solidifies what's the most extreme radical far-left out of the mainstream ticket of any major political party in American history."
No, really, no shit. He actually said that, according to Darcy.
And in a segment titled "Meanwhile, Ingraham scrapes bottom of barrel," Darcy notes that she "read what she characterized as a 'telling tidbit' from Biden's email to supporters in which he said, 'I’ve decided that Kamala Harris is the best person to help me take this fight to Donald Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021.'"
Ah-ha! commented the oddly misogynistic blond harpy: "Wait, wait, to lead this nation? Wasn't that you supposed to be on the top of the ticket doing all that leading for us, Joe? You know, that whole presidency thing? Come on, man. Even Joe is witted enough to understand that he's not really going to be running the show if he wins in November."
Boy do these asses ever miss Hillary.
And there it is, Oliver Darcy's dispiriting roundup of merely the first night of Fox News' gutter-tabloid defamation machine. It's still rather early in the silly season — the two parties' brain-numbing conventions have yet to be held — but in watching Fox only, one would think the one-dimensional, socialistically extreme, demented barbarians of the "far left" were already reconstructing Barack Obama's reeducation camps.
As I conclude this piece, there are still 82 days, 12 hours and eight minutes remaining until Trump's self-exploding Wile E. Coyote Day. God give us strength — and pray ye that He throws not the corroded kitchen sink at us.
Make US Great Again
Biden/Harris
Monmouth University Polling finds Joe Biden leading Trump by 10 points among 868 registered voters (51% to 41%, 6-10 Aug.), with the president's 41% matching his averaged approval rating. "Fully half (50%) of registered voters continue to say they are not at all likely to support the incumbent," (italics original), reports Monmouth, which is happily rated "A+" by FiveThirtyEight.
Moving from the happy to hilarious, though, is Monmouth's reporting that "just over 1 in 5 registered voters (22%) … do not have a favorable opinion of either candidate. Biden is the preferred presidential choice among this group by 55% to 17%."
In other words, by a wide, 38-point spread, even those voters who are indifferent to, or just downright unfavorably disposed toward, Biden prefer his election over the bloated, orange reptile's.
And that, gentle reader, is what has Trump weeping with rage. Evidently he miscalculated by "winning" for us too much. If he had just settled for being a great president rather than the Messiah, he himself would be winning as I write.
The NYT's Ross Douthat has read It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, by former Republican propagandist Stuart Stevens. Mr. Douthat was not amused. He was, however, prodigiously confused:
Stevens presses a critique of Republican voters, activists and operatives — and white religious conservatives above all [which particularly offended conservative Catholic Douthat] — that makes its author seem less like a convert with a tale to tell and more like the
world’s most clueless mercenary, a political veteran who noticed only after several decades that he was fighting for what was, by his own account, transparently the wicked side….
"What does [an authentic] center-right party in America stand for?" Stevens asks, in the closest thing to an ideological statement his book contains. "Once this was easy to answer: fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution."
In fact, this list [does not distill] the issues that conservative voters cared most about before 2016…. All it distills is a cloistered center-right elite consensus, hawkish and globalist and fatally naïve, whose failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and China and domestic political economy mattered at least as much to the rise of Trump as the crankish or bigoted aspects of conservatism that Stevens spends his book decrying.
Of course Stevens' list fails to itemize what conservative voters cared most about before 2016 — since what they most cared about were the crankish or bigoted aspects of conservatism that Stevens spends his book decrying.
They cared about the partisan racism that Goldwater introduced in the early to mid-1960s; they cared about "shiftless blacks" in Cadillacs and on welfare in the Reagan years; they detested the fiscal sanity that ultimately gripped one-term President George H.W. Bush; they rallied around the militarism and domestic lawlessness of H.W.'s son — and throughout, they gave not a damn about "fiscal sanity, free trade, being strong on Russia, personal responsibility, the Constitution."
That was Stevens' whole point, Ross. Hence what I least care about is whether Stevens is or is not "the world’s most clueless mercenary." It's just not relevant to what he now describes — to paraphrase — as his party's downward trajectory into the squalid wasteland of modern conservatism, which, as we all know and Stevens now admits, is squarely opposed to actual conservatism.
The payoff went to Donald J. Trump, who simply popularized Douthat's pejorative of a "cloistered center-right elite consensus," which, with all its hideous faults, still can't compare unfavorably to Trump's quotidian destruction of the entire American political tradition.
"I would like to repeat that it has passed all the necessary tests," said Russian President Vladimir Putin about his country's newly developed coronavirus vaccine, which, in fact, is far from having passed all necessary tests.
The World Health Organization has warned about short-circuiting Phase 3 trials, "which normally last for months and involve thousands of people," reports the Associated Press (via Politico). In Russia, human studies did not begin until 17 June, testing all of 76 subjects.
Putin compounded his lie about necessary testing having been completed with yet another lie — one worthy of his feathered-bird pal, Donald Trump: "The most important thing is to ensure full safety of using the vaccine and its efficiency."
Russia's Health Ministry added that "the vaccine is expected to provide immunity from the coronavirus for up to two years" — a pleasant thing to know, but only if it is true, which no one can know because Putin short-circuited the Phase 3 trials.
And so all that Russia's president has confirmed is the axiomatic garbage of the Trump-Stalin mindset: Whenever expedient, the truth is helpful; but propaganda is forever priceless.
The Washington Post's splendid Ashley Parker:
Rather than look for campaign ammunition in the former vice president’s long track record of politically vulnerable votes and policy proposals, Trump has instead chosen to describe Biden as a godless
Marxist bent on destroying the country with a radical agenda that would make Che Guevara blanch….
To hear Trump tell it, the former vice president and longtime U.S. senator is "the most extreme left-wing candidate in history." Biden is going to "abolish the police" and "abolish the suburbs." Biden is even "against God….
"He’s following the radical left agenda, take away your guns, destroy your Second Amendment, no religion, no anything, hurt the Bible, hurt God," Trump said Thursday in Ohio. "He’s against God. He’s against guns"…. [He's] a Trojan Horse for the Radical Left Agenda," and "the radical left has taken over Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Don’t let them take over America."
Politics professor Ken Goldstein noted to Ms. Parker that "there is certainly this notion that a bunch of wizards sit around and come up with this caricature and then spend hundreds of millions of dollars to drive the caricature, but it only really works if there is some kernel of truth to it."
I would add that Trump's peculiar, twofold approach to campaign messaging is his incurable compulsion to slander every opponent and every critic at any level; and perhaps equal to that failing is that he's simply incapable of comprehending, let alone conceiving, in any depth, any non-fatuous policy ideas.
Trump is not the ideological guardian of conservatism or even pseudoconservatism; he's just a cheap, frothing junkyard Dobermann — or, as Tommy Lee Jones, Agent K, said: "Imagine a giant cockroach, with unlimited strength, a massive inferiority complex, and a real short temper."
Kristi Noem, governor, S.D.: "[In 2019, in the Oval Office,] he said, 'Kristi, come on over here. Shake my hand,' and so I shook his hand, and I said, 'Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.'" [Not many people know that.]
Trump: 'Do you know it's my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?'"
Noem: "I started laughing. He wasn't laughing, so he was totally serious." [Despite having laughed in his face because of his buffoonishness, the South Dakota governor is "a steadfast ally of Mr. Trump," observes the Times.]
Later, Noem "greeted Trump when he arrived in the state for his July Fourth celebrations at the monument with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included his face."
***
For this country's first 100 years, just actively seeking the presidency was considered a garish act by the electorate: The job came to the man, not the man to the job. As merely one example of how this sitting president has debauched even the job itself, he has actively sought to deface Mount Rushmore by having his added to it.
Trump has the humility of John Gotti — without his better-fitting suits — and the integrity of Mitch McConnell — without his good looks.