If I recall correctly, I once asked how anyone can resist the occasional, demimonde slumming at Truth Social. Unlike other sites of dissipation and all-round ill-repute, TS is free, and it has it all. There is a house in Mar-a-Lago / They call The Rising Sun / It's been the ruin of many a poor boy / And God, I know I'm one.
But there is a downside I must warn you about, if you're considering becoming a self-victimized logged-in reader of smut. You'll begin seeing it in your inbox, too. The little squib I received this morning is representative of Donald's cringeworthy beggary — I rather suspect he really can go on without me, having pored through thousands of responses looking only for my name — although this one has the added nice touch of an opening tsk-tsk-tsk what-am-I-to-do.
(Do make sure you read the "The Rising Sun's" concluding lyrics just after his alms-seeking. They're in the original.)
Now the only thing a gambler needs Is a suitcase and a trunk And the only time he's satisfied Is when he's on a trump
***
A bit of background. According to the first volume of the Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, cited by Wikipedia, "The oldest published version of the lyrics is that printed by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1925."
Ah, what a great year that was. It was the year in which the Schutzstaffel — the SS — was founded by a xenophobic, severely unbalanced sociopathic reviler at rallies whose party finally achieved a respectable membership of over 27.000. By 1925 it was pretty apparent to foresighted onlookers that psychopathy can gain a shockingly, frighteningly large following.
It is exceptionally difficult to top Trump-Vance on the title's proposition. But David Von Drehle, usually a thoughtful Washington Post columnist, has managed to pull it off. If you disagree that he has outcrazied the aforementioned duo, I think you will agree that he at least came close.
Democrats should stop with the existential threat language because it’s not working.
I understand the allure of political pragmatism. In other such instances I'm in unflinching harmony with that approach. This one, however, presents some thundering questions.
If Trump went beyond his existence as an authentic "existential threat" and began fulminating at rallies that he will "dismiss Congress" as a king would parliament, order military invasions of Canada and Paraguay — both on Day One, the latter going as gifts to Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin ...
and order the immediate construction of concentration camps for the imprisonment of all Americans who identify as Democrats (as well as the monitoring of those suspicious independents) ...
should Democrats stop with the harsh language because their protests against, and condemnations of, Trump's explicit intentions weren't working with voters?
Would Democrats ever be forgiven by history for falling silent on America's would-be dictator's overt plans to convert the United States into a Fourth Reich?
Would American citizens forgive them once they witnessed, before being hauled off themselves, their neighbors being perp-walked to a paddy wagon by the Trump-stylized Stasi-Gestapo?
My examples of Trumpian extremes are, of course, extreme themselves. Yet they're not that far from the idiocies, tyrannies and dictatorial measures he would take if reelected via the "disowned" Project 2025.
Von Drehle overlooked a critical factor in his stop-with-it-already proposition. Directly following his statement above and in support of its pragmatism, he said [Democrats have] been saying it for almost 10 years and America’s still here.
What there is no question about is that America would not still be here if Trump had in his first term the Hitlerite inner circle and tens of thousands of servile, fascistic government employees that he has, in fact, explicitly said he will take with him into a second term.
In David Von Drehle's statements are vivid reflections of the political journalism pack that insists on treating Trump and Trumpism as an everyday politician and everyday ism ...
even though every word spoken, every act on display and every unambiguous written policy imported from the 1930s into modern American politics by Trump stand nakedly before the nation's political journalists, wearing blinders.
CNN's latest update reports that "thousands of people were injured Tuesday and several killed when their pagers exploded almost simultaneously across Lebanon,... A child was among at least nine killed in the blasts, which injured around 2,800 people, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said. At least 170 people are in a critical condition."
Najib Mikati, Lebanon’s prime minister, condemned Israel's terrorist attack as "a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty and a crime by all standards," as all terrorist attacks are. Former U.S. intelligence analyst David Kennedy believes it was a "supply chain attack"; in the manufacturing stage the pagers were maliciously modified, then shipped.
The Israeli "pager assault" was but a preliminary move to the far more ominous execution of Phase 2: "Israel has added a new objective to its ongoing war," writes CNN in a separate report. In an overnight meeting of Prime Minister Netanyahu's security council, the decision was made to deploy the nation's killing machines to the northern border.
"Though the return of residents of northern Israel has long been understood to be a political necessity," notes CNN, "this is the first time it has been made an official war goal." Netanyahu told U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein yesterday that returning the northern residents requires a "fundamental change in the security situation in the north."
Hezbollah has told Netanyahu that it will cease violence once Israel ceases its warring violence in Gaza. And Axios reports that Hochstein told Netanyahu that a war with Hezbollah is a really bad idea, in that it "risks a much broader and protracted regional conflict."
But no one, including his main and nearly singular benefactor, the U.S., can persuade Bibi into doing anything he first refuses to hear.
To those about to die, in Lebanon and Israel, we salute you. Gracious of you to do so in honoring Bibi.
And I, for one, pity Kamala Harris for the many migraines Bibi will give her should she find herself in the wintery Oval Office.
"Kamala Harris may be gaining ground on the economy.... [The poll found that] about 44 percent of registered voters trusted the vice president to manage it, compared with 42 percent supporting Trump, within the poll’s margin of error. But of the respondents who watched last week’s debate, 48 percent favored Harris on the economy.
"There are other signs that Americans may be changing their outlook. U.S. consumers increasingly feel better about prices and other economic matters, according to the latest sentiment survey conducted by the University of Michigan."
I was about to leave it at that, but I got tangled up in the poll's entrails and couldn't break free. They took hold of me more tightly since earlier polling had already shown Harris gaining on Trump in the economic arena. A few of them follow, and, usually true of public opinions, some of them are mystifying.
Among respondents, 74% said they "live comfortably," "meet expenses with a little left over," or "just meet expenses." In general, a pretty content crowd. Only 26% said they were "having trouble" meeting expenses, a stat much lower than I would have predicted.
Now when three-quarters of polling respondents tell you that financially they're pretty content, you'd likely surmise that their contentment springs from a pretty good economy, right? Not only is that not so in this business school's survey, it has been not so for many months.
In this case, roughly the same number of contented respondents (that 74%) was discontented (72%) with the U.S. economy, calling it "not so good" or "poor." Another mirror image captured in the poll was that the 27% who described "overall economic conditions" as "good" or "excellent" matched the above-mentioned 26% who had good reason to be discontented.
One secondary finding was that 34% saw "immigration and border security" as the most important issue in the presidential election, topped only by the 58% who said "economic issues, like jobs and the cost of living." Playing third was "the future of Social Security and Medicare," 32%.
A good way to look at all three — immigration being unfavorable to Harris — is that her gains on the economy and the Democratic firewall of entitlements overwhelm the immigration issue.
This finding motivated a silent chuckle on this here writer's part. When asked "how much have you seen, read, or heard recently about Kamala Harris' economic proposals," 62% said "some" or "a lot." When asked the same about Trump, the pollster heard the same 60%, given that margin thing.
Why the chuckle? Harris has been on the stump talking economic policies nonstop and for weeks on end, while just as nonstop Trump has been evacuating himself at rallies in spittingly ferocious defamations of everyone from DOJ's window washers to the president and his Democratic successor.
I'll close on two other positive points of interest; on the first, Harris nearly runs the table. Forty-nine percent of respondents said she would do a "better job [of] representing the interests" of the middle class — the largest class of people who vote. Only 36% said that about Trump.
Then on to other groups Harris pocketed. Just look at this table and her beautiful 10-point spreads on the above question, all the way down until, electorally, the spreads mean little, except for working bigly against Trump.
These stats would seem to outweigh the business school's survey finding of Harris' 2-point within-the-margin-of-error lead on the matter of whom voters' trust to responsibly manage the economy. They will outweigh the one finding and then gradually increase its size, assuming these voters begin connecting quite a few dots they've so far overlooked.
Because I'm a man of unlimited virtue, including exceptional humility, yesterday I donated a huge sum of cash — $10; hey, huge is relative to us plebeians and peasants — to Mary Trump's Democracy Defense Fund.
She explains on a page separate from the main that the DDF — "a hybrid federal Political Action Committee" — "coordinate[s] directly with candidates and run[s] independent expenditures into key races around the country."
(The website suggests giving amounts, but in her Twitter appeals she asks for as little as $5, an amount not suggested on the site. I doubled that to 10, because ... I'm a man of unlimited virtue.)
Key to niece Mary's fund is it that it's focused on congressional races, which too many voters neglect in a presidential year. Her organization "strive[s] to secure our electoral system from the authoritarian traitors who seek to destroy it."
Note the plural, traitors. Congress is overpopulated with D. Trump's wanton far-right clowns. Whichever way the presidential contest goes, meantime the country needs concerted campaigns to thin their herd.
Many wild guesses occur every day in this world and my share is that you feel more personal affinity with Mary Trump than with Section IRS Code 26 U.S.C. § 527's 501(c)(4) and sly 501(c)(3) PACs in competition.
If I happen to be right, then I also suggest that if you're financially able, by which I mean there's no pain involved, consider becoming almost as virtuous as I.
The best way to introduce this post is to quote Kamala Harris' response to a debate question about race. "I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us."
The second-best way (even though there can be no such thing), assuming you have not read his NY Times columns, is to introduce linguistics professor John McWhorter. His is a discipline that has long interested me, defined by one university as the "scientific study of language" and its focus on "the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general." Note: My approach is deeply unscientific.
I bring up McWhorter because of his 29 August piece, "The not-so-secret meaning of all the 'joy.'" By the air quote he meant "not just joy but JOY ... surrounding the elevation of Kamala Harris." The linguist, who is black, argued that this particular joy "is a result of one fact: that Harris is Black." And, he continued, the joy of her blackness is unjustified in that it treats her as a product of her skin color.
McWhorter sees this singular "fact" of Harris joy as a universal phenomenon, and he added another comprehensive element to his argument. "The thing sweeping so many people up is the idea [of] her being ... a Black woman at that." (Italics mine.)
I disagree intensely with him on both scores. I'd never enter a debate with linguist McWhorter, simply because I as a disciplinary amateur would be crushed by him the scientific professional. But on the politics and social relations of his argument I could hold my own. More than that, I believe I'd win the match.
I'll state my case in personal terms — but primarily as a microcosm of American society at large. What occurred to me, what shocked me in the way of suprise, when I read McWhorter's August column was this: When Harris went from understudy to Biden's starring role, notonce did I think of her as a person of color. To stress this paragraph's initial point, I say this only as an infinitesimally small yet representative part of modern American society.
As recently as the Obama era I could not have made that remark. Of that I'm sure. But again, and far more importantly, nether could society at large have made the observance. We as a whole have striven for years to arrive where we are on the "question" of race, which is to say, at least as far as race in a presidential contest is concerned. Indeed we have arrived.
I apply the same assessment to the question of gender. McWhorter sees that, too, as a Harris identifier. Reaching back to the Obama era once more, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him when the winner of the primary contest defeated the woman Hillary Clinton. Yet I gave no more thought to Harris the woman than I did to Harris the black woman.
I appreciate the danger in what I write here. Some will see it as Carpenter shamelessly blowing his own horn, boasting to all about his uncommonly vast catholicity of thought. Those who see it that way I most likely would never persuade otherwise, so I won't try. My argument is merely that I see McWhorter's as outdated, even antediluvian when you think of the tremendous progress we Americans have made in such a short span of time.
The essential addendum to my I-as-an-extreme-societal-micrososm you have anticipated: Hardly all Americans possess this liberality of thought (or non-thought?). A few days ago I ran across the following passage and saved it. I also forgot to save the messenger's link. Sorry about that.
"Harris has also resisted taking the bait. Last month, during a TV conversation about U.S. foreign policy, the Fox News host Jesse Watters speculated about her getting 'paralyzed in the Situation Room while the generals have their way with her.' Rather than reacting to the comment Harris and her campaign have ridiculed the right’s anti-woman rhetoric and policies, tarring her attackers as 'weird' instead of lending them credibility."
Harris' approach on gender is a smart one; Watters', Fox News', all Watterite Fox Newsers' and the entire right wing's approach is characteristically imbecile. Theirs is before-the-flood thinking on gender as well as race, fostered by a man whose supreme characteristics are imbecility, misogyny, misanthropy and every morbid ology, emphasis on psychopathology.
Yes mine is an opinion, not a sociological fact I can at this hurried moment substantiate with a collection of facts. Nevertheless I do believe there are more Americans who've lost the gendered and racial impressions of the past than there are Trumpists still residing there, and wallowing in it.
I agree with Kamala Harris' belief that "the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us." And we know it without thinking about it.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
Such was JD's inventive rationalization for lying his ass off. And such was Trump's reason for hiring him as second banana, an even littler generalissimo for his designs on a banana republic. Vance's creative moment erupted on CNN’s Dana "State of the Union" program with Dana Bash Sunday, as I'm sure you have read.
I didn't watch the farce, but its additional news was that Bash noted he had admitted to "creating the story." That he defended by counter-noting he'd heard "firsthand accounts from [his] constituents," which is likely true, since Ohio is by and large as crazy as he is. Vance then returned to more bunkum, topping it off with the added benefit of the euphemistic allowed .
“I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris' policies. Her policies did that." Which meant vice presidents, not presidents, now set administration policies, which is JD's design on Trump's designs. "But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about the story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris' policies." The latter, another little something he'd do as v.p.
All told, as cynical as political cynicism can get. You're hardly alone. "We talk about abortion, we lose. We talk about immigration, we win," said a Trump adviser. Contrary to winning via chronic lying, Ohio's Republican Governor Mike DeWine said the pet-eating tales are "a piece of garbage that is simply not true."
When Bash said to JD that his and Donald's vile rhetoric has caused bomb threats and potential violence, Guest V. replied that her observation was "disgusting." Clearly a genuine emotion due to the observation's truth.
But there's another side to JD'a manifold admissions. For now he's a non-mustachioed soundalike doppelgänger of another two-bit corporal in the army of Trumpers who scream foul! at public incriminations of the main man and his general staff as "Nazis" and "fascists."
They scream with vigor, they scream it's way over-the-top but typical "liberal" slander. Even if we accept those charges as truthful — though I and millions of others know with epistemological comfort they are neither extreme nor slanderous — we now have a JD-approved, ready-made reply to the delicately outraged.
As he would say were he ever to re-hinge, If we have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the contemptible rhetoric and naked intentions of Trump Inc, and to the unthinkable suffering of the American people who could be subjected to its tyrannies, then that’s what we're going to do.
No longer is there any cause for you and your fellow brownshirted Soldaten, Cpl. Vance, to object to the pointed censure of yet-demonstrated but in-the-bank fascistic designs implanted in Donald's diseased brain.
(Editorial note: From here on out I'll post only 538's more reliable polling operations — those that score at least 2.0 out of a 3.0 under its ranking categories, which will scrub the interruption of each poll's rating and your having to tolerate the interruptions. I hope you find this to be an improvement.)
In accord with my beloved Walt and his wisdom, I give you the headline finding from YahooNews/YouGov's poll, released over the weekend. As the graph notes, this result came from registered voters. Among the likely to vote, Harris leads with about the same, 49% to 45%.
The news outlet attributes Harris' showing to the 10 Sept. debate. (I find this curious, since her numbers were generally the same before the debate). "Nearly half of those familiar with the debate, in fact, say Trump delivered a poor performance (48%), while a clear majority (58%) say Harris’s performance was either excellent or good," writes Yahoo.
The downside? Trump's awful performance and Harris' win statistic of 58% has not of yet come close to matching her 4-point, likely voter lead. On the other hand, some serious, positive fundamentals appear to be in play.
Perhaps the most encouraging of YouGov's findings is that Harris inverted her support among independents: Pre-debate she was 9 points down ( 35% to 44%) in this group; post-debate, she's leading by 10 points, 47% to 37%.
The also weekend-released ABC News/Ipsos poll showed an identical Harris result from the debate, and a near-matching disharmony between it and Harris' lead. As I noted above, "It remains to be seen whether Tuesday’s spectacle will move the needle," observes ABC News.
Mostly in line with YouGov, Ipsos found Harris leading by 51% to 47% among registered voters, and 52%-46% among the likely. What was the "likely" finding before the debate? 52%-46%.
Although the last stat for Harris lies in the fog of standard margin errors, it is the first +6 I've seen for Harris. Ten days ago I wrote "I can't recall so much as one +6, which would be closer, realistically, to triumphing in America's antique and irrational method of choosing a president." I have now, even if it's little more than psychological comfort.
Yesterday The Washington Post updated the battleground states' status. The paper writes that it will continue doing so "at least once per day." I'll limit mine to maybe once a week. Let's run the bases with WaPo.
In the post to follow shortly I'll add a bit more detail to a change in my identification of pollsters' ratings. In each post it will eliminate 538's ranking of each survey while still providing confidence in the cited polls' reliability, and perhaps best of all simplify what I believe is the need for an evaluation of each poll's accuracy. That said, there's this from AtlasIntel:
An exception to my intro is this poll. AtlasIntel is new to the collection of pollsters I have cited to date, and its ranking — 2.7 of 3.0 in 538's listings — is noteworthy because of this post's title: Its findings are peculiar, very peculiar.
Nate Silver writes that the "AtlasIntel poll cut against what was otherwise a strong day of polling for Harris. It’s a highly-rated poll so resist the temptation to unskew."
I do resist "unskewing" polls whose findings are less than pleasing. From an obligation to objectivity I take them at face value, good or bad, though often with explicative commentary. But AtlasIntel's finding is so utterly out of line with a dozen other highly rated polls, my resistance is strong — not that I'm questioning the pollster's objectivity, only that its methodology in this instance was perhaps flawed.
Here's another finding — but in the other direction — for which there is probable cause for reasonable doubt. Notes the newspaper that commissioned it: "The Des Moines Register and Mediacom by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines." Selzer is also highly rated, 2.8/3.0.
"I wouldn’t say 4 points [47-43] is comfortable" for Trump, said the pollster's president, J. Ann Selzer.
Either both polls are broadly inaccurate, or really bizarre fluctuations are taking place within the electorate, nationally and regionally.
Let's start the workweek with something light to brighten its five days of foreboding potential. From Andy and ...
Trump Cognitive Test
Donald J. Trump’s catastrophic debate performance has sparked widespread concern about his mental decline.
As a public service, TBR is offering the following cognitive exam to assess Trump’s acuity. For the sake of the nation and the world, we urge him to take it.
I am most afraid of
a) Sharks b) Boats c) E. Jean Carroll
The number of people who attended my Inauguration was
a) 1.5 million b) 15 million c) 8.1 billion
I have never read
a) Project 2025 b) The U.S. Constitution c) The Art of the Deal
Kamala Harris is
a) Black b) Indian c) Generated by AI
I almost crashed in a helicopter with
a) Willie Brown b) Jerry Brown c) Bad, Bad Leroy Brown
Another word for “crazy person” is
a) Loon b) Loser c) Loomer
The Democrats want to take away our
a) Cars b) Bacon c) Ketchup
COVID can be cured with
a) Horse dewormer b) Bleach c) Ketchup
The next Supreme Court justice I nominate will be
a) Sean Hannity b) Hulk Hogan c) The late, great Hannibal Lecter
The eating thing that’s most likely to happen is
a) Haitian migrants eating cats b) Haitian migrants eating dogs c) Putin eating me for lunch
The person most to blame for January 6 is
a) Nancy Pelosi b) Nikki Haley c) Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley are the same person
I have never paid
a) Building contractors b) Taxes c) Rudy Giuliani
I have never met
a) The Proud Boys b) The Backstreet Boys c) Tiffany Trump
I have never had sex with
a) Stormy Daniels b) Karen McDougal c) Steve Bannon
My wife’s name is
a) Melanie b) Mercedes c) Malala d) Malomar e) Melanin f) Macrame g) Milli Vanilli h) Mojito i) Mimosa j) Marsupial k) E. Jean Carroll
I'm torn between the helicopter and eating-thing questions as the prize winner. The Pelosi/Haley, Bannon and Loomer answers, close runners-up. Reasonable people might disagree. But is that not the beauty and God-granted greatness of America? ... for at least, possibly, its remaining five months.
Unlike Donald Trump — his instant fundraising email: "There are people in this world who will do whatever it takes to stop us" — I do not know, nor does any member of the public, the true intent of the suspected assassin, emphasis on suspected. Maybe he enjoys blasting robin red breasts on refreshing Sunday afternoons. Hey it's possible.
As I wrote a Canadian friend who departed his U.S. birthplace and American madness years ago, what we do know is that the Secret Service "appears to be doing its usual bang-up job." How a man carting a lethal weapon got anywhere close to the golf course strikes me as a bit of not-so Secret incompetence.
In 1997 our firearms-happy Supreme Court stripped the federal requirement of background checks from the 1993 Brady Law. Since then congressional Democrats have tried and almost universally failed to beef up America's insane gun laws. The major exception was the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994, which applied to originally Soviet-made AK-47s. The law expired 10 years later and Republicans have blocked all efforts to revive it.
Which brings us to today's poetic justice. The apprehended, golf-course roaming suspect was packing one. A trifle overkill for blasting robin red breasts, I grant you, but in freedom-adoring America, to each his own, by law.
I'll speculate along Trump's email line. Perhaps the country-loving gunman had simply decided to commit the runaway bane of all freedom-adoring people: voter fraud. In which case he had also decided to cast his ballot just a little too early and rather illicitly. Such instances have occurred on presidential candidates, president-elects (FDR) and sitting POTUSes, too many and too painfully to name.
I'd wager that today's maybe-shooter purchased his AK-47 after 2004, when our freedoms once again included the right to own a military weapon that no moderately intelligent hunter would have neither a need nor desire for. Its sole ontology, etiology and teleology is to kill human beings.
Donald, you can thank yourself, your calibrated Republican allies and your packed Supreme Court for insisting against all logic that assault rifles are no different from 18th-century muskets. Today will make not a dent in your gun-pandering, no doubt of that, notwithstanding that you have seen the face of poetic justice.
***
Know your killing machines.
Because it appears the sheriff's office doesn't. From late last night:
The weapon recovered by authorities was identified by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office as an “AK-47-style rifle” equipped with a scope. However, a firearms expert told The Washington Post that the gun more closely resembles an SKS-type rifle.
[Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric] Bradshaw described the weapon as an AK-style rifle. However, photos shared at a news conference Sunday appear to show an SKS-type rifle in a polymer stock, fitted with an AK-inspired magazine for 7.62mm cartridges, according to the firearms expert.
SKS-type rifles are semiautomatic weapons that chamber 7.62mm rounds, a higher caliber than is most often used by AR-style rifles. They are patterned off a design that originated in the Soviet Union in the 1940s but was soon rendered obsolete by the AK-47.
The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office referred questions about whether the recovered weapon had been misidentified to the FBI, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Please remember that this site relies on your financial support. So visit the Make A Donation button in the sidebar. You'll be helping to put this commentary on firmer financial ground. I believe or at minimum hope you'll feel good about helping, which I've heard from many givers over the 20 years of my writing here, and I in turn will be grateful for it. With much thanks, I am, —PM
I have it on authority of Trump's Secret Police (best to start early) that many of you are neglecting, or worse, choosing to abstain from reading Truth Social. As said Secret Police informed me of this, I sensed a faint odor of imminent knee-capping if I also chose to abstain from encouraging you-the-slouchers to make Donald's site part of your daily, reading ritual.
Would I fear such a threat? I'd be terrified. Nonetheless, I'm sharing a mere two bits from his most recent insights into our vastly troubled republic, the origin of which I shan't identify, seeing how I prefer my knees as they are. Read on.
"I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!"
To the point, at least. With that cathartic act of bile-splatter completed, I thought his Sunday (and Mon.-Sat.) plan to head to the golf course and soak up some pleasing, invigorating alerts of Shots fired! would lift his fingers from keypad. I was wrong. And this one is even more Trumpian than the first.
All rich, job creating people, that support Comrade Kamala Harris, you are STUPID.
C'mon, man, how can anyone resist the evangelistic voice and philosophical depths of Donald J. Trump at a cell phone's little letters, made exclusively for little fingers? I certainly can't. From him I have learned many things, which are deep indeed. Foremost is the ultimate length of behavioral degradation to which some narcissistic sociopaths will go to achieve ultimate power.
Yesterday Politico wrote "the biggest knock against Harris from Trump world in the last 24 hours is that they believe she botched a local TV interview.... Several Trump advisers sent it to us, suggesting Harris was evasive and rambling."
Continued Politico's Playbook, "See for yourself if they have a point."
So I saw for myself. Which you can do if you have 11 minutes. First I was greeted by the Trump War Room's Twitter post saying the Harris interview is its "newest ad."
With high confidence I'll speculate that the soulless munchkins of the War Room have by now heard so much of its eponymous blatherskite's random, unfettered quackery that they can no longer distinguish it from Harris' direct, specific policy answers to the local TV guy's questions. There is no evasiveness, none at all.
I'll further speculate that the diminished-capacity little people now also confuse English spoken coherently — that which Harris speaks in the interview — with Cadet Bone Spurs' verbal meanderings and pointless digressions. Forced repeated subjections to his fickle ineloquence have stewed their brains into mush.
Should Trump's silliness peddlers want to try their hand at reading some true, honest-to-god rambling, obfuscations and evasions, then here it is, from the nonpartisan Nevadan Independent, founded by Jon Ralston, frequenter of cable news programs.
You can tell the paper really is independent and unbiased from its headline about Trump's mess of a Las Vegas speech on Friday, which featured the speaker's defense of his "debate performance" and his "vows to free up federally owned land."
But even that initial focus and the story's first words about Trump being in town to talk up his "economic policies" could not deter professional journalists from their duty to acknowledge the speech's most pertinent feature right up front: That Trump "spent much of his time repeating falsehoods and bemoaning this week's presidential debate" — "bemoaning," not "defending."
"[Trump delivered] his usual rhetoric against illegal immigration — this time complete with internet memes blown up on screens beside and behind him — and once again predict[ed] that a victory for his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, would mark the undoing of America.
"[He] haphazardly weaved political points on immigration and the economy with myriad tangents, such as a back-and-forth with the crowd about the best nickname for President Joe Biden, as well as criticizing his treatment at Tuesday’s debate by the ABC moderators who fact-checked him in real time. He said Harris was 'clearly not well' — accompanied by videos of her laughing — and called her 'a threat to democracy.'"
The Nevadan Independent provided specifics.
"He condemned moderators for not fact-checking his opponent while demanding that moderator and ABC anchor David Muir owed him an apology" ... He repeated "that some states allow the killing of babies after they are born" ... "He also repeated a false conspiracy theory that Harris was wearing an earpiece during the debate to feed her answers' ...
"[He showed] an image of tattooed Latino men ... with text saying they would be people’s apartment managers under a Harris administration" ... "[He showed a man with a knife following a woman captioned 'No one is safe with Kamala’s open border' ...
"[He] some undocumented immigrants are being flown into the U.S. on 'beautiful jet planes" ... and he added "that hundreds of millions of people would enter the U.S. illegally if Harris were elected president [my emphasis], and that 'our country will be obliterated.'" (That's a lot of plane tickets.)
Editorial ethnonational note: Trump said last week that he'd deport Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, "back to Venezuela." Remember, Kamala is "clearly not well."
The reporters covering the rally spoke with a couple attendees. One was 65-year-old Kerry Denman, who said, "I think he's gonna do it, but also I think the Democrats got to figure out some way to f--- him out of it."
Another was a Las Vegas teacher, 55-year-old Raquel Lara. She had heard "stories" about immigrants "hurting children," so the border issue was especially important to her. She was gladdened that Trump will win in a "landslide." But she was gloomy in thinking that should Trump lose, it is going to "be war."
I put it to you. Do you think that after attending a Harris rally, some leaving relate a conspiracy theory to reporters, and then say they're sure that "it's going to be war" if Kamala loses? It seems to me the new and veteran KHivers are "into" what's upbeat, not civil war.
Speaking yesterday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Kamala Harris declared, "As president, I will get rid of the unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs to increase jobs for folks without a four-year degree." She added, "And I will challenge the private sector to do the same."
You often hear the phrase, "It's about time." This time, at least, Harris' initiative is also worthy of another cliché you hear: "Truer words were never spoken." A college degree is far from the identifier of a person's abilities and skills, she said, noting the value of apprenticeships and technical programs.
I have no doubt that someone imparted to Kamala the tale of my working a summer temp job to earn some cash for grad school. My employment was by the university I'd be attending, and its personnel office rang me up with an assignment that I was all too pleased to grab.
The only problem, I figured, was that the position was in the university's accounting department. And what I knew of accounting was akin to my woefully insufficient knowledge of Guatemalan lesbian charwomen. (I'm still working on that.)
But personnel said no problem, just scurry on over and take a seat. I then figured, or suspected, hell the way this outfit's upper management performs, my woefully insufficient knowledge of accounting really will be no problem. So off I went.
When personnel called, they said they were glad to see on my application that I had a college degree. Because this position required one. (The U.S. Census Bureau reported years later that more than 62% of Americans who were 25 or older had no such paper, a statistic that gave personnel distress years before when trying to fill demanding temp jobs.)
I was particularly glad to take the gig because it paid a buck or two more an hour than other temp work — what with my having demonstrated that I could drink my way through an undergraduate program.
I arrived at my destiny. And when I arrived, (not I in the photo), just a trifle angsty because of my general-ledger ignorance, I discovered how I'd be spending eight hours a day, five days a week, for roughly two months.
And it was this. I'd spend half of each weekday stapling some sort of maybe invoices(?) together and the other half I'd spend unstapling similarly mysterious documents. That was it, my sole raison d'être at the imposing University Accounting Department. For this the institution mandated acollege degree.
My seat was but temporary because the university was in the process of filling it permanently. And yet the poor wretches who hadn't bothered drinking their way through 120 higher-education credit hours would be thwarted anon, sniffishly and with prejudice.
The sheer absurdity of the whole degree thing, as you can see, has never left me. And so Kamala, I, the proletariat and indeed all American workers who have only their binding chains to lose, thank you.