Archives for 2024

I have a lot of thoughts, so strap in. This is gonna be a long one. Since Harris is now the nominee I had some time today while sitting under the willow and while I was driving places running errands to think about things without interference, and a couple of things occurred to me. Also, I took a half an edible about forty minutes ago so your guess is as good as mine where this post goes.

My first thought is that one of the perks of having Kamala on the ticket is youth related, but not in the way you probably are thinking in regards to the youth vote bump she is getting. That’s obviously a great thing just from a voting standpoint and turnout but just general excitement, memes, and energy. But the other youth related bonus to Kamala is that she is only 59 and as such, the vast majority of her political career comes after the 1994 Proposition 187 in California, the ballot initiative championed at the time by Republican Governor Pete Wilson.

Just a bit of history although all the majority of you are my age and older, but California used to be a red and then purple state. After prop 187, Republican support just bottomed out. In 1988 the first Bush was the LAST Republican to win the Presidency. Clinton won by slim margins in 1992 and 96, and since then the EAR/ONS/Golden State Killer has as much chance as getting elected on a statewide ticket there.

What does this mean? It means that since Harris has been in politics, she has been dealing with the lunatic wing of the GOP since day one. The Republican Party has crystallized down to it’s distilled wingnut essence, and every Republican of some stature there has been nuttier than a fruitcake. B1 Bob Dornan, Duncan Hunter and his shitty spawn, etc. Absolute nutters.

That means at no time in her political career has she ever experienced a sane Republican party- she has no memory of the golden ages when Reagan would have drinks with Tip O’Neill and Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy were buddies and all that bullshit that made Tim Russert and Chris Matthews moist in the loins. Bipartisanship and a sense of camaraderie and being friends with the opposition have never existed in her world. Republicans have only ever been awful and an impediment to progress. In other words, we finally have a candidate whose internal monologue is the same as ours when Republicans speak- “Get fucked, maniac.”

This is undeniably a good thing. Maybe one day in fifty years we can have bipartisanship again. But not fucking now.

A second thing I am seeing that I really like and really gets me excited is something Mistermix alluded to earlier:

The use of the word “weird.” This is not a coincidence, as I saw Tim Walz saying the same thing:

This is such an effective line of attack and is just electoral poison. It’s a brilliant way to define these guys in the eyes of voters, and it has the bonuses of being true, something low information voters can agree with, something is easy to say, and it is versatile because there are so many weird things about these fucking guys and it’s something you can say to Trump supporters without having them descend into whataboutism with your beliefs.

“You voting for Trump?”

No, he’s so weird. All that face makeup and the ridiculous orange hair. Just a weird dude.”

He’s been so normalized by the media that people forget how fucking weird he is. He buried his former wife in a golf course without a gravestone. He pervs on his daughter. He’s always babbling on about Hannibal Lector. He drinks all those diet cokes. He keeps praising dictators. He rambles on about the strangest shit. He only eats McDonalds. He likes steak well done and with ketchup. These are all really fucking weird things.

So yeah, maybe it took a younger candidate with a much younger comms and social media team to do what the rest of us missed. And it works on Vance, too, as hillbilly twitter and Appalachians like Beshear all continue to otherize Vance. What they are doing is basically the same thing Kendrick Lamar did to Drake this year with Euphoria, Meet the Grahams, and Not Like us.

A third thing I have observed is really a quite positive development. It has seemed that for at least fifteen years the Republicans have had a factory running non-stop to churn out douchebags to run and every time some loser like Tom DeLay leaves the scene they puke up a Howley or Tom Cotton. Just a seemingly endless back bench of dickheads, maniacs, and losers. I mean there have been so many young Republican scumbags churned out by this factory that many of them in the last 8-10 years have risen through the ranks, got elected, and then promptly got convicted or embroiled in a scandal and flamed out. And then for the same time period, you pan the camera to the Democratic side and it looks like a scene from the Russian politburo circa 1985. Just one 70-80 year old after another. Oh look, it’s Chernenko. Oh look, Breshnev. Oh look, Andropov. And on and on and on.

But I’ve spent the last few days thinking about VP choices, and it hit me- “Wow, we have a lot of fucking talent.” I mean we have a REALLY deep bench of governors and young elected folks out there who would all, in their own right, make great Presidents. Whitmer, Cooper, Beshear, Waltz and on and on and on. We have a lot of fucking talent. And we need to keep cultivating and growing that talent by winning statewide elections in all 50 states. We have some real starts in the larval phase with folks like Max Frost, and then you have AOC, who I would like to remind you I was an early adopter and donated to her first race because she is going places, and she is, as Mistermix noted a while back, going places. I could conceivably, if I keep going to the gym, live long enough to see her become speaker or make a run for President. Or Senate.

It’s really an embarrassment of riches and bodes well for the future. It’s reason to be positive.

A minor housekeeping detail. We have not really updated the commenting policy in a long, long time, and I think we need to add a statement that makes clear that there are some things we just will not accept and there is no need for timeouts and “what not just get the fuck out of here goodbye don’t let the door hit you in the ass how can I miss you when you won’t go away.”

I’m personally thinking about three things motivating this. One is the inevitable tsunami of racism that is about to start up now that we have a black candidate. The second and third stems from the current war in Gaza. I’m simply not going to put up with any dehumanizing bullshit about Palestinians or conflating Palestinians with Hamas and I am not going to deal with even whiffs of anti-Semitism. And don’t think I am saying any criticism of Israel is off the books, because Fuck Netanyahu and fuck the monsters in his coalition for the way they are prosecuting this war.

At the same time, I’m not a fucking idiot. Well actually I am on a lot of things, but on this, I am not. You’re not getting a timeout for going into a post on the Russia/Ukraine war talking about… Russia and Ukraine, and start saying shit to the openly Jewish writer about them not caring about “zionist bio warfare” or other bullshit. You’re not fooling anyone. It’s not just a weird coincidence that you just so happened to start this off topic bullshit in the Jewish guy’s post.. I see what you are doing. We all see what you are doing. You’re out of here.

I’ve already lost one person I cared about deeply who left the blog and who I would do anything to get back, I’m not losing another. So we’re going to make changes.

As always is the case, my ideas only come into fruition after Watergirl puts in the leg work, and she is writing up a draft policy with the change and all the front pagers will weigh in on it before we implement it. Thank you for understanding why this change is necessary, or I suppose if you don’t understand why it is necessary, guess what- we’re making the change any way.

A fraternity brother called the other day and said he was working in Ohio (he travels for work overseeing construction and production of pharmaceutical labs) and that he was going to swing by and that morphed into him coming for a couple of days, which is fine, but I had to do a rush three hour “I can’t let people know I live like this” clean and scrub the bathroom and kitchen.

As I mentioned earlier I spent a little time under the willow tree, which is so nice because it provides shade and muffles sounds other than the whispering of the branches. I like to just sit there and listen and hear what birds are where and just get an idea of what kind of critters are living with me here. I also like to watch Maxwell sit and watch things. How his whole body will twitch when he gets aroused by potential prey, or how his head will snap to something and lock in on it and it takes me a couple of minutes to finally spot the bird or frog or whatever caught his interest. Cats are just so fascinating from the littlest one to the largest lion out there.

I think that’s all I have. Gonna go watch some tv and wait for my friend and eat some peaches.

Thursday Evening Open ThreadPost + Comments (358)