Republicans in Disarray!

It's good politics and it's very satisfying. https://t.co/o78X1a8eTB

— Barry Petchesky (@barry) July 29, 2024

… Republicans have been trying out angles of attack on Harris—a perfectly milquetoast liberal with a nice family and a big laugh and an occasional kookiness and who can be attacked much more effectively from the left than from the right, something they can’t take advantage of—and all their angles of attack have been extremely fucking weird. And, this is crucial: Dems have pointed out just how weird they are…

A serious person doesn’t support a ban on pornography, or say that women shouldn’t get divorced just because they’re unhappy, or oppose abortion in cases of rape and incest. But then, a serious person isn’t recommended for the second-highest position in government by the most powerful grotesques of Silicon Valley: litigious vampire Peter Thiel, SPAC grifter Chamath Palihapitiya, even dumber Jason Calacanis David Sacks, and the most divorced man alive, Elon Musk, all of whom pushed Vance on Donald Trump. Vance—Yale Law, venture capitalist, obsessed with sex other people are having—resembles so many other vat-grown Thiel projects that have crashed and burned in previous elections upon voters getting the barest look at them and their values; Blake Masters really thought he could win over normal people by filming himself firing a gun in the desert and portraying his opponent, a literal astronaut, as a soyjak. (If you are not online enough to know what that is: Congratulations. The modern GOP’s problem is that it’s unsettlingly online.)

Is it any wonder, then, that when someone made up out of whole cloth a joke that Vance fucked a couch, everyone believed it?

People have had enough of this shit. Too many years of Donald Trump and Trump-enthralled Republicans lying and bullying their way to power, and targeting the most vulnerable to score points among their base of freaks and perverts. The When they go low, we go high counterstrategy of the Hillary Clinton era has been abandoned. It was not effective, and it was not satisfying. Now, when they say and do weird shit, Democrats simply point out, Hey, that’s real weird…

It’s weird to be so obsessed with genitals, who has them, and what they do with them. It’s weird to the point of fetishistic to be so concerned with people “breeding” to avoid being “replaced.” It is fundamentally weird to care so much about what other people do when it doesn’t affect you at all. Nobody wants to be around people like that, and we should say it…

But the most effective aspect of the Dems’ You’re weird strategy is that it is an initiative. For my entire life, the Democrats have been passive campaigners, easily drawn into Republican framing of issues. It has been a mug’s gambit to get suckered into arguments over where exactly means testing should begin, rather than rejecting it altogether. “Late-term abortion” is a Conservative phrase that when engaged with and adopted by Democrats, shifts the Overton window for Republicans to push for a 15-week abortion ban, which is functionally a full abortion ban. This doesn’t work. You can’t engage them on their terms, and let them dictate the conversation. The Dems’ latest stratagem has the usefulness of both staying on the offensive, and immediately dismissing attempts to change the subject. No, you’re weird, I’m not going to get into that with you.

The people crave normalcy. They want elected officials who are recognizable as human beings, with normal human interests and emotions. They want to occasionally go entire days without thinking about the President. Demonstrating that you hear and agree with them, giving them voice by pointing out the sheer weirdness of Republicans, isn’t just good politics. It’s basic humanity. It’s not weird at all that it’s working so well.

right now the one thing every faction of the democratic base agrees on and enjoys is hating republicans, and harris is indulging us

— flglmn (@flglmn) July 29, 2024

But they keep giving us new material!

Start the week with Andy Serkis, the voice of Gollum, reading some Trump tweets as Gollum ?? pic.twitter.com/NF7dNwVdCt

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) July 29, 2024