Now THIS is end-stage Trump Derangement.
I told you so, not that anyone paying attention couldn’t. Ethics Alarms noted long ago that this would be the most hysterical election season ever from Democrats, and that as the election grew nearer, their desperation and absence of any ethical compass would have them crossing lines of civility, fairness, and decency no previous version of their party had ever crossed. The LBJ’s infamous nuclear war countdown TV ad sliming Barry Goldwater? The 2024 Axis says “Hold my beer!”
The signs are everywhere. Late, late last night, I happened upon CNN, as one of their wild-eyed hosts conducted an alleged news interview as if it was a Kamala Harris rally, going off on her own rant about “Trump’s lies.” The news media isn’t even pretending to be practicing journalism rather than partisan advocacy; “the stakes are too high,” you see.
The stakes are their pals, allies and co-conspirators losing power. Can’t have that.
Even though black Americans remain on balance ridiculously loyal to the Democratic Party, the fact that some are showing independence has the Axis freaked. Barack Obama, a far more careful and skilled hypocrite and demogogue than the other leaders of his party, stooped to reprimanding black men this week for not voting reflexively for their own, and scolding “the brothers” for not supporting Kamala Harris, even though she is, you know, pretty obviously an incompetent—but ambitious!—hack.
The Times today is full of the stench of panic, or whatever it smells like when miscreants realize that the jig is up. Maureen Dowd, however, wins the prize. In her column qua diatribe called “Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?” she stoops to appealing to the authority of ancient Clinton hired gun James Carville, who has morphed into some kind of Hell Beast cross between Gollum and Robert DeNiro. He tells Maureen that Harris should give up even pretending to tell voters why she should be President and only talk about how horrible Donald Trump is. “She should scare the crap out of voters. You know, Trump is just taunting us, having a rally at Madison Square Garden just like the Nazis did in 1939,” canny James says. Having a gathering in Madison Square Garden means you’re a Nazi? I did not know that!
Dowd can’t quite process Carville’s theory in her fog of Trump Derangement. “Other Democratic strategists I talked to agreed that Harris needs to let her guard down, cut loose and turn on the afterburners. Mainly, her pitch is that she’s not Donald Trump. And that’s an excellent pitch. But she needs to make the case for herself more assertively,” Dowd says, contradicting herself in a single paragraph. That Harris is not Donald Trump is all she has, and, you know, there are millions Americans who can make that claim for themselves, and an striking number of them could make it better than Kamala Harris.
She can’t make the case for herself more assertively because there is no case. Writing about why Harris is not well-supported by men, even black men, Victory Girls states the undeniable: “Kamala Harris is NOT popular. She is an empty vessel. She dropped out of the 2020 primary because she had no support then. She was picked by Joe Biden for vice president solely because she was a woman of color. And when Joe Biden was summarily shoved off the top of the ticket, Kamala Harris was anointed as his replacement without a single primary vote. She was created as the nominee with exactly zero popular support. And the more people see of her, the more they are reminded WHY she failed as a presidential candidate on her own merit.”
Bingo.
Dowd, like her Axis colleagues, is deluded: bias has made her stupid. “Kamala’s guarded nature leaves people feeling that she’s not fully revealing herself,” she writes, assuming her readers are blind, deaf and dumb. “Her reluctance to do serious interviews made her look fearful. She should have been interacting more with the media as a way of getting off the teleprompter and giving a sense of who she is as a person.”
Maureen. Come on. 1) Harris has a “guarded nature” is because she can’t afford to “reveal herself”: there’s nothing to reveal that would make anyone vote for her. It is why she answers direct questions with non-sequiturs like “I grew up in a middle class neighborhood.” 2) She looks fearful because she is fearful. and should be. She is stuck in the Peter Principle. 3) Now you’re saying she should have been “interacting with the media”? The news media has been rationalizing Harris’s refusal to do serious interviews with anyone who would ask her tough questions (like, just to pick a wild example out of the air, “Why did you keep telling the public that Joe Biden was as sharp as ever when you knew he was teetering on the edge of senility?”) is because, off a teleprompter and without a memorized response, Harris babbles incoherently. “Trump is better at riffing,” Dowd concedes. Ha! Almost anyone is better at riffing.
So what to do? Dowd’s answer is the totalitarian’s answer: demonize. Seed hate and fear. “Abortion rights are on the ballot and, as a woman, she can conjure the medieval nightmare that Trump and Vance threaten.”
Medieval nightmare. Nice. Letting the states decide the issue like the Constitution mandates is a Medieval nightmare.
Dowd concludes, disgracefully, “As Carville says, we need less mulling and more action in a do-or-die moment. She needs to do so we don’t die.”
Vote for Harris or die.
As Jack Benny might say, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”
Ethics Alarms 
In a post entitled “The View from Martha’s Vineyard,” the author makes the following observations:
“Former President Barack Obama sternly chided Black men over ‘excuses’ to not vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” ABC News reports. This recalls Joe Biden’s charge that blacks “ain’t black” if they failed to support the Delaware Democrat. On the left being “black” is a matter of politics, and that recalls one of the many attacks on author Thomas Sowell.
Back in the 1990s Clinton civil rights pick Lani Guinier charged that Sowell was not authentically black because he failed to support affirmative action. Sowell, author of The Economics and Politics of Race and many other books, shot back, “I don’t need some half-white woman from Martha’s Vineyard telling me about being black.” In 2024, nobody needs a half-white former president from Martha’s Vineyard telling them anything…
You can read the whole thing here:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/10/the-view-from-marthas-vineyard.php
I love the smell of desperation in the morning….
I really hope their desperation is real and justified.
Regarding bias making Maureen Dowd stupid, I’m not so sure. I think she’s just one of the cool but mean northeastern girls who’s gotten by with snark her entire career. Behind the low-grade Dorothy Parker impersonation, I don’t think there’s much intelligence.
This certainly looks like a panic fueled desperation over the realization that their hand picked stooge is going to lose, and decisively. And when people are desperate, mistakes are made, like that obnoxious ad about men voting for kamala that’s having the opposite of the intended effect.
Just for background: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/americans-hold-nazi-rally-in-madison-square-garden
So, just for context, Trump holding a rally in MSG nearly a century after the American Nazi Party held one there means he’s celebrating that rally and he’s a Nazi. Got it.
I see the DNC was held there in 1924. Did Google hide any Dem events held there after that? Maybe for context, Trump is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the 1924 DNC? WHO KNEW?
Oh! Well, would you look at this! The DNC was held in MSG in ’76, ’86 and ’92! Golly, that’s multiple generations of Nazis in the party that’s on the right side of history. Fuck off.
What exactly do you think that is “background” for?
The German-American Bund was never a huge organization. Like white supremacist organizations today, its size and influence has been largely inflated by left-wing fearmongers. Much of the Bund’s membership was made up of German-Americans immigrants, such as its leader Fritz Kuhn. Some of them, like Kuhn, had become naturalized citizens of the U.S. Others did not. Like many immigrants, they had come to the United States due to financial struggles, not because of any ideological commitment to our country’s values. In fact, like many immigrants today who come to our country for the same reason, they had no problem taking advantage of our Constitutionally-protected liberties to advocate on behalf of the home country and by trying to bring some of the Fatherland’s worldview’s over here, ignoring, of course, the fact that we have enjoyed a great measure of success by not having the same worldview as other countries.
They did attempt to recruit among white veterans of World War I with limited success. Their rally in Madison Square Garden was perfectly legal. We find it distasteful today just as many people found it distasteful then.
Hitler barely acknowledged them and had very little interest in supporting their activities. There is some evidence that far more money went from the Bund to Germany than from Germany to the Bund.
Fritz Kuhn and many other troublesome (or what we would call today “problematic”) German-Americans were interned in the United States during World War II. Read an excellent book called The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II by Jan Jarboe Russell. Kuhn – a naturalized American citizen, remember – was held as an enemy alien along with Germans who had not yet taken out citizenship, as well as their U.S.-born children. English-speaking American children who knew no other life were held with their parents and, in some cases, sent into wartime Nazi Germany in exchange for VIPs or even some German Jews.
Kuhn was stripped of his citizenship and deported to West Germany after World War II where he was promptly taken into custody.
Very interesting. I’ll have to look this up.
Fascinating and informative, as always. Thanks!
I did note, reading that post from history.com that the protesters outside MSG outnumbered the folks at the rally by 5 to 1.
I will also note that this happened in February, 1939. That is significant in that it comes between the Munich agreement in the fall of 1938 and German occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939.
Many, many people at the time were still deluded that the Sudetenland was the last of Hitler’s territorial ambitions. After Germany took the rest of Czechoslovakia, the pretending was over. British and French leaders knew then that there was almost certainly a war coming and did their best to shore up for form alliances to either head it off or defend against Germany.
I do not know how the Bund reacted to the Czech takeover, but that was probably their last, real chance to break with Hitler and the Nazis.
There are still plenty of Nazi rallies in Manhattan.
https://x.com/TWreninator/status/1844223791062569228?t=pMl8qChLdXO6q4vBtSpPmA&s=19
Like yourself, I am now “cautiously optimistic” about how this election will play out. Unlike four years ago, there is a chance. Trump was never ahead in 2020, he’s been ahead several times this time out. Trump didn’t botch two debates and walk away from a third, nor get COVD himself, like he did in 2020. Trump was the flailing president in a time in which the US was spiraling out of control, now he’s the one saying I can do better than this, when Harris is the one with the terrible last four years to defend. Vance made Walz look like a fool, opening Harris’ judgment to question (I already questioned it when she passed over Josh Shapiro, moderate and popular governor of the must-win state of PA). Most importantly, at least I think, as we get closer and closer to the actual election, it’s looking more and more like most of the breaking balls are breaking Trump’s way. You hear almost no talk about Harris winning in a landslide anymore, and those publications that have been supporting her full-throated from the beginning sound more out of touch than anything else.
There just isn’t much left for the Democrats to campaign on except abortion and Trump hatred. There is plenty to point out that’s VERY wrong with their approach to governing the last few years. The economy tops the list, and a lot of ink has been spilled on it already, but every time everyone goes to the grocery store or to fill up the car, everyone sees where we are economically, and it’s pretty bad compared to four years ago. A lot of ink has already been spilled on the border also, but now the effects of Democrat policy can be seen, and they are not good. Even Democratic mayors of sanctuary cities are getting to the point of saying “enough, this is more than we can handle.” The world was relatively peaceful and relatively stable during Trump’s administration. Now not only did Biden undo in a few weeks everything we did in 20 years in Afghanistan, but this administration has the US mired in two proxy wars that are no closer to ending than when they began, one of which, in Israel, threatens to ignite the whole region. Then there’s the whole question of China, but I’ll put that aside for now. Then we can talk about how badly blue states and blue cities are being governed at home, with spiking crime and DAs more interested in putting cops than criminals in jail.
A vote for Harris is a vote to continue all of this, and that’s really all you need to know.
And that’s about as good a summation as can be written. Well done, Steve-O!!
Yes, nice summation.
I too am feeling much more hopeful this time, but always with the caveat that Trump can do something to lose it for himself.
It’s not so much the things that the MSM latches onto and denounces. I mean, Trump has his own version of word salad, but sense can be made from it if you actually listen to what he’s saying.
One of the problems Trump is hopefully going to have is that he is making a lot of campaign promises that he is just not going to be able to fulfill, unlike 2016. In his first term, he was actually able to do a lot of the stuff he said he would.
This time around, every week he seems to come up with another economic or tax proposal that just makes no economic sense or has almost no chance of passing Congress. Fortunately, Harris is doing similar things with the caveat that half of her proposals are for hiking taxes rather than reducing them.
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I don’t know if the pollsters have fixed the Trump undercounting problems they’ve had, but if they haven’t — whoa Nellie! He might just carry Minnesota, and wouldn’t that be a hoot.
Harris has to be hidden from the public, much like Biden was hidden from the public in 2020. HIding her became difficult, so they tried to show her only in friendly spaces. Much like Biden, she can’t even handle that.
The Democrats are living in such a bubble that they apparently told Harris that she could win with any vice-president pick she made, she was so far ahead of Trump. This has led to the ‘I need a vice-president dumber than me’ meme.
https://ifunny.co/picture/donald-j-trump-i-need-a-vp-dumber-than-me-M3HDOvhoB
https://babylonbee.com/news/experts-say-kamala-can-still-win-if-she-doesnt-appear-in-public-again-between-now-and-election-day
The Babylon Bee is having entirely too much fun this election campaign. And, no matter who wins, they are guaranteed four more years of back slapping stories.