Somewhere in one of my picture folders I have a photo of a coffee-drinking lass on a bed wearing a T-shirt* with the sentence “Yes, But First, Coffee”. Until I find it again, this pic from Rule5Texan on X will do quite nicely.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Today is my 65th birthday — old enough to qualify for Social Security, but still working. It’s been four days since I updated the blog, but my day job kind of interfered with the blogging schedule this week. Also, I keep doing that thing where I begin an article, write hundreds or even thousands of words, and then abandon the draft because some news event interrupts. Do not accuse me of early-onset Alzheimer’s — I’ve always been somewhat scatter-breained this way, before they had such terms as “ADD” or “multi-tasking” to describe my modus operandi.
My greatest joy in journalism was the years I spent, from 2008 to 2012, in a blur of frenetic travel, doing shoe-leather reporting on the campaign trail. Being on the scene, reporting what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, provided infinitely more satisfaction than the mere quote-and-comment stuff of blogging. But the rigors of the campaign trail take their toll — it’s a young man’s game, and I was something of a senior citizen in the traveling press corps even when I was not yet 50. Nowadays, it seems, the business of covering campaigns is done mainly by kids fresh out of college, no doubt as a cost-saving measure by financially strapped media organizations.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe it’s been so long ago that I was careening around upstate New York covering the Doug Hoffman campaign, furiously ratting the tip jar to pay for my gas and the rental car (that got ambushed by a deer one foggy night). That grassroots populist Tea Party campaign against the GOP Establishment (remember Dede Scozzafava?) was, as those of us who witnessed it predicted at the time, a template for the 2010 midterms, when Republicans recaptured the House in a historic landslide (see “The Republican Mandate,” Nov. 25, 2010). And, when you look at it in retrospect, one can trace a direct path from the populism of the Tea Party movement to the campaign that put Donald Trump in the White House in 2016 and which now, less than a month before Election Day, bids fair to return Trump to the White House again.
Excuse the nostalgic reverie, but you get to be this old and find that most of what you have to offer the younger generation is (a) fabulous tales of Ye Olden Days, and (b) advice that they will, of course, ignore.
Portrait of the Author as an Old Man
However frustrating it is to get old, however, it is still preferable to the alternative. Merely being alive can be considered an achievement, at this point and, like Carl Spackler said after telling his story about the Dalai Lama: “So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”
Speaking of old guys, it’s a great misfortune that my old blog buddy John Hoge died last year. As you know, Hoge was an alumnus of Vanderbilt University and yesterday, the Commodores upset the Alabama Crimson Tide, the first time in 40 years that Vandy beat ’Bama, and the first time they had ever beat a team ranked No. 1 in the country. Why did this tragedy strike the Tide, which was riding high after knocking off Georgia a week earlier? My brother Kirby could preach you a sermon about what’s wrong with Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe, but you probably wouldn’t want to hear that sermon. However, having received total consciousness (thank you, Dalai Lama), I view this world-historic event — Vandy beating Alabama — as a timely omen of November 5.
Maybe it’s just me who sees it this way, but if lowly Vanderbilt can triumph over the top-ranked team in the country, isn’t it possible that Donald Trump can achieve something no president has done since Grover Cleveland, winning the presidency in two non-consecutive terms?
What did I gain from that experience? Well, not total consciousness (again, thank you Dalai Lama), but merely walking across Harvard Yard has a mystical way of imparting the spirit of elite enlightenment, and from that experience I obtained a crucial esoteric insight that, to celebrate the occasion of my 65th birthday, I will now share with readers, i.e., the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:
SOTD
Regardless of how poorly my Senators did this year, I miss playing, and I am already poring over the cards of players who will definitely be available next year as well as looking at players from the playoff teams who will probably be available in the draft after those teams trim their rosters in the off-season. If nothing else, we’ll have the Designated Hitter rule in effect, which means we’ll have space for a slugger with an iron glove on the roster without having to worry about his impact on the defense.
In other news, the era of T.I.T.S. is over at Flappr. Sad! Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
Happy Friday, Comrades of the Commentariat. Usual weekend deadlines for the usual weekend posts. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
My first reaction to Tuesday night’s “debate” (scare-quotes necessary because this televised event in no way resembled an actual debate) was focused mainly on how bad Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan were as “moderators” (scare-quotes necessary, etc.), However much you hate the media, you don’t hate them as much as they deserve to be hated.
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) dominated Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) from start to finish in Tuesday nights vice presidential debate. It wasn’t even close. Despite the moderators’ best efforts to give Walz a hand, he was no match for Trump’s running mate.
Vance, composed and prepared, delivered clear, well-informed responses, especially when highlighting Kamala Harris’s ineffectiveness as vice president. Vance not only outperformed Walz on core issues but also tackled traditionally Democratic topics in ways likely to appeal to voters. His effortless command over the debate left both Walz and the moderators struggling to match his poise and precision.
And not even the liberal media could deny it.
“[JD Vance] landed a lot of punches in between all the niceties and all of that,” observed CNN’s Abby Phillip. “And the thing that really stood out to me was that Tim Walz did not seem prepared for it. He didn’t respond to a lot of the criticisms and attacks that Vance put on the table.”
She added, “I mean, I think there was a clear lack of preparation and execution here on Walz’s part.” Dana Bash disagreed with her. “I think, actually, it’s the opposite,” she said. “I think he had too much preparation.”
Bash continued, “He had so many lines that he was clearly trying to say that he didn’t listen.. when… JD Vance said one of the many, many things he really hit Kamala Harris on — not Tim Walz, but Kamala Harris — he didn’t respond because he clearly had things in his mind. I think the lack of interviews that he has done with national media, with local media, it showed he needed more rest.”
Jake Tapper agreed.
“I agree. I mean, JD Vance is much more experienced at this, at public speaking, at defending himself, at pivoting,” Tapper conceded.
The undeniable fact of Walz’s debate flop was, of course, a subject that CNN (I watch, so you don’t have to) didn’t want to spend much time discussing Wednesday. Insofar as they couldn’t avoid it, CNN spent most of their time highlight a couple of what they imagined to be “gotcha” moments involving abortion and the J6 “insurrection.”
J.D. Vance avoided answering the question of whether Biden actually won the 2020 election. This is scandalous, inside the bubble where CNN talking heads live, but of course there is a very good reason why Vance refused to address this — namely, that about 70% of Republican voters don’t for a minute buy the “81 million voters” narrative.
Inside the bubble where CNN anchors and other news media types live, there is not the slightest doubt that Biden won and Trump lost, which is why they keep yammering on about J6 as a “threat to democracy.” Out here in the real world, of course, those of us who watched the Election Night coverage, and who have followed up on some of the claims made by skeptics, fall into one of two categories:
“Election deniers” who absolutely don’t believe Biden won;
and
People who aren’t sure that Democrats stole the election, but aren’t willing to rule out the possibility.
Personally, I’m in the second category. It seems to me that there was some illegal “ballot harvesting” and maybe other shenanigans in the key swing states, but I haven’t yet seen irrefutable evidence that I would stake my credibility on as an explanation of how Democrats stole the election. Furthermore, and this is important, I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained, politically, by endlessly re-litigating the 2020 election. It’s enough for me to say I suspect shenanigans, and move on.
One of the things that leads me to suspect that Democrats really did steal the 2020 election is how determined the media are to silence anyone who doubts the result, and how enthusiastically they applaud the prosecution of J6 protesters. If it were really so self-evident that Biden won, why the censorship? Why the punitive rage toward “election deniers”?
Anyway, the judge in the J6 case against Trump unsealed special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page filing in the case, and CNN was covering this at the top of every hour, without acknowledging the root problem with Smith’s case. See, it is impossible to say what Trump did was a crime — not morally wrong, nor unconstitutional — if Democrats actually did steal the election. That’s a giant asterisk the media never permit to be discussed. Smith’s argument is that Trump was trying to overturn “the will of the people.” That’s both his starting premise and his conclusion, so that his argument might be rendered as a syllogism thus:
A. Trump lost the election and tried to prevent the legitimate winner, Biden, from taking office;
B. [ blah blah blah ]
therefore
Conclusion: TRUMP IS A CRIMINAL! A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY! SEND HIM TO PRISON!
My point — now circling back around to J.D. Vance’s avoidance of the question during the debate — is that the prosecution of Trump hinges on an ironclad certainty that Joe Biden did get 81 million votes, but even if I can’t prove otherwise, that doesn’t mean it’s a crime for me (or Trump) to think the election was stolen. Given the circumstances, where most of the people who voted for Trump felt that he (and, by extension, they) had been wrongfully cheated, the riot at the Capitol wasn’t a threat against democracy, but rather an attempt to protect democracy from crooks who rigged the election.
All that will become moot — a subject for historians to discuss — if Trump wins in November. Let him have his second term, after this four-year interregnum of Mr. Eighty-One Million Votes, and Trump will have a chance to redeem his reputation. The floundering performance of Walz in Tuesday’s debate makes it seem more likely than not that Trump will win this election, and win it convincingly enough that those who doubt Biden won in 2020 will be able to say, “See? We told you so.”
