The Campaign We Deserve?

There is so much to talk about as this blessedly shortened Presidential campaign heads toward November. But there are several recent events and episodes of staggeringly obvious nonsense to hit on this week that I will hopscotch a bit.

I won't talk about the obvious, that being the former guy's visit to Arlington National Cemetery and the tasteless standard smirk and thumbs up photo behind a headstone that he attempted to use for political purposes. My colleague Jim Moore has a wonderful piece that completely explains the unmitigated gall of it all. I recommend it.

Let me start with the Democratic candidate and her first TV sit-down interview. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz spoke with Dana Bash of CNN for a half hour or so in a restaurant in Georgia. It was OK in that they are still at the beginning of the second-date stage of their hopeful romance with America. The answers were general and on message and that is no doubt by design.

But damnit all! Why can't any politician give the simplest answer to a political dilemma, thus leaving your opponents ample room to claim you are the love child of Joseph Stalin and Mother Jones?

Take, for example, why you "flip-flopped" on the issue of fracking? That is of course an industry technique for extracting previously hard or impossible to get oil and gas. No one wants to hear that your "values haven't changed." That is gauzy gobbledegook. Start with the idea of flip-flopping being nonsense if you are an open-minded thinking person.

You say that this time in office has shown that some issues are more complex than it seems at first glance and that while we all understand fossil fuels must ultimately be phased out for the sake of the planet, they will be needed for years to come. Oh, and we produce more now than ever. No intelligent leader holds on to a wrong idea when confronted with new information. See? Was that so hard?

And Tim. A grammar mistake? That is misusing less and fewer, not saying you carried an M-16 in war. It's real simple, buddy. I misspoke. In the heat of the moment after another mass shooting I should have said I carried a weapon of war, not in war. One word, Tim! Have mercy, people, I just report on this stuff, you have to live it. I will never understand a politician's reluctance to give the clearest, simplest answer to a question. I screwed up. I apologize. Done. Next question.

I think we are back to what the meaning of is, is.

She was smart to avoid being baited into commenting on Trump's predictable racial taunts. Stay above that idiocy.

But you will inevitably have to answer for proposals that will obviously be impossible to turn into reality. There's not enough fairy dust in Oz to get this Congress, or the next one probably, to vote for new houses, down payment subsidies and anti-gouging regulations. Oh, they'd all be great, but one thing the conservatives have right is we are in debt up to our collective armpits.

You're a Democrat, ma'am. Remember, that guy up there wagging his finger did get us to a budget surplus, just 25 years ago. Yeah, it was that recently. Before that it was LBJ. Uh-huh, Democrats. You can use that whenever the spendthrift argument comes up, but you probably won't. Why? Damned if I know. Apparently, if a politician admits anything the other side is saying, they will melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.

If Carville had any hair left, he'd be pulling it out right now.

The best thing Harris has going for her is her opponents. If she were up against a Romney or McCain, it would be like scaling Everest. But this shouldn't be that tough a climb. For example.

J.D. Vance is a walking, talking ode to proper vetting of potential running mates. What is his fixation with women as brood mares? For example, this is from the Huffington Post...

Asked why he viewed elite institutions like Yale University as “corrupt,” Vance reiterated his feelings about women who don’t have kids.

“You have women who think that truly, the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey, instead of starting a family and having children,” he said.

He continued: “What they don’t realize — and I think some of them do eventually realize that, thank God — is that that is actually a path to misery. And the path to happiness and to fulfillment is something that these institutions are telling people not to do.”

Let me take this moment to point out that his wife Usha and he are both Yale Law grads. But then again, they have 3 kids thus a stake in the country apparently. As someone told me online, Trump may have made a mistake, but he still has to carry Vance to term.

The senior partner in Vance's current firm is Donald Trump, who keeps saying, for some reason, that it is legal to kill a child after it's born. Let's stop and think about that, for a moment, and then contemplate who would believe it. That particular act has a name. It is called murder. There is a fancier name, infanticide. And it is about as illegal as it comes. But it is an imaginary thing that some of his cohort want to put a stop to. Even though it has already stopped.

It's like the law against voting if you are not a citizen. Trump wants a bill on that passed or the government should be shut down. But, that, too, is already illegal. It's like hitting your car's key fob twice to make sure it's extra-lockity, I guess.

Again, these are simple and moronic arguments that are easy to refute. But, instead, we get crickets.

Then there is Project 2025, the handbook for a new "conservative" administration, you know, whoever that might be, nudge-nudge, wink-wink. You've probably heard a couple of things about this Heritage Foundation project. .

It would find a way to fire all governmental staff people and replace them with Trump, er, conservative loyalists. Civil Service be damned. Then there are the usual attacks on Social Security, Medicare, the Departments of Energy and Education, climate regulations, abortion, etc. It's like a Heritage fever dream. The project’s website bills it as a “governing agenda” that would “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”

The former President claims no knowledge of the book though former Trump administration officials directly affiliated with Project 2025 include former Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, former deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn and former Justice Department senior counsel Gene Hamilton.

Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025, is also the Republican National Committee’s platform policy director.

Though Trump claims he knows nothing of the project and doesn't agree with it, NBC reports this...

Trump also spoke highly about the group's plans at a dinner sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in April 2022, saying: “This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America.”

J.D. Vance wrote the forward for a new book, essentially about the project, written by Heritage President Kevin Roberts. Axios reports...

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) wrote the foreword of an upcoming book from the architect of Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for the next Republican administration.

In publishing materials for Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts' upcoming book, "Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America," Vance said Roberts is presenting a "new future for conservatism."

• Vance also uses incendiary imagery while praising the book, writing, "We are now all realizing that it's time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon."
• The Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 are referenced in the first sentence of the book's description, which also claims "America is on the brink of destruction."
• "Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few," the description reads.
• "All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations."

So, there's that. And don't get me started on the grotesquely preposterous case of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a man who has taken a legendary political name and smeared it on the wall of the monkey house.

Look, there are so many issues to confront today, domestic and foreign. Inflation is down to 2.5% and will come down more when the Fed cuts interest rates in the Fall. I filled up at $2.69 a gallon the other day. GDP grew at 3% this past month. Border arrests are at a 4 year low. Campaign on that, for heaven's sake!

And if you are a conservative, the Harris plans for the economy don't have a snowball's chance and would cost a fortune. Stop the race-baiting and commie calling and talk about that.

6 dead Israeli hostages were found this weekend and neither side will budge on a peace deal. Netanyahu is now attacking Palestinians on the West Bank, and HAMAS is still killing Jews. We have big fish to fry here. The US has leverage here and in Ukraine. Use it!

Meanwhile, we continue this Kibuki Theater of a campaign playing to the lowest common denominator and think chanting USA, USA is the answer to all our problems. Enough, people.

Let's focus on what's really important. Militia Barbie, Megyn Kelly, formerly of Fox, called CNN's anchor Kaitlin Collins a "cold-hearted bitch." This is proof positive that since her firing, she can't afford a mirror.