Dear Friends,
Let’s talk about a few major news items.
From all accounts, Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance had a very good debate last night. Composed, calm, sharp, even somewhat likable. His opponent, Governor Tim Walz, was uncomfortable and in over his head. It is usually the case that the Vice Presidential debate is meaningless in the grand scheme of electoral politics, and that may prove true here. Except that this year is something of an outlier election: never has the country been presented with two candidates as terrible as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. VP picks could make a difference at the margins—and it does look like this election is going to be won and lost on the margins in a few critical swing states. That’s why Harris was a fool to not select Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. I digress.
At least one of my friends who is still enthusiastically supporting Trump has actually started making this argument just this morning. There is almost nothing left of Trump’s character or policies to defend, so now the argument is: Trump will have a better right-hand man than Kamala. That is what you call motivated reasoning and grasping at a pretty pathetically weak straw.
Leave the optics and presentation aside. I have no doubt that Vance is better-spoken than Walz. The question is what substantively differentiates the two? Very, very little. They are, it seems to me, two statists arguing over which of them should run the all-encompassing, cradle-to-grave entitlement state they envision. They both love big government. They love spending taxpayer dollars. They love the Federal government aiding industries they like and punishing others. They both think the Federal government is the answer to every problem. They are both effectively pro-choice—the one thing they agree the Federal government should not regulate. My political party, the one that represented my political views for the first four decades of my life, has vanished into the ether. What we have now is two Progressive tickets: one, a Progressive Version 2024, and a Republican Party that is simply now the Democrat Party circa 2000. I don’t support progressivism at any stage of its embryonic development, so I am without a real option next month.
If a large enough cohort sends a message to the new “Democrat Lite” Republican Party, then maybe it will exert some pressure on it to change. And, as just a reminder, voting for Kamala Harris does not send a message. Kamala votes are counted as votes that support her. Only by writing in somebody different altogether does the actual message get sent and properly interpreted. That, and voting for Kamala and what she claims to believe on a host of topics is, in my mind, immoral.
On the topic of sending a message, here are two anecdotes that are simply anecdotes. I don’t know if one can extrapolate anything significant from them. I was driving down a country dirt road and I went past a house that had about a dozen political signs along the roadside. Every single Republican running for anything whatsoever was represented. It took me a minute or two after passing by to realize: there was no Trump sign.
There is another house along a major road near my house. These folks are really conservative and are always helpful because they put signs in their yard that remind me who to vote for in some of the more obscure local races. This year they’ve got all their signs out: for Sheehy, conservative judges, Republican state house candidates, and so forth. No Trump sign.
Anecdotes, yes. Also potentially significant if it is a trend in swingier states than Montana.
Over the past couple of weeks Israel has first crippled Hezbollah in Lebanon (literally, with exploding pagers and radios), and then decapitated it—killing almost all of their senior high command in surgical strikes. Iran promised to respond, and on Tuesday they did, with a barrage of over 200 ballistic missiles. All of which were intercepted and destroyed by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. One person, a Palestinian in the West Bank, died from falling debris.
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