Hating on the Haitians

During the debate, creepy Donald Trump lied about many things but the only time that I actually slapped my forehead in astonishment was when he brought up the story about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of people in the small town of Springfield, Ohio. There are some wild things that he regales his followers at his rallies that are utterly preposterous (windmills causing cancer, children being given gender changing surgery in schools without their parents’ knowledge, talking of Hannibal Lecter as if he were a real person, being forced to choose between being electrocuted by the batteries in electric boats or being eaten by sharks) that I felt that even he would not bring up at the debate as being too nutty for anyone but his devoted cult.

I had heard about this Springfield rumor that had been debunked even before the debate and I placed it in the category as too extreme for prime time and could not believe that he would bring it up during the debate. But he did. Clearly the moderators had anticipated that he might do this and immediately fact-checked him, saying that the city manager had said that there was no credible evidence of this. But that did not stop weird JD Vance from doubling down and saying that his office had received calls from people asserting this. Since anyone can call and say anything, that is an extremely low bar for spreading such malicious and dangerous rumors that could well result in crazy people harming Haitians, not just in Springfield but across the country.
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The morning after the debate

The reviews are in and the general consensus supports my own immediate reaction last night which was that Kamal Harris cleaned creepy Donald Trump’s clock in the debate. At many points she was openly laughing at his nonsense.

Stephen Colbert gave his hot take soon after the debate ended and did a pretty good job at identifying the key points.

Jon Stewart also gave gave his hot take but it was not as good as Colbert’s.


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Harris clobbers creepy Trump in debate

As I said, these debates are all about optics and not substance and it was clear that Kamala Harris won hands down.

She appeared calm and confident and assured, smiling even when he made the most outrageous statements, while he looked angry all the time. For those seeing her closely for the first time, she looked, well, presidential. But most importantly, she controlled the debate, keeping him on the defensive by trolling him and he could not resist the bait, and ended up talking about his own vulnerabilities.

Perhaps the starkest difference came at the end in the closing remarks when she delivered a message of hope and uplift and unity, making her case about the future and comparing that with his message of gloom and divisiveness, ending by saying that we would not be going back to the past.

To add to a terrible night for him, after the debate Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, signing it “Childless Cat Lady”.

In her post announcing her support for Kamala Harris, Taylor Swift said that she had been spurred to act after the Trump campaign implied that she supported him, and also was not pleased with a certain remark made by his running mate, JD Vance.

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth,” Swift wrote.

She signed her post, in which she posed with a long-haired cat, “Childless Cat Lady”. That’s something Vance once said, and which is not going away

This will enrage him and he will likely respond (you know that he cannot ignore any slight) by saying that she is a terrible singer and that the crowds at his rallies are bigger than at her concerts.

You can watch the full debate.

Getting under creepy Trump’s skin in today’s debate

Given that nowadays campaigns can put vast amounts of policy proposals and details on the internet, debates are not the place to unveil new ones or discuss them in depth. At this stage of the election season, debates are unlikely to cause voters to switch allegiances. There is the persistent belief in the media that there are these genuinely undecided voters who look to the debates to help them make a choice. But such people are probably very few. Most ‘undecided’ voters are already leaning towards one candidate or another and the best one can do is to retain them.

The main goal of these debates is to energize supporters of your candidate and depress the emotions of those of your rival. The June 27th debate caused many Democrats to feel that they were going to lose with Joe Biden as their candidate, so in that sense creepy Donald Trump achieved that goal. The problem was that he was too successful in that Biden dropped out and was replaced by Kamala Harris who has completely turned that enthusiasm gap around. Creepy Trump cannot be blamed for not anticipating this possibility, given that it was unprecedented. I had long ago given up the idea that the Democratic nominee could be anyone other than Biden and had resigned myself to the possibility that, bar some kind of miracle, he would slowly drift into defeat in November. But such a miracle did occur.
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Getting past the debate hype

Given the dramatic fallout from the first presidential debate on June 27th that resulted in Joe Biden dropping out, there his a great deal of media hyping about the one to be held tomorrow (Tuesday the 10th) at 9:00pm Eastern time. The usual expectations game is being played, with each side boosting expectations for the opponent so that anything other than a boffo performance can be portrayed as a loss.

I will watch it but do not expect anything dramatic to happen. Kamala Harris seems like someone who is disciplined and on message and is unlikely to get rattled. Creepy Donald Trump will be his usual self, constantly lying and making all manner of unfounded assertions. Harris has already preemptively said that she expects creepy Trump to lie a lot and I hope she says so again early and often during the debate. What I will be watching for is how unhinged creepy Trump’s attacks will be.
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The guerrilla war between fascists and anti-fascists

It is no secret that far-right, white supremacist, neo-Nazi groups have been active on the internet, spreading propaganda, recruiting new members, and organizing people to take street actions (such as disrupting Black Lives Matter and other demonstrations) in order to spread their message. Many of these groups operate in secret. Their goal seems to be to provoke enough confrontations with their perceived opponents and the government so as to trigger a civil war. They seem to believe that if the conditions are right, a huge mass of like-minded gun-owning people will rise up to take back ‘their country’ from the usurpers who are threatening to take it away from the white Christians they see as the rightful owners. Given the massive size and strength of the US military, the idea of provoking an armed confrontation with the aim of taking over the government seems delusional but they may think that there are people in the military who will defect to their side.

Police forces, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI are aware of these efforts but are limited in how they can respond. This is because the FBI in particular has had an ugly history of infiltrating and illegally disrupting groups that were legitimately organizing for civil rights, gay rights, anti-war, and other left-wing causes. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly made the charge that there is a ‘Deep State’ that is targeting conservative groups and this has made law enforcement wary of doing anything that might give credence to that view. As a result, they now walk a fine line to show that they are are not surveilling groups based purely on their ideology but because thy pose an imminent threat of violence.
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I must be really, really old

When the news broke yesterday evening that former vice-president Dick Cheney had declared creepy Donald Trump a threat to democracy and that he would be voting for Kamala Harris, I wrote that this was major news. After all, Cheney was vice-president in the period 2001-2009 for two terms under George W. Bush and was reputedly the most powerful vice-president ever, amassing a degree of executive power and influence that no vice-president before him had. He was also a pillar of the Republican establishment. He had served as a congressman, a defense secretary under president George H. W. Bush, and chief of staff to president Gerald R. Ford.

And yet, when I tuned in to NPR’s news programs All Things Considered on Friday evening and Weekend Edition Saturday this morning, neither program, even though they both run for two hours, saw fit to find room to even mention this. Given that NPR’s audience skews older, I can only conclude that they felt that this would only be relevant to a much older demographic than even what they have, and that their audience may not even know who Cheney is or see any significance in his switching his allegiance
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Liz and Dick Cheney endorsements of Harris may signal the beginning of a trend

Recently, I linked to an article by Tim Miller, a writer for The Bulwark, a site that is home to the group of former Republicans known as ‘Never Trumpers’, who bemoaned the fact that there were not more high-profile Republicans who had spoken at the Democratic conventions and endorsed Kamala Harris. Former congressman Adam Kinzinger was the most prominent. Miller pointed out that many Republicans, including those who had occupied high positions in the administration of creepy Donald Trump, had been sharply critical of their former boss but had refrained from endorsing Harris, and he singled out Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Mike Pence by name. Pence has only said that he would not vote for creepy Trump, not that he would vote for Harris.

On Wednesday, Cheney came out with just such an endorsement of Harris and went even further.
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How much do ‘issues’ matter in US elections?

The short answer seems to be ‘not much’, although much lip service is given to it. During election season, voters will often say that what they are concerned about are major issues like the economy, inflation, immigration, and so on. Reporters will often ask them about these things and it makes both reporters and voters look like serious people who are not swayed by superficial matters. But the replies elicited are often generic and do not suggest that the voters are looking for specific proposals in order to make up their minds. They seem to be looking for candidates who view as important the same things as they do.

I am becoming convinced that issues are not that important in people deciding how they vote, while acknowledging that the word ‘issues’ covers a lot of ground. My suspicion is that people decide who to vote for based on a whole host of intangible feelings or general perceptions, like which party or candidate seems like they would do things that the voter would generally agree with, especially on emotionally charged issues, which party they have generally voted for in the past, which candidate they like/dislike/fear more, and so on. At this stage, the genuinely undecided voter is a rarity and is usually a low-information voter who may well not vote at all or vote more or less based on a last-minute impulse.
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