The Subliminal Walz

I'm still thinking about the effect of subliminal images on the presidential campaign, most recently last week's story of Kamala's husband, the cheesy predator Doug Emhoff and the affair with his kids' nanny that ended his first marriage. According to the UK Daily Mail, the news sparked "panic in Harris's camp".

Ever since Kamala announced that Tim Walz was her running mate on Tuesday, that story was eclipsed. But in the runup to the announcememnt, the consensus was,

[I]t's unclear exactly how much a running mate helps the candidate at the top of the ticket -- and the downside of picking someone not ready for the bright lights of a national campaign are severe, possibly making the lack of negatives superior to any possible positives a contender brings.

"At the end of the day, the most practical thing is, do no harm," said former Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., a Harris ally.

"Who's the governor of which state? Who's the senator from, what state? What do they bring? There's all this public record about the other factors that you would include. But the vetting ... is where you really have to do the deep dive to make sure that somebody meets the other criteria, but that can at best bring value, at worst, be neutral, because you sure don't want someone to bring the ticket down," he added.

After less than a week, we've seen how this has worked out for Harris. Walz's "stolen valor" issue actually has two angles: the first is that Walz previously extended his enlistment in order to remain at the command sergeant major rank, but he reneged on the commitment when he learned his unit would be deployed to Iraq, and he retired instead. The second is that he repeatedly issued, or allowed to be issued on his behalf, misleading or false statements that he had served in combat in Afghanistan, when he never served there or in any other combat zone.

Here's where we're getting into subliminal territory. Although, and his former top aide Anita Dunn confirms this, Joe Biden's fall from grace was never reflected in the polls, and nobody seems to know precisely what it was that sealed his fate, it's occurred to me that in retrospect, the Uncle Bosie episode from last April may have been the first hint that the fall was impending:

Was President Joe Biden's uncle eaten by cannibals? That appears to be what he suggested − twice − this week when he said the remains of his uncle, a military veteran who died during World War II in a plane crash off the New Guinea coast, were not recovered.

Biden's telling differed from an account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which says Biden's uncle, Ambrose Finnegan, and two other men "failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash."

. . . "And my uncle − they called him Ambrose. Instead of 'Brosie,' they called him 'Bosie,' Biden said. "My Uncle Bosie was a hell of an athlete, they tell me, when he was a kid. And he became an Army Air Corps, before the Air Force came along. He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones."

"And he got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be − there were a lot of cannibals − for real − in that part of New Guinea," Biden continued.

. . . Biden brought up the circumstances of Finnegan's death while discussing how former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican frontrunner, reportedly disparaged American soldiers killed in combat as "suckers" and "losers" while president, according to military officials who worked for Trump. Trump has denied the allegations.

In Biden's case, he embroidered the details of his uncle's death to make it seem that he was shot down in combat and then eaten by cannibals in what came off as a blatantly political attempt to discredit Trump. It didn't help at all that he referred to an Uncle Bosie, which created an overall impression of feckless vainglory. I don't think it's a coincidence that a renewed wave of allegations that Joe had pooped his pants, first in April on the White House lawn, then in June at the D-Day commemoration, emerged around the same time as the Uncle Bosie story.

My theory of what brought Joe down, if the polls didn't, was in fact that by mid-June, Greg Gutfeld was making poopy-pants jokes about Biden on his show practically every night. I think the poopy-pants meme needed some kind of subliminal permission, and what gave it that permission was the Uncle Bosie story.

So now we have a situation in which a woman, Speaker Emerita Pelosi, claims credit for having taken the presidency away from Joe "like a child", in Trump's words -- in effect, she emasculated Joe, took away his alpha male presidential status, and replaced him as a candidate with a woman. Remember the insight I've heard that Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election because two women tried to assassinate him.

Two women, Pelosi amd Harris, then identify a man whom they find acceptable to be number two to a woman, Tim Walz, "Tampon Tim", who, unlike the alpha males Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro, won't upstage Kamala. Tampon Tim then, incredibly, swaggers onto the scene with a record of dodging combat service while claiming to be an Afghanistan vet. Well, open season. As of last night, even the legacy media was on the case.

This in turn gives subliminal permission, much as it did for Biden's poopy-pants meme:

Tim Walz & his Lt Governor love a Parade✔️🌈 pic.twitter.com/sm5vQGuhls

— Marla Hohner (@marlahohner) August 8, 2024

Whether Walz is a closeted gay -- who knows, but I can't rule it out -- he's clearly been outed by Pelosi and Harris as a submissive, beta male. But it's gotten worse -- worse, indeed, than poopy-pants for Biden. All you have to do is search "Walz horse" on the web to learn more. It's false and scurrilous, of course, but then, we're in politics, where these things happen. What's remarkable is the speed with which this has taken place.

There's another aspect of subliminal permission here -- you can't hit Kamala very hard, because she's a girl, and she's more or less a minority. But you can hit Emhoff, and you can hit Walz, so they're taking hits that are subliminally intended for her as well. But leaving even that aside, there's something inescapably cheesy about these two men who surround her.