In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Jennifer Van Laar at Red State broke the initial story, at least on a national platform, that there may have been an as-yet-undisclosed medical event, not just a positive COVID test, that caused Joe's sudden premature departure from his Las Vegas campaign tour on July 17. But this is just one of the whole series of events between the July 13 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, PA, and Joe's July 21 announcement on Twitter from his Delaware basement that he was withdrawing from the November race. The juxtaposition seems at minimum incongruous. The most extensive analysis of that chain is on Seyumour Hersh's Substack behind a quasi-paywall, which I've so far been unable to bypass, even though it's theoretically possible. However, Van Laar now provides a pretty good summary in this piece at Red State . In her interpretation of Hersh's story, there are many unanswered questions: According to Hersh's latest reporting the Democrat inner c...

Here's what's plain as day, but nobody mentions it. First, when people say "the polls", they mean the Real Clear Politics "averages", which is the word they use, but these numbers aren't the "arithmetic mean", they're something cooked up in their "model", which is the same sort of thing that told us there'd be mass graves in public parks in 2020 after the hospital ships ran out of beds or something. But second, the polls on which they base their models are a select group of approved pollsters that release predictable results on a monthly basis. What happens every month is one pollster releases predictably favorable results for Trump -- let's say Rasmussen has him up by 6 over Joe or Kamala. RCP feeds it into their model, which spits out Trump up 3. Then a pro-Harris poll comes out, maybe Reuters/Ipsos, with Harris up 2. RCP runs its model, and it comes out with Trump now up only 1.2 -- or whatever. This goes on all mo...

Remember Fani Willis? Seems like years ago, but just last January, the Georgia racketeering case, according to CNN, was "key", because as a state case, it’s not something that could be dismissed through a presidential pardon, which applies only to federal matters. Trump’s lawyers have long considered this case the most significant legal threat given the jury pool and the fact that it is beyond pardon powers. Within weeks of that assessment, that "most significant legal threat" had disintegrated amid jokes about Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs. This is just one example of Trump's extrordinary combination of luck and deftness that's driven his campaign, especially his ability to exploit subliminal cues. This is a factor with the insertion of Kamala Harris into the race that's so far completely eluded commentators. Let's take the latest Democrat talking point that emerged over the weekend, which seems to have come simultaneously from so many differ...

Isn't it odd how the composition of the photo above very faintly echoes Michelangelo's Pieta , just as the more famous one of Trump pumping his fist beneath the flag echoes the photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima? Says something important, I think -- and neither of those photos was remotely posed, they were lucky catches by the photographers. This is part of the underlying authenticity of the whole event. As I noted yesterday, it seems as though the most momentous events of the campaign so far don't seem to move the polls. There are several possible explanations. One is that the impact of certain events isn't easily quantifiable, or at least not over a short time. Another is the Rush Limbaugh theory, that the polls are carefully curated and massaged to shape the news, not to report it. Another is that some of the most momentous events don't even reach the news, and as one example, here is a report from Seymour Hersh via The Gateway Pundit : As The Gateway...

An uncharacteristically insightful piece at Hot Air this morning leads in passing to an intriguing question: First, Biden didn't really crater all that much from the debate. On June 27, the day of the debate, Biden's RCP average was 45.1, and it bottomed out on July 3 at 43.6. By the time Biden withdrew, though, he'd recovered most of that lost ground to have an RCP average of 44.8. Trump went from 46.6 on June 27 to 47.9 on July 21, but much of that gain came after the assassination attempt and then the GOP convention. Second: Harris only negligibly improves on Biden, even in the honeymoon week. On June 27, before the debate, Biden was 1.3 points behind Trump in the RCP average. Trump had a 3.1-point lead on Sunday, when Biden withdrew. Now, at the end of what should be the friendliest news cycle Harris will ever get, Trump still leads by 1.7 points -- slightly better than his lead when the debate aired. The writer thinks this is about Kamala, but I think the big...

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, MT, has become a regular at Real Clear Politics, which is an indication that whatever he writes is likely to be as cautiously conventional as you're likely to find. His piece today is Who Engineered the Political Coup Against Biden? The title suggests he's going to veer into the sort of Ferdinand Lundberg territory that I favor, the populist notion that a cabal of wealthy families controls US politics and media, but since this is RCP, there's no way that's going to happen. And it didn't. He raises a potentially interesting point: [Joe] had the delegates, and he had the nomination unless he willingly surrendered it. But something happened. About the same time Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and raised his fist in defiance, Democrats seemed to have concluded that Biden could not win in November. . . . [S]omeone needs to tell the truth about the 10 days that shook ...

Per the new York Post, Former President Barack Obama hasn’t endorsed Kamala Harris’ presidential bid because he doesn’t think she can beat Donald Trump, according to a source close to the Biden family. Following President Biden’s shocking exit from the race on Sunday, and his immediate endorsement of the vice president, most of the Democratic elite have been quick to rally behind Harris — but Obama is a notable exception. “Obama’s very upset because he knows she can’t win,” the Biden family source told The Post. But notice this comes from "a source close to the Biden family", when previous leaks from the Obama camp have come in the form of attributed attacks from David Axelrod and George Clooney that had Obama's tacit approval. The Biden family is leaking this now, because Joe seems still to believe he could have pulled out the November election, while Kamala can't. The story continhues, “Wait until the debate . . . She can’t debate. She’s going to put ...

PROOF OF LIFE? Biden shuffles out of his motorcade, mumbles incoherently at reporters, and ascends the stairs of the smaller AF1. It's Biden's first public appearance since the coup to force him off the ballot. pic.twitter.com/lPUGnF0C5e — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 23, 2024 Although there was more apparent confirmation on various alt platforms yesterday that something hinky took place with Joe in Las Vegas last week, polite opinion hasn't yet mentioned it. About as close as it's come has been Newsweek, which debunked what was basically a straw man claim : Right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk has posted a rumor that President Joe Biden had a medical emergency in Las Vegas last week and may be in hospice care, claims which have been debunked. The post contradicted the official account of the president's COVID-19 diagnosis and has sparked widespread speculation, but what are the facts? . . . He wrote: "Got a weird lead on a story that people sho...

Last night, as I sometimes do, I woke up with a start and asked a question that had been developing in my mind all the prior day: why were Obama and Pelosi so anxious to replace Joe with Kamala, who at best is no better a presidential candidate than Joe, and is potentially worse? MSDNC: Kamala doesn't fare any better against President Trump than Crooked Joe did — and Democrats' hope to the contrary is "based more on hope than it is on numbers right now." Brutal! pic.twitter.com/EBZftusTAv — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 22, 2024 The received versions of how Joe came to withdraw from the race differ. Yesterday I cited a CNN version that has Joe meeting with key advisers who simply told him he no longer had a path to 270 electoral votes. A competing version outlines a sense of increasing urgency from Democrat leaders in the weeks following the June 27 debate: Pelosi, a Dem California rep and former House Speaker, had tried a different tactic befo...

On succeeding to the presidency following Nixon's resignation, Gerald Ford said in part. I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our Government but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad. In all my public and private acts as your President, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end. My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. In that case, Nixon had resigned, a final and unambiguous act, and the electorate was at least tentatively willing to believe that the problem was specific to Nixon, and it culd be solved simply by replacing Nixon with Ford. But if one thing is plain from Joe's withdrawal as a candidate for the November election, the nightmare isn't ending, and Joe's mere withdrawal as a candidate is neither final nor unambiguous. Trump, whose instincts over the past year have bee...

The problem nobody wants to face is twofold: first, JD Vance as Trump's running mate is stepping right into the role Nixon played for Eisenhower and Agnew played for Nixon, the low-road campaigner, and he's asking the important question: If Joe Biden doesn't have the cognitive function to run for re-election, then he certainly doesn't have the cognitive function to remain as Commander-In-Chief. How can any Dem pushing him to drop out of the presidential race, argue in good faith that he should stay on as POTUS? — JD Vance (@JDVance1) July 19, 2024 But the second horn of the dilemma is Kamala : We reported on Friday that Kamala Harris was going to have a conference call with big Democrat donors. The meeting was put together on short notice. However, at the time of the report, it was not clear what message she was going to deliver to them. . . . We now have details about the call. According to the New York Times, the call included roughly 300 donors, and ...