The Subliminal Emhoff

From the first time I saw a photo of Second Dude Doug Emhoff, I thought there weas something cheesy about the guy. Yesterday the UK Daily Mail confirmed my surmise:

Kamala Harris’s husband’s first marriage ended after he got his children’s nanny pregnant, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife Kerstin with the blonde nanny, who also taught at their children’s pricey private school.

OK, we're dealing with R-rated materai here that will never get a full explication in polite opinion, but one of my chief interests is Trump's ability to exploit subliminal messages, and boy, is this a subliminal message. Let's start with the question I had before any of the nanny business broke: there's nothing special about Emhoff, especially in the sex appeal department. Among his peers, former Hollywood lawyers around 60 years old, is Kevin Morris, at least in photos a much sexier guy who unlike the Second Dude has managed to keep his first marriage together.

So from the start I always kind of asked what Kamala was doing with him, because she's much more of a national figure who for her age is at least not a frump, whereas Emhoff is kind of a nebbishy male frump. A subsidciary puzzle was what the appeal of Emhoff was to Dr Jill that she would let herself be caught French kissing Mr Nebbishy Frump at last year's State of the Union. So these questions already bothered me.

But here's another. Arhold Schwarzenegger's reputation took a hit when his wife, Maria Shriver, divorced him after learning he'd fathered a child with the couple's longtime housekeeper. But I have a feeling the public tends to give men like Schwarzenegger, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump himself something of a pass -- they are, or were in their prime, attractive alpha males.

Doug Emhoff is not, he's more in Harvey Weinstein's class. If he's gotta get an outside piece, it's not as though starlets and interns are lining up at the office door. He's gotta schtup the governess, there's nobody else. And the governess has to go along, or she'll lose her job. But this is being a sexual predator, a Harvey Weinstein. Mr Cheesy's current wife, Kamala Harris. is against sexual predators:

"As many of you know, before I was elected Vice President and before I was elected a United States Senator, I was an elected Attorney General and an elected District Attorney. And before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor.

"So, in those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. . . . So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump's type. I know the type and I have been dealing with people like him."

So what's she doing married to a bush-league Harvey Weinstein? Nor can she insist that she's shocked, shocked:

The relationship and the circumstances around it were known four years ago to Joe Biden’s vetting committee as Harris was herself going through the running mate process before being picked for the ticket, a person familiar with the conversations told CNN. The person also said that Emhoff had told Harris about the affair well before they got married.

So apparently that makes it OK, huh? But we still have the problem that Michaelah Montgomery raised while speaking at a Trump rally in Atlanta last night:

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown admitted in 2020 to an extramarital affair with Kamala Harris.

Brown also admitted to giving Harris her first official state job.

In a short article in the San Francisco Chronicle Brown admitted to the extra-marital affair and to appointing Harris to two state commissions.

. . . “Aside from her record as a prosecutor, why don’t we ask Mrs. Willie Brown if Kamala Harris cares about black families,” Montgomery said.

But beyond the sexual histories of both partners, we have the peculiar, indeed weird, situation that Emhoff's ex-wife seems to think she, Kamala, Doug, and the kids are all still in some kind of blended family. I quoted her last week:

". . . For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin Emhoff said in a statement first provided to CNN. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

Kamala herself agrees that this is all one big, happy, blended family, and Doug's ex is her BFF:

Just before the 2020 election, Harris spoke again about the importance of her blended family and how Kerstin Emhoff played a significant role in ensuring her relationship with her two step-children was positive.

“One of the keys to my relationship with Cole and Ella is their mom,” Harris told CNN at the time. “The thing about blended families — if everyone approaches it in the way that there’s plenty of love to share, then it works.”

In a 2020 profile in The Washington Post about Doug Emhoff, Kerstin Emhoff recalled one night when she, her ex-husband and Harris were having dinner in Manhattan. Kerstin Emhoff said she “nearly spit out her wine” when she learned that Doug Emhoff surprised Harris with a trip to Italy, which he planned entirely.

“I don’t know what you’ve done to this man,” Kerstin Emhoff recalled telling Harris. “But it’s great.”

Well, as long as there's plenty of love to share, it's copacetic, at least at Esalen. But this is strange. It goes beyond schtupping interns or romping with porn stars, there's something a lot deeper going on here, and the governess business can't be isolated. There's got to be more that will come out. How, for instance, does the French kiss with Dr Jill fit into the blended family?

But even if nothing further does emerge, there are two issues. One is the subliminal effect of the wannabe First Dude schtupping the governess and Kamala apparently being OK enough with it to marry Mr Cheesy. The other is that the Biden vetting team was aware of it in 2020 and thought it wasn't a problem. How'd that happen?

The Other Day I Talked About Murphy's Law

Getting past the simple definition of Murpnhy's Law, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong", it's worth going into what's thought to be the origin of the name:

The law's name supposedly stems from an attempt to use new measurement devices developed by Edward A. Murphy, a United States Air Force (USAF) captain and aeronautical engineer. The phrase was coined in an adverse reaction to something Murphy said when his devices failed to perform and was eventually cast into its present form prior to a press conference some months later[.]

. . . [During an initial test,] it became apparent that they had been installed incorrectly, with some sensors wired backwards. .. . Murphy blamed the failure on his assistant after the failed test, saying, "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will."

The phrase first received public attention during a press conference in which [project head John] Stapp was asked how it was that nobody had been severely injured during the rocket sled tests. Stapp replied that it was because they always took Murphy's law under consideration; he then summarized the law and said that in general, it meant that it was important to consider all the possibilities (possible things that could go wrong) before doing a test and act to counter them.

This suggests that the concept formed at first in a burst of exasperation but quickly changed into a principle of planning and quality assurance -- if you can reasonably anticipate an adverse outcome, the prudent course is to examine its potential causes and do what's necessary to avert them. Thus Murphy's Law isn't just a passive observation of a perverse universe, but a caution about the need for humility and a perception of potential mishaps in arranging any sort of affairs.

This, of course, is one component of what we think of as competence, and the other day I referred to the problem when I talked about the potential that the Harris campaign could, as Sean Trende put it, just keep a balloon bouncing in the air between now and the election, anticipating that nothing could go wrong. We're already starting to see indications that this isn't going to happen. For instance, Kamala Harris VP Pick Leaked by Incompetent Philly City Staffer:

Kamala Harris' vice presidential pick was leaked on Friday due to an incompetent staffer not understanding how to schedule posts on social media.

In a move that will no doubt rankle the Harris campaign, a video promoting Josh Shapiro as the choice was pushed out by the X account owned by Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker. It was immediately apparent that the post was meant to be scheduled for early next week when Harris is set to join Parker and others in the city to officially announce the VP pick.

I'm not sure why it would be so important to keep her choice of running mate secret until Tuesday -- I mean, who cares all that much? -- but if it was in fact so important, the campaign should have been on top of it, and that would include releases on social media. If the campaign can't control this sort of thing, it's not a good sign going forward.

But let's look at the odd developments in the death penalty case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants for planning the 9/11 attacks. While Kamala wasn't directly involved, and as far as I can discover, she hasn't commented or tried to take credit, this is all attributable to the Biden-Harris administration. As of yesterday, it was announced:

The US has reached a plea deal with alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants accused of plotting the 2001 terror attacks, according to the Defense Department.

The pretrial agreement – reached after 27 months of negotiations – takes the death penalty off the table for Mohammed, Walid Bin ‘Attash, and Mustafa al Hawsawi, prosecutors said in a letter, obtained by CNN, sent to the families of 9/11 victims and survivors shortly before the Department of Defense announced the news in a press release Wednesday evening.

Astonishingly, the prosecutors then acknowledged that, er, something could go wrong!

“We recognize that the status of the case in general, and this news in particular, will understandably and appropriately elicit intense emotion, and we also realize that the decision to enter into a pre-trial agreement will be met with mixed reactions amongst the thousands of family members who lost loved ones,” prosecutors wrote in the letter.

And indeed, something did go wrong, right away, and big time!

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin on Friday revoked the shocking plea deals that would have spared the death penalty for the accused mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and two alleged accomplices.

In an official memo, Austin, 70, announced he had relieved the official responsible for signing off on the widely criticized plea agreements from authority and would instead assert his own authority in the matter.

. . . Family members of the Sept. 11 terror attacks who were outraged to learn the plea agreements would take the death penalty off the table applauded the abrupt reversal.

“Oh, that’s good news. Because the majority thought that was a cop-out on somebody’s part to give them a life sentence instead of the death sentence,” retired FDNY Deputy Chief Al Santora, who battled 9/11 illness and lost his firefighter son Christopher in the attacks.

“I think they got so much publicity that they changed their mind.”

But this raises intriguing questions. Did the judge who approved the plea deal notify Secretary Austin beforehand? Did Austin approve it before he disapproved it? Did anyone notify the Harris campaign that this was coming? Did the campaign have any input? Who's running the show? Someone should have been not just aware of the potential outcome -- the prosecutors spelled that out in their letter, after all -- but should have been proactive enough at minimum to delay the announcement until after the election, if for some reason they felt they couldn't disapprove it. But hey, they had to disapprove it anyow once it came out!

This is incompetence. But let's look at one of the causes farther back in the chain:

Joe Biden climbed back up the stairs of an airplane that had just arrived and he wasn’t flying on, as Kamala watched in amazement

I mean, he legitimately has no idea where he is or what he’s doing
pic.twitter.com/g5dBZ0CqXo

— Ian Miller (@ianmSC) August 2, 2024

It looks more and more as though Joe's condition is quickly deteriorating, and his adminisration is in disarray, with key staff already leaving and replaced in his inner circle by Hunter and Dr Jill. What could possibly go wrong?

I don't think it's out of line at all to envision a world crisis coming up in the next months with Joe literally incompetent to deal with it, a White House staff in disarray, and a collection of amateurs and bunglers on the Harris staff and campaign incapable of maintaining a cohesive and consistent response, domestically or diplomatically. This is where Murphy's Law is definitely going to kick in.

The State Of The Honeymoon

Just yesterday, of all things, Nate Silver announced that the race is a toss-up.

Now that the election is in kamala_mode, however, it’s far from clear whose position you’d rather be in, and I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to bet either on Harris or on Trump. At FiveThirtyEight, we actually had a formal definition of a “toss-up”, which is an election where each candidate had at least a 40 percent chance of winning. We’re now quite comfortably into that territory. As of this afternoon’s model run, Harris’s odds had improved to 44.6 percent, as compared to 54.9 percent for Trump and a 0.5 percent chance of an Electoral College deadlock.

This, of course, is based on a model, and I would suggest that putting the percentages down to a decimal point is at best misleading. The problem is that, as this memo from a pollster to the Trump campaign points out, the fundamentals of the race haven't changed.

The Democrats deposing one Nominee for another does NOT change voters discontent over the economy, inflation, crime, the open border, housing costs not to mention concern over two foreign wars. Before long, Harris' "honeymoon" will end and voters will refocus on her role as Biden's partner and co-piiot.

An additional problem is Kamala's weakness as a candidate, versus Trump's quickness at seizing opportunities. A good many commentators are misreading the Real Clear Politics numbers, for instance Elizabeth Stauffer at Legal Insurrection:

Although early polling still shows Trump ahead of Harris, she has managed to narrow the gap to a startling degree.

The RealClearPolitics average of head-to-head polls shows Trump 1.4 points ahead of Harris by a margin of 48.1 to 46.1 percent. Before Biden withdrew from the race, Trump led by 3 points.

The RCP national average fluctuates from day to day, depending on how the most recent poll has been plugged into the model. A pro-Trump poll will raise the average for a few days until the next pro-Harris poll comes out and knocks down Trump's standing by maybe 2 points. Comparing a day in mid July when Trump was up by 3 to a day in August when he was up by 1 is meaningless, this same thing has been going on since last year.

But dealing with Trump at his best, as I've been saying, is a question of subliminal messaging. Let's look at the latest controversy over Trump's appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists. For starters, Jesse Watters is correct in the simple observation that it ripped the news cycle right out of Kamala Harris's hands by creating a new controversy that put him back as the center of attention. But Joy Reid at MSNBC pointed out the subliminal message it conveyed:

To the president and board of NABJ: Y’all got played. Donald Trump showed up at the convention for exactly three reasons. . . to try to dispel the notion that he’s scared to debate a Black woman. Second, to steal the attention that Vice President Kamala Harris has hijacked from him because she’s just more interesting, and her support is more joyous and rooted in popular American culture. Three, to create clips to play for his very white, very right-wing mega fan base of him standing up to the Blacks.

The piece at Gateway Pundit goes on,

Joining Reid, April Ryan, White House correspondent for The Grio and an MSNBC contributor, said “It was a shock and awe moment. I’m still trying to deal with it.”

But Gateway leaves uut what was revealing about the Harris campaign: Kamala was invited to the event, but Trump himself pointed out that she didn't attend. Trump characterized this as bad faith on the part of NABJ, but had she attended, this would effectively have been at least a quasi-debate. We must assume that Kamala's handlers wanted to avoid any such opportunity. Scott Adams, who underatands subliminal messaging, outlined the actual message Trump sent:

How much did I enjoy that? 10/10.

Who changed the conversation about all of politics? Trump did.

Did you hear the word weird yet today?

He managed to changed the entire cycle to 'Why are you being such a bitch' basically.

Basically she was just a total bitch, and he just treated her like a bitch.

. . . it's the best thing I've ever seen in politics.

Now if you tell me that the men sitting in the audience hated that, did they?

I don't think they're going to tell you if they liked it.

Wasn't this precisely Joy Reid's point? This reminds me of the time Barbara Bush characterized Hillary as "a word that rhymes with witch", becasue we're getting into Hillary territory here, as Kamala's mentor and sugar daddy Willie Brown also pointed out, in the context of Trump's political acumen:

“He’s an entertainer, that’s all it is,” Brown argued.

And that can overcome everything else, all of Trump’s manifest liabilities?

“Oh yeah, if the public is fascinated with your antics, you survive,” he said, before lowering the boom. “It’s unfortunate, but you can’t really tell the voters they’re idiots.”

Brown was far more candid about Harris at lunch, before the debate, when Biden’s renomination seemed inevitable and his vice president was more unpopular than he was.

Brown worried out loud that Harris had “the Hillary syndrome” — that “people don’t like her” — and fretted it was not fixable. Thinking through Harris’s future if Biden were to lose, Brown said: “You need a Black woman on every goddamn corporate board in America!”

But the comparison to Hillary goes deeper, to the changed nature of the Democrat coalition. According to Ruy Teixeira,

In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition. . . but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition. . . but with far fewer white working-class voters.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Times poll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today.

. . . Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34.

It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years.

. . . Right now, [the Harris campaign is] on a narrow, polarized path to November and their [they're?] reckoning with Donald Trump.

In oher words, much more even than with Obama, Harris is running a campaign aimed at bourgeois white women, the sort of target Groucho Marx could take on -- and one side of Trump is the entertainer truth-teller who has just a dash of Groucho Marx. This is what Scott Adams and Willie Brown both instinctively see.

"Short Race"?

Two pieces in two days at Real Clear Politics say Kamala has the benefit of a "short" presidential campaign. Yesterday, Sean Trende concluded:

In short, we can’t think of this campaign as a traditional campaign. It’s a sprint, and a shorter sprint than people acknowledge.

This morning, Karl Rove echoed:

This presidential election was one of America’s longest: . . . But with Mr. Biden’s withdrawal and replacement by Vice President Kamala Harris, it suddenly became one of the shortest.

Regular visitors know that my estimate of both Karl Rove and Sean Trende isn't high, but here I think they've about pegged out on the obtuseness meter. The traditional start of the presidential campaign season is Labor Day, but even if we put the start farther back at the summer nominating conventions, which is when we learn for sure who the actual nominees will be, I don't see how this year's schedule differs much from any other.

In fact, it's very similar to 1972, the campaign nobody wants to mention. That year, Thomas Eagleton was replaced as George McGovern's vice presidential nominee on August 1, which forced a campaign reboot much like this year's replacement of Joe with Kamala -- but we're on almost precisely the same schedule now.

Karl Rove's op-ed at The Wall Street Journal is behind their paywall -- normally, aggregators aren't supposed to link to something behind a paywall -- but from the little we can read, I think his argument must be very close to Trende's. Trende says,

This campaign is a lot like the old kids’ game of “don’t let the balloon touch the ground.” . . . Kids bounce a balloon around, and they do so until the balloon touches the ground. In the long run, kids can’t really win the game, as gravity inevitably wins out. But if the goal is to pass time while parents pull together some last minute aspect of the party, the kids can theoretically win.

Well, I must have gone to a lot of well-run parties when I was a kid, because I never played this game and hadn't heard of it. But Trende's implication seems to be that this is something parents use to distract kids' attention from the fact that the magician didn't show up, or maybe the party store was out of piñatas. In other words, this is a suddenly improvised Plan B, which simply doens't bode well. Trende himself acknowledxges that gravity is likely to win.

As I've been saying since Joe withdrew, the basic Democrat problem is there's been no serious Plan B, not just for this year's campaign, but since Obama's second term, when he had no clear successor. Obama chose Biden as his running mate in 2008 because, as a white Catholic from a southern state, he balanced the ticket, but he was also, even as of 2008, too old to upstage Obama and not terribly bright as well. Obama clearly never thoujght Joe was any sort of credible successor.

Obama favored Hillary, the 2016 election turned out to be a fluke, but let's recognize that the Democrats had no Plan B to replace Hillary after she lost, and Joe turned out to be more of a Plan Z than a Plan C; he barely squeaked by in 2020, helped by COVID and a basement campaign, as well as the ability of his handlers and press enablers to conceal his actual condition.

I think where Trende's analogy fails is when he suggests that only the period from now to November is the bouncing ball. He seems to think Joe's withdrawal from the race is analogous to Aunt Lizzie forgetting to check if the party store had piñatas, and Mom and Dad suddenly had to improvise the afternoon of the party. It isn't like that. Joe's party store never had piñatas in stock at all, and everybody pretended this wasn't the case long before the party.

The main problem, even before we try to look at individual candidates, is that so many parts of the Democrat New Deal coalition have already left the party -- southern whites, Catholics, labor, and now many Jews -- that the remaining stalwarts -- radical feminists, minority agitators, LGBT++, parlor socialists, and Ivy Leaguers -- aren't enough to win a national election. Joe, a token southern white Catholic, was the last candidate who could credibly maintain the fantasy of the New Deal coalition.

In fact, Joe's handlers effectively acknowledged this problem by cooking up the "lawfare" campaign against Trump -- Joe coulsn't run a campaign based on the traditional New Deal imterest groups, because they'd begun to see the Republicans were doing a better job at representing those interests, so the handlers had to find distractions. In effect, Joe's handlers wanted to bypass the electoral process, which they succeeded in doing with the Democrat primary season, and which they wanted to do with the national campaign by putting Trump in prison.

In other words, the problem wasn't that the campaign season would be long or short, the problem was that there was still a campaign season at all. On one hand, Trump beat back the "lawfare" threat -- nobody says "convicted felon" any more, that's been overtaken by events -- and on the other, Joe, the last credible southern white Catholic Democrat, collapsed as a candidate.

His replacement is a faux generic minority woman cipher who right now is being pumped up by legacy media. On one hand, the traditional summer-fall presidential campaign season is plenty long enough to sort the candidates out -- Dukakis was ahead in the polls in the 1988 campaign; Kerry in 2004 -- and here was plenty of time for the electorate to review the issues. On the other, no amount of time can compensate for a clearly flawed candidate, like McGovern in 1972, Mondale in 1984, or Hillary in 2016.

It almost seems like both Trende and Rove are trying to forget that Joe put himself into what amounted to a premature fall campaign by early June, when it became clear that the "lawfare" strategy had backfired. He then underook European trips to look presidential, while hoping to knock Trump out in an early debate. The difficulty was his underlying weakness as a candidate, which included his failing health, and he withdrew, apparently in exhaustion, after only six weeks of serious campaigning.

Trende wants to use an obscure kids' party game as a metaphor for the current state of the post-Joe campaign. I think a better paradigm for how things are going is Murphy's Law, which applies to bouncing balloons as much as anything else:

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.

Or, put another way, for Kamala as a candidate, what could possibly go wrong, especially over the course of 100 days?

Well, This Whole Thing Is Hinky, After All

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 circle plan was to keep Joe's impairment covered up, apparently until he was re-elected. . . . What was the end game, then? For Biden to be re-elected and for whomever is running the country currently to continue? Or for Biden to be re-elected and for Harris to take over when the decline was too big to deny? That doesn't really make sense, since they could have had Harris invoke the 25th Amendment and take over at any point - unless they didn't think Kamala could get elected on her own.

. . . Until thnat fateful debate.

But the additional question for me is that the debate was on June 27, and whatever may have been said behind the scenes, the official line from Obama on down was that it was just a "bad night", and in fact, as commentators have been saying ever since, it didn't affect Biden's standing in the polls. Although Pelosi in particular had begun to make noises about Joe deciding to "do the right thing", there was no public sense of urgency -- until after the assassination attempt, which had nothing to do with Joe. That bothers me. Van Laar continues,

Hersh went through the days leading up to Biden dropping out, beginning with Monday, July 15, when Biden flew to Nevada. On the 16th he spoke to the NAACP and was successful in quashing some of the "He must drop out!" talk. On the 17th he was scheduled to give a speech to a Latino group, but after a meet-and-greet at a Mexican restaurant that speech was canceled, Biden's motorcade sped toward the airport - and the President wasn't seen publicly for a week.

. . . The official story was that Biden had tested positive for COVID and had some symptoms, so was rushing back to Delaware to isolate. But everyone saw the writing on the wall, and the events in Las Vegas set off a cascade of events culminating just a few days later in Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 campaign. It didn't help that Biden was unreachable[.]

But Van Laar makes it clear that while there had been some pressure for Joe to drop out, things didn't become urgent until the weekend of July 13, in other words, after the assassination attempt:

Congressional leaders were involved in pressuring Biden for at least a week before Obama was "deeply" involved, and Politico reported that Pelosi had an arm-twisting meeting with the Bidens over the weekend of July 13 imploring him to drop out.

But Obama didn't start the final, decisive push until Joe was back in his Rehoboth basement. This confirms for me yet again that the June 27 debate, while problematic, wasn't a decisive factor for the lizard people -- they could continue to discount or excuse it as they'd been doing all along for earlier episodes like his wandering away toward the skydivers at the G7 meeting or freezing at the Hollywood fundraiser. Bad as all this was, it apparently didn't get urgent until the weekend of July 13.

As homicide detectives say, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Hersh's version, reported widely, is that Obama called Joe the following Sunday morning, July 21, and threatened to have Kamala invoke the 25th Amendment. Apparently Joe had been unreachable since July 17, and maybe this was the soonest Obama could get hold of him. But what was the efficient cause of the call? An unspecified medical episode in Las Vegas, something to do with the business in Butler, or some combination of those factors?

Now we get to the FBI. The official statement from the FBI's deputy director as of yesterday is,

Thus far, though absolutely nothing has been ruled out, the investigation has not identified a motive nor any co-conspirators or others with advance knowledge.

Nevertheless, in the same statemeent, the FBI deputy director said,

Something just very recently uncovered is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with the shooter in the 2019 to 2020 timeframe. There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature.

While the investigative team is still working to verify this account to determine if it did belong to the shooter, we believe it important to note, particularly given the general absence of information to date reflecting on the shooter’s potential motive.

Yeah, and while the FBI doesn't know for sure, maybe the security guard Richard Jewell planted the Atlanta Olympic bomb. Deputy Director Abbate's version was immediately contradicted by the platform on which Crooks is thbought to have posted:

BREAKING: The FBI is now claiming that the Trump shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks had an unspecified "social media account" in 2019/2020 (when he was 14/15 years old) that posted "anti-immigrant and anti-semitic" content.

This is not consistent with Gab's understanding of the… pic.twitter.com/UPPJSAkPqp

— Andrew Torba (@BasedTorba) July 30, 2024

Elon Musk replied,

It sure looks like the FBI leadership engaged in perjury … https://t.co/tU1M7fs9lj

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2024

As homicide detectives say, a lie is as good as a confession. If I had to come up with a working theory of the case, I would say that if the July 13 Butler attempt had been successful, it would have left the November race wide open. Trump hadn't selected Vance as his running mate yet, and Joe was still the presumptive Democrat nominee. It would have been possible -- maybe a stretch, but just possible, with Trump out of the picture -- to present Joe as the stable alternative to a Republican nomination process thrown into chaos, especially absent the medical emergency on July 17 that supposedly did change the picture for Joe.

The weekend before the Rpuublican convention was in fact both the perfect and the last opportumity for the insiders to pull this off -- but as far as I can see, that particular window is now shut, with Vance as Trump's backup and Joe out of the running, and now people are starting to ask questions. As I said on July 21, the unexpected set of circumstances of the prior week has left the lizard people without a Plan B.

I don't think we've heard the end of this, and it's at least strange that so many days after the event, we've been told so little.

Whew, That Was A Short Honeymoon!

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 month, every month, and the results have been exactly the same since last year: depending on what poll just came out, Trump has been up on RCP ("the polls") between maybe 0.7 and 3 depending on what day, month after month.

There are people who are paid -- I'm not sure why -- to look at these meaningless numbers and think they're finding a "trend", when the differences come only from the day of the month you're looking at. This piece in the Never Trump National Review is at least aware of the odd consistency of "the polls" month to month:

Substituting Harris for Biden has helped Democrats claw back to the position they occupied before the first presidential debate — both at the national and swing-state levels. But Democrats were losing the race for the White House even before the debate.

This is another way of saying that if you looked at "the polls" after the June 27 debate, early in July, the latest Rasmussen would have kicked the RCP model up to Trump ahead 3. But a week or two later, WSJ and Reuters/Ipsos would have brought the model back down to 1.7, which was what had been happening all year anyhow, debate or no debate, Harris or no Harris. This is the same "trend" commentators were finding after Joe's State of the Union, which had Joe gaining ground against Trump the same way -- until he wasn't, and Obama and Pelosi finally told him to get lost, even though "the polls" hadn't changed at all.

That, of course, was the point Joe kept trying to make, it was a margin-of-error race and a tossup, but it did him no good. But doesn't that suggest that the Democrat insiders weren't taking "the polls" seriously? No matter how you sliced "the polls", as far as the lizard people were concerned, Joe was going to lose. But the legacy media, and even some on the right, were ginning up a "honeymoon" narrative.

The polls ["the polls"!] are in after a chaotic few weeks in the 2024 presidential election, and they point to a newly hyper-competitive race.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ elevation has jolted the race and blunted the momentum former President Donald Trump could have seen coming out of the Republican convention and the assassination attempt that preceded it. Though polling showed Trump building a lead over President Joe Biden following their debate last month, that advantage has mostly evaporated against Harris in the fresh round of surveys conducted since she became the all-but-certain Democratic nominee.

Translated: the predictable monthly fluctuation in the RCP model has fluctuated yet again, and the fluctuation continues in precisely the range it's had since the start of the year. Depending on where you are in the month, Trump "has a lead", or his previous "advantage" has "mostly evaporated". At least, that's for public consumption. The lizard people, though, aren't buying it:

Democrats are privately expressing concerns over Harris’s candidacy. One source familiar with the internal discussions told the Hill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was “lukewarm” about Harris becoming the nominee, a view that appears to be widespread among the party elites.

“She wasn’t a great candidate,” a Democrat senator told the Hill about Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. Harris ended her campaign before the Iowa caucuses. “And she may not be as a political campaigner as good as Biden was in his prime,” the senator said.

Another story makes an important point:

After numerous gaffes as vice president, Harris shied away from the press and has not sat for a single one-on-one interview with the media since becoming the de facto nominee.

Any interview, and especially any debate against Trump, is likely to be as disastrous for Kamala as Joe's June 27 debate --but at the same time, it isn't going to be reflected in "the polls", just as Joe's June 27 debate wasn't, and just as the assassination attempt in Butler wasn't. But if "the polls" weren't affected by such momentous events, why did the lizard people force Joe out? Were they disingenuous?

Democrats at the highest levels are making a critical push for President Joe Biden to rethink his election bid, with former President Barack Obama expressing concerns to allies and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi privately telling Biden the party could lose the ability to seize control of the House if he doesn’t step away from the 2024 race.

My view continues to be that whatever finally influenced the lizard people, it wasn't "the polls". They let Joe dither for fully two weeks after the June 27 debate, but something between the assassination attempt on July 13 and his abrupt retreat to Rehoboth June 17 changed things irrevocably, and apparently after a final nudge from Obama, he withdrew on July 21.

Did the lizard people seriously expect something to change if they swapped out Joe? I would have to guess that they didn't if the replacement was Kamala, which might be reflected in the Seymour Hersh report that Obama's first choice was Mark Kelly -- but even there, Kelly wasn't, and isn't, a national figure; at 60, he's the same age as Kamala but looks older; and he isn 't a cheerful or optimistic figure. If he was the best alternative, well, fine, but they couldn't choose him no matter what, because Kamala.

The coup had to be some sort of desperate last resort when everything else failed, but whatever it was, it wasn't, and isn't, "the polls". Nor is swapping Joe out for Kamala, however desperate a move it may have been, going to change a thing. Why they did it is still a puzzle.

The Power Of The Image

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 different people that it must be coordinated, Trump and JD Vance are "weird":

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz continued making his increasingly popular argument that Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are “very weird.” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker echoed Walz . . . .

“Listen to the guy. He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind,” Walz said of Trump on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Have you ever seen the guy laugh? That seems very weird to me, that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye — if he has laughed, it's at someone, not with someone — that is weird behavior, and I don't think you call it anything else.”

Walz, a progressive former congressman serving in his second term as governor in Minnesota, made waves last week when he said of Republicans in another TV appearance “these guys are just weird” and that Trump and Vance seem like they are running for “He-Man Women Haters Club” of “The Little Rascals” fame.

On MSNBC, Jen Psaki called Vance Trump's "weirdo running mate". But what on earth makes Vance a weirdo? He's a successful straight white guy with a stable marriage and kids? That kinda turns the whole definition of weirdo upside down. But let's look at what's weird, for instance, Second Dude Doug Emhoff's purported family arrangement:

The ex-wife of second gentleman Doug Emhoff on Wednesday defended Vice President Kamala Harris against sexist criticisms about her lack of biological children, calling them “baseless” and expressing her gratitude for the presumptive Democratic nominee.

“These are baseless attacks. For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and I,” Kerstin Emhoff said in a statement first provided to CNN. “She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

Are there boundaries here, or not? What kind of "family" is this? And that takes us back to that weird smooch at last year's State of the Union:

What's up with all this extended family stuff, anyhow? Talk about weird:

Trump doesn't even need to say a word, but likely he will: