that couch thing
I want to tell everyone to knock it off on the couch thing. I don’t even really understand it. It is not true, verifiably not the case — supposedly in the book and look in the book and it is not there — and if it were the case that it is in there, would be a thing that is… I don’t know… Humanizing the jackass? Kind of? At the very least hanging it over him leads to more risk-taking in book writing — see too why Obama’s first book is an actual book and after winning any election nothing he puts out reads as anything worth reading. I can’t even see how this idea gets at some “hypocrisy” angle — it is a weird dunking of a political foe which when it evaporates muddied the water for things that are legitimate — an escape clause to point to immature lies the liberals are promulgating and justify their own distortions with a “whatabout”ism. I hope to find out that the source of it was apolitical and “in it for the lulz”, because this meme is just kind of annoying.
The “childless cat ladies” thing is a lot serious in part because it is not a one-off, there is — as everyone is finding out now — a good deal of policy proposals spouted off off of this frame of mind. (Some of which, in some variant, championed as mildly liberal politicians, or if you want to propose an expansion of the child income tax credot, go at it, cause “it takes a village” after all.) And I am not the person who posited this thought but — I pity the Democratic OPPO worker who are now having to sit through right wing podcast interviews with Vance, and ensure the thoughts of variants of trad Catholics and neo-paleo con whatevers. Vance emerges as a bizarro-version of the problems that inflicted the lot of 2020 Deocratic presidential aspirants in 2019: forgetting that the Internet is not the realworld. Or, in his case, thinking he can bum-rush the world y amassing these podcasters.
There is one thing more that strikes as I in a very second hand fashion reassess his once broadly touted book. The cat ladies comment can essentially be taken as another version in that “basketful of deplorables” comment that oh so doomed Hillary Clinton. But, taking another gander at what I understand on his book — he basically took that line as well. Fled the area and declared them all drug addicted laggards. Coming and going! The most Elitist of Populists!
This assessment: Good at pandering up, but not down.