Weird factor and JD Vance
The 2024 presidential election throws a number of mini or micro stories to jump in and out of or follow. I guess the Biden Zombie campaign is over and done with, and watching the post debate Biden campaign had an appeal all its own — points of desperation, telling into a void, politicians flaking away. I do stand amused a story that Jill Biden warns that the Biden will not remember the Democrats who orchestrated his ouster — which, a similar story about the Clintons following 2008 has its meaningfulness — watch out in post 2010 redistricting primary battles with Obama endorsing Democrats — but in terms of Biden… Yeah, Pelosi and Axelrod are shaking in their boots.
Another story keeping an eye on, and I did drop out of looking at the National Review sensing a pointlessness because they were pontificating on a scene that you knew was about to change, is people who I some level know the follows of Trump and do see Authoritarianism in him, but are talking their way right back into voting for him. Here Biden offered a convenient back-way: would vote for the Democrat against Trump, but he is old, frail, and doddering into senility and forgetfulness, so it is Trump. If the Democrats had gone with literally someone, anyone else. And now watch a line change. Would vote for the Democrat over Trump, even a dead rock like Biden, but now we have (litany of liberal crimes) supporter Kamala Harris — so no thanks on that! The game continues.
Item three, and this gets a little hard. I want to take a look see on JD Vance fanboy Rod Dreher as the wider public pours over Vance. And this is going to get illuminating.
The battle over “normie” status continues unabated, a man who decried the decadence of American culture to the point where he fled to Hungary cries out over the implications on this term. I will go ahead and say that some Democratic Party discourse leaves me flat and dead — something I noted in Biden’s state of the union address as it moved to its litany stage, and something I saw in presumed Democratic Vice Presidential pick Josh Shapiro (The announcement has made that she is going to announce the pick at a Pittsburg event on Tuesday — I can do the math and read the tea leaves)’s stump speech for Harris. There is a blind spot, one a Republican in the Virginia gubernatorial race will waltz right in on, in this framing as they catapult through the list of “freedom”s the nasty Trumpists and Republicans under away of Agenda 2025 want to destroy — “the right for children to read what they want”. Yeah, I know, Tipper Gore has long left the stage — as much as you may mock the old “Parental Advisory” labels as “greatest promotional tool ever” for the albums, they did serve as useful guidelines for parents to know that — at the very least, the kids are listening to some things now — should steer them to some fuller understanding on meanings. We are past an era on v-chip arguments. The “TV-7” ratings I never knew what it meant. Perhaps the right now hates these things and thinks it is coddling “trigger warning” adjacency. But you stare at the easy line from Governor Shapiro and see it falls into the line of books accepted and not accepted into school libraries — and I don’t want to stuck crying “censorship!” because a school library has dropped a graphic novel coming of age memoir from a gender non-comformist expressing graphic lust regarding illustrated genitalia.
But it is that thing where The Moral Majority was founded, with assumptions inherent in its name, and then as they progressed they had to share down at the reality that — they weren’t in the majority. And the fight for normalcy continues, unwinnable by anyone, as it should be.
Jimmy Carter was blasted away with a “weirdness factor” question. In some part, I guess Dreher ought relate to that. America was not used to vote for born again Christian, as I guess they aren’t Catholics – – or church going Catholics such as our elderly president who I see in other tweets I can see Dreher mocking away at in terms of the terms of his Catholicism. It figures. I am almost giving JD Vance too much credit is placing it into some cultural points of what a same conservative parent might object to in current liberal assumptions. Because when he asked about the great “unmarried cat lady” policies, and spit-balling notions that parents ought get extra votes for children they have — the line he took went to economic and tax policy, the sane point where we actually do make way for parental burden which does do some of the “ought tax the childless more” idea — the child tax deduction. He lied and said Harris opposed this, sought its removal. At this point I almost feel like the man no longer deserves my defense and call out of his inane and stupid the couch thing is — and it is further exasperated that the man at the top of the ticket wants to move to a nineteenth century system of financing by tariff anyways.