I was up at 5 a.m. as I went to bed early with an incipient cold (or some other virus), and the insomnia is still with me. This morning I leave for Utah, but will put up here two articles I read yesterday as well as a clip from Bill Maher’s “Real Time”. I am still baffled that so many science-oriented skeptics think that one’s biological sex is what one thinks it is, regardless of other traits and despite the truth that what one “thinks” is based on biology (neurons and the like). Onwards and upwards.

Niall Ferguson, who happens to be married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and is also seen as a conservative, has what I thought was a good article in The Free Press, which you can access below or find archived here.  It’s about Israel’s continuous refusal to follow America’s marching orders in the Middle East. I’ll give a few quotes (indented):

First, of course, I have to give the usual disclaimer that I’m not a huge fan of Netanyahu, but I do give him credit for prosecuting the war successfully despite repeated American objections. An excerpt (the essay Ferguson refers to is Jake Sullivan’s “7,000-word essay published in Foreign Affairs one year ago”).

Since then, the region has been in a state of upheaval not seen in half a century—since the last surprise attack on Israel almost exactly 50 years previously, on Yom Kippur 1973. And at every single major hinge point of Israel’s war with Iran’s proxies, the U.S. has been as wrong as Sullivan was in that essay.

The White House said don’t go into Gaza. Israel did, and in a sustained campaign killed a high proportion of Hamas fighters. Team Biden-Harris said don’t go into Rafah. Israel ignored those warnings, too, and in February liberated two hostages there. Ten days ago, a routine Israeli patrol in Rafah spotted the mastermind of the massacre, Yahya Sinwar, who was killed soon after. Washington said don’t send troops into Lebanon. Israel sent them anyway and in a matter of weeks has inflicted severe damage on Hezbollah’s positions there.

Biden and Harris said “Ceasefire now!” but Israel had no interest in a ceasefire that gave Hamas breathing space to regroup. Finally, the U.S. warned against Israel directly attacking Iran. An as yet unidentified U.S. government official even appears to have leaked Israel’s plans to Tehran—a scandal that ought to be front-page news. You know what happened next.

The past year has revealed many things—not least the moral confusion of many young Americans—but two major points stand out. First, Israel has pursued a strategy of targeted retaliation of impressive precision and effectiveness. Second, the United States has lost all but a shred of the influence it once had over Israeli policy. Fact: As a share of Israeli national income, U.S. aid peaked at 22 percent in 1979. It’s now down to 0.6 percent.

The political consequences are twofold. First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has successfully outmaneuvered his critics at home and abroad, who wrongly assumed that, by relentlessly exaggerating the collateral damage of Israel’s campaign against Hamas, they would prevent Israel from exacting vengeance—and from reestablishing deterrence.

Second, the Biden-Harris administration has been left looking even more hapless in its national security strategy than Jimmy Carter’s did in 1980, when Ronald Reagan swept to victory with a promise to achieve “peace through strength.” The Iranian revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis, combined with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had made 1979 an annus horribilis for Carter.

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Andrew Sullivan despises Trump, and has declared that he’ll vote for Harris, but that doesn’t stop him from calling her out. I’d say that such criticism is fair, since it’s designed not to defeat the Democrats but to correct them. Read by clicking below, or see the piece archived here . “Project Fear” refers to what appears to be Harris’s main campaign strategy: to continuously diss Trump (fair enough, and her criticisms are correct) but not to advance her own policies (not a good tactic). Read the transcript of Harris’s town-hall interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who also dislikes Trump.

An excerpt .from Sullivan:

And so the few undecideds are looking for a positive reason to vote for Harris. And this is the best she could do in her truly pitiable CNN town hall:

I think that the American people deserve to have a president who is grounded in what is common sense, what is practical, and what is in the best interest of the people, not themselves.

Weak. Lame. This is the first presidential candidate who doesn’t seem to want you to know what she’ll actually do, or what she really thinks about anything much, and who responds to every direct question with a meandering digression. Blathering about an “opportunity economy” and a “middle-class background” doesn’t cut it. With Anderson Cooper — who was superb — she memorably crashed and burned.

She had taken a day off to prep and yet still could not tell us what her first Congressional priority would be, what policies of the last four years she would change, how she would prevent illegal immigration, why Biden had not issued this year’s executive orders three years ago, and why she was now in favor of building a wall she once called “stupid, useless, and a medieval vanity project.” When asked to name just one mistake she’s made over the past four years, in life or in office, she said:

I mean I’ve made many mistakes, um, and they range from, you know — if you’ve ever parented a child, you know you make lots of mistakes. Um, in my role as vice president, I mean I’ve probably worked very hard at making sure that, um, I am well versed on issues, and, um, I think that is very important. It’s a mistake not to be well versed on an issue and feel compelled to answer a question.

Calling Michael Scott. Her entire performance was a near parody of why normal people hate the way politicians talk. Every answer seemed to be a form of damage control, not conviction. And her body language … well, a near-literal defensive crouch isn’t confidence-inducing. Nor is it reassuring to think someone who cannot crisply answer a straight question will have to make split-second, life-and-death decisions as president. She seems like a party functionary who has never known real political combat — maybe a decent low-level cabinet member. But president? C’mon. Even the Dem strategists after the town hall were bewildered by her “word salad city” — to quote David Axelrod. Substacker Adam Coleman wrote:

There are moments when she physically squirms as she searches for a canned response to give Anderson Cooper. She’s in a friendly environment on CNN, and Anderson Cooper absolutely hates her opponent, but even his basic questions made her squirm.

No one wants a president who squirms, laughs, and prevaricates on her meandering way to a calculated, canned response. The undecideds don’t. And the base is given nothing really to speak of, apart from abortion and the filibuster. She’s neither persuading the center nor rallying the faithful. Her final trump card is celebrity concerts and endorsements. Have the Dems learned nothing? And no serious presidential candidate should have a closing message like this one:

Let me, if I can, just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair, we cannot despair … Let’s not let the overwhelming nature of all this make us feel powerless, because then we have been defeated, and that’s not our character as the American people. We are not ones to be defeated.

Not exactly “Fired up! Ready to go!” is it?

Sullivan speaks the truth here, and I am truly baffled at those who think that Harris is a great candidate and will likely be a good President. Yes, she’s miles better than Trump, but that is still a long distance from “excellent”. I will be glad it she beats Trump, but I will still worry how Harris, who was roundly beaten the last time around, will handle the world’s most important job.  No, I feel no “joy”, just disappointment about how the whole thing was handled, from Biden refusing to bow out early enough to allow a proper selection of a Democratic candidate to Harris pretending that she has “earned” the nomination when in fact she inherited it.

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Finally, here’s Bill Maher’s latest news-and-humor clip saying that what Harris needs is a “Sister Souljah moment“. You remember that moment, right? The Wikipedia link just above describes it, as does Maher in the video below. Maher even provides several SS moments that Harris could use.

(I do think that Maher’s comment about Monica Lewinsky was out of line.)

Here’s Bill Maher’s monologue from his most recent Real Time show, arguing that voters should not expect an “October surprise”.  He argues that because Trump has been so persistently awful in familiar ways, that there will be no change in his character before the election (remember that it’s just about two weeks away).  He’s in five lawsuits, there’s all of his awful treatment of women, and he keeps doing bizarre things. None of this has markedly helped or hurt his polling numbers. So. . . no surprise with Trump. (There are some funny asides, though.)

This, he urges Democrats and liberals not to put any stock in something bad happening that will knock Trump out of the race, dismissing several possibilities (see 4:15).  He adds this:

“This is Kamala’s great dilemma: Trump is invulnerable to an October surprise, but she is very vulnerable, because she is the one who is still undefined. And as she showed in this week’s Brett Baier interview, her go-to when attacked for her own actions is usually ‘Trump is worse’. Okay, we know that, but now undecided voters want to hear about you. They want someone to vote for. . .  the voters’ big doubt about Kamala is ‘Are you part of far-left insanity?”

I saw the Fox interview, and watched Harris bob and weave rather than specify position she holds, especially ones that are different from Biden’s. (He shows a video.)  Harris cannot simultaneously argue that she is not Joe Biden, and will not have the same policies as Biden—but then refuse to tell us what those policies are.

Maher then (9:40) then recites an answer that Harris could have given in response to a question about the immigration system but didn’t (she waffled).  That answer, says Maher, would help her (he’s pro-Harris). But does admitting that something could be improved over what it was really going to help her? After all, she wants to be unburdened by the past.

Here are two clips from the latest Real Time show: the introductory monologue and the longer comedy bit, which this week is on the interminable campaigning going on.

This 3½-minute intro is about the debate and Trump’s abysmal showing (he doesn’t forget to bring in Haitians and dogs).  His imitation of Trump at the end is pretty good:

Here Maher beefs about how long elections are taking these days, suggesting that we start the campaigning on Labor Day at the earliest, for we can learn enough about the candidates within three months, especially given today’s short attention spans. (It’s long enough for debates, too!) Even heterosexual sex, he says, takes on average between three and seven minutes. The long campaigns, he claims, is due entirely to money.  “It’s time we admit that the endless campaign exists only to enrich advertisers, political consultants, and what’s left of the news media.”  He adds that the only things that last too long these days are campaigns–and streaming series.

The educational part is Maher’s description how much less time it takes other countries to have political campaigns–and the much shorter interval between someone being elected and taking office.

Although Maher is always accused of being a right-winger, that’s not true at all; he’s more or less a left-centrist, like me.  Here he defines “ick” with some graphic examples, and says that Trump has a bad case of it, and that’s the best thing Democrats have going for them. But. . . . he then says that the extreme Left aren’t immune to it, using as an example of the extreme Left going after Cheryl Hines, married to RFK Jr., for not divorcing him.

He says this, “You want to know why I have a bug up my ass about the Left more than I used to? It’s shit like this: there’s an ugliness they never used to have. The liberals I grew up respecting–none of them are like this.  Going after the wife? Even the Mafia doesn’t do that!”  He then shows a clip of Barack Obama at the latest DNC criticizing everyone across the political spectrum for thinking the worst of those on other side, and thinking that “the only way to win this is to scold and shame and out-yell the other side.”

The YouTube notes:

Donald Trump is stained with “the ick,” but liberals who scold and shame those who don’t share their worldview risk being tainted by it, too.

I’m not sure that Bill Maher qualifies as an expert on marriage given that he’s never been married and vowed he never will be. But, as usual, he’s funny, and the message not to fully demonize one’s political opponents is always worth pondering. Maher ends up by criticizing the Republican politicians as “far worse” than the Democratic ones, but adds tjat “the kind of people who are always howling on social media are the ones who give people the ‘ick’ when they hear the word ‘liberal.'”

It was good to hear Obama again: I’d missed his convention speech.