Category: politics

The Washington Post declines to endorse a Presidential candidate, now and forever

October 25, 2024 • 1:40 pm

This is strange given the paper’s political leanings and the fact that it’s endorsed candidates for 48 years running, but this morning the Washington Post declared that it will not be endorsing a candidate in this year’s political elections, or ever again. Click on the headline below to see the statement of the paper’s publisher and chief executive officer, or find the article archived here.

Excerpts:

The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.

This is not the first time the paper demurred, but it now sets a precedent for all future Presidential elections:

As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:

“The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections. The unusual circumstances of the 1952 election led us to make an exception when we endorsed General Eisenhower prior to the nominating conventions and reiterated our endorsement during the campaign. In the light of hindsight we retain the view that the arguments for his nomination and election were compelling. But hindsight also has convinced us that it might have been wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation’s Capital to have avoided formal endorsement.”

Indeed, but the paper’s slant towards Kamala Harris was so palpably obvious that they might as well have endorsed her!

More:

And again in 1972, the Editorial Board posed, and then answered this critical question ahead of an election which President Richard M. Nixon won: “In talking about the choice of a President of the United States, what is a newspaper’s proper role? … Our own answer is that we are, as our masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, and that with one exception (our support of President Eisenhower in 1952), it has not been our tradition to bestow formal endorsement upon presidential candidates. We can think of no reason to depart from that tradition this year.”

That was strong reasoning, but in 1976 for understandable reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president. But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.

. . . We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.

Our job at The Washington Post is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds.

Most of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent.

In general I agree—if you see the word “independent” as meaning “having no slant on the news or on our official position.”  Having “institutional neutrality” in this way reassures the reader that the news will not be biased one way or another.

But my problem with this is that the Post, even more than the New York Times, has been strongly slanted (in both news and opinion) towards Harris and other Democrats. So why the change? Will we expect to see more unbiased news now, sort of like the Wall Street Journal? Let us hope so, for it’s getting harder and harder to find unbiased examples of “mainstream media.”

The NYT also reported on this (in its business section). Click below to read or find the piece archived here.

 The Times spreads some rumors:

Questions about whether The Post would endorse a candidate this year have spread for days. Some people have speculated, without any proof, that the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, was being cowed by a prospective Trump administration because his other businesses have many federal government contracts.

Mr. Lewis, in his note to the staff, said little about how The Post arrived at its decision, adding only that it was not “a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another.” He referenced an editorial the paper published in 1960 that it was “wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation’s Capital” to avoid an endorsement.

The Washington Post’s editorial writers had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president, according to four people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive newsroom matters.

. . . . The Post’s editorial board had contacted the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign to request interviews ahead of its decision to endorse, two of the people said. Ms. Harris declined the interview and the Trump campaign didn’t respond, one of the people said.

The Post’s decision drew immediate blowback on social media, including from Marty Baron, the recent editor of The Post who led the paper through a period of editorial and business success.

“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” Mr. Baron said in a post on X. He added that former President Donald J. Trump would see it as an invitation to continue to try to intimidate Mr. Bezos. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

The Post’s move follows unfurling tumult at The Los Angeles Times, where the head of the editorial board and two of its writers have resigned this week to protest the decision by The Times’s owner, the billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, to block a planned presidential endorsement.

Upset, several Post editorial board members resigned, as they thought the paper should endorse Harris. But note that the editorial board itself had already endorsed Harris:

Newspapers across the United States have steadily backed away from endorsing political candidates in recent years.

The New York Times’s editorial board, which operates separately from the newsroom, endorsed Ms. Harris for president on Sept. 30, saying: “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump.” But in August, it said it would stop endorsing candidates in New York elections, including the New York City mayoral race.

We’ve accepted these endorsements for years and I, for one, have never questioned them.  But really, what purpose do they serve? Thinking about it, they seem a form of condescension or even compulsion, as if the readers can’t be trusted to make up their minds after reading or hearing the news.

In the end, I think the Post did the right thing, and I think other papers should follow in its wake.  Yes, of course continue to have editorials written by others, ideally representing a variety of views, but an official endorsement by a paper itself makes readers wary of its objectivity when it comes to the news—and reporting the news objectively is, of course, the first duty of a paper.

Some nooz

October 24, 2024 • 12:00 pm

Just to fill in the Nooz, here are a few items:

First, there’s a Google Doodle (click on screenshot below) celebrating the “Rise of the Half Moon”, in which you can play a game demonstrating your knowledge of the lunar cycle.

*Slate has an article criticizing the institutional neutrality of universities (as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report). Why? Because these are parlous times (e.g., Trump is running and universities ust denounce him and his policies. The author happens to be the President of Wesleyan University!

This may seem straightforward, but in the wake of Oct. 7 and controversies over statements (or the lack of statements) concerning the atrocities, many academic leaders have embraced a doctrine of “institutional neutrality.” Recalling the bruising hearings with lawmakers in December 2023 and the campus protests of last spring, it seemed to many safer to celebrate a doctrine that called for silence. Few people, of course, want corporate-sounding university statements that say next to nothing while trying to please everyone, but now presidents, deans, and others are being told not to participate in debates about the issues of the day. After years of encouraging “more speech” as a sign of a school’s commitment to freedom of expression, the fear of offending students, faculty, and, especially, lawmakers and donors has led many academic leaders to retreat from the public sphere.

This is exactly the wrong time for such a retreat. Although academic leaders usually stay neutral about a candidate’s political statements, today’s campaign rhetoric is not politics as usual. The threats to higher education made by former President Donald Trump and Sen. J.D. Vance are not subtle. Although for decades schools have interacted well with Republican and Democratic representatives, the brazen VP candidate has declared that “universities are the enemy.” The Trump agenda promises to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion departments and to punish those schools who do not live up to a right-wing version of civil rights standards. Trump has promised to close down the Department of Education and fire the accreditors who now certify which schools are eligible for governmental support. The folks who brought us the fraudulent Trump University now threaten to dismantle a higher-education ecosystem that is still (for now) the envy of the rest of the world. We must not be neutral about this.

The problem is, of course, that ideologues will always maintain that this ia a crucial election, and the university must pronounce on it. If ever there was a slippery slope, this is one. And the article makes an error:

External controlling of the curriculum, monitoring entrance exams, and policing faculty are direct threats to our educational missions, and these are not the only ones. Institutional leaders should also be speaking out against the mass deportation the Republican nominees threaten. So many of our schools have made a place for Dreamers, those students who were brought to the United States as children, and whose status in a second Trump administration is uncertain. Now Trump has promised to deport legal immigrants as well. His nasty nativism is antithetical to the recruitment of international students, a practice that has been a boon to higher education and to the world. We must not be neutral about this.

Apparently author Roth doesn’t realize that the University did issue an official pronouncement favoring protection of the Dreamers and legislation to keep them here.  Other stuff that the overheated author wants us to issue statements about has nothing to do the mission of a University:

Educators should give up the popular pastime of criticizing the woke and call out instead the overt racism that has rippled through the Trump campaign over the past few months. The rhetoric about pet-eating Haitians is the most sensational example, but when a presidential candidate speculates about immigrants’ genetic disposition to commit crimes while also calling minorities “vermin,” we are fully in the zone of racist hate.

We do not call out stuff like making false assertions that Haitians eat dogs. Stupid though it is, what does that have to do with the mission of a university?

*Once again Anthony Blinken has made a futile trip to Israel to try persuading the Jewish state to lose the war.  Apparently he envisions a Gaza ruled by the Palestinian Authority, a position he’s held for some time, and a position that’s beyond stupid.

The United States sees a new opportunity to revive cease-fire efforts after the killing of top Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by Israeli forces in Gaza last week. But there’s no indication that the warring parties have modified their demands since talks stalled over the summer.

There was also no immediate sign of a breakthrough after Blinken met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials on Tuesday.

Israel blamed the failure of talks on Sinwar’s hard-line stance, but Hamas says its demands for a lasting cease-fire, full Israeli withdrawal and the release of a large number of Palestinian prisoners have not changed. Hamas blamed the failure of the talks on Israel’s demand for a lasting military presence in parts of Gaza.

Apparently Blinken also touted an Egyptian plan for a limited hostage release in return for a short cease fire (not acceptable; they must let all the hostages go) and told Israel they have to keep the humanitarian aid flowing to northern Gaza, though Israel is trying to defeat Hamas there by providing humanitarian corridors for civilians to evacuate northern Gaza so Israel can impose a siege on Hamas to eliminate it there. But no dice: the aid must keep coming, and Hamas gets the lion’s share of it.

*Speaking of Israel, that country has had to change its plans for its reprisal on Iran for the recent missile attack; this is because Israel’s original reprisal plans were leaked from somewhere in the U.S. government (suspects have been floated).

Israel has been forced to delay a potential retaliatory attack on Iran after details of the planning were leaked from the US, Britain’s The Times newspaper reported Thursday.

According to the report, citing an unnamed intelligence source with knowledge of Israeli deliberations, Israel is worried that even though no potential targets were named in the leak, the details provided could help Iran predict certain patterns of attack.

The Times said Israel has developed an alternative plan but needs to war-game it before proceeding.

. . . “The leak of the American documents delayed the attack due to the need to change certain strategies and components,” the source said. “There will be a retaliation, but it has taken longer than it was supposed to take.”

Marked top secret, the documents first appeared online Friday on the Telegram messaging app and quickly spread among Telegram channels popular with Iranians.

I say Israel should go for Iran’s nukes, though of course the Biden administration, for reasons best know to itself, seems to have forbidden that.

*A Wall Street Journal poll reports that “Trump takes narrow lead over Harris in closing weeks of race.”

Donald Trump has opened a narrow lead in the presidential race, as voters have adopted a more positive view of his agenda and past performance and a more negative view of Kamala Harris, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds.

The national survey finds that Trump is leading Harris by 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%, compared with a Harris lead of 2 points in the Journal’s August survey on a ballot that includes third-party and independent candidates. Both leads are within the polls’ margins of error, meaning that either candidate could actually be ahead.

The survey suggests that a barrage of negative advertising in the campaign and the performance of the candidates themselves have undermined some of the positive impressions of Harris that voters developed after she replaced President Biden as the presumed and then confirmed Democratic nominee.

. . . Views of Harris have turned more negative since August, when equal shares of voters viewed her favorably and unfavorably. Now, the unfavorable views are dominant by 8 percentage points, 53% to 45%. Moreover, voters give Harris her worst job rating as vice president in the three times the Journal has asked about it since July, with 42% approving and 54% disapproving of her performance.

Here’s a plot of who people would vote for, but note that the difference is well within the margin of error

By contrast, views of Trump have turned rosier. Voters recall his time as president more positively than at any point in this election cycle, with 52% approving and 48% disapproving of his performance in office—a 4-point positive job rating that contrasts with the 12-point negative rating for Harris.

Moreover, voters give Trump a solid edge in most cases when asked about the candidates’ agendas and policies. By 10 points, more voters have a favorable than unfavorable view of Trump’s economic plan for the country, while unfavorable views of Harris’s economic plan outweigh positive views by 4 points.

Favorability ratings, showing a big boost for Harris after Biden decided not to run. So much being made from a difference of a few points!

I have no idea whether this decline means anything, and, as Election Day nears, I am trying to pay less attention to polls. I well remember when the polls predicted a Clinton victory over Trump, and then I watched the election results come in while I was in Hong Kong (I’d already voted). As the needle moved toward Trump, I got more and more depressed, and as the election was called, I went for a long, rambling Walk of Despair, not even knowing how I got back to my hotel. This is what comes from paying attention to polls, especially when the elecdtion is this close.

Bill Maher on the unlikelihood of an ”October Surprise”

October 20, 2024 • 11:30 am

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.

 

A bit disappointed by Gretchen Whitmer

September 24, 2024 • 10:00 am

UPDATE: As Malgorzata points out in a comment below citing an Algemeiner article, Whitmer did defend her attorney general, which constitutes taking sides against the odious Rashida Tlaib. A quote from the Algemeiner:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) issued a statement in defense of the state’s Jewish Attorney General Dana Nessel over what she called “antisemitic” suggestions by US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) that Nessel’s office harbored “biases” against pro-Palestinian activists.

“The suggestion that Attorney General Nessel would make charging decisions based on her religion as opposed to the rule of law is antisemitic,” Whitmer wrote on Monday. “Attorney General Nessel has always conducted her work with integrity and followed the rule of law. We must all use our platform and voices to call out hateful rhetoric and racist tropes.”

The statement came one day after Whitmer, during an interview with CNN anchor Jake Tapper, initially refused to weigh in on the quarrel between Nessel and Tlaib, who suggested that the attorney general has not treated anti-Israel protesters impartially because of her Jewish faith.

Whitmer, having corrected herself, is back on the side of the angels again. If only she were the Democratic candidate for President!

Although Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, identifies herself as a “progressive” Democratic, to me she seems progressive in the right way: she’s trying to fix the problems in her state with tangible legislation. You can see the list of her accomplishments here, and A. B. Stoddard, writing in The Bulwark last year, called Whitmer 52, “one of the most experienced, exciting, and winning Democrats in the country.” I agree with nearly all of her policies—although she’s a bit too soft on illegal immigration—and that’s why I wanted Whitmer to be the Democratic candidate for President. (Importantly, she also governs a swing state.) She has accomplished stuff in a bipartisan climate, and I’d feel a lot better with her at the helm than with Kamala Harris.

But when Kamala Harris was anointed by the Democratic Party to be its candidate, Whitmer refused to be a candidate. That’s very sad, because, given her record, Harris doesn’t hold a candle to her.  And, of course, if Harris wins this time she’ll surely be the Democratic candidate in 2028 unless she screws up big time, so that Whitmer would have to wait eight more years if she wanted to run America.

So I was sad to see this article in Politico; the title tells the tale (click to read):

An excerpt:

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declined to take sides in a debate between Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) over almost a dozen University of Michigan students charged for pro-Palestinian protests.

“I’m not going to get in the middle of this argument that they’re having,” Whitmer said on Sunday in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I can just say this. We do want to make sure that students are safe on our campuses and we recognize that every person has the right to make their statement about how they feel about an issue, a right to speak out,” Whitmer added. “And I’m going to use every every lever of mine to ensure that both are true.”

Nessel, Michigan’s first Jewish Attorney General, recently charged 11 University of Michigan students for pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Most were charged for refusing to vacate the encampments on campus in May, according to the Detroit Metro Times.

Nessel defended the state’s decision to charge these students saying, “Conviction in your ideals is not an excuse for violations of the law” and “what is a crime anywhere else in the city remains a crime on university property.”

Tlaib — the only Palestinian American in Congress and a strong critic of Israel — criticized Nessel for this decision in an interview with the Detroit Metro Times. She said: “It seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

. . . When CNN’s Jake Tapper initially asked about the back and forth between Nessel and Tlaib, Whitmer declined to directly defend or criticize the state’s attorney general, responding that all she could say was “our Jewish community is in pain, as is our Palestinian and Muslim and Arab communities in Michigan.”

“I know that seeing the incredible toll that this war has taken on both communities has been really, really challenging and difficult. And my heart breaks for so many,” Whitmer said. “But as governor, my job is to make sure that both these communities are protected and respected under the law in Michigan. And that’s exactly what I’m going to stay focused on.”

Well, it seems to me that Whitmer should be supporting her own attorney general, or at least saying, that “Nessel brought charges against the protesters and we need to let those charges play out in the legal system”. But she went a bit further with her “whataboutism”, not recognizing, apparently, that free speech is not the same thing as disrupting a campus and violating the law.

That said, Whitmer is clearly between a rock and a hard place. While her attorney general brought charges against pro-Palestinian students, one of her state’s representatives, the odious Tlaib, is supported by many Michigan Palestinians or their supporters. So I can’t hold this against her very hard. While I dislike politicans that are pure pragmatists, Whitmer is not really a pragmatist.  She takes stands, and is known for her potty mouth, which I like.  A bit of that is evident in the video below.

Here’s her speech at the Democratic National Convention, without any nattering about coconuts or inappropriate laughter.  Whitmer of course had to support Harris in her speech, but believe me, I’d rather check a box for Whitmer than for Harris in November.  Had there been debates to choose a candidate, Whitmer would, I think, have come out on top.  This is a tough, accomplished women who has no problem articulating her positions.

Bill Maher on the endless campaign

September 15, 2024 • 12:45 pm

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.

 

Postmortem of the Presidential debate: Trump blew it big time

September 11, 2024 • 9:45 am

There were at least two op-eds in the New York Times in the last few days arguing that if Harris was to win last night’s debate, she could not spend her time attacking Trump but had to show that she had tangible policy proposals for the American people.  Well, Harris did win the debate (I’m not aware of anybody who disagrees with this, including conservative websites like the National Review), but it was not because of her policy proposals. (Fortunately, I managed to stay awake to watch the whole thing.)

The NYT was wrong: Harris won the debate hands down, not by presenting tangible policies (she did mention a few), but by doing what she was told not to do: baiting and attacking Trump. She did it calmly but persistently, to the point where Trump became so baffled and enraged that he simply lost it, becoming unhinged and yes, almost deranged. And when that happened, his narcissism and lying became uncontrollable. In fact, at some points I thought that, like Biden, he had simply lost his ability to think. It seems to me now that Trump is showing signs of age, in a manner different in degree but not in kind from the kind of fogginess that brought down Biden in his last debate with Trump.

If you didn’t see the debate, it’s below.

I suspect that some of Harris’s debate practice involved confecting statements that would unsettle Trump, and, sure enough, they worked, like a red cape shown to a bull.  Perhaps the most effective was Harris’s assertion that people got bored at Trump rallies, which were insubstantial and full of pop culture, and simply left them early.

That was enough to unsettle Trump, who claims that his rallies were, like everything else he does, the greatest in the history of America. And he never recovered his equilibrium.  The lies and misstatements spouted forth like water from a fountain.  There was the statement that Haitians were eating pets in Ohio, the claim that Harris met both Putin and Zelensky and failed to secure a peace (she never met Putin), the false claim that tariffs on foreign goods wouldn’t result in higher prices for consumers, that if was elected he could settle the Ukraine/Russia war before he took office, that Harris was a Marxist, that some Democrats support the execution of children after birth, and so on. None of that is true. When Harris said that world leaders were laughing at Trump’s ineptitude (another statement guaranteed to bait him), his response was to quote Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, a minor figure who admires Trump but also admires Putin. Was that the best he could do?

The WaPo and other sites have compiled a list of Trump’s lies and exaggerations, and it’s long.  Now Harris wasn’t immune to misstatements, either, but they were far fewer, and included her statement that “And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, the first time this century,”, which isn’t true. She claimed that the Biden administration created over 800,000 manufacturing jobs (the true number is close to 625,00).  But these are trivial compared to Trump’s fulminating and arrant lying.

I don’t know how many undecided voters would have been swayed by Trump’s performance to vote for him, but I doubt that it’s anywhere close to half.  The debate was really a contrast in likability and personality, and Harris’s cool demeanor and failure to get flustered made her look far better than Trump, whom I’ve always said suffers from a form of personality disorder.  And voters want to like the person whose box they check on the Presidential ballot.

Both candidates evaded some questions, including Trump’s denial of any responsibility for Project 2025, his failure to own up to the “fine people on both sides” statements he said after the far-right rally in Charlottesville, and his failure to specify how he’d rid the country of 11 million illegal immigrants. For her part, Harris didn’t really explain how her policies could change if her values didn’t, and she didn’t own up to her change of policy on fracking nor admit the seriousness of the immigration issue. This was balanced by two statements by Harris that were eloquent and, at least to me, somewhat moving: her defense of abortion rights for women and her rebuke of Trump for failing to stand for America’s democratic values by not supporting Ukraine.

No, Harris wasn’t strong on presenting policies (she did outline some, like her $6,000 tax credit to parents with newborns and a reduction in tax credits, and her website now outlines specific plans, including giving $25,000 to first-time home buyers). Whether her plans are financially viable is another question, but neither she nor Trump were asked that. (Note that, according to the New Republic, many of Harris’s policies were lifted directly from Biden’s campaign website).

The one issue on which I strongly disagree with Harris is the stand on Israel she espoused. While she said she strongly supported Israel and its right to defend itself, she also argued that the death toll of civilians in Gaza (something that’s been lifted from Hamas’s figures) is too high, and that we need both an immediate cease-fire and especially a two-state solution.  Both of those policies explicitly deny Israel the right to defend itself: a cease-fire now is a loss for Israel and a victory for Hamas, and we simply cannot have a two-state solution now. There are not honest brokers on either side, and of course neither Israel nor the Palestinians really want a two-state “solution”, which won’t solve any problems. (Israel now has no faith that a Palestinian state will be peaceful, and the Palestinians want the erasure of the state of Israel far more than they want their own state alongside Israel.)  I have little faith that Harris will conduct an israeli policy to my liking, but of course many Americans are far less pro-Israel than I.

As for the moderators, they were pretty good, though David Muir dominated the questions over Linsey Davis, which seems to me a bit sexist. However, the questions were generally good, and I thought the policy of fact-checking false claims during the live debate was a good one (and probably threw Trump off even more).

I believe that the Democrats, flush with victory, are now calling for a second debate, but I’m not sure there will be one. If the polls show that voters (and the electoral college) have moved towards Harris, Trump will surely not agree to a second debate.

When I discussed this with Luana today, she came to a conclusion that is hers. And here it comes. There is one good outcome of this debate: whichever side loses will have to recalibrate. If Trump loses, then MAGA is gone and Trump has lost most of his influence in the GOP. If Harris loses, then the Democrats have to become yet more centrist (though I have to add that Harris has deliberately become more centrist recently as a pragmatic issue to win).

We don’t know who will win the election, and the next few days will show how much Trump’s embarrassing performance will cost the GOP. (Remember, he’s always been an awful debater but has nevertheless come out on top twice.)  But regardless of that, there’s no question that the winner of the debate was Kamala Harris. I’m still not a big fan of hers, but was reminded last night why I’ve always regarded Trump as a joke—but a very dangerous joke.

Now, of course, it’s your turn to weigh in, and I ask you to do so in the comments. (There was some weighing in after my livestream post on the debate last night.)

Bill Maher won’t vote for someone who conveys “ick”

September 10, 2024 • 2:00 pm

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.