Mr. Ramirez dismisses:
And Mr. Geraghty has words to go with that: Why Graham Platner’s Supporters Don’t Care. After reviewing the vicious treatment accorded to Mitt Romney in the 2012 election from pundits and media…
Heading into the 2016 presidential election, many Republicans concluded that if any person they nominated was going to be painted as the devil, they might as well nominate a man with the reputation of a devil and as ruthless as the devil and get all the advantages of nominating a devil. And the GOP, the country, and the world have been living with the consequences of that decision ever since.
In 2024, Democrats were convinced they had nominated — er, had selected for them — the better candidate. They were convinced Kamala Harris was smarter, wiser, and more experienced. What’s more, she was “joy.” She was “brat.” No less a world-renowned moral authority than Taylor Swift had endorsed her. As Democrats often told the country, it was the prosecutor against the felon. In the minds of those on the political left, Trump had long-since morally disqualified himself with his performance in his first term, his refusal to accept his defeat in 2020, his incendiary remarks leading up to the January 6 riot, and the multiple criminal investigations of him.
And Kamala Harris not only didn’t win the presidential race, she lost the popular vote and all seven key swing states.
It was the Democrats’ turn to learn that nominating the seemingly “better” person meant little — particularly if the country was deeply dissatisfied with the Democratic incumbent, and the better person said “not a thing comes to mind” when asked what she wanted to do differently than the incumbent.
This helps explain why today, so many Democrats are dismissing Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo, his sexting other women, his account on Kik, and allegations of his abusing past girlfriends as mere “minutiae,” not worth a moment’s thought.
This concludes your Platner item du jour.
Also of note:
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Here's an idea for Mr. Ramirez's next cartoon. Introduced by Kevin D. Williamson: Republicans Rat-Paddle Away From the SS Trump. (Dispatch gifted link)
Do you hear that? Skitter. Scuffle. Scurry ... splash!
The rodential squeaking started off sounding like the occasional whine of a rusty gate hinge. Pretty soon, it is going to sound like Indiana Jones in the catacombs underneath Venice. As the SS Trump founders and careens, it is impossible to miss the sound of rat bellies hitting the water, with the rats snug in their little rat life-preservers and praying for a ratty little lifeboat to come along and pick them up.
And you know what that means: It is time to strafe the lifeboats.
How bad are things for Donald Trump? His overall approval rating is down to 38 percent, according to the New York Times poll, a reminder that half of any population has below-average intelligence and that 38 percent evidently couldn’t beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe.
I will point out, as usual, that Democrats are slightly, significantly worse. I don't think KDW would agree, but he's in no mood for whataboutism.
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By the way, Trump is messing up in the Mideast. Erick Erickson writes on The Pottery Barn Rule of Foreign Policy.
Colin Powell is said to have warned George W. Bush before the Iraq war with a shopkeeper’s logic: you break it, you own it. Powell later denied using those exact words, and Pottery Barn has no such policy. But the principle outlived the quibble, because it is true. A nation that shatters the existing order takes ownership of whatever it leaves on the floor.
The United States broke the order in the Persian Gulf. On February 28, American and Israeli forces struck Iran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Whatever one thinks of that decision — and I supported it — it ended one status quo and obligated us to build a better one. Roughly one hundred days later, we have not built it. We have built something worse.
Consider what the President of the United States now presides over.
Iran has laid naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which a fifth of the world’s oil moves; our own Central Command sank sixteen Iranian minelayers trying to stop it. Iranian drones have struck merchant ships in the Gulf. Iranian missiles and drones have rained on American-allied Gulf states, killing a port worker in Bahrain. And in the last twenty-four hours, Iran fired barrage after barrage at Israel — the first such bombardment since the April ceasefire — which the Revolutionary Guard cheerfully called “a warning.” Before February 28, ships moved through Hormuz and Israel was not under missile fire from Tehran.
That was the status quo we destroyed. What replaced it is a shooting gallery. By any honest accounting, we are worse off than the day we started.
What do you way, Donald? Shouldn't we just go back to blowing up the bad guys? Maybe we should never have stopped.
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It's a very special kind of disgrace. John Fund contends: California's Election System Is a Disgrace. Making a point too subtle to be made by the partisans on both sides:
The system is indeed a designed mess: A voter can return a ballot in any county in California, no matter which county that voter is registered in. A decade ago, California legalized ballot-harvesting — which allows anyone to collect and deliver a limitless number of mail-in ballots — which increases the risk of fraud or coercion. The state mails ballots to all registered voters, 23.2 million of them. Ballots received by officials up to seven days after Election Day are counted.
I agree with people who've been saying that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the recent election. But (quite obviously) the system is designed so that it's easy to commit fraud without leaving evidence. We simply don't know how much fraud there was.
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You know that joke about why you shouldn't try to teach a pig to sing? Jerry Coyne recommended a substack article from Sam Harris, and he's right, it's pretty good: Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel
First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.
Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.
However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.
A brief excerpt from this powerful essay.
(I was unimpressed with Harris's book on free will back in 2015. This essay is better.)
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