Veep Debate -- Fly Me to the Moon

 Very quick analysis from your mostly moribund blogger:

• Pence was exactly as I expected him to be -- solid, Midwestern, generally authoritative. He stayed on point, never lost his cool, and he did two things to set up the next week or two of the campaign. First, he made sure everyone realized that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden will not answer the question on packing the Supreme Court. This is an important question, not some Matsu and Quemoy thing. Second, he turned the question of accepting the results of the 2020 election into an opportunity to remind everyone how the Democrats still haven't accepted the results of 2016. Nicely done.
• Harris wasn't terrible, but she's a demagogue and she has a difficult time keeping her cool. The mannerisms and smirking you got on the split screen did her no favors. She was also evasive on several points and tripled down on the dishonesty of Biden's performance the week before, especially the lie about Charlottesville. She lost the debate, but she didn't lose the election.

SNL won't have to work very hard for their punchline this week: 

Pretty fly for a white guy

I give Pence credit; I would have swatted the fly away for sure, but he kept his composure. I suppose his days in the employ of Dr. Benton Quest helped him to learn how to deal with insects.

The Headlines Write Themselves

 It's right there for you:

When you use Urban Dictionary as a style guide

There's a lot more to say about Harris -- her cynicism, her willingness to say damn near anything to get elected, her lazy campaigning -- and we will amplify that as the campaign rolls on. But truth be told, the choice of Harris is puzzling. She doesn't really give Biden what he needs electorally, because California is already in the bag. She's not popular with the various minorities she supposedly represents. She had myriad advantages when she began her campaign, but she pissed all of them away. All you have to do is roll the Tulsi Gabbard critiques to eviscerate Harris's record. 

I don't suppose Biden had any better choice -- if he'd nominated Susan Rice, it would have guaranteed an indictment. He couldn't pick Stacey Abrams, or Karen Bass, or Val Demings. He ruled out anyone with Y chromosomes months ago. 

We'll see what happens, but on balance I think having Harris on the ticket does not help the Democrats in any way.

The field, at the moment

Where I see 'em, right now.

Biden: He’s still the front-runner, but is generating no enthusiasm. He’s supposedly electable, but he’s never won an election outside of the state of Delaware -- being Obama's Veep doesn't count. Not seeing it.

Warren: Somehow, she’s not dead, but it’s likely she's gaining on the rest of the Dem field because no one is currently reminding anyone of her flaws, which are manifest. I don’t suppose Trump will be too reticent about mentioning those flaws.

Sanders: A hateful crank, but crankery is always a growth industry on the Left. Running on little more than bile, however, and it’s difficult to see how he’ll hold off Warren.

Harris: I thought she’d be a stronger candidate, but she’s got the Ted Kennedy problem of the Roger Mudd variant. She’s running but she doesn’t seem to know why. And she can't hide her nasty streak.

Buttigieg: The more he says, the more repellent he becomes. As sanctimonious as John Marty, but without the bow-tied fashion sense. Of course, he’s actually running for vice president.

Booker: A classic senatorial windbag. His greatest asset is his self-regard. Coincidentally, it’s his greatest liability. Also running for vice president.

O’Rourke: A complete moron. Married well, though. Every generation throws a Kerry up the pop charts.

Klobuchar: Her magic surname means nothing outside of Minnesota, but her mediocrity shines through. Perhaps she could move to Illinois, change her name to Kupcinet, and try again in 2024.

Castro: One-time HUD secretaries often run for president – Jack Kemp and Ben Carson did, too. He won’t get any farther than they did, though. And he's not nearly as serious as either of them were.

Williamson: I really think she means well. She’s a gust of helium, but a successful one because we live in an unserious world and she has had the wit to monetize her foolishness. Too nice to be president.

Yang: Giving away other people’s money is always a popular position, at least if its not your money being given away. But he’s going nowhere.

Gabbard: She’s the most serious candidate in the Dem field and her antiwar bona fides are undeniable. But her gloomy worldview is a mismatch for this moment and her surfer packaging doesn't square with her overall message.

I understand there are other candidates, too. Maybe you think they're worth discussing, but I can't see why.

Clown Show, Part 2

Then, there was the second Democratic debate on Thursday night. A spectacle. Quick impressions:

Would you care to respond to Senator Harris, Vice President Biden?

• A commenter on another blog compared Joe Biden's evening with Sonny Corleone's visit to the toll booth in The Godfather. It was a setup, for sure, especially the exchange with Kamala Harris regarding busing (more about that shortly). Biden has never done well running for president; he's an old back slapping politician who was past his sell-by date in 2008 and his status as the front-runner was always more about name recognition than anything else. He's not going to make it. 
• I've never understood why people like Bernie Sanders, although I will say this -- he's the most honest totalitarian of the bunch. He's an instantly familiar type -- an angry old man railing against his lifelong enemies. His rhetoric is infused with sulfuric acid. He cannot understand why the world doesn't bend to his will. He's implacable. He's only happy when it rains. He had a moment in 2016 when his opponent was the odious careerist Hillary Clinton, but he's not going to make it out of a 20+ person field.
• Kamala Harris is really a nasty piece of work. She put the cap into Biden about busing, even though it's doubtful her story about being a second grader on a bus in Berkeley will check out (and I'm sure Biden's panicked staff is going full oppo on it). Her parents weren't sharecroppers or factory workers who were part of the Great Northern Migration; they were academics. Like Ted Cruz, she grew up in Canada, graduating from high school in Montreal. She is trying to position herself as a champion of the downtrodden, but as a career prosecutor she's going to receive flak for sins of omission and commission. She will certainly be in position to be the nominee, especially since the California primary is early on the schedule, but I expect the other campaigns are going to do everything they can to take her out tout de suite, as they say in Quebec.
• Pete "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg is a more polite demagogue than Harris or Bernie, but he's a demagogue nonetheless. His disquisition on Republicans and Christianity was particularly dishonest; while a Venn diagram of Christians and Republicans would show considerable overlap, Buttigieg purposely distorts cause and effect. Conservative Christians support Republicans because Republicans are not, in the main, as actively hostile to Christianity as the Democratic Party regularly reveals itself to be. Doing so isn't an abdication of values; rather, it's a tactical move to survive a party that would stomp out dissent. Mayor Pete is a clever guy who is really running for Vice President, but my guess is his smug style will begin to grate and some of the other candidates will use recent events in South Bend to send him back there.



Dear Lord Jesus, I do not often speak with you and ask for things, but now I really must insist that you help me win the election tomorrow because I deserve it and Joe Biden doesn't, as you well know.

• I've not seen "Election," the 1999 Reese Witherspoon vehicle, but the character she played in the movie, Tracy Flick, has become part of the culture -- the overweening high school steamroller who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Kirsten Gillibrand is like that. She was obnoxious on the debate stage and the recipient of dirty stares from just about every other participant. No one wants to deal with people like her, so she's not going to make it. 
• The two Coloradans on the stage, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, both tried to be moderate in varying ways. They aren't going to make it.



I have $100,000 in student loan debt and dirty diapers, so I'm going to take your guns away!

• There's something about Eric Swalwell's smarminess that causes a visceral reaction for me, so I'll have to tread carefully. He reminds me of the Greg Marmalard character in Animal House -- smug, phony, sneaky, the sort of guy who would stick a shiv in your back without blinking an eye. Fortunately, he's got no chance. 
• Andrew Yang is the most interesting candidate in the field, by a long shot. Unsurprisingly, he got about 3 minutes to talk. His website is brimming with ideas, some daft, some quite good. I especially like his stance on data privacy: Consent should be informed and active – companies are responsible for ensuring that they collect a positive opt-in from each user before collecting any data, and this opt-in should be accompanied by a clear and easy-to-understand statement about what data is being collected, and how it is going to be used. You can waive these rights and opt in to sharing your data if you wish for the companies’ benefit and your own convenience – but then you should receive a share of the economic value generated from your data. I don't want Yang to be president, but once his campaign hits room temperature Donald Trump ought to adopt some of Yang's ideas for his own campaign.
• Marianne Williamson is your sophomore year college girlfriend. She wrote you a poem called "Mensch and Moonchild" and gave you a few mind-blowing memories behind the stadium, but ultimately you're grateful that she went on a field term to Ecuador in the second semester.

Dirty Cop Barr

I saw a little of the circus up on Capitol Hill yesterday, in which various half-witted Democratic senators (redundant, I suppose) tried to turn Attorney General William Barr into an international supervillain. I thought to myself --

• they don't really believe any of their claims, but 
• they need to get the narrative rolling right away, because 
• when Barr starts indicting people, they will then be able to claim he's a Trump stooge, and 
• that Hillary Clinton in particular needed to have that narrative in the air

As usual, Victor Davis Hanson got there first, with a list of useful reminders:

Russians likely fed salacious but untrue allegations about Trump to ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who was being paid in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to find dirt on Trump.

The Russians rightly assumed that Steele would lap up their fantasies, seed them among Trump-hating officials in the Barack Obama administration and thereby cause hysteria during the election, the transition and, eventually, the Trump presidency.

Russia succeeded in sowing such chaos, thanks ultimately to Clinton, who likely had broken federal laws by using a British national and, by extension, Russian sources to warp an election. Without the fallacious Steele dossier, the entire Russian collusion hoax never would have taken off.

100% true statement. Back to Hanson:

Without Steele's skullduggery, there likely would have been no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court-approved surveillance of Trump aide Carter Page. There might have been no FBI plants inserted into the Trump campaign. There might have been no subsequent leaking to the press of classified documents to prompt a Trump collusion investigation.

Given the Steele travesty and other past scandals, it is inexplicable that Clinton has not been indicted.

It is. But her luck could be running out soon, despite the 20-screen multiplex of project emanating from Cory Booker, Mazie Hirono, Kamala Harris, et al. Why? Back to Hanson:

For much of her professional life, Hillary Clinton had acted above and beyond the law on the assumption that as the wife of a governor, as first lady of the United States, as a senator from New York, as secretary of state and as a two-time candidate for the presidency, she could ignore the law without worry over the consequences.

For Clinton now to project that the president should be indicted suggests she is worried about her own potential indictment. And she is rightly concerned that for the first time in 40 years, neither she nor her husband is serving in government or running for some office, and therefore could be held accountable.

Thus, she and her patrons must turn William Barr into a dirty cop. The alternative?