Did you detect a theme at the DNC? An underappreciated story from the DNC convention last week was how Democrats finally seemed to get their messaging act together. Speeches at the DNC convention that ended Thursday night dwelled less on Donald Trump and his many crimes and miserable plans for this country. Democrats focused more on where they want to take America and everyone in it. As Vice President Kamala Harris said in her acceptance speech Thursday night, “we have so much more in common than what separates us.” Freedom was the central theme of the convention. Freedom is a core American value. For conventioneers and viewers slow on the uptake, Beyoncé’s “Freedom” regularly blasted the United Center as a bumper between program segments. Throughout the four-day convention, speakers invoked freedom not as an abstraction or as justification for stockpiling weapons. Democrats embraced freedom as the expression of personal and family autonomy, freedom as the catalyst for realizing people’s hopes and dreams for a better future.
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Following up the post below, I did want to highlight at least one newspaper who is asking “the question:” Even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office? But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country. While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics alike, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago.
The headline for this NYT review of David Rhode’s new is puzzling. It says I thought the story was going to be about DOJ employees being afraid of getting in trouble if they spilled the beans to David Rhode. But it doesn’t really reveal anything like that except a passing reference to the fear for their jobs if Trump wins in November and to say that Merrick Garland wanted to preserve the norms of the Justice Department and that was hard because Trump is such a lying criminal. Be that as it may, it sounds like an interesting book anyway: Trump was the first president since Nixon to utterly reject the idea that federal law enforcement should operate independently of the president’s personal desires or prejudices. Rather, he sought to use the attorney general, special prosecutors, U.S. attorneys and the F.B.I. as instruments to help himself and his friends and to punish his enemies. Although Rohde doesn’t hide his conviction that Trump undermined democracy with his salvos against the Justice Department’s independence, he nonetheless writes in measured, restrained language that should hold up well in the light of history.
Of course this is nothing new… That’s just a smattering of the commentary on this. Something very strange is going on and you have to assume it comes from the editors who earlier made it clear that they were unhappy with the Democrats for failing to give them the proper respect to which they believe they are entitled. (That would be, at the very least, adapting their electoral strategy to run to the Times whenever they are beckoned.) Combined with the “Both Sides” journalism which leads them to have to whitewash Trump’s outrages in order to balance their coverage, we have a serious problem. Donald Trump’s pathological lying and his party’s scorched earth tactics are not even on the same planet as the Democrats’. Sadly, it’s not just them. I guess the Democrats have no choice but to simply accept the asymmetry of the press coverage which is made many times worse by the fact that the right already has an extremely effective partisan media dedicated to pushing Trump’s lies. We’ll just have to maintain a critical eye through the campaign and beyond.
As we know, the MAGA cult (aka the Republican party) has epic piles of chutzpah and sheer gall. But their new attack on Tim Walz as a pathological liar has got to be the most audacious projection they’ve ever done. Kevin Drum helpfully unpacked their ridiculous claims: Let us investigate the vast history of lying by Gov. Tim Walz as alleged by the Trump campaign: Retired from the National Guard as a command sergeant major.He did rise to the rank of command sergeant major, but upon retirement his rank reverted to master sergeant. Had children via IVF.Walz almost always refers only to “fertility treatments,” but a couple of times has used the term IVF. In fact he and his wife underwent IUI, commonly referred to as IVF but actually a different, more affordable fertility treatment. Won an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce (2006).It was the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Taught in China for a year through a program at Harvard University (2006).It was a program affiliated with Harvard. Earned the title of Nebraska Citizen-Soldier of the Year (1989).He did indeed earn this award, but so did 51 other people.
But not the click-hungry media James Fallows notes the lack of balance in how the media treats Republicans vs. Democrats: A reminder in campaign coverage: -Dozens of serious stories in major outlets examined Biden’s age and cognition as matters of “fitness to govern.” -I still have not seen any such story about Trump. I welcome learning of ones I’ve missed. -Instead, these are*all played as “campaign messaging challenges.” Politics, not governance. Latest example, big front-pager in WaPo, with print headline “Aides seek to steady a swaying Trump.” Not “is he fit to govern.” Online hed shown below. Biden: threat in governance. Trump: lost mojo for campaign. These are not the same. But Trump has lost his more than his mojo. He’s losing his audience. Kamala’s comms team is trolling him relentlessly over it. I don’t know if Digby posted these already. (I’ve been kinda busy.) But if we’re not comparing sizes, but mojos, Team Harris has it. ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download.
Oh Lindsey. You are just as dishonest and delusional as your daddy: “You saw a hate fest full of insults. And Donald Trump said to Barack Obama, you’re a nice man after President Obama insulted and and jabbed President Trump continuously,” Graham said. “It was designed to draw him into an exchange of insults.” “It was light on policy, heavy on insults. So I told President Trump, then and now, you’re going to win this thing if you focus on policy,” he added. Graham then noted that people are not “joyful” on several matters including inflation and cost of living, and pitched a Trump second term. Democrats have been using themes of “joy” heavily since Harris became the nominee. “I think President Trump offers the best solution to change the trajectory of the country. And finally, if you’re waiting on Kamala Harris to come up with new policies, you’re going to die waiting, because she will continue what they’ve been doing for the last four years,” Graham said.
Wolf pups! When we visit dens, we try to count the number of pups in the den. However, we often cannot see all the way in the den so we set up trail cameras at the den to see how many pups are in it. Sometimes the trail camera footage verifies our initial pup count and other times we realize how many pups we “missed”. E.g., when we visited this den a few weeks ago we counted 5 pups. When we checked our trail camera footage, we realized there were actually 8 pups!
A memo went out Thursday night An old speaker’s trick at the end introductory applause is to settle one’s hands on the sides of the podium to quiet an audience and signal time to begin speaking. When Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tried that on Thursday night, the cheers seemed for a moment as if they might subside. But Democratic National Convention delegates packed to the rafters in Chicago’s United Center were not having it. The cheers swelled anew, and louder still. Overcome with emotion, Warren pulled back from the podium a half step and wiped away a tear. Warren’s ovation was the loudest and longest of any speaker save for President Joe Biden’s hero’s welcome late Monday night, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s on Thursday as the Democrats’ presidential nominee. President Barack Obama’s matched Warren’s welcome in length but not in intensity.
Extreme right meets extreme past Did Republicans build a time machine out of a DeLorean? It seems they’re pining for the time of slavery (Alternet): A prominent Republican group is citing one of the most reviled Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decisions in American history to justify its case that Vice President Kamala Harris should be deemed ineligible to run under the U.S. Constitution. In an official resolution, the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) – a 90 year-old GOP-aligned organization that counted former President Ronald Reagan among its membership — took the position that Harris should not be allowed to hold the office of president, citing several “precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases.” Among the six cases the NFRA cited was the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, which is regarded as one of the worst SCOTUS decisions of all time, if not the worst ever.