SATURDAY: Introducing Nehamas and Epstein!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2024

Introducing Hurt: Through whatever fortuity, some people at the New York Times basically know it all.

Lucky for us, they're willing to share! For the latest example of this service, we introduce Nehamas and Epstein.

On Wednesday, Candidate Harris gave a speech at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh. Nehamas and Epstein were assigned the task of creating a news report about the candidate's speech. 

Nehamas and Epstein were eager to share. Headline included, their report started like this:

Harris Casts Herself as a Pro-Business Pragmatist in a Broad Economic Pitch

Vice President Kamala Harris laid out a broad vision of her economic plan on Wednesday as she sought to bridge the political divide between the progressive senator who ran for president in 2019 and the pragmatic, pro-business candidate she is presenting herself as now.

During a speech in Pittsburgh in which she declared “I am a capitalist,” Ms. Harris promised to protect and expand U.S. manufacturing as she tried to convince voters that she will defend and lift up the middle class.

“From our earliest days, America’s economic strength has been tied to our industrial strength,” she said. “The same is true today. So I will recommit the nation to global leadership in the sectors that will define the next century.”

Speaking not with the trappings of a raucous campaign rally but in front of the sober signage of the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, Ms. Harris delivered remarks seemingly tailored to voters sitting in wood-paneled offices reading the print edition of The Wall Street Journal. Such voters may have supported John McCain and Mitt Romney, and might believe the economy was better four years ago, but the Harris campaign appears to be hoping that many will now have trouble stomaching the idea of voting for former President Donald J. Trump.

As always, there were the things the candidate said. Then too, there were her motives.

It was in their account of the candidate's motives that the Timesmen's omniscience appeared. Their various insights came early and often. Here are some of the things the Timesmen revealed:

Paragraph 1: When she delivered her address, Harris was "s[eeking] to bridge the political divide between the progressive senator who ran for president in 2019 and the pragmatic, pro-business candidate she is presenting herself as now."

Paragraph 2: Harris was "tr[ying] to convince voters that she will defend and lift up the middle class."

Paragraph 4: Harris's remarks seem to have been "tailored to voters sitting in wood-paneled offices reading the print edition of The Wall Street Journal."

Paragraph 4: The Harris campaign appears to be hoping that many [such voters] will now have trouble stomaching the idea "of voting for former President Donald J. Trump."

Credit where due! By paragraph 4, the Timesmen were restricting themselves to reporting how matters "seemed" or "appeared." That said, also this: 

Before the Timesmen tried to report much of what the candidate said, they were willing to build a framework around her reasons for saying the things they'd eventually have to mention.

In their next two paragraphs, they stooped to the task of mentioning some of what Harris had said. But then, in paragraphs 7 and 8, there they went again:

Ms. Harris made her pitch in a Democratic stronghold that was once a capital of American industry, in a top battleground state that could determine the winner of the presidential election. She has previously given economic addresses on her plans to lower costs and to help small businesses. Her emphasis on manufacturing on Wednesday was a return to a more traditional Democratic talking point, one often highlighted by President Biden before he dropped out of the race in July.

Her speech tried to weave her economic themes together into a broader vision. She said she was “not constrained by ideology,” an apparent response to polls that show some voters consider her too liberal...

The candidate wasn't saying something she believed or was pledging to do. Instead, she was giving voice to a "traditional Democratic talking point." 

She was apparently responding to polls—polls which show that some voters think that she's too liberal.

Nehamas and Epstein were serving the public in a familiar way. They were telling us less about what Harris said, more about why she said it. 

For the record, the ability to do this may have stemmed from the greatness of their preparation: 

Nehamas is thirteen years out of Harvard (class of 2011). Epstein, a somewhat older man, was perhaps a leavening agent. He graduated from Emory in the class of 2001.

For the record, we aren't saying whether the Timesmen were right or wrong in their various assessments. Such assessments move us beyond our own pay grade.

It does perhaps seem strange to think this—to think that Harris believes she can win this race by appealing "to voters sitting in wood-paneled offices reading the print edition of The Wall Street Journal." Are those lucky duckies the targeted voters who "think she's too liberal" (according to polls)? 

On Olympus, the gods know the answers to such questions. But as Homer once noted, most of us here on Earth by way of contrast know nothing.

Nehamas and Epstein were sharing their views. They did so early and often.

In a different neighborhood, Charlie Hurt would soon be sharing his views about Candidate Harris's Thursday interview with MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle.

Charlie Hurt is a Timesman too—a Timesman of a different stripe. For the record, he seems like the nicest guy in the world. Also, his thumbnail reads like this:

Charles Hurt

Charles Hurt (born 1971) is an American journalist and political commentator. He is currently the opinion editor of The Washington Times [and] a Fox News contributor...Hurt's views have been considered to be Republican leaning.

...His first full-time job after graduating [from Hampden-Sydney] in 1995 was at The Detroit News where he became a replacement worker during a bitter strike. He worked at the paper until 2001, when he moved to the Washington, D.C. area to join the staff of The Charlotte Observer.

Hurt was The New York Post's D.C. Bureau Chief and news columnist covering the White House for five years.

From 2003 to 2007, Hurt covered the U.S. Congress as a reporter for The Washington Times before leaving to join The New York Post. In 2011, he rejoined The Washington Times as a political columnist. In December 2016, Hurt was named the opinion editor.

National Review editor Rich Lowry described Hurt as, "an early adopter of Donald Trump populism." Hurt has written numerous opinion pieces lauding Trump since the 2016 election.

For the record, everything there is legal. Specifically, there's no reason why Hurt, like tens of millions of other voters, shouldn't be allowed to hold a favorable view of Candidate Donald J. Trump.

As we've noted, Hurt seems like the nicest guy in the world. On Monday, we'll be looking at what he said about the Harris-Ruhle interview when he appeared on Thursday evening's edition of the Fox News Channel's primetime "cable news" show, Gutfeld! 

At some point next week, we'll also look at the famous 2021 interview between Candidate Harris and NBC's Lester Holt. For the record, and for some strange reason, the interview was conducted in Guatemala City.

Harris has been mocked for something she said in the interview from that day right up to this. In a global first, we'll be suggesting that you look at Holt's performance that night, but also at the way the interview has been described by members of the mainstream press.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. That said, it isn't clear that we the people—that we the humans—are actually built—are actually wired—for the daunting task of creating an intelligent discourse.

The brightest among us are sometimes too bright. Things can go downhill from there.

Candidate Trump staged one of his pressers!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

How did The Five react? Yesterday afternoon, in front of Trump Tower, Candidate Donald J. Trump staged one of his lengthy pressers.

It started at 4:52 p.m. The candidate continued until 5:37, having taken just a handful of questions. The Fox News Channel aired the whole thing, eating into the regular time for its most-watched program, The Five. 

As the presser drew to an end, we felt sorry for that program's four Trump-supporters. Here's why:

We don't think we've ever seen the candidate seem more disorganized or more disordered. We know that the candidate doesn't drink. Otherwise, we would have wondered if he had been drinking that day.

What would the Trump supporters say about his performance? Below, we'll answer your question. First, though, we'll show you the sort of thing the candidate said this day.

Just after the clock struck 5, he was off on one of his standard jags, a jag to which he kept returning. At 5:05 p.m., in the iteration shown below, his presentation made even less sense than it normally does:

TRUMP (6/26/24): By the way, the crime rate in Venezuela is down to the lowest level it's ever been that they know of because they've taken their street gangs, they've taken their criminals, off the streets, they've taken their drug dealers and they've emptied their jails, almost. They'll be empty very soon, within the next two months. I guess they can't get enough buses.  

But they're bringing out, they're bringing people at record levels to our country. These are criminals, and their crime rate is the lowest it's been ever that anybody can remember...

"I guess they can't get enough buses!" Under current arrangements, given the traditions and norms of American journalism, we don't have an established way to report, and then to discuss, a peculiar statement like that.

Most of that passage is pure boilerplate. The candidate has said it a million times. It's been (dismissively) fact-checked almost as often. 

As far as we know, the Trump campaign has never produced any evidence in support of these general claims—claims the candidate recently seemed to extend to countries all over the world. That said, we thought the candidate added an especially fanciful filigree this time around:

They've emptied their jails, almost. They'll be empty very soon, within the next two months. I guess they can't get enough buses.

Venezuela's jails will be empty soon. As of now, whoever is doing this apparently can't get enough buses!

That struck us as an especially pitiful addition to the standard story telling. They're busing the criminals to our country—but for now, they're just a bit short on buses!

Where do these buses get unloaded? Why is there no videotape of this remarkable process? 

Also this:

Has any news org ever posed these obvious questions to the Trump campaign? What did the Trump campaign say in reply, and why isn't a presentation as peculiar as this being reported on the front page of major American newspapers?

We've long recommended pity for Trump, who we regard as (clinically) afflicted. To us, his behavior seemed to be especially disjointed on this particular day.

That said, there is no established language within our mainstream journalism for describing such disjointed behavior. And there's no established practice according to which major reporters report the fact that a major figure is making statements which seem to make no earthly sense.

To our ear, the candidate's story was wearing no clothes in this embellished new iteration. To our eye, his performance had been especially disjointed and disordered all the way through.

As the lengthy presser continued, we felt sorry for the Fox News stars who would have to discuss this event. How would they describe it? 

Perhaps you know the obvious answer. The candidate had never been sharper, the four Trump acolytes all agreed, starting with Judge Jeanine's reliably upbeat assessment. Five hours later, the reliable host of the Gutfeld! show took things even farther.

Last month, The Five was the nation's top-rated "cable news" show. Yesterday, it occurred to us that the program needs a name change.

We'll save that new name for another day.  But there has never been a major candidate who makes the type of presentation this candidate routinely makes, and big newspapers like the New York Times seem to lack an established language with which to report such events.

Where do the buses drop all those criminals off? Has any news org ever asked? Is it just simpler not to do so—to avert a news org's gaze while reporting the latest polls?

CANDIDATES: On Fox, one of the candidates is "a wine drunk!"

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2024

But also, a child of vast privilege: In our view, talk show host Dana Loesch is good at what she does. 

The problem lies with what she does. In yesterday's report, we offered an example. 

On Wednesday evening, Loesch spoke with the Fox News Channel's Jesse Watters. At the start of the interview, she offered this assessment of Candidate Harris's interview with Stephanie Ruhle: 

WATTERS (9/25/24): Nationally syndicated radio host Dana Loesch is here. Dana, did Kamala Harris just go on television and say the American Dream is gone?

LOESCH: Well. it was really hard, Jesse, to understand what she said because I don't speak Drunk Hallmark.

According to Loesch, Candidate Harris had been speaking a language known as "Drunk Hallmark." As we've noted, Loesch is skilled at what she does.

Elsewhere in the Fox News empire, a certain analytical theme may have taken root as Loesch offered this comment. Last night, on the prime time Gutfeld! show, the program's host offered these words of wisdom as he pretended to discuss the interview with Ruhle:

GUTFELD (9/26/24): Now we know why Kamala has been avoiding the press. I've never seen anyone so anxious and irritable while trying to express hope and joy.

She probably woke up with a headache. I don't know if she's a wine drunk, but her policies are those of a wine drunk—fake platitudes that could only impress other drunks matching her drink for drink until the morning when the harsh sun of reality peeks through the blinds.

She probably woke up with a headache. She seems to be a wine drunk!

Drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk! Will this bit of invective join the sexual insults aimed at Harris which are now a routine part of this primetime "cable news" show?

We can't answer that question. But one of the program's D-list comedian guests soon jumped in with this:

GUTFELD: Joe, like Kamala—uh, Kamala [changes pronunciation]—you have performed in front on one person. What did you make of her performance?

DIPAOLO: I would say the two-drink minimum is for the audience. I don't know what it is, but there's something about the way she talks, the more I listen, I think, "Am I drunk?"

He's probably the nicest guy in the world But that's the way the game is played on this dominant "cable news" channel.

On Wednesday evening, Loesch had opened with "drunk." One night later, the children were possibly starting to follow her lead. 

That said, it's as we showed you yesterday. As Loesch continued to speak with Watters, she offered a claim about Candidate Harris we'd never heard before.

As it turned out, it was very hard to locate the source of this unfamiliar claim. As we showed you yesterday, this is what Loesch said:

LOESCH: This is what happens when you never—you don't know what it is to be middle-class, you don't know what it is to run a business. 

This woman, Jesse—I know you know this—she is soooo privileged. If you look up "privileged," it is like every Democrat candidate ever in the dictionary. 

She went—and I know she talks about busing—but she started in a very expensive primary school that most Americans could not even think of affording. And she lived in a really nice neighborhood. 

She had a two-parent home, which is a privilege now, thanks to Democrat policies ruining the American family. She's been privileged, nonstop, from a baby now to where she is...

Did Harris secretly grow up wealthy and highly "privileged?" We first saw that claim aggressively pushed last Saturday morning on the soul-draining propaganda show, Fox & Friends Weekend. 

Now, Loesch was selling that notion too, with Watters looking on. In this case, Loesch included a specific claim we'd never heard before:

Candidate Harris had "started in a very expensive primary school?" We'd never heard any such claim—and as best we could tell as we fact-checked the claim, Comrade Google had never heard this specific claim either.

A quick bit of background:

When you fact-check a claim like this from someone on the Fox News Channel, you'll typically find its source in an item from the New York Post or from the web site of Fox News itself.

Sometimes, the claims in question are defensible, possibly even accurate. A lot of the time, they aren't.

In this instance, a Google search didn't turn up any obvious source of Loesch's surprising claim. We had to Google around at length before we could get some idea of what she might possibly mean.

What was Dana Loesch talking about as she tried to paint a picture of Harris as a child of wealth? The best we can offer is this:

At first, we thought she might be referring to Harris's year or years in preschool. Way back in 2020, an article from the Berkeleyside news site had discussed that fairly familiar material. The report was republished this year:

How Kamala Harris’ childhood in Berkeley influenced her

[...]

Harris was bused to the [Thousands Oaks Elementary] school from a yellow home on Bancroft Way, between Browning and Bonar streets.

Combing through old phone books and real estate records, Berkeley historian Steven Finacom deduced that Harris lived in the building that now houses Berkeley International Montessori School. Harris’ spokeswoman confirmed the location. When Harris lived there, beloved family friends Regina and Arthur Shelton ran a preschool out of the bottom unit. Her family had previously lived on Milvia Street as well.

Around that era, redlining forced black Berkeley residents to live west of what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Way, in the flatland neighborhoods like the area Harris grew up in. Finacom described Harris’ neighborhood at the time as “an integrated community with families of various races, both middle class and poorer residents, and both renters and homeowners.”

Harris lived in the Bancroft apartment with her mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris and her sister Maya...

Despite her massive wealth and privilege, Harris's family lived in an apartment in a redlined neighborhood. Also, she attended a mom-and-pop preschool on the first floor of the building where she lived. 

Decades later, that building "now houses Berkeley International Montessori School," a wholly different undertaking. At first, we wondered if that might be the tiny germ out of which Loesch had built the claim she turned loose, two nights ago, on several million Fox viewers.

Skillfully, we continued to search. We decided to seek the work of Steven Finacom, the Berkeley historian who was cited in the passage we've already posted.

Eventually, we landed on this extremely detailed recent report. After describing the mom-and-pop daycare run by the Sheltons, Finacom includes a single murky statement which may have triggered the novel claim of a certain highly skilled talker:

Kamala Harris’ Berkeley: 3 homes that shaped her early childhood

[...]

[J]ust before the Harris family’s time in the home, the ground-level garage was eliminated and converted into space that would accommodate the day care business of Regina and Arthur Shelton...

Today, the Sheltons’ former day care space houses the Berkeley International Montessori School. 

From the Bancroft Way house, Harris went to church in Oakland with the Sheltons; took piano lessons from another nearby neighbor; learned ballet from Madame Bovie, a world-famous ballerina; frequented the Rainbow Sign, a Black cultural center that would help shape her political imagination; and, after attending kindergarten at the private Berkwood School, [Harris] caught the school bus to first grade at Thousand Oaks Elementary School during the second year of Berkeley’s integration program. 

According to Finacom, Harris "attended kindergarten at the private Berkwood School." She then went to first grade (and beyond) in the Berkeley public schools. 

Assuming Finacom's report is accurate, is Berkwood supposed to be the "very expensive primary school that most Americans could not even think of affording?" 

We don't have the slightest idea, and neither does anyone else. "Cable news" doesn't work that way, especially when practiced by professionals like Watters and Loesch.

At any rate, our googling continued. Eventually, it yielded this:

Decades later, the Berkwood School merged with a second school, becoming the present-day Berkwood Hedge School. In all candor, we can't tell you what the original Berkwood School was like more than fifty years ago, when Harris was 5 or 6. 

At any rate, Finacom reports that Harris spent her kindergarten year at a private school. Is that what Dana Loesch had in mind when she launched her surprise attack on the candidate's life of wealth and high privilege? 

We don't have the slightest idea. Neither does anyone else.

"I know you know this," Loesch said to Watters, before she launched her attack. Almost surely, Watters had no idea what Loesch was talking about, but he did know enough not to ask.

According to experts, Loesch was speaking an emerging modern language known as Drunk Fox News Attack. Whatever is said in that drunk-adjacent modern tongue, everyone else will nod in agreement during a Fox News broadcast.

For the record, Kamala Harris didn't grow up in a "typical" middle-class family. In various ways, the cultural context within which she was raised differed from the American statistical norm.

That said, she did grow up in the Berkeley flats—in a redlined section of Berkeley. And she did get bused from that part of town to a public elementary school up in the Berkeley hills.

Also, she did grow up in a two-parent family, until her parents separated and then divorced. In fairness, she did grow up with one obvious type of privilege:

She wasn't surrounded by people like Loesch—by people who constantly invent new forms of garbage to air on Fox News Channel shows.

In our experience, the claim that Harris was the secret child of wealth began on Fox & Friends Weekend. It began with videotape from a very angry Breitbart staffer who grew up in Montreal.

A trio of friends told viewers that day that Harris had secretly grown up in the lap of wealth and privilege. Conduct of this type never stops on the Fox News Channel. People like Maggie Haberman are correct when they say that existing structures of our mainstream orgs weren't built to respond to such conduct.

Kamala Harris is a wine drunk. Also, Hunter Biden may have started "banging" (or "f*cking") Jill. This garbage can gets opened every night on this "cable news" channel as millions of voters look on.

Loesch is good at what she does! The problem starts with what she does, and with the surrounding silence.

Borrowing from Frost, is there something we're withholding? Is it making us weak?                                                        

The New York Times has covered Trump well?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2024

On balance, we don't agree: We have a lot of respect for Maggie Haberman. We think she's plenty sharp.

In a recent appearance of Fresh Air, Haberman said the New York Times has done a good job covering Donald J. Trump. 

We agree with a lot of the specific things she said. On balance, though, we're inclined to disagree with her major point. 

What the heck did Haberman say? At Mediaite, Tommy Christopher presented transcript and tape of the relevant passage as she spoke with Dave Davies:

DAVIES (9/19/24): I’m interested in how you respond when people say that The Times and the media have given Trump credibility by treating things he says as if they should be taken seriously when they don’t deserve that treatment, or when he gives a garbled answer about, you know, say, child care, and it’s rewritten to sound clear and credible. 

In general, I mean, is there a point here?

HABERMAN: I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump. There are always going to be specific stories that could have been better, should have been better, that are written on deadline, and people are not being as precise as they should be. I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally—they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. 

I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does. I think most of the information that the public has about Trump is because of reporting by the media. And I guess I don’t really understand how this industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly—and the media is not a monolith. It’s not a league. But this industry that exists to do that—I don’t see how they think they are a solution by undermining faith in what we do. That’s been very confusing to me.

DAVIES: Yeah. Well, I mean, part of the attacks are, clearly are partisan. I mean, Republicans and Trump supporters are going to attack.

HABERMAN: I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about criticism on the left. I’m talking about a lot of—

[The fact] that Trump has used the language of despots to undermine the press is very well established, and it’s very dangerous. And I’ve talked about that. The publisher of The New York Times has been incredibly clear about that. He published an op-ed recently in The Washington Post actually talking about that. So I don’t think that anybody is in—at The New York Times is trying to sanitize Trump’s language. 

Do I think that there are occasional pieces at my paper, at other papers that probably should have been done differently? That’s absolutely true. And that’s—but that—what happens with this industry on the left that attacks the press is that it gets described as a grand conspiracy to try to help Trump somehow, as opposed to people doing their job on daily deadlines and not always hitting the mark because we are humans. And we are doing our best under a very challenging set of circumstances. But I actually think the media has done a very good job of covering Trump.

I think that what is frustrating to those people making those claims is that there is not the result they want to see, which is Trump melts or Trump no longer has, you know popularity. I mean, you were saying—I think your question was treat him with credibility. He’s the Republican nominee. So there’s a substantial voting bloc in this country—almost half—that take seriously what he’s saying. And it’s not because The New York Times wrote a certain story. And so to not understand that, I think, is problematic for folks leveling the charge.

For the full transcript and tape from Fresh Air, you can just click this.

We agree with a lot of the specific things Haberman said in the posted passage:

We agree that Trump is a [deeply challenging] figure to cover because of the volume of misstatements he emits. 

In the modern era, there has never been a major political figure who trafficked in flagrant misstatements in the way he does. For that reason, the basic systems of the mainstream press haven't been created to deal with such a figure.

We also agree with something Haberman may seem to imply: 

It isn't the job of a major newspaper to produce a certain political result, in which the public turns against Trump. 

It isn't the job of a major newspaper to produce a specific outcome! It's the job of a major newspaper to report and discuss major news events—and that's why we would suggest that the Times, and other news orgs, haven't done a bang-up job reporting on Donald J. Trump.

Again and again and again and again, Donald J. Trump makes crazy statements or publishes crazy Truth Social posts which go unrecorded by the paper of record. Here's a recent example captured by Mediaite:

Trump Reposts Fake Image Connecting Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs to Kamala Harris

Donald Trump on Friday reposted a fake image connect Vice President Kamala Harris and Sean “Diddy” Combs amid the entertainer’s federal sex trafficking case.

Last week, Combs was arrested at a hotel in New York City after being indicted for sex trafficking. According to the indictment, the 54-year-old “abused, threatened, and coerced women and others around him” for decades. He was charged with racketeering conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion; and transportation to engage in prostitution...

You can continue reading from there. You'll be reading about the kind of garbage can conduct now associated with the Fox News Channel's Gutfeld! program, another high-profile entity from which the Times averts its gaze.

It's bad enough when a "cable news" incel does it. But in this case, the conduct was performed by a major party nominee to be president of the United States.

Again, Haberman expressed a key point in her statement on Fresh Air. The mainstream press has never encountered a major figure like Donald J. Trump before. 

For that reason, they have no muscle memory telling them what to do in the face of conduct like his. There is no established procedure.

Our view? Conduct like that is front-page news when it comes from such an important political figure. You have to report that he did it again—and again and again and again.

"Something we were withholding made us weak." So said Robert Frost, speaking about this continent's British colonials before some among them decided to break away from Mothership England.

The fuller passage reads exactly like this:

The Gift Outright

[...]

Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

"Such as we were we gave ourselves outright," the poem says as it continues, while also noting this:

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

It's hard—it feels strange—to break away from established norms, to decide to do something entirely new, and major orgs like the New York Times have never had to deal with someone like Trump before.

In theory, they should have to deal with the reality of the present day. They should be reporting the reality found each night on the Fox News Channel, and they should stop withholding themselves it comes to the repetitive conduct of Candidate Trump.

It's actually news when he does these things. For that reason, major news orgs should figure out how to report it.

Existing systems weren't built to deal with Trump? We completely agree! But for that very reason, major orgs like the New York Times need to create new systems.

They need to devise the new way to report the news, create the language with which to perform that task. In our view, the person who appeared on Fresh Air is smart enough to do it.

CANDIDATES: When Candidate Harris delivered a speech...

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2024

...the Fox News Channel fought back: She entered the current White House campaign very late in the game.

When she did, Candidate Harris faced several major challenges.

She was facing a challenge set for her by outgoing President Biden:

By his policies at the southern border, and the apparent result of same. By his failure to explain those policies—a failure we would regard clear derogation of duty.

By changes in the cost of living which occurred during his term. By his failure to make any attempt to speak to that situation.

(Also, by the gruesome behavior of his gruesome son, Hunter Biden. By his failure, over time, to come to terms, in any way, with the actual conduct of the special group of people he weirdly describes as "the Bidens.")

Vice presidents who run for the White House are often challenged by their associations with the outgoing president under whom they served. Adding in the sheer stupidity of present-day American discourse, Candidate Harris has been especially challenged in this regard.

Candidate Harris has also been challenged by an array of positions she adopted in 2019. (She left the last presidential campaign in December of that year.) Within the context of American politics, some of those positions were so extreme that major journalists have incorrectly assumed that she never took them. 

On Fox, it's routinely asserted that the candidate is insincere in her current, more moderate positions. We would assume that she was possibly less than fully sincere when she adopted the earlier positions, back when they suited the outlook of large parts of the Democratic Party base.

That said, we have no idea.

Yesterday, Candidate Harris delivered a speech. After that, she was interviewed by MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle.

We thought her interview was by far the best she's given in this campaign. In our view, the candidate is sensational in giving a scripted speech. Previously, she has often seemed halting, unsure of herself, in her infrequent interviews.

What did the candidate say in her speech? At present, we expect to spend next week examining "the issues." That said, the candidate faces another serious challenge, no matter what she says or proposes or does. 

Yesterday, Harris gave a speech. Last evening, the Fox News Channel fought back. We were especially struck by what was offered to us the people on that channel's gruesome 8 p.m. program, Jesse Watters Primetime.

There's no way to keep up with the firehose of propaganda which issues from "the cancer growing on the society" known as the Fox News Channel. At upper-class newspapers like the New York Times, the finer element in our society has agreed that they mustn't ever report or discuss the things which occur on that channel.

For today, we direct your attention to what happened starting at 8:15 last night. At that time, Watters introduced Dana Loesch, whose thumbnail goes like this:

Dana Lynn Loesch Eaton (born September 28, 1978) is an American radio and TV host. She is a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and a former writer and editor for Breitbart News...

[...]

During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, she endorsed the Ted Cruz campaign while disparaging the candidacy of Donald J. Trump. However, according to The Atlantic, since Trump's election Loesch became one of the Trump presidency's most visible "passionate defenders."

In 2016, Loesch labelled the mainstream media as "the rat bastards of the Earth. They are the boil on the backside of American politics ... I'm happy frankly to see them curb stomped." When the videos resurfaced after a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland in 2018, Loesch said she had meant she wanted some news stories to be curb-stomped and was not encouraging violence against journalists.

And so on from there. For the record, Loesch is conventionally attractive and is quite good at what she does. 

Loesch is entitled to her views, and also to her demeanor. But is she entitled to her facts? That's the question which is raised by what she told several million neighbors and friends as Watters looked on last night.

It was standard end-of-democracy stuff! Just to set the scene, this was the first exchange:

WATTERS (9/25/24): Nationally syndicated radio host Dana Loesch is here. Dana, did Kamala Harris just go on television and say the American Dream is gone?

LOESCH: Well. it was really hard, Jesse, to understand what she said because I don't speak Drunk Hallmark...When I hear her speak, I feel like I'm listening to a freshman Marxist collegian who has yet to take an Econ class sit here and try to dictate to people who have had to make payroll, who have had to be the first people to show up and the last people to leave, what it is to run a business... 

Loesch doesn't speak Drunk Hallmark! Or at least, so she claims.

Adding to our earlier list, Loesch is of course entitled to whatever it is she "feels like." That said, she quickly managed to employ the word "Marxist," as is the norm on this channel when offered a question like that. 

Watters followed with a peculiar claim, saying that neither Harris, nor her husband, has ever been "successful financially." In fairness, Watters routinely makes odd claims as he waves his hands all about on his peculiar program.  

Eventually, the question of facts arose. We'll admit that we'd never heard the claim in question before! 

Quick background! On Fox, the employees have been working hard, in the past few weeks, to insist that Harris is a product of upper-class financial privilege. 

She's not from the middle-class at all! Extending this mandated theme in a way we'd never heard, Loesch now offered this:

LOESCH: This is what happens when you never—you don't know what it is to be middle-class, you don't know what it is to run a business. 

This woman, Jesse—I know you know this—she is soooo privileged. If you look up "privileged," it is like every Democrat candidate ever in the dictionary. 

She went—and I know she talks about busing—but she started in a very expensive primary school that most Americans could not even think of affording. And she lived in a really nice neighborhood. 

She had a two-parent home, which is a privilege now, thanks to Democrat policies ruining the American family. She's been privileged, nonstop, from a baby now to where she is. So she can't identify with the American voter, and that's why Trump's messaging is resonating with people, because he's built stuff...

A lot of that helps illustrate an extremely basic point. As a species, we the people simply aren't wired—we simply weren't built—for this "public discourse" stuff.

A lot of that passage helps illustrate that point. That said, we'll admit that we'd never heard it said—we'd never heard it said that Candidate Harris is so amazingly privileged that she started in a very expensive primary school that most Americans could not even think of affording. 

A note on the fall of the west:

Back at the dawn of the modern political era, there was no way for a person like Loesch to make a statement like that to millions of American voters. Today, major platforms exist for no reason except to promulgate such claims.

That said, we had never heard any such claim—and when we sat and googled the claim, it was very hard to find what Loesch was talking about. Loesch was so far off in the weeds when she made this statement that we couldn't find a record of other such people making some form of the statement.

Within our failing public discourse, there are the thing a candidate says—but there are also the things that people like Loesch will say about a candidate.

Tomorrow, we'll show you what we found, late last night, after a rather difficult search. Loesch was really off in the weeds when she spoke with Watters last night. That silly boy laughed at what she said.

In the wake of a certain "democratization," this is the way the remnant of our public discourse now works. The finer people at upper-class sites have all agreed not to tell you this. Life is sweeter, safer, better when you defer to Fox.

Forced to enter the race very late, Candidate Harris faced major challenges. On balance, it seems to us that she's doing a very good job.

That said, there are certain challenges no candidate can hope to meet. As it turns out, the whole human race faces a challenge from the way we humans are wired!

Tomorrow: In all candor, we still aren't completely sure what the talk host meant

A 6-point lead turns into 7!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2024

Numbers, like Fox, can be hard: For starters, we'll offer a general observation:

Watching the programs on the Fox News Channel gets to be extremely hard.

Over the course of the past several years, MSNBC was enough of a challenge. But watching Fox is hard.

The demagoguery comes in waves, in every shape and size. The disingenuous conduct is undisguised. When people are willing to behave in these ways, watching them do it is hard.

At certain spots around the world, it's become harder and harder to hold back the sea. It's a bit like that with the conduct at Fox. We add the following fact:

Blue America's major news orgs have agreed to avert their gaze. All in all, our deeply flawed human species may not have been built for this general type of work.

On a more whimsical note:

Who will win the presidential race? Despite press corps devotion to frisking the polls, we have no idea.

We can say that numbers can be very hard. Just in, from The Hill, the latest proof looks like this:

Harris holds 7-point lead over Trump in national survey

Vice President now holds a 7-point lead over former President Trump, according to a new national survey.

The survey, conducted by Reuters and Ipsos, found Harris leading with 46.61 percent support compared to Trump’s 40.48 percent, rounding to a 47-40 gap. That margin was slightly higher than the 5-point advantage over Trump the prior edition of the poll found Harris held.

The report continues from there. According to the report, the survey's numbers for Harris and Trump "round to" a 7-point gap.

Breaking! In fact, those same numbers subtract to a 6.13-point gap. As measured by this particular survey, that's the actual size of the gap.

In our view, Harris supporters should accept the instruction flat or round. But even in this most highly educated of all journalistic worlds, numbers can be very hard!

For further discussion: When a major party nominee is referred to as "Cackling McKneepads" night after night, should other big news orgs take note of that fact? 

(At Fox, the women avert their gaze while one of the incels does this.)

And yes, the full picture is even worse. Watching Fox News is depressing and hard. Was our highly self-impressed species really built for this type of work?

(We humans! When we're hard up, we pawn our intelligence to buy a drink. That was the finding of the noted anthropologist Cummings, roughly one century ago.)

CANDIDATES: Harris to deliver a major address!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2024

Not that anyone cares: There was a time, at the dawn of the era, when the major candidates really knew their stuff.

Or at least, that's what Theodore White alleged in his famous, Pulitzer-winning book, The Making of The President 1960. 

As we noted yesterday, Candidate Hubert Humphrey really knew his stuff! And that was just in the primaries, of which there weren't all that many at the dawn of the era:

WHITE (page 88): What is amazing about Humphrey is the wealth, the diversity, the detail of his knowledge, which runs from internal labor-union politics to the price of milk to the support price on peanuts to the tonnage on the St. Lawrence Seaway to his favorite Food for Peace plan to nuclear disarmament. Name a subject and somewhere, from his reading, Humphrey has picked up an expertise that he has digested and can now deliver, fused with intensity and passion within the frame of his own philosophy: that this is a nation of individuals, of yeoman and country merchants, and government’s job is to keep the big man from crushing the little man. 

Candidate Humphrey knew it all, or at least so White alleged. As we noted last week, Candidates Kennedy and Nixon were also alleged to know their stuff—not that anyone cared:

WHITE (page 292): Kennedy’s response to the first question on Quemoy and Matsu was probably one of the sharpest and clearest responses to any question of the debates; in that response, actually, Kennedy was tentatively fingering at one of the supreme problems of American statecraft, our relation with the revolution in Asia. 

[...]

[Footnote]: For a full development of this two [and a half] minute answer, one had to wait for days, until Kennedy’s extraordinarily lucid half-hour speech on Quemoy and Matsu in New York on Columbus Day, October 12th. That speech was heard only by a local audience, and its full text was reprinted, so far as I know, in only three newspapers in the country. It was as fine a campaign discussion of an issue of national importance as this correspondent can remember—yet its impact on the nation was nil.

Candidate Kennedy knew his stuff too (as did Candidate Nixon). Despite that fact, White reported that only three newspapers bothered to print the entire text of his "extraordinarily lucid half-hour speech" about Quemoy and Matsu.

For that reason, "its impact on the nation was nil!" Due to the indifference of the press, we the people were kept from hearing what Candidate Kennedy had said about this somewhat abstruse policy matter.

As we noted last week, that footnote by White seems to come from a vastly different country—from a whole different universe.  In several weeks of reviewing White's famous book, that footnote seems to define the current state of play more than any other passage. 

Imagine! Back at the dawn of the modern era, White was appalled by the fact that the nation's newspapers had failed to publish the full text of a half-hour policy speech. 

White seemed to assume that we the people would actually have read the text of that speech had it only been published. We don't know if that assumption was accurate, but what a sign of the change in the times!

(The times they are a-changin', Bob Dylan soon said. He first said it three years later.)

By now, the times have thoroughly changed. Even in online editions where the cost of newsprint isn't involved, today's newspapers wouldn't dream of publishing any such text. Nor is there any sign that any of us the people would actually read some such text.

In the current presidential campaign, one candidate keeps stumbling around, offering truly weird pronouncements about major policy questions. For better or worse, it's very, very, very hard to find the published text of these very strange policy statements.

It's within that context that the other nominee will be making a speech today. At the Washington Post, Viser and Stein present this preview of today's address:

Harris to deliver major speech on the economy in Pittsburgh

Vice President Kamala Harris plans to outline in greater detail Wednesday an economic philosophy rooted in her own biography, attempting to contrast her vision with Donald Trump’s and win over voters in a crucial swing state who so far have viewed her skeptically on a driving electoral issue.

Harris, speaking at the Economic Club of Pittsburgh in what her campaign is billing as a major address, is expected to focus on the middle class, while also outlining the ways in which she views herself as a capitalist who believes there are limitations of what government can do, according to a senior campaign official. She will describe her economic philosophy as “pragmatic,” advisers say, stressing that her policies are practical and not “bound by ideology.”

[...]

During the speech, The Washington Post reported Tuesday, Harris is expected to call for new federal incentives to encourage domestic manufacturing, according to two people familiar with her plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe matters not yet made public.

Harris will point to Pittsburgh as essential to the rise of American manufacturing as well as the labor movement. She hopes to make a sharp distinction between her plans to spur production with targeted tax incentives and Trump’s plans to impose trillions of dollars in new tariffs, aides say.

And so on from there. For one thing, Harris is going to talk about tariffs—though at this point, it's not entirely clear that anyone actually cares.

We'll grant you this—the Post's report is just a preview of what will likely be said. That said, it's featured halfway down the front page of the Post's website, well below such thumb-suckers as this:

What we learned from Ellen DeGeneres’s Netflix special
Two years after the end of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” the comedian and former talk show host breaks her silence.

At the two major web sites of the New York Times, today's speech is getting even less play. Plenty of real news is being covered by the Times, but the print edition also invites readers to waste their time on this:

The Long, Strange Saga of Kamala Harris and Kimberly Guilfoyle
More than two decades ago, the future vice president and the future conservative firebrand were rising legal stars in San Francisco. Then Ms. Guilfoyle accused Ms. Harris of trying to deny her a job.

Attention! Possible catfight occurred, long ago! So says today's New York Times in a very lengthy report.

How will today's address be reported once it's actually given? We can't tell you that.

We can tell you this. 

Thanks to the so-called democratization of media—thanks to the remarkable spread of undisguised pseudo-journalism—the coverage of policy matters is, for tens of millions of us the people, increasingly an undisguised gong-show.  

That undisguised gong-show is delivered by arrays of undisguised flyweights. These flyweights arrive on the scene in fully loaded clowncars. 

In our view, MSNBC is bad enough. What happens on the Fox News Channel is an unrelenting joke—an unrelenting joke which is leavened with the usual reference to one of the candidates as "Cackling McKneepads." 

So it went again last night, right there in prime time, with Nancy Pelosi's appalling number of facelifts also pleasingly cited. So it went once again, as a corporate clownshow continued. 

Over the course of the next two days, we'll try to show you some of what we've seen as we've watched one of the candidates make ludicrous claims.  In Red America, those ludicrous claims are relentlessly cleaned up. At Blue America's major orgs, they're largely ignored.

All in all, a cancer has grown on the democracy, such as it ever was. As this cancer has grown, our finer news orgs have behaved like the famous frog in the pot of water which is slowly brought to a boil.

Blue America's orgs have averted their gaze as the temperature rises. That conduct has brought us to the point where gangs of incels, in prime time, lob sexual insults at one candidate while they mock the face lifts and the girth of other women they fear and oppose.

Hubert Humphrey knew his stuff. What explains the peculiar claims repeatedly made by one of the major candidates? 

At the Fox News Channel, they work to hide those peculiar statements. At the New York Times, they don't especially seem to care.

Two reads diverged in a shallow wood, Robert Frost once alleged. Within the current context, our society has chosen to walk down a very long road. 

It may be very hard to find our way back from where we've gone—to find our way back out of all this now too much for us.

What is truth? Pontius Pilate once said. The truth is, nobody cares, major top experts have said.

Tomorrow: What did "Cackling McKneepads" propose? And what about the other candidate? 

Over the next two days, we'll try to lay some of it out...

Truth Social is worse than you think, Warzel says!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2024

Here's the part he leaves out: We agree with Charlie Warzel's basic point. As a matter of fact, it echoes what we've been saying about the Fox News Channel.

Donald J. Trump is worse than you think, Warzel says at The Atlantic. More specifically, he's talking about the candidate's Truth Social posts. Dual headline included, here's the gist of Warzel's piece:

The Trump Posts You Probably Aren’t Seeing
His Truth Social posts are even worse than you think.

[...]

Last Friday, I received an email with a link to a website created by a Washington, D.C.–based web developer named Chris Herbert. The site, Trump’s Truth, is a searchable database collecting all of Trump’s Truth Social posts, even those that have been deleted. Herbert has also helpfully transcribed every speech and video Trump has posted on the platform, in part so that they can be indexed more easily by search engines such as Google. Thus, Trump’s ravings are more visible.

Like many reporters, I’d been aware that the former president’s social-media posts had, like his rally speeches, grown progressively angrier, more erratic, and more bizarre in recent years. Having consumed enough Trump rhetoric over the past decade to melt my frontal cortex, I’ve grown accustomed to his addled style of communication. And yet, I still wasn’t adequately prepared for the immersive experience of scrolling through hundreds of his Truths and ReTruths. Even for Trump, this feed manages to shock...

On their own, each of these posts is concerning and more than a little sad. But consumed in the aggregate, they take on a different meaning, offering a portrait of a man who appears frequently incoherent, internet-addicted, and emotionally volatile—even by the extreme standard that Trump has already set...

"Even for Trump," his Truth Social postings are hard to believe, Warzel says. That echoes what we've been saying about the imitation of life which currently goes by the name of the Fox News Channel.

Warzel says he wasn't prepared for how erratic and bizarre Trump's full postings are. Here's what Warzel doesn't say:

Why are Trump's rantings so hard to believe--so surprising? In large part, because major orgs like the New York Times refuse to treat his bizarre behavior as a stand-alone, front-page news topic. 

His rantings have been normalized through neglect. The same is true of the intellectual and moral squalor which defines the bulk of the programming (though not all) found on the Fox News Channel.

A cancer is growing on the presidency, John Dean once famously said. In our view, a pseudo-journalistic cancer is growing on the American public discourse, and it goes be such names as these:

Fox & Friends
Fox & Friends First
Fox & Friends Weekend
The Big Weekend Show
Life, Liberty and Levin
The Five
Jesse Watters Primetime
Gutfeld!

We'll take a guess—very few readers of the Times understand how fatuous, how journalistically corrupt, those programs (and others) actually are. 

They think they know, but they have no idea—and their highly regarded, major newspaper keeps choosing not to tell them. The corporate stars on MSNBC also agree not to tell them.

We'll assume that Warzel is right about the full sweep of the Truth Social posts. We'll assume that what you see there is "worse than you think"—is more "extreme" and more shocking than you might imagine.

That said, why was Warzel surprised by what he saw when he looked at those posts? It's because the major news orgs with which he's familiar haven't reported on the bulk of those posts.

In our view, Donald J. Trump seems to need help—seems to be badly disordered. Instead, he's been relentlessly normalized, and the process continues. We'll guess that Warzel was right to be shocked by what he saw, but he should have been told long ago.

In our view, it's an ongoing news event when a major party nominee--or a major "cable news" channel—seems to be badly disordered. Just a guess:

Life is easier—and it's safer—when news orgs avert their gaze. 

CANDIDATES: Two candidates continue their fall!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2024

But what about Candidate Harris? Yesterday morning, deep in despair, we listed the names of the four candidates in the presidential election which took place at the dawn of the modern political era. 

Our call of the roll was flawless. As you may recall, the hopefuls in question were these:

The candidates in 1960:
John F. Kennedy: United States Senator from Massachusetts
Richard M. Nixon: Vice President of the United States 

Lyndon B. Johnson: Senate majority leader; "Master of the Senate"
Henry Cabot Lodge: Former United States Senator from Massachusetts; United States Ambassador to the United Nations, 1953-1960

Three of the four ended up in the White House. Only Lodge, the Republican vice presidential nominee, managed to escape that high honor, though even he gave it a try.

Lodge was a genuine Boston Brahmin. A quick overview goes like this:

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. 

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (1902 – 1985) was an American diplomat and politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate and served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1960, he was the Republican nominee for Vice President on a ticket with Richard Nixon, who had served two terms as Eisenhower's vice president. The Republican ticket narrowly lost to Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson...

Born in Nahant, Massachusetts, Lodge was the grandson of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the great-grandson of Secretary of State Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen. After graduating from Harvard University, Lodge won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He defeated Democratic governor James Michael Curley in 1936 to represent Massachusetts in the United States Senate. He resigned from the Senate in 1944 to serve in Italy and France during World War II.  In 1946, Lodge defeated incumbent Democratic Senator David I. Walsh to return to the Senate.

He led the Draft Eisenhower movement before the 1952 election and managed Eisenhower's successful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination at the 1952 Republican National Convention. Eisenhower defeated Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson II in the general election, but Lodge lost his own re-election campaign to then-Congressman Kennedy. Lodge was named as ambassador to the United Nations in 1953 and became a member of Eisenhower's Cabinet. Vice President Nixon chose Lodge as his running mate in the 1960 presidential election, but the Republican ticket lost the close election.

In 1963, the now-President Kennedy appointed Lodge to the position of Ambassador to South Vietnam, where Lodge supported the 1963 South Vietnamese coup. In 1964, Lodge won by a plurality a number of that year's party presidential primaries and caucuses on the strength of his name, reputation, and respect among many voters, though the nomination went to Barry Goldwater...

Within the demographics of Massachusetts politics, Lodge defeated We Irish in 1936. He then lost to us (indeed, to Rep. Kennedy himself!) in 1952. 

As for the three who did reach the White House, none of the three left that position of his own full free will. 

President Kennedy was murdered in 1963. His successor, President Johnson, decided not to seek re-election in 1968 as the society was collapsing around him. 

President Nixon resigned from office in 1974. He wanted to spend more time with his family at the San Clemente residence he so loved.

Yesterday, lost in despair about the quality of this year's hopefuls, we glanced back through Theodore White's portrait of another candidate from 1960—his portrait of another candidate who almost reached the White House.

This candidate was defeated by Candidate Kennedy in the 1960 primaries. Plainly, White admired his vast intelligence and his devotion to the regular American people:

WHITE (page 88): What is amazing about [Hubert] Humphrey is the wealth, the diversity, the detail of his knowledge, which runs from internal labor-union politics to the price of milk to the support price on peanuts to the tonnage on the St. Lawrence Seaway to his favorite Food for Peace plan to nuclear disarmament. Name a subject and somewhere, from his reading, Humphrey has picked up an expertise that he has digested and can now deliver, fused with intensity and passion within the frame of his own philosophy: that this is a nation of individuals, of yeoman and country merchants, and government’s job is to keep the big man from crushing the little man. 

[...]

What spoiled the Humphrey campaign—apart from the underlying fact that this country, Democrats and Republicans alike, was unwilling to be evangelized in 1960—was the very simplicity, the clarity, the homely sparkle he could bring to any issue. He could talk on almost any subject under the sun—to farmers, to workers, to university intellectuals. And when he finished there were no mysteries left; nor was he a mystery either. He was someone just like the listeners. There was no distance about him, no separation of intrigue, none of the majesty that must surround a king. Humphrey in a druggist’s jacket explaining the problems of druggists in small towns and their inventories (which he could, spectacularly), or Humphrey, joining a picket line to sing “Solidarity Forever,” was just like everyone else; and a President, unfortunately for Humphrey, must be different from everyone else. Humphrey yearned for the attention of the national press; yet the national press, which bore him so deep an affection, considered him almost too easy a friend...

There's much more in White's book about Humphrey's early progressive career, which started in 1945 with his election as the mayor of Minneapolis at the age of 34. 

In 1968, he became the latest sitting vice president to be caught in the vortex surrounding the president under whom he had served. After finally breaking with Johnson late in that year's general election, he narrowly lost to Candidate Nixon, who eventually abandoned the Oval under personal stress of some undisclosed kind.

At any rate, three of The 1960 Four eventually reached the White House. That said, they weren't perfect people. 

President Kennedy conducted an affair with a 19-year-old intern who actually was 19 years old and who actually was an intern. The extremely unattractive story has been cleaned up a bit in this Wikipedia profile. 

(Because President Kennedy is also Dear Jack, our contemporary press corps has rarely mentioned this matter, even as they've endlessly worked to embellish the facts in another.)

Later, Presidents Johnson and Nixon had to abandon their posts. In each case, inevitable human imperfections are believed to have been involved.

With his devotion to ordinary people and with his vast array of knowledge, Candidate Humphrey may have been the most admirable candidate of them all in that watershed year. For ourselves, we've been thinking of those candidates in a state of mild despair as we consider the state of play within "our [flailing] democracy" in this presidential year.

Yesterday, we also listed this year's four candidates. In any perspicacious reckoning of this year's campaign, former candidate Joseph R. Biden plainly makes it five. 

Over on the Republican side, the moral and intellectual squalor seem quite apparent this year. We've long assumed that there's "something wrong" with the presidential nominee. 

Tribunes of the upper-end press have agreed, right down to the end, that this apparent state of affairs must not be reported or discussed, except through the use of high euphemism. Everyone knows that "something is wrong," but our tribunes continue to be shocked, shocked with each new manifestation which appears.

In yesterday's report, we described the GOP's young vice presidential pick reaching the bottom of the moral barrel. Later yesterday, he managed to take things even further, as reported at Mediate:

Vance Lays Into the Media for ‘Debunking’ Springfield Migrant Claims Instead of Listening to ‘People Speak Their Truth’

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance laid into the media for “debunking a story that comes from the residents of Springfield” on Monday, and urged journalists to listen “to people speak their truth" after he was criticized for promoting unfounded allegations about Haitian migrants eating pets in Ohio.

“I wish the American media was half as interested in the stress on the local schools, the stress on the hospitals, and unaffordable housing as they are in debunking a story that comes from the residents of Springfield,” said Vance at a campaign rally in North Carolina, Monday.

He then questioned, “Did you ever think about listening to people speak their truth instead of listening to some bureaucrat and assuming that everything they tell you is true?”

Sad! Adopting a braindead formulation which largely comes from within Blue America's tribe, the candidate said that the people of Springfield have been "stating their truth" about the eating of their city's cats and dogs. Even Pilate didn't stoop to that level when he posed his famous question, "What is truth?"

The people of Springfield have been "stating their truth" about the eating of cats and dogs! So said this apparently damaged young man, formerly a vastly mistreated child.

In fact, as the two people who triggered this frenzy have continued to speak their truth, they've apologized for misstating "the" truth in their original claims. But it seems that nothing is going to stop the very young man who was apparently damaged by the highly disordered upbringing he described in a best-selling book. 

Meanwhile, Candidate Trump explained himself further yesterday. It isn't just the Jews, he has now said. Catholics also have to be crazy to vote for "Comrade Kamala," this unusual hopeful has now declared.

Say what you will about Candidates Kennedy, Nixon and Johnson—none of the three was capable of this sort of gong-show, end-days campaign conduct. As for us the regular people in whom Candidate Humphrey had such faith, we the people are proving ourselves to be capable of believing almost anything during such highly fraught times as these—and we'd say that there are signs of this human proclivity among Red and Blue tribunes alike.

Inevitably, there are also the two Democratic candidates—Candidates Harris and Vance. At present, they're being slimed as obvious Commies and China symps all over the Fox News Channel.

As this happens, Blue America's great news orgs avert their gaze, choosing instead to focus all day on the latest largely useless polls.

In the last two days, Joe Scarborough has turned from Morning Joe into Shouting Joe as he has ranted about the fact that some people don't precisely agree with his every stance concerning the current race. In truth, there are shortcomings on display with our candidates too, and some people have noticed this fact. 

As we've noted, we're going to vote for Candidate Harris, who has been sensational in some aspects of this campaign. As with the previous Candidate Humphrey, she is significantly hobbled by her association with the horrors of the previous Candidate Biden. 

That strikes us as largely dumb and unfair. But that is the expected norm in all human reasoning.

That said, she too seems to be a limited person, as has always been true of everyone else. 

No candidate was ever perfect. As these end days glide along, we'll review our own hopefuls tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Jonathan plays the card