Suntabs
Steven L. Taylor
·
Sunday, July 28, 2024
·
18 comments
- And a little entertainment:
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter
Maybe it’s genetics, maybe it’s my upbringing, but those are two drugs I’ve never ever been drawn to. I mean, I understand the lure of cocaine, adrenaline, and the siren song of violence, but power? Ambition? Nah, not even in my youth.
Personally, I think the vetting process consisted of the Orange Emperor looking out at the crowd, pointing and saying “I want that one.”
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Agree about power. Power for what? Over other people?
One of the commenters at BJ described Usha Vance to his young daughter.
The girl’s response: “They are 100% each others beards.”
I think a big element of Harris’s success is the euphoric relief of half of the electorate that we don’t have to do Trump/Biden anymore. We have been doing for 6 years now and everyone is just exhausted by that dynamic. Biden gone; new face; new story; tada!
So Republican Vice-President USA candidate JD Vance, a Catholic, apparently thinks that the childless Priests and Nuns of the Catholic Church should not have as much of a say as parents would have in how our democracy functions.
I sure would like to see the legislation proposed in all 50 states that will provide for parent ballots and non parent ballots. Just exactly how will votes be allocated using this Preferential Parent Polling?
Will parents with multiple offspring get more votes than parents with one child?
Maybe Jack and JKB can help us out with this.
I think the strain of having to pretend everything was okay with Biden lifted and the result is a sense of freedom. Also, it turns a mirror on every Trump lackey and voter. These Vance emails…where in 2015 he’s like cops are bad and Trump sucks are fragments from an alternate reality where Trump never happened and conservatives chose to live in the same world as liberals and we have a much different set of issues to deal with.
The fact is that none of the last 8 years needed to happen. Something about Biden dropping out, the Trump ticket looking like two black-pilled incels, and Harris immediately killing it rather than falling into some centrist narrative trap where her persona alienates and she has to prove to real Americans she ain’t in Hamas connects to this other reality.
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Ditto. I’ve sampled various drugs but always cautiously. I’d cut a tab of blotter up with an exact-o knife to control the dose. Never found cocaine interesting – it’s a drug for dull people who want to pretend to be interesting.
As for power, I’m allergic to it, and actively avoid the perks of even my low, low level of fame. I don’t like being praised, it makes me uncomfortable because it feels like I’m giving power to someone else. It’s the Sauron’s Ring problem – why would you externalize and thus make vulnerable, something you can contain within yourself?
OTOH, I quite like money. The usefulness of money does not rely on fame or approval or other forms of power. 20 bucks is 20 bucks, whether you’re loved or hated.
Of course Usha was appalled by him. But she doesn’t let being personally offended or appalled get in the way of attaining status and power. She did, after all, clerk for Circuit Court Judge Kavanaugh, and then for Chief Justice Roberts when he was upholding the Muslim ban.
Usha Vance is a Republican hypocrite, but I repeat myself.
@Michael Reynolds:
Something we agree on. Watched the beginnings of the cocaine cowboys games real time, struck me as a good way to die stupid. Only experience with acid was when I was sandbagged with a couple of tabs unbeknownst. Turned out I could smoke more weed than people wanted to share with little effect. But $$$, I like having it, but other than having life’s necessities, it’s pretty much “meh”. Power/ambition, apparently I was out shooting a band with Tri-X the day that was issued.
The family singing the ABBA parody really is pure gold. They should sing it at the convention in Chicago but I believe they’re English and GOPers would say Dems are allowing foreigners to take American jobs.
Regarding Usha, I’ve seen this before with political spouses. Definitely something to keep in mind if you ever fall in love with someone who has electoral aspirations–you get joined up with the person running. You don’t have many pathways. This isn’t like Carville and Matalin.
She’s probably spending so much time grinding her teeth she’ll need expensive dental work.
With regard to the Olympics, part of the issue is that the tableau that they were reproducing was a painting that was undoubtedly influenced by “The Last Supper.” The painting in question was “The Feast of the Gods” (that’s the English translation of the title) by Jan van Bijlert, from 1635.
Jan van Bijlert studied abroad, including in Italy, and would have been familiar with “The Last Supper”–either having seen the original or reproductions. And like many artists he appears to have been referencing the original work.
Here’s a link to the van Bijlert’s painting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bijlert_09-530998.jpg
Once you see it, you can see the similarities–including the fact that the figure in the middle of the Olympics tableau has a halo, something lacking in Di Vinci’s painting.
All that said, it’s rediculous to turn this into an identity politics/culture war political issue.
@Matt Bernius:
Hence, it is critically important to their cause that the GQP continue to drag this non-existent issue up onto the stage and scream how important it is.
Dear GQP, don’t any of you have any idea just how ridiculous you appear to rational humans? Never mind, silly question.
@Matt Bernius: Ridiculous pretty much sums up the bulk of evangelical involvement in politics from the 80s on. They need to embrace the “love not the world, neither the things that are in the world” verse more closely. Paying special attention to what the following verse says about the people who do love the world and its trappings.
@Flat Earth Luddite: The GQP isn’t making its pitch to rational Americans. They get that pitch would be a wasted effort. Their whole success depends on getting all the irrational voter support. Even small defections may result in a loss at the polls. Consider 2o2o; both candidates improved their voting turnout, but Biden did better, iirc, and won because of it. And Trump ordering whackos to stay home affected the Georgia Senatorial election, again iirc.
I don’t want to make the mistake of overconfidence; there’s still a long way to go to win this November. But I wonder if these chain of events end up being the best we could have hoped for, even though no sane person would have planned it out this way.
One of the reasons I didn’t want Biden to be the nominee in 2020 is that I was thinking beyond that election cycle. I saw he was already starting to seem diminished compared to how he’d been just eight years earlier, when he kicked Paul Ryan’s ass in a debate. I figured that even if he won in 2020, it put us all in a very precarious position going forward. If he chose not to run for reelection, we’d lose the incumbency advantage. In any case, we were always going to be on edge due to the high chance of a sudden decline in his health, physical or mental. And politics just isn’t kind to old guys; you only have to look at history to know that. Reagan figured out a way to do it, but he was the exception.
I think a lot of people are wishing Biden had chosen to hand over the reins to Kamala all along, instead of us letting us go through the tumultuous last few weeks. But it’s not clear that would have put us in a better position than we are now. For one thing, there’d have been a much higher chance that a big name in the party would have challenged her in the primaries. And the Republicans would have had much longer to figure out a line of attack. They’ve spent the last several years building their entire strategy for winning on smearing Biden, and now that’s all gone up in smoke. The short time frame between now and the election should have been at least as big a problem for us as it is for them, but that simply isn’t what’s happened. We’re unified, we’ve got our shit together, and now they have no idea what to do next. That isn’t something I’d ever have predicted if Biden were to step down, and I know I’m not alone.
It’s quite possible that after this is all over, we’ll look back at Trump’s agreement to debate in June as the worst mistake of his political career–his Stalingrad.