Coup Victim Gets Prime Speaking Slot
In brief release from captivity, Biden will address Democratic convention
Aug. 19: Biden, Hillary Clinton speak tonight … Chicago protests begin … Walz finally pisses me off … Baked by Hamm …
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The 2024 Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago today. Topping the list of today’s speakers is Pres. Joe Biden, whose return to the ticket is being demanded and/or predicted and/or unwholesomely fantasized about by former Pres. Donald Trump.
Trump has warned that Biden’s removal from the ticket was accomplished in a bloodless coup executed by Democratic Party leaders. As students of history know all too well, any successful coup incorporates the following elements:
Allow the victim to remain in office with full command of all the levers of power they had before
Allow the victim continued access to press and lawyers they can use to challenge the coup
Give the victim a prime speaking slot at your nominating convention
Debate your general-election opponent as if you need votes
Participate in a general election despite your willingness to coup
Of course, Trump has multiple reasons to free Biden from his non-dungeon. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote to a woman. In 2020, Trump lost the popular vote and Electoral College vote — as an incumbent president — to an old guy who was the most Beltway guy to run for president since the last time Biden ran.
With Harris on the ballot, Trump now faces the prospect of losing the popular vote, the Electoral College vote, and his vestigial feelings of manhood to a younger woman who he only recently learned is Black. And Indian-American. And a child of immigrants.
The only way losing to Harris could be worse for Trump’s shriveled Superfund site of an ego is if Harris came out as a gay, transgender, cat-owning, undocumented little person.
But there’s another contrast that just demolishes Trump. And it’s not the ageist accusations that Trump has dementia — he’s always said and done crazy shit.
It’s the contrast between Trump and Biden. Biden’s decision to step aside is selflessness manifest, juxtaposed with the least selfless person ever to have a self.
Trump’s whole shtick is that only he stands between America and them…the others coming for “freedom.” Which is absurd on the face of it.
Trump does nothing to stand in the way of progressives. It’s not Trump behind right-wing lawsuits. And the only legislation Trump actively opposed was bipartisan (ew) border security/fearmongering.
Hell, when actual bullets were flying, Trump literally didn’t stand in between the killer and Trump’s people. A guy actually for real biologically died. Trump got a Band-Aid™ after literally ducking out of the way.
The only man metaphorically standing between America and The Enemy was literally crouched on the stage looking for his shoe.
Biden’s departure from the race reminds people what actual sacrifice looks like. And real patriotism. Biden refused to stand in the way of his party and its principles and the voters who wanted a new choice.
Biden didn’t cling (after initially clinging) to ego-satisfying polling interpretations. He didn’t silence or refuse to hear dissenters. Biden not only listened, he did the thing he did not want to do.
Now, is it true that Biden’s also making America complicit in horrific, illegal war crimes? Did he allow America to produce more oil than any nation ever has even though it may have sealed Earth’s doom? Sure, yes, but hey, nobody’s perfect!
But last month he did a thing no one’s done before. And he did it based on empiricism; believing the polling he was shown about his prospects, believing the people who showed it to him.
That’s why Biden and you can expect a rapturous reception for him tonight. Because tonight he represents not just democracy but selflessness in its name.
Democrats Need Dissent
One way Democrats at the Chicago convention this week will look like an actual democratic party is that the streets outside will be teeming with people yelling at them about how much they suck and in what ways.
Protester causes include Gaza, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and the many many things America could fund without a Pentagon and even with a Pentagon. The first march was last night and everyone seems to have made it out okay.
One protester even yoinked the mic at a Democratic welcome party last night and though I’m not happy about what appear to be overly handsy organizers, it could’ve gone a lot worse. It didn’t! A protester got up and shat on everyone’s good time, which is their job and is the cover charge for any truly democratic Democratic Party party.
So, as of now the protests are accomplishing Goal #1: Ensuring that there’s coverage of the party’s dissenters and their views.
And not just Democratic dissenters. Third-party candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West are expected to participate in Poor People’s Army events.
In a nice grace note, West was at a Rainbow PUSH Coalition event last night to honor the Rev. Jesse Jackson, its founder. If folks aren’t aware of the towering position Jackson once held within the party, consider that attendees included West, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), lots of House progressives, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
To Chicago’s credit, the city’s poor and unhoused — undocumented immigrants, documented residents, and undocumented residents — will not be scooped up like cat litter to protect delegates from seeing what happens when we don’t take care of people.
The city has set protest guidelines that haven’t satisfied protesters, but haven’t pissed them off enough to inspire violent revolt, either. It’s good to see Democrats recognize that democracy means people can yell at you. And nothing in the Constitution gives delegates the right to walk down the street without protesters loudly reminding them about their party killing Palestinians and/or Earth.
And because I’m still cranky about an otherwise estimable Newsfucker who posted that they don’t care about Harris’s policies, I want to make another point about dissent — which is about policy.
Big, ugly, public policy disputes are good for parties. At least, in functioning democracies. Hell, they’re a necessary component of functioning democracies.
You can unify behind Harris and still want her to do things. Maybe all the Gaza protests help Harris. They could give her ammunition to move left. Or, hell, they might help by making her look more centrist.
(Related: Peter Beinart writes of the elegant solution available to Harris on Gaza. She can reject a full arms embargo, but say that she will enforce U.S. law, which prohibits arming individual military units guilty of “gross violations” of human rights.)
There’s another example where dissent may help: Signaling strong support for Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, aka Monopoly’s Bane.
As I argued last week, if people don’t speak up for Khan, Harris has no political motive to keep her. And when rich donors demand Khan’s ouster, Harris will have no ammunition, nothing to point to as evidence that she, Harris, will pay a political price for tossing her, Khan.
Dissent. Helps.
Walz Pissed Me Off
It’s true. It happened. The thrill is gone.
Last night, at Aliquippa High School football practice in Pennsylvania, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) said, “Our politics has been pretty ugly. Our politics has seemed pretty negative. Our politics has been something that I know, what I fear most is that young people turn away from it rather than turning into it.”
Which sounded like a pretty good rebuke to what Walz said the day before, which is what pissed me off. Naturally, lots of folks loved it.
The day before, Walz said, “In the heartland and in Nebraska and in Minnesota, we don't need a Yale-educated philosophy major backed by billionaire venture capitalists to tell us who we are. We know who we are.”
I have a problem with about 87% of that. First of all, geographic bullshit. The alleged heartland and Nebraska and Minnesota aren’t more American than the rest of America. They’re less representative of America’s people and, considering how they vote, less representative of its founding principles.
Show me a Democratic politician with the sand to extol Queens, New York as an avatar of America.
Oh and also, we don’t know who we are. That kind of essentialist certainty is just a whisper from full-blown nationalism. Individually and nationally we are supposed to be learning constantly about who we are, and changing who we are, to become a more perfect union.
But can you guess the part that really pissed me off? Spoilery hint: I was a philosophy major!
Ivy-bashing and thinking-bashing and other forms of anti-intellectualism are what got us here. For the love of Jesus or Satan or Cthulhu please do not tie populism to anti-intellectualism yet afuckinggain.
On a similar note, Walz deployed cultural/culinary virtue signaling. “Do you think JD Vance knows one damn thing about Nebraska? You think he's ever had a runza? That guy would call it a Hot Pocket. You know it. Every one of you in here know it. A damn Hot Pocket."
When Stuart Stevens says “I love this guy,” that’s nature’s way of telling you your brain has made a stinky-pants.
This kind of cultural litmus testing is not only toxic bullshit it’s the kind of weapon that too often ends up in the arsenals of racism and nationalism. Cut. The. Fucking. Shit.
Because this notion that states are different in some important, not-bad way is the root of so much of our trouble. It’s deployed almost always in the name of fucked-up un-American shit, whether the issue is education or church-state separation or enslaving people.
You wanna unify people? Stop telling us we’re divided by geography, academic institution, course of study, and fucking runzas.
(Keep going with the billionaire venture capitalists, obvi!)
Harold Hamm Is Baking People
We don’t talk enough about the individual human beings responsible for climate change. The least we can do for the next generations is identify who was most responsible for baking or drowning their grandchildren or killing them in a plague caused by shifting migratory patterns.
Partly that’s because we think of climate change as a future thing, the exclusive intellectual property of Michael Bay or whoever does those movies now.
But, guys, it’s here!
According to CNN, a new analysis by the International Institute for Environment and Development shows that:
Summers (defined as the span between first and last really hot days) are longer.
Our cities are hotter.
The new analysis defines 95° as “extremely hot,” or in layperson’s terms, Jesus, I’m Schvitzing (JIS).
The analysis focuses on cities, illuminating which cities are shitty about heat mitigation. (Spoiler: Texas is bad!)
Of the top ten big cities that had the biggest heat increases over the past half-century, seven are in Texas, and presumably will be until the last survivors flee. That’s based on the number of JIS days they had every year. Chart, you say?
And here’s an absolutely terrible1 chart showing how much longer summer is getting, based on the time between first and last JIS days each year:
Who’s responsible for this? Big Oil, of course. Hundreds and hundreds of fossil fuel executives over the decades who covered up their own science about what they were doing and, worse, funded fake science to make their coverup seem credible, and worst, convinced millions of Americans and their leaders to let the planet boil.
But, diligent Newsfuckers might ask, which individuals can we blame now?
Guys, look, it’s Harold Hamm!
Remember former Pres. Donald Trump’s April Big Oil fundraiser nation-auction? C’mon, you remember…the one where he told fossil fuel executives to give him a billion dollars? I knew you remembered!
Well, you know Trump ain’t exactly one for follow-through, so that’s where Hamm came in. The Washington Post reports that Hamm took the lead in connecting Trump with potential Earthfucking donors.
Hamm is the billion neverenoughaire CEO of Continental Resources, which extracts oil from the ground and hope from the future.
And what does Hamm want in return for helping to make Trump represident? Here’s his wish list, courtesy of the Post:
More drilling on federal your land
Weakening the Endangered Species Act so he can act to endanger more species, and
Curbing environmental regulations.
Here’s something I forgot about because for some reason no one’s talking about it in the middle of a presidential campaign focusing on inflation. In 2020, Russia and Saudi Arabia were in a price war that drove the price of gas down. You know, like they keep telling us the Invisible Hand will do.
But they never teach you about the Invisible Hamm.
Behind the scenes, Hamm pressured Trump to end the price war. Why? Because it was costing him money. Trump got the two nations to agree to massive production cuts, boosting oil prices. That you then paid.
And if that doesn’t convince you of Hamm’s patriotism, he was off Trump for a while, not for obvious sane-people reasons but because Trump didn’t pardon a friend of his who was a criminal. Once Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) pooped out, though, Hamm got over it and now he’s all in again.
Vance’s Admitted Lies
If you missed the second installment of The Vance Files this weekend, I dug into how Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) admitted to lying — as an adult — in his book “Hillbilly Elegy.” What I found about his lies, and how he talks about them afterward, shed a lot of light on the man’s thinking. You can check it out here if you missed it. And if you want to support me for spending my weekends doing horrific things like reading JD Vance, you can become a paid subscriber or make a one-time donation.
If nothing else, it’ll help keep me motivated — and fed! — as I work on the next one, which promises to be a doozy.
DNC Lineup
Tonight: Pres. Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, former Secretary of State and Trump-popular-vote-beater Hillary Clinton.
Tuesday: Former Pres. Barack Obama, second gentleman Doug Emhoff.
Wednesday: Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), former Pres. Bill Clinton, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Thursday: Vice Pres. Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic presidential nomination as the final step of her coup which for some reason still includes elections in November.
TCB
Catch me on The Nicole Sandler Show tonight at 5pm eastern time! You can watch or listen free to me and Nicole Sandler right here.
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Go get ‘em, kids.
Terrible because bending the lines makes them look closer in length.
Walz's lies or Vance's lies? Last paragraph. I totally appreciate you subjecting yourself to the horror of reading JD Vance. You've landed on many a grenade in your writing lifetime.
Haven’t you ever heard “all politics are local”?
I was liking your newsletter until this one. Tim Walz gave a great speech to his fellow Nebraskans & Vance seriously shat on Appalachian’s in his book & continues to try to tell us who is & isn’t acceptable.
I couldn’t read the rest. Ugh.