An elegy for the fat old alley cat and his hillbilly friend…

Don in hiding

The question of the day is why is Donald Trump hiding? While he pouts and steams in his Mar-A-Lago hideaway, Kamala Harris and the Democrats are free to define the Republican Party campaign as weird. Harris, especially, has decided to do a full frontal attack on Trump using all the words that the thin-skinned convicted candidate cannot deflect because they are true and widely known — even to his MAGA friends. The campaign is impervious to Trump’s best assets, the crooked GOP Supreme Court majority and Judge Cannon who are unable to interfere in the rough and tumble of the campaign. The torrent of bad news revealed by an increasingly hostile MSM opinion points out the contrast between the excitement and joy unloosed by the Harris-Walz campaign and the missteps taken almost daily by Trump and his running mate. Trump for example has resorted to gibberish:

“People vote with their STOMACH, and food is now at an all time high because of Kamabla/BidenINCOMPETENCE,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Monday. “With them in charge, IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE!”

And,

“Kamabla has stated, over and over again, that she wants to DEFUND THE POLICE AND, WITHOUT QUESTION, BAN FRACKING. NO MORE FOSSIL FUEL.’ This will quadruple the cost of energy in America! DEPRESSION ANYONE!”

He added in later posts that “Kamabla Harris is afraid to Debate me on FoxNews” and claimed “Kamabla is the WORST V.P.”

The Republican nominee’s new attacks come the week after he sparked an angry backlashfor questioning Harris’ ethnicity. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,”

Trump’s New Attack on ‘Kamabla’ Harris Is Literally Gibberish,” by Dan Ladden-Hall

Trump now hermiting at his Palm Beach thumbs out these inane screeds in the middle of the night while JD Vance plays his “strange bedfellow” in the light of day. Then on Thursday after he saw the course of his campaign begin to plummet as Harris rolled out her VP with his Fred Rogers vibe waving excitedly to large crowds, like a sleepy-eyed Punxsutawney Phil, he pops out for a shambled presser to remind us how long we have to wait for him to go away:

“She picked a radical left man,” Trump said. “He’s got things done that he’s … he has positions that are just not, it’s not even possible to believe that they exist. He’s going for things that nobody’s ever even heard of, heavy into the transgender world, heavy into lots of different worlds having to do with safety. He doesn’t want to have borders. He doesn’t want to have walls. He doesn’t want to have any form of safety for our country.”

Donald Trump Gives Rambling Press Conference, Says Kamala Harris Can’t Do Same,” by Igor Bobic and Liz Skalka

The nonsense didn’t bother the assembled reporters enough to question his insanity as they dutifully listened and forgot to do their jobs. Meanwhile, Harris and Walz come off as a welcomed antidote to the MAGA craziness that had gripped the nation for what seemed like a century.

The truth is a difficult and unyielding foe. In 2016 and again in 2020, Trump’s handlers used tricks and mirrors to deflect the truth. They spun out lies and conspiracy theories that befuddled the Clinton campaign which found itself too busy chasing lies to tell their story. Biden’s team deployed a rapid response team in his race which neutralized the effect of the lies, but by 2020 Trump’s campaign was burdened by his unique incompetence with a healthy dash of arrogance. Biden’s team was masterful at exploiting both. Harris-Walz has flipped the script using preclusive attacks by beating the GOP sour pusses to their own lies. The Trump script has been used many times before. He is by now a relic. Predicting his lies even before they are told deflates their power to deceive. They have become stale by now as Trump’s schtick is like a traveling vaudeville act that hasn’t bothered to freshen. Who wants to hear a grown man calling people names (Governor New-scum) or comparing crowd sizes (his J6 insurrection rioters and MLK’s March on Washington crowd)? At the same time, his running mate has managed to alienate half the voting public while coming off as a lounge act far off the Vegas strip who karaokes the worn GOP attacks on Joe Biden who is no longer running.

The Alley Cat Caper

Democrats have learned over the past 8 years how to get under Trump’s skin. Biden was a master at making Trump squirm with anger. Even on a bad day, at the June presidential debate that led to his abandoning his campaign, Biden was able to land telling blows that cast Trump as a philandering, immoral degenerate:

“How many billions of dollars do you owe in civil penalties? For-for molesting a woman in public, for doing a whole range of things, of having sex with a porn star … while your wife was pregnant. What are you talking about? You have the morals of an alley cat.”

-President Joe Biden, speaking to former President Donald Trump at June Presidential Debate on CNN

Trump could only stare gap-mouthed as a diminished Biden, weakened by age and the flu, landed a Rocky Balboa haymaker that literally hit home.

Biden, who has the mentality of a street fighter despite his reputation for empathy, does not suffer fools well. As he exited the arena he set the stage for his political heirs. The criteria for the weirdness that Harris and Walz are now using to label their opponents are simply reimagined Biden “malarkey”. Praying with evangelicals and hugging American flags now only heightens our sense of his hypocrisy.

Vance picks up the theme. He got his new job by begging his boss for forgiveness for calling him an idiot among other transgressions. He plays righteous scourge to women and those in our communities who are unfairly harassed and bullied for being “different’. Vance began his faith life as an evangelical, then as an atheist only to convert to Catholicism after law school. Call me a skeptic, but the choice may well be one mixed with convenience:

“I really like that the Catholic Church was just really old,” Vance said at a 2021 conference of the Napa Institute, a conservative Catholic think tank. “I felt like the modern world was constantly in flux. The things that you believed 10 years ago were no longer even acceptable to believe 10 years later.”

But Vance’s Catholicism, like that of many church members including President Biden, lines up with Catholic teaching only in limited — but very different — ways. Vance supports the death penalty in some cases, wants to boost fossil fuels, wants to deport millions of migrants and has voted against many government programs aimed at aiding the poor. All of those positions are in opposition to his church.

- WAPO, “ JD Vance’s Catholic conversion is part of young conservative movement,” by Michelle Boorstein

The GOP pair are now being exposed for their false piety- the very epitome of the GOP double standard that overlooks the sins of the privileged while hectoring the poor, women, gays, and minorities trying simply to live a normal life. Vance, in particular, embraces Republican hypocrisy. His depiction of “cat ladies” as childless is the flip side of the equally demeaning trope of women who were once identified as “barefoot and pregnant.” Both memes speak more about male irresponsibility in relationships than they reflect on women.

Vance is mining a dangerous vein as he blames women for their experiences as parents of last resort. Damned if they choose parenthood, dammed if they don’t, the role of the men in their lives who abandon their parental responsibility belong at the tip of Vance’s spear. These are the men, like Donald Trump, who rely on strong and faithful women to maintain a family and raise their children, while they “play the field”.

Timed out

The GOP hasn’t been in touch with the real America for a long time. They have refused to recognize its diversity and the wisdom of common sense, the value of life experience. Their perspective is jaded by outdated and repudiated perceptions of race, gender, and sex. Their perch is grounded in the past in which dominance was a white, propertied male’s right in defiance of our enlightened founding documents. Even the men who wrote the words were deaf to their meaning. And so the GOP has been taken over by aggrieved white males embracing Donald Trump. They are immune to “enlightenment” and hobbled by its intrusion into this campaign pitting him and his running mate against a powerful and intelligent Black and Asian woman teamed with a mid-western happy warrior as a partner.

Undermining the Constitution is without a doubt a road back, and rewiring its intent as the current Supreme Court has decided to do with its absurdist rationalization of originalism begs a larger question: do their opinions removing rights won over many years make our America better?

• Our America has ended slavery, granted women suffrage, recognized the evil of segregation, and ruled it unconstitutional.
• Our America has recognized the status of gays in society and has granted them equal status to marry, parent, and lead public lives without recrimination and judgment.
• Their America is only better for racists, misogynists, the uber-rich, and ne’er-do-wells who pose as Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, and bomb-throwing anti-institutionalists.

There are now signs that America is sick of the politics that reins in our freedoms. Freedom makes us better. Cooperation makes us better. Education makes us better. Making America great is a noble goal, but undoing what is right about our nation to make life easier for some at the expense of others does not improve us. It diminishes two and a half centuries of hard-won freedoms.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are both beneficiaries of Joe Biden’s selflessness and guardians of his legacy. That legacy included the electoral spanking that defeated Trump with a “death by a thousand cuts.” Biden with Harris won the popular vote by landslide numbers, yet squeezed out small-margin victories in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. Harris’s campaign can complete the effort and put out the fire that Donald Trump lit under American Democracy. She and Walz can deliver the message America has longed for — karma is a hard-hearted bitch. Trump knows his fate awaits him in courts in Washington, D.C., and Florida. He also will come to know that once he is no longer supported by political immunities granted by his status as a candidate, there will be more indictments in states that illegally empaneled fake electors who acted on his behalf- more opportunities to indict him for his part.

When Sidney Powell, who is now a cooperating witness in the Georgia Rico trial, vowed to release the Kraken, little did she know that her Kraken friend had changed teams. When Tim Walz suggested that Republicans “mind their own damn business” it was good advice. It mirrored Joe Biden’s more earthy advice to Donald Trump to “…shut up, man.” Mark Twain is a trusted resource whenever we want to stick a pin in an overblown ego:

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

We are blessed with the knowledge that Trump and company are averse to taking advice, even when it would serve them well. Trapped in place by their own words, Trump-Vance seems unable to pivot from Biden to Harris. The harder they try the worse they get.

There are just about 90 days left for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to end our national nightmare for good. When we vote they lose…

Originally published at https://www.dailykos.com on August 9, 2024.