RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/oprah-vs-hulk

Political conventions are a form of theater. The stage, the lights, the confetti; the personalities, who, from the rostrum, make the case for their party; and the driving ambition: to rally the base, demoralize the enemy, and win.

In most years, the oratory supports the agenda. The parties select their nominees, assemble a platform, and focus their rhetoric on how their policies will improve the life of the nation. But this year, the agenda took a back seat to aesthetics.

Donald Trump’s policy proposals—control the border, cut taxes, and achieve peace through strength—have been the same for a decade. Kamala Harris’s have been carefully hidden. She has distanced herself from her previous positions and presented emotion, most notably, “joy,” in lieu of concrete policies. Given this situation, let’s set aside substance for a moment and focus on style.

The two conventions this year, the DNC in Chicago and the RNC in Milwaukee, featured two speakers who captured their respective parties’ aesthetics: television host Oprah Winfrey, for the Democrats, and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, for the Republicans.  

The Democrats selected Oprah for an obvious reason. She is a star—and a star-maker. For decades, Oprah has curated her image as a compassionate friend, generous hostess, and moral voice. She appears in public immaculately dressed, coiffed, lighted, and staged.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/28/wheres-kamalas-convention-bounce/

Two days ago, Nate Silver, the media’s favorite polling “expert” who on election day in 2016 gave Hillary Clinton a 71% chance of winning, said polls had Kamala Harris 5 points ahead of Donald Trump and that “our best guess is that her lead will increase further, especially given that almost none of the polling was done after her strong acceptance speech on Thursday.”

Of course, Silver was hardly alone. The leftist media was fully expecting a big bounce in Harris’ poll numbers.

So, where is Kamala’s big convention bounce?

The Morning Consult found Harris’ lead over Trump unchanged since last Thursday.

A Yahoo/YouGov poll, which was also conducted after the convention, found that “if Harris got a ‘bounce’ from the DNC, it was a very small one — too small to alter the fundamentally deadlocked nature of the 2024 contest.”

The RealClearPolitics average had Harris at 48.3% last Monday. It is currently at 48.4%. But her lead over Trump actually shrank slightly, from 1.6 points last Monday to the current 1.5.

The FiveThirtyEight average had Harris at 46.7% last Monday, and 47.1% this Monday. It also shows that her lead over Trump has declined since the convention ended last Thursday, going from 3.7 on Aug. 23 to 3.4 now.

And, Harris’ odds of winning went from 51% chance on Aug. 19 to 49% today, according to Polymarket. Trump’s went from 47% to 50%.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/08/25/trump-owns-the-democrats-in-the-most-unexpected-way-n4931964

During presidential campaigns, candidates are typically briefed by the nation’s security agencies on critical matters they could face if they win the election. However, this week former President Donald Trump announced that he would refuse to take part in these standard intelligence briefings for candidates.

And the reason is actually quite genius. He explained his decision by expressing concern that Democrats would leak classified information and then attempt to accuse him of being the source of the leaks.

In other words, Trump knew a trap was being set for him.

“I don’t want them, because, number one, I know what’s happening. It’s very easy to see what’s happening,” he told the Daily Mail. “We have an incompetent leader, and we have two incompetent leaders. We have a Marxist that’s going to try and be president, and this country is not ready for a Marxist or a communist president, and that’s what she is. She destroyed San Francisco, she destroyed California, and this country is not ready for it.”

Trump continued, “So, I don’t want the briefings because as soon as I get one, they’ll accuse me of leaking it. The best way to handle that is to avoid the briefing altogether. They come in, give you a briefing, and then two days later, they leak it and blame you.”

“The only way to solve that problem is not to take the briefing,” he added. “I don’t want it, understood? I’ll have plenty of them when I get back in.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/25/the-lefts-swift-shift-after-rfk-jr-s-trump-endorsement/

The thing I admire about contemporary deep-state Democrats is their nimbleness.

This nimbleness was on ostentatious view in the regime response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement Friday that he was 1) suspending his campaign (at least in battleground states) and 2) throwing his support behind Donald Trump.

The acrid scent of panic might have been expected among the limp-wristed, totalitarian faithful. And, in fact,  beneath the amusing cologne of anti-Trump bluster, the panic was indeed discernible.

But there was also that trademark smooth-as-a-suppository (as Saul Bellow put it) suaveness, exemplified, for instance, by former Obama strategist David Axelrod.

“Robert F. Kennedy Sr.,” Axelrod posted shortly after the deed was done, “would have been appalled to see his son cut a deal to drop out for [t]he race and endorse Trump.”

Imagine: someone agrees to drop out of a race at the last minute and support a rival candidate!  As the commentator Ned Ryan put it in response to Axelrod’s snippy post: “You suddenly seem offended by someone cutting a deal to drop out of the race and endorse someone else.”

Cast your mind back, David, to July 21 of this year.  That’s when Joe Biden, having been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by the secret committee running the country, suddenly announced that he was dropping out of the race. This was, remember, after Biden repeatedly insisted that he was staying in the race and was looking forward to the next debate against Trump. Yes, the first was a disaster, but he would show ’em!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/rfk-jr-chooses-democracy-over-democrats/

On Friday evening, a Kennedy joined Trump on stage in Glendale, Arizona. The first major Trump rally after the DNC convention featured RFK Jr as an answer to the Republicans who had come out for Kamala at the showcase event for her political campaign. The Kamala campaign had enlisted a former Pence aide, Stephanie Grisham, a former discredited press secretary, and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, while Trump brought out Camelot on stage. But what happened at the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale went beyond a matchup of names.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was more than the heir to a storied last name and acronym, he was the most successful third party presidential candidate since Ross Perot took on Bush and Clinton. Earlier in the summer before the Biden coup, RFK Jr had been polling as high as 10% despite media coverage that veered between hostile contempt and determined disregard. And he had done it without Perot’s massive fortune or the media’s endless willingness to give the billionaire airtime in the eventually successful hopes of kneecapping Bush and aiding Bill Clinton.

While there were other third party candidates in the race, RFK Jr polled so well because he was seen by his supporters as representing a genuine alternative to the two-party system and whose idiosyncratic views were authentically his own in sharp contrast to candidates like Cornell West or Jill Stein who just represented even more left-wing versions of the Democratic Party ticket.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/23/the-media-marketed-candidates/

Until Thursday night, we did not know that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are truly supreme beings. They are the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful humans we’ve ever known. We realize this now because the media told us so.

And the American media would never try to manipulate the voters, would it? It just tells the story straight. For instance:

“Kamala Harris’ Speech Was Powerful and Heartfelt” — Variety
“One little heartbeat of hope.” — Van Jones, CNN
“If you didn’t think you knew Kamala Harris before, you may know her now. This was a powerful, strong speech.” — Norah O’Donnell, CBS
“The emotion and the feeling down here is, I don’t know. Seven-year-old birthday part is how I would put it. There is joy and there’s not a lot of thinking. It’s a good time.” — Tony Dokoupil, CBS
“Harris embraces patriotism, savages Trump in acceptance speech” — Politico
“Harris prosecutes case against Trump and pitches herself as a middle-class champion” — National Public Radio
“This is a new chapter, as she said, in the American story.” — Robert Costa, CBS
“She is interested in not just doing what the left or the right says you should be on, in terms of the ideological sides, but what she thinks is the right thing to do.” — Abby Phillips, CNN
“Kamala Harris Gave the Best Acceptance Speech I’ve Ever Seen” — New York Magazine
“A-plus. The best since Bill Clinton’s ‘Man From Hope’ remarks in 1992.” — Washington Post

And of course, the media were all in on Walz’s speech from the night before. They gushed over his “Midwest dad energy.” He’s a “relatable dad,” everyone’s favorite coach and teacher, “Midwest nice,” wears flannel better than any man before him, and no one – no one – gives better pep talks. His “plainspoken style” is to be deeply admired, his mere presence reminds us “that America is good and that we shouldn’t give in to hopelessness,” his family is so adorably irresistible that it just brings all the right people to tears.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/08/his-own-words-why-rfk-jr-now-backs-trump/

On Friday (US time) the unthinkable came to pass: A Kennedy, the closest America gets to political royalty, endorsed Donald Trump. Below, the edited text of his announcement, in which he lays out his reasons: lawfare, the corruption of a forever lying media, the fear, as he puts it, that a party beholding to ‘Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money’ represents not democracy but its betrayal. — rf

___________________

SIXTEEN months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat — the party of my father and my uncle, the party to which I pledged my allegiance long before I was old enough to vote.

I attended my first Democratic convention at age six in 1960. Back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution, and civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, and against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor and the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against Big Money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you all know, I left that party last October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money. When it abandoned democracy by cancelling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting President, I left the party to run as an independent…

…I’m sorry to say that while democracy may still be alive at the grass roots, it has become little more than a slogan for our political institutions, our media, and our government, and most sadly of all, for the Democratic Party.

In the name of saving democracy, the Democratic Party set itself to dismantling it. Lacking confidence that its candidate could win at the voting booth, the DNC waged continual legal warfare against both President Trump and myself. Each time our volunteers turned in those towering boxes of signatures needed to get on the ballot, the DNC dragged us into court state by state attempting to erase their work and to subvert the will of the voters who had signed. It deployed DNC-aligned judges to throw me — and other candidates — off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham of a primary, rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/24/harris-walz-and-a-peculiar-definition-of-freedom/

To hear the mainstream media tell the story, the just-finished Democratic National Convention was not just about “reintroducing” Kamala Harris to the American people, but about reintroducing the Democratic Party as well. While Americans might have been convinced by nefarious MAGAs and other nogoodniks that the Democrats want to control their lives and tell them what to think, what to drive, what to eat, and how to behave in countless other facets of their lives, the truth is that the Democrats are the party of “freedom.” They—and they alone—stand between the nation and the totalitarianism of the Right.

NBC News, for example, noted in response to Minnesota governor (and vice presidential nominee) Tim Walz’s convention speech that he “capped off the third day of his party’s convention, touting his vision of ‘freedom’ and excoriating the GOP.” The Washington Post, for its part, suggested that the entire theme of the convention was to modify “Democrats’ message from ‘democracy’ to ‘freedom.’” Harris, the paper wrote, “has shifted the focus, speaking far less about democracy and far more about freedom.” The independent journalist Matt Taibbi, himself, at least nominally a man of the left, lamented the Democrats’ “sinister rebrand of ‘Freedom’” and argued that “freedom” was “was right up there with ‘joy’ and ‘unity’ as key themes” of the convention, which he concluded “was not funny.”

The Democrats’ effort to reintroduce themselves as the true and rightful protectors of “freedom” is inarguably as complicated as it is cynical. And as Taibbi suggests a great deal of the logic underlying the Democrats’ pretense is derived from the differences between “negative rights” and “positive rights,” which have been at least a peripheral theme in American politics since Barack Obama’s rise to power more than a decade and a half ago.

Nevertheless, to understand what is going on here and why the Democrats think they can make the case that they are the party of freedom, it is important to recognize that none of this is technically a “rebrand.” None of this is, in any way, new. Indeed, it is foundational to the ideology of the left. For nearly three centuries now, that which we know today as leftism has portrayed itself in precisely the sense that the Democrats portrayed themselves this week: the true and exclusive guarantors of freedom.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/24/strategic-vagueness-is-the-democrats-new-switcheroo/

Obviously, the Democrats’ first “switcheroo” occurred when their party’s powerbrokers unceremoniously removed President Joe Biden as their presidential nominee with all the finesse of a posh D.C. restaurant owner prying a ravenous rat off their back-alley dumpster; and replaced him with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Now, the Democrat elite confronted an equally daunting task: transforming their anointed candidate into presidential timber in the eyes of the general public. Given the effort the Democrat establishment put into prepping the first “switcheroo,” making V.P. Harris palatable to Democrat voters was a foregone conclusion. Indeed, every percentage point the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, raced ahead of Mr. Biden in the rematch was another nail in the latter’s political grave.

It was the old political adage writ large: offer someone death (Mr. Biden) and they will accept torture (Ms. Harris). Propelled by the threat of Trump redux, Democrat voters not only refused to complain about being disregarded by their party’s power brokers for the third time in three presidential elections, they welcomed President Biden’s jettisoning and embraced the V.P. Harris selection.

In so doing, the Democrat establishment had succeeded in turning their party’s presidential primaries into non-binding referendums: a process whereby Democrat voters provide an advisory role that their ruling power brokers may or may not take into consideration when they determine who will be “our democracy’s” nominee and their running mate. Of course, the Democrat establishment’s ultimate aim of turning general election voters into a rubber stamp of their party’s handpicked candidate was yet to be a fait accompli. Thus, the crux: how to transform, by any means fair or foul, V.P. Harris from a less-than-winning radical hack into the glorious savior of our nation that only an American ingrate and/or insurrectionist would oppose?