Harris didn’t do as badly as she could have.
Trump didn’t do as well as he should have.
Both told howlers that got their opponents exercised.
The moderators were awful.
Nothing will change.
I predict there will be no second debate.
Thoughts?
SCENE: Governor Walz’s command post van, parked out back of the Minnesota State Fair. Governor WALZ enters, dressed in his “regular Joe” costume, trailed by Lieutenant Governor FLANAGAN, sans turquoise earrings. Trailing after in the entourage are the Governor’s press secretary, Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, and Lt. Gov. Flanagan’s press aide Cat SCAT. WALZ’s face is red, causing his eyebrows to stand out like little white flares on a dark night. Several other staffers, as well as FLANAGAN’s husband, former MPR political reporter and NPR’s MyLyssa SILBERMAN, reporter for National Public Radio’s Saint Paul bureau, covering the “Fake News” and “Diversity” beats, and Betty Rae TORSTENGAARDSEN, a writer at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, and Lac Qui Parle County Dairy Princess in 1987, and voted “most likely to end up as a freelance political writer” by her sorority at U of M Morris in 1992.
WALZ: What the hell was that?
FLANAGAN: Weren’t they tooooold of the policy?
BIRKENSTOCK: It was on the handout (SCAT produces the handout); “The state fair is only about food and baby animals“.
WALZ: Then what the hell was this?
BIRKENSTOCK: It was all that out of town media.
WALZ: Well, what can we do about them?
SILBERMAN: What do you mean, “do”?
WALZ: Can we get rid of them until they know the rules? I mean, just look at this:
WALZ: I mean, what happened to the reporters who knows the rules? Peggy, what did you do with that guy from Public Minnesota Radio?
FLANAGAN: Dated and married him? (WEBER gushes).
WALZ: Can one of you date and marry that woman?
(BIRKENSTOCK and SCAT trade nervous glances)
BIRKENSTOCK: Uhhhhh…
WALZ: Look – the Minnesota media knows their place. What’s it gonna take to get these national people to follow the rules?
SILBERMAN: I probably shouldn’t be talking here, but playing games with access usually does the trick.
BIRKENSTOCK: I know, we gotta get in control of that.
TORSTENGAARDSEN: Or – and this may seem a little radical – you could answer policy questions from the press…
(Everyone in the room looks at TORSTENGAARDSEN as if she’s farted in church)
WALZ: Get her the hell out of here.
(Security guards and Secret Service pass TORSTENGAARDSEN out of the van like it’s a mosh pit in 1992).
WALZ: OK. Serious discussion here. National media. What the hell? Think, people…
And SCENE
Kamala Harris’s choice of Tim Walz for her running mate appears to be hurting her…
Only 52% of Minnesota voters see him as an excellent or good choice, with 12% saying he’s a fair selection, and a staggering 34% saying he’s a poor pick.
Walz is underwater with men, with 49% approving of his selection and 50% opposing it. About 40% of male respondents called him a poor choice of running mate.
Voters under the age of 35, a key demographic Harris needs in November, also aren’t enthusiastic: 49% called Walz an excellent or good pick; the other 51% regarded him unfavorably. These voters make up 25% of the anticipated November electorate.
Walz is also one percentage point underwater with parents, with 48% regarding him favorably and 49% panning the pick. Among people with children, 35% say he was a poor selection.
And who knows him better than the people he’s been governing, badly and opaquely, for six years?
As one local wag put it…:
What she said.
Leave him at the door, America.
I saw the Reagan biopic last week.
The movie was…good.
Not the great movie the subject or the time of history deserves; Philip Klein points out some of the problems I couldn’t quite articulate, while Jim Geraghty echoed the reasons I left the show so excited anyway:
Reagan is ultimately deeply satisfying for those of us who have fond memories of the 40th president, and packs a lot into its two hours and 15 minutes. The movie gains some focus from its framing device — Jon Voight is a geriatric KGB spymaster, explaining to a young and ambitious Russian leader why the Soviet Union really collapsed. (I started wondering if this was meant to be a secular The Screwtape Letters. I also wondered if the film was attempting to draw a parallel between the Soviet threat of the last century and the coalition of hostile powers facing us today.) It is the best depiction of Reagan in pop culture since the video game Call of Duty.
The movie was clearly a conservative effort – I think most of the “out” Republican actors and entertainers in the business play some part or another (the fall of the Berlin Wall is framed by seminal opening guitar figure from “Sweet Child of Mine” – covered by Christian guitarist Phil Keaggy). And but for that conservative effort, the movie – or an honest movie – about the era would never get made.
As Klein points out, it’s far from perfect; the movie tries to jam a lot of story into two hours, and doesn’t always do it elegantly. Sometimes the shortcuts are intentionally hilarious – the film jams the rapid-fire deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko into sixty seconds via one of the more hilarious little segments I’ve seen since Terry Gilliam worked for Monty Python. Sometimes – like the meet cute between Reagan and Nancy Davis, his future wife – they feel like plot devices that I hoped were homages to Reagan’s B-movie background.
So the movie was…good. It’s clearly low-ish budget, and feels like it.
But the story is one that direly needs telling to a whole new generation. Probably two generations.
Is Reagan the movie to do it? Maybe not.
If it prompts those of us who were there to tell the story to those benighted generations?
Now there, we’re onto something.
Because the story is heavily-laden with nods to our current environment. At the beginning, Jon Voight’s KGB agent – the narrator for the movie – reminds the viewer that communism always sought to conquer both by force of arms and, more insidiously, from within.
And Reagan saw that clearly when he was with the Screen Actors Guild, long before he even became a Republican, thirty years before he became president.
The movie hits the high points – some of them hard (the Brandenburg Gate speech, Rejkjavik, the clarifying moment that was the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II), some much too quickly (the economic comeback from the ’82 recession and the ’84 debate with Mondale); the story really deserves a trilogy – perhaps separate stories for his genesis as an anti-communist, the domestic story, and the part they said couldn’t be done, his leadership in pressing the fall of the USSR.
But this’ll do for now.
For those who remember them, seeing the renditions and backstory of the Brandenburg Gate speech was a misty bit of nostalgia that resonates all too hard as we see tyranny resurging, around the world and at home.
But perhaps the most redolent moment was one I was too young to remember live – the Time for Choosing speech, one of the most magnificent bits of oratory in this nation’s history.
Since my old friend Michael Brodkorb chose to misappropriate it in his Strib op ed endorsing Kamala Harris, I think the real thing needs a lot of airing.
We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.
Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then, when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.
You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.
You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
The speech deserves better than to be hijacked in support of a couple of actual communists. This record will be set straight.
Pass it along.
There must be a new reporter on the campaign beat.
Nobody told her – Governor Walz doesn’t answer questions. Not when asked by Dana Bash in a pre-taped interview…
…much less at the state fair, where the media’s job for the six years of. his regime so far has been to ask him about food and fishing, as his social media team takes gauzy photos of him holding piglets and getting fed corn dogs by Peggy Flanagan.
Nobody told the new girl. And it got awkward:
Friggin’ interlopers. Is nothing sacred?
Once nice thing about being a conservative these days…
…is that all your “conspiracy theories” turn out to be true.
George W. Bush’s Air Guard record.
Mitt Romney’s tax returns.
The Russian Collusion hoax.
The “Perfectly Fine People” hoax.
“White Supremacists started/did most of the rioting in Minneapolis!”
“Kids are coming to school hungry in Minnesota”.
And now this:
A PBS senior corresponent apologized Wednesday after falsely telling her audience thart former President Donald Trump tried to talk Israel out of a cease-fire amid its ongoing war in Gaza.
Judy Woodruff passed off blame for the blunder by “clarifying” that she based the flimsy scoop on outside reporting that she had read byefroe broadcasting from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago.
“The reporting is that former President Trump is on the phone with the prime minister of Israel, urging him not to cut a deal right now, because it’s believed that would help the Harris campaign”, Woodruff told a PBS roundtable”.
Woodruff posted a tweet “Clarifying” her regret that she’d been caught:
But it’s out there. Democrat tweeps are chanting it like it’s fact. The intellectual gerbils that make up the Democrat base are parroting merrily away.
Because, well perception is reality. And who controls what people perceive, anyway?
Could happen to anyone.
Hey – wasn’t “misinformation” public enemy number one?
Berg’s Seventh Law is getting more and more inerrant.
This can’t be good news for Democrats:
I’m waiting for the inevitable ACLU lawsuit in response.
SCENE: On Broadway at Central, in Northeast Minneapolis. It’s late fall; winter is clearly on the way. Stray papers blow down the street, nearly deserted in, visibly chilly. Outside the boarded up remains of what had been a breakfast place catering to “laptop-class” white progressive “new urbanites”, one of many boarded up stores on that once-lively stretch of street, a small group of people stand around a fire in a trash pail.
The group includes Tyrese and TayShawnda GROVES, a 40-something black couple; Steven SPALSKI, a 31 year old white male with his girlfriend, 30 year old Summer BLEAKER; 58-year-old Cindy HARLESS; Juan and Marcella VEGA, both 50, with their 11 year old son Arturo; and 45 year old Thai NGUYEN..
A police car creeps down the rutted road, dodging potholes, the officer avoiding the gaze of the people around the fire.
TYRESE GROVES: (to Spalski): So what did you used to do?
SPALSKI: You mean…before the joy?
(The group laughs, mirthlessly)
SPALSKI: I was a graphic designer for a startup that had just done its IPO.
BLEAKER: He was in line for a ton of stock options.
MARCELLA VEGA: What happened?
SPALSKI: (sighing with a weight greater than his years): All our customers went bankrupt.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Same here. We ran a little grocery store over North. We were getting by…
TYRESE GROVES: …til the “anti-gouging price controls” hit.
NGUYEN: F***ing “anti-gouging act”
(Several of the people spit onto the dirty sidewalk).
GROVES (To Juan and Thai) You?
JUAN VEGA: I ran a little repair shop. Couldn’t get parts anymore.
NGUYEN: Thai restaurant. All our wholesalers went bust.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Well, they took care of the “gouging”.
(Bitter laughs ensue)
MARCELLA VEGA: At least we had all that “joy”.
(General murmurs of disgust was the group warms their hands).
A Subaru, belching oil smoke, pulls up. Two women – 27 year old Emily FRONTENAC and 48 year old Emily MONTPETIT-EMILY, roll down a window. FRONTENAC’s hair shows little flecks of long-neglected blue dye at the end of long dirty-blond roots. MONTPETIT-EMILY, a blocky-looking woman, stares ahead grimly.
FRONTENAC: Hey – do you know the guy who’s selling the gluten-free eggs?
THAI: I might.
JUAN VEGA: Hey, just a minute ( points at the shirt MONTPETIT-EMILY is wearing, which looks a little like this…
JUAN VEGA: You’re one of the “pissed off women” who dragged Harris and Piglet over the line into the white house!
MONTPETIT-EMILY: Er…uh…
SPALSKI: You’re the ones that brought us all the “Joy”!
FRONTENAC: Uh….
JUAN VEGA: I had a good life before you “pissed off white progressive women” tanked the economy!
FRONTENAC: We saved abortion rights…
HARLESS: I can’t feed my grandkids abortion rights!
FRONTENAC: But…
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: Hey, it’s a couple of the “pissed off women!”
JUAN VEGA: You always knew better than everyone.
SPALSKI: I had a life before you and your idiot president!
(Arturo Vega picks up a small rock and whips it at the Subary, dinging off the door)
FRONTENAC: Heyyy!
NGUYEN, HARLESS and TYRESE GROVES pick up handfuls of rocks and garbage and start pelting the car, which accelarates away as SPALSKI kicks at the back bumper.
MARCELLA VEGA: Feeling the joy yet, b***h*s?
JUAN VEGA sails a rock down the street, cracking the Subaru’s back window.
TAYSHAWNDA GROVES: I’ll show you pissed off women…
(General murmurs of asssent)
NGUYEN: So what are you all having for dinner tonight?
BLEAKER: Probably more joy.
(MIrthless laughter).
SPALSKI: Never gets old, does it?
And SCENE.
To: Senator Tina Smith
From: Mitch Berg, Obstreporous Peasant
Re; Democracy
Senator,
Yesterday you (via your social media intern) tweeted this:
“History” may mark those words, if it’s written by someone dumb enough to be a Tina Smith voter.
But – and saying for sake of argument that Donald Trump was in fact any way a threat to “democracy” between election day and Joe Biden’s coronation – the big story is our constitutional system worked. It easily dealt with whatever “threat” Trump might have been.
Your personality cultism is more appropriate for a Maoist dictatorship…
…but I suspect you know that, and are OK with it, since you will likely be one of the people in the dachas rather than the gulag, at least for a while.
But stop calling it democracy.
That is all.
I’ve got a question for the hive mind of this blog.
Yesterday, Governor Klink made perhaps his most, to coin a term, “weird” attack on JD Vance:
Now, what he’s talking about is theWhich brings up the question – does the term “Runza” occur in Minnesota at all?
It’s apparently named after a chain of burger joints in Nebraska.
And on that burger joint’s menu is a meat pie.
In North Dakota, it’d be called a Fleischkikla (German-Russian for the German Fleischküchle. In Northeast Minneapolis, it’s a Pierog. There are other names in other languages. They probably have a local term in Ohio that would flummox Klink
But in all my years in Minnesota – admittedly almost none of it in the First CD – I’ve never ever heard the term Runza.
Am I missing something?
Or is this literally the dumbest attempt at a dunk that Walz has ever tried?
We’ve known it in Minnesota for a while. But the rest of the nation needs to know.
Governor Walz has a tenuous relationship with the truth on topic after topic.
I want to put together the ultimate compendium of Tim Walz’s lies. And I need your help .
If you can recall an episode about which the Governor lied, drop it in the comments. If you’ve got a link to “the receipts”, so much the better.
I want this to be a resource for everyone who needs to prompt everyone to remember – or learn for the first time – what a, er, creative fella the Governor is.
Pass the word.
Long ago, there were a couple of regular-ish commenters who felt the need to reinforce their claims by invoking information “from neighbors” living nearby them, who just happened to be world-class experts on the subject – but couldn’t be named, because they didn’t want to get pelted with questions from people from a blog. So we’d just have to take their word for it.
It’s easier than looking up data to support your case, and it sounds more credible than just saying “in my opinion, yadda yadda”.
It comes, I think, from being either being insecure in one’s own capability to hold up their end of the argument, or a need to stretch six square feet of factual tablecloth to over ten square feet of table.
Governor Walz has been having a week of it. We talked yesterday about his episode butting his time in the MN Guard up against a trip to Afghanistan he took as a congressman, without adding that little change of context in there.
But it goes on:
Like Walz, I grew up on the Great Plains.
There are plenty of terms for “a blue-collar or ag-class person from a physically and/or socially isolated place”.
That term is never “Hillbilly”. That term doesn’t occur organically on the Plains. It comes via the media (“Beverly…”, “…Elegy”, dozens of country songs), or from the occasional transplant.
But not organically.
Walz is trying to appeal to the blue-collar white guy vote with which Harris is incredibly weak, and doing it with all the grace of an Australian break-dancer.
SCENE: A small postwar “starter” home in New Hope, Minnesota. It is about 10PM. Josh McGILL, 35 year old estimator and sometimes technician for a family HVAC business, and Cassie McGILL, 33 and an office manager for a real estate firm, have finally gotten their kids to bed for the evening. They are working on the bills as the evening news plays on the TV in the background.
JOSH: Well, if we just had $100 more, the budget would be balanced.
CASSIE: But Junior is going to need new skates for hockey soon.
JOSH: Ugh. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to get a lot over overtime.
CASSIE: And then there’s the elephant in the room – this house is just too small for three kids.
JOSH: The way mortgage rates are going, we can’t afford to move.
CASSIE: And with food up 30%, gas and heating up…
JOSH: …don’t forget taxes on everything going up…
CASSIE: …that too – I don’t know how we make that work.
JOSH: And with our commercial customers dropping like flies, we are going to wind up laying people off at this rate.
CASSIE: (sighs heavily). We’re still paying for that catalytic converter that got stolen. What are we going to do?
(The TV mysteriously gets louder, and Kamala HARRIS and Tim WALZ dart their eyes to CASSIE and JOSH, through the screen)
HARRIS: Feel joy!
JOSH: DId you say something Cassie?
CASSIE: It’s…the TV.
HARRIS:
WALZ: Do it for One Minnesota!
CASSIE: Oh, Madame Vice President and Governor Walz. Hi. It’s just that things are kinda…stressful…
(The sound of Beyonce’s song “Freedom” turns up, and HARRIS and WALZ start dancing)
JOSH: It’s kinda like, prices have gone up way, way faster than our incomes, and business is slowing, and interest rates for my business are crazy, and whatever savings we have are getting bled out, and our kids school just isn’t doing the job, and…
(The music stops abruptly. HARRIS and WALZ’s eletronic gazes fix upon the McGills)
WALZ: Perhaps you weren’t listening.
HARRIS: Don’t be weird ,Josh and Cassie. Feel joy! Because joy is what you should feel if you don’t want to be the weird person who isn’t feeling joy.
JOSH: Er, that’s great, but it doesn’t…
HARRIS: (Scowling). I said feel joy. .
WALZ: Now. For One Minnesota.
HARRIS: And One America, not weird America, a joyful America, unburdened by the weight of what has been.
(And just as suddenly as they appeared, they are gone, as KARE 11 shows TikTok videos of the Saint Paul City Council dancing.)
CASSIE: What was that?
JOSH: I have no idea.
And SCENE.
Calling Republicans “weird”, and demanding “Joy”, is about as substantive a policy discusion as you’re going to get from a 2024 Democrat.
As Richard Fernandez reminded us in 2016, it’s largely Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert’s fault:
The process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn’t like; Stewart and/or Colbert aired a sustained critique of the idea and the thinking behind it; liberal internet publications hailed it as the greatest rhetorical victory since Darrow argued for Scopes; liberals’ Facebook feeds full of liberal friends filled up with clips of the takedown. No one learned anything, no one engaged with an idea, and nothing outside of a very specific set of ideas was given any real credence. As Emmet Rensin so perfectly put it:
Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. … Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style … and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that is opponents were, before anything else, stupid.As Rensin deftly discerns, this sort of intellectual elitism is probably part of the reason that the Democratic Party went from getting 66 percent of the manual laborer vote in 1948 to outpolling the GOP by just 2 points in 2012. It’s the inevitable consequence of eight years of reducing George W. Bush and all of his supporters to dumbass hicks, and choosing to denigrate the poor and uneducated (if only they read The Atlantic!), rather than doing real outreach to them. But as Christopher Hitchens learned on Bill Maher’s show, people don’t want to consider that possibility:
I – and many smarter than I – have been observing for well over a decade that the Democrat party’s messaging seems to be aimed exclusively at people who might have an MA or PhD, but left their critical thinking skills at graduation.
…that amazes me about this “interview” with the loathsome Senator Smith…:
…is that Acosta actually called her on her lie.
My expectations of the media have fallen that low.
On the other hand, Esme Murphy wouldn’t have done even that.
The Minnesota Military and Veterans Museum is a non-partisan, private museum located inside Camp Ripley, up near Baxter.
It published a book referencing MInnesotans’ involvement in twenty years of the Global War on Terror.
It includes Governor Walz’s comments at a 9/11 address the the Capitol.
I’ve screenshot this quote from those remarks:
Let’s forget for a moment that Bagram is in Afghanistan; people flub things when speaking in public. Let’s just let that slide for the moment.
He said “he was in the Guard – and one night, he stood on a ramp at Bagram”.
Was this yet another cutesy turn of phrase – “I said I was in the Guard, and that I was at a Ramp Ceremony; I didn’t literally say my Guard service and this ceremony intersected, you weird Repubulican”.
But it sure does look like he’s saying he was in the Guard in…er, someplace in action, doesn’t it.
Ilhan Omar won er primary against Don Samuels last night.
And boy, was she a class act afterwards:
So, if you’re a Don Samuels supporters in MInneapolis – a moderate, or just someone who’s sick of crime – I’ll invite you to take a look at Dalia Al Aqidi.
She’s smart, She’s sane. She’s never called anyone’s voters “nazis” unless she was describing German voters in 1932.
What do you have to lose?
UPDATE: When you look at the world through the lens of Berg’s Seventh Law, it starts to make sense:
Maybe she was just deflecting away from the DFL’s support of actual Nazis in advance…
SCENE: Mitch BERG is boxed in in at a stoplight. Avery LIBRELLE rides up in between cars on a recumbent e-bike. BERG ponders getting away over the sidewalk, but figures it’s not quite worth it.
BERG: (dejectedly, resigned to the inevitable). Hey, Aver…
LIBRELLE: Shut up, Merg. Republicans like you are slandering a good man who served honorably for 24 years in the Minnesota National Guard.
BERG: So you dispute…
LIBRELLE: Shut up! There is no overriding or exception to the honor that must be bestowed on people who serve .
BERG: Unless it’s George W Bush.
LIBRELLE: He was a silver-spooned coward!
BERG: Right. (Checks traffic. No joy). So, to recap, Governor Walz served…
LIBRELLE: …with impeccable honor. For 24 years.
BERG: Right. Now – you do realize it’s not me saying this.
LIBRELLE: It’s a bunch of political hacks!
BERG: It’s his battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kolb:
And it’s his battalion’s chaplain, Captain Bjertness:
The chaplain of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s field artillery regiment said there is no excuse for the Democratic VP pick to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment — not even running for Congress.
“In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told The Post.
Bjertness, 61, was the chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, of which Walz was command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, two months before the unit deployed to Iraq. Walz has said he did so to run for Congress, and he was elected the next year.
And it’s the guy who replaced him as the Command Sergeant Major at the virtual last minute before they went overseas.
“He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States. That’s not who I would pick to run for vice president,” Thomas Behrends, one of the retired officials who signed the letter, told the New York Post on Tuesday.
They have between them, if I’m doing my math correctly, a bare minimum of 55 years of honorable service among them.
Does that not make their point of view not merely dispositive, but above reproach?
By your logic?
LIBRELLE: (Looks around, quietly rides away).
BERG: Recumbents look stupid…
And SCENE
I was “yesterday years old”, as the kids say, when I learned about this:
Truly we live in a time of miracles; there is now a pro-skyrocketing debt, pro-foreign-policy collapse, pro-Middle East war, pro-weaponization of the institutions against political opposition, pro-censorship, pro foreign policy of “losing slowly”, pro packing the SCOTUS, pro-crime, pro firearm confiscation, pro collapse of education, anti-federalism, pro redefinition of bedrock societal institutions, anti free speech, pro-rule-by-executive-decree, pro-open border, anti-sovereignty, pro-untrammeled bureaucracy, pro-socialism wing of the GOP.
We truly live in a time of wonder.
I mean, for those of you for whom “Duck Hunters for Gun Safety” isn’t enough.
UPDATE: I see Michael appropriated Reagan’s “A Time For Choosing” title.
Among the choices Reagan put forth in his speech, Michael chose the wrong one.
The wrong choice 60 years ago, the wrong choice now, the wrong choice always.
I didn’t know this until this morning- but Governor Klink still has a House of Representatives twitter account.
It’s in effect a zombie account, but it’s out there.
And as of this 0445 this morning, it’s still “mis-speaking” for the Governor:
It’s all right there – for the time being, at least.
If he “misspoke”, he’s been doing it for a very long time.
Harris, unburdened by what is, has a plan to deal the border.
Or so we’re told:
Thing is, she is in power now. She and “President” Biden could do all of this today.
How, “unburdened by the facts that have been” are Democrat voters?
So, Governor and Veep Candidate Walz supports censorship of “misinformation” (which is defined by his sycophants in the media) and “hate speech”, which is defined by…him.
I’m gonna guess this gets called “hateful misinformation”.
One heartbeat away from the presidency, if America doesn’t wise up this fall.
I’m just a little bit overjoyed that Kamala Harris selected Tim Walz.
How do I put this? Tim Walz is Bernie Sanders in an Elmer Fudd costume.
Kamala Harris felt the need, for whatever reason – we’ll come back to that – to to whatever sliver of the Democrat Party that is to her left, to a governor of a state that is only academically in play.
I’d been thinking Josh Shapiro was a lock – there’d even been some “congrats” videos “leaked” last weekend of various Democrat dignitaries congratulating Shapiro.
He would have been a formidable choice. That, too, we’ll come back to.
Walz? He’s got baggage. And I”m going to keep reminding the world of that baggage:
So – why not Shapiro?
Because he’s a JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, and the Democrat party has a bit of an antisemitism problem. They don’t want Chicago looking like, well, Lake Street.
Anyway – to all the Dems chanting “Hahaha! He’s America’s fun uncle! Cope!”, I say “his place on the ticket is all the ‘cope’ I need, thank you very much”.
So it’s Walz:
Bring on the fall!
UPDATE: Ben Shapiro captures a lot of what I’ve been thinking:
Barack Oba…er, Kamala Harris has picked Governor Klink to complete her ticket. The precedent was clear to anyone paying attention – Walz was governor because he’d made his deal with the devil.
Part of the deal appeared to be “making Flanagan appear to be a co-governor”; her name appeared below Walz’s on most campaign literature – but was longer, and usually colored such that her name “popped” harder than Walz’s.
You can hear the Twin Cities media going Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee all the way to Chicago. Those of us who live here and pay attention – a painfully small Venn diagram, as the 2022 election showed us – know that, as Scott Johnson says, Walz “casts the pale shadow of a man incapable of embarrassment and presents as an example of life imitating art, in this case the advertising art that created Joe Isuzu:
For those of you in my audience who aren’t from MInnesota, let’s go through a little of Tim Walz’s political record.
Congress: Walz spent six terms as a US House rep from the 1st District – the largely rural southern tier of counties, at the time. He ran to the commonsensical center to defeat the very moderate Gil Gutknecht; like Colllin Peterson, Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad and Earl Pomeroy, he made moderate noises for his rural base. He was a-rated by the NRA.
And when Governor Dayton ran up to his term (and, likely, health) limit in 2018, Walz took that record – sans his NRA rating, which he dumped like it was a “3” when a “5” was batting her eyes at him:
Emerging As A Puppet: Tossing aside the NRA endorsement wasn’t enough to impress the DFL’s newly surgent “Progressive” wing, which pushed the overtly extreme Erin Murphy, backed with the equally gleeful extremist Erin Maye Quade at a convention where even Keith Ellison was too moderate (they endorsed fire-breathing socialist Matt Pelikan over the, I say again, too moderate Keith Ellison.
Not even picking Peggy Flanagan – literally the most extreme leftist in the Minnesota House at that time – was enough to slow the prog wave, although it was a start:
Of course, DFL chair Ken Martin knew the electorate wasn’t quite as demented as the DFL activist base – outside the metro, anyway – and put his foot down, He pulled his backroom deals, put the DFL’s money behind Walz/Flanagan, and dragged them over the line for a win in the 2018 DFL primary.
The precedent was clear to anyone paying attention – Walz was governor because he’d made his deal with the devil.
Part of the deal appeared to be “making Flanagan appear to be a co-governor”; her name appeared below Walz’s on most campaign literature – but was longer, and usually colored such that her name “popped” harder than Walz’s.
Unremarkable: During those years, Walz’s most extreme urges were stymied by the GOP’s slim, often one-vote, majority in the Minnesota Senate. Not that he didn’t try – but the worst instincts of his “progressive” regime got tempered by Paul Gazelka’s canny politicking – one might call it “rear guard action”, either in the military sense, or (to some) the “covering one’s ass” sense. Take your pick.
The Deluge: And then came Covid.
Walz declared emergency power on Saint Patrick’s Day, 2020. In an infamous press conference, he said Minnesota would have a bare minimum of 20,000 dead by July, if everything went perfectly – with 70,000 much more likely. He seized emergency power, and shut down schools, churches, most businesses…
…but not big box stores, liquor stores, or “The World’s Largest Candy Store”, in Jordan, run by a major campaign contributor. He declared broad swathes of Minnesota’s labor force “non-essential”. He instituted a “snitch line”, which countless “Karens” used to report their neighbors for offenses against the Covid regime.
He also repeated Andrew Cuomo’s catastrophic errors in handling long-term care of the elder;ly; the carnage in Minnesota’s nursing homes was epic, and inexcusable.
But the death toll lagged his predictions – by about an order of magnitude. And for a brief, weird moment, the media did the unthinkable – they asked questions .
Including at a presser on May 11 – where a reporter asked if the Department of Health department would release the code for the model that had made the initial, alarming preductions .
And Walz’s spokesperson replied “No – because people might use it to get different results than we did”.
Which, for those of us who passed ninth-grade science class, is the opposite of science.
He held emergency power for seventeen months, for an emergency that in effect ended in the summer of 2020.
The Floyd Riots: Walz’s performance during the George Floyd riots was perhaps more controversial – mostly notably when Mayor Frey of Minneapolis asked where the National Guard was, after 2-3 days of rioting, and the Governor, essentially, asked why the Mayor hadn’t put a cover sheet on his TPS report.
Some in emergency management said he followed the plan (although the response was botched at many levels).
Speaking as someone who lives in a neighborhood hit hard by the riots, I didn’t care then, and I don’t care now. The Guard appeared in token numbers on the Friday after the riots came to Saint Paul – four days into the violence – and didn’t appear in numbers sufficient to tip the balance until Saturday.
The Governor may have done his job – maybe. But he did it to the absolute bureaucratic minimum standard. The only two leaders in the whole affair were Chief Axtell, and then-president Trump, whose threat to send the 82nd Airborne may or may not have spurred actual action, but certainly seemed to, whether coincidentally or not.
The Flood: And then came the 2022 elections.
The DFL did what it does best – scare suburban women into thinking abortion (protected in the MN Constitution for years, now) was in imminent danger. They rode that to seizing the “Trifecta” – control of both chambers of the Legislature.
It was a close fight – Keith Ellison and Julie Blaha nearly lost. 1,000 votes would have swung the Senate to the GOP; about 4,000 more, the House. Scott Jensen was a weak GOP candidate at the head of a decreasingly potent state GOP – but Walz only won by 8 percent.
But the DFL governed like they’d had a California-style mandate.
And the results have been wretched. I’ll just brain-dump them here:
When they think they’re among friends, the left proudly recognizes Walz as one of their own.
The Rule Of The Brittle: Walz succeeded Mark Dayton – who was a fairly opaque governor, largely because his health was so atrocious his rarely went to the office (unreported by the state’s compliant media)
Walz is healthier – but far more opaque. Other than the stage-managed pressers during Covid, his only real communication is via his very active Twitter feed, which provides a constant deluge of photos of him cavorting about the state, usually in his “regular Joe” costume of a seed cap and overstretched T-shirt. State Fair time is usually high season – as he and his entourage waddle about the fair, sucking down corn dogs as the cameras roll.
Which is probably a good thing – because he doesn’t handle questioning well. And he appears to know it – the only debate in the 2022 cycle was on a feeble TV station in Rochester. And Scott Jensen got under his skin – which isn’t hard to do. He has a long record of losing his cool when people actually question him.
So his handlers allow none of that.
Speaking of questions:
Why Walz? I think most national GOP strategists thought Josh Shapiro would be the prime choice. Pennsylvania may be the swingiest of the swing states; some day it’s the hinge pin of this election.
While Minnesota is a 50-50 state (four DFL and four GOP reps in Congress), the DFL turnout machine dominates state races against a MN GOP that makes the Vikings look like overachievers.
if the state is in play then things are very bad for the Democrat indeed. This doesn’t seem to track the situation.
I’ll entertain thoughts in the comments.
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