Thoughts, prayers, screams
"It's just outrageous that every day in our country...that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive...You know, it doesn't have to be this way," Kamala Harris told an audience in New Hampshire. Yes, but did she offer thoughts and prayers? "Leigh Ann and I are praying for the victims," said Mike Collins, who represents Winder, Georgia, in Congress. Mike knows a lot about AR-15s -- he once made a video shooting a voting machine to demonstrate his contempt for the "stolen" 2020 election. "Today is not the day for politics...I would ask everybody to keep these victims in your thoughts and prayers," said Brian Kemp, governor of the state. Two years ago he signed Senate Bill 312, Georgia's "open carry" law. "Please join me in prayers," implored Margie Greene. J.D. Vance is "keeping the whole community of Winder, Georgia, in [his] prayers." The fourteen-year-old killer, too? What a compassionate guy.
Gun Violence Archive, whose grim task it is to keep the records, says this was the 385th mass shooting in the US in 2024, an occurrence so commonplace that most of them go largely unnoticed. If you want to make the evening news you need to come up with something special. For instance, the four people shot on a train in Forest Park, Illinois, on Monday appear to have been asleep. The shooter didn't know them. I guess he was just bored.
Remember how the shootings diminished during covid, when people were complaining about having to stay home? Good times. All those bodies stored in refrigerated trucks died from something other than gunshots. That must be what it's like to live in Europe.
But life, or "life," goes on. Trump held a stroke session with Sean Hannity in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and SpongeSean lobbed him a softball about the Winder shootings. "It's a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons," replied the sick and angry felon, "we're going to heal our world, we're going to get rid of all these wars that are starting all over the world because of incompetent American leadership...You know, Viktor Orban made a statement, he said, 'Bring Trump back and we won't have any problems.'" Pennsylvania voters are much influenced by the pronouncements of European dictators. Although to be fair, school shootings in Hungary are extremely rare. That's how Trump's "brain" works these days. He calls it "weaving," drifting from one disparate topic to another and bringing it all back home after at least one outrageous whopper about "Comrade Kamala." Professionals call it dementia. Fortunately, he knows nuclear weapons "maybe better than anybody." Jimmy Carter served on one of the first nuclear-powered subs but he didn't have an Uncle John at MIT, the source of all Trump's inherited expertise. "We have a smart family. It's nice to have a smart family." One capable of getting to the heart of complicated issues.
"Her husband's best friend is married to the head of the network [ABC] and they're going to get the questions, I've already heard," he went on, sounding like the person you hope will sit next to someone else at the hairdresser. Although a self-styled genius, he is obsessed with Harris having an unfair advantage in the debate, apart from being a rational adult who can read. And the word "weird" has taken up residence in his head since he first heard it (from Tim Walz in Philadelphia). "There's something weird with that guy, he's a weird guy. Vance is not weird, he's a solid rock. We're not weird. We're other things, perhaps, but we're not weird. But he is a weird guy."
Jesse Watters would agree. Christopher Cotton wrote a long piece for Salon called "Joyful warrior Tim Walz and the last days of patriarchy." Cotton presents this as a good thing, freeing men and boys from the need to adhere to rigid ways of being male; he ranges from the Old Testament to menstrual cycles to Star Wars, Native American religion and Dorothy Dinnerstein. Read it, it's enthralling. Cotton concludes, "There's one battle [Walz] is not fighting and it drives MAGA men nuts: he doesn't fight the gender war, yet he does not appear the least bit defeated."
All Watters heard was "last days of patriarchy." On The Five Jeanine Pirro asked, "Do you agree that Walz is driving MAGA men nuts with his masculinity?" "Women love masculinity and women do not love Tim Walz," he retorted, offering no evidence for either proposition. "You saw him with a vanilla ice cream shake...had a straw in it, oh, again that tells you everything." It's just impossible to consume a summer treat to Jesse's satisfaction -- he nearly had a stroke when Joe Biden ate an ice cream cone. I'm not sure how to drink a shake without a straw. I guess you just let it run down your face. Watters makes you long for the reasoned discourse of Tucker Carlson.
Wait till he reads Doug Emhoff's description of meeting Tim Walz: "We kind of bonded backstage and we get up there and we just do this big bro bear hug. And I cannot tell you how many texts I got from my actual friends and actual family members -- 'You never hugged me like that! What's going on?'" Two happily married family men with successful careers who never felt the need to shoot up a school. What's going on? When did the world change up on the MAGAs? Who moved my testosterone?
Speaking of Tucker of the Tan Testicles, he sat down with Charlie Kirk to explain how terrible it is to send women (and only women) to war: "I thought we had a military and a police force in order to protect our women and children...to keep foreigners from hurting our women and children. That's why we send men to die for our women, whom we revere and respect...sending women to go fight our wars, that's not a liberation movement, that's a kind of slavery..."
Where to start? "Our women and children..." linking women with children is Misogyny 101. If you care about "our" women, stop telling them how to make medical decisions about their bodies. If you care about "our" children, you might start by making their schools gun-free zones. You're not prepared to do either, much less go to war for them. Also, you can fuck right off with comparing everything you don't like to slavery, another topic you're not equipped to address. Nobody's "sending women" to fight -- women fought for years for the right to serve in the military and then to serve in combat. What's so masculine about piloting a helicopter or launching a missile? Look who I'm asking, a couple of manicured losers who couldn't get a jeep into second gear.
J.D. Vance doesn't see why day care workers need certification: "Maybe grandma and grandpa want to help a little bit more. Maybe there's an uncle or aunt who wants to help a little bit more." Maybe J.D. should check in with events in this country. Maybe those people want to help but they have lives of their own -- and jobs of their own, as Republicans propose raising retirement age. Maybe they have other children in other states who need help with their kids. Maybe people who weren't raised by a heavily armed grandmother think you should let Usha work while you stay home with the kids. You'll find it's not the endless vacation you imagine.
The Trump-Vance campaign is such a punchline that party elders are stepping up to help. House Education and Workforce chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) send a subpoena to Tim Walz in connection with an outfit called Feeding Our Future which stole $250 million in pandemic relief aid. It has already been investigated by the FBI and no state officials were charged. Walz says, "This wasn't malfeasance, they simply didn't do as much due diligence as they should have." It will have to do until a Hunter Biden's Laptop (HBL) comes along. And the McDonald's scandal won't go away. A woman who lived near the family in Oakland says Kamala Harris used to babysit her when she was ten. Why isn't this job on the vice president's CV? It may be time to unleash Jim Jordan.
The Justice Department announced criminal charges against two employees of Russia Tonight and the seizure of 32 internet domains spreading propaganda on behalf of the Trump campaign. Not surprisingly, this outraged other beneficiaries of Putin's generosity including Newsmax and Fox News. Not surprisingly, America is the enemy. These people should get their own flag. Oh wait...
The rest of his speech made even less sense, if possible, "weaving" from the need for power stations to the approaching "1929 depression" to how his "friends" in the Arab world are working against him. "They are working very hard, despite being here, that I am not your president," was a sentence that must have challenged translators the world over. Kamala Harris apparently built eight or fifteen EV charging stations at a cost of $9 billion or $5 trillion. This is the kind of thing that impresses CFOs and bankers. And he was reading from a script.
Oh, and he wants the US to have a "sovereign wealth fund" like the one his good friend Prince Bone Saw has in Saudi Arabia. His would be financed by the tariffs he plans to collect from foreign countries, because all attempts to explain tariffs to him have failed. The fact that Saudi Arabia is basically the property of the Saud family is also beyond his understanding. If only Uncle John had been an economist!
Best for last: Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, the Laurel and Hardy impersonators who "run" the Trump campaign, circulated a lengthy email ordering the churls not to speak to the media or leak inside information. Violators were indirectly threatened with job loss. Within an hour the email was received by NBC News, among others. Here's another fine mess.
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