HereAndGone2's profile

HereAndGone2 2m ago

Not CW as such, just that the Harris campaign keeps on giving us little nuggets of joy.

According to Josh Shapiro, she didn't reject him, he rejected her, so there! Also allegations that the vetting process for potential VP involved asking if he was an Israeli agent or something. Duelling memoirs!

I don't know if he's ticked off that she passed over him for Walz, or if he's glad to have gotten out before the disaster campaign and is just rubbing it in, or if this is just revenge for hurt feelings and maybe the way she wrote about him in her memoir of the campaign, but it feels like scores being settled.

In Mr. Shapiro’s book, “Where We Keep the Light,” the governor is measured in describing his interactions with Ms. Harris herself. But Mr. Shapiro, who is Jewish, details a contentious vetting process in which Ms. Harris’s team focused intensely on his views on Israel — so much so that at one point, he wrote, he was asked if he had ever been an agent of the Israeli government.

...As he tells it, he also had reservations about the vice-presidential search process from the start, and says that he ultimately decided to withdraw himself, after meeting with Ms. Harris at the end of the process. He asked to be connected with Ms. Harris to share the decision, he wrote, but says he was told “the VP would not handle bad news well and that I shouldn’t push.”

Having read the memoir, I can well believe that she would scream at her staff for daring to deliver any bad news. But this does contradict Harris' account of the selection process, where there's a distinct impression left that she thought him a bit too big for his boots (and poor Hubby yet again makes the wrong choice):

Storm had picked him up from the parking lot of an elementary school in Glover Park. At the last minute, Storm had traded her Jeep for a vehicle with tinted windows, since discretion in this process was so important to us. Josh went to get in the front seat, but Storm instructed that he needed to be in the back, so he could duck and not been seen. She thought he seemed a little disappointed by that.

When he learned she was the residence manager, he peppered her with questions about the house, from the number of bedrooms to how he might arrange to get Pennsylvania artists’ work on loan from the Smithsonian.

In our meeting he was, as always, poised, polished, and personable.

…Josh had been elected governor in 2022 and was popular in a state with nineteen electoral votes that we badly needed to win. We talked about how to handle the attacks he’d confronted on Gaza and what effect it might have on the enthusiasm we were trying to build. Big protests at the convention were a major concern. As a student, he’d written an op-ed stating that peace with Palestinians was impossible, and this decades-old article had been dragged out to smear him as “Genocide Josh.” He said he felt he’d been able to deal with critics by stating clearly that his youthful opinion had been misguided and that he was fully committed to a two-state solution. He had also publicly called Netanyahu “one of the worst leaders of all time.”

I asked him if he understood the job of vice president. “Because if you do, you’ll be good at it and our administration will be strong.”

He peppered me with questions, trying to nail down, in detail, what role I saw for my VP. At one point, he mused that he would want to be in the room for every decision. I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation. A vice president is not a copresident. I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership. I had to be able to completely trust the person in that role.

“Every day as president,” I said, “I’ll have ninety-nine problems, and my VP can’t be one.”

Apart from apprehensions for myself, I was also concerned for him. I thought his frustrations with the job might impact his performance in the role. And why take an effective Democratic governor out of a job he liked and was good at? But could I afford to turn my back on such a talented political athlete in such a critical state? Josh assured me he’d do everything to help me win Pennsylvania whether I chose him or not, “because this is the most important election we’ve faced.”

I had time to hash out these thoughts in a debrief with my team. Meanwhile, Storm returned Josh to the pickup location. Storm instructed the state trooper who was arranging transport on an alternate route that would avoid driving by the vice president’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue. She assumed that the press would notice official vehicles with Pennsylvania plates. She was disappointed, ten minutes later, to see those very cars on CNN, cruising right by the residence. That lack of discretion did not play well with her.

…When Kelly left, I got on a Zoom call with the selection committee and my chosen committee of advisers: Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, former Congressman Cedric Richmond, and Tony West. We reviewed what we’d heard from each of these exceptional men and weighed the pros and cons. Their concerns were how adeptly and passionately each of them would defend me. In short, who would be most loyal and effective at the job. The ambition must be for the job, not for the political future beyond.

…Doug and I went back and forth. He had known Josh longer and leaned that way.

…By the time I went to bed, I’d decided on Walz.

Seems there was just the tiniest smidgeon of non-agreement there:

“Her accounts are just blatant lies,” Mr. Shapiro told The Atlantic last year.

In his book, he acknowledged — more diplomatically — that he and Ms. Harris saw the role differently.

...When he returned home, he wrote, his teenage son observed, “It doesn’t seem like you want to do it.” Soon after, he wrote, he tried to communicate that view to Ms. Harris’s team.

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HereAndGone2 3hr ago

The UK government won and could've won harder at any time, if they were willing to use force more aggressively

They were hobbled by the pretence that the army was only there as a neutral peace-keeping force, that the North was nothing to do with them at all, and this was just the innocent Brits being nice, kind, good neighbours by helping out the Paddies with their little problem.

Under the hood, there were plenty of dirty tricks campaigns.

This is the main thing that continues to annoy me: the English will not take responsibility for their history. Dawkins shooting off his ignorant mouth about religion being the problem in Northern Ireland, that it was (Irish) Catholics versus (Irish) Protestants, was just one example of the view there: the nice kind Brits had nothing to do with centuries of political manipulation and setting one side against the other and colonisation, it was just stupid Paddies with their ignorant tribalism.

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HereAndGone2 3hr ago

I don't know how true this 6/6/6 thing is (I never heard of it until that stupid balloon popping ad for Kamala Harris) but even if so, it's the ideal, the same way that men want the blonde blue-eyed slim waist and big tits and shy coy virgin who's a nymphomaniac in the bedroom but for them only, yeah?

Then you find the ordinary person, man or woman, whom you settle down with. Nobody gets to marry movie stars and models routinely, only a few people. Ordinary people get with ordinary people. And mostly they're happy.

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HereAndGone2 4hr ago

Female sexuality is fundamentally stupid and evil in a way that male sexuality simply isn't.

Them's fightin' words, and we could get into a real fight over this. Men have done stupid and evil things for sex, and so have women. Male sexuality will happily fuck six year olds, is that fundamentally smart and good?

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HereAndGone2 4hr ago

Slim/attractive (they're mostly the same thing): partially driven by genetics? But still, exercise and diet go a long way here.

You can diet and exercise to be slim and as toned as necessary, but if you're horse-faced or just don't have that 'current standards of what constitutes attractive' features, it won't help. "Plain Jane" is a term, for a reason. It doesn't necessarily mean "short, fat, otherwise objectionable", mostly "not hot".

Men and women do judge things differently; yeah you'll be 20-something for ten years, but then you turn 30 from 29 and now suddenly you're a hag? Leo DiCaprio is probably the extreme here, but note his rotating list of girlfriends who get swapped out for a younger model when they age out of what he clearly deems an acceptable age range, while he continues to get older (seems he's been with the current squeeze a whole three years! Just another three years to go before she hits 30 and we'll see if the relationship continues or not).

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HereAndGone2 4hr ago

Well dash my wig, sometimes things fall out so wonderfully it's almost like the universe was steering them that way. Was he just doing "I'm a journalist, I'm reporting on this" or was he doing "Let me help document the Legal Observers peacefully protesting against the fascist bigots, since I too am part of La Résistance and wish to disseminate our goals to the wider public in order to encourage them to also peacefully protest"?

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