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The way I see the things in my bubble.
Watching the Democrats media machine spinning at full gears is impressive. Trump's assassination attempt is old news. It never happened. The iconic Pulitzer and election winning picture is nowhere to be seen. A lot of dem aligned twitter accounts suddenly are active and on the attack. Felon and rapist are everywhere. Suddenly Trump's age is a problem. Absolutely no accountability demanded from the people that were telling that Biden is ok. No talks if he is fit to be president. Their reality building efforts are smooth and from what I can see effective - no one seems to remember critics of her that they wrote from the ancient time of June 2024, let alone before. All in all makes you believe that Snowcrash's ur-language was not pulled out of Neil Stephenson's imagination.
On my side - Republicans are high on copium, seems to not have been prepared for Kamala, lack message and message discipline, and are on the defensive. JD Vance seems to be bombing. And for it - the election moved from landslide to at best narrow win. I still think that she is the second worst possible candidate after Joe Biden but probably ok enough to win.
The quantity of vitriol on both sides is extremely high, the quality is lacking. But I would say the Democrats are better right now. I feel that it is manufactured enthusiasm, but has the chance to become real one.
All in all bad news for everyone that hopes that mass migration to the west will be curbed before the mid 2030-s (lately I have become single issue on that issue).
The shooting would still seem to be news with the Cheatle hearings and resignation. It's just not the main news right now because the Biden replacement with Harris is genuinely huge news with massive implications - hard to see how it would be otherwise. Pretending it isn't the main news now just seems silly. Things would presumably be different if Trump had actually been killed.
It seems to me that they are on the attack - it's just a very stupid, self-destructive form of attack. Calling Kamala a "childless cat lady" just makes Vance look like a weirdo who has been marinated too much in online right-wing men's chats, normies don't feel the anger towards childless women that is evident in such circles - like, to me, a childless aunt is the literal childless aunt of our kids (i.e. my sister) who doesn't own cats or drink wine but helps us often and is beloved by the kids.
Or the whole "Kamala got her first job by having sex with Willie Brown" - even if one assumes there's a quid pro quo aspect, well, it's something that happened decades ago and I don't think that there are suggestions that Kamala has used sex to advance since then, so it just comes off as more random misogyny (and that's assuming one even knows what the original context is when they see the meme with a woman giving a blowjob in the Harris logo etc.)
This was not a new campaign attack against Kamala. This misquote comes from a resurfaced Tucker Carlson interview from three years ago when JD Vance had just entered the Republican Senate primary.
Here is the full quote by the way:
So she is not directly singling out and attacking Kamala as being miserable cat lady, there are two separate sentences.
Dread Jim has a take that the problem is childless older women who haven't played a role in raising their nieces and nephews tend to end up hating children. I think there is something probably to this, and the childless women who have climbed the corporate ladder are probably less likely to have played a role in the lives of their related children than your sister. I don't know how active a role Kamala played in the life of her nieces and nephews, but there are several clips of her giving a cackling laugh at the plight of parents, and that does make me uneasy. And she is a wine-drinker.
Anyways, I do agree that calling out Cat-Lady-Occupied-Government is bad politics, even if it is a real problem worth being concerned about.
Okay, serves me right to not get a full context and just trust clips.
How does that make it better? I think it makes it worse – it's not just calling Kamala Harris names but an attack on all people without biological children (stepchildren apparently don't count for Vance). That's more than 50% of American households that Vance says don't care about the future. And aside from being completely unevidenced, insulting tens of millions of voters also seems not very smart.
I mean, this is a general problem for the current GOP, which is different from the past.
As a dirty left-winger, I opposed the Bush GOP with all my heart, but I understood they were trying to win majority support. They failed in 2000, but even putting aside everything post-9/11, they governed in a way to try to get a majority in 2004 - Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, etc. along with social conservative stuff I didn't like, but was at least far more popular at the time.
Which, they were then rewarded with the last electoral Presidential majority a Republican candidate has received in 2004, that then they decided to blow-up by trying to privatize Social Security.
Now, the GOP seems not interested in actually winning over a majority of voters. The view seems to be, run a straight flush, win with 47.3% of the vote, then act like you won a 35-state mandate in your actions afterward, then be shocked you become unpopular 19 seconds into office.
Ironically, that's why beyond pure partisanship, it would've been nice if what looked like was possible in 2004 - Kerry winning w/ a popular vote loss - would've happened, because then there might've been a bi-partisan movement to trash the Electoral College, and I'm not saying that as somebody who believes the GOP would be unable to create a platform and argument to win a national popular vote.
I don't think that electoral college should be trashed, but made stronger. A lot of problems could be solved if it was beefed up. Think something along the lines of - people really vote for electors of their state - as in there are lists with people and they can choose 1. The first X people by votes are the states electors. The electors are free to vote to whomever they desire in DC. The candidates have to actually campaign to the electors to convince them to vote for them. The person that got most votes becomes president. The person with second most - becomes vice president.
Sounds like a great way to incentivize assassinations!
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