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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14568 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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https://archive.ph/IHPLW

Tim Walz isn't seeking reelection.

It's been interesting watching the reaction in my various social circles as this plays out. It seems like it's rapidly coalescing into two distinct narratives depending on tribal alliance:

  1. Walz is hoping to get out of the spotlight before he's indicted in connection to the fraud scandal
  2. Walz fears for his life because insane ultra-MAGA instigators are trying to ruin him.

I don't know if either are actually true, but it's an interesting thing to watch develop in real time.

Does the “spotlight” really matter in this case? The Trump Train is going after him regardless of his job. If they can tie him to the ongoing fraud cases, they will.

Likewise for potential lone wolves. He’s going to be in the news whether or not he has a gubernatorial security detail. But I rate that risk pretty darn low, and I expect he does, too.

The real takeaway is that VP candidates don’t usually do much.

  • Kemp: made a Presidential bid and went back into business.
  • Lieberman: continued as senator for CT. Actually was primaried in 2006, but won on an independent ticket.
  • Edwards: made another failed run while cheating on his dying wife.
  • Palin: got <8 years of book deals and talk show appearances before Trump made her angle obsolete.
  • Ryan: continued as representative for WI for 7 more years; became Speaker of the House.
  • Kaine: continued as junior senator for VA.
  • Harris: lol

Hell, with one big, elderly exception, elected VPs don’t even do that much. You have to go back to Bush Sr. to find someone who actually advanced in their career after they were out of the Executive Branch.

Trump Train is going after him regardless of his job. If they can tie him to the ongoing fraud cases, they will.

I'm not sure if I buy that. Trump has a terrible track record of actually using the force of law against his political opponents. Even if Walz is guilty of a crime, it seems more likely that his AG will show up and give a speech on Fox News rather than actually indict.

Conditional on Walz being guilty of something damning—something with genuine prison time, I’d expect him to get indicted. I’d expect that whether or not he was sitting governor.

If that condition isn’t met, and the case against Walz is weak or nonexistent, I wouldn’t expect an indictment. Governor or not, the cost/benefit isn’t that strong. I think Comey and James only got their cases railroaded because of personal animosity.

The thing about speechifying on Fox is that it works whether or not the case is strong. Hear name, trigger boo lights. So, again, I expect it to happen regardless of Walz’s position.

I don't get the impression that Walz is personally corrupt. I could well believe he never touched a cent of dirty money.

What he is, is weak. Kamala picked him precisely because he was biddable and wouldn't have opinions of his own to clash with her. I could well see that he just went along with what the advisors and civil servants told him to do. And if that meant "sign this, Governor, no don't worry, ignore the racist MAGA noise about bad things happening, ha ha you know everything is hunky-dory", then sure.

From "107 Days" (and boy, having just finished the book, I meant to finish giving my opinion of it but all this happened) re: her decision about who her running mate would be:

[Shapiro] 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.”

...It was quickly clear to me that Tim had walked into that room feeling he wouldn’t get the job. The first thing he said as he sat down—I don’t even know if the door had closed behind him—was: “Whether or not you pick me, I’m going to do everything I can to get you elected.” He was immediately self-critical. “I’m not a good debater.” “I’ve never used a teleprompter.” He was less polished than Josh. But he had an appealing authenticity and was genuinely self-deprecating. A lot of people in politics act self-deprecating, but it’s just that, an act. If anything, Tim over-indexed his own liabilities.

...[The debate with J.D. Vance where Walz was too civil for her liking] When Tim fell for it and started nodding and smiling at J.D.’s fake bipartisanship, I moaned to Doug, “What is happening?”

I told the television screen: “You’re not there to make friends with the guy who is attacking your running mate.”

“I’ll have ninety-nine problems, and my VP can’t be one.”

So as a presidential candidate she had ninety-nine problems and her running mate being a bitch was one.

It definitely comes across as she was scared any potential VP would outshine her (Shapiro or the former astronaut, Mark Kelly) so Walz was a godsend. No self-esteem/self-confidence, and happy to stand in the background and do what he was told.

Incidentally, based on your reading, would you agree with the pithy summary that someone else here posted/quoted a while back: “I [Kamala] didn’t not pick Buttigieg because he’s gay—I didn’t pick him because he’s gay and we only had 107 days”

Oh gosh, yes. As I slogged my way through the book, I was panting to get to the end and her Big Fat African-Asian-American Loss because I wanted to luxuriate in her tears.

I realise that sounds mean, and it is, but good God this woman is insufferable. Here's a taster of what she did when her staff threw her a surprise birthday party:

That afternoon, when I climbed the steps to the plane, I discovered it had been decorated in streamers. My team on board were wearing gold party hats and presented me with a deliciously rich German chocolate cake, my favorite birthday cake. They had red velvet cupcakes for the press. There was also a big helium balloon with fat numerals: 60. My team knew that I stopped counting birthdays a long time ago. So I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon. Then I went to find my Uggs.

Now, I've had a joust with Sloot on here about me being middle-aged, and I've never worn stilettoes in my life, but I am not ashamed of being the age I am (a couple years older than the Cocoanut Queen here) and even I would never be so ungracious as to deliberately burst a balloon with my age on it. There's several little gems scattered throughout the book where you just know some poor staffer got screamed at for how very dare they! 😁

But not just some staffer, no, Hubby Darling comes in for a whack of the stick too for not being special enough about her big important birthday (I have no idea who the ghostwriter was, but I wouldn't have let her include this little anecdote. Or at least not this way. Though I guess Kamala wants things her way, so her way it is):

Throughout the flight, I was looking forward to a special evening with Doug. Though we were apart a lot those days, campaigning in different cities, for my birthday our staff conspired so that we’d meet up in Philadelphia. I was wondering what he’d planned for our evening.

The simple answer: Nothing. Not a thing.

Doug had been keeping to his own grueling schedule and had flown in from a campaign event in Michigan. He was tired and preoccupied. What I didn’t realize: the attacks on me and the many personal assaults he’d been experiencing were finally taking a toll.

He hadn’t put any thought into where we’d stay that night, so staff had picked a place for us that they thought would be a bit more special than the usual campaign hotel. It turned out to be a bland establishment whose red-and-black decor looked like it hadn’t been redone since the ’70s. The only distinguishing feature of the room was its larger size, but the curtains were broken.

Storm [Horncastle, my indispensable social secretary], knowing how much I love good food, had picked two possible restaurants from which to order dinner. She thought it would be nice if the meal was a bit of a surprise for me. So, on the plane, she knocked on Doug’s door to ask him to choose the menu. He’d shrugged and told her to ask me. So she picked the menu herself. Ordered a cake. Dressed the table with candles. My girlfriends had sent flowers.

Doug at least had thought to get a gift for me. It was a necklace by a designer I admired from Ojai, California, Jes MaHarry, the same designer who’d made the piece he’d chosen for my anniversary gift. This one featured a set of baroque pearls nestled in a gold setting. When I turned it over, I saw that the pearls’ backing had been engraved with the date. How thoughtful, to commemorate the milestone of my big birthday.

But then I looked closer. The date was not my birthday. It was the date of our wedding anniversary. He’d obviously intended to give me both pieces on our anniversary, until it occurred to him that by repurposing one piece, he could kill two birds with one stone. He could practice thrift and also save himself the bother of shopping for a birthday gift.

I went to take a bath. It’s one of the things I did at the end of those long days to help me slow down enough to get to sleep. In the warm steam, I managed to relax and get over my disappointment. I was about to climb out of the tub when I noticed that all the bath towels were hanging on the far side of the room, unreachable. I called to Doug to ask him to bring me one. No answer. He was in the other room, watching the Dodgers eliminate the Mets in the playoffs. He couldn’t hear me over the television. I called his phone.

His answer: a casual “What’s up?”

Really?! It was a bridge too far.

And then we got into it. The stress had finally gotten to both of us. It was one of those fights that every married couple has had.

But we weren’t every married couple.

Doug stopped the argument cold. As soon as his words were out, the truth of them landed on me like a bucket of ice water.

“We can’t turn on each other.”

With the hits coming from every direction, we had to stay united. Back-to-back, swords raised against all outside attacks. We had to protect each other, be each other’s pillar of strength, givers and receivers of patience and unconditional love.

I noted earlier that Storm speaks bluntly but always with correct protocol. The next day she told Doug, “Mr. Second Gentleman, you have to fix this.” She handed him a set of note cards. She’d numbered them one through five, for the nights we’d be apart through the end of the campaign. She instructed him to write a note on each one.

From then till the election, no matter what city each of us had landed in, at the end of the day I would find a note on my pillow, in Doug’s chicken scratch, telling me how much he loved me.

Now, I imagine that she thought this was a cute, candid, slice-of-life little story that showed how she's only human after all, she and her husband have tiffs just like you ordinary folks, but they are strong and united.

However. She covers his birthday in the book, too, but naturally she gets everything right and perfect. She isn't there because she's out campaigning, but she gets her staff to hang up a happy birthday banner, she arranges his favourite meal, she gets the perfect gift for him. We don't get what he thought about it all, or if he wanted to complain about "but you didn't do anything special" as well. Of course not.

The queen cannot be expected to get out of her damn bath and walk across the room to the towels. He doesn't love her! Her perfect social secretary, though, saves the day by lecturing the wayward Second Gentleman on how he has failed her majesty and what he must do to make up for it, complete with homework, which he then dutifully completes every night (and again you just know she's keeping tally of whether it's every night or he forgot one night).

Good Lord Almighty, imagine being married to this woman. Imagine working for her: you get a fun birthday balloon with her correct age on it and instead she stares at you with the cold-blooded reptilian gaze and tooth-baring 'smile' of an alligator as she deliberately bursts it with her sharp heel, leaving you sweating as you realise she is imagining it's your head not a balloon, and you have to wait for the screaming scolding later. Because You. Have. Failed. Her. Did you not remember, or did you just not care, that the queen does not count birthdays anymore? How could you be so insulting and so cavalier? Are you really cut out for this job, after all?

EDIT: Also, yikes. Hubby Darling is Jewish. And she plonks down a story making him look like a cheap huckster: hey, I can kill two birds with one stone, repurpose this present for anniversary and birthday, not have to buy two different gifts! Yeah, way not to lean into the stereotype of Jewish money-obsession. She is very tone-deaf this way, too centred on how she feels, what she thinks, what other people think about her. I know she's the candidate and this is her campaign, but she really talks about others as though they're just there to orbit her, the one and only sun. There's a way of describing "we were all stressed and tired after a long campaign, and I felt disappointed about my birthday" without making it "Because my husband is a selfish, cheapskate, jerk".

EDIT EDIT: Imagine making your staff address your husband as "Mr. Second Gentleman". Had she been elected, it would have been "Madam President and Mr. First Gentleman" like they were royalty! 😊 Yeah, that might be correct protocol, but in a "this shows how we're only human" anecdote, "Listen, Mr. Emhoff" (or even "Look, Doug") "you have to fix this" etc. works a lot better for that humanising insight than the "I am a robot, beep boop" tone here. That kind of formality shows what working on Kamala's staff was really like, what her expectations of behaviour were, how you were supposed to know your place.

Fascinating, thanks for the summary! I gather the book does little to combat the perception that Kamala is an entitled airhead with a princess complex from having failed upwards her entire career and having never been told “no” by anyone in the Dem machine thanks to her unassailable idpol trifecta (Black, Asian, female)

I went in not expecting the book to be heavy on the self-reflection, but it went even lower than my expectations. She really puts herself across as Practically Perfect In Every Way. She has all sorts of applicable little relevant experiences in her life so she can connect with everyone from shit-kicking clodhoppers to the crème de la crème.

What's funny, and stunning, and a little bit frightening, is her complete lack of self-awareness. That bit about smiling at her staff as she burst the balloon with her stiletto? That's not normal, Kamala. That's sociopath behaviour. "You know I don't track my age. You have displeased me. Be thankful this is only a substitute for your empty heads, and not your real heads under my heel, as I crush this in punishment."

Definitely once out of her comfortable little San Francisco bubble, she can't handle the larger stage. The part about Joe Rogan? She goes on and on about how it was all his fault and the show's fault and literally accuses him of lying in his account of how they couldn't make the interview happen. Meanwhile, the Call Me Daddy interview for which she threw over Rogan gets about one sentence along the lines of "I did this". I was expecting her to expand upon why she did it, why it was so important, how she was getting her message across, the big huge massive audience that podcast has so yah boo Rogan, and so on. Nope, but she was happy to spend a few pages about how unfair and mean Rogan had been.

Everything descends into bathos with her. The important decision about picking her running mate, and how her staff liked Walz, and others advised her this and that? This is how it ends:

It was always going to have to be my decision. I told my staff and family that I didn’t want any more input, and I went to do something practical: I made a tasty rub and seasoned a pork roast.

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

She certainly ended up roasting Walz's pork! The linking of "seasoning a pork roast" with "deciding on Walz" makes it sound like the train of association going on in her mind was "Mmm, what a succulent little white boy piggy, he'd be perfect with a tasty rub and trussed in the oven!" 🤣

it's amazing how catty and petty she comes across in that passage. I wonder if she realizes that those are both still very prominent Democratic politicians and that she's basically sabotaging them with her book?

I think this book was definitely settling scores, particularly after the post-mortems on just how the fribblin' heck the Dems had screwed the pooch on this election.

Nothing is ever her fault. She is perfect. She can relate to everyone, no matter who, no matter what (it gets funny after a while when she pulls out yet another example of "I, too, was X, Y or Z" - like telling the high school band about how she gave up French horn because too much spit).

Her team were great, and yet. Failure! How could this be? Well plainly she was sabotaged, backstabbed, didn't get enough support, and of course Satan and his demons were all on the side of Trump (she hates Vance, too, which again is very funny to read).

But the fight goes on!

I wasn't sure if she intended to try a second bite at the cherry for 2028 or if she wanted to run for governor of California instead after this book, and I'm still not sure what her intentions are. She seems to be on an extended book tour and maybe trying to work up momentum for some new campaign.

Ha. I don’t think you’re wrong. Even correcting for the autobiographical bias, he comes across as a real golden retriever.

My point is that 1. isn’t likely to motivate him. I figured your original explanation was more likely. He’s a loser, and he lost to the biggest bogeyman in the West. That’s career-limiting.

Walz is almost certainly guilty of nothing that he was responsible for. That's how modern political machines work - we have advanced beyond the need for brown envelopes.

That's how modern political machines work - we have advanced beyond the need for brown envelopes.

New Jersey begs to differ!

Arguably, Trump himself is living proof that the court of public opinion matters more to politicians than actual criminal processes: in that vein, the AG discrediting an opponent on Fox News is quite possibly more career-ending that finding, say, 37 felonies to charge and convict. I could imagine Walz continuing to campaign if indicted, but here he's been forced out of town.

Not endorsing, just observing.

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