RHETORICAL CRITIC

Americans expect their politicians to be relativist liars, regardless of party. The skill-set of deception is the only one that allows consistent ascension to party leadership. This is why corrupt senators are elected again and again despite scandals; their power to deliver money to their state tends to outweigh their obvious lack of principles in the minds of enough voters. And thus it goes for presidents as well.

But that calculating power that drives re-election and power maintenance requires someone to be home behind the mask.

Trump’s rallies were once, at the height of his popularity, a safe place to hold court before his strongest supporters. Now, though, they falter. His mask is harder to maintain. It can only be sustained for shorter periods.

The above video is like watching reality skip one too many projector frames. It seems like the usual dog-and-pony show at first… until it doesn’t, and it’s Trump swaying for over half an hour. This would be alarming behavior for the even most devout televangelist.

The emperor with no clothes dances, and no one dares tell him otherwise.

What a difference a few weeks can make.

Harris is ascendant after selecting Walz as VP, the Democratic convention, and a party finally daring to exhale and go low. Trump is descendant after a bizarre assassination attempt, the vapid selection of a running mate seemingly found amidst couch cushions, and perhaps the growing realizations that he has a sentencing hearing in September, his crowds are not quite the crowds they once were, and criticism of age turns out to be a double-edged sword.

Harris might win, which I’d like, but Trump has too much to lose this time, and too many blind followers, to allow for a clean win either way the vote actually goes. The contested presidential election of 2000 will look civil.

No one knows exactly how it will fall out, but I think the election of 1860, the following events of April 1861, and more recently, January 2021, contain some hard lessons that many historians have endeavored to distill into a simple precipitate. My hope is that the worst of it will be pitiful and amateur, like the Business Plot or the failed plan to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, showcasing the hard limits of conspiracy rather than the soft limits of evil.

Ukraine decided to go on the offensive in Kursk and has had success, even as a corresponding bulge forms in the Donbas. Relying on Russia to run out of bodies has never proved a winning strategy, so I’m not surprised at the attempt at a tack. Nevertheless, the long prelude to World War 3 continues. It won’t end soon or well.

But it’s only been a few weeks since I commented last, which is nothing, historically, and in other news, an insignificant speck of a planet continues to revolve about a backwater sun. Best estimates suggest it will suffice to house its current inhabitants for another billion years or so, assuming they don’t raze its surface to a cinder in the meantime. Either way, after its rather brief and bothersome “life” period, the planet itself will be toast after the star transitions to its red giant phase, another three and half billion years later.

For someone made of stardust and water, and only then for the briefest of cosmological moments, I am feeling my age lately.

So the media essentially did this to Biden, no Time Lord required:

Now that Biden has stepped out of the race and overshadowed Trump’s assassination attempt, oddball convention, and Bizarro-universe VP pick, the new timeline will stabilize. The week will have tributes to Biden (the word “selfless” will appear often) and the obvious alternatives to Harris will make clear they will wait their turn (almost all of them are senators and governors that the Democrats cannot afford to lose). With a contested convention avoided, the decks are thus cleared for the next news event, which, if not a tsunami obliterating Nebraska or another similar black swan, should be Harris’s VP pick after the convention.

I have no predictions for that. I don’t have any predictions about anything anymore, frankly, when it comes to politics since 2015. Too many chaos agents remain in the mix. All someone like me can do is sit back and analyze.