But were also not that far removed from Trump the messiah rising from the grave and being a national hero.

It was a quick turn around in a dead race to even things up. Now we see where things go the next few months

The Walz video he does with his daughter, who was conceived through IVF and is named Hope, is hysterical. It showcases him as the everyman in contrast to video clips of JD Vance railing on about cat ladies and constant vitriol.

Thanks! That's not really my interpretation of that video but it was the set-up by the CNN host. Richmond listed 3 criteria at the start and didn't include Presidential ambition.

the vibes I get from Walz are like Tom Arnold's character in True Lies

Making this one long sentence really upped my anxiety level :D

But I agree and like the pick. If I was on the fence on Harris (I was already voting for her), this pick probably would have helped. I think this is a little like the Biden pick for Obama. We have this new African American face leading the party, so let's add "a fun old white grandpa" to the ticket to help get some white swing voters. Not the worst idea.

He’s not like the other guys. He’s hip to “Gender Queer.” He loves non-binary children. He knows that graphic depictions of vibrators, blowjobs, and strap-on dildos belong in every classroom. He knows that love is love. https://t.co/3p1FR3A2UE

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) August 6, 2024

"We're Not Weird!" they insist, as they focus on dildos in classrooms.

dola:

I think one thing that non-Democrats miss is just how many of us want to bring our kids to school, go to work, come home and watch TV. We just want to be left alone.

Maybe this election will finally be the one that starts to open people's eyes to that fact.

That guy is 100% a pedophile.

I've heard the same thing about school board elections. Parents don't want to have to be concerned with that weird shit. Just teach my kid math and whatever. Don't need some screaming lunatic banning books black people wrote.

a book from one of the main pushers of the pizzagate conspiracy, Jack Posobiec called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) will have a forward written by, you guessed it, JD Vance.

After COVID, a decent number of parents thought "Yeah, I think that liberals went a little too far with the school closures. I think I'll vote GOP this time."

And they quickly got buyers' remorse when those GOP members actually got into power and started closing down the libraries and the like.

I think I wrote earlier in this thread somewhere, I miss the boring of politics.

Magats weaponized all aspects of government and continue to erode trust.

Nixon and Reaganism led the way; then the Bushies came in and W really ruined things, and now Trump is the final CODA.

It's amazing to think Trump and his Magat followers in 4 years destroyed most of what made America great.

It'll never go back to a functional process until most of the extermists die off, but you can see how many want to follow Trumpist way of escalation and attack.

Perhaps Harris will help calm things.

I don't see Trump conceding and I fully realize that he'll just run again should he "lose" this fall. GOP will never be rid of him until he expires and the question then is what monstrosity can replace him after that.

It was set up because he had already made the statement before. He was trying to make it clear that wasn't the only reason. But the fact is there were 4 main competitors for the job (Kelly, Beshear, Shapiro, and Buttigieg) that all campaigned for the job looking for it to be a sling shot to the Presidency, but she chose the one guy who doesn't have that ambition. Whether that was the main reason he was chosen or not, Harris made the decision not to be the King maker for the next Democratic contender.

Shapiro would have fractured the party and been a huge headache when Israel starts a large regional war in the Middle East. Not to mention the stuff about covering up a murder for his friend and sexual harassment stuff in his office. Walz is just a nice boring Midwestern guy with humble roots.

If Shapiro wants to run in 2028 or 2032 and go through the primary process where voters can decide if that stuff matters, that's fine. But for the next 3 months I think you'd want as few headaches as possible from a VP.

There's been a 5%-10% swing in polls in just a few weeks. I think that's pretty significant and they haven't even held their convention yet or major events. Things move fast and everything can change but it seems like the momentum is just continuing as evident by the absolute freakouts taking place on the right.

WaPo got text message exchange from Vance and a prominent white nationalist.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...johnson-texts/

Also LOL


https://abcnews.go.com/US/despite-ne...y?id=112616502

Many people I know are over the moon about Walz as VP pick. I'm not looking forward to the constant Fox News microscope about how Minneapolis is a crime-ridden hellscape. I'd say my slice of Minneapolis-St. Paul is about as good as it gets, on the metrics I care about- access to healthcare, access to jobs, public transit, green space, bicycle trails, diverse, LGBTQ-friendly, and generally friendly neighbors.

Dola- and the book's contents, are, unbelievably, worse than you would imagine. Essentially arguing that leftists are a subhuman group and we need methods outside of our current government's solutions to deal with them. Where have I heard that one again?

There's apparently audio of Trump praising Walz's response to the George Floyd protests.

As noted earlier in this thread, recently the Trump campaign and JD in particular seem to be leaning into the 'stolen valor' angle...because Walz said he carried a weapon once and he left the National Guard after 24 years instead of going to Iraq. They also have an actual consultant from Swift Boats for Kerry on staff. How they expect that strategy to work with Donald Trump's history/soundbites regarding the military (and the Republican's recent record of voting against vet benefits and blocking promotions) at the top of their ticket is anybody's guess.

From listening to Walz the last couple days what stands out is he has outstanding timing both comedic and just when telling a story. It’s a stark contrast from Vance who sounds canned. I also think it’s funny how his needling the gop gets them so worked up as if they are the ones who have cornered the market on mocking their opponents. They are the definition of dishing it out but can’t take it.

The stolen valor thing is a really bad look for them IMO. As you said, this guy did 24 years and retirement packets aren't something you just drop and then separate. It's usually 8-12 months prior to separation. You can't just retire to get out of a deployment.

It's in-line with the GOP attacks on the military though. It's crazy that they have a nominee that dodged the draft, consistently block pro-military legislation, and mock and/or tear down any service member that isn't part of the cult and still claim to be the pro-military party.

But it's super similar to 2004.

what about his latest epic burn: "I'm not weird. YOU'RE weird!"

I wonder if it's just that he's a normal person in a world of people who are not normal. Most big politicians have been in a bubble for most of their life. Prestiguous Ivy League schools, the same handful of law schools, worked for the same handful of think tanks or organizations. Spent most of their time around lobbyists and rich donors.

This guy spent most of his life just being a normal person. Went to a small state school, taught high school and coached football. It could just be that any normal person sounds good next to all these freaks in Washington. Harris, Vance, and Trump have probably not been to a hardware store in their adult life.

Probably doesn't matter much one way or the other, but if the plan is for Vance to chase Harris around the country that's going to backfire with the professional women the Trump campaign needs to win over.

This election is starting to look more like 2020 where Trump had painted himself into a corner so badly there just weren't many voters left for him to pull in. His ceiling is looking like an close electoral college win by a few thousand votes over a handful of states.

I was talking with my dad about this and he made a great point. It's wild how Trump makes the worst comments, idiotic decisions (a la Vance), is completely tone deaf to most of America and yet, he has a decent chance to win in November.

I'm not really sure how much all this election noise even matters. Outside of another assassination attempt, it's just going to come down to turnout. Trump's turnout seems pretty much locked in stone at this point, it's just if the democrats come out in force (esp in battleground states) to support Harris. And I'm just not sure what will impact that at this point.

I invite all of you to weigh in again:


JD Vance attacks Tim Walz’s military record as election race heats up | US elections 2024 | The Guardian

Of course Vance's running mate got bullshit deferments to avoid Vietnam. Curious he doesn't mention that.

Well, they always have Tampon Tim attacked to fall back on. Seriously, today's GOP are the most childish, insecure group of people I have ever seen, and these are people elected to lead. I can't imagine how hard other world leaders laugh at some of these Clowns now. Not a grown up in the room.

Vance is a lying piece of shit. Walz put in his papers 2 months before his unit got the deployment order, and 10 months before thry deployed. He retired Honorably after 24 years of service.

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I'm guessing that this plan for the Trump campaign is to let Vance campaign on his own to try to salvage his image. Keep Trump out of sight, and try to show Vance as a scrapper.

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Their campaign is a mess. They've been pushing "VPs don't matter" because of Vance's unpopularity while shifting to attacking Walz because they haven't found an effective attack on Harris yet.

They always do best in polling when Trump keeps his mouth shut and the media finds something else to attack. However, that's not something Trump is capable of doing.

and the more attention Harris/Walz get. The more attention Vance gets, positive or negative, with the DNC coming up, and with polls shifting to Harris he is for sure going to have to make himself the center of attention again and it wont go well for him.

Sorry for the anxiety attack. haven't posted much in this thread recently with the anxiety it was causing me :)

Laura Ingraham: If you know Minnesota well, and I know it well -- especially Milwaukee -- it's changed. pic.twitter.com/2L0HvrHMo6

— aliciasadowski (@aliciasadowski6) August 7, 2024

If Walz was able to take Milwaukee, surely he can finish off what we started in 1812 and take Canada.

According to his financial disclosure, Walz owns no stocks. Guess that made the vetting a little easier.

On their way to a 15 year old’s OBGYN appt pic.twitter.com/63TTCQXXsX

— Christine Nangle (@nanglish) August 7, 2024

According to polling, Trump's most effective argument against Harris is the border. Whether or not they are overstating her involvement/influence on Biden policies, the fact is it's almost singularly his best attack right now. I think he was 6 points ahead of her on the issue in the poll I saw.

It worked before.

Before anyone starts, I have zero interest in engaging in the discourse over whether it is okay for a civilian who has not served to denigrate and/or insult a veteran's service. Like everything else, if your guy/gal does it, it is funny/cool/just telling the truth. If the other guy/gal does it, it is disrespectful/insulting. That line has already been crossed.

No lie, some of the funniest people I've ever met have been my social studies teachers.

Fair point.

Did it work? An Arizona Republican hasn't won a major state race in years. The candidates he backs keep getting walloped.

And almost on cue he schedules a press conference for today. It’s likely going to be a horror show of maga lies and stupidity.

a friend reminded me that the original swiftboating also came from a draft dodger.

The original worked better because they separated it from the campaign. It was technically an independent group of concerned veterans. These attacks are coming from the candidates themselves which I don't think will play well. But who knows? This country and it's fake patriotism is tough to peg.

I'll add this,

When I was Active Duty Air Force, it was actually pretty normal that once an enlisted person hit 20 years, s/he would just coast along until deployment orders came along, then they would drop their retirement paperwork.

Not saying this this applies to Walz since he put in his paperwork before deployment orders came down.

If he had (1) just accepted the election results, and (2) not stuffed a bunch of classified documents in the bathroom so he could show them to people, he'd be in such a good place right now.

Every GOP presidential hopeful would have spent 4 years coming kiss his ring to get his endorsement. He'd get to call into Fox and Friends whenever he wants. By not committing federal crimes, he'd have avoided federal prosecution.

My father is/was a trump supporter. He was shot down, also a POW. I pointed this out and asked him how he could support someone who just tossed vets/pows under the bus, like this, and his response was 'well he's not talking about ME", but don't ask him about Hanoi Jane. She's basically Satan himself.

And I do think that's what trump supporters do. They look beyond the obvious things that would impact them, or be about them, make rationalizations as to why it is, and then look under every rock misstep by the 'others' to both make them feel better about their rationalizations and to reinforce their beliefs.

I told him I couldn't respect him after that. To which he replied 'I'm your father, you have to' and I simply told him, "No".

From what it looks like, they had an idea they may be deployed soon, but no actual confirmation. Waltz was planning on running for congress, and if they did deploy he wouldn't be able to do it. He went to his CO and talked it over, and his CO encouraged him to go ahead and retire. One of the guys that wrote the complaint letter was the guy that took over as CSM and he had made it pretty clear he personality didn't like Waltz, saying he "talked too much." So a guy with a personal axe to grind and a Republican supporter.

It reminds me of the Trump deportations that his supporters were cheering. Then some small, very red town had the guy that owned the Mexican restaurant deported and they were upset because "he was one of the good ones".

The love Trump until his policies directly impact them. They want other people punished.

It's the "Shirley Principle"

They need to deport all the bad illegals. Shirley they won't deport Jose. He's one of the good ones.

They need to stop all the government handouts. Shirley they won't take away my unemployment insurance if I lose my job. I need that to get back on my feet.

They need to get the bad books out of the library. Shirley they won't ban actual literature. Just the bad books.

They need to stop all those bad women from getting abortions. Shirley they won't ban an abortion if a child is raped.

Shirley you can't be serious.

The backlash is beginning.

And it is subtle.

Wa Post headline: "Walz’s Army record faces scrutiny as GOP critics, fellow veterans question claims about his service"

Note no actual investigation into what is and is not true. Just basically taking the GOP line of attack and making it a headline.

Did he embellish his military record? Sure would be cool if the Wa. Post could hire some people (I think that they are called journalists. I've also heard them called reporters.) to investigate the claims and make the story about whether they are true or not.

But that would require work.

Very true. And nearly everyone was OK with it because you respected the guy that did his 20+. The very few that had problems with it were assholes that no one liked because they were the type that found a problem with everything.

I think I have told this story before, but my last job had several guys that I worked with that was here under questionable means. They had paperwork, but the owners pretty much knew that it was fake. The owners were big Trump supporters, and "rah, rah"-ed the build the wall crap. When I asked what would happen if one of their guys got deported. They told me directly "oh that won't happen. They are the good ones. But if it did, I would drive to Mexico and sneak them back in myself."

My wife's stepfather does home renovations and this is almost exactly him. He's helped several migrants get on their feet, given them jobs, and considers them friends. He's also the guy on Facebook pushing for the wall, deportations, and posting stories to every crime committed by a migrant.

I'm not watching it because I'm on a conference call, but if center-right Twitter is to be believed, Trump isn't doing himself any favors with this presser.

He just had to get in front of a camera.

But he really does seem to lack the juice he used to have.

Makes sense. He's older now.

dola: not watching it either. Just going off of reactions

Yeah this is bad. Talking about crowd sizes, gas going up to $7-$9 a barrel (yes he said barrel), rebuilding every bridge in America because of electric trucks, something about soldiers with no arms no legs no faces.

He's lost it. This is a nervous breakdown in real time.

If he is breaking down, that's a problem for the GOP, because there's no one to take the keys away from Grandpa.

The Dems were not a cult of Biden. So when he started slipping, powerful Dems were not afraid to speak frankly to him (though I still think that the decision to stop contending for the nomination was his).

But who's gonna speak frankly to Trump? Everyone who has his ear is either a relative or making money grifting off his campaign.

Like, I'm sure Mike Johnson understands that a true Trump implosion would hurt the GOP down ballot (and, thus, his Speakership). But what can he do to prevent that?

I've been an undecided voter but now I'm full MAGA. I learned today that Kim Jong Un likes Trump a lot but he doesn't like this group at all and that was the convincing argument I was looking for.

Semi-related but Nancy Pelosi has started to give herself those flowers over the past couple of days, which doesn't seem very productive.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...tion-campaign/

That's fair. Can't fault you for that.

Apparently there's also a country which he won't name because he does not want to get it in trouble where they encouraged people to get guns and crime is down 29%. So that's another reason to vote for him.

I’ve listened to 4 minutes of this and he has told at least 10 lies.

Stephanie Grisham said this is what Trump does when he's lost faith in the people around him. When he feels people are failing him he takes control.

This presser is really just an off the rails campaign speech. And a bad one at that. He's covering 3-4.topics in a single sentence and it's impossible to make any sense of what he's saying or trying to accomplish.

He sounds like someone trying kill the last hour of a filibuster.

He sounds like a sad desperate weird man.

I was spot on. It is not only a disaster but beyond low energy.

Nothing. It's literally the last stages of Frankensteins monster and I have zero shred of sympathy. They had multiple chances to rid themselves of him but were too spineless to do it. Had they this election would be in the bag for them.

Ivanka?

When Biden stopped contending for the nomination, my first thought that one of the kids (my guess was Ashley) told him enough. I feel like Ivanka is the only person who could tell Donald that he is done.

he also couldn't remember Tim Walz's name. He froze at the beginning, then just said "man", later called him "Kamala's new friend" and "the Minnesota gentleman"

There is zero chance Trump has ever heard of Tim Walz prior to two days ago.

Putin is the only one who'll tell Don he's done.

The biggest difference between Biden and Trump is that Trump needs to run to stay out of prison or worse. Even if he loses this election, he'll simply refile for the following one. He won't go away until he dies.

Trump is def rooting for Serbia right now.

I kind of am also.

Biden was so terrified as coming across as partisan that he went the opposite direction. I’m not so sure Harris is the same and I suspect it was one of the issues on the White House people talk about. The gop has already dove headfirst into the “weaponization of doj” claim that I think Harris may just be like, fuck it if they are gonna accuse us anyway let’s do it. Either way I think this is the GOP and maga last stand. Dems have a deep bench and people are so sick of maga. So many of the rising gop stars have the trunk stain and would have to cater to maga just to win the primary. The party is truly fucked if they lose.

Ehhhhh, it's not as deep as Trump but there were quite a bit of ride or die Biden folks. His cognitive decline has been known even before he was elected in 2020. You had people vehemently defending Trump's immigration policy because Biden proposed it. You had people defending a fucking genocide for christ sake.

And Dems absolutely were afraid to speak up. The party targeted anyone who did for awhile. They closed the primary. It only became safe to speak up when he bombed the debate in front of 50 million people and it became clear that he was going to get trounced in the election. Dems were utter cowards who ignored reality and will be responsible for Trump returning to power if he wins in November.

I agree with a lot of what you said except the last part. It was late but plenty of time before the election. If Trump wins it is the fault of the people for not getting out and voting Kamala.

It's interesting that all the far-right/fascist leaders seem to end up in this position. Bolsonaro needed to win to stay out of prison. Netanyahu needs to keep a war going to stay out of prison. Same with Orban.

They didn't hold a real primary where voters could have decided the nominee. Kamala might be fine, but she is unlikely to be the strongest candidate the Democrats could have put out had they held a primary.

I'm not knocking them for going with Kamala since they didn't have many options, but that's still the fault of the party and the diehards who refused to acknowledge reality and let it get that far.

This guy. He is indignant he's being left out of the 'weird' conversation.

Maybe he's trying to up the weird to tamp down it's effectiveness.

Yeah, they did box themselves in letting things draq when it should have been clear that Biden should have not run for re-election period. Still, a Kamala / Walz ticket would have me pull my vote back from Chase Oliver if have even a semi-competent campaign.

If the presser was awful you wouldn't know it from the network nightly coverage. Just that it happened, he said Harris was bad and he lied a bit.

They have completely normalized his lunacy.

It would have ended the campaign of any candidate pre-Trump.

It's crazy we went from the Dean scream to where we're at.

Trump's gotta be pissed that Joe Rogan endorsed RFK Jr.

Ahhh the Dean scream. Did you know it has its own Wiki page? What to know how we got here?

I've never understood how it was different from any other campaign speech, even compared to those times.

Dukakis looked like a dork when he rode a tank, he's out.

The next big UFC event in the US is going to be awkward

It seems some republican surrogates are moving on to the "Wizard of Oz" strategy.

"Pay little to no attention to trump, whether you like him or hate him, our policies are what you support, and we're better for it"

Almost as if the man behind the curtain is irrelevant now focus on us and what WE do. It's the first messaging I've seen that doesn't strictly revolve around trump for trump reasons.

That won’t continue. Trump will never allow it to be about anything other than himself.

It's smart, though. Most of the people I know who are Republicans and say they're still voting for him, that's the reason. The either competely discount the authoritarian stuff or flat-out don't care, as long as they get their tax breaks, or 2nd Amendment protections, or abortion restrictions, or whatever matters most to them.

I really don't know many people (outside of my parents and some of my wife's relatives) who are all-in on Trump the personality as the driving reason for their votes. A lot of those people obviously exist, but I don't really have any personal association with any of them.