Pun Salad

Yes, another lyric snippet from the old Eric Clapton song, "Crossroads" in today's headline.

The last verse also contains an unintentional reference to Kamala:

Yeah, probably not that Willie Brown.

Our weekly look at what the bettors are saying.

Gee, last week our table (compiled pre-pullout) contained Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Gavin Newsom: all contenders considered to have a 2% or greater shot at winning last Sunday, now gone. And … sigh … now it's just Bone Spurs and Cackles.

Is it time for Republicans to despair yet? Recall that back in June Trump was at 50.8%, Biden at 40.7%, not that different.

But I'm not making any predictions.

Also of note:

• No competition for Simone Biles, though. Matthew Continetti judges The Biden-Harris Mental Gymnastics.

  The Paris Olympics began on July 26, and Democrats were ready. They’ve been performing mental gymnastics for the last month.

  The party and its media allies deserve medals in political contortion. In the space of a few weeks, they’ve gone from saying that Joe Biden is the next FDR, to Biden is fine, how dare you question his age, to Biden is incapable of serving a second term, to Biden is a stubborn old man who will sink the party, to Biden is a demigod whose selflessness will be recalled for centuries.

  Keeping up with the changing party line is exhausting. Not long ago, remember, it was considered a slur to suggest that Joe Biden was too old and infirm to be reelected president.

  In June, when the Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on Biden’s memory loss and confusion, the White House denounced the paper and its parent company. Biden’s BFFs on MSNBC called the article “a Trump hit piece.”

  Continetti is pretty good at detailing the triple flips involved in the MSM coverage.

• Advice from Kevin D. Williamson for … Kamala? Yes, because he despises Trump even more: If It Has to Be Harris ….

  Let’s get the to-be-sure stuff out of the way: As I have written before, I have a pretty low opinion of Joe Biden, but even if he were literally brain-dead, I think he’d be less of a threat to the country in the presidency than Donald Trump would. I believe Kamala Harris has a better chance of beating Trump than Biden did, but I also believe that Harris has less of a chance of beating Trump than a half-dozen other Democrats—Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, Jared Polis, Wes Moore, Willie Nelson’s weed guy’s chauffeur’s personal masseuse, etc. If I were betting my own money on it today, I’d bet on Trump to beat Harris in November. 

  All that being stipulated, a few thoughts on how the Harris campaign might improve its odds. 

  Presidential elections in the United States are pure Kulturkampf. If they were about policy, Donald Trump would be another retired game-show host with a very active Twitter account, slightly to the left of Pat Sajak, and of no great interest. We have made the presidency into a kind of sacral kingship based on the idiotic notion that the president personifies the spirit of the nation in the way the British monarch does. (Formally, at least: King Charles the Mundane is no Elizabeth II.) The president has become a democratic idol in which the demos worships itself. But the demos is divided, with each half defining itself exclusively in opposition to the other half. Hence, the current situation in which alternating halves of the country believe we are in a state of existential crisis owing to the fact that the wrong kind of priest-king (Republican/Democrat, Catholic/Protestant, Hutu/Tutsi) occupies the national priesthood.

  KDW's advice is good, albeit paywalled. Basically: try to persuade the persuadeables, Kamala, that you are not a doctrinaire leftist. Or…

  Or she could take her chances on running an exclusively pump-up-the-base campaign, trying to beat Donald Trump in an outrage contest, and see where that takes her. My guess would be back to California.

• Let's see if Kamala can thread this needle. Zachary Faria's headline is incendiary, but (I think) clear-eyed about what her recent statements on Israel and Gaza amount to: Kamala Harris wants to keep Hamas in power.

  Harris offered a condemnation of sorts of Hamas after her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a bit of throat-clearing before she articulated her actual position that Hamas should be allowed to remain in power.

  “I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done,” Harris said of a ceasefire, which would allow Hamas to remain in power after the terrorist organization has promised to carry out more massacres like the Oct. 7, 2023, one that started this war.

  Harris ("and her ilk") place 100% of the responsibility for Gazan suffering on Israel.

  And similarly, their demands are entirely aimed at Israel, none at Hamas.

  And, following Rule 13 from Alinsky's playbook (""Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.") their "personalized" target is Bibi Netanyahu.

• It sucks and it blows. As foretold by Bart Simpson, J.D. Tuccille observes: Even After the Harris-Biden Substitution, the Presidential Race Still Sucks.

  An old joke frames Washington, D.C. as Hollywood for ugly people. But it's more accurate to say it's Hollywood for horrible people who make you want to back away slowly in search of an exit. To notice the unattractiveness of members of America's political class, you need to be dangerously close to their sociopathy and hunger for power, and who wants to enter that orbit? And that brings us to Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States and savior (they hope) of Democrats' dreams of retaining the White House against a challenge by famously flawed former President Donald Trump.

  "Famously flawed" is putting it mildly, but…

• In his defense, Trump's had some contact with violence of late. Jacob Sullum drops a truth bomb: Promising To Restore 'Law and Order,' Trump Falsely Claims Crime Is Rising.

  "Our crime rate is going up," former President Donald Trump claimed during the Republican National Convention last week, when he vowed to "Make America Safe Once Again." Yet the most notable recent increase in the homicide rate happened on Trump's watch, and violent crime has been falling since then.

  That gap between Republican rhetoric and reality corresponds with long-standing public perceptions of crime, which Americans routinely say is going up even when it is going down. Trump is hoping to capitalize on that misperception as he campaigns on a promise to reverse a nonexistent trend by "restor[ing] law and order."

  And, to be fair, this has been a truth-challenged campaign on both sides. (Yes, that's both-sidesism; sue me, it's obviously true.)

• Don't we all have Constitutional amendments we'd like to ignore? Emma Camp noticed: Trump Calls For Jailing American Flag Burners.

  In reaction to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech before Congress on Wednesday, raucous anti-Israel protests erupted across Washington, D.C. Protesters vandalized statues outside D.C.'s Union Station with phrases like "Hamas is comin" and "long live the resistance." At one point, protesters replaced the American flag with a Palestinian flag and then burned the American flag.

  In response to the flag burning, former President Donald Trump told Fox and Friends on Wednesday that he believed those who burn or damage the American flag should face jail time. Trump also brushed off those who would point out that flag desecration is First Amendment-protected speech.

  If anything, flag-burning should be encouraged: nothing says "I am an idiotic asswipe" more clearly than flag-burning, and such clarity is welcome in these murky times.