 |
| Image from here. |
This VP choice seems to cement Trump as 110% behind every dimension of the threateningly outlandish Heritage Foundation Project 2025 (where "brevity is wit" is proven), Search the web and see that Kevin Roberts loves the choice.
Locally in MN, Gary Gross has yet the write of the selection, likely pondering what precisely he'd best say, and we look forward to his JD blog post, when he publishes.
Expect this stem item to be UPDATED.
UPDATE: This election is surely shaping as being about Project 2025. Extreme meme team with JD in the passenger seat, Kevin Roberts driving the car. DeSantis would have been a safer choice. Old Don just along for the ride, Kevin and JD being the thinking team. (And how awkwardly they think in a thousand pages of cruft.)
Expect more updating.
FURTHER: It looks as if Donald Dilettante really is feeling his age and infirmities in handing the keys to a new generation of idiots, where Kevin and JD take the "bloodless revolution" journey, "if the liberals allow it," and he just golfs and gets mean with those on his Nixon-like long enemy list while hosting more Saudi financed golf extravaganzas on his properties. Same old Apprentice-fucker.
And the hand-off holds even if he loses. Convenient you say? Ya betcha.
FURTHER: As a Marine, four year enlistment, it appears he was a remf, not seeing combat, where his most challenging physical burden was during basic training. The last "veteran" in office was George W. Bush, who served stateside and quit early. McCain was the last candidate with actual combat service, and a POW.
Alternet has a not to favorable view of Vance, stating early in the item:
Here are five things that Americans should know about Vance:
1. Onlookers have claimed Vance's morals have collapsed
According to retired professor Tom Nichols, who describes himself as a Never Trump conservative, Vance is a "contemptible and cringe-inducing clown."
Writing for The Nation in July 2021, Nichols said that the lawmaker has turned "on everything he once claimed to believe." He's a "sellout” or “backstabber." A “traitor” or “apostate.”
"Worse, Vance has not only repudiated his earlier views on Trump, but has done so with ruthless cynicism, embracing the former president and his madness while winking at the media with a What can you do? shrug about the stupidity of Ohio’s voters," said Nichols
“If I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about,” Nichols quoted Vance telling Time Magazine, “I need to just suck it up and support him.”
Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara called Vance a “pathetic loser poser fake jerk."
Cleveland News Scene said of Vance: "If politics is the art of empty gestures, J.D. was proving himself a prodigy."
2. Vance has been accused of lying about being a "working class hero."
New York Magazine reporter Sarah Jones wrote in March that Vance pretends he's fighting for working-class people but that the reality is he's trying to "reshape the Republican Party, and America too, in part by appealing to working-class voters."
She was responding to a Politico profile heralding that Vance was "something like an intellectual, or at least like a completely unselfconscious nerd."
The reality is, she wrote, he's become a "figurehead for the New Right," attacking anti-Trump conservatives and the left to ensure the "upper echelons of American government, business, media, entertainment and academia" are all "populated" by conservatives.
Vance isn't fighting for working-class people, she argued. His voting record in the Senate shows he opposes union organizing while marching on picket lines with the UAW.
Historian Gabriel Winant wrote Vance’s “false class politics” puts “the suffering of working-class people” in “conspiratorial rather than structural terms.”
"Vance isn’t stupid," Jones said. "And he knows that he can stitch anything onto a critique that is divorced from reality. He can peddle racism in anti-immigration ads and justify himself by his mother’s addiction... He can insist that he is still that working-class whisperer. But the truth is far uglier. The working class has many enemies in Washington, and Vance is one of them. He is selling out America’s workers to his friends and allies on the right — and they have no interest in sharing power or wealth with the masses. The New Right seeks power for itself and itself alone. In Vance’s America, workers will stay on the bottom rung."
3. Trump has complete control over Vance, critics have said.
Unlike former Vice President Mike Pence, Vance's career in Republican politics is tied to Trump. While Vance's successful book may have catapulted him to success, it is his association with Trump and MAGA that has put him in a position of power, experts have said.
As the Cleveland News Scene recalled, Trump "is a cruel master. He demanded servility from his yes-men, then belittled them for their weakness in doing so. He couldn’t resist mocking J.D. for the toady he’d become."
“J.D. is kissing my a-s he wants my support so bad,” Trump told a rally crowd in Ohio. It was a humiliation for Vance, said the Toledo Blade.
Still, the Cleveland report called Trump the "impresario of fraud," who was doing nothing more than "mocking a lesser practitioner."
4. He's been criticized as being little more than a right-wing troll
The Guardian's Jan-Werner Müller wrote, "Vance has perfected what, on the right, tends to substitute for policy ideas these days: trolling the liberals," Müller wrote. "Mobilizing voters is less about programs, let alone a real legislative record (Vance has none; his initiatives like making English the official language of the US are just virtue signaling for conservative culture warriors). Rather, it’s to generate political energy by deepening people’s sense of shared victimhood."
[...]
Alternet separately wrote about Vance and Trump's luck in having only an ear wound:
The former president was tackled by U.S. Secret Service agents, who have been criticized for their response to the emergency threat.
Trump's statement from his social media site focused on the fact that such an event shouldn't occur in the U.S., while Senator J.D. Vance had a different take on it.
Vance stated on social media that the shooting "is not just some isolated incident."
"The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs," he claimed on Saturday. "That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination."
Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law, called Vance's statement "extremely unhelpful, reckless, and dishonest."
"It turns up the heat and invites retribution," he added over the weekend. "We should demand better from our leaders."
Norman Ornstein — who is an emeritus scholar at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute — said that Vance "is not a leader."
"He is a pandering, cowardly, disgraceful lickspittle to Trump and and Putin," he said Saturday. "That he would say this is a true reflection of who he is."
@JDCocchiarella, a Democrat, said, "F--- JD Vance and this disingenuous and dangerous statement."
Moreover, Alternet noted in a Feb. 2024 item a contradiction:
While it’s impossible to know what’s in his heart, Ohio Republican J.D. Vance has been taking some positions against so-called elites that would seem to be squarely opposed to… guys like him.
They include statements he’s made about people trying to disqualify former President Donald Trump from running again.
It’s widely thought that Vance [at that earlier time where it now is a done deal] is lobbying to be Trump’s running mate. And last week he received a lot of attention by telling ABC host George Stephanopoulos that in 2020 he would have given Trump’s phony slates of electors a chance to contest the election in Congress.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, of course, refused to do such a thing. So Trump attacked him via Twitter during a violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That prompted some of the marauders to chant “Hang Mike Pence!” while Pence was still in the building.
Vance’s current statements contrast with the time before Trump took power. “My god what an idiot,” Vance tweeted of soon-to-be President Trump in 2016.
And his statements to Stephanopoulos last week were part of a series of head-scratchers Vance has made in recent months. On Jan. 4, for example, he published a 494-word post on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
In it, Vance bitterly criticizes “elites,” who he says got their positions not through working hard and being smart, but because they “checked a box.”
Vance starts with Claudine Gay, the Harvard University president who was forced out amid multiple allegations of plagiarism.
“The most important point about Claudine Gay’s plagiarism isn’t that she was fired, but that she had the job — the most prestigious job in higher education — after an extremely thin record of accomplishment,” Vance wrote of Gay, who is Black. “Claudine Gay has never published an article — even a plagiarized one — that really mattered, or significantly advanced scholarship. She got her job not through merit, but because she checked a box.”
Vance then cast a wider net, writing, “Our entire elite is like this. People who got their jobs because they checked boxes, not because they achieved something amazing or accomplished something meaningful.”
Vance’s despised “elites” apparently don’t include Trump, who inherited at least $413 million, only to declare six bankruptcies, be indicted on 91 felony counts, lead the Trump Organization to a criminal tax fraud conviction, and to be found to have committed sexual abuse in a civil proceeding.
Ohio’s junior senator also wouldn’t talk about where he falls in the privilege scale.
His office didn’t respond on the record when asked how, as a sitting U.S. senator and a graduate of Yale Law School, Vance himself is not an “elite.” And in terms of “box-checking,” his office didn’t respond to a question asking whether he played up his Appalachian ancestry on his Yale admission essay — thereby checking a “box” of his own.
But where his argument perhaps is most confusing is when Vance turns his attention to lawyers [then] trying to keep Trump off the ballot on the rationale that the former president violated 14th Amendment by engaging in insurrection. It seems to be a reasonable question, given Trump’s lies about his loss, his elaborate attempts to overturn it, and the violent attack he stoked as Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s victory.
[...] In his post last month, Vance himself tried to disqualify lawyers for even making the argument that Trump had disqualified himself by attempting to overturn the election results and the will of 80 million American voters.
“This is why you should scorn the attorneys who tell you that Donald Trump committed ‘insurrection’ and should be thrown off the ballot,” Vance wrote. “They have no special legal knowledge. They are political hacks pretending to be lawyers, and they are not smart or accomplished, they have a credential from an institution that cares more about box checking than merit.”
That’s an interesting claim when you look at the credentials of three attorneys who have played major roles in the effort to disqualify Trump.
Two are Michael Stokes Paulsen and William Baude.
In August, the conservative law professors wrote an article. It said that Section 3 of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment was written for just such an eventuality as Trump seeking reelection after doing so much to overturn the result of one he’d already lost.
[...] As for the professors having “a credential from an institution that cares more about box checking than merit,” that’s a surprising statement for Vance to make.
Both hold law degrees from Yale University, the same school that awarded one to Vance. His office didn’t respond when asked in a follow-up question if Vance believed his degree came from an institution that is more concerned with “box checking” than merit.
Then there’s the senator’s claim that proponents of the 14th Amendment argument “have no special legal knowledge” and “are not smart or accomplished.”
Before he was elected to the Senate in 2022, Vance worked in corporate law, then in venture capital, and wrote a memoir about his Ohio roots. Baude is a law professor at the University of Chicago and Paulsen at the University of St. Thomas.
Whatever their relative merits, all three resumes seem to pale next to that of another prominent believer that Trump should be disqualified from the 2024 election.
That would be J. Micheal Luttig. In 1991, George H.W. Bush appointed him to the 4th U.S. Court of Appeals — a bench on which he sat for 15 years. Before that, Luttig served as assistant attorney general, assistant counsel to then-President Ronald Reagan and clerk and special assistant to then-Chief Justice to Warren E. Burger.
Instead of ad-hominem attacks against people who disagree with him, Luttig made an argument on historical and constitutional grounds.
“The January 6, 2021 insurrection sought to prevent the vesting of the authority and functions of the Presidency in the newly-elected President,” said a brief Luttig co-authored urging the Supreme Court to disqualify Trump. “The Civil War generation certainly understood that the threat and use of force to prevent a newly-elected President from exercising executive power is an insurrection. Indeed, the activities of federal officials to prevent Lincoln’s inauguration were one basis for Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Well, the Leonard Leo SCOTUS did damage, but that is apart from Vance bullshitting.
One more Alternet item, my favorite, while admitting the outlet is generally unfavorable to Repubican aims and conduct:
Some GOP donors were hoping that former President Donald Trump's choice for a running mate would be Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) or North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — someone who would appeal to more traditional conservatives and isn't overly MAGA in their views. But during the opening day of the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Trump went full MAGA when he chose far-right Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate.
Once a scathing critic of Trump — the "Hillbilly Elegy" author even compared him to Adolf Hitler in 2016 — Vance gave himself an ultra-MAGA makeover and is now a strident Trump loyalist. After Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13, Vance blamed President Joe Biden for the shooting — which Biden, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and other prominent Democrats forcefully condemned.
In an article published by The New Republic, journalist Edith Olmsted warns that the selection of Vance as Trump's running mate is a major victory for Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation's controversial far-right blueprint for a second Trump Administration. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but Olmsted stresses that Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts was hoping Trump would pick Vance.
"The leader of the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025 reportedly couldn't be happier that Donald Trump picked Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate Monday," Olmsted explains. "Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which penned the lengthy blueprint for a potential far-right Trump takeover and draconian dismantling of the administrative state, was speaking to reporters when the announcement was made."
On X, formerly Twitter, the New York Times' Nick Corasaniti said of Roberts, "He reacted to the news 'with a broad smile on my face' and said that 'privately, we were really rooting for him.'"
Roberts himself tweeted, "Congratulations to @JDVance1 — a man who personifies hope for our nation's future. When Americans get to know him, they will appreciate his values and vision as I do."
So, more recognition that a vote for Trump - Vance, besides awarding mediocrity, is a resounding blessing of the mischief known as Project 2025.
The Biden - Harris ticket will be running against Project 2025 in all of its proposed reach, while also running on the Biden presidency, which first mopped up the Trump Covid debacle, and then created jobs and got well-targeted legislation passed that helped lift the economy from the Trump/Covid depression which Biden inherited. Biden was effective. Trump was defective. Vance is an all-in Trump lover - these days.
FURTHER: Gary posted, - https://libertyprosperityblog.blogspot.com/2024/07/elon-musk-rescues-gop-gotv.html - barely mentioning Vance at all, but touting the moneyed elite interests putting their studied and intentioned money into a Trump - Vance - Project 2025 investment - folks like Musk not spending without a purpose - while Trump and Vance fraudulently pose as populists with the left-behind white race, its little people, as the ostensible Republican aimed-for beneficiaries, when in fact, big surprise, it is still massive accumulations of wealth which Trump has served (with envy). Vance likewise.
Indeed, Vance is peeing in his pants to serve the identical humbugs. He just can't wait; and Kevin "Heritage" Roberts is cheerleading for the pair and waving pom-poms with his Heritage Project 2025 name prominently dyed into the pom pom fabric, irrevocably there, never to be washed out.
The over-monied elites are over-joyed. The Trump Vance ticket is being set to move on to more populist phrased total bullshit lying. To them - it's lying for a good cause. To America, its people, it is lying by weasels, for weasels. And snakes and scorpions of great wealth are set to also feed at that opulent table. But they succeed only if the BIG LIE is successful. Defeat it in November, or wish you had.
May we the people prove to not be we the stupid. Might the people even in ever larger numbers read any part of Project 2025 to see who Trump and Vance really are.
Gary writes:
The WSJ is reporting that Elon Musk is contributing to a superPAC with the intent of helping the GOP catch up with the Democrats' mail-in ballot operations:
Elon Musk has said he plans to commit around $45 million a month to a new super political-action committee backing former President Donald Trump’s presidential run, according to people familiar with the matter.If this reporting is accurate, and there's no reason not to think it isn't, then this is a significant upgrade in the GOP's GOTV and voter registration operations. Factor in the GOP's enthusiasm gap and the possibility for a wave election increases significantly.It's a safe bet that JD Vance will virtually live in the Rust Belt.Other backers of the group, called America PAC, include Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, the Winklevoss twins, former U.S. ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft and her husband, Joe Craft, who is chief executive of coal producer Alliance Resource Partners.
[Palintir - Peter Thiel link added]
Gary links this video touting Wall Street Journal [Murdoch] reporting how the election will be bought. Or at least the attempt is set, with money of wealthy dudes promised to a ticket that isn't getting that attention over any true intent to serve us.
Watch it. Suffer the crap background music, (it fits). Remember now to November - Musk does not give. Musk invests.
The Big Lie is upon us. Bigger and bigger it will grow, as November nears. We can do the right thing. Let there be hope.
FURTHER: Vance had only 18 months Senate experience in the Senate while taking the second spot on the Trump ticket. Because of Trump's age and health, Trump might not make four years, putting Vance into the White House, (all if the Trump ticket wins).
Obama had three years in the Senate before heading the ticket, but with Biden in second spot, age not then an issue, and Biden having had a full Senate career.
To the extent experience might matter, Obama - Biden did fine mopping up the Bush economic collapse and serving two terms. Biden wins, it is an experienced ticket. Trump wins and his health fails, Vance will step in and a VP will be appointed, etc.
The guess is Vance would do better than Trump, which is not setting the bar high.