CSotD: Undecision 2024

Today’s Deflocked (AMS) happened to hit on this topic at just the right moment to jump from the funnies into the editorial section.

CBS has announced that its moderators will not correct blatant lies in tomorrow night’s VP debate. This will allow the discussion to be a game of “Is so!” and “Is not!” instead of wasting time actually discussing plans and policies.

Vance reportedly is going to attack Walz for having served 24 years but never in combat. I don’t expect Walz to point out that Vance was never really a hillbilly, however, and I’m hoping the evening has more substance than I fear JD can bring to it.

Dave Granlund is one of several cartoonists to marvel that there are such things as “Undecided Voters,” though we should note a few cases of voters with definite opinions sneaking into some “undecided voter” interviews in order to pretend to have had sudden conversion experiences.

I wish “undecided voter” were an oxymoron, because it would be better if such low-information people stayed away from the polls, but I suppose they’ll show up and pull whatever levers they decide in their infinite wisdom are correct. I just hope they aren’t so numerous as to actually tilt the election one way or the other.

If there are enough nitwits who have always voted Republican, perhaps they will be canceled out by an equal number of nitwits who have always voted Democratic, and the only real beneficiaries will be Jill Stein and RFK Jr, who will harvest the votes of nitwits who think it wise to go against the flow.

Speaking of low-information voting, Clay Bennett (CTFP) suggests that knowing how tariffs work is becoming increasing valuable as Dear Leader continues to flog them as a cure-all for economic despair.

I saw on social media that someone claims to have dug up Trump’s grades from his year at Fordham, after which he transferred to Wharton, and if the transcript is accurate, we can assume his grades didn’t all transfer with him, since it shows a 1.28 GPA on a scale of 4.

I nearly flunked out my freshman year, but I did better than that and I’ve never pretended to have had good grades, having borrowed Shannon Sharpe’s joke about graduating Magna Cum Thank You Lawdy. I have also borrowed the old line about never letting school interfere with my education, and I was very active in college. Just not particularly in the classroom.

The main difference is that Trump brags about graduating with honors, which he most certainly did not, and another is that he clearly has no idea how tariffs work, and I do.

But the main factor is that, in my time as a business writer, I ran across all sorts of bullshit artists who were one step shy from being genuine con artists, as well as some who crossed that line and wound up being gigged for it.

Which brings us to this

Juxtaposition of the Day

Dave Granlund

Dennis Goris

The standard take on such people is to say “He could sell iceboxes to Eskimos,” at which point some humorless numbskull will say that’s how they keep food from freezing.

In this case, however, I suspect missing the point involves assuming that the watches are being sold in order to help fund the campaign, while I think the point is that, as Dave Whamond suggests, he’s found one more scam, like his university and his wine and his steaks and his sneakers and his trading cards.

And that, like the transparent, ridiculous claims about audience sizes and his uncle at MIT and his graduating from Wharton with honors, it’s part of an inability to resist hot air and self-promotion.

Every neighborhood barroom has such a person, and the flaw in the depiction of Cliff Clavin was that Cliff often knew what he was talking about. In real life, that’s not only unnecessary but virtually unknown.

As it happens, I had a backwards clock in my bedroom during high school. It had been a gag gift, but after you stop chuckling over it, you find that you can read it quite easily, just as, once you realize you’re dealing with a compulsive BS artist, you can read Trump quite easily.

OTOH, I worry about those suckers who are willing to believe that the watch is properly laid out, who are also willing to pay several times what the thing is worth, and who vote as if the election were like an office pool in which you pick the one you think is going to win.

Which is how elections are decided in places like Moscow and Tehran.

Juxtaposition of the Day #2

Walt Handelsman

Mike Lester — AMS

Two conflicting takes on low-information voters.

Handelsman cites the success on the right of having portrayed Harris as not having any policies. She was thrust into the position of candidate so late in the game that she did spend a period of time simply introducing herself, but has gotten down to laying out proposals.

However, like “Al Gore lies” and “John Kerry didn’t deserve his medals,” a narrative has been established that is hard to shake, and it isn’t helped by her decision not to sit for pointless puffball interviews with the usual suspects but to speak to influential but unpublicized groups and directly to crowds.

The counter, as Handelsman suggests, is that Trump and Vance are making such outrageous claims that they’re setting up a narrative that can work against them, at least with voters who are paying attention.

However, it’s necessary that they pay such close attention that they realize, for instance, that Harris’s proposed buy-back program was for assault weapons, not guns in general, and that it’s perfectly consistent for someone to support sensible gun ownership and be opposed to assault weapons.

But you shouldn’t expect to hear that explanation from the Trump/Vance side of the aisle.

Mike Luckovich hits the mark so often that I’m embarrassed by how often he appears here, but I disagree with this one.

There’s no need for the GOP to hide the collection of lies, nonsense and frightening proposals they bring to November. Those who get it have already gotten it, and those who will never get it will never get it.