Left Jabs

  They put that convention together in roughly four weeks.  Okay, the basics were already in place. Chicago was not going anywhere. The venues were booked. The staff was hired. The balloons were on order. The party color was still blue. All they had to do was switch out the candidate. No problem. Yes problem. The effort had to be massive, a “sleep when you’re dead” moment for several thousand people, and they pulled it off without a hitch. It was maybe the best mini-series ever. We got four days of spellbinding speakers, heart-tugging videos, and gut-wrenching stories of grave injustices perpetrated by MAGA miscreants. We got to watch Democrats punch back, for a change, after decades of back-peddling against a Republican insurgency that seems, finally, to be running on fumes. We got to see the case against Donald Trump emphatically pressed, with large dollops of vitriol and ridicule. But all that was last week. What now? As it happens, the conve...

  Of all the egregious failures our mainstream media has subjected us to in recent months, perhaps none was more egregious than its refusal to distinguish which candidate was cognitively impaired, and which one wasn’t. In the press, Joe Biden’s age issues were permanently on the front burner, while Donald Trump’s were, as usual, barely mentioned. Once again, the media gave Trump a pass, despite unmistakable signs that he was teetering on the brink of dementia, and may have already fallen in. The public evidence of this has been massive, and there were plenty of people outside the mainstream media who were screaming about it, even as early as two years ago. But, as this did not comport with the both-sides narrative, the story was always that Biden was senile, while Trump was just your typical presidential candidate, felony convictions notwithstanding. In the psychology community, it’s considered a big ethical no-no to diagnose public figures from afar, no mat...

  It continues to amaze me how many extremely smart, extremely well-educated people are engaged in trying to take this country down. I marvel at the bent natures of people who are able to absorb lavish intellectual inputs, then use them for mephistophelian purposes. Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law) comes immediately to mind. So does Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law), Ron DiSantis (Yale, Harvard Law), Rand Paul (Baylor, Duke Medical), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard). John Neely Kennedy, the aw-shucks cornpone senator from Louisiana? He went to Vanderbilt and Oxford. The list goes on. What they all have in common is that they’re Republican — no surprise there — and that they’ve all taken that expensive learning and rejected, as inconvenient, any components that pertain to truth, justice, or compassion. These (mostly) white men constitute the elitest of the elite, yet they currently make their livings heaping scorn on “the elites,” and they do it with a straigh...

As the Kamala Harris campaign shifts into high gear — her running mate is due to be announced today — I’m underscoring its seriousness by taking the week off. I should have a new piece next week, but meanwhile, please take another look at this essay from May 2023, in which I explored the chasm between red states and blue, a chasm that has only grown wider since. It's hard to escape the feeling that the country is coming apart at the seams, and that the seams are literally the borders between the states. It used to be, when we talked of red states and blue states, we were basically talking about electorates, and how they voted. Now we're talking about deep cultural divides that are, on the red side, wholly artificial — they're being imposed from above, with little or no popular support. Republicans with veto-proof majorities in their state legislatures are writing harsh new rules for living in their states, more-or-less inviting anyone who's not ha...