Post 637 - August 7, 2024

Our dishwasher is on the fritz.

It’s a two-drawer model and the top drawer isn’t working. It jams and then we can’t open it. The bottom drawer seems to be fine, though. We’ve just been using the half that works and putting off fixing the other one. Last week, I finally bit the bullet and arranged for a technician to come and look at it.

When he arrived a couple of days later, he poked around, pushed some buttons, and ran a quick cycle to figure out what was wrong with it. Finally, he called me over and started talking in dishwasher language. This bit isn’t coordinating with this bit. The something-flange isn’t engaging with the something-or-other-else doohickey. The rotor housing needs to be replaced.

In other words, he knew what was wrong and somebody would get back to me to schedule a repair call.

That’s all I needed to know. When can they come, I asked, and whom do I pay?

I didn’t listen to what the guy said but rather how he said it. What do I know about dishwashers? I tuned out the stream of information and, instead, watched him as he spoke. He was calm. He looked me in the eyes. He didn’t fidget. I believed him. He answered a question or two, and then he left.  He seemed like a nice guy. Nothing he said conflicted with what I think I know about the machine.

Yesterday, Vice President Harris announced that she had chosen Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota to be her running mate. He is sixty years old. He’s served in Congress. He was a command sergeant major in the National Guard. Before that, he was a social studies teacher and a football coach. At the same time he was coaching the team, he helped some kids form a school LGBTQ club and offered to be their faculty advisor. All this in rural Minnesota, no less.

He's the person who started calling the folks on the Republican ticket, “weird.”

As Governor of Minnesota, he passed meaningful tax legislation, expanded the state’s free student meal program, codified the right to choose into state law, pushed free college education for low-income students, shored up Minnesota’s infrastructure, and instituted background checks for gun buyers.

He seems thorough, compassionate, effective, and kind of normal. I think I’m good.

While all of us claim that we vote for people based on their stances on different issues, I wonder if that is strictly true. If a person espousing issues that we agree with is abrasive and unappealing, would we still vote for them?  I think we are all more swayed by a person’s “vibe” than we would care to admit.

I like the vibes of the people who are at the top of the Democratic ticket. I thoroughly dislike the vibes of the two leading the Republican party. Clearly, there is a sizable chunk of the American population who feel the opposite way than me. Something about that creepy Republican f&*#-you attitude resonates in a way that I can’t begin to understand.

It would be interesting to see whether the people who like that uber-aggressive alpha-male demeanor are fully aware of what their hot-rodding candidates really stand for. It seems to me that if the far-right base did, they would kick them to the curb, immediately. As it is, that chaotic anger must be feeding something.

With not one but two Democratic candidates out there pushing an agenda that emphasizes helping middle-class Americans, the other side is still blowing smoke. Just when the Republicans, strategically, should have been figuring out a counterattack to the Great Liberal Agenda, J.D. Vance’s wife came out and said that her husband never meant to mock women who couldn’t have kids. She said he didn’t even mean to disparage cat ladies, he was only being sarcastic. Unfortunately for them, nobody’s laughing and now Vance’s idiotic pronouncement is alive and well for a whole fresh news cycle. That’s in place of anything with substance.

With each passing day, the Democrats seem to grow ever more normal, unified, and grounded while the Republicans become stranger and odder. It’s almost virgin territory for both.

As much as the Right is now trying to distance themselves from their Nazi-era-inspired Project 2025 document, they have not offered a single new policy idea to replace it. They are clearly still firmly behind every hateful thing it espouses.

Almost odder than anything else, the former President is now repeatedly telling his rapt followers that he doesn’t need their votes anymore. He says they have plenty already. He’s said it more than once over the last few days. He keeps assuring his base that they need not bother dragging themselves to the polls.

The Republicans think they are going to win. The reason old 45 thinks they are going to win is that the GOP has installed 2020 election deniers in key positions all throughout the country. These good people are planning on refusing to certify the voting results in places where they don’t win. They are planning on creating chaos on election day and overthrowing the government.

When I was a kid, I loved the campy old Batman television show. I have vivid memories of watching it when I was five. I’m still happy to watch it a few million years later.

In every episode, Batman and Robin would find themselves at the mercy of one of the insane megalomaniacal villains and facing a certain death. Almost every time, the bad guy is so impressed with his or her plan that they can’t help but crow about how clever they are to the intrepid crime fighters just before they pull the switch to finish the duo for good. As the criminal mastermind gleefully drones on, the caped crusaders quietly figure out how to escape. They demagnetize a switch, reconfigure a flux-capacitor, or simply untie the knots in the ropes holding them.

If evil genius Blofeld had just shut up and killed James Bond, he would now be ruling the world. Alas, he desperately needed to see the fear and, hopefully, grudging respect in his captive’s eyes. Oh well.

It seems to me that the Republican’s devious plan would have been infinitely more effective had the Republican candidate just kept his mouth shut. He didn’t though, and now he’s warned us all about what they’re planning to do. None of the cartoon baddies in any superhero movie can keep a secret. They are physically incapable of it. The same seems to be true of the Republican Presidential nominee.

I don’t know how we are going to stop the election deniers from throwing the 2024 elections into chaos. The Supreme Court certainly isn’t going to help – they have been totally corrupted. The Republicans have abandoned all sense of the rule of law, so they are going to be looking for any opportunity to stick it to the rest of the country. Because our mustache-twirling former President is so desperate to show everyone what a genius he is, though, we now have a few months to figure out how to stop this plot from unfolding. So much for the element of surprise.

Blame and misfortune don’t stick to the former President. No matter what he does, he seems to get away with it on some level. The same, however, is not at all true of his followers. They get caught and they go to jail. Nearly 750 of his loyal supporters have been convicted of crimes associated with the January 6^th insurrection alone. Of those people a whopping 467, give or take one or two, have been sentenced to serve jail time.

I think that when push comes to shove the severity of the consequences of what these unprincipled certifiers are considering doing is going to sink in. Most of them, I predict, when faced with the very real prospect of doing time, are going to chicken out. On some level, they must know that their fearless leader won’t do anything to help them.

The former President does not have a great track record with loyalty. Even though he declared he was going to march on the Capitol with his mob, he never went anywhere near it. He watched it all transpire from inside the White House. Hopefully, they’ll all remember that this is the man who urged their fellow insurrectionists to find and hang the Vice President. The fact that 45 tried to get his right-hand man snuffed out, when he, himself, hand-picked him, will hopefully give at least some of these idiots pause.

That the Republicans think that they are going to lose is evident by their plan to simply take power illegally. They were, if not ahead, then solidly neck-and-neck for a long time. When President Biden pulled out. everyone was shocked, Republicans and Democrats alike, about how quickly the left unified behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Personally, I can’t remember ever having lived through anything like this. One day we were all sitting around moping and on the verge of just letting our democracy slip away. The next day we were out cheering in the streets. Since then, that feeling has only grown.

Tens of millions of dollars keep pouring into the Harris campaign coffers. At least another $20 million flooded in after Governor Walz was added to the ticket. Hundreds of new volunteers continue to sign up every day to fight in all the Democratic races.

Before President Biden stepped down, nobody really believed the left would ever agree on a new candidate and be able to get them on the ballot. Where would their war chest come from? Few of us had any faith that there was enough time between now and Voting Day to make any headway. We were all proven wrong.

These new Dems seem to know what they are doing. They seem confident. Heck, they all even seem happy. They’re laughing in almost every picture. What happened to the existential dread?

I should say that the dishwasher repair guy never got back to me. The last week or two have been busy ones and until I started writing this, I realized that I had forgotten all about him.

None of us knows what anyone we help elect is really like out of the spotlight. Their competence could be all a sham. Before Governor Walz was chosen, rumors of a darker side to some of the other potential VP candidates started seeping into social media. Dems in government don’t like this one. This other one yells at people. Whatever.

My sense of people is far from infallible. I can be swayed as much as anybody. During the pandemic, I was solidly behind Governor Cuomo. Heck, after 9-11 I was solidly behind then Mayor Rudi Guiliani. I also fully believed the repairman when he said he’d get back to me.

If there is a dark side to President Jimmy Carter, I would prefer not to know about it. He is maybe the best ex-president we have ever had. The man who is nearly a hundred has been in hospice forever. His son just posted that President Carter told him that he wants to stay alive long enough to be able to cast a vote for Kamal Harris.

If James Earl Carter likes her, then so, of course, do I.

Where on earth, I wonder, did I put that repair guy’s phone number?