Tag: JD Vance

The new “normal”

It’s been kind of amusing to see the Democrats leaning recently into the idea that there’s something basically strange about the Republicans… Minnesota governor Tim Walz seems to have kicked it off in a TV interview and the Harris campaign quickly picked up on it:

“Old and quite weird” indeed. The Republicans aren’t particularly happy at being picked on like this:

Is there a Democrat equivalent of this dickhead?

And, to be sure, it’s really not the most refined political argument, but then again the Republicans don’t have much in their armoury either that’s better. “Ron DeSanctimonious” was about as sophisticated as Trump got, and someone probably had to come up with it for him. And, as someone says in that Politico piece, people understand Trump being weird better than they understand “an existential threat to democracy”. The latter is, of course, still correct, but “weird” certainly does hit harder in a way.

And let’s face it, THIS shit IS weird. There isn’t any other way to fairly describe whatever the fuck this is if it’s not meant to be some sort of parody of the cult’s iconography. Cos on the face of it, it’s so deranged it looks like it has to be parodic, and indeed I thought it had to be when I first looked at it when someone posted it on Bluesky. But then I saw Tim Pool’s name at the top of the post. Yes, Grim Fool posted this monstrosity (obviously didn’t create it, though, cos that would’ve required him to have talent). I couldn’t believe that either and thought someone must have photoshopped it… no, they didn’t, I went to Tim’s Twitter and, well, that’s exactly what I found there. And Tim is incapable of irony, so he posted this thing with a straight face. Fuck me dead. These people have no sense of their own absurdity.

I mean, look at this silly old chud here. There was a bunch of people like him at the recent Republican convention at which Drumpf appeared with a frankly unnecessarily large bandage covering his putative war wound from that shooting, whereupon it became like a badge for other people there. This is not normal. Weird is the word. I don’t see John Fetterman’s admirers having strokes as a sign of support for him, for example. And see this fuckwit too:

Well, at least her father probably wasn’t a leader in the fucking Ku Klux Klan, which is rather more than can be said for Rod Dreher’s dad. Also, I wonder if she ever published private pictures from a teenage girl’s private Instagram in a major magazine while accusing said girl unjustly of sexually harrassing other girls at her school, cos Rod DEFINITELY did that. That’s clearly weird behaviour on his part. People with normal moral compasses know better than that.

Obviously the left has been kind of tut-tutty about the “weird” thing, too, like the clown I saw harrumphing on Mastodon the other day about how everyone laughing at the couch-fucking thing distracts us from realising that J. Divans (saw him called that on Twitter today and thought it was FUCKING MARVELLOUS) is in fact a monstrous human being… Jesus FUCK, you idiot, NO ONE who’s paying attention thinks Vance isn’t a piece of shit, we know exactly what he thinks. Piss off with your indignation, let the rest of us laugh at the cunt like he deserves. Make him look stupid. Make him look weird.

But the choice of the term “weird” has also drawn some criticism on the grounds of ableism or something like that, which I understand a little better. By the same token, I also understand the arguments I’ve seen some make that the Left deploying “weird” like this gets in the way of the Right defining themselves as “normality”, and about the distinction between “good weird” and “bad weird”… but the latter does kind of assume people’s willingness to actually make it, and I did see someone (wish I could recall who) say something about how what we should really be calling them isn’t so much weird as creepy…

…and, frankly, Malsh Walsh here makes a good argument for that. Let’s face it: the idea that he expresses here (a girl raped by her father should have to give birth so the father’s crime will be discovered) is not only weird and illogical, it’s FUCKING MONSTROUS. Not only is Walsh full of shit, he’s being actively evil here. And I can see why some are saying we should be emphasising their badness more than their oddness, and frankly that’s a line of thought I’m increasingly coming round to myself…

…and the authors of this astounding bit of work have latched onto that aspect of the whole thing; this is profoundly disquieting, nailing the essential unpleasantness of these people, and it’s one of the best political ads I’ve ever seen. The casting is just brilliant, and the SWEAT… oh gods, the SWEAT. I think the increasing amount of sweat is a good way to finally round this post off.

Ad-Vance JD where?

I haven’t had much to say about JD Vance, Drumpf’s running mate in the election, and I’m kind of glad about that, cos his story has got marvellously sillier as it’s gone on. I suppose we can begin with his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, whose somewhat mixed reception (especially among the Appalachian folks whose way of life—among which Vance himself grew up—it apparently takes a dim view of) already meant he was a complicated figure, popular enough to win Senate election two years but not really liked per se. This, at any rate, is what I’ve been able to gather. In spite of that, there was some speculation before the Republican convention that Trump would pick him as his running mate, which wound up being the case, and…

…oh. THAT’s unfortunate. And because Nick Fuentes is a fucking Nazi piece of shit, he’s not a fan of Vance’s wife either:

An opinion I’m sure a large segment of the party shares but they’ve had more sense so far than to admit it. Of course, the strangest thing about the Vance-as-VP thing is that, well, he’s quite frankly said these things about his putative future boss in the past:

And he meant “America’s Hitler” as a bad thing, not a good one. I wonder at what point he switched from “never Trump” to “whatever Trump”? I know people’s political opinions change, but it’s quite a swing from calling a guy Hitler to happily being that guy’s Himmler… and it just makes him look like a stranger and stranger choice for Trump’s second. But I said the story gets sillier, and it does…

No, REALLY. The story that Vance supposedly refers to in his book about having fucked a couch is, alas, about as real as the stories from years ago about Ted Cruz having been the Zodiac Killer… but it’s out there in the same way and it’s making him look like a fool in the same way too; I see Bluesky running with the gag in the way Twitter would’ve done once (maybe it is, I’m just not there much to see it) and it’s been kind of gold:

Incidentally, this is what I meant when I said the other day about the limited shelf-life of the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme. Shepard Fairey’s art is not only iconic, it’s durable and eminently adaptable over a decade and a half later. I don’t know how you make the current affair fit the “Brandon” frame. Anyway, obviously the story is absurd on the face of it, but what a weapon it makes, especially given Vance’s existing wobbly popularity and the way he’s been revealing himself as a piece of shit, especially with his comments about childless women—you know you’ve probably got a bunch of those in your base, JD? Maybe not a lot, but you will have a lot of childful women who’ll find that stuff just as offensive. Indeed, none other than Meghan McCain appears to be worried about just that:

This, of course, is precisely who the Republicans are, and Meghan’s clearly frightened that women on her side might actually recognise this fact at last and not vote for Trump. Quelle tragedy. So Vance is making himself look like enough of a cunt as it is, but the couch business is delightful icing on the cake… There is some speculation that Trump will see the error of his ways sooner rather than later, and this guy is speculating that he might pick Nikki Haley instead. I find the idea of Trump picking a woman for the role unlikely at best, but if he did pick here that would be kind of magnificent, given that one of the first groups to offer their endorsement of Kamala Harris was a PAC of former Nikki Haley supporters. I think Haley replacing Vance would be about the funniest way this story could end.