Midwestern Nasty

Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (below) pulled the lowest possible stunt a couple of weeks ago when he ran an ad in which the mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, called Dr. Acton a liar who can't be trusted.  What Ramaswamy chose not to mention was that Dr. Acton's mother can't be trusted; her husband, Dr. Acton's stepfather, abused the Democratic nominee and her brother, and both siblings had to be transferred to the custody of their father.  The mother, currently living in a car with a bunch of cats, got a good deal of money from Ramaswamy, who made tons of money through all sorts of underhanded means.

The ad was roundly criticized by Ohio Republicans, except for the Vice President, and Trump sided with his veep, saying that Dr. Acton was clearly an untrustworthy person and deserved what she got.  Well, she didn't, and she certainly didn't deserve a mother who let her get abused by her stepfather and who also was convicted for killing kittens but had her conviction overturned on a technicality.   Ramaswamy found someone that the GOP famously wanted to use for their benefit in 2024 - an Ohioan who's harming cats for personal satisfaction. 😡

And just when you thought that the news out of the Midwest couldn't get any more foul, Representative Haley Stevens, the Michigan Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate this year and lost the primary to Abdul El-Sayed, suddenly betrayed her fellow Michigan Democrats by endorsing Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate challenging El-Sayed, who is vying to be the first Islamic member of the U.S. Senate.  Stevens insisted that she changed her mind about endorsing El-Sayed for anti-Semitic statements he allegedly made and said he was not a nice person.

Is Haley Stevens Jewish?  No.  But some of her most generous donors are.  

Stevens, who gave up her House seat to run for the Senate, has long been in the pocket of AIPAC, the American-Israeli Political Action Committee, that horrible bunch of people who think that Israel should continue to run roughshod over Palestinians and kill as many as possible to turn Gaza into the resort that Trump envisions for the seaside territory of squalor and oppression.  But when it became apparent that supporting El-Sayed would not please her donors - or her fiancé, who is an AIPAC stooge himself - Stevens moved to endorse Mike Rogers mere hours after reassuring Michigan Democrats that she was sticking with El-Sayed.  Then she went on Anderson Cooper's program on CNN to explain her change of heart and, well, have you noticed that Stevens sounds like Edie McClurg? 

That's about all I or anyone else could discern from her after watching Cooper having to endure Stevens' non-explanation, which was the most incoherent performance on a TV newscast by a female Michigander since Madonna defended a promotional video banned on MTV by explaining the First Amendment to Forrest Sawyer on ABC's "Nightline."  

A few pundits wondered if this could have an impact on El-Sayed's chances.  It did - El-Sayed raised $2.4 million, more than half of that amount coming from first-time donors, yesterday.  It was his biggest one-day fundraising effort ever.  Not exactly the $35 million that Stevens got from AIPAC, but it's still impressive.

I'm happy to report that Amy Acton and Abdul El-Sayed will likely win their respective campaigns when the votes are counted tomorrow.  Vivek Ramaswamy's thirty seconds of fame - he somehow managed to double it - is running out fast, and Haley Stevens is toast already, having been expelled from the Democratic Party and having had virtually her entire House staff quitting en masse.  I hope she has the physical strength to move her stuff out of her congressional office by herself.

Tiger Dad

Former presidential candidate and shifty entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-chair of the mythical Department of Government Efficiency with noted robber baron Elon Musk, has, along with Musk, advocated for more H1B visas for foreign workers to take jobs in the tech sector.  Many if not most of these workers would be South Asian like Ramaswamy himself.

This created a serious rift in MAGA between the tech right and the alternate right over American identity and American values.  Ramaswamy specifically said that foreign workers are needed to work in the tech sector because native-born Americans are not smart enough, which is what one must expect when we have a culture that values the prom queen over the "mathlete" and the jock over the valedictorian.  Ramaswamy could have stopped there, but he said that the culture also lauds intellectually impoverished TV sitcom characters over their brainier counterparts in shows like "Boy Meets World," "Saved by the Bell," and "Family Matters."  He also suggested that parents should get their children to stop watching such sitcoms and spend more time hitting the books.

I don't know enough about those sitcoms to comment on that observation - I rarely if ever watched them - but on the former point, I would have to say that Ramaswamy is absolutely right.  High schools are supposed to prepare teenagers for adulthood and also help them succeed to the best of their intellectual ability, yet the students with the best brains and the most serious commitment to their studies are often ostracized and even ridiculed for their intellectual fortitude.  High school culture values the most popular kids, the athletes over the mathletes - and this is just a microcosm of the general popular culture in America overall, where intellectuals are rejected in favor of "folksy" or "populist" figures.  How far back do you want to go?  The presidential election of 1828 was framed by supporters of Andrew Jackson as a contest between President John Quincy Adams, who could write, and Andrew Jackson, who could fight.  We all know who won.  (If you don't, you're part of the problem.)

Obviously, the alternate-right wing of MAGA doesn't like Ramaswamy's characterization of their nation and themselves as morons, and they feel betrayed by Ramaswamy's (and Musk's) support for increased immigration from places like India.  The alternate right, after all, wants to keep America white and keep brown people out (although South Asians are actually members of the Caucasian race, George Carlin once having called them dark brown white people).  The ensuing fight between the two factions had splintered MAGA and set the stage for a period of inaction come 2025, and liberals are enjoying the show, sitting back and eating popcorn as they watch.

Don't get too giddy over this internal MAGA feud, fellow anti-MAGA people.  They're still basically united on making America a nation of toxically masculine virtues that persecutes anyone who has a problem with that.

And as proof that Ramaswamy is right about American intelligence . . . who won the presidential election last month? 

Taken For Granite

The New Hampshire primary is today, and it's do or die for Nikki Haley, who could pull a classic Granite State upset against Donald Trump and win or go down swinging like Sonny Liston as the polls (which, in New Hampshire, are never right) suggest.

Haley has hit her heights.  Alliterations aside (well, after that second one), Haley has finally been going after Trump on his increasing cognitive disorder, as he's been confusing her with Nancy Pelosi in talking about January 6 and making beep-beep noises talking about nuclear-missile launch boards.  But she started doing so late - maybe too late to win. But we will see tonight. 

As for the other Republican contenders . . . well, Vivek Ramaswamy's fifteen minutes of fame are pretty much over, though he might have won himself  the Secretary of Commerce position in a Trump 47 administration, but given Trump's racist insinuations against Ramaswamy's fellow Indian-American Haley (oh yeah, South Asians are actually members of the Caucasian race, making them, as George Carlin once called them, dark brown white people, so it's actually ethnicism, or perhaps xenophobia), that's not likely.  Asa Hutchinson, the only 2024 Republican presidential candidate not from New Jersey who called Trump on his crimes, also quit the campaign, much to the delight of the Democratic National Committee, which sent out a press release joking that they hadn't even noticed that he was still running.  Sort of like when I learned this month that Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie Norton on "The Honeymooners," died at 99 and I said to someone that I hadn't even known she was still alive - except that I didn't say that as a joke!  Anyway, President Biden personally apologized to Hutchinson, realizing how mean-spirited that press release was, especially when Hutchinson was an anti-MAGA comrade in arms.  But that's the Democratic National Committee for you.  Heck, leading Democratic Party members ridiculed Martin O'Malley in 2016 when he exited the presidential campaign - and he's a fellow Democrat!

And then there's Ron DeSantis . . .

After a landslide re-election victory as governor of Florida that destroyed Florida's state Democratic Party like a hydrogen bomb, DeSantis was a colossus in the national Republican Party and seen as the logical heir apparent to Trump, and he looked like an attractive candidate, advocating Trumpist policies without Trump's toxic personality.  Unfortunately, DeSantis turned out to have a toxic personality of his own.  His inability to smile, for example, is clearly evident in the photo above, and he couldn't work up enough energy with voters to even display an affectation of warmth.

Democrats were hoping that DeSantis would be strong nationally as he's been in Florida and cause a knockout brawl with Trump that would mirror the Ford-Reagan battle of 1976.  Instead, the DeSantis campaign was destroyed like the Florida Democratic Party, and in both cases it was DeSantis who did the destroying.  He tried so hard to show his MAGA credentials that he came across as a vindictive, angry man who would do anything to further his political career - and not just as a presidential candidate. He had been going after gays and picking fights with Disney even before he declared his candidacy for President, as well as restricting abortion in his state even before Dobbs was handed down by the Supreme Court.       

DeSantis will still be governor of Florida for another three years, but his political career is all ready over.  By 2028, no one will want DeSantis to run for President.  His chances for a Trump 47 Cabinet position have already been blown to bits.   

He died with his high-heeled boots on.