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Deplore--Again, I won't read your logorrheic posts. But I've noticed, in some of your shorter ones, you are saying evil and stupid things about Sanity Clause subscribers. That may be par for one of the Trump courses, but it doesn't work here...and shouldn't work anywhere. I thank you for being a paid subscriber and respect your right to rant about me or anything else. But if you continue acting like a brutish idiots with subscribers who are trying to have a civil conversation and I will cut you off.

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Joe, Sorry that my substantive posts are too complicated for you to comprehend. And just like you make unsubstantiated derogatory remarks about President Trump, now you are doing the same to me. Both of these failures of yours are connected to the same cause; your inability to intellectually deal with facts and logic. If some of your subscribers are equally intellectually challenged and gullible enough to believe the moronic drivel from you and the rest of the fake news media and I happen to point it out to them, your excessively maternalistic approach isn’t going to help them grow in knowledge or critical thinking capability. Should not your subscribers be able to stand up for their ideas, or what in practice are more like misconceptions fed to them by the fake news media, without you rushing in to play mommy as if they were children?

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Call me naive or cynical. As an ex elected representative I call it realism. The Kamala Harris ‘pivot’ and the moderate campaign being run by her very impressive team is the mirror image of the pivot of The Labour Party under Kier Starmer in the UK that just won a “landslide election” (actually 70% of the country didn’t vote for them). The minute he took office he reversed that pivot and started elevating the progressive agenda in areas like free speech, government regulation on Labour, Property Ownership, a rush to net zero, DEI and identity politics.

Joe, do you really believe Kamala Harris is NOT like most politicians today? They’ll do whatever it takes to get elected then revert to form. The form of her 2000 run for Democrat Presidential Candidate. Her form as a politician in SFO and CA which begot a generation of progressive policies that has delivered a State that ranks in the lower quintile for K-12 public education, health and wealth inequality, homelessness, infrastructure improvement, public safety?

I have more faith than you do in the strength of The Republic to withstand a narcissistic bully’s attack on The Constitution. I don’t have your faith that Kamala Harris’ recent transformation to a moderate is anything more than the output of a very good campaign. The outcome will be no different to what the UK has seen.

Wanna bet?

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I would say naïve and gullible. If your reference of “a narcissistic bully’s attack on The Constitution” is about President Trump then it’s obvious that you don’t have the capability to discern between the truth and the propaganda of the fake news media. I agree that President Trump has a thin skin and will counter punch every personal attack (and there are an appalling number of them), but that isn’t narcissism. Anyone who is capable of paying attention would recognize that President Trump has and will sacrifice a lot personally to serve the country and its citizens whom he loves. Now the lying, Marxist, racist, community organizer B. Hussein Obama who hates the country and its citizens is a narcissist. And to what “attack on the Constitution” do you refer? The democrats widespread election fraud, the government false flag operation on January 6, the corrupt DOJ/FBI lawfare attacks on President Trump, parents at school board meetings, Christians at worship services, citizens praying outside of abortion clinics and the goofballs and grandmas who were let into the Capitol and wandered around taking selfies; are attacks on the constitution. And face it, the current ruling class hates the Constitution because it limits their power. Finally, if you think that Trump is a bully I would much rather have a strong, intelligent, successful alpha male leader who puts America first than the feckless leadership and personal grift of the current political and bureaucrat class. For four years under President Trump’s leadership we had peace and prosperity where the Biden/Harris administration has been a dumpster fire.

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I would just call it predictably partisan, turbocharged by a media-elite New Yorker's chronic, severe Trump Derangement Syndrome. There's no other explanation for his willingness to look away from Harris's record, from SF to the West Wing, and claim that she is somehow beyond the grievance and identity politics she has espoused for as long as she has been a player in national politics. Or to somehow impute some profound meaning from her rote, repetitive, canned speeches. But that's OK. Everyone is free to make their own decisions in a month.

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Thanks for providing your NYT essay here; since I ended my 30-year subscription in disgust a few months ago, this is the only way I’ll see it.

Lovely, small “c” conservative essay, gently balanced. You had this small “l” liberal at “Daniel Patrick Moynihan”.

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Joe, you’ve failed your charge; the only case you made for Cackling Harris is that she is not Trump and then you spew all of the regular lies of the failing New York Times, lies that I’m not going to waste my time to refute.

In addition, Ronaldus Maximus was correct that government was the problem and unfortunately years later it is an order of magnitude more corrupt. Once the US government industrial complex got away with assassinating JFK they grew to be the largest crime syndicate in the world, even larger than the CCP. President Eisenhower warned the country of this very dark undercurrent. It is hard to imagine that they could achieve the level of extortion of the middle class and grift that they have. But here we are $37 trillion in debt and inflation is their only way to keep the US dollar afloat. And the Pravda corporate media like the NYTimes are their propaganda machine.

If elected Harris isn’t going to run the country any more than Basement Biden is. President Trump is running against the US government crime syndicate and their Pravda media who will do whatever it takes to keep him from returning to office, including lawfare and assassination. And when they project their own criminal activity onto Trump, like weaponizing the DOJ, they expose their strategy. They are desperate to maintain their grift and not get caught.

This time President Trump will build a team that will ferociously drain the swamp, a swamp that is much larger than we understood when we elected him the first time. And only idiots call President Trump and his supporters racist. Record numbers of Blacks and Latinos support Trump so much so that B. Hussein Obama has been scolding Black men like an angry school principal. Along with being the best president in our lifetime President Trump provides tremendous entertainment by pissing off all the shallow, superficial, people his supporters want to be pissed off. The entertainment watching these petulant children set their hair on fire is something you just can’t buy.

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Well said.

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I haven’t seen Kamala Harris take a clear step away from identity politics the way Bill Clinton distanced himself from Sister Souljah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment

There are daily examples she could criticize.

Neither have I seen her take a clear step suggesting we reduce unnecessary regulations to gain efficiency.

And twice recently she was asked what she would do differently than Biden and she said NOT A THING. And yet she has emphasized her values have not changed.

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author

Fair points...but her silence on identity signifies that she's knows it's a loser and her comments about building stuff were unexpected and, I think, a good sign--perhaps that she learned something from Josh Shapiro's quick reopening of I-95 in Philly.

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Very well said, indeed. You've been practicing: "And not ever, if we can respect and curate our traditions and institutions." Echoes of Big Ben. And rightly so. The bigger elision/nonsense/hypocrisy of Trumpism is its reliance on the very institutions its denigrates and is bent on "destroying". What is actually happening of course is to weaken these institutions - the Justice Department, the courts, the regulatory agencies, etc. for a raid on the country by the big players, the rapacious industries that back La Grande Orange and the man himself. A "Muskerade", you might say, or to make it too respectable the Trumpian Paradox.

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Sorry for typos - yikes

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Excellent.

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Jay Turney

There's a lot to digest here, and much of it entails problems with Mr. Klein's priorities - he is a dedicated Democrat, after all, and can't be expected to be superhuman even in less vitriolic times. But some of it is worth thinking about. One problem I have with both sides on January 6 is something I know Mr. Klein knows about, likely better than me. Given anecdotal evidence of election irregularities in 2020, as well as the fact that some states have non-citizens listed as legitimate voters, why did Trump pursue the hairbrained scheme of attacking black boxes, computer voting, which many people, usually leftists, have alleged are too easy to commit fraud with? Why, when it is by definition unprovable! Why not do what every other candidate does in (modern) disputed elections ... demand recounts in the states in dispute! Duh! Trump painted himself into a corner with his ridiculous "don't certify the electors" ploy, and opened the door for an ugly, "All the King's Men" style riot outside the building where the electors were being certified!

If some of this is wrong, I would like someone to show how, because it is so obvious to me that Trump screwed the pooch, whatever else you may think about him.

Finally, I don't like minimizing the very real assault on the First Amendment by ostensibly Democrat-controlled censorship bureaucracy. This is no more a conspiracy theory than the time of tonight's sunset. It will take some guts for Democrats to reign in the advertising - censorship- govt. complex on the Web, or other places. So, there is that, and other items, I cannot digest.

In the long run, though, we are all dead. That is, if this country doesn't completely fall apart, there will be more non-white people than not. There will be more interracial marriages and offspring. And much more. 66 year old white guys, even those who read Fanon, Dubois, Douglass, etc, and listen to Whitney Houston and Ella Fitzgerald, etc, are not going to be the cultural elite anymore. I hate that people, of all backgrounds, will no longer be reading Shakespeare or Pynchon, because books will have rotted off the shelves while screens rule everything. But each individual and the whole human race is mortal. Things change. The Democrats are the future - for me, though, just not right now.

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Great essay. Thanks for the sanity.

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Excellent piece. Thank You.

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Great commentary, timely and well-placed.

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What he said!

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