Left Jabs

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The Repair Guy Bares his Politics

He was there to patch a crack in our foundation. It was a tricky job that had, over the course of a year, vexed several other repair guys who were supposed to know what they were doing. The foundation was still under warranty, so we didn’t much care how many tries it took, as long it got fixed. But our builder, who was ultimately responsible for the warranty, wanted to get this off his plate, so he finally splurged and sent in Bill, the foundation whisperer. Every trade has one, the go-to guy, the hotshot who’s more expensive, but worth it. As Bill was happy to tell us himself. Fifty-something, loud and gregarious, oozing self-confidence, he looked over the crack, turned up his nose at the previous repairs, then told us he’d have it fixed in an hour and a half. Which he proceeded to do, and apparently quite well, though we haven’t yet had enough rain to really test the repair. All of which would have added up to a reasonably satisfying experience if we could

The Convention is Over, But the Video is Just Getting Started

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 convention was

The Accelerating Madness of the Republican Nominee

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 matter

Usha Vance is Just a Bit Conflicted

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 straight fa

The Benighted States of America

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

It’s Okay to Fall in Love, But We Have to Fall in Line

They like the fact that this is a young Black woman squaring off against an old white guy. They like that she's going to all just talk about abortion. And they like the fact that she was a prosecutor and he's a felon. They like that framing. — JesseWatters , Fox News host I couldn’t have said it better. Watters, the current occupant of Tucker Carlson’s old time slot, was trying to sound smarmy and insulting — his default setting — but when you see his words on the page, you realize he’s reading the situation with uncanny accuracy. Hell yes, we like that framing. More, please. The rollout of Brand Kamala was superb. A marketing coup of the first order, I was agog. Before we’d even absorbed that Biden was stepping aside, the websites were up, the lawn signs were printed, the merch was available for purchase, and there she was, ready for her closeup. A star is born. It was as smooth a launch as I’ve ever seen, and to think it was cobbled together in less than t