Originally published at: 4 Takeaways From The Night Of JD Vance’s Big Introduction At The GOP Convention - TPM – Talking Points Memo
The third night of the Republican Convention in Milwaukee had two goals: introduce audiences to the MAGA 2.0 take on foreign policy, and to former President Trump’s newly selected vice presidential candidate, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH). In both cases, what was included was as notable as what wasn’t. Here are four takeaways from RNC night…
All 4 takeaways should just be that Vance is a shameless, lying, pandering toady who just debased himself for a grasp at power.
Anything else is superfluous.
30 Likes
The biggest takeaway is that being a total self-serving fraud is actually one of his redeeming qualities.
27 Likes
Sounds like another ‘war on drugs’ - that worked well the last few times it was tried so why not another round; it’s such a crowd pleaser.
18 Likes
“Famous” as in Trump, famously, tried to extort its president is incorrect. “Infamous” is correct.
12 Likes
What a lying, conniving sack of shit. Also what exactly is a “black and brown” job that an immigrant can steal ?
Isn’t the onus on the employer to make sure the employee is a citizen or holds a green card ? Where is the crackdown on people like Trump for hiring undocumented people to serve drinks or clean up slop at Mar-A-Lardo ??
I could only watch the Vance the bearded doughboy for about 5 minutes. He makes me nauseous.
22 Likes
The “war on drugs” was a license to use state violence on non-whites, to confiscate their property, to disenfranchise them. It was indeed hugely popular, among the elite, among racists (which was most everybody), and among craven politicians who always want an easy platitude that resonates.
Organized Money is extremely excited about any opportunity to shrink the franchise, no matter the pretext. Few pretexts are more flexible than a war on drugs.
Another war on drugs would be a literal permission slip to do most of the worst things they are determined to do. It will absolutely please all the crowds that matter at the RNC, and it will please all villains who have captured the GOP (for different reasons).
And I guarantee they can sell it to almost everybody, because drug addiction really does produce horrifying anecdotes by the truckload, in all colors and shapes and sizes. The only thing easier to sell is actual drugs to actual addicts.
17 Likes
Aren’t TMF and Vance every woman’s dream?
4 Likes
Biden answered this one two days ago:
Biden said, “Folks, I know what a Black job is: it’s the Vice President of the United States! I know what a Black job is: the first Black president in American history, Barack Obama!”
– President Joe Biden, speaking to the NAACP
He also mentioned KBJ, and some others in his administration, but I’m having a hard time finding the full quote right now.
27 Likes
Are they planning to go out and sack the Sacklers and take all their money?
5 Likes
Some drugs are associated with whiteness, and those are fine. Other drugs are associated with blackness, and those are bad.
I’m not hip to the web of mythology that codes the various drugs as white or black, but obviously whatever the Sacklers sell counts as white drugs, and that means they aren’t even drug dealers.
Trump’s stated desire to go after drug cartels south of the border sounds to me just like Dick Cheney making plans to invade Iraq. He’s offering to use state power to eliminate the Sacklers’ competition.
That’s the GOP’s vision of international relations. Using the state to help a private actor establish a permanent monopoly. (And that’s how you know that Joe Manchin is a Republican: his family did an analogous thing with epipens. If it walks like a duck, and profiteers like a duck…)
16 Likes
MY MORNING RANT FOR THE WHINERS ON HERE
JOE BIDEN IS BEATING TRUMP IN THE POLLS. I DON’T GIVE FUCK WHAT THE MEDIA SAYS. WE ARE SEEING SKEWED POLLS EVERYWHERE. I SHARED A FEW TODAY. SO DON’T BUY INTO THE BULLSHIT
THEY WANT PRESIDENT BIDENT TO DROP OUT, BECAUSE THE GOP CONTROLLED MEDIA WANTS TRUMP TO RUN AGAINST THE BLACK WOMAN
WE KNOW DEMOCRATS WOULD STILL BACK VP HARRIS. BUT YOU NEED TO WAKE THE FUCK UP IF YOU THINK DISENFRANCHISED REPUBLICAN VOTERS OR INDEPENDENT VOTERS, WHO CAN’T IMAGINE A WOMAN BEING PRESIDENT, WOULD VOTE FOR HER
NOW, KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF & GET BACK TO FUCKING WORK GETTING PRESIDENT BIDEN & VP HARRIS ELECTED
https://x.com/DogginTrump/status/1813620295225479182?t=CtTakKwo17lKurNDZiCwpQ&s=19
30 Likes
> That America is not just an idea, it’s a place. He took the theme of American identity and ran with it, suggesting America is a nation in the oldest sense of the word.
*> *
> “It’s a people with a common history,” he said.
*> *
> It was a somewhat-quiet, somewhat-obvious dog whistle, gesturing toward the idea there are, as some on the far-right contend, “heritage Americans.” That is, Americans whose ancestors have lived here for generations, and who therefore, the argument goes, have a deeper understanding of what the country means. It’s a view of nationhood that’s long existed everywhere but here, and whose absence has long made our country exceptional.
So, J.D., what’s your stand on all those “heritage Palestinians”?
17 Likes
One other dumb question. Where, exactly, are they going to deport these people to ? Mexico ?? What if the new President of Mexico refuses to take them ? Are we really prepared to go to war with Mexico over migrants at the border ?
These people - Trump, Vance and Homan are all men with “paper assholes.” Never made an honest living at anything their whole lives. Pathetic poseurs in waiting. They have no clue of what they are talking about. None.
11 Likes
How about Heritage American Indians. We are the only country built on genocide, slavery and hypocrisy. We could use a little humility before we start discriminating between “Heritage Americans” and everyone else they exploited. Vance’s Heritage Americans were not for the most part, great people.
We BECAME great through democratic self-actualization and measures like Reconstruction and the recognition of voting and civil rights. Heritage had nothing to do with it.
22 Likes
As a real “legacy American” (I am the tenth generation in America. Among my ancestors is a leader of the Germantown Quakers who in 1688 made the non-ownership of slaves a condition of membership in their community; one of the soldiers who crossed the Delaware with General Washington to save the Revolution; and a young soldier who celebrated his 16th birthday on Little Round Top, fighting to save the Union.) I detest these service avoiding descendants of transported felonious English pig-fuckers (like JD Vance), latecomers who never were and never will be the same stuff as my ancestors who really did create America.
17 Likes
“Knock it the fuck off” may be an even less inspiring campaign slogan than “Finish the job”. I share Pelosi’s worry that Biden is not generating the same voter interest he did in 2020, with the result that he may not win, and even if his does, ends up with short coattails. I agree with you that putting Harris at the top of the ticket would be a disaster for the party. In any case, it’s just a few days until the virtual polling of delegates and Biden’s stepping aside becomes moot. The only replacements with national name recognition and political chops at this point would be Gavin Newsom, 56, or Gretchen Whitmer, 52. Both have little foreign policy experience (Biden’s wheelhouse), but Newsom should be pretty good on Asia Pacific issues. The EU is already planning on how to deal with four more years of Trump, who may abandon NATO and Ukraine (which faces its coldest winter ever with 80% of its thermal co-gen power plants knocked out by Russian bombing this year). Business was typically agnostic about presidents as long as they toed the neoliberal policy line, but the state corporatist model envisioned by Trump could change that. As the election approaches, it may be big companies that step in to save the Biden-Harris bacon. Vance, for example, talks gobbledygook about his plans for AI and Big Tech, yet we’re talking about huge reallocations of capital, labor and energy use in just a few years. In that sense, running something like a Newsom-Warnock ticket would make sense. But again, the matter is moot in a few days. Most regular voters are not going to switch candidates, so this will come down to turnout and the party that can motivate irregular voters or those that haven’t voted ever.
4 Likes
Idle chatter. You’re going to abrogate a largely uncontested primary outcome and throw away the crucial advantages of incumbency in order to cut off a quarter of a billion in funding from the Democrats and tie up the ticket in a flurry of Heritage Foundation ballot access lawsuits to be heard in at least some cases by corrupt Trump judges? Maybe you want to see what’s going on behind the scenes. We Now Know What Really Happened in Atlanta
11 Likes
Well getting covid right after his “cold” is not helping. Americans voted for a black man and they voted in majority for a woman, but god forbid a woman of color run.
2 Likes
Remember the Three Amigos movie, where they try to figure out what “infamous” means. They decide it must mean “super famous.”
2 Likes