Veep This

So we actually watched Joe's presser last night. We almost never watch these things. We thought Joe did okay, for him. Joe did his creepy whisper, and fell back on his old trick of numbering the things which needed to be done. We lost track of how many times Joe said 'for example'.

Maybe Joe did just good enough to quell the uprising against him? Yes, yes we saw the gaffs. So what? The point wasn't for Joe to do great. The point was for Joe to do good enough. A friend remarked, 'You just want him to stay in the race and lose to Trump.' We do. We do. We don't know. We weren't the target audience. We shall see.  

We are annoyed by all the Trump Veep talk. Only once in our lifetime has the vice-presidential pick made a difference. That was 1992. Bill Clinton's choice of Algore made a ticket of young, southern, moderate Democrats. This was the anti-Dukakis/Mondale/Carter ticket, and it won. Dick Cheney didn't add anything to the GOP ticket in 2000. Nobody but Beltway political geeks think that way. Quick, who was Hillary's Veep pick? And by the way, Barry Soetoro didn't pick Biden in 2008 for his foreign policy chops. Biden has no foreign policy chops.* Barry O picked Biden because he was a non-entity. In 2008 there could be only one sun the sky. 

Honestly, we'd pick DeSantis for Trump's. There's potential for 12 years of Project 2025, MAGA inspired destruction across the land. Though, Ron would make a heck of a MAGA AG, wouldn't he?

Oy. The Jerusalem Post reports, 'National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir received the highest amount of support among coalition party voters as a candidate to lead the right-wing bloc in a post-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu era...' This is a survey of the entire coalition, not just Likud. And Ben Gvir only gets 24 %. But he is such an asshole. The man has no business leading any coalition and is certainly unfit to be PM. Israel badly needs a center/center right coalition. This blog nominates former PM Naftali Bennett. 

2004 and More: Ah...20 years ago. We were still living in our rustic farmhouse in bucolic Peapack, NJ. We were taking one graduate course at AMU and writing an epic paper on the First Crusade. That paper, like virtually all of our graduate papers, would eventually become a magazine article. We read a lot of books on same. We were also busting our hump on A Line Through the Desert. This was our summer of worrying about George W. Bush and the upcoming election.

*Three years as president, three foreign policy disasters. As we said, no chops.