The Monday Kamala

And a good Monday morning to Stroock's Books reader(s) wherever they may be.

Ah, Remembrance Day, a day after the Marines celebrated their 249th birthday. If this commercial doesn't make you emotional, well, we don't want you reading this blog. That final shot is something. 

And there's just something about this pic on Remembrance Day:

With apologies to our Australian reader(s).

On Remembrance Day, reader(s) will permit us to mention our own Pershing in Command: A Study of the American Expeditionary Force in the Great War. We've wondered if redoing the cover would lead to a sales boost. Probably not, but we will wonder some more. 

We had actual rain last night into morning here in New Jersey, our first real rain since September. That should help with the wildfires. 

Mrs. Stroock's Philadelphia Eagles went to Dallas and took care of business, defeating the Cowboys sans Dak Prescott 34-7. Our own hapless New York Giants went to Munich and lost to the equally hapless Carolina Panthers. Never lose in front of the Germans, Big Blue, they see it as a sign of weakness. This should officially end the Daniel Jones era in New York. As for the Jets, well, same old Jets. 

We begin our second week of unabashed basking in the glow of Trump's victory. Today begins election post-mortem week here at Stroock's Books. Let's start at the beginning, by which we mean Will's old formulation: circumstances, ideas, and candidates.

So yeah...we didn't do election predictions because we didn't want to write the 'I was wrong. here's how and why' column. We admit to wimping out.* We missed badly in previous elections. In 2012 we missed because after W's 2004 victory we assumed the GOP had mastered the art of turning out the vote and didn't believe polls showing a D+5 electorate. Actually, we were right about that. The electorate was D+6. In 2020 we were wrong because, well we just predicted Trump would win the kind of victory that he won last Tuesday. Here's what we wrote for our Kremlin handlers four years ago. 

Which is why when we saw what we saw in the Kamala campaign, we weren't sure we were really seeing what we thought we were seeing. And did others see what we saw. Victory Davis Hanson did. Here's his postmortem in the NY Post.  We thought we saw an utterly vapid, empty and frankly, stupid candidate. We'll skip the bad jokes, but Kamala was a woman of no particular accomplishment who had been positioned for success by the men in her life, starting with Willie Brown.** She was a bad candidate. 

Back in 2020, Tulsi Gabbard needed two minutes to nuke that woman from orbit. The candidate since then showed zero growth, or even the ability to grow. There's no there, there. An empty cab pulled up to the White House and out stepped Kamala. A humble woman with much to be humble about. Choose whatever cliched insult one likes. They all hit the mark. I come from the middle class, she doesn't, should be on Kamala's gravestone. 

How bad is Kamala's judgement? She thought campaigning with Liz Cheney was a good idea. Who's voting for Kamala, or anybody else, because of Liz Cheney? And she chose Tim Walz. This blog has said again and again the veep selection doesn't help win an election, we're reconsidering that in light of JD Vance. But we know for sure that Tim Walz hurt the Dems. 

Forget Walz's hard leftism. Forget his dalliance with China. Tim Walz is a weirdo, a weirdo in a way most women don't see. Ladies, he's the guy that uses the urinal right next to yours. He's the guy that loiters in the locker-room. He's the guy that tries to make a raunchy remark about a girl and gets it wrong.  He's the guy who flashes jazz hands at an Iron Maiden concert. There's just something off about Tim Walz. 

As for ideas, Kamala had no ideas. Kamala is not capable of having ideas. 

Circumstances...? We ask Democrats the same question we asked in 2016: why do you think this race was a slam dunk? Kamala was selected by the Democrat elite after a failed and unpopular president glitched on stage. Nobody voted for Kamala. She was the incumbent representing an unpopular administration with a terrible job approval rating. The economy is meh, inflation is high, the international scene terrible, and so were Kamala's circumstances. 

Kamala's was a terrible campaign with a terrible candidate. No wonder the election wasn't even close. 

*We also had a bad case of the yips. We spent much of the weekend, Monday and Tuesday nervous and downright mopey. Mrs. Stroock was concerned. 

**Now there was a man and a gifted politician.