J D Vance
October 15, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Senator Vance came to town yesterday. I take it that his principal mission was fundraising, but he made a public appearance outside the site of the former Minneapolis Police Department Third Precinct building and declared Minneapolis a city in decline. J.D.’s opposite number on the Democratic ticket of course let the building burn in the signal event of the George Floyd riots of 2020. The Star Tribune attempts to rebut
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October 14, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Who out there among you remembers the song “Plant a Radish” from The Fantastiks? Try to remember! We will have to make our way through the songs in that classic show some Sunday morning. In the meantime, consider this. Senator J.D. Vance planted a Raddatz — Martha Raddatz — on ABC’s This Week yesterday morning. The Washington Free Beacon covers the planting in “‘Do You Hear Yourself?’ Vance Skewers ABC
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October 13, 2024 — Scott Johnson
“Aside from that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” is a question so stupid that it is a one-line joke. Martha Raddatz rolled on at greater length with Senator Vance this morning on This Week (full video here, transcript here, clip below), but her question/statement ranked up with the Mrs. Lincoln joke for stupidity: RADDATZ: I want to — we played some other comments about migrants and migrants
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October 11, 2024 — John Hinderaker
In the early days after Tim Walz and JD Vance were announced as vice presidential candidates, Walz scored higher approval ratings. Neither man was broadly familiar to the public, so that was an artifact of biased press coverage. But in the aftermath of Vance’s crushing debate victory, public opinion has shifted. Rasmussen finds Vance with a positive approval rating, 50% favorable to 42% unfavorable. Walz is under water, at 42%
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October 3, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Last night I was on the Seth Leibsohn radio show in Phoenix. We mostly talked about Tuesday’s vice presidential debate, but that led us into a few other topics, like immigration, legal and illegal. It is a good conversation, and it goes on for several segments: I think the vice presidential debate will continue to reverberate. For the first day or two, Democratic Party sources have been spinning Tim Walz’s
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October 2, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Kamala Harris has held a narrow edge in the betting odds as compiled by RealClear Politics for the last several weeks, but after last night’s outstanding performance by JD Vance and disastrous performance by Tim Walz, the betting odds are now dead even: This is consistent with the point I made this morning, that this this year’s election is so excruciatingly close that even an edge in a vice presidential
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October 2, 2024 — John Hinderaker
JD Vance turned in an excellent performance last night. He was the most coherent and, I think, the most likable of any of the four candidates who have taken the debate stage this cycle. In comparison, Tim Walz presented a sad spectacle. He got off to a terrible start, visibly nervous and largely incoherent. He got a little stronger as the evening went on, but the damage was done. And
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October 2, 2024 — Scott Johnson
J.D. Vance squared off against our own Minnesota Governor Tim Walz in a debate hosted by CBS News last night. I have posted the full video at the bottom. CBS News has posted the transcript here. Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan. Vance bested Walz by a substantial margin. Indeed, to borrow the metaphor that Howard Cosell applied to boxing contests, Vance ever so gently pummeled Walz’s face into a bloody
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September 10, 2024 — Scott Johnson
It was Clint Eastwood playing Inspector Harry Callahan who laid down the humbling maxim in Magnum Force (1973): “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Pseudo historian Darryl Cooper abides by Callahan’s maxim in declining to debate real historian Andrew Roberts on the subject of Churchill and World War II. Cooper is sufficiently self-aware to know “how that would go for [him].” That is, it would not go well. A
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September 8, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In his 2019 review/essay on Tucker Carlson in the Claremont Review of Books, Michael Anton reasonably assessed: “Tucker Carlson has become the de facto leader of the conservative movement—assuming any such thing can still be said to exist. He didn’t seek the position. I doubt he wants it. He’d probably disclaim it, in fact. But the mantle settled on him nonetheless…” Perhaps without his show on Fox News, which Anton
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September 6, 2024 — Scott Johnson
According to Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper “may be the best and most honest popular historian in the United States. His latest project is the most forbidden of all: trying to understand World War Two.” Carlson added: “I want people to know who you are and I want you to be widely recognized as the most important historian in the United States.” You may not be familiar with Cooper’s views —
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September 5, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I want to draw attention to Park MacDougald’s take on what he calls “The Tucker Op” in his daily column at Tablet’s The Scroll. He takes account of more weirdness in the Carlson/Cooper hoedown than I did — e.g., Churchill’s alleged installation as prime minister by shadowy “financiers,” the likening of Israelis to the Nazis (“So, the Nazis were misunderstood, but also the Israelis are a bit like the Nazis.
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August 31, 2024 — Scott Johnson
CNN’s Dana Bash all but bowed to royalty when she interviewed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for a tricked-out hour broadcast this past Thursday. Bash’s attitude was proudly servile. Among other things, she scrupulously adhered to the party line on issues such as Harris’s disclaimer that she had the responsibility of a “border czar” for the overwhelming flood of illegal immigration that Biden and Harris have invited and facilitated. The
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August 25, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Governor and Vice President wannabe Tim Walz is big into attributions of weirdness, but he presents as another case study in Democrat projection. To take just one small example, I thought his bragging that none of his Nebraska high school classmates went on to Yale was weird. It made me think of my own high school class of 38 guys. Three went to Harvard, two went to Yale, one
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July 15, 2024 — John Hinderaker
As expected, Donald Trump announced today that J.D. Vance will he his running mate. I think that is a bad decision for a number of reasons. At 39, Vance is too young for the role. And with less than two years in the Senate as his only political office, he has nowhere near the experience that a vice president should bring to a ticket. Vance, who is unknown to the
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