RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “Nothing is ever meant to get solved…What’s important the marching, shouting, controlling, the self importance and the power:”

And the reliance on DoorDash. Don’t forget about that:

BERNIE SAYS THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD:

Welker: "Do you think Kamala is abandoning her progressive ideals?"

Bernie: "No… I think she is trying to be pragmatic and do what she thinks is right in order to win the election."

Oops, you weren't supposed to say that part out loud!pic.twitter.com/IKKbmGW5YA

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 8, 2024

During the Obama era, Jim Geraghty was fond of saying that “All Barack Obama statements come with an expiration date. All of them.” Kamala never explicitly walks backs her earlier promises to ban everything (plastic straws, cars, fracking, the police, whatever is the subject of the left’s two minute hate du jour), so one can safely assume some or most of these are still her goals.

IT WAS 50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Push the Button. Remembering Evel Knievel and his Snake River Canyon jump 50 years ago:

Imagine being in such a situation as Knievel was then, knowing that the X-2 would likely fail—it had failed its two tests—and going through with it anyway. He had created an epic around his canyon jump, built a whole career on it, really, and now it was time to face the deed. He’d even gotten Bob Arum, the boxing promoter managing the event, to agree to a ruse: posing at a press conference with a fake check for $6 million, supposedly Evel’s purse. (In reality, his guarantee was only $225,000, plus a cut from the gate, but the bluster worked again, both short-term and long: in its 2007 obituary for Knievel, the New York Times uses the $6 million figure.) If he cancelled now, he would spare his life but lose everything else. The expression “a fate worse than death” exists for a reason. Better to explode into eternity, with the consolation that all you have created will live on after you—now shrouded in the mystic—along with a slim alternative hope that, just maybe, something would happen and you would get lucky.

Something happened. He got lucky—so lucky as to be almost inconceivable. The X2 blasted off as intended in a roar of white steam, but the parachute deployed almost immediately, far earlier than it was supposed to. It’s generally been regarded as a system malfunction, though it can never be known for sure whether Evel himself might have prematurely pulled the latch to deploy the parachute.

Whatever happened inside the cockpit, the rocket, with its parachute out so early, soon slowed—helped by 20-mile-an-hour headwinds that blew it backward. A rarely seen angle from ABC’s postmortem coverage shows the Skycycle poised to clear the canyon when it slows up, dragged by the parachute; it drifts backward, back out over the canyon, and then begins a nosedive, its white steam now replaced by reddish smoke, like something out of the Batman television series of the late sixties. POOF! Except now Evel seemed headed for a SPLAT! as the rocket drifted downward to the canyon floor—and the Snake River.

He missed the river, Montville says, by a few feet. If he had landed there, he would have drowned; they wouldn’t have been able to get to him in time. Instead, the Skycycle, after colliding with the canyon wall on its way down, came to rest in some brush, out of view of the overhead cameras. Maybe the cushion on the Skycycle’s nose really was effective, though it’s hard to conceive of how the X-2, which looked about as sturdy as a discarded canister from an amusement park ride, could crash-land without breaking up and killing its passenger. Never mind: somehow, Knievel was soon visible again, riding on a rescue craft, waving to the crowds. He hadn’t achieved the goal, but he had gone through with his impossible try—and lived to tell. A life defined by dares had climaxed by carrying out the grimmest, gravest dare of all.

That wasn’t how the media saw it. They derided Snake River as a fizzle, and some who had paid to watch it called it a “rip off,” a term that already resonated with 1970s youth culture: Vietnam, Watergate, the end of many illusions. A rip-off it was definitively not. For one thing, the X-2 could launch only when Evel pressed a button in the cockpit that would release 5,000 pounds of steam pressure. He pressed it. Some may have been dissatisfied because the event offered so little pleasure for the eyes—and wallet, with $10 charged at the closed-circuit theaters and $25 at the canyon site itself. There was enough, though, if you knew where to look: like the stomach-grabbing moment when Evel is lowered into the cockpit, snug as a screw drilled into hardwood; his body settles into the tiny slot in a way that makes it seem like he can never get out.

Figuratively, he never could.

Knievel’s self-created myth, and desire to keep topping his own exploits led him to an impossible place. But for a while, he was a dominant part of American culture in a decade where the nation itself seemed determined to crash into a brick wall. In other words, he was perfect for the cynical decade of the 1970s.

IT WAS 20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Rathergate at 20.

When the film Truth premiered in 2015, only a little over ten years after the events depicted, film critics seemed to take the movie as a historical account. Based on Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty, the film was something else again. It prompted John and me to revisit the story in the Weekly Standard article “Rather shameful.” On Power Line I itemized “problems” with the film in “Lies of Truth.”

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the CBS News broadcast that we helped expose as a fraud in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election. I find that even those who vaguely recall the scandal know next to nothing about it. I like to say that we contributed to Dan Rather’s early retirement from CBS News. We foolishly thought that a corner had been turned.

However, Dan Rather lives! He is celebrated as a lion of truth, justice, and the American way. Earlier this year Netflix broadcast a documentary that is illustrative of the continuing descent in which we find ourselves. This is what I wrote about it on Power Line.

When Rathergate broke, even the then-Washington Post-owned Slate in September of 2004 described him as Dan Rather: The anchor as madman. And as Glenn wrote at the time, Rather’s implosion was a reminder not to trust what was being presented by old media (or by an media, for that matter):

The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn’t ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn’t fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I’m not sure. It’s not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.)

The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy.

That’s because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren’t linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that’s impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.

(This is actually a lot like the world lawyers live in — nobody trusts us enough to take our word for, well, much of anything, so we back things up with lots of footnotes, citations, and exhibits. Legal citation systems are even like a primitive form of hypertext, really, one that’s been around for six or eight hundred years. But I digress — except that this perhaps explains why so many lawyers take naturally to blogging).

You can also refine your arguments, updating — and even abandoning them — in realtime as new facts or arguments appear. It’s part of the deal.

This also means admitting when you’re wrong. And that’s another difference. When you’re a blogger, you present ideas and arguments, and see how they do. You have a reputation, and it matters, but the reputation is for playing it straight with the facts you present, not necessarily the conclusions you reach. And a big part of the reputation’s component involves being willing to admit you’re wrong when you present wrong facts, and to make a quick and prominent correction.

When you’re a news anchor, you’re not just putting your arguments on the line — you’re putting yourself on the line. Dan Rather has a problem with that. For journalists of his generation, admitting an error means admitting that you’ve violated people’s trust. For bloggers, admitting an error means you’ve missed something, and now you’re going to set it right.

What people in the legacy media need to ask themselves is, which approach is more likely to retain credibility over time? I think I know the answer. I think Dan Rather does, too.

Presumably, now that CNN has resurrected the television career of Brian Stelter, one of his favorite guests will return as well. Will Stelter’s new show still be called “Reliable Sources?”

Related: What Dan Rather paved the way for: VDH on A decade of untruth: Adding up the media’s lies about Trump and Biden.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

'Maybe We Took A Wrong Turn Somewhere,' Thinks Party Whose Candidate Just Got Endorsed By Dick Cheney And Vladimir Putin https://t.co/uSLyFxPade pic.twitter.com/5u986HScTf

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 7, 2024

ROBERT SPENCER: Tucker’s Historian Wasn’t There to Talk History — He Was Making Policy Points for Today.

[Darryl] Cooper’s point is that the Israelis are like the Germans, launching a war without a plan and ending up committing genocide. This analogy outrageously ignores the fact that Hamas started the war with Israel by invading the country and murdering 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. Did the Soviet Union invade Germany before the German tanks rolled into Russia on June 22, 1941? No. In fact, Stalin was scrupulously keeping to the terms of his pact with Hitler, and studiously ignoring the many signs that the Germans were about to break that agreement.

Also, the Israelis are not committing genocide, either by accident or design. It is false that they had “no plan to care for the millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war.” West Point Professor John Spencer says that Israel has, in fact, “created a new standard for urban warfare” In a March 25 article in Newsweek, Spencer stated that as of that date, “some 18,000 civilians have died in Gaza, a ratio of roughly 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. Given Hamas’ likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1. Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.”

Cooper ignores all that, as demonizing Israel is the entire point of his discussion with Tucker Carlson. Cooper wants us to think that Hitler was pushed reluctantly into war and ended up killing Jews out of grim necessity and even worse, a desire to be humane. Then he wants us to see Israel as the new Hitler, committing genocide not out of malice but out of an abject failure of planning, but either way, the point is clear: the U.S. should abandon Israel and stop aiding its allegedly imperialist and genocidal enterprise. By making Hitler seem more reasonable, Cooper attempts to make betraying an ally seem more reasonable as well. And Tucker Carlson, to his everlasting discredit, earnestly played along.

Tucker morphed into Pat Buchanan so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

WHAT DOES JOE BIDEN THINK ABOUT DICK CHENEY ENDORSING KAMALA? Let’s ask him!

According to Joe Biden, Dick Cheney is the most dangerous Vice President in American history.

Cheney supports Kamala Harris. Seems about right. pic.twitter.com/aSrZ3kV2lG

— MAZE (@mazemoore) September 6, 2024

Also, let’s ask him about the massive amount of plastic surgery he’s had done since this debate in 2008. And why isn’t he stuttering in this clip?

KEEP ROCKIN’! Nice Try: LA Times Whines GOP Ducking Their Share of Blame for…California’s Ills.

How small is the GOP’s minority in the once-Golden State? This small:

(Classical reference in headline.)

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Kamala Quietly Asks Aides If She Should Just Try Sleeping With The Economy.

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

What could possibly go wrong?

Flashbacks:

● Ellison Posts Photo of Himself Posing With ‘Antifa’ Handbook, Says It Will ‘Strike Fear’ in Trump.

● Democratic Deputy Chair Keith Ellison Meets With Far-Left U.K. Leader Accused Of Anti-Semitism.

● Minnesota AG Keith Ellison’s Chief of Staff Promotes Pro-Hamas Rally.

● The Compleat Keith Ellison.

● Star Tribune sues to unseal U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison’s divorce records: DFL candidate for attorney general was accused of abuse by an ex-girlfriend.

NFL SEASON KICKS OFF WITH SURPRISING LAST-MINUTE TRADES:

● Alan Dershowitz Announces Departure from Democratic Party, Citing ‘Anti-Zionist’ DNC.

● Democrats React to Dick Cheney Endorsing Kamala Harris and Expose Themselves in the Process.

UPDATE: More complete list of preseason and opening weekend trades found here:

As Mollie Hemingway adds:

MORE:

What can be, unburdened by what has been:

BIDEN DROPS THE MASK: ‘We should have named it what it was.’

The Inflation Reduction Act was perhaps the signature achievement of the Biden-Harris administration. The only problem was that it wasn’t about inflation and did not reduce inflation. Rather, it was a giant, $369 billion climate spending bill that Democrats, for whatever reason, believed they could not openly say was a giant, $369 billion climate spending bill. And since inflation, fueled by other Biden-Harris spending, was raging at the time, they decided to call the climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act” and hope nobody would notice.

TO BE FAIR, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY WE WERE PROMISED: The Moon is slowly drifting away from Earth and it’s beginning to impact us.

“Slowly drifting away?” Brother you have no idea what we were told the 21st century would portend!

OLD AND BUSTED: Kamala Harris says she supports plastic straw ban during CNN climate change marathon.

—Fox News, September 4th, 2019.

The New Hotness? Don’t even get her started on Starbucks lids!

Kamala Harris claimed that Donald Trump was an 'unserious' person:
"We talked about those lids. You know how those lids on those Starbucks cups, they're white, right?
So if you wear lipstick, they get all over the lid. So I find myself in meetings, if I'm the only woman, I keep… pic.twitter.com/gsXBj2eJ5u

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) September 6, 2024

EVEN THE MEDIA DOESN’T LIKE KAMALA:

Do you get the feeling that the media is starting to dislike Kamala Harris?

Despite all the Joy©  that the media had recently been peddling with all the conviction of a billboard in Pyongyang, one senses an underlying mood of growing discomfort.

“Was CNN’s big Kamala Harris interview a dud?” asked the Washington Post. CNN itself criticized Kamala for her flip-flopping on border security. MSNBC ripped her for her flip flopping on Israel. Arch-leftist Chris Cillizza wondered if there is anything Kamala actually believes. Axios called her out for mimicking Biden’s basement campaign strategy. Even the Guardian insisted she needs to stop hiding and to talk to the press.

That’s certainly a 180 degree change from the headlines she was making throughout July.

What to make of all this? At this point in the Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton, and Biden campaigns, the media had by now firmly circled the wagons and was playing its dutiful part as a neutered Pravda to the Democrat Politburo. There was no question of ever criticizing their candidate in public. So what is different this time around?

I doubt the DNC-MSM liked Biden very much (who never failed to publicly humiliate them, long before his brains turned to applesauce), but as state media propagandists, they knew their job was to defend him. Similarly, they’ll do their best to push Kamala into the end zone this time around as well. As an earlier Democrat presidential candidate was famously quoted as saying, “You don’t have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line.”

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The shameful Nazi apologism of the Very Online right.

Forget that toothless crackhead who says he had sex with Barack Obama. Never mind the lowlife pimp who cosplays as a lifestyle guru, Andrew Tate. This week Tucker Carlson scraped even lower in the barrel of cranks to find a guest for his chat show on X. He had on Darryl Cooper, a historian, podcaster and – wait for it – apologist for Adolf Hitler. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now reached the ‘Were the Nazis really the bad guys?’ stage of contrarian online blather.

Tucker’s chat with Cooper has caused a storm. As well it might. Also known as ‘Martyr Made’, Mr Cooper is a notorious historical revisionist. He has huge beef with Winston Churchill. Churchill, not Hitler, was the true villain of the Second World War, he says. He’s a giddy promoter of the myth that Hitler made a peace offer in 1940 but Churchill rejected it and insisted on plunging the world into war. Hitler the peacenik – who saw that coming down the pipeline of online bollocks?

What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.

For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted, was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony, but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.

Cooper’s shameless saluting of Nazi Paris cuts to the heart of the Hitler apologetics that have spread like a pox through the Very Online right. These people are in the grip of a deranged fantasy: that Europe in the Nazi era was better than the new Europe of genderfluidity, mass immigration, Islamist terrorism or whatever. They scurry like the abject moral cowards they are from the undoubted problems of the present into an utterly fictional past. A past where Hitler was a peacemaker, Europe was calm (until that rotter Churchill came along), and ‘Western civilisation’ remained intact. Overlooked – wilfully – is the war, savagery and unprecedented programme of extermination unleashed by the Nazis, all of which added up to the most violent and egregious assault on Western civilisation in history.

While Abigail Shrier and Tablet’s Park MacDougald wrote that they think Tucker is enjoying the Reich Stuff because secretly, he wants Kamala to win, Jonah Goldberg disagrees. In “Tucker’s 1945 Project,” he writes:

The only prominent “What is Tucker doing?” theory I disagree with is the idea that he’s trying to get Kamala Harris elected. The number of things Tucker could say—truthfully!—that could get Trump in Dutch is very long (including things he’s said to me). Choosing to boost Hitler apologetics to get Kamala Harris elected is some four-dimensional chess fantasy stuff. I do think causing headaches for Trump and J.D. Vance is a benefit for him, because forcing them to either kowtow or denounce him is a flex move. Vance has already made it clear he won’t criticize Tucker, which is a demonstration—in Tucker’s estimation—of his power.

No, the most likely explanation is that he likes Nazi apologetics, either on the merits or because of the reaction, or both.

So what’s to like? Again, I dismiss entirely the suggestion that he thinks he’s telling the truth. He might have convinced himself he believes it, but veracity isn’t the point. So what is appealing about the idea that the West took a wrong turn by opting to destroy Hitler? Giving antisemitism and Holocaust denial some lebensraum might be part of it, sure. I’m not trying to minimize the evil of that.

But I think that to the extent there’s an ideological project behind Tucker’s latest schtick, antisemitism isn’t the primary motivation. Sure, pissing off “the Jews” has its joys for him. But that’s probably gravy. Tucker is an acolyte of Patrick Buchanan and sees himself as the Buchanan of the 21st century. It’s worth recalling that Buchanan fell—or leapt—into the same intellectual bog Tucker is rolling in now. In 2008, Buchanan wrote Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. As bad as his argument was, it was far more serious than the nonsense spewed by Tucker’s “historian.”

Buchanan’s larger project, laid out in that book and several others, was to make the path America followed after World War II a “wrong turn.” In the postwar era, America turned its back on many of the things Buchanan thought made America “great.” Now, Buchanan’s version of greatness is saturated with just-so stories, nostalgia, dyspepsia, grievances, and a lot of correlation confused for causation. But in his telling, we became an “empire” and stopped being a “republic.” We admitted a lot of immigrants who had no business becoming Americans. Feminism, gay rights, Israel, free trade, civil rights, and other “problems” emerged in the postwar era. If “the past is a foreign country,” he liked that country better.

Buchanan was by no means entirely wrong in all of his criticisms of postwar America, but his fixation that it was all both entirely lamentable and entirely avoidable was entirely wrong. Buchanan changed as he got older (I was friendly with him, as were my parents). He got bitter and cranky. Tragically childless—no one tell J.D. Vance!—I think he was cut off from the best ambassadors of the country-that-is-the-present we can have in this life: our own children.

The advantage of Tucker’s 1945 Project is that it’s easier to sell than the similar Wrong Turn projects swirling on the right. The new right nationalists and postliberals have been peddling the idea that we took a “Wrong Turn” with John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, England’s Glorious Revolution, or the Enlightenment generally. It’s hard to sell the poorly educated or miseducated on that stuff, in part because most of them have no idea who John Locke was or what the Enlightenment was about. But everybody’s heard of Hitler and Churchill.

Not surprisingly, the left is enjoying Tucker’s election eve “1945 Project” immensely. Axios describes it as “MAGA’s media meltdown,” before concluding, “Trump won’t have issues turning out his base in November, regardless of the state of conservative media. The bigger question is which voices will fill the vacuum when Trump is eventually gone.”

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: NPR: A new kind of ‘eco-chaplain’ is helping people deal with ‘climate grief’ – ‘Grief, anger and depression’ from ‘feeling that it may be too late to save a planet in deep peril’ – ‘Trump’s election freaked everyone out.’

As Joel Kotkin wrote in Newsweek in September of 2022: Environmentalism Is a Fundamentalist Religion.

Today’s climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil’s spawn. The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world. And as with other kinds of religious fundamentalism, the climate hysteria is often overwrought and obviously so; a decade ago, the same activists predicted a planetary disaster by 2020 if the U.S. and China did not reduce their emissions by 80 percent—which of course never happened.

This approach is a losing one that reduces the effectiveness of the green lobby. What’s needed to combat climate change is a pragmatic approach based on adapting to real and verifiable dangers. And this starts with environmentalists acknowledging the limits of our ability to curb emissions in the short run.

This is not to cede the fight. The reality is what we do in the West means increasingly little. Today’s biggest emitters comes from China, which already emits more GHG than the U.S. and the EU combined, while the fast growth in emissions comes increasingly from developing countries like India, now the world’s third largest emitter. These countries have developed a habit of blaming climate change on the West, then openly seeking to exempt themselves from net zero and other green goals. And the West’s penchant for hyper-focusing on our own state or national emissions misses the reality of where the future problems are actually concentrated.

Fortunately, the religious true believers know who will save them:

But some true believers are now curiously attacking actual religions: Greta Thunberg arrested at pro-Palestinian protest.

But then, as I wrote earlier this year, plus ça change: the original European environmentalists had a strange coalition with Islamists as well.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Deja Vu All Over Again Edition.

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

'Never Has America Faced A Greater Threat Than Donald Trump,' Says Guy Who Started Two Wars And Shot A Dude In The Face https://t.co/7xNBIdkIYx pic.twitter.com/Yh6DUiL87s

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) September 6, 2024

DOMINIC GREEN: Tucker Carlson’s bad history.

When armchair generals refight World War II in podcasts, they confirm that World War II still intervenes between us and the rest of history. Current policymaking is stupefied before its terrible shadow. Every crisis is Munich, every rival a Hitler. Carlson and Cooper don’t want to reduce the war’s scale in retrospect, only to reshape its image. The problem, for them anyway, is that the historical record shows that isolationism cannot contain aggressive antagonists, with the appeasement and isolationism of the 1930s the clearest proof of all. The solution, for them anyway, is to promote the false history of the Old Right and Pat Buchanan. That is self-pitying and provincial. It cannot secure America’s position in a realigning world. But it will make the hucksters rich. This is what Tucker doesn’t want you to know.

Or to put it another way:

UPDATE:

On January 25, 1965, the day after Churchill's death, Leo Strauss began his class with these remarks: pic.twitter.com/TzNLuCJaDF

— heraclitusfan99 (@heraclitusfan99) September 5, 2024

YET ANOTHER FORMER HITLER RELEASED FROM THE BUNKER, REHABILITATED, GIVEN NEW SUIT: Dick Cheney is voting for Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney says.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: “I’m just trying to find the bridge. Has anybody seen the bridge?”

—Robert Plant, singing on Led Zeppelin’s “The Crunge” in 1973.

Now we know why he can’t: TikTok has destroyed pop’s best asset – the bridge.

JUDGE DELAYS TRUMP HUSH-MONEY SENTENCING UNTIL AFTER ELECTION.

MORE LIES: Kamala Harris, Associated Press Completely Distort JD Vance’s Message About School Shootings.

Along with:

● New York Times Twists Heritage Report to Smear J. D. Vance as Right-Wing Bogeyman.

● The London Telegraph: School shootings are just a fact of life, says JD Vance.

● And the popular in the States London Daily Mail: JD Vance calls school shootings a ‘fact of life’ in wake of Georgia massacre: ‘psychos are going to go after our kids.’

UPDATE:

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME SOCIALISM?! The Nation Aims for Worst Take of the Year Complaining About Democrats Embracing ‘Dark Side’ of Football.  “This is certainly a take, and definitely in the running for the worst take of 2024:”

It may seem like the Democrats are playing offense. That certainly fits a sports cliché, but it gets the underlying political dynamic backward. Football—and the reclamation of patriotic symbology—is pulling the Democratic Party to the right. While the left never had a coordinated plan to sink pro football, the last decade’s exposure of the sport’s corrosive nature is a good thing. People have the right to know the negative physical and psychological effects that can arise from playing the most popular sport in the country. Football and medical whistleblowers have exposed a right wing willing to look away from public health if it means pats on the back and campaign dollars from the reactionary billionaires that run the NFL.

“While the left never had a coordinated plan to sink pro football,” we all know of one fella who really gave it the ol’ college try, speaking of sports cliches. Good luck with that, though: