I will say that, in principle, holding your nose and voting for a bad-but-less-bad choice is defensible behavior in a democracy. Certainly it will be a very rare occasion when any candidate is near-perfect. Just like the Fellowship of the Ring having to choose between a) a dangerous, wintry mountain pass, b) the Mines of Moria, or c) trying to sneak by Saruman's tower unobserved, sometimes you have to pick the least bad option and go with it.
Trump is so uniquely, terribly, amazingly, destructively awful it is very hard for me to imagine how anyone, from Ted Cruz to Elizabeth Warren, could possibly be evaluated as worse. To quote the OP:
Our options are not equally bad. While I oppose much of the Biden-Harris-Walz platform, those objections pale in comparison to a candidate who is willing to tear down constitutional guardrails for his personal benefit. In 2016, I remember people (approvingly) saying that Trump was prepared to “burn it all down,” and he is. He’s willing to destroy any institution that gets in the way of his obtaining and maintaining power. We’ve seen it time and again by now.
That’s not the way to make America great again. That’s an existential threat to America’s continued survival as a constitutional republic.
It’s also an existential threat to Ukraine, Europe, and Taiwan. MAGA isolationism and pro-Putin policies would endanger Ukraine’s survival in the near term. It would also embolden China to take action against Taiwan. This isn’t an issue of lofty principles or culture wars, it’s an issue of real world realpolitik.
The threats from the two parties are not the same.
I don't really agree with all of the OP's reasoning but this is the destination that it seems to me principled conservativism would arrive at. The immediate and durable erosion of the rule of law and institutional integrity that a second Trump administration would bring could not possibly be worth the benefit of the fraction of implementable policies that a conservative would see as beneficial regardless of the President's identity, particularly when most of those policies would be evanescent and endure for only as long as Republicans could hold the White House.
YMMV. I'm generally okay with using a "more bad versus less bad" rubric, but here the choice is between Boromir and Sauron. Boromir had flaws to which he sometimes succumbed but basically meant well even when he disagreed with the prevailing wisdom about how to proceed.
Giving Sauron the One Ring back is never going to be the less bad option.
(I do not see Pinky saying -- at least not here -- "Let's give Sauron the Ring." Saying that there'd be some policies resulting from a Trump administration that Pinky considers beneficial is not the same thing. And we must admit that Sauron taking charge of Mordor probably did dramatically increase per-Orc productivity, so that was a silver lining of sorts?)
Lyndon Johnson is one. Unfortunately we got to learn how inspired it was when he acceeded to the Presidency.
Al Gore was... not inspired, maybe, but a bolder choice than it seems now (a second southern Democrat?), because now we think of him as the very personification of "dull and boring."
Before that... McKinley picking Teddy Roosevelt, maybe? Jefferson picking Madison?
Heard an interesting observation. Don't remember from who. Not my idea. But I kind of like it.
Campaign moves are often about opening up "permission gates," so voters can come to you. For instance, Trump seems to have thought that by going to speak at the National Association of Black Journalists, he was opening up a "permission gate" to allow black voters to consider voting for him. (Not sure that worked if that truly was the goal and I'm not sure it was.) The J.D. Vance pick was a bad one because it didn't open up any new permission gates for different people to join the Trump coalition.
Picking a normie-looking, normie-talking, white guy from a middle America state who isn't a lawyer, served in the Army, doesn't have a fancy college degree, has guns, is from a rural area, etc. opens up a "permission gate" for voters who identify with some of those traits to say they would consider voting for Kamala. On the one hand, it's safe because we're talking about majority sorts of traits, but maybe that's a necessary serving of white bread under the barbeque, after so much effort has gone in to portraying Kamala Harris as "other" in one way or another.
Again, I'm not sure that I buy this idea, but I certainly see it and get what ... whoever it was ... on whatever channel it was on ... was trying to get at, particularly with the idea of a "permission gate."
If this idea of "permission gates" is right, then it seems like it might be possible to close them, too, either your own by a misstep or your opponent's by a clever maneuver. And although I've cited bad gate moves by Trump here, that doesn't mean he's always had bad moves; the man did get elected in 2016 and came close again in 2020. These are just the recent ones that come to mind as signals to voters of this nature.
If anything, I think voters affirmatively like the "I cleaned up my act and now look at me" story, which is great until and unless you stumble. So... don't stumble, I guess.
This is the story I think they're going to tell with Walz. "Give us power, and we'll make sure your kids are fed at school so they can learn, we'll make you safer on the road when you drive, we'll help you go to college," and so on. The best Walz quote I've seen so far is that you don't win elections to accumulate political capital, you win elections to use it. Dems will call Minnesota a Democratic policy success story and take whatever hits come along with that for things that haven't worked out as well as Walz and his slim governing majority there had hoped.
So there's people saying:
* Harris is "Hitler and Stalin combined but times 200,"
* Harris' yet-to-be-named running mate will support "allowing men to beat up women in the Olympics,"
* Saw the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics as "the end of Western Civilization,"
* And see Harris fundraising Zoom calls as a "harbinger of end times" (as opposed to, say, a prodigious use of bandwidth).
Well, whatever you do, don't call these people "weird!" We shouldn't upset anyone.
Hey Lee, I have a professional question, if I might bend your ear for about five minutes. Probably easy for you. Would you mind shooting me an e-mail at [myname] at gmail?
Apparently the campaign is running with the idea that Kamala can only be Indian-American or African-American but not both. What they think are "gotcha" headlines and quotes are being projected on screens at the Harrisburg rally going on right now.
Presumably, the campaign people, or Trump, or both, believe this will be to their net advantage.
None of these have a llama's spit's chance in a bonfire of actually passing any time soon. So mainly they're interesting as political gambits. And I suspect they'll be popular!
If the Arizona GOP were capable of nominating anyone but Kari Lake, I would say that yes, this is a serious objection. But if your opponents insist on handing you W's, I say you should use them.
I don't much care who the VP pick is from among these choices. Walz brings a very interesting Democratic legislative success story from Minnesota and I think any midwesterner would help with Wisconsin and Michigan. (Minnesota itself is, if not in play, marginal.)
But I think Kelly brings a lot of short term advantages and the long term can be deferred. Especially if, as I noted above, the Arizona GOP repeatedly takes aim before shooting itself in the foot.
Why is this the thing that marks the fall of Snopes?
Is it that they're addressing the question at all? Seems to me the sort of thing Snopes was created to address. I agree with @CJColucci below: whether a bullet or shrapnel caused the wounds on the candidate's ear is not particularly important. Perhaps the essay failing to point out "But this doesn't really matter, does it?" is your complaint?
If it's "Snopes is debasing itself by even addressing this question," no I don't agree with that. This seems to me to be exactly what Snopes does.
Was it the reasoning they used? I think they're right that if the teleprompters were intact after the shot, that means the teleprompters didn't take an errant shot and generate shrapnel, is a pretty reasonable one. Glass shards would have to come from somewhere. There doesn't seem to have been any other glass around to create these purported shards. In the absence of such phantom shards of glass, the bullet itself seems to be the most likely object to have caused the wounds. Is there some part of this logic I'm missing?
Brandon, maybe the circumstances can provide moral justification. You'll notice that after flirting with the idea that a good PM would resign for this, I backed away and concluded that the real challenge presented here is taking moral responsibility for it.
If you're going to say that there might be circumstances under which taking moral responsibility for it could be done with pride, or at least lack of regret, okay. We aren't told any of those in the question; the examinee responding to the question (in 2011 or 2024 or at any other time) must then imagine and posit such circumstances for which the use of lethal force was the least bad available option.
That still addresses taking moral responsibility -- by way of lightening the burden before shouldering it.
Yeah, but it's questionable in my mind if such laws are enforceable, or if the Electors' decisions are privileged. These laws haven't been enforced in the past, to my knowledge, despite a handful of faithless electors in most of the recent election cycles.
On “Conservatives for Kamala”
I will say that, in principle, holding your nose and voting for a bad-but-less-bad choice is defensible behavior in a democracy. Certainly it will be a very rare occasion when any candidate is near-perfect. Just like the Fellowship of the Ring having to choose between a) a dangerous, wintry mountain pass, b) the Mines of Moria, or c) trying to sneak by Saruman's tower unobserved, sometimes you have to pick the least bad option and go with it.
Trump is so uniquely, terribly, amazingly, destructively awful it is very hard for me to imagine how anyone, from Ted Cruz to Elizabeth Warren, could possibly be evaluated as worse. To quote the OP:
I don't really agree with all of the OP's reasoning but this is the destination that it seems to me principled conservativism would arrive at. The immediate and durable erosion of the rule of law and institutional integrity that a second Trump administration would bring could not possibly be worth the benefit of the fraction of implementable policies that a conservative would see as beneficial regardless of the President's identity, particularly when most of those policies would be evanescent and endure for only as long as Republicans could hold the White House.
YMMV. I'm generally okay with using a "more bad versus less bad" rubric, but here the choice is between Boromir and Sauron. Boromir had flaws to which he sometimes succumbed but basically meant well even when he disagreed with the prevailing wisdom about how to proceed.
Giving Sauron the One Ring back is never going to be the less bad option.
(I do not see Pinky saying -- at least not here -- "Let's give Sauron the Ring." Saying that there'd be some policies resulting from a Trump administration that Pinky considers beneficial is not the same thing. And we must admit that Sauron taking charge of Mordor probably did dramatically increase per-Orc productivity, so that was a silver lining of sorts?)
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/12/2024”
We'll get another Trump presser tomorrow. I... will probably not watch it.
On “Tim Walz Tapped to be VP Kamala Harris Running Mate”
As opined elsewhere in the thread if that's the worst they can dig up on the guy, I think the Dems can live with it.
"
Lyndon Johnson is one. Unfortunately we got to learn how inspired it was when he acceeded to the Presidency.
Al Gore was... not inspired, maybe, but a bolder choice than it seems now (a second southern Democrat?), because now we think of him as the very personification of "dull and boring."
Before that... McKinley picking Teddy Roosevelt, maybe? Jefferson picking Madison?
"
Heard an interesting observation. Don't remember from who. Not my idea. But I kind of like it.
Campaign moves are often about opening up "permission gates," so voters can come to you. For instance, Trump seems to have thought that by going to speak at the National Association of Black Journalists, he was opening up a "permission gate" to allow black voters to consider voting for him. (Not sure that worked if that truly was the goal and I'm not sure it was.) The J.D. Vance pick was a bad one because it didn't open up any new permission gates for different people to join the Trump coalition.
Picking a normie-looking, normie-talking, white guy from a middle America state who isn't a lawyer, served in the Army, doesn't have a fancy college degree, has guns, is from a rural area, etc. opens up a "permission gate" for voters who identify with some of those traits to say they would consider voting for Kamala. On the one hand, it's safe because we're talking about majority sorts of traits, but maybe that's a necessary serving of white bread under the barbeque, after so much effort has gone in to portraying Kamala Harris as "other" in one way or another.
Again, I'm not sure that I buy this idea, but I certainly see it and get what ... whoever it was ... on whatever channel it was on ... was trying to get at, particularly with the idea of a "permission gate."
If this idea of "permission gates" is right, then it seems like it might be possible to close them, too, either your own by a misstep or your opponent's by a clever maneuver. And although I've cited bad gate moves by Trump here, that doesn't mean he's always had bad moves; the man did get elected in 2016 and came close again in 2020. These are just the recent ones that come to mind as signals to voters of this nature.
"
If anything, I think voters affirmatively like the "I cleaned up my act and now look at me" story, which is great until and unless you stumble. So... don't stumble, I guess.
"
This is the story I think they're going to tell with Walz. "Give us power, and we'll make sure your kids are fed at school so they can learn, we'll make you safer on the road when you drive, we'll help you go to college," and so on. The best Walz quote I've seen so far is that you don't win elections to accumulate political capital, you win elections to use it. Dems will call Minnesota a Democratic policy success story and take whatever hits come along with that for things that haven't worked out as well as Walz and his slim governing majority there had hoped.
On “Political Dreams and Electoral Nightmares”
We can make that dream world real-er than it is now. Probably won't ever get to the destination, though.
On “Open Mic for the week of 8/5/2024”
So there's people saying:
* Harris is "Hitler and Stalin combined but times 200,"
* Harris' yet-to-be-named running mate will support "allowing men to beat up women in the Olympics,"
* Saw the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics as "the end of Western Civilization,"
* And see Harris fundraising Zoom calls as a "harbinger of end times" (as opposed to, say, a prodigious use of bandwidth).
Well, whatever you do, don't call these people "weird!" We shouldn't upset anyone.
"
Hey Lee, I have a professional question, if I might bend your ear for about five minutes. Probably easy for you. Would you mind shooting me an e-mail at [myname] at gmail?
On “Asian Markets Have A Horrible Monday, US Markets Set For Fall”
Or is it a dead cat bounce?
On “Political Dreams and Electoral Nightmares”
Oh man, I'm sorry to hear the news about you, Andrew. Here's hoping something roughly equivalent comes along soon that you can say "yes" to.
On “Donald Trump and The National Association of Black Journalists: Watch For Yourself”
Wow -- Lara Loomer puzzling over birth certificates. It's like it's still 2008.
"
Apparently the campaign is running with the idea that Kamala can only be Indian-American or African-American but not both. What they think are "gotcha" headlines and quotes are being projected on screens at the Harrisburg rally going on right now.
Presumably, the campaign people, or Trump, or both, believe this will be to their net advantage.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/29/2024”
I suspect cursory investigation will reveal parallels to, or borrowing of ideas from, the sovereign citizen movement.
"
None of these have a llama's spit's chance in a bonfire of actually passing any time soon. So mainly they're interesting as political gambits. And I suspect they'll be popular!
On “Kamala’s Veepstakes”
But he's a frickin' astronaut!
"
If the Arizona GOP were capable of nominating anyone but Kari Lake, I would say that yes, this is a serious objection. But if your opponents insist on handing you W's, I say you should use them.
I don't much care who the VP pick is from among these choices. Walz brings a very interesting Democratic legislative success story from Minnesota and I think any midwesterner would help with Wisconsin and Michigan. (Minnesota itself is, if not in play, marginal.)
But I think Kelly brings a lot of short term advantages and the long term can be deferred. Especially if, as I noted above, the Arizona GOP repeatedly takes aim before shooting itself in the foot.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/22/2024”
Why is this the thing that marks the fall of Snopes?
Is it that they're addressing the question at all? Seems to me the sort of thing Snopes was created to address. I agree with @CJColucci below: whether a bullet or shrapnel caused the wounds on the candidate's ear is not particularly important. Perhaps the essay failing to point out "But this doesn't really matter, does it?" is your complaint?
If it's "Snopes is debasing itself by even addressing this question," no I don't agree with that. This seems to me to be exactly what Snopes does.
Was it the reasoning they used? I think they're right that if the teleprompters were intact after the shot, that means the teleprompters didn't take an errant shot and generate shrapnel, is a pretty reasonable one. Glass shards would have to come from somewhere. There doesn't seem to have been any other glass around to create these purported shards. In the absence of such phantom shards of glass, the bullet itself seems to be the most likely object to have caused the wounds. Is there some part of this logic I'm missing?
Not sure what's going on here.
On “Eton’s Ethically Equivocal Entrance Exam Essay”
Brandon, maybe the circumstances can provide moral justification. You'll notice that after flirting with the idea that a good PM would resign for this, I backed away and concluded that the real challenge presented here is taking moral responsibility for it.
If you're going to say that there might be circumstances under which taking moral responsibility for it could be done with pride, or at least lack of regret, okay. We aren't told any of those in the question; the examinee responding to the question (in 2011 or 2024 or at any other time) must then imagine and posit such circumstances for which the use of lethal force was the least bad available option.
That still addresses taking moral responsibility -- by way of lightening the burden before shouldering it.
On “The Next Candidate To Be Dumped?”
Give it time. More will surely accumulate.
"
Or maybe the Brotherhood of Steel? That'd be about his speed although I doubt Vance would have risen much further than Squire.
"
Yeah, but it's questionable in my mind if such laws are enforceable, or if the Electors' decisions are privileged. These laws haven't been enforced in the past, to my knowledge, despite a handful of faithless electors in most of the recent election cycles.
On “Democrats in Array as Harris Consolidates Support”
So this looks like relatively good news for Harris: The first post-swap major national poll shows Harris leading Trump, 44% to 42%. If RFKJr is added to the ballot, it becomes 44% Harris, 38% Trump, 8% Kennedy (suggesting that adding RFKJr to a Trump-Harris ballot only hurts Trump).
Now, it's just one poll, more will follow. But there's actual data now, suggesting that this was a good move for the Dems.
On “Voting for Republicans is Voting for Fascism”
A: written in bad faith.