VP debate:
Ms. Harris scored points when she focused on the Administration’s support for the case before the Supreme Court that would repeal ObamaCare. She claimed this would strip millions of their health insurance, which is false. But Mr. Pence lacked an effective reply, and this is the GOP’s biggest single vulnerability on policy. And all for a legal case that they have little chance of winning at the Court.
Mike Pence’s Re-Election Case – WSJ
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[T]he chaos that has followed Donald Trump around for his entire presidency like the cloud of dirt accompanying Pig-Pen moved to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center …Trump has always demanded a bespoke reality. He famously said in a deposition that his net worth was pegged not to his assets but his mood. As president, everyone from Cabinet officials and foreign leaders, to lowly staff, to the bulk of the conservative media, has either had to bend to the reality he wants or be pilloried as traitors, weaklings or liars.
Jonah Goldberg, Donald Trump’s Bespoke Reality – The Dispatch
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I can understand the argument that we don’t have to be afraid of COVID-19, that it shouldn’t run our lives, and that in the past six months, the nation’s scientists have invented an armamentarium of medications that can cure anyone who gets infected. I’m not sure any of that is right—but I can understand it as an argument. What I can’t understand is the idea that returning from the hospital after dispatching this non-alarming and very mild flu is worthy of a movie suggesting that the patient must have had the courage of Achilles to face it down. Have you seen the video of President Donald Trump’s triumphant trip back from Walter Reed? You would think the man was returning from liberating Europe, not getting a steroid shot in Bethesda. I should make a movie about the time I went to urgent care for a UTI.…
One after another, people who were present at the ceremony [announcing Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court] have announced that they’ve got it. It’s like a roll call of the damned. Kellyanne Conway: present. Kayleigh McEnany: present. Mike Lee: present. In the court of the mad king, a positive test, and a presumed recovery, is perhaps essential for every courtesan who wants to be in the inner circle. When you hear of someone at the top who doesn’t have it, you have to wonder about their commitment to the operation. I thought Stephen Miller was going to commit Seppuku but Tuesday he was able to confirm he has it, too. And it’s fine to have a little laugh at their expense—COVID-19 is political, and to many conservatives, including presumably those infected at the White House, getting the bug is nothing to worry about.
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But the Rose Garden wasn’t the only place where people were infected. During four days of debate prep (the worst debate prep in history, but that’s another matter), Chris Christie got it. Will the man ever learn? When has his relationship with Trump ever brought him anything but misery? Some people are drawn to bullies. They have a need to endlessly repeat the suffering of their childhood, always hoping for a different outcome. To see a healthy and chipper George Stephanopoulos, sitting in his neon bright Good Morning America studio interviewing a pale and clearly anxious Christie, quarantined in Jersey, was heartbreaking. “No one was wearing masks,” he said of the four days he had spent with the president, and you weren’t sure whether he was angry about it or maybe a little bit proud of it; at last he’d been given a seat at the cool kids’ table.
Caitlin Flanagan, The Rose Garden Coronavirus Experiment – The Atlantic
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 