Tonite’s debates

I rarely post twice in a day, but these items have a sell-by date of 8/23.

GOP Presidential Preferences

Republican voters no longer want to elect professional politicians to the presidency. Sure, they like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis well enough. They think he’s a good guy. Maybe they’d like to see him put in charge of Health and Human Services during the next Trump administration. But he’s a pol—and because he’s a pol, they don’t particularly trust him. The person they trust is Trump—more than they do their pastors, more than they do conservative media figures, and even more than they do their own friends and family. They certainly don’t trust the normie politicians fighting over scraps at the bottom of GOP primary tracking polls. You know, the people who will be debating in Milwaukee tomorrow night.

If I ran the debate …

Thank you all for being here. It is weird not to have the frontrunner here, of course. But, then, it’s a little weird that the frontrunner is the guy who lost last time around and then tried to overthrow the government.

Which brings us to our first question: Who won the 2020 presidential election?

I’d like to remind you that those electrodes attached to your … are we allowed to say that on television? … are hooked up to our state-of-the-art Acme B.S. Detector. And thanks to our sponsors at Acme B.S. Detectors! On the other side of that circuit is a Duralast Platinum AGM Battery boasting 750 cold-cranking amps—and thanks to our other sponsors at AutoZone! You know the drill: We have Mitch Daniels standing by with the controls in hand, and, if you try to wholesale the kind of bull you normally feed gullible Republican primary voters and fawning Fox News types to our audience, then it is ZAP! right in the ’nads.

Mr. Pence, when the administration in which you served attempted to overturn the 2020 election in a coup d’état under color of law, you did your constitutional duty and certified the electors. And for about 48 hours, you were pretty critical of Donald Trump. Well done! By my calculation, that means you conducted yourself honorably for about 0.14 percent of the four years in question with the guy you now call your “former running mate.” Don’t you think there should be a kind of time-out or something? I know you’re an evangelical, but you are also a baptized Catholic. Couldn’t you—shouldn’t you—go to a monastery for like 20 years or something?

Okay, so let me get this straight: If police shoot Walter Scott in the back, it’s Walter Scott’s fault, somehow, and cops have a really hard job. But if a “patriot” is barricaded in his house pointing a rifle at federal agents there to serve a lawful arrest warrant and somebody gets dead, that is … Chris Wray’s fault? Help me understand this one.

Excerpts from the GOP Presidential debate Kevin D. Williamson would moderate if only we’d let him.

You could read Kevin D. Williamson all the time if you subscribed to The Dispatch.


We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.