"It's a cookbook!" cryptographer Michael Chambers shouted to the people boarding an alien spaceship at the end of "To Serve Man," one of the most memorable episodes of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone." That's basically what Pennsylvania's Carey Law School professor Serena Mayeri is shouting about the 2024 GOP platform.
The difference is that Chambers was right about the aliens using the human race for food, but Mayeri's Newsweek column is a tacit admission that Americans support conservative policies.
Hers is just one example I have for you today of lefties admitting that Trump and the GOP hold the moral high ground going into the general election.
According to Mayeri, Trump has "supposedly moderated his positions" on abortion and same-sex marriage just to "win support from suburban women, independents." And never mind that the Trump Organization was one of the first in New York to provide same-sex benefits and that Trump himself refused to sign on to a national abortion ban.
(It is possible to be pro-same-sex marriage and anti-Obergefell just as it's possible to be pro-life and against yet another breach of the Tenth Amendment.)
Poll after poll — and the last two election cycles — show that the state level is where most Americans want the abortion issue decided. This year's GOP platform confirms what constitutional conservatives have said all along, that Roe v. Wade incorrectly made abortion a federal issue. The same thinking goes for same-sex marriage.
Slate's Aymann Ismail wrote Tuesday that he expected the RNC to be "dark and tense" but after arriving there on Monday found it to be "something else entirely."
"The mood was not tense—it was almost chipper," he discovered. "Once inside, I was again surprised by the jubilance of the many conventiongoers. Red hats crowned smiling faces as attendees giddily rushed toward the arena and secured a place in line to get inside and escape the heat."
How could it be that Angry Cheeto Hitler's supporters could be so exuberant just two days after an assassin's bullet barely missed splattering his brains all over his fascist cult members?
Might the Angry White Male vision of the typical Republican or the MAGA stereotype be somehow distorted? Could conservativism be based on a forward-looking, optimistic view of the world?
Sadly, these are questions Ismail didn't ponder, much less answer. A pity, too — he could have written a much deeper, much more important column.
But for sheer schadenfreude, you can't beat Presidentish Joe Biden's tacit admission of his (and his party's) heated rhetoric in his Monday interview with NBC's Lester Holt.
In case you missed Matt Margolis's full writeup from Monday night, here's the meat of the matter:
NBC to Biden, "Have you taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things that you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced?"
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) July 15, 2024
Biden, "I have not engaged in that rhetoric." WATCH pic.twitter.com/q7CUriBbtV
Why would Biden — the same man who gave the infamous Nuremberg Rally speech two years ago, painting half the country as fascists — suddenly deny his own rhetoric? If Trump is a fascist (and his followers, too), that's an argument Biden should be proud of.
Instead, Biden chose to deny the very rhetoric that he and his people dropped for a whole 36 hours after the attempted Trump assassination before going right back into Literally Hitler™ Mode.
Recommended: Mea Culpa: Turns Out the Dems Can Go Right Back to 'Trump Is Literally Hitler!'
Trump goes into Wednesday night's acceptance speech as a Reaganesque happy warrior, speaking to a convention hall filled with "jubilant" partygoers to sell a policy agenda that Americans love.
And Democrats know it.
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