Your Weekend Message From The Master

(Editor’s note: Charles Pierce writes daily at The Esquire Politics Blog at Esquire.com. He is an award-winning writer and author, most recently Idiot America. Every weekend, he sends out a weekly newsletter to subscribers, of which, I am one. From now through the election, I will post his weekend musings on here.)

July 28, 2024

I already have promised to stay as far away from the J.D. Vance couch story as I intend to stay away from the couch in question. (Got a flight booked for Neptune already.) However, it has come to my attention that, now that things seemingly have turned around a bit on the election, we have been afflicted with the arrival of the Dean Vernon Wormer Memorial Society (Motto: No More Fun Of Any Kind). By all conventional political standards, a sudden enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket has hit the election like a 50-pound sledge.

By all conventional political standards, the vice-president’s campaign is now on a two-week winning streak. Even the search for a running mate, which can be one of the enervating elements of an election, seems ignited by joy. (This accounts for the sudden emergence of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who is everybody’s feisty grandpa despite being only a year older than his possible running mate. It was Walz who pointed the way to a telling argument against the Trump-Vance ticket that was just sitting there, waiting to be picked up and used as a merry cudgel. It was so simple that nobody noticed it. To wit: