Weird

 This summer, Tim Walz secured his status as Harris's inevitable VP pick by delivering his immortal diagnosis of the Trump-Vance campaign: "These guys are weird." It was all-but universally conceded to be a great line—one that defined the campaign going forward. As messaging, it was brilliant. It got us out of the high-minded, lofty rhetoric that had already worn thin for people, and risked becoming a cliché, and brought us back to some awareness of the gut-level ick factor that Trump and Vance evoke. 

But there's also a potential problem with it. Namely—who ever said being weird was a bad thing? A lot of Americans bear the term with a sense of pride. Molly Ball, writing for the Wall Street Journal, profiled a big-tent right-wing conspiracist event this week, bringing together every possible variety of crank, eccentric, and oddball in the country, and she notes that many of them treated being "weird" as a badge of honor. "I consider myself a weirdo," one of them told her—in a particularly telling line. 

Cloister, Father of the Cat People

 Shortly after J.D. Vance set loose his bogus (and dangerously racist) urban legend about Haitian immigrants supposedly eating cats, it was not long before the memes started appearing on right-wing social media riffing on the theme. Several of them asserted some version of: "Kamala Harris hates cats." 

I found this odd, since just a few weeks earlier, Vance had been much in the news for calling Harris a "childless cat-lady" in a 2021 podcast. So which one was it? Is she a cat lady? Or does she detest the animal? One can say many things of someone you accuse of being a "cat lady"—but surely being anti-cat is not one of them? 

Madness!

 In the otherwise dry and policy-oriented vice presidential debate that just concluded, there was one absolutely jaw-dropping moment. This occurred when Walz got around to asking J.D. Vance point-blank whether he conceded that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

This was a great strategy on Walz's part. Vance, throughout the night, was trying to portray himself as a reasonable and moderate person—not someone who was living in an alternative epistemic universe from the rest of us. And yet, as Donald Trump's running mate, he cannot explicitly disavow the former president's most bananas claims about things; they are, after all, the official positions of his campaign. The best Vance can do, when these things come up, is to ignore, downplay, and dodge.