I’m sorry, people, it’s too funny, I simply must leave it here:
Look at the account posting this gem. They beamed it proudly to their millions of followers. “Marco Rubio says he doesn’t remember minding her too much! Let’s tell everybody!”
This gives a whole new definition to the word “needy”.
Kamala Harris for president. Mike Rounds says hello to her!!
I’m a political junkie and I don’t know who Rounds is lol.
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Does anybody understand why she’s like that? Her parents are both professors. He mother is from a high-IQ group. Why is she not smart? I understand that it’s statistically possible for two very smart people to have a dumb child but this dumb?
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Not exactly dumb. It’s a tactic.
She’s accustomed to misdirecting and papering over information deficits with excess verbiage. She reminds me of… like, every time I’ve met people who do this IRL, they are basically con artists. The idea seems to be: as soon as it looks like you might get the wrong question, or someone might ask a revealing followup, you just fill the gap with words. Words words words, repeating words, contentless words: like a magic distraction shield that prevents the more intelligent/skeptical from ever getting a question in, ever analyzing in realtime, and weirdly, this strategy *actually works* on quite a lot of people. Squid ink and dodge. Keep people teetering enough that they can never quite find their balance and call you on it. Deflect and confuse. The second half of the game is a bit of gaslighting to make your listener feel like it’s him or her that’s dumb for not understanding. Weaponize other people’s insecurity.
So like, I’ve seen this with real estate agents, car salesmen, people trying to sell timeshares, skeezy pastors, some fly-by-night operation that blew through our town trying to convince a bunch of immigrant parents to fork over thousands of dollars to let them basically fill out college applications for their kids (who could do it themselves for free), and a cagey NGO employee carefully avoiding answering questions about what his NGO actually *did* in Africa… You can also hear it in a huge number of hostile compelled congressional testimony from representatives of three-letter agencies. I recall a pretty primo example in Joe Rogan’s infamous interview with the Twitter lawyers, “I can’t answer that question honestly, so I’m gonna repeat some preprogrammed phrases from earlier…”
I don’t think she’s brilliant. Also don’t think she’s dumb– there’s a certain verbal fluency required to deploy the tactic. But it is not accidental. It’s a *strategy.* I have never encountered it IRL where it wasn’t a huge red flag for dishonesty.
It probably is a tactic and she’s simply not smart enough to deploy it more elegantly. What bothers me is not so much her behavior as that people are choosing not to notice. Yes, we’ve all seen this in all sorts of con artists but now all of a sudden we are pretending nothing’s happening here.
Do people *like* being lied to?
It’s really weird.
Like, we’re all seeing this, right? Now we’re all gonna make a secret handshake agreement to pretend it’s not a problem.
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Camel Ho has got to Go together with Lame Duck Jo. Sugar tits causes cavities.
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Trump, for all his faults, is going to be re-elected as our next President — unless he somehow manages to be an even bigger idiot than Harris.
But don’t worry about it. After all I’ve seen of American politics in my 79 years, I know the country will survive either way.
Dreidel
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I hope you are right, Dreidel, but I cannot share your optimism.
Government policies and political decisions can, and do, have devastating effects. Just ask the people of Venezuela and Nicaragua, to give but two examples.
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Yeah, but when ours crashes, it’s gonna take half the world with it. 😦
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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