Kamala Harris vs. Gun Bingo

The Post-Convention Bounce

I flew back from the Chicago convention the day after Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech satisfied that she has the poise, the presence, the wit, and the charisma to put up a very strong fight against the Orangeman. I re-entered Red America via Wilkes Barre airport. As we drove east through the old woods of Pennsylvania toward the Empire State, I spotted something I’d never seen before in New York - or anywhere: a roadside sign advertising Gun Bingo. 

Apparently, gun bingo is a popular pastime in Pennsylvania and many other states with open-carry laws and gun-loving populations. They serve as fundraisers for local projects or charity events for a family with a sick child and are often held at firehouses. Oddly they are often held in conjunction with “designer purse bingo” - a fashionable receptacle for a lady to carry her weapon or just an activity for the girlfriend standing by her armed man. 

Poking around on the interweb, I found this comment from one happy customer: “I'm curious where else in our great nation has gun culture quite to this level: I'm going to play gun bingo this afternoon! $100 buy-in gets you 10 games, a gun every game, plus raffles, door prizes, pick-a-square boards, etc. Tickets purchased in advance and limited quantities sold. All proceeds go to our local snowmobile/4-wheeler trail maintenance club.”

I hold our great nation’s Star Wars Bar of humanity – that is to say, our giant melting pot of a country – in high esteem, I really do. I like to talk to all kinds of Americans, and it’s the greatest part of my job. And now that I know what’s going on over the border, I might soon, on a dreary cold fall night, when dark comes too early, mosey over to a gun bingo night and try my luck at winning a firearm. If only to understand whether one can walk away with such a prize without licensing, background check, or training. 

But the image my mind tries to conjure up as I think about this game right now is of the faces of people playing gun bingo, looking up at a large screen TV with Kamala Harris speaking, eloquent, graceful, and forceful at the same time, elegant in her navy blue suit. What do they see? She looks great to me and my friends, but if you’re sitting in a fire station in the Pennsylvania backwoods hoping to win a gun, does that soigné character put you off?  Is anyone in the gun bingo demographic ever in play for the Democrats? If so, should Pennsylvania Democrats do gun bingo fundraisers?

This week, polls show Harris up nationally by 4 points against Trump. She hasn’t yet got the usual “convention bump” – but she’s holding steady and “remains in the driver’s seat” per one headline. To keep the driving metaphor, let’s have a look at the speed bumps and potholes ahead. 

The Scheme, Updated: 

I have written here about the scheme, the five-alarm fire, Defcon 3 alert, red-lights flashing emergency that is the Republican plan to outright steal the election, or at the very least throw a legit Harris win into chaos and the courts. 

For several years, obscure activities have been underway in red states portending an operation to steal the 2024 election. First, MAGAs are simply refusing to certify the popular vote. The plan apparently is to send in Trump electors in December, no matter what the voters want. In June, the AP collected incidents from Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, in which Trump-affiliated officials refused to certify, or sued to stop the certification of results they didn’t like. Journalist Justin Glawe has collected at least 15 instances since 2022 of Republicans refusing to certify results that are “typically routine” matters. These dry runs bode ill for November 5. 

In the last few days, there have been further alarming reports. Texas used an obscure law to purge more than a million voters since 2021. Gov. Greg Abbott held a press conference to brag about this feat this past Monday. The Abbott regime’s anti-democratic Gestapo tactics include accused but never convicted securities fraudster state AG Ken Paxton raiding the homes of members of the oldest Latino civil rights organization in the US, as part of a trumped-up voter fraud investigation. 

In Georgia, MAGAs managed to tilt the state elections board to their side, after running a campaign to push out a non-MAGA Republican member. The new board promptly passed a controversial and previously rejected rule to give local and county officials wide leeway to recount or delay or reject outright votes at the granular level. Fortunately. Democratic lawyers have immediately challenged this in court, but given the makeup of the Trump-era judiciary, there is no guarantee of a fair hearing. 

These and other incidents are ominous signs of coming election mayhem. 

Fashy Accommodating Media:

I understand as well as anyone the desperate economic straits of “legacy media” and really, any person or organization trying to make a living off the written word. I get that the outrageously headlined Rich Lowry op-ed column  - “Trump Can Win on Character” - in yesterday’s New York Times was effective clickbait. 

Got my attention. 

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review, a hard right journal of hard right ideas started by hard right (or as Gore Vidal called him, “crypto-fascist”) William Buckley. Lowry is entitled to his wrong opinions. But it’s hard for me, having written op-eds and features for the Times, to imagine that he pitched this batshit idea with a straight face (Trump and “character” in the same sentence, haha!), and furthermore how the paper of record - which fact-checks the absolute hell out of every sentence - published this essay without some corresponding caveat. 

I imagine everyone was smirking as Lowry turned in his copy including this sentence: “One of his talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power.”

Is repeating lies until the gawping, dizzied listener thinks they sound true the essence of a great communicator with character? 

The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of character is the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual. (Italics mine).  Lowry’s definition of character - tailored to Trump - leaves out the second M-word: “Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life,” he writes, “but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?”

To which, I would answer, behold Trump this week, caring about average Americans:

Cynical Political Use of Private Trauma:

Trump laid a wreath at Arlington Cemetery this week, leveraging the grief of a family that lost a loved one in the Kabul Airport bombing during the chaotic American withdrawal in August three years ago. Trump has been using this family as props in his quest to blame Vice President Harris for the Kabul military debacle  - a tragedy which, it must be noted, had its roots in the Trump administration's deal to GTFO Afghanistan by releasing thousands of Taliban prisoners. 

Getting out of Afghanistan was long overdue. Every President - W, Obama, and Trump, before Biden, deserves criticism for letting it linger and fester, while American blood and treasure - to the tune of trillions of dollars - were squandered. But Trump’s deal with the Afghans to release 5,000 Taliban fighters as part of a deal to end the war arguably led to the ease with which Taliban overran Kabul, committed the suicide bombing, and has since most certainly led to the resurgence of the lunatic sect’s hideous, surreal and utterly dystopic abuse of women and girls that gets worse every day. (If you have the stomach for it, read this horrifying report on the Taliban’s new law forbidding women to speak in public.)

Trump’s stunt at Arlington included breaking cemetery rules about photography near recent burial sites. When a cemetery employee objected to the shoot, two Trump staff reportedly got into a ”physical and verbal altercation” with the employee. Even before that thuggish incident was reported, the visit provoked anti-Trump veterans and others because Trump has been trashing American warriors ever since his dad sent him off to a third-rate military school when he was unable to function in normie school as a teen with a likely reading disability. As a candidate, he famously dissed John McCain (“He's not a war hero, he's a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you,” he said to pollster Frank Luntz.) As president, on an official visit to Europe to honor Americans who died in World War I, he called the dead “suckers” and “losers.” 

The bone-spurs draft dodger has boasted “I’m not saying the military is in love with me—the soldiers are.” Indeed, some of the worst of them do love him for his toxic masculinity. 

Sleazewatch: 

The scale and unchecked impunity of Trump and his collaborators’ corruption is too large now for the American media to keep track of and for the public mind to absorb. Bits and pieces of this Hieronymous Bosch landscape of iniquity loom before our eyes and then fall out of our memories daily. This week I’ve been thinking about Kushner and Mnuchin leveraging White House contacts to reap billions off Gulf Arabs; Trump’s Medal of Freedom awardee Miriam Adelson showering Trump with $100 million of the Macau and Vegas casino dirty money pelf she inherited from her late husband.

I feel a duty to add a weekly SLEAZEWATCH reminder to this essay. This week I recommend Joe Conason’s terrific compendium of conservative grifts going back to the mid-20th Century, The Longest Con. With wit and brio, Conason recounts how the conservative movement absorbed a growing tribe of greedy grifters whose collective ethos now makes up their core ideology. I recommend the entire book — but you can read my review in The New Republic here at the link. 

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Free Stuff and Promos:

I will be reading from my book The Trump Women Part of the Deal on Tuesday, September 10 at KGB on East 4th Street in New York, as part of their monthly reading series. Free, if you’re in the city do drop in.

While I am in the process of recording an audio version of my novel Zero Visibility Possible, you can listen to my recent interview about it on WJFF, Radio Catskill, here. 

Finally, as always, I will give a free subscription to The Freakshow to anyone who buys my novel, which is available in paperback or Kindle. Just email me the receipt.