FRIDAY short TAKES.

Let us reclaim the culture first.  "it is time that we recognized that art need not be adversarial or 'transgressive' in order to be good or important."  Roger Kimball continues with a necessary fact-check of puerile transgressivity.  "Everyone is brought up on stories of how an obtuse public scorned Manet, censored Gauguin, and drove poor Van Gogh to madness and suicide. But the fact that these great talents went unappreciated has had the undesirable effect of encouraging the thought that, because one is unappreciated, one is therefore a genius. It has also made it extremely difficult to expose fraudulent work as such."  If it is difficult, better that the work of exposing it begin now.

Progressivism.  “Big government has failed us, so what we need is bigger government.”  We are being played.  Everything that can break is breaking.  The con is still holding.  "President Trump took a bullet while Kamala Harris can't handle a question."  Harris has failed to secure our border.

Disqualifying.  "Walz, who was a dues-paying member of the National Education Association during his years as a high school teacher, told AFSCME members at the union's 46th international convention in Los Angeles about his strong record of fighting for workers' rights as governor of Minnesota."  Less competent than Kamala?  "The only candidate who wouldn't upstage Kamala is a socialist drunk driver."

Donald Trump, put in the work.  "Trump could run a much better, much more persuasive, and much more effective campaign with much better chances of victory if he wanted to do so."  It is Donald Trump's job to stay steady.  Now is not the time to relitigate the past or to settle old scores.

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

1.  Finish the job.  "Harris has made it clear that she stands behind and intends to carry forward most of the priorities and accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, whether we are talking about immigration or environmental policy or deepening affordable medical care or defending reproductive freedom and women’s healthcare."

2.  Your business is rejoicing.  "Not only did Kamala have to provide free entertainment to get people to show up, the unions bused people in."

3.  Progressives tell you who they are.  "'The far right are spreading racism, Islamophobia, and hatred,' says a Stand Up to Racism statement published in the Daily Mirror Wednesday and signed by actors, artists, drag performers, journalists, labor leaders, musicians, peace advocates, and members of Parliament—including Jeremy Corbyn, an Independent, along with Labour's Diane Abbott and Zarah Sultana."

4.  Blue Falcon.  "When your own peers serve you up, that’s an indicator."  If you exaggerate your accomplishments, might you be denigrating your actual accomplishments?  "I just want to say I’m proud to serve my country, and I always will be.  I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person’s service record'"

5.  The Democrat campaign is being run by middle-school mean girls.

6.  Price controls on food are a really terrible idea.

7.  The nurturant parent canard.  "No elected official gets to send us to bed without supper, ground us, or wash our mouth out with soap."

8.  Are you surprised that politicians pander, no tax on tips edition?  "But it raises more questions than already were floating in the ether about which policies and issues are fundamental to her identity — and, conversely, which she will throw overboard for short-term political gain."

9.  Their incompetence is their diversity.  "Multiculturalism, for the benefit of those who have been asleep inside a cocoon for the past several decades, is not the template for a tolerant society."  People keep voting for DEI over competence and that’s what they get.  Mostly for the worse.  "Competence is something in seemingly short supply these days.  A feminized society that abhors competition, under the sway of an elite that rigs games in its favour so that it may select winners (them) and losers (you) based on whim, cannot help but end up this way."  Don't overthink things?  "Incompetence is a good default hypothesis for explaining almost any screwup."  Perhaps so, and yet, "One of the more notable aspects of the current social malaise in the West is a general contempt for men"

10.  Winning ugly?  "Republican party grandees decided never again to 'lower' themselves to the Atwater level. And so, they have gone on to lose 'nobly' seven of the last eight popular votes."

11.  Buckle in.  "It is a temporary sugar high caused partly by the feeling of liberation following the sudden release from Joe Biden, partly by the slobbering media jumping all over the reinvention of Kamala."  The Democrats do love them some presidential cults though.

12.  To win ugly, concentrate on the goal.  "What's not okay is depressing Republican turnout in swing states by trashing popular governors or continuing to litigate 2020."

13.  To win ugly, widen your appeal.  "If things don’t change, the ranks of disaffected voters won’t be enough to outweigh others who simply can’t face another four years of the Trump show and will back even a party hack concealing her real politics simply to escape it."

14.  Involuntary servitude is inefficient.  "Why pay when you can threaten potential draftees with prison sentences for not complying?"

15.  Call attention!  "I take her at her word that she thinks that illegal immigrants should be able to vote and be given driver's licenses. I take her at her word that she wants to ban fracking and kill a bunch of U.S. jobs. Take her at her word."

16.  Tim Walz, corona tyrant.  "This man would like to take your rights away. He will take your rights away. Because what happened to me could have happened to anybody. What happened to me will happen to you."  Has one of his subjects become a Packer fan?  “I love Wisconsin. I’ll never go back to Minnesota. I’ll live there for seven more months then after that I never want to go to that state again.”

17.  Coastal metrofexuals with Euro-envy, take note.  "Americans are proud and free citizens who refuse to kneel with the guns to make sure we never have to."

18.  Be careful casting punitive votes.  "One of the central duties of a conservative is to remember, always, that there are trade-offs for everything.  To frame a case for Kamala Harris in the presidency only in the negative sense that it avoids another Trump administration is to pretend away those trade-offs. But they will not go away by ignoring them."  

19.  China's Olympic medals.  "I just think we should all laugh at how miserably pathetic they are."

20.  Keep Olympic gold emergent.  "Unlike even most democratic countries, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee does not receive a penny of government funding. Team USA owns the Summer Olympics as a national side hobby, and we wouldn’t have it any other way."  Even with breaking and table tennis.