MEDIOCRITIES AND SCOUNDRELS.

George Will is a Cub fan, which means he has more than a passing acquaintance with both, but he's writing about the presidential campaign about to wrap up.  "Voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history."  Time for it to end.

Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?

Donald Trump, a volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums, is painfully well known. There is nothing to know about Kamala Harris, other than this: Her versatility of conviction means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.

Apparently the only thing worse than a presidency offering up shiny things is a presidency offering up vacuity.  David "Iowahawk" Burge offers an apposite bon mot.  "Remember: the entire future of our nation, nay planet, depends on you selecting the least horrifying imbecile we decided to offer you." Back to you, Mr Will.

Her sole notable decision as a candidate has been the choice of a running mate whose self-description (“knucklehead”) is more astute than his flippancies about serious matters (the electoral college is icky, socialism is “neighborliness,” etc.) and his self-celebratory fictions about his past. Tim Walz’s achievement during his pirouette in the spotlight has been to make his counterpart, JD Vance, resemble Aristotle.

Or perhaps one of the Brothers Grimm: Vance’s scary fairy tales (he calls them “stories”) about kitten-cooking Haitians, etc., are, he says, intended to be didactic. They might be if he, a bristling porcupine of certitudes, candidly demarcated his fictions from reality. The 2024 campaign has revealed the recklessness of Joe Biden’s 2020 choice of a running mate. Trump, who is 78 and who is not a martyr to the strictures of healthy living, was as reckless in choosing Vance.

And, as disaffected Republican strategist Mick Mulvaney notes, if either of the candidates loses, the reasons will not be hard to see.  It's either the current vice president not making clear why she seeks the office, or the former president having riled up his supporters in the wake of his loss last time.

Some percentage of Americans are voting for Trump — 45 percent? — and a roughly equal percentage are voting for Harris. The people in the middle are trying to figure out who she is, and she hasn’t told them. They are also trying to figure out if they can trust him in office again —  and the only reason they are even asking that question is because of Jan. 6. How they break on those basic questions will determine the outcome next week.

Commentators, politicos and the media tend to want to make politics seem very complex and profound. And I suppose sometimes it can be. But more often than not, winning and losing are ultimately about simple things.

That might be, and yet, pace Mr Will, can the soul-searching at least wait until Fasching Dienstag?

Whoever wins, both parties should be penitential about what they have put the country through. And both should begin planning 2028 nomination processes that will spare the nation a choice that will be greeted, as this year’s has been, by grimaces from sea to shining sea.

Perhaps, if the real debt ceiling crashes in before the Iowa caucuses or whatever nomination fakement the Democrats rig, any presidential planning early on will be overtaken by events.