Dispatches from Vilnius

This guy sure has a nasty habit of sticking his foot in his mouth.  His latest plea to religious conservatives implied that November will be the last election necessary.  Afterward " it'll be fixed ."  An off the cuff statement like this would be enough to bury a presidential candidate, but not Trump.  He seems to be given an inordinate amount of leeway in the media, as if to say, "what do you expect from a man off his rocker?" Nevertheless, his campaign team tried to rephrase that statement into a call for " unity and prosperity ," but Trump has a hard time hiding his authoritarian streak.  After all, he is "great friends" with authoritarian leaders around the world, and doesn't think much of democratic alliances like NATO and the EU. The Kamala Harris campaign is jumping all over his latest statement as proof positive that Trump is a serious threat to democracy.  Not that we really needed it, but every self-inflicted wound helps.  This ...

Daina was positively giddy hearing the news that Kamala will stand in Joe's place.  We had been arguing the past few weeks as to whether Biden should step down.  I felt it would cause too much chaos but a wave of support for her candidacy came washing in over social media within hours of the news, including from her presumed rivals at the convention, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer.  If Kamala wins, Daina said, we will go to America! It's been 16 years since we were last in the United States.  At the time, Obama was in the heat of his first presidential campaign.  We were flush with cash and took the kids on a cross country trip from Washington, DC to Los Angeles, and up the coast to San Francisco, picking up Obama paraphernalia along the way.  I wore my Obama t-shirt until most of the letters had come off in the countless washes.   Little did we know that October would bring a huge stock market collapse with McCain looking like a deer caught in...

This is supposed to be the big weekend.  Come Monday Biden will supposedly announce whether he stays in the race after isolating himself with COVID the past few days.  Some are even speculating he doesn't have COVID but is using the time for reflection.  There's a whole lot of "spitballing" going on, as Tomi Lahren put it, but so far no hard evidence that Joe will withdraw from the race. So why does the media continue to wag the tail of the dog, so to speak?  I suppose it makes the Democratic Convention potentially much more interesting than the anemic Republican Convention we just witnessed.  All those bandages on the ears of loyal MAGA followers as they craned their necks to hear their beloved leader speak.  It was enough to make anyone gag, especially as the Orange King rambled on for what is now regarded as the longest acceptance speech in convention history, much of it spent retelling the fateful shooting that left him with half an ear to hear him talk...

You couldn't have scripted it any better.  Trump survives an assassination attempt on video, pumping his fist as blood trickled from his ear.  Either the shooter was a lousy shot or hired to carry off the latest episode of an election that has become a non-stop reality show.  Seems like the former as the suspect is a 20-year-old kid who apparently had some axe to grind.  No one is sure at this point as he didn't leave an online manifesto. Given his papa bought the AR-15, we can assume he comes from a conservative family.  So, it seems like Trump got shot at by one of his own. Nevertheless, Republicans are putting together all sorts of wild conspiracy theories, hoping to make this an action carried out by the long established "deep state" that has been looking to rub out Trump.  Mostly, the Maga crowd is blaming the shooting on the mainstream media.  I saw a couple of my conservative friends post on facebook that "the media has blood on their hands once...

  After the first round Marine thought 280 seats were within her grasp but her National Rally party was outflanked on the second round of voting, finishing a disappointing third in the number of seats in the National Assembly.   The only question now is who does Macron side with, the leftist New Popular Front, who won the election, or the far-right National Rally, who would take the country back to Vichy France. This surprising turn of events was a big blow not only to Putin, who was counting on a big upset in France, but to radical Republicans in America, who desperately wanted a big victory in Europe to legitimize their globalist conservative vision.  They had seen UK turn liberal just a few days ago.  They couldn't take another big loss. For years, the Republican Party had been working hard to overturn governments in Europe, often working side by side with the Kremlin.  Richard Grenell was the conservative frontman of this cabal while serving as Trump's...

I watched the ABC exclusive interview with Joe Biden and he looked fully in control of his faculties, if that is that main takeaway.  He wasn't as articulate as I would like him to be but I could see he was fighting off his frustration with George Stephanopoulus's line of questioning, in which he continually harped on the president's state of mind as if conducting a cognitive test himself. It made me think of a foreign service test I once took.  It was here in Vilnius.  The first two sections were easy enough as they tested my language skills and general knowledge but what threw me was the biographical questionnaire.  It was set up like a lie detector test in which the same questions were repeated with slightly different phrasing to see if I was being honest.  There were also little comment sections at the end of most of the questions where I presume I could expand my answer if I chose to.  It was part self-assessment of my office and personal relationship...

Back in 2016, The Republicans seized on Brexit as a harbinger that conservative leaders were wanted to defeat the "world order."  Nigel Farage was one of their "heros" and an adamant Trump supporter.  Still is.  It didn't matter that Farage and his fellow Brexiteers had no plan for post-EU Britain.  Chaos was better than subscribing to the liberal world order. After eight years of chaos and uncertainty with no good plan being put forward by the Tories and their conservative allies, Britain voted the bums out of office, giving the Labour Party a resounding landslide victory .  Even more amusing, Farage and his so-called Reform Party only garnered four seats, far short of the number he thought his last-minute bid would garner.   You won't hear Republicans cheering this result as it doesn't fit their narrative.  Instead, they are blabbing about Franxit, or whatever you want to call it, as Marine Le Pen's nationalist party did far better than expected...

News has ceased to be informative.  Instead it has become predictive, or at least tries to be.  It takes a few rumors and turns them into a narrative for a brokered Democratic convention in August where Biden will be replaced on the Democratic ticket. While there were a few grumbles after the debate, no principal Democratic leader has suggested Biden should be replaced.  Yet, all the major news outlets run with the story just the same.  It has reached the point where Trump is upset that it overshadows his "fantastic" performance. Throughout this election cycle we have seen predictive storytelling.  There has been little attempt to present news as it is or to give us any real understanding as to why.  It would have been much more interesting to delve into the reasons why Biden stumbled so badly in the debate or why the CNN hosts made no effort to rein in the many lies and false claims Trump made.  Anthony Scaramucci generously estimated that Trump lie...