Ask A Genius 1018: JD Vance
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/22
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, JD Vance was picked. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have announced they’re going to support Trump all the way, pledging at least $10,000,000. So what’s going on?
Rick Rosner: Freaking Elon Musk is a weirdo and kind of a fraud. He has been drifting Trump-ward for years now. I think he initially intended to buy Twitter to make it more right-wing and Trumpy, and now it is. So, you know, it’s a shame, but that’s the deal. Peter Thiel—I don’t know a lot about him, except I know he supports Trump and he’s a tech billionaire. Beyond that, I can’t say much, but he’s linked with JD Vance, I guess. I looked it up.
JD Vance comes from poverty. He served four years in the Marines as a journalism officer or a media officer for six months in Iraq in 2005. After he left the military, he went to Yale, then law school, maybe also at Yale Law. Then he worked in the offices of some congresspeople, I guess. Eventually, he ran for the Senate, and now he’s a senator. Oh, he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, his autobiography, which was made into a movie by Ron Howard. But, you know, I don’t have any particular insight beyond what I said yesterday about Hillbilly Elegy and JD Vance. I did look up to see which side, the Republicans or the Democrats, have more support from billionaires.
It used to be, five or ten years ago, that most billionaires, when there were fewer of them, leaned Republican, which makes sense because they get huge tax breaks from the Republicans. But I looked at more recent articles, and about 80% of billionaires in America support Democrats. I assume it’s because Democrats are less shitty than Republicans. Beyond that, I don’t have any more insight. Who do you consider the most odious public personality on the left and the most odious public personality on the right?
Robert Menendez, who was convicted of 16 counts of bribery, is a Democratic senator who wins the day at least. He’s an asshole and an idiot who took blatant bribes, including gold bars and stacks of cash. When the FBI raided his house, they found half a million dollars and a bunch of gold bars shoved somewhere. He’s a fucking idiot and corrupt as hell. He’d been charged with this years before and got off with a hung jury.
But he didn’t clean up his fucking act. He’s a fucking dumbass. He has a salary of $174,000 a year, plus all sorts of benefits as a senator. Plus, when he’s done being a senator, he gets a lifetime pension of $174,000 a year. So he could leave the Senate and get paid $174,000 a year for doing nothing and go into some other business like lobbying where he could probably get paid half a million dollars a year.
But now he’s 70 years old and he’s going to jail. At least, he could go to jail for a maximum of 222 years. Obviously, that’s not going to happen, but I assume he’ll be going to prison for at least five years, which is a significant chunk of his remaining life, especially since he’s in terrible shape. He’s a roly-poly kind of guy.
For what he could make in one year as a lobbyist, having been a senator, he’s going to prison for years. So he’s a fucking idiot and an asshole. On any other day, Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona senator who’s on her way out, who scuttled a lot of Democratic initiatives, would be on the list. She ran as a Democrat and then switched to being an independent, messing up things like a raise in the national minimum wage. She’s pretty loathsome. She sold out the Democrats and stopped years of progress for reasons we don’t even understand why, except that…
Maybe it’s because she’ll get paid millions of dollars as a lobbyist once she’s the next senator, Iona. You know, the most loathsome Republican is Mitch McConnell. You can make a case for Mitch McConnell because, you know, he let Trump continue to be a political entity. If he had told the Republicans to vote to impeach Trump after he was impeached a second time for fomenting January 6th, they would have had enough votes to impeach him and end his political life. Once you’re impeached, you can’t run for president again.
But he didn’t. He also stole the Supreme Court seat from Obama, so the current conservative court is his fault.
Of course, Trump, besides McConnell, is the most awful major politician we’ve had in the history of the country. The end. I’m lying down, so I’m going to keep it on the same day. We can stop if you’re tired. I’m tired too.
And we can resume it because, you know, that’s tomorrow. I guess one of this would be a cut here for a separate session. Here’s the new question: How far do you think all this messianic talk about Trump and the shooting will go? How far could this go?
Not very far. It’ll be largely forgotten except by lunatics who are already in the cult. It’s not going to draw anybody new into the cult, not a significant number of people. I don’t think most people find it persuasive.
Maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see some poll results. You know, the guy got clipped in the ear by apparently a bullet, though maybe by flying glass, but if you look at photos of the crime scene, I’m not sure that his teleprompter got shattered. But anyway, he got winged on Sunday. He played golf without any kind of band-aid because there wasn’t much in the way of damage. Then yesterday, he wore a big bandage over his ear to show how he was injured.
But everybody laughed at that except the people in his cult. When Reagan got shot, the bullet came reasonably close to killing him in 1981. What he had to say and his whole demeanor during the whole thing kind of charmed the nation. I’m not sure that Trump’s ear bleeding was anywhere near as persuasive. The end. Nobody grades the pundits on their accuracy. People can say whatever they want and be wrong consistently without losing their pundit jobs.So I’m not buying it. I don’t think somebody who was already on the fence or a little disgusted by Trump is going to be taken in by him wearing an ear bandage. I keep saying this, but even though I say you can’t trust them, the polls are pretty close. If you look at all the swing states, Trump, according to the polls, is leading in all the swing states by a few percent. We’ve got more than 100 days to go.
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