Thursday's Most Active Threads

The most active thread yesterday was the one about the Republican National Convention which I've already discussed and will, therefore, skip today. After that was a thread titled, "NYT and WaPo report Biden is close to stepping down" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The original poster overstated things in the thread's title. The two articles to which he linked were not as definitive. One, in the Washington Post, said that U.S. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi had told members of the House that President Joe Biden can be persuaded fairly soon to leave the presidential race. The second, in the New York Times, reported that people close to Biden have said that he has begun to accept the idea that he may have to drop out. There have been multiple reports that Pelosi is now leading the effort to convince Biden that he cannot win the election and that he should leave the race. My assumption is that leaks that lead to articles such as these are part of the process. Going public with expectations that Biden will soon agree to drop out is probably aimed at creating an air of inevitability that will lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy. This effort has been mishandled from the beginning. In the aftermath of Biden's disappointing debate performance, Democrats were really faced with two choices: 1) accept that Biden had had a bad night but rally around him nevertheless; or 2) launch a full-court press to replace Biden. But Democrats split between the two option and some chose a third alternative of simply giving up altogether. What resulted was a continual trickle of Biden opponents calling for him to withdraw and, as I described it before, subjecting Biden to a death of a thousand cuts. That many of the first to publicly call for replacing Biden were wealthy and elite only made matters worse. Those statements got publicity, but only made Biden and his supporters even more determined to resist. This soon developed into a worst-case scenario for Democrats who face going into their convention completely divided. Pelosi, the adult in the room if you will, apparently decided it was time to step in. It may have been true the day after the debate that Biden still had a chance to defeat former President, current cult leader, and convicted felon Donald Trump. The argument can be made that those calling for him to be replaced jumped the gun. Regardless, I am fairly confident that Biden has been so seriously wounded by the ongoing public efforts to convince him to step down that whatever chances he may have once had have evaporated. Regardless of whether those initially in favor of replacing Biden were prescient or have simply created enough damage to make their desire inevitable, we are at the point where a continued Biden candidacy is untenable. As the posts in this thread demonstrate, there is considerable frustration that we have arrived at this point and quite a few posters are clearly not pleased. Others, however reluctantly, accept that it is time for Biden to step down. Others are happy and predict that this will give the Democrats their best chance of defeating Trump. If the Band Aid could not have been pulled off quickly in the first place, let's hope that the process will not be drawn out very much longer.

Next was a thread posted in the "Beauty and Fashion" forum titled, "Usha Vance Dresses". The original poster says that she wants a "a boat neck, cape sleeve, forgiving fabric, longer midi travel dress" like Usha Vance, the wife of the Republican Vice Presidential nominee J. D. Vance, wore at the Republican National Convention. The original poster linked to a dress that she liked, but indicated that it was too expensive. Because I am not the brightest bulb in the tree, especially when it comes to women's clothing, I took the original poster at face value. But based on some of the replies, I wonder if it was a bit tongue in cheek. Either way, the reaction of many posters to Vance wearing what might be considered travel clothing during her national debut caused emotions anywhere between disgust and amusement. Some posters theorized that the campaign was attempting to position her in such a way that the clothing choices made sense. Others said the dress might reflect her profession as a lawyer in which travel-friendly clothing is prioritized over style. DCUM has a long tradition of critiquing the fashion of celebrities. Particularly political celebrities and even more particularly female political celebrities. If there is any silver lining that our generally liberal-leaning audience might see in a second Trump administration, it is likely the revival of "The Trump Women and their Fashion Mishaps" thread, which is currently on part 3 but would easily be a mainstay of the most active list if the Trump women were to return to prominence. Vance supporters are probably unhappy with the treatment she received in this thread, but they should find some solace in the fact that she was not lumped in with the likes of Kim Guilfoyle, Lara Trump, or Ivanka Trump in the Trump women thread. As for the discussion in this thread, it tended to revolve around the colors of the dresses. The cream dress was roundly and almost universally panned. That was the one dubbed a "travel dress". The blue dress had a lot of fans and the red dress was a hit that received considerable praise. I had to chuckle at the observation of one poster that Vance, a "DC lawyer mom with three small kids and a husband who seems pretty focused on his own career", almost perfectly matches the traditional DCUM demographic and, until Monday, "could have been a frequent DCUM poster". Having more or less made peace with her dresses, posters moved on to criticizing her shoes which, some posters seem to believe, should be tossed into a fire and replaced with something more elegant.

The next most active thread was titled, "Whose Responsibility?" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster says her daughter was admitted to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill but yesterday received a phone call saying that her admission was on hold because the university had not received her final high school transcript. After some investigation, the original poster found that the transcript had been sent to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. The original poster's daughter's high school counselor said the daughter must have made an error when selecting to which college transcripts should be sent. The original poster is skeptical about that because everything else was sent to the correct college and suspect that counselor was at fault. Everything was resolved, but the original poster still would like to know whether the high school has a responsibility to verify that they are sending transcripts to the correct school. The fact that this thread is among yesterday's most active is indicative of the fact that we are in a college admission dead zone at the moment. The fantasy college admissions league players that are active in this forum are stir crazy, frustrated, and at their wits end. They desperately need some SAT scores and GPAs to critique. But, with none of those at hand, they are left to debate who did what and when in this instance. To those posters' credit, they were fairly restrained in their replies. Regardless of who might be responsible, they agreed that the problem was resolved and that the original poster should move on. But the original poster was far from ready to move on. Far from ready. She sock puppeted posts to fake the anger that she expected others to feel but that they, in fact, did not. When one poster suggested that the original poster's story might not be true, the original poster claimed that the poster has a daughter who is "fat, ugly and going to [community college]." While most of the posters in this thread consider the entire incident to be no big deal or, at best, a warning that college applicants should stay on top of their email and frequently check the admissions portal, the original poster considers this to have been a major event. She says that it caused her daughter considerable stress and endangered her daughter's future. All of this despite it apparently having been resolved within a few hours. In a later message she hinted that the high school counselor should be fired and that she might pursue legal action if she could prove that the high school was responsible for the error. I assume that the original poster is trolling, especially given the large number of sock puppeted posts, and the outrage that can't possibly be real.

The next thread in the list of most active threads is about U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in California, calling for Biden to step aside. Because that topic is so closely related to the one I discussed above and I really need to get back to moderating the site, I am going to skip that thread and end this post at this point.