Why won’t the AP tell the truth about J.D. Vance and the couch?

Sofa, so good?

What does “fake news” mean in the post-truth era? Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and rebranding of it to X, was supposed to augur a new age of unfiltered information, to combat the censorship of Silicon Valley apparatchiks. For a lot of this week, that meant you’d see Laura Loomer and Charlie Kirk sincerely assuring you that Joe Biden was dead or about to die (he addressed the nation, weakly, on Wednesday, an impressive feat for any corpse). How is the discerning reader supposed to separate fact from falsehood in this climate? 

That’s the question facing tech-savvy Senator J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick, this week, after he found himself on the receiving end of an unsavory and very viral rumor: that he had sexual relations with a couch in college and wrote about it in his famous memoir Hillbilly Elegy. 

The rumor started eleven days ago, when X user @rickrudescalves tweeted, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, 𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘺, pp. 179-181).” The post was amplified, imitated and set America ablaze. 

“‘JD Vance fucked a couch’ fine we have one thing in common that doesn’t mean I’m gonna vote for the guy,” responded one user, one of thousands of reactions to the anecdote which is… completely fabricated, sadly. 

In the Trump era, the media would appoint its own ombudsmen to determine which stories were “fake news” or “misleading”: think CNN’s in-house poindexter Daniel Dale and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. Sure enough, Snopes published a story debunking the rumor, as did the AP’s Fact Check, in a piece headlined “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” 

The AP piece soared just as high, leading to blushes at head office and the article’s deletion, as the story “didn’t go through our standing editing process.” 

So… the AP article authoritatively declaring that J.D. Vance has never admitted to performing a sex act with a couch was removed, meaning… the wire service isn’t sure whether he ever has or not? Cockburn expects the site to put its sharpest reporters on the case. America demands answers.

How long will the Kamala honeymoon last?

Just how real is Kamalamentum? The Democrats have been buoyant ever since Joe Biden announced he was stepping aside in order to let his VP run in November’s election, apparently invigorated by having a candidate on whom they feel they can depend, rather than one in Depends. Since the switch, Kamala has been viral on TikTok (thanks, China!) and appeared in a teaser for a forthcoming episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race in which she’ll feature. There have been a number of widely attended fundraising Zoom calls — because going outside is for Republicans — not least of all the White Women for Harris Zoom Thursday night, which raised $1.8 million and featured Pink!, Megan Rapinoe and an odd conversation about toad venom between Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Connie Britton from Spin City. The campaign was further boosted this morning with the announcement that Barack and Michelle Obama had endorsed Harris, posting a deeply hackneyed video shot on Wednesday in which the candidate appears to take a call from the former POTUS and FLOTUS. And some polls this week show her level or ahead of Donald Trump.

Whether all that will count for anything come November is another matter. One skeptic is Clinton campaign veteran James Carville. “I have to be the skunk at the garden party. This is too triumphalist, OK?” Carville told MSNBC. “Everybody’s giddy. I look at the coverage and it’s great. If I had to write a play about what I think, it’d be entitled, ‘The Icepick Cometh,’ OK? Get ready, they’re coming.” Carville had previously told Don Lemon that Harris had already had “the best day that she’s going to have for the rest of the campaign” at the start of this week.

Scratch the surface and there are plenty of reasons why the Democratic coalition may crack up beneath Harris. Progressives are critical of her inconsistent positions on sex work, due to her sponsorship of FOSTA-SESTA, and cannabis, to name a couple of examples — and the left wing of the party is likely to be crucial to its get-out-the-vote ground game. She is yet to make key staffing decisions — and hiring the wrong people was a major factor behind the failure of her last bid for the presidency. Speaking of her 2020 run, the policies she advocated for then may well come back to bite her now, such as her louche stance on illegal immigration, which she pivoted on during her time addressing the “root causes of migration” as vice president (whatever you do, don’t call her a “border czar”).

The Trump campaign announced last night that it wouldn’t agree terms for a debate with Harris until she had formally secured the nomination, throwing the September 10 clash on ABC in doubt. Who’s to say how popular a candidate she seems by then…

Tim Burchett’s Wandering Jew

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a historic fourth address to a joint session of Congress this week. Tickets were such prized possessions that some lobbyists who work on pro-Israel legislation only got seats because of the nationwide flight outages that saw some would-be attendees stranded across America. While almost half of congressional Democrats, and Republican representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, boycotted the speech, Jews from all over America who secured tickets watched from the rafters, including radio legend Mark Levin… and one disappearing member of the Tribe. As Netanyahu’s remarks concluded, Representative Tim Burchett was overheard telling a colleague, in his quintessential southern drawl, “I’m looking for a Jewish man, about 5’10”,” after apparently misplacing one of his guests.

Burchett’s district is anchored by Knoxville, Tennessee, which has a Jewish population of almost 2,000 people. Cockburn sincerely hope that he found the wandering Jew he was looking for.

Inside BoJo’s no-show

Former British prime minister Boris Johnson made a surprise appearance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last week, but his hopes for a hero’s welcome didn’t turn out quite as he planned. Boris got plenty of likes on the photo with former president Donald Trump he tweeted on Tuesday, but what many don’t know is that the onetime Spectator editor was also at the convention on Monday and even held a speaking event.

No one could be blamed for not knowing, as apparently the event with the “Vapor Technology Association” was barely publicized. A picture of the event shows just a handful of people, maybe two dozen in the crowd with a sea of empty chairs meant to hold 150-200.

According to the spy who snapped the pic of the nearly empty venue, Boris didn’t want to publicize the event for fear of ruining the shock of his Trump photo op scheduled for the following day, but then illogically got quite upset that no one had come out to see him. In the hope that more adoring fans would turn up, Boris waited backstage for an hour before coming out to speak. Unfortunately that only made things worse, as half the crowd that did show up left before the star took the floor.