Last Week Tonight host John Oliver is feeling pretty good about the 2024 presidential election, mainly because of how weak the GOP attacks on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have been so far.
Oliver first focused on Donald Trump’s attempts to make “Kamabla” stick as a nickname, a tactic Oliver described as “immediately confusing.”
He seemed more perplexed, however, by the right-wing outrage over allegations Walz changed the Minnesotan state flag so that it looked more like an autonomous state in Somalia. It’s an accusation Oliver considers to be both irrelevant and a bit of a stretch.
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“What are you talking about? Have you seen flags?” Oliver said. “They’re all some combination of colors, stars, and in the case of Sicily, a three-legged monster with a head for a vagina. That’s really more of a ‘Sicily’s gonna Sicily’ situation.”
Oliver explained, “For what it’s worth, the flag was changed mainly as a result of objections to the depiction of a Native American on the old flag, which had only been around since 1957 anyway. Also, Walz wasn’t the one who pushed for the change; he just happened to be governor at the time.”
Oliver described the attack as “more than a little desperate,” although it was nothing compared to the critiques of Walz’s supposed “stolen valor” in the military. After showing the clip where JD Vance accused Walz of abandoning his crew right before they deployed to Iraq, Oliver explained what really happened:
“Walz retired in May of 2005. His unit wasn’t ordered to mobilize until July of that year and didn’t deploy to Iraq until 2006. Even the hard-right Wall Street Journal editorial board said the charges leveled so far about his military service look like thin gruel.”
The good news, Oliver argued, is that these shameless attacks indicate that the GOP can’t find any real ones that could do some genuine damage.
“It does seem telling that so much of their attack strategy seems to boil down to a nonsense word and false accusations of stolen valor,” Oliver said. “Two desperate smear attempts with one thing in common: they reveal the Trump campaign has currently got absolutely nothing.”
