◼ Even the brain worm is mystified by RFK Jr.’s decisions that day.

◼ Kamala Harris picked Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. It was a surprise that she didn’t go with Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of must-win Pennsylvania. But there was a very public pressure campaign against Shapiro, a Jewish supporter of Israel who has criticized antisemitic protesters. Walz, though also a supporter of Israel as contemporary Democrats go, is a favorite of the MSNBC crowd and has not criticized any protesters. After escaping a swing district in the House, he has proven himself generally up to date with progressive fashions and has governed as far left as possible, but is supposed to be “folksy” and nonthreatening. In the early going, he has proved a spirited campaigner, although in order to get a cheap laugh he blighted his introductory speech with a reference to a poisonously stupid internet lie about J. D. Vance. By choosing perhaps the most left-wing governor in America, at least Harris isn’t trying to hide who she is.

◼ Walz’s military service has drawn deserved scrutiny. Walz, to his credit, served 24 years in the National Guard. But while some reporters have gotten this wrong, he knew that his battalion was set to mobilize and deploy to Iraq when he retired and left the Guard to run for Congress. His decision surprised and rankled fellow soldiers, some of whom are braving personal attacks to speak out. Walz has said that he left the National Guard to run for public office because he thought he could advocate more effectively against the war, which he had publicly opposed, in the halls of Congress than from the battlefields of Iraq. But the former soldiers who have criticized him for abandoning his unit are entitled to their opinion and deserve to be heard. Walz and his campaign staff have also been loose in their characterization of his record in a way that seems intended to suggest, falsely, that he served in a combat zone. Over the years, friendly press has reported that Walz is variously a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. In 2004, he was photographed holding a sign that read “Enduring Freedom Veterans for Kerry,” which any fair-minded observer would take to mean that Walz was saying he fought in Afghanistan. At the very least, Walz should apologize for the sign, and for allowing his service to be mischaracterized by the press for nearly two decades.

◼ Before the Walz selection, progressive activists pulled out all the stops to persuade Harris not to choose Shapiro. He was accused of maintaining a blinkered sympathy for the Jewish state, of serving covertly in the Israeli military, and of tacitly endorsing the slaughter of innocent Palestinians. “Josh’s position on Israel is almost identical to everybody else, but he’s being held to a different standard,” observed Representative Jared Moskowitz (D., Fla.). “You have to ask yourself why.” Indeed. Some media outlets offered competing explanations for Harris’s decision, ranging from the believable (Harris was intimidated by Shapiro’s talent and ambition; Shapiro was unsure about a subordinate role) to the implausible (Shapiro has no special appeal to voters in the state he won by 15 points in 2022). But these explanations, and the fear that Shapiro’s selection would rattle the pro-Hamas hornets’ nest, are not mutually exclusive. We can’t say that the campaign against “Genocide Josh” worked—or didn’t. We can say that it proved progressive commentator Van Jones correct about the antisemitism that has gotten “marbled” into the Democratic Party.

◼ The approval rating of Brian Kemp, governor of Georgia, is a robust 63 percent. “He’s a bad guy. He’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor,” said Donald Trump at a recent rally in Georgia. Just as Democrats had united behind Harris, Trump chose to relitigate his stolen-election conspiracy theories about 2020 and to trash the GOP governor of a key swing state. “I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal,” Trump added, referring to the recent exchange of prisoners between the U.S. and several Western allies. “If you look at Caracas, it was known for being a very dangerous city, and now it’s very safe,” Trump said in an interview with an online influencer. “In fact, the next interview we do, we’ll do it in Caracas, Venezuela, because it’s safer than many of our cities.” Saying later that he was joking, he made a muddled point about the Venezuelan government’s exporting its criminals to the U.S. Trump somehow makes dictator Nicolás Maduro, who has stolen multiple elections, sound like an effective crime-fighter. Reportedly, Trump is frustrated with the tied polls and the growing sense that, ever since Joe Biden withdrew as a candidate, the GOP has been fumbling away a winnable presidential race. If he wants to identify the problem, he should check the nearest mirror.