The Associated Press actually ran a fact check on Wednesday, since retracted, on the item circulating on the interwebs about Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance and a couch.
That’s where we are at this stage in the 2024 election, folks.
Couch coitus. Sectional assault.
Alleged, I should make clear to point out.
Makes you wonder how the AP handles today’s dolphin porn story?
Yes, somehow, it gets weirder.
And with that one, there are receipts.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, to the couch story:
“No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch,” the AP proclaimed in the since-scrubbed fact check, which was looking into a claim posted by a Twitter user that Vance had written in his 2016 best-seller, Hillbilly Elegy, about how he had looked at his “wedding party of six groomsmen and realized that every single one of them had, like me, f–ked a couch.”
I can quote extensively here because subsequent posts on whatever this is have produced a purported screenshot of the passage, which I’ll link to here.
The claim from those perpetuating it is that the passage was in either a galley of the book or in the first edition, and in either case, it was later removed by the publisher, for what would probably be obvious reasons, if that is indeed what happened.
Vance, of course, has not addressed the couch story, for what should also be obvious reasons.
My take on this, for what it’s worth: something doesn’t seem quite right with the passage produced in the screenshot.
The sentences preceding the description of the goings-on with couches are about his circle of high-school and college friends, and how many of them were intending to stay in Columbus (Vance got his undergrad degree from Ohio State) after graduation, an example, according to the text, of “brain drain,” small towns on the periphery leaving home in search of better opportunities.
To go from there to, you know, doing stuff with a couch, doesn’t seem to follow.
The other story emerging on the interwebs about Vance, involving dolphin porn, does seem to come with some authenticity.
And it’s not necessarily a new story.
RawStory wrote on Feb. 18 about how Vance was being “mocked on his own social media post because of a picture that he shared which showed a dolphin apparently attempting to mate with a woman.”
“Maybe the internet was a mistake,” Vance had posted with the picture, which was captioned: “Woman gets violated by a dolphin and enjoys it.”
“The problem,” according to RawStory, “is that the words ‘woman’ and ‘dolphin’ were highlighted in the image, suggesting that whoever took the screenshot apparently searched for those exact terms.”
Yikes.
Now, to be fair – not that Vance, of “childless cat ladies” and Biden’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination” fame, deserves to be treated fairly, but still – Vance wasn’t looking for dolphin porn necessarily because he’s into it.
(I’m pretty sure. Almost certain.)
What I see here is, it was just a poorly conceived, even more poorly executed attempt at a gotcha, is all.
I haven’t seen anything from Vance on this one, either, and doubt that we will.
The kerfuffle here and with the couch story reminds me of the likely apocryphal story about the old political master Lyndon Johnson, who, finding himself in a closer-than-expected re-election battle, told his campaign manager to put out a statement about his opponent being a “pig f–ker,” with the campaign manager pushing back, saying there was no way anybody would believe the story to be true.
“I don’t care if it’s true,” Johnson is said to have replied. “I just want him to have to deny it.”
Let’s just say, my spidey sense tells me that JD Vance is going to be confronted with more of these type things that the people putting them out there are going to try to get him to deny between now and November.