Programming note: Join Steyn tomorrow, Saturday, for another episode of his Serenade Radio show, On the Town - including a presidential edition of his Sinatra Sextet. The fun starts at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe but... for one week only, 1pm North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here. On Sunday, Mark will also have a brand new special pre-election edition of his Song of the Week.

~The Freeish World's lousiest election system continues to work its dark magic:

Oops, now it's six hours:

A "free and fair election" is not possible in these conditions. Stop waving that Constitution and get real, wankercons: there's no point having the greatest constitution in the world if you have the crappiest election system in the world. The latter will cost you your country, and the former will not prevent it.

~As longtime readers will recall, I used to appear weekly on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. I occasionally reciprocated by having him on The Rush Limbaugh Show during my guest-hosting stints, and over the years we've done various events together at the Naval Academy and elsewhere. Hugh is both super-professional and the soul of moderation. If you'd asked me to make a list of American pundits least likely to rip out his earpiece and storm off the set, he would definitely have been in the Top Three.

And yet...

Immediately afterwards, Hugh quit The Washington Post, where he had apparently been a columnist. I wasn't aware of that, as I haven't read the paper since Jonathan Yardley retired as its literary columnist a decade ago.

Hugh was quite right to do what he did. The host's starting point was that Trump is "laying the groundwork" for not accepting the results of the election ...and his only evidence for this was what his first guest called "far-fetched" lawsuits that the GOP won - as Hugh was obliged to point out.

The show's host then huffed prissily that "I don't appreciate being lectured about reporting." Well, it's pretty basic. Ruth Marcus, one of those unreadable no-talents who unaccountably prosper for decades in the torpid world of American "journalism", is a graduate of Harvard Law School, so surely must have known that, if you're going to premise your entire argument on lawsuits, the disposition thereof is a relevant factor.

So Hugh walked out, and the other guest's line went down, depriving viewers of any further exposure to her dining room. All very GB News. Except that I'd usually manage to vamp until some semblance of technical competence re-emerged from the amusingly named "Master Control", whereas Prissy McHuffpants just gave up on his show and ended it.

~With improvisational skills like that, he should be Kamala's running mate:

"Understand the difference here moving forward. Moving forward understand the difference here." Is this vital last-minute outreach to the critical Yoda-fan demographic? The difference here moving forward understand.

But, eventually, she moved forward:

What we are looking at is a difference in this election. Let's move forward and see where we are.

"Let's move forward and see where we are." Like the health experts say, if you walk a mile a day, after three months you'll be ninety miles from home. Slogan-wise, the stars of Avengers XXIII: Salad Girl vs Garbagetron think they can do better than that:

In a sane world, that would kill celebrity endorsements for the next quarter-century. Yet there are supposedly millions of people itching to vote the same way Captain Sequel and Franchise Girl vote.

Throw in Cardi B and make it a half-century. Don't know who Cardi B is? She's National Spokeswoman of the Foundation for Prompter-Dependence Awareness. Unfortunately, she forgot to wear the awareness-raising ribbon:

What's with all these prompter malfunctions anyway? In the days when I used to tour leftie cities, there was always the danger you'd be booked into some beautiful nineteenth-century theatre where the audio guy was antifa and would sabotage accordingly. Are the prompter guys all Maga?

Luckily, Cardi B is so professional you never even notice the telephone:

~You'd almost think from Cardi & Co that there was nothing at stake in this election other than their own cool. Au contraire:

There's a lot of truth in that. Yesterday Kamala graciously agreed to say a few words to the court eunuchs on some or other airport runway and devoted them to defending the honour of the Cheneys. How did even a campaign as club-footed as Kamala's wind up, in "the final quarter" (as Tim Walz would say), joined at the brain like Siamese twins from a Wuhan lab to the scion of the most despised political dynasty in the country?

There's a reason this is happening.

While this stupid corrupt election was staggering to its "final quarter", the BRICS summit photo-op offered the perfect distillation of American impotence: after Biden's assurance at the start of the Ukraine war that Putin had been totally "isolated", the leaders of regional powers on every continent are happy to be up there on stage with him - in Russia - all of them fine-tuning plans for the post-American world.

Conversely, if you do Washington's bidding - as poor old Zelenskyy did, with a bit of strongarming from Boris Johnson - your country's a smoking ruin.

The Pentagon learned nothing from its humiliation in Afghanistan. It is not likely to learn anything under Liz Cheney. World War Three is on the cards - and, as in Afghanistan, America will lose ...because when does it ever win?

But, if it's any consolation, it'll be a lot quicker this time.

Cardi B fronting for the Cheneys. Only in America!

~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.