Vice President Kamala Harris said the public should no longer use the terms “radical Islamic terrorism” and “illegal alien” during a speech she gave at a Los Angeles mosque in July 2016.
“We must have the courage to object when they use that term, ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ which ignores how Muslims have overwhelmingly been the greatest victims of terror,” she told the crowd at the Islamic Center of Southern California. “We must also have the courage to reject the term ‘illegal alien.’”
Does she simply hate Genesis all together, or is she more of a fan of the Peter Gabriel era?
Kamala Harris, whose mentor and former boyfriend Willie Brown was one of the most powerful figures in California state politics, was part of an expansive political machine, and she ran the attorney general’s office along the lines of a twentieth century urban prosecutor. She refused to cooperate with ICE in disclosing the immigration status of criminal offenders, but such antics are the baseline in leftwing sanctuary cities like San Francisco.
Until recently, San Francisco was a colorful but relatively safe town—small (with under a million residents), wealthy, and surrounded by water. With antisocial behavior largely confined to certain districts such as the Tenderloin, San Francisco lived up to its reputation as one of America’s urban jewels. Its murder rate was much lower than in gritty Oakland across the Bay, but the Golden Gate city distinguished itself in drug-related deaths. In that category, San Francisco posted statistics nine times the national average — until the opiate epidemic caught the rest of America up.
As DA, Harris focused her attention, somewhat strangely, on marijuana offenses. In the Bay Area, pot is considered about as exotic as vitamin supplements. To be fair, she was in line with her predecessor — Hallinan prosecuted even more of those types of violations. But Harris opposed recreational marijuana and in 2010 co-authored the rebuttal to the pro-legalization argument for the California voter guide. Although she changed her position on cannabis prohibition once she rose to the national stage, there is little doubt that the prosecution of marijuana offenses in one of the most permissive American municipalities contributed to her downfall as a presidential contender. During the 2020 presidential debate, Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard noted: “she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” Kamala’s candidacy was already faltering, and that remark finished it.
Kamala could certainly get tough on San Franciscan tokers. But cop killers? Meh:
Harris last faced serious opposition in 2010, when she barely won the race for state attorney general in navy-blue California. Her 2020 presidential campaign collapsed before Iowa. She has no political base, no signature issue, is not part of a movement, and is best known for her word salads and very online fans.
These inconvenient details have been ignored or forgotten. Instead, an orgy of excitement has accompanied Harris’s rise. With the efficiency of a Malenkov, she locked up the presumptive nomination within 48 hours of Biden’s departure. Her ability to read off a TelePrompTer with an expression other than befuddlement has been rapturously received by her grateful party. Young and impressionable pundits speak of an “Obama moment,” seemingly unaware that Barack Obama emerged as a star at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and became, with the publication of The Audacity of Hope in 2006, a cultural phenomenon. In 2008 Obama filled an NFL stadium for his Greek-column acceptance speech. Harris has coconut tree memes.
The Democrats and the press may yet make Harris something special, something new. Friendly reporters are doing the grunt work of pretending that Harris had no role in the southern border crisis, revising years-old articles to spread the fiction that she was never called “border czar.” No doubt they will also try to distance Harris from the 20 percent rise in prices during the Biden-Harris administration, from the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea, and from the ongoing cover-up of Biden’s infirmity. Perhaps they will succeed.
Harris’s candidacy, after all, has knocked Donald Trump off the front page the first time in a decade. Her earned-media bounce has restored the presidential race to its pre-debate equilibrium: Trump leads, but it’s close. Can Harris and the Democrats keep up the act? She’s an alternate who finds herself the star of the team. She’s facing a political gold medalist. In this competition, there’s no room for error. And the judges? They can be harsh.
“‘You are a slow learner, Winston.’ Said O’Brien gently:”
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
And the public should completely forget what those experiences consisted of:
Not least of which, this experience:
THROWBACK: Kamala says she was the last person in the room and was a major part in the decision to pull out of Afghanistan which led to the disastrous withdrawal where 13 servicemembers were kiIIed.
One day before anti-Israel protesters caused mayhem in Washington, D.C., burning an effigy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after he spoke to Congress, scrawling graffiti across federal property, and burning American flags, the National Park Service granted the organizing group a public gathering permit. The Washington Examiner obtained a copy of that permit in full from a Biden administration source — providing a key window into the planning of the rally and the ways in which demonstrators skirted federal rules.
The permit, a redacted version of which can be read at this link, was given to the ANSWER Coalition, a group that coordinated with other pro-Palestinian activist hubs on the planning and execution of the protest. Dozens of protesters were arrested following clashes with police, though at least 11 of them had their misdemeanor charges dropped by Thursday evening, the Washington Examiner reported.
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In the permit, the ANSWER Coalition described how it would be protesting in various areas in the nation’s capital, including John Marshall Park and Columbus Plaza. At 3:37 p.m. on Wednesday, after many hours of protests in the streets, the NPS said the permit for Columbus Plaza had been revoked.
Minutes later, a man wearing a red shirt was captured on social media graffitiing the phrase “Hamas is coming” on a historic fountain in the plaza honoring Christopher Columbus.
The Wednesday protest, according to the permit, was slated for between 5 a.m. and 4 p.m. that day. Activists continued to demonstrate after 4 p.m. in the district as part of the rally, which ANSWER said on the permit application was to “stop the genocide in Gaza.” The protest was called “Arrest Netanyahu! Surround Congress July 24 with the People’s Red Line for Palestine,” according to ANSWER’s website.
At least 11 anti-Israel protesters arrested in Washington, D.C., had their misdemeanor charges dropped Thursday evening, one day after protesters scrawled graffiti across federal property and burned an American flag in the nation’s capital.
Fifty years ago, there were no professionals competing for the United States. Today, they’re all professionals, paid top dollar so they can train full-time for the glory of the country. They are sponsored by Coke, Pepsi, GM, and dozens of the largest corporations in the world.
Even the USA Canoe Slalom Olympic Team has sponsors.
The preparations for the games have taken seven years, so naturally, France is on edge, hoping everything goes off without a hitch.
Is a sabotage of the French rail network considered a “hitch”?
France’s high-speed train lines were targeted by multiple “malicious” acts including arson on Friday, in what has been described as “an attack on France” and “coordinated sabotage” to disrupt travel ahead of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
The French state railway company SNCF said in a post on X that “a large number of trains were diverted or canceled,” and asked “all travelers who can to postpone their trip and not go to the station.”
Who’s behind it? The French government and the rail company don’t say. For a list of suspects, see “telephone book.”
Earlier: The Olympian Self-Deception of Anti-Zionists. “Atop this questionable decision, Adidas piled a whopper: Its chosen model for the ’72 throwback shoe would be none other than Bella Hadid, a viciously anti-Israel celebrity who has used her platform to advance pro-Hamas propaganda. Adidas then apologized and said it would be revising the campaign. Then Hadid reportedly lawyered up, and Adidas apologized to Hadid. The shoe company founded by actual Nazis is very sorry to everyone involved—sorry to Bella Hadid, sorry to her critics for hiring Bella Hadid, etc.”
She’s “familiar with science!” But her boss claimed to have “ended cancer as we know it” a year ago, so I’m not sure her “familiarity” is even relevant going forward.
Those leaked DNC talking points may as well have been an instruction manual for the media. Just look at this. They're practically reciting the list point-by-point. pic.twitter.com/w365u927nY
What would you call a gathering of angry people marching behind a giant, grotesque effigy of a horned Jew with blood dripping from his mouth? A gathering at which one attendee held up a placard calling for a ‘Final Solution’ for ‘the Zionists’? A gathering at which people giddily waved the flag of a movement that is devoted to the murder of Jews? A gathering at which there were banners and speedily daubed graffiti on public monuments singing the praises of this Jew-killing outfit? I would call it a fascist rally. And yet, bizarrely, when just such a rally took place in Washington, DC yesterday, the liberal media called it an ‘anti-war protest’. Were they watching something else?
Let’s speak frankly: yesterday’s protests in Washington, DC against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were deeply disturbing. They were riddled not only with the febrile Israelophobic bigotry we’ve come to expect from the supposedly progressive left, but also with open anti-Semitism. With classic anti-Semitism. With expressions of virulent contempt for the Jew as blood-drinker, the Jew as child-killer, the Jew as such a key source of the world’s ills that a ‘solution’, ideally a ‘final’ one, must be found to his continual ailing of the human race. This was a hate-fest masquerading as concern for Palestinians.
Consider what many in the press are referring to as ‘the Netanyahu puppet’. What cowardly euphemising. This was no mere mocking likeness of the Israeli PM – it was a repulsive caricature of The Jew. Displayed outside Congress, where Netanyahu was speaking, it contained almost every anti-Jew trope. Blood-spattered horns sprouted from the Jew’s head. His hands and mouth were generously smeared with fake blood, as if this creature had freshly feasted on human flesh. His white shirt was red with blood, too – the spillage from his vampiric gorging.
It was right out of Medieval Europe, where eruptions of anti-Semitism were fuelled by ‘folk beliefs’ about Jews having ‘horns and big noses’. And being blood-drinkers, of course. The blood libel that was the trigger for so many medieval pogroms held that Jews killed Christian kids to use their blood in the baking of Matzah bread. To see such Dark Ages-style hatred and hysteria on the streets of DC in 2024 – to see a mob in modern America gather to mock an effigy of a blood-drinking Jew with horns – is horrendous. There were other effigies of Netanyahu, too. One was set on fire outside Union Station to the cheers and cackles of the crowd. It was like a medieval purging. It brought to mind the centuries-old practice of ‘Judas burning’ at Easter, also known as the ‘Burning of the Jew’, when effigies of that ‘Christ killer’ would be set alight.
Nonsense — those objective straight-shooting right down the middle journalists at NPR assure me that yesterday’s protests were “Largely Peaceful,” albeit a tad fiery as well.
If I try very hard, I can squeeze out a drop of admiration for the White House staff. They stayed at their posts, and if this meant feeding the public a steady diet of bullshit sandwiches with the intent of keeping Biden in office, no less sentient, then so be it. But I cannot summon that drop for the journalists conscripted to distribute the sandwiches. They had one job, to be the eyes and ears for the public, and in this they failed. Some of the failure can be traced to a susceptibility to a brain fever inspired by Donald Trump, a fever that told some reporters it was not only okay to act on a set of alt-journalistic principles, it was noble, and if this meant squinting hard enough to see a visibly failing 81-year-old man as the most capable person to lead the nation, they would do it. They had to. Animus for Trump was the power-pack they and the administration had counted on riding to 2028 and, as stinky and rickety as it might be, they could let go only at their own peril.
And then on Sunday, in flew a deus ex machina. You can nearly hear the communal heave of relief from those on the political beat. No more proppin’ up ol’ Joe; with Harris, they had a fresh candidate to spit-shine, and I imagine the country’s editors working double-time, trawling for stories that made the vice-president look, if not cuddly, then at least relatable, and didn’t she do some cooking thing a few years ago?
Which is how we wound up with multiple national reporters snorting up what crumbs they could from a short-lived “Cooking With Kamala” series on YouTube, in which — spoiler alert — the only item Harris herself cooks to completion is a tuna sandwich.
The Democrats and the MSM have figured out a way to handle all of this. It involves three steps. The first is to re-invent Kamala as the ENERGIZED! EXCITING! FRESH! candidate, as though she just dropped in from planet Xenon and has no history. Her remarkably undistinguished record (and that’s being kind) as part of the Biden administration’s failures will be ignored, in hopes of Kamala 2.0 catching on with the public. Step 2 will be to hammer home the idea that Republicans threaten women’s “reproductive rights” and Kamala and the Democrats will protect them. Step 3 involves choosing a more moderate running mate in order to preserve the fiction that Kamala will not govern from the far left.
No doubt, as Charles Cooke writes, Kamala can win. But unlike Obama, (Bill) Clinton, and Jimmy Carter when they debuted upon the national scene, she’s not, to borrow from Obama’s description of himself from TheAudacity of Hope, “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes [can] project their own views.” And she lacks Obama and Bill Clinton’s rock star personalities and undeniable skill at retail politics:
This isn't going to be like Obama for the media. She has a very public record of comments, a prior presidential run, and in administration policy positions like put in charge of the border. This is going to be a heavy lift for them. https://t.co/YlAuH2dv1W
Good God, they did the meme! Unfortunately, since it happened on the radio, there will be no chyron to screenshot.
* * * * * * * * *
On Wednesday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered, NPR National Correspondent Jennifer Ludden said that despite “some skirmishes with police” at events in Washington, D.C. critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, “the atmosphere was largely peaceful, as protesters sought to draw attention to ongoing violence” and that the events also had “a notable number of Jewish protesters” in attendance.
Ludden said, “There were some skirmishes with police, who say they used pepper spray, but the atmosphere was largely peaceful, as protesters sought to draw attention to ongoing violence they feel desperate to stop.”
NPR can get away with this sort of thing because their audience is in thrall to them, and they don’t need to share pictures. People who listen to the station trust those voices, which are Oh So Cultured, and wrongly assume that they are getting an intelligent and accurate picture of the world.
UPDATE: NPR’s “largely peaceful” quote is sure doing some heavy lifting as well:
It’s “largely peaceful” inasmuch as “The charges against four people, including a 15-year-old, who were arrested for assaulting police officers during yesterday’s riot were dropped,” Townhall alum Julio Rosas tweets.
“Nothing brings out my skepticism,” Ann Althouse wrote this morning, “like everyone using the same word.” Count me double on that, especially when the “everyone” applies to media outlets in the US and around the world.
It’s as if the Journolist has never gone away! Which it clearly hasn’t, as Ann’s screenshot demonstrates:
She and her running mate may come out of the convention even with, or perhaps even slightly ahead of, the Trump-Vance ticket.
The honeymoon will not last very long. Trump will succeed in painting Harris as an out-of-touch San Francisco leftist, much as Bush portrayed Dukakis as a Massachusetts liberal. Trump will find plenty of running room with that campaign, as there is hardly a left-wing cause that she has not embraced.
She was supposed to be in charge of the southern border but has done nothing for four years as millions of migrants flowed into the United States from just about every country in the world. She favored the Black Lives Matter campaign a few years ago (before it was revealed to be a fraud), raised money to bail out rioters and looters in Minnesota, and refused to condemn proponents of “defunding the police.” She was once a prosecutor, but very much of the kind favored by George Soros—that is, a pro-crime prosecutor. She supports the Green New Deal, with its array of taxes and subsidies designed to eliminate fossil fuels, gas-powered cars, and much else besides, including air conditioning and gas stoves. She favors cancellation of student debts, ruled unconstitutional by the federal courts. She is equivocal in support of Israel: she has supported a ceasefire in the current war, an approach favored by critics of Israel, and has criticized the Jewish state for not doing enough to ease the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza.
In general, she views the United States and the world much as “the Squad” in Congress does—that is, from a left-wing point of view. She and her fervent supporters are out of touch with the views of most voters. As a result, middle-of-the-road voters, independents, and many Hispanics will desert Harris’s campaign. In addition, based upon her record, she is not even an especially effective campaigner or a speaker who conveys much substance on the stump.
Once her views are made known to the public, Harris’s support will begin to melt away, though perhaps not as thoroughly as Dukakis’s support did in 1988. After all, there are enough Trump-haters and loyal Democrats to prevent her campaign from collapsing altogether. But by mid-September, Trump will have opened up a six-point lead in the polls that will remain intact for the balance of the campaign. In October, Democrat operatives, aware that Harris’s ticket is going to lose, will begin to shore up downticket races for Congress in the hope of saving some degree of influence in the House and Senate, thereby preventing a total electoral debacle.
While Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate, he has governed as one of the most progressive presidents in modern American history. In 2020, Biden sought to distance himself from self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders; after Biden as president pursued massive stimulus and spending programs, Sanders became one of his biggest supporters.
Now that Biden has announced that he will not pursue reelection, the Democratic nomination will likely fall to his vice president, Kamala Harris. While Harris may campaign as a moderate, analysis of her economic record does not support that label.
In her time in the Senate, Harris positioned herself on the far left of a Democratic Party already moving sharply to the left. According to DW-NOMINATE, a measure that compares the votes of senators and representatives and ranks members from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative) Harris was the second-most liberal member of the Senate when she served from 2017 to 2021, behind only Elizabeth Warren. In fact, her overall voting record is more liberal than that of Bernie Sanders. Though it is difficult to compare members across time, Harris’s score (-0.709), which is based largely on economic votes, ranks among the more left-wing in American history.
Harris’s senatorial record differs starkly from that of her boss. While Biden shifted left on entering the White House, he remained a moderate across his nearly four-decade Senate career. His approximate -0.3 DW-NOMINATE score put him close to the middle of his party throughout his time in the upper chamber.
When Harris was in the Senate, she introduced and co-sponsored bills that would have dramatically shifted U.S. policy leftward. In 2019, she unveiled a $10 trillion plan to reduce greenhouse gases to zero by 2045—five years faster than proposed in the uber-progressive Green New Deal. Harris also advocated for an end to fracking, a measure that, had it taken effect, would have stopped about two-thirds of all oil production in the United States.
[The WaPo’s Sarah Ellison gave Federalist CEO Sean Davis] less than an hour to respond to her demands for comment before her article, written in conjunction with [Mariana] Alfaro, went live.
When Davis did respond a few hours after Ellison’s initial comment request, he noted that she and the paper she represents “spread false and dangerous conspiracy theories” on social media and in the publication’s pages about targets of political violence, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Trump.
“Do you feel personally responsible at all for the violence directed at Kavanaugh given your participation in spreading those conspiracy theories?” Davis queried. “Are you concerned that your paper’s false reporting and dissemination of conspiracy theories has encouraged individuals to inflict violence on Trump or his supporters?”
Davis also pointed out that Alfaro “sent me a nearly identical e-mail earlier this week” but “did not acknowledge my response to her.”
“I can’t imagine it’s the policy of your paper to ignore responses you receive only to send new reporters to ask the same question over and over again until you get a quote you can slice and dice to smear your political enemies,” Davis concluded.
Harris’s record is a story both of incompetence and of how little faith her own allies have in her political acumen and capabilities as an executive.
Since Joe Biden announced his intention to withdraw from American public life at the end of his term, the Trump campaign and its Republican allies have focused on their new opponent’s subpar performance handling border security. The GOP’s strategy makes sense. For all the media’s efforts to revise or even erase history, Harris was, in function if not title, the Biden administration’s “border czar.” And yet, the Republican Party’s approach to this messaging campaign has so far been to frame Harris as a fully empowered functionary who nevertheless bungled her charge. In reality, the Biden administration set Harris up to fail, as a way of providing the president cover for his own dismal mishandling of the border.
UPDATE: Huge: Kamala Harris Receives Bipartisan Condemnation For Her Handling of the Border. “In a stunning move on Thursday, the House of Representatives strongly condemned ‘the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border’ in a bipartisan vote. All Republicans supported the resolution, as did six Democrats: Reps. Yadira Caraveo (D-Colo.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Donald Davis (D-N.C.), Jared Golden (D-Maine), Mary Peltola (D-Alaska), and Mari Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.).”
WAS IT OVER WHEN KIM JONG UN BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?!
This is what happens when you’ve been elevated to a position that is above your ability to function. pic.twitter.com/ZEaZo6sfwF
In the meantime, I will be interested to see how Biden’s address plays in the media. The thing that struck me were the number of lies it contained. Consider just this one passage, which occurred near the end of Biden’s address. We are, Biden said, “stronger, more prosperous and more secure” today than before, but that is not true. Nor is it true that “today we have the strongest economy in the world.” Wages are not up, as Biden claimed, nor is inflation tamed. Biden claimed that “violent crime” is at “a fifteen-year low,” but in fact it is soaring. Biden even said that he was “securing our border” and that “border crossings are lower today than when the previous administration left office.”
These are but a few of the gross misstatements — indeed, gross and obvious lies, with which the president regaled the American people in his address, probably his last such address as president.
The bottom line of this curious — probably unprecedented — performance is that Biden will cling to power as long as possible. He will not — not now, anyway — endow Kamala Harris with the perquisites of incumbency. For that, I suppose, we should be modestly grateful.
Certainly the photographs shot tonight of the Bidens during and after Joe’s speech have a funereal pall about them. How much longer can the regime keep John Gill’s desiccated husk in the Oval Office?
July 24, 2024
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH THE BORDER CZAR:
UPDATE: Gaslighting the Public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar.’ “We can be sure of this much: If the border was not a mess, if this was not a winning GOP issue, Kamala Harris would be running on it right now. And her media sock-puppet friends—who seem to believe in nothing except making sure she wins—would be celebrating ‘The Greatest Border Czar Who Ever Was.’”
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