Or: Why I could not Support a Kamala Harris Presidency
With the recent revelation of large-scale hacks of the US telecom system by Chinese state operatives, the long-running, undeclared cold war between the United States and the People’s Republic of China has just heated up. Way up.
The full extent of the penetration is not yet known, but insiders have described it as possibly the worst intelligence failure ever.
And as China ramps up the digital aggression, it also makes bold moves against its neighbors, including Taiwan, and forges a close relationship with Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power. The Chinese press, megaphone of the State, seethes with bellicose, menacing rhetoric.
The American mainstream press, meanwhile, has mostly ignored the breach, just as it has ignored or soft-pedaled every other Biden-Harris cock-up. Where is that “speaking truth to power” when you really need it?
This and many other crises—real ones, not the invented kind—await the next President, whoever that may be. In no particular order they are: The War in Ukraine, a bellicose, meddlesome Iran expanding its malignant reach, a widening war in the Middle East, a continuing flood of third-world migrants, now numbering well into eight figures.
We also face stubbornly persistent inflation, a surging BRICS coalition, which hopes to unseat the Dollar as the World’s reserve currency, exploding national debt, exploding housing costs, an electrical grid on the edge of collapse, an intractable homeless problem, a poisonous political and social climate, an epidemic of deaths of despair among America’s traditional population, and a deepening sense that our Republic is in terminal decline.
Every warning light on the console is flashing bright red right now. Thanks to our proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Clock of Doom stands at 90 seconds to midnight, worse than at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Every single one of these crises was either caused or exacerbated by policies of the Biden-Harris administration. Why, then, would any reasonable person even think about trusting Kamala Devi Harris to clean up the train wreck she played a key role in causing?
Remarkably Unremarkable
The Presidency is unlike any other job. It is 24/7/365, ultra-high stress, ultra-high demand, ultra-high responsibility. To do it well requires extraordinary energy, dedication, and skill.
But there is nothing extraordinary about Kamala Harris. She is remarkably unremarkable, with few real accomplishments despite excellent paper qualifications, and no visible talents other than an advanced ability to answer questions with empty platitudes.
An adept President must be able to think and react in real time, on the fly, in the face of multiple distractions and pressures. Harris fails this very basic test, miserably. She cannot think on her feet. She withers under pressure. Take her script away and she flails and looks lost. Under questioning she is defensive and evasive. In answer to criticism that she was avoiding interviews, which she plainly was, Harris did a whirlwind tour of friendly shows that lobbed nerfball questions at her, gently, and she flubbed even those.
She had exactly two hard interviews, one with Fox News, one with Sixty Minutes. She sabotaged the Fox interview, which was supposed to last forty five minutes, by showing up very late. When the interview began to go sideways, her crew signaled frantically from offstage to cut it short. The 60 Minutes interview featured numerous non-answers and evasions. The broadcast version was even edited to replace one rambling, word-salad answer with a more concise reply from earlier in the interview, suggesting that the once-venerable newsmagazine was giving Harris a helping hand. Which, if true, would be a grave breach of journalistic ethics.
On The View, the ultimate friendly venue, she was asked what she would have done differently than Joe Biden. To which she lamely responded, “Nothing comes to mind.”
Yet this person styles herself as the “Change” candidate who will “turn the page.” Standards have slipped, for sure. But not that far. How again is this person fit to be Chief Executive?
Harris represents much of what is wrong with American society right now. She got her start in politics not through merit, but by the machinations of a well-connected lover. She has off-the-charts ambition but no apparent goal beyond climbing the career ladder. Ask her what she plans to do with the power she seeks and she blanks. If pressed, she flashes a “help me” look as she searches the cue cards of her mind for just the right mashup of boilerplate talking points. If she has ever had an original thought, there is no record of it. She milks her gender and mixed-race identities for everything they are worth.
Harris is the product of the California Democratic Machine, that closed system of Party insiders and favorites, which runs, and ruins, the Golden State. She was selected by that machine to be Attorney General, and later Senator, because she is a reliable Party apparatchik who checked all the right boxes: Woman, check. Brown, check Black, check. Check check check. If only she were also gay, she would be perfect.
The DNC, which claims about every five minutes to be “Saving Democracy,” essentially forced Harris onto the 2020 ticket over Biden’s objection, and then appointed her as nominee when Biden unwittingly revealed his diminished condition in the debate with Trump. The DNC knew this would happen, of course, which is why they scheduled the debate for two months earlier than is customary, to allow time to make the ol’ switcheroo. A compliant Democrat base rubber-stamped the swap without a peep of protest.
Harris is the ultimate diversity hire; if she were Pamela Deborah Harris from Bakersfield, she would have topped out in middle management at County Parks and Rec. But by the DNC’s reckoning, she’s bulletproof because of her membership in three protected classes. Ding! Ding! Ding! And this makes her very useful. By the Progressive rules of engagement, anyone who opposes her may be attacked without mercy as racist, two different ways, and misogynistic.
Character Issues
Democrats have made this election a contest about “character,” with Harris playing the pure and upright heroine, and Trump cast as the mustache-twirling villain. But “mistress to the powerful” isn’t a good look, no matter how you spin it.
Neither is “denier of justice for abused children.”
Her predecessor as San Francisco District Attorney, and former boss, Terence Hallinan, had painstakingly assembled an 800-page dossier documenting the abuse of children by Catholic clergy over many years, and was preparing cases against some of the alleged offenders. After defeating Hallinan in a close election, the very first action Harris took as DA was to scuttle those cases and disappear the dossier on which they were based. San Francisco became the only major American city not to pursue charges against Catholic clergy.
“Why would she do such a thing?” you might ask. Surely there’s a good reason.
Well it might could have had something to do with the campaign donations she accepted, the largest allowed by law, from all three law firms representing the Catholic Church. She also accepted nearly $60,000 in donations from an assortment of Catholic-affiliated organizations.
It’s worth mentioning that in the race for DA she broke her legally binding promise to limit campaign spending to $211,000, a pledge signed by every candidate. Shattered it, actually, as she spent nearly three times the limit, for a total of $620,000, which undoubtedly put her over the top in an extremely close race. For this violation she was fined a record $34,000. It’s also worth mentioning that as California Attorney General, she failed to pursue even a single case of abuse against the Catholic Church.*
These are the actions of a seriously unscrupulous person willing to do whatever it takes to win. That’s a deal-breaker for me, and it ought to be for you, too.
As DA, Harris promised to go after “corporate criminals,” but instead pursued mostly soft targets, low-end real estate developers who got a little too chummy with regulatory agencies, that sort of thing. Penny-ante prosecutions that changed nothing. The big property owners, and donors, who made life just a little harder for thousands by renting substandard properties at extortionate prices, a scandal for years, went entirely unmolested.
As Attorney General she was tough on weed smokers (despite having been one herself) and the parents of truant public-school students. Powerful offenders, not so much. She ignored three Federal orders to release low-level offenders from overcrowded state prisons, eventually forcing a confrontation. When pressed, she dragged her heels and whined that the loss of cheap inmate labor would disrupt State fire-control operations.
Harris has described herself tough-on-crime, border-state prosecutor who battled transnational gangs. This stretches the truth, which is mixed. During her time in office she gained a reputation as a credit hog, who would show up for photo ops, always front row, center of frame, and then promptly leave, which very much irritated those actually doing the work.
When an internal investigation revealed that employees of the State’s drug-testing lab were using and stealing the product they were supposed to be testing, jeopardizing thousands of criminal cases, she stonewalled for months and did nothing. Because of her inaction, California courts were forced to throw out 1200 convictions along with thousands of pending cases.
Were Harris not the darling of the California political machine, she would have been disgraced and disbarred. Instead, she was kicked upstairs, and chosen to replace Barbara Boxer when she retired from the Senate in 2016, a contest Harris won easily against token opposition. As Senator she gained a reputation as a blind partisan and a hazard to anyone standing between her and a camera. She is famous for her weirdly meandering, repetitious interrogations of Republican nominees to Federal office.
But some fawning sycophant told Harris she was “the female Obama,” and she believed it. So four years into a wholly mediocre Senate career, she answered the call of destiny and ran for President. It did not go well. She was, in fact, the first to drop out, before the first primary even took place, crushed by abysmal poll numbers.
She had a reasonably strong start, but the more voters saw of her, the less they liked. By the time she suspended her campaign, she was polling at four percent among fellow Californians, and less than a half percent overall, which rounds to zero.
Harris is the classic Horrible Boss, who goes through staff the way some people change their socks. Following her disastrous Presidential run, more than seventy staffers came forward to tell stories of rampaging egos, screaming matches, out-of-control spending, and epic dysfunction. In the first three years of her Vice Presidency, she suffered an astonishing 92 percent staff turnover.
Although she has numerous admirers, Harris has also drawn withering criticism from people who know her well. As usual, these harsher critiques were widely disseminated in alternate media, but were all but ignored by the mainstream press, so the people who really needed to see them did not.
Failure to Thrive
The Vice Presidency is the closest thing there is to an apprenticeship for the top job. In this role Harris failed dismally. Her one large responsibility, the border, was a genuine fiasco. On her watch, possibly as many as 20 million migrants, the vast majority military-aged males from third world countries, crossed the southern border illegally, with virtually no screening.
On the other hand, who can blame them? They were essentially invited to come on down by the Biden-Harris administration, which issued 94 Executive Orders, beginning on Day One, that loosened restrictions and reversed Trump-era rules regulating the border, as it bragged that it had done so. Migrants were showered with freebies, given I-phones, money and lodging, plus plane tickets to the destinations of their choice. Those who had no particular destination in mind were distributed strategically, mostly among small cities in Red states, over the objections of local governments. Most of the migrants have no marketable skills and little English proficiency. Those who don’t disappear into the vast, coast-to-coast immigrant underground will be on public assistance for years, if not forever. More than a few have serious criminal histories, if their gang tatts are any indication.
On the plus side, though, the drug cartels have made out very well. Every single person who crosses the southern border is a multi-thousand dollar payday for the world’ largest, best-organized criminal organization, which secures repayment by any means necessary. Which often means forcibly employing them in its many illegal operations. Hundreds of thousands of women and children have also been trafficked by the cartel for the sex trade, trapped in bondage until the Cartel says so by debt that can literally never be repaid. The Cartels openly recruit new members wherever young Hispanic people gather, and through ads on Craiglist and Facebook.
It is a statistical certainty that thousands of people who wish to do our nation serious harm were concealed among the millions. The perpetrators of the next 9/11, the one after that, and the one after that are this very moment among us, thanks to the breathtakingly foolish policies of the Biden-Harris Administration.
Unsavory Company
Harris’ backstory, which has been thoroughly whitewashed, is eye-opening. Both of her parents were dedicated communists. They met at a meeting of the Afro-American Association, a hate group dedicated to the promotion of Black supremacy. Non-black people were not allowed to join this organization with exactly one exception: Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a Brahmin Indian from a prominent, radical family. Gopalan was an angry, ungrateful person who made no secret of her disdain for the United States and its traditional white majority, which some might call ironic, given that this country and its systems made possible a successful academic career. Harris’ mother and father clashed bitterly over the mother’s radical politics, which led to the couple’s separation and eventual divorce, after which Harris was raised exclusively by her mother.
From an early age Harris marinated in racial animosity. For years she gleefully told the story of coming downstairs at her house in Berkeley to find the living room full of Black revolutionaries. Eventually it dawned on her that many of those who heard the story were dismayed, not amused, by the revelation, so she stopped telling it.
On those rare occasions when Harris says “I love America,” she does so without a trace of conviction, in the manner of a weak actor at a table read. In the summer of 2020, when rampaging mobs reduced entire neighborhoods to ash heaps, Harris responded not with horror but with glee: “They’re not going to stop. WE’RE not going to stop,” she gushed in a live interview, as a grinning Stephen Colbert looked on.
In his later years, Osama Bin Laden frequently lamented the “Tragedy of Andalusia,” the expulsion of the Moors from Europe in 1492, as though it were a recent thing. The Democrat Party similarly fixates on ancient, sometimes imagined, historical crimes to the exclusion of current reality. Democrats speak of slavery, defunct for seven generations, as though it ended only last week. Centuries-old traditions are regarded as instruments of oppression. The West, whose technologies, philosophies, and institutions defined the modern world, is dismissed as a “colonizer.”
The Democrat Party of Kamala Harris has lost its mind and its way. It makes no secret of its hatred for traditional America and its fervent wish to tear that hated thing to the ground. It is the party of identity, identity, identity. It is the Party of permanent, insoluble grievance. It inverts the Wisdom of Martin Luther King: The color of your skin is everything; the content of your character? What’s that?
It is the party of intersectionality, of group guilt that may never be expunged. It advocates high-order, state-sponsored censorship. It is a secular religion, complete with original sin (Slavery,) divine retribution (climate change,) a god figure (Gaia,) a program of penance (de-industrialization, reparations, de-population,) and a promised Utopia, (diversity, equity, and inclusion.) As with all cults, dissent is absolutely forbidden. Go against it and your life becomes a living hell.
As President, Harris would be a mere figurehead. She would do what she is told, when she is told, by those who elevated her. She would do nothing to control the Bureaucracy, nor would she resist the tide of authoritarianism ascendant in her Party. She would not lift a finger to rein in the Permanent War Machine. At very best she would be an agent of managed decline. At worst she would start World War III.
But But But ORANGE MAN!
Whenever the Left mentions Donald Trump, it is with the intent is to stop the conversation in its tracks. Worst person ever; end of discussion. Harris has been packaged as the anti-Trump, a savior who will deliver us from this looming existential threat.
But it has become apparent to anyone paying attention that Trump couldn’t possibly be anywhere near as awful as his enemies had adamantly insisted, through a series of increasingly unhinged and desperate attacks. He was a traitor, a rapist, he wanted to put dissidents in concentration camps. He will kill the planet. Consider the reaction to the recent rally at Madison Square Garden, which was, we are told, directly aligned with a semi sort-of Nazi-sympathizer rally once held there.
Eighty five years ago.
In a different building that no longer even exists, in a different location.
As though thousands of events of every description hadn’t also been held at the Garden in the years since. Such as the Democratic Convention of 1992, at which Bill Clinton accepted his Party’s nomination.
Nevertheless it was Hitleresque spectacle, like the Nuremburg rallies.
Attended by thousands of eager Jewish supporters.
That’s some seriously out-there thinking. But Trump is LITERALLY HITLER!!!!, so whatever.
Many of the allegations about Trump turn out to be total horseshit. Much of what wasn’t made up outright was exaggerated or stripped of all context to inflict maximum damage. What remains is mostly thin gruel when examined closely.
Among highly public people, Trump is the closest thing there is to an open book. He’s been on the A-list of fame for over 40 years. There is no longer any mystery to the man. He wears his flaws on his sleeve.
Is he sometimes undisciplined? You bet. He is also often careless with his speech, and is aggressive and domineering in general. He exaggerates. He sometimes takes up all the oxygen in the room. He can be an absolute asshole. The mere mention of his name can cause seizures in perhaps fifteen percent of the population. He is a weird, flawed, sometimes maddening individual.
But.
Trump understands power and how to use it in a way that is rare. He knows how to read a room. He is a highly skilled negotiator. He has demon energy. He doesn’t care if he ruffles feathers. And he loves this country. His message: Make America Great Again, is wholesome and uplifting.
Despite a years-long, coordinated, relentless, high-octane campaign of character assassination, which inspired nearly successful actual assassinations, the man is still standing. Literally bloodied but unbowed. Furthermore, he has attracted the support of people who by all rights should want nothing to do with him: Robert F. Kennedy jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, JD Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy; impressive, principled, highly accomplished individuals who will be core members of a team-of-rivals cabinet. These people would not have allied themselves with Trump, risking their precious reputations in the process, unless they were pretty damned sure. Dozens of prominent Democrats have come forward to support him. He will have a lot of help.
Furthermore, he’s not the same guy he was eight years ago, the one that got so many people so riled up. He has matured, moderated, grown. This is his last hurrah and he wants to get it right.
Finally, in a dangerous world, do you want a leader who is respected, who doesn’t back down in a fight? Or do you want someone whose slogan is “joy,” who seems incapable of giving a straight answer?
Whatever you think of Trump, he is respected, even feared, by America’s adversaries. Ms Harris inspires no such reaction. Do you really think Vladmir Putin or Xi Jinping or the imams who run Iran or the Mexican drug cartels or Hezbollah tremble in fear at the mention of her name?
In his heart of hearts, what do you suppose Barack Obama really thinks of Kamala Harris? Does he think she’s da BOMB? Or does he see her as a useful idiot he can use to secure a de facto fourth term?
We have a historic choice: One selection offers, I believe, a chance of stalling or reversing our nation’s headlong slide into irrelevance. The other accelerates it beyond all hope of recovery.
Two principal arguments are used to justify a Harris candidacy. “Because she’s a woman of color” is one. The other is: “Because she’s not Trump.” That’s a really sorry sales pitch. So for this and many other reasons I have rejected the candidacy of Kamala Harris and given my vote to Donald Trump.
* Source: Profiles in Corruption ©2019 by Peter Schweitzer, Chapter 2, pages 13-45
© 2024 by Scott P. Snell. Right of reuse is freely granted with proper attribution