Or: Why I could not Support a Kamala Harris Presidency
With the recent revelation of a series of large-scale hacks against the US telecom system by Chinese 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 resolutely ignored the breach, just as it has ignored or soft-pedaled every other Biden-Harris fuckup. Where is that “speaking truth to power” when you really need it?
This and many other top-shelf 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 unvetted third-world migrants, 20 million and counting by some estimates.
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, a stubbornly persistent homeless problem, exploding housing costs, a poisonous political and social climate, an epidemic of deaths of despair among America’s traditional population, and a deepening sense that our Republic has entered a state of terminal decline.
Almost every warning light on the console is flashing bright red right now. Thanks to our proxy war with Russia, 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 in the world would anyone trust Kamala Devi Harris to clean up the train wreck she played a key role in causing?
Failing Upwards
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 evasions.
She cannot think on her feet and withers under pressure. Take her script away and she flails and looks lost. In answer to criticism that she was avoiding interviews, which she plainly was, Harris did a whirlwind tour of friendly shows that gently lobbed puffball questions at her, and she flubbed even those.
She had two hard interviews, one with Fox News, one with CBS’ 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 cut the interview short. The 60 Minutes interview featured numerous non-answers and evasions. The broadcast version was actually edited to replace one rambling, word-salad answer with a more concise reply from earlier in the interview, a giant 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 responded, “Nothing comes to mind.” Yet she styles herself as the “Change” candidate who will “turn the page.”
And we are being asked to entrust this mediocrity to conduct delicate, high-level, high-stakes negotiations with some of the toughest, wiliest, least-forgiving people on Earth.
Harris represents everything that is wrong with America right now. She got her start in politics not through merit, but by the machinations of a well-connected lover. She has boundless ambition but no goal beyond “elevate Kamala.” Ask her what she plans to do with the power she seeks and she blanks or deflects. If pressed, she flashes a “help me” look as she searches the rolodex of her mind for just the right mashup of boilerplate talking points. Her one and only non-government job, a stint at McDonald’s, probably didn’t happen, as the company said it could find no record of her employment. Tellingly, her campaign has dropped that claim. If she has ever had an original thought, there is no record of it.
Harris is the product of the Democratic machine that runs, and ruins, California. 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. The holy trinity of immutable traits.
The DNC, which claims 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 a failing 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 June rather than August, as is customary, so as to allow time to make the ol” switcheroo, which a compliant Democrat base rubber-stamped without so much as a peep of protest.
Harris is the ultimate diversity hire; if she were Pamela Denise Harris from Barstow, she would have topped out in middle management at municipal Parks and Rec. But by the DNC’s reckoning, she’s bulletproof because of her membership in three protected classes. Ding! Ding! Ding! Anyone who opposes her will be ruthlessly tarred by Democrats 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 abuses 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. Well it might have had something to do with the campaign donations, the largest allowed by law, she took from all three law firms representing the Catholic Church. She also accepted nearly $60,000 in donations from an assortment of Catholic-affiliated organizations. As California AG, she also pursued no abuse cases against the Catholic Church.
It’s worth mentioning that she also broke her legally binding promise to limit campaign spending to $210,000, a pledge signed by every candidate, although “broke” might not be the right word. She blew it right out of the water, spending three times the limit. Which is undoubtedly put her over the top in an otherwise tight race. For this violation she was fined a record $38,000.
These are the acts of a deeply unscrupulous person willing to do whatever it takes to win, and in my mind, a total deal-breaker.
Harris promised to go after “corporate criminals,” but instead went after soft targets, a handful of real estate developers who used contacts to get favorable treatment by regulatory agencies. Penny-ante prosecutions that changed nothing. The big property owners, and donors, who made the lives of thousands miserable by renting substandard properties at extortionate prices, a scandal for years, went entirely unmolested.
As Attorney General she was tough on weed smokers and the parents of truant students. Powerful offenders, not so much. She ignored multiple Federal orders to release low-level offenders from overcrowded state prisons, forcing a confrontation. When pressed, she lamely asserted that the loss of cheap labor would disrupt State fire-control operations.
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 machine, she would have been disgraced and likely disbarred. Instead, she was kicked upstairs, and chosen to replace Barbara Boxer as Senator. In that role she gained a reputation chiefly 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.
Four years into a sub-mediocre Senate career, she thought highly enough of herself to run for President, but was crushed by low single-digit polls. She dropped out before receiving a single primary vote. She was the first candidate to quit.
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, and epic dysfunction. In the first three years of her Vice Presidency, she suffered an astonishing 92 percent staff turnover.
Failure to Thrive
The Vice Presidency is the closest thing there is to an apprenticeship for the Presidency. In this role Harris failed dismally. Her one large responsibility, the border, was an unmitigated fiasco. On her watch, as many as 20 million completely unvetted persons, the vast majority military-aged males from third world countries, crossed the southern border illegally.
On the other hand, who can blame them? They were practically invited 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. Migrants were given I-phones, money and lodging, plus a plane ticket to the destination of their choice. Those who had no particular destination in mind were distributed strategically among Red states, without the consent of those states. Most of the migrants have no marketable skills, at least no legal ones, 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 Cartels have made out very, very well. Literally every person who crosses the southern border is a multi-thousand dollar payday for the world’ largest, best-organized criminal organization. Hundreds of thousands of women and children have been trafficked by the cartel for the sex trade, trapped in bondage until the Cartel says so because of debts that can never be paid. The Cartels openly recruit new workers 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 us 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 idiotically lax policies of the Biden-Harris Administration.
Unsavory Company
Finally, I cannot support Kamala Harris because of what she represents. Both of her parents were dedicated communists. They met at a meeting of the Afro-American Association, a hate group promoting 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 radical family, who made no secret of the fact that she despised the United States and its white majority, an ironic sentiment given that her successful academic career would not have happened without them.
From an early age Harris marinated in racial animosity. For years she told the story of frequent coming downstairs to find the living room full of Black revolutionaries. On those rare occasions when Harris says “I love America,” she does so without a trace of conviction, in the manner of a bad actor reading a line. 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,” 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 the current reality. Democrats speak of slavery, defunct for seven generations, as though it ended only last week.
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 content of your character matters infinitely less than the color of your skin. It is the party of group guilt that may never be expunged. 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, land acknowledgments, de-population,) and a promised Utopia, (diversity, equity, and inclusion.) As with all cults, dissent is not permitted. Go against the Blob and your life becomes a living hell.
President Harris would be a figurehead, even more so than the current President. She would do what she is told, when she is told, by those who have 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 her very best she would be an agent of managed decline. At her worst she would start World War III.
But But But TRUMP!
This really isn’t about Trump anymore, who was never even a tenth as bad as his enemies had adamantly insisted, through a series of increasingly unhinged and desperate attacks. For example, the recent rally at Madison Square Garden was, we are told, directly aligned with a Nazi-sympathizer rally once held there.
Eighty five years ago.
In a completely different building that no longer even exists.
As though thousands of events of every description hadn’t been held in the Garden in the years since. Such as the Democratic Convention of 1992, at which Bill Clinton accepted his Party’s nomination. 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 the last 45 years. There is no mystery to the man. He wears his flaws on his sleeve.
Yes he is sometimes undisciplined. He is often careless with his speech, he is aggressive and domineering. He exaggerates. He takes up all the oxygen in the room. He can be an absolute asshole. The mere mention of his name can cause seizures in maybe ten 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.
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: RFK jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, JD Vance. Impressive, principled individuals who will be core members of a team-of-rivals cabinet. These people would not have allied themselves with Trump 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 guy 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?” Someone who seems incapable of even 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 respects or fears Harris? Xi Jinping? The Imams who run Iran? Hamas? The Mexican cartels? Hezbollah?
For that matter, do you think Barack Obama respects Harris? Or does he see her as someone he can manipulate?
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 pretty 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.