There’s Just no “There,” There

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 resolutely 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 unvetted 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 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 has entered a state of terminal decline.

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, 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.

She cannot think on her feet and 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 gently lobbed puffball questions at her, and she flubbed even those.

She had 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 from offstage to cut it 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, suggesting that the news magazine was trying to give Harris a helping hand, an extraordinary 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 she 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 of the United States of America?

Harris represents much of what 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 off-the-charts ambition but no goal beyond climbing the career ladder. 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 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 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 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. Surely there’s a good reason.

Well it might could have had something to do with the campaign donations she accepted from all three law firms representing the Catholic Church, the largest allowed by law. She also accepted nearly $60,000 in donations from an assortment of Catholic-affiliated organizations. As California AG, she also pursued zero abuse cases against the Catholic Church.

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 otherwise tight 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. In other words, a deal-breaker.

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 and the parents of truant 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 whined that the loss of cheap inmate 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 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.

Four years into a wholly mediocre Senate career, she thought highly enough of herself to run for President. It did not go well. In fact, she was the first to drop out, even before the first primary took place, crushed by abysmal poll numbers that at one point rounded to zero. She was the first to be voted off the island.

Harris is the classic Horrible Boss, who goes through staff the way some people change their socks. Following her disastrous Presidential run, some 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 a genuine fiasco. On her watch, as many as 20 million 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 essentially invited by the Biden-Harris administration, which issued 94 Executive Orders, beginning on Day One, which loosened restrictions and reversed Trump-era rules regulating the border. 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. Literally every 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. 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 by debt that can never be paid. 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 reckless policies of the Biden-Harris Administration.

Unsavory Company

Finally, I cannot support Kamala Harris because of the philosophies she represents. Her backstory is eye-opening. 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 prominent, radical family. Gopalan was an angry, ungrateful woman who made no secret of her disdain for the United States and its white majority, which some might call ironic, given that these 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 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 reading a line. 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,” 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, land acknowledgments, de-population,) and a promised Utopia, (diversity, equity, and inclusion.) As with all cults, dissent is not permitted. Go against it and your life becomes a living hell.

A President Harris would be a total 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 existential threat.

But it became 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, increasingly desperate attacks. For a current example, 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.

This is literally delusional 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 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 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 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 her? Or does he see her as someone he can use to help him 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 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.

 

* 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

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