The appointment of Senator Kamala Harris as Democratic candidate for vice president is a suitable final step in the increasingly goofy Joe Biden campaign, prior to next week’s virtual Democratic convention. She was a catastrophic candidate for the presidential nomination, starting out as a strong rival to Marxist Senator Bernie Sanders, and like Biden himself and all the others except Mayor Pete Buttigieg, her candidacy sank like a rock. Almost every policy question was answered with a pious assertion of the need for “a national conversation.”
If her proposals had been acted upon, the country would have been swept by a pandemic of logorrhea (the inability to stop talking). Harris favors open borders and compared the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service to the Ku Klux Klan.
She favors the entire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Green Terror, including abolition of fracking and ultimately of fossil fuel consumption and use, and the now customary Democratic hare-brained nonsense about windmills and solar panels. (At the confirmation hearing for James Mattis as secretary of defense, she asked him how he would combat climate change.)
She favors free full-service public healthcare for everyone, sharply increased taxes, and the confiscation of privately owned firearms—Beto O’Rourke could soon be on every doorstep in America.
Critics on the Left
Harris has many critics among the 98 percent of Democrats who did not support her candidacy for president. The Left is displeased with her performance as San Francisco’s district attorney and as attorney general of California: she always called for maximum sentences and condoned the widespread American practice of prosecutors extorting or suborning inculpatory false evidence by threats of indictment if that evidence is not forthcoming, and promises of immunity from prosecution for perjury if it is.
Loyola Law Professor Lara Bazelon recently accused Harris in the New York Times of having “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony, and the suppression of crucial information.”
President Trump has made serious efforts at penal reform and sentence reduction for nonviolent offenders. By contrast, Harris sent over 1,000 marijuana users to prison but acknowledged having tried it herself. Harris’s performance as a prosecutor clashes with the general current Democratic enthusiasm for defunding and discouraging the police and turning a blind eye to urban vandalism, arson, and looting.
A Poor Field
Biden backed himself into a corner through his malapropistic aspersions of African Americans and the claims against him about molestation of women (claims Harris once endorsed), and pledged a black female candidate (or, as some have suggested, a dark-skinned person with a cervix).
Those who met those criteria were a pretty job lot. Representative Val Demings of Georgia was promising but obscure; former National Security Advisor Susan Rice is tainted by the Benghazi fiasco and her role in the persecution of General Michael Flynn, and is sometimes unacceptably abrasive. Rep. Karen Bass of California is, on her record (including her public condolences to the people of Cuba over the hardly premature death of Fidel Castro), a Communist; and unsuccessful Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams is a deluded fabulist and would have been a preposterous choice.
In the valley of the bumbling or belligerent African-American Democratic female politicians, the half-Jamaican, half-East Indian, chronic “conversationalist,” Senator Harris wins. The Democratic National Committee and its media allies have already warned that any criticism will be portrayed as sexist and racist, but that charade has become tiresome.
The vice presidential nominee’s prospects are clouded by the apparent expectation (according to a Rasmussen poll) of 59 percent of Americans that, if elected, Biden will not finish his term for medical reasons (despite his well-filmed weekend bicycle ride of 75 yards). So more than half the electorate thinks a vote for the Democrats will be for both Biden and Harris to be president. There is nothing in her performance in office or as a presidential candidate to indicate that Americans would greet a Harris presidency with equanimity.
Whatever happens, she wins. If the ticket is successful, her chances of being president are excellent. If Biden completes his term, Harris is the principal candidate to follow him. And if the Democrats lose, the ranks of defeated vice presidential candidates include many who went on to greater things: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Earl Warren, Edmund Muskie, Robert Dole, Walter Mondale, and Lloyd Bentsen.
Democratic Incompetence on Parade
The Biden-Harris tandem kicked off with Biden’s monstrous lie that Trump demonstrated his support for Nazism at the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville in 2017, one of the opening guns in the Democratic media character assassination of the president. What he actually said was that there was merit to the arguments of both sides in the original controversy in Charlottesville over what to do with the statue of Robert E. Lee, and that in the violence that ensued both sides were equally odious.
In the ensuing false controversy whipped up by the Trump-hating media, there were some hilarious acts of moral posturing, such as corporate raider Carl Icahn resigning from a White House cultural committee. (Trump abolished the committee as redundant.) This is where the Democrats have arrived: where they began, accusing Donald Trump of every conceivable permutation of bigotry and corruption.
The Democratic media made no reference whatever to the shooting of 21 African Americans in Washington, D.C. in one incident last weekend, but the Democratic mayor, the egregious Muriel Bowser, ignored the shooting and complained that her ban on assemblies of more than 50 people was sometimes not observed. World-famous Michigan Avenue in Chicago was smashed up which at least caused the hopeless mayor, Lori Lightfoot, to acknowledge for the first time that some of the peaceful protesters were committing crimes, but she publicly warned her police chief not to “bait” her.
The Big Apple naturally has the most incompetent mayor of all: Bill de Blasio blamed his city’s skyrocketing violent crime rate on the summer and the coronavirus. His abrupt chopping of the entire crime prevention unit and of $1 billion from the city police budget, of course, had nothing to do with it. And New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, ducked his own responsibility in sending COVID-19 sufferers back to homes for the elderly and blamed unspecified Trump regulations and visitors and nurses for 19,000 deaths in those facilities, a number greater than the combined total of coronavirus fatalities of Germany and Canada, countries which have a total population of 120 million.
And in Washington, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) returned to her script of four years ago and incanted: “With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.” She said that it didn’t matter that China favors Biden in the election because the United States has no problems with China.
For nearly four years the Democrats and the self-shamed legions of their national political media accomplices have had no narrative except constant, 360 degrees, stentorian defamation of the president. It is the most protracted and despicable performance of a major American party in opposition since the Democrats betrayed their own president (Lyndon Johnson), spuriously destroyed President Nixon, and completed the trifecta by withdrawing all aid to Indochina and consigning it to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese Communists and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Millions died.
In 12 weeks we will have the election result; I trust the people.