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Scenes We’d Like to See . . .

In the 1960s, the Phillip Morris company produced Lark cigarettes and deployed trucks with banners reading “show us your LARK pack.” Mad magazine showed what happened when that truck drove by a cancer clinic. Mad also offered “Scenes We’d Like to See,” a one-page feature lampooning fairy tales and such. The current reality show of politics, often beyond satire, could use that kind of treatment.

Many voters, for example, doubtless would like someone to ask Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris: “Your relationship with Willie Brown has been described in print as ‘poontronage.’ How did you first meet Brown, and what was the basis of the relationship? I mean, you were 30, he was 60, and Brown was not exactly Billy Dee Williams.”  

It’s a fair question of a woman who probably won her 2010 California attorney general race by ballot fraud. She now goes around touting a “Harris Administration,” when she’s running under Joe Biden, a man she savaged in the primaries as a segregationist, and worse.  

For his part, the former vice president could stand some questioning from a real reporter, something like, “Mr. Vice President, in January 2017, why did you request to unmask General Michael Flynn?” Or, “Mr. Vice President, how hard was it to get that Ukrainian prosecutor fired?” Or, “Mr. Vice President, you are on record that the Chinese are ‘not bad folks.’ Have Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party ever done anything with which you disagreed?” 

Consider also Marie Harf who, prior to joining President Obama’s reelection campaign, was a spokeswoman for the Central Intelligence Agency, where she “crafted the CIA’s media strategy on a wide range of sensitive national security and intelligence topics.” Harf also served in the State Department as a senior advisor for strategic communications to John Kerry. Like many from the previous administration, Harf has become a fixture on television. Some journalist might ask her: “Was Alger Hiss innocent?” which is not a trick question. Or, “Do people still become terrorists because they can’t find a job?” 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is the most ardent evangelist of the Green New Deal. Many economists would like somebody to ask her, “What is a marginal tax rate?” or “Which had the more powerful economy, Castro’s Cuba, or Hong Kong?” Or how about “John Maynard Keynes praised F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Did you ever read that book and, if so, what do you think of it?” Those are fair questions for someone who wields so much influence over Democratic candidates. 

Former CIA boss John Brennan had a high profile during the Russia and Ukraine hoaxes. By all indications, no reporter asked Brennan, “any regrets for voting for Gus Hall in 1976? After all, the man was a Stalinist.” That’s a scene many in the intel community would surely like to see. 

By all indications, nobody ever asked Barack Obama: “Mr. President, in Dreams from My Father you dedicated 2,000 words to ‘Frank,’ whom you publicly identified as known Communist, Frank Marshall Davis. Why did Frank disappear from the audio version of the book, and failed to appear in anything you wrote after that?” That remains a fair question for someone who was the most powerful person in the world for eight years, and who is taking a high-profile role in the 2020 campaign.

“Mr. President,” someone might ask, “in the 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, David Garrow said Dreams from My Father was not an autobiography or a memoir. Garrow said it was a novel and you were the novel’s most important ‘composite character.’ What is your view of that judgment? I mean, it questions your whole narrative.” 

A reporter familiar with the deep state might ask: “Mr. President, the texts of the FBI’s Lisa Page and Peter Strzok said the president wanted to know ‘everything we’re doing.’ What was your role in the operations Midyear Exam and Crossfire Hurricane?” 

Those are scenes we’d like to see, but they are unlikely to play out under the establishment media. For a detailed explanation of why, see The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julian Benda, with a foreword by American Greatness columnist Roger Kimball. 

Maybe Obama and his handlers will get into it in the new 768-page A Promised Land, slated for release on November 17, two weeks after the election. See if Frank makes a comeback, and if the ex-president comments on David Garrow’s 1,460-page opus. The biography escapes mention in Michelle Obama’s Becoming and Ben Rhodes’ The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, both released in 2018. 

Mad magazine aside, you just can’t make up this stuff.

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About Lloyd Billingsley

Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party and other books including Bill of Writes and Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation. His journalism has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Spectator (London) and many other publications. Billingsley serves as a policy fellow with the Independent Institute.

Photo: Scott Eisen/Getty Images

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