H. L. Mencken apparently never quite said that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” He said lots of similar things, however, and I like to think he would have been proud of being the sort of chap to whom people attributed such astringent mots.
He would also, I feel sure, regard the theater surrounding the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign as a test case of the proposition.
Last week in this space, I pointed out the irony of the Sudden Harris Ascendancy Syndrome. Here she was, one of the least popular figures on the American scene—someone, moreover, whom everyone, no matter their political coloration, regarded primarily as political life insurance for Joe Biden—and yet, Wham!, the very moment Biden resigns, her media reconstruction begins in earnest.
I almost wrote “media rehabilitation,” but that would not have been quite right. We say that someone is rehabilitated when he has fallen from a previous state of health, competence, or popularity.
Kamala Harris has never been competent or popular. So what the media has done to or with her these last couple of weeks is more of an outright fabrication project. In part, as I wrote last week, it is a product of “magical thinking,” the belief, or at least the hope or pretense, that by saying something is so, you magically make it so.
The primary aim of this bit of theatrical slight-of-hand is positive. It is to make people believe, for as long as they inhabit this theater of the absurd (the show runs, by the way, until November 5) that the person answering to the name “Kamala Harris” is not against fracking, though her doppelgänger, who existed until July 21 when Joe Biden dropped out of the race, was adamantly against fracking.
Similarly, Kamala 2.0 does not believe in open borders. But the original version, who was Biden’s “Border Czar,” did nothing to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants and spoke openly about a “path to citizenship” for them all eventually and Medicare and other benefits for them now.
Pick the issue: if it’s contentious, you will find that Kamala has had a sudden metanoia in the last couple of weeks. She is like the wolf who, addressing a flock of sheep, assures them that as soon as he is elected, he will become a vegetarian.
They are trying the same thing with Tim Walz, but what is uphill work for Kamala Harris is Mt. Everest for Walz. He really did order that tampons be put into boys’ bathrooms in Minnesota schools. He allowed eight babies to be murdered after botched abortions left them alive. He sat back and watched Minneapolis burn when the St. George Floyd riots erupted in 2020. Just a day or two ago, NBC reported that Walz now says he “misspoke” in 2018 when describing his military experience. But he did not “misspeak.” He lied.
Walz is one of the many Democrats who seem to think that George Orwell’s 1984 was a how-to manual, not a sober warning about the dangers of totalitarianism. Remember the COVID insanity? Walz was one of the worst governors during that made-up emergency. Not only did he mandate vaccines, but he also set up a “snitch line” and encouraged Minnesotans to report their neighbors should they dare to venture outside without a mask. Nevertheless, the media has been playing a clip over and over of Walz saying he wants people to “mind their own business.” As if.
The Democrats’ old friend, what the Freudians call “projection,” is evident everywhere in this entertainment. It boils down to accusing your opponents of the very things you are doing or are. So, the memo went out that J. D. was henceforth to be described as “weird,” when in fact he radiates normality, competence, and healthy self-confidence. Walz? Despite the theatrical producers’ best effort, the fact that the man is one sick puppy cannot be obscured.
The strategy of the Biden-Harris—er, make that the “Harris-Walz” campaign depends on people being dazzled by their theater of the absurd. Both candidates claim now to believe things they have spent the last decades attacking. But their supposed conversion is not the result of any heavenly illumination. It’s not like Saul falling to the ground on the road to Damascus. Rather, it is an abracadabra sort of conversion, i.e., no conversion at all, merely subterfuge. It’s an elaborate show we are being treated to, replete with fake polls showing Harris-Walz ahead in some swing states.
Already, the façade is cracking as more and more devastating videos come to light about both candidates. The ridicule machine of Trump and his allies is only getting cranked up. More, much more, will be coming to an internet search near you.
As I say, this show is scheduled to run at least until November 5, maybe longer, depending on how much election fraud the Democrats are allowed to indulge in. But there will be occasional intermissions during which the deciding question will be pressed upon all of us theatergoers. Is this campaign about mood and emotion—is it, I mean, essentially a female campaign? Or is it a matter of competing policies, of things like peace, prosperity, individual liberty, and economic competitiveness?
I am betting that, when the Chardonnay is gone and paper masks no longer fit, every robust voter will decide that he wants to live in the real world of common sense, not the hot-house world of woke theatrics and socialist nostrums. In other words, I predict that Mencken’s diminishing wager about the American public will, at least in this one instance, turn out to be dead wrong.
Anyone who votes for Kamala Harris, based on her record, has got to be either uniformed (educated in a public school) or on the dole and that includes Corporate America and especially the Intel giants and the Military Industrial Complex. The big money is among the latter. America will be fighting wars for the next decade with dead bodies littering the globe. Trump would have negotiated America out of the Civil War. We had peace because we carried a big stick (insurance); enemies knew there would be a price to pay. How do wars get paid for? They get paid for via taxes and public debt. You can’t fight wars without money, oil, or gold. Trump was once a Democrat who criticized the Iraq war (the second war). Iran would be nowhere had we not taken down Iraq. Saddam, was certainly a monster but better that the monsters of the world ague with each other than have them join forces, as the Biden Administration facilitated, to fight with America.
Harris is no different than Clinton who took out Gaddafi and turned Libya into a caliphate enemy which, previously, was not only not an enemy but used the nation’s oil wealth directly on the citizens in a way Norway only wished it could. Harris is a blazing idiot and her VP pick turned Minneapolis into a city that resembles Gaza.
As a veterinarian I am keenly aware of the animal shelter population. Under vapid Bidenomics insanity the population of unwanted and castaway pets has exploded. The middle class is getting poorer. They cannot afford to feed or care for themselves let alone any pets.
I have major concerns with illegal voting. The confidence of the party is based upon what they knew they got away with in 2024. That tells me all I need to know. Republicans are beyond naive. They are incurably dumb. They offer poll watchers. Poll watchers are valuable and need to be present but are not a real solution; they can do nothing to determine if the votes and ballots are from US. citizens.
Hey, Task, take it easy on the public school kids–some of us actually got educations there,lol.
Mr. Kimball’s piece highlights the most absurd aspect about this election, the attempt to turn the Hyena into a competent human being & transform Tampon Tim into a moderate.
As I have stated elsewhere, Harris is the poster girl for ‘pass the trash’, the practice of allowing ungifted individuals to fail upward. The selection of Walz as her running mate just illustrates that she is in well over her head-- there is no spin that can turn Walz’s being on the ticket as anything other than a massive unforced error. While it means that there may not be riots outside of the DNC, selecting a VP candidate because he’s not a Jew is not a good look.
When it comes to Walz, all I can do is shake my head in baffled astonishment. That he managed to get re-elected in 2022 just goes to prove that a large percentage of Minnesota urban voters must suffer from Stockholm syndrome. His record and public comments since then completely contradict any attempt to whitewash his career. My advice to the Trump/Vance campaign is to broadcast Walz’s public statements from the last four years on a neverending loop-- while it might not save Minnesota from itself, it should scare the bejeesus out of the handful of truly undecided voters that currently exist & moderates from both parties.
Harris will be at the base of Mt. Everest with Walz after her first debate with Trump and maybe after her first press conference. Pre-coup, her credibility wasn’t even at sea level. But we’re supposed to believe she’s now soaring over the political landscape. No one with a serious and sound mind can regard anything along those lines that the polls say about her—since most are fake, that’s not hard to do. So, as they have since 2012, expect Democrats to try to solve their political problems, as in matching their fake polls to their deeds, by again perpetrating industrial-scale election fraud. This election could have a plot twist worthy of the best crime novels. It could be one for the ages, as in the world before WWII and the one that came after it. But Democrats have too much to lose if they don’t try. By now, though, they should know how much normal, law-abiding Americans need to get the country back on track. They should also know that many voters do not believe they have a hope in hell of doing that.
I very much like that Mr. Kimball begins his article with the quote often attributed (including yours truly) to H.L. Mencken. Because make no mistake, the Harris - Walz traveling magic show is heavily dependent on a very shallow, ignorant and easily misled American public.
Whether that public could be described as low IQ (after all, at least half the adult public is statistically to the left of the apex of the Bell Curve), or just plain stupid (as the long departed Mr. Mencken was unafraid to assert), it matters little. The point is that the Dems have a ready-made pool of malleable voters who can be made to believe pretty much anything.
Which reminds me of Voltaire’s quote about absurdities and atrocities. But I digress…
The problem for the Dems is there are only so many low IQ types, college professors, people-of-color, Alphabet mafia deviants, and parasitic public employee unionists ready to vote for despotic tyranny. And the problem gets worse when you factor in the hemorrhaging numbers of black men and Latinos from the aforementioned groups. These Democrat refugees have had enough of the gaslighting, cultural Marxist insanity, economic strangulation, and general political mayhem.
Perhaps Mr. Kimball should have closed his article with Lincoln’s timeless adage about fooling all the people all the time. Then again, the Harris and Walz three-card Monty show doesn’t have to fool great swaths of the great unwashed masses that so irked Mencken in his day–and in ours. No, the Dems need only to magically produce sufficient numbers of ballots to offset the record number of VOTES that Donald Trump will receive.
David Copperfield will be so jealous on November 6th, or 7th…or whenever. Hey, magic takes time.