Really. You just threw old man Biden over and you think Kamala is going to save you?
Kamala. The woman so politically toxic that Biden’s team delayed their exit precisely out of fear of how badly she’d do?
The woman who imploded against Tulsi Gabbard so visibly that it makes “we finally beat Medicare” look deft in comparison?
The self-proclaimed “top tier candidate” who ended her 2020 campaign winning only an average of 3.4 percent of Democratic voters?
The woman whose campaign was so poorly organized that even the New York Times admitted that no one knew who was actually in charge?
That Kamala?
Apparently so. And on the surface, we get it. Replacing a walking corpse with the potential first black woman president oh my Gawd you guys looks like a step up. And hey, if Kamala were still nothing but a senator from California who they parachuted in, then there might be something to recommend the idea that she’s a fresher, more exciting face for the Democratic party. But the problem is, to borrow from Harris herself, she didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree. She exists in the context of what came before. And what came before is awful.
To start with, what has Kamala actually done? Seriously, that’s not a rhetorical question. Even when political issues of real importance have been added to her portfolio – issues about which she really should do something -- she’s still done nothing. This is most noticeable in the case of immigration. Recall that in March of 2021, President Biden put Kamala in charge of “controlling migration at the southern border following a big influx of new arrivals,” according to the BBC. Biden’s reason for this was that, as the former Attorney General of California, Harris was supposed to be uniquely placed to deal with issues of law enforcement and immigration.
But was this borne out? Don’t be ridiculous. Aside from telling immigrants “do not come” in an instantly and hilariously memed speech, Kamala presided over a regime in which 85 percent of illegal immigrants who were caught were then released into the US. This immigration crisis got so bad that even emerald blue New York City erupted into chants of “send them back” when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came back to town to appeal on the immigrants’ behalf.
Again, to quote the BBC – no friend to the American Right -- the immigration assignment was big opportunity for Harris: a “significant portfolio laced with both political opportunity and peril.” Yet Kamala did nothing, and now the peril she has inflicted on Americans must be used to end this undeserved political opportunity. Even Bill Maher mocked the Biden administration’s handling of this issue. Repeatedly.
In fact, Maher even explicitly called out Harris’ do nothing record as vice president: “In three years as Vice President, she’s been quieter than an electric car,” he quipped just weeks ago. Damn. When you’ve lost Bill Maher – who we like, but whose TDS is terminal – what does that say about your odds of swaying a majority of voters? Considering that as far back as November 2021, she was already the most unpopular person in American politics, with just a 28 percent approval rating, it doesn’t look good.
But then again, we suppose Harris did do something as vice president, though admittedly, it’s not something the Democrats should be proud of: she helped cover up her boss’s deteriorating mental state. In fact, if you ever wondered just who was making the decisions in the White House as the alleged president grew more sclerotic by the day, Harris is a perfectly plausible candidate. The only question is when, exactly, she knew that Biden became unsalvageable. Was it when he took office? Before? After? And whenever it was, why did she conspire to hide it from the people who elected her? What did she know, and when did she know it? If she were still bottom of the ticket, these are questions she might be able to slink away from, but as the nominee for President of the United States? It’s a bad start when the only thing voters can be sure you did was conspire to lie to them. Kind of makes everything else you say in the campaign easy to tune out.
“But she’s a prosecutor and Trump’s a criminal!” The progressives shriek. Well, okay, since they brought it up, let’s look at this “prosecutor’s” record on law enforcement. Normally, we wouldn’t think it’s possible for a prosecutor to simultaneously be too harsh and too lenient at the same time, but clearly, our imaginations were unequal to the task of conjuring up Kamala Harris. Her harshness has already been summed up ably by Tulsi Gabbard, and we despair of equaling her eloquence, so just to remind everyone: “She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laugh about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana. She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California[…]There is no excuse for that, and the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor, you owe them an apology.” Damn. You tell her, Tulsi.
This rebuke, which some credit with ending Harris’ 2020 campaign (even though she never got above 18 percent in the polls), clearly had an impact, but in the worst possible way. Because come the 2020 “summer of love,” Kamala Harris overcompensated for this miserable record in the worst possible way: she became an active booster of criminals.
On June 1, 2020, Harris put out a tweet supporting an organization called the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a cash bail fund devoted to raising money to bail out protesters arrested during the BLM protests. Among those freed by this organization were: 1) a man accused of sexually assaulting an eight-year-old, 2) a man who assaulted a 71-year-old woman and burglarized her home, and 3) a man who allegedly stomped on his victim’s head before robbing them. One rioter who was freed twice by the organization was later arrested for a third time, this time for rioting with a weapon, weapon possession in a courthouse, and drug possession. In other words, Kamala’s response to the charge that she locked up innocent people was to argue for freeing guilty ones. It’s hard to imagine a more grotesque example of anarcho-tyranny in action.
Not, of course, that Kamala’s instinct for attributing guilt where it didn’t exist fully went away. She was, for example, more than willing to believe the cock-and-bull story cooked up by Jussie Smollett, a story so ridiculous that, as Dave Chappelle put it, the best support which black people could have offered to Smollett was to stay silent, because everyone knew “this n**ga was clearly lying.” Everyone, it seems, except Kamala Harris.
And that’s not even touching on the fact that Harris fully endorsed the ahistorical revanchist slop known as the 1619 Project. 1619 advances many historical claims which are not merely wrong, but flat out absurd, to the point that the least absurd (somehow) is that America is a systemically racist country founded on slavery. If Kamala really believes that, one wonders why she’d want to lead such a country. Why she would bother enforcing its laws. How she could swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, if elected, and mean it. But what are we saying? We know the answer to all those questions: she doesn’t want to lead America. She wants to remake it. She doesn’t want to enforce the laws; she has no problem locking up the innocent and freeing the guilty. She doesn’t want to support or defend the Constitution of the United States; she’s prepared to ignore it on a whim.
Hearing that, one might be tempted to make comparisons between Harris and former President Barack Obama. But this, too, is erroneous. Whatever Obama’s flaws (and they were copious), only a fool would deny he was charismatic and the kind of figure who, at least on the surface, would make Americans feel easy about trusting him to make history as the first black president. Harris, on the other hand, is nothing of the kind. Charismatic? Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker has a less off-putting laugh than her. Making Americans feel easy? Harris herself doesn’t even feel easy with her duties as vice president.
If you doubt that, look at Axios’ extraordinary story from this Monday, in which they reveal that Kamala was so anxious about a friendly dinner with DC-area media mogul David Bradley that she needed her staff to put together a full “mock dinner” with staffers playing participants. Some even suggested including wine in the mock prep. If she can’t handle a meeting with a media baron, how is she supposed to handle meeting, say, Vladimir Putin? Are her staff going to send out for mock vodka? We, at least, hope we don’t have to find out. Though perhaps her staff will tell us anyway; she’s reportedly a nightmare boss whose paranoia makes her treat those who work for her like witnesses under questioning. We hope every one of them sings like a canary.
All of which is to say this: If Joe Biden personified neoliberalism and its descent into belligerent, thoughtless power lust unburdened by coherence, then Kamala Harris embodies wokeness: proudly unqualified, humorless, paranoid, obsessed with collective guilt yet indifferent to individual innocence, and saddled with a guilty conscience which her defenders mistake for anxiety and impostor syndrome. But it’s no syndrome. She is an impostor. A usurper. A cancer on the body politic which only the national spotlight can disinfect. And it will, as surely as Donald Trump will kick this sniveling, careerist nonentity back onto the ash heap of irrelevance, where she belongs.
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