RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/12/our-three-silent-mice/

Biden

President Biden was forced, unceremoniously and unwillingly, to abdicate from his impending reelection nomination. Since then, we have neither seen nor heard much from our sitting President. He has vanished, poof, gone.

This is quite unusual if not alarming. Unlike prior to the June 27 debate, the left now makes no effort to hide Biden’s debility. Indeed, it accepts the reality that an infirm Biden might not be able to finish out his remaining six months. Yet it still cannot decide whether the nation’s exposure to a President Harris prior to November 5 would lend her the advantage of incumbency or (more likely) ensure her defeat given global exposure to her puerility.

In the past, when a vice president took over the party nomination from his sitting president boss, the lame duck president was nonetheless evident and in charge until the duration of his tenure.

When Lyndon Johnson belatedly decided not to run for reelection in 1968, he claimed that he needed to devote his full attention and remaining months to finding a solution to the then-raging Vietnam War. Indeed, Johnson sought to steal interest away from his often-underappreciated vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and the latter’s ongoing (and failed) bid as the Democratic nominee to replace Johnson.

Ronald Reagan was still very busy in 1988 in his last six months as president—even as his sitting “a thousand points of light” vice president, George H.W. Bush, became the Republican nominee and was fixated on campaigning to replace Reagan.

At times in late 2000, during the waning days of Bill Clinton’s administration, a restless, lame duck Clinton seemed almost to compete for the spotlight with his then vice president, party nominee, and would-be Democratic presidential replacement Al Gore.

The vanishing Biden caught another case of COVID in mid-July shortly after his disastrous and historically early presidential debate with Trump. And in the subsequent month, Biden simply disappeared.

He is rarely seen, more rarely heard, even as Iran has promised a theater-wide war against Israel, Putin has more frequently threatened to escalate Russian attacks to existential levels, and the economy has witnessed dramatic stock shocks, dismal job news, and increasing talk of an impending recession.

Americans have wondered what happened to their president. Apparently, Biden was deemed unfit by his party bosses and donors to remain its nominee but still considered hale enough to continue for half a year as America’s president.

Rumors swirled that a depressed, embittered, and unwell Biden was in seclusion licking his wounds, acidic over being betrayed by his erstwhile allies—the Obamas, former speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, the left-wing squad, a traditionally obsequious and in-the-tank left-wing media, and perhaps his replacement, the machinating Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden gave a so-so endorsement of Harris. After that pro forma act, he has somehow evaporated in a fashion that has left the White House even more vacant than during the octogenarian Biden’s prior three years of customary three-day workweeks.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/08/geese-tarts-and-presidential-politics/

EXCERPTS:

Loose talk of that sneering variety is, of course, to be deplored. That she should be the victim of vile slut shaming is beyond unfair, as Media Watch‘s Paul Barry gallantly observed in his defence of the lady’s reputation and wits. After all, nobody drags out Donald Trump’s love life to use against him. Well not often anyway, and when they do it’s for a damn good New York reason, like the ‘vivid memory’ of a mad woman who paints trees blue and believes he molested her in a department store so long ago she can’t recall what she was wearing, the month of the traumatic assault or even the year.

Those are the rules of the game if you’re targeting Donald J. Trump. But a fierce, independent, ambitious, modern African-American woman should never, ever be judged for falling in love with an older gentleman. That he happened to be a dispenser of favours, sinecures, wealth and power was but a happy coincidence and cannot be held against her, for who can tell where love will take root? Nor that he was married with children, for this was San Francisco in the Nineties and who is to judge what conduct is and isn’t cool? The 29-year-old assistant district attorney was just restarting her career after a successful second shot at the California bar exam when Willie Brown, 30 years her senior, the original Slick Willie, touched her as if with a wand. Up she floated, and floated, and has kept right on floating ever since, with only the one setback, the thwarting of her 2020 ambitions.

Today (Aug 7), Ms Harris has announced her running-mated, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (pronounced walls). Almost certainly she when she makes the formal announcement a few hours from now she will not take questions from the press. That has been the recent pattern, responding only to the odd shouted query that slips past the cordon of her keepers at an unguarded moment. There was one of those incidents on Friday night when her handlers allowed their charge to stray too close to the press mob covering the return of Vladimir Putin’s hostages and one of the hacks tossed her a Dorothy Dixer. She had done well minutes earlier, a competent performance with a vacant, slightly rocking Joe Biden standing mute as a drugstore Indian (above) as she rattled off the TelePrompter’s lines. Then came her unscripted response to the US-Russia prisoner swap:

“This is just an extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy.“

If you say so, dear.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/when-the-twin-cities-burned-tim-walz-dithered/

It was 6:29 p.m. on the last Wednesday in May 2020, when Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey phoned Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Riots had erupted the day before over the police killing of George Floyd, and the city was overwhelmed.

Frey pleaded with Walz to call in the National Guard.

Less than three hours later, the city made a written request to Walz’s office for 600 guardsmen to help quell the chaos that was engulfing the Twin Cities.

Rioters were burning buildings. They were shooting at police officers and attacking them with Molotov cocktails, fireworks, bricks, and bottles filled with cement. At least three people died during the riots.

Faced with one of the most serious public emergencies in Minnesota history, Walz froze.

“He did not say yes,” Frey said of his request to Walz. “He said he would consider it.”

The far-left governor did not agree to call in the Guard until late the next day, according to a blistering postmortem, the Review of Lawlessness and Government Responses to Minnesota’s 2020 Riots, released in October 2020 by the Minnesota senate.

Instead of sending in the 600 guardsmen that Minneapolis had requested, Walz sent in only 100 late that Thursday. The Guard wasn’t fully mobilized until Saturday, four days after the first building burned, according to the senate review.

https://pjmedia.com/chris-queen/2024/08/06/live-results-kansas-michigan-missouri-and-washington-primaries-n4931388
BIG BREAKING NEWS: Our friends at Decision Desk HQ have declared Wesley Bell the winner of the Democrat primary in Missouri’s 1st District, which means that Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) has lost!

The Squad is now a little less Squaddy. And that’s a good thing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/walzing-with-kamala/

Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, a choice that left many pundits puzzled. For the real deal on Walz, consider Powerline’s John Hinderaker, a Minnesotan quite familiar with Kamala’s VP choice:

“I think it was a process of elimination,” writes Hinderaker, “Mark Kelly seemed like a strong candidate, until it came out that he invested in a spy satellite company with the Chinese.” Harris wanted Josh Shapiro, “but at the eleventh hour, helped by an essay Shapiro wrote when he was in college, the anti-Semites blocked him.”  That left Tim Walz, “a small-minded, mean-spirited man,” who will fit well with the Harris ticket.

“He ran a basement campaign for re-election in 2022,” Hinderaker recalls, “refusing to show up for debates with Republican Scott Jensen after the first one went badly. So Jensen was left debating an empty chair.” Walz was also “largely responsible for the George Floyd riots that devastated Minneapolis and other cities, because he dithered for days rather than calling out the National Guard. By his own admission, he held off out of sympathy for the rioters’ cause. We are still living with the consequences.”

On Walz’s watch, Hinderaker notes, “Minnesota became a high-crime state for the first time ever.” Before Harris picked Walz, Powerline’s Scott Johnson, also a Minnesotan, wrote a Free Beacon piece headlined “Take My Governor – Please.”

After Biden’s debate with Trump, Walz was one of those contending that demented Joe was still “fit for office.” As Johnson explains, “Walz knew he was lying. Walz knew we knew he was lying. He casts the pale shadow of a man incapable of embarrassment and presents as an example of life imitating art, in this case the advertising art that created Joe Isuzu.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/07/harris-first-decision-proves-the-radical-left-completely-controls-the-democratic-party/

There’s a reason nobody expected far-left Kamala Harris to pick a far-left governor from a deep blue state as her running mate. It’s never worked.

In the wake of Jimmy Carter’s crushing defeat in 1980 and repeated Democratic losses thereafter, the party decided that to win presidential elections they had to at least appear as moderates.

Bill Clinton won by labeling himself a “new Democrat” and picked Al Gore, then a fellow moderate Southerner. Gore in turn tapped Joe Lieberman as his running mate. Barack Obama tried to position himself to the right of John McCain and ran with Scranton Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton picked Virginia moderate Sen. Tim Kaine to balance the ideological scales. Biden ran as a sensible centrist with a talent for working both sides of the aisle (and picked Harris more as an insurance policy against impeachment than anything else).

Which is why pundits across the board expected Harris – in what amounts to the first important decision she has made as presidential candidate — to pick a more mainstream governor with cross-party appeal from a swing state like Arizona or Pennsylvania.

But the radicalized, hopeless woke Democratic party couldn’t bring itself to OK anyone like that. So instead, Harris decided to “balance” the ticket with another leftist.

As Axios reported today: “Many Republicans expressed surprise and relief at the choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, readying renewed ‘radical’ liberal attacks.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamala-harris-recycling-the-2020-democrat-campaign/

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election through a successful tripartite subterfuge.

One, Biden never really campaigned. His handlers rightly assumed that the more the public and the media saw a debilitated Biden in the flesh, the less they would want him as president.

So, the Biden campaign used the COVID lockdowns to ensure that Biden stayed safe in his basement office.

Biden strategically distanced himself from disinterested journalists, using COVID as an excuse to avoid public appearances. It allowed him to run a 19th-century, front-porch sort of virtual campaign.

In his place, the liberal media, Democratic grandees, and the billionaire donor class served as Biden campaign surrogates—vastly outspending, out-advertising, and out-lawyering the underfunded incumbent Trump.

Second, again using COVID as a pretext, well-funded Democratic legal teams altered the voting laws during early 2020 in key swing states to encourage non-Election Day voting.

For the first time, majorities in many key states voted by mail-in/absentee ballots and during weeks of early voting.

We now know why the left was so motivated to push through radical balloting changes that were otherwise impossible prior to 2020 but have been mostly institutionalized since.

Non-Election Day ballots outnumbered Election Day ballots. They were far more likely to be cast by Democrats. And as the number of such ballots soared, the traditional rejection rate of non-Election Day ballots prior to 2020 fell—even as registrars were swamped.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/06/kamala-harris-has-a-serious-project-2025-problem-of-her-own/

If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Kamala Harris was running against some guy named “Project 2025.” She brings it up in every speech. Her campaign has said that “Project 2025” is on the ballot.

But it’s not the lies she and the media are spreading about Project 2025. It’s the fact that Harris doesn’t have one herself that should trouble voters most.

In case you don’t know, Project 2025 is an alliance of more than 100 conservative groups led by the Heritage Foundation, which got together to compile a 900-page list of policy proposals called “Mandate for Leadership.” (Heritage has published this volume every four years since 1980.)

Trump and his campaign have repeatedly made it clear that this isn’t his agenda. And, indeed, he has detailed plans posted on his campaign website – not to mention a track record of success as president.

But Harris? She has no policy agenda whatsoever. None.

Aside from fundraising pitches and ads for childish merch, her official campaign website is comprised of just a “Meet Kamala Harris” page, with 11 paragraphs of text that unintentionally showcase her rice-paper-thin resume.

Here’s the entire list of her “big” accomplishments:

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/05/how-trump-can-win-or-lose-the-election/

The Good News

The good news for the Trump campaign is that the sure Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is a lifelong California hard leftist at a time when the state is emblematic of progressive nihilism. Her extremist advocacies as a San Francisco county and city attorney, state Attorney General, and senator are on record. And they are consistent with what has virtually destroyed the state.

Harris was also a driving force as vice president for Joe Biden’s unpopular and unworkable progressive policies—whether open borders, massive illegal immigration, hyperinflation, fanning woke divisiveness, arguing for lax criminal prosecution, or defunding the police. She was far closer to the mindset of the unhinged Squad than Joe Biden himself.

None of the Biden-Harris administration’s main policy initiatives ever polled 50 percent approval. Abroad, the world blew up under their tenure with an unbridled Putin invading Ukraine, an unbound Iran brazenly using its proxies to attack Israel, and China all but warning the West of its impending absorption of Taiwan—now not a question of if but only when.

So, it should be easy for Trump to win the key midwestern swing states. All he needs to do is repeatedly remind voters that Harris is the most far-left presidential candidate in modern history. He can drive home that she is not only on record endorsing these extreme positions but has been doing so emphatically for years to energize her exclusively left-wing constituents and audiences.

If Trump heeds the lessons of late Lee Atwater, then he need only follow the 1988 Republican campaign script, when hard-left Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis’s 17-point lead in late July melted through nonstop reminders that Dukakis was and always would be far to the left of the American voter.

Dukakis’s efforts to claim that the election was only about his “competence,” not his liberal ideology, evaporated after a devastating series of ads—exposing the “technocrat” Dukakis as an extremist and a hypocrite desperate to disown and hide his prior unapologetically left-wing record from the voters. And Dukakis was a far better candidate than Harris.