RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamala-loses-one-person-cnn-debate/

As we enter the final stretch of election season, every day seems to bring another Trump/Vance victory in spite of a hostile media, and another embarrassing loss by the Harris/Walz campaign. Recently, for example, Trump endeared himself to regular Americans by putting on an apron and working the McDonald’s drive-thru; conversely, McDonald’s dealt a fatal blow to Kamala’s claim she had worked for them as a teenager by releasing a statement declaring they could find no evidence of that. She is looking more and more like the most hapless, brainless, inauthentic, unqualified presidential nominee in modern history, if not ever. Even the state media like CNN can’t cover for her anymore, as evidenced by the tepid assessments of CNN commentators in the wake of Kamala’s recent CNN town hall hosted by Anderson Cooper.

To recap: when the Democrats realized that Joe Biden could no longer be propped up as their 2024 candidate, they found themselves painted into a corner. The Democrat kingmakers – Barack Obama, Susan Rice, and Valerie Jarrett – needed to step in and depose the decrepit Biden but didn’t want to fall back on Vice President Harris, whom they knew was devoid of accomplishments, likeability, brains, and presidential charisma, but how could they not go with her? Running the vice president as the nominee would ordinarily be the obvious move; leap-frogging over Kamala and selecting someone else would be a clear acknowledgement that she had never been anything but a diversity hire. And how could the party of identity politics not go with a “woman of color”? It would discredit their entire ideology.

So they rolled the dice and installed Kamala, knowing she was not ready for prime time but counting on a supportive media and a strategy of painting Trump as Hitler 2.0 to get her over the finish line. But in the ensuing months she has not only not risen to the occasion, she and her campaign are flailing to such an extent that all they have left is to fear-monger hysterically about Trump as A Threat to Democracy™.

Then came CNN’s Wednesday evening town hall in Philadelphia. David Urban nailed it when he declared afterward that she lost a one-person debate. A couple of examples of her prevaricating and fumbling will suffice to give a sense of just how badly the event went for her.

When Cooper hit her with a question she should have seen coming from a mile away – is Trump’s idea of a border wall actually “stupid,” as she had initially called it? – she panicked immediately and rambled about Trump until Cooper interjected to get her back on track. As an open borders enthusiast who plans to give citizenship to millions of illegals in the country, she had the nerve to say that there needs to be a legal process for immigration and that she will secure the border. Cooper flustered her further by pressing: “So you don’t think the idea of a border wall is stupid anymore?” and she responded again by attacking Trump and complaining that “he didn’t do much of anything” with the wall.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/24/its-unhinged-to-compare-trump-to-hitler/

It was the October surprise that surprised no one. America’s political and media elites have this week alleged that Donald Trump is just like Adolf Hitler. This might be a little more shocking if they hadn’t been claiming exactly this for the best part of eight years.

The prompt for the latest round of hysterical Trump-Nazi comparisons came from John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff turned Trump-hater. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly claimed that his former boss spoke wistfully of Hitler and said he wished that he had Hitler’s generals. Kelly is certain that Trump meets the ‘definition of a fascist’, having found a general definition online.

Trump’s campaign adamantly refutes Kelly’s claims. But vice-president Kamala Harris, Trump’s increasingly desperate presidential rival, has predictably seized on Kelly’s comments. She took time out from her busy schedule of preparing truly terrible answers for her CNN Town Hall yesterday, to stand in front of a podium with the presidential seal on it and denounce Trump as ‘a fascist’ who wants ‘unchecked’ power. Citing Kelly’s claims, she said that Trump wants ‘a military who will be loyal to him, personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the constitution of the United States’.

It seems the empty ‘joyous’ vibe that initially characterised Harris’s campaign has now given way to dystopian fear-mongering about the return of fascism. Harris is now reviving the core message of Joe Biden’s campaign – that Trump poses an existential, fascist-like threat to American democracy. It’s desperate stuff.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/harris-finally-crashes-and-burns-on-cnn/

Even CNN’s own analysts panned the Democratic nominee’s performance. This was her first authentic campaign disaster.

The engines have flared out right at the end of the flight. The tank is out of gas. The weather is choppy, the navigation system completely unreliable, and the best guess is that you’re still short of the runway. (Oh, and the captain had a stroke while in the cockpit a few hours ago, leaving only a flight attendant as the pilot. She refuses to read the instruction manual or listen to the passengers.) Yes, it’s easy enough to spin up lovingly bespoke metaphors for how the Harris campaign is handling the late stages of the 2024 race — a race they very much could still win, I must always emphasize — but I’ll conclude this one by saying that if last night’s Kamala Harris CNN town hall (with Anderson Cooper hosting in the Philadelphia suburbs) is any indication, the plane may already be disintegrating in midair, before it even hits the ground.

You may have noticed that I’ve had a decidedly muted reaction to Harris’s other recent “serious” media interviews, whether Bret Baier at Fox News or Bill Whitaker on 60 Minutes, in the sense that while Harris was predictably awful in both sit-downs (almost relentlessly so), she was boring and unrevelatory in her awfulness. In other words, we learned nothing new about the depths to which she is capable of sinking performatively that we didn’t already know. They were water-treading exercises for the most part.

Last night’s CNN town hall, on the other hand, was memorably bad. This is the moment her campaign dreaded, the moment when the fundamental emptiness and inadequacy of their candidate was revealed for all the world to see without helpful edits or someone to bail her out. There Harris stood exposed — with an unpersuaded audience and a moderator in Cooper who handled his task without showing any particular solicitude for her electoral fortunes — and she withered in the spotlight. (As Dylan might have said, “Even the vice president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.”) There are moments from this event — many moments, oh so terribly many of them — that will haunt Harris in retirement forever should she lose, the sorts of ghastly stammering failures destined to go into YouTube clip reels ten years later explaining “How We Got Here.” (And if she wins? All is not forgiven, merely set aside — until the reality of her as president for four years takes its toll on Democratic fortunes, which will be quickly.)

As for myself, I found Harris’s answer to Anderson Cooper’s pointed question about the border fence to be perhaps the lowest moment of her entire public career to date, and I mean that in the specific sense that nobody who watches it — not even her fiercest partisans — will be able to come away from it with anything save a reflex-level revulsion. (For her friends, the reaction will be shame and desire to change the subject. For her enemies, it will be glee. For the vast majority of normal voters, it will simply be: “DO NOT WANT.”)