RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-cnn-interview-revealed-only-that-kamala-harris-is-as-vacuous-as-her-campaign/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

We have been waiting ever since the day Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race for Kamala Harris to sit down in front of a camera and take questions from an interviewer. And if nothing else, we have learned why: In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.

To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.

And all throughout she offered no answers to any policy questions whatsoever, nor any explanation for her various changes of position between 2020 and now. In theory, Bash asked most of the “right questions”; in practice, the way she solicitously asked them — sometimes even helpfully offering in advance a multiple-choice list of acceptable answers for Harris to choose from — turned them into cream puffs that Harris immediately used to serve up word salad.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/30/kamalas-stolen-working-class-valor/

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been found guilty of puffing up his military record to look more manly – also known as stolen valor. Now it looks as though Kamala Harris has committed her own version of stolen valor by claiming a working-class medal that she may never have earned.

Harris and her campaign have been bragging about her modest roots and her supposed connection to working-class folks, exemplified by her having toiled at McDonald’s while in college, a claim she repeatedly makes in her speeches and that came up countless times at the Democratic National Convention.

But, like so many things about Harris and Walz, this story started to fall apart on closer inspection.

Earlier in the month, Harris’ campaign said that “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college.” An ad produced by a pro-Harris PAC said she’d “worked her way through school at McDonald’s.”  

That’s fishy enough. Even if Harris worked full-time all summer every summer at McDonald’s, she’d have earned only a fraction of Howard University’s tuition and fees. (The line about Harris’ “working mother” is also a stretch. Her mom was an eminent cancer researcher, and her dad was a tenured Stanford economist.)

In any event, Harris couldn’t keep up this particular fabrication, and later in August at a campaign event said only that she’d “worked at McDonald’s to earn spending money.” Still later in the month, the New York Times said she’d worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, California, “for a summer” while going to college in Washington, D.C.

Suddenly, Kamala’s working-class roots don’t look so working-class anymore.

https://www.nysun.com/article/trumps-endorsement-by-kennedy-and-gabbard-signals-a-reform-revolution-that-upends-the-old-conservative-liberal-

American politics is undergoing a profound change in its core pattern. We haven’t seen anything like it since President Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932.

For nearly a century, politics has been defined as a choice between liberals, usually Democrats, and conservatives, usually Republicans.

Now, the key dividing line is changing dramatically in politics and government. An increasingly corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest government system is failing to deliver on its promised achievements — and then lying about its failure. The American people are increasingly alienated from their government.

At America’s New Majority Project, our polling shows roughly 70 percent of Americans believe our country is on the wrong track. We are also learning that Americans want real changes that don’t fit the traditional liberal-conservative dialogue.

Given the opportunity to pick the top three changes for our government that are most important for getting America back on track, Americans chose less corruption (45 percent), more accountability (38 percent), and less dishonesty (29 percent).

These are not left-right issues. These are questions of fundamental dysfunction and reform which cut across normal politics. These ideas also profoundly threaten lobbyists, government contractors, entrenched bureaucrats, and the Congress.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/29/new-rules-for-radicals-how-to-reinvent-kamala-harris/

How do accomplished radicals elect a mediocre far-left presidential candidate?

The task might at first seem impossible.

Kamala Harris is currently a radical incumbent vice president. For more than three years, she was second in command to an unprecedentedly unliked Democrat president, his failed policies, and his unpopular record.

Harris herself had compiled a hard-left trail over her own entire career while loudly boasting indiscreetly to leftist audiences of being proudly “woke” and “radical.”

Most challenging for a Harris candidacy makeover was the long, entrenched Democratic Party’s reluctance to remove a debilitated President Biden from the Democratic ticket.

Why?

Because Harris was deemed such a liability that she had become a Spiro Agnew-like insurance policy for a failing Biden.

Until just recently, Democrats had considered an unpopular and enfeebled Biden nonetheless far preferable to an incoherent, lightweight, and widely ridiculed potential replacement Vice President Harris.

After all, she had never before entered a presidential primary. She never won a single delegate by voting. She failed miserably as a candidate in 2020.

And she co-owns the unpopular record of an even more unpopular president.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamalas-gospel-of-envy/

Winston Churchill warned the free world 80 years ago: “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Yes, a gospel of envy can be attractive to anyone who doesn’t have to pay for what they want. It’s easy to understand why “equity” is such a powerful word in the progressive world of the left. Equal opportunity is for conservatives. After hours of watching the Democratic National Convention, it’s clear that leftists feel they are entitled to equal results no matter how little people have to do to earn those results. Can you buy votes by attracting freeloaders? The left seems to think so.

It’s clear that many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, credit card debt is hitting record highs, and their savings have shrunk or all but disappeared. President Biden has boasted that wages are up, but when you take into account inflation, real wages have declined. The average household has lost nearly $2,000 of purchasing power since Biden and Harris took office. So, it is no wonder that “free” sounds pretty attractive. Maybe that is why Kamala Harris is calling herself the candidate of “joy” for all the people, but the Biden/Harris policies have ravaged the middle class she says she is here to serve. Her acceptance speech at the convention was an emotional message to fight for all, but her vicious and inaccurate attacks on Trump were so over the top and filled with lies that she proved to be the worst divider of all. She went from joy and love to anger and attacks without substance.

President John F. Kennedy campaigned with a message of personal responsibility—“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for our country.”  Today’s leftists don’t want to hear about what they have to do for our country; they want to know what they are going to get from their government. The left feels entitled to the American Dream by just living here.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/29/a-most-obvious-lie/

While at times it’s been hard to pin down just what Kamala Harris stands for – somehow she’s both a tough prosecutor and an advocate for defunding the police – she is at her core a hard-left progressive. But her campaign team, which includes the mainstream media, is putting in the extra hours to recast her as a centrist.

Don’t fall for the lie.

In the weeks following her party coronation, never-received-a-vote-outside-of-California Harris has been presented to voters as a “sober-minded centrist.” Other media outlets and personalities have eagerly covered her fundamental transition.

She no longer opposes fracking.

She’s doesn’t want to outlaw private health insurance.

She now wants to control the border.

She really doesn’t plan to ban internal-combustion engine automobiles.

Harris has also stolen Donald Trump’s “no tax on tips” proposal, and she’s of course become a supporter of a strong military, swearing she’ll be sure that the U.S. will continue to have the “most lethal” armed forces in the world.

“Kamala seems to trade in her old principles and positions for new ones every few days,” say our friends at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/oprah-vs-hulk

Political conventions are a form of theater. The stage, the lights, the confetti; the personalities, who, from the rostrum, make the case for their party; and the driving ambition: to rally the base, demoralize the enemy, and win.

In most years, the oratory supports the agenda. The parties select their nominees, assemble a platform, and focus their rhetoric on how their policies will improve the life of the nation. But this year, the agenda took a back seat to aesthetics.

Donald Trump’s policy proposals—control the border, cut taxes, and achieve peace through strength—have been the same for a decade. Kamala Harris’s have been carefully hidden. She has distanced herself from her previous positions and presented emotion, most notably, “joy,” in lieu of concrete policies. Given this situation, let’s set aside substance for a moment and focus on style.

The two conventions this year, the DNC in Chicago and the RNC in Milwaukee, featured two speakers who captured their respective parties’ aesthetics: television host Oprah Winfrey, for the Democrats, and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, for the Republicans.  

The Democrats selected Oprah for an obvious reason. She is a star—and a star-maker. For decades, Oprah has curated her image as a compassionate friend, generous hostess, and moral voice. She appears in public immaculately dressed, coiffed, lighted, and staged.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/28/wheres-kamalas-convention-bounce/

Two days ago, Nate Silver, the media’s favorite polling “expert” who on election day in 2016 gave Hillary Clinton a 71% chance of winning, said polls had Kamala Harris 5 points ahead of Donald Trump and that “our best guess is that her lead will increase further, especially given that almost none of the polling was done after her strong acceptance speech on Thursday.”

Of course, Silver was hardly alone. The leftist media was fully expecting a big bounce in Harris’ poll numbers.

So, where is Kamala’s big convention bounce?

The Morning Consult found Harris’ lead over Trump unchanged since last Thursday.

A Yahoo/YouGov poll, which was also conducted after the convention, found that “if Harris got a ‘bounce’ from the DNC, it was a very small one — too small to alter the fundamentally deadlocked nature of the 2024 contest.”

The RealClearPolitics average had Harris at 48.3% last Monday. It is currently at 48.4%. But her lead over Trump actually shrank slightly, from 1.6 points last Monday to the current 1.5.

The FiveThirtyEight average had Harris at 46.7% last Monday, and 47.1% this Monday. It also shows that her lead over Trump has declined since the convention ended last Thursday, going from 3.7 on Aug. 23 to 3.4 now.

And, Harris’ odds of winning went from 51% chance on Aug. 19 to 49% today, according to Polymarket. Trump’s went from 47% to 50%.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/08/25/trump-owns-the-democrats-in-the-most-unexpected-way-n4931964

During presidential campaigns, candidates are typically briefed by the nation’s security agencies on critical matters they could face if they win the election. However, this week former President Donald Trump announced that he would refuse to take part in these standard intelligence briefings for candidates.

And the reason is actually quite genius. He explained his decision by expressing concern that Democrats would leak classified information and then attempt to accuse him of being the source of the leaks.

In other words, Trump knew a trap was being set for him.

“I don’t want them, because, number one, I know what’s happening. It’s very easy to see what’s happening,” he told the Daily Mail. “We have an incompetent leader, and we have two incompetent leaders. We have a Marxist that’s going to try and be president, and this country is not ready for a Marxist or a communist president, and that’s what she is. She destroyed San Francisco, she destroyed California, and this country is not ready for it.”

Trump continued, “So, I don’t want the briefings because as soon as I get one, they’ll accuse me of leaking it. The best way to handle that is to avoid the briefing altogether. They come in, give you a briefing, and then two days later, they leak it and blame you.”

“The only way to solve that problem is not to take the briefing,” he added. “I don’t want it, understood? I’ll have plenty of them when I get back in.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/25/the-lefts-swift-shift-after-rfk-jr-s-trump-endorsement/

The thing I admire about contemporary deep-state Democrats is their nimbleness.

This nimbleness was on ostentatious view in the regime response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement Friday that he was 1) suspending his campaign (at least in battleground states) and 2) throwing his support behind Donald Trump.

The acrid scent of panic might have been expected among the limp-wristed, totalitarian faithful. And, in fact,  beneath the amusing cologne of anti-Trump bluster, the panic was indeed discernible.

But there was also that trademark smooth-as-a-suppository (as Saul Bellow put it) suaveness, exemplified, for instance, by former Obama strategist David Axelrod.

“Robert F. Kennedy Sr.,” Axelrod posted shortly after the deed was done, “would have been appalled to see his son cut a deal to drop out for [t]he race and endorse Trump.”

Imagine: someone agrees to drop out of a race at the last minute and support a rival candidate!  As the commentator Ned Ryan put it in response to Axelrod’s snippy post: “You suddenly seem offended by someone cutting a deal to drop out of the race and endorse someone else.”

Cast your mind back, David, to July 21 of this year.  That’s when Joe Biden, having been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by the secret committee running the country, suddenly announced that he was dropping out of the race. This was, remember, after Biden repeatedly insisted that he was staying in the race and was looking forward to the next debate against Trump. Yes, the first was a disaster, but he would show ’em!