RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-harris-campaigns-hubris-may-be-on-the-verge-of-breeding-nemesis/

As I’ve mentioned repeatedly in recent weeks, Kamala Harris’s substanceless presidential campaign has been a deranging, quasi-psychedelic experience, like watching the everyday physical reality you previously took for granted simply melt into fractal trails of pastel-colored candy floss. So picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies as I take you down to America’s political strawberry fields, where nothing is real and there’s nothing to get hung about — and where Harris’s campaign has now simply decided to steal policy positions from Donald Trump’s campaign because, hey, haven’t you heard? It’s a “vibes” election now, friend! And the vibes will make a sober man seasick.

The first example of the Harris campaign’s capsizing reality — as discussed at length on Friday — was her sudden rebranding as a “border hawk” — rewriting her history while tellingly never once promising to either stop or reverse the flow of illegals pouring over the southern border. This weekend? It was Kamala in Nevada (a swing state whose hinge is the service-worker-based casino industry) promising to end taxes on tips.

I assume others here will write about the policy implications of this fantasy proposal with greater intelligence than I am capable of mustering anymore. Honestly, it sounds like a terrible idea to me, and a transparent giveaway to secure the electoral votes of Nevada alone, which (pace, alas, Jon Ralston) does not matter all that much in terms of 2024’s electoral calculus. In fact, I said as much back when Trump himself first proposed it in Las Vegas, joking that from Trump’s perspective it was probably just a way to further ingratiate himself with exotic dancers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/veterans-will-not-be-fooled-by-tim-walz/

Kamala Harris’s disastrous and cowardly choice of Tim Walz as her running mate over Josh Shapiro – who was the logical pick and was shamefully passed over because he is Jewish – is simply more of the same with her. He’s a choice made from fear. She feared somebody who would be competition. She feared somebody who would be smarter, which really limited her choices. So she chose this guy, who no doubt told her exactly what she wanted to hear. This is her modus operandi. She’s afraid. She operates from fear, and now she has exactly the kind of sergeant major she wants by her side – one who will be sure to enable her worst instincts all the way to defeat.

You just know that Walz being in the Army checked a box for her – DEI hacks love checking boxes – and she didn’t look any deeper than that. No one around her did either. None of her flunkies ever served. None of them understand. They just thought that they could flash some pictures of Walz in his uniform strutting about, and that would be enough to nail down the votes of all the rubes with DD 214s. But what you don’t know can hurt you. And what she doesn’t know is that Tim Walz is going to alienate vets, except for the pinko blue falcons like the loathsome Vindmans and those Twitter goofs who insist you shouldn’t have an AR15 because they are experts, having once qualified “marksman” on an M4.

You can Google “blue falcon” if you want. Just don’t do it with kids around or on your employer’s computer.

Civilians aren’t going to understand this. It’s a veteran thing. Civvies will look at pictures of him in his BDUs or ACUs and think he looks STRAC. But vets know what they see when they look at this guy and it’s not good.

https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2024/08/10/walz-former-superior-he-quit-and-went-over-my-head-to-do-so-n3792960

We covered this a couple of days ago based on a clip, but the entire interview with retired Minnesota National Guard Command Sergeant Major Doug Julin is worth watching. CNN’s Laura Coates spent ten minutes on Thursday night trying to defend Tim Walz through most of it, but Julin would not be deterred. Not only did Walz know that his unit would be deployed when he suddenly retired, Walz back-doored Julin in applying for retirement, he explains, leaving his unit in the lurch. 

And there’s a reason Walz did that — a very clear reason, Julin points out:

COATES: Is your concern that it’s — oh, go ahead. I do want to ask this question quickly, Sergeant Major, and I appreciate your time, but is your — [crosstalk] — concern about the manner in which he did not speak to you or his decision to retire, which he, as we’ve talked about, he would have been entitled to do, which causes the most concern? Because that is the focus that so many people are wondering about, whether he has done something wrong in service or done something personally to offend you.

JULIN: No, he did something wrong in service, as I stated before. He knew the policies and procedures and how we go to leadership and address issues or discuss issues and concerns out there. Again, backing up, he had told me, no, I’m going forward, we’re going to go with the battalion, and go from there. So, I’m under the believing, he told me he was going forward. I’m underneath that believing that he’s going forward. He went around me, which he should have addressed it with me so he could help me with some things out there.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/14/a-campaign-of-joy/

The Democratic talking points were issued and the media enthusiastically accommodated: The Harris-Walz campaign is now a moveable feast of joy. But there’s nothing even remotely joyful about Kamala Harris’ and Tim Walz’s political orientation. Their positions are founded on militancy and just plain meanness.

The media are nothing but shills for the Democratic Party. They are so willing to please that they will run with whatever theme the party tells them to. Take a look at recent headlines. 

“Harris Used to Worry About Laughing. Now Joy Is Fueling Her Campaign,” says the New York Times.

“Harris is pushing joy,” according to the Associated Press’ surely unbiased reporting.

The British Guardian swears that the “Democrats’ joy is unconfined,” while ABC News wants Americans to know that “early Harris-Walz rallies feature big crowds, talk of ‘joy.’”

National Public Radio says “Harris and Walz reintroduce joy,” as the Washington Post declares that “​​Harris and Walz seize on joyful message in contrast to darker Trump themes.” And from Salon’s perspective, “Vibes matter: Trump can hardly restrain his jealousy over the Harris campaign’s joy.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/11/theater-of-the-absurd-harris-walz-edition/

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.

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.