RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/the_donald_trump_you_never_see.html

On October 9, the renowned lawyer and professor Alan Dershowitz posted a video on his show, The Dershow, titled “Is Harris winning or is Trump losing?”  In it, he argued that the polls are beginning to trend in favor of Harris.  Professor Dershowitz asked:

What is the reason for that?  Is it that Harris is winning more voters, or Trump is losing more voters?

Professor Dershowitz said that he doesn’t think the election is about policy as much as it is about personality.  He said,

A lot of people I know are saying, “Look, I much prefer Trump’s foreign policy, and economic policy, but I just can’t bring myself to vote for the guy … because he did this or said that.”

Trump does say and do things that turn people off.  In addition, when he says things that are perfectly okay, the left wing, the media, and his political opposition twist what he says to mean something terrible and then claim he said it.  A classic example of that is when Trump said that there were “some very fine people on both sides,” referring to a clash in Charlottesville between people who wanted to remove the statue of General Lee and people who wanted to protect the statue.  Malevolent distortions of what Trump said about that clash never end.  Headlines include “Trump again blames both sides for violence at white supremacist rally in Charlottesville” (Politico), “Why Can’t Trump Just Condemn Nazis?” (The Atlantic), “Trump revives his controversial claim equating white supremacists and anti-racism protestors in Charlottesville clashes” (The LA Times), etc.  The press leaves out Trump’s clarification, which he made in the same press conference:

And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white Nationalists. They should be condemned totally.

The left wants us to think that Trump makes Nazi-like statements and that he is a right-wing antisemitic extremist who is against freedom and democracy.  Leftists are successful in persuading people.  At one point, they even convinced J.D. Vance, Trump’s current running mate, that Trump is like Hitler.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamalas-charm-blitzkrieg-fails-miserably/

There are some people so incompetent that they could blow a tap-in putt. “Hand me the wedge,” they say as they overlook a 2-inch gap. You can’t help these people, even though they are likely the most in need of saving anyone, because you can’t save people from themselves. This, I suspect, is why the handlers of Kamala Harris have chosen to run the campaign they have.

Hiding is the only defense against incompetence. The only problem is that no matter where you hide, there you are. A person can escape a lot, themselves is not one of them.

After two months of hiding not working, as the public notices the Democratic Party’s nominees for president and vice president haven’t really done much talking beyond scripted, vapid stump speeches, the Harris/Walz campaign has decided to launch a “charm offensive.” They decided to let their candidates talk in what can only be described as either uber-friendly or softly-scripted interviews with supporters…and they still did horribly.

You can tell a lot about the amount of faith a campaign has in its candidates by the people they’re willing to talk to. For example, Donald Trump will do pretty anything and to almost anyone, unless they’ve mistreated him in the past.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, on the other hand, would need their own family members screened and topics agreed to before they’d sit down for breakfast with them. (In Kamala’s case you might be able to understand it, as news reports indicated her husband allegedly has no problem smacking a woman around if she displeases him.)

Aside from a 3 on a 1 to 10 scale of toughness interview with 60 Minutes, Democrats could not have played it safer than they have. Howard Stern has fully transitioned into everything he mocked in order to become famous in the first place, with whatever testicles he had left actually ascending back into his body, seemingly all the way into his throat.

https://www.nysun.com/article/william-jefferson-clinton-election-denier?lctg=1474934676&recognized_email=

Bill Clinton, election denier? That’s the prospect heaving into view now that the 42nd president is raising doubts about the legitimacy of the vote tallies on November 5. What he said is that he’s wondering “whether we can get an honest, open count.” With the presidential contest in a “dead heat,” as NBC News puts it, Mr. Clinton’s remarks suggest an emerging Democratic strategy if the votes don’t go their way: Challenge the integrity of the balloting.

On the hustings in Georgia for Vice President Harris, Mr. Clinton mused that “what will decide the outcome,” NBC reported, is “who wants it bad enough.” A Clinton aide clarified that “various reports of threats and intimidation against election officials” prompted the remarks. Yet Mr. Clinton’s comments remind that while President Trump is often excoriated for his refusal to accept the outcome in 2020, the Democrats are better on this head.

Feature, say, Secretary Clinton and other members of her party who, after Trump’s win in 2016, insinuated that Russian meddling in the race had made him an “illegitimate president.” Mrs. Clinton, after losing, pointed to “the many varying tactics” deployed during the 2016 campaign, “from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories” as among “just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did.”

Then again, too, what about the Democrats who doubted the fairness of the 2000 and 2004 elections won by President George W. Bush?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/3-reasons-why-kamala-harris-still-cant-define-her-vision

Who is Kamala Harris?

Despite an uptick in interviews, several weeks on the stump, three years as vice president, months spent campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, four years as a senator and seven as California attorney general, many Americans still don’t think they know the “real” Kamala Harris.

How can that be? Remaining undefined after all this time as a public figure is astonishing. Equally shocking is Harris’ obvious terror of being in the spotlight. That’s the only plausible explanation for the “word salads” that are tossed to interviewers when a teleprompter goes missing. Or the ill-timed bursts of laughter meant to cover her anxiety. 

As Maureen Dowd wrote recently in The New York Times, “Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.” 

True, she did well during her debate against former President Donald Trump, but that performance required weeks of rehearsal and memorization, a giant assist from partisan moderators and – let’s be honest – an inexpert opponent.

Why is Harris so insecure? One possibility is that it is because she knows she is not qualified, and that she has landed on this lofty perch for all the wrong reasons. That she became V.P., because Joe Biden had promised to pick a woman of color, and not because of her accomplishments. And that she was tapped to be the 2024 nominee because Democrat pooh-bahs realized a diminished Biden could not beat Donald Trump and ran out of time to find someone better. 

Another explanation is that Kamala Harris is pretending to be something she is not: a moderate politician. She may be struggling to mask her progressive beliefs, the ones she ran on unsuccessfully in 2019. Her father was a Marxist economist and her mother a liberal activist; both presumably had some influence on their daughter as she grew up in San Francisco.

Harris has said her core values have not changed, but that would suggest that her flip-flopping on important issues like fracking and Medicare-for-All are political gambits, meant to reassure critical centrist voters. After all, she didn’t hold leftist opinions in college; she held them just five years ago.  To broaden her appeal, she may be lying about a great many things; that would make anyone uncomfortable. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-scent-of-a-harris-panic-in-the-air/

The 2024 race is still close.

But then so was the 1980 Carter-Reagan race at this same juncture.

Indeed, incumbent president Carter was then comfortably up in the last two October Gallup polls—before utterly and suddenly evaporating on Election Day.

But in the last seven days, there seems a sense of panic in the Harris campaign.

How do we know that?

Why are Democratic pundits—from Axelrod to Carville—blasting the Harris campaign and otherwise warning of bad things to come?

Why are some of the once Democrat sure-thing senate races—e.g., in Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Michigan—tightening up?

Pundit poll-watchers are suggesting that Trump is close, even, or slightly ahead in the swing-state polls, suggesting that he is nearing a margin that could cancel out anticipated “ballot irregularities”.

The expected October Harris-Biden surprises—the opportune Fed interest rate cut, the transparently desperate Jack Smith beefed-up re-indictment, the current new Hollywood Trump-hit movie, the desperate Zelensky fly-in to Pennsylvania, the election-cycle customary Bob Woodward unsourced gossip book—seemed so far to have had no effect.

Why would any campaign send out the bumbling Tim Walz to a Fox Sunday interview after his disastrous debate?

Why is a suddenly smiling Biden so eager to claim candidate and VP Harris as a co-conspirator to his disastrous four years?

Why would Harris pivot and now agree to (admittedly mostly softball) interviews, thus confirming to the voting public why she wisely had previously avoided all press conferences, interviews, and town halls?

https://tomklingenstein.com/

In the days following last week’s vice-presidential debate, there has been a barrage of polling and commentary focused on how the debate does not matter. While it is true that, historically and statistically, vice-presidential debates do little to shift public opinion, this particular debate between Vance and Walz is different in three important ways.

First, the debate showed that Vance complements Trump in a way that expands the ticket’s vision for America. This is important because Americans ultimately vote for a vision. Second, the debate is taking place in the context of unprecedented political times, which puts more emphasis on every public forum the candidates engage in, including last week’s debate. Third, both Harris and Walz, since becoming a ticket, have given the fewest number of interviews and press conferences out of any presidential duo in history. This fact increases the significance of the debate as one of the few significant ways Americans can learn about the little-known Walz.

On the first point, Trump and Vance are complementary in a way that is unusual for a Republican ticket. Since 1984, which is when the first vice-presidential debate took place, there have been few tickets in which the vice-presidential pick has contributed positively to the presidential candidate’s vision. For example, in 2008, John McCain’s pick, Sarah Palin, ended up hurting McCain in the polls due to uncertainty about her qualifications and competence. McCain even acknowledged later on that he regretted picking Palin. In 2016, Mike Pence, Trump’s pick, was a standard, run-of-the-mill conservative who neither brought a fresh perspective on Trump’s vision nor was particularly engaging or charismatic to voters.

The debate last week showed that Vance is a unique pick in that he supplements Trump’s America-First vision. Trump’s vision, fundamentally, is about common sense, strength, and competence. Vance not only possesses common sense, strength, and competence, but also complements this vision with the additions of humaneness, empathy, relatability, and intellect. Unlike Pence, Vance is a force to be reckoned with. Taken as a collective, the comprehensive vision that the Trump-Vance ticket is putting forth is not just about Making America Great Again, which is the root of the vision; it is also a people-first, rather than party-first or elite-first. It is vision that focuses on fixing a country that has never been so broken in our lifetime. Even before Vance became the vice-presidential nominee, his relatability was evident through the popular appeal of his book, Hillbilly Elegy. The debate last week allowed the American people to see that crucial aspect come through in a direct way as Vance answered each question with strength, intellect, and poise, and also treated Walz with respect. On the immigration issue, Trump brought an unmistakable urgency and call to action to the issue during his debate with Kamala Harris. During the vice-presidential debate, Vance supplemented that urgency with specific facts and stories.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/15/non-citizens-will-vote-in-november-the-only-question-is-how-many/

Eight years ago, the mainstream media told us in no uncertain terms that noncitizens don’t vote in American elections. “There is no evidence,” they said. The likely number “is zero.”

They were provably wrong then – there’d been multiple accounts of noncitizens who’d registered and voted in elections. In the years since, the evidence of this problem has piled up higher. But the media are still at it. It’s “extremely rare,” they say. It never “affects the outcome of a race.” Republicans are looking to “blame illegals” if Donald Trump loses, etc.

Here’s one example of the disconnect.

An audit of Texas voter rolls in 2019 found 95,000 noncitizens who’d registered, 58,000 of whom voted in an election. This year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he’d removed 6,500 noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls, nearly 2,000 of whom voted.

Yet just this weekend, ABC News ran a piece titled: “In South Texas, the myth of noncitizen voting takes center stage.”

But it’s the media that’s peddling the myth. Voter rolls are criminally outdated and error prone. Some states are so eager to register voters that they don’t put up needed safeguards. When election officials do bother to audit their registration rolls, they keep turning up thousands of noncitizens.