RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/60-minutes-officially-announces-yes-we-edited-the-harris-interview-and-were-proud-of-it/?utm_

I’d like to add a brief note tonight on a kerfuffle of less matter and moment than the other debates of greater importance currently raging throughout American political media. (To name but one example: How many times will Kamala Harris and her media surrogates try to sell “Donald Trump is old and tired” as a campaign talking point before giving up at the transparent futility of it all?)

Earlier this month Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes, and it went just about as well her other various media encounters have: rather poorly. She served up her usual word salad, and I don’t recall there being much for me to say about it that wasn’t already covered well enough by my colleagues.

One little detail that nagged at me, however, was the way in which 60 Minutes edited their interview with Harris after first airing a preview of it on Face the Nation. When interviewer Bill Whitaker queried Harris about the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomatic relationship with Israel, Harris began with a rambling, lost prelude that amounted to her typical rhetorical churn. Then she collected herself and remembered her canned answer.

Later on, when the interview aired on 60 Minutes, that opening word jumble — which made Harris look remarkably weak — was edited away from Harris’s response. Instead of looking like a deer in the headlights unable to quickly answer, she was presented to viewers as a crisper speaker and thinker than she was.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/10/14/media-rushes-to-downplay-explosive-evidence-of-kamala-harris-plagiarism-n4933333

Did Kamala Harris plagiarize sections of her 2009 book? It sure looks like it. Christopher Rufo has uncovered significant evidence of Harris taking the work of others word for word and passing it off as her own, and it’s damning. Nowadays, when many Americans take for granted that politicians lie, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The plagiarism calls into question Harris’ honesty, her integrity, her trustworthiness, and even her most celebrated area of alleged expertise, as the plagiarism took place in a book that was designed to establish her credibility as a prosecutor.

JD Vance knows it’s a big deal. “I saw today, actually,” Vance said Monday, “a story that Kamala Harris apparently copied some significant chunks of her book from Wikipedia. So if you want a president with their own ideas, vote for Donald Trump. If you want a president who copies her own ideas from Wikipedia, vote for Kamala Harris.”

The New York Times knows it’s a big deal as well, which is why it published an 1100-word piece on Monday trying to explain away Harris’ plagiarism and portray the whole matter as an unfortunate example of just how low the foes of the sainted Harris will go. In the Times’ version, “conservative [a four-alarm word for the Times and its hapless readers] activist Christopher Rufo” is making a mountain out of a molehill. He “had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to ‘make a big deal of it.’” 

That was the assessment of one Jonathan Bailey, whom the Times identifies as “a plagiarism consultant,” without explaining what exactly a “plagiarism consultant” is or how one attains such a lofty position. Bailey, the Times informs us magisterially, “said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”

See, if you’re a Democrat, you can get away with ripping off entire paragraphs of other works and claiming them as your own, as long as you fit the thefts into a document of sufficient size.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4928306-desperate-democrats-cry-misinformation-to-squash-criticism-of-kamala-harris

For days now, the liberal media and its Democratic allies have seemed much more concerned about Republicans spreading “misinformation” than about the real-life suffering of North Carolinians.   

For proof, look no further than this blizzard of headlines — all from Politico:  

“The worst I have ever seen’: Disinformation chaos hammers FEMA”
“After the deluge, the lies: Misinformation and hoaxes about Helene cloud the recovery” 
“Elon Musk is piling onto all the hurricane disinformation, hampering relief efforts” 
“FEMA director on misinformation: ‘Truly dangerous narrative’” 

Politico is certainly not alone, ABC ran with this story on Tuesday: “Ahead of election, experts warn Hurricane Helene misinformation is ‘just the beginning.’” 

CBS contributed this one on Monday: “Misinformation has surged following Hurricane Helene.” 

 That’s the same CBS that reportedly doctored video of Kamala Harris’s “60 Minutes” interview to make the Democratic candidate appear more intelligent. So their concern about misinformation is apparently episodic.

It’s almost as though a memo went out to Democrat-friendly media allies, prompting a concerted pushback against criticism of the Biden-Harris White House’s response to Hurricane Helene. It’s not surprising. 

The pile-up of delayed, tone-deaf and embarrassing responses to the devastating storm from the administration and Kamala Harris has been damaging; her team is desperate to contain the damage.