MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Gormless, formless Kamala just said the quiet part out loud - and proved which campaign is the real threat to democracy
Daily Mail
Oct 25, 2024
Days to go and there's only one argument Kamala Harris - and her minions in the media - can make: Trump is Hitler. If Kamala were smart, she'd do what Obama did and reach out to, rather than demonize, those who disagree. But she's not smart. This, we know.
Days to go and there's only one argument Kamala Harris — and her minions in the media — can make: Trump is Hitler.
Or Mussolini, or Stalin, or Pol Pot — take your pick. If Trump gets elected, he's building concentration camps, ripping up the Constitution, sending the military to arrest his political enemies — hell, anyone who didn't vote for him — hosting Putin and Xi in the Lincoln bedroom, burning the country down and throwing Rachel Maddow in jail.
Well, most of us could get behind that last one.
Here's what Maddow said about Trump voters at a Brooklyn forum in September: 'I believe that humans can change and that redemption is possible… I am always hopeful.'
And the left wonders why so many find them to be supercilious and condescending. If Kamala were smart, she'd do what Obama did and reach out to, rather than demonize, those who disagree.
But she's not smart. This, we know.
During her disastrous town hall on CNN Wednesday night, she gave only one clear and succinct answer.
'Do you think,' host Anderson Cooper asked, 'Donald Trump is a fascist?'
'Yes I do,' Kamala said. 'Yes I do.'
You could see it in her eyes: She thought this was her mic-drop moment. But no one in the audience — composed largely of voters, Cooper said, inclined to vote for her anyway — clapped or responded in kind.
The campaign of 'joy' and 'vibes' has gone quite dark indeed. Trump-as-Hitler is the left's new talking point, uttered with grave seriousness to voters still too stupid, ignorant, racist or xenophobic to get it, apparently.
Despite having a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren, Trump is a Nazi. His upcoming rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday? Nazi rally.
His stalwart, full-throated defense of Israel? Best left undiscussed.
Ex-Trump Chief-of-Staff John Kelly's four-year-old claim that the former president admired Hitler — disinterred by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and denied by a Trump spokesperson — is also making the rounds, though it begs the question: If Kelly believed Trump was such a Hitler acolyte, why didn't he resign right then?
Why not sound the alarm when it really mattered? Could Kelly, who was fired by Trump, be seeking revenge? Nick Ayers, former chief of staff to Trump's former VP Mike Pence, wrote on X that Kelly's claims are 'patently false'.
The media is ignoring that. The Nazi drumbeat, it seems, will go through Election Day and, if he wins, well beyond.
Sometimes, though, the mask slips. Take this exchange between MSNBC's Jen Psaki, getting hysterical – in both senses of the word — with top Dem strategist James Carville last week.
Psaki: 'It seems like you're saying we should go back to scaring people, because that's what they need to hear?'
Carville: 'Yep.'
There it is: The quiet part said out loud.
No serious person really believes Trump is a threat to democracy — not least when you hear it from a party that staged an internal palace coup and put forward a nominee who hadn't earned a single vote.
Bret Stephens, columnist for the New York Times, wrote about the left's misguided Trump-fascist ploy two days ago: 'Aside from being gratuitous and self-defeating — what kind of voter is going to be won over by being called a name? — it's also mostly wrong.'
Stephens is one of the Times' token conservatives, but somehow he got this past America's wokest newsroom.
Even Democratic senators up for re-election in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin are running ads touting their ability to work with Donald Trump. Here's the thing: People can't be just a little bit fascist or a little bit racist.
So make no mistake: Leftist elites are laughing at the poor saps who believe this stuff.
No serious person really believes Trump is a threat to democracy - not least when you hear it from a party that staged an internal palace coup and put forward a nominee who hadn't earned a single vote.
So make no mistake: Leftist elites are laughing at the poor saps who believe this stuff.
It's quite sad, really, for a major party candidate to be so empty, so devoid of any real opinions, policy, or personality, that she can only run in opposition. Harris has been campaigning since July, and she has yet to define herself.
What is she for? Not just what she believes — but what is the point of Kamala Harris?
Other than pure, vaulting ambition, the answer seems to be nothing. Seeking power for the sake of power seems a far greater threat than anything she can level against Trump.
Here was Harris, at that CNN town hall, responding to a young, earnest 'Habitat for Humanity' volunteer asking what she would do 'to make sure not another innocent Palestinian dies by bombs funded by U.S. taxpayers?'
Ooooooh boy. Kamala was not prepared for that one. Her eyes closed slowly. She brought her fingers to the bridge of her nose, as if fighting off a migraine. A pause, a little word salad, and finally, 'a two-state solution' — so easy, that — and a friendly reminder that Trump is a fascist.
Who would you rather have dealing with the Middle East?
Even Obama's top doctors can't cure this patient. Apparently, there is no treatment plan that can imbue Harris with authenticity, wit, or intelligence. She cannot be moved away from her hoariest trope, one that could be used as aural torture against prisoners of war: 'We are a people who have ambition. We have aspirations. We have dreams.'
Among those dreams is never hearing this vacuous nonsense again.
After weeks of preparation, studying, reading and mock interviews (one would hope, anyway), here's the best she could do on why the Biden-Harris administration ignored the border crisis for years:
'Well, there was a lot that was done but there's more to do, Anderson. And, and — I'm pointing out things that need to be done, that haven't been done, but need to be done.'
Aren't we supposed to be unburdened by what has been done?
Anyway: Imagine her handlers backstage, watching and listening to this. No wonder there are leaks from her camp about internal panic. Even David Axelrod, the guy who got Obama elected twice, couldn't defend this abject failure during CNN's post-mortem.
'Word salad city,' he said.
To a question posed by a political science professor named Carol, who asked Harris which policy she most wanted Congress to push through.
Simple, yes? One issue, one fix — even in a dream scenario.
Gird your loins for this one.
'Well,' Harris said, 'there's not just one. I have to be honest with you, Carol. Um, there's a lot of work that needs to happen but let's, let's — I think that maybe part of this, the point that I — how I think about it is, we've got to get past this era' — here Kamala's eyes closed, as if she was praying for a cogent answer — 'of politics and partisan politics slowing down what we need to do in terms of progress in our country.'
Carol looked unimpressed.
And what about Doug Emhoff? Any decent journalist would have used this town hall to ask about Kamala's husband, accused by an ex-girlfriend of violently slapping her in the face — in public, outside an A-list gala, so hard that she spun around — or the nanny, who he allegedly impregnated during his first marriage and paid $80,000 to go away.
And what about Doug Emhoff ? Any decent journalist would have used this town hall to ask about Kamala's husband, accused by an ex-girlfriend of violently slapping her in the face.
Alas, we had Anderson Cooper, who also declined to tell us whether CNN had vetted these voter questions. Cooper embarrassed himself and his failing network here — much as Maria Shriver, the only other top Dem female who knows what it's like to have your husband knock up the nanny, told attendees of another Kamala town hall on Monday that they couldn't ask the candidate any questions.
'Hopefully,' Shriver told the crowd, 'I'll be able to ask some of the questions that might be in your head.'
How's that for free and open discussion? The point of a town hall is for citizens to ask candidates questions that concern them. Instead, they got Maria Shriver shutting them down.
And she called herself a journalist while doing so!
Little wonder Anderson Cooper seemed to think, by contrast, that he was doing a decent job — even as Kamala walked all over him.
'One of the things I specialized in as a prosecutor,' Harris said, 'was crimes against women and children.'
There's the opening: WHAT ABOUT DOUG? What about the women who say he treated them terribly? Does Kamala, as the left so stridently tells us, believe all women? Or just women who Doug hasn't dated?
When will someone in the national media grow a spine and ask this gormless, formless candidate about her husband's accusers?
It won't be anyone on CNN, that's for sure. Last week, Scott Jennings, former special assistant to President George W. Bush, dared to bring up 'some of the questions that are swirling around Harris's own husband' before the network's panel swiftly shut him down and shut him up.
That is thought policing. That is intellectual fascism.
If there's one thing we can be sure Kamala Harris believes in, it's the very thing she's accusing Trump of doing and being — shutting down perceived enemies, refusing to be straight with the American people, and letting the media run cover for her and her husband.
So much for the politics of joy.
No comments:
Post a Comment