Notes from "Kamalat"
Observations from the Democratic nomination takeover by VP Harris
My original plan for today’s column was to discuss the concept of the “unitary executive”, which was at the heart of the ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court’s last ruling of the October 2023 term, Trump v. United States, published on 1 July 2024. But, in writing that column, I decided to lead that column with a few quick-hit bullet points about President Biden’s withdrawal from the race for the Democratic nomination, despite the fact that virtually every delegate to the Democratic National Convention was pledged to vote for him, and the quick apparent shift to nominating Vice President Harris. At first, I started with three points. Then four. Then six, and now I was over 1,000 words in a column that was already going to be lengthy (over 5,000 words). And then I thought of about five more points to add.
So . . . the end result of all that is that the column on the “unitary executive” theory (which contains much more of a discussion of originalism and textualism than non-lawyer readers may want!) will be pushed off to next week, so that I can get in all of the quick-hit bullet points before they change from being “news” to being “olds” and no one wants to hear about them any longer.
Oh, and the title of this article is pronounced the same as one variant of “Camelot”, which was the nickname given to John F. Kennedy’s presidency from 1961-63. I daresay that we’ll see someone else use that imagery for VP Harris’ presidential campaign before November, but I wanted to use it first!
ONE: So we have been told that President Joe Biden contracted COVID, which is why he didn’t give a public announcement about his withdrawal from the 2024 race in person. And we have also been told that he was given multiple doses of PAXLOVID — six doses by Saturday morning (20 July) at his Delaware home. Now, since the standard for PAXLOVID is three doses, that means that he had had a PAXLOVID rebound while he was campaigning in Las Vegas, which occurs when you take the three doses, test negative for a few days, and then test positive again.
However, there seems to be a belief in the Trump Circus World that more happened to Biden than just a COVID rebound. Part of that belief is fueled by this report from the NBC affiliate in Las Vegas that emergency rooms in Las Vegas were being prepped for Biden during his campaign appearance in Las Vegas, before the decision was made for him to return to Delaware on Air Force One. As a result, there was speculation that Biden had suffered some other type of health event, perhaps even a stroke, perhaps even dead. [I won’t provide links, because I don’t want to refer people to those sites, but at least his address from the Oval Office on Wednesday ended the “dead” rumors..]
But wait a minute . . . wasn’t the reason that we had a year-long lockdown (two years long, in some public schools) because COVID was so life-threatening to older people? I seem to remember hearing that, if you didn’t quarantine, you might kill Granny or Gramps by spreading COVID to them. And a huge percentage of COVID deaths occurred at nursing homes.
So why wouldn’t a serious, life-threatening health event for a relatively frail 81-year-old man be a PAXLOVID rebound? In fact, in 2022 Anthony Fauci (who should be familiar to everyone from the pandemic), who was then also 81, experienced a PAXLOVID rebound and said that, for him, the rebound was “much worse” than the original case of COVID. But facts rarely matter in Trump Circus World; I’m beginning to think that it should adopt Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” as its theme song.
TWO: But since Biden dropped out, a lot has suddenly come out about how long Biden has been challenged in doing normal activities that the President is expected to perform. This week, the Wall Street Journal published a story about Biden’s candidacy being an epic miscalculation. Here’s the lead:
President Biden had just finished trying to persuade a group of congressional Democrats to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill when Nancy Pelosi, then the House speaker, took the microphone.
In 30 minutes of remarks on Capitol Hill, Biden had spoken disjointedly and failed to make a concrete ask of lawmakers, according to Democrats in the room. After he left, a visibly frustrated Pelosi told the group she would articulate what Biden had been trying to say, one lawmaker said.
“It was the first time I remember people pretty jarred by what they had seen,” recalled Rep. Dean Phillips (D., Minn.), who would go on to mount an unsuccessful primary challenge against the president.
That was October 2021. That month was the last time Biden met with the House Democratic caucus on the Hill regarding legislation.
Please read that carefully. OCTOBER 2021, and President Biden — the leader of the free world, who had been in office for just nine months — could no longer do the public speaking job of the President without using a teleprompter, even in small meetings, let alone in public appearances. It seems obvious to me that, if you can’t speak clearly without somebody writing down the words for you to read, you can’t think clearly either.
October 2021.
THREE: President Biden had withdrawn almost all of the troops from Afghanistan at the end of July 2021. less than three months before. Kabul fell to the Taliban on 15 August. From this story, it seems clear that Biden was already not fully competent at that time. And now it’s almost three years later —- and we the American people have been gaslighted (gaslit?) for all that time. And it appears that everyone in the Biden-Harris administration knew it.
By covering it up, and then quickly moving to ensure the nomination for VP Kamala Harris after Biden’s withdrawal, the Biden-Harris administration ensured that Democratic voters would not get a true policy choice in 2024, because an incumbent president is not going to draw a serious primary opponent (sorry, Dean Phillips, but you know your challenge wasn’t serious just as well as we do) unless that opponent wants the President to lose re-election: see President Jimmy Carter in 1980, who was challenged by Sen. Ted Kennedy for re-nomination (and for leadership of the Democratic Party) and then was bombed by Ronald Reagan in the general election, and President George H.W. Bush, who was challenged by paleoconservative Pat Buchanan (who felt that Bush was hostile to the social conservatives in the Reagan Coalition) for renomination and then was beaten by Bill Clinton in the general election, for the two most recent examples.
No one knows exactly what Kamala Harris would do as president, although we know that during her campaign in 2020, she was just as radical as avowed socialist Bernie Sanders — and during her term in the Senate, or at least during the last two years (2019-20), she and Sanders were rated as the two most progressive (or radical, depending on your viewpoint) members of the Senate (according to GovTrack), with Kamala on top in 2019 and Bernie on top in 2020. Over four years (2017-20), according to DW-NOMINATE, she moved ahead of Sanders but was still only #2, behind implicit (but not avowed!) socialist Elizabeth Warren.
So she’s on the far, far left. And we also know that she feels no obligation to tell us the truth about anything, even national security threats like Joe Biden’s declining mental capabilities.
Do we really want someone from that administration in power for the next four years?
I know I do not. Your mileage may vary.
FOUR: So, would things have wound up better in Afghanistan (or anywhere else) had Donald Trump still been in office? Because (as I discussed in a prior column), ex-President Trump’s campaign is a combination of a revival meeting and a circus, with no basis in policy whatsoever, it’s difficult to know what you’re really going to get with a second Trump presidency. But there is one thing that we know, left over from his first term: Afghanistan, which we just discussed with regard to Biden-Harris.
The Trump administration’s planned withdrawal date from Afghanistan was 1 May 2024. Here’s what Trump said in his speech on 26 June 2021 (two months after that date, as the Biden-Harris administration was actually withdrawing the troops); this was featured in his first revival meeting/circus rally after leaving office:
I started the process. All the troops are coming back home. [The Biden administration] couldn’t stop the process. 21 years is enough. Don’t we think? 21 years. They couldn’t stop the process. They wanted to, but it was very tough to stop the process when other things… It’s a shame. 21 years, by a government that wouldn’t last. The only way they last is if we’re there. What are we going to say? We’ll stay for another 21 years, then we’ll stay for another 50. The whole thing is ridiculous. … We’re bringing troops back home from Afghanistan.
So Trump was planning to withdraw the American troops from Afghanistan despite accepting the belief (which turned out to be fact) that the Afghan government would collapse at once to the Taliban if he did so, which would create chaos in the region. And Trump didn’t even try to create any kind of plan to prevent that chaos except for blustering at the Taliban that “[if] you decide to do something terrible to our country … we are going to come back and we are going to hit you harder than any country has ever been hit.” Note — “our country”, not “your country”, so Trump had told the Taliban that they were free to do whatever they liked in Afghanistan once the U.S. was gone, as long as they didn’t return to sponsoring terrorist attacks (like September 11, 2001) against the U.S.
No wonder Kabul fell so fast. Trump thought that it was “a shame” but inevitable, because the Afghan government “wouldn’t last”.
I think it’s obvious what will happen to Ukraine if Trump becomes President again, and he’ll probably say that that is “a shame” too, while he moves on to his next clown show in the Trump Circus. Laughs! Thrills! Chills!
Will Israel be safe? It’s foreign, too. How about Estonia? Poland? Heck, will we?
Do we really want someone from that administration in power for the next four years?
I know I do not. Your mileage may vary.
FIVE: Taking into account points THREE and FOUR, Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken deserves at least a medal and our undying thanks for keeping the U.S. out of a worse mess internationally. I expect that every world leader who met with President Biden and who listened to the absolute indifference being expressed by his opponent knew that the most powerful country in the world was being led by a cognitively-failing puppet . . . and that his most likely successor was prepared to declare “open season” on U.S. allies worldwide. And yes, as a result there has been some aggression worldwide, but that occurred in part because Blinken, who is only Secretary of State after all (not Commander-in-Chief), wouldn’t be able to respond the way that a real President would to such worldwide aggression.
But it could so easily be much worse with an addled president. Ukraine and Moldova fallen to Russia. NATO collapsing. Taiwan fallen to China. Parts of Israel permanently occupied by its existential enemies.
However, the world is not like that . . . yet.
SIX: Perhaps building on their success in hiding President Biden’s incapacity for so long, the press has now begun whitewashing VP Harris’s past record in earnest. So far, my favorite example is this one from Axios:
Driving the news: In the past few days, the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the "border czar" title — which she never actually had.
"Harris was appointed 'border czar' in March of 2021, and since that time, millions and millions of illegal aliens have invaded our country and countless Americans have been killed by migrant crime because of her willful demolition of American borders and laws," Trump told reporters on a call on Tuesday.
House GOP Chair Elise Stefanik introduced a resolution condemning the administration and its "Border Czar" for failing to secure the U.S.
Harris supporters have rushed to her defense. "She assumed the role that Vice President Biden had during the Obama administration, which is diplomacy with Central America," former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told Fox News on Tuesday. "She is not the border czar."
BUT . . . Axios, 14 April 2021:
Why it matters: The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border has reached crisis levels. Harris, appointed by Biden as border czar, said she would be looking at the "root causes" that drive migration.
WHICH LED TO . . . an editor’s note appended on Wednesday to Tuesday’s story:
Editor's note: This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a "border czar" in 2021.
So, instead of standing by what Axios reported AT THE TIME, Axios was willing to retcon the history and thus claim that it made a mistake back in 2021. Why? Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review gave what I thought was a very good answer to that question:
What happened with “border czar” is that it was repeated uncontroversially in the media—both literally and in tone—when it was in the interest of the press for Biden to hand it off to Kamala, but, now that it’s inconvenient that this happened, it’s a right-wing conspiracy theory.
It's also useful information. The media's going all-in to deny that Harris had any responsibility for the border demonstrates that, deep down, they understand that the border is a disaster, and that the Biden administration is at fault.
Sticking with this example for just a little longer, Axios is just another unpaid press agent for the administration working from a well-defined set of media talking points.
Wait. Is there really such a thing? Well, this was shared on X today:
Yes, that’s the list of “talking points” about Kamala Harris’s time as “border czar”. Notice how it blames Republicans for ‘inventing” the title. Now, it’s technically true to say that she wasn’t actually appointed “border czar”, because we don’t appoint czars in the U.S. (or even tsars), but she was given the responsibility for the border, and everyone (including Axios, but also including NBC, ABC, CBS, and PBS) called her that. The powers-that-be in the Democratic Party have to hold the American people in very low esteem to try to pull this off.
Then again, until we got to see it with our own eyes, no one outside of VP Harris and his family and aides realized how far gone President Biden was, thanks to good use of talking points and media gaslighting. So, perhaps Democrats and the media have good reason for holding the American people in such low esteem.
But there has been so much else. During her 2020 presidential campaign, Harris released what she called a $10 trillion plan to fight climate change, according to the L.A. Times, similar to the infamous “Green New Deal” from the same year — and it included so-called “environmental justice” provisions, including a Climate Equity Plan, which she co-sponsored with AOC, that would require that any environmental legislation be evaluated for its impact on low-income communities. Due to various conflicting proposals and estimates, the cost of the Green New Deal could never be definitely determined, and the cost estimate of Harris’ plan provided by her also seemed to rely on questionable estimates and could soar tens of trillions beyond her estimate.
But there is no reason to go through this list of Harris 2020 proposals point-by-point, except for one thing: the media appears to be scrubbing her record as fast as it can, in an effort to enable her to run as a generic Democrat (which would probably succeed against the Trump Circus and its buffoonish head) instead of an extremely far left partisan (which would probably fail). Can the media put VP Harris over the top? I don’t know, but the evidence is that it’s going to go all out to do it.
When I was growing up, I was told that one of the glories of the First Amendment was that it freed the press to occupy a skeptical (not necessarily an adversarial) role and, in the cliche often used, “speak truth to power”. Now, something I rarely talk about is that when I was in high school, I was an award-winning student journalist (for editorials, not for straight reporting) . . . but I quickly gave it up after briefly working for a real newspaper. Nevertheless, I wish we could return to the days of the skeptical press. Perhaps that would have spared us from the entire mess of the Biden-Harris 2024 campaign! But it doesn’t seem likely that those days will return in the near future, because, depending on the outcome of the election, the press will either be fawning (if Harris wins) or openly adversarial (if Trump wins). Neither way benefits this country.
SEVEN: And on that point . . . it’s amazing how readily that the press accepted the narrative from the Biden staffers that President Joe Biden made the decision to withdraw from the 2024 campaign on Saturday night, worked with two speechwriters to draft the withdrawal letter that night, and then couldn’t publicly announce it until he’d informed his key staffers and aides, which delayed the formal announcement until about 1:40 PM Sunday. There were major articles in the New York Times, NBC News, Politico, and many other papers, all telling the exact same story. NBC News said that it had over two dozen sources for its story.
Really?
See, the problem with believing that story is that any political consultant who was at all competent would have advised the Biden administration to release the story of Biden’s withdrawal on Sunday afternoon, after all of the network Sunday-morning news shows were done filming, so the story wouldn’t end up in the same news cycle as last week’s Republican National Convention. That way, the story could become the lead story for the entire next week’s news cycle, and none of the GOP analysts who were on the news programs would be able to respond to it. Instead, it would be discussed in the next week’s cycle, when the news shows would probably bring on Democrat analysts with a fresh set of talking points, including how courageous and patriotic President Biden was for withdrawing.
In fact, as documented in a prior column, former ABC News, CBS/Showtime and MSNBC political director Mark Halperin reported that, as of Thursday, Biden’s withdrawal had already been arranged for Sunday afternoon. And that is exactly what happened. (And the other part of Halperin’s scoop, that Biden wasn’t going to endorse Harris, might explain the 30-minute gap between Biden’s published withdrawal letter and his endorsement of Harris, because that gap indicates to me that the plan was NOT to endorse Harris; otherwise, the endorsement would have been included in the letter, when Biden praised her for her service). But no one has been curious about this; the MAGAs are instead focusing on point ONE above, and the Democrats and media are just saying, “Nothing to see here; move along.”
Once again, how I miss the skeptical media.
EIGHT: Speaking of Mark Halperin, I noted in the prior article that he was now at NEWSMAX due to multiple incidents (at least a dozen) in which he was accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault and fired by NBC/MSNBC, CBS/Showtime, and HBO in 2017. I got some pushback for treating him as a serious source because of those issues, which led to his blacklisting from mainstream media outlets despite his long history and solid reputation as one of the most respected reporters in the business prior to the allegations — which I have no doubt are largely true, because some of the worst sexual harassers that I ever saw were politicians, and Halperin was part of their world. Perhaps he thought he was as big a star as Donald Trump.
But . . . the fact that Halperin was a terrible person during the 2010s, which left him at a minor news site without a good reputation, does not mean that he still isn’t a good reporter with solid contacts. I wouldn’t want him as a friend, and I wouldn’t want him around my daughters, and I’m sorry to say that there were and probably still are lots of others like him in politics, but — because everything he says is going to be savaged because of his cancellation from polite media society — he has far more to lose from publishing and standing behind a story that turns out to be false than most reporters do, which is why I generally treated his prior article as accurate (and so it was).
He’s not at NEWSMAX because he’s a talentless hack; he’s there because he took advantage of his female co-workers. I’m not sure what the working environment around him at NEWSMAX is like, but we learned from Roger Ailes at Fox News that sexual harassment and sexual assault was no less common in right-wing media than in left-wing media, and also that failing to monitor it can be very expensive. But there is no reason to believe that any of that affected his ability to do his job.
EIGHT: I’d love for this entire column to just be about “Kamalat”, but it turns out that the MAGA Mutt, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, became part of the Kamala story this week as well, and not in a good way. A 2021 interview that Vance did with then-Fox News yapper (and Mega MAGA influencer) Tucker Carlson, in which Vance refers to “childless cat ladies” and people without children making policy for the Democrats went viral and generated lots of pushback against Vance. Here is the full interview (just under five minutes); the most controversial parts are near the beginning, but none of it is VP-caliber rhetoric:
I’d like to put in the Bugs Bunny line, “What a maroon!” But I’d be lying; I understand exactly what the Mutt was intending to do, and most likely, so do you.
On the one hand, it’s easy to understand that Vance was trying make a tribal appeal to social conservatives, who as a rule have children and love to “own the libs”. But then again, there are many reasons that people do not have children, and such a broad-brush attack reveals a certain shallowness of thought, which may not come as a surprise from the MAGA Mutt (who, after all, was an underdog in his Senate primary when he first got in, about the same time that he was giving this interview). He probably never figured that these imbecilic words would come back to be used against him so quickly.
Two other thoughts:
My late first wife and I tried to have children. starting about a year after we were married. It turned out that she wasn’t able to. It was a horrible time for both of us, but especially for her, because (as she said) having children is something all women expect to be able to do. For a long time thereafter, I remember waking up in the middle of the night in bed, alone, and hearing noises coming from the basement — which, as I got closer, turned out to be sobs. I’m not sure we ever fully recovered. Why would anyone who was reasonably normal say that women without children were “childless cat ladies” who were less interested in the future of America than other people? Answer: someone who was reasonably normal wouldn’t say that.
And the other fu##-up from the Mutt here is that he calls out three Democratic politicians by name in his rant: Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC is indeed childless, although she is only 34. But Kamala Harris is the stepmother to her husband’s two children, who were both in their teems when their father and Kamala got married, and Buttigieg and his partner had adopted two newborn fraternal twins shortly before Vance made this statement. Does Vance actually believe that stepparents and adoptive parents are not motivated by their stepchildren or adoptive children? Perhaps he does. But again: someone who was reasonably normal wouldn’t say that.
On the one hand, the Trump Circus is not at all driven by the issues, so perhaps this misstep by the MAGA Mutt doesn’t matter as much as it would have in a party that wasn’t led by a presidential candidate who brags about grabbing women by . . . well, you know. On the other hand, this is a clear unforced error by the MAGA Mutt, who had been expected to appeal to women and draw them back into the Trump Circus tent, and you do question whether Trump is starting to wonder whether he should let the Mutt go back to chewing up shoes in the backyard at Mar-a-Lago.
Yep, I didn’t have much to say about the current situation in the 2024 election, did I? Looks like it’s now well over 4,000 words. Good thing I broke this off from the originally-intended column.
Be seeing you.