It’s kind of depressing, reading the various stories linked here and there by various blogs and social media about pro-Palestinian/pro-terrorist orgies of protest on the grounds of various colleges and universities, and in the streets of certain big cities. This reminds me of the anti-war demos of the Vietnam War era. Massive turnout, lots of signs, lots of free-floating rhetoric … which turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all, in the long run. Much of the ruckus wasn’t motivated by sincere conviction about the welfare of the South Vietnamese, or the lives of our military troops. It was all just the followers of fashion, making a show of their fashionable conviction.
Politics
Random Thoughts (3)
1) As I was watched the Fox News interview of Kamala, the thought that kept running through my head was, “Why did she agree to do this, especially on Fox?”
From such questions, investigations are born.
She had already done a run of media exposures (I don’t call her time on the “The View” and “Call Her Daddy,” interviews) the previous week and they went as well as expected; CBS had to basically take a chainsaw to the video in order to make her “60 Minutes” interview even remotely palatable. For all of the criticism of her for running from the media, she knows the strength of her game and it’s not hanging around people who want serious answers from serious questions.
So, given her run-and-hide strategy, why do an interview with a hostile network like Fox?
Because her time at Fox was not meant to be “another” interview, but rather it was to provide the hostile environment, the platform, for her to display some spunky behavior and one-liners for campaign ads and the rest of the media to fawn over. She was going to use Brett Baier and Fox as a campaign prop, go into the proverbial lion’s den, hijack and divert the questioning so she could get in some choice quotes for tape, and then get out.
The fact that the interview was going to take place less than an hour before airing, leaving little time to edit, and was only supposed to last 20 to 25 minutes (and she was late even for that), lends credence to the strategy that she was going to do a drive-by. A confirmation of that came the next morning when the legacy media decided to use a style guide of calling her performance “feisty.” You go, girl.
It was a risky strategy at best because it depended on the interviewer deciding to yield the tempo and initiative to the interviewee in fear of being called a bully. But Baier didn’t fall into that trap and instead kept pushing her to answer his questions.
“Vote Your Conscience”?
I’ve always hated this idea that your vote is “sacred” and that you should “vote your conscience.”
Nonsense. It’s only ever been transactional and strategic. Nobody cares about your lofty ideals; only 1 of 2 candidates will be elected, and abstaining is also making a choice. Sitting out an election is your right—but there’s nothing valorous about not being able to make up your mind in a simple binary.
In most elections the only options are bad and worse. When worse is much worse, writing in your ideal candidate is especially foolish. Nobody will get your point and you make it more likely that worse gets elected.
Public life would be better if fewer people thought about politics and elections as battles between good and evil and more people thought in terms of making incremental improvements by choosing less-bad alternatives. This is unlikely to happen unless the stakes are lowered by reducing the size and power of government.
Douthat on Late-Term Abortion
Last week, Russ Douthat of the New York Times wrote an opinion piece, “What Do Liberals Believe About Late-Term Abortion?”, in which he outlined some of the parameters of the debate regarding both late-term and abortion in general. This year the Democrats have used the abortion access issue as key part of their electoral strategy.
Some excerpts.
First, Douthat provides a definition:
“The phrase ‘late-term’ itself is contested, but for the purposes of this discussion I’m talking about abortions that take place around or beyond the threshold of potential fetal viability, which (thanks to medical advances) currently sits somewhere in the range of 22 weeks to 25 weeks of pregnancy.”
Then to put the number of late-term abortions in perspective:
“… (the) belief, that these procedures are vanishingly rare, turns on the question of what “rare” means. Relative to other abortions, yes, late-term procedures are extremely rare: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 percent of American abortions take place at or after 21 weeks, which, by my calculation, would be slightly under 10,000 out of slightly under one million.
“On the other hand, relative to other causes of childhood death that liberals take extremely seriously, thousands of late-term abortions loom quite large. The CDC reports that in total just over 10,000 American children under age 14 died of natural and unnatural causes in 2022. As the demographer Lyman Stone points out, if you included late-term abortion in those numbers, it would instantly be the leading cause of childhood death, eclipsing diseases, drugs and gun violence.”
He then covers the implications:
“…if you accept that they will be killed in meaningful numbers (numbers that would almost certainly increase under Harris’s preferred legal order), well, then you need to either retreat to the life-begins-at-breath position — radical but consistent, mystical but stable — or else come up with some other marker that establishes personhood at, say, 35 weeks of pregnancy and consigns viable fetuses before that line to a less-than-human status.
“Having followed these debates for many years, I think it’s fair to say that the pro-choice side — not every pro-choice individual, but the political collective — consistently refuses to make this choice, preferring to occupy an ambiguous zone where late-term abortion is permitted in law, minimized as a reality and left unjustified by any consistent argument about human life or human rights.”
A Canadian October Surprise?
So you know Kamala’s campaign is in trouble when you start seeing the media throwing more Hail Marys than the UNM football team.
Some are more obvious than others.
I saw on CNN this morning an Anderson Cooper special that covered her past 3 ½ years as Vice President. She looked fantastic with plenty of footage of her with world leaders, in the White House Situation Room. She looked poised, confident, the epitome of a leader…. of course that perception was probably helped by the fact that the sound was off.
Then there are others which are more curious.
Headline in today’s Washington Post: “These Five Tumultuous Years in Montreal shaped Kamala Harris.”
I have been waiting more than five years for this story to drop. Long story short, her divorced mother took a job at the prestigious McGill University Faculty of Medicine in Montreal and a young Kamala and her sister moved from sunny California to a foreign land of snow and poutine.
You would think a story like that would be worth something, if not to her campaign in 2019 which crashed and burned in spectacular fashion, then to her as a Vice President trying to cut an image on the international stage. You could have spun it as giving her an international perspective and some heft, she could have used it.
Yet to my knowledge no American media outlet has picked it up, only a passing reference to her friend Wanda Kagan who she met while in Montreal. Even her biography published for her first presidential campaign, “The Truth We Hold,” barely gave it a page. Hold that thought for a minute…
The Post article is full of choice nuggets pushing an angle of that racism and turmoil that Kamala had to endure.
There are the allegations, based on one witness and a lot of loose speculation, of the sexism and racism her mother faced both at the University of California and then in trying to find another job. No word in the article that McGill had a world-class med school and that life in Montreal, while cold five months of the year and juiced with money that looks like it came from a Monopoly game, is actually quite pleasant. However, that would provide a chaff cloud of reality that would deflect from a good story about a young woman’s heroic coming of age in a racist, sexist world.
Toward the end of the article Kamala’s school-age friend, Wanda Kagan, left Montreal:
“Ward felt the city ‘was just too racially divided’ and she returned to her native New York City.”
As for Kamala, after a year at Cégep she attended Howard University in DC where for her:
“The Washington campus was a world away from the racial, ethnic and cultural divisions she had seen so often in Quebec.
“As she settled into a seat at Cramton Auditorium for an orientation in 1982, Harris recalled in her memoir, she realized that everyone looked like her. ‘This is heaven!’ she wrote.”
So both Kamala and Kagan found New York City, and Washington, DC, less of a racial hellhole than a Canadian city? That sort of muddies the water about the narrative of racism. Not to mention that DC, to this day, remains a heavily segregated city. Of course Kamala was writing specifically about her experience at Howard and how she thought it was heaven that everyone looked like her. Hmmm.
So why did this article drop now, and why was it given top of the page treatment by the mouthpiece of the DC swamp? Let’s cover the facts.
We’re little more than 3 weeks before an election that the Left has breathlessly told us (ad nauseam) will determine the future of “our democracy.” We’re also in that critical part of the campaign when we start seeing the “October Surprise.”
At this critical juncture of the campaign, a vital part of Kamala’s media praetorian guard just happens to decide to run a 3000+ word investigative piece covering five years of her life that both she and the rest of the media have deliberately ignored for the past five years.
She spent those five years living not just in another country, but in a distinctly different culture. You would think that for someone desperately trying to establish her bona fides as someone who wasn’t an intellectual lightweight, this would have been something she would wanted to have brought front and center during the past 3 ½ years.
So when a media outlet does finally write about her Montreal experience, it focuses on the racism she encountered in a country that the Left favorably compares to the United States. I never thought I would see the American media report that people had to leave Canada and move to the US for its better racial climate.
Something doesn’t fit. Kamala’s campaign is collapsing and the Washington Post dedicates valuable real estate at the most critical part of the campaign to finally getting around to her time in Montreal?
Is the Washington Post trying to get ahead of something? What exactly happened in Montreal that Kamala and the media (until now) don’t want to talk about?