Opinion
Don’t believe the hype: Kamala Harris is bad news
The same people who want you to like her told you that Biden was not too old for the job
July 22, 2024 09:18
3 min read
The same people who want you to like her told you that Biden was not too old for the job
July 22, 2024 09:18No one is surprised that Joe Biden’s presidency is ending in failure and chaos. His mental and physical incapacity were obvious in 2020, if you weren’t blinded by partisanship.
The Democratic Party foisted an incompetent on the American people in 2020. A largely corrupt media abetted this deception for more than three years. Foreign leaders degraded their own offices by playing along, as Keir Starmer did on July 11 when he said that Biden was “on really good form” at the Nato summit in Washington DC – the same summit at which Biden introduced Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin”.
Vice President Kamala Harris has been an active player in this scam. In 2020, Biden became the first candidate in American history to let it be known that if he won one term, he wouldn’t run for a second. His incapacity was already blatant. The mind-rotting mystique of identity politics meant that his token role as Barack Obama’s vice-president – the doddering white dude who could shore up the Rust Belt vote – now played against him.
Biden was a placeholder, so he made sure to pick an even weaker rival, Kamala Harris, as his nominee for vice president.
The same media that lied to you about Biden’s health will now tell you that Harris is good for the Jews and Israel. They will tell you that her husband, Douglas Emhoff, is Jewish. They will tell you that her adopted children call her “Momala”. They will relate her heart-warming history of interracial banter with her mother-in-law. If Donald Trump retains his lead in Michigan and Pennsylvania, they will even tell you that Harris keeps a bowl of lokshen pudding on the nightstand.
All nonsense.
The truth is that this administration is more hostile to Israel than any since the Eisenhower administration. Its first actions were to take the Houthis off the terrorist list and restore funding not just to the corrupt Palestinian Authority but also to Gaza, even though, as the State Department admitted, the money could go to Hamas.
The administration has empowered Iran by allowing sanctions to lapse and freeing up billions of fungible dollars, including $10 billion in the weeks after October 7. It has withheld crucial weapons from Israel in its hour of need and misled Congress that it was doing so. It has sanctioned Israeli citizens. It is working ceaselessly to give Hamas a state.
At home, the Democrats have not just presided over a wave of anti-Jewish incitement and violence without parallel in any Western state since 1945. They have encouraged it, by commission and omission. They have pushed a poisonous false history into the schools. They have looked the other way as Jews are beaten in the streets of Democratic-run cities.
Harris was the first senior administration official to demand an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza. She has falsely accused Israel of causing a “humanitarian catastrophe”. In March, she informed us that she had “looked at the maps”, and publicly warned the Israelis that “any type of military operation” in Rafah would be “a huge mistake”. She was, she said, “ruling out nothing” if Israel went ahead.
Harris must now pick a running mate. Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio senator JD Vance will further handicap the Democrats in the Rust Belt swing states. That makes Pennsylvania’s governor Josh Shapiro, a centrist Democrat, an ideal partner for Harris. There’s just one problem. “He’s Jewish, there could be some risk in putting him on the ticket,” John King of CNN told Anderson Cooper on Sunday night. This wasn’t King’s personal opinion. He was reporting a fact about today’s Democratic Party. Perhaps that explains why Cooper, normally an avid policeman of the pieties, didn’t even blink.
The same media that lied to you about Biden’s health will now insist that Trump is bad for the Jews and Israel, that the Republicans are raving Jew-haters and that Trump’s vice-presidential nominee Vance is “far-right” and “isolationist”. They will even imply that Vance’s Catholicism represents a danger to democracy.
The facts are that Vance accuses Biden of having “surrendered the war on terrorism” and “prolonged” Israel’s war with Hamas while “making it harder and harder” for Israel to defend itself.
Vance has called for Israel to win its war against Hamas “as quickly as possible”, and for Israel and the Sunni Arab states to ally against Iran and build up the Abraham Accords. But the facts have never counted for less in American politics.
Dominic Green is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a Washington Examiner columnist