by Charles C. W. Cooke at National Review
Over the last couple of years, as familiarity has bred contempt, and contempt has bred exasperation, I have got into the habit of distilling into uncustomarily blunt terms what I think of our most prominent political aspirants. My modest verdict on the incumbent president, Joe Biden, was that he was “an asshole.” My considered take on his predecessor, Donald Trump, was that he is “a lunatic.” Herewith, to complete the trilogy, I will offer another candid take: Kamala Harris is an idiot.
Like the little boy staring at the naked emperor in the famous fairy tale of yore, I can scarcely believe what I am seeing before my eyes. Since she replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, reporters have struggled mightily to find kind ways of describing Harris’s ineluctable inability to convey anything comprehensible, complex, or concrete. Harris, the New York Times has variously proposed, has been “strategically vague,” “light on detail,” and “careful.” Alternatively, she has “put her own stamp on the art of the dodge”; learned to respond “to unpleasant questions without answering them”; and shown an ability to “avoid delineating her stance on some issues.” And yet, if one were to search for a single world to sum up her candidacy, that word, apparently, would be “joy.”
I disagree. I think that word would be “idiot.” Harris isn’t “vague” or “careful” or disinclined to “delineate her stance.” She’s wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth. She’s not “light”; she’s dull. She’s not a “dodger”; she’s a fool. She’s not “joyful”; she’s imbecilic. As Gertrude Stein once said of Harris’s hometown, Oakland, there’s no “there there.” She’s a nullity, a vacuum, an actress, an empty canvas that is incapable of absorbing paint. Search through Harris’s historical press clippings and you will be astonished by the vastness of space, for, in more than two decades of analysis and reporting, Harris has not once been credited with a single valuable or original idea. What you see on TV is what you get in private: a broken battery-operated toy that can’t talk, that can’t argue, that can’t laugh in the right places, and that badly malfunctions if expected to transcend the superficial. Asked by Stephanie Ruhle what would happen to her plan to “raise corporate taxes” and make “billionaires and the top corporations” pay “their fair share” if the “GOP takes control of the Senate,” Harris seemed unable to process the concept. “But we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes,” she replied. “And we’re going to have to raise — we’re going to have to make sure that the biggest corporations and billionaires pay their fair share. That’s just it.”
Shakespeare observed that the wish is father to the thought. Add in the corollary…
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