Jul
24
2024

When Did the Babylon Bee Stop Doing Satire?

It would be nice if this observation stopped the prattle about "democracy" from the usual suspects. Maybe the WaPo will take down its insipid "Democracy Dies in Darkness" slogan, and replace it with … I don't know, maybe "Suck it up, Buttercup"?

But the slogan still graces (for example) the top of the page containing George Will's latest, with his advice: Democrats, fear not an open convention.

An English person once said of another, “He has risen without a trace.” If only that could be said of Harris, the helium candidate, lighter than air. The eerie strangeness of her public maunderings will live as long as YouTube enables the savoring of her streams of semiconsciousness about space, school buses, broadband in Louisiana, Poland and NATO’s northern flank, nations working together by working together, the border (“We have a secure border”) and equity (“Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place”).

Perhaps delusions of adequacy disincline her to prepare, or even think, before speaking. Democratic delegates who convene in Chicago should think before possibly handing to her the nuclear launch codes. And they should read their party’s Rule 13.J: “Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them” (emphasis added). Shall, not may. It is a duty.

It is a duty the party delegates will shirk, undoubtedly, and only people like Will will call them on it.

On the other hand, Jim Geraghty has a pretty good point, which is: no sane politician wants to get in front of a steamroller: You Can't Have a Competition If No Other Candidate Shows Up.

But it is obvious that out of any Democrat, Harris has the most legitimate claim to the Democratic 2024 nomination, in a situation like this where Biden has withdrawn between the end of the primaries but before the nominating convention.

First, everyone knew Joe Biden’s age and the general sense of the state of health when the 2024 Democratic primary began. Yes, the Biden team tried to keep the public in the dark about just how quickly he was fading, but… we could see him. People may not have known just how doddering Biden was, but no one who had paid any attention to the president in his public appearances in recent months should have expected a quick-witted, sharp, steel-trap memory guy to show up that night.

Second, everyone knew that Kamala Harris was vice president, and that if Biden were suddenly unable to perform his duties – whether from a heart attack, stroke, or falling anvil – she would take over. A vote for Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary was a vote to keep Harris a heartbeat away from the presidency.

I'm pretty sure that, for a lot of people, "democracy" means "let's vote on stuff as long as we get the results we want".

Also of note:

  • Remarkable agreement on the obvious. Headline from Dan McLaughlin at National Review: Kamala Harris Still a Dangerous Authoritarian. (Gifted link)

    Which Kamala Harris will run for president? We’ve seen two different versions of Harris. It would be premature to dismiss either, but we also should not let one obscure the risk of the other.

    On the one hand, there’s the Harris we saw as California attorney general, a senator, and a presidential candidate. That Harris was a dangerous authoritarian with an unlimited appetite for power who displayed contempt for the Constitution and no regard for the rights, dignity, faith, or reputations of anyone in her way.

    On the other hand, there’s the Harris we have seen as vice president: bluntly, an idiot. That Harris is a figure of fun and hardly seems in danger of accomplishing anything. She’s been endlessly compared to the Julia Louis-Dreyfus character on Veep, with her speeches full of empty cliches and time-filling blather. She has hemorrhaged staff. The Biden White House never assigns her anything but hopelessly lost causes and impossible tasks while endlessly leaking about the low regard in which she is held.

    These two pictures are not necessarily inconsistent. Power hunger is not limited to the smart, the competent, or the eloquent. Incompetence is not limited to the meek. Disregard for America’s Constitution, laws, and basic civics can proceed as much from ignorance as from malice. Harris, raised in the progressive hothouse of the San Francisco Bay Area, is reflexive rather than considered because she has never really had to engage with opposing ideas, win the support of people who disagree with her, or pay a political price for disregarding their rights.

    Headline from David Harsanyi at the Federalist: By The Way, Kamala Harris Is A Dangerous Authoritarian. And a sample from that:

    Like any good authoritarian, Harris enforces whatever laws she sees fit to enforce whenever she sees fit. One of the reasons Kamala allegedly opposed the nomination of Neil Gorsuch was that the judge “consistently valued legalisms” — which is to say, respected the Constitution — “over real lives.”

    Kamala was never one for legalism. When candidate Biden argued that Harris’ promise to issue an executive order unilaterally banning access to certain guns would be unconstitutional, she retorted: “I would just say: Hey, Joe, instead of saying ‘No we can’t,’ let’s say yes, we can,'” before cackling at the very notion that presidents couldn’t do whatever they wanted.

    As a national candidate, Kamala said she believed immigration laws should be treated as civil, rather than criminal, offenses. So, of course, Biden gave Kamala the job of border czar — she did not perform admirably, to say the least — where she noted that one of the “root causes” of the problem was a “lack of climate resilience,” before sending corrupt regimes hundreds of millions of dollars.

    So which is it? Harsanyi's and McLaughlin's articles overlap a little, but not as much as you might expect. There's plenty of evidence for those headlines out there. And probably more to come.

  • Hey, WaPo! How about "Democracy Dies with Noble Lies"? Bari Weiss writes on our current age: The Era of the Noble Lie.

    The reason there is no Democratic presidential nominee right now—27 days before the party’s convention in Chicago begins—is because of a lie. The reason the Democrats are going to scramble to whip a majority of their 3,936 delegates into line behind Vice President Kamala Harris—the reason the most basic elements of the Democratic (and democratic) process are being so dramatically challenged—is because of the lie that everyone around Joe Biden told themselves and then told the public.

    By now, there is no denying that that’s exactly what happened.

    Once the reality of Biden’s deteriorating condition became plain on that CNN debate stage, the question was only who was going to admit what they knew and when.

    To choose just one example: George Clooney, who had been onstage with Biden at a fundraiser on June 15, wrote in The New York Times on July 10 about what he had actually seen when he was hauling in checks for Biden’s second term. “The Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote, referring to the disastrous June 27 CNN debate that led to Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

    It’s not just that they knew about Biden’s condition and lied about it. They knew they were lying and believed they could dupe their supporters at least through November 5, 2024. In other words: double talk. One message in public. A different message in private. Until it became impossible to sustain.

    And the Free Press paywall (somewhat ironically) cuts in shortly after that.

    But it's worth remembering: these are the folks who were lying to you before. Why believe them now?