It
was only a matter of time before the legion of leftist lunatics seeking the
Democrat presidential nomination was divided between front-runners and laggards
by political, financial, and media realities.
Although
some 22 or 23 motley candidates remain in technical contention, the polls,
media coverage, and contribution data seem to have reduced the field even at
this early stage to four realistic leading candidates: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris,
and Bernie Sanders. Some would add the
Rainbow Mayor of embattled South Bend, Peter Buttigieg, but he is now much
closer to the hapless 2 percenters in the polls (he's at about 5% nationally)
than he is to the four leaders (who range from three now clustered at 12-15% to
leader Biden at 29%). Such early polls
can be sharply misleading if relied upon for precise outcome projections, of
course, but here we are only talking about a gross division between the broad categories
of leaders and laggards.
Beyond
this general division, however, influential elements of the Democrat-Left and
its mainstream media arm seem to have settled upon one candidate in particular
as their early favorite, despite Biden's lead in the polls: Senator Kamala Harris of California. Even some influential Republicans, like
ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, have touted Harris as the likely Democrat
nominee.
In a
sane and sensible political environment, Harris would hardly seem to have the
right stuff for a front-running presidential candidate. On the national stage, she has little to show
in terms of experience or accomplishment:
Barely two years of utterly undistinguished
service as a U.S. Senator. Period. No significant legislation or successful policy
initiative bears her name, and whatever senatorial prominence she had gained
before seeking the presidency derived solely from her obnoxious, ill-tempered,
and duplicitous outbursts in contentious committee hearings.
Harris is closer to Al Sharpton than she is to reasonable positions on race.
Similarly,
her earlier service as Attorney General of California was at best
undistinguished and at worst inept and dishonest. Among other derelictions, she refused to take
any position on a package of major criminal sentencing-reform initiatives which
a strong attorney general would have pounced upon, one way or the other; she
notoriously failed to prosecute Steve Mnuchin's California bank, OneWest,
despite evidence "suggestive of widespread misconduct," while later
accepting Mnuchin's donations to her senatorial campaign; and she arrogantly refused
to defend Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure resoundingly approved by
California voters affirming that marriage is solely between a man and a woman,
leaving the measure undefended in federal court and effectively overriding a
crucially important vote of the people.
But actual
accomplishments and effective leadership experience are not the qualities the
Democrat Left favors in seeking presidential candidates. If they were, Barack Obama would not have
been the Democrats' nominee in 2008, when his sparse qualifications were eerily
similar to those now presented by Kamala Harris.
Rather,
today's Democrats are obsessed with considerations of race, gender, leftist
ideology, and rabid hostility towards President Trump and his supporters in
choosing their leaders. Moreover, the
Democrats have abandoned any reliance upon the ameliorating qualities of
tactful charm and conciliatory style (as opposed to substance) that enabled
Obama to conceal his leftist orientation from the clueless middle of the electorate
in 2008 and 2012. Current candidates
like Harris, Warren, and Sanders have made it clear they are in no mood to
charm or conciliate the roughly one-half of America's populace who support
President Trump. Quite the contrary.
In
this environment, the ascendancy of Kamala Harris as the anointed favorite of
the Democrat and Media Left seems almost inevitable. She is a photogenic female who flies the
colors of black ethnicity, even though she is more Asiatic Indian than Black
American (her father descends from Jamaican Blacks and her mother from Asiatic
Indians). This ethnic ambiguity does not
seem to trouble genuine Black Americans from considering her one of their own –
although the jury is still out on that --
while it enables her to extend her minority/ethnic appeal to South
Asian-Americans.
Thus,
Harris punches both the women's and minority cards. This in itself gives her near-decisive
advantages over the white male and white female candidates, not to mention over
the single significant black male candidate, Senator Booker of New Jersey. Further, Harris fervidly endorses all the
Left's favored social and sexual issues, like unlimited abortion, homosexual
predominance, and the subordination of female privacy and modesty to the
demands of trans-sexual intruders (i.e., she supports the radical legislation
making sex or gender a matter of personal election, rather than biological
reality, for purposes of federal law).
She also advocates the legalization of prostitution.
But
for whatever reason, powerful elements of the Democratic establishment, its
hard-left political base, and especially the leftist mainstream media seem
determined to anoint Sen. Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee -- and
then assure her election "by all means necessary."
If
this grim prospect doesn't shock and infuriate all sane and sensible Americans,
it should. Because Kamala Harris, plain
and simple, is a radical, afro-racist, anti-white, left-wing virago. She should be allowed no closer to the
presidency than earth is to the Crab Nebula.
Harris's
obsession with radical race-based programs and policies that benefit blacks and
penalize whites (and in some cases Hispanics and East Asians as well) is open,
unambiguous, and utterly unapologetic.
She
apparently believes that her race-focused approach will ingratiate her with the
Democrat-Left base, yet fail to offend the moderates and independents needed to
win a general election. She is probably
right on the former point, but the latter is dubious. If not, we are in for difficult times indeed.
Harris
was one of the first and foremost of the Democrat candidates to openly support
the spiteful, divisive, outdated, and obscenely unfair proposal of so-called
economic reparations for slavery. A
reparations program for a slavery system that the White Americans of the Union
dismantled with their blood, sweat, and treasury over 150 years ago would be
unworkable, dysfunctional, unjust, and racially incendiary. That is why even liberal advocates of
race-based remedies (like President Obama) rejected reparations long ago as a
hopelessly unworkable delusion – until its recent resurrection from the policy
graveyard by afro-racist radicals and, subsequently, by pandering presidential
candidates like Kamala Harris.
Harris
doesn't care that such reparations would forcibly transfer money (via taxes)
from lower- and middle-class whites, Hispanics, and East Asians who had nothing
to do with slavery to wealthy blacks (like herself) who were born a century or
more after its abolition. Millions of
the putative black recipients of reparations have thrived and prospered in a
legal and governmental system so far removed from slavery that blacks have long
been systematically favored over
whites under affirmative action and preference programs governing employment,
education, housing, and extension of credit.
Harris completely discounts over fifty years of such government
preferences and multi-billion-dollar grant and subsidy programs that have
already benefitted millions of blacks (including those descended from slaves)
without resorting to the unworkable and divisive procedures that would be
entailed by a vindictive reparations program.
As
though her advocacy of reparations were not radical enough, Senator Harris has
further proposed the resurrection of the insidious school busing programs that
most Americans (blacks included) had considered rightfully dead and
buried.
Harris
brought the moribund busing issue back to life with a cheap shot against Mr.
Biden in the Democratic debate, where she sanctimoniously portrayed herself as
some kind of California Rosa Parks, bravely integrating segregated schools in,
of all places, Berkeley, California. The
leftist media and political establishment swooned and gave her great plaudits
for this subterfuge, when she should have been sharply condemned for her bald-faced
fraud and hypocrisy. The Berkeley
schools were simply not segregated,
and Ms. Harris' bus rides to a good public school had all the danger and drama
of a suburban princess riding her bus to the Montessori School.
Apart
from falsely portraying herself as a brave heroine of desegregation, Harris's
support for forcibly busing children from their natural neighborhood schools
into distant and sometimes dangerous schools represents another example of her
brazenly wrong-headed anti-white ideology.
Until extreme racial pandering gained prominence in the current democrat
presidential campaigns, forced busing to achieve some desired level of racial
balancing had been decisively rejected (and largely forgotten) not only by
politicians, courts, and policymakers but also by both white and black
parents. It is a measure of her racial
radicalism that Kamala Harris would advocate the resurrection of such a toxic
and divisive policy, with reckless disregard for its divisive and damaging
consequences.
Not
content with her incendiary advocacy of renewed racial busing, Harris further
upped the racial ante by proposing an enormous, budget-busting program of
race-based housing subsidies for blacks.
Specifically, Harris proposes to spend $100 billion of taxpayer funds to help black families buy the homes
of their choice. See https://www.bizpacreview.com/2019/07/07/kamala-harris-bribes-black-voters-100-billion-in-taxpayer-money-for-housing-772368.
As
Harris explained her plan: "After
generations of discrimination, it’s time to give Black families a real shot at
homeownership. . . . If we eliminate racial wealth disparities in homeownership
rates, median Black wealth would grow $32,113 per household, and the wealth gap
between Black and white households would shrink 31%.” In fact, the federal government has been
discriminating in favor of blacks in
housing policy for decades, not the other way around. It was ill-conceived government programs to
eliminate minimal credit standards – e.g., through the Community Reinvestment
Act -- to facilitate black home ownership that were largely responsible for the
disastrous housing and financial bubble crisis of 2008-09. Now Harris wants to do it all again, at
catastrophic cost to taxpayers and the economcy, all in furtherance of her
egregious political pandering to black democrats and their leftist
cheerleaders.
Even
while this post was being written, Harris has proposed yet another
multi-billion dollar race-based program in her seemingly inexhaustible
pandering to black voters and the guilt-ridden, self-hating white
leftists. As though trillions for
reparations and $100 billion for black housing were not enough extravagance,
Harris now promises to invest an
additional $60 billion in historically black colleges (HBC's) – schools
that already receive an enormous amount of federal financial support even while
they often discriminate against non-blacks.
But Harris was still not done spending your money to buy herself more
votes. Before the ink was dry on her HBC
give-away plan, she announced an additional $12 billion for so-called "entrepeneurship" programs
devoted to the black community.
Needless
to say, the expenditure of these absurdly astronomical amounts of federal funds
on handouts to the 13% black portion of the population is nothing less than
fiscal and budgetary insanity – wholly apart from the resentment and discord it
would incite among elements of the population who would pay for the very
programs that exclude them on racial grounds.
Yet the reckless and radical Senator Harris seems utterly oblivious to
the disastrous consequences inherent in her proposals.
In
that respect, a critical thread that runs through Harris's racialist proposals
is her utter disregard for the constitutional standards that limit such
programs.
Government
grants or preferences based on racial classifications are subject to the equal
protection standards of the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments. Specifically, such programs must be narrowly
tailored to achieve a compelling government objective under settled Supreme
Court precedents, notably the 1995 case of Adarand
v. Pena. Harris's race-based proposals
are unlikely to satisfy these constitutional standards. Merely granting generalized benefits to
blacks, or seeking to remove generic disparities between white and black wealth
or income, do not constitute compelling government objectives under the
governing precedents; in any event, Harris's grossly overinclusive programs are
anything but "narrowly tailored."
Although
Harris is an experienced lawyer and former state attorney general, she appears
wholly oblivious of the demanding constitutional standards that her race-based
programs must satisfy. As a demagogue of
the left, however, Harris scorns the rule of law and the Constitution whenever
it stands in the way of her pandering political proposals.
A
final racial issue that Senator Harris exploits is the mindlessly repeated
falsehood that the death penalty discriminates against blacks. As Harris has stated, "“As a career law
enforcement official, I have opposed the death penalty because it is immoral,
discriminatory, ineffective, and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars." Specifically, she claims that black and
Latino defendants are more likely to be executed than white defendants.
Piling
on the demagoguery, Harris has further stated:
“The symbol of our justice system is a woman with a blindfold. It is supposed to treat all equally, but the
application of the death penalty — a final and irreversible punishment — has
been proven to be unequally applied.” She
therefore promises, if elected, to support abolition of the federal death
penalty.
But
as repeatedly demonstrated on this blog and elsewhere, Harris's claim that the
death penalty is discriminatorily applied against blacks is patently and
demonstrably false. Not only false, but
the opposite of the truth.
What
makes Harris's phony claim especially disturbing is that the facts which contradict it are so emphatically clear and readily
available. One need only click on
the easily accessible databases of the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice
Statistics (BJS) to confirm that for at least the last three decades the death
penalty has been imposed disproportionally against whites rather than blacks.
Simply
put, for decades blacks have consistently
committed slightly over 50% of U.S. murders (the only crime for which the
death penalty is constitutionally permitted), yet represent only about 33% of those executed. Recent years have emphatically reinforced
this pattern of disproportionate execution of white defendants in the U.S. In 2016, for example, out of 20 total
executions in the U.S., 18 were white.
See BJS, Captal Punishment, 2016, Table 2 (April 2018). Year after year, the pattern confirmed by BJS
and FBI data is the same: Blacks commit slightly
more than half of U.S. murders, but white defendants predominate among those
executed. Yet racial agitators like
Kamala Harris persist in perpetrating the canard that the death penalty is
disproportionately imposed on black and minority defendants. It is a Big Lie of grotesque proportions.
On
issue after issue – reparations, forced busing, privileged federal handouts for
blacks, and race-based death penalty demagoguery – Kamala Harris pursues
radical programs and policies that expressly favor blacks at the expense of the
blameless non-black citizens who must fund or endure them. If this does not constitute racist politics,
it is hard to imagine what would. At a
time when the country is already burdened by toxic racial divisions, the
nomination or election of this deeply divisive radical would be disastrous.
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