Geese, Tarts and Presidential Politics

It was cruelly whispered of Theodora, wife of Emperor Justinian, that in an earlier life she performed indecent acts with trained geese. Beyond dispute is that Barbie started life as a 12-inch tart in Hamburg’s low bars, an improbably proportioned doll inspired by the adventures of a cartoon call girl known as Lilli. Today the Byzantine Empress is more often remembered as a giver of laws and combatant in the doctrinal wars of the early Christians, while a cleaned-up and renamed hooker makes her money for Mattel. As for geese, seldom mentioned of late is Gargantua’s advice that the neck of a well-downed goose serves best for wiping the bottom, so their reputation can also be said to have lifted. Thus does history offer hope for Kamala Harris to rise above that other criticism, not that she is sly rather than smart but that she has — oh, such sexism! — risen horizontally.

Loose talk of that sneering variety is, of course, to be deplored. That she should be the victim of vile slut shaming is beyond unfair, as Media Watch‘s Paul Barry gallantly observed in his defence of the lady’s reputation and wits. After all, nobody drags out Donald Trump’s love life to use against him. Well not often anyway, and when they do it’s for a damn good New York reason, like the ‘vivid memory’ of a mad woman who paints trees blue and believes he molested her in a department store so long ago she can’t recall what she was wearing, the month of the traumatic assault or even the year. Those are the rules of the game if you’re targeting Donald J. Trump. But a fierce, independent, ambitious, modern African-American woman should never, ever be judged for falling in love with an older gentleman. That he happened to be a dispenser of favours, sinecures, wealth and power was but a happy coincidence and cannot be held against her, for who can tell where love will take root? Nor that he was married with children, for this was San Francisco in the Nineties and who is to judge what conduct is and isn’t cool? The 29-year-old assistant district attorney was just restarting her career after a successful second shot at the California bar exam when Willie Brown, 30 years her senior, the original Slick Willie, touched her as if with a wand. Up she floated, and floated, and has kept right on floating ever since, with only the one setback, the thwarting of her 2020 ambitions.

Today (Aug 7), Ms Harris has announced her running-mated, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (pronounced walls). Almost certainly she when she makes the formal announcement a few hours from now she will not take questions from the press. That has been the recent pattern, responding only to the odd shouted query that slips past the cordon of her keepers at an unguarded moment. There was one of those incidents on Friday night when her handlers allowed their charge to stray too close to the press mob covering the return of Vladimir Putin’s hostages and one of the hacks tossed her a Dorothy Dixer. She had done well minutes earlier, a competent performance with a vacant, slightly rocking Joe Biden standing mute as a drugstore Indian (above) as she rattled off the TelePrompter’s lines. Then came her unscripted response to the US-Russia prisoner swap:

“This is just an extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy.“

If you say so, dear.

Almost seven weeks have passed since the Vice-President fronted an unscripted session with the press and two weeks since she answered any questions at all. In that time Joe Biden has been hailed as the greatest mind ever to occupy the Oval Office, destroyed by Donald Trump in their debate, immediately relisted by his former spruikers as the dopiest mind ever to occupy the Oval office, thrown over and out by his own party’s panic-stricken nobs and replaced by an understudy veep who received not one of the 13 million primary votes accrued by the man she has replaced.

And the week after that debate, a series of inexplicable Secret Service failures allowed an assassin’s bullet to come within half an inch of spattering the Republican challenger’s brains all over a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania. Given that Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service, consistently declined requests to bolster Trump’s security detail while also denying any protection whatsoever to independent Robert F. Kennedy, a prime target if family history is any guide, talk of a conspiracy wrapped in the pretense of incompetence was inevitable.

And through all of the above, not a word from the White House to explain who is running the country. Was it Kamala — is she now de facto president? — who has ordered the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group to take up station off the Middle East? Was it Kamala who finally approved extra protection for Trump and Kennedy? Is it Kamala who is talking to the Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve about Wall Street’s ongoing convulsions? Nobody knows and nobody is explaining anything about the redistribution of executive authority, especially the Vice-President herself.  The questions, oh so many of them, that have been hanging since Joe Biden’s debate humiliation are pointedly ignored by both the Biden (sic) administration and legacy media. Were reporters being similarly stonewalled by a Republican White House, the Briefing Room would be in loud and outraged revolt.

How is it that, apart from 2020’s setback when her bid to be the Democrats’ nominee faltered  before even making it to Iowa, the current Vice-President has once again floated to a position for which no evidence of competence has ever been evident? The inevitable observation is that acclaim without achievement has been the story of her life. There was nothing to recommend her for a $40,000-a-year part-time gig on California’s workers compensation board to which pillowmate Willie, speaker of the state’s lower house at the time, appointed her, nor when she was presented with another nice little earner ($72,000) via a seat on the state’s Medical Assistance Commission. Willie, now 90,  plied her with presents that included a BMW, taxpayer-funded international junkets and he introduced his lover to fellow Democrat powerbrokers, presenting her as the girl going places.

The greatest gift of all, though, was his political machine’s backing her bid to serve as San Francisco’s district-attorney. The boss and his ward heelers knew how to get out the vote. The office of California’s attorney-general beckoned next, a position also obtained with Brown’s backing. Cases involving Brown’s generous supporters were dropped or simply allowed to languish. All of the above is on the record, yet the woman who might be the next president has received scant attention from Big Media’s dying dinosaurs. There just hasn’t been the time or space to squeeze some history into all the Kamalamania filling broadcasts, web sites and newspapers.

Not to further denigrate America’s mainstream press for its shortcomings but the ability to turn a blind eye is definitely not one of them. As Joe Biden wilted, the aspirant president systematically repudiated every position she has ever held. Ban fracking, as she once pledge to do? That wouldn’t go down well in frack-friendly Pennsylvania, a key swing state where jobs depend on it, so that had to go. As The Hill, no right-wing redoubt, put it: “Here is the simple question: Was Vice-President Kamala Harris lying about her position on fracking in 2019, or is her campaign lying now? Every American deserves to know the answer. So far, a sympathetic media supposedly charged with holding truth to power is allowing her to stay silent.”

The silence of the media eunuchs extends far and wide. Is she still an ardent supporter of “gender-affirming care”? No one is asking. Is she still for sanctuary cities, which running-mate Walz supports? What about her plans for obligatory gun confiscation, which would require somehow circumventing the Second Amendment, and how does she propose to pull that one off? Outlawing private health care, granting permanent residency and eventual citizenship to illegal border-crossers? Even fellow Americans wishing each other a merry Christmas has stirred her ire. “How dare we speak Merry Christmas! How dare we!” she said in 2017, lamenting that there can be no moral right to a festive season when the children of illegal aliens “will not have a Merry Christmas.”

So far it is working. The stonewalling, the silence, the pretense that the knifing and replacement of the sitting President and primaries winner is just politics as usual. The swing state polls now show a tight race — she’s a point behind Trump here and a point ahead there, but nowhere is the Republican’s lead greater than the margin for cheating. Covid gave Joe Biden’s crew the excuse to keep him off the campaign trail and safe from questions. Unless China unleashes another engineered virus, a physical “basement strategy” isn’t an option, so Kamala’s high-approval honeymoon will depend on more of the same — no impromptu answers to unapproved questions.

Think of it as the Mobile Basement Campaign and you won’t go far wrong.