The current Vice President of the United States of America is not — and I'm being generous here — a gifted orator. I've often said that it seems as if she has a hamster wheel in her brain when speaking in public. She'll latch onto a word or phrase which catapults her brain onto the wheel and then she spends the rest of the time trying to no avail to get off of it. If you were to ask Harris whether she thinks she's articulate, she might respond with something like this:
I would like to articulate whether I am articulate because I want to articulately articulate my articulateness.
As soon as she realizes it's hamster wheel time — which usually happens very quickly — she begins wildly gesticulating in the hope that her hands might distract the listener from whatever the hell it is she's failing to say.
My friend Stephen Green's latest column about Harris hit on a point that really got me thinking:
But, dear Lord, even the apathetic can't help but sometimes hear her speak. There’s a studied vacuousness to Harris’s statements, an honest effort put into every wordy obfuscation. I've covered too many of those moments over the years to bore you with them again, so here's a link to the latest example, and you can decide whether or not to click.
Yes, she works on being that awful. The Democrats know that means that she isn't going to get any better at this.
Whenever Joe Biden goes off the rails while speaking, the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media quickly try to explain it away with an excuse about age or that alleged childhood stutter of his that somehow never came up in media coverage until 2020.
They don't have that luxury with Madame Veep; her verbal train is scheduled to go off the rails on the daily. Being 1000% hooked on diversity over substance, however, they knew long before they deposed Biden that they were stuck with her. The Democratic hierarchy is also painfully aware that their historic double first vice president can't be left to her own verbal devices now that she is the party's standard-bearer.
The media lapdogs have a long, embarrassing history of running interference for Democratic candidates. For example, Paul Krugman probably has a double hernia from carrying so much water for Joe Biden on inflation over the last three-and-a-half years. Despite Krugman's yeoman efforts to tell us how great things are, stuff still costs too much.
As we discussed in Wednesday's Morning Briefing, the Dem media faithful have been working hard to both whitewash Harris's political record and diminish any Republican attacks on it. The next step in that process is to try and combine the two while being Harris's mouthpiece and speaking for her. I'm going to call it "Harrissplaining."
This is the beginning of an article in Wednesday's New York Times titled, "As Republicans Attack Harris on Immigration, Here's What Her Record Shows":
As they seek effective attack lines against Vice President Kamala Harris, Republicans are focusing on her role in the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies, seeking to blame her for the surge of migrants into the United States over the past several years.
A review of her involvement in the issue shows a more nuanced record.
President Biden did not assign her the job title of “border czar” or the responsibility of overseeing the enforcement policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, as the Trump campaign suggested on Tuesday in its first ad against her. But she did have a prominent role in trying to ensure that a record surge of global migration did not become worse.
The only nuance here is the shift from the MSM insistence that Harris was never the border czar to the a**-covering, "President Biden did not assign her the job title..." journalistic sleight of hand. This is reminiscent of the debate over the Affordable Care Act, when Dems were saying that the bill never said "death panels," even though what constitutes a death panel was clearly being discussed. It's one of those semantics games that the Left plays to distract from the reality of their disastrous policies.
What's particularly rich here is the very notion that a little media touch-up here and there will somehow cast a soft glow over the harsh reality of the nightmare that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have created on our southern border. That's a pig that won't even let you get within a mile of putting lipstick on it.
The border is still the #1 issue in this election, and it's obviously the Democrats' greatest area of vulnerability. Thanks to her turn as border czar that the MSM can't memory hole, it may be an even bigger Achilles' heel for her than it was for Joe Biden. Donald Trump never loses sight of this and has already been pretty relentless about hammering her over the border.
All of the Harrissplaining in the world won't stem the tide of illegals flooding northward from Mexico or change the fact that many of them are committing violent crimes all over the United States. The Democrats own this. Kamala Harris owns this.
The blood on her hands isn't going to wash off.
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