"Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that
Ms. Harris is weak and a phony and doesn’t truly care about the country or the
middle class." These words written by Rich Lowry of National Review
appeared, astonishingly, in the New York Times.
For those of us whose youth was misspent in the post-World
War II years, the word “phony”, Holden Caulfield’s most often used deprecation
in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye,
has a prickly resonance. The book first appeared in 1951.
Caulfield is a stubborn realist, and he rarely fails to confide
to us his unvarnished thoughts: “The part that got me was, there was a lady
sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it
got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was
kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She
had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the
bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and
behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf.”
There were lots of tears shed at the now concluded Democrat
National Convention that centered on joy, joy, joy, the Goddess of the joyful
convention. The tears were joyful to be sure, and in November we shall all see
how many Caulfields there are in the larger voting audience.
Maureen Dowd of the Times shed part of her fan base when,
prior to the convention, she characterized the rude ouster of President Joe
Biden by fellow Democrats as “a jaw-dropping putsch.” Not shy about mentioning
names, she made reference to “the handprints of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi,
Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries on the president’s back.” Pelosi and others,
she wrote, have shamelessly and disingenuously feted Biden since stabbing him
in the back.
Dowd’s review of the convention in yet another column was also
hard-edged. A few excerpts follow:
“The cameras kept
cutting to Pelosi’s face during Biden’s speech Monday night amid a sea of
bobbing blue ‘We (heart) Joe’ signs and ‘We love you, Joe!’ chants, looking for
signs of the pair’s schism. Some skeptical observers thought Pelosi was forcing
her smile, as though, one person joked on X, you were singing ‘Happy Birthday’
to a co-worker you hate… Mindy Kaling introduced Pelosi on Wednesday night as
‘brat before brat was brat,’ and as ‘the Mother of Dragons’ … Then she [Pelosi]
moved to the matter of most importance to her: defeating the former president
who egged on his ‘patriots’ to smear the Capitol with feces and blood, bringing
violence and sedition to that hallowed building … ‘Let us not forget who
assaulted democracy on Jan. 6,’ Pelosi said. ‘HE [Trump] DID. But let us not
forget who saved democracy that day, WE DID’… She quoted ‘The Star-Spangled
Banner,’ saying, ‘We gave proof through the night that our flag was still
there’ … Nancy Pelosi did help save democracy that night. And she helped save
her party when she worked with others to persuade Biden that it was time to go
home to Wilmington. Mother of Dragons, indeed.”
Dowd’s reflections on the perfidies of phony Democrats will
not last long should Harris succeed in defeating the Jan. 6 anti-democrats who
continue, perversely, to support Trump, long denounced by Democrat patriots as
a fascist intent on destroying American democracy.
Conventions come and go. But the appointee of the Democrat
National Convention to the presidency, assuming Harris defeats Trump in the
2024 November election, will continue on her unobstructed way for four to eight
years in the future. A good many people are still asking, “Who is the media shy
Kamala Harris?”
Harris is now engaged in running against both Vice president
Kamala Harris and Harris the joyful Democrat candidate for president. And she cannot
claim title to the second without abandoning her title to the first, because
the two political personas are at war with each other. She is, in the words of
Lincoln, “a house divided against itself.” Harris, the New York Post has remarked, is now
plagiarizing Trump’s positions on the border and “no taxes on tips.” The paper,
noted for its amusing headlines, ran on its face page on Wednesday, August 28
the headline “Harris for Trump.”
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