It’s Friday, August 14th, 2020…and 75 years ago tomorrow darkness fell on the Empire of the Rising Sun, as the Japanese people listened to the first words they’d ever heard from their emperor:
But before we begin, since we’ve touched on heinous crimes, Townhall.com‘s Matt Vespa relates one of a particularly vicious variety which would have dominated every cable news program and paper in the U.S. for at least a month…
“…Civvies on Broughton Street in Savannah posted that it would require a refundable $20 deposit when booking an appointment to visit the boutique. However, the since-deleted post also wrote that people of color would be exempt from the fee, the New York Post reported.
“As a mostly White staff with White ownership, we do not feel comfortable upholding a digital and financial barrier which could prevent BIPOC from shopping at our store at this time on top of the limitations already made by online booking,” the store announced last week, the Post shared. The “new and recycled clothing” store wrote that patrons who “are White and refuse to put down a deposit because you believe our policy is unethical” would not be allowed to make an appointment.
Since putting up the policy, the store received negative reactions and threats of legal action.
…After the widespread backlash, the business put up an apology and removed all mention of the previous policy for its social media. “Statement from the owners, ’It was not our intention to act in any way that might be perceived as discriminatory and for that we apologize,’” a Facebook message read.
…“No one “perceived” it as discriminatory…it is discriminatory,” another commented…”
Again, imagine the headlines and rioting had the races been reversed: the store would be a smoldering ruin and permanently out of business. Meanwhile, discriminating consumers of any color can vote with their feet and spend their Benjamins elsewhere.
Progressives and their MSM propagandists: they lie but once…and that continually.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Since we’re on the subject of Progressive propagandists, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty informs us…
Reports Iran has since invited NBC News to visit all its secret nuclear facilities and corroborate it’s program’s purpose is peaceful remain unconfirmed…but well within the realm of possibility.
Hey, if Brian Williams is back from San Antonio…
…he could lend his credibility to NBC‘s effort!
Next up, we offer a series of commentaries of what, courtesy of Townhall.com, Ben Shapiro describes as…
“For well over a year, former Vice President Joe Biden has carried forth a simple strategy: Be nonthreatening. Facing a volatile, mistake-prone incumbent, Biden merely had to mimic vital signs, stay out of the spotlight and avoid looking off-putting or radical. And he accomplished those objectives, to great effect. He barely stumbled his way through the Democratic primaries, representing the nonradical voting repository for those alienated by the extremism of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren; he refused to kowtow to the Twitter blue checkmarks calling for him to endorse rioting and looting; he shied away from insane slogans about defunding the police. He stayed in the basement, playing prevent defense against President Donald Trump.
All he had before him was one final hurdle: picking a vice president.
Usually, the vice presidential pick means little or nothing. The vice presidency is a uniquely powerless office, and presidents rarely hand over power to their vice presidents. But Joe Biden will be 78 in November and appears to be slipping significantly mentally — despite CNN’s protestations that he can still ride a bicycle. There is a reason nearly 6 in 10 Americans, according to a new Rasmussen poll, think Biden’s vice president will finish his first term.
So Biden had one task: to pick a vice president who would appear nonthreatening, mainstream and generally normal. The onus would then lie with President Trump to shift the spotlight from his own campaign.
Biden couldn’t do it.
He made an early error on that score when he declared publicly that he would pick a woman. This made it obvious that Biden was seeking a token — some sop for the woke progressives in his base. And that sop opened the door to further demands: the demand, for example, that he pick not merely a woman (or, as the woke left might have it, an individual with a cervix) but a black woman. And so Biden was trapped into a limited selection of politicians, ranging from the unknown (Rep. Val Demings of Florida) to the communist (Rep. Karen Bass of California), from the quietly sinister (former President Obama’s national security advisor Susan Rice) to the loudly ridiculous (Georgia non-governor Stacey Abrams).
None of these picks would be great; some would be far worse than others. But there was one pick who would prove far worse than all the others: Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Harris is deeply radical. She endorsed “Medicare for All” while announcing that she would move Americans away from their private health care plans; she announced in open debate that she would use executive orders to ban “assault weapons”; she said she would ban fracking; she attacked Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a purported rapist and Judge Brian Buescher for his Catholicism. Harris is unpopular with many black Americans: As a prosecutor, she was fond of pursuing heavy sentences for light charges, as well as civil asset forfeiture — and then she bragged about smoking marijuana during her campaign. Harris has similarly alienated moderates, attacking Biden himself as a vicious racist for his unwillingness to support forced school busing in the 1970s, and suggesting that she believed Biden’s sexual harassment accusers. There is a reason Harris utterly flamed out in the primaries, aside from her bizarre habit of breaking into a Joker-esque whoop when asked difficult questions.
Nothing about Harris screams nonthreatening. In fact, in her Machiavellian campaign manipulations, she appeared deeply threatening — threatening enough that Biden campaign adviser Chris Dodd reportedly wondered why Harris “had no remorse” for her opportunistic and dishonest attacks on Biden. At the very least, Biden should hire a food taster.
In selecting Harris, Biden has opened the door to the Trump campaign. And Trump should take full advantage. Biden’s alleged moderation means nothing if he is willing to place Kamala Harris one heartbeat(or a few rapidly degenerating brain cells!)from the presidency. Biden’s entire campaign strategy has now been undercut — all in a vain attempt to please the Twitterati, who will remain pleased for precisely seven seconds. Trump should be ecstatic. The race is on. And that’s all on Biden.“
As the Journal’s Kim Strassel notes, all you need to know about Kamala Harris as a candidate can be gleaned from her first campaign, when…
“In that run, Ms. Harris had about 50 seconds of fame—from a June 2019 debate in which she accused Mr. Biden of being too friendly to racists. Her “That little girl was me” moment and other practiced phrases led to a “Saturday Night Live” impersonation…
…that, as SFGate noted, “mocks” the candidate for her “ ‘viral moments’ desperation.”A New York Times story about how her campaign “unraveled” described one such quest for a memorable catchphrase, noting that her aides had become “given to gallows humor about just how many slogans and one-liners she has cycled through.”“
Now, of course, she’s a “moderate”, a “small-c conservative”, the very second coming of Barack.
Second, writing at, appropriately enough, American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson wonders…
“As we enter the final 90 days of the November presidential campaign, a few truths are crystalizing about the “Biden problem,” or the inability of a 77-year-old Joe Biden to conduct a “normal” campaign.
Biden’s cognitive challenges are increasing geometrically, whether as a result of months of relative inactivity and lack of stimulation or just consistent with the medical trajectory of his affliction. His lot is increasingly similar to historical figures such as 67-year-old President William Henry Harrison, William Gladstone’s last tenure as prime minister, Chancellor Hindenburg, or Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944—age and physical infirmities signaling to the concerned that a subordinate might assume power sooner than later.
…Recently, when Biden has attempted to speak without prompts, indeed to clear up “rumors” of his cognitive problems, he simply loses his train of thought and utters a series of unstructured and unsettled thoughts that refute the very premise of his interview. The understandable Democratic strategy is to run out the clock and to choreograph a few post-Labor Day public appearances, to outsource campaigning to his running mate and future cabinet secretaries, and then to hope, in the manner of a 2016 Hillary Clinton, that he has amassed a large enough September lead to outlast a closing October Trump campaign.
There are problems with such a strategy, as we saw in 2016. If Biden late in the campaign stumbles in the debates, there is no post-convention remedy to reassure the public he is compos mentis or otherwise can be replaced by a majority consensus. Then the country would be entering something eerily similar to, but far graver than, the McGovern debacle of desperately looking for a new running mate after it was disclosed that an apparently perfectly cognizant Tom Eagleton—his running-mate for 18 days—had undergone two electric shock treatments in his past as well as undisclosed prior hospitalizations for bipolar disorder.
Right now, the Democrats have a virtual campaign and a virtual candidate and a strategy of running against the Trump news cycle. That may work, but it assumes Americans under quarantine don’t mind that they do not really know who is the Democratic challenger, or that Biden is, in fact, not physically or mentally able to function as either a candidate or president. It also assumes that the Trump-owned news cycle will remain as dismal over the next three months as it has the last five or six weeks, and that the virus will spike in late October again, rather than slowly burn out as it seems to be doing in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.
Add it all up and the question is no longer whether Biden could fulfill the duties of the presidency but whether he can finish a traditional campaign over the next three months—without outsourcing his duties to a committee, or serially saying something blatantly racist, or simply disappearing to the nether world of his basement where saying nothing beats saying anything.“
Better Joe say nothing, ’cause he knows nothing…and less and less at that every day.
“Maureen Dowd took it on the chin Saturday for stating in her New York Times column that “it has been 36 years since a man and a woman ran together on a Democratic Party ticket.” Hillary Clinton, who you may recall won the Democratic nomination in 2016 and chose Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as her running mate, was among those pointing out the error.
Ms. Dowd’s column was mainly about whether Joe Biden’s running mate, who we now know is California Sen. Kamala Harris, will have to endure the same indignities that Rep. Geraldine Ferraro did when she joined Walter Mondale’s ticket in 1984 to challenge President Reagan. The more interesting question might be the extent to which blunt appeals to gender and race still animate the American electorate today. As George Will put it after Ferraro died, “she was an instrument—Geraldine Ferraro was—of identity politics, a Catholic woman from Queens.” The result? Mondale lost Catholics and women. Reagan even came close in Queens.
Like all presidential candidates, Mr. Biden was looking for someone to help him—or at least not hurt him—geographically and with certain voting blocs. His campaign has made no secret of his strategy to win back white working-class residents of battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin who left the Democratic Party to vote for Donald Trump. It’s hard to see how Ms. Harris will help him with those voters. Barack Obama won them over in 2008 by playing down racial differences on the campaign trail. Ms. Harris’s most memorable moment during the primary was to suggest that Mr. Biden was a racist for expressing opinions about forced busing in the 1970s that turned out to be nearly identical to her own.
The inconvenient truth for progressives is that primary voters bypassed several female and minority candidates—including Ms. Harris—to nominate Mr. Biden. If having a woman on the ticket were a priority for most Democrats, why did Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar flame out? In addition to Ms. Harris, black voters might have opted for Cory Booker if race was a top concern, yet they overwhelmingly went for Mr. Biden. Perhaps liberal elites and their media allies care more about a presidential ticket that “looks like America” than the average Democratic voter does…”
Let alone Independents and Republicans…not to mention gun owners. No wonder Soros-backed state A.G.s are scrambling to hobble the NRA in the run-up to the election.
We conclude our coverage of what we believe to be the 2020 version of John McCain’s 2008 Sarah Palin hail-Mary with two videos, both highlighting help the addled Biden doesn’t need:
Speaking of urban locales where babies are being slaughtered without the use of “assault rifles”, The Washington Free Beacon‘s Kevin Baley details how a…
“A Chicago-based charity has worked to free at least 20 defendants facing felony charges—including attempted terrorism and assault of a police officer—as an unprecedented crime wave rocks the city.
The Chicago Community Bond Fund, which opposes cash bail and pretrial incarceration, has posted bond for the alleged felons, putting them back on the streets before their trials. The charity, like other community bond funds across the country, is now flush with cash, raising $3.5 million from 75,000 contributors in late May and early June. Bond funds together have taken in $90 million in the weeks following George Floyd’s death alone, according to the New York Times.
…Bond receipts obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that the Chicago fund has posted bond for defendants charged with violent crimes. Of the 24 people the group freed on May 31 and June 1 in Cook Countyalone, seven faced weapons charges.
Among the individuals freed by the group is 25-year-old Christian Frazee, who was charged with attempted terrorism and possession of an incendiary device. Prosecutors say Frazee was detained in the early morning hours of June 1 as he approached squad cars wielding a molotov cocktail and a lighter. He allegedly had a butane torch lighter and a bat in his backpack.
…The fund also promotes the work of Chicago-based activist groups that have played a lead role in organizing anti-police protests. Together with public interest groups like the National Lawyers Guild that provide legal services for activists, the CCBF acts as a kind of insurance policy for demonstrators who have taken to the streets in massive numbers throughout the summer.
When considering whom to post bond for, the Chicago fund takes into account the accused’s “position in relation to structural violence” and likelihood of abuse behind bars.Women and gender nonconforming people are overrepresented in its client pool, the group said in 2017…”
We’d ask Karla Dominguez what she thinks of such efforts, but she’s unavailable for comment…
…having been murdered by the man who’d previously raped her after he was released from jail by a judge more concerned about him catching COVID than protecting the public from violent criminals.
The judge just beat the bail funds to it.
Then there’s this classic rejoinder from a Portland police officer to an overly-concerned citizen (pump up the volume!):
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s two from Ed Hickey…
…four from Balls Cotton…
…another pair from the lovely Shannon…
…and two final contributions from Speed Mach:
Finally, just an FYI, we’ll be undergoing shoulder surgery on the 17th, so after the Monday edition, it’s uncertain when or how much we’ll be able to publish with our right arm in a sling. Embedding videos shouldn’t be too difficult, but pecking an entire column with one finger may prove problematic.
We trust you’ll bear with us if the quality you’ve come to expect suffers somewhat during our recovery.
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