With Tim Walz sitting by her side, Kamala Harris on Thursday night faced the most extended unscripted session since she became the Democratic nominee. She “moved the ball forward” – in the parlance of at least 3 CNN analysts afterward. And as one, David Axelrod, put it: ”You may not like how she answered but she gave her answers in a forthright way and tied them to her values.”
Well, jeez, that’s a helluva lot more than Donnie Dump does – which is to say merely spewing lies. Yet the media's turkeys yelp about Kamala's "refusal" to sit down with them, while they have Dumpster Don yap nonstop babble and think he's engaging them.
My take, staying with the football metaphor, is that she and Walz got a first down – a 40 yard first down, and they’re near mid-field. One more interview like this and they should be at the one yard line.
The reply I loved best was when CNN interviewer Dana Bash asked Kamala about the orange Turd’s daft BS, sputtered out at a NABJ confab e.g.
Trump Implodes At NABJ Event Showing He's Learned Zero Humility Since July 13th Shooting
that Harris couldn’t make up her mind if she was Indian and then “happened to turn
Black”.
Recognizing the bait, Kamala would have none of it and tersely replied: “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.” Bravo! Why waste time dignifying a fungal turd with a response?
Understandably, given the continued malaise and discontent concerning grocery prices, Harris focused on the economy during the interview. She said she would seek to help the middle class by extending the child tax credit, lowering the cost of groceries and making housing more affordable. Also, going after corporate price gougers, e.g.
Newsflash To WSJ Editors: "Price Fixing" Is Not The Same As Protecting Consumers From Price Gouging
Which the clueless media still conflates with price controls.
As she told Ms. Bash:
“I think that people are ready for a new way forward, in a way
that generations of Americans have been fueled by hope and by optimism. I
think, sadly, in the last decade, we have had in the former president, someone
who has really been pushing an agenda and an environment that is about
diminishing the character and the strength of who we are as Americans, really
dividing our nation. And I think people are ready to turn the page on that.”
Summing up in one neat paragraph the toxicity of the Trump
era. Though Bash’s actual question concerned how Harris would deal with the
fact (based on interviews, surveys) so many apparent intelligent voters yearn to
go back to the Trump era.
I suspect Kamala felt as I did, that these folks (mainly low information voters) were deluded and suffered a case of political amnesia. How else explain being unaware of a stock market crash under Drumpf and ten million jobs lost, not to mention an added quarter million dead from Covid because he played fast and loose with protecting the population once the pandemic began.
In response to Dana Bash pressing her, Harris addressed
criticism that her positions have shifted significantly on major issues,
including climate change and immigration, saying three times in one minute, “My
values have not changed.”
Bash, meanwhile, asked Tim Walz about his comment in 2018, referring to school shootings, that “we can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at.” (While he served for 24 years in the Army National Guard, he was not deployed to a war zone.) Personally, I don't get what the big deal is. The remark came in the wake of a school shooting, as he told Dana Bash, and all he was doing was making a point to his audience about the lethality of the military-style weapons (like ARs) used in such shootings. There was absolutely no intention to "steal valor" as the imps and maggots of MAGA have tried to imply.
Walz said that he speaks plainly and sometimes passionately, and he rightfully cast questions about the veracity of some of his comments as partisan attacks.
“If it’s not this, it’s an attack on my children for showing love for
me, or it’s an attack on my dog,” he said. “I’m not going to do that.” Kudos to you for that, Tim.
Of course, the chucklehead media – including wannabe pundits like Bill Maher (who last week claimed Kamala was “worse than Trump for avoiding the media”) will still yammer about “flip flopping”. Be that as it may, but as the sober pundits who appeared on Deadline Whitehouse noted, it is indeed values which are the currency behind policy.
Policy positions will always change in adapting to a world and society that evolves (or devolves) but it is the values which maintain the essential stability of policy – any policy. Whether that be on dealing with climate change, or illegal immigration, or inflation. In any case all policies uttered by any candidate are only aspirations in the end. Most can't see the light of day unless passed by congress, and with the evenly split lot we have, that ain't happening soon. So it's basically a case of mental masturbation for the media and press.
In that respect I give both Harris and Walz an ‘A - ’ for their interview responses. Let the pinhead pundits whine and cry "BWAAAA...she didn't give us anything to work with!" But those of us with more than air between the ears know she did. And Tim Walz too.
The CNN interview done, I now look forward to Kamala stomping Trump’s orange ass in 12 days in their ABC debate. (Just keep a cattle prod nearby, in case the orange predator circles too closely like he did with Hillary in 2016.) Until then we will have to endure more bonehead pundit and op-ed twaddle like this from the Wall Street Journal:
“The Vice President got away for the most part with
repeating her campaign’s platitudes about “the middle class” and “a new way
forward” and was never seriously challenged on anything…That’s a shame because
the voters still haven’t received a straight answer about whether, and how, she
has changed her views from the far-left positions she espoused in 2019 as a
presidential candidate. “My values have not changed,” she said more than once,
in a practiced answer that can be read any way you want.
See Also:
Ah, the lazy, crazy days of August during a presidential election year are upon us. That's traditionally when the political press decides that the Democratic candidate has not been accessible enough to them, so they spend weeks badgering them for interviews and demanding press conferences while insinuating that the candidate must be hiding something.
Recall the 2016 cycle when, during the month of August, the press had a collective tantrum because Hillary Clinton's staffers roped her off as she walked in a parade in order to keep reporters and photographers from turning the event into a paparazzi-style scrum. I wrote at the time:
Aaron Blake recounted the event in all its chilling detail and then rather sheepishly admitted that nobody in America really gives a damn about how Hillary Clinton treats the press. (A point I made a month ago.) After all, the press is held in only slightly higher esteem by the public than loan sharks and puppy mill operators. The thinly veiled threat underneath all this outrage is that the media will react to being treated badly by giving the candidate bad press, but it's pretty clear that train left the station a long time ago when it comes to Clinton, so the cost-benefit analysis probably doesn't argue in favor of the campaign giving a damn either.
And:
by Maya Boddie | August 30, 2024 - 6:16am | permalink
Since Donald Trump's Monday visit to Arlington National Cemetery, several aspects of the former president's visit to the historic of over 400,000 of US service members have been widely condemned.
The Washington Post reported, "Pentagon officials were deeply concerned about the former president turning the visit into a campaign stop, but they also didn’t want to block him from coming, according to Defense Department officials and internal messages reviewed by The Washington Post."
In an op-ed published by MSNBC Thursday, former US Army officer Brandon Friedman submits that, "to combat veterans, Arlington National Cemetery has the same power that all holy places have. And that is why Donald Trump’s recent behavior is so repulsive."
Friedman writes:
And:
by Amanda Marcotte | August 30, 2024 - 6:36am | permalink
Hannah Arendt famously described the psychology of Nazi propaganda as "the point where [the masses] would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true." It's a quote that comes to mind often when contemplating the lies of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. And it cropped up for me again while reading about the new right-wing conspiracy theory targeting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and his dog.
It's a twisty road that led us to this point. Scout, the beloved pet of Kamala Harris' running mate, stands accused by rabid Trump fans of being a fake. While this story is a silly sideshow, it has serious implications. Unable to handle the strong possibility that their candidate will lose in November, Trump's followers are preemptively immersing themselves in a fantasyland where everything they don't like is "fake," from Harris' crowd sizes to the pet photos of their opponents. This isn't just a coping mechanism, either. As we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, the non-stop accusations that Democrats are "faking" everything can lead Trump's followers down dangerous and even violent pathways.
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