When I was very young, my mother used to read me Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" before bed. My favorites were "How the Camel Got His Hump" and "How the Leopard Got His Spots." They made an indelible impression on me because although I was only four years old at the time, I remember them clearly to this day.
Those stories were so popular and so enduring that "Just So Stories" actually entered the lexicon, defined as "an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals."
In our present political context, Kamala Harris tells a lot of "Just So Stories." We call them "word salads," but in essence, they're just untestable narratives about a wide variety of topics, including Donald Trump.
"Since she replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, reporters have struggled mightily to find kind ways of describing Harris’s ineluctable inability to convey anything comprehensible, complex, or concrete," writes Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review. What Cooke is struggling to say is something we're forbidden to say about a woman, especially a black woman.
Kamala Harris is an idiot.
To his credit, Cooke actually gets around to calling Harris an idiot.
And yet, if one were to search for a single world to sum up her candidacy, that word, apparently, would be “joy.”
I disagree. I think that word would be “idiot.” Harris isn’t “vague” or “careful” or disinclined to “delineate her stance.” She’s wildly, catastrophically, incontestably out of her depth. She’s not “light”; she’s dull. She’s not a “dodger”; she’s a fool. She’s not “joyful”; she’s imbecilic. As Gertrude Stein once said of Harris’s hometown, Oakland, there’s no “there there.” She’s a nullity, a vacuum, an actress, an empty canvas that is incapable of absorbing paint. Search through Harris’s historical press clippings and you will be astonished by the vastness of space, for, in more than two decades of analysis and reporting, Harris has not once been credited with a single valuable or original idea.
Tell us what you really think, Charlie.
"What you see on TV is what you get in private: a broken battery-operated toy that can’t talk, that can’t argue, that can’t laugh in the right places, and that badly malfunctions if expected to transcend the superficial," writes Cooke.
We are three weeks before election day. Harris has just started taking interviews, mostly from friendly, helpful, talking heads who aren't going to expose her for the idiot she is because if she wins, they want to be able to interview her again.
She has mastered a few talking points that sound incongruous when she's trying to shoehorn them into an answer to a question that's only vaguely related to the talking point.
“Why,” asks the commentariat, “has she not improved her answers over time?” The answer is simple: Because she has not improved her thinking over time. It may be true that, in addition to being an idiot, Harris is “nervous,” or “overwhelmed,” or “indecisive,” but, properly understood, those are less separate diagnoses than symptoms of the same underlying ill. The word-salads; the awkward cackle; the stunned repetition of agnostic phrases — they are all byproducts of Harris’s debilitating suspicion that she has no earthly clue what she’s doing. She can’t debate policy because she’s never examined policy. She can’t sell a worldview because she’s never had a worldview.
Harris presents "Just So Stories" as fact all the time. Her explanation of the border crisis is a mixture of fantasy and myth. Her bragging about cutting the flow of fentanyl into the county by 50% is so far from reality that even Democrats had to criticize her for that one.
"Last week, Harris was asked on The View what she would do differently than Joe Biden, and, though that remains the key issue in the election, it became clear that she’d never considered the matter before it hit her ears," writes Cooke. This suggests that Harris doesn't think about much of anything at all.
If she's elected, you have to wonder who will actually be running the country.
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