Tucker Carlson Tuesday:

Big news in the political world. Just hours ago, Joe Biden’s handlers announced they have selected Senator Kamala Harris of California to run as Biden’s vice president. We will admit, we did not see this coming. In fact, just last night on this show, we told you Susan Rice was likely to get that job. Rice is a hardened partisan but she’s not stupid. And more to the point,Rice has sincere beliefs, whether you like them or not, and we don’t.

But Kamala Harris is the opposite of that. Harris may be the single most transactional human being in America. There are time-share salesmen you would trust more than Kamala Harris. You could find payday lenders who are more sincere. So it seemed inconceivable that given his current state, Joe Biden would chose someone so transparently one-dimensional as Kamala Harris. Someone as empty as he is. It would be the first entirely hollow presidential ticket in American history and we thought it could never happen. But it is, they’re doing it anyway. Biden-Harris, that’s what they are going with.

And the choice tells you a lot about the current state of the Democratic Party. America is still technically a democracy yet neither Biden nor Harris has ever been popular with actual voters. This is Joe Biden’s third run for president. The first two attempts ended in embarrassing disasters. The third was headed at high speed in that direction and then a series of unforeseen flukes and highly crowded primary field left Biden the last man in the race. He was clearly shocked by his own victory. On election night, the night he clinched the nomination in March, Biden was so rattled he mistook his sister for his wife during the acceptance speech.

At the time, Joe Biden’s relative unpopularity seemed like a major problem for Democrats. This is politics, after all. The people who tend to have the most support tend to win. So, if you’re choosing a presidential nominee, you think you’d want someone with built-in constituency, a base of passionate voters you can count on election day. But as it turns out that’s the last thing leaders of the modern Democratic Party wanted. They already had a candidate like that, in fact, his name was Bernie Sanders. And they did everything they could to stop him.

No. What they wanted instead was someone they could control and Joe Biden for that discretion perfectly. Biden was eager, malleable, and totally blank. He was willing to be whatever his handlers wanted him to be. Kamala Harris will be every bit as eager and that’s the point. If Biden-Harris still doesn’t make sense to you as a ticket, it’s only because you are not cynical enough. Harris clearly wasn’t picked for her personal charm. More than 30 years ago she dated a man called Willie Brown, who was later the mayor of San Francisco. She was 29 years old at the time, Brown was 60 and still married. Brown launched Harris’ political career. He knows her very well. Last week Brown publicly urged Joe Biden not to pick Kamala Harris as his running mate. It turns out Willie Brown’s opinion no longer matters in the Democratic Party. Jeff Bezos’ opinion matters, so do the opinions of his fellow Bay Area tech titans and the finance moguls in New York. These are the people who bankroll the Democratic Party. They are the economic engine of the left, and they love Kamala Harris. Not personally. It’s business. Their main interest is in keeping the government carve outs that have made them rich. They know the last thing Kamala Harris will do is threaten any of those. Never, under any circumstances. One thing you can be certain of the in a Biden-Harris administration, private equity barons will still pay half the tax rate you pay. That’s the real point.

Voters may not like Kamala Harris but Wall Street does. Just in case you’re wondering who’s actually in charge. And yet still, even politicians have souls, technically anyway. How could Joe Biden pick a running mate who once publicly denounced him as a racist? You remember the moment. It was in the debate last summer.

 

CARLSON: ‘I do not believe you are a racist. I do not believe you beat your wife.’ Right. Kamala Harris, civil rights icon. Actually, Harris group mostly in Canada and in any case forced busing was a disaster from the beginning to the end. Nobody liked it, including black families. Joe Biden may be a bigot but it’s not because he opposed forced busing. But apparently he has forgiven Harris for that slur. Maybe he doesn’t member it. But even a dimming 77-year-old must have some memory of what Harris once said about his purported sex crimes. Just last year, several women came forward to say Joe Biden had touched them in sexually aggressive ways, both on and off camera. Kamala Harris wholeheartedly endorsed their claims. “I believe them and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it.” Wait, what? You believe that Joe Biden sexually assaulted a number of women, sexually assaulted them. But you’re joining his presidential ticket anyway? How does that work exactly? How can you do that? As it turns out, she can do it happily, shamelessly without even taking a breath. Just tell Kamala Harris what to say and she will say it. That’s the whole point of Kamala Harris. It’s why she’s so useful. And for the next several months, Harris is going to say that Donald Trump is a racist. She will say that every day until November. That’s her job now. You watch. But keep in mind as you watch that there’s no fighting back. It’s not allowed. Kamala Harris is a “historic” candidate and that means you have no right to criticize her regardless of what she says. They are already telling you that. They are making a clear.

Just last week a group of abortion lobbyists … sent a letter to media organizations around the country about Biden’s upcoming VP pick. It was addressed to editors, news directors, reporters. The choice of the vice presidential candidate was most certain to be a black woman they said. They were right and they wanted to warn reporters that in the wake of George Floyd’s death, any critical coverage of Joe Biden’s VP pick what amount to “systemic racism.” That wasn’t guidance. It was an unveiled threat. They made it because they knew it would work and in fact it’s already working. Immediately after Harris was chosen today “The New York Times” sent out a bulletin describing her as “a pragmatic moderate.” Got that? A pragmatic moderate, not some kind of kooky ideologue, not someone flaky liberal from San Francisco. Not at all, no. Instead someone who wants to solve America’s toughest problems and solve them without regard to orthodoxy or partisanship. A sober, steady leader in troubled times. Actually it might be nice to have someone like that. But that’s not kamala Harris, not even close. Harris has endorsed forcing schools to let biological males play on girl’s athletic teams. That’s not a majority position. It is nuts. But it’s not as crazy a subsidized abortions for biological men. Harris is for that too, she has announced it. Men can’t get pregnant so how do we pay for their abortions? Harris has never explained, of course, at this point it would be ‘systemically racist’ to ask her so no one ever will ever ask. Shut up. No questions allowed. Meanwhile there is not a fashionable rich lady position that Kamala Harris doesn’t have. Plastic straws are bad. Red meat is worse. If there was a bill to make SoulCycle mandatory, Kamala Harris would get behind it. …

But she has non-frivolous positions too. On health care Harris believes illegal immigrants have every bit the right to taxpayer-funded medical treatment that you do as a citizen. This is yet another position, whatever you think of it, that the majority of Americans do not support. But as we have noted, Harris doesn’t care what most people want. They are not her audience. She was told to support free health care for foreign nationals who break our laws and so she does support it. …

Kamala Harris isn’t an idiot and she knows what she just suggested is actually impossible. You can have a welfare state. Lots of countries do. You can have open borders. But you can’t have both. No country can survive with a welfare state and open borders. That’s obvious. No one disputes it. But Kamala Harris doesn’t care either way. The survival she cares about his or her own survival. By the way, if you think you can keep your family safe as a country collapses around her ambitions, you’re wrong because she plans to disarm you first.

We could go on and on. Oh, the ironies. The party that is angry about police brutality has just hired the former chief law enforcement officer of California. Again, there’s a lot to say and in coming weeks we’ll say it. There’s a lot of available tape and Harris will soon provide more. But we’re going to sum Kamala Harris this way: Last year when actor Jussie Smollett staged his fake hate crime, Harris was one of the first national leaders to jump in with position of support. Smollett was ‘the kindest, most gentle human being Harris had ever met,’ she wrote. The attack on him was ‘An attempted modern-day lynching.’ Okay, she fell for it. Lots of credulous rich people did but what makes Kamala Harris a remarkable figure is it in the face of changing evidence she never recanted her support. That tweet is still up, she did not delete it. You can still read it on her Twitter feed tonight. Smollett’s story was entirely concocted. Harris knows it. We all know it. But she doesn’t care. In fact, Harris understands perfectly well why Smollett lied, by smearing Trump supporters as bigots, he hoped to advance his career. And Kamala Harris of all people can respect that.

Kevin D. Williamson:

Joe Biden has named his 2020 running mate: authoritarianism.

American prosecutors wield awesome and terrible powers that lend themselves easily to abuse, and Senator Kamala Harris, formerly the attorney general of California, is an enthusiastic abuser of them.

Harris was a leader in the junta of Democratic state attorneys general that attempted to criminalize dissent in the matter of global warming, using her office’s investigatory powers to target and harass non-profit policy groups while she and her counterpart in New York attempted to shake down Exxon on phony fraud cases.

Until she was stopped by a federal court, Harris was laying subpoenas on organizations such as the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a conservative-leaning group that is critical of Democratic global-warming proposals. She demanded private information that the organizations were not legally obliged to disclose, including financial information and donor lists, in order to be able to subject the supporters of right-leaning groups to legal and financial harassment. This was, as a federal judge confirmed, an obvious and unquestionable violation of the First Amendment.

It was also a serious abuse of power. Harris’s actions were coordinated with those of then attorney general Eric Schneiderman in New York, who argued — preposterously — that Exxon’s taking a different view of global warming was a form of securities fraud. This isn’t a conspiracy theory: They held a press conference and organized their effort into a committee, which they called AGs United for Clean Power.

This was not happening in a political vacuum. At approximately the same time, the IRS was being weaponized to harass and disadvantage right-leaning nonprofits and policy organizations, for example, leaking the confidential tax information of the National Organization for Marriage as an act of political retaliation, an offense for which the IRS was obliged to pay a settlement. (The IRS’s other abuses, as in the Lois Lerner matter, remain largely unpunished.) A lawyer with connections to Barack Obama and Andrew Cuomo attempted to extort billions of dollars from Chevron in a mammoth racketeering project that involved falsifying evidence and bribing judges, a project that was cheered on by green activists such as musician Roger Waters and Democratic operatives such as former Cuomo aide Karen Hinton, both of whom had negotiated for themselves a percentage of the settlement. That went on until a federal judge intervened on RICO grounds. Democratic voices in the media were calling for the authorities to — this part is even less subtle —“arrest climate change deniers,” a project to which activists such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. lent their voices.

And this was not idle talk: As with Harris’s abusive investigation in California, a legal pretext was offered, albeit a patently ridiculous one.

Harris’s self-serving prosecutorial abuses have been directed at political enemies, but they also put hundreds — maybe thousands — of people in jail or at risk of prosecution on wrongful grounds when it suited her agenda. As Lara Bazelon of the Loyola law school wrote in the New York Times:

Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.

Consider her record as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Ms. Harris was criticized in 2010 for withholding information about a police laboratory technician who had been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” her work and stealing drugs from the lab. After a memo surfaced showing that Ms. Harris’s deputies knew about the technician’s wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harris’s indifference to the systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.

Ms. Harris contested the ruling by arguing that the judge, whose husband was a defense attorney and had spoken publicly about the importance of disclosing evidence, had a conflict of interest. Ms. Harris lost. More than 600 cases handled by the corrupt technician were dismissed.

In the context of Harris’s political vendettas, that eagerness to engage in “systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights” is particularly terrifying.

In choosing this corrupt prosecutor as his vice-presidential candidate, Joe Biden has made a serious error, one that highlights his already substantial deficiencies in judgment.

I wonder how Black Lives Matter will feel about this, from Lara Bazelon of Loyola University in Los Angeles:

Cockburn of The Spectator:

The chattering caste of Washington DC has spent much of the summer obsessed with the idea that Donald Trump will refuse to leave office if he loses in November, as Cockburn has already noted.

This perennial topic was silly enough when it was restricted to Nancy Pelosi making awkward assertions on cable television. But in the last two weeks, like QAnon, the fantasy has become substantially more elaborate, and less healthy. Numerous outlets, led by the Boston Globe, have showered attention on an endeavor calling itself the ‘Transition Integrity Project.’ The project brought together…well, not exactly big names in American politics, but certainly many people who would like to think they are big names: former Scott Walker aide Liz Mair, ex-Bush speechwriter David Frum, former DNC chair Donna Brazile, and so forth. Once assembled, these sort-of-distinguished personages played out simulations (‘games’) of four possible 2020 election outcomes: a large Biden win, a narrow Biden win, a narrow Trump win (while losing the popular vote), and an election with no real clear winner at all.

The headlines, and the Transition Integrity Project, all emphasized that the simulations showed the threat posed to democracy by the Apricot Adolf.

‘We … assess that President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power,’ the project’s final report says.

But Cockburn has a quibble. Though labeled ‘bipartisan’, the simulation seems to be entirely the work of Democrats alongside anti-Trump Republicans. Nobody actually allied with the President appears to have played a role in the simulations. Cockburn isn’t always the smartest but, saying that President Trump is ‘likely’ to contest an election result, simply because his enemies think he wants to, doesn’t strike him as very newsworthy.

Far more interesting, and totally unnoticed, is the behavior of former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Podesta also took part in the simulations, and unlike the anti-Trump Republicans, he wasn’t pretending to be someone he hates. Instead, organizers did the sensible thing: they had an anti-Trump Democrat portray an anti-Trump Democrat. Because the simulation designers apparently wanted to torment him as much as possible, Podesta had to endure an exact 2016 repeat: he played Joe Biden in a simulation where Trump loses the popular vote but wins a close but convincing victory in the Electoral College.

Buried at the bottom of a New York Times article, the paper describes what Podesta did:

‘Mr Podesta, playing Mr Biden, shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede. Alleging voter suppression, he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College.

‘In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr Trump took office as planned.’

This was so astonishing that Cockburn’s monocle nearly popped off reading it — and he doesn’t even wear one. The actual text of the final report is even more jarring. According to a summary of the game, while acting as Biden — rather than accept defeat — Podesta actively instigated secession, and then issued an ultimatum: Trump could only begin his second term if Puerto Rico and DC became states, California was cut into five pieces, and the Electoral College was abolished. When the ultimatum was refused, Podesta got the Democratic House (played by other Democrats) to declare Biden the president, and then watched to see how the military would react. If you think Cockburn exaggerates, here’s what the document says about ‘Game 3: Clear Trump win’ (a scenario in which Trump wins the Electoral College and the popular vote)

‘The Biden campaign encouraged Western states, particularly California but also Oregon and Washington and collectively known as “Cascadia” to secede from the union unless Congressional Republicans agreed to a set of structural reforms to fix our democratic system to ensure majority rule. With advice from President Obama, the Biden Campaign submitted a proposal to 1) give statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico; 2) divide California into five states to more accurately represent the population in the Senate; 3) require Supreme Court Justices retire at 70; and 4) eliminate the Electoral College, to ensure the candidate who wins the popular vote…’

And it goes on,

‘One of the most consequential moves was that Team Biden on January 6 provoked a breakdown in the joint session of Congress by getting the House of Representatives to agree to award  the presidency to Biden (based on the alternative pro-Biden submissions sent by pro-Biden governors.) Pence and the GOP refused to accept this, declaring instead that Trump was re-elected under the Constitution because of his Electoral College victory. This partisan division remained unresolved because neither side backed down, and January 20 arrived without a single president-elect entitled to be Commander-in-Chief after noon that day. It was unclear what the military would do in this situation.’

Now, understandably everyone wants to be gentle with Podesta after his stressful 2016 moment, but shouldn’t this merit a headline somewhere? Something like ‘Top Democrats Contemplate Civil War If Biden Loses?’ But that hasn’t happened (until now, thanks to The Spectator). Instead, we’ve just had another suffocating glut of anxious warnings that Donald Trump is planning to ignore the election.

It’s enough to leave even Cockburn nervous. When Democrats and the press warn that Trump will try and override the election result, are they simply being hysterical? Or are they, as psychologists like to say, projecting?