Harris and Walz have made a thing of “turning the page,” but the page that must be turned is the one they are on.

In recent years, beginning with Obama, the Democratic party has become unmoored from its basic center-left policies and embraced ideas and policies that are illogical, absurd, and increasingly unpopular. Things like these:

• Allowing open borders coupled with a very generous social welfare system to be tapped by all who enter; 
• Endorsing chemical castration of children and allowing transgender women into the private spaces of actual women;
• Engaging in endless wars in which we have no genuine national stake; 
• Supporting UNWRA, which exists solely to attack our longtime ally Israel;
• Issuing regulations that limit productivity in everything in the name of preventing the chimerical and unproven climate change;
• Fighting all efforts to make national elections auditable; 
• Ignoring the violence on college campuses;
• Committing significant First Amendment violations and pursuing frivolous lawsuits against their opponents;
• Defunding the police and allowing crime to flourish in blue cities;
• Embracing corrupt dictatorial international bodies like WHO and WEF;
• Promoting DEI policies that are discriminatory and result in ethnic and racial identity, rather than merit, being the criteria for hiring and promoting employees.

Looking at some tea leaves, I see the beginning of the end of this party as presently constituted. It will soon have to refashion itself, jettison its most outrageous members and their notions, or be replaced by another new party altogether.

The map reader (Harris) and the genius military strategist (Biden)

The elimination of Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas, in Rafah this week exposed once again the moronic foreign policies of the Harris-Biden team. Both hailed it, and Harris, with outrageous chutzpah, claimed credit for it, though the administration is surely responsible for this having taken longer than it should have.  

As late as March of this year, Harris was still working to keep Hamas intact:

“I have studied the maps… It would be a huge mistake for Israel to go into Rafah.”

For months, the Administration warned Israel not to go into Rafah.

In mid-March, US officials told the Politico news site that US President Joe Biden would consider limiting future military aid to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved ahead with an offensive against Hamas in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah…

Vice President Kamala Harris famously said at the time that she had “studied the maps” and that an operation was not viable, while warning of potential consequences…

The intense global pressure led to months of delay, but the Rafah offensive eventually went ahead in May regardless, with Israel successfully evacuating the civilian population ahead of its push into the city…

In fact, shortly before Sinwar was killed in a firefight, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu threatening an arms embargo unless it met the Administration’s absurd demands respecting Gaza. Now Harris says, “Justice has been served, and the United States, Israel, and the entire world are better off as a result.” Now Biden says, “This is a good day for Israel, the United States and the world.”

National security adviser Jacob Sullivan even asserts that U.S. intelligence had helped Israel locate Sinwar. (If they knew where he was, why did they fight so hard to keep Israel away from a man they concede is a U.S. enemy?) 

Biden argued that going into Rafah would extend the fighting forever. The Israelis finally ignored these threats, and some recruits spotted Sinwar, who, after murdering the six hostages he had kept with him underground as insurance, scampered out of a tunnel, and they eliminated him. Saturday, there were scenes of hundreds of Gazans leaving Rafah for sheltered areas in the north or surrendering. The cesspool that the Administration prevented from being sanitized will now surely be cleaned out rapidly.

It’s hard not to be contemptuous of those who promulgated and endorsed the Biden-Harris nitwit strategy and now try to pretend they are happy that Israel’s ignoring them did the trick.

Secretary Blinken: “Yahya Sinwar was responsible for the murder of thousands of Israelis, Americans, and citizens of more than 30 countries. His decision to launch the terror attacks on October 7 unleashed catastrophic consequences on the people of Gaza. The world is a better place with him gone.”

 Tea Leaves

In the early 1980s, I worked for the Department of Justice, making several trips to the USSR, and to me it was clear the place was crumbling. It’s in small details that the bigger picture often becomes clear. For example, how in the USSR, censorship crippled their economy. The desire to keep a lid on free expression, for example, meant that computers and typewriters were kept under strict state controls, and even photocopies had to be recorded by subject and number of pages and approved by bureaucrats up the line. Yes, it meant unapproved writers and opinions had to go through hoops to hand copy and distribute views contrary to the state’s. No modern state, however, could survive and thrive this way, was my view. Here's how I’m reading the tea leaves about the Democratic party as presently staffed and their policies.

Senate Races

Absent enormous voting cheating of the sort we saw in 2020, I think Donald Trump will win. For the first time in decades, more voters have registered as Republicans than Democrats. Then look at what’s happening in four swing states:

Ads have been released that show four Democratic Senate candidates in battleground states either working with former President Donald Trump or agreeing with his messaging as the November election is less than a month away.

Campaign ads for Rep. Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin focus on the Democratic candidates' alliance with Trump or his policies, implying that aligning with the former president may benefit their campaigns more than siding with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

While Trump is behind Harris by 1.4 points according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, he leads the vice president in every battleground state.

Then there’s the Al Smith Catholic Charity dinner.

This is a major event every four years where the candidates roast each other at a dinner, the proceeds of which go to support charities. From its inception until this year, only Walter Mondale skipped it. Kamala Harris skipped it this year, submitting instead a video with an actress who is openly anti-Catholic and which was so insulting to the Catholic Church that in his closing benediction, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan omitted mention of her.

Trump, who chatted and joked amiably with longtime foe Chuck Schumer, was greeted by another foe, Governor Kathy Hochul, and prosecutor Letitia James, whose case against him is in the process of being thrown out on appeal, was in the audience looking less than overly confident. 

Trump got in a number of zingers, but this one, according to videos I watched, seemed to have brought down the house:

 "The Democrats have been telling us Trump's reelection is a threat to democracy. In fact, they were so concerned of this threat, they staged a coup, ousted their democratically elected incumbent, and installed Kamala Harris. 

"Sometimes [all her] prayers take 3.5 years and a George Clooney op-ed."

They all know, and so do we. The effort to save the day by dumping Biden, installing Harris, and keeping the same idiotic policies and advisers has failed. Time to turn the page back to Trump.