Two weeks past the Democratic convention, and already the odd couple that emerged from it, Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, are not exactly a well unified, carefully coordinated team.

Already they are campaigning at cross-purposes.

A couple days ago, Joe Biden woke up and smelled the coffee, officially declaring his opposition to the leftist riots engulfing America's blue cities.  This followed the absolute radio silence of the Democrats about the matter at their convention.

According to Fox News:

"Needless violence won’t heal us," Biden tweeted on Wednesday in response to the riots that erupted over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man. "We need to end the violence -- and peacefully come together to demand justice."

In that case, it appeared that the violence he was condemning was the police action against sex crimes suspect Jacob Blake, so out came another from him:

In an interview with MSNBC Thursday, Biden said again that "I condemn violence in any form, whether it's looting or whatever it is."

And for good measure, he argued that Trump did it:

"[Trump] views this as a political benefit to him," Biden argued in an interview on MSNBC. "He's rooting for more violence, not less. ... If we want to end where we are now, we've got to end his tenure as president."

Harris, by contrast, had another tack:

Kamala Harris says that the riots are not going to stop, ever, and to BEWARE. With a smile on her face. pic.twitter.com/xkwAUOMJcL

— рќ•”hiрќ“Ѓрќ“Ѓiає–а»ђiЛў (@chiIIum) August 27, 2020

Like most leftists, she was cheering the riots.  They'll never, never, never, never stop (diabolical cackle).

So the message from the pair of them was that the riots are bad and need to stop, but they're never going to stop (cue witch's cackle).  Anything Joe says to stop them is going to go ignored, because Kamala is in the saddle.

You'd think a professional presidential campaign would be unified enough to get its messaging straight.  But the messaging is not straight — it's contradictory, crossed wires, Kamala apparently not getting the memo.

Harris is maintaining the older Democratic position that riots are great, just a little past-due social justice, a quest for bread, and other nonsense.  Harris somehow is close enough to the riot-American community to know that the riots are never going to stop, not on her watch, not on Joe's watch, and certainly not on Trump's watch, and her smile tells us she's happy about it.  And she was raising money for rioters earlier:

Kamala Harris helped violent rioters in Minnesota get out of jail to do more damage.

Don't believe her when she says she "condemns the violence"—look at her record, not her words. https://t.co/lL2aYjxPZA

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) August 31, 2020

Biden, on the other hand, has read the polls and immediately changed his position to not liking the riots and calling for them to stop, gaslighting us to think he, too, is against them, as if nobody had ever watched that Democratic convention and noted the silence and consent.

It's pretty early in the campaign to veer off into cross purposes this pronounced.  This pair isn't talking to each other.  They're just going off on their own, each doing what seems logical to bring in votes.  That these stances don't match in the least suggests a campaign in disarray.  Dollars to donuts, it gets worse as November approaches. 

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of image by Chris RubberDragon via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 and public domain logo.