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October 2, 2021

When Kamala forgets to cackle under stress…

By Thomas Lifson

Yes, the Kamala cackle is incredibly annoying.  It's one of the reasons why she was the first to drop out of the Democrats' presidential nomination derby.  But it looks as though a semi-successful effort to train her out of it has backfired.

The Democrats briefly thought that maybe, just maybe Kamala Harris would grow out of her repulsiveness and somehow rescue them from the doom that Joe Biden's deteriorating mental faculties portend for the party (and, incidentally, the nation).  Four days ago, The Hill optimistically headlined, "Democrats see Harris as major player in midterms," to which many conservatives (including me) reacted with the Dirty Harry catchphrase, "Go ahead, make my day."

The same website, The Hill, reported Thursday, "Vice President Harris has rebounded in recent weeks, regaining her footing with approval ratings that now stand higher than President Biden's."

That's not too hard to do when Biden's poll ratings are plummeting.  The same article, 19 paragraphs into the body of it, admitted:

To be sure, Harris's polling numbers are not spectacular. The same Gallup poll that showed her with a 49 percent approval rating showed she had a 49 percent disapproval rating.

But it failed to note that Harris's rise in the polls has coincided with relatively little about her appearing in the media.  She hasn't been subjected to "the lid" the way Biden is when he loses all lucidity, but when it comes to Kamala's visibility and popularity, Mies van der Rohe's axiom on modernist architecture applies: "Less is more."

That strategy unexpectedly fell apart Thursday Tuesday when she made what was intended to be an uncontroversial visit to George Mason University to discuss "voting rights," which in DemSpeak means offering maximum opportunities for vote fraud.  It should have been a safe topic for her.  Lots of canned phrases such as "voter suppression" and students at a second-tier state university shouldn't be expected to pose really difficult questions.

But Kamala forgot to cackle when a female student launched an attack on Israel for "ethnic genocide" and claimed she needed to raise the issue because "it affects my life and people I care about's lives."

I am fairly sure Kamala has had advanced behavioral training to suppress her cackle under stress because it is so very annoying and insincere.  But the problem is that there was a function to it: it provided a release of her stress and allowed a little extra time to think over what she should say.  Not that she was capable of using that time wisely.  But lacking that margin, she committed a major blunder and, after nodding along with the student's attack, said:

I'm glad [emphasis added] you did [raise her points]. And again, this is about the fact that your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth, should not be suppressed and it must be heard, right? And one of the things we're fighting for in a democracy, right?

Unity should never be at the expense of telling anyone personally that, for the sake of unity, 'Oh, you be quiet about that thing. You suppress that thing. Let's not deal with that thing.' That's not unity. True unity is everyone in that room has a voice.

The point that you are making about policy that relates to Middle East policy, foreign policy, we still have healthy debates in our country about what is the right path, and nobody's voice should be suppressed on that.

The student said nothing about her views being suppressed, and anyone who observes life on all but a handful of college campuses knows that it is not left-wing attacks on Israel that are suppressed these days, but rather pro-Israel and conservative points in view that face censorship.  So Kamala went off on a tangent.

But she also by nodding along, saying she was "glad" and failing to contest anything the student said while decrying the nonexistent suppression of her views, implicitly endorsed what she said ("your truth").  It wasn't just supporters of Israel who noticed.  Iran's official television service gleefully tweeted:

And that tweet was not the first time Iran's Press TV has used Harris as an ally:

Even though the Democrat party is surrendering to the Jew-haters of the Squad, openly becoming an ally of the mullahs of Iran is a bad look.  That's why they have rolled out a damage control effort.

Maybe they are realizing that a cackle-free Kamala is a real hazard.  That would explain two new hires to her vice presidential staff:

Vice President Kamala Harris has added two crisis communications veterans to her staff to work on long-term planning, after a bumpy first nine months and with the 2022 midterm elections looming in the distance, according to a report on Wednesday.

Lorraine Voles, a crisis communications expert, and Adam Frankel, a speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, worked for Harris during President Biden's transition and are well versed in White House and corporate messaging, the Washington Examiner reported.

Even though they control the media, academia, and government school systems, and most major corporations, it is not fun being a Democrat right now.  Biden and Pelosi are falling apart and may be "finished," but the idea of Harris being an improvement on Biden should he resign or be twenty-fifthed out of office is turning out to be a fantasy.

I'd suggest that they bring back the cackle, but even Democrats aren't dumb enough to fall for that.

Photo credit: C-SPAN video screen grab (cropped).

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