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February 21, 2022

Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris brings it to Munich

By Monica Showalter

With little to do in the Biden administration, Kamala Harris has taken now five trips abroad — embarrassing herself and her country across the globe.

Her to-do in Munich, over the Ukraine issue, in terms of fecklessness, gave Neville Chamberlain a run for his money.

Start with this, which she really said:

White House transcript is here.

C-SPAN video is here:

So apparently, she's just noticed that Ukraine has a problem, and the U.S. is all over it, coming to Europe to solve it.  What's more, she apparently thinks the Europeans, who have already held significant talks with Vladimir Putin over the matter, haven't really been paying attention.

Is this a self-absorbed fool who's just starting to do her "homework"?  Apparently, she just looked up from her Instagramming and noticed that Ukraine is "serious" and now is announcing it, in case anyone at that conference or in the press dispatched to cover it didn't know.

It sounds like something a dim Hollywood figure would say — Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Meghan Markle, Joy Behar, take your pick.  Don't forget that a few weeks ago, based on leaks from disgusted staff, Kamala became rather famous for not doing "her homework" even when her staff spoon-fed it to her.

"Staffers who worked for Harris before she was vice president said one consistent problem was that Harris would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared," the Washington Post reports.

One former staffer told the paper, "It's clear that you're not working with somebody who is willing to do the prep and the work. With Kamala, you have to put up with a constant amount of soul-destroying criticism and also her own lack of confidence. So you're constantly sort of propping up a bully, and it's not really clear why."

This sounds like one of those moments.

She was remarkably fact-challenged, not exactly doing her homework on how many conflicts have hit the European continent since World War II, claiming that the place was always at peace.  

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">&gt; When you&#39;ve never heard of Yugoslavia <a href="https://t.co/1KPkkyppjW">https://t.co/1KPkkyppjW</a></p>&mdash; Jack Posobiec рџ‡єрџ‡ё (@JackPosobiec) <a href="https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1495537024287313922?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 20, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Whatevs, Kam.

There also was this whopper:

Citing the NATO principle that an attack on one is an attack on all, she added, "Let me be clear: America's commitment to Article 5 is ironclad. This commitment is sacrosanct to me, to President Biden, and to our entire nation."

Memo to Kamala: Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

It gets worse.

Here she is, volunteering us for inflation duty, declaring that the American people will heroically swallow even higher inflation than we already have to defend Ukraine's borders.

Coming from someone who refuses to defend America's borders and who, in fact, enables the ongoing open-border policies through her corporate initiatives, but also because she refuses to talk to anyone who isn't all in for open borders, this is a little rich.  It can't be going unnoticed in Europe, and you can probably imagine that Putin's propaganda shop is in brainstorming right now as to how to best use this.

It isn't even a factual analysis, given that all inflation, including that which is found in the U.S., is monetary-driven, brought on by the Fed's printing of too much money.  As Steve Hanke and John Greenwood, two serious monetary economists who specialize in the study of inflation, wrote last October, "the monetary bathtub is overflowing."  They wrote that back when the Bidenites were calling inflation "transitory" and predicted with 100% accuracy what was to follow.

Now we are supposed to bravely take the inflation hit, which, as Hanke would say, is baked in the cake, as some kind of brave gesture to defeat Putin, which is pretty convenient for the Biden-Harris administration, which created the inflation in the first place.

Imagine what the Europeans who understand what inflation is were thinking.  And let's not go there as to what the American people will be thinking as inflation soars higher.

Amateur hour, though, continued in quite a disturbing way.  Harris, it turns out, was there for show, to "burnish" her foreign policy credentials, given that she's spent most of her life as a giggle-girl partying hearty in search of the next Willie Brown.  It's all about her political ambition, and she's fallen on her face a lot this year, so now she's having another go for the cameras.

One problem: The work is being done by the Big Boys elsewhere, and Harris is not coordinating with them.  This report from the Washington Post is damning:

"The vice president and Secretary Blinken have talked to each other here, but they're pursuing separate schedules and their teams are not closely coordinated," said one American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. "You could argue it's a divide-and-conquer strategy, but that's far-fetched. The Harris stop is about burnishing her political credentials as a leader in the middle of a crisis."

Apparently, they don't talk to each other.

Harris and Blinken have seldom been in the same building, let alone the same room, and except for a private confab Friday morning, their schedules have rarely overlapped.

There also was this humiliating detail:

Few diplomats have missed the fact that while Harris was long scheduled to attend the conference, Blinken's attendance was confirmed at the last minute. The White House rejected the suggestion that he was being dispatched to shore up the less-seasoned Harris.

"I don’t think there’s any plans to limit or reduce the vice president’s role at the Munich Security Conference or … on the global stage," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.

Really?  This isn't the first big meeting where Harris has been kicked to the curb as the Big People got together to talk shop.  Back in September, she announced a big meeting of heavyweights on root causes of illegal migration, to be held in Mexico City, and that meeting happened...without Harris to get underfoot.

This is pretty close to the same pattern, except that Harris was there this time to make speeches and do handshakes — apparently, it was too well known that she would be going, so there was no getting rid of her.  But like high school adolescents, the Biden inner circle makes sure she can't create too many problems for them as they get the work done.

It's no wonder.

Look again at the kinds of remarks Harris makes — total amateur hour ignorance.  All anyone has to do is let Harris open her mouth, and the sense that she's in over her head is pretty obvious.

Image: Screen shot from MSNBC video via YouTube.

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