The selling of Kamala: Part II – the Obamas help create the narrative at the DNC

The New Neo Posted on by

[You can find Part I of “The Selling of Kamala” here.]

At the DNC they’re trying to perform an amazing sleight of hand that’s supposed to get people to believe that two plus two equals five. Virtually every sentient being in the US is aware that Kamala Harris has been the vice president for the last three and a half years – that is, for the duration of the entire Biden administration so far – and so it takes some doing to divorce her from responsibility for those years. But the Democrats know it’s necessary for them to perform this piece of revisionist history.

Enter the master Democrat magician: Barack Obama. He said many things last night at the convention. But among them was this:

“We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse,” [Obama] said. “America is ready for a new chapter. America is ready for a better story. We are ready for a President Kamala Harris.

When Obama refers to years of “bluster and bumbling and chaos,” we on the right might immediately perceive that as an excellent description of the Biden administration’s record, particularly on the economy and the Afghanistan withdrawal. But the right is not Obama’s target audience. He isn’t trying to conjure up that image except as a description of the Trump years for his base, although he’s probably also trying to appeal to the independent voters who see Trump as a problem and have bought much of the MSM/Democrat description of him.

But even more striking to my mind is Obama’s use of metaphors of narrative, of both movies and books. A sequel. A new chapter. A new story. It’s a reliance on what author Milan Kundera called “imagology” in his book Immortality [emphasis mine]:

For example, communists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

The Democrats are banking on the fact that for the majority of Americans imagology will be stronger than reality. The actual story of the moment is not a “story” at all, it’s the reality of what Americans are experiencing: inflation, wars, crime, homelessness, unchecked illegal immigration, mental illness, addiction. And another reality is that Democrats have been in power for nearly four years, and the number two person who’s been in power during that time has been none other than Kamala Harris. To pretend otherwise is definitely to create a story – a fiction. But the Democrats are counting on voters wanting that story to be true, and desiring so very much for the story to be true that they believe it rather than their own lying eyes.

This emphasis on stories and narratives – and empty vague rhetoric – was one of the first things I ever noticed about Obama. And whenever things got rough during his presidency, pundits and politicians who supported him would talk about how the Democrats just hadn’t gotten their narrative out to the public properly. All failures were treated as failures to communicate rather than actual failures in the real world.

I’m in awe of how sickeningly brilliant and transparently emotional the current Democrat approach to Kamala Harris’ candidacy and record is. There’s no pretense of talking to the whole country; the goal is to super-energize the Democrats’ base and pull in a certain percentage of the middle (we’ll leave aside for now the question of whether fraud will be involved as well). The idea is not just to regard the Trump years as a strange yet temporary halt to the progress the Democrats have made; it is also to forget the reality (as opposed to the revisionist narrative) of the Biden years, even though Kamala Harris is practically an incumbent who is deeply connected to the Biden administration.

It’s almost a form of hypnosis, a willed amnesia.

Reading about it is enough to remind me of the deep duplicity of the Obama years, as well as what was to me the inexplicable worship of the man. As of this moment, I see that I’ve written 1,722 posts on Obama and this will be the 1,723rd. And yet his influence on this country and the world has been so large that the high number of posts doesn’t seem excessive. Reading about his speech reminds me how he managed to make so many people believe that his sonorous voice and the slogans of hope and change would lead to something wonderful, a quasi-spiritual awakening and finally – finally! – the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

And now they’re singing that old song, eight years later, in order to elect a person incredibly ill-suited to convey the magic, a magic I never could perceive but which I know affected many people so deeply that they must be nostalgic for it.

Or maybe, reading between the lines, the Democrat listeners understand that Kamala Harris will only be the figurehead, much like royalty in Britain, and that the real power will remain in the Obamas. And if so, that’s perfectly fine with most Democrats.

About those new jobs created by the Biden-Harris administration

The New Neo Posted on by

On this administration’s jobs creation:

Even the NY Times covered the story, but in a very low-key “not much to see here” way, and without mentioning either Biden or Harris at all.

Was this a case of outright deception on the part of the admininistration?:

Although it’s impossible to know whether the BLS’s misstatement of employment data was intentional or simply an error, given the drastic lengths to which Democrats have already gone to keep Trump out of the White House — the 2016 Russian collusion hoax, two Trump impeachments, the October 2020 letter signed by 51 former intelligence community officials declaring the Hunter Biden laptop story had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign, the government’s insistence that the COVID-19 lab leak theory was a conspiracy, four bogus Trump indictments, two spurious civil lawsuits in New York, concerted efforts to remove Trump’s name from the ballot in several blue states, and the Democrats’ extraordinary efforts to hide Biden’s deteriorating cognitive health — it’s become more and more difficult to trust this administration.

I would say that long ago it became impossible to trust this administration. Then again, you can also trust them to be incompetent as well as to lie.

From Churchill:

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Those “experts” rate the presidents

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting piece by Robert Graboyes, who calls attention to this NY Times article from last February which discussed a poll taken at the end of 2023, in which 154 political scientists ranked the U.S. presidents in terms of greatness. The Times article had the following title and subtitle:

Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last: President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.

Let that sink in: Biden was ranked as the fourteenth greatest president in our nation’s history, mostly for the supreme feat of keeping Trump from getting a second term. Meanwhile, Trump was dead last on the same list – the least great president ever, in their opinion.

And these are professors engaged in molding the minds of our young people. Is it any wonder we’re in big trouble?

Here are some of the details of the poll:

Respondents included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics, as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses. 525 respondents were invited to participate, and 154 usable responses were received, yielding a 29.3% response rate.

Hmmm; not the greatest response rate. Perhaps those with a bone to pick were most motivated to fill in the form:

… Abraham Lincoln again tops the list (95.03 average), followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90.32), Teddy Roosevelt (78.58), Thomas Jefferson (77.53), Harry Truman (75.34), Barack Obama (73.8), and Dwight Eisenhower (73.73).
The most notable changes in this ordering are Franklin Delano Roosevelt moving up to #2 from the third spot last year, and Dwight Eisenhower falling back to #8 from #6 last year. The bottom of the rankings is also relatively stable. Donald Trump rates lowest (10.92), behind James Buchanan (16.71), Andrew Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6), William Henry Harrison (26.01), and
Warren Harding (27.76).

That tells you more about academia than it does about presidents. In no universe – even one composed of Democrats – should Obama be number seven, and in no universe should Trump be last.

One of the strangest and most depressing things about the survey is that, when the results were broken down by the politics of the respondents, there wasn’t all that much difference between most of the rankings from self-reported conservatives versus self-reported liberals. For example, Obama was rated almost as highly by Republicans as by Democrats, and by conservatives as by liberals. Go figure. And Trump was rated almost as low by all those groups, although the difference between left and right was a little greater for Trump. But he was rated universally very low by all political persuasions.

Does this mean that most college professors who call themselves “conservatives” or “Republicans” are of the NeverTrumper variety? Probably. Academia is a club of sorts, and it tends to be a snobbish one at that. Or perhaps those who might disagree with the low assessments of Trump were among the ones who didn’t return the survey.

The number of respondents on the right was especially small. Here are the figures:

Democrats – 95
Republicans – 15
Independents/Others – 44
Liberals – 98
Conservatives – 20
Moderates – 36

From Graboyes:

Trump is certainly and intentionally a polarizing character—a provocateur. But how does one justify 170 votes for Trump as “Most Polarizing,” versus only 33 votes for Abraham Lincoln? Inexplicably, Lincoln also received 60 votes for “Least Polarizing” president.

I think I might be able to explain the contradiction in the “polarizing” numbers for Lincoln. They make some sense if the group rating him most polarizing was speaking about opinions of Lincoln in Lincoln’s own time, and the group rating him least polarizing was speaking about opinions of Lincoln in recent times.

Biden got only 36 votes for “most polarizing” – and he is in fact extremely polarizing.

This is academia today.

At the DNC: buh-bye, Joe, don’t let the door hit you on the way out

The New Neo Posted on by

I didn’t watch the DNC last night, but apparently the Democrats gave Biden the honor of addressing the crowd. That was rather magnanimous of them, considering he’s still the president and that he had won the primaries and was their designated nominee for 2024 until just a short while ago.

Someone also scheduled Biden’s speech for 11:30 PM, which seems exquisitely cruel considering that he tends to fade far earlier than that.

I forget what article I read it in, but a pundit on the right described the speech as Joe delivering his own eulogy. He had to pretend that all of this was just fine with him – that it was his own choice, really, to suddenly give up the office he’d pursued for so many decades, finally achieved, and had clung to tenaciously right up to the point when he was forced to let it go.

Here’s a description of the speech:

If the Harris campaign had any hopes that Joe would let them get distance from his record, they were dashed. “When I say we I mean Kamala and me,” he emphasized, reminding voters that there’s no turning the page by voting for Harris.

Biden tried to play the old hits, but they ring hollow now. He talked about Charlottesville and how he claims Trump as president “emboldened” and praised anti-Semites. “Hate has no safe harbor” in America, he says. But we saw how anti-Semites have safe harbors – literal encampments on college campuses, immune from the law – in Joe Biden’s America. Biden even said of the pro-Hamas protestors, “Those protesters out in the street. They’ve got a point.”

It’s sadly appropriate that Biden invoked ye olde Charlottesville hoax at this point, since that’s the way he kicked off his 2020 campaign as well. So the Charlotteville hoax is a bookend to his campaigns. And at the same time that we see Biden’s mendacity about what Trump meant by the phrase, we see his deep hypocrisy when he sympathized with the “point” of the anti-Israel “demonstrators,” which he mischaracterized as wanting the killings of innocents on both sides to end.

And the following just drips with stagy falseness:

Of course, the pretense of one big happy family had to be maintained. Biden denied that he was angry at the Democrats who forced him off the ticket. Nancy Pelosi stood in the front row holding a “We Love Joe” sign, just weeks after wielding the knife. She came to bury Joe, not to praise him.

What a travesty.

Meanwhile, House Republicans have issued their report on Biden’s corruption, which comes a mite too late for anyone to care. Not that more than half the nation would have cared anyway, even if Joe were running again. Andrew C. McCarthy writes:

It is an important summary of the Biden Family Business, as much accountability as the public can expect given the limitations of congressional investigations that are stonewalled by an incumbent administration.

It is, moreover, a useful record of that stonewalling — very much including the corruption of the Justice Department — which connects the current Biden administration with the tireless self-dealing of Biden’s career, culminating in his term as vice president. …

Comer’s committee traces the money trail from Hunter, to Joe’s brother Jim, to Joe Biden himself.

All of this monetization of Joe Biden’s political power should be part of the criminal tax trial Hunter faces in about two weeks.

Why isn’t it? Because the Biden-Harris Justice Department buried it.

Of course they did. Integrity is in short supply these days.

And meanwhile, from a speech by Tim Walz at the DNC delegates’ breakfast yesterday:

We get an opportunity tonight to say a thank you to the best president of my lifetime that I’ve been able to witness, to someone who’s delivered time and time again, someone who made the selfless act of handing that torch to an incredible leader.

You need a strong stomach to listen to that sort of thing, especially while eating.

A must-see Caroline Glick video

The New Neo Posted on by

Caroline Glick makes it crystal clear why no supporter of Israel should ever vote for Kamala Harris

By the way – when the Allies fought WWII, did they start out having a plan for “the day after”? I don’t think so. The Marshall Plan was proposed in 1947 and implemented in 1948.

Here’s another great Glick interview:

The Democratic National Convention began today

The New Neo Posted on by

I won’t be watching. Speeches – particularly from the left, but speeches in general – are not my cup of tea. I’m not a glutton for punishment, although I usually watch some excerpts.

But there’s plenty of coverage all over the place – for example, this, this, this, this, this, and this. You can talk about any of it – or anything about the convention – in this thread.

A lot of people have been reminiscing about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, marked by violence in the streets, the crackdown by police, and the demonstrators’ chant of “the whole world is watching.” I recall being one of those people watching, too. I also remember what a strange year it was, because Lyndon Johnson had said he wasn’t running, and that left the field open for Hubert Humphrey to be nominated.

And I was distracted by stress in my personal life, although that stress was caused by the political. I had just been on the west coast saying goodbye to my boyfriend, who was being shipped out to Vietnam (I’ve written about that at length in this post). I had stayed out west for a big wedding, and by the time of the Democratic Convention I’d only been back home for a few days. So the whole time was sad and frightening for me for a host of reasons.

The unpromising hostage negotiations

The New Neo Posted on by

The hostage negotiations are great PR for the murderers of Hamas, as is the constant understandable pressure from many of the Israeli hostage families on the Israeli government. But Sinwar and the others have no intention of capitulating to any deal unless it involves their empowerment and continuation, basically an Israeli surrender. After all, they learned long ago up close and personal – Sinwar himself was freed from an Israeli prison in 2011 as part of the Shalit exchange – what extraordinarily lopsided deals Israel was willing to make with them in the past.

After releasing some prisoners in order to get many of the more vulnerable hostages back, Israel has not made any more deals and refuses to accede to Hamas’ unreasonable demands. It seems to me that’s a given; they really can’t afford to do so, or the whole war will have been in vain.

But Biden and Blinken and the rest of the crew in the current administration keep pretending that there is some sort of good faith cooperation on the part of Hamas, and that the deals negotiated on their behalf by parties such as Egypt and Qatar will be accepted by Sinwar, and that Israel could afford to give up what Hamas demands. It’s a charade that we’ve seen them go through many times. My guess is that the administration would dearly love for a deal to be made at any price, so it can claim negotiating victory and “peace for our time.” The MSM cooperates and writes optimistic pieces about how the deal is practically done, really in the bag – and then there’s the announcement that alas, it fell through again.

These cycles repeat and repeat like Lucy and the football. But Hamas has no intention of giving up whatever hostages might still be alive – if they even know who really is alive at this point – for anything short of an end to the war. That’s why Hamas took the hostages in the first place – that, and sadism. Blaming Israel for any of this is preposterous, and yet so many do.

Here’s the latest:

The Hamas terror group published an official statement on Sunday evening in which it rejected the terms for a hostage release-ceasefire deal that were discussed in Doha on Thursday and Friday, and blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for putting up new obstacles in the talks.

Netanyahu, for his part, reportedly told cabinet ministers earlier on Sunday that he was pessimistic about the chances for a deal, especially given that Israel had been effectively negotiating with mediating countries rather than with Hamas, which refused to send a delegation to the latest round of talks.

“The chances are not high,” the Kan public broadcaster quoted Netanyahu as telling ministers.

You can say that again.

Here’s Blinken on the subject:

Speaking ahead of meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog in Tel Aviv, Blinken said, “This is a decisive moment, probably the best, maybe the last opportunity to get the hostages home, to get a ceasefire, and to put everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security.”

“I’m here as part of an intensive diplomatic effort on President Biden’s instructions to try to get this agreement to the line, and ultimately over the line. It’s time for it to get done,” he continued.

It’s a fiction that any deal with Hamas would get “everyone on a better path to enduring peace and security.” That’s not what Hamas wants – except the “peace” of ending the Israeli state and taking over the whole region, as well as Islam ultimately triumphing in the rest of the world.

Cornhead goes to a Walz rally so you don’t have to

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s his report. An excerpt:

The crowd was at least 75% female. That’s the largest percentage I have ever seen over the years in attending Democrat events. On top of that, at least half the people were unionized teachers who cheered when asked if they were teachers. For Tim Walz and his wife, both of their parents were teachers and all but two siblings are. It’s a union family. At one point Walz threw out the canard about how the GOP is banning books. The Dems are okay with pornography in grade school libraries, doncha know. …

This same former student said, “I can’t wait for the rest of the country to get to know this guy.” Me too. And that’s why I shouted out a question, “Why did you let the Twin Cities burn?” I know Walz heard me, but he didn’t answer. A woman in my row told me to shut up. After the rally, I told her that two people died in the riots and there was at least $500 million in property damage. But she didn’t want to hear of it. And her husband started screaming at me about acting like an adult instead of a child. The thing of it is, adults should make decisions based upon facts and reality and that means hearing inconvenient truths about public safety under Governor Walz.

Meet violinist Adrian Anantawan, who was born without a right hand

The New Neo Posted on by

There are some stories that are simply inspiring, and testaments to the human will. The life of Canadian violinist Adrian Anantawan is one such story. He was born with no right hand; you can find a lot of information and many videos of his playing at the website I just linked.

Here’s a good introduction, though:

And another slightly longer talk and demo:

When he was born, I doubt his parents thought of Anantawan as a future violinist. And yet I would imagine that, once he made the choice to start the violin and then kept going, it was at least in part due to their encouragement. Then again, he may have been born not only with no right hand but also with a temperament that gave him the determination to persevere and ultimately succeed at something he loved very much.

A personal note: I have a friend with a similar disability, acquired in utero for a similar reason. She had surgery as a child to take off a couple of her toes and fashion them into a few rudimentary fingers. The amazing thing about her is that most people don’t even notice. She has developed various techniques for hiding her hands, and she is very animated in a way that means that people focus mostly on her face. She’s also is able to do most ordinary things with her hands – although she doesn’t play the violin.