Kamala Harris and Barack Obama: the parallels and the differences

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “TommyJay” writes:

I must say, Kamala is the emptiest of empty suits. She must be one of the most synthetically, media manufactured politicians ever.

I watched a documentary recently about Lou Pearlman and the rise of the boy bands like NSync and the Back Street Boys. Lots of grist in there, and yes those bands were manufactured after a fashion, but they actually worked pretty hard to bring their musical talents up to some decent level.

Has Kamala ever worked hard at her vocations? I am doubtful.

From the mid-twentieth century on, it’s been unusual for anyone to have arrived at the position of nominee of a major US party for the presidency without having been tested in the crucible of the primaries and had success. But one of Harris’ unique qualities is that the one time she entered the presidential primaries – 2020 – she failed miserably and quit very early. And yet here she is in 2024, the Democrats’ presidential nominee.

That’s one obvious difference between Harris and Obama right there: he won the primary battle in 2008. And although the superdelegates were part of his hard-fought victory over Hillary Clinton, he nevertheless had broad appeal among rank-and-file Democrats. Biden comes closer to having been selected-not-elected as the nominee in 2020, because strong competition from far-left Sanders caused Democrat powers-that-be to convince everyone other than Biden to drop out. But at least there was a contest, however rigged, and Biden won primary votes. Kamala never did, not in 2020 and not in 2024.

However, it struck me quite some time ago that Harris has some remarkable similarities to Obama although there are some strong differences. Here are a few of the similarities:

– Both are of mixed race, although Obama is one-half black and one-half white and Harris is about a quarter black, a quarter white, and half Indian.
– Their black parents are their fathers.
– Their fathers are not African-American, but African (Obama) and Jamaican (Harris).
– Each had two – count em, two – parents with PhDs. [see * below]
– Their mothers were researchers.
– Both mothers died of cancer, although Harris’ mother was 70 and Obama’s mother was 52.
– Their fathers were both professors of economics, described as socialists.
– Both were (and for Harris, are) estranged from their fathers. Obama’s estrangement was more complete, since his father had almost nothing to do with Obama as he was growing up.
– Both lived a large chunk of their formative years in foreign countries – Obama in Indonesia and Harris in Montreal, Canada.
– Both have foreign first names.
– Both had parents who divorced.
– Both had parents who met at a university.
– Both are connected closely to Joe Biden. Biden was Obama’s VP and Harris was Biden’s VP.
– Both were raised in parts of the US that are deep blue.
– Both are lawyers.

As for differences, Obama married at a much younger age – 31 – and had biological children, whereas Harris didn’t marry until she was nearly 50 years old and she has stepchildren. Obama’s political career had been legislative both at the state (Illinois) and federal level up until he became president, whereas Harris worked as a lawyer, DA in San Francisco, and AG in California, before she too became a senator. Obama is tall with a deep sonorous voice whereas Harris is relatively short and her voice is somewhat grating. They project very different personalities: Obama calm and measured and Harris more excited and emotional with a strange laugh.

But one of the most dramatic and least talked-about similarities between the two is the role that mentors played in their political rise. Each got their start in large cities long dominated by Democrat machine politics. And each became (for different reasons) the protege of a powerful black politician at the state level, an experienced older man who promoted them and was responsible for their early prominence at the state level. For Kamala Harris it was Willie Brown, a married man separated from his wife, thirty years her senior, with whom she had an affair in the 1990s that ended in 1995. Brown was speaker of the California State Assembly during that time, a position of power, and later became the mayor of San Francisco from 1996 to 2004. And when I say “position of power,” I mean it:

Brown’s long service in the Assembly and political connections, his strong negotiation skills, and the Assembly’s tenure system for leadership appointments combined to give Brown nearly complete control over the California legislature by the time he became Assembly Speaker. According to The New York Times, Brown became one of the country’s most powerful state legislators. He nicknamed himself the “Ayatollah of the Assembly”.

Brown was also a great fundraiser and had a huge network of deep-pocketed donors on which to draw. More:

Brown had a reputation in the Assembly for his ability to manage people. Republican State Senator Ken Maddy of Fresno noted Brown’s ability to “size up the situation and create, sometimes on the spot, a winning strategy.” According to Hobson, “He was a brilliant daycare operator. … He knew exactly how to hold the hand of his Assembly members. He dominated California politics like no other politician in the history of the state”.

Obviously an extremely talented and savvy politician. Brown was directly responsible for Harris’ ascendance in the political sphere:

Brown’s romantic relationship with Alameda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris preceded his appointment of Harris to two California state commissions in the mid 1990s. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission patronage positions. When the appointments became a political issue in Harris’s 2003 race for District Attorney, she responded: “Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work”.

But Brown’s influence didn’t stop there:

As mayor of San Francisco in 2003, Brown was supportive of her district attorney campaign although they were no longer dating. Critics—including her opponents—were bemoaning cronyism at City Hall. …

At the start of the race [for San Francisco DA], Harris did not appear likely to advance to the runoff. In her own campaign’s initial polls, she stood at about 6 percentage points. “She was unknown by a vast majority of voters,” said Mark Leno, a friend of Harris who was then a state assemblyman organizing her campaign. …

[One of her opponents] had thought being a good prosecutor was enough to win the election, calling himself “totally naive” and adding, “Kamala, she had connections to the mayor, which gave her access to a lot of money people up in Pacific Heights.” …

Harris raised money aggressively. She raked in more than $100,000 before December 2002. By the end of the campaign, she had raised and spent money so prolifically that the city’s ethics commission found Harris violated a pledge not to exceed a voluntary $211,000 spending cap. The Harris campaign apologized and said it was a misunderstanding, according to the Chronicle. She used the money to bombard voters with mail touting her progressive credentials.

Yet by Labor Day of 2003, Harris was still polling between 6 percentage points and 8 points.

Then the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed her. I have no idea whether Brown was involved with that, but he was the mayor at the time and I have a strong suspicion he had a large hand in the endorsement. Harris then moved up in the polls but remained behind. Later, that same opponent sent mailers accusing her of only getting where she was because of her affair with Brown, and that apparently backfired and she ended up winning the 3-way election. Her later runs for California AG and then senator were helped along by many endorsements from powerful Democrats in the state, where winning the Democratic primary is generally equal to winning the election.

You know the rest – how poorly she did in 2020 on the national stage. And yet, in the end, powerful Democrats chose her as vice president in 2020 despite her failure in the primaries. I can’t think of another totally failed candidate chosen for the post because of identity politics. And that is part of her problem today – her lack of experience in fielding difficult questions and her lack of appeal to a national audience.

Obama’s Illinois mentor was named Emil Jones, and just like Willie Brown he was black and a long-term politician at the state level. Jones became President of the Illinois Senate from 2003 to 2009. Thirty years separated Harris and Brown’s ages, and Obama and Jones were twenty-five years apart. No, he and Obama were not romantically involved, but early on Jones recognized Obama’s potential and used his influence to help him.

I’ve written at length (2015) about the assistance Jones gave to the ambitious Obama when the latter was in the state senate. Here’s an excerpt [unfortunately, some of the links there are now dead]:

If you want to learn a lot about the sort of operator Obama was back in his early political days in Chicago, you’d do well to read this, which also goes into the way that Emil Jones greased the skids for Obama by handing him legislation on a silver platter, and how angry Obama got when anyone suggested he hadn’t accomplished this on his own. And that article I just linked was written by an Obama admirer; I can only imagine what detractors would have written. This information was in the public domain prior to the 2008 election; wonder why so few people have heard of this stuff?

Or how about this, which was also written before the 2008 election and, although something of a puff piece, still contains some clues to Obama’s rise and how he engineered it with Jones’ help and his own cold-blooded ambition. After the Democrats finally won control of the Illinois state legislature after years in the wilderness of Republican domination, Obama went to the newly-minted Majority Leader Emil Jones (whom he had carefully cultivated even before he was elevated to that position) with a proposition:

“…[Obama] went to see Jones with a big idea. By that point the two men had known each other for the better part of 20 years, but theirs had not always been an easy relationship. They had first met in the mid-1980s, when Obama, as a community organizer on the far South Side, had seen Jones as an ‘old ward heeler’…

“Jones, a chain-smoking, gravelly voiced, unvarnished throwback to the era of the old Daley machine, was wary of Obama, a freshly minted agitator from Columbia University. Obama and other community activists ‘were in-your-face types” [said Jones to the reporter]. “I happened to see them out there one day. And I told them, I said, ‘You don’t gotta be outside. Come on in the office.’

“A friendship was born. A decade later, after returning to Chicago with a law degree and the mantle of first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama won his own state-senate seat, taking the place of an incumbent [Alice Palmer] who had decided to run for Congress, placed a distant third in the Democratic primary, changed her mind, and – with Jones’s help – tried to run for her old seat after all. Obama’s team, in a move as bold as it was adroit, challenged her nominating petitions and managed to keep her name off the ballot.”

Let’s pause for a minute to understand what was happening. Obama had met Jones before he even went to Harvard Law, and at first Jones and Obama were mutually distrustful but then struck up a friendship. But during Obama’s first run for office years later, Obama pulled a really nasty but very effective power move on Jones’ favored candidate, Alice Palmer, and won. This (as I read in more detail in another article that unfortunately I can’t seem to locate right now) really impressed Jones and made him realize that Obama was no soft law school prof but one of the more hardened and ruthless pols around, even though he was just beginning in the trade. The Alice Palmer gambit was what I call Obama’s Godfather move, and Jones understood that he was in the presence of a man with certain gifts: the ability to look like a nice guy and yet who had no reluctance to mow people down, even former friends and mentors, when he needed to do so to get ahead.

To continue:

“Obama arrived in Springfield and told Jones, then the minority leader, that he wanted to ‘work hard.’ He promptly became Jones’s point person on a number of tricky issues, including ethics reform. Now, with Jones elevated to the senate presidency, Obama was approaching him with a cold-eyed proposal.

“‘After I was elected president, in 2003, he came to see me, a couple months later,’ Jones recalled, relishing the tale. ‘And he said to me, he said, You’re the senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er.’ Jones stretched out the word, as if savoring the pleasure of it, and his voice became very quiet as he continued: ‘And I told Barack, You think I got a lot of pow-er now?, and he said, Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er. And I said, What kind of pow-er do I have? He said, You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!’ Jones let out a soft, smoky laugh. ‘I said to Barack, I said, That sounds good! I said, I haven’t even thought of that. I said, Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?, and he said, Yeah. Me.’

“Jones let the words hang for a moment, and then went on. ‘The most interesting conversation. And so I said to him, Let me think about this.’ Obama knew that Jones’s support could single-handedly freeze the discretion of other powerful politicians in the state, and put endorsements of possible rivals on ice. ‘We met a little later that day, and I said, That sounds good. Let’s go for it.'”

Jones gave legislation to Obama that other people had worked on for years, and that (as this article I linked previously made clear) frustrated and angered a lot of legislators who had done the actual work on the bills and had to watch as Obama got the glory instead of them. Obama, the freshman, knew exactly how to work Jones, who’d been doing this for years, and Jones knew a fellow master manipulator of power when he saw one.

Todd Purdum, author of this Vanity Fair piece, is an admirer of Obama. But he noticed something important about how Obama got to the top, and how his ability to hide his ruthless nature (Purdum calls it Obama’s “toughness”) behind a mild facade helped him get there and get there fast:

“The rare talent is to wear ambition lightly, and to allow toughness to be taken for granted. Obama’s life and career suggest he has that talent – or at least that gift. He long ago decided that he had a chance to make something extraordinary of himself. With a calculating consistency that may not always have been apparent to others, or even sometimes to himself, he set out to do just that. His half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, a schoolteacher in Hawaii, says simply, ‘He’s a very cool customer.'”

Obama didn’t appear to the public to be ruthless, but I believe he was and still is. He certainly was part of the coup against Joe Biden. And Kamala? How ruthless is she? She is so fake in her presentation that it’s hard to tell much about the real Kamala Harris, including how much of a role she might have played in Biden’s ouster.

* [NOTE: Commenter “Gringo” points out that according to Wiki, Obama’s father “was forced to leave his PhD program at Harvard University in May 1964 because of administrators’ concerns over his finances and personal life, including uncertainty over the number of wives he had, but he received an M.A. in economics from Harvard in 1965.”]

More on Sinwar and the six slain hostages

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s unclear how the information in this article was obtained, but it seems to have been from a combination of: testimony from the hostages who were released or rescued previously, evidence collected by the IDF and analyzed scientifically, and answers that captured Hamas terrorists have given when interrogated. There also might have been electronic eavesdropping and even spies or informants in the Hamas camp or among other Gazans.

At any rate, here’s some of what is claimed to have been the case:

According to the report, the six captives — Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Ori Danino, Alex Lobanov, Carmel Gat, and Almog Sarusi — were kept further north in Gaza in the first month of the war …

In November, as part of the weeklong ceasefire-hostage deal with Hamas that saw the release of 105 civilian hostages, Israel agreed not to carry out surveillance in the territory during specified hours, while the truce lasted. During that time, the terror group transported some remaining hostages to new locations, the report said — including to Rafah, where the IDF had not yet entered.

Rafah is the place where Biden and most of the international community pressured Israel not to enter.

More:

Hamas moved the six hostages to a tunnel three stories (20 meters, or 65.6 feet) belowground, the report said. The hostages’ captors reportedly resided in a building aboveground, with a shaft leading down to the captives.

The six Israelis were apparently kept in this tunnel system the entire remainder of their lives, subsiding mostly on energy bars, according to the report.

The hostages were placed in the corridor where they would eventually be killed — which was even harder to reach and had worse conditions than where they’d been held before, in the same system — after Israeli troops rescued four hostages alive in central Gaza’s Nuseirat in June.

On August 21, when the IDF was operating in the area, pursuing intelligence that Sinwar was likely in the vicinity, troops reportedly spotted and attacked a group of some 26 terror operatives, most of whom were killed or wounded.

Those men, Channel 12 reported, included Hamas terrorists who had been guarding the six hostages for some eight months. Other longtime guards of the six fled amid the IDF operations, the report said.

Those captors were reportedly replaced by two relatively junior operatives, who were instructed to kill the captives if the IDF closed in on their location.

That’s exactly what these new guards did.

The following is especially heartbreaking and touching. But the mistreatment and suffering of the hostages at the hands of Hamas is no surprise whatsoever:

The hostages’ bodies testified to a struggle, as has been previously reported. One hostage had shielded Carmel Gat, and another managed to escape several meters before being killed, the report said.

Channel 13 in September cited “forensic” findings showing “Hersh, Ori, Alex and Almog defended Eden and Carmel.”

The hostages’ bodies also evidenced malnourishment and frailty, partly explaining why they were not moved along with the Hamas leader as he sought to outrun Israeli forces — they were too weak.

It was previously reported that Eden Yerushalmi appeared to have been starved, and had lost 10 kilograms in captivity, weighing only 36 kilograms (79 lbs) when she was recovered.

The four men tried to shield the two women.

RIP.

The only possible silver lining in the dark cloud of their deaths is that it may have been the outrage that more fully unleashed the wrath of Israel against the perpetrators, and may lead to a more definitive defeat of Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Iran. One can hope, anyway.

Trump the unlikely populist at the McDonald’s fryolator

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump does some funny stuff here, working the fryolater and then the driveup line at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. It drew the usual outrage from Harris supporters:

The restaurant was closed to the public during his visit, and NBC News reported that the customers who Trump served at the drive-thru were pre-screened by his campaign and vetted for security.

Those measures come after Trump has been the target of two assassination attempts earlier this year– one at a rally in Pennsylvania, and one at a Florida golf course.

The visit amounted to a campaign stunt to generate coverage, and it drew criticism from the Harris campaign and its allies.

“Donald Trump, a 78 year old, who’s never earned a real paycheck in his life, put on a show, playing dress up to act like he’s one of us,” Shawn Fain, head of the United Auto Workers (UAW), said at a Harris campaign event Sunday.

One of the many many many things about Trump that drives the left wild is his ability to appeal to what used to be called “the common man,” despite his great wealth and the fact that he was born to wealth. But his popular/populist appeal is real and was one of the first things I noticed about him back in 2015 shortly after he launched his presidential campagin. In August of that year I wrote a post about him entitled “Trump the unlikely populist.” I wasn’t a fan at the time – I preferred other GOP candidates, and the fight for the nomination was just beginning. But I certainly noticed his appeal.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Trump has mastered not just the “art of the deal” but the art of giving a speech that sounds like ad-libbing stream-of-consciousness but is not. As he went along it occurred to me that what he is doing is cheerleading for America, reiterating over and over what he would do for America and what he would do for the people he is speaking to, and fitting his words to their desire that America be what it once was. It’s the flip side of Obama’s hope and change: they hope that he can change things back to a time when America was great, and that’s his explicit message and the slogan on the very flyover-country-looking hats he wears and sells. This is a guy who knows marketing, and it’s no accident that the slogan is also pretty much what Reagan used in 1980 (Reagan put the word “let’s” at the beginning of the phrase, but otherwise it was exactly the same). …

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Trump supporter, but that I also get his appeal. Watching him speak at length, I “got” it even more. He makes all other politicians look boring and stilted (hey, many of them are boring and stilted). He makes it all sound so simple—just as Obama did, but in a completely different direction and with a completely, and I mean completely, different style. Populist appeal is a neat trick in a man who’s a multi-billionaire and who grew up in enormous wealth and graduated from Wharton. But he’s got it, and although I’m sure he carefully nurtures it he manages to make it look natural.

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him—although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

Over nine years ago.

That recent quote from Fain, the head of the UAW, went like this: “Donald Trump, a 78 year old, who’s never earned a real paycheck in his life, put on a show, playing dress up to act like he’s one of us.” What does being 78 have to do with it – except that the Harris campaign likes to hammer home the idea that Trump is worn and tired? And of course Trump is “playing dress up” – the whole thing was a humorous troll of Kamala, and no one was meant to think that Trump was presenting himself as a guy who really worked, or had worked, at McDonald’s.

But two parts of Fain’s sentence interest me even more. The first is Fain’s statement that Trump acts like he’s one of us. But who is this “us,” kimosabe? McDonald’s workers are not auto workers and the job is more likely to be a brief stint for young people just starting out. That’s the way Harris has presented her supposed history at the chain. Nor is Harris “one of us” either, of course, although – unlike Trump – she really does pretend to be. Her parents were members of the intellectual class, she was raised in the liberal enclave of Berkeley and then the foreign one of Montreal, she then became a prosecutor protected and promoted by a well-connected man (Willie Brown) and the rich donors of San Francisco, and yet she keeps telling us how solidly middle-class she is.

The second part of Fain’s comment that especially interests me is the assertion that Trump has “never earned a real paycheck in his life.” I wonder whether NBC, the network where Trump’s long-running TV show “The Apprentice” aired, would agree. I’m going to assume he didn’t do the show for free and that he got something amounting to a “paycheck” from NBC. And of course he made plenty of money in business, although no boss was handing him a paycheck.

However, when Trump was young and learning the business from his father – who was a real estate developer – his father insisted he learn the business from the ground up. That meant working at a number of positions such as this:

He and his brothers also as boys were trained by dad in the business. So they would sweep out basements, collect coins from the coin-operated laundry machines in the apartment buildings. Sometimes do little repairs. And when they got a little older, dad would have them collect rents. Because he expected them to all go into the business with him.

I once read a biography of Trump that said much the same thing, and that Trump raised his own children the same way, learning the business from the ground up. And this Chicago Tribune article from 1989 – written back when the press was still relatively kind to him; title “Trump: the people’s billionaire” – says this:

Indeed, Trump came off much the better on that broadcast [the Phil Donahue show]. ”The audience loved me.” Hundreds of viewers wrote him. I was so embarrassed by Phil Donahue`s treatment of you . . . It`s unfortunate that jealousy makes people behave so badly . . . I will never watch him again. . . .

”He`s the people`s billionaire,” says Ivana Trump, not without pride.

”You have no idea. Middle-class Americans adore Donald, and I don`t know why.

”They shouldn`t,” she says. ”They should resent him. He`s young and wealthy and he flaunts it.”

”Yeah, I find I get along better with the construction workers and the cab drivers,” Trump agrees. ”The people who count in the world. Working people respect the fact that I built this company by myself. People like Donahue, they don`t dig it. They`d like it for themselves.”

Trump has been remarkably consistent about that sort of thing.

[ADDENDUM: It’s now being alleged that McDonald’s made an offer to Harris for a similar photo op, but they never received an answer.]

The Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI) – plus, Kamala and the Christians

The New Neo Posted on by

I had never heard of the above group called IBSI before, but CAMERA is having a Gala Champagne Brunch on January 8, at St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, featuring someone named Dumisani Washington as the speaker, on the topic of “Standing With Israel: growing the Zionist movement in the 21st Century.” It’s an interesting approach, because Christians are among Israel’s staunchest supporters in the US, and yet black and/or Hispanic people consistently are found to have higher rates of anti-Semitism than other demographic groups.

See this:

Dumisani Washington is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI) and the former Diversity Outreach Coordinator for the over 10 million member Christians United for Israel (CUFI). He is also the host of the Truth to Power with Dumisani Washington radio program on the HNEW HD3 FM 102.7 in New York City as well as on all social media podcast platforms. Dumisani is a pastor, professional musician—graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music—and author whose latest book is the second edition of Zionism & the Black Church: Why Standing with Israel Will be a Defining Issue for Christians of Color in the 21st Century. He and his wife, Valerie, have been married 36 years and have six children and three grandchildren.

However, I don’t think Kamala will be joining the movement any time soon:

In addition to everything else you could say about that, it seems an exceptionally stupid thing to do. Why alienate a huge voting bloc? Is it because she’s already written Christians off anyway, since she is so pro-abortion? But for me the most shocking thing about her behavior in the clip is the mocking laughter. She’s not trying to hide her contempt for believers or for those who disagree with her.

Actually, I have yet to see Kamala Harris laugh at anything that’s actually funny, or make a joke that has any humor in it.

Serenade: how to film ballet

The New Neo Posted on by

Or how not to film ballet.

I admit it’s a very difficult task. Film flattens a three-dimensional highly spatial art into two dimensions of flatness. Dance’s impact can only really be made in space, which allows for perspective and weight. But without film dance is completely ephemeral. I have memories of transcendent performances, but I’m happy to have films – however inferior – to look at as well. For me, they spark memories. For those who didn’t see the originals, they give at least a glimpse of some of the greatness.

If a pas de deux – a dance for two people, a man and a woman – is being filmed, the task is somewhat easier. The camera can come in fairly close and it’s an approximation of the shapes the performance made in space, and the viewer can also see some facial expressions. Too close offers too much of the strain, but too far depersonalizes and threatens to turn the dancers into featureless dolls.

However, for an ensemble work, the challenge is much greater. The only way to see the patterns is to position the camera quite far away, as though the viewer is seated in the mezzanine or even balcony. But then the personalities and expressions are somewhat lost. So most filmmakers or videographers cut back and forth from far view to medium view to closeup, depending on what’s happening with the action. But making those choices is not easy and way too often the result, although well-intentioned, is a dizzying confusion that causes the viewer to lose sight of the ballet itself as a whole – which, after all, is the way it’s meant to be viewed.

Here’s a frustrating example. It features one of my very favorite ballets: Balanchine’s “Serenade,” which is a masterpiece. The music is Tchaikovsky’s exceptionally lovely “Serenade For Strings.” The performance is apparently from 1973 although the film is dated 1977, it’s Balanchine’s own New York City Ballet, and I’m very familiar with all the soloists. But even though I know and love the ballet, the camerawork is dizzying and disorienting. No sooner do you get an idea of what’s happening than it cuts to something else:

Here’s a video from a 2011 production by the Sacramento Ballet, a lesser although very good company. I think the director strikes a better compromise and most of the time you can see both the dancers and the shapes the group makes onstage, so important for this particular ballet:

Trump answers the charge of whether he’d use the military to move against his opponents

The New Neo Posted on by

In her Fox News interview with Bret Baier, Harris said this about Trump:

You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him,” Harris told the Fox News host.

“This is a democracy, and in a democracy the president of the United States in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it,” she said.

If you would like to read what Trump actually said rather than Harris’ spin on it, see this. I think it’s quite clear – although he could and should have made it more clear – that he’s talking about violent, disruptive, far left demonstrators, and mostly about calling on the National Guard if necessary to maintain order. There’s nothing really new or different about that, although many people on the NY Times staff got all upset when Tom Cotton mentioned something similar a while back.

For example, here’s one of Trump’s previous statements on the matter:

On Oct. 13, during an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump was asked if he is expecting chaos on Election Day. The former president said he was not anticipating mayhem from “the side that votes for Trump” but from what he called “the enemy from within.”

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and [are destroying] our country — I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day — I think the bigger problem are the people from within,” Trump said.

“We have some very bad people; we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” Trump added.

Here’s more recent clarification from Trump, from a WSJ interview:

Columnist Peggy Noonan, a longtime and sometimes severe critic of Mr. Trump, asks him to clarify [comments he made in an interview with Maria Bartiromo televised this past Sunday]: “If you were to reach the presidency again, would you of course rule out using the military to move against your enemies? That is, yours would not be a fascist-style government that would use its agencies, entities or military to move against your political foes because they have opposed you—is that correct?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Trump says, “but I never said I would. . . . First of all, Biden, who doesn’t know he is alive—Biden said that he expects there to be a lot of trouble if I win the election. That’s a very bad statement for him to make. He said that. That’s where this came from.” Mr. Trump digresses into his poll numbers and has to be brought back on topic.

Ms. Noonan: “But you would never do that?”

Mr. Trump: “Of course I wouldn’t. But now, if you’re talking about you’re going to have riots on the street, you would certainly bring the National Guard in. As an example, in Minneapolis while I was there”—meaning while he was in office—“they had riots, literal riots. That whole city was burning down. And Minnesota, the governor was supposed to—our favorite governor—the governor was supposed to do it. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it. And I said, ‘You got to get the National Guard.’ . . .

“And when you looked over the shoulder of that poor guy from CNN, that poor, stupid reporter who was standing there saying, ‘This seems to be a peaceful demonstration,’ then he gets hit on the leg with a rock, and behind him the whole city was burning. It looked like World War II in Berlin, and he’s trying to say that it’s peaceful. So I insisted that the National Guard—if I didn’t do that, I don’t think you would’ve had a city left. So I’m only talking about in cases like that where you need help. You can’t say, ‘I’ll never bring in everything,’ as the entire country is disappearing in bedlam. But certainly not against my opponents—it’s against civil unrest.”

But Harris would much rather imply that Trump will have some sort of policy of using the military to shoot his enemies and “the American people,” as well as locking up people who merely “disagree with him.” No, that last bit is solely the province of the party to which Harris belongs.

Drone targets Netanyahu’s house but no one’s home; Blinken and Biden have a plan

The New Neo Posted on by

Was Netanyahu’s house hit? It’s unclear from this article. The NY Times says the drone hit a nearby building. But either way, this particular drone didn’t set off any warning systems. That’s the danger of drone attacks, which sometimes activate such systems and sometimes do not.

At any rate, Netanyahu himself seems fine – although lame-duck Joe Biden has been saying that now that Sinwar is dead it’s time for a ceasefire. That’s the typical backwards logic of Biden; on the contrary, it’s actually time to press on and finish the job of defanging Iran’s proxies. Only then is it “the day after.” But Biden wants something to happen prior to the 2024 election, so he and Kamala can claim some sort of credit.

The article says there’s a plan:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is considering a post-war plan for Gaza based on ideas developed by Israel and the United Arab Emirates that would be presented after the presidential election, U.S. officials say.

Why after the election?

More:

Several officials in the White House and State Department are concerned the plan would marginalize Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his government, which is what Israel and the UAE are pushing for in the immediate term.

They’re concerned about that? Abbas, who is now eighty-eight years old, to be turning eighty-nine in a month? That Abbas? The one who is weeping for Sinwar?:

The Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and seen internationally as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, expressed its condolences Friday on the “martyrdom” of Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, calling him a “great national leader” and urging Palestinian national unity. …

Israel has long accused Abbas and the PA of backing terror by lionizing terrorists as “martyrs” and paying stipends to jailed terror operatives and families of slain terrorists.

It also accuses the PA of inciting to hatred of Israel in its education system. Fatah regularly lauds the actions of Palestinian terrorists and senior Fatah officials have at times expressed support for Hamas and its deadly attacks on Israelis.

Those are not just Israel’s accusations – not just Israel “pouncing.” I don’t think the accusations are disputed. More:

Abbas has indicated that the PA is willing to take control over the Gaza Strip after Hamas is removed from power there — on condition of the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Big of Abbas. Is that consistent with Blinken/Biden/Harris’s plan?

The Idiocracy of Tim Walz

The New Neo Posted on by

The self-described knucklehead doesn’t even know what a venture capitalist is:

“Sen. Vance became a media darling. He wrote a book about the place he grew up. But the premise was trashing that place he grew up rather than lifting it up,” Walz said on Tuesday of the Republican vice presidential hopeful, adding, “This guy is a venture capitalist cosplaying as a cowboy or something.”

“I don’t even know what a venture capitalist does most of the time!” he then yelled.

Social media reacted with quips and astonishment to Walz’s comments about the term “venture capitalist,” which regards one who invests in a startup business venture.

“Tampon Tim be like ‘vote for me. JD Vance is smart and I’m an idiot,’” a social media user reacted on X.

Walz is going for the Idiocracy vote. Maybe it’s a rather large bloc these days, alas.

[NOTE: If you’re unfamiliar with the movie Idiocracy, you might want to take a look. It’s transgressively, offensively funny.]

More details on the ignominious death of Sinwar

The New Neo Posted on by

From the British press:

A unit from the IDF’s 828th Bislamach Brigade was patrolling Tal al-Sultan, an area of Rafah, on Wednesday morning, when it came across a group of three Hamas fighters in the street and engaged them in a firefight.

The terrorists were ‘on the run’ moving from house to house, the IDF said, and became split up.

One of them, since identified as Sinwar, ‘ran alone into one of the buildings’. He went up to the second floor, and troops responded by firing a tank shell in his direction.

So – if that account is correct – it explains how Sinwar was originally identified as a terrorist, and why he ended up alone in the building where he ultimately died. Apparently he and the other two had been on the move.

Grenades were thrown at the IDF troops (it’s not clear from where), and then they decided to send a drone into the building into which the man later identified as Sinwar had gone. That’s how we got that amazing drone footage of him sitting in a chair, with a hand wounded from the gun battle in the street, looking at the drone and throwing something at it that appeared to be a stick.

And then:

Two 120mm tank shells slammed into the building, as well as a surface-to-surface Matador missile, according to Israeli reports, with shrapnel scything across the upper floors and killing Sinwar.

Unaware they had taken out Israel’s prime target, the soldiers did not return to the site until Thursday morning, when soldiers from the 450th Infantry Battalion were sent in to get a closer look.

So there was a delay, and then a different unit was the one that uncovered the body and recognized that it could be Sinwar. Also:

He was found with a weapon, a flak jacket and 40,000 shekels (£8,250).

‘Yahya Sinouar had a lot of cash and fake passports on him, he was ready to flee,’ Israeli army spokesman Colonel Olivier Rafowicz told French outlet CNEWS this morning.

He claimed that the items Sinwar had on him, which allegedly also included a card from UNRWA, the UN aid for Palestinian refugees, ‘may show that he was ready to flee and leave Gaza and his men behind.’

During his many years in Israeli prisons, Sinwar learned to speak fluent Hebrew. He could have fled to Israel, perhaps, and organized something horrific there. There are other possibilities as well, of course – Iran or Qatar come immediately to mind. But the shekels are interesting.

The details of Sinwar’s death are sordid and ignominious, far from glorious. That makes it harder for Hamas to present him as some sort of hero. I continue to wonder what percentage of Gaza’s population is rejoicing at the news. Israel has offered evidence that at least some people were happy. And then there’s this:

An opinion poll published in mid-September by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), a think tank based in Ramallah and funded by Western donors, showed for the first time the majority of Gazans opposed the decision to attack Israel on October 7.

The poll, conducted in early September, found that 57% of people surveyed in the Gaza Strip said the decision to launch the offensive was incorrect, while just 39% said it was correct – down sharply from the previous poll in June.

Hamas has long been accused of crushing dissent in Gaza with beatings or worse. But recent months have seen some rare public displays of dissent.

This isn’t evidence of any newfound love of Israel. But it’s still an important thing if most Gazans come to think that the war against Israel was a bad move, and that it is they who have suffered a result, and will suffer from any future such aggression on their part.