Jerry Shenk: Biden-Harris: A study in futility

Nothing the Biden/Harris administration has done since Inauguration Day, January 2021, has worked to the advantage of America or Americans.

Today, wages badly lag the brutally inflated costs of food, housing, and energy; the national debt has skyrocketed; the dollar has lost standing; racial tensions have increased; millions of illegal immigrants, including criminals, traffickers and terror watch list suspects, have poured across America’s open southern border; public health and safety have suffered; crime is rampant; federal agencies are politicized; civic and national pride are in decline; the strategic oil reserve is depleted; military readiness is a memory; American foreign policy is in shambles; our allies distrust us; our enemies don’t fear us; and wars have destabilized Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

If President(ish) Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had set out to destroy America, what would they have done differently?

Americans know well the Biden/Harris administration’s failures. Joe’s approval ratings had hit record election year lows – down to never-Trump RINOs and the thirty-something percent of people who would vote for any, even a comatose Democrat.

Yet, it wasn’t failures or poor ratings that ultimately did Biden in. He was only ditched after his senescence became impossible to conceal.

Party brokers were so spooked by Biden’s lousy June debate performance that they kicked him – and 14 million democratically-cast primary votes – to the curb in favor of an unpopular, substance-free woman with approval ratings consistently lower than Joe’s, one who never received a single primary vote – but could, at least, still read a teleprompter.

Relief at Joe’s departure and “suddenly popular” Kamala’s media-hyped, albeit apocryphal “qualifications” have Democrats on a sugar high. Anyone with a sweet tooth knows how those end.

Harris’s handlers obviously know nothing has worked in three-plus years. If Biden/Harris had a positive record on anything, Kamala would be running on it. But she’s not. She’s denying and/or ignoring their mutual failures in favor of an insipid, tightly scripted, policy- and media scrutiny-free campaign.

In fact, Harris clearly expects fawning media to run hers as they did Joe’s 2020 campaign.

One comprehensively dishonest Harris TV ad claims: “As vice president, Kamala took on drug companies to cap the price of insulin.”

The Trump administration issued a rule regulating insulin prices in November 2020, a rule Biden paused in January, then later restored, presumably to take credit for it, as he did during the debate that exposed his senescence and inspired the Harris coup. By claiming credit for the “cap,” Harris plagiarizes her boss’s lie about whose administration conceived and put the policy into effect.

Victor Davis Hanson summarized the Biden/Harris failures and Harris’s dishonesty: “[T]he policies that the left has given us over the last years – hyperinflation, spiking staple and gas prices, racial and tribal chauvinism, dangerous streets, an emasculated and politicized military, and wars abroad – did not work, and are now being masked to retain power….”

But, what if she manages to get away with it? What if Harris’s horse manure ads and partisan media fan fiction fool enough voters, or Democrats manufacture enough fraudulent votes to drag her over the finish line? Then what?

Recently, while ducking questions about it, gravitas-less Harris has been desperately rewriting her history – with media help, of course. Associated Press hacks call it “calibrating her policy pitch.” Honest observers call it “flip-flopping,” or, more accurately, “lying.”

Let’s review: Kamala has solicited funds to bail out violent left-wing rioters, favored defunding the police, co-sponsored the Green New Deal, said she would ban private health insurance, fracking, air travel, meat, and combustion engines, and, after neglecting her “border-czar” responsibilities, decriminalize illegal border crossings. Candidate Kamala has said she would back amnesty for the nation’s 11 to 22 million illegal aliens.

Good luck rewriting all that…

Kamala is irrevocably linked to every Biden/Harris administration failure. She’s repeatedly insisted that “Bidenomics is working,” and lied to America about Biden’s decline. Harris is the most far-left candidate in the modern era, a red-diaper baby who promotes socialism in America.

If years of Biden/Harris should have taught Americans anything, it’s that electing Joe’s understudy would be a disaster.

One perspicacious young black woman posted this succinct message online: “Voting for Kamala after getting rid of Joe is like [soiling] your pants, and then changing your shirt!”

A bit crude, perhaps, but when you’re right, you’re right!

Contact columnist Jerry Shenk at jshenk2010@gmail.com