Jul
30
2024

Another Dead-On Parody

And it's from the lovely, talented, and apparently ageless Mary Katherine Ham:

You also won't want to miss the video linked below MKH's, apparently a sample of the white ladies' Zoomage. It would take a better philosopher than I to classify it: creepy, cringe, or airheaded?

Also of note:

  • Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Charles C. W. Cooke imagines a day when people discover Kamala Harris’s Policy Problem.

    If one strips away the many glittering layers that have been added to her avatar by the operators and sycophants of America’s contemptible national press, one soon notices that Kamala Harris has a policy problem. Politics, even now, is about more than baubles and encomia, and in their obstinacy, most voters remain at least somewhat interested in the policies that each candidate brings to the feast. It would no doubt suit Kamala Harris down to the ground if she could spend the next 100 days being hysterically feted with visions of “Kamalot” — dispiritingly, that’s a real neologism — but, at some point, she’s going to have to answer a smattering of substantive questions, and, when she does, she’ll have three realistic options from which to choose: (1) Run on the radical agenda that she adumbrated in 2019; (2) embrace the array of positions that have made the Biden–Harris administration one of the least popular in modern memory; or (3) cut the president she serves loose and gesture at a contrived moderation in which she does not in any sense believe. None of these is ideal.

    Thus far, it seems as if Harris is being forced by gravity to plump for Option 2. Last week, her campaign vowed that she would seek to impose no new taxes on individuals who earn less than $400,000 per year. That, verbatim, is President Biden’s position. Soon afterward, the campaign not only reversed Harris’s 2019 position on fracking — which was to ban it completely — but insisted that those who had seen the many videos in which she had made her toxic vow were guilty of making “false claims,” and it confirmed that, henceforth, “she would not ban fracking” if given the chance. That, too, was President Biden’s effective approach, right down to the immediate attempt to change the subject to “climate-change legislation.” Given that 2019-era Harris wanted to kick 150 million people off their private health insurance, make an open border a matter of explicit policy, extend Medicaid to illegal immigrants, ban modern sporting rifles by executive order, consider racial reparations, and pass the Green New Deal in its entirety, it seems likely that this reflex will persist.

    CCWC assumes (1) those "substantive questions" get asked; (2) Kamala responds with something other than her usual word salad; (3) anyone pays attention. I'm pretty doubtful about all of that.

  • OK, so it's a rhetorical question. Still it's worth asking, and Brendan O'Neill at Spiked asks it: Why is it only ‘escalation’ when Israel retaliates?

    Everyone’s fretting over an ‘escalation’ in hostilities following the Majdal Shams massacre. ‘Diplomats [are] scrambling to prevent a surge in fighting’, says the NYT. Too late. The surge in fighting already happened. It happened on Saturday when Israel lost 12 of its children to the rocket fire of radical Islamists. There are widespread ‘fears of escalation’ after Saturday, says Reuters. That it printed these words next to a photo of a row of small white coffins containing the remains of the kids murdered by Hezbollah is extraordinary. There’s your ‘escalation’, Reuters. It has already occurred.

    The foreign ministers of Australia, Japan, India and the US issued a joint statement after the massacre, saying ‘We underscore the need to prevent the conflict from escalating’. Likewise, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, has said ‘we are deeply concerned about the risk of further escalation’. These are warnings to Israel, aren’t they? These powerhouses of Western diplomacy, with their noisy teeth-gnashing over ‘escalation’, are essentially telling Israel to chill out. Indeed, one US security analyst told the Guardian that ‘the most pressing task for US officials’ is to ‘delay any Israeli retaliation’ in order that we might ‘achieve de-escalation’. Relax, Israel – it’s only 12 kids.

    I made similar comments yesterday about the WSJ coverage. O'Neill's conclusion: "The West’s viewing of the Middle East through identitarian goggles has blinded it to the truth – and to morality."

  • J.D. Vance is proving himself to have been a poor pick. No, not the cat ladies comment, although that was bad too. Eric Boehm looks at Vance's 2021 comments about tax policy: J.D. Vance Says Childless Americans Should Pay Higher Taxes. They Already Do.

    Duh, right?

    In comments from 2021 that resurfaced last week, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) said that childless Americans ought to pay higher taxes than those who have kids.

    "If you're making $100,000 [or] $400,000 a year, and you've got three kids, you should pay a different, lower tax rate than if you're making the same amount of money and you don't have kids," Vance said back then, during an interview with conservative activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk.

    Here's the good news for Vance: It's already true that childless Americans pay higher taxes than most of those who reproduce. That was true in 2021, and it is true today.

    Boehm points out that Vance not only ignored the status quo, he made his argument in the most hamfisted way:

    Parents should pay lower taxes than nonparents […] because policy ought to "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad."

    Nonparents are bad! Punish them!

    Yes, as Boehm says: Vance expressed this in "the most politically toxic way" possible. Bottom line: Vance "revealed a nasty part of his character and his views on how government should work. Americans should notice that.

    And of course, this also reveals something about Donald Trump: he makes bad decisions (in this case, his VP pick) for the wrong reasons.