Some Future Shakespeare Will Write a Play About This …

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I just can't figure out if it will be a comedy or a tragedy.

This Charles C.W. Cooke Corner post would seem to point to "comedy": Kamala Harris Embarrassed Herself During Hurricane Milton.

I do not have a high opinion of Kamala Harris, and I never have. I think she’s a dishonest, vapid, opportunistic cipher who, in any serious country, would be considered ineligible to run a post office, let alone to manage the executive branch of federal government. But I must confess that even I have been astonished by how badly Harris has screwed up during Hurricane Milton. Perhaps this is what inevitably happens when you’re accustomed to throwing any allegation you can think up out into the ether and watching the press turn it into a scandal that benefits you, but . . . well, really? Trying to take on the governor of Florida during one of the worst hurricanes in recent memory? Even the Mafia-esque longshoremen’s union declined to do that.

The incident has been excruciating to watch. Harris came in hot, with the indignant accusation that Governor DeSantis’s refusal to take her call was “irresponsible” and “selfish,” and, in every moment since, she has been humiliated by the key figures on both sides of the aisle. As one might expect, DeSantis immediately noted that, while he didn’t know that she had called, there was, in fact, no reason for her to have done so. She’s not relevant here, DeSantis said. She’s never been relevant here. She’s never called before, because she has nothing to do with this. And, if she hadn’t noticed, he was rather busy.

Don't the Saturday Night Live skits write themselves?

But Jeffrey Blehar implies more than a little Et tu, Brute?-ism with his headline question: Is Joe Biden Trying to Knife Kamala Harris?.

A quick note: Kamala Harris has had quite the unfortunate week in this final month of the 2024 campaign, and the bad news is that it’s still only Thursday. As Charlie Cooke noted earlier today, the bleak screwball comedy of her desperate, flailing attempt to inject herself into the Hurricane Milton news story has gotten to the point where hilarity curdles into cringe. One wonders if we are witnessing something special with this cartwheeling series of embarrassments, something we would be wise to properly appreciate in the moment while we have the chance: the worst performance yet of a generationally untalented candidate. After this, America understands that Kamala Harris is the last person anyone should be tasking with natural-disaster response; she is her own ongoing natural disaster.

Trump supporters should temper their excitement: Despite all of this, Harris is currently slightly favored to win the election. But if she doesn’t — and it is basically a coin-flip race — once the Left is done burning Harris in effigy, their angry gaze will turn to Joe Biden next, and he will be blamed. Not for his atrocious governing record and vain attempt to retain power, mind you, but rather for his repeated (and notable) failure to support Harris’s campaign messaging at several points throughout the final weeks.

Reader, as a thought exercise, can't you just imagine everyone involved here wearing togas?

Or (even better) Julius Caesar Costume Designs by Jack Kirby?

Also of note:

  • Jeff, please expand this reasoning to pharmaceuticals. Jeff Maurer gets it: Hurricanes Are Showing Why Price Caps Are Bad. Skipping down a bit for our excerpt:

    Let’s focus on toilet paper. It gets bought up before a hurricane because people know that they might be stuck in their house for a few days, and they don’t want their lesser-worn clothing and fur-covered house pets to be “pressed into service”, so to speak. If toilet paper is sold at the normal price, there’s no reason not to stock up — even if you don’t end up needing any extra paper at all, you bought at the normal price, so no harm done. So, the first person to get to Kroger cleans out the store and rides out the hurricane atop a mountain of two-ply luxury, while everyone else ends up having to throw out their socks and sofa cushions after the storm.

    But if toilet paper starts selling for $10 a roll when demand suddenly surges, the first person to get to Kroger will face different math. They’ll ask themselves “How much toilet paper do I actually need?” and then do a quick calculation based on the amount of toilet paper they already have, the number of days they expect to be stuck, and their planned diet over those days. And then they’ll buy only what’s essential. Other people will do the same thing, and folks who don’t really need toilet paper — like bidet owners and divorced women who still have their wedding dresses — will opt out entirely. And that helps prevent shortages.

    The other thing that will happen when TP sells for jacked-up prices is that companies will divert supply to where it’s needed. During a hurricane, most of the country is not experiencing an Ass Emergency, so they won’t notice if five percent of shipments get diverted to the disaster zone. But that five percent will mean the world to disaster victims who are facing rectal 9/11. If TP is at $10 a roll, the Charmin Bears — America’s third-richest family — will move mountains to get their product where it will make the most money. And that will prevent shortages and eventually lower prices.

    All of this is totally counterintuitive. It really does seem like jacking up prices during a crisis should earn you a Nobel Prize in Assholery and be forbidden. But the market forces I’m describing are real, and it does look like Florida’s anti-price gouging law is contributing to shortages. And yet, there’s a bipartisan consensus that the anti-gouging law is good; Ron DeSantis’ government extended the law, and Kamala Harris warned price gougers of “consequences”. Which seems like more evidence that both parties have suddenly decided that even though there are hundreds if not thousands of years of evidence that price caps lead to shortages and hardship, maybe this time they’ll work.

    That's a long snip-out but, I did want to point out that whenever you see "bipartisan consensus", it increases the probability that whatever's attached is a Real Bad Idea.

  • Speaking of tragedies, however… Don't throw away those Julius Caesar costumes at the end of hurricane season, kids. Because, as Veronique de Rugy points out: Biden and Harris' Record on Spending and Debt Is a Tragedy of Epic Proportion.

    No matter the result of next month's election, President Joe Biden will soon leave the White House. That makes it a good time for a nearly final assessment of his and Vice President Kamala Harris' first-term legacy on federal spending and debt—a tragedy of epic proportion. Unfortunately, neither Harris nor her rival on the campaign trail has made a priority of fixing this problem.

    As a matter of fact, "her rival on the campaign trail" seems to be making a priority of promising to make the problem worse: Donald Trump tells Detroit he'll make car loan interest tax-deductible

  • Speaking of the Donald… Madeleine Kearns is doing the news roundup at the Free Press these days, Lots of small items worth skimming. Example:

    Donald Trump has long complained that China is stealing American jobs. But that didn’t stop him outsourcing the printing of at least 120,000 copies of his “God Bless the USA” Bible to China. The foreign-made Bibles cost less than $3 each and are sold in the States for a minimum price of $59.99, leading to a sales revenue of about $7 million. “The Bible is a reminder that the biggest thing we have to bring back in America, and to make America great again, is our religion,” Trump said in a video urging people to buy his good book.

    From the link. the GBtUSA Bible also includes at no extra charge:

    • Handwritten chorus to “God Bless The USA” by Lee Greenwood
    • The US Constitution
    • The Bill of Rights
    • The Declaration of Independence
    • The Pledge of Allegiance

    Are the Chinese reading what they're printing?

    How about these guys in Oklahoma: State Education Department Seeks Bids for 55,000 Classroom Bibles.

  • He's gonna have to take down that "Science is Real" sign on his lawn. NHJournal reports on the deep thoughts of Timothy Horrigan: NH Dem Says There's No 'Accepted Definition' of 'Biological Male'. It's a longish article about the failed (for now) effort to keep restrooms sex-segregated in New Hampshire. Skipping down…

    Rep. Timothy Horrigan (D-Durham) published a letter in the Union Leader criticizing one of the newspaper’s reporters for writing, “a transgender athlete identified in court paperwork as a ‘biological male.’”

    “This reference is a little misleading because the young woman at the center of the controversy is female,” Horrigan wrote, referring to a biological male playing on a girls soccer team. “She is living her life as a woman, and everyone close to her considers her to be female. She’s not male.”

    Besides, added Horrigan, “The term ‘biological male’ has no commonly accepted definition.”

    Actual Scientist Jerry Coyne has been on the warpath for years about this disinformation. Here's something he wrote back in 2020: A defense of the binary in human sex.

    Tim Horrigan can assert that there's no "commonly accepted" definition, but that's mainly because he, and people like him, have (essentially) a theological objection to not accepting the definition.


Last Modified 2024-10-11 7:33 AM EST