Divorced From Both Reality and Common Sense: The Press Defies Pragmatism in Order to Support Kamala
Look, it has become very apparent over the course of a month that our journalism complex in this country is fully on board with a Kamala Harris presidential run. This is a woman who was announced as the de facto yet unelected head of the Democratic Party over one month ago, and she has yet to sit for a formal interview or hold a press conference. Yet the media has insisted that her campaign is doing gangbusters.
It is all thanks to the press. But in their unwavering backing of the campaign, the press has gone over the horizon in terms of common sense. In order to prop up this Potemkin campaign, journalists need to present things to the public in outward defiance of what is obvious to basic thinkers. They are attempting to tell the public – to tell us - things are the opposite of what we can clearly discern. The amazement is that it does not require plucking select instances over the past month; in just the past few days, we have multiple examples of the press-defying logic.
Let’s just start with the most audacious example. At CNN, Jamal Simmons attempts to state that Donald Trump LOST the debate held with Joe Biden. That would be the debate where Joe Biden’s political career came to crater-inducing conclusion, where the post-event analysis on CNN and MSNBC saw their panelists looking as if a hand grenade had been dropped on the set. The debate where Democrats and press members were in a panic before it was even halfway over.
This week saw the third anniversary of the military deaths that took place when a bomber took the lives of 13 servicemembers at the airport in Afghanistan during that ill-fated withdrawal from the country. This has been a black stain on the Biden administration evidenced by the desperation in the press to blame it on Donald Trump.
In order for this argument to hold up, it has to mean that Joe Biden is completely and entirely ineffectual, unable to make any decision that was allegedly set in place before his arrival. But the obvious reason for this senseless approach is that it reflects poorly on Kamala. So if Biden is excused from culpability, then Harris, by extension, is even more blameless for the fiasco. Of course, all of this withers and falls apart under the realization that Harris is on record bragging about how she was the last person in the room during the extraction process and declaring the decision was all Biden’s, so her attachment to the debacle can only be blamed on herself.
This desperation echoes what we covered yesterday — how Politico, in similar fashion, tries to say that JD Vance is somehow in the wrong to attach Harris to anything policy-wise with the current administration. It is a weird paradox attempted in the press, to sell Harris as a vessel of change when she is the vital component of the current administration in power.
The comedy here is that there is a need to distance her from the record of Biden administration policies, so the question first asked is: What is the problem with the results of Biden’s policies? The follow-up to this becomes: If this means Harris had no involvement in policies, how is she at all qualified to run the country herself? The press demands that we ignore this reality, so this way, they can accuse Vance of wrongly “tethering” Harris to…um, to…the Biden-Harris administration.
Also at Politico, we have Jonathan Martin attempting to demean the Trump campaign as not having a consistent message. If you just tilted your head in a confounding reaction, just wait; it gets more obtuse.
Martin’s argument is that Trump and Vance daring to be critical of any negative reports involving the Harris-Walz campaign serves as proof that the duo is showing they have no tangible campaign issues to run on for the cycle. Trump being available at multiple news conferences and Vance being a regular fixture on the news interview circuit are to be ignored; latching on to negative items about their opponents shows a lack of an agenda, supposedly.
Best of all? One of the items said to prove Trump has no agenda is Trump pointing out that Harris has not declared any policies at all. Seriously, this is Martin’s position.
Perhaps no better example of the press needing us to overlook core sensibilities in order to sell us on a storyline is this nugget from the Associated Press. Reporters Zeke Miller and Chris Megerian are simply marveling at the way Harris is seemingly able to take credit for certain positives from the Biden campaign as well as selling herself as an agent of change — as if she does not represent the incumbent administration.
Kamala Harris is having it both ways as she hits the campaign trail after the Democratic National Convention, taking credit for parts of President Joe Biden’s record in rallies staged in front of Air Force Two while casting herself as a new leader who rails against “the politics of the past.” In every presidential cycle candidates run on experience or freshness, but Harris so far appears to be successfully harmonizing two seemingly competing messages, much to the frustration of former President Donald Trump and his allies.
Uh, yeah — Zeke and Chris? Harris is not the one doing this – you are the ones doing this! Kamala is barely putting anything out there policy-wise, so if this tactic is “working,” it is because sycophantic journalists like yourselves are acting like the PR division of the Democratic Party.
Real journalists would be digging into these details and exposing the offender. In generations past, candidates contradicting their message were criticized, changing their political positions on the fly were called out as flip-flopping opportunists, and making claims that defied years of prior service were scorned for pandering to voters. A candidate outright refusing to speak with the press would have motivated journalists into a caffeinated furor of investigation.
Today, all of these traits from Kamala Harris are regarded as positive selling points and a sign of a cagey campaign. The press have spent over a month trying to oversell Kamala to us, and in the process, manage to only devalue themselves even further.
Post a Comment