Friday, August 16, 2024

The Weird, Creepy, Surreal—and Dangerous—2024 Campaign

 Victor Davis Hanson  "The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history.

"Here are 10 unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world:

1. How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now?

2. Would the media prefer to help her win but lose further credibility themselves by failing to ask why she has disowned her last three decades of leftist agendas, or to reclaim some of their reputations and thereby risk her losing?

3. Does the Left appreciate the new campaign and election protocols it has now established?

That is to say: "Cancel by fiat their virtual nominee four months before the election when he sinks in the polls?

"Nullify the outcome of a year of primaries and the will of 14 million voters?

"Threaten a sitting president with removal by the 25th Amendment process unless he steps aside as his party nominee?

"Anoint a replacement nominee before the convention and without a single primary—and then prevent any rival candidates from challenging her?

4. After the precedents of 2020 and 2024, is the future orthodox protocol for any Democratic nominee now to avoid all interviews and extempore speaking, and stick to teleprompted speeches and scripted responses only?

Is the fear that a transparent progressive messenger with an overt and honest left-wing message will double down on it and thus guarantee defeat?

5. For the next 80 days, has the chameleon-like Harris now become a temporary MAGA candidate, as she expropriates former President Donald Trump’s positions from border security to no taxes on tips? Does the media care to ask the new 80-day MAGA Harris why she has renounced many of her once emphatic beliefs?

"6. If Democratic presidential reelection candidate Joe Biden was pronounced fit as a fiddle before June 27, but after July 21 was abruptly forced off the ticket as too debilitated to continue as his party’s nominee, what exactly is his status now?

(Half-cognizant and thus able enough to continue his not-so-important task as America’s president, but also half-enfeebled and thus utterly unable to continue as the far more important Democratic nominee, it appears.)

"7. Does the new antisemitic Democratic Party prefer to risk losing with the radical nonentity WASP Tim Walz as vice presidential candidate rather than likely win with a popular, successful, and moderate Jewish Josh Shapiro?

"8. If one vice presidential candidate went to a war zone to serve with his deployed unit, while his counterpart preferred to retire from the military to avoid doing the same and lies about his abdication, how can the media credibly assert that the former’s tour was militarily suspect and yet pronounce the latter’s absence as heroic?

"9. If the current president canceled his reelection bid because he was too debilitated and unpopular, and is now rarely seen or heard, and if the vice president is out of Washington running a campaign in his place, but avoiding all press conferences, interviews, and unscripted addresses, who exactly, if anyone, is running the United States for the next six months of the lame-duck Biden-Harris administration?

"10. If Trump all summer has been compared by his enemies to Hitler and his murderous Third Reich, and if a 20-year-old would-be assassin and murderer with ease took up a sniper’s position to kill Trump—without a notified Secret Service or other law enforcement attempting to abort the shooter’s attempted assassination—what signal does that send to other would-be assassins for the next 80 days of the 2024 campaign? . . .More here...

No comments: