Know Your Op: Kamala Under Attack
How to spot & combat false narratives about MVP-to-be Harris.
ONE WEEK after Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his running mate, the GOP is still throwing its steaming colander of bigot spaghetti at the wall, hoping some of the racist or sexist strands stick.
At first, Trump’s minions were somehow caught unawares by the announcement—clearly they do not follow my Twitter feed—and seem to have prepared to attack Susan Rice, which would have meant reprising their Sexist Billboard-topping single, “Benghazi.”
They have begun to hone their messaging, however, painting Harris as a “radical leftist”…
…even as the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party lambastes her as too centrist. “If you are an anti-war pro-pot Bernie Sanders-liking class warrior type,” writes Ben Domenech in The Federalist, “Kamala does nothing for you.”
The Domenech piece is instructive, as it essentially lays out various points of attack that smart Trump supporters might employ. Most Trump supporters, happily, are not smart, and will stir—and indeed already have stirred—up all manner of sludge to muddy the waters.
Before we look at the various false narratives the GOP/GRU ratfuckers will try to weaponize against the soon-to-be Madame Vice President (#MVP), a quick note on her name. It is pronounced COMM-uh-luh, like the word “comma” with a “la” at the end. “Kamala” like “Hanukkah”—not kuh-MAH-luh, as Mitch McConnell says it (he knows better), and certainly not how Borat pronounces Pamela Anderson’s first name, which is what that bloated buffoon Tucker Carlson seemed to be going for.
And now, the deza narratives:
Kamala isn’t eligible for the office because she isn’t a natural-born citizen.
Newsweek—which wants you to know that they are absolutely, positively not going full birther here—ran a piece by an old white law-talkin’ guy who used to clerk for Clarence Thomas examining this.
What Newsweek’s editors did not disclose is that the author, a John Eastman, once ran for California AG and lost…to Kamala Harris. Also, he’s completely, unequivocally fucking wrong:
That the press, which was pleased to erase Harris during the primaries, shot down this Birtherism 2.0 narrative so quickly is encouraging.
Kamala’s not Black. Or not African-American. Or…something.
The media loathes nuance, preferring when things like ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation and so on are binary. Biracial, bisexual, they/them…these concepts flummox headline writers, pundits, and yowling cable-news talking heads. Back in 2004, Chappelle’s Show ran a sketch called “The Racial Draft,” which lampooned this tendency. The premise was that there’d be a draft—exactly like the ones they have in the NFL and the NBA, complete with announcers and color commentary—in which, as Comedy Central describes it, “delegations from America’s ethnicities assemble to divvy up racially ambiguous celebrities.” Let’s just say if Dave Chappelle re-did the sketch in 2020, Kamala would be the #1 pick. “Is she Black? Is she Indian? Let’s settle this once and for all!”
The truth is that she’s both. Her father is from Jamaica. Her mother is from India. Kamala is a first-generation American, the daughter of immigrants. Her father was not a billionaire mob-fronted real estate developer, or a former president, or an investment banker and Senator. She’s achieved what she’s achieved on her own merits, like a latter-day Alexander Hamilton—maybe you’ve heard of him?
And on the afternoon of January 20, 2021, there be 80 individuals who will have served the United States as President or Vice President. Kamala Harris, biracial child of immigrants, will be the only woman, and the second person of color. That’s the story.
Kamala is too ambitious.
This was the narrative that circulated in the press a week or so before the announcement, when it came out that irrelevant old white guy Chris Dodd had concerns about her greater ambitions.
It is, needless to say, idiotic to select a VP who does not aspire to the top job. And when you have a 78-year-old first-time president, not picking a capable and ambitious #2 is nothing short of negligence. Ben Domenech is more blunt: “This is going to be the Harris Administration with Joe as a figurehead. That is not an exaggeration. Biden chose the most ambitious potential partner, who arrives on the ship and announces ‘I am the captain now.’”
Your point being?
All joking aside, the Biden Administration is going to be a team effort—an “Avengers Assemble” of the left. Joe has made that clear. Kamala Harris will be the Anthony Davis to Biden’s aging Lebron James, but I expect major roles to be played by plenty of other prominent Democrats. After four years of sycophants maladroitly dancing to the off-key tune of an idiot king, what a welcome change this will be.
Kamala won’t energize the base.
Joe raised $26 million in the first 24 hours after the announcement. I’m no expert on campaign financing, but $26 million seems like a big number. Then, in the next 24 hours, the campaign raised $22 million.
But sure, low energy.
Black voters won’t rally around Kamala.
Right, but they will rally around…Kanye West? I don’t know who is advising the Trump campaign on outreach to the Black community—Is it Diamond? Is it Silk? Is it whoever’s updating Herman Cain’s Twitter feed?—but please, Jared Kushner, keep listening.
Kamala slept her way to the top.
This line of attack began in the primaries, with Tomi Lahren—a intellect of great renown who I’m sure never once traded on her looks to get a job—tweeting:
The unfuckable Rush Limbaugh joked about this on his hateful show, as Media Matters reports:
In response to a comment by Brown in his latest newspaper column this past weekend that “Harris is a tested and proven campaigner who will work her backside off to get Biden elected,” Limbaugh went off on a particularly vile sexist tangent, declaring: “If anybody knows her backside, it’s Willie Brown.”
“And I mean in the biblical, intimate sense,” Limbaugh continued. “He knows her backside. They’ve both acknowledged it. She knows his. Even though his backside is not as big as hers—but—but, look, I got distracted.”
Here’s the truth: Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco, was speaker of the California Assembly when Kamala Harris dated him in the mid-90s. It was not, as some Facebook memes have claimed, an “affair.” She was single. Brown had been estranged from his wife for more than ten years. Yes, he was older, but since when do Republicans care about older men dating younger women?
“In his capacity as speaker,” Snopes explains, “Brown [in 1994] appointed her to two political posts—first to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, and then to the Medical Assistance Commission.” What fun jobs those sound like! I’m sure Brown picked Kamala for those oh-so-sexy sinecures because she’s easy on the eyes!
The Trump team doesn’t understand this, but appointing smart, well-qualified people to important-but-boring jobs in government is what politicians do. If Kamala were out of her reckoning in those posts—like, say Trump’s entire cabinet of “acting” dipshits, or Tomi Lohren on the zombie box—that would be different. Brown did his job, Harris did hers, and here we are.
Kamala is a “ho” and a homewrecker.
Eric Trump, who stole money from his own cancer charity, “liked” a tweet that called the Kamala pick “whoreable.” A freelance photographer working for the NBA, of all outfits, was sent packing after he shared a “Joe and the Hoe” meme on his Facebook page, a line of attack picked up with alacrity by the aforementioned Limbaugh, an inveterate slut-shamer. Not to be outdone, the ever-deplorable Kurt Schlichter tweeted:
…which sounds more like the first paragraph of a pathetic letter to Penthouse Forum than a political attack.
Gentlemen, please: Kamala has been married to the attorney Doug Emhoff since 2014. Search Google Images to marvel at all the cute pictures of them together, enjoying each other’s company. Here’s one from his Twitter page:
Contrast with this:
So: not a whore (sorry, Eric) and not a homewrecker (sorry, Kurt); that narrative exists only in the sad masturbatory fantasies of unfuckable Republican men.
Kamala is not authentic.
Per Domenech, “she is actually painfully inauthentic and scripted. When she goes off-script is when things go really bad, and while you can mostly stay on script in the era of Zoom campaigns, this will be most significant in a debate, where she proved she only really works well when working from a script.”
I seem to recall her looking pretty good venturing off script when she destroyed Jeff Sessions, Brett Kavanaugh, and Bill Barr in rapid succession:
It’s almost like she doesn’t care much for corrupt, arrogant, middling, middle-aged white guys with law degrees.
But the Federalist editor makes a good point. After all, when you’re engaged in a debate with a real what-you-see-is-what-you-get, salt-of-the-earth type like Mike Pence, who for sure isn’t keeping any aspects of his personality hidden away at all, authenticity becomes oh-so important.
Kamala’s a cop…
This, the original op boosted by Russian bots last year, derives from her being the Attorney General of the State of California. Domenech jumps all over this. “What about the authoritarianism?” asks the staunch supporter of Trump’s despotic government, who claims that the choice in November is between “an administration that occasionally sounds authoritarian, and one that actually is.” He calls “the ‘Kamala is a Cop’ meme…a stand-in for her status as a leftist authoritarian law and order type.”
Wait, Kamala is the authoritarian? That’s straight from the Goebbels “accuse your opponent of what you are guilty of” playbook.
…who also wants to defund the police.
Presumably, Liz Cheney means that Harris wants to “recreate” America more along the lines of the hundreds of thousands of enlightened folks peacefully protesting systemic racism in Portland, and not in a way that involves Bill Barr’s jackbooted thugs.
To state the obvious: Kamala can’t both be a cop and want to defund the police. The only people who can hold both of those ideas to be simultaneously true are those who think that serial rapist and Jeffrey Epstein BFF Trump is leading a mass movement to end child sex trafficking.
Kamala’s a radical.
The word radical is subjective, and intended to scare the “suburban housewives” Trump is trying so desperately to woo. The Fourth of July Traitor John Neely Kennedy said the same thing in a cleverer way: “She’s very smart. She’s very aggressive. And she’s very liberal. I think of Kamala, I would say—I would describe her as Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, but smarter and without the bartending experience. She will be a very formidable candidate.” (The mere mention of AOC by a Republican is a dog whistle for “Marxist radical Communist bad.”)
Kamala isn’t a radical. But remember what Newt Gingrich said about her being more progressive than either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren? He’s right. Per GovTrack, she is the most progressive member of the US Senate. Feel free to mention this to your friends with the rose or the bloody tooth in their Twitter bios.
Kamala is coming for your weed.
As a prosecutor, Harris lived to send pot smokers to the joint. (Get it? Joint? Ha ha ha). That’s the word on the street, anyway—but it isn’t true.
“Harris’ history of prosecuting marijuana cases as San Francisco district attorney is more nuanced than those debate-stage confrontations indicate,” writes Casey Tolan in an extensive analysis in the Mercury News on how she prosecuted marijuana cases.
[F]ormer lawyers in Harris’ office and defense attorneys who worked on drug cases say most defendants arrested for low-level pot possession were never locked up. And only a few dozen people were sent to state prison for marijuana convictions under Harris’ tenure.
“There is no way anyone could say that she was draconian in her pursuit of marijuana cases,” said Niki Solis, a high-ranking attorney in the San Francisco Public Defender’s office during Harris’ time as DA.
The issue was raised in one of the debates last year by chaos candidate Tulsi Gabbard (D-Science of Identity Foundation), who disingenuously claimed that Harris “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” Tolan explains:
Gabbard was misleadingly citing figures for all of California while Harris was attorney general — even though the vast majority of marijuana cases in the state are prosecuted by independently elected county district attorneys.
While it’s true that Kamala was not an early proponent of legalization, she has come around on the issue:
Harris publicly came out for legalizing marijuana only in May 2018, after she was widely considered a likely presidential contender. Since then, it’s become a centerpiece of her plans to reform the criminal justice system. “We can’t keep repeating the same mistakes of the past,” she tweeted last year. “Too many lives have been ruined by these regressive policies.”
Is she going to lead the charge for legalization? Probably not. Nor is she going to lock up everyone who passes the dutchie ‘pon the left hand side. That was Jeff Sessions’ big thing, and even he didn’t do that when he was AG.
Harris was a prosecutor and the AG of California. Anyone can cherry-pick her record and weaponize it against her. Read this to learn about the issues in granular detail. Or, carve out some time and watch this video. Black Women Views is the truth:
Let’s close with a contrast in styles of dancing:
Thanks to @JoanieVee1 and @KHiveLLP for help with this piece.
Photo by Gage Skimore.
Post script: The “KHive” is the brainchild of a single individual: Bianca Delarosa. She has a terrific blog, a fun and informative podcast, and a must-follow Twitter feed, in which she hips us to all things Kamala and takes on the Bernie Bros. Please support her work, and if you’re a big media person, interview her!
I love Kamala, she is exactly the right person to be VP, and would easily step into Presidential shoes, should it become necessary. Meanwhile, Republicans have used all of this crap before- shouting, shaming, belittling, name calling, and generally being a**holes in order to hurt the chances of every qualified woman in the Democratic Party. They’ve been doing this long before Hillary Clinton entered politics in the 1980’s.
Republicans are desperate to win, I believe it’s because they are hiding so many corrupt actions, have changed so many regulations to help their corporate bosses, including those that will help save our planet, that it will take years and many investigations to find and correct their heinous acts. Who knows just what they’ve done to accommodate Putin and their other foreign friends. We will need many forensic accountants, hopefully under Elizabeth Warren, to sort out the loopholes GOP created in the tax act and the regulations that guard the economy from being raped by unscrupulous corporations, banks and Wall Street gamblers.
Republicans are the criminal party, we need to face that truth, say it to yourself a few times to truly believe it, it’s not that both parties are corrupt,,,no, it’s GOP that have become corrupt in order to appease their donors and those who hold kompromat on them including the July 4th traitors. Republicans in their greed for power and money want to hold onto that power, everyone single one of them (except Trump), know that what they have done since 2015 will send them all to jail.
Fear is what shows with every tweet, every meme, every Op-Ed in New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, by Republicans and their journalists, words and articles that slam Kamala in any and every way possible, we will know then, just how desperate Republicans are and just how corrupt some of the media are by their actions.
Keep your eyes and ears open, keep checking that your name is still in the voter roll, if not, be sure to register, get ID if you intend to vote the regular way, if not send your completed ballot in ASAP, remember, Republicans are counting on their voter suppression tactics, their gerrymandering, and their attempts to outright destroy, by setting fire to, or bombing mail boxes or hold your vote up in the mail, to win...and, as it gets closer to voting day in November the opposition will try everything, increasing the violence until Democrats will be afraid to vote. As they did in Portland and Chicago, they will have jailed those persons who protest, which they consider to be dissenters.
I’m counting on us to vote in a landslide, certain that we will get enough votes to destroy Trump, and win extra seats in a Congress/Senate get all your ducks in a row, help your family, your neighbours, friends to vote if it’s feasible to vote in person.
Above all, stay safe, wear your masks, wash your hands, keep social distance from everyone (outside of your family) help your children do the same.
America, our country and our democracy depends on every single vote this year. Don’t fall for Republican games, you will know them by their incredible offers, or heinous lies.
Great article, Greg. God, you make me laugh so much with your brilliant, sardonic shade (all the more effective because: underpinnings of truth). Pretty effin' rich for that sick little trunt Lahren to be insinuating that others have slept their way to success... Maybe there'll be a spot for her on the county fair circuit when the Grand Ol' Pharty finally sinks....