As Joe Biden inches toward retirement, right-wing attacks on his presumptive replacement, Kamala Harris, are already beyond the pale. The meanness of spirit and naïveté can sometimes be breathtaking. Take a vicious recent commentary by David Suissa in LA’s Jewish Journal. Suissa welcomes Trump’s nomination of JD Vance as a “breath of politically incorrect fresh More
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As Joe Biden inches toward retirement, right-wing attacks on his presumptive replacement, Kamala Harris, are already beyond the pale.
The meanness of spirit and naïveté can sometimes be breathtaking.
Take a vicious recent commentary by David Suissa in LA’s Jewish Journal.
Suissa welcomes Trump’s nomination of JD Vance as a “breath of politically incorrect fresh air” and a “middle finger to identity politics.”
Suissa presumes that Trump has big-heartedly chosen Vance for the VP slot out of a selfless bow to “the best man for the job.”
By contrast, Suissa implies that the choice of Harris means just to fill the Democratic ticket with a woman of color. Her prominence, he implies, is strictly the product of her politically correct race and gender.
The level of deception is mind-boggling…but deadly characteristic of the Trump Cult.
Far from a bearer of proven competence, Vance is a 39-year-old misogynist and homophobe with virtually no background in government and zero preparatory experience to serve as either Vice President or President of the United States.
Like Trump, Vance is a hollow media creation. His claim to fame is as the author of a book allegedly about “hillbillies”, a fortune made as a tech speculator, and a blind ring-kissing fealty to Donald Trump despite all the nasty things Vance once said about him. Like Trump, Vance is a wholly-owned, climate-denying subsidiary of the fossil/nuclear fuel industry.
Aside from his brief stint in the US Senate, Vance brings zero administrative or foreign policy preparation to competently handle the highest or second-highest positions in our government.
And very far from what Suissa says about him, Vance’s anointment is pure demographics. To anyone who was listening, the core of Vance’s acceptance sales pitch was as a child of Appalachia serving as Trump’s designated toady in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and other Rust Belt bulwarks whose electoral votes will decide the presidency.
Vance’s nomination only makes sense as the middle finger of a GOP campaign desperate to win midwestern electoral votes. This is, after all, a ten-state election, and Vance’s demographic plays in at least five of them. None of which has anything to do with any presumed capability to actually handle the job(s) for which Trump has him running.
Kamala Harris also, of course, brings her own demographics. She’s a woman of color, which Suissa presumes to label as her sole qualification Vice Presidency or beyond.
The contempt is breathtaking.
Like Vance, Harris of course has her demographic role to play. More than half the electorate is female. The black, Caribbean, South Asian and other ethnicities she embodies represent a third or more of it (her husband is Jewish).
Of course, running as a woman of color comes with costs. We’ve never had a female president. But Hillary Clinton did beat Trump in 2016 by more than three million popular votes. The male, white Christian Nationalist resistance was beyond ferocious…and this year will likely explode on a whole new level.
Harris brings plenty of baggage, left and right, from her highly contentious career.
But as an accomplished 59-year-old attorney and prosecutor, she brings with her decades of brutally intense, highly complex, often contradictory public service. In 2007 she published Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, about her contentious, mostly progressive ideas on legal reform.
Kamala served two terms as San Francisco’s District Attorney, then twice as the Attorney-General of the nation’s largest state. She worked four years as America’s third female US Senator of color, and four more as Vice President of the United States.
Fifteen previous Vice Presidents have become president. Six have been elected on their own, including Nixon and Biden. Few have had greater prior preparation to actually handle the job than Kamala Harris. Few if any have had thinner preparation than JD Vance.
Vance’s “middle finger to identity politics” includes his vehement misogyny, including the demand that women who choose to have abortions be tracked down and prosecuted by armed police. He is vehemently anti-LGBTQ.
Like Trump, who offered essentially to sell his presidency to the oil and gas industry for a billion dollars, Vance loves fossil fuels. He also hates wind and solar, which in Ohio have been devastated by a legislature recently turned toward a $1 billion nuclear power bailout by a $61 million bribe to a former Speaker of the House (who now resides in federal prison).
Suissa also bemoans the tendency of those on the left to equate Trump with Hitler. Vance, of course, has famously done just that.
The Donald still brands his his opponents as “vermin,” a term favored by Hitler to describe Jews like Harris’s husband.
In explicitly violent rhetoric, Trump vows “retribution” against those he dislikes. An actual functionary now has a “Dachau List” of more than three hundred designated “far left” targets. Public death penalty trials for “treason” have been floated for the likes of former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) and current US Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who is also Jewish.
No previous major American presidential candidate has ever made such public threats. Richard Nixon had an “enemies list,” but never talked openly of violent “retribution.”
Trump’s threats recall Adolph Hitler’s fascist rhetoric leading up to his assumption of absolute power in the 1930s. Trump’s Supreme Court has given the President unfettered authority to break any law, a staggering assertion absolutely alien to anything the Founders might have said at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Far from an “originalist” interpretation, this astounding decree paves the way for the absolute power at the core of Trump’s game plan.
From his January 6, 2021 attempted coup to the present and predictable future, Trump’s absolutist rhetoric reeks of a coming dictatorship…backed by heavily armed MAGA brown shirts itching to open fire.
Much of the post-Holocaust agony among the Jewish community wonders how the Jews of Germany could not see what was coming with Hitler despite the absolute clarity of his authoritarian vision. What right-wing Jews seem to miss today is that from the KKK to MAGA, fascist bigots always end at anti-semitism. No matter their professed Revelations-based love for the state of Israel, Christian Nationalists’ hateful vengeance against gays, women and people of color will forever coincide with a visceral hatred for Jews.
Despite JD Vance’s loud warnings about Trump’s core Hitlerism, his “hillbilly” demographic defines his choice as The Donald’s #2. It’s certainly not from any special talent or experience he might have displayed for public service to anyone except the fossil/nuclear industry.
And despite the personal contempt of David Suissa and so many others, Kamala Harris brings deep, tangible credentials to the professional demands of actually doing the job of a President of the United States.
It’s sad to see such a career denigrated on the basis of her race and gender in a publication like The Jewish Journal.
But buckle down….as Joe heads toward the door (hopefully after freeing Leonard Peltier) the right wing waves of misogynist and racial contempt aimed at Kamala Harris are about to hit critical mass.
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