Kamala Harris: Still Not Ready for Prime Time
Her recent high-profile gaffes remind every American that she might be worse than Joe Biden.
“The United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance.” So said Vice President Kamala Harris yesterday in a since-deleted tweet that falsely and bizarrely implied Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
No doubt having been made aware of their boss’s gaffe, Harris’s handlers quickly replaced it with a cleaned-up version. Too late, though. The Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy and others called her out on it.
According to the latest in a long line of spokespersons from Harris’s office, the account that issued the tweet — the account whose user name is “Kamala Harris” — is controlled by the DNC. Uh-huh.
But lest you think this was an isolated slip of the thumb, or that real adults are actually in charge of our nation’s foreign policy and our relations with nuclear superpowers such as Russia, Harris said the same thing at the 1:42:35 mark of this video, recorded Saturday at the Democratic [sic] National Committee’s winter meeting: “So I will say what I know we all say and I will say over and over again: The United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance.”
That venue, a gathering of ardent Democrats, explains why her misstatement received such enthusiastic and sustained applause. She was, after all, among equally dim-witted friends.
Gaffe? What gaffe?
Harris’s latest faux pas comes on the heels of her weirdly inappropriate laughter last week during a joint presser with Polish President Andrzej Duda, which quickly became the stuff of international mockery. Apparently, there’s something knee-slappingly funny about Ukrainian refugees fleeing the death and destruction of Russian bombs and missiles. (On the bright side, at least she didn’t call them Iranians.)
And those gaffes, of course, come on the heels of a compendium of similarly weird and inappropriate tics of laughter. Kamala Harris: motivational speaker.
Just over a year into her term as veep, it’s a bit unsettling to consider that she’s a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. But, hey, who are we to judge Harris’s foreign policy chops? Who else but Kamala could’ve boiled down the Ukraine conflict into the following elegant synopsis:
Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine so, basically, that’s wrong.
We take no joy in noting that the nation’s first female vice president of Jamaican-Indian descent who grew up in Canada and whose ancestors were slaveowners is something of a dolt, but, well, never mind. We actually do take a bit of malicious joy in it, because we believe that no single force in American politics is more deleterious to the health and well-being of our nation than the sort of tribalism and identity obsessiveness that have become the Left’s raison d'etre, its reason for being.
When Joe Biden announced that he’d decided to forego the usual litany of qualifications for choosing a running mate — which include, for example, competence and likability — he left himself with precious few options aside of the Bay Area progressive protégé of Willie Brown who failed the California bar exam and whose own Golden State constituents had her polling in the single digits among an already weak field of Democrat presidential candidates.
Perhaps Biden is smarter than we think, though. Perhaps he knew exactly what he was getting when he chose Harris as his running mate: impeachment insurance.