Hardly Black or Blue

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

To the surprise of exactly no wide awake political observer or pundit, Joe Biden yesterday essentially settled on a younger female version of himself- Kamala Harris. Just to put aside for a moment the silly and craven bow to political correctness of Biden vowing weeks ago to choose only a woman of color as a running mate regardless of any man's or white woman's greater fitness to assume the presidency, the so-called zeitgeist of the so-called left are hailing this as a safe and sane choice. But it's hardly one or the other.

     Naturally, the White House, in its usual violations of the Hatch Act, wasted no time in attacking Harris. Crack Whore Barbie Kellyanne Conway hit Harris on her criminalization of marijuana use when she was California's Attorney General, which is actually true (even if her boss Trump holds the same view). She also attacked the media for paying attention to what Kamala was wearing and not Mike Pence, who must have 25 versions of the same suit in his bedroom closet in the Naval Observatory.

     The usual birther/QAnon conspiracy theorists were already advancing reasons why Harris can't be the president if and when Biden falls to the wayside. Which is sheer lunacy because, whether or not her parents were not US citizens, Harris was still born in Oakland. She's been a resident of this nation for more than 14 years and is over the minimum age of 35.

     Yet, while Harris might be legitimate, that doesn't mean she'll be qualified to assume the oath of office in the likely event Biden won't survive his first term. 

     Firstly, while California has a good record in my lifetime in electing liberal Democrats into the Governor's mansion in Sacramento (Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, twice), it has a much more dismal record in electing actual liberal Democrats into the Senate. Dianne Feinstein has been a Blue Dog barnacle in the US Senate for decades and Barbara Boxer was no prize, either. Kamala Harris, a freshman senator who was elected in 2016, just follows that dismal tradition of California electing moderate to right wing Democratic senators.

     Secondly, choosing a vice presidential running mate from the original pool of wannabes and alsorans essentially means you're choosing someone who either was being disingenuous in thinking they were better and more qualified to be president or still thinks they're a better choice than the guy at the top of the ticket. But I don't think Biden will have a problem with Harris. While on the campaign trail on her Quixotic journey from being the female Obama to a fifth rate candidate, Harris seemed to be for Medicare For All, which Biden has consistently shit on. Nowadays, even during a pandemic that's killed about 165,000 Americans, she's not talking about that so much anymore.

     But the lady's got ambition and no one can fault her on that. Like Obama before her, she decided halfway through her first Senate term that she wanted the really big brass ring. But ambition alone doesn't save the day, as she immediately found last winter and her campaign had all the traction of wet ice on Teflon. And it was all because of a meme.

Kamala the Cop

It was a nickname she couldn't ever escape on the presidential campaign trail and for good reason. Both Harris and wouldbe feminist Amanda Marcotte pissed and moaned about "douchey white guys" (read: Bernie Bros) for derailing a campaign that never had a chance, to begin with, and turning Harris' so-called strength as a prosecutor into a weakness. (That's Harris' fault, as she'd called herself "a top cop" while running for the US Senate.)

     But Kamala Harris' full history as District Attorney of San Francisco and as California's Attorney General is still one of the best-kept secrets on Capitol Hill, closely-held secrets almost on a par with who really killed JFK and what those 100 unofficial Senate offices really cost the taxpayers each year. Among the things black voters were critical of were, among many other things, her heartless anti-truancy law that threatened the parents of kids playing hooky with criminal charges whether or not they could've prevented the truancy. Two and a half years ago, she defended ICE even as they were ripping children out of the arms of migrant parents and throwing them in cages.

     Then there was Harris' deliberate (and successful) attempts to shield dirty cops and prosecutors like her for misconduct. Among that misconduct was covering for a crooked crime lab in Orange County and keeping in prison on purely procedural grounds, then standing in the way of compensation to the wrongly-convicted Daniel Larsen. True, it didn't help matters any that Larsen was a three time loser and subject of mandatory sentencing and was a former Neo Nazi. But innocent is innocent and it plainly doesn't matter to Harris who'd shown time and again to be quite willing to keep innocent people in prison then deny them just compensation even when the defendant wasn't even tried by her office.

     Another glaring example of Harris' misconduct happened when she was San Francisco's DA. Her deputy in her office had been notified by an Assistant DA that a crime lab employee had been stealing cocaine from the crime lab in which she worked and that she was “increasingly UNDEPENDABLE (their emphasis) for testimony.” Harris, then running for Attorney General, then tried to manage and downplay the scandal and failed to notify defense attorneys who'd litigated cases in which the lab technician was involved. Again, potentially scores of innocents remained in prison for non-existent involvement with the drug trade because Harris was running for a higher office in an election year.

     Those two facts alone should've gotten Harris kicked off Biden's list or perhaps had kept her off it. She was essentially the west coast's version of Linda Fairstein, who did suffer heavy comeuppance last year when her own prosecutorial misconduct was brought to light by social media activists and a damning mini series on the Central Park Five. But they didn't. In fact, these examples of her cold-blooded corruption and misconduct made her more attractive to the basement-dwelling old man who thought he was running for the Senate again and couldn't recognize his own wife.

     I'm not going to harp on the fact that Harris is not so much African American as she's half Jamaican and that she's been cynically using the "black" or "woman of color" banner for her entire political career. But while Harris may not actually be black, neither is she blue. Her misconduct as SF's DA and as CA's AG that resulted in an untold number of innocent people remaining in jail is exactly the sort of candidate the Democrat Party doesn't need now or ever.

     This morning, Kellyanne Conway said the Trump campaign/administration was elated Harris was Biden's choice. And maybe, aside from the new right wing voters that fancies themselves as "liberal", they may be the only ones. Harris was pure poison to black people, supposedly her own kind, in California. And between Biden with his 1994 crime bill and Harris' borderline racist policies that shielded bad cops and prosecutors while railroading innocent African Americans, both ends of the "Democratic" ticket have incarcerated enough black people to populate a small African nation.