Kamala Harris’ The Truths We Hold: More Smoke and Mirrors – by Amanda S. Green

I’m baaaaack.

Whether that means you should run and hide or I should fear for my liver, I’m not sure. Probably both. But maybe not. After all, we’ve already discussed books by Clinton, Sanders and Lenin. Surely, I couldn’t find something to drive me to drink even more than those or you to worry about my sanity. Well, I’ve never been one to back away from a challenge and I think I’ve met it.

I give you The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris.

Yes, that Kamala Harris. The current sitting senator from California who is making every impression that she’s going to run for president but who refuses to actually say so.

Oh the things I do to help Sarah keep your guys entertained. VBEG

On the surface, Harris should be the picture of the American Dream. The daughter of immigrants—her mother immigrated from India in 1960 and her father from Jamaica in 1961. Until her parents divorced when she was seven, Harris grew up in Berkley. And that is where, if you really look closely, the “dream” diverges from the path. Her mother, a breast cancer scientist, received custody of Harris and her younger sister. She then accepted a job in Canada and Harris grew up there. She graduated from a Montreal high school. That is when she returned to the US to attend college.

Not that you’d know that by reading the description of the book on Amazon:

From one of America’s most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country.

Senator Kamala Harris’s commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents–an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India–met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. . . .

So what does she mean by the title of her book? Will we know—and will we be able to stomach it—by the time we finish the book? Only time will tell.

The book opens with Harris recalling election night 2016. She talks about her husband and how he makes certain noises when he reads the paper that warn her he’s seen something she’s not going to like. So you can just imagine the noises he made as they wound their way toward the election night watch party as the media began showing her dear Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to win.

It quickly becomes clear where Harris stands when it comes to the current president—as if any of us needed any clarification. She even manages to throw in a reference to her children’s book as she relates the events of Election Night 2016.

Like any “good” politician, Harris had everything in place for her victory party. The venue had been secured. Decorations in place, including balloons ready to drop from the ceiling. Food and drink and who knows what else (it is the People’s Republic of California, after all). Everything was perfect, especially since the polls had her winning without any real problem.

Except for this one little blight on her evening. Her pal Hillary wasn’t doing so good.

Yet even as we prepared for that hard-earned celebration, all eyes were on our screens as state after state came back with numbers that told a troubling story. (The Truths We Hold, Kindle Edition, loc. 84)

I guess “troubling” is one way to put it. The majority of people outside of certain Democratic enclaves like San Francisco and NYC felt otherwise.

And I’m still trying to figure out which “truths” she refers to in the book’s title and who this “we” is. While I might not always agree with what Trump does, I still prefer him to Hillary or Bernie.

But, as you’ll see as we move further into the book, Harris knows how to manipulate her audience. Instead of describing why the results were so “troubling” to her, she pulls her 9-year-old godson into the story. According to her, this young boy came up to her table, tears in his eyes. Being the good godmother that she is, she wanted to make sure none of the other kids had been picking on him. Oh no, it hadn’t been anything like this. It was far worse (yes, irony is high in that statement).

Alexander looked up and locked eyes with mine. His voice was trembling. “Auntie Kamala, that man can’t win. He’s not going to win, is he?” Alexander’s worry broke my heart. I didn’t want anyone making a child feel that way. Eight years earlier, many of us had cried tears of joy when Barack Obama was elected president. And now, to see Alexander’s fear. .. (The Truths We Hold, location 88).

My first question: why was he afraid? Your average 9-year-old doesn’t know diddly about politics and certainly doesn’t follow what candidates say. So what had his loving godmother and the other adults in his life been telling him? [DEAR G-D it’s another woke 9 year old. Points for not being 6 or 8, but other than that, if the kid exists at all he’s being made a puppet of his older relatives, and the left’s need to believe the hoary legend that children speak with the voice of G-d. Of course, it helps that so few of them have or spend any time with their kids when they chance not to have aborted them. They really have no clue what the real little blighters are. I award Kamala Harris no points and may G-d have mercy on her soul. -SAH]

More importantly, why?

Then there’s the follow up of why hadn’t they explained to him about the checks and balances of Congress and the courts? Oh, because he’s nine and that doesn’t fit the narrative maybe? You can’t do anything to take away from the boogeyman image of Trump they’ve been doing their best to build not only for the media but for everyone who will listen.

So how did “Auntie Kamala” respond?

She and the boy’s father took him outside to talk about what was happening.

“Alexander, you know how sometimes superheroes are facing a big challenge because a villain is coming for them? What do they do when that happens?”

“They fight back,” he whimpered.

“That’s right. And they fight back with emotion, because all the best superheroes have big emotions just like you. But they always fight back, right? So that’s what we’re going to do.” (The Truths We Hold, location 92)

And that, my friends, is our first indication of how Harris and others of her ilk think and plot and plan. They don’t fight with facts and figures. They fight with emotions. They appeal to the emotions of their constituents, often without regard to the facts or the cost or the consequences of what they propose. It’s all about the feelz and has little, if anything, to do with reality.

Oh, by the way, that was also a none-too-subtle plug for her children’s book. I won’t link to it. If you’re interested, just look her up on Amazon.

But consider her comment to Alexander. Superheroes fight back with emotion. Now exchange “superhero” with Democrat and you have what is happening now. We saw it in Texas with Beto O’Rourke, we’re seeing it on the Hill over the shutdown, we see it every time the ACA or iterations of it are put forth by the Dems. It is all emotion—no, it is all emotional manipulation—and not what will happen if we let emotion rule.

Consequences? There won’t be any consequences, at least that’s what they’d have us believe.

After “reassuring” her godson, Harris had something else to do. It was time to give her victory speech. Of course, boo-hoo, it couldn’t be the speech she wanted to give. After all, her beloved Hillary had lost and her speech had been written with the idea that the opposite would have been true. So she winged it (if you believe that, I have some property I want to discuss with you).

I told the crowd we had a task in front of us. I said the stakes were high. We had to be committed to bringing our country together, to doing what was required to protect our fundamental values and ideals. (The Truths We Hold, location 110)

Once again, I find myself asking who she’s referring to. Her liberal California supporters? What about the rest of the nation? Then there’s the very important question of what these so-called “fundamental values and ideals” happen to be. I can take a pretty damned good guess and so can you. Just as we know who will pay for it all, not that Harris or her cronies will admit it. They will happily appeal to our emotions and tell us the government will pay for it, praying as they do that we forget that we are the ones paying for the government.

Bastards.

What we have to remember is that Harris sees this as a battle for “the soul of our nation.” (TTWH, location 118). She probably sees herself fighting on the side of angels. I don’t know about you, but I have her on another side. But that’s just me.

Just in case there’s any doubt about how she feels, she makes it clear here:

[Referring to President Trump] we’ve seen an administration align itself with white supremacists at home and cozy up to dictators abroad; rip babies from their mothers’ arms in grotesque violation of their human rights; give corporations and the wealthy huge tax cuts while ignoring the middle class; derail our fight against climate change; sabotage health care and imperil a woman’s right to control her own body; all while lashing out at seemingly everything and everyone, including the very idea of a free and independent press. (TTWH, location 119)

Say what? It would take more time than I have this morning to note all the times her beloved Obama aligned himself with anti-white activists, anti-American or anti-Jewish dictators. Oh, and let’s not forget about how ICE under Obama did exactly what the Democrats are so upset with now. Where was the outrage then? I could keep going but won’t.

Oh, to hell with that. I will at least for a bit longer, at least where it comes to the idea of Trump trying to do away with a “free and independent press”. In one way, she’s right. He has been on the attack where the media is concerned. But he isn’t trying to shut down honest reporting. What he has been railing again, as we all should be, is the biased reporting in the media. I’m not saying the media hasn’t always had bias. It has. But never has it been so apparent as it is now. Never has the media been so intent on making and creating the news than it is now. That isn’t reporting. That is propaganda and I, for one, and tired of it.

I believe there is no more important and consequential antidote for these times than a reciprocal relationship of trust. You give and you receive trust. And one of the most important ingredients in a relationship of trust is that we speak truth. It matters what we say. What we mean. . . We need to speak truth: that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and anti-Semitism are real in this country, and we need to confront those forces. . . We must speak truth about our mass incarceration crisis—that we put more people in prison than any country on earth, for no good reason. We must speak truth about police brutality, about racial bias, about the killing of unarmed black men. (TTWH, locations 129-140)

Yep, she’s doing it again. She’s appealing to emotion without supporting fact. She’s hitting all the talking points of the Democratic platform. Note, if you will, who the common “bad guy” happens to be. The white guy (or gal) who isn’t getting on the bandwagon with her. Apparently only “unarmed” black men are being killed by cops. No discussion about the number of cops being targeted by the community-at-large. Racial bias only flows against blacks and no one else. At least that’s the implication.

It is, as with so much from the dems, all smoke and mirrors without substance.

Does that mean everything she says is wrong? No. We do have problems in this country that need to be addressed. But the ploy of playing to emotions to drive a further wedge between different segments of society isn’t going to do anything except make things worse.

In other words, she is doing exactly what she claims Trump does.

What sort of superhero does that make her?

This book is not meant to be a policy platform, much less a fifty-point plan. (TTWH, location 144)

Really? We aren’t through the preface and we’ve already gotten the basis for her future presidential run. If this really was merely a “collection of ideas and viewpoints and stories” from Harris and others, would it have begun with such a clear attack on Trump and conservatives across the nation? If it wasn’t her launching platform for a presidential bid, would it have come out just this month, at a time when she is visiting Iowa and other key states?

I think it’s obvious the book is meant to help drum up interest and support for her in 2020. The liberals can’t have their beloved Obama back in the Oval Office as president. Many are looking to Harris as the next best thing. Of course, there are those who want Michelle Obama. Others who love them some Bernie or Fauxcahantus.

Of them all, Harris is potentially the most dangerous. She knows how to manipulate a crowd. As she said, her “superheroes” are emotional and fight with big emotions. It is up to us to figure out how best to combat her and those like her.

Now to find something to take the bad taste out of my mouth. I’ll continue the running commentary on the book next week.

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking the unbelievable twaddle that passes for deep political thought these days. We’ll collect for her liver transplant later. Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)