A Study in Showboating-- Kamala Harris and the RFK Case

[David Andrews]

I'm not sold on Kamala Harris, but let's make a list of 10 successful national-level politicians (Executive, Legislative) who weren't shameless political climbers.

"Name me someone that's not a parasite, and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"  -- Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna

 

Edited July 20, 2019 by David Andrews

[Cliff Varnell]

42 minutes ago, David Andrews said:

I' m not sold on Kamala Harris, but let's make a list of 10 successful national-level politicians (Executive, Legislative) who weren't shameless political climbers.

"Show me someone who's not a parasite, and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"  -- Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna

Accusing a politician of "showboating" is like accusing a fish of swimming.

 

[W. Niederhut]

4 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Accusing a politician of "showboating" is like accusing a fish of swimming.

 

   Good point, but, in some cases, accusing a politician of showboating is more akin to accusing a shark of swimming.

    For example, Donald Trump invited women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct to one of his debates with Hillary-- around the same time that Donald arranged for Michael Cohen to pay $130 K to Stormy Daniels.  Trump is a shark.

   Is Kamala Harris a shark, or a fish?  

[Cliff Varnell]

16 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

   Good point, but, in some cases, accusing a politician of showboating is more akin to accusing a shark of swimming.

    For example, Donald Trump invited women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct to one of his debates with Hillary-- around the same time that Donald arranged for Michael Cohen to pay $130 K to Stormy Daniels.  Trump is a shark.

   Is Kamala Harris a shark, or a fish?  

Kamala Harris has the same sense of "going for the jugular" that Bobby Kennedy had.  For instance, Bobby accused Hubert Humphrey of being a "McCarthyite" in the 1960 West Virginia primary even though Bobby had served on McCarthy's committee.

Call that what you will.  I call it ruthless.

No matter who the Dems nominate (and hopefully elect), real change will only come if there is bottom-up grass-roots pressure.

Edited July 2, 2019 by Cliff Varnell

[W. Niederhut]

6 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Kamala Harris has the same sense of "going for the jugular" that Bobby Kennedy had.  For instance, Bobby accused Hubert Humphrey of being a "McCarthyite" in the 1960 West Virginia primary even though Bobby had served on McCarthy's committee.

Call that what you will.  I call it ruthless.

      Not all politicians are similarly Machiavellian and psychopathic-- least of all Bobby Kennedy and his older brother, Jack.  Bobby, certainly, believed that it was less than expedient to demand that Martin Luther King, Jr. be released from a Georgia prison, but he did so because he knew that it was morally right.

     Personally, I won't vote for a Machiavellian shark nominated by either party.  I want a POTUS who has the moral sensibility and courage to break the CIA into a thousand pieces, or stare down Joint Chiefs clamoring for a nuclear war because he knows they're nuts.

[Cliff Varnell]

16 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

      Not all politicians are similarly Machiavellian and psychopathic-- least of all Bobby Kennedy and his older brother, Jack.  Bobby, certainly, believed that it was less than expedient to demand that Martin Luther King, Jr. be released from a Georgia prison, but he did so because he knew that it was morally right.

     Personally, I won't vote for a Machiavellian shark nominated by either party.  I want a POTUS who has the moral sensibility and courage to break the CIA into a thousand pieces, or stare down Joint Chiefs clamoring for a nuclear war because he knows they're nuts.

I don't view Harris as psychopathic.  I want a Dem president to respond to pressure from the Dem base the way Trump responds to pressure from the GOP base.

[David Andrews]

16 hours ago, David Andrews said:

I' m not sold on Kamala Harris, but let's make a list of 10 successful national-level politicians (Executive, Legislative) who weren't shameless political climbers.

"Show me someone who's not a parasite, and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"  -- Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna

 

________

#1 - Wendell Willkie

#2 - Adlai Stevenson...

[Cliff Varnell]

Here's a balanced view of Harris' record.

The Two Faces of Kamala Harris

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/kamala-harris-trump-obama-california-attorney-general

Harris has shown the capacity to be moved leftwards when pressured by activism. This is no small thing. But you can’t pressure Harris — or any other politician, for that matter — without having an understanding of her record beyond the fuzzy PR that Democratic loyalists are currently trying to substitute for actual political discussion. Perhaps Harris will end up the 2020 nominee. Then it’s all the more important we understand her inadequacies.

</q, emphasis added>

Personally, I'm down with an Elizabeth Warren/Stracey Abrams ticket in 2020.

Edited July 2, 2019 by Cliff Varnell

[Kirk Gallaway]

On 6/29/2019 at 9:45 PM, Ron Bulman said:

Just the refusal to address Sirhan and the RFK assassination was a lighting rod for me when I read about it a few month's back.  She had an opportunity to address a key potentially polarizing issue, that was the right thing to do, and she whiffed.  Great further detail by Jim.   Good to see he's still doing good work.

 I think Jim wrote a pretty good piece, though not the first such piece, and I'm familiar with some of the points he makes. He ends with that same point which is a crowd pleaser here, but is ultimately seen by  astute political observers as a fringey  issue.

To those of us who feel  an urgency to spend funds to reopen the JFKA, there is just as much resistance against it.

The resistance isn't due to a deep state government coverup, but  government representatives don't believe, maybe they aren't informed, and don't think it a very flattering thing to pursue, (To that we may say, so what?) ,but most of the public are just not that motivated and the reps don't want to spend the taxpayer money if they can't be sure it won't end up being wasted.

 

I sympathize but the  political reality is all the Democratic candidates have meticulously manicured their positions over years to arrive at the place they are now.  My guess is probably none of these Democrat aspirants would have done any differently than Harris, or they would have made it a matter of public record earlier in their careers.

As far as "showboating", under the circumstances, and with so many candidates, it's what the public expected them to do.

Edited July 3, 2019 by Kirk Gallaway

[Kirk Gallaway]

Re The Debate

You do wonder about the power of these talking heads to tell the everyday person whose watching  who won the debate..Sure the biggest confrontation was Harris confronting Biden. 40 years later, it is a bit unfair to a square from Delaware. Though as so often, Biden brought it on himself with his earlier comments.

But even if it was the major confrontation of the night. There were a number of more substantive comments by a number of people.

 

I thought Bernie had some of the most cogent lines, but it's true , it's not like you haven't heard him say those things before. It seems like the media has decided  to marginalize Bernie based on his inability to gain in the polls.

I thought they were out to get Elizabeth Warren, seemingly on no more evidence than Trump calling her "Pocahontas". But Warren's run the best campaign and was the only one to get really substantive on the issues, and I've been  really surprised that voters are smart enough to appreciate that. That seems like a real positive sea change to me.  If she just rises so far and no further, is yet to be seen.

 

Joe said:

I wish Eric Swawell could get more exposure and I also believe both Governor Jay Inslee and NYC mayor Bill De Blasio have the guts and gravitas needed to successfully stand up to the Republican political war machine.

 

 Being perceived as another as-hole from NYC,  I think Di Blasio would absolutely mop the floor with Trump in a debate. Though to  people on the right, he's a very polarizing figure. But he's not polling well as Mayor in NYC, but neither does Trump.

I think Bernie and Di Blasio are sufficiently relentless to mercilessly beat an unfocused troubadour like Trump in a debate, until he's left with nothing but a lot of stupid, infantile lash outs, that will be apparent to both sides.  But with Bernie,  I always wonder how much hysteria does the word "socialist" have to the average voter?

I like Doug's passion. He could be right. I could see Harris just prosecuting Trump into a noose in a debate. I sometimes have wondered if Warren may be end up being frail but if  she stays to her point and continues to not mince her words. I think she could easily beat Trump in a debate.

 

I've seen some old pictures of Biden that remind me of how little I use to like him. I tried unsuccessfully to find a "60 minutes" interview from when he was running for President in 1988, where he told, I believe it was Leslie Stahl that "You're looking at the next President of the United States." He ended up completely falling on his face, getting almost no support and losing the nomination to Mike Dukakis.

 

Edited July 3, 2019 by Kirk Gallaway

[Cliff Varnell]

Over on the Deep Politics Forum Jim DiEugenio has implied that I'm a xxxxx who follows him around to Consortium News under "disguised names."  Paranoid much?

Here are the DPF posts that set him off:

***

Here's a balanced view of Harris' record.

The Two Faces of Kamala Harris

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/k...torney-general

Harris has shown the capacity to be moved leftwards when pressured by activism. This is no small thing. But you can’t pressure Harris — or any other politician, for that matter — without having an understanding of her record beyond the fuzzy PR that Democratic loyalists are currently trying to substitute for actual political discussion. Perhaps Harris will end up the 2020 nominee. Then it’s all the more important we understand her inadequacies.

</q, emphasis added>

Personally, I'm down with an Elizabeth Warren/Stracey Abrams ticket in 2020.

***

Harris has shown the capacity to be moved leftwards when pressured by activism. This is no small thing.

The grass-roots activists who get Kamala Harris elected Prez will need to stay active in order to hold Harris' feet to the fire. If they don't she'll default to the Establishment.

***

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race-baiting

race-baiting noun, often attributive
race-bait·ing | \ ˈrās-ˌbā-tiŋ
\
Definition of race-baiting

: the making of verbal attacks against members of a racial group

What Kamala Harris said to Joe Biden at the first debate wasn't race-baiting.

If you're confused about what race-baiting is, here's a bit of context

By Collier Meyerson

https://splinternews.com/if-youre-confused-about-what-race-baiting-is-heres-a-b-1793848630

This week, as the shooting of nine black churchgoers in South Carolina sparked a nationwide discussion of racism in America, Ian Tuttle at the conservative news site National Review published a takedown of activist DeRay McKesson, calling the #BlackLivesMatter organizer a “next-generation race-baiter.”

McKesson, he wrote, “has shown an unsurpassed ability to force every injustice, historical and contemporary, real and perceived, into a single framework: ‘Whiteness’ is wicked, ‘blackness’ is ‘beautiful.’”

It’s a classic misuse of the term “race-baiting,” a phrase used against those who dare to speak candidly about racism in America. In the Obama era, the right has embraced the term as a way of discrediting black people.

Right-wing outlets like the Drudge Report, Fox News and the National Review use the term “race-baiting” frequently and liberally. Drudge conveniently catalogs its use of the term for its readers.

Even when media outlets aren’t using the term “race-baiting” they find ways to allude to it and distract from what’s really being said.

CNN and Fox both aired segments this week focused on whether President Obama's use of “n” on a podcast was appropriate, rather than discussing why the president said the word in the first place. “I think many people wondering if it’s only there he would say it, and not perhaps in a State of the Union, or a more public address,” said Fox host Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

The accusation of race-baiting certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was forced to defend his activism from inside a Birmingham jail cell after eight white Alabama clergy penned a letter responding to civil-rights protests calling for “outsiders” to leave.

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here,” King wrote in response.

It isn’t hard to draw a parallel between those eight Alabama clergy and Tuttle. “Go home, Deray. And stay there,” demands Tuttle of McKesson, rather aggressively.

It’s not just South Carolina. After the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Bill O’Reilly told his viewers he was “furious” about media coverage of the shooting. Conservative voices echoed O’Reilly. “This mantra of the unarmed black teenager shot by white cop. You know that description in and of itself actually colors the way in which we look at the story,” said a Fox News guest captured in Jon Stewart’s segment on race-baiting.

The current usage is a bastardization of a term that actually has real meaning. The right has co-opted the term “race baiting,” but here’s context for its proper usage:
In 1986 George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign released an advertisement attacking his opponent Michael Dukakis for supporting prison furloughs:

The advertisement baits voters by preying on their fears of black men’s inherent criminality.

Another example: During his campaign for presidency in 1976, Ronald Reagan warned of a “welfare queen” from Chicago who defrauded the government by using “127 names” and posing “as a mother of 14 children at one time.” Reagan went on, “Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”

Reagan—like Bush did after him— perpetuated the stereotype of black people as lazy. Instead of focusing on America’s poverty, Reagan named black people as the problem. A beautiful distraction.

And it mirrors Tuttle’s attack on Deray McKesson. Disproportionate killings of black people by police officers, systemic poverty, lack of access to fair and equitable education—those aren’t the problem. Deray McKesson is.

McKesson is Tuttle’s red herring, just as Horton was Bush’s and the “welfare Queen” was Reagan’s.

Deray McKesson’s occupation is not, as Tuttle implies, professional race-baiter. To borrow from Tuttle, McKesson is a “professional activist,” a far cry from the damaging imagery promulgated by white politicians for votes.

“This next-generation race-baiter has absorbed the argot of the academy, recognized that it is the closest thing to a self-powering engine of racial outrage as has yet been devised, and figured out how to package it for a mass audience,” wrote Tuttle.

Merriam Webster - for clarification - defines “race-baiting” as “the unfair use of statements about race to try to influence the actions or attitudes of a particular group of people.”
Tuttle is calling McKesson a race-baiter for being a “professional activist” who travels around the country working to raise awareness around the deadly impact of racism. “New York City, Milwaukee, McKinney, Baltimore, Charleston — wherever racial tensions have appeared, McKesson has not been far behind,” writes Tuttle.

A mob — for clarification — is defined as “a large crowd of people, especially one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence.” Hardly the activism propagated by McKesson on Twitter.

***

Originally Posted by Jim DiEugenio:This is what I mean about Harris. She is little more than an opportunist. This is not the kind of leadership we need today. We do not need more of Obama/Clintonism.
.</q>

There is no such thing.

Obama negotiated the Iran nuke deal; Hillary wouldn't have. Obama negotiated the removal of 93% of Syria's chemical weapons; Hillary wouldn't have. Obama put 30,000 troops into the Afghanistan "surge"; Hillary would have put in 60,000. Obama was reluctant to arm Syrian Sunni "moderates"; Hillary as President would have given ISIS Damascus.

I get a $1200 a month subsidy from ObamaCare.

The opening to Cuba, signing the Paris Climate Accords, the DACA program, cutting the budget deficit more than 50% while pulling the economy out of the Great Recession, gay marriage, net neutrality, some bank regulation.

Yeah a lot of his policies sucked -- I voted for Julie Stein in 2012 because I was pissed at Obama. But after the Dems lost the Senate in 2014 Obama did pretty good.

I went over to Kennedys & King to find any article with a full-throated, detailed denunciation of Trump and his policies.

Couldn't find anything of significance.

Whose purpose does it serve to pitch propaganda all against Democrats?

 

***

The Cult of Bobby : Hero or opportunist? Almost 25 years after his death, Robert Kennedy is seen as both.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...397-story.

      ***

The higher Harris rises the more her record is examined and the higher the profile of the decision not to re-open the RFK case.

That's how modern politics works.

A President Harris would have a lot more to answer to on the RFK case than a Senator Harris.

If Harris wins the Dem nomination Fox News might pick up the RFK angle. Just say'n...

Edited July 3, 2019 by Cliff Varnell

[Ron Bulman]

Part two pf the article from K & K.

https://kennedysandking.com/articles/kamala-harris-part-2

[Cliff Varnell]

Concentration camps on the southern border.

Tanks on the Mall for the 4th of July.

The Iranian people suffer under capricious sanctions.

The American system of checks and balances is under constant assault.

To name a few.

Silence equals assent.

 

Edited July 6, 2019 by Cliff Varnell

[Joe Bauer]

On 7/4/2019 at 5:46 PM, Ron Bulman said:

Part two pf the article from K & K.

https://kennedysandking.com/articles/kamala-harris-part-2

Just read part 2.

Again, it's too bad information like this regards Kamala Harris is being ignored by the main stream media.

[Kirk Gallaway]

Joe, I'm not sure what you're saying the MSM ignored. Everyone knows there hasn't been forced busing in 35 years. Harris was evoking what turned out to be a losing policy for the Democrats, and opportunistically told everyone how she personally benefited from it. Yes, Biden could have cleverly responded by asking Harris what she's done for busing in her state, which is nothing, because forced busing has long been dead, and  Harris knew it would fail and she would end up  just being tied to a dead issue.

Edited July 6, 2019 by Kirk Gallaway