Pride and Pettiness

Can a political columnist be this spoilt for choices?

Hatch those peepers and look upon the works of the Trumpified Washington, ye Mighty Reader, and despair!

Armed National Guardsmen circling listlessly outside Kristy Kreme Doughnuts. Groanfully humorless talkshow hosts booted from viewer-starved nocturnal slots. Chinese spy apps operating with impunity. The conservative Socrates taking a hemlock slug to the jugular. Murderous transgender furries scurrying about. The government is once again teetering on the edge of shutting down. The President is hawking golden work vouchers for a million a taker. The country’s chief health official, a formerly bug-brained horse addict, is convinced off-the-shelf acetaminophen causes autism in utero. The most detestable development of all: the scourge of immigration authorities on the moil class being paid pennies to tidy the topiary of Washington elites.

Cranks, and ails and Politico tales, and dirty stunts aplenty.

Narrative warfare wages along the Potomac. And amidst all the rhetorical shooting drops a dumbbomb—emphasis on the first word in that incendiary compound. Kamala Harris—remember her? The former vice president, best known for coughing up scraggled howls we’re told constituted “laughing”? The previous presidential contender who was elevated to the Democrats’ default pick because her graying superior insisted incestual rape was as prevalent as oxygen? The ci-devant 2020 prez aspirant who spent an oceanload of moola only to drop out before Iowa?

Memory still fuzzy? The woman who spent four years a heartbeat from the presidency occupied by a senescent skeleton with advanced prostate cancer? Still nothing? Ok, how about Willie Brown’s former squeeze?

Ah! That chimed the bell. Well, Harris, who served as dutiful Democratic footsoldieress for decades, is rejoining the fray to “resist” Donald Trump’s darkening populist agenda. Where was she for the past nine months? Definitely not wallowing in a shin-high pool of turned Barefoot chardonnay. No, ma’am! The erstwhile veep spent a season off the front doing the important, preservative work of… hiring a publicity firm to contract out with a ghostwriter to scribe up a memoir-tell-all-belch-blame book.

Almost an ante-year from midterm elections, with Democrats scraping sheol in favorability polling, the outside party’s last standardbearer isn’t roadmapping a path back to power. She’s kneecapping the ol’ burro.

Harris’s book, laconically titled 107 Days for the amount of time she spent officially campaigning for the Oval Office, “has little advice for how her party can win again,” according to Semafor’s Dave Weigel. On one hand, perhaps no advice is the best advice: Harris didn’t just flub her race; she gave out the Democrats’ long-running moral rejoinder, the popular vote. But on the other, more useful hand, why rejoin ranks to friendly-fire recriminations?

Four words, in the impostured stretched ebonics Harris has wheezed for years: Kamala’s gotta get hers.

And hers she gets. The clawing she metes out to her fellow Democrats is sharp, resentful, and sanguine. It’s going to take more than a tub of Mederna to fade these scars.

Kamala clearcuts the prospective Dem 2028 field: Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro has too big a head; former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is too light in the loafers to win national office; Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, despite surfing the stars, is a nebbish; the triad of prog governors—sauve Gavin Newsom, stern Gretchen Whitmer, sweaty J.B. Pritzker—all faffed too long around before endorsing Harris.

Condolences, gang. Better luck and favor in 2032!

As for Joe Biden, the man who lifted Harris out of the slough of mediocrity, no liver spot is spared. Harris’s hatchet is sharpened to extra shivy for her old boss. The deputy cuts the principal over his “reckless” reelection bid that foundered as soon as Biden faced an unguarded, staff-unassisted 90 minutes on stage.

Ego, vanity, vaulted self-conception afflict us all. Kamala kicking her stiletto before a buffer’s walker to remind him of time’s wrinkling sweep would be one thing. But she barely guises her bitterness in the placid prose of recounting events. Harris dishes that Biden seemingly sabotaged her own debate by dialing her minutes before stage time to accuse her of calumniating him. Then there was Biden’s bemused donning of a Trump 2024 hat, which Harris understatedly skewered as “completely unhelpful.”

In sum, hell hath no fury like a woman, especially a woman ambling for president, scorned. Few blue pols escape unclouted. (Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear should whisper an orison that his money wasn’t wasted on his Vogue photoshoot.)

But why, at a time when President Trump and Republicans show slippage, did Harris pen a dirt-tossing tract and potentially sog the Democrats’ revival?

A precise psychological concept explains Harris’s irrational behavior, and it can only be found after wading through the complete works of Freud, listening to every Jordan Peterson YouTube lecture at .5x speed, and deep-reading the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition.

The technical hermeneutic phrase: ‘cause f@%# ‘em, that’s why.

Josh McLaurin, a state senator in Georgia, said that politics should be thought of like a vengeance dial “If you’re a politician,” he elaborated, “you carry around all these personal grievances and memories of all the things that were done to you, and you get to decide whether to keep that dial turned down or to turn it up.”

Kamala could have turned it up to 11, crying écrasez l’infâme to her detractors. Instead, she notched it at 5, leaving a festering corpo-pile of acrimony in the donkey stall.

Political power never comes without pettiness. Harris may have detonated more than a few bridges with her burn book, but if she runs again to lead our foremost party of resentment, count Kamala as frontrunner. She’s, for once in her Charmin-soft life, earned it.