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Kamala Harris, Prof. Corey, and a Law Student
If you have never attended a scholarly lecture by the late Prof. Irwin Corey, please begin by viewing this 82-second link. He died at 102. He has been reincarnated in Kamala Harris.
“Well, we need a holistic approach because a holistic policy will result in a holistic solution that will afford everyone holistic results.”
I taught law school for twenty years. During those two decades, I had the opportunity to educate and touch the lives of more than 2,000 students. I tried to know them all by face and name from day one, and I became a life mentor to several of them. Some, even non-Jews, asked me, a rabbi, to conduct their marriages. Today, after hearing Kamala Harris’s “holistic” TV interview on MSNBC, I remember one of them in particular.
Harris’s Strategy
We who closely follow this stuff have long known that Harris is a phony, a three-dollar bill not even worth the inflated paper on which it is printed. She is unworthy to be even a candidate for president, and if she is elected, G-d forbid, the Creator of the Universe will repay and punish those who elected her with a Divinely exquisite measure for measure: they will have her for their president over the next quadrennium.
We know by now that she is not going to do many, if any, press conferences, and the few interviews for which she will sit will be only with hand-picked Democrat ringers. Even then, she may require Walz to be seated alongside her throughout the interview like a court-appointed guardian assigned to accompany a child for a rarely approved visitation with an abusive parent under a restraining order.
Her handlers keep her restrained. The strategy works. Let’s say all you eat all day is a quart of Haagen-Dazs or McConnell’s ice cream (rightly boycotting Ben & Jerry’s) followed by a box of 32 Godiva or See’s chocolates, flushed down by a six-pack of any beer except for Bud Lite.
OK? That’s your daily diet, seven days weekly through the past ten years. Meanwhile, your blood lab draws come back with numbers reflecting perfect hemoglobin, creatinine, A1C, cholesterol (all three: HDL, LDL, and Triglycerides), and all else perfect, even the molars. OK?
Then, although your doctors and dentist will be scratching their heads, why stop? Indeed, just the opposite: Don’t dare stop! It tastes great, and it’s working!
That’s the Harris campaign strategy. They all know that if she opens her mouth unscripted she will get politically crushed. So they rightly advise her to keep it up. Just shut up and cackle. Meantime, it works.
Rarely, she takes a risk and agrees to be interviewed by a ringer such as Oprah or her mother or some leftist hack at MSNBC. Recently, she did one of those, and whiffed at several softball tosses. She sounded OK to the unsophisticated, seemed to the gullible, and to know what she was talking about. But it was like Walter Mondale sitting alongside Gary Hart and asking “Where’s the Beef?”(READ MORE from Dov Fischer: Why We Inherently Despise Kamala Harris)
For example, when asked about what she would do about high mortgage rates (i) preventing a generation of young people from buying their first home and experiencing the American Dream, and also (ii) restricting older homeowners from selling their low-interest-mortgage homes to downscale or upscale because of insanely higher borrowing rates, Harris said this without having a script, thus having to think:
[I]t’s going to be different in different places, depending on the needs of that community, the needs of that local government, that municipality, but working in consultation and coordination and also around incentives that we can create.
For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people. (Emphases added.)
Sophisticated viewers and readers grasp that she said nothing. As it happens, the incompetence of Harris and Biden has caused the price of my home to rise … uh, holistically? So I have no business complaining. I have no plans or desire to move anywhere else in America. So I’m good. And my kids all went to private Ivy League schools before Jews started getting beaten up there by Arab Muslim foreign exchange students, so they bought their own homes before Harris-Biden destroyed their American Dream. But, still, the fool said nothing, instead dressing her word salad with “holistically,” an adverb most Americans do not use.
Harris Is Like a Student I Once Had
That reminded me of a particular law student I had several years ago.
This guy impressed the heck out of me. Whereas most students came to class wearing jeans or shorts and everyday t-shirts, even undershirts, he always came to class wearing a suit and tie. A true anomaly. I knew that I never did that in law school. I was a jeans and button-down guy myself. He spoke elegantly, just beautifully. He could have been a radio host on NPR. He spoke with elevated diction, excellent grammar, and impressed beyond words.
Whenever he spoke up in class, he perorated with a self-confidence and ease that extended way beyond what a law student typically would articulate. I still remember him. I told my wife, Ellen of blessed memory, that she had to accompany me to class one day to experience this guy in action. I would not tell her in advance which student I meant and would leave it to her to guess. And yes — she guessed. So impressive.
But there was this kinda weird thing. The way most of us law professors teach is by assigning students in advance to read 2-4 published judicial appellate opinions regarding litigated cases that came their way. Then, in class, the professor leads a discussion, focusing not only on the facts of the assigned cases and the applicable law that governed those facts, and the appellate panels’ holdings but, equally important, focusing on the “How” and “Why”: How did the appellate court apply that law to those facts, and why did they come out as they did?
In other words, the students were expected to arrive in class knowing the assigned facts and law, and they were being invited to think like (fair) judges about what they had read and to evolve a process of legal thinking by internalizing how and why real-life (fair) judges ruled as they did. Sometimes that process may seem obvious, but in the more complex cases the reasoning is more subtle. (The cases were not of the political sort where Obama Judges and other partisans abandon all fairness and objectivity, fabricating their own law, ruling based on their own personal preferences.) (READ MORE: The Debate Was Fixed)
Our immaculate student, when he volunteered to discuss an assigned case or when I called on him to engage him in the wider class discussion, always began by exquisitely detailing the cases’ facts and law and then describing the court’s holding. Then, when I would ask him some questions, like hypothetical scenarios that were similar but differed in important ways, he never could answer me. He could memorize, but he could not think. He lacked reasoning power. He transmogrified from a confident English-speaking Winston Churchill to a dolt. I could not figure it out.
In law schools, final exams like mine require students to read somewhat convoluted hypothetical fact patterns that we make up — what we professors call a “parade of horribles” — and to apply to those facts the laws they have learned throughout the term in order to reach their own “judicial” conclusions.
We grade those exams by anonymous Student Identification Numbers (S.I.N.) so that we have no idea whose paper we are grading. That helps ensure that, in grading essays, professors are not being influenced inadvertently by knowing whose paper is on the grading desk. After all exams are graded, we send in the final scores by their anonymous SIN, and we later may request from the Registrar a list revealing which students scored which grades.
When I got my list back that term, sure enough, the incredibly impressive student with impeccable comportment and diction had failed miserably with one of the lowest scores I ever gave. I could not believe it, but in time I could. Retrospectively, the pieces clicked.
The Harris Bluff
That is Kamala Harris. Her handlers dress her properly. She knows words and grammar, has learned to project self-confidence, and knows several “smart-sounding words.” But it is all bluff — smoke and mirrors but no beef. She is kind of smart, but she is not intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, knowledgeable, or wise. As with all handicapped people, she has learned the tricks to disguise her challenges.
For example, I live with a lung transplant. Sometimes I have a day when I have a lung-related but not virus-related cough. If I am scheduled that day to deliver a speech for my $1,000 honorarium, I take a spoon of 5 milileters of codeine cough syrup an hour before the speech. That way I do not cough; I thereby cover up my handicap.
Kamala Harris has a handicap. She cannot think. But she can memorize phrases. Therefore, because of her handicap — an inability to think — she avoids press conferences or impromptu interviews with people who are not Democrat ringers. When she is asked a question she did not expect, or — worse for her — when she is asked a follow-up question, even if it is a softball and she had a memorized response to the opening question, she panics and covers it up.
Sometimes she buys five seconds by cackling, even if the subject is severe. Over time, with training and practice, she has evolved her equivalent to my codeine cough syrup. To push through the challenge, she starts motioning her hands like a professor, cackling, and talking gibberish like Prof. Irwin Corey. As she perceives she has not filled an adequate amount of time with her answer or has not remotely answered with specificity, she defaults to a word salad, lost as a deer in headlights, searching for something — anything — to say.
Some people fill dead space by saying “Uh …. Uh … Uh.” Others use “Y’know … It’s, uh, like, well, y’know — uh, what was the question again?”
For Kamala Harris it is a word salad, preferably spiced with a dressing that sounds profound. What can be, unburdened what has been done. (Look self-assured to convey that, if the listener is lost, it is his or her problem.)
The economy? The border? Inflation? “Well, I grew up in a middle-class home, and I always loved yellow school buses and Venn diagrams. Don’t you?” (Cackle)
High mortgage rates? “Well, we need a holistic approach because a holistic policy will result in a holistic solution that will afford everyone holistic results.” (Look profound)
It worked for that law student for several months, but it caught up with him at final exams. It will catch up with Harris, too. Half of America already has graded her final exam with an F-. The other half will catch up in time, hopefully not when they are given a pink slip at work, denied a mortgage at the bank, getting raped or murdered by an illegal immigrant with a gang tattoo on his chest, or getting bombed by an Iranian or North Korean hypersonic bomb.
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Rav Fischer’s latest 10-minute messages: (i) “There is No Palestine” (here) and (ii) “Jewish Campus Students Need to Stop Whining” (here)
The post Kamala Harris, Prof. Corey, and a Law Student appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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