Wednesday Potpourri

First, I have made the point before, but it is good to find an expert who sustains it:

According to psychiatrist and body language expert Carol Lieberman, Kamala Harris suffers from "imposter syndrome," a psychological condition where a person lacks confidence in their competence and feels they don't deserve to succeed.

Second, Kamala Harris had a teleprompter for her interview with Oprah. That explains it all.

Third, yesterday Joe Biden came to my neighborhood to announce to the world that his administration had been a rousing success.

If you believe that, you will believe anything.

At the same time Walter Russell Mead was explaining in the Wall Street Journal that Biden had failed miserably at Middle East diplomacy. The Biden administration will surely go down as one of the most inept and incompetent in recent memory.

As tensions escalate and bombs fall across the Middle East, President Biden’s emissaries continue to urge all parties to calm down and dial back the violence. No one is listening, and this brings us to the central paradox of a troubled presidency stumbling toward an inglorious close. Mr. Biden may love diplomacy, but diplomacy doesn’t love him back.

No administration in American history has been as committed to Middle East diplomacy as this one. Yet have an administration’s diplomats ever had less success? Mr. Biden tried and failed to get Iran back into a nuclear agreement with the U.S. He tried and failed to get a new Israeli-Palestinian dialogue on track. He tried and failed to stop the civil war in Sudan. He tried and failed to get Saudi Arabia to open formal diplomatic relations with Israel. He tried to settle the war in Yemen through diplomacy, and when that failed and the Houthis began attacking shipping in the Red Sea, the ever-undaunted president sought a diplomatic solution to that problem too. He failed again.

Get the picture.

By now, no one in the region listens to the Biden team. Its greatest error was its wish to restore the Iran Nuclear Deal, and thus to insist on a moral equivalence between the two sides in the current conflicts.

Fourth, the current propaganda war against disinformation and misinformation is an invitation to tyranny. As Thomas Sowell once opined, who is to decide what is fact and what is fiction.

Victor Davis Hanson returns to the subject:

One of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.”

These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos.

Instead, they are used by politicians to impress and persuade the public to follow the “expertise,” “science,” or “authorities” to support all sorts of injurious initiatives and policies—of dubious value and otherwise without much political support.

Think of all the health experts who collectively swore to us that the COVID mRNA vaccinations would give us ironclad and lasting protection from being either infectious or infected and were without any side effects.

Other “authorities” assured us the first nationwide lockdown in U.S. history would stop COVID without hurting the social or economic life of the country.

Ditto testimonies about the pangolin-bat origins of COVID or the authenticity of the bogus Steele dossier.

Do we still remember the 1,200 healthcare “professionals” who in June 2020 told us that hitting the streets in mass numbers to protest during the post-George Floyd riots was a legitimate exemption from their own prior insistence on a complete nationwide quarantine? 

And also,

Would that such suddenly tight-fisted, inflation-hawk Nobel laureates had earlier warned us of their concerns in 2021, before the inevitable Biden inflation emasculated the middle class.

In other words, when Biden wished to print trillions of dollars, partisan Nobel Prize winners in advance discounted the crippling hyperinflation that followed. But now, given their dislike of Trump, they reversed course, warning the country that Trump’s likely deficit spending was “irresponsible.”

As for the state of the world, Hanson explains that we should ignore the entreaties of the recent batch of former government employees, vouching for Kamala’s foreign policy competence….

No matter. Our Republican experts nevertheless assure us that Trump “is unfit to serve again as President, or indeed in any office of public trust,” while Harris, they insist, has “consistently championed the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”

In such Orwellian language, destroying the border and federal immigration law with it, helping to unleash an unprecedented lawfare at election time to ruin a presidential rival, or urging court packing, an end to the electoral college and the senate filibuster are all championing “the rule of law, democracy, and our constitutional principles.”

Fifth, as for crime, it is obviously difficult to find accurate statistics. The FBI counts crimes, but it ignores the crime rates in certain large blue cities.

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed that purports to be more accurate.

Left-leaning commentators and advocates have insisted over the past year that crime rates are falling. ABC’s David Muir asserted so while rebutting Donald Trump during the recent presidential debate. The nation’s largest crime survey says otherwise: Crime rates haven’t been falling, and urban crime is far worse than it was in the pre-George Floyd era.

The new findings were released this month by the National Crime Victimization Survey. Run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and administered by the Census Bureau, the NCVS dates to the Nixon administration and is one of the largest federal surveys on any topic. It asks some 230,000 U.S. residents annually whether they’ve been the victims of crimes. It then asks about the nature of the crime, whether it was reported to the police, the demographics of the perpetrator and other particulars.

The NCVS report for 2023 finds no statistically significant evidence that violent crime or property crime is dropping in America. Excluding simple assault—the type of violent crime least likely to be charged as a felony—the violent crime rate in 2023 was 19% higher than in 2019, the last year before the defund-the-police movement swept the country.

But crime hasn’t risen equally across the nation. America’s recent crime spike has been concentrated in urban areas. These are the areas in which leftist prosecutors have gained the strongest footholds, where police have been the most heavily scrutinized, and where lax enforcement and prosecution have become common.

The results aren’t pretty. According to the NCVS, the urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.

The urban property-crime rate is also getting worse. It rose from 176.1 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2022 to 192.3 in 2023. That’s part of a 26% increase in the urban property-crime rate since 2019. These numbers exclude rampant shoplifting, since the NCVS is a survey of households and not of businesses.

In contrast, violent-crime rates in suburban and rural areas have been essentially unchanged since 2019. In suburban areas in 2019, there were 22.3 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons 12 or older, compared with 23.3 in 2023—a statistically insignificant change. In rural areas, the rate was 16.3 in 2019 and 15.3 in 2023—again, not a statistically significant change. Our recent crime spike is essentially limited to cities.

Sixth, a few words from JP Morgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon:

If you do not control the borders, you are going to destroy our country... Now that they are sending migrants into New York... all my super liberal friends realize what a problem it is.

Please subscribe to my Substack.