Wednesday Potpourri

First, the words of Kamala Harris... just when you thought she could not become more incoherent:

What we see is so hard to see that we lose faith or a vision of those things we cannot see but must know.

Second, in the Middle East, for those who think that Hezbollah is dedicated to liberating Palestine, a bit of information from AG Hamilton:

Forget Israelis for a second. Worth noting that when Hezbollah was raping, murdering, starving, and enslaving Syrians for the last decade, UNIFIL forces that were supposedly responsible for disarming Hezbollah were just sitting by and doing nothing.

Those who are supporting these anti-Israeli groups have no real idea about what life is like when they are in charge.

Third, and then there is the great Harris plagiarism scandal Naturally, the media is covering up the fact that Harris plagiarized sections of a book she wrote. It is entitled, Smart on Crime.

JD Vance offered this:

Hi, I'm JD Vance. I wrote my own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia.

Of course, the New York Times downplayed the story, but Chris Rufo responded in detail to the Times distortions:

The New York Times is lying about my plagiarism story and I have the receipts to prove it: 1. The Times claims that I only argued that Kamala Harris plagiarized "five sections" involving "about 500 words." But this isn't true. In my story, I wrote that Stefan Weber argued there are "more than a dozen" instances of "'vicious plagiarism.'" This past Saturday, I provided the Times not only with my written analysis, which argues that there are "more than a dozen," but with Weber's full dossier, which included 18 allegations of varying severity. So, the Times deliberately withheld this crucial contextual information from its readers and from the supposed plagiarism expert, who, based on this limited information, called it "not serious." They could have easily confirmed the "more than a dozen" point, but instead, lied by omission.

Tell me you are not surprised.

Fourth, Helen Andrews used to be a senior editor at a publication called The American Conservative. Then, she wrote a long review of the new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, entitled, “Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel.” 

Her publisher was so totally offended that he fired her. How dare she question the anti-Semitism of the saintly Coates.

Now Barton Swaim reviews the book for the Washington Free Beacon. Apparently, some precincts of the American right allow free expression of ideas:

Coates’s writing is consistently muddled, sometimes barely comprehensible, and full of cryptic turns of phrase amounting to truisms.

Of course, Coates is incapable of offering a reasonable appraisal of the situation in the Middle East and Israel. He traffics in juvenile analogies and only finds what sustains his thesis, that Jews are like slave-owners and that Palestinians are like slaves:

Coates is comically ill-equipped to talk about Israel and its conflicts with Palestinian terror groups and Arab states, and you quickly get the sense that he knows he has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t care. His authority to write on the subject derives from a 10-day visit to Israel in which, as an invited guest of the "Palestine Festival of Literature," he was plied with Palestinian propaganda. A more enthusiastic imbiber of agitprop the festival’s organizers, I imagine, could not have hoped for.

The book’s one-sidedness is all that is worth mentioning. And Swaim mentions it:

The scandal of the book—and the reason Tony Dokoupil of CBS wasn’t simply justified in challenging Coates in a recent interview but had a duty to challenge him—is that Coates never mentions Palestinian terrorism. An unobservant or gullible person could read The Message and have no idea that the Israeli soldiers’ vigilance is a consequence of Palestinians’ notable tendency to lunge at Jews with knives, self-detonate in crowded areas, and otherwise maim and murder innocents. Coates doesn’t mention the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, or any other act of Palestinian terrorism. Nor does he wonder why, although more than two million Arabs are citizens of Israel, few if any Jews are citizens of Arab countries.

Fifth, major American universities seem incapable of suppressing anti-Semitism on their campuses. The result, in Columbia and at Harvard, is sharply reduced fundraising. I trust that no one is surprised.

Sixth, remember smash and grab retail theft, a practice that infests certain stores in certain blue cities in America. Among those stores compromised are pharmacies run by Walgreens. As it happens, the robberies have caused the pharmacies to lose money, so more than a few people in more than a few neighborhoods will soon be without a convenient pharmacy.  

Megan McArdle wrote on Twitter:

A quarter of Walgreens stores are unprofitable, and the company plans to close most of them. Seems likely that the closures will include a lot of theft-prone locations that have gone into a retail death spiral: everything's locked up so it can't be stolen, which depresses sales as well as theft.

Seventh, as you have no doubt heard, ad nauseam, the problem with the federal government’s disaster response in North Carolina is not real, it is misinformation. Naturally, CBS News is on board with the subterfuge. When House Speaker Mike Johnson offered evidence to the contrary, evidence that suggested government incompetence, the network deleted his remarks.

He wrote on Twitter:

I recently traveled to NC and victims of Hurricane Helene told me nearly two weeks after landfall, the Biden-Harris Administration had STILL not provided them with all the resources they desperately needed. But CBS selectively edited OUT ENTIRELY this first-hand perspective.

And they think they are doing journalism.

Ninth, it’s election season, so the Biden administration is getting ready to punish Israel-- for conditions in Gaza. Humanitarian aid going into Gaza is normally stolen and distributed by Hamas, but, why not blame Israel when you can.

The New York Post reports:

The Biden-Harris administration is giving Israel 30 days to improve humanitarian aid efforts in Gaza or else the US could halt military assistance, according to a letter sent to the Israeli military.

The Oct. 13 letter, penned by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, threatens to pause the delivery of US weapons and aid to Israel unless the Jewish state provides assurance that humanitarian aid is flowing into Gaza unhindered, according to reports in Israeli media.  

The warning comes as President Biden has spent months voicing his growing frustration with the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which has become a major issue among Democratic voters — especially young Democrats — as Election Day looms.   

The American officials found that since April, there has been a significant deterioration in the amount of aid entering Gaza despite Israel’s vow to keep food and supplies coming back in March. 

Caroline Glick offers some sage commentary:

NSM-20 stipulates that if Israel doesn't satisfy US demands for resupply to Hamas, it will enact an arms embargo. Those are the consequences of non-resupply of Hamas. Also, we have proven beyond reasonable doubt that UNRWA is a Hamas-controlled terrorist organization. Hamas's top terrorist in Lebanon was the head of UNRWA in Lebanon. Yet the administration is demanding that Israel continue to treat it as a humanitarian relief group and provide it with the privileges of a diplomatic delegation. Likewise, the International Committee of the Red Cross has not visited, or condemned Hamas for barring its representatives from visiting any of the Israeli hostages. But it does insist that Israel permit it to visit the Hamas war criminals Israel holds who participated in the barbaric, sadistic day of genocide on Oct. 7. And here is the Biden-Harris team demanding that Israel let these terrorist apologists visit the terrorist rapist and murderers to prove Israel is being nice to them. There has never been a more hateful, anti-Israel administration in U.S. history. This is how they act when they feel somewhat constrained by the elections. Imagine what they intend to do to Israel beginning Nov. 6.

No one ever accused the Biden administration of being fair and balanced.

Tenth, if you have not decided who to vote for, perhaps you were waiting to hear what Dave Portnoy, of Barstool Sports, has to say about the matter.

Well, the New York Post has the story:

Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy posted a six-minute rant on social media in which he blasted Vice President Kamala Harris as “the worst presidential candidate in the history of American politics.”

“I am so sick of being gaslighted like she’s some great candidate,” the multi-millionaire said in a video on Sunday.

“Look at the world stage. Afghanistan was a disaster, the Middle East is basically in flames, you got Russia,” Portnoy said. “Then on the homeland, inflation’s out of control, people burning American flags in the streets…law and order doesn’t even seem to matter anymore, you got border, immigration.”

Now you know.

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