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Imagine you’re Kamala Harris and you’ve gone all Hitler, all the time, but no assassins have granted your wish and Donald Trump continues to build a significant lead. Now what?
That’s the crucial question facing the vice president and desperate Democrats as, with apologies to Willie Nelson, the days dwindle down to a precious few.
So far, the answer from Harris and her party is a steady drumbeat of more Hitler, more fascist and more dictator charges despite warnings they are dog whistles for violence.
It’s not a stretch to imagine someone on the edge would conclude it’s sane and moral to stop the modern version of a monster who launched a world war and killed 6 million Jews.
Judging by her flip response, Harris doesn’t care. “No one should be the subject of violence,” she told reporters Friday, then added “but the American people deserve to be presented with facts and the truth.”
There you have it. If the trigger man comes, don’t blame me because I just told the truth.
Ex-prez ‘otherized’
Disgusting as it is, the Hitler charge represents the latest version of the Dems’ eight-year effort to paint Trump as un-American and a threat to democracy.
To borrow a phrase the left uses, they’ve “otherized” him as a unique danger, putting a target on the back of a man already targeted at least twice and wounded once.
Not their problem. They’ve got an election to win.
The anti-Trump jihad has rested on one lie after another, beginning with the 2016 bid by Hillary Clinton, the FBI and the Obama-Biden White House to tar him as a Russian agent. The Robert Mueller probe came up empty, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi picked up the ball and ran with two impeachments of Trump, neither of which led to a conviction.
Out of office, he instantly became a target of the Biden-Harris Justice Department, which obeyed White House wishes and broke the historic barrier by bringing two federal indictments against a former president and playing major roles in two state criminal cases.
Several civil cases also emerged, all bearing Democrat fingerprints. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court stopped a dozen blue states that aimed to keep Trump off the November ballot. They did it, the Dem agitators claimed, to protect democracy.
Right — and the village had to be destroyed to save it.
With the pileup of charges against Trump, the smart money assumed he was toast and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former ambassador Nikki Haley were among the Republicans who thought they could win the party’s 2024 nomination.
But they, along with Democrats, were quickly enlightened.
The mainstream choice
As we know now, the Dems’ criminal and civil cases actually made Trump more popular, not less. Something similar seems to be happening now.
The nonstop fearmongering has put him on the cusp of winning the presidency again. As I wrote last week, I hope it’s a landslide.
That would be the ultimate smackdown of the dirty tricks and the weaponization of law enforcement and the legal system, all of it amplified by the propaganda media.
The Hitler firebombing is the last gasp and seems to be Harris’ pathetic closing message.
Naturally, the odious Clinton is jumping on the bandwagon. She nodded in smug approval at the party convention when the audience chanted “lock him up” and is now claiming Trump is “actually reenacting” the 1939 pro-Hitler rally that took place in the old Garden with his Sunday rally.
“President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany. So I don’t think we can ignore it,” Clinton said on CNN.
Even for her, this is really weird. Trump has held scores of rallies in various venues over the last eight years, yet this one is Hitler-esque because there was a Bund rally 85 years ago in a namesake building that no longer exists?
Get a grip, lady.
The nonstop efforts to define Trump as outside the acceptable realm have succeeded in one way. The attacks have managed to obscure the fact that he, despite his highly unorthodox personality, is pursuing policies that are far more mainstream than those of Biden and Harris.
It’s their administration and their party’s increasingly radical positions that are way outside the norm of the last 75 years of both major parties.
Take the Dems’ unprecedented embrace of an open border. No party or leading official of any persuasion ever dreamed of letting in 10 or 12 million unvetted migrants from all over the world.
Yet Biden and Harris have done just that, and she favors giving them all a path to citizenship. They would effectively become legal the day she takes office.
Cheap labor and new voters — what’s not to like?
Similarly, the administration’s unchecked spending, its see-no-evil approach to high crime, declining education standards, soaring inflation and cultural lurches are unprecedented.
As such, they are at odds with where the majority of Americans have traditionally viewed their government and the world and where both parties have planted their flags.
Not incidentally, those policies have failed, which is why the administration is so unpopular.
Dem abortion extremism
Abortion is another example of their radicalism. Long after the controversial Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, many leading Dems, especially Catholics, were sympathetic to the pro-life position and uncomfortable with limitless abortion.
The divided sympathies were so strong that Bill Clinton created a linguistic compromise for his party when he declared that abortions should be “safe, legal and rare.”
Yet these days, no Dem who hopes for a political future dares suggest abortions should be “rare.”
That would be political suicide.
But Trump actually comes closer to the Bill Clinton formula when he supports abortions in cases of rape, incest and the health needs of the mother.
By doing that, he has angered a lot of Republicans because the GOP has been a pro-life party.
Harris, on the other hand, rejects any comprise or exception to the positon of unlimited abortion on demand, even for Catholic hospitals. Against the backdrop of recent history, her position is far more radical than Trump’s.
Their positions on the corporate tax rate offer another example. When Trump took office in 2017, the rate on C corporations was 35%, among the highest in the world.
The changes he pushed through reduced the corporate rate to 21%, in line with the 21.3% average in Europe.
He proposes now to reduce it 20%, while Harris wants to raise it to 28%. If she gets her way, American companies with international competitors would be at a big disadvantage and stock prices and employee salaries and benefits would likely change to reflect higher government levies.
The pattern extends to foreign policy, where the Biden-Harris belief in appeasement has moved the world closer to a world war.
And they call Trump dangerous.