Fox News Harris Interview

From the beginning Harris was evasive and Baier was combative. One excuse for the latter goes like this: she got there late, cutting the interview short, and was excessively evasive, so he had to press her. Could be.

   Harris is completely full of shit about immigration, of course. She's got nothing--if you don't count lies, evasion and ORANGE MAN BAD. The Biden administration was a train wreck, and nowhere more than at the border. Responsibility for the border disaster lies squarely on the shoulders of the administration. And the party. And Harris...

   I almost don't blame her for lying and evading about this--she's got no rational defense.

   Baier, however, seemed overly combative to me. And I though the use of the clip of Jocelyn Nungaray's mother was questionable. I understand that there are good reasons to put a face on the statistics. OTOH, almost any policy is going to be a tragedy for someone. Administrations have to think in terms of the statistics--or so it seems to me. Either side in the Obamacare debate can, for example, probably produce stories about someone whom the other side's policies killed, crippled or immiserated. 

   Re: the "trans" surgeries for inmates, she really had nothing. She actually reverted to the boilerplate ad hominem: Trump is trying to scare people. Nonsense. The point is that your apparent policy preference is objectively surreal. The intention of the party informing people about your surreal policy preference is irrelevant.

Anyway.

   In general, I'd say that this was not a good interview for Harris. (Though I'm not neutral, of course.) Not so much because she's an empty suit but because she had to defend bad policies. She's not wily enough to give a rhetorically effective defense of such terrible policies. Few are. But she did what she had to do: she kept saying words. That's enough to keep her from losing support, and to maybe at least keep undecideds undecided.

   Her best line of attack continues to be the unfitness argument; it has the virtue of being sound.

   The "enemy within" argument is part of that strategy, though it seems to me to be more of the same sort of thing we've seen over and over: Trump says something incoherent, the left puts the worst interpretation on it. To repeat myself: they pretend he said something terrible even when he's on video saying the opposite--see e.g. the "very fine people" hoax. So, when he says something unclear--as he usually does--they have a field day. The left can take even the most innocuous utterance and produce a line of gibberish "proving" it to be racist. This is their forte. And Trump is such an inarticulate dumbass that he causes alarm even among reasonable people.

   And this "enemy within" stuff...that's a phrase no one should want to get within a hundred miles of. Rather like "enemy of the people." It's objectively alarming. WTF does he mean by it? Some say he means illegal alien gangs, some say he's talking about radical rioters... I can't freaking tell. It sounded pretty bad to me. Also it's perfectly reasonable to think: no acceptable candidate repeatedly says unclear-and-possibly-authoritarian things. Say enough such things and the smart money says that you're an authoritarian...

   Anyway.

   I haven't watched the end of the interview yet. I can't deal with that much stupid right now.