Kamela Harris and Joe Biden: The Love Story that Never Was
And the sheer lunacy which pervades the selection of Vice Presidents
By
David Gottfried
Before I go any further, I ought to make it absolutely clear that I hate Trump. My prior essays on here give you many reasons to loathe that ogre and demonstrate my anti-Trump credentials.
However, the sappy, soporific, cutesy coverage of MSNBC, which submissively exalts Biden and Harris, is such a trying load of unadulterated horseshit, and the stink really reeks.
I guess I flipped my lid sometime after midnight on July 23, when Rachel Maddow told her gullible and loving listeners that Biden and Harris love each other, have always loved each other, etc.
Where do these guys get the audacity to rearrange the facts to suit their political needs. (Where does the far right get the gall to say that the Sandy Hook massacre of 6- and 7-year-olds was a fantasy to boost support for gun control.)
In fact, Biden hated Harris and with good reason. In one of the first debates, in the 2020 race (the debate was actually held in 2019), between the democratic contenders for the presidential nomination, Harris decided to make a name for herself by suddenly delivering a full-throated furious indictment of Biden’s allegedly racist history. For a time, the loud, brassy bitches in the “you go girl” chorus were infatuated with Harris because she kicked a white man in the shins, or perhaps a more private part of his anatomy.
But then again, the myths about Vice presidents and their strong rapport with presidents come from everywhere. For example, in the very recent Supreme Court decision, which said that Trump, as an ex-president, will be largely immune for the commission of criminal acts, betrayed the Court’s ignorance of history, or its willingness to reimagine history to suit its political purposes, by saying that Roosevelt had a very close relationship with his final VEEP, Harry Truman. In fact, Truman never came to high level meetings at the white house, was completely in the dark about our research on building an atomic weapon, and was treated by Roosevelt with scorn and distance as Roosevelt considered him a morally mediocre fixture of Missouri’s Pendergast political machine. (The Court’s belief that Roosevelt’s illusory good rapport with Truman exculpates Trump of criminal liability rests upon a theory so convoluted, cockamamie and obtuse that I don’t have the energy to try explain it.)
In fact, everything about picking vice presidents borders on a species of lunacy. Historically, at about 8 or 9 or 10 in the morning, following the night the presidential candidate was nominated, the candidate and his pals, all hung over, exhausted, and surrounded by ashtrays so dense with cigarette butts that the butts of one ash tray seem connected to the butts of another ashtray, like all the butts on all the Amtrack cars between Boston and Washington, proceed to choose a Veep.
So, in 1952. Eisenhower picked Nixon to make conservatives happy, and we are still reeling from not only the political, but also cultural corruption he engendered. 1 In 1960, Kennedy picked Johnson to secure the South even though Bobby Kennedy and Johnson wanted to kill each other, and the intense animosity between these two men gave us, perhaps, the angry backdrop for hard-driving Rolling Stones songs such as “Satisfaction” and “Street Fightin’ Man.” I think this is as good an excuse as any to give you a great you tube video:
Also, Johnson decided to expand the war in Vietnam. Most really smart foreign policy advisors were against getting any deeper in Vietnam. For example, in 1954, after the French suffered a debacle at Diem Bien Phu, Eisenhower assembled his best generals, men such as Gavin and Ridgeway, and it took them only 90 minutes to decide that Vietnam would be a waste of time. But Kennedy unfortunately picked Johnson as Veep and Johnson, for whatever reason, deigned to make terrible decisions.
In 1988, Bush selected Dan Quayle to succeed him, and that very young boy (If he were Jewish, I’d say he did not even look old enough to have been Bar Mitzvahed) was such an intellectual midget that when asked about his talents, in his debate against Dem Lloyd Bentsen, he said he was like John Kennedy because he was so young and vibrant and well, cute, in a Ken doll sort of way. Bentsen masterfully decapitated Quayle as shown in the YouTube video at the commencement of this essay.
Thank G-d we never suffered the likes of a Dan Quayle as President.
And now Trump is having second thoughts about Vance, his choice for Veep. Vance might be a very bright guy, but he seems to be a bit like an academic moaning like a wolf in West Virginia, ready to demolish Washington like Joshua laying siege to Jericho. That might be even too much for the mega toxic maga minions for whom even the most savage superlative is mousey and moderate.
Of course, buyer’s remorse happened to the Dems in 1972: Eagleton, who has been chosen to be Veep at the convention, was dumped a couple of weeks later after it was discovered that he had had shock treatment for depression in 1960.
The moral of the story: We shouldn’t pick Veeps in the fog of a hangover. Of course, I might be wrong about the hangovers. It is possible that my juniors, as prissy and pretty and polished as an old lady’s fantasy of what a young man should be, don’t drink anything stronger than Perrier.
I am probably showing my age. Since they drank Perrier 10 years ago, they probably hallucinated wrinkles in the labels on the Perrier bottles, and they are perhaps drinking a new tasteless, odorless beverage of constricted and cowardly living. I’m going to the fridge to get a beer.
Eisenhower detested Nixon so much that on the eve of the election between Nixon and Kennedy, when a reporter asked Ike how Vice President Nixon had helped him, Eisenhower said that in a week he might be able to think of something.