Reviewing Kamala’s Town Hall, Through a Glass Darkly

By

David Gottfried

The first few paragraphs may seem bitter.  But after the granite beginning, my harsh criticisms are leavened with humor and a revelation, regarding small businesses, that may amaze you.

It is 3:30 A.M., and I have just been speaking to a succession of Asians,  situated in Asia, with respect to my credit card, and of course about 40 percent of the words they uttered were completely unintelligible, but all of the words seemed painfully coherent and stinging in one sense:  They were getting their jollies attacking an American and trying to take my money. 

When I was growing up, half the non-Jewish morons of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn told me that I was a cheap, Rich, Jewish bastard who killed the son of G-d.   Man, if only I had had the sense to nourish whatever mercantile and mendacious propensities I had.  If only I had not been corrupted and compromised by one of the greatest cripplers of Jewish men in America:  The Disease of Masochistic Liberalism.        

So pardon me if I don’t review Kamala Harris’s recent Townhall, in Pennsylvania, with tender loving care. 

Whenever you are feeling down and troubled, just thank your lucky stars that you’re not asking a candidate questions at a “Town Hall Meeting.” 

Two centuries ago, town halls meant something:  They were assemblies, largely in New England,  where people intelligently and forthrightly tried to tackle problems.

Now, our televised townhall meetings are opportunities for candidates to get softball, easy as pie questions which make the candidate look good and perpetuate the notion that we have a worthwhile democracy  where inquisitive, independent adults put their big boy pants on and ask probing, provocative questions about the economy and world affairs.  

While watching the Kamala Harris townhall on CNN on October 24, I noticed one or two pointed queries.  One woman had the balls  to ask Kamala a tough cookie of a question about the Mideast.  However, most of the questioners seemed like polite little children, almost like the Von Trapp children, From “The Sound of Music.”  One tall, large man, when asking Kamala about the high cost of groceries, seemed as sweetly endearing as Friedreich Von Trap, primly attired in doofish Austrian Lederhosen, crying to Mommy Kamala that he skinned his knee and it hurt.  Kamala assumed the role of Dikey Daddy Protectress and swiftly pledged to pass a law outlawing price gouging. 

How the hell are you going to outlaw price gouging ?  In the late Sixties, when people were much more liberal,  Law Professors were not ready to accede to the proposition that a contract, selling something for three times its fair market value, should be deemed null and void.  And if you fucking agreed on a number, how the fuck do you think you will get 60 out of 100 Senators to support it and overcome cloture. And how many doofish American nit wits, giggling to re-runs of Bea Arthur sit coms, know what cloture is.

After grocery boy asked his question, a moderately stunning black lady, with a regal demeanor and countenance, posed a question that could only come from the mind of the coarsest simpleton.   (Beautiful fashion and stunted minds are highly correlated.  The dumber you are, the deeper you bow before the altar of the dictate “dress for success.”) 

I don’t remember the exact words in the black woman’s question, but it boiled down to this:  Mommy Kamala, how are you going to make the big bad economy behave itself.   Such sissy soft questions make politicians feel sufficiently happy and wholesome to actually screw their wives instead of whores.

I suppose someone from the peanut gallery is going to tell me that a question, as to how one would improve the economy,  is really tough.  What should a poor candidate say ?  Should he say that he is in favor of unemployment, inflation, disinvestment, waste and the wonton evisceration of our manufacturing muscle.  

When asked about the economy, a candidate need only say the right buzz words. 

Think of Billy Boy Clinton. He was a genius at meaningless political speech.   I really got nausea when Clinton, in 1992, coined the phrase “grow the economy.” (Wow, like I really thought he might say that he wanted to shrink the economy) When he uttered his silly slogan, he deepened his voice and put special emphasis on the O sound in Grow, stretching the word out in a pseudo  soulful manner and sounding as innocent and fine as a nice country yokel growing corn, and obscuring his intention to hire a bankster from Goldman Sachs to lead the Treasury Department.  Our Clintonesque candidate  will also say that he will fight deficits, protect the currency and these words mean nothing to most voters as most voters don’t know anything ANYTHING about economics.  Oh, but phrases like “balancing the budget” sound so familiar and homespun  (balancing the budget, two alliterative words separated by an article, sound as curative as soup and sandwich, and the voter regresses to an eight-year-old who can’t wait to eat Mommy’s soup and sandwich.   His words are the equivalent of political sweet nothings, like the gentle pitter patter of rain we hear before we take our morphine and go to the polls.)            
 

Kamala, like any other garden variety con man of a politician, also said that she would boost “small businesses.”   

This shtick is pure magic for politicians.  By pledging to help small businesses, he will get the votes of conservatives because he says he wants to help businesses; because he says he wants to  help businesses that are small, he can also get the votes of liberals who like all things small and cuddly.  

And he will certainly get the votes of old farts and sweet fat grannies, and especially the votes of sweet but stupid ladies that love pepperidge farm cookies.   When they hear a politician speak of helping small businesses, these dim wits recall silver screen classic movies and see little Malcolm Mac Dowell buying some chocolate or toffee from a kindly old lady in a kindly, quaint shop.   They think of the  little luncheonette and the candy store and the dry cleaners and the barbershop.   

However, you must read the Federal Tax Code to know what a small business is.  In it you will find that any mining company that hires fewer than 290 employees is a small business.   And you will find the requirements, for designation as a small business, for about three dozen industries tucked away in the Federal Tax Code.  In all of these industries, firms are defined as small if they hire fewer than 200 or 300 or 400 workers.  

The fact of the matter is this:  We have been voting for politicians who claim they love small businesses, and they have been enacting laws that help large businesses swallow small businesses and the American Small Business Nirvana exists only in Hollywood and the scripts and talking points of scurrilous, sneaky politicians.  

Also, when they talk about the economy, they are forever speaking drivel about the excessively venerated goddamn “middle class.” 

Politicians, like that phony liberal in chief Chuck Schumer who has for years given hedge fund managers billions by taxing their salaries as if they were capital gains, try to make their constituent sheep imagine that almost all Americans are part of one enormous, benign middle class to stifle the true and cruel real class schemata:  There is a rich and bitchy class and then there is a class of suffering sad sacks.

In Schumer’s regressive outlook, people who make 20,000 dollars a year are in the same friendly middle class as bloodsuckers who make 400,000 dollars a year.    The 20,000-dollar guy does not need mortgage payments deducted; hell, he does not have a house.  Hell, he does not need anything deducted.   He needs money that his landlord is saving by deducting his, the landlord’s, mortgage.  Putting 20,000-dollar guys in the same class as 400,000-dollar guys is like putting Poles and Germans in the same class (While Nazi Germany occupied Poland, the rationing laws for eggs prescribed that Germans were allotted three eggs per week, Poles got one egg per month, and Jews got one egg per year.)

Our elections are rigged.  Not for the reasons that Donald Trump erupts about.  Our system is rigged because people don’t know what they are voting for, what issues are in contention and are silly putty for infinitely corrupt and contemptable candidates. 

All that said, I will concede that Kamala is head and shoulders above the eternally dumping gluttonous Trump.   I will vote for Kamala.  But I will hold my nose.