Despite the Harris Candidacy, I’m Actually Optimistic

Take a trip through the headlines over this Labor Day weekend, and positivity isn’t exactly a hot seller at the moment.

After all, we just found out that the Hamas animals our part-time presidential administration has been hard at work attempting to broker a peace deal on behalf of with our ally Israel decided it was better to slaughter six hostages — including an American citizen whose parents spoke at the Democrats’ convention two weeks ago — than to have the Israelis rescue them from an underground torture chamber.

One of last week’s columns in this space asked if our diplomats are idiots for wasting their time attempting to craft an armistice between Israel and Hamas. We officially know the answer to that question and it isn’t a surprise. Shockingly enough, though, there are Israelis in the streets calling not to annihilate Hamas but instead to do a deal with them, which is tantamount to a surrender.

We still have relatively persistent polling showing that while Kamala Harris didn’t get much of a bounce from that convention, she’s also defying the political gravity you’d expect from one of the least-popular vice presidents in American history.

This despite Harris conducting an interview on CNN which was taped rather than live, far less than the 50 minutes it was billed to be (Harris’ answers to the sycophantic Dana Bash’s questions covered just 16 minutes), and contained what can only be described as an emotional support animal in Tim Walz, who probably had the opposite effect of that which was intended; Walz towered over Harris as she sat in a chair which swallowed her nearly whole during the interview. It looked as though the Democrats had nominated a DEI version of Master Blaster from the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome movie.

No, Kamala isn’t tall enough to play Tina Turner’s character in that movie. And she certainly doesn’t have the presence Tina had, either.

Harris’ tax plan is straight out of Juan Peron’s nation-killing Argentine playbook. Nobody really believes her when she tries to steal parts of Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda that the administration she serves has actively worked against — how can you claim you’re for no taxes on tips when you’re hiring 80,000-odd IRS agents whose jobs will be to police taxes on tips? — and yet the presidential race is still tied or Harris might even be ahead in the polls?

It isn’t just foreign policy and electoral politics which looks apocalyptic.

In Aurora, a suburb of Denver previously best known for the exploits of James Eagan Holmes, who 12 years ago killed a dozen people at a premiere of The Dark Knight Rises at a local theater, the sins of an open border have found America out.

In that city the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua has set up shop in a few apartment complexes, terrorizing the residents New Jack City-style by patrolling with long rifles and harassing all who would move freely about the premises. The suburban city’s mayor and several members of the city council have reacted with outrage and vow to do something about the problem. But Colorado’s Democrat governor Jared Polis, who was Pete Buttigieg before Pete Buttigieg was cool (yes, I recognize that P-Butt isn’t actually cool), denies that the Tren de Aragua occupation even exists.

Interestingly enough, the name “Tren de Aragua” comes from a failed government project of Hugo Chavez, that country’s dead communist dictator. About 15 years ago, the Chavista government hired up a host of people to build a rail line in Venezuela’s Aragua province. The project went south, as so many communist enterprises do, and the trade unionists put out of work by the failure decided they would apply themselves to theft and extortion in an effort to match the exploits of their government. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Who Lies About Working at McDonald’s?)

A decade and a half later, Chavez’s successor Nicolas Maduro decided to export that competition to America, and our idiot politicians took them in.

Which doesn’t lead to very happy returns for the lower-income apartment dwellers of Aurora, Colorado and multiple other locales.

And what is our media’s focus while all of this is happening? Apparently Trump committed a grave offense against the U.S. military when he showed up at Arlington National Cemetery at the request of several Gold Star families in order to participate in a ceremony honoring the 13 Americans killed during the chaotic evacuation of Kabul three years ago.

There was an altercation between cemetery staff and a member of Trump’s team, though it’s unclear who was at fault, and Team Trump was so crass as to take photographs of his appearance in Arlington.

The whole thing is so stupid it’s actually shocking it was able to fill up a single news cycle, much less three of them.

Then there’s the story of San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Ricky Pearsall, shot in the chest by a 17-year-old punk who coveted the rookie first round draft pick’s Rolex. Pearsall survived and even walked to the ambulance which came to get him. The bullet miraculously missed all major organs as it passed through his torso; it didn’t even damage San Francisco’s reputation for public safety, because, well, there is nothing left of that to damage.

Yes, everywhere you look there is a Parade of Horribles traveling at low speed on the streets. No, there is no quick solution presented even by the good guys.

But color me optimistic anyway.

I haven’t lost my mind. It’s always darkest before the dawn, and sometimes you just have to hit rock bottom first.

Are we there yet? No. It can certainly get worse. But it can get better, too. And things might just begin to turn around a bit.

After all, the most non-woke movie made in the past decade, Deadpool & Wolverine, is now the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. And the new Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid and Penelope Ann Miller is number 2 at the box office right now.

The slaughter of Hersh Goldberg and those other five Hamas hostages, as grotesque and atrocious as it was, is a pretty clear signal that Israel is scouring Hamas out of Gaza. If the terrorist scum who held those hostages believed that there was another day for them to live and fight for, they would have moved the hostages rather than liquidating them. Their depravity was borne of desperation, and that means as painful as the news was, the Israelis might now soon finish the job in Gaza, their idiot leftist trade unionists notwithstanding.

We’re finally coming to a consensus for reversing the mass migrant invasion at our southern border when even Kamala Harris, the so-called “border czar” of the Biden administration, is all of a sudden backing Trump’s border wall concept. You can call that some political and demographic profit-taking by the Democrats, and you wouldn’t be wrong in saying so, but on the other hand there is no doubt that the Latin American criminal gangs have begun wearing out their welcome — and everyone knows who the welcome wagon was for them. (READ MORE: Trump Is Running for a First Term, Not a Second)

Harris is No Shoe-in

And those polls? Well, just understand that a lot of those surveys showing favorable numbers for Harris are grossly oversampling Democrats. There is also such a thing as response bias, something Ryan Girdusky ably described at The American Conservative last week. Girdusky noted that old white leftists are far and away the most likely human beings to answer polls, and their frequency of picking up the phone when others are too busy or otherwise refuse is very likely skewing the numbers in those demoralizing surveys you see.

There is a reason Nate Silver has suddenly gone very diffident in Harris’ chances of winning, after all.

A Trump victory in November is not a tonic for all of what ails the country and the world, in either culture, politics or economics. But based on prior performance he can be said to be a tourniquet.

And if it isn’t quite moving in his direction, particularly following Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s endorsement a week and a half ago, at least the momentum of Harris’ Team Incompetence campaign appears to have halted.

Or maybe it’s the incurable, delusional, sunny optimism our readers have come to know in this column poking its head out again.

The post Despite the Harris Candidacy, I’m Actually Optimistic appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.