Colleagues I Hardly Knew Ye

I have mentioned before, probably many times, that I have discovered as most of us boomers get older...OK, simply get old, that our true feelings become more apparent. I worked in the journalism trade for 54 years now, come September, and over those years I worked with some talented and creative men and women whose work I still admire. And I, for the most part, never really knew their politics. And that's as it should be. But now that most have retired, and with Zuckerberg's Frankenstein monster Facebook as an outlet for their repressed bile, I am amazed at what schmucks some of them actually are.

I am not going to name names, for all you Houston TV and radio fans, because come on, I worked with these people. But for crying out loud, for folks who observed the non-partisan tenets of our trade, they must have been on the verge of exploding like Mr. Creosote, the fat diner in Monty Python...

These days, the angle of attack that many are taking against Kamala Harris, and I certainly understand there are legitimate questions she should answer, is that she is somehow Karl Marx's illegitimate great granddaughter. It's like the John Birch Society is still out there calling everyone to the left of Goldwater a red.

Now, she is certainly a liberal Democrat, but one of my former colleagues decided this bit of photoshoppery was somehow an accurate depiction...

For the younger kids in the crowd, this is a play on the famous photo of Che Guevara, Fidel's right hand man and an astonishingly incompetent revolutionary in his own right.

This is similar to the phony "wanted" poster of President Kennedy circulated by the Birchers in Dallas a few days before his fatal visit.

By the way, the accusation that he sent federal troops to "invade" a sovereign state was when he activated the National Guard to force the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, as federal law decreed. Now there's your Stalin-level tyranny right there, bubba.

They were distributed by a monstrously active Bircher named Col. Edwin Walker, a man who was cashiered from the Army for distributing this kind of nonsense to the troops. Ironically, the Warren Commission determined that just a few months earlier, Lee Harvey Oswald, who apparently couldn't decide whom he hated more, took a shot at Walker in his home.

At any rate, while JFK was certainly a liberal as well, this kind of rhetorical overkill is apparently in vogue again. Wait, while I check my calendar...

OK, I'm back and it is indeed 2024. So, what besides the standard issue Democratic platform planks is Harris guilty of that earns her the Trump sobriquet "Comrade Kamala." Well, let's be fair, it doesn't take much to earn one of his 3rd grade nicknames, but best I can tell is she once supported Bernie Sanders proposal for "Medicare for all." That would be, essentially, a single payer health care system like (checks notes), yeah, every other industrialized nation on the planet.

Oh, and for some conspiracy-minded MAGAns, that planet is round, in case they are wondering.

What kind of commie-tool would propose something like that? Slinging around lines like...a ‘national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.’

Oh, wait. That was Winston Churchill in 1943. My mistake.

When I was in Germany for the run up to reunification of East and West, all of us reporters attended press conferences with both parties on the issues involved.

Since it was the early 90's and health care reform was all the rage with the Clintons, we asked our hosts about the German national system. Neither the liberal Social Democrats or conservative Christian Democrats would dream of going to US-style health care. Their arguments revolved around who could run it the most efficiently.

Look, I have outlined all the facts surrounding this, including why we aren't the greatest health care system in the world, not even close. Here is the article, and it will disabuse you of some national delusions.

So, she agrees with Winston Churchill. What else you got? Oh, she wants to prevent price gouging. A lot of my former colleagues are arguing that grocery stores operate on razor thin profit margins, so they aren't to blame for high prices. Well, the Federal Trade Commission looked at the situation and as reported in USA Today...

“As the pandemic illustrated, a major shock to the supply chain have cascading effects on consumers, including the prices they pay for groceries,” FTC Chair Lina Kahn said in a statement. “The FTC report examining US grocery supply chains finds that dominant firms used this moment to come out ahead at the expense of their competitors and the communities they serve.”

Ah, then there is the border. Another of my colleagues posted a video by the most trusted dissembler in the media, former ABC reporter John Stossel. It was Stossel who penned a column during the Hurricane Katrina energy crisis entitled "In Praise of Price Gouging." Of course, he is a climate change denier, and thinks the minimum wage is actually harmful.

And my friend and former colleague posted a Stossel video touting "Latest border statistics," of 302,000 encounters a month at the end of 2023. But in July, the number was down to 56,000. Why use an out of date number? Because Stossel has a point to make, and those damned later stats only get in the way.

Now my former colleague was one of the finest journalists I have ever watched or certainly worked with, and he would never have used bad numbers in a story. But now? By the way, Stossel talked about big money needed for Harris' proposals, forgetting what I pointed out last week, that the former guy added more to the debt in 4 years than any Presidential term in history.

And his border numbers did look good. But until the pandemic, it was a trend. Here is a year by year chart.

The numbers really started down under the former, former guy and when the pandemic hit, the border was essentially closed for health reasons. This chart stops at last year, but the current numbers? The Texas Tribune reports...,

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in Texas apprehended 30,771 migrants between ports of entry in June, down from 45,139 in May. Border Patrol agents apprehended 83,536 migrants in June across the southern border, down from 117,901 in May. That marked the fewest monthly apprehensions since January 2021, the month President Joe Biden took office, according to CBP figures released Monday.

The new statistics are among the first released since Biden’s executive order that widely stopped granting asylum to migrants went into effect June 5.

So, why didn't Stossel report that? For the same reason that my friend didn't when he posted the video. It doesn't help the case. Neither does talking about the bipartisan border bill that Trump leaned on his sycophants in the House to kill.

Now, Democrats will hem and haw about the border in response, and what should or shouldn't have been done and what Harris' job title was. Frankly, that is pretty lame defense. And, let's be honest, explaining all this stuff doesn't work in a 60-second ad and no one will read it all in some position paper. Come on, I'm lucky if you read half of this, though that may be more a product of my prose than anything else.

I mean, look at that chart above. Would you read that without someone pointing a gun at you? Or, Governor Kristi Noem doing it to your dog?

And they are right that Harris hasn't sat for an interview yet. Hey, come on lady, it's been one whole month! I presume she will probably start with 60-Minutes and then do the debate on the 10th. After that, it will be hammer and tongs, and more of these kinds of internet postings until November.

Expect to hear lots about Project 2025, her supposed "communist professor" father, a California politician she dated, and more. We'll hear how the Ukraine War will be ended in one day (?) and China will pick up your grocery tab with tariffs, or something like that. Abortion will be a big deal, and should be, but will it decide the election? I'm guessing not. And of course, there will be warnings about some migrant lurking in your garage to pounce, or some such.

But those of you nostalgic for the 50's and 60's, you'll be happy to know the Red Scare has made a comeback. After all, Tim Walz has actually been to China. I mean, the prosecution rests, eh?

Oh, and where's Hunter and his communist, uh, crowd-sized appendage?