By Rich Lowry
Thursday, August 01, 2024
‘L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”
So says George C. Scott’s General Patton in the eponymous
movie when his comrades want another day’s rest during the Sicilian campaign.
No one is going to mistake Kamala Harris for Patton, or
even George C. Scott, but her latest tack on immigration honors his call for
“audacity, audacity, always audacity.”
After helping preside over a comprehensive failure at the
border, a lesser politician might mumble something or other and change the
subject to aborting babies.
A politician with an ounce of respect for the public
might at least acknowledge, before saying anything else, that “mistakes were
made.”
A politician less certain that the media would swallow
any set of absurdities deemed in her interest might hesitate before making such
facially preposterous claims.
The idea that Harris has been a tough-minded success on
the border while Donald Trump was a failure is sociopathic in its dishonesty.
It’s tiresome and apparently beside the point to recite
the basic facts, but after experiencing what was a migrant crisis by the old
standard that now seems quaint, the Trump administration implemented a series
of measures that all but brought illegal crossings to a halt.
Then, the Biden administration reversed them all and
illegal immigration quickly accelerated to record levels.
This is a matter of record that isn’t in dispute. The Washington
Post has a series of charts setting it out.
Millions of illegal immigrants have entered the country
and strained the resources of big cities across America. If the numbers have
reduced recently, they are still at high levels and the reduction is, in
part, due to legerdemain that has redirected illegal immigrants into parole programs to create a patina of legitimacy around
their crossings.
Meanwhile, interior enforcement has been kneecapped, with deportation by ICE falling drastically.
It’s not as though, by the way, that Harris was a former
border hawk who got press-ganged into serving in an open-borders
administration; she set out positions to the left even of the Biden
administration prior to becoming vice president.
Yet Kamala Harris declared of Trump at her Atlanta rally,
“I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week. Any day of the
week, including, for example, on the issue of immigration.”
“Donald Trump,” she added, “has been talking a big game
about securing our border. But he does not walk the walk.”
Harris is running an ad that claims she’s working to fix the broken
immigration system while Trump is trying to stop her — a lie so heedlessly
flagrant that it truly boggles the mind.
The ad leans much on Trump’s opposition to the bipartisan
immigration bill several months ago. But the case against that bill was that it
did too much to bless the unacceptable status quo and that Biden always had
vast unilateral powers to act on the border — a claim that Biden vindicated by,
after much resistance, indeed acting on his own.
The Harris case has not been met with a flurry of fact
checks, nor have editors been zealously adding the word “falsely” in front of
her claims. No, she’s flipping the script, and going on offense, and punching back.
Moreover, the facts don’t support Republican attacks on her very nuanced record. According to Senator Chris Murphy (D.,
Conn.) on MSNBC, her record is something to brag about.
All this amounts to saying, “She wasn’t the border czar,
but, boy oh boy, did she do a great job at the border.”
Perhaps Harris isn’t to be blamed for trying this.
With the media having elevated her from also-ran vice
president to savior of the republic in the space of about twelve hours a couple
of weekends ago, why not try to get it to swallow an even more outlandishly
implausible notion?
Nothing so far should lead her to believe anything other
than that her audacity will be rewarded.
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