How to turn a twofer into a threefer

In case your command of American slang is less than perfect, a twofer is someone who ticks two boxes on the list of woke credentials. A threefer is someone who ticks three such boxes, and so on, although not quite ad infinitum.

Thus Kamala Harris is a twofer, or even a twoandahalfer. She is a woman – tick. She is also racial minority – tick. And then perhaps another half-tick because, in addition to being half-black, she’s also half-Indian. That’s two racial minorities for the price of one, can’t beat that.

Now she has the Democratic nomination more or less sewn up, barring a likely dip in the polls, all those ticked boxes are supposed to establish – dare I say circumscribe – her presidential credentials.

Having twice indulged their appetite for diversity candidates, American voters may not be quite sated yet. After all, by being black, Obama ticked only one such box.

By the way, both Jim Crow segregationists and woke ‘liberals’ have an identical racial criterium: a drop of tar, all black. Hence Barack and Kamala are universally accepted as black even though their mothers were, respectively, white and Indian. That’s as if mothers – women! – didn’t count, which strikes me as rank misogyny. Tell me where to report such reprobates.

Some naysayers still insist that, in the absence of any other discernible qualifications, being a twofer may still not be sufficient to take Kamala to the White House. Now, if she were a threefer… Wait a minute.

True, Kamala is neither a cripple nor a lesbian nor a trans, but presidential candidates never walk, or for that matter run, alone. They have a VP candidate in tow as part of the ticket. And if Kamala herself can’t be a threefer, her ticket certainly can be.

The choice of her running mate therefore makes itself: Pete Buttigieg, the openly homosexual Transport Secretary. And as an extra benefit, he’s a white Midwesterner, thereby adding both chromatic and geographic balance to the ticket. Sorted, as they say on our side of the Atlantic. Hail, President Harris.

This reminds me that there’s no such thing as corrupt politicians, not in democracies at any rate. There are only corrupt, or rather corrupted, electorates. Yes, what I’ve written so far today is a mocking spoof. But you can only mock something that exists, and what exists is Kamala Harris who may well become the next president of the United States.

This at a time when the West is in what Americans call clear and present danger. Russia, inflamed by Nazi propaganda, is waging brutal war against the West’s eastern flank. In that undertaking she’s supported surreptitiously yet unequivocally by China.

Also, according to recent intelligence reports, China is about to invade Taiwan, thereby disrupting the supply of silicon chips to the West and holding its economies to ransom. And at this critical time, political analysts are discussing the woke boxes Kamala ticks or doesn’t.  

It takes a thoroughly corrupted electorate to vote for Kamala strictly on the basis of such extraneous qualifications. And if any other basis exists, I’m at a loss to see what that might be.

I’m not an enthusiastic admirer of Trump, but he is beginning to look better by the minute. Say what you will about him – and I’ve said plenty – at least he doesn’t play the ticket-balancing game.

Trump chose as his running mate a likeminded man he thinks will be a good vice president and potentially president. J.D. Vance is an eminently capable chap who doesn’t balance Trump’s ticket in any way: he is white, conservative (as the term is understood in the US), populist – and he doesn’t come from any swing state.

My opposition to Trump is largely a matter of style and rhetoric but, compared to Harris, he comes across as a present-day Demosthenes.

For example, here’s how Kamala communicated the idea that the present must be viewed in a historical context: “I think it’s very important… for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualise it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.”

Or this is how she expressed her resolute support for Roe vs Wade: “I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.”

I read up on such verbal problems when working on my book about Tolstoy’s philosophy and religion. One chapter was devoted to the writer’s mental health, as analysed and recorded by psychiatrists.

They reached the conclusion that Tolstoy suffered from epilepsy, one of whose symptoms is perseveration, a tendency to repeat the same words and phrases within the same sentence. This may be a symptom not only of epilepsy but also of some other organic disorder or brain injury. And Kamala does perseveration with the best of them.

Joe Biden’s tenure has brought the issue of mental health into focus, but now the focus can be profitably shifted to Kamala, who doesn’t seem to be quite compos mentis either.

Just look at this passage where she explains Artificial Intelligence to the uninitiated: “It’s about machine learning, and so, the machine is taught – and part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine – and we can predict then, if we think about what information is going in, what then will be produced.”

I’d be curious to hear what a psychiatrist would have to say if exposed to that text without attribution. He’d probably notice perseveration and might conceivably even diagnose mental retardation – that gibberish sounds as if it was delivered by someone half a century younger than Kamala.

If her oratory is laughable, her record is well-nigh non-existent. Politically, she won the 2017 Senate election in California, where having a pulse is the only requirement for a Democratic candidate to win. When she ran solo as a presidential candidate in 2020, Harris was blown off in the early primaries. Even impeccably Democratic commentators openly mocked her tendency to talk drivel and laugh uncontrollably at the most inappropriate moments.

(An interesting aside: in America political candidates run; in Britain they stand. Can one extrapolate that the American national character is more dynamic?)

Kamala then provided that vital balance to Joe Biden’s ticket and became his VP. Now, it’s commonly believed that US Vice Presidents’ responsibilities are seldom more onerous than those of a doorstop. There is some truth to that belief, but it’s not the whole truth.

Sometimes presidents assign specific tasks to their VPs, which was the case with Kamala. She was given the immigration brief, specifically that of controlling the eternally porous southern border to stem the influx of illegal migrants.

On her watch, at least seven, and by some estimates as many as ten, million illegals crossed the border with Mexico. The situation that had always been dire became catastrophic. But not as far as Kamala is concerned.

Proud of her accomplishments, she said: “We have a secure border in that that is a priority for any nation including ours in our administration.” Mrs Cicero strikes again but, rhetoric apart, if Kamala thinks the Mexican border is secure, there are some properties I’d like to sell her west of Malibu in her native California.

How this nonentity can be considered as a possible candidate for presidency is beyond me. Yet the problem isn’t just with Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party or the thoroughly corrupted US electorate that can be swayed by woke credentials even in the absence of any other.

For similar outrages are happening all over the West, with manifestly unfit candidates rising to power on the basis of irrelevant criteria. My view is that we are reaping the crop planted by the Enlightenment, but this is something to ponder not in an article but in a book (such as any of mine, apart from the aforementioned one on Tolstoy).