Posted on 10/13/2024 7:51:48 AM PDT by MtnClimber
What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious.
If I may start with an understatement: It has not been a good week for team Kamala Harris. First, there was the scandal of her interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes. Asked about US influence on Israel, Harris delivered one of her signature, zero-calorie word salads. We know this because the network released a preview of the interview on social media, where it was promptly pounced upon and mocked. But when the entire interview aired, the interview was edited so that Harris’s original answer was replaced by a brief answer lifted from another part of the interview.
That bit of techno-fraud was instantly pilloried and deposited a lot of unsightly egg on the corporate face of CBS. I have not seen anything resembling an apology or even an acknowledgment from the network. As of this writing, calls for an unedited transcript of the whole interview to be released have gone unanswered. As the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote, CBS’s refusal is “a huge scandal” that, among other things, “suggests that much of the entire finished product was manipulative and deceitful, and not just the one horrible example that was discovered.”
Bad though the episode is for CBS, it is also humiliating for Harris. As Macbeth noted in another context, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.” The 60 Minutes débâcle was only the advance guard assaulting team Harris last week. Then there was a disastrous “town hall” meeting in which, again, multiple humiliations were assembled. First, some attentive scribe noticed that Harris was reading her replies off a teleprompter. Remember that was supposed to be an open forum in which Harris could connect with voters personally. But here she was, repeating scripted replies to pre-formulated questions.
And that was not the worst of it. A little digging revealed that the audience, too, was scripted. As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by an ‘audience-for-hire’ company and weren’t allowed to ask questions. The event was completely stage-directed and fake.”
An “audience-for-hire company”? Yep. I am not sure exactly which company team Harris employed, but it turns out that such initiatives are a booming business. Consider, for example, the company Crowds on Demand. Their website advertises “PROTESTS • RALLIES • ADVOCACY” and goes on to boast that
Whether your organization is lobbying to gain approval of a project, move forward a legislative initiative, bring additional pressure within complex litigation or trying to see swift and effective action in another way, we can set-up protests, rallies, demonstrations, alternatives to litigation or business disputes, coordinate phone-banking initiatives and even create non-profit organizations to advance your agenda.
I suspect that Democrats have frequent recourse to such companies. The Harris campaign, at any rate, is nearly 100% synthetic. Its crowds are actors or activists for hire. Ditto the figures populating its ads. In what has been derided as the “cringiest political ad ever,” a Harris satellite, attempting to address the campaign’s masculinity deficit, just released the truly horrible “I’m-a-man-and-I’m-voting-for-Harris” ad.
Like many people, I at first thought it was a spoof, an anti-Harris production designed to make fun of her and her running mate, Tim Walz. That certainly was the effect. But it turns out that the half dozen men in the ad were not random XY creatures who just happened to support Harris for president. No, they were B-list actors, recruited and paid to deliver their lines. (And what lines they were. One actor who pretended to know something about cars, said “You think I’m afraid to rebuild a carburetor? I eat carburetors for breakfast.” I am thinking of offering a reward to anyone who can tell me what that means.)
One enterprising commentator discovered who wrote the ad—Jacob Reed, a writer for the late-night talk host Jimmy Kimmel—and the real-life biographies of the actors. Let’s just say that none is a poster child for masculinity. The comments have been brutal. “Zero testosterone was used in the making of this ad”; “A Real Man instantly realizes that there isn’t a single Real Man in this pathetic beta male cringe-fest of a propaganda video”; “From the party that can’t tell you what a woman is”; “As a man, I think I walked away from this ad with a yeast infection.”
The world was still ridiculing the ad when the news came that Tim Walz, in another effort to assuage the doubts about his masculinity, had invited journalists on a pheasant hunt. A bunch of photographs of the “hunt” are circulating. You’ll see lots of outdoorsy garb and a few dogs. What you won’t see are any shotguns. In a real hunting party, every hunter would have a couple of shotguns to hand. But in the fake, synthetic world of Harris-Walz, no guns were thought necessary. As someone quipped, perhaps they were planning to catch the pheasants by hand and strangle them. Eventually, Walz was given a gun, but it was painfully clear that he had no idea how to handle it. As one commentator noted, Walz’s “gun handling skills make Dick Cheney look like the safest shooter in the world. Perhaps that is why Cheney endorsed him.”
All this happened in a matter of days, and the days in question are barely three weeks from the election. What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious. Strange things can happen in the last days of a presidential campaign. Sudden reversals of fortune are not unknown. Candidates can suddenly turn things around and emerge victorious after weeks or months of trailing in the polls. The most difficult obstacle to victory, however, is being made to appear ridiculous. That is almost inevitably fatal. Harris and Walz have made themselves ridiculous time and again this last week or two. I do not believe they can recover.
An audience for hire company? How embarrassing.
The DEMs need to ramp up their Antifa/BLM protests and wave of destruction soon before it’s too late.
Soros hired both the Antifa and neo Nazis actors at C-ville. Actually, there were bad actors on both sides.
Harris yard signs everywhere.
Shocking how stupid people are and so willing to advertise.
None of this is remotely funny. The powers that be that are behind these two running for office literally want all opposition dead. This whole thing is FAR from over. We are now going to see real terrorism come to the surface in America.
Yeah, this audience-for-hire business has been going on for some time and really took off with the advent of social media. In its early days it quietly provided reliable, non-combative scripted callers for radio talkshows.
From the article,as a comment on the ‘I’m a man and I support Kamela” commercial: “As a man, I think I walked away from this ad with a yeast infection.”
Well worthy of FR, and something I would have been proud to come up with.
Very typical Federal Government incompetence.
Paid for with your hard earned tax dollars turned against us.
You can see it at this post yesterday "Is it real, or is it fake?" for the video. It's even worse than that collection of testosterone-challenged beta cucks pretending to be men who support Harris.
Articles such as this are nothing more than gaslighting.
I saw pictures of Hillary rallies where reporters outnumbered rally goers. Reportedly, she rarely made campaign appearances. Those signs would suggest that almost no one would turn out to vote for her, yet the election was fairly close.
Same thing with Biden. No one at his rallies, he barely campaigned at all, and his speech style was incoherent and sometimes abusive. Yet we are supposed to believe that larger numbers of people turned out to vote for him than have ever turned out to vote in an election.
So when I see articles about how badly casting-couch Kamala is doing, I have to take it with a grain of salt.
Yes, more than half the audience for hired seat fillers in of Las Vegas. Their job was to sit. The people who did ask questions were hand selected by Univision and flown in - not Vegas locals - so the questions and answers were anything but impromptu.
a collection of testosterone-challenged beta cucks pretending to be men who support Harris.
Yes it has been around for a while - so have paparazzi for hire. If you want to make yourself into a social media celebrity hire a crowd and some paparazzi to wait outside a restaurant for you. A couple of security guards to “hold the crowds back”.
They will do that the day after Trump is sworn in. Trump needs to create a new “Untouchables” Squad independent of the Justice Dept. to go after these obvious frauds.
It’s their strategy. Look up “Asch conformity experiments”. The Dems are programming the weak-minded and trying to do the same to the rest of us.
I saw the video online, what a dork Walz is.
Walz sets off my gaydar.
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