By Joe Saunders October 8, 2024 at 8:56am
Facts, as John Adams famously said, are stubborn things.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her supporters were reminded of that the hard way while facing a rare one-on-one interview broadcast Monday night, when she was confronted with the disaster of the open-border policy adopted by the Biden-Harris administration three years ago.
And she couldn’t wriggle out of it.
Check it out here:
Bill Whitaker presses Vice President Kamala Harris on President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers as part of a policy shift on border crossings, and on whether the Biden administration should have taken those steps sooner. https://t.co/l85soF5tG7 pic.twitter.com/XNnCKNnaWS
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 8, 2024
During the “60 Minutes” interview, CBS News’ Bill Whitaker opened the segment on illegal immigration by noting that Harris had “recently embraced President Biden’s crackdown on asylum seekers.”
“That crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings,” he said. “If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?”
Harris’ answer was a mishmash of proposals to Congress, including the “border security” fiasco that died in the Senate in February — three years after the time frame of Whitaker’s question.
The current administration wouldn’t even admit that there was a crisis on the southern border until January of this year.
— Susie (@SoCalSister22) October 8, 2024
Whitaker wasn’t buying what Harris was selling.
“There was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration,” he persisted.
“As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”
The question is blunt. The implications are impossible to ignore. But that didn’t stop Harris from trying.
“It’s a long-standing problem,” she said. “And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.”
Predictably, she fails to answer the actual question.
— Rick Ross (@RickRossTN) October 8, 2024
Whitaker refused to let her wriggle out of it.
“What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?” he asked, again.
He got more tap dancing in response.
“The policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, OK?” she said, unconvincingly.
“But the numbers did quadruple under your watch,” Whitaker interjected.
The response was more finger-pointing — “we need Congress to be able to act …” Harris said.
Not even the most delusional of Harris fans could have missed the point.
The illegal immigration unleashed by President Joe Biden and his border czar/vice president has gone from a flood to a tsunami since 2021 — swamping areas of the country far from the border with violence, gang activity, drugs and sex trafficking so bad even Democrats are disgusted.
Is immigration the biggest issue of the 2024 election?
(And that takes some doing — these are the kind of people who enjoyed the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, for crying out loud.)
Harris’ non-answers were almost parodies of a politician dodging serious questions. It was like if a youthful George Washington was asked if he cut down the cherry tree and he responded something like:
“While it’s true that there are plenty of cherry trees and always have been, I’ve committed to planting more cherry trees in the future and the solution to the current cherry tree situation is at hand — ignore the hatchet in the other hand.” **
Now, supporters of former President Donald Trump know all too well the treacherous bias of the establishment media when it comes to profiling presidential candidates — and the establishment media very much includes “60 Minutes.”
The Harris campaign and its operatives know about that bias, too. So for a candidate like Harris to flounder so badly in such friendly surroundings said even more about her abilities than the ludicrous non-answers she tried to pawn off on Whitaker during this interview.
It told Americans she’s unprepared for even slightly tough questions. It told viewers she seriously thought she could get away with that kind of nonsense.
And she told voters, in no uncertain terms, that she’s counting on the majority to be cynical enough — and gullible enough — to accept her vapid responses as the price to be paid for avoiding a new Trump administration. And she’s counting on the rest to be fools.
But facts are stubborn things. Americans will find out in November if they’re stubborn enough.
** Yeah, yeah, yeah. The George Washington cherry tree story has its doubters. Snopes calls it “unproven.” But the point is the point. And the comparison was irresistible.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
