Harris and Sinwar

The Bret Baier interview with Democrat Party presidential prospect Kamala Harris was a debate between Harris’ two faces. Baier simply held up the mirror to nature. He had less than 20 minutes in the interview, and Harris was fashionably late to arrive and early to leave.

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The former interview-shy prosecutor, Vice President for nearly four years in the President Joe Biden administration, has been interviewing at the margins the last few weeks. The Baier interview should have been political Hollywood for her but, as part of a long term strategy to duck hard questions and embarrassing exposures, it turned out to be a glaring failure, largely owing to Baier’s persistent questioning.

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The more Harris ducked and bobbed and weaved and let loose convoluted non-answers to Baier’s simple and necessary questions – How many illegal migrants have crossed the border during your nearly four years as Vice President in the Biden administration? Baier was looking for a number. And when did you first become aware of President Biden’s diminished mental capacity? – the more it became plain that Harris was tucking her years as Vice President under her arm, prepared to leave the unpleasant interrogation for a more important venue. In fact her team cut short both ends of a truncated interview. Harris’ wordy non-answers were designed to eat up time.

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Harris’ most persistent and challenging problem is that she had during her long career in politics adopted different personas to satisfy professional contingencies and played them to the hilt. Dressing up in personas – a hard on crime prosecutor, a soft on crime attorney general; now a conservative, now a progressive; now in sync with Biden’s too friendly relations with the murderous Iran regime, now a fast friend of Israel, besieged on all sides by Iran’s’ proxy terrorists ?– created a character-dysplasia vividly on display throughout the Baier interview.

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One is reminded of Shakespeare’s line in Hamlet: “I could close myself in a walnut shell and count myself the king of infinite space -- were it not that I have bad dreams.” The Baier interview was one of Harris’ bad dreams, and her wordy walnut shell provided no safe refuge.

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Time and circumstances are crushing Harris’ safe spaces.

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Consider Harris’ comments on the untimely death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar . The Wall Street Journal tells us, “Vice President Kamala Harris said the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar presents an ‘opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza’ that started a year ago.”

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To the Biden-Harris administration, pretty much every successful Israeli assault has been an occasion for ending the war in Gaza and opening the door to US preferred negotiations, apparently with Iran, Hamas’ financier.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu envisions a different road to peace in Gaza, pretty much the same route outlined by former President Ronald Reagan when asked what his policy might be with respect to the Soviet Union. “We win,” Reagan answered, “they lose.”

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Harris continued, “Justice has been served [by the death of Sinwar], and the United States, Israel and the entire world are better off as a result… I will say to any terrorist who kills Americans, threatens the American people, or threatens our troops or our interests, know this: We will always bring you to justice.”

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The Associated Press (AP) noted, “The [Biden-Harris] administration's response to the killing of a chief architect of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel was carefully choreographed, leaving room for Harris to emphasize the push to end the war as she balances her loyalty to Biden.”

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It should not be forgotten – the AP report cited above makes no mention of it – that the Biden-Harris administration had strongly advised that Netanyahu should avoid entering Rafah, where Sinwar was successfully hiding out, surrounded by a buffer of Hamas’ hostages.

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Newsweek recently reported, “Back in March, Vice President Kamala Harris warned Israel not to enter Rafah, the southern Gaza enclave where Hamas had holed up among the civilian population, saying in an interview that the U.S. would not rule out "consequences" if the Israeli military moved forward with a gathering invasion.” Harris’ “consequences,” many reporters inferred from her stray remark, entailed the withdrawal of munitions from Netanyahu.

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Harris’ most recent remarks following Sinwar’s justifiable death smacks of political stolen valor.

Netanyahu’s remarks following the death of Sinwar were Churchillian: "Yahya Sinwar is dead. While this is not the end of the war in Gaza, it's the beginning of the end."

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For his part, Biden, pursuing Middle East peace in Germany, issued a written statement on Sinwar's death. The president, whose reelection campaign was deadened by shakers and movers in the Democrat Party, “focused on how U.S. intelligence helped the Israelis pursue Hamas leadership and noted that Israel had every right to ‘eliminate the leadership and military structure of Hamas,’” accordion to the AP report. “Today proves once again that no terrorists anywhere in the world can escape justice, no matter how long it takes,” Biden said.

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Netanyahu has been serving justice upon the enemies of Israel by the bucketful in recent days, spurning advice from the Biden/Harris administration that Israel, perpetually under siege by its enemies, should prematurely beat its swords into plowshares before its enemies – Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the as yet untouched Iranian Ayatollah Shia war-masters in Tehran – have been vanquished.

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Until they are vanquished, Netanyahu and the friends of Israel in the United States justifiably fear that a premature negotiated settlement before the war is successfully concluded will simply be a return to the status quo ante before the ascendancy in Gaza of Hamas and its late leader, Sinwar.

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Also, Harris failed to note in her brief comment following the death of Sinwar that Netanyahu’s vision of peace in the Middle East is far more practical than her own. How painful would it have been for Harris to compliment Netanyahu for having pursued a just war likely to bring justice to the Middle East and an end to a shape-shifting foreign policy in the Biden-Harris administration?