HGotW: Kathleen Parker
Once, twice, three times a douche-nozzle, the three times winner of the "This Fucking Guy" award has walked her way on the finalist list for the Mount Douchemore.
This came and was buried on the WaPo so fast that I failed to see it when it was published, hinting that the deaf, dumb, and blind editor monkeys at the Post quickly realized that this was a shit-take.
First, here are the three prior awards:
Alas, a kind reader alerted me to the latest dribblings of Post’s conservative diversity hire, Kathleen Parker, and her whingeing about how Harris’ candidacy isn’t Obama 2.0.
First, here’s the gifted link: “News flash: Kamala Harris is not a remake of Barack Obama”
She leads off strong(ly reeking of envy):
I beg to differ that Vice President Kamala Harris is the second coming of Barack Obama, though that is what her campaign would like you to think. And whether her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is the folksiest “normy,” as one commentator put it, White guy in the Midwest, news anchors ought to be able to resist the tug of Harris mania.
Folks, when a conservative commentator leads with “I beg to differ…” you know that what follows will be a take that is just awful.
Here Parker is expressing her pissy-ness of the changing election dynamics. Whilst I see people comparing the enthusiasm that Harris/Walz has ignited in the electorate to the waves of support that Obama was rolling up in 2008, I am not seeing people claim she’s the reincarnation of the Obama.
Then she overlays some of her own fan-fic, mirroring many of the talking points that the R’s have been spitting out:
Poor Joe Biden, who, we should note, is still the president of the United States. What must he be thinking as Kamalapalooza takes off before the dust has settled on his shuffle off to Delaware — or wherever Nancy Pelosi has stashed him? Maybe he’s in the Obamas’ basement, from which the former president once joked he wouldn’t mind running the country via a frontman or woman wearing an earpiece as a third-term president. Will Obama be dictating terms to a President Harris, whom he once complimented as “the best-looking attorney general in the country”? (emphasis mine)
Oh, really KP? That is your best shot at a witty repartee? That Obama once complimented Kamala? Is that all ya got?
Also true: Without her beauty, Harris might be joining Biden in retirement. All you have to do is imagine her spoken words coming from a less-attractive package. Or put her on radio.
So, third paragraph, and Parker goes full toxic, shaming Kamala on her voice, and claiming that she’s only on fire because she’s an attractive middle-aged woman.
Wow. I just got nothing. I am sure she felt that because Trump was making such a huge deal about the image of Kamala on the latest Time magazine cover being a lot like (ick) Melania.
I should point out that the pundit class and the press are bigly upset that the transition form Biden to Harris was drama-llama free, and they are big mad that they didn’t get the mini-primary, and jungle fight on the convention floor that they so craved.
Of course, she uses the usual caveat’s that bigots and twats return to like a binky:
I’m treading on soggy turf here, and not just because Tropical Storm Debby has dumped a couple of lakes in my yard. Speaking about a person’s physical appearance today, especially a woman’s, is verboten. “Telegenic” is the only acceptable term, as though people can’t extrapolate the meaning. Why not be bold — and honest — as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan was in a recent column? A bad picture can’t be taken of Harris. She’s gorgeous. There.
Pro-tip: If you are trying to justify your misogyny by tapping in Peggy Noonan, well, you are some kind of special.
Then she trots out the (so very tired) “big government” trope:
Big Government, which Republicans since Ronald Reagan have viewed as the enemy (except when they’re running it), isn’t Harris’s best selling point when the country is facing a likely recession, and a vast swath (70 percent) of Americans can barely pay their bills. Recent polling and election history tell us that voters usually turn to Republicans when the economy is on the line.
At least she has the decency to note that R’s are not really into small government, but then she dives into the tired standard schtick - that voters reliably turn to Republicans when people are worried about their economic situations. Sadly, she’s not wrong, but the reality is that if you look at actual performance and health of family economics are better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones, but hey, way to keep the faith Ms. Parker.
Then she takes aim at Tim Walz, and she picks his universal meals for all students. That is Communistic!
Walz boasts that Democrats, unlike Republicans, “don’t have the Ten Commandments posted in our classrooms, but we have free breakfast and lunch.” Which is to say Walz might be to the left of Harris and is one of the reasons Trump said “I could not be more thrilled” when Walz became Harris’s pick as running mate. But Walz will “unleash HELL ON EARTH,” as Trump also said (his emphasis). I didn’t realize vice presidents were so powerful.
So, the party that is pro-life, pro-family, is upset that (checks notes) a state governor got passed a law and funding to provide universal breakfast and lunch for their future citizens and voters? Oh, the humanity, where will it stop? C
Naturally, she has to be careful to put some daylight betwixt herself and Trump, so she does a clean up in aisle 9:
These observations shouldn’t be construed as an endorsement of Trump, who remains as Trumpy as ever, despite his near-death experience at the hands of a would-be assassin. Nor of his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, erstwhile hillbilly/Yale law grad/hedge funder and provocateur, who, among his several foot-in-mouth feats, let the cat ladies out of the bag. As unforced errors go, this one surely has nine lives.
Gee, Trump thinks Walz will be easy to beat, but Veeps aren’t really important, but he also made the own-goal of the century in the piling on selection of JD Vance as a running mate, whilst he was high on the adrenaline of the attempted assassination the Saturday before the RNC.
That sounds like Parker is a bit wistful that her golden calf is not just fallible, but a fucking insane rabid beaver wearing a dead ferret hairpiece.
Parker continues, almost showing a glimmer of “getting it”:
While Vance promises to “mop the floor” with Walz, Trump doesn’t exactly burn up the debate stage — unless, of course, his opponent is cognitively impaired. When trying to make a point, as in a recent Fox News interview, Trump circles the barn so many times, I can collect eggs from the henhouse and water the horses before he gets to it. A debate between him and Harris would require not only a fact-checker but a sous chef adept at deconstructing word salads.
Gee Kathleen? Ya think? Seriously, what do you really think? Oh, you don’t have to guess, she goes right back to the well of bad takes:
I don’t know about you, but I feel embarrassed, sad and a little scared. As New York magazine heralds “Kamalot” on its cover, The Movement is being sold as Obama 2008. The giddiness I mentioned earlier has all the markings of a run on tulips. Harris and Walz, meanwhile, are calling themselves “joyful warriors,” waging a war of smiles and killing it with kindness.
It’s smart strategy juxtaposed against the unsmiling, petulant Trump, but that’s all it is.
Gee, she so wants to tie a cinder block around Kamala and toss her into the depths of Lake Tahoe.
She then says that she needs a “strategy” to beat Trump that isn’t just being a pretty face:
Strategy isn’t policy and, except for Harris’s radiant smile, 2024 is nothing like 2008. Obama was more than just a pretty face. He brought a keen intellect to the arena and remains the most eloquent, effective orator of our time. Harris remains the person she has been for the past 3½ years: a sometimes bumbling beauty with a stride that conveys confidence if not precisely competence.
Uh, look Ms. Parker, you’re correct that Obama wasn’t just a pretty face, but where you’re wrong is your assumption that Harris is just a vacuous pretty face, void of substance. Are you pissed that she has yet to sit down to be subjected to your paper’s pathetic attempts to both-sides and create a horse race to drive traffic and thus ad revenue to pay your ridiculously too large salary.
I will take the Prosecutor over the Felon, 7 days a week.
And you will return to the category of writers on the post that I only click on to read and make fun of.
Last pull quote:
Twenty years ago, at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Barack Obama, then merely a state senator from Illinois, stepped out onto the stage, a lanky vision of grace and beauty, and mesmerized the crowd with his message: “There is not a liberal America, and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a Black America, and a White America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There is the United States of America.”
Spellbound as anyone else, I elbowed fellow journalist Carl Cannon and said, “We’ve just heard the first Black president of the United States.”
Oh, I see, you have a fangirl crush on Obama, and you are wondering if that tingling in your loins seeing Harris ignite a similar level of enthusiasm, and you are thinking this might be some latent homosexual tendencies.
Yeah, get the fuck over yourself, you are my Human Garbage of the Week, having graduated from your twice awarded “This Fucking Guy” trophy granted to participation award hating trash.
She’s a bad attempt at a low-rent Maureen Dowd.
She is, as you are kind enough not to point out, an incredibly bad writer. Overused tropes. Silly jokey lines. Dull style. I see WaPo going onto my list of discarded sources when my subscription runs.