As WorldNetDaily columnist Michael Brown handwaved Donald Trump’s immorality to justify voting for him, he was much more critical of Kamala Harris. In his Oct. 14 column, he played the just-asking-questions card to advance the unproven claim that anti-Semitism kept Harris from choosing Josh Shapiro as her vice presidential candidate:
According to an Oct. 9, 2024, article in the New York Times by Shane Goldmacher, “There may be seven main battlegrounds in the race for the White House in 2024, all of which could prove crucial. But Pennsylvania stands apart as the state that top strategists for both Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump have circled as the likeliest to tip the election.”
In light of this observation, which is hardly novel, the obvious question is: Why, then, wasn’t Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro chosen as Harris’ vice presidential running mate? Wouldn’t he do a better job of delivering Pennsylvania to the Democrats? And overall, wasn’t he a much better choice than Tim Waltz?
Now, I am neither a political pundit nor a pollster. And I am simply raising questions rather than making assertions, let alone dogmatic assertions.
But what if Trump wins the national election and taking Pennsylvania was a key to that victory? (Again, this is not a prediction; these are questions.) What if choosing Shapiro for vice president would have secured Pennsylvania for Harris? And what if he was not chosen because of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish sentiments?
Brown conceded that Democrats are not anti-Semitic but insisted they were catering to Arab-Americans by not choosing Shapiro:
Obviously, Jews have played a prominent role in Democratic politics for years. And there have been more than a few Jewish Democratic presidential candidates, most prominently Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg and Joe Lieberman (vice presidential candidate in 2000 as a Democrat before becoming an Independent). Few would seriously argue that the main reason Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders in the primaries was because he is Jewish. (For the record, both Howard Phillips and Marianne Williamson are Jewish too.)
And then there was Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964, who was crushed in the election by the Democratic incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson – and not, primarily, because he was Jewish. (Arlen Specter, formerly a Democrat, ran for president in 1996, but as a Republican.)
What is different today, however, is Israel’s war in Gaza (and beyond) and the massive spike in anti-Israel sentiments throughout America, coupled with the Biden-Harris efforts not to alienate Arab American voters.
Given the potential importance of Pennsylvania in the elections, it is foolish not to consider concerns of an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel backlash as a main reason Shapiro was not chosen. This is hardly a matter of playing the anti-Semitism card. In this case, it could well be real.
Brown spent his Oct. 28 column attacking Harris for wanting to reinstate Roe v. Wade protections for abortion:
Doesn’t this sound reasonable? Abortion is one of the most personal decisions anyone can make, and so, if anything is “not the government’s decision,” it is this.
What Harris failed completely to address is why “many” people “rightly” oppose abortion, namely, because abortion takes the life of another human being. Could anything be more basic than that?
That’s why we have laws against murder and laws against rape and laws against kidnapping. All of them are transgressions against another person.
That’s also why, more specifically, we have laws against infanticide, even if the baby is intolerable, even if the child has a congenital disease, even if the mother is simply incapable of caring for the little one.
Whatever the case might be, the one thing she (or the father) is not allowed to do is terminate the life of the baby. Obviously. To do so would be to commit murder.
But Brown refused to fully embraced the logical endpoint of that absolutist line of thinking: that every woman who has ever had an abortion must be arrested and imprisoned (and even executed) for murder. Instead, he promoted his new book in which he claimed “to present compelling arguments for the cultural positions I oppose, seeking to help us respond with more heartfelt, compelling answers.” His idea of this is to present a hypothetical case of a 12-year-old girl who was “abducted and raped by a sexual predator who had just been released from jail — then dismissed the case as exceedingly rare and then offering “stories of women who were raped and aborted their babies, only to learn that the abortion didn’t heal the pain. And I tell the stories of some of the finest people on our planet, people who have an incredible amount of good but were conceived in rape.” He made no mention of Trump’s moderation on abortion or why he considers that acceptable.
Brown did finally acknowledge Trump’s retreat from anti-abortion extremism in his Oct. 30 column — but decided it doesn’t matter because Democrats are the real extremists:
It’s true that Kamala Harris is proving to be a very unpopular candidate. In fact, according to a recent poll, “When asked which candidate they rejected ‘more,’ 50.1 percent said Harris, while 48.6 percent said Trump.”
That is really quite striking when you just think of how much hatred there is toward Donald Trump. Yet, according to this poll (conducted from Oct. 25-29), more of them “rejected” Harris than Trump.
But if Trump and the GOP do triumph next Tuesday, it will not just be due to Harris’ unpopularity and Trump’s popularity. That’s because Trump has too much baggage. Too many haters. Too many alienating flaws. Too many obstacles to overcome.
Plus, Trump has disappointed many Christian conservatives by taking the teeth out of the GOP platform on important issues such as abortion and same-sex “marriage.”
No, there is something else going on, something that is driving many voters away from Harris and the Democrats. As articulated by the left-leaning political pundit Van Jones, “I just wonder if we look back on this period – there’s no excuse for the stuff that Elon Musk is doing, the stuff he says, he’s irresponsible – but if progressives have a politics that says, all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil, it’s kind of hard to keep them on your side. And so, we might want to think about, if you’re chasing people out of the party, you can’t be mad when they leave. And maybe if we had a different politics, where we actually said, dignity for everybody, everybody’s respected, and we need you, more people might stay.”
Quite true. Except for the fact that the scorpion isn’t thinking rationally and pragmatically. It’s being true to its own nature. It can’t help but sting the very one that it’s depending on for survival.
Put another way, defending tampons in boys’ bathrooms (as per Gov. Tim Waltz) is not a winning strategy.
In fact, Walz (whose name Brown misspelled) did not force schools to install tampon dispensers in boys’ bathrooms at school, and he offered no evidence that Walz ran on that issue in the election. But then, Brown was always going to find a reason to support Trump and oppose Harris, even when his right-wing sense of morality should have told him differently. To borrow from the scorpion analogy he used in this column, it’s his nature.