Happy Monday!

First up, a hearty thanks to the great John Zmirak for filling in for me last week.

Second up, apologies to anyone trying to email any of us at The Stream the past several days. Major woes knocked out the system of our parent organization. Hopefully, all will be well soon. 

Musta Been the Heat

The D.C. area was brutally hot during my days off. In fact, the heat actually made me delirious. You wouldn’t believe the stuff I imagined.

At one point I imagined Kamala Harris teaming with the people who brought us Rachel Levine, Sam Brinson, Drag Queen Story Hours, and pornography in schools to call Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance “weird.”

Donald Trump, who before I went on vacation was Hitler, was also now downgraded to “weird.”

The media pundits instantaneously and simultaneously started using the word “weird” every ten seconds to describe them, as if there was a glitch in the matrix, or a skip in the record.

Harris, Harris, Everywhere

Meanwhile, the same people who spent three years posting stories about how Joe Biden’s staff was always complaining that Kamala Harris was unprepared and terrified to take on tough tasks, and that her own staff thought she was a lazy, insecure bully, were suddenly declaring her a historic combination of Joan of Arc, Margaret Thatcher, and Arianna Grande.

In fact, this same Harris secured the Democratic nomination for president of the United States without a single voter voting for her. It’s as if we were no longer in a democratic republic anymore. The role was just handed to her, as if the Democratic National Committee was doing its best impersonation of Willie Brown.

Even more surreal: I imagined commercials running everywhere showcasing Harris as a moderate. I imagined that 60 years after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the party that gave us the Klu Klux Klan hosted a “White Dudes for Kamala” event.

And strangely, her voice kept changing. Whenever she ventured south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the California-born and Canada-raised daughter of Jamaican and Indian parents suddenly sounded as if she were a supporting actress in Gone With the Wind.

Here is Kamala Harris, who was born in California to Jamaican and Indian college professors, talking to drag queens in Los Angeles a week ago vs. black people in Atlanta tonight.

Fakest human being that has ever lived. pic.twitter.com/qE4NoB8ibN

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 31, 2024

This Harris was everywhere. I could not even click on YouTube without her showing up. Why is this happening whenever I play an ABBA video? A Springsteen video? Some cute animal video sent by my wife?

Nonetheless, Harris has spent two weeks as the de facto Democratic nominee without giving a single interview or holding a press conference. It can’t be true that someone became a candidate for president only to treat questions the way a Muslim treats pork. We’ve got J.D. Vance on one side and J.D. Salinger on the other. 

The Disappearing Presidents

While Harris has been appearing, details on the assassination attempt on Donald Trump have virtually disappeared, with the Secret Service offering little more than an “Oopsie!” to explain its astonishing, hard-to-believe-it-was-just-incompetence failure to protect the former president.

And the current president of the United States? He practically been a ghost. Joe Biden popped up only often enough to start convincing people the White House has rebooted the movie Dave — that the real Joe Biden is in a coma somewhere deep beneath the White House while a Baltimore employment agency boss is pretending to be The Big Guy. 

Now that’s weird.

Olympic-Sized Delusions

I was so delirious from the heat that I imagined the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games offered a bizarre, blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper, and the Vatican stayed mum about it for over a week. Also, two males were beating the stuffing out of females in women’s boxing, securing Olympic medals, and yet YOU were the problem for complaining about it.

In one of the more pleasant moments, gymnast Simon Biles jumped so high during her floor routine that she nearly banged her feet on the roof of the arena. She collected enough gold to change her name to William Devane (with two more chances to add to her pile today.)  

Sweetheart Deals

I know this had to be my imagination: The Biden administration cut a sweetheart plea deal with the mastermind of 9/11, other 9/11 leaders, and the man who beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Then, after family outrage and widespread shock over the realization that the Biden administration wants to deliver harsher fates for grannies praying at abortion clinics than for the Islamic terrorists who killed 3,000 people, the plea deal disappeared just as quickly as it arrived.

Nah, Nancy Pelosi Didn’t Really Suggest Joe Biden Should Be on Mount Rushmore? Did She?

Finally, it is inconceivable that Nancy Pelosi declared over the weekend that Joe Biden has been “such a consequential president” he should be put on Mount Rushmore. Sure, he freezes up as if carved out of stone, but does the former speaker really believe Biden is up there with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt? 

Almost as bizarre, Pelosi also is now pushing back on the idea that her arm-twisting helped force Joe Biden out of the race.

Along The Stream

Of course, the things described above actually did happen, and the Streamers were on top of it. A couple of stories from the past few days:  

Raymond Ibrahim offered an analysis: “Radical Islamic Terrorism” No Longer Exists, Decrees Kamala Harris.”

Jules Gomes posted “The Orgiastic Paris Olympics Mimics Belshazzar’s Blasphemous Feast.”

Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.