OPINION:
Democrats love to talk about “dog whistles.”
You know, Donald Trump racist. Hitler, semi-fascist Nazi. Putin, Ukraine. Dangerous to democracy, word salad, coded language, women — or something. You know.
Psychiatrists have a word for this. It’s called “projection.”
The only dog whistling going on is all the crazed word salads that Vice President Kamala Harris tosses up whenever she is asked about actual issues that actual voters care about in this presidential race, such as inflation, the economy, crime and her open border.
When your policies in office are a catastrophe, your political record is atrocious and your personality is so deeply loathsome that your campaign forbids you from laughing, then you have nothing to run on. So, you run on psychological warfare.
Do you know what a narcissistic control freak is? It is someone who demands that you pronounce her name in a very specific way in which only the first syllable is stressed. And if you fail to pronounce her name precisely the way she demands, you will be branded a racist and hounded by society.
If you stress the second syllable of her name, you are a racist. If you pronounce her name stressing the third — or the first AND third — you are a racist.
Overlooked during the Democrat convention in Chicago last month was one of the most bizarre psychological operations ever publicly displayed in American politics. The Kamala Harris campaign actually trotted out children to scold American citizens about the fit and proper way to pronounce Kamala Harris’s name.
Or else.
Ms. Harris’ narcissistic control freak nature was even more obvious during the debate last week, where she had no answers for even the softest questions about her disastrous record in office.
Inflation? There is no inflation. Stop talking about inflation.
Otherwise, all she offered were highly practiced facial tics and scornful postures meticulously designed to distract from any kind of factual political debate. Whenever Mr. Trump spoke, Ms. Harris put on an Olympic display of facial contortions.
The coup de grace was when she stared at Mr. Trump with psycho eyes and a baleful smile and then tucked the knuckles of her hand beneath her chin in a statuesque pose of withering mockery.
Sure, it reminded viewers why sane voters in both parties find Ms. Harris so profoundly unlikeable. But it succeeded in distracting people from any sober discussion of important issues.
Asked about her administration’s intentional policies to throw open the Southern border and allow millions of illegal aliens — including murderers and rapists — into the country, Ms. Harris contorted, deflected and projected.
She has worked as a prosecutor, she said. It was all Donald Trump’s fault. And then this psychological jujitsu.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said. “He’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight, even when it’s not the subject that is being raised. And I’m going to actually do something really unusual, and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.”
She then listed some of the more entertaining bits from Mr. Trump’s rallies about Hannibal Lecter and cancer and windmills. But that was not the point of her psychological attack.
It was this: “And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Ms. Harris slithered.
Not only was she trying to distract viewers from the invasion of our border that she and President Biden are singularly responsible for, but she also wanted to distract Mr. Trump from the topic as well.
Again, asked about her policies that have led directly to the invasion of our border, the murders of American citizens and the rapes of American children, Ms. Harris replied: I was a prosecutor. It’s all Donald Trump’s fault. And people are leaving his rallies.
How psycho is she? How psycho does someone have to be to answer such a profoundly important question in such a starkly unserious manner? And how can she get away with this in a campaign for the presidency?
Well, because the political press doesn’t just enable her and let her get away with it. They are in on it.
“Vice President Harris, thank you,” ABC moderator David Muir intoned before turning to Mr. Trump and amplifying Ms. Harris’ lie that the open border is somehow Mr. Trump’s fault, even though he has been out of office during this entire four-year invasion.
“Let me ask you, though,” Mr. Muir curried, “Why did you try to kill that bill and successfully so?”
And then people wonder why psychologically deranged lunatics spouting Democrat talking points about democracy and Ukraine and Donald Trump wind up trying to assassinate the man that the media calls “Hitler.”
The dog whistles are getting louder and louder. Let’s pray Election Day comes before anybody else gets killed.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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