“Flashback: Harris fumed at Americans for saying ‘Merry Christmas’ before illegal migrants got protections”, Fox News reports:
Then-Sen. Kamala Harris warned Americans not to say “Merry Christmas” until there was permanent status for some illegal immigrants — amid a Trump-era battle over protections for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
“And when we all sing happy tunes, and sing Merry Christmas, and wish each other Merry Christmas, these children are not going to have a Merry Christmas. How dare we speak Merry Christmas. How dare we? They will not have a Merry Christmas,” she said at a 2017 press conference, a video of which was obtained by Fox News Digital.
Speakers pushed for the passage of the Dream Act, which would grant a pathway to citizenship for some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors, NBC News reported.
Here is the video and here is the 2017 NBC article to which the article refers.
This clip has got a lot of play because it shows Kamala Harris as a purse-lipped woke puritan. Fair enough, she is one. Even if one completely accepted her point of view that passing the DREAM1 Act was a desirable objective in 2017, why should that not having been done be the thing that made it outrageous for Americans to wish each other “Merry Christmas” until it was done? There were plenty of worse things going on in the world in 2017: wars, famines, natural catastrophes, terrorism, poverty, crime. Why were these miseries not enough to prompt the curtailment of Christmas greetings until they were solved? Nor were these evils limited to the year 2017. So far as I know the DREAM Act has not been passed to this day. So we must assume Kamala Harris has now personally abstained from “speaking Merry Christmas” for six years and seven months and is still saying “How dare you” to anyone else who does it.
Yet in her defence, gestures of self-abnegation as a demonstration of commitment such as Harris made have a long history. In 1601, during the Dutch Revolt, Archduke Albert of Austria was laying siege to Ostend. His wife, Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, declared that she would not change her shift until the city fell2. Since that did not happen until September 1604, her underwear got a bit grubby, giving rise to the colour term “Isabelline”.
Now that’s what I call commitment. If she wants to be taken seriously, Kamala Harris needs to follow the example of Isabella and urge her followers to do likewise.
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1No offence, Yanks, but for introducing the idea of bills or laws whose titles spell out aspirational words, your entire nation deserves to suffer the fate of Ostend.
2This story has been fact-checked to the standard expected of the Guardian or the New York Times.
1No offence, Yanks, but for introducing the idea of bills or laws whose titles spell out aspirational words, your entire nation deserves to suffer the fate of Ostend.
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Yeah, it’s remarkably stupid. OTOH, the job of thinking up stupid acronyms probably pays pretty well, and I wouldn’t mind having it myself.
I thought that DREAM as an acronym was allocated to the whole class of laws like that benefitting Keir Starmer’s pension: Damn Right for Everyone Apart from Me.
Even more contemptable is the practice of naming bills in honor of a deceased child whose memory is thought to compel us to bestow yet more power on the state.
According to K. Harris as a little girl she celebrated “Kwanzaa” with “the elders”.
In reality K. Harris was brought up in various university towns (in Canada, but also the United States) by her Indian academic mother and Jamaican academic father (Donald Harris a Marxist economist – yes K. Harris is what is called a “Red Diaper Baby” – Marxism is the only frame of reference she has, even if her father does not believe she is a very good Marxist).
There were no tribal “elders” – and as for “Kwanzaa” it was invented by an FBI informant in the late 1960s (in the United States – not Africa), I very much doubt that K. Harris had heard of it till she went to university.
Because she was speaking to voters for whom Issue #1 was open borders, silly.
The only information that can ever be gleaned from Kammi’s speeches is, to which voter group was she speaking? She is . . . adaptable.
Was Greta inspired by Kamala?
Unlikely, but the question should be asked.
1. No offence yanks . . .
I fully agree with Natalie Solent. In my experience, in the US at least, virtually all laws named after people or that have cute acronyms turn out to be extremely bad.
Politicians are going to politic. Their antics are only worth watching such that you know who not to vote for.
I will say one thing in favor of “named bills”, and that is that you then can discover exactly who deserves the blame for it all.
I have an opinion about the whole thing, to include the typical fashion that many have for naming bills after their sponsors: It’s a really, really bad idea, because it encourages the idjit class. Just like naming ships or buildings after them.
Personally, I think that if you’re going to put your name on something, then you’d better be paying full freight for the cost. If the taxpayer puts a dime on it, then it ought rightly be named something like the “Sucker Stadium” or “Rube Building”, because that’s whose money went there, for similar reasons.
Bills are coming due, soon. Watch this space for effects…