I hate to append that corny clickbait “Exclusive” to this post’s headline, but I want to be clear: nobody else has noticed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s latest, and in my view, most unethical and blatant effort to influence the election in order to elect Kamala Harris.

I just searched online: I appear to be the only one who has noticed so far, or at least who has written about it. Not Fox News, the devoted mob of conservative pundits at PJ Media, the Washington Free Beacon, Joe Concha—of course not the Times, WaPo, CNN et al., which are are pretending PBS is beyond reproach and as unbiased as…they are.

On October 1, the Public Broadcasting System premiered an episode of “The American Experience” titled, “The American Vice President: Rethinking a political afterthought.” Like the other installments in the long-running educational series, it was a mini-documentary about an aspect of American history, using historical footage and interviews to tell an enlightening story. I began watching it from my point of view as a student of American history, government history and the Presidency in particular. Halfway through—-it shouldn’t have taken that long, but it was 5 am. this morning—I realized what the real message was: “Kamala Harris is qualified to be President of the United States.”

I have to say, as media-sponsored indoctrination and propaganda goes, “The American Vice-President” is very clever. I wonder who had that brainstorm? “Hey, Harris is going to have a tough time convincing some independents that she should be President. How about if we do an American Experience piece about how the modern Vice-Presidents really are like Deputy Presidents? And we can unveil it a month before the election!”

PBS made one mistake, because bias makes you stupid, and it was what made me slap my forehead. Guess who they chose to be the go-to current “journalist” in the episode who moves the narrative along. It is Rachel Maddow, fanatic Trump-hunter, the smug, smirking, progressive Democratic Party operative who used her platform as a host on MSNBC to push the Russian Collusion hoax, and who never apologized or accepted responsibility when it was exposed.

All documentaries have agendas and are manipulative, by this one, like the political party it is an in-kind contribution to, cheats. The case “The American Vice-President” tries to make is that the 25th Amendment passed during the Johnson administration that added a system for filling a Vice-Presidential vacancy transformed the office from its previous denigrated status as “not worth a bucket of warm spit,” as Thomas Marshall (no relation) memorably said, into a dynamic, challenging, crucial job with power and responsibility. Along the way, we get historical revisionism and convenient amnesia. For example, the first President to get to office without ever being elected VP or President, Gerald Ford, “at the end of the day,” we are told, “was in fact prepared. He was in fact qualified.”

That’s odd: when he was President the Left derided him mercilessly as an incompetent bungler. Many of PBS “journalists” and commentators joined the rest of the mob howling that Ford’s pardon of Nixon was a betrayal of the nation and the rule of law. And Ford was not prepared and qualified: his brief White House tenure was a mess, which is one reason an obsequious, far left peanut farmer who never understood the office could defeat him.

The documentary pretends that every VP from Adams to Ford was marginalized, and thus those selected for the job were the equivalents of doorstops before the magic of the 25th Amendment transformed Vice Presidents into fully-vetted Presidents-in-waiting. Yet the criteria for choosing Presidential running mates hasn’t changed one iota, and whether a particular President chooses to give a VP an active role in policy-making and governance remains up to that POTUS. The show doesn’t mention the most recent VP before Harris, Mike Pence, because Trump basically ignored him as much as Woodrow Wilson ignored Thomas Marshall. Obama picked Joe Biden as his veep, not because he had any respect for Biden’s skills (he didn’t and doesn’t) but because Joe was an old-school white guy to calm those who might be wary of the novelty of a black President.

The group of Vice-Presidents following the 25th are indistinguishable from the ones who came before, a mixed bag including some obvious mediocrities who were mostly ignored (Quayle, Pence, Biden) and some professional pols who were occasionally delegated some project of substance with widely varying success (Bush1, Gore, Harris). Meanwhile, some previous Vice-Presidents, before the 25th, had been given useful experience that prepared them for the big job, notably Richard Nixon (Martin Van Buren was Andrew Jackson’s chief advisor, but also was a lousy President).

The whole premise of the episode is intellectually dishonest in two respects. First, the Vice-Presidency was always important, as indicated by the fact that so many VP’s became President. The weird loophole of the job being vacant after a veep moved up was John Tyler’s fault: the Founders almost certainly intended for the death of a POTUS to mandate a quick special election with the Vice-President as an acting President, but Tyler used ambiguous language in the Constitution to claim the job for a full term. The 25th didn’t make the Vice-Presidency more powerful or significant.

Moreover, the theory that because the job is important more qualified leaders fill it logically absurd. Harris, ironically, is a prime example. She was chosen because of her sex and color, and that’s just about all. Sarah Palin was a youngish woman chosen to contrast with old John McCain being chosen as Vice-President doesn’t mean you should be, and never has.

The intent of “The American Vice-President,” however, is a cognitive dissonance scale trick as well as a post hoc ergo propter hoc con. NOW Vice-Presidents have to be skilled leaders (they always should have been). NOW the job is important, and so of course, anyone who serves as Vice-President must be be capable and qualified to be President, and because they must be, they are. And who is our Vice President? Why, Kamala Harris! Case made!

As I was watching the program, I wondered when it was first shown. My assumption was that it was an older program (Trump and Pence don’t exist in the show’s universe) and was being re-run as aboost for the Democrats. Then I looked up its premier date: October 1, 2024

What a coincidence!

It is condign justice that the same week PBS issued its in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign, Harris’s veep choice made a fool of himself in the debate with J.D. Vance. The fact that the episode’s mission may be foiled by harsh reality, however, doesn’t change the fact that it represents an abuse of public funds and is smoking gun evidence of just how corrupt and biased the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has become. This is how you try to rig an election. Not one penny of my taxes should be spent on rigging elections.

You can watch the episode here; the transcript is here.