The quote, attributed to Oscar Wilde, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell [in Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop”] without laughing” comes to mind, or George Will’s favorite term, “condign justice,” referring to punishment for misconduct that is especially fitting and appreciated by observers. At Ethics Alarm, I signify such delicious and amusing examples of metaphorical boomerangs circling back and breaking the thrower’s face with the mocking laughter of the “The Simpsons'” Nelson Muntz.
Axios reports that the self-inflicted one-two punch of Joe Biden’s epically awful Presidency and his DEI VP, Kamala Harris’s spectacularly incompetent 2024 campaign is still keeping the Democratic Party deep in a hole. Gee, what a surprise: you intentionally place the fate of your party in the hands of an aging and demented political hack who was never that bright to begin with and an inarticulate empty power suit whose sole qualification for high office has been her gender and skin-shade, and for some mysterious reason you end up in political Hell. Who could have seen that coming?
According to the report:
- The Democratic National Committee has paid off than $15 million of Harris’s 2024 campaign expenses in the first six months of 2025.
- That’s about all the money the DNC had on hand. The Republican National Committee, in contrast, has about 80 million in its coffers.
- “Some donors and senior Democrats are angry that Harris’ campaign spent an unprecedented $1.5 billion during her 15-week run and still lost all seven swing states.” Gee, ya think? Especially since Harris used a lot of the money to bribe celebrities like Oprah, Al Sharpton and Beyonce to endorse her or give her softball interviews. Joe Rogan was happy to give her a high profile interview for free, but Kamala was afraid that his balls…let me rephrase that…that he would ask substantive question she’d have to answer competently, and that he wouldn’t edit her replies to extract the gibberish like “6o Minutes” did.
- It’s good to know that Democrats are as deceitful to themselves as they are to the general public. “As of Election Day, there were no outstanding debts or bills overdue, and there will be no debt on either the DNC or [the Harris for President committee] report for post general report,” Patrick Stauffer, the campaign’s chief financial officer, told reporters last November. He neglected to mention the Accounts payable that were going to pour in after Election Day.
- Some previously reliable donors indicate reluctance to give the DNC more money as the crucial 2026 midterms loom. I believe the term is “throwing good money after bad.”
Now here’s what Damon Runyan’s characters would call “the beauty part”: The DNC asked Harris and her team to hold fundraisers with Harris hosting and to call on donors to help pay off the expenses of her failed and inept campaign. Harris, reportedly, has refused, insisting that she has done enough. Her argument is the “everybody does it”: Barack Obama left the DNC in financial distress after his 2012 re-election, and the the cost overruns weren’t paid off until 2015.
Pop Quiz: What’s the distinction between Harris’s campaign and Obama’s in 2012?
I love this story!
Ethics Alarms 
Maybe her booksales will help!
I’m excited for it to arrive and just read the prequel – “Bears on Wheels”.
I wonder if the network broadcast and print media reinforced their hubris.
I am quite curious how the split of the lack of money the democrats comes down. On one side, you have disgusted donors about the waste that happened in the Harris campaign, the lack of any substance and the frustration at a path forwards. Counter that with Trump shutting down the NGO money train that is a pathway back to the democrats. Which one matters more?
A quiz, yay! I was not too shabby at bs-ing my way through quizzes, which is why I now keep my GED proudly on display in my cubical. Anyway, Obama’s campaign was better – even without the confirmation stemming from his victory. Obama was more polished, more articulate, but his campaign couldn’t hide the danger of his impending presidency: he was mostly for himself, but he also had designs to destroy the country. In contrast, Harris was all for herself, and had no designs external to that, but would have destroyed the country by default. Obama’s campaign enjoyed the veiled, and not so veiled, leverage of past systemic racism, whereas Harris saw his racism, and raised him sexism. However, the novelty of that leverage had worn off with Obama, so being the first woman President only got her to “almost won,” vs. Obama’s “won.” In the final analysis, who was more dangerous? Harris didn’t display the ineffectual temperance Obama did occasionally (if only to secure some kind of general legacy), but she also lacked his general competence, which may have interrupted the continuity of her destroying the fabric of our society and country. They also campaigned in different times – only 12 years apart, but still different eras in our quickly-evolving socio-political landscape. OK. Tough quiz. I give up.
Hilarious. I’d give it an A+.
Schadenfreude is observing that the one thing preventing the country from being fleeced by a Dem candidate is that candidate fleecing the DNC.
I’ve been thinking the Dems are in total disarray in terms of lack of leadership and lack of a program other than “But Trump!” But that list of bullet points is really eye opening and stunning. They really are a hurtin’ unit. And that’s too damned bad.
Obama’s campaign was successful, so he was too busy being president. By contrast, Harris has nothing better to do at the moment.
Wait, if a political party spends money they don’t have, how are they expecting to raise money to pay those debts even if they win? Donors want to support existing campaigns, not pay for a campaign that’s already over one way or the other.
Well, the obvious difference is that Obama actually prevailed. He was also reasonably popular. Harris failed miserably and is probably one of the most unpopular candidates in recent history.
Like it or not, Obama at least ran a fairly ruthless campaign with one goal: destroy mitt Romney, which he achieved, partly because Romney didn’t fight back ruthlessly. Harris was facing Donald trump, who is by nature ruthless, and she figured or seems to have figured that she didn’t really need to fight at all, just appear for softball interviews and wave her hands talking about joy.
I think she thought that between dislike of Trump and anger over the Dobbs decision, that would be enough to put her over the top with relative ease. A lot of her advertising spots, like those that said what happens in the voting booth stays in the voting booth, came from a place of arrogance that said only an idiot would vote otherwise and you don’t want to put yourself in that category.
it never seemed to occur to her that she was defending 4 years of a terrible record. Trump lost partially because the final year of his first term was a complete disaster where it seemed like everything was spiraling out of control and people just wanted it to stop. It never got better under Biden, though, it just got worse while the leadership tried to lie to the American people and say it was getting better and tell the American people they were just too dumb to see how much better it was getting. When asked if she would have done anything different, she said no, essentially validating everything Biden had done including all of the failures.
In the meantime, the Democratic Party’s lap dogs in the media just kept right on lying for them and saying that the American people were just too dumb to understand what was going on. Unfortunately, the American people aren’t that dumb, and just had to look at the pump prices and the grocery bills to understand that things were not getting better, and they became annoyed that this was the case and they were being expected to swallow these lies.
We all saw the results, Harris did the same with the election as with Willie Brown and blew them both. Frankly, she got embarrassed, and she knows she is now considered damaged goods. Her political future is probably ended. Oh, they talk about her running for governor of California or running again in 2028, but it’s a pipe dream. Everyone knows she has nothing of substance to offer and she got thrashed worse then Hillary, because she lost the popular vote. As far as she’s concerned, she’s done with the Democratic party and is going to go look for a no show law professor job and maybe a few corporate board seats. She’s done working hard.
The fact is that she probably wouldn’t do that well with fundraisers anyway. She lost and was not distinguished during her term as vice president, actually the administration shuffled her off into the background. It’s unlikely that donors will pay big money to listen to her word salads.
Truth be told, it could be said that she achieved for the Democratic party what everyone feared that Trump was going to achieve for the Republican party The first time out: lose badly and take a lot of other candidates down, leaving the party powerless. All the melanin and estrogen in the world won’t keep that from sticking to her.
The Democratic party has spent the last decade drinking too much of their own bath water and refusing to acknowledge any mistakes, leave alone failures. They have also drunk too much of the identity politics Kool-Aid. If they lose, it’s because of racism and sexism, not because what they were offering was not very good and they recently proved themselves to be failures at governing. Yet they can’t look in the mirror and say they probably deserved to lose this time out ask themselves what they need to change so that this doesn’t happen again.
Right now it isn’t looking to good for them in the midterms next year. They have been reduced to calling names and making impotent threats. That isn’t how you win elections. Everyone also sees that they are not about doing good things for the American people, they are first and foremost about getting power and keeping it so they can Lord it over everyone else. I wouldn’t be surprised if a split in the Democratic party was in the offing, with the pragmatic liberals who actually wanted to get things done splitting off from the crazy woke people.
I guess that quiz was too easy.
The Democratic party has spent the last decade drinking too much of their own bath water and refusing to acknowledge any mistakes, leave alone failures. They have also drunk too much of the identity politics Kool-Aid. If they lose, it’s because of racism and sexism, not because what they were offering was not very good and they recently proved themselves to be failures at governing. Yet they can’t look in the mirror and say they probably deserved to lose this time out ask themselves what they need to change so that this doesn’t happen again.
I wonder if the network broadcast and print media reinforced their pride and hubris.
[From your host: This banned commenter is offended that EA relied on a well-sourced report from New Media entry Axios about a topic that the Axis media, like the Times, has been refusing to report, because they have pimped, are pimping and will pimp for the Democrats, even the disgraced Joe Biden, the treacherous Barack Obama, and the pathetic Kamala Harris. Why not the Times, he implores. (his mission here is to gaslight readers into not believing the Times is wildly partisan and biased, and that it doesn’t bury stories and important news routinely to help its favorite party. Laptop? What laptop? Biden is sharp as a tack!) Axios is also biased leftward, but has shown more integrity than the Times….and who hasn’t?]
Some questions: 1. I’m curious: Why was this commenter banned? What were the harms inflicted or rules broken? 2. If you feel his/her/their comments offer no value to the site, why are you investing energy into summarizing these comments for the rest of us? Seems odd …. sort of a version of people deciding to depart a site because (alledgedly) they do not find the conversation to be of value to them but also feeling compelled to announce (generally at great length!) why they have decided not to contribute any more comments…
This is not an airport, no need to announce your departure…
All silliness aside, this commenter self-banned over a dispute with another commenter. He was also a nuisance constant defender of the New York Times. Other than that I’ll leave the details to Jack.
1. He was a useful and articulate commenter. He is banned because he dictated to ME to restore a rightly banned commenter, saying he would quit the blog if I didn’t comply with his directive. He chose…poorly. I use the same principle here that I did as a manager: when a staff member threatened to quit if X didn’t happen, my response always was, “Bye! Good luck in your future endeavors!”
2. He had the option of sending me an apology and a promise to be good, and did not. Instead, he continues to send out comments despite knowing he is forbidden, sometimes arriving when I have to be otherwise engaged, sucking in other commenter to respond, sometimes at length, to his posts, with those posts being lost when his illicit ones are send to SPAM hell. He no longer has the reinstatement option since his defiance of the rules here is intentionally disrespectful.
3. Other banned commenters have tried to sneak back here, none so relentlessly.
4. I sometimes handle his illicit posts like this one, A. Because he deserves it B. Because it pisses him off and C.to avoid the comments of good, rule-abiding commenters like yourself being vaporized.
Thanks for the info! Very interesting.
It’s one thing to threaten to quit “or else!” when you own the only bat in the neighborhood pick up game… but trying to manipulate the person who owns the ball field when you are just one of many players… reveals a faulty analysis of the power dynamic.
However!
It does appear that he still values the game and (if you will forgive a mixed metaphor!) has figured out how to get as much mileage as he can from his rather weak hand by sneaking onto the field when you are distracted.