The Book on Harris, Biden and Barry

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Kamala Harris, who got her start under Democrat queenmaker Willie Brown, finds it hard to make coherent statements. So it makes sense that, in addition to her other defects, the Democrats’ replacement for Joe Biden is also something of a plagiarist.

As Christopher Rufo notes, Harris’s 2009 Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, written with Joan O’C Hamilton, does more than paraphrase the work of others. A section on high-school graduation rates borrows heavily from an uncited NBS news report. In another section, also without proper attribution, Harris reproduces a press release from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim.”

Wikipedia and a Bureau of Justice Assistance report get similar treatment, and as Rufo explains, “there is certainly a breach of standards here.” Harris called the book Smart on Crime but “there is nothing smart about plagiarism, which is the equivalent of an academic crime. The publisher, as well as the sitting vice president, should retract the plagiarized passages and issue a correction. There should be a single standard—and Kamala Harris is falling short.” Such a fall plunges far beyond plagiarism, and is hardly limited to Harris.

As Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden noted in 2010, in his first run for president in 1988, Joe Biden plagiarized a speech of British leftist Neil Kinnock. In addition, Biden seldom cited learned sources and famous books, and such, doubtless because the Delaware Democrat had not read them. As the saying goes, “the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read,” and that’s Biden all over.

He was first elected in 1972, in the throes of the Cold War, but the Delaware Democrat shows no evidence of reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s landmark The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. Also escaping attention were novels such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, works of true genius. If Biden ever cited anything by Nobel laureate Albert Camus (The Plague, The Stranger, The Fall), a writer the Soviets may have murdered, it has escaped notice.

A number of former Communists, including Koestler, Andre Gide, and Richard Wright contributed to the landmark The God That Failed. Biden shows no knowledge of that work nor landmark autobiographies such as Chronicles of Wasted Time  by Malcolm Muggeridge, who went to the USSR as a comrade and wound up rejecting the Stalinist state.

Biden could have learned about the New Left from Radical Son by David Horowitz, whose parents were Communists, but the Delaware Democrat wouldn’t go there. Joe Biden had read little of anything, so no surprise that, as Robert Gates said in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, he was on the wrong side of nearly every foreign policy and national security issue of the past 40 years. Biden doubtless skipped the Gates book, and a lot more.

The Delaware Democrat shows ignorance of novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, and even a prolific writer like John Updike. It’s hard to find evidence that Biden, and many politicians of all parties, have ever read these famous authors, let alone writers like D. Keith Mano, author of The Bridge and the magisterial Take Five. Or how about the late Richard Grenier, author of The Marrakesh One-Two, the Arab world portrayed with murderous realism, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the few politicians who read it.

It is also hard to find cases of journalist asking candidates what books they have read, because establishment journalists and publicists also display their ignorance. Back in the 1980s a book ad described George Orwell as the author of “Animal House,” and by the 2000s the ignorance had not abated.

In Dreams from My Father, a community organizer calling himself  Barack Obama claims he read books by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright, finding the famous authors “all exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels.” Only the autobiography of Malcolm X “seemed to offer something different.” It’s hard to find a case where anybody asked the Dreams author which books by Baldwin, Wright et al he actually read, and if he was aware of Richard Wright’s desertion of the Communist Party, as he revealed in The God That Failed.

In Dreams “Frank” is a well-known black poet, but critics and journalists did not press him to reveal the true identity of Frank, who turns out to be the Communist Frank Marshall Davis. The author, formerly known as Barry Soetoro, says he “found a book on east Africa,” but in the run-up to 2008 nobody asked him about passages in Dreams that bore remarkable similarities to I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights, by Italian writer Kuki Gallmann, a longtime resident of Kenya.

In the 2015 Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation, this writer called Dreams from My Father a roman à clef, something palpably obvious to any unhypnotized reader. In the 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, David Garrow explained that Dreams from My Father was not an autobiography or memoir but a novel, and the author a “composite character.” That truth prompted few if any second thoughts from the composite character’s acolytes in the media, the academy, and Congress. As Peter Collier (Things in Glocca Morra) used to say, this cargo cult simply got in their canoes and paddled to the next cause, the ongoing jihad against Donald Trump.

From the 2008 campaign through two terms in the White House, nobody in the establishment media, academy or Congress pressed Obama on Frank, or the reality that the Dreams book was a novel. In his second term, the composite character was already passing the torch.

He proclaimed that Kamala Harris, “is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country –  Kamala Harris is here.” Harris moved on to the U.S. Senate, and Joe Biden, with whom she clashed in the 2020 primaries, picked her as his running mate. Democrats have now booted the senile Biden for fellow incoherent plagiarist Harris.

In all that time, nobody asked the “brilliant” Kamala which of the great books of our time she had read, or what she thought of them. In no television interview did anybody ask Harris if she was aware that Dreams from My Father was a novel. Had she read works by novelists such as J.K. Rowling, and how about, say, Joan Didion, Joyce Carol Oates, or Camille Paglia? It’s hard to recall Harris, like Biden, ever quoting a learned source or famous author.

Presidential candidates who do not read have no advantage over those who cannot read, and the same goes for journalists. It’s all part of the ongoing trahison des clercs that helped put the composite character in the White House and now touts the decidedly non-brilliant Kamala Harris, who seeks the same residency. Such are the consequences of the fathomless illiteracy now dominating the culture.