As a litigation attorney, whenever I prepared a client for a deposition, I would emphasize: “Tell only the truth. Do not lie; do not obfuscate. Your job is to be honest. My job is to figure out how to save you despite that.”
The rabbinic reason to be honest is that it is good for your soul and helps open a door for you to Paradise, the Garden of Eden, after your life on this earth. You have been sworn in by the court officer, and G-d commanded not to take His Holy Name in vain and not to be a false witness. It all is “recorded” — in Heaven.
That is the rabbinic perspective. However, I was not being paid the big bucks for my Talmudic learning and religious devotion. Rather, I was being paid to be as good an attorney as the law firm expected when they hired me. And I knew that it simply is the best litigation tactic to be honest because, if you lie, you will have to remember every detail of that lie for the rest of your life, or someday it will come back to bite you. It all is recorded — by the deposition stenographer.
Before We Move On To More Important Things…
Now to Harris: Besides being very correctly attacked for her shameful immorality in entering public life, her extremely woke record in California politics, and her failed 2020 presidential campaign, Harris also has been mocked repeatedly for several things — primarily her cackling and her word salads.
I have written elsewhere that we now have moved beyond the introductions and honeymoon, and it is time to focus for the next three months on 12 extreme-left policies and issues that lie at the core of her entire political identity.
Nevertheless, I would like to tie one last knot: the three memes. Many in the Republican conservative world have mocked three particular Harris memes that have emerged in TikTok Land and Instagram Universe: the coconut tree, the Venn diagrams, and the yellow school buses. In and of themselves, all three should be left alone. It is time to move on to the serious stuff: the 12 issues and policies. But a big asterisk should be appended.
I am a big believer in being fair. If my cause is just, it will not suffer for being fair to the other side when “fair is fair.” So I have written elsewhere that, truth be told, President Trump spoke much too long at the Republican National Convention. His scripted speech was pitch-perfect, and he should have mostly stuck to it, with just a bit of segueing. True is true. Fair is fair.
As to Harris, I see no reason to mock her narrative that her mother would say to her when she would do or say something drawing parental comment, “Did you just fall out of a coconut tree?” I think that is charming.
It is exactly the kind of thing President Trump does all the time. He pulls something out of somewhere, a segue prompted by something only he can understand, and we who support him love that stuff. It is so real. It is so different from the over-scripted Biden, Romney, and McCain types who dare not speak off-script at all and, consequently, show no personality.
We don’t trust them because we know only what their speech writers think, not what they think. In our guts, we don’t trust them at all because we know they are reading, not speaking from the gut. We may like what they have to say, but we don’t trust that the speakers themselves believe what they are reading. When Harris tells her coconut memory, that is charming. When Trump goes off script and goes wherever he will, his supporters love that. The man is real.
The Venn Diagram Thing, Like the Coconut Tree Thing, Is Charming
If he wants to talk about Hannibal the Cannibal, even though his speechwriters are going crazy backstage, we know we can trust him when he says he will close the border and more.
In the same vein is Harris’s Venn. When she starts talking about how much she loves Venn diagrams, that indeed is weird, but it is charming. I remember a Trump speech I was watching on TV in 2016 with my beloved wife Ellen of blessed memory, during which Trump had a fly passing in front of him. He gently swatted it away. Next thing you know, he was talking about mosquitoes, seals, and sharks. One minute, he is promising to build the border wall, to stand up to Putin and Kim Jong Un, and to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the next minute or two it goes from mosquitoes to sharks to seals.
Ellen and I just laughed and laughed and laughed. We loved that stuff! So did the 63 million Americans who elected him president. He is so real. McCain would not do that. Jimmy Carter would not do that. Romney would not do that. Jeb Bush would not do that. Clinton would not do that. And y’know what? They also would not close the border, stand up to Putin and Kim Jong Un, and move that embassy to Jerusalem.
So, fair is fair: I have no issue with Harris waxing on about her love for Venn diagrams and her memory of her mother asking whether she just had fallen out of a coconut tree. After all: if not now, Venn?
Who Doesn’t Love a Yellow School Bus?
But the third meme. Ah, the yellow school bus. Who does not love a yellow school bus?
When I was a boy, I attended yeshiva Jewish parochial school all my pre-college years. They do not have a yeshiva every three blocks like Starbucks. All yeshiva kids go to school by school bus. Our yeshiva, Brooklyn’s Yeshiva Rambam, used a company named “Reliable Buses, Inc.” And, yes, as predictable, one of their six or so buses that served Rambam would break down every week. That was what was so reliable about them — they guaranteed at least one breakdown reliably per week.
Reliable Buses, Inc. had six drivers who served the school year after year. I still remember three of them 60 years later: Willie, Joe, and Tony. Willy was humorless and no-nonsense. He parted his silver hair down the middle. Joe was gruff-looking and intimidating, but an OK guy. And Tony — oh, Tony! We always hoped each year that this year Tony would be assigned our route. He insisted we call him “Tony Baloney.” How could a kid not love such a guy?
And his super-dopey single joke had us in stitches for eight years of grade school. He would ask another kid every day, in his Brooklyn Italian accent: “Hey, ya know what?” The kid would answer “No. What?” And he would answer: “That’s what.” And we all would be laughing hysterically for the next 10 minutes.
We loved the school bus. We could talk with our friends. Criticize our teachers behind their backs. Plan recess activities. Get into arguments about who is better, the Yankees or the Mets. The boys could make fun of the girls. The girls could make fun of the boys. (We all ended up marrying happily, and we never expanded beyond two genders.)
If Toby Keith could write and sing I Love This Bar, we could have sung I Love This Bus. We just did not know how to write it. Or to sing it.
When Kamala Harris tried to be charming and started waxing warmly reminiscent, cackling “Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus?” I could have filed that with the charming coconut and Venn memes. Only one thing: In 2020 she was seeking the Democrat nomination for president. She fizzled out rapidly after an abrupt, concise moment when she briefly surged to the top. She never even made it to the Iowa caucuses. Her brief golden moment came when she correctly associated Joe Biden with bare-knuckles racism for having worked closely with racist Democrat senators to oppose busing and, thus, prevent school integration.
By contrast, Kamala portrayed herself as a pitiable victim of American Jim Crow society, a victim of racists like Joe Biden and his bigoted white buddies, because she was that martyr who got a break by being bused to school for integration. Suddenly, a yellow school bus was not a subject for cackling gleefully but a cynical political weapon to wield against an old, privileged, and prejudiced White male. She tugged at American left-wing hearts as she practically cried, a casualty of persecution saved only by government fiat that put her onto a school bus.
That is why we tell our law clients never to lie or mislead. It may work at today’s deposition. But it will be recorded. And your public mendacity will come back later when you slip and forget how you characterized school buses four years earlier. That debate night, a yellow school bus brought tears to the cameras. Now, having forgotten her public drama, she waxes reminiscent and cackles: “Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus?” So much fun, all through the town. It is just as she lied shamelessly to us, looking us in the eye for four years, telling us without a blink that Biden was sharp, incisive, and mentally keen. And physically hard to keep up with.
No, Harris. We can keep up with Biden. The challenge is to keep up with your unblinking falsifications to our faces.
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