RICH LOWRY: Kamala’s sociopathic dishonesty on the border

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.” So says George C. Scott’s Patton in the eponymous movie when his comrades want another day’s rest during the Sicilian campaign. No one is going to mistake Kamala Harris for Gen. Patton, or even George C. Scott, but her latest tack on immigration honors his call for “audacity, audacity, always audacity.”

After helping preside over a comprehensive failure at the border, a lesser politician might mumble something or other and change the subject to aborting babies. A politician less certain that the media would swallow any set of absurdities deemed in her interest might hesitate before making such facially preposterous claims.

The idea that Harris has been a tough-minded success on the border while Donald Trump was a failure is sociopathic in its dishonesty. It’s tiresome and apparently beside the point to recite the basic facts, but after experiencing what was a migrant crisis by the old standard that now seems quaint, the Trump administration implemented a series of measures that all but brought illegal crossings to a halt. Then, the Biden administration reversed them all, and illegal immigration quickly accelerated to record levels.

This is a matter of record that isn’t in dispute. Millions of illegal immigrants have entered the country and strained the resources of big cities across America. If the numbers have fallen recently, they are still at high levels and the reduction is, in part, due to legerdemain that has redirected illegal immigrants into parole programs to create a patina of legitimacy around their crossings. Meanwhile, interior enforcement has been kneecapped, with deportation by ICE falling drastically.

It’s not as though, by the way, that Harris was a former border hawk who got press-ganged into serving in an open-borders administration. She set out positions to the left even of the Biden administration prior to becoming vice president. Yet, Harris declared of Trump at her big Atlanta rally the other day, “I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week. Any day of the week, including, for example, on the issue of immigration.”

Harris is running an ad that claims she’s working to fix the broken immigration system while Trump is trying to stop her — a lie so heedlessly flagrant that it truly boggles the mind. The ad leans much on Trump’s opposition to the bipartisan immigration bill that failed to pass several months ago. But the case against that bill was that it did too much to bless the unacceptable status quo and that Biden always had vast unilateral powers to act on the border — a claim that Biden vindicated by, after much resistance, indeed acting on his own.

The Harris case has not been met with a flurry of fact checks, nor have editors been zealously adding the word “falsely” in front of her claims. No, according to the media, she’s flipping the script, and going on offense, and punching back. All this amounts to saying, “She wasn’t the border czar, but, boy oh boy, did she do a great job at the border.”

Perhaps Harris isn’t to be blamed for trying this. With the media having elevated her from also-ran vice president to savior of the republic in the space of about 12 hours a couple of weekends ago, why not try to get it to swallow an even more outlandishly implausible notion?

Nothing so far should lead her to believe anything other than that her audacity will be rewarded.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.