Kamala Harris: "Fierce Prosecutor" vs the "Progressive Activist" & Lara Bazelon's Big Fail [View all]

[ismnotwasm]

But as I set out to do the real work, I quickly found myself researching Tulsi Gabbard: that culminated in my last piece, “Tulsi Gabbard Looks More and More Like a Troll With a Glass Jaw.” And dear god, was that a whacky ride down the rabbit hole. She is not a very interesting person, but she certainly does what she can to attract attention where there is not much substance. Gabbard somehow manages to be utterly transparent and dissembling at the same time, making her appear to me, at least, to be a hot disingenuous mess.

“In her career, Ms. Harris did not barter or trade to get the support of more conservative law-and-order types; she gave it all away.” ~ Lara Bazelon, The New York Times

So recently, as I hear all the truncated criticism of Harris piled on and conflated by opponents, I have been driven to look closer, and oh, what I’ve found. I want to start with one person in particular: Lara Bazelon of The New York Times. Her bio says she is a law professor and the former director of the Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent in Los Angeles and she authored the January 17, 2019 article, “Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’” for the NYT. I pulled up so many pieces on various aspects of the candidate’s record in California; time and time again, Lara Bazelon is the first reference, the place from which every other liberal “journalist” described as their baseline line for information. Obviously, I had to check out that article.

To say that I was dumbfounded is putting it politely: Bazelon’s article is so critically lacking in anything more than cursory research, so lacking in any nuanced, fact based analysis or even necessarily complex narratives, that I could have written this superficial hit piece in the seventh grade. A whole litany of California papers — The Los Angeles Times, The Sacramento Bee, SFGate, even Vox, Politico and fucking Wikipedia — provided a more thorough, circumspect view of Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial past. So while Bazelon was writing to a base already sharing her own narrow liberal lens on criminal justice, it is incomprehensible to me that she is any excuse for an arbiter of candidate Harris’s political character. So, Ms. Bazelon, let’s try this again.

https://medium.com/gayleleslie/kamala-harris-fierce-prosecutor-vs-the-progressive-activist-lara-bazelons-big-fail-1f679b70663a