Having served on editorial boards, all I can say is that the New York Times editorial board must be a completely weird place.

They put out this 1,995-word 'no surprise' editorial endorsement for Kamala Harris out today, topped with a giant photo of the vice president -- giving the most bizarre reasons imaginable, beginning not with her, but with what's really driving them, which is their tired old boilerplate hate for President Trump:

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

This crap is the same thing they said in the last two elections, so they haven't exactly developed new arguments beyond their ad hominem hatred of Trump's personality, and actual personhood, given all the assassination talk out there on the left.

But as a result of this Trump Derangement Syndrome, they try to tell us that Harris, a socialist from Berkeley, California -- which is not exactly a bastion of that -- is actually a patriot if you don't pay attention to her policies. Trump's unfitness makes her so by default:

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.
 

Patriotic? Patriots vote for patriots, so by extension, that makes Kamala a patriot, the patriot's choice in elections this time.

But since when has Kamala Harris ever had anything good to say about this country until she ran for election? Patriotism, needless to say, has never been a hot issue in places like Berkeley or her subsequent city of San Francisco -- as flag burning is more the local style in those parts.

Here entire past, including growing up in a wealthy part of Canada, suggests opportunism, not patriotsm, the selfless giving of self for a higher cause. She has zero academic achievement, for one, which would involve the patriotic American concept of hard work to get ahead based on merit. Nope, not for her. Her early adult life was propelled by partying with billionaires in Pacific Heights in tight little exclusive political and social networks in order to seek the next political rung upward.

Instead of serving in the military as a patriot, she 'served' as Willie Brown's mistress to get her first no-show political appointment that led to more positions that followed, which is the kind of thing most patriots would recognize as cheating.

What's more, she's never earned the kind of popular support it takes to win a primary on her own, let alone win a race in a standard and patriotic democratic election -- for her, it's always a matter of winning by rigging. That kind of unearned power is far from patriotic as Americans understand it. 

And every cause she has ever supported has been an anti-American one, seeking to replace America itself with Hugo Chavez-style socialism. Hugo liked to wave his country's flag around, too.

But the New York Times insists she's the patriotic choice and advises its readers to embrace that "patriotism" over any lousy policies she might harbor:

She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Do it for the flag. Vote for her because of all that "patriotism" you're suddenly filled with.

This, from the very editorial page that in 2021 had this to say about the American flag:

The New York Times sparked fireworks with an Independence Day report on the political implications of displaying the American flag — just weeks after being forced to defend an editorial writer who said she was “really disturbed” to see Old Glory flown by supporters of former President Donald Trump.

As I noted earlier, they've got funny ideas about patriotism over there.

So now that we are supposed to ignore her policies in the name of patriotism, let's take a look at a few of those policies the Times doesn't want us to look at.

Harris's open borders policies which are on her record now, was a naked bid to replace the electorate with one more to her liking -- and sure enough, much of it was literally Hugo's electorate, the same people who wore red tshirts and voted for Hugo Chavez and all pro-offered his free stuff. Now they're here, voting for more free stuff, cancelling out the votes of other Americans, and based on recent scandals, not even bothering to take out U.S. citizenship to vote in our elections.

Patriotism, all right, but to a different country.

The Times then gets comical when it calls her policy proposals, which amount to a string of Chavez-style crony handouts to special interests, "thoughtful."

Pay no attention to that ever mounting national debt.

In contrast to the Kamala-patriotism equation, the Times claims that Trump is all about moral turpitude while Harris is the picture of virtue and that's where it gets really disgusting.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race.

There's also this kultursmog:

His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Mr. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies. In at least 10 instances during his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.

So Trump is the lawless one of low moral character and Harris is the virtuous one who only seeks to faithfully enforce and obey the Constitution? That's outright laughable, a logic turned on its head given Harris's record in office.

Harris's privileged career in fact has long been one lawless act after another. Patriot that she is, she has an awful lot of problems with U.S. law and the Constitution. She views these things as obstacles to getting what she wants, and while she has the power, she's corrupt enough to break them for her own purposes.

It's not just the grotesque legal runarounds on her open-border border policy -- it's a lot of things she's done in her long-ago that she doesn't want anyone talking about.

Hamala Harris's entire public office record is immoral and unethical -- as attorney general in California, she kept people in jail beyond their terms in order to use their labor to fight wildfires. She used the Los Angeles Police Department as her personal party police. She harbored a sex harasser in her office as a close associate and then pretended to know nothing about it when the state was forced to make a large payout. She got her political start at Willie Brown's knee. She also unethically colluded with recent debate monitors, according to a whistleblower report, to keep certain topics, such as that of her brother-in-law Tony West accused of embezzlement, that she didnt want brought up at the debate, the scandal of rotting corpse in the bathtub where she let the perpetrator off easy because he was gay, the pervy priests she let off easy, the Jussie Smollett hoax which strongly suggests her involvement, the withholding of evidence in a death penalty case, the case of the lady thrown in jail for having a truant child who was sick in the hospital -- everything here screams moral turpitude and a reckless disregard for the law.

These aren't political positions which she changes like she changes her underwear, these are things she actually did.

Comically, after telling readers to pay no attention to Harris's policies before casting their ballots for her, the Times suddenly admits that Harris's policies might just be important after all:

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

If her policies don't matter because she's such a big patriot and Trump is such a moral degenerate ... why should the voters be "right to ask" about the policies? They were just told to vote for her because it was the patriotic thing to do even if they disagreed with her.

Nobody needs to be asking questions with a grand Times command like that.

Weirder still, they list a long string of Trump's policies that they did consider successful, such as his COVID vaccine program which they liked, and his criminal justice reforms (studiously ignoring the big ones like Trump's economy record, Trump's jobs record for minorities, Trump's record of peace, including his Biden-Harris-trashed Abraham Accords, Trump's border control agreements, Trump's effect on people's 401(k)s and credit card debt).

That’s not to say Mr. Trump did not add to the public conversation. In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China’s rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic. Yet even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes.

Oh please -- they were getting ridiculous.

They named so many succcesses of Trump's that their argument against him pretty well vanished, even as they later tried to claim that these were bad things.

Their argument on patriotism as the rationale for voting for Harris was ridiculous. They never liked patriotism until they started claiming that Harris was the embodiment of it. Now they're running with this thin reed as an actual reason to vote for her, even as she hasn't a patriotic bone in her body. It's cultural appropriation of the worst sort. And in other circumstances, they claim to hate that, too.

One wonders if they are biting their tongues as they write this inchoate and ridiculous endorsement editorial, the sound of Harris's manic laughter dancing in their heads all around them. No wonder RealClearPolitics ignored this one in their morning lineup this morning.

Image: Screen shot from YouTube video.