There’s a kind of holiday-season letter — I’m sure you’ve received one — that isn’t so much an update from the family who sent it as an advertisement for the brood’s glory.wow888
The children are typically the stars of it. One of them just got into Princeton at 13. The other climbed Kilimanjaro. There’s a photo of the two in just the right outfits against just the right backdrop at just the right time of day. They’re beatific in the late afternoon light.
And the hagiography is sweet in its way. But humble? Hardly. That’s why I’m puzzled by Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s assertion last month that having children tempers a person’s ego. And that’s why I’m glad that Kamala Harris — at whom that remark was directed — finally put Sanders in her place this week.
Sanders made her comments when she was onstage in Flint, Mich., on Sept. 17 with a father of five whose ego has, by her moral arithmetic, been quintuply tempered. I speak, of course, of Donald Trump. Sanders once propped up his presidency for a salary, as the White House press secretary. Now, as the governor of Arkansas, she shills for him for free.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTShe was introducing him to a crowd, and after telling a cute story about one of her own three children, she said, “My kids keep me humble.” Then — because it’s the logical segue? — she added, “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.” For good measure, Sanders mispronounced Harris’s first name. Because that’s what a humble person does: shows phonetic respect. You can take the woman out of the Trump administration, but you can’t take the Trump administration out of the woman.
Later, when people less petty than Sanders expressed offense at her swipe, her spokesman said that the humility deficit she had in mind was Harris’s “claiming she alone can solve America’s problems.” Whoa. Hold on a second. “I alone can fix it” — that’s indeed an infamous boast, uttered at the Republican National Convention in 2016 by one Donald J. Trump. Sanders and her minions need to hit the history books. They’ve got their egoists all mixed up.
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