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Jeffrey Lord
Jeffrey Lord is a Contributing Writer for NewsBusters. Lord is a former White House political director in the Reagan White House and aide to HUD Secretary Jack Kemp.
Say what? Vice President Kamala Harris is not the “border czar”?
That has been the outraged reaction from the liberal media which has been insisting that to say otherwise was decidedly not true.
Over there at Conservative Review, CR gleefully ran a (partial) list of various media figures and outlets who took exception to the idea that Vice President Harris had been serving as the Biden administration’s “border czar”.
Among the cites from CR’s Blaze Media were these:
“Kamala Harris Was Never Biden’s ‘Border Czar.’ Here’s What She Really Did,” read a Time headline on Tuesday.
“The Veep and the border: Kamala Harris’ role was never ‘border czar,’” said another from the New York Daily News.
“Harris was never put in charge of the border or made ‘border czar,’” immigration experts said,” added USA Today, implying that so-called “immigration experts” might have esoteric insights into a moniker that was widely shared.
Axios in particular has been called out for gaslighting on the issue. On Wednesday, Axios was roasted on social media after it insisted in a tweet that Harris “never actually had” the “title” of “border czar,” even though an article from the outlet in April 2021 specifically referred to Harris as Biden’s appointed “border czar.”
Hello?
The obvious raises its head. So let’s turn to that obvious: a dictionary.
Here is the “dictionary.com" definition of “czar”:
Any person exercising great authority or power in a particular field… an autocratic ruler or leader.
Here is the Merriam-Webster dictionary defining czar:
One having great power or authority
Here is Vocabulary.com:
People in charge of something important.
Wikipedia notes in a section headed “Metaphorical uses” of the term czar that
Czar has been used in English as a metaphor for positions of high authority.
And then there’s this from Britannica.com: Czar Definition & Meaning | Britannica Dictionary
“Czar” is “used as an unofficial title for the person who is in charge of a government office or department”
* The President has appointed a new drug czar.the education/housing/terrorism czar
All of which to ask a basic question. Did the journalists at Time, the New York Daily News, USA Today and Axios ever bother to check a dictionary for the literal rendering of the dictionary definition of “czar”?
Answer? Obviously not.
Which has resulted with more egg splashed on their individual and collective faces than could be laid by a couple dozen of the most productive hens.
Here, for example, is no less than President Joe Biden saying this of his appointment of Harris, bold print for emphasis supplied:
“She’s the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle [Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador], and the countries that are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks – stemming the migration to our southern border.”
Got that? According to President Biden himself he literally said he appointed Harris “to lead our efforts” on dealing with the border crisis. Say again, he said he was appointing her “to lead.” And, again, the literal dictionary definition of “czar” is “leader.” Which is to say: “to lead.”
The point here is simple.
The liberal media has gone out of its way to mislead Americans about Harris’ role in dealing with the border crisis. Why? Because to acknowledge that Biden did in fact appoint his Vice President “to lead our efforts” on the border – which is to say, to borrow from the literal dictionary definition of the word “czar” – to act as the “border czar”. To admit the obvious is to admit that Harris has failed abysmally at her Biden-assigned job “to lead our efforts” in resolving the border crisis.
Suffice to say the media kerfuffle over referring to Harris as the “border czar” is really a major indicator of the serious lengths the liberal media will go to camouflage the truth of a matter if that truth does not reflect well on the liberal media darling of the moment.
And at this moment, the current liberal media darling is Vice President and soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. She the once upon a time “Border Czar” – leader – per no less than President Joe Biden himself.
Apparently Joe Biden – in calling her a “leader” – reads the dictionary.
Imagine that.
This article was originally published by NewsBusters.
