Lucas: Semper Fi J.D. Vance, Semper Fi!

Yeah, Kamala, I am weird, weird like a U.S. Marine.

What’s your excuse? San Francisco?

What indeed could be weirder, politically speaking, than a leftist Democrat progressive like Kamala Harris bent on turning the country into California without the weather?

It is not California dreaming. It is California burning.

That is how J.D. Vance, 39, the Appalachian-bred Republican U.S. senator from Ohio, should have responded to Vice President Harris, 60, and her attack on his loyalty to America while labeling him “weird” in the process.

Yeah, I’m so weird that I joined the Marine Corps out of high school, he should have said, like so many other patriotic 18- and 19-year-old American kids did to defend our country.

What branch of the military did you serve in?

Harris, the Democrat Party’s presumed candidate for president, who will be officially crowned at the party August convention in Chicago, had originally planned on running for vice president against Vance, who is Donald Trump’s running mate.

But after party leaders, led by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, threw President Joe Biden to the curb and forced him to drop his candidacy, they closed ranks and united behind Harris.

No sooner did Trump choose Vance as his running mate, however, than Harris unloaded on Vance and said: “Trump looked for someone he knew would be a rubber stamp for his extreme agenda. Make no mistake, he will be loyal only to Trump, not our country.”

Vance, who served four years in the Marine Corps, responded at a Minnesota rally.

He said, “Now I saw the other day Kamala Harris questioned my loyalty to this country. That’s the word she used, Semper Fi. Loyalty. And it’s an interesting word. Because there is no greater sign of disloyalty to the country than what Kamal Harris has done to the southern border.”

He continued, “And I’d like to ask the vice president, what has she done to question my loyalty to this country? I served in the United States Marine Corps. I went to Iraq for this country. I built a business for the country.”

He added, “My running mate took a bullet for this country. So, my question to Kamala Harris is this: what the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America. And the answer, my friends, is nothing.”

Well, hardly nothing. Harris is a successful Democrat California politician who served as district attorney in San Francisco, attorney general, a U.S senator, and vice president.

And she is now one election away from becoming president if she can successfully erase much of her extremist record of support for open borders, abolish ICE, free medical care for illegal immigrants, defunding the police, opposition to fracking, abolishing private health care and so on.

If Harris were not already far to the left, her campaign is being buttressed by Anita Dunn, Joe Biden’s senior advisor, who left the White House to work for a PAC supporting Harris.

Dunn is noted for naming Mao Zedong, the Communist Chinese leader responsible for killing some 30 million Chinese, as one of her “favorite political philosophers.” The other, weirdly enough, is Mother Theresa.

In any event, Vance could make significant campaign gains among veterans, as well as others, by going after Harris on the issue of loyalty. You will not find anyone more loyal than a U.S. Marine.

Being a Marine and serving his country meant a lot to Vance. It shaped his life, as it did the lives of millions of other veterans who have served in the various branches of the military.

If elected, he would be the first Marine to serve as vice president and possibly president after that.

Vance wrote about what the Marines meant to him and how the Marine Corps made this poor, disgruntled and sullen youth the man he turned out to be.

It is all in his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was written and published in 2016 before he entered public life.

In it, Vance tells of how all the childhood resentments he harbored during his young and difficult life vanished when he witnessed the terrible hardships of the children he came across in war-torn Iraq.

He wrote, “I began to appreciate how lucky I was, to be born in the greatest country on earth.”

How weird.

Semper Fi J.D., Semper Fi.

Peter Lucas, a U.S. Army veteran, is a political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonheral.com

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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority earlier this month. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)

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