Saturday Miscellany

First, sometimes the only way to grasp the story is to look at it through the lens of satire. This week the celebrity world and a few politicians set out to get Joe Biden. That means, they want to induce him to withdraw from the presidential election, leaving the place to a candidate who has a better chance of winning.

At the center of it all was Amal Clooney’s husband, George, about whom the satirical website The Babylon Bee, had this to say:

In New 'Ocean's 14', George Clooney Pulls Off $30 Million Heist By Tricking People Into Giving Money To Politician Before Revealing He's Demented.

Second, the agonies of the Democratic Party are giving Commentary editor, John Podhoretz-- schadenfreude. If you do not know, the word means gaining joy from the suffering of others.

Podhoretz wrote this about one George Clooney, a major player in the unfolding political drama. It does raise the question: how does it happen that a mere actor becomes a political player?

True, he was a flawed but noble doctor on ER, but Clooney was the worst Batman, and his last meaningful contribution to America in any way was the pretty good movie Michael Clayton sixteen years ago, a movie he neither wrote nor directed (you don’t want me to list the movies he’s written and directed, because just remembering their names will be enough to put you to sleep, they’re so boring and second-rate). The mood shifted yet again when the Bidenites reminded everybody else that Clooney is mad at Joe Biden anyway because his loathsome if visually formidable wife helped draft the arrest warrant for Bibi Netanyahu at the International Criminal Court the administration publicly criticized.

He continued:

The agony here is all on one side. And it’s not my side. It’s being experienced by people who have spent the past eight years bathing luxuriantly in their own self-infatuated sense of their politicial virtue as demonstrated by their fixated hatred on all things Trump. That fixation either deluded them from seeing or prevented them from admitting or gave them the permission structure for lying about the severity of Joe Biden’s condition. Now they are finding themselves in the choppiest political-emotional waters anyone has experienced in politics since the Republican New Hampshire primary in 2016 began to make it clear to non-revolutionary conservatives that their ideas had been supplanted and their understanding of the political rules was outdated. The people who are suffering today thought themselves immune from the self-doubts and sense of despair that gripped people like…me.

Nicely put.

Third, and then Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle explained that the shock and awe that befell media professionals when they saw how badly Joe Biden had botched the first presidential debate was merited. They had been covering for Joe. They had deflected all calls that he was suffering from dementia. And they believed their hype. Which is worse than trafficking in misinformation.

Since the Post journalists live in an ideological bubble, they know less, she opined, than the average viewer of Fox News. Call that the most unkindest cut of all.

The media’s treatment of Biden wasn’t a conspiracy to protect a Democratic president, but it looks like one because that was its practical effect. None of our decisions were entirely driven by partisanship. But if we’re honest, many of them were unduly influenced by it.

As Biden’s decline grew more visible, people kept respectfully airing the administration’s insultingly implausible claims: that there was a secretly brilliant president flitting around the back corridors of the White House like Batman, while the videos of that same president acting befuddled on world stages were “cheap fakes.

A lot of articles about Biden’s age ended up so couched in ethereally vague language about “questions” and “concerns,” so defensively swaddled in equivocal context that the necessary SOS didn’t get through.

As a result, viewers of Fox News understood the president’s condition better than our audiences, which ought to be a huge wake-up call for us. We don’t have the exact problem conservatives imagine, but we do have a problem. And the only way to fix it is to add more viewpoint diversity to our newsrooms.

Fourth, our woke military, the one that has made a fetish of diversity, equity and inclusion, tried to build a pier in Southern Gaza, the better to deliver supplies to the poor non-starving people.

Well, the project failed. It has been abandoned:

The Pentagon will shut down the $230 million temporary pier that the U.S. military built to rush humanitarian aid to Gaza, American officials said on Thursday. The project has struggled to overcome rough seas and other problems since it started in May.

Fifth, the debate over puberty blockers proceeds apace. Pamela Paul has written a good column offering both sides of the question for the New York Times.

Over on the other side of the pond, the new Labour government has just banned them definitively. As it happened, the Tory government had banned them for a few months. Labour extended the scope.

Gerald Posner writes this on Twitter:

Good news from across the pond. The new Labour Health Sec @wesstreeting ends speculation about whether the NSH will make the temporary ban on puberty blockers permanent.

Labour moves to ban puberty blockers permanently.

Wes Streeting to agree with Tory ruling on powerful drugs for under 18s as his party toughens stance on trans issues.

 

(This after the outgoing conservative government banned puberty blockers for three months.)

Seventh, my new manuscript, entitled, Can’t We All Just Get Along is looking for a literary agent and/or a publisher. Recommendations and suggestions welcome.

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