How stupid do liberals look these days? Do you really want to know? Well, if you do, over at the National Review, Jim Geraghty wants to help. His title, The Icons of the Left Collapse, is a bit over the top, but, well, you’ve got to tell it to sell it, and Jim does have a story to tell—three of them, in fact.
First up is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom Jim tags rather unsportingly as an “an egomaniacal, blustering, bullying charlatan.” It’s been clear pretty much from the get-go that Andy mishandled things pretty disastrously in the first, horrible days of the COVID 19 outbreak, particularly with regard to the state’s nursing homes, but lately the news for the Empire State’s guv has gotten even worse—worse, in fact, since Jim wrote about it last week, as the WashPost’s Philip Bump explains: Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home problem is getting worse. For years, Cuomo and not-my-favorite-Big Apple-blowhard New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio have been making themselves and each other look ridiculous—making each other look as ridiculous as they are, one might say—and now Andy’s decided to share the compulsive animosity by “allegedly” threatening to “destroy” Democratic state assemblyman Ron Kim. According to Kim, Cuomo assured him that “I hadn’t seen his wrath and anger”. So if Andy grows a beard and starts demanding to be addressed as “Yahweh”, don’t be too surprised.
Next up is the anti-Trump “Lincoln Project”, which, by the time I finish typing this piece, may have already shut its doors. It seems that one of the Project’s founders, James Weaver, was a long-time fancier of young lads, sending them smutty emails and explicitly offering them pay for play arrangements at the Project itself. The mainstream media didn’t seem to be all that excited, at first, to go after these anti-Trumpers, but that changed radically when both New York magazine’s Miranda Green and the New York Times’ Danny Hakim and Maggie Astor landed on the story with both feet. Not only has Weaver’s behavior been utterly contemptible for many years, there are a good many “who knew what when” issues that, shall we say, aren’t as clear as they should be. Entirely tangential but almost as embarrassing are revelations that a great deal of the money collected by the Project ended up the pockets of the Project’s founders, despite some ingenious financial arrangements that freed the Project from the burden of explaining both where the money came from and where it went. Almost as if the founders decided “we’ll never make the big bucks we’ve become accustomed to with the Trump troupe in charge. We need a new racket.” And they found one, and the “I’m a conservative but I can’t stand Trump” crowd got a serious black eye.
Also among the walking wounded is the entire state of California, the Golden State getting a good going over in the, yes, New York Times by Ezra Klein in his piece California Is Making Liberals Squirm: If progressivism can’t work there, why should the country believe it can work anywhere else?, wondering just why it is that the state’s liberal elite, in their haste to help the poor, and the environment, always seem to make everything worse for everyone except themselves, almost as if all their virtue-signaling were just a pose to cover their own greed and vanity. Jim (remember him?) quotes from both Ezra’s cri de cœur and the NR’s Kevin Williamson’s brutal takedown of said cri, Ezra Klein Misapprehends California’s Problems, suggesting not too gently to Ezra that the whole point of California’s “environmental” legislation is not to save the spotted owls but to save the property values.
Well, I agree with Jim on all three of these, for the sins and shortcomings of my political faith is something I’ve moaned about frequently if not compulsively over the years—this one being perhaps the longest if not the loudest—but, frankly, Jim’s list needs a little updating, so how about revisiting the painfully unattractive dismissal of New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil for his thoughts out of season, which I criticized here. Times columnist Bret Stephens had his own response, which the Times refused to print, but which you can read courtesy the New York Post.
Actually, I don’t blame the Times too much for “spiking”, as we say in the biz, Bret’s piece, which is a bit of a troll, though a rather “reasonable” one, all in all, which includes the following passages:
The Times has never previously been shy about citing racial slurs in order to explain a point. Here is a famous quote by the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater that has appeared at least seven times in The Times, most recently in 2019, precisely because it powerfully illuminates the mindset of a crucial political player.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’ and all that stuff.”
Is this now supposed to be a scandal? Would the ugliness of Atwater’s meaning have been equally clearer by writing “n—, n—, n—”? A journalism that turns words into totems — and totems into fears — is an impediment to clear thinking and proper understanding.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, right New York Times? Are you going to fire yourself?
Well, one thing we never run out of these days is compulsive political correctness, so naturally, there’s more, this time coming from the West Coast, though reported most ably, it seems to me, in the Big Apple by New York’s Jonathan Chait, discussing the Disney folks’ dismissal of Gina Carano for, basically, the “crime” of not talking like a Hollywood liberal. Among other things, we “learned” that only liberals are allowed to make invidious comparisons involving Nazi Germany. When conservatives do it, it’s “anti-Semitism”, “fake news” that really is fake news, fake news that was reported over and over again as “fact” by the mainstream media, as Chait points out.
Ugly stuff, eh? As a liberal, one can only say “Thank God for Ted Cruz!”
Afterwords—Still More Donald McNeil Edition
The Times did run a story on McNeil by their Media Equation guy Ben Smith that’s, well, awfully long, but if you read long enough you get to a statement by Sophie Shepherd, one of the high school students on the 2019 trip to Peru with McNeil that ultimately led to his departure from the Times. According to Shepherd, McNeil told her “Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to,” which strikes me as both absurdly oversimplified and grossly impolitic. If McNeil said that, or something like it—McNeil refused to discuss the matter with Smith—I don’t blame the Times for reprimanding him, which is apparently what happened when McNeil returned from the trip. However, I still don’t see why he should be fired over the matter. But it seems the story going around in a lot of venues of an innocent truth seeker being hounded by a bunch of spoiled preppies (Sophie went to Andover, like, you know, George Bush) isn’t quite the full story.
