By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, February 19, 2024
The
media isn’t the driver—the media is the passenger. That’s one of the things we
consistently get wrong in how we talk about politics and political
discourse.
Former New
York Times ombudsman Margaret
Sullivan writes:
Biden’s advanced age is, granted, far from
ideal for a president seeking a second term, even the very effective president
that he has been. Yes, he’s old; and, never a gifted public speaker, he makes
cringe-inducing mistakes. It would be great if he were 20 years younger. His
age really is a legitimate concern for many voters.
But for the media to make this the
overarching issue of the campaign is nothing short of journalistic malpractice.
In
other words, after the throat-clearing and the obligatory “to be sure” bit:
Stop trying to make “fetch” happen.
But
“fetch” is happening. And not because the “corporate media,” as Dahlia Lithwick
of Slate calls
it—meaning CNN and the New York Times and presumably the
outlet in which she writes (Slate’s parent company does
approximately $4 billion a year in revenue; it isn’t exactly Fugazi
on tour in 1989)—wills it to be so. It is not as though media outlets and
like-minded groupings of media outlets do not have agendas of their own—they
certainly do. But their ability to drive the national political agenda is
wildly overstated—traditionally by conservatives, who have got a lot of mileage
out of complaining about being shut out of the mainstream media and persecuted
by it, but also by Democrats and progressives when it suits them.
In
reality, the media doesn’t have that kind of power. Consider the
Democrat-aligned media’s hysteria campaign, now in its fourth decade, intended
to turn Americans against gun rights and in favor of more rigid police measures
against firearms owners. That hasn’t worked, not only as a matter of
jurisprudence (the Second Amendment is one of those things conservatives have
successfully conserved through old-line institutions such as the Federalist
Society and without much help from the endless belly-aching from right-wing
populist dopes online) but as a matter of public opinion and way of life. The
share of American households with one or more guns has
fluctuated predictably between 35 percent and 45 percent for decades,
and the number of Americans who tell Gallup they want stricter gun laws has declined since 1990 while
the number who say they want more libertarian gun laws has increased. (The
share of Americans who think the laws should stay about where they are is about
30 percent, right where it was a quarter-century ago.) The anti-gun elements in
the media can make a lot of hay out of mass shootings, while Second Amendment
advocates rarely have anything as dramatic to deploy on their side, and that
hasn’t mattered very much at all. Americans are equally obdurate on other
hot-button issues: The number of Americans who say they believe abortion should
be legal but only in certain circumstances—by far the most common view—hasn’t really budged in
50 years.
Contra
Sullivan and Lithwick, Biden’s age and his mental fitness for the office are a
problem not because the New York Times and its “corporate”
associates have issued a command but because Joe Biden currently is the
president of the United States of America and, as such, is frequently in view
of the public, which can plainly see that he is a diminished man who is rapidly
declining from what was—let’s face it—not exactly an Olympian height of
intellect to begin with. Democrats who point out that Donald Trump is himself
an elderly doofus who was no great shakes an age ago when he was a 46-year-old
political dilettante and a certified schmuck—and who today is a declining man
who has aged not like a fine Bordeaux but more like convenience-store
sashimi—are right, as far as that goes, but they are not right in a way that
helps their case. Trump and Biden are both sliding down the same slippery slope
toward the same final shock that flesh is heir to, but Biden is a good deal
farther down the road than Trump is, having had a head start. Put another way,
the two men’s defects do not at the moment cancel each other out: Biden is, as
every honest person can see, worse off. “Sure, our guy has the mental acuity of
an eggplant, but the other guy is no Richard Feynman, either” doesn’t get ’er
done.
This
puts Democrats in an awkward position. Their best argument is one that they do
not want to make, i.e., that a literally brain-dead Joe
Biden would present less of a danger to the world than would Donald Trump, a
relatively energetic psychopath who attempted to stage a coup d’état against
his legitimately elected successor the last time he was in power. Unable to
make the most direct argument, Democrats have to pretend that this is a kind of
parliamentary democracy and that what is on the ballot in November is a
ministerial slate. It isn’t. Like many other conservatives, I am no great
admirer of Antony Blinken’s or Janet Yellen’s, but I am not eager to see them
replaced by Tucker Carlson and Mike Lindell or J. D. Vance and Marjorie Taylor
Greene. But the structure of the U.S. government is not like that of the United
Kingdom. We elect a president, not a parliament. Who gets what post with what
mandate under what terms is one of those hairy issues that Joe Biden does not
seem up to thinking through.
And
it is a predictably rotten thing that he is inflicting himself on the 2024
election.
Despite
the partisan insistence to the contrary, Joe Biden has never been a decent,
patriotic, public-minded man. He has always been a lying, conniving,
self-serving creature—and a mediocrity and a dolt to boot. And at age 81, he
remains true to form: A decent, patriotic, public-minded man would not put
Americans in the position of being forced to choose between a would-be caudillo in
the clutches of some bizarre and unspeakable pre-Oedipal narcissism who named
his youngest child after the
imaginary friend he invented to lie to the New York Post about
his sex life or … an eggplant—even though the eggplant beat the caudillo last
time around.
The New
York Times has its problems, beginning with the fact that a good third
of its pages are
edited by nitwits. But don’t blame “the media” for Americans’ noticing that
Joe Biden thinks he’s still
dealing with François Mitterrand.
But
if you are going to make that argument, then make the argument honestly: The
real complaint from Democratic partisans isn’t that the Times et
al. are doing a bad job reporting the news—it is that they will not oblige
Democrats more than they already do by engaging in a cover-up.
In
Other News …
Alexei
Navalny is
dead. He was likely murdered by Vladimir Putin’s government right around
the time Americans were being treated to Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of
the Russian dictator and Carlson’s tourism department testimony to the
loveliness of Moscow, at least the bits that his Russian minders let him see.
Maybe my old colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty can ask the Russian
ladies at the Manhattan wristwatch boutiques about that. I am sure
they will have some fascinating insights.
In
Other Other News …
Responding
to my
criticism of Wolfish, author Erica Berry writes: “Every
now and then (like today) i get a Google alert that a man has written a blog
post about how terrible and crazy my writing and person are, and when it
happens I buy myself a really really fancy treat and also cast some spells.”
That’s great. I hope the treat is something really good, like a Porsche or a
month in Montreux. But my criticism isn’t that Berry is a terrible person; in
fact, I wrote the opposite—that she represents a way of looking at the world
associated with “perfectly nice people.” My criticism is that
her work contains substantive errors that are germane to her main argument,
including claims of fact that are demonstrably false, misrepresentations of
news stories and headlines, etc. Berry—and her editors and publishers at
the New York Times and Macmillan—have an intellectual duty to
address those errors, to acknowledge and correct them.
If
you believe, as I believe, that writing really does matter—and if you desire,
as I desire, that books should play a larger role in our public discourse than
tweets and posts and whatever is on Fox News this evening—then it should matter
to you that Erica Berry in her book and in her recent New
York Times essay makes claims that are not true. Above all,
it should matter to Erica Berry. I do not lose sleep over much, but when I make
a serious error in a piece, I’m out of sorts for a week. Making mistakes is no
great sin—refusing to address them is.
And
Furthermore …
That’s
a funny thing I learned as an editor: The counterintuitive fact is that good
reporters often end up writing a lot more corrections than mediocre reporters.
The better ones usually are writing in greater detail about more complicated
subjects—they also may just be producing more, period—and they tend to be more
scrupulous about fixing errors. More generally, a person who has failed at a
lot of things is often someone who has tried a lot of different hard things,
and you’d rather have his record of failure than the “successful” record of the
well-paid man who never did anything very interesting but did what he did with
unremarkable competence. I know a lot of high-dollar lawyers in their 50s whose
dearest wish is that they had done something else with their lives.
In
Closing
Maybe
it is a weird tic of mine, or maybe you have it, too, but I am kind of
protective of other people’s religions, especially public worship and public
festivals. E.g., I always have thought it is kind of gross that
tourists go to black churches in some parts of the country just to listen to
the music, as though they were attending a concert rather than worship. I know
that some of these churches welcome and encourage that—it is a way to raise
money, in some cases, and the tourists are going to hear the preaching as well
as the singing—but it always makes me cringe a little. (It is always something
to see white politicians clapping along awkwardly in some Harlem church, or
moving, like the Lord, in mysterious ways.) The tourists at St. Patrick’s in
New York or at the various churches in Rome have always creeped me out.
That
being said, if I were going to impose my firangi self on a
Hindu festival, it definitely would be Maha Shivaratri, which is coming up in
March. I do not pretend to understand the relevant religious material, but I
heard the festival being celebrated in Delhi a long time ago, and I still
remember the music.
The
music isn’t the whole thing—but it isn’t nothing, either.
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