A Good Week for the American Right Is Not Enough to Right America

Another double whackadoo is now in progress.

Jul. 21 - It’s been an interesting ten days. There was the Trump assassination attempt last weekend. On Monday the most threatening of the lawfare cases against him were dismissed by a district judge, the Republican National Convention kicked off, and Donald Trump announced J.D. Vance as his running mate. While I was knocking around Wroclaw during the second part of the week, the Republican National Convention wrapped up. President Joe Biden got covid. There were heavily sourced reports that Mr. Biden was preparing to withdraw from the 2024 election as early as Sunday the 21st. Those reports were contradicted within hours by administration reports that the Biden-Harris ticket was still in it to win it. That prompted yet another wave of Congressional Democrats to beg Mr. Biden to call it quits. An IT security update bricked a billion computers. There was a deadly Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv. Bob Newhart died.

Bob Newhart!

In my off hours—of which there obviously weren’t many on such a short trip—I got started on Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. (Not many pirates or lusty wenches, so far, but I’m only on chapter three: who knows what kind of sea raids and bodice rippings may lay ahead?)

Addled and easily distracted as I am, however, the book and current events and the death of Bob Newhart swirled together in my head and coalesced into a kind of archetypical Newhart routine of a northern European Neanderthal receiving a telephone call from a relative who’d just encountered a Homo sapiens for the very first time.

I imagine it might have gone something like this. . .

Sorry, that wasn’t me: that was me imagining Bob Newhart imagining how it might have gone. That was his genius. Imaginary phone calls and one-sided conversations, often wildly anachronistic. He was the king of deadpan, the lord of laconic, a man whose unassuming and mild-mannered demeanor concealed a savagely satirical wit. George Carlin and Lenny Bruce tossed comedic grenades and dropped bunker busters. They were loud and outrageous and wore their anger on their sleeves. Newhart was a quiet sniper, but no less deadly. He approached microphones looking nervous and bookish, as if he were the unlucky accountant who’d drawn the short straw and had to tell the board of directors that the firm was about to go under.

From an LA Times tribute published this week:

In [his signature standup] routines, he often was calming someone down, or talking them around, or putting a good face on bad news. He’d play a policeman talking a jumper off a ledge (“You know you’re drawing a hell of a crowd for a weekday”), an analyst with Benjamin Franklin as a client (“OK, Ben, let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this kite fixation thing”) or a PR agent counseling Abraham Lincoln before the Gettysburg Address (“You changed four score and seven to 87? Abe, that’s supposed to be a grabber. ... We test-marketed that, and they went out of their minds”). A buffeted but maintained equanimity was the hallmark of his career, from his stand-up work to his situation comedies to his many guest appearances.

When I was ten or eleven, a friend and I would spend whole afternoons listening to Newhart’s comedy albums at the local public library. I grew up watching reruns of The Bob Newhart Show, and got to enjoy Newhart as an adult.

These aren’t the best four selections of Newhart, but they were the best I could find in a hurry.

“Stop It” first aired on Mad TV in 2002, but it may be the perfect skit for our current cultural moment.

“I’m very confused, I’m strugging to identify my gender, I’m—”

“Do you have a penis or a vagina?”

“A vagina, but—”

“Okay, you’re a girl. A woman. A female.”

“Biologically, sure, but I feel—”

“STOP IT!”

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American politics is getting awfully twitchy. Even the achingly sincere Peggy Noonan says so: she concludes a recent column by writing:

A final point. We have, many of us, for some time—months, certainly the past few weeks—felt various degrees and kinds of horror. But oh these are exciting times. Things are moving, shifting. Again, this is big history. Hold on to your hat.

She’s a weird one, that Peggy Noonan. A Reagan Republican, and therefore an anachronism here in 2020, but she still has a clear and penetrating eye. Unfortunately she’s also always had a heart of mush. You’ve got to scrape the mush away to see her insights.

So yes, any week in which the leading presidential candidate is almost assassinated and the other is being cajoled by his own party to drop out of the race is definitionally “big history.”

What I find most interesting about this week is that a big chunk of the American left believes that the assassination attempt on Trump was staged by Trump himself, and Republicans are pretending to be surprised by this finding.

It’s not the left’s insanity I find so interesting: it’s the right’s feigned surprise.

What conspiracy hasn’t the left rallied around since 2015? It’s their go-to move. No one should be surprised that one in three Democrats thinks the whole thing was a Magawood production. The surprise is that it’s only one in three.

(Give them time, they’ll grow that metric: Democrats are masters of inflation.)

Joy Reid seems determined to distinguish herself as Chief Whackadoo of Whackadoo Nation, as you can see here. (That’s a clip from Megyn Kelly: I can’t find the “raw” footage, which looks like it might have come from X.)

The left will, as usual, do this as a double whackadoo. They’ll continue “just asking questions” about this “very interesting” assassination attempt that they are by no means suggesting was actually staged. That’s that’s the whackadoo offense, it’s how they move the ball downfield. At the same time, they’ll accuse anyone asking how the U.S. Secret Service could have possibly been so thoroughly incompetent of making conspiratorial insinuations: that’s the whackadoo defense.

It’s how they operate. They do it all the time. They spread corrosive conspiracy theories about Republicans as cover for whatever particular mischief they themselves are actually up to (on offense), and any Republicans who get a whiff of that mischief and begin asking questions are pre-emptively slimed as conspiracy theorists (on defense).

I’d give examples but you already know them. It’s already a meme, for God’s sake: “what’s the difference between Republican conspiracy theories and reality? About six months.”

Alright, one example: Joe Biden says everyone has to get the vax because that will stop the spread of covid because once you’re vaxed you can’t get the virus. He says it repeatedly. Publicly. Literally rages at the nation on live television that he’s “losing patience” with the unvaccinated. Voices of dissent arise because everyone knows someone who got vaccinated and then got the virus. The dissenters are shouted down as conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, covid deniers. Eventually it emerges that the vax doesn’t prevent the spread of covid. Uh-oh! The administration pivots on a dime. The president never said the vax would prevent the virus, they say, and in fact that’s not the job of a vaccination anyway, and who are these monsters trying to score cheap political points by misrepresenting the president’s statements during a public health crisis?

A second example, since it follows the same template so perfectly: the president and the administration bellow for weeks that Vladimir Putin better not invade Ukraine because he will face the mother of all sanctions if he does. Such strong, muscular sanctions! Voices of dissent arise: is the threat of sanctions enough to turn back a massed army? Is that really the best we can do? The dissenters are shouted down as conspiracy theorists: they obviously don’t understand the awesome power of these particular sanctions—the jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Russia invades Ukraine anyway. Whoops! The administration pivots: the president and his minions spend two weeks saying no one ever said sanctions would prevent the invasion. Sanctions can never prevent an invasion, they insist. What kind of monsters would try to score cheap political points misrepresenting the president’s statements during a ground war in Europe?

And hell, I might as well throw in a third example: Joe Biden is a whirlwind of manic energy, the sharpest mind in any room, almost impossible to keep up with, and anyone dissenting from that narrative is spreading poisonous and maybe even treasonous misinformation! Then the nation watches in horror as that adamantine Biden brain sputters and short-circuits and overheats at the June 27 debate. Pivot! OMG, the administration has been concealing Joe Biden’s cognitive degeneration! The president must go!

(Not because he’s rapidly approaching a vegetative state, mind you, but because he might lose in November.)

Against that backdrop, whether through deliberate neglect or massive incompetence, the U.S. Secret Service allowed former President Trump to take a bullet from an assassin’s gun. The Director of the Secret Service says everything was done with the usual brilliant and exacting standards of her elite service. Dissenting voices arise: how brilliant and exacting is the service if it failed catastrophically at its one and only job?

I mean, if you hire a carpenter, the best carpenter in the world, the most excellent and elite carpenter in history, a beautiful carpenter, to drive a nail into a board, and he instead drives the nail into your ear, are you a conspiracy theorist for suspecting that either he’s not a very good carpenter or he really had it in for you?

What the hell else could you think?

Now the dissenters, the people wondering aloud how the hell the Secret Service could have failed to spectacularly, are being shouted down as conspiracy theorists by the very same people who think it’s entirely reasonable to question whether perhaps the whole thing was a false flag operation staged by Trump himself.

The only thing that matters to Democrats this November is that they cannot lose. Just ask them. This is an existential election. Democracy is on the ballot. If Trump wins, the wolves will come out of the walls. Project 2025 will make America Mordor again!

And because they can’t lose, they won’t. The celebrated cabal of Molly Ball will once again rig America—not the elections per se, but America itself—to ensure the correct outcome. They’ll change laws, stoke civil unrest, censor the news, throw virgins into volcanoes, whatever it takes.

So I repeat: Joe Biden will not be the Democrat on the ballot but whatever Democrat is on the ballot will win the election. That’s because it’s not just Democrats who’ll do literally anything to prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidency: it’s the whole establishment. The media, big tech, academia, Hollywood, NGOs, non-profits.

The assassination attempt might have shaken the timeline a little: the summer and autumn may play out a little differently than initial trajectories suggested they would. It won’t be enough to make a difference. Especially now that so much of the left is fixating on the narrative that the assassination attempt was itself just one more way in which the tyrant Trump is attempting to Burn all the Reichstags. Instead of being an event that might humanize Trump a little, it’s become just one more marker on how genuinely Hitlerian he really is.

I could be wrong. I hope I am.

This was inarguably a good week for the American right, but it’s going to take a lot more than one good week to right America.

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The Reign in Spain

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899. He was young at the time of his birth. It was fine to be young.

He drove an ambulance in the first world war. It wasn't called the first world war then. It was called the war. It was one of those times when people shot at each other. When people were shooting at each other they didn’t have time to worry about what to call it. It was only afterwards that they needed to call it something. “What should we call that time when we were shooting at each other?” “Let's call it the Great War.” “Good.”

It was a good ambulance. It was long and white. It had flashing lights and a siren that went “wee-ooo, wee-ooo.” He liked that.

After the war he lived in Paris. A lot of Americans lived in Paris after the war, but only a few of them had ever driven an ambulance. In the 30s he went to Spain. He was a journalist. They were having a war.

They called it the Spanish Civil War. It was started by an Evil Bastard named General Franco on July 18, 1936. It was a test to see whether or not they should have World War II. They had fascists and socialists and anarchists. They even had clowns. People shot at each other.

(General Franco finally gave up power on July 19, 1974, because he was sick. Maybe he had always been sick. It is sometimes hard to understand sickness. Maybe we are not meant to understand it.)

Later Hemingway lived in Cuba. He liked to fish. He thought all men should fish. He wrote stories about fishing. Finally he blew his brains out at his home in Idaho. It was July 2, 1961.

He had written a lot of books but now he was dead.

On July 20, 1969, by the way, Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. It was a brave thing to do. Hemingway would have liked that.

But he would have been disappointed by the fishing.

Besides Mr. Hemingway, today is also the birthday of Jon Lovitz (1957), Robin Williams (1952), Cat Stevens (1948), Kenneth Starr (1946), Don Knotts (1924), Isaac Stern (1920), and Marshall McLuhan (1911).

Keep enjoying your summer!

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