Five Quick Things: George Clooney, Sad Clown
I wrote yesterday about the potential for a palace coup dislodging Joe Biden from the presidency, and in that column I dismissed the likelihood that Kamala Harris would have either the brains or chutzpah to lead such an effort.
Even though she’s the one with the golden opportunity to pull it off (or she would be, had she the chops).
It’s going to have to be a coup, because it’s clear that Biden isn’t going to leave on his own. And the Democrats are at a point of crisis they haven’t seen in a generation.
The media is turning on Biden, which is prompting the public to turn on the media — not because anybody thinks Biden is being treated unfairly; people tend not to like being lied to. And while most of the Democrats’ elected officials are sticking with him, with even a few of those beginning to lash out at the ones who’ve begun to break ranks, the roster of ranks-breakers is definitely growing.
Which brings us to the most egregious chump in America today.
1. “Can’t I Count on You People, George?”
There was a time, though it’s largely passed, when George Clooney could be counted on to make outstanding movies. His collaborations with the Coen Brothers gave us O Brother, Where Are Thou?; Intolerable Cruelty; and Hail, Caesar! (which is a quite underrated film that actually finds a way to make fun of the Frankfurt School, something quite uncommon in a Hollywood product), and the Ocean’s Eleven franchise reinvented the heist genre and made it fun again.
Lately, though, Clooney is beginning to show that he’s lost a step.
He seems like he’s more of a politician than an actor. And unlike somebody else who made that transition more successfully, Clooney is no Ronald Reagan.
Three weeks ago, Clooney was one of the hosts for a $30 million star-studded Hollywood fundraiser that consisted of Jimmy Kimmel interviewing Joe Biden and Barack Obama on the stage and Obama, out of necessity, playing usher as Biden found himself confused and disoriented and needing assistance to get off it.
When the entire country saw the footage of Obama having to assume the role of nursing-home orderly, Team Biden castigated social media and the conservative press for something called “cheap fakes,” swearing that what people could see with their own eyes was nothing at all like the reality, which was that Joe Biden is “sharp” and “on his game.”
Where was George Clooney then? Certainly not outside of Biden’s camp.
Oh, but this has changed, hasn’t it? Now, Clooney is writing op-eds saying that while he loves him some Joe Biden, it’s time to change horses.
I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced.
But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.
Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign. The George Stephanopoulos interview only reinforced what we saw the week before. As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, who we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.
The rest of us can laugh at this, as it so obviously reveals that Obama is actively attempting to push Biden out and he’s using Clooney as a cat’s-paw to do so.
But if you’re one of the suckers who ponied up thousands and thousands of dollars to attend Clooney’s fundraiser for Biden, which per Clooney’s current advocacy was money thrown out the window since it added to a war chest only Harris can fully access, wouldn’t you be angry to the point of violence over his about-face?
Clooney is now telling you that he knowingly grifted you out of your hard-earned, or maybe hard-inherited, swag to benefit the presidential candidacy of a ham sandwich. And he furthermore says that inserting a new candidate who will then require an equal sum, or more, of your money to get in the game with Trump is eminently doable and no hill for a stepper.
There’s a Ben Folds Five song that comes to mind. Perhaps you’ll also conjure it without needing to hit the link.
All that notwithstanding, Clooney is shilling for Obama. And Obama is turning on Biden. And maybe we’ll finally get the civil war in that party they’ve (and we as a country have) needed for a long time.
Trump posted this last night on Truth pic.twitter.com/EKSV0kQIjC
— Amit Shah (Parody) (@Motabhai012) July 11, 2024
I personally can’t wait to see Biden publicly lashing out at the Obamas and leaking dirt on them. Whether anybody on his team has the sand or the savvy to go there is a good question; doing so ensures a loss in November, but the longer this debacle persists, the more obvious it becomes that November is a lost cause for Biden anyway.
2. Oh — and Can You Guys Have a Race War as Part of Your Intraparty Civil War, Too? Thanks!
As part of the Biden takedown, this thing has gone viral…
Joe Biden is a racist fool and no one can hide it anymore!
— Ada Lluch (@ada_lluch) July 6, 2024
You can file this one under “gaslighting” as well, you know.
We don’t need to go through the litany of ridiculous statements coming out of Biden’s mouth, which, on the lips of a Republican politician, would have branded the man an incorrigible racist and bigot.
But here’s a piece of video that says more than any of those lines about “putting y’all back in chains” or “if you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black,” or references to “Dunkin’ Donuts” and Indian immigrants or the rest.
Maybe that poor girl waiting in that rope line for a greeting from the president, with his sign in her hands, will rethink her loyalties.
Maybe lots of other black people will begin to notice thatthis is a pretty good metaphor for Democrat politics as a whole.
Or maybe this is another example of the dam breaking and the gaslight finally being turned off.
Of course Biden is a racist. He’s always been one. There’s a reason he palled around with Robert Byrd and James Eastland when he was a young senator. And there’s a reason he treated Clarence Thomas the way he did when Thomas had to come before Biden’s Judiciary Committee to get confirmed to the Supreme Court.
He’s been a racist a lot longer than he’s been, as Dave Portnoy called him, a head of lettuce. And they’ve gaslit the public about that, too.
3. But Wait, Ummm … They Don’t Have Anybody Else
You probably saw this on Thursday. Boy, has it made the rounds…
You can discount these results to an extent, as there are other polls out there showing that a “generic” Democrat beats Donald Trump 53–47. Presumably with a large enough media blitz and enough money and legwork, somebody younger and less demented would run better than Biden would.
But what that poll shows is there isn’t a “generic Democrat” out there. Their options outside of Biden and Harris are a collection of aging hacks who never had even the questionable chops Biden offers and a younger group of empty suits who, other than perhaps Josh Shapiro, have already marked themselves as clownish. COVID did not treat the Democrats’ Generation X politicians well.
Biden’s camp is going to show these numbers around and make the real point that there isn’t a magic bullet out there, so shut up and get in line.
That isn’t working on their donors, though.
And the longer this goes, the more the specter of “Big Mike” looms:
4. How Disturbing Is This?
We don’t have anywhere near enough space to give this the treatment it deserves, but I wanted to mention it this week before it gets too stale:
Mother throws newborn daughter out of a window to her death because 'she thought a child would ruin her career as an executive at Porsche' https://t.co/uaQvY3Jcwm pic.twitter.com/8iiBBQ4Y1K
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) July 5, 2024
When I saw this, it reminded me of two summers ago, right after the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision and there was a collective panic among the Left about the availability of abortions. And in one of the more horrific displays of societal dysfunction, there was a wave of announcements that Corporate America would set aside funds for their female employees to travel to have abortions if need be.
Are we saying that Porsche’s corporate culture is so unfriendly to motherhood that this was a rational response? No, not quite. There isn’t enough evidence of that, yet.
But is it fair to say that this cultural imperative that feminists have forced women to adhere to is making a lot of deeply miserable, mentally unstable women who are so divorced from themselves attempting to survive the rat race that tragedy looms in too many lives?
That’s fair, isn’t it? Something like this would have been utterly shocking a generation ago. Now it’s almost a punchline to a joke.
This needs an examination. We’re losing the ability to sustain ourselves as a society because our priorities as a culture are horribly wrong. And the victims, and victimizers, are everywhere.
5. The Critical Drinker Reviews Horizon, and…
The title of this one says it all.
“Very long.”
I’m with the Drinker when he says he isn’t scared away by a film’s runtime, so a three-hour Kevin Costner Western epic wouldn’t scare me off. And to be honest, I’ll certainly watch Horizon … but I’m going to do it at home when it hits the streaming services.
And for the reasons the Drinker notes, which I’ve seen mentioned multiple times.
I like Costner, but I’m in the minority, apparently, because Dances With Wolves to me was boring, self-indulgent, and woke before its time. And what scared me about Horizon from the time I heard it was coming out was that this was going to be Dances With Wolves on steroids.
I’m not sure, based on the Drinker’s review, that those fears are valid. I’m not sure they’re not, either.
Costner is apparently sinking a large chunk of his fortune into making this a four-part epic. It seems like it might be a labor of unrequited love, though: box office receipts on the film haven’t been great.
I wonder if this is at least partially due to Yellowstone fans turning up their noses at Horizon out of pique that Costner abandoned the series.
I also wonder that if you’re making four three-hour movies, wouldn’t you be better off making a limited series with 12 one-hour episodes and getting Netflix or Max or Amazon Prime to carry it?
There’s a lot about this that suggests Horizon is a bit of an anachronism; it’s attempting to fit itself into a hole in the market that doesn’t exist anymore.
I think there’s still room for the Western genre. I think our culture needs Westerns to remain relevant. Westerns are actually necessary elements to keeping us the America the world needs us to be. But we need our Westerns to be digestible. I’m not sure Horizon is.
But I’ll give it a shot. I’m not going to the theater to do that, but I’ll watch when it comes to my TV.
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