18 May Purposeful Ridiculousness
Mayor Pete – or Secretary Pete as he is now known – is smarter than you. Heck, he’s smarter than anyone you know. Or will ever know. Or can even imagine, frankly.
You don’t have to take our word for this, of course, Wired magazine has the details:
As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner office one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, and Knausgaard’s Spring—though not in the original Norwegian (slacker). Fortunately, he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.
Needless to say, this story – and that paragraph in particular – has generated quite a response among conservatives on social media. And that response has, nearly universally, involved mockery (in this case, from National Review Online’s Charles C.W. Cooke):
Buttigieg, who is white but makes up for it by being gay, is young for a Secretary of Transportation. And yet, with his authoritative air, his famed ability with Norwegian, and his remarkable professional record, he has the mien of a figure who has been in the role for decades. “In just two years,” he informs me, “I have responded to more train crashes, air-travel crises, and supply-chain problems than any of my predecessors did in eight. People often ask me why I think I’m doing a good job. I think that answers the question.”
If anything, this understates Buttigieg’s prodigious ability, for, as he is only too keen to record, he has managed to rack up this remarkable record of responses while spending only a small portion of his time doing the job. “Capitalism gives people the impression that it’s important to work all the time,” he observes. “I’m here to tell you that it’s not.”
We chit-chat for a while about minutiae — Fermat, musical counterpoint, the known origins of the umlaut — and then, unbidden, he opens up about his personal life. “I like water,” he tells me, effervescently. “I drink it often — sometimes cold.” “Tell me more,” I ask girlishly, sensing that he has more to give. “I like pizza, too,” he adds. “I have a pizza oven at home. We use it on Saturdays.”
Mockery is, in our estimation, the appropriate response here. Honestly. What else is there? We have often noted in these pages our admiration for Voltaire, one of the greatest satirists in Western history. And we could add to that our appreciation for Francois Fenelon, the Archbishop of Cambrai whose biting satire, The Adventure of Telemachus, exposed the authoritarianism of Louis XIV and inspired Voltaire. Between the two of them, they exposed much of the wretchedness and corruption that had come to characterize official France in 17th and 18th centuries. (Unfortunately, they also inspired the deadly nihilism of the French Revolutionaries, but that is a story for another day…or several.)
When confronted by the reality of de facto state-run media that seeks more to “frame” reality for its readers than to pursue the truth, mockery is inarguably the most appropriate and effective response.
All of that notwithstanding, it is worth giving this bootlicker’s treatment of Secretary Pete at least a moment’s serious thought, if only to remind ourselves that our de facto state media has an agenda, into which such articles fit nicely.
Surprisingly – and for a change – in this instance, that agenda isn’t about propping up the existing administration and defending it against all possible “attacks” (also known as “bad news”). Rather, the agenda is most concerned with defending the regime, which probably means sacrificing the administration. Confused? Don’t be. It’s pretty simple – and it’s something about which we have written before. In brief, the current (and creepy) love being shown by the media for Secretary Pete, Vice President Harris, and a handful of others is about one thing, and one thing only, which was summed up nicely by Newsweek just a couple of weeks ago:
A new poll has found broad concern over President Joe Biden‘s age as he seeks reelection in 2024.
Released on Sunday, the poll, conducted by ABC News and The Washington Post, found that 68 percent of respondents, just over two-thirds, said that Biden was too old to serve a second term as president.
The former senator and vice president was 78 years old when he was sworn in as president in January 2021, making him the oldest individual to hold the office in American history. By the end of a potential second term, he would be 86.
Concerns about Biden’s age, mental fitness for office, and general well-being have dogged him since he was elected. Despite numerous stand-out achievements, including the passage of sizeable bipartisan bills and a historically strong performance for his party in last year’s midterm election, his approval ratings have sagged, and the new ABC/Washington Post poll showed just 36 percent of respondents approved of his performance as president.
ABC News compared Biden’s current approval rating to other single term presidents around the same time in their terms and found it slightly lower than Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump. Only Harry S. Truman saw worse approval ratings during his first term, though he was ultimately elected to a second.
If you couple these findings with those from other recent polls showing that Donald Trump would beat Biden handily in a 2024 rematch, then it’s not hard to understand why the entire ruling class – including the media – would be panicking and why they would be willing to debase themselves like Virginia Heffernan at Wired just did. They’re desperate. They can’t risk having to suffer through another Republican presidency, much less another Trump presidency.
We would go so far as to suggest that the stories floating around right now about how Senator Diane Feinstein doesn’t remember that she was absent from the Senate for three months or about how she had some serious but unspecified medical event during that absence are part of this same process/agenda. Feinstein has been certifiably unfit to serve for years now. The urgency in exposing her mental decline, however, is new and, we think, intended to grease the proverbial skids for another, much bigger exposure.
At this point, the Left needs two things: It needs to push Joe Biden out of the 2024 race and to do so fairly quickly; and it needs to invent theoretically viable alternatives for nomination. They can’t just hand the whole thing to Kamala, at least without testing her.
So, prepare yourselves. Over the next few weeks and months, you’ll be reading a great deal about smart Secretary Pete is, how effective Vice President Harris was as a prosecutor, how charming and dreamy California Governor Gavin Newsom is, and how downright serious and presidential Colorado Governor Jared Polis is. You’ll also read a great deal about how ol’ Joe forgot this or misremembered that or made up the other thing. You’ll see Democrats taking solemn and regrettable but “necessary” actions to limit the power of Senator Feinstein and maybe even Senator Fetterman. It’s too bad, they’ll tell us, but it has to be done. Bigshot donors will give anonymous interviews questioning Biden’s fitness. Young voters will threaten to sit out the election if he is renominated. Etc., etc., ad infinitum.
Joe Biden is NOT going to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024. Mark it down.
