(NOTE: I read The New York Times Opinion section so that others don’t have to. While I could write something every day that mocks the lunacy there, I decided to just highlight a few of them once a week. I’ll also offer one from The Washington Post so they don’t feel left out. I provide the actual headline from the op-ed and go from there. Enjoy.)
Now that we are about to hit the interminable United States presidential election slog full stride, expect the Opinion writers at the hack factories to exhibit even more signs of disconnect from reality. They’re already barely reality adjacent. Soon, they’ll be so far away that they won’t be able to see reality with NASA equipment.
Let’s head over to the asylum and see who made noise last week.
1: The Right Don’t Need No Education
Professor Paul joins us again, this time to trot out another tired leftist misreading of what conservatives really believe. The topic of conversation in this column is higher education. Here’s a snippet:
What’s going on here? It’s easy to get drawn into debating accusations about particular courses or institutions, but that’s missing the fundamental context: the extraordinary rise in right-wing hostility to higher education in general.
Is every accusation about left-leaning professors trying to indoctrinate students false? Probably not: America is a big country, and it surely must be happening somewhere — although the specific charges made by right-wing critics are often ludicrous.
Let’s start with that last line first. Krugman admits that leftist indoctrination on college campuses is “happening somewhere.” That’s like saying, “Some McDonald’s restaurants serve fast food.” Leftist college professors aren’t even trying to hide what they’re up to, which is what makes Krugman’s assertion all the more ludicrous. (I keep plugging my book, Don’t Let the Hippies Shower, because it’s relevant to most of the education stories I do lately. I gave it an update a few years ago. It’s a quick read and I’ve never changed the Black Friday discount. Give it a read!)
Krugman’s premise that conservatives have “hostility to higher education in general,” is patently false. Ron DeSantis got his BA at Yale and went to Harvard Law, so using him as the poster boy for this idea doesn’t jibe at all.
No, Paulie boy, conservatives only have a problem with the leftist hijacking of higher education. The progs who run academia are anti-free speech, anti-American bigots. They’re devoted to closing minds, not enriching them.
Everyone should have a problem with that.
2: It’s Time to Prepare for a Possible Trump Indictment
This is a guest Op-Ed written by a couple of leftist Brookings Institution flacks, with an assist from a Georgia lawyer who I’ll bet thinks Stacey Abrams is her governor.
This article is a bunch of wishful thinking. The trio has penned a legal fantasy that it no doubt believes stands out from the zillion other “this is how Trump gets indicted” hot takes that we’ve been subjected to for over six years now.
I will give them credit for not saying “the walls are closing in.”
3: We’re Not Asking the Right Question About Biden
A recent column of mine discusses the fact that the leftwing media is about to get busy creating a fictitious Joe Biden in an effort to keep him in office. This is Ezra Klein’s first go at it for this cycle.
Klein is working his way through a series of tortured justifications for why he’s OK with Biden running again. To do this, he has to keep making things up, all the while hoping that his delusion will firmly take root at some point during the process. Here’s one example:
So let me give it a try: Members of my profession have built our lives around our mastery of words, and so we overestimate the importance of eloquence. We like politicians who speak as if Aaron Sorkin is cranking out their dialogue. But voters don’t see malapropisms and run-on sentences and unfinished thoughts and occasional fabulism as the disqualifiers that we do. Ronald Reagan proved that, and George W. Bush proved it again; then Trump tried to teach us the same lesson, and now Biden is taking his turn.
Sure, the problem is that professional writers have set the bar too high for Old Joe when it comes to public speaking. After all, why should a man who has been in the public eye for over fifty years have picked up any speaking skill along the way?
The comparison at the end is such a reach that I hope Klein didn’t tear a rotator cuff. Writing off Biden’s continued verbal confirmations of age-related dementia as “malapropisms” isn’t excuse-making, it’s pathological denial.
It gets worse:
Age has also brought Biden, perhaps out of necessity, a sense of restraint. He does not delight in the sound of his own voice as he once did.
There’s so much wrong with those two sentences that I could have devoted an entire column to them.
We all know what’s going on, even if Ezra doesn’t. Good luck trying to make Biden 2024 seem coherent, Ez.
PostScript: Engage, don’t cancel, China over the balloon
This is WaPo‘s variation on a theme that I saw a lot in the MSM during the big balloon festival. Here is how it begins:
Breathlessness over a balloon has revealed more about U.S. politics than Chinese policies. Afraid of looking soft on China, the Biden administration is failing to turn China’s blunder into a diplomatic opportunity. Instead of postponing Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China in protest, President Biden should have directed Blinken to present Chinese President Xi Jinping with recommendations to increase transparency and lessen dangers.
This is something we used to see a lot during the Cold War. Americans on both sides of the aisle like to think that our greatest potential enemies have the same motivations and goals that we do.
China was flexing with the balloon flyover. Xi Jinping doesn’t want to be our friend, he wants to permanently assert dominance while America is being run by a weak puppet.
And he’s doing a good job of it.
Until next week!
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