Firehose #102: The Longest Week

Also: Say hi to us in Cooperstown!

There are some weeks that age a man in years. Moynihan here for example, ran himself absolutely ragged at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and yet still woulda showed up for our monthly appearance Friday on The Megyn Kelly Show had it not been for those confounded software outages. So to start this long if hurried weekender (we’re in Cooperstown for our annual pilgrimage), here’s me & Kmele doing our level best to keep pull the slack.

* All right, let’s see if we can get the rest of this email in roughly chronological order. Start with this lacerating July 13 Discourse piece about the Joe Biden debacle from Martin Gurri, author of the Fifdom-beloved The Revolt of the Public, which we discussed with him on Episode #225. Gurri’s piece, which was republished a few days later at The Free Press, is brutal, maybe 10% meaner than I would have gone, and worth reading in full. Here’s how it starts….

Joe Biden entered the Senate in 1973, at the tender age of 30. He looked like a president, he felt like a president, and he fully expected to rise to the top. His formula for success was that of every ambitious politician deprived by nature of directing principles or opinions: find the meandering mainstream of his party’s establishment, where the big fish swim, then wade in and drift. Biden was in turn strongly against and stridently for abortion, a righteous Vietnam dove and then a stern Iraq hawk, a friend of racist Democratic senators before becoming a promoter of compensatory quotas for racial minorities. 

Virtually every time a vacancy arose, Biden, by his own admission, considered running for the presidency. In 1988, at the age of 44, he actually did so—and failed. Biden may look and feel like a president, but he has never sounded like one. Long before old age turned him into a bleary-eyed mutterer, he tended to get lost in his own verbiage. He told fantastic stories about his personal life that could be easily disproved. He plagiarized bits from Bobby Kennedy and parts of a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Biden, it seems, was as needy as he was ambitious. His campaign resembled a prolonged pratfall. He dropped out before the first primary.

Thanks to a few very big, very lucky breaks, this human weathervane eventually found himself in the White House. Just a few years later, however, President Biden’s luck looks to be running out. A disastrous performance in last month’s presidential debate pulled back the curtain, in the style of The Wizard of Oz, to reveal the president as the sad, confused old man most of us already knew him to be. Then the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, and the former president’s courageous reaction in the moments following the incident, cast Biden’s shortcomings and infirmities in an even more glaring contrast. Biden is now increasingly alone, abandoned by the very establishment that created him. For both the king and what was once his court, a terrible reckoning has arrived.

Did someone say weathervane??? Here’s how Gurri’s piece ends:

The debate was a transcendental event, far more significant than anything that was said in it. While Biden gargled and mumbled, a ripping noise could be heard by those who listened closely, a sound like the rending of a veil, as the whole Gothic fortress of fantasies disintegrated, the replica vanished like a ghost and 100 million Americans could suddenly behold the cruel struggles of a man tormented by a dying body and a dying mind. The shock of what we saw still lingers, not because it was surprising but rather because it was so predictable and consistent with what we already knew: It was truth, and we have grown used to lies. We had witnessed, in real time, the unraveling of a colossal fraud and the end of Biden’s political life. […]

I see no reason to pity Biden. He perpetrated a hoax on the American people and has had the misfortune of being found out. The punishment will fit the crime: humiliation for heedless vanity. If he is forced to withdraw from the presidential contest, that will be all the world remembers of his brief tenure at the top. If Trump regains the presidency in 2024, Biden will end up detested by the very elites whose good opinion he has groveled all his life to obtain. Failure, this time, will be fixed and final, like destiny itself.

He will not bear these blows stoically. I expect he’ll spend whatever time remains to him as a 21st-century version of King Lear—fallen, baffled, victim of his own fatal misjudgments, an old man lost on the heath and railing at the storm.

* Biden and his brain/braintrust will come up again, but let’s pivot to the RNC. On opening night Monday, Moynihan hosted a Free Press livestream watched by a mind-boggling 350,000 people, featuring working class hero Batya Ungar-Sargon (#451), Red Scare co-bitch Anna Khachiyan (#219), TV pollster Frank Luntz, “luxury beliefs” coiner Rob Henderson, Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam, Ringer podcaster Tara Palmeri, and foreign correspondent James Pogue:

* On Tuesday morning, I wrote about the previous afternoon’s big veep pick, in a Reason piece headlined “J.D. Vance Completes Trump's Ideological Takeover of the Republican Party.” Excerpt:

The GOP's new work clothes were on startling display during Monday night's keynote RNC speech, by International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Sean O'Brien. Watching star-spangled delegates enthusiastically cheer on a union boss stumping against right-to-work laws, bashing Amazon and the Chamber of Commerce, and decrying "American workers being sold out to big banks, big tech corporations, [and] the elite," well, this is not your father's (or grandfather's) Republican convention.

As political pollster and author Patrick Ruffini argued to Nick Gillespie in March, Trump has been the primary change agent in a realignment of America's two major political parties. "Specifically, it flipped after 2016," Ruffini said, "when Democrats really seemed to [begin to] have a lot of trouble holding on to the broad mass of working-class voters, which are today defined as voters without college degrees."

* Disputing that thesis with trademark vehemence was Kevin Williamson (#44):

Whatever one makes of Vance as a potential future president, he is nonpareil as a candidate for the vice presidency. He has no legislative record to speak of, and—if we can set aside the fact that he once very publicly held the view that Donald Trump is an amoral lunatic utterly unfit for office—his rhetorical record isn’t much trouble, either. Not that he hasn’t said a lot of outrageous and stupid things. Vance is a Putinist social-media troll who described entitlement reform as a plot to “throw our grandparents into poverty … so that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht.” But nobody takes anything he says seriously—he is so transparently a man who will say whatever his betters require him to say to get what he wants from them. Telling people with money and power what they want to hear is the only consistent throughline in his career, from Hillbilly Elegy to the present day. Once an appendage of Peter Thiel’s, now he is an appendage of Donald Trump’s after a long and bitter apprenticeship of sycophancy. […]

It is tempting to believe that Trump chose Vance because the former president is confident about his prospects in November and wants Vance to lead his legacy project, putting a cap and a seal on the old-school Republican Party and announcing that Republican welfare chauvinism—which is to say, national socialism (and those are the right words, though I do not mean to indicate Nazism) as practiced in the United States—will be the only possible mode of Republican politics going forward. But that assumes many things that are not obviously true: that Trump has a long-term plan; that Trump is interested in political ideas; that the dynastically minded quasi-royalist Trump prefers Vance as the face of the Republican future rather than one of his own children, etc. 

* Also on Tuesday, Jesse Singal (#111 & #171) wrote up his impressions from watching Joe Biden attempt a teleprompter speech in front of the NAACP. Headline: “This Is No Longer Remotely Tenable.”

At one point the president said, “We have to stand against the violence and intimidation of white supremacy, the murder, innocent lives in that grocery store in Buffalo, New York, when I went up there.” […]

A couple times, he seemed to get lost mid-utterance, start to say something else, and then try to pick up where he left off: discussing Trump, Biden said “His mismanagement of the pandemic was especially devastating to black communities — oh, I know, becau — and other countries, other communities of color.” Sometimes you could sort of understand what he was saying, policy-wise, but if you took the words at face value they didn’t make sense: “My city Wilmington, Delaware, I-95 runs up through what used to be the black community, divided it, six lanes wide. We’re gonna make sure that the states want it, we’re gonna be able to pave over the top of that and still have the highway — connecting neighborhoods!”

* On Wednesday from the RNC, Mike Pesca (#343, #418) posted an interview with the Fifdom’s favorite Beetlejuice enthusiast, Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert.

* That night for the Honestly pod, Moynihan went to a Black Conservative Federation event at the RNC “to ask them why they think that MAGA conservatism is appealing to black voters.”

* I think I mentioned on #437 the startling political journey vis-à-vis Donald Trump made by Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah (watch me interview the then-leader of the GOP #resistance at the 2016 RNC). Pod friend Steve Hayes of The Dispatch on Thursday went ahead and interviewed Lee all about it.

* The final night of the RNC saw another Moynihan Free Press livestream, this time with such Fifth Column stalwarts as Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, Members Only #129, M.O. #140, #392, M.O. #180), Peter Meijer (Special Dispatch #51, #307, #339, #367,  #424, M.O. #184), and Bari Weiss (#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187); plus Batya, quadrennial Dem challenger Marianne Williamson, Biden dropout news-breaker Mark Halperin, my recent Real Time co-panelist Abigail Shrier, NatCon economist Oren Cass, and comedian Tim Dillon:

* In last week’s Firehose, I mentioned the untimely death by suicide of L.A. journalist comrade and Generation Kill author Evan Wright. Read a testament to his reporting at the Military Times, listen to some discussion about him by Sarah Hepola (#354) and Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.D. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) over at Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em, and enjoy this tribute shared with us by our very own Søren in his things:

For those who read or watched Evan Wright's Generation Kill, Captain Nathaniel Fick -- now a U.S. Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, which is a job that exists -- shared some nice words, on LinkedIn:

A few days before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, my commanding officer told me that a journalist from Rolling Stone would be riding with my platoon. I was upset. At best, he would be a distraction; at worst, a threat.

After our first close-quarters firefight, I found Evan Wright counting bullet holes in the door next to his seat. He could have left at any time, gone back to Kuwait to check into a nice hotel and file his story, but he didn’t. Instead, he spent many nights at the forward edge of the entire U.S. invasion. So many memories — Evan and I crouched behind a tire as AK rounds snap past, talking about the relativity of safety; Evan running a crazy zig-zag pattern from one covered spot to another under sniper fire, while I yell at him to just run straight goddammit; learning on a cold desert night that Evan’s bulging duffel didn’t contain a warm jacket, only cartons of Marlboro Reds he thought he could trade for whatever he’d need.

He wrote a series of articles about our platoon in Rolling Stone. They won the National Magazine Award in 2004, the top prize in magazine reporting. He turned them into a book, and then an HBO series, Generation Kill.

Evan took his own life this weekend. He leaves behind a wife and three young kids. I knew Evan as a good and gentle guy in a place that was neither good nor gentle. He wasn’t a Marine, but many of us who spent March and April, 2003 alongside him have thought of Evan for the past two decades as one of us. Rest in peace, brother.

* Comment of the Week comes from Pete Morris:

When I struggle to describe the craziness of the ‘70s to my sons and my students, like Matt, I turn to the on-field mayhem that accompanied MLB championships. Chris Chambliss's walk-off homer in the 1976 ALCS is the most iconic.

But for me, nothing tops what Reggie Jackson did in the 9th inning of Game 6 of the '77 World Series. It begins with Mr. October jogging out triumphantly to his position in right-field, as, in the background, a steady stream of New York's finest file out of the stands to (theoretically) hold back the anticipated rush of the crowd. At the same time, trash already is being thrown out of the stands in anticipation of the triumphant storming of the field. Before the inning (and the game/series) is over, Reggie has to retreat back into the dugout to get his batting helmet for protection from all the celebratory debris. Then, as soon as the final out is recorded, Reggie goes into Beast Mode, and races through the swelling crowd into the safety of the clubhouse. There has never been a more impressive 75-yard run in American sports history: not by Marshawn or OJ or Jim Brown or anyone else before or since. The jaw-dropped look on my son's face the first time I showed him that video is one I never will forget.

* Speaking of béisbol, we are out here making our annual pilgrimage to Nancy’s dead boyfriend. Come find us at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony Sunday!

Walkoff music we heard in the car on the way here, and I thought to myself “Huh, that sounds like an aural representation of the RNC this week,” and then whilst searching for it on the interwebs lo and behold IT WAS BY AMERICAN POLITICAL SAGE, LIP-SYNCH FAILSON AND SPARE-TIRE ENTHUSIAST KID ROCK. And so: