Workin’ for the Weekend #59: Bari-Kari, Forbidden Accents, and Foer More Years

Also: Gmar Chatima Tova!

Greetings and salutations from the old ‘hood, where everything’s the same as it ever was, only with more tents, more sidewalk casualties, and a stronger smell of weed/urine. A far more delightful fragrance could be found Friday at yet another generous opening of the Shabbat doors by the LBC’s most Hillel-tastic podcaster, the great Chaya Leah Sufrin, and her long-suffering family. (I say “suffering” not [just] because of Chaya Leah, but because her four terrific sons are all Angel fans, God help us all.) May the seal be for the good, and so forth! (I am told this makes sense.) And, since there’s too many items chasing too few minutes (in other words, inflation), let’s just jump right to it:

* Moynihan sat in the hosting chair this week for The Free Press’s Honestly podcast, cross-examining Franklin Foer, author of the new The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. This exchange in particular caught my eye:

MM: Are there any criticisms about Biden that you think land?

FF: Sure. In terms of their Covid policy, there are a lot of right-wing critiques that I think are justified. They could have pushed harder to reopen schools. I think it’s maybe more complicated, obviously, than some of his critics portray. But in the end, it was a place where he should have devoted greater political resources and he didn’t. 

MM: He didn’t want to upset Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the largest donor to the Biden campaign.

FF: Right. The other element that I think is important to recall is that the nation was potentially on the brink of labor strife around schools. And maybe you could argue it was worth forcing a confrontation there. But there was real anxiety on behalf of teachers about going into schools. And so he had a strategy for managing that. I would argue he could have been more aggressive in pushing them. 

* The Free Press is owned by our friend Bari Weiss (veteran of Episodes #89, #115, #159, #180 & #187), who, as readers of last weekend’s missive will recall, was the intended target of a bizarrely off-base L.A. Times attack centered around a massive Free Press/Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression-sponsored event 10 days back debating the sexual revolution. (Yes, that’s a run-on sentence, but: inflation.) Another considerably more skilled critique came since then from my long-ago ex-colleague Kerry Howley at New York magazine, and I thought it was perfectly fine as far as such things go, but I will admit to nodding along more than once at this fiery riposte from Meghan Daum (#157). Excerpt:

For reasons I remain unable to fully comprehend, Weiss elicits in otherwise mild- mannered people an unfathomable level of visceral disdain. I have seen entire dinner parties fall apart at the mention of her name. […]

Thirty years ago, the women on that debate stage would have been introduced to the world via media standard-bearers. They might have been controversial, but they would have come with a mainstream stamp of approval. The conversation would have taken the form of a Charlie Rose roundtable rather than a stage show with a boxing bell. Their words would appear in books released by commercial publishers rather than on Substacks and edgelordy podcasts. Anyone who’d built an organization as successful as The Free Press would have almost certainly been included on Time’s “100 Most Influential People” list or even featured on 60 Minutes. At a minimum, when a newspaper sent a reporter to cover an event put on by such an organization, the reporter would have done her job and gotten the facts right. 

Instead, we have derangement begetting more derangement. We have petty resentments masquerading as social critique. We have tribalistic pandering passing itself off as moral clarity. It’s beyond lamestream. It’s downright heartbreaking.

* As referenced on #422, I wrote a Reason piece this week keyed off Donald Trump’s Meet the Press appearance: “Media Critics Agree: Stop Interviewing the Bad People!”

* More Reasonalia: This Tuesday, Sept. 26, in New York City, there will be a Reason Speakeasy with Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379) interviewing Yascha Mounk (#124, #195) about his new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Then on Oct. 10 there will be another Reason Speakeasy with Alexandra Hudson, author of The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Go forth and meet the NYC Fifdom!

* Speaking of Fifdom, and Yascha Mounk, and Ask a Jew, the gals got into it w/ the “democracy hipster” just this past week. From the write-up:

We cover:

·        Why do you write so much??

·        Growing up in Germany as a Jew was a little weird

·        BUT HOW JEWISH ARE YOU YASCHA

* Excellent explainer here from commenter The NuclearBlonde:

Pony soldier is a Tyrone Powell movie from 1952 not a John Wayne movie in which members of the Royal Canadian police (mounties) are called pony soldiers. The actual line spoken in the movie is, "The pony soldier speaks with a tongue of the snake that rattles",

There is a spoken line, a voice-over, in the John Wayne movie She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) that uses the term "dog-faced soldiers". He probably confused the two since he is 800 years old and crazy as a loon.

The information in this post was partially plagiarized in honor of the Big Guy himself.

* Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill (#129) had a recommended take on ol’ Rusty Rockets: “Russell Brand and the Crisis of Scepticism.”

* Some listener, somewhere, accused me of chortling insufficiently at the comedy stylings of Ryan Long. Unfair, says I! Anyways, this made me laugh, and also to think about the kind of stuff we have not invented a subscription level to cover:

* Comment of the Week comes from Gerry Cooney:

Moynihan, I’m much better looking than Boebertjuice.

Outro music comes from the single best remix of a beloved album that I have ever heard: