Congratulations to Sen. Cory Booker for his record-breaking non-filibuster rant, which lasted 25 hours and 5 minutes. The previous record holder was South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who went 24 hours and 18 minutes. A source close to the late senator once told me Thurmond was equipped with something called a “motorman’s friend.” Could Booker have worn a similar device? Or perhaps just a pair of Depends?
Speaking of which, there’s a new book about Joe Biden and the 2024 presidential race. Gerard Baker reviews Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
“The collusion of the media in the White House’s attempts to cover for Biden’s advancing senility will rank as one of the landmark episodes in the collapse of trust in American journalism, but now that it’s safe to report on all this we learn, among other things, that the president once took a visiting family on a tour of the White House that ended up inexplicably with him wandering around the locker room of the swimming pool, and that he would have a makeup artist on hand almost constantly to gloss up his deathly pallor before Zoom meetings with staff—meetings for which he would then frequently not show up.”
“The biggest revelatory details though come in the reporting of the feuding between the main protagonists in the Democratic Party over the summer as Biden was pressured to drop out after his disastrous late June debate with Trump, as Harris maneuvered herself into the nomination, and as some of the party’s luminaries tried to stop her.
“The quarreling reads like high school kids texting each other about their vicious rivalries. Joe hates Barack, and Jill hates Nancy, but they all agree that Kamala is an absolute LOSER.”
“Like a candidate for euthanasia, we are told that [Pelosi] believed Biden must be ‘afforded dignity.’ ‘Trying to force (his) hand would boomerang, she told friends.’ And yet in a series of television interviews in which she strikingly gave him no backing, and in backroom conversations, she eventually succeeded in dialing the political morphine up to the max.
“The scars they left were raw. ‘We were hurt by Obama,’ said one Biden adviser. ‘We were fucking pissed at Pelosi.'”
If only the Democrats chose someone younger and sharper than Biden. Someone with both leadership experience and animal cunning. In other words, Chuck Schumer. Andrew Stiles reviews the New York senator’s latest book, Antisemitism in America: A Warning.
“Schumer recalls how his own staff urged him not to speak out about anti-Semitism after Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and the campuses of elite universities were overrun by supporters of this ‘justified’ act of anticolonial ‘resistance.’ Speaking out was ‘politically risky,’ they warned. Schumer agrees, but doesn’t really explain why. If he’s correct that anti-Semitism on the left is confined to the ‘radical fringe,’ then what’s the big deal? He barely mentions the avowed Hamas sympathizers currently representing his own party in Congress. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) he commends for allegedly regretting her anti-Semitic outbursts. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) he omits entirely.
“The senator might have considered the political risks of wearing Kente cloth and kneeling in the Capitol to protest racism in 2020, or the Democratic Party’s reluctance to condemn the violent mobs laying waste to America’s cities in the name of defunding the police. He might have pondered how this insane reaction, generously described as a ‘new era of historical re-examination,’ contributed to what he even more generously describes as the ‘intellectual framework’ through which the political left views every conflict as a ‘struggle between oppressor and oppressed’ where violence against the oppressor is inherently justified.”
“To his great credit, Schumer might be the first Democratic politician to cite reporting from the Washington Free Beacon—about the Columbia University deans who were caught texting each other ‘antisemitic tropes’ and vomit emojis during a discussion about Jewish life on campus—without an accompanying condemnation. He blasts the elite universities for their ‘widespread failure to discipline both faculty and students who engaged in overtly antisemitic activities and those that made Jewish students feel unsafe on campus,’ and congratulates himself for pressuring schools to take a harder line. Schumer does not mention another Free Beacon report that directly contradicts this claim, based on internal messages between Columbia’s leaders who relayed the senator’s view (in January 2024) that the ‘best strategy is to keep heads down’ and ‘hope the Dems win the house back’ because the university’s political problems ‘are really only among Republicans.’ Has Schumer genuinely changed his mind since then? Or, as a cynic might conclude, has he simply reevaluated the extent to which pervasive left-wing nonsense on campus is politically damaging to Democrats?”
Even if the left jettisons Schumer, it wouldn’t be the end of their troubles. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Tunku Varadarajan returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm by Katherine Carter.
“What Carter does—and what makes her book different from the many hundreds of books written on or about Churchill—is to make Chartwell a protagonist in the Churchill story, turning it from an inanimate dwelling-house to a lively proscenium on which the great man lived and worked and plotted a course for his soon-to-be-embattled country. ‘As well as looking at the broader story of Chartwell during the crucial years leading up to the Second World War,’ writes Carter, ‘I intend to reposition it in the historical narrative, from scenic backdrop to center-stage.’ She sets out to debunk the myth that Chartwell was where Churchill went to switch off from politics, to merely fish and paint and eat restorative meals: ‘You only need to look at Chartwell’s visitors’ book, which was typically only signed by overnight guests, to see how untrue such a portrayal is.’ More than 700 different people signed the book, and when you factor in the very many visitors who popped in to see Churchill for just an hour or two, those who made their way to Chartwell in the prewar years of the 1930s numbered (says Carter) ‘in the thousands.’ His heroic (and overworked) secretary, Grace Hamblin, called it his ‘citadel’ (giving Carter the perfect prompt for her book’s title).
“Carter offers a detailed account of the most significant visitors to Chartwell, focusing on those who helped concentrate Churchill’s mind on the growing threat of a revanchist Hitler and his war machine. … The names are an enchanting list of the familiar and the forgotten. The book begins with Churchill’s return from a visit to Germany in August 1932—made in the company of Clementine and their son Randolph—when he missed meeting Hitler by a hair’s breadth, the German chancellor chickening out of a private dinner with the British statesman ostensibly because he (Hitler) was unshaven and unwashed after a long day of travel. The truer reason, suggests Carter, is likely to have been that he didn’t fancy the prospect of a tĂŞte-Ă -tĂŞte with—and a host of awkward questions from—a man of Churchill’s intellect.”
“Carter’s descriptions of meals at Chartwell offer a mouthwatering complement to her accounts of the heavier discussions of diplomacy (which featured a frustratingly unproductive visit, from Churchill’s perspective, by Joseph Kennedy, who’d go on to be American ambassador in London); national security and the minutiae of air and naval warfare; coalition politics in Britain; and German rearmament. The Churchills ate sumptuously when they had company. When the French politician Flandin stayed at Chartwell, he lunched on gigot d’agneau, dining a few hours later on sole, pheasant, and ice cream (not at all as commonplace then as it is now). Lunch the next day was chicken chasseur, followed by partridge italienne for dinner. These culinary efforts, writes Carter, ‘had the desired effect of impressing their guest and making him feel at ease in the Churchills’ company.'”
Chicken chasseur or partridge italienne? Much like the folks at Lumon Industries, I’m so divided! Which brings me to Michael M. Rosen and Danya Rosen‘s review of season two of Severance.
“Many have labeled it the ideal workplace drama for the Great Resignation era, a program that lampoons the drudgery of seemingly pointless white-collar jobs (the show is the brainchild of Dan Erickson, who toiled for years at a door-parts store). The four main characters labor cluelessly in a generic building, in an unidentified town, during an ambiguous era, performing ‘macrodata refinement’ that none of them understands.
“Others regard it as a well-justified middle finger to global conglomerates like the fictional Lumon Industries, which cares little for its workers and much for its profits—a winking swipe, perhaps, at the show’s platform, which is owned by one of the world’s largest and most diversified companies.
“And yet others have deemed it a withering critique of society’s apotheosis of technology, a deeply unfavorable appraisal of how, in the dawn of the AI age, we worship the false gods of progress and innovation at the cost of our humanity.
“All of these approaches to the series have merit. Yet they underplay the key conceit of the show, enshrined in its name: the division of the main characters’ consciousnesses into ‘outies,’ who exist outside of Lumon, and ‘innies,’ who grind away within its walls. When the outies descend the elevator every morning toward their ‘severed floor’ at Lumon, they transform into their innies, bright-eyed and ready to start their workdays. But the innies’ lives, while seemingly simple and pleasant in their frame, appears deeply oppressive and limited from the outie viewpoint.
“And this severance, in turn, highlights the fundamental difficulty we encounter in truly understanding and empathizing with those who are different from us—including distinct aspects of ourselves.”
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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