Go f#@k yourself.
Are you familiar with NY Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens? He’s one of those right wing apologists they keep on staff at the despised “liberal” corporate media as part of their vain, ongoing attempt to prove to the MAGA cultists that they’re actually all fair and balanced. His schtick is to come on like an eminently reasonable old school conservative, though he’s actually an infuriatingly self-satisfied know-it-all never-Trumper who nevertheless can’t bring himself to support the Democrats, though he despises Donald, he really does. This makes him a somewhat less hideous version of Hugh Hewitt, the insufferable Trump sycophant who’s still sucking up precious column inches at the Washington Post, prompting me to throw up in my mouth every time I so much as see his by-line. Hewitt’s so god-awful that I once wrote an angry letter to the editor, pleading with them to make it stop:
From: Graeme Coffin graeme.coffin@icloud.com
Date: October 11, 2019 at 11:03:04 AM EDT
To: Fred.Hiatt@washpost.com
Subject: Democracy and what kills it
Mr Hiatt,
Hi! I’m a Canadian subscriber. We have enough of our own problems up here to distract me, heaven knows, but like most Canadians I pay closer attention than most Americans to what goes on in your country, and I fork over happily for your publication because I’m inclined to agree that democracy dies in darkness, just as your catchy masthead slogan insists. I’m writing to suggest that democracy also fries to death under the scorching, withering photon bombardment of the arc light of imbecility that is Hugh Hewitt.
Balance and tolerance for opposing viewpoints are terrific and all that, but there’s something to be said for stroke prevention too, yes? I can’t be the only one of your loyal readers who just about pops a brain aneurysm every time he or she so much as reads the title of a Hewitt column. Indeed, I bet you’d get a lot more letters like this, save that so many who’d send them drop dead, or lose their capacity for language, before they’re able.
As you can imagine, this didn’t much impress anybody at the Post. They didn’t even bother to respond, much less print my missive prior to hiring me to replace Hewitt as their guest essayist – their loss, obviously – so I know better, now, than to take a similar run at the Times editorial staff over the smug, faux-intellectual posturing of Bret Stephens. I’ll eviscerate him here instead, and oh boy, does he deserve it, for all sorts of prior sins, and especially his latest:
Why’s he such a Kamala skeptic? Because, silly, we don’t know enough about Kamala’s precise policy positions on a whole host of complex issues, and that’s why she doesn’t deserve the currently undecided vote. Writes Bret:
What does Kamala Harris think the United States should do about the Houthis, whose assaults on commercial shipping threaten global trade, and whose attacks on Israel risk a much wider Mideast war? If an interviewer were to ask the vice president about them, would she be able to give a coherent and compelling answer?…A few more questions for Harris: If, as president, she had intelligence that Iran was on the cusp of assembling a nuclear weapon, would she use force to stop it? Are there limits to American support for Ukraine, and what are they? Would she push for the creation of a Palestinian state if Hamas remained a potent political force within it? Are there any regulations she’d like to get rid of in her initiative to build three million new homes in the next four years? What role, if any, does she see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans? If there were another pandemic similar to Covid-19, what might her administration do differently?
Never mind that her opponent is, as he well knows, wholly incapable of answering such questions. The public needs to know what Kamala would do, down to the most granular level, about every hypothetical that clever little Bret can conjure! It’s not enough that she isn’t Trump, he concludes.
In response to which, MSNBC’s redoubtable Stephanie Ruhle opened up this 45 gallon drum of whupp-ass during the most recent broadcast of Bill Maher’s show on HBO (advance to the 2:25 mark):
Stephanie’s point, which any frickin’ moron understands to be incontrovertible, is that actually, dumbass, it frigging well is enough that Kamala isn’t Trump. That’s all you need to know. As I’ve scribbled in this space countless times, if the choice is between Donald and literally anybody else (and I’d extend that to pretty much any thing), any sane person knows what to do. I’d rather have a f*&king wombat sitting behind the Resolute Desk than Trump. I’d rather pin the Presidential Seal on a goddam barrel cactus. Under the circumstances – which, let me repeat for what seems to be necessary emphasis, constitute a national and indeed international emergency – the petulant, quibbling, smarty-pantsed debating society points raised by Stephens are utterly irrelevant, and symptomatic of an obsolete journalistic mind-set that’s maddeningly oblivious to what’s now at stake. I’m reminded of something the hilarious David Sedaris wrote for The New Yorker a while back:
Correct.
However, I have a different argument for Bret, if he needs more persuasion: we damned-well do know what Kamala would do as President, on a whole host of key policy questions. It’s complete bloody nonsense that “we don’t know her answer to anything”, as he insisted in his losing argument with Stephanie Ruhle.
We know she’d maintain the Biden administration’s vigorous support for NATO and America’s other alliances, not undermine them while desperately trying to curry favour with Putin and assorted other foreign dictators, as Donald would. We know she’d continue Biden’s promotion of measures to combat climate change. We know she’d continue advocating for “Bidenomics”, fighting for measures to invest in American jobs and boost the middle class. We know she’d let Trump’s egregious billionaire tax breaks expire when they’re up for renewal next year (and thus no further explanation is needed for the steadfast opposition she faces from odious oligarchs like Elon Musk). We know she’d continue to support Ukraine, even if we don’t know whether she’d give Zelensky more room to maneuver than Biden has. We know what sort of judges she’ll appoint, and what sort of new blood she’ll inject into the Supreme Court, if (God willing) she ever gets the chance. We know what she’ll do to populate the civil service, and maintain the independence of the Fed and the Department of Justice. We know she won’t pardon the January 6 insurrectionists and drop the federal prosecutions of Donald. We know where she stands on assault weapons, and what she’ll do to bring some sort of gun control back into American law. We sure as shit know where she stands on female reproductive autonomy.
Seems like plenty to me. Moreover, we can readily intuit much more. Bret asks how, for example, Kamala’s handling of a pandemic might differ from Trump’s disastrous dumpster fire of a response to COVID. Seriously, Bret? Gee, here’s my wild guess: she’ll take advantage of the bureaucratic expertise reconstituted by Biden after Trump took a buzz saw to the NIH, CDC et al., listen to experts like Fauci, dust off the comprehensive pandemic response protocols that Obama tried to leave on the shelf for Donald, actually understand what the hell’s going on, and do everything she can to facilitate and promote a mass vaccination program as soon as it becomes possible, rather than counsel the masses to ingest a litre of Javex, gulp down a fistful of horse-deworming pills, screw the masks and social distancing, and wait for it all to disappear “like magic”. I know this, because I know she’s an intelligent, serious, and competent person. She doesn’t have to come out and explain to me like I’m an eight-year-old that she wouldn’t try to pretend a pandemic isn’t even happening, then bungle the government response so badly that hundreds of thousands die needlessly.
Not enough, Mr. Stephens? Yeah, too bad. If you really doubt she’d maintain bedrock policies that are crucial to international security, just because she hasn’t come out and asserted, say, that she’d take steps to maintain freedom of navigation in crucial waterways threatened by the likes of the Yemeni Houthis, well, you’re a pinhead. If you think that somebody who is, after all, still the sitting Vice President, and a loyal member of the current Administration, should be running around the country articulating detailed policy positions that could contradict and undermine Biden’s ongoing diplomacy on thorny questions like those involving Hamas and Gaza, you’re just plain thick. If you want her to perpetrate geopolitical malpractice and commit herself right now to a course of action in case somebody like Iran decides to go nuclear, give your pointed little head a shake.
I mean, Jesus Christ, the corporate media is just full of Bret Stephens’s variety of useless horse shit. They’re all sniping at Kamala and picking nits, while giving Donald’s many gargantuan issues a pass. To quote a guy who actually wasn’t, despite what Americans think, Caucasian, English-speaking, or Christian, they’re all straining at gnats while swallowing camels. It’s not just that at this point, it’s a fully satisfactory policy platform simply to promise you won’t do any of the things Donald has planned, full stop; it’s not just that the pundits are failing to properly stress what Trump and his pack of trolls mean to inflict upon what they all fervently hope won’t be a democracy for very much longer; worse, even, is that the media are doing almost nothing to point out that Trump is a blithering, incoherent idiot in the throes of cognitive decline.
Memo to the NY times editorial board: Trump isn’t just a wannabe fascist surrounded by criminals, religious zealots, anti-semites, and white nationalists. He’s losing brain function at an alarming rate. It’d be insanely dangerous to seat Mother Theresa in the Oval if she was that far gone. This is is the guy, remember, who already asked about dropping hydrogen bombs on hurricanes, wanted to invade Venezuela, figured that Denmark should sell him Greenland (and pitched a hissy fit when they wouldn’t), had to ask General Kelly what the heck ever happened at Pearl Harbour to rate all the monuments and fuss, and told his minions to order South Korea to relocate Seoul – the entire city of 26 odd million – to a safer distance from the DMZ. Think about that: he not only figured it was an actual logistical possibility to move a metropolis that dwarfs New York City, lock, stock, and barrel, he assumed that as U.S. President he had the authority over another sovereign nation to make it happen. He just sat there, waved his hand, and told his National Security Advisor to “make them move it”. He was that batshit crazy six years ago. What sort of shape do you imagine he’s in now, after several subsequent years of accelerating brain rot? What sort of orders is he going to be barking at random as various little thoughts occur? You think this time around, staff will just smile, nod, and do nothing while they wait for him to forget all about it? You figure Stephen Miller and Seb Gorka will be trying to get him to simmer down and see reason?
But ooh! oooh! squeals Bret, we don’t know Kamala’s precise calculations on the proper extent of nuclear energy production in the effort to curtail greenhouse gas emissions!!
Of course, the real reason Stephens and others like him are so pissed is that Kamala isn’t giving all sorts of interviews, and answering all sorts of irrelevant gotcha questions. She’s cut them out of the process, and they’re beginning to understand that it doesn’t matter to anybody but them. The Democrats have finally realized that the American public, sad as it may be, has neither the wit nor the inclination to give a rat’s ass about the details. They’ve finally figured out that even trying to explain the most basic concepts relevant to complex questions of public policy only gets you into all sorts of electoral hot water, which is why the Republicans won’t touch anything beyond the comprehension of an underachieving grade-schooler with a barge pole, and haven’t for decades. The Dems have woken up to the happy fact that they simply don’t need Bret Stephens. They don’t need to care about his opinion pieces, and they sure don’t need to pin themselves down answering questions about possible naval responses to ocean-borne guerrilla warfare in the frigging Gulf of Aden. Instead, Kamala is making an end-run around the corporate hacks and taking it directly to the people via rallies and social media, and she’s keeping it simple. She plans to make it easier to buy a home. She’ll fight for reproductive rights. She’ll stop coddling the billionaires and cut middle class folks a break for a change. Plus, oh yeah, she’s not Donald.
Meanwhile, Bret, go take a flying f@#k at a rolling doughnut, and while you’re at it, maybe take a minute to ponder why it is that so many now think that you and your ilk aren’t just useless, you’re part of the problem.
*****************************************************************************
Well, no sooner have I posted this than Tom Nichols decides to make the exact same point, using about 2,000 fewer words:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
VOTE WOMBAT. Your safer choice for Commander-in-Chief.
the needlefish 
One comment on “Hey Bret Stephens, I’ve Got an Idea for You!”