Slacker Sunday, Insipid Pundit Edition
The most insipid, have to be in by 12 o'clock
Links are at the end, baffled.
Chris Cillizza was a victim of the recent purge at CNN, presumably because he’s too liberal for the Fox News audience. It wasn’t the staple CNN inappropriate relationship with a subordinate, or that he’s a chucktodd. Chucktodds are in high demand. A reliable lack of insight is gold in ordinary times.
The more trenchant question would be why he was ever there to get fired. Some say it was nepotism; that he’s the love child of Howard Kurtz and Maureen Dowd.
Whatever the backstory, he was there and now he’s gone. He was deprived the opportunity to flog his new book, which was reviewed yesterday in The Guardian.1 It’s about presidents and presidencies viewed through the lens of their approaches to sport.
The reviewer seems intent on giving the book a good plug, but he doesn’t do Cillizza any favors. He cites the incisive author as revealing that Donald Trump is “not a good sport who’s going to be genteel,” and that “lots and lots and lots of Americans” like sports. Whom among us doesn’t like NASCAR?
Cillizza isn’t doing the reviewer any favors either. Nobody who takes themselves seriously as a journalist wants to be seen typing stuff like that, or cutting/pasting it.
By the end of the review both the reader and writer are fairly drowning in insipidity. May the good lord preserve anyone who tries to read the actual book. Seen below is a reader who has reached Chapter III.
I ran across Superyacht Times a month or two ago whilst looking for information about Jeff Bezos’s Brobdingnagian schooner, and the magazine has been showing up in the news feed ever since. Today it features eight Italian-built superyachts, any of which you parvenus can get into for less than €20,000,000.2
You’re welcome.
If you say “debt ceiling” three times really fast nothing will happen. David Dayen at The American Prospect has taken note of a lawsuit filed by a government employees’ union seeking to declare the debt limit unconstitutional. The Bidennaires oppose the suit.3
So, to put it bluntly, the White House may have initially stumbled into the box in which they now find themselves, but now they’re standing firmly in it on purpose. They’ve created the conditions by which there is no alternative. If they wanted to pry an alternative open, they had an option with this case. The case will go forward, of course, but a May 31 hearing leaves almost no time for it to have much bearing on the situation. It’s just another marker in the future that pressures the White House into making a deal.
Either the Bidennaires didn’t game out various debt ceiling scenarios in advance, or they did and they’re either really bad at it or they’re where they wanted to be.
Ah well.
This has been a physically challenging week, hence Sunday’s post stumbling out of the gate today.
Hence too the unusually generous dollop of music, which includes performers I listened to while thinking about writing but not.
The Courtneys, “The Courtneys on Audiotree Live;”4 Guerilla Toss, “Famously Alive;”5 Potty Mouth, “SNAFU;”6 Crime of Passing, “Crime of Passing;”7 Priests, “Tape Two;”8 Shilpa Ray, “Door Girl.”9
And that, Comrades, is all I got. If you like what I do when I do it, please share it around, and I’ll be mighty obliged if you consider subscribing—it’s free unless you want to pay.
I'm late to everything, but that's because I resist everything. Today I discovered that the droning, rebarbative, braying music of Swans makes me feel the same way I feel when reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Passenger," which I have also resisted. Is everything I resist interesting? Of course not. I can't make myself get interested in why there is an "argument" about the Debt Ceiling. (Is the ceiling the most frightening part of a dwelling, or is it the corners, or the alcoves? Views differ.)
"Who doesn't like NASCAR?" I don't. Tom Geohagan, who filed that suit, is pretty smart. He went to a friendly court in the hopes that, as the first case filed, he wouldn't have an adverse ruling in the lower courts, restraining the President from using the 14th Amendment, while the case wound its way to the Supreme Court.