Loose Ends (110) (Updated!)

Obama’s national security aide Ben Rhodes famously remarked that young journalists “literally know nothing,” but today someone at The Hill newspaper abused their ignorance privilege with this epic tweet:

What—did Germany murder seven million Jews before noon today? I musta missed that breaking news. The tweet has been deleted, but seriously Hill people, shouldn’t you just delete your entire Twitter account? If The Hill had any sense of shame or embarrassment they would, but they’re journalists, so . . .

Now I’m starting to understand why so many leftists think Trump is literally Hitler. They really are that dumb.

UPDATE: The Hill issued a “corrected” Tweet:

The Hill staff is clearly unacquainted with Denis Healey’s First Law of Holes, which is: If you’re in one, stop digging.

It is not news that Bill Kristol is anti-Trump, so much so that he’s apparently prepared to vote for Joe Biden in November. I’ve had some private communications with Bill about things, and these exchanges shall remain private. As Bill is a friend of longstanding I choose friendship over politics every time, so I won’t indulge a public dispute with him. I shall remain ever grateful to Bill for running my long piece in The Weekly Standard in October 2016 explaining the “Claremont” case for Trump, even though he strongly disagreed with it.

I  might, however, bring to readers’ attention something Irving Kristol wrote back in 1985, when, it is hard to remember now, elite opinion thought Ronald Reagan was a dangerous populist:

What is going on is something very strange and without precedent. To put it simply: The common sense—not the passion, but the common sense—of the American people has been outraged, over the past 20 years, by the persistent un-wisdom of their elected and appointed officials…To the degree that we are witnessing a crisis in our democratic institutions, it is a crisis of our disoriented elites, not of a blindly impassioned populace…This new populism is no kind of blind rebellion against good constitutional government. It is rather an effort to bring our governing elites to their senses. That is why so many people—and I include myself among them—who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism.

The article was called “The New Populism: Not To Worry.” I have a hunch he’d say much the same today if he was still with us. (Significant, perhaps, that Norman Podhoretz has become very pro-Trump, while his son John is . . . less so.)

Michael Moore’s film “The Planet of the Humans” that has upset the greenies has been taken down from YouTube, on the flimsy pretext that one scene supposedly violates some photographer’s copyright. It is true that “fair use” copyright law remains opaque, but I imagine there are thousands of YouTube videos would need to be taken down if a strict interpretation of fair use was applied evenly. I suspect this is just an excuse for the leftists at Google to take down “an inconvenient truth” (heh).

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