HGotW: Bret (bug) Stephens

Diversity hire dares to critique a Democratic Candidate who happens to be the current vice president as not worthy of being the nominee. 's'cuse me, it's time to take out the trash.

A bunch of years ago, the Gray Lady opened their purse strings and recruited the conservative columnist Bret Stephens from the WSJ.

Clearly a diversity hire, it was an attempt to add a presentable face to editorial staff, and to help balance the increasingly enfeebled David Brooks, and the rad-trad-Catholic Ross Douche-hat.

I rarely click on a link for any of his columns, because fuck him, but today, he penned a piece that is titled “Democrats Deserved a Contest, Not a Coronation” (gifted link), and by piece I mean “moldering diarrhea spewed onto the page”.

Here he is spreading his “white boy summer” vibe:

The last two times Democrats attempted to stage a coronation instead of a contest in choosing a presidential nominee, it did not go well. Not for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Not for Joe Biden this year.

So why would anyone think it’s a good idea when it comes to Kamala Harris — the all but anointed nominee after barely a day?

There is much to unpack here, but it really boils down to him being big mad that he can’t get six or eight columns betwixt now and the convention on August 19 hyping and pumping his pet things (like Aaron Sorkin’s now yanked piece on the Times saying that the Dem’s should nominate a bold candidate. That candidate? Mitt Romney. Uh, that is as bad as nominating Hillary Clinton.)

No, Bretbug has his panties in a wad because he really wanted the Democrats to nominate a Republican-Lite. Hell, Joe Manchin (I-dumbfuckistan) tested the waters and pulled back a bloody stump, and now says that he wouldn’t accept being selected as Harris’ Veep. As if.

Maybe the answer is that a competitive process, either before or during the Democratic convention, would have been divisive and bruising. Or that Harris’s fund-raising advantages over any potential rival were already insuperable. Or that Democratic Party big shots (though not Barack Obama, at least not publicly yet) genuinely think the vice president is the best candidate to beat the former president.

Uh, no, this does nothing but play into the strengths of the Trump camp, and while Bretbug Stephens has proclaimed Trump to be bad, he seems to think that he is in the catbird seat and can tell the Democrats what to do. Like the folks at The Bulwark, Bretbug seems to think he has juice within the Democratic Party. You don’t, so as you are fond of saying to us, “stay the fuck in your lane”.

I’d like to point out that it is fucking weird that Obama hasn’t publicly weighed in. Is that because he prefers someone else? Considering that many of his inner circle and aides from his administration were instrumental in the efforts to remove President Biden from the ticket, they probably wanted the entire ticket swapped. Whatever the reason, this is not cool.

He then trots out the predictable tired tropes:

She’s unpopular

Uh, the last 48 hours has been wild, raised the most from small donors, Zoom conferences of people of color had upwards of 40,000 attendees and generated over $3M in contributions.

Oh, and she had a barn burner coming out rally in Wisconsin.

Seems she’s not as unpopular. But I am sure he has plenty of friends who turn up their nose at her. Wonder who he associates with?

She’s a bad campaigner

This is predicated on her early exit in 2020. As a former DA and AG, she struggled in the primary that was flush with progressive “icons” and she couldn’t hide her past.

But she is a skilled pol, and she has won in the past.

She’s been a bad manager

Yeah, so? Politicians are uber Type-A people. The world is awash with their shitty management. You know who is far worse? Donald ‘shit-bird’ Trump.

She has a penchant for excruciating banality

So? You pen 750ish words a couple of times a week, and when I do click on a link I am presented with right wing banality up the wazoo.

She’s a blue-state Democrat who needs to win purple states

Imma gonna guess that he doesn’t think that Gavin Newsom wouldn’t be the turd that floated to the top of the contested convention. He really is the only candidate with national name recognition, and no amount of flogging one of your pet “agreeable” Democrat candidate was going to make that come out any different.

She’s anchored to Joe Biden’s record

That’s cool. Soft landing for the economy, turned the tide on Covid, stock market has grown to record levels, the IRA, got control of inflation, and has the lowest rate of unemployment in over 50 years.

Yeah, that’s a shitty record (I will need concussion protocols for that level of eyeroll) to run on.

Her career smacks of connections and favoritism

This one really stinketh. This is a superset of the “DEI” trope and rolls in a healthy dollop of misogyny. The implication is that she “slept” her way to the top, and she is in this position only because of the men who she wiled with her charms.

Yeah, that shit needs to fucking stop. Although I do hope the R’s lean into it, because that will add to the women’s incentives to vote against Republicans on top of their Project 2025 fuckery and the ginormous self-own was the Dobbs ruling overturning the precedent in Roe v. Wade.

For this, Bret Stephens earns this week’s Human Garbage of the Week.

Runner up: Graeme Wood

The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood penned this shit-sandwich on Monday, the day after Biden dropped out from the race: “Democrats Are Making a Huge Mistake”.

Same shit, same bad take.

A prolonged process would also confer strategic advantages. Normally a party commits to a platform and a ticket several months (or in the case of incumbents, years) before the election. My colleague Tim Alberta has described the Trump campaign’s meticulous planning for a Biden campaign. “Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate,” Alberta writes, was “meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.” Now that Trump is committed to his path, the Democrats have an unusual chance to revise their strategy to neutralize Trump’s choices. “The Republican Party just spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden,” Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News yesterday, with a whiny and wounded sense that the Democrats had violated the bounds of fair play. And in some ways they have—but now that they are redrawing those boundaries mid-campaign, they may as well take full advantage of their opportunity. That means not providing Trump with a fixed target, and calibrating their selection process for maximum lethality for his campaign’s locked-in choices.

I dunno, anything that makes the snake-human hybrid Stephen Miller whine like a pussy-assed-bitch seems like a good plan to me.

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