FAFO:

NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW:

MEGYN KELLY, KMELE FOSTER AND MATT WELCH: Jerk Obama Speechwriter Writes in NYT About Daring to Be Friends with Rogan-listening Brother-in-Law.

 

TEN YEARS GONE:

BRUCE BAWER: Revisiting Three Days of the Condor. A top-notch thriller turns fifty.

Like Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Joe’s being targeted by spies for reasons he can’t fathom — and, to save his life, needs to figure out why. Thornhill’s search takes him from New York to Chicago to Rapid City; Joe’s, from New York to Washington and back. Neither of them is a superman — neither is above expressing fear and confusion — but under the circumstances, both of them are impressively unflappable, determined to get the answers. And to survive.

I’ve mentioned North by Northwest. Even more similar to Condor, plot point by plot point, is another Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps (1935). What distinguishes Condor from these earlier films is its post-Watergate paranoia and cynicism. The late, great critic John Simon it “an elegy of private, political, and, finally, cosmic pessimism, a kind of national, if not indeed metaphysical guilt film to enchant the disenchanted.” Hovering over the whole thing, he added, was “the vague but all-inclusive malaise of Watergate.” Yes, Graham Greene and John Le Carre had been there before, even prior to Watergate. But Condor struck the perfect balance between capturing the truly palpable pessimism of a unique national-historical moment and providing classic Hollywood entertainment of the first order.

Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr,. and David Rayfiel and based on James Grady’s 1974 Six Days of the Condor (which I remember devouring avidly on a long family car trip), Condor would be followed by decades of other action thrillers — the Jason Bourne and Mission: Impossible and Taken franchises, the later James Bond pictures, and many, many others. But in these pictures the paranoia was invariably a pose, the cynicism a reflex, the darkness merely aesthetic. Not so in Condor, where it was a part of the Zeitgeist.

Read the whole thing.

DISPATCHES FROM THE KAMALA KATASTROPHE: Kamala Harris Worked at McDonald’s For… Two Weeks, New Book Asserts Without Evidence.

While a Washington Free Beacon investigation found no evidence that Kamala Harris worked at McDonald’s, an alleged summer job that the failed presidential nominee tried to make a centerpiece of her campaign biography, a new book from a trio of mainstream media reporters has concluded that Harris toiled under the golden arches for “two or three weeks.”

The Free Beacon report led Trump to raise questions on the campaign trail about whether Harris was embellishing her biography. “She never worked at McDonald’s but it was a big part of her résumé,” Trump said at a campaign rally in September.

The ordeal sent the Harris campaign into a tailspin, according to 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, who omit any mention of the Free Beacon.

Harris’s aides “debated for weeks whether they should respond to Trump’s attacks about McDonald’s,” they write, and “spent weeks agonizing” about the decision.

In a post titled “Into the Fryer,” Scott Johnson of Power Line adds, “In her Boston Globe column covering the Washington Free Beacon’s greatest hits — I wrote about it in ‘No equal on the left’ earlier this week — Jill Abramson focused on the Beacon’s reporting on the higher education beat. She omitted stories with significant political impact. One such story was the Free Beacon’s challenge to Kamala Harris’s fantasia about her summer employment at McDonald’s.”

I don’t think anybody thought it would culminate in these classic moments from last year:

Though to be fair, unlike the Harris campaign, we do know conclusively that Trump really was employed by McDonald’s in his youth:

TULSI GABBARD BLOWS OPEN RUSSIAGATE WITH DOCUMENT DUMP.

That’s nice. So when do we move beyond the standard GOP failure theater in response?

UPDATE: In “To Cap an Action-Packed Week of #Winning, Tulsi Nukes ‘RussiaGate’” Stacy McCain writes, “As egregious as the RussiaGate scandal is, the overwhelming likelihood is that nobody involved in this sordid mess will ever be charged with a crime, and that if somehow Bondi does find a way to get indictments against Brennan, Clapper, Comey, et al., the subsequent trial will end in a verdict of acquittal. ‘Guilty as hell, free as a bird,’ to quote Weather Underground alumnus Bill Ayers. ‘America is a great country.’”

JIM GERAGHTY: Ultimately, Math Ended The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

You can be like Chris Hayes, Brian Stelter, Vox, The New Republic, Adam Schiff, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressives, and choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of The Late Show is a sinister plot by spineless, cowardly corporate executives who are terrified of irking President Trump and who desperately want the Federal Communications Commission to approve the merger of CBS’ parent company, Paramount Global, with Skydance Media. (And, it should be noted, Colbert’s choice to  turn the show into a four-nights-a-week version of the speaker list at the quadrennial Democratic National Convention.)  That is a dramatic world, with noble heroes and dastardly villains, plotting against the interests of the public, punishing a brave comedian, smashing dissent, and bending the knee in obedience to a ruthless, vindictive, power-mad president.

Or you choose to believe you live in a world where the ending of the show is a reflection of the fact that CBS was losing $40 million each year on the show, as the Wall Street Journal reports today. And as much fun as it would be to blame Colbert for being greedy and making the show unprofitable with his $20 million per year salary, with numbers like that, the show would still be unprofitable even if he worked for free.

Reuters adds, “the show’s ad revenue plummeted to $70.2 million last year from $121.1 million in 2018, according to ad tracking firm Guideline.” If a show’s ad revenue gets nearly cut in half over a six-year period, that is a serious and worsening problem, and an indication that it isn’t a reflection of a one-year blip or temporary economic pressures.

That is a much less exciting world. In that world, Colbert’s nightly denunciation of Trump was not much of a factor in the show’s fate, other than maybe alienating roughly half the potential audience for the show.

Charles Cooke adds:

I don’t think they envisioned that there could ever be a step five. As Abe Greenwald of Commentary wrote in his newsletter yesterday:

Liberals are learning that there’s no such thing as lifetime tenure, eternal cultural dominance, and unending access audiences or the levers of power. To be honest, many of us outside the liberal establishment are learning it too. I’d become half-resigned to the endurance of the liberal Pangea. But the ground is now shaking beneath everyone’s feet.

Related: From the Washington Free Beacon on Thursday: NPR CEO Katherine Maher, Who Once Said ‘America Is Addicted to White Supremacy,’ Now Says NPR Needs Federal Funding To Support ‘Rural Communities.’

NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who once called America “addicted to white supremacy,” is warning that looming federal funding cuts to her left-wing broadcast organization will disproportionately hurt rural communities.

“The primary impact of this potential rescission is going to hurt communities where they need support most, which are rural stations—stations that serve communities that do not have access to other forms of local news, emergency reporting, emergency alerting,” Maher told CBS News on Thursday morning, just hours after the Senate voted to cut funding to public broadcasting.

“I think that the place where we’re seeing the most traction is senators who represent communities where there are large rural communities, large tribal communities,” she said Wednesday on CNN. “Broadband service is not universal, and heck, cell phone service is not universal.”

Those comments follow Maher repeatedly disparaging white Americans.

A decade ago, Rob Long wrote that Johnny Carson broadcasted in a television universe that consisted of “three big channels—and maybe an old movie on one of those fuzzy UHF stations—so if you didn’t like what was on, you were out of luck. Network television didn’t compete with cable channels or Hulu or Amazon Prime. It competed with silence.”

Robert Conquest’s First Law of Politics states that “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” But I really don’t think he was envisioning the mindset of network TV and public radio executives who convinced themselves — or at the least tried to convince others — that they still worked in the mass media world of 1972.

NICK FREITAS: The NY Times Doesn’t Understand ‘Where Men Have Gone’ (Video).

The Times article that Freitas references has the subhead, “So many men have retreated from intimacy, hiding behind firewalls, filters and curated personas, dabbling and scrolling. We miss you.”

Yes, how on earth could that have happened?

 

NEVER IN THE FIELD OF HUMAN COMEDY HAVE SO MANY CONTRIBUTED TO SO FEW LAUGHS:

Many of which presumably are his “comedy” writers. In his 2003 obit for Bob Hope, Mark Steyn wrote:

If Hope started out as the first modern comic, he quickly became the first post-modern one. Other comedians had writers, but they didn’t talk about them. Radio gobbled up your material so you needed fellows on hand to provide more. But Hope not only used writers, he made his dependence on them part of the act:

I have an earthquake emergency kit at my house. It’s got food, water and half-a-dozen writers.

As Megyn Kelly asked yesterday, if Colbert has such a large staff behind him, why do they churn out such unfunny material? How does Colbert get up in front of a studio audience and not know his material is terrible?

Exit quote: “CBS was basically running a high-production-values MSNBC late night variety show and wanted advertisers to act like it was a Magically Broadly Popular program coming off a banger prime-time lineup in 1987.”

TIMES CHANGE:

Previously, from P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores:

Not long after Andy [Ferguson] and I met, we were driving down Pennsylvania Avenue and encountered some or another noisy pinko demonstration.

“How come,” I asked Andy, “whenever something upsets the Left, you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas whenever something upsets the Right, you see two members of the Young Americans for Freedom waving a six-inch American flag?”

“We have jobs,” said Andy.

We still have jobs, but the Left finally pushed normies into activism. They had thought that was exclusively their turf.

ACCOUNTABILITY IS MANDATORY:

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