BREAKING: Pamela Paul says Roberts should quit!

MONDAY, JULY 11, 2022

A look at all we have: In this morning's New York Times, opinion columnist Pamela Paul shows us what we're left with at this very late date. Her column appears beneath this headline:

If Only John Roberts Would Retire

Paul pictures a better world in which the Chief Justice retires at age 67, letting President Biden nominate his replacement. She seems to know that this ain't gonna happen—but at this point, it looks like this is pretty much all we have.

In print editions, Paul shares space on the opinions page with the latest column by Charles Blow. His headline is steeped in a somewhat extreme type of gloom:

We Are Political Hostages

By "we," Blow seems to mean people who aren't "white." Overall, his reasoning strikes us as possibly specious. Early on, he offers this:

BLOW (7/11/22): In November of 2019, Nate Cohn in The Times analyzed a number of surveys of swing-state voters and looked specifically at the “persuadable pool,” the 15 percent of voters in the battleground states who were undecided and still thinking of voting for Donald Trump or a Democrat.

He found, “As a group they are 57 percent male and 72 percent white.”

For most other people, “freedom of choice” in elections is an illusion. We are captives of the two-party system. We are political hostages.

Voters subject to oppression have only two choices: the benevolent captors (Democrats) or the cruel captors (Republicans).

Blow is employed at the highest level of American journalism. He's frequently featured on "cable news"—but he pictures himself trapped between two different groups of "captors."

These columns represent the best the Times can do. Stated a slightly different way, this is the best our team has!

It's been like this for a very long time. In its least mistakable manifestation, this dates back to the mainstream press corps' obsession with the deeply troubling wardrobe of Candidate Gore in 1999—with his suits, his boots, his polo shirts, the height at which he hemmed his pants, the number of buttons on his suit jackets (three), the color of his troubling wardrobe and what it all so plainly meant about his psychological problems and his fiendish electoral strategies. 

High-end "journalists" predating Paul and Blow never said boo as they and their colleagues mugged and clowned in this relentless war of propaganda and stupidification. After two years of this (and similar) group inanity, George W. Bush ended up in the Oval.

Alito went to the Court.

(Within the past year, we haven't been able to make ourselves refresh you about the astonishing nonsense concerning that candidate's clothes. We've found the prospect too depressing—but understand that this went on and on, then on and on, with no one saying so much as boo about the manifest nonsense. For the record, this lunacy came from the New York Times and the rest of the MSM, not from "the right-wing noise machine." Just for the record, the manifest lunacy to which we refer came from our own blue tribe.)

This morning, Pamela Paul wants Roberts to quit. Charles Blow gives us Blow in chains.

This is the best our tribe can do. Even at this very late date, this seems to be all we have.

Just for the record: Just for the record, exit polls in November 2020 estimated that 67 percent of voters nationwide were white. Cohn's estimate concerning the number of "persuadables" was only slightly higher than that.

This afternoon: This afternoon, we continue our award-winning occasional series, Took the Gödel Challenge. In theory, our series is aimed at the 12-year-old kid who is going to straighten things out.