Institutions in ruin, and none that aren't
Every time you think you see a beacon of clarity and righteousness, it turns out to be another wrecked artifact
The landscape of 2022 post-America looks like nothing so much as an abandoned amusement park, with rusted-out rides, refreshment stands in various states of deterioration, and the whole thing nearly completely concealed by nature’s reclamation.
Such is the advanced state of wreckage of the nation’s institutions, ranging from journalism to politics to arts and entertainment to religion to sports to business.
This is why opinion writing, which, while it still has its distinguished practitioners, is an increasingly a field in deserved disrepute. Most who approach it from the premise of an axe to grind are patently disingenuous. The attempt to frame polemical screeds in terms of the recognizable left-right dichotomy of an era that ended six years ago rings hollow. Without doing the deep dive of public opinion research, I daresay that it’s a major factor in the steep decline of cable-news ratings across the ideological board. Modern punditry largely exists to provide the gratification of seeing the side one hates “owned” or “destroyed.”
Bad faith is everywhere one looks.
Joe Biden preens in his insistence on nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court, insisting that “it’s time,” but it clearly wasn’t time in 2003 and 2005:
The story begins in 2003, when Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit is considered the country’s second-most important court, and has produced more Supreme Court justices than any other federal court. Brown was immediately hailed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. She was highly qualified, having served for seven years as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court — the first Black woman to do so. She was the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers, and grew up in rural Alabama during the dark days of segregation, when her family refused to enter restaurants or theaters with separate entrances for Black customers. She rose from poverty and put herself through college and UCLA law school as a working single mother. She was a self-made African American legal star. But she was an outspoken conservative — so Biden set out to destroy her.
Biden and his fellow Democrats filibustered her nomination, along with several other Bush circuit court nominees, all of whom had majority support in the Senate. Columnist Robert Novak called it “the first full-scale effort in American history to prevent a president from picking the federal judges he wants.” Democrats argued that she was out of the legal mainstream, but Republicans responded that she had written more majority opinions than any other justice on the California Supreme Court — and she was reelected with 76 percent of the vote, the highest percentage of all the justices on the ballot.
When Democrats derailed her nomination, Bush renominated her in 2005. Brown was eventually confirmed by a vote of 56 to 43 — after Democrats released her and several other Bush nominees in exchange for Republican agreement not to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations. Biden voted a second time against her nomination. He never explained why, if Brown was so radical, Democrats let her through but killed 10 other Bush nominees.
The following month, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement, Brown was on Bush’s shortlist to replace her. She would have been the first Black woman ever nominated to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. But Biden appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” to warn that if Bush nominated Brown, she would face a filibuster. “I can assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered,” Biden said. Asked by moderator John Roberts “Wasn’t she just confirmed?,” Biden replied that the Supreme Court is a “totally different ballgame” because “a circuit court judge is bound by stare decisis. They don’t get to make new law.”
What Biden threatened was unprecedented. There has never been a successful filibuster of a nominee for associate justice in the history of the republic. Biden wanted to make a Black woman the first in history to have her nomination killed by filibuster. Bush eventually nominated Samuel A. Alito Jr.
The focus in coverage of CNN’s latest round of woes has understandably been on the sexual aspect, and in recent memory, it was the focus of Andrew Cuomo’s final days in office and brother Chris’s final days at the network, but the fact that line between politics and journalism was badly blurred merits attention as well:
CNN boss Jeff Zucker and his paramour Allison Gollust had an inappropriately close friendship with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — personally calling him to do news segments with his brother Chris Cuomo and even coaching him on what to say during his infamous COVID briefings, The Post has learned.
Gollust and Zucker — the latter of whom dramatically quit CNN Wednesday after their affair was exposed — also gave Andrew Cuomo endless positive coverage because of their relationship, sources said.
“While those 11:30 a.m. daily briefings by Andrew were across every network, they boosted ratings in a poorly performing slot for CNN,” one source said.
According to a source to Cuomo, “Zucker and Gollust even advised Andrew what to say — how to respond and particularly how to hit back at [President Donald] Trump to make it more compelling TV.
“No network head should be coaching an elected official,” the source added. “It’s absolutely the antithesis of CNN’s standards of business.”
Of course, in 2015, Fox News instantly became television’s contribution to the birth and nurturing of the cult that insisted it was the rightful steward of the conservatism mantle, but since the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, the extent of the symbiosis between its on-air personalities and the halls of official Washington power have been likewise blurred, what with the does-he-realize-what-this-is-doing-to-his-legacy calls to White House aides that day from Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. The network has not lost a minute of sleep over Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes leaving their roles as across-formats commentators over Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” miniseries, nor has there been any notable internal pushback over Newt Gingrich’s wolves-are-now -sheep / real-risk-of-jail remarks on Maria Bartiromo’s show this week.
And then there’s the rot that permeates the Republican Party.
Liz Cheney, who serves on the January 6 select committee and presumably is one of those whom Gingrich is referring to, is of course being primaried in Wyoming. Let’s have a look at the background of he would bring her political career to an end:
When the Department of Justice indicted members of the Oath Keepers last week for their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, one Republican official might have taken more notice of the arrests than others.
Frank Eathorne, who was revealed in a leak last year to be one of 191 Wyoming-based members of the far-right militia group, was in Washington for protests on Jan. 6. But Eathorne is no rank-and-file fringe crank. He is the sitting chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party.
The Very Stable Genius himself is not sitting idle. His Twitter account suspended, he daily issues press releases on “45th President” letterheads rife with the most juvenile of insults, as he also did at his rally last weekend.
The recent confirmation, via documents that have come to light, that Trump tried to get the Justice, Defense or Homeland Security Departments to seize voting machines in the immediate aftermath of the November 2020 election has not moved the needle regarding his front-runner status for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
How deep is the rot in the Republican Party? Well, the Justice Department is looking into filing charges in the matter of bogus electors filing charges in seven states that voted for Joe Biden.
There may be a certain type of reader of this piece who gets to this point and reacts along the lines of “wait a minute; earlier, you pretty resolutely disparaged Joe Biden.”
That’s my point. There is no alternative to the rot.
We are all squared off against each other. Pick your level of societal activity. Even if you wish to immerse yourself in distraction, which is out there in abundance, you’re going to come up against it. We can’t unite about anything.
That’s my dilemma as a writer who does indeed feel compelled to share observations on the present scene. I don’t know what kind of conclusion to draw about a way forward that seems imbued with light.
And stop with insipid responses about Jesus.
With church attendance at historic lows and agnosticism at a historic high, anybody tossing that solution out there without a compelling case is peddling rank escapism.
We’re losing our birthright.
Lots of people reading this surely have grandchildren.
How deeply have you thought about the world they’re going to inherit?