THE COVINGTON DEBACLE III

I was going to post something about how horrible it was that so many staffers at a publication as important as National Review came so enthusiastically to the conclusion that a bunch of Catholic high school kids from Kentucky were slimebags, how National Review "apologized" only for its journalistic mistakes and not for the fact that they libeled kids and how National Review doesn't matter anymore.  But then I read this Kevin Williamson column.

Let me be direct about this: You people are a bunch of hysterical ninnies, and it is time for you to grow the hell up.

You know who you are.

The Covington fiasco has proved to be a clarifying moment. And here is what has been made clear: Much of the American media is no longer engaged in journalism. It is engaged in opposition research and in what is sometimes known among political operatives as “black p.r.”—the sinister twin of ordinary public relations. As Joy Behar, as profoundly dim and tedious a person as American public life has to offer, forthrightly confessed: The hysteria and outright dishonesty surrounding the Covington students had nothing to do with them. It has to do with narrowly partisan, selfish, deeply stupid, entirely unpatriotic, childish, foot-stamping, fingers-in-the-ears, weeping, cooties-loathing, teary-eyed, tremulous, quavering, pansified, gormless, deceitful, dishonorable, and cynical politics of the lowest kind — the politics of Us and Them.

To be honest, I can't remember the last time I personally had any gorm but Kevin gets better.

And the fact that a couple of children in MAGA hats engaged in boorish behavior — which isn’t even a fact, as it turns out, but a lie constructed and wholesaled with malice aforethought — wouldn’t have told us one damn thing about Donald J. Trump, his administration, or his political supporters at large. The fact that we had a momentary national moral crisis over the (as is turns out, fictitious) actions of a couple of nobody teenagers is all the evidence anybody needs of the fundamentally hysterical and unserious times in which we live. In a sane world, nobody cares about whether a 16-year-old boy somewhere . . . smirked.

WAY better.

Everybody who has pretended like that smirk tells us something serious about the state of the world is a liar and a fraud. I don’t mean the people who were legitimately taken in by the deceit — especially those who have had the honor and self-respect to admit their errors and correct them — but those who willfully persist in the lie. I’m talking about you, Ruth Graham of Slate, still trying to justify by whatever pathetic means are available what everybody with any sense knows to have been an exercise in pure horses***. I’m talking about you, editors of the New York Times. You sorry specimens are poor excuses for journalists, which, of course, we already knew. What’s more relevant here is that you are bad citizens. Trafficking in lies and distortions because you think the guy in the White House is kind of gross is unworthy of adults with responsible positions in a free society that depends on honest and functional institutions.

Of course Alyssa Milano is an idiot for insisting that those stupid red hats are “the new white hood.” You know who is even more idiotic than Alyssa Milano? Anybody who gives the furry crack of a rat’s patootie what Alyssa Milano thinks about anything. She’s a moron at 500 yards and a lunatic at a thousand. You know it. If she happens to be a moron and a lunatic who is on your side, that doesn’t make her any less of a moron and a lunatic. And making common cause with morons and lunatics can backfire: Ask a conservative about Ted Nugent.

Read the whole thing.