Workin’ for the Weekend #48: Vivek and the Presidents Club

Also: Join us Sunday at 9 pm ET for Third Sunday!

Hello, overachievers! As mentioned last week, our usual Second Sunday Members Only taping w/ some of our very closest paying subscribers was put off until this coming Third Sunday, June 18^th, Father’s Day, when we shall all gather ‘round the virtual firepit, crack open a wine cooler, and start sobbing over Cormac McCarthy. Our scheduled on-time departure is 9 p.m. ET; stay tuned for the usual last-minute notification….

* This week we kicked off what is now our THIRD presidential campaign season here at Fif’ headquarters, conservatin’ with 6^th place GOP hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. You people sure are a tough crowd! So, apparently, was George Will, who wrote a good column this week under the headline, “Vivek Ramaswamy runs on the unlimited optimism of the inexperienced.” Sample: “Ramaswamy, who has not encountered many problems that are impervious to his charisma and certitude, believes that a forcefully expressed presidential vision can conquer Washington’s viscosity. When he has lived longer, he will know better.” Ramaswamy has also gotten the double-Reason-interview treatment, first with Zach Weismueller and Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379), then with John Stossel:

* Ramaswamy’s contestable depictions about the expansion of NATO (the initial early ‘90s push of which I covered extensively at the time) had me reaching for the archives and rediscovering some old expressions of exasperation, such as this 2005 piece counting up the ways Thomas L. Friedman had been hilariously and self-confidently wrong about the reasons the alliance was expanded, and this one from literally the next day about apoplectic lefties not being familiar with the diplomatic uses of the word “Yalta.” The (largely European) failure to conjure up a new post-Cold War security structure to guarantee the existence of Central European states was a main subtheme of both my 2021 essay about 1990s Prague and my March 2022 reaction to the Russian invasion.

* We were talking post-interview about the “rando” lane in presidential (and especially GOP) primaries. I first teased out this theory in March 2015, months before Donald Trump’s history-making escalator ride, in a piece with the winning headline of “Ben Carson's Gay-Making Prisons, and the Insurgent/Petulant/Crusader Split Among GOP Anti-Establishmentarians.” Nut graf:

The Republican Party in 2015 has a huge and unsated anti-Establishment passion, one that's only stoked by the primacy of elite characters like Jeb Bush (and Mitt Romney before him). Establishment vs. anti-Establishment has been the internal GOP divide since at least spring of 2010 (when Tea Party types began primarying Republican darlings in earnest); led to just a brutal parliamentary smackdown of grassroots activists at the 2012 Republican National Convention, and is as inevitable in the 2016 presidential campaign as water flowing downhill. This fight will be had, no matter how hard RNC Chairman Reince Priebus tries to schedule it out of existence. Candidates who figure out how to channel anti-establishmentarianism will punch above their weight during primary season (something Ben Carson and Ted Cruz in particular seem to understand); candidates who fight against it (Bush most openly) are in for a rude surprise.

* As several commenters pointed out, the 2015-16 rando I blanked on was Carly Fiorina, progenitor of one of the great bits of pre-Trump political surrealism:

* So which other presidential candidates have we interviewed over the years? In chronological order: Gary Johnson (#27), Andrew Yang (#134), and (for a cupla weeks, anyway) Justin Amash (#184). Expect the ranks of the Presidents Club to grow….

* I wrote a piece this week touching on some themes discussed now and then on this podcast: “Chris Licht Ouster Shows How Cable News Has Become a Cope.” Excerpt:

[A]s any extended viewing of CNN itself suggests, one critical reality that Licht was unable to overcome is that the newsroom he so brashly attempted to remake has, like so many others around the country, transformed itself into a consciously anti-Trump, anti-Republican, "pro-democracy" machine whose engine runs on "moral clarity" rather than dreaded bothsidesism or even (involuntary shudder) centrism. […]

Keeping the discussion at the level of abstraction allows for the nifty evasion of an awkward fact: That CNN, like so many anti-bothesidesism media institutions, went on a speculative, fact-lite bender during the Trump era, particularly when it came to reporting and commentary on the various Russia-related investigations. That you can probably count on one hand the number of serious self-reflections about this massive, consequential, yearslong journalism failure is considerably more damning than a single cable network's decision to broadcast a town hall full of rowdy Trump fans.

* Hey, remember Kmele’s N-word segment from The Independents? I see that Busty Wimsatt has posted that entire special January 2014 episode about race:

* Comment of the Week come from Julia:

Pride flag / alphabet of identities exchange was hilarious. I didn’t realize until now I may actually be an ‘A?!” All this time I thought I was just a middle aged woman who was turned on by coming home from working all day, swapping out my hard pants for sweat pants, pouring a glass of Chardonnay, and figuring out what episode of Dateline I wanted to watch? 🤷‍♀️. Now they call that “asexual?!” I guess our flag would just be a white flag?

Outro music is honor of my wife’s birthday (and her upcoming concert experience): The Cure, reacting in real time to the Tiananmen Square massacre: