The bullshit season is upon us
Forgive the headline of this article; it’s the only thing I could come up with that accurately conveyed how this week seems to be shaping up so far in politics. After seeing what all played out yesterday, I sure wish we’d get to the meat of it all.
For example, yesterday Marianne Williamson – who ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020 and got a ton of media attention but virtually no interest from voters – announced that she’ll also be running in the Democratic presidential primary in 2024. She’s obviously only running again to sell more of her books. But instead of admitting as much, major news outlets including the Associated Press and the normally more reliable PBS NewsHour insisted that she was a “major” 2024 candidate. The problem is that there is no real 2024 news yet, so instead we get fed empty hype about empty candidates who are taking advantage of the vacuum.
In another example, MSNBC declared on-air yesterday that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is taking too long to indict Donald Trump and dragging her heels. This new narrative is based on… nothing at all. There have been no developments whatsoever to suggest that Willis is stalling or anything like that. Anyone with a greater-than-zero understanding of the legal process knows that she’s currently working her way through the process of having a regular grand jury bring the indictments. But some folks at MSNBC are willing to take advantage of the fact that much of the viewing audience doesn’t know this, and so they’re now falsely portraying Fani Willis as a coward hiding under her desk, just as they’ve spent all year falsely portraying Merrick Garland as a coward hiding under his desk.
You’ve got to have extraordinary contempt for your audience to feed them this kind of bullshit. Marianne Williamson is not going to be a “major” candidate in 2024. And indictment timeframes are dictated by the lengthy and complex process involved in bringing indictments, not based on somebody sitting there nervously trying to work up the courage to wave an instant indictment magic wand.
Yet this kind of reductive and emotionally manipulative fiction is precisely what dominates the discussion surrounding any ongoing political storyline when there’s no new actual information surrounding that story. There is no indication that President Biden will face an actual primary battle from anyone serious in 2024, so we’re being fed nonsense about an also-ran. We’ve learned nothing new in the past week about how close Fulton County is to completing the indictment process against Donald Trump, so we’re being fed gibberish about how the DA must be hiding under her desk.
One of the best things about Donald Trump’s criminal indictment happening – aside from him being brought to justice and our long national nightmare being over and all of that good stuff – is that the airspace will no longer be dominated by empty talk from empty heads who are making up simplistic nonsense to cover for the fact that they don’t have anything new to tell you. That alone is enough to make Trump’s indictment, when it soon arrives, a blessing.
