DEMOCRATIC PARTY ACTIVISTS WITH BYLINES LOOKING FORWARD TO THEIR UPCOMING FOUR YEAR NAP: An obituary for the press in the post-Trump era.

The New York Times in October published a collection of essays claiming the Trump presidency has “cost” the United States its “innocence,” its “generosity,” and its “apathy.”

However, what the collaboration does not mention are the things that the Biden administration will “cost” the country, including that it will bring an end to what Vanity Fair calls the “golden age for journalism.”

We say goodbye, then, to journalists elevating as worthy of public notice obvious liars and lunatics, including convicted felon Michael Avenatti, gossip columnist Michael Wolff, mental health quack Bandy Lee, and conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch — all because they oppose the administration.

Goodbye to weekly “bombshells” that land with a “splat!” instead of a “boom!”

Goodbye to near-daily input from presidential historians turned political assassins.

Goodbye to members of the press acting as if the cover artwork of the latest edition of a prestige news magazine is in some way provocative, stunning, or even particularly interesting.

Goodbye to White House correspondents pretending as if they are reporting from an active war zone or claiming they feel safer covering authoritarian regimes.

Goodbye to the Holocaust being invoked against the administration on a near-daily basis.

Read the whole thing. Exit quote: “Goodbye, all. It has been a crazy four years. See you all back here the next time a Republican is president.”

Credit to the Trump administration for finally treating “reporters” like the Democratic Party activists with bylines the rest of us knew they were, and for providing a template for future Republican administrations in dealing with a massively hostile “press:” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Starches the Media On the Issue of “Peaceful Transition of Power.” Exit quote: “I don’t call on activists.”

SCIENCE SAYS HE’S RIGHT. BELIEVE IN SCIENCE. Hospital CEO says he had Covid and doesn’t need a mask. His staff are appalled.

P.J. O’ROURKE: Shamalot.

In 2013, as the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination approached, the New York Times published an article by executive editor Jill Abramson. The Times—always standing ready at the eternal flame, Bic lighter in hand—titled the article “Kennedy, the Elusive President.” Ms. Abramson wrote, in what I suppose she thought was a lament, “An estimated 40,000 books about him have been published since his death… and not one really outstanding one.”

Logevall’s is another. In his JFK and all the rest of these “not really outstanding” books, the problem isn’t Kennedy’s elusiveness. The problem is our elusiveness about Kennedy. We don’t want to grasp and hold in our minds the reality of the man. Nor do we want to dwell on the fecklessness and mediocrity of his kith and kin. After two generations of partisan tarnishing, we want a political memory that gleams.

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment…

A false memory will do. (Camelot lyricist Alan Jay Lerner went to prep school with Jack.) We’re afraid—no, we know—that if we inspect John F. Kennedy too closely, we’ll wonder what we saw in him. To the extent that there’s even a real “we” left to wonder. Anyone old enough to vote for Kennedy in 1960 is over 80 now. (And 49.55 percent of them voted for Nixon.) But the distant, hazy, reminiscent glow lingers, especially in high places such as the Harvard history department.

No thanks, however, to this particular book. Logevall does his clumsy best to walk upon his knees to the shrine. Yet JFK is a life of a saint that makes a hula hoop of his halo. The facts haggle with the hagiography. Logevall has done too much research. The devil (or his lapsed human instrument) is in the details, and so very many details of Kennedy’s life are provided here that Logevall turns into an accidental iconoclast.

Read the whole thing.

And for a look at how the myth of the Kennedy years as Camelot may have permanently damaged the Democratic Party, James Pierson’s 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism is well worth a read.

THANKS, ASTEROIDS: Dinosaurs May Have Continued Dominating Earth If an Asteroid Hadn’t Wiped Them Out.

JIM TREACHER: Andrew Cuomo Thinks He Can Ban Thanksgiving.

What are [New York’s sheriffs] supposed to do, go house-to-house? Bust down your door and throw open all your closets and cupboards? Maybe shove around some of the older relatives Cuomo hasn’t killed yet? “Hey, maybe there’s an 11th guest hiding in the attic!” I mean, what are we talking about here?

Cuomo keeps ranting about “the law,” but his edicts aren’t laws. That’s not how laws work. He’s not a dictator. He can’t just ban Thanksgiving by fiat and expect everybody to sieg heil.

And he says the cops’ refusal to enforce his imbecilic decree is “frightening to democracy” and “a violation of constitutional duty.” Well, if this wannabe third-world thug wants to bring up the United States Constitution, how does the Fourth Amendment factor into this? Has Cuomo read that one? Is there a coloring book we can give him to explain how it works?

Andrew Cuomo is behaving exactly the way he and his fellow Democrats falsely accuse Trump of behaving. He’s just the sort of tinpot fascist they claim to oppose. Yet all they do is praise him, because he’s a fascist for their team.

You’re gonna need much more Cuomosexual Conversion Therapy:

But in the last few days, more New Yorkers have enrolled in Cuomosexual Conversion Therapy. Their two major sticking points? Vaccines and schools.

There was widespread optimism when Pfizer-BionTECH and Moderna announced success rates of over 90 percent for their COVID-19 vaccines. For the first time in months it seemed as though there was hope for America. Enter Andy-Vaxxer Cuomo, using his platform as governor to undermine public trust in the FDA’s potential authorization of vaccine which we will all need to take. ‘We can’t let this vaccination plan go forward the way that Trump and his administration is designing it,’ he said last week, with all the scientific expertise of an Instagram wellness blogger. ‘I’m pushing hard to make sure that we have a process in place to check what the FDA says before people start getting the vaccine in New York.’

People were happy to put up with Cuomo’s pettiness when he was moving his daughter’s boyfriend to the Canadian border, or deploying the State Liquor Authority to target bars that mocked his dumb food rule by serving ‘Cuomo pizza’. But the prospect that his tussling with Trump might delay the climax of the COVID carnage has given many pause for thought.

The governor compounded his misstep with another display of logger-headed machismo posturing this week, clashing with Mayor Bill de Blasio over school closures. The mayor, after dithering for days, introduced an arbitrary 3 percent positivity rate to re-close NYC’s public schools. The governor contradicted this, saying at a Wednesday press conference that schools could remain open as the positivity rate was only 2.5 percent. A Wall Street Journal reporter expressed confusion on behalf of parents — and Cuomo, acting as hard as a pierced nipple in winter, snapped:

New tools are available to aid in the deprogramming process:

Perhaps these should be sent to the homes of Emmy Award voters:

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Watch: Joe Biden Still Can’t Seem to Complete a Sentence.

SORRY, 1619 PROJECT, BUT THE MAYFLOWER WAS FAR MORE PIVOTAL TO AMERICAN HISTORY.

WORLD WAR III BEGAN WHEN A MAN NAMED ALBERT SHANKER GOT A HOLD OF A NUCLEAR WARHEAD: Fox News Host MacCallum And NYC Teachers Union Chief Argue Over Schools Closing During Second Coronavirus Surge In America.

And from America’s Newspaper of Record: Democrats Push To Keep Schools Closed So Kids Will Be Dumb Enough To Accept Socialism.

(Classical reference in headline.)

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Colonialism Protest Meal Edition.

RON RADOSH: The Angela Davis Moment.

The article also hails Davis as a pioneer who “understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented” — that is, the belief that all struggles are united and that one can’t work for black liberation without championing the liberation of other oppressed groups. (It doesn’t mention that one of her intersectional causes, as she said in a recent interview, is uniting “antiracist efforts” with “global resistance to the apartheid policies and practices of the State of Israel.”)

George does address Davis’s years of membership and leadership in the (Soviet-run) Communist Party of the U.S.A. Bizarrely, he writes that she stayed in the party even as communist regimes “became more and more totalitarian” (as if the Soviet Union or East Germany had been less totalitarian when they treated Davis as a guest of honor!), leaving its ranks only in 1991 because it did not embrace democratization. But this unsavory part of Davis’s history is placed in the exculpatory context of the Communist Party’s supposed laudable role in the struggle for black equality, “sanitized from many histories of the civil rights movement.” In a particularly dishonest aside, George points to the fact that “Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington” as an example of this role.

In fact, the CPUSA’s role in fighting for civil rights was always conducted within the context of Moscow’s needs. In 1941, Rustin’s mentor A. Philip Randolph planned a massive March on Washington to protest discrimination against blacks in the defense industry and the armed forces and other racial injustice. The CPUSA strongly opposed the March as an action that would interfere with wartime unity and the American-Soviet alliance; Rustin, then in his late 20s and a member of the Young Communist League — the Party’s young-adult wing — supported it and was helping organize it. This was one of the issues that led to Rustin’s break from the Communist group. (Eventually, Randolph called off the March after Roosevelt passed the Fair Employment Act.) It is extreme chutzpah for the Times to suggest that Rustin’s leadership in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s had anything to do with his very early membership in the YCL — especially since, in later years, he still considered himself a democratic socialist but was also a staunch anti-Communist.

Davis, on the other hand, tells George that she still believes in communism and Marxist ideology; she doesn’t expect much from the Democratic Party as far as “transforming America,” but does believe that “it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left.” (She’s also a big fan of the progressive “Squad” of AOC+3— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.) The article concludes with Davis saying that “our work as activists is always to prepare the next generation … to engage in even more radical struggles.”

We’ve had nearly a  century of what we now call the MSM airbrushing communism, when not outright praising it. No wonder Davis is considered a hero by the far left. As blogger Moe Lane once wrote, “Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.”

GENTLEMEN YOU CAN’T INVESTIGATE CRIMES HERE — THIS IS A POLICE STATION! Black Female Police Chief in Virginia Fired After Aggressively Investigating and Prosecuting Mob Violence.

AUDIT: Georgia Governor Calls for Audit of Signatures on Ballot Envelopes.. “It seems simple enough to conduct a sample audit of signatures on the absentee ballot envelopes and compare those to the signatures on applications and on file at the secretary of state’s office.”

WELL: Nurse Who Claimed Dying COVID Patients Filled With ‘Anger And Hate’ Appears To Have Embellished Story.

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DON’T ‘CALIFORNICATE’ THE REST OF AMERICA:

With taxes soaring, quality of life plunging as violent crime and homelessness surge, home prices out of reach, nonsensical government regulations spreading, an increasingly heavy-handed government and a slumping job market, California now ranks 47th out of 50 states on the widely followed Economic Freedom Index issued annually by Canada’s Fraser Institute.

As their future prospects dim, many longtime and even native Californians are leaving for better times in neighboring states such as Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Utah and New Mexico.

More recently, the departing have moved even farther away, relocating in Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama. It’s a “reverse Beverly Hillbillies” migration.

From 2007 to 2016, some 7 million Californians (gross total) left the state, most of them middle-class or upper-class in income. In 2018 alone, the number of economic and quality-of-life refugees surged by nearly 700,000, and the flood appears to be continuing today.

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column. Otherwise, as a — [cough] — longtime resident of Texas, I’m all in favor of this proposal by America’s Newspaper of Record: Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “There’s no such thing as a ‘lockdown.’ There’s only rich people staying home and paying poor people to bring them stuff.”

SPACE: SpaceX could launch back-to-back rocket missions from two coasts this weekend. Here’s how to watch.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MORPHED INTO THE CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED: In defense of RealClearPolitics.

Dear heavens! Rightward and aggressively pro-Trump? Cockburn almost fainted when he read those words — so he can only imagine the effect they had on the Times’s more delicate subscribers. What else?

‘RealClear became one of the most prominent platforms for elevating unverified and reckless stories about the President’s political opponents, through a mix of its own content and articles from across conservative media.‘

Elevating unverified and reckless stories? Goodness! Don’t they know that’s the New York Times‘s job? What the reporter Jeremy Peters seems to be describing here is aggregation — RealClear posts stories from outlets of different political persuasions. Today, for instance, you can find links to Vox, the Atlantic and Politico, as well as the Washington Examiner, American Greatness and the Wall Street Journal. In the olden times, hacks such as Cockburn used to call this ‘editorial mix’.

Diversity of opinion is a fairly alien concept to the Times, a newspaper that has published approximately one Trump supporter for each year of his presidency.

New York Timespeople can’t handle diversity of opinion within their own newspaper, so no wonder they find it such a repellent concept when they encounter elsewhere.

MOST OF THEM DON’T MIND, BUT STILL: Whoa: Nearly a Third of Democrats Believe the Election Was Stolen From Trump. “According to a Rasmussen poll conducted November 17-18, nearly half of likely voters, 47 percent, believe the election was stolen from Trump. If Joe Biden is ultimately certified as the winner, there will undoubtedly be a big fat asterisk on his presidency. . . . Joe Biden’s problems are not simply because many Republicans believe the election was stolen. It’s true that the poll showed a significant partisan divide on this issue: 75 percent of Republicans believe it is very likely (61 percent) or somewhat likely (14 percent) that the election was stolen from Trump. But, according to the poll, while 69 percent of Democrats say it is not at all likely (61 percent) or not very likely (8 percent) that the election was stolen from Trump, 30 percent of Democrats believe it is very likely (20 percent) or somewhat likely (10 percent) that it was.”

Hard to call it a fringe conspiracy theory with those numbers.

GOOD AND HARD: Newsom’s ‘Disgraceful’ COVID Hypocrisy the Latest Frustration for Napa Restaurant Owners.

In other news from Northern California: ‘Muir Woods, Queer Woods,’ as wokeness and gnosticism comes to the forest. Exit quote: “You might be thinking, well, just get out of crazypants California, and everything will be fine. Do you seriously not think that what starts in California stays in California?”

ACE: Neocons Agitating for More Victory-Free Wars, Again.