JOHN PODHORETZ: The Case for Schadenfreude.
The agony here is all on one side. And it’s not my side. It’s being experienced by people who have spent the past eight years bathing luxuriantly in their own self-infatuated sense of their political virtue as demonstrated by their fixated hatred on all things Trump. That fixation either prevented them from seeing or kept them from admitting or gave them the permission structure for lying about the severity of Joe Biden’s condition. Now they are finding themselves in the choppiest political-emotional waters anyone has experienced in politics since the Republican New Hampshire primary in 2016 began to make it clear to non-revolutionary conservatives that our ideas had been supplanted and our understanding of the political rules was outdated. The people who are suffering today actually thought themselves immune from the self-doubts and sense of despair that gripped people like…me.
I was speaking to a friend, a very serious Catholic, who confessed (sorry) that he was enjoying the spectacle so much he felt guilty for his schadenfreude. I asked him whether this was because he thought his emotion did not befit a Christian. He said yes. I said, well, I don’t have that particular problem. I haven’t had this good a time in years. I hope there are another couple of polls to give Biden hope. That will keep all this going, and keep me entertained. Not much good can come out of any of this, so, just as the doctor told the young Alvy Singer when Alvy said he was depressed because the universe was expanding, “we might enjoy ourselves while we can, hah?”
As long as we’re doing old Woody Allen jokes, Steve Hayward explores: Dems: Facing the Abyss Inside the Abyss.
When Democrats stare into the abyss-inside-the-abyss that is Kamala Harris, it is suddenly understandable that many conclude they’d be better off sticking with Biden after all. Smarter Democrats know they need to pass over Harris if they are to have any hope of winning, but are terrified at the prospect of angering their identity politics factions they have negligently empowered over the last three decades.
I’m reminded at this point of a commencement address Woody Allen once wrote (but never delivered as far as I know), which I paraphrase thus:
More than any other time in history, Democrats face a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
[Paraphrased from Side Effects, p. 57.]
Still though, as the line from a film that came out the same year as Annie Hall reminds us, “don’t get cocky.”