THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Rep. Josh Gottheimer says progressive protesters shouted ‘Jew’ at NJ event.

LET OMICRON SPELL THE END OF THE PANDEMIC—AND THE COVID SHAMING:

“As an ultra-cautious, triple vaccinated, always-masker I was shocked and very afraid,” another tweeted. “To my surprise, I also felt ashamed. And embarrassed. How could *I* have let this happen? How could *I* have put my family at risk?”

These people want you to know they are the “good” Americans, those who wear two or three masks, didn’t see family, travel or socialize for two years, and didn’t leave their houses. “We did everything right,” followed all the rules, and still got it!

It’s the new confessional, not Catholic but COVID. “Forgive me, Dr. Fauci, for I have sinned,” they cry out. And it’s not just individual citizens that are posting their COVID Confessions. It’s politicians and public health officials, journalists and other public figures. And it’s really weird.

These tweets and the culture they emerged from betray the truth about much of the “fight” against COVID that liberals seem unable to let go of, even when the virus comes for them. Rather than admit that a virus doesn’t care about your virtue, they experience getting infected with COVID as shameful—because they wanted others to feel shame.

Note the notifications of deaths, either “with” or “from” COVID, that dutifully include an announcement of the deceased’s vaccination status. Is this to avoid ghoulish trolls mocking those who chose not to, or could not take the vaccine? Or public proof that the deceased did the “right” thing and was therefore a moral person and not to blame for their own demise?

Since when in human history has someone’s vaccination status ever been included in an obituary? These obligatory COVID/Vaccine Acknowledgement Statements are like some kind of new Land Acknowledgements for the COVID Zero faithful. If only blue state liberals could acknowledge the truth: that no one should feel guilt or shame for getting a highly infectious disease.

After all, we don’t shame people for getting chickenpox or seasonal influenza or any number of other highly contagious respiratory viruses or diseases. It’s something many liberals actually know in other contexts; they would never shame someone for getting an illness that is even related to their behavior, like obesity, alcoholism and some forms of diabetes. Why is this a thing with COVID?

Reason’s Matt Welch has the answer to that question: RIP, ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’

GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: L.A.’s Arms Race of the Affluent.

In Beverly Hills, even the purchase of a firearm comes with certain…expectations. The city’s only gun store, Beverly Hills Guns, is a “concierge service” by appointment only, for a largely affluent clientele. And business is booming.

Since opening in July 2020, the store has seen upscale residents from Santa Monica to the Hollywood Hills increasingly in a panic following several high-profile smash-and-grab and violent home invasion robberies. The apparent siege has brought in a daily stream of anxious business owners and prominent actors, real estate moguls and film execs, says owner Russell Stuart. Most are arming themselves for the first time.

“This morning I sold six shotguns in about an hour to people that say, ‘I want a home defense shotgun,’” says Stuart, whose store is discreetly located in a Beverly Hills office building, with no sign on the doors, down the hall from a diamond dealer. “Everyone has a general sense of constant fear,  which is very sad. We’re used to this being like Mayberry.”

That fear has the wealthiest of local gentry contemplating every more elaborate security measures: armored luxury cars, safe rooms and bullet-proof glass in their homes. One client asked about creating the “Tony Stark-level” security of a half-dozen automated drones to hover over his house, says Stuart, whose gun store is part of his larger security company, Force Protective Agency. “If you want the Gucci package, it’s going to cost money.”

The security business is experiencing a rebound after a couple of diminished years because of the pandemic. Some firms had their on-site security guards sent home for health and social distancing reasons. Not anymore. In Beverly Hills, the craving for additional security dates to the riot that followed an otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter protest* in May 2020, with unprecedented looting along Rodeo Drive that left broken boutique windows  beneath beloved luxury brands: Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Michael Kors, MCM, Ermenegildo Zegna. Last March, a $500,000 Richard Mille watch was stolen at gunpoint from a diner at the Il Pastaio restaurant.  The Dec. 1 home-invasion robbery and shooting death of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant, 81, in her Trousdale Estates home, only accelerated the arms race among the affluent.

Just a reminder that the people who want you unarmed aren’t practicing what they preach. As to why, curiously, CTRL-F “George Gascon” brings up zero returns.

* Nice variation on the DNC-MSM’s “mostly peaceful protest” leitmotif.

THE END OF MOVIE THEATERS — PART 22:

One single data point sums it up.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” collected $260 million in the United States and Canada on its opening weekend. Total ticket sales for the two countries totaled $283 million, according to Comscore. That means “No Way Home” made up 92 percent of the market. “Nightmare Alley,” which was released on the same weekend, played to virtually empty auditoriums. It took in $2.7 million.”

92 percent of the market. It’s a staggering figure that shows just how dead movie theaters are.

Blockbusters had been swallowing up more and more of the theater marketplace with the entire industry increasingly built around $100 million and then $250 million and then $1 billion massive movies with less room for midsize movies. Combine that with the pandemic and you have movie theaters built around a handful of huge blockbusters and nothing else. Literally.

It was in this environment that Steven Spielberg made one of the worst decisions of his career: Say what? The ethnic irony of Spielberg’s West Side Story:

While it’s the music that many of us associate with “West Side Story,” much of the story is told through spoken language, with the Sharks in Mr. Spielberg’s version, the Puerto Ricans, speaking Spanish and their adversaries, the Jets, speaking English.

Forgoing subtitles for the Spanish dialogue was a deliberate decision. “If I subtitled the Spanish,” Mr. Spielberg told entertainment digital media platform IGN, “I’d simply be doubling down on the English and giving English the power over the Spanish … I needed to respect the language enough not to subtitle it.”

This was an artistically bold choice. But the decision also sidelines the vast majority of the film’s potential audience, since Spanish speakers represent just 13% of the American public, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

This means substantial parts of the film are inaccessible, or at the very least are hard to track, for non-Spanish speakers. While the scenes are artfully scripted and acted, and sometimes use a mix of English and Spanish dialogue — which attentive audience members may be able to follow — many non-Spanish speakers will get lost or lose interest.

Losing interest you say? With just $36.6 million in ticket sales, West Side Story is officially a box-office bomb. “In its first three weeks in cinemas, the film has captured just $36.6 million in global ticket sales. Its production budget was around $100 million, not including marketing costs.”

CNBC’s article at that last link doesn’t even mention the lack of subtitles, despite it being a decision on-par with Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories commercial suicide that helped to kill off United Artists. Assuming movies will still be shown in theaters going forward, Spielberg’s “artistically bold choice” could ensure that no director will be given final cut by a studio ever again.

WHEN DANIEL GREENFIELD JOINED ISIS:

They say that everyone has a twin somewhere in the world. Scientists, when they’re not calculating the amount of chocolate someone can safely eat a day, claim that everyone has six doppelgangers somewhere around the world. And some even have their own evil twins.

Mine was living in Australia all along.

I had spent the time since the attacks of September 11 writing about the dangers of Islamic terrorism. But somewhere in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, another Daniel Greenfield had decided to convert to Islam. One thing led to another and before anyone knew it, he had become a fan of ISIS and was arrested with police alleging he’d been planning an attack.

While one Daniel Greenfield had been investigating an Islamic terror plot, another Daniel Greenfield, some 7,500 miles away, was having his Islamic terror plot broken up.

Read the whole thing.

THIS IS CNN: Second CNN Producer Under Criminal Investigation For Allegations ‘Involving Potential Juvenile Victims:’ Report.

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: After Conviction For Sex Crimes, Ghislaine Maxwell Announces New Job At CNN.

LOL: LIBERAL WOMEN SHOCKED, SADDENED TO FIND THAT SEX AND THE CITY HAS GONE FULL WOKE, DOESN’T RESEMBLE THE OLD SHOW. “I know most of you don’t watch this show but it’s just so amusing to me that Sex and the City people are going through the same thing — what the hell is up with all of this woke bullshit? — that Star Wars and comic book fans went through six years ago.”

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? We have a powerful weapon to fight inflation: price controls. It’s time we use it, says the Grauniad.

Control-F “Nixon” brings up zero results. Which seems odd:

[In 1971, Economist Herb] Stein was saying aloud what they all knew. Prettifying a political grab by dressing it as an economic rescue was precisely the kind of action against which eminences like Burns warned foreign governments when they made grand speeches abroad. Nixon was indeed now preparing to do what Harold Wilson had done in 1967: disingenuously pretend that devaluing a currency would not affect the consumer. Stimulating the economy in this way might win Nixon the election, but inflation would eventually explode, as Friedman sometimes said, like a closed pot over high heat. Wage and price controls and taxes on imports could make the kind of growth America was accustomed to, the old bonanza, disappear for years, even a decade. True scarcity of key goods might suddenly become the rule. And that was true no matter how many times that cowboy Connally went around bragging about tariffs and telling others that America was “the strongest economy on earth.”

* * * * * * * *

The 1971 run on American gold also, however, reflected foreigners’ insight. Outsiders knew a tipping point when they saw one. America had moved closer to Michael Harrington’s socialism than even Harrington understood. The United States had locked itself into social spending promises that might never be outgrown. Today, interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies serves as a measure of markets’ and individuals’ distrust of the U.S. dollar. In those days there was no Bitcoin, but gold played a similar role. The dollar was the common stock of America, and foreigners used gold to short it.

The disastrous performance of the U.S. economy in the following years proved the foreigners’ 1971 wager correct. To pay for its Great Society commitments, the U.S. government in the next decade found itself forced to set taxes so high that it further suppressed the commercialization of innovation. Products that could have been developed from patents awarded in the 1960s remained on the researchers’ shelves. Today we assume all markets will rebound given a decade. But there was to be no 1970s rebound for the Dow Jones Average. The Dow flirted with the 1,000 level throughout the decade, but did not cross the line definitively until 1982, an astonishingly long period to stagnate, nearly a generation. While markets languished, unemployment for all Americans rose. High prices, high interest rates, and federal budget deficits plagued the nation. “Guns and butter” had proved too expensive, but so indeed had butter alone. The 1960s commitments required spending that, then and down the decades, would be far greater than for Vietnam or most other wars. Those on the far left who had originally pushed for aggressive public-sector expansion had achieved what they sought, to subordinate the private sector. In 1977, Harrington actually titled a new book The Twilight of Capitalism. Those who had counted on the private sector to sustain prosperity saw they had expected too much. The nation’s confidence evaporated. Indeed, by the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter felt the need to undertake a national campaign to restore confidence, the kind of campaign Franklin Roosevelt had launched in response to the Great Depression. From being a nation that could afford everything, America morphed into a country that could afford nothing, a place where the president warned citizens to set their living room thermostats to sixty-five in January, or face catastrophe.

In a supreme irony, many of the people who caused the economic damage found themselves mired in the dirty work of reversing what they had wrought. The task of reducing inflation through punishing interest rates fell to Paul Volcker, who as a junior official aided leaders in the 1971 decisions that triggered the 1970s inflation in the first place. Mortgage rates rose to today incredible-sounding levels, over 15 percent. In the 1980s, the same John Connally who as treasury secretary in 1971 pounded on Nixon’s desk for populist measures that ensured an economic quagmire, went bankrupt, a casualty of the mess he had helped to create.

—Amity Shlaes 2019 book, Great Society. There’s a reason why its epigraph is, “Nothing is new, it is just forgotten.”

YOU SAY TRUINTERNATIALDEPRESSURE; I SAY TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE. LET’S CALL THE JOE THING OFF. Lauren Boebert Tricks the Left Into Exposing Biden With a Savage Troll:

“But folks on the left weren’t aware of it, even though it had gotten a fair amount of coverage. So they attacked Boebert for saying it — mocking her intelligence, saying she shouldn’t be drunk tweeting, that the word was evidence that she wasn’t literate, asking if she had mental issues, and saying it showed she shouldn’t be in office. They had no idea what they were saying was effectively being applied to Biden because they didn’t keep themselves informed enough about their leader to know that this was a Biden comment.”

BIDEN NOW OWNS THE PANDEMIC:

Biden won the presidency on a promise of the federal solution that he now says doesn’t exist. It didn’t exist in 2020, either. Yet that didn’t stop him from saying that he wouldn’t open the economy until he’d marshaled the powers of the federal government to “shut down” Covid, as if a pandemic can be defeated by taking it out back of the gym and pummeling it like it was Donald Trump or Corn Pop.

If you have nothing better to do — if, perhaps, you’re in bed with a mild but slightly synthetic-feeling cold that won’t put you in the hospital unless you’re an obese octogenarian with comorbidities where other people have organs — you can read all about The Biden Plan, as he called it, on his campaign website. This Plan of Plans has three elements:

• “[T]o massively surge a nationwide campaign and guarantee regular, reliable, and free access to testing”

• “Double the number of drive-through testing sites and increase the numbers until there are no more lines”

• “Build a national contact tracing workforce, starting by hiring at least 100,000 Americans and equipping sorely under-resourced public health departments with the resources they need to spot and stop outbreaks”

Biden has failed to deliver any of this. Omicron has caught him pants-down yet again on testing. There are spectacular lines at drive-in testing sites. And while there is no sign of Biden’s contact-tracing militia, there is plentiful evidence that public health departments remain flatfooted.

Which is why: 2022 is likely to be a brutal year for Joe Biden and Democrats.

But don’t get cocky. As Glenn has written, “If you want to win, donate and volunteer. Winning takes work, and commenting on Internet blogs, even this one, doesn’t count.”

THE REVOLT AGAINST MODERNITY:

GHISLAINE MAXWELL CONVICTED OF SEX TRAFFICKING VICTIMS FOR JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend sends these thoughts:

A) wanna lay any money on how long Ghislaine Maxwell lasts in prison, and

B) wouldn’t the normal thing have been for a prosecutor to cut a deal with her in exchange for assorted former presidents, CEOs, royals etc?

I mean, I don’t want to be cynical, but it’s almost like…

Srsly tho, it’s all academic. What’s the point of being in the witness protection program when it’s the feds who want you dead?

I wish I could call this overly cynical, but in 2021, is it really?

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Princeton historian mugged by Princeton.

Graeme Wood profiled Xiyue Wang for the Atlantic earlier this year in “The Princeton Historian Mugged by Reality.” Last week the Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross updated the story in “Historian Says Princeton Left Him To ‘Rot’ in Iranian Prison.” Adapting the heading of Wood’s Atlantic profile, the update might be titled “The Princeton Historian Mugged by Princeton.” That is more or less the story told by Wang in the lawsuit he filed against Princeton last month in New Jersey state court (the subject of Ross’s story). I have embedded the complaint below.

Working toward a Ph.D. under the supervision of the eminent Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin, Wang traveled to Tehran for archival research. Wood’s enraging profile tells the story of Wang’s arrest and imprisonment by Iranian authorities in the course of his research. Tortured by the Iranians, Wang “confessed” to being a spy. After 40 months in Evin Prison, he was sprung by the Trump administration.

Wood’s profile captures Wang’s awakening from the falsehoods and illusions about Iran disseminated on campus at Princeton and elsewhere in the United States. He refers to his time in prison as “involuntary fieldwork.” The torture to which he was subjected is a disgusting trademark of the regime, although the time in prison was not entirely wasted. He perfected his Farsi and learned French. French must be something like the tenth language he has learned in the course of his studies.

Reflecting on his long stay in Iran prior to his arrest, Wang told Wood that that he met no supporters of the regime — unlike his time in the United States. Princeton professors talking with him about his imprisonment wanted to blame it on Trump, even though it occurred under Obama and Trump secured his release. Wood quotes Wang: “What are they teaching their students? The facts just don’t matter.”

There’s really only one way to visit Iran properly: As part of a New York Times’ sponsored vacation.

SCIENCE! CDC Director Walensky Makes Revealing Admission on Why COVID Isolation Period Was Shortened. “‘It really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate,’ CDC Director Walensky says on why the CDC shortened the isolation period from 10 days to 5 days if you’re asymptomatic.”

LIE OF THE YEAR: ‘I Will Shut Down The Virus.’

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Politico Gushes: Lawrence O’Donnell ‘Riding High’ — As Biden’s Favorite Ring-Kisser.

Isn’t it funny how the liberal media found close ties to President Trump to be seamy and scandalous (think Sean Hannity), but close ties to President Biden are just great? Politico reporter Max Tani is touting MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell as “riding high”…because he’s tick-tight with Biden chief of staff Ron Klain. The headline is “How Lawrence O’Donnell became the White House’s favorite cable news personality.”

When his contract renewal was in doubt four years ago, Lawrence O’Donnell begged his viewers to help keep him on the air at MSNBC. 

Now, as the left-leaning network’s prime-time lineup is at its most unstable point in a decade, the 70-year-old anchor has inadvertently become MSNBC’s most valuable star; or, at least, it’s most dependable one, owing to the rare, direct line he enjoys into the Biden White House. 

O’Donnell is, unlike virtually anyone else in cable these days, riding high. 

As other programs have struggled to break out of the post-Trump slump that has tanked ratings and left some shows straining to find the urgency that drove programming during the previous administration, he has found a unique role as the Biden team’s go-to anchor on MSNBC. O’Donnell’s decades-long relationship with President Joe Biden and his chief of staff, Ron Klain, has paid off handsomely, making the MSNBC host one of the White House’s only go-to news anchors and granting him rare on-camera access.

“News anchor”? That’s hilarious. He’s just as much a “news anchor” as Hannity. Tani admits O’Donnell is NOT riding high in the ratings. Fox’s Laura Ingraham dunks on him nightly. It’s just that Brian Williams is out, and Rachel Maddow’s going to try and step away from nightly duties, so he wins by default. Never mind Fox’s actual ratings in prime time.

Flashback: Lawrence O’Donnell: “I am a socialist. I live to the extreme left, the extreme left of you mere liberals.”

FASTER, PLEASE: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace: ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ Is Part Of Slow-Moving Insurrection (Video).

LET’S GO BRANDON: Forecast: Gas Prices Will Peak at a Monthly National Average of $3.79 in May 2022.

WHERE WOKISM IS A OUI BIT DIFFERENT:

But why now, and why in a country like France, with its very different history from the United States? For that matter, why has wokeism taken hold in other European countries, where the radical movement seems in many ways to be an imitation of its American counterpart?

In France, there’s an oft-noted irony within the answer. Despite vocabulary that seems appropriated from American academia, the main concepts originated with a group of leftist French academics in the 1960s and 1970s, who became the rage in many American universities and whose ideas, though simplified and sometimes caricatured, have been enthusiastically reimported into France.

The most influential figure was Michel Foucault, the psychologist and philosopher whose lifelong sympathy for marginalized groups and oppressed people led him to a sustained reflection on the dominating and exploitative nature of power, including its ability to define what is supposedly normal – as opposed to what it considers abnormal or sick.

In matters such as gay rights and equality for women, Foucault-like sympathy for the marginalized feels the same on both sides of the Atlantic. But American wokeness is most powerfully concentrated on a question of race that seems unique to America. Centuries ago, Europe may have engaged in the slave trade, but no European country has anything comparable to the history of American slavery, no decades of Jim Crow, no Ku Klux Klan, no lynchings or legal segregation of the sort that afflicted black America, and also no civil rights movement, no Martin Luther King Jr., and no George Floyd killed in Minnesota. And yet, the vocabulary of critical race theory, with terms like le racism systematique, le privilège blanc, microaggression, even le fragilité blanc, has taken hold in France like an invasive species.

Part of the answer seems to be the contagious global appeal of a doctrine explaining complicated questions, holding the same attraction for French academics, students, and others as for their American counterparts. The appeal is especially strong for a younger generation impatient and dissatisfied with the more moderate views of traditional liberalism — or, in France, the traditional left, even if it was the same enlightened left that fought against colonialism, against anti-Semitism, against the powerful, conservative Catholic Church, as well as for choice on abortion, equal access to education, and France’s extensive social safety net.

Then there’s the matter of demographic change. Britain, Germany, and France have substantially increased their minority populations through high immigration and higher birth rates among non-whites. This has generated two conflicting reactions. One is the increased strength and appeal of right-wing anti-immigrant parties, in France represented most conspicuously these days by a former television personality, Eric Zemmour, who to his detractors looms as a French Trump.

Lisez le tout.

THE GREAT NFL HEIST: HOW FOX PAID FOR AND CHANGED FOOTBALL FOREVER.

Hill: Rupert, God bless him, he knew sport was key. He knew the NFL was key. But Chase understood that in terms of developing the business, the NFC gave him the main metropolitan markets. I’ve always said this on many occasions. The architect of Fox Sports is Chase Carey.

Padden: The finance people and the salespeople at the network got together and said, “OK, how much can we pay for these rights?” They did an analysis of what kind of advertising they could sell and came up with the maximum break-even number. Then Mr. Murdoch came bounding into the room and said, “What do we have to bid?” We told him. He said, “That’s not enough. The NFL doesn’t really want their games on our network. They’re just using us to bid up CBS. I’ve got to bid CBS away from the table.”

Carey: You had to have a number that — I don’t have a better word for it — made them choke.

Murdoch eventually came up with the choking point: four years, $1.6 billion for the NFC rights. In 1993, it was an astonishing figure. It was half a billion dollars more than CBS had paid under their old deal, and 60 percent more than CBS was offering on the current one.

Krieger: When he does a deal, Rupert’s thinking about, “What’s this going to look like 10 years out, 20 years out? Will this help me build a network?” The other guys are trying to manage financials for the next quarterly financial report.

Ebersol: Did I ever think in my wildest dreams that there wasn’t going to be $400 million coming in on the other side? No.

Carey: It was fairly late Thursday night when we went over to make the offer.

Jones: I’ll never forget when we were sitting right beside each other there in New York — Pat [Bowlen] and I. The number came in for the NFC package. And underneath the table, we were kickin’ the living shit out of each other. He kept a straight face and I kept a straight face. We just kicked each other.

Tagliabue: To come in with a “4” instead of a “3” was pretty startling.

Roger Headrick, Minnesota Vikings president and CEO: We had no idea that the TV rights could escalate to that kind of a level.

Jones: It was aggressive enough that one of the biggest questions was, “Can they pay this?” As a matter of fact, there were several owners who said, “We need to get some lines of credit here to back this up.”

Because the next four Super Bowls would be split among three networks and Fox would get only one of them, Fox’s bid was lowered slightly, to $395 million.

Carey: The part I remember is, after I said [the $400 million number], Jerry Jones came up and said, “You guys are players.” That was Jerry’s response.

* * * * * * * *

Madden, who’d worked at CBS since 1979, had a place in American pop culture that was akin to Santa Claus, one colleague observed. He seemed eternally peppy, and his Madden Cruiser bus carried him around him the country. Madden had a video game (then in its fifth edition) and commercials for tough-actin’ Tinactin. But his genius was that he simultaneously made the TV analyst’s job more complex and more accessible than it had ever been before. Madden could explain the fine points of line play and then wax about the lineman’s belly and cut of his pants. Boom!

Madden’s regular-guyness belied just what a sought-after TV star he’d become. Early in 1994, his suitors included Fox’s Rupert Murdoch, ABC’s Bob Iger, and General Electric’s Jack Welch, who controlled NBC. Joe Buck later called Madden the “ultimate free agent.” Lesley Visser compared him to Moby Dick. At the end of the negotiations, Madden didn’t just get more money than any sports announcer ever had. He got a contract that paid him more per year than any player in the NFL.

Richie Zyontz, CBS producer: [Murdoch] came to one of our early seminars. I remember what he said: “If I have to introduce someone new to our country to one person who is uniquely American, it would be John Madden.”

Dick Ebersol, NBC Sports president: He was the first crossover football media star. He wasn’t just men. He was women.

Joe Buck, St. Louis Cardinals announcer: He was — to me at least, because it’s what I do for a living — larger than the game. Even though he said he wasn’t. “I’m just an everyman. I’m just the guy at the bar that you nuzzle up against and you’re elbowing during a big play.” But he wasn’t that. … He was larger than life.

Artie Kempner, CBS director: To this day, John Madden is the best analyst in the business. Here’s why: No matter who you are — Troy Aikman, Jon Gruden, Al Michaels, Cris Collinsworth — we’re not the reason you tune in to watch games. You watch games or events because of the game or event. But what John Madden did better than anybody is take a shitty event and make it interesting or engaging. You could have a 31–3 game, and John could keep your attention.

Neal Pilson, CBS Sports president: He’s one of the very, very few guys in the history of our business that brought a rating himself. I can give you at least one other, and that was Howard Cosell.

Eric Shanks, CBS broadcast associate: He’s a great observer of people. A guy would walk through the lobby and if his shoelace was tied over here or over here, he’d be like, “Watch out for that guy. He doesn’t do his job very well. If his shoelace is tied in the middle, that’s a guy you want to do business with.” That’s a pretty good rule.

Pete Macheska, CBS associate director: I’ll tell you a story. The Ritz-Carlton in Chicago, their lobby was on the 12th floor. He’d sit in the lobby for hours just watching people. I remember one time we were waiting to go to dinner, and the Rolling Stones were staying there. One guy goes, “Hey, there’s Mick Jagger.” John had no idea who Mick Jagger was. None.

Matt Millen, CBS analyst: Here’s the thing people don’t know about John. John is probably the brightest guy in the room. He just doesn’t want you to know it. He wants you to think he’s this big, lovable dog you can pet.

* * * * * * * *

Zyontz: John was football for Fox. He set the tone. He put us on the map. That’s obviously what Murdoch wanted, and he paid a ton of money. John was worth every penny because he gave us instant credibility.

Jerry Jones, Dallas Cowboys owner: If you make that kind of commitment [for the NFC rights], you’ll go after and get the best. That’s peanuts. That’s arguing about the price of the seasoning after you’ve paid a fortune for the steak.

RIP to the best.

MUCH MORE LIKE THIS: DeSantis Delivers Smackdown to Reporters One-By-One Best of 2021 (Video).

HARRY REID, FORMER SENATE MAJORITY LEADER, DEAD AT 82.

Flashback: “Reid is everything the national political media claims to hate, but they can never quite fully denounce him.”

As NRO’s Dan McLaughlin notes, “Harry Reid fundamentally & permanently altered the Senate, created America’s current political landscape, paved the way for Donald Trump, & made it possible to put Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, & Barrett on the Supreme Court.”

UPDATE: Harry Reid is proud he lied about Mitt Romney’s taxes. “‘They can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win did he?’ Reid said during a wide-ranging interview. So, in Reid’s world, it is perfectly acceptable to make a defamatory charge against an opponent to damage his campaign.”

(Updated and bumped.)

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN):

Via a friend, and sad, but kinda fair.

OUT ON A LIMB: Sanity Prevails: Overwhelming Majority of People Believe There Are Only Two Genders.

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM PRESIDENT KLAIN: Pennsylvania Gets Christmas-Day Delivery of Illegal Aliens From Biden Claus.

I WOKE LUCY:

As a Cuban, I’m offended by the casting of Spanish actor Javier Bardem as the most famous Cuban entertainer of all time, Desi Arnaz, in the new film, Being the Ricardos — but only in an alternate woke universe. In the real world, I’m totally fine with it. And I was born in Santiago and lived one block from the former Arnaz family home. Everyone else outside the echo chamber of Hollywoke could also not care less about the Bardem-Desi “controversy.”

“Casting a Spaniard to play a Cuban in a film that literally features a scene about how the two identities are not interchangeable might actually constitute a previously uncharted level of gringo f–kery,” wrote Laura Bradley in the Daily Beast. The Industry’s slavishness to such shallow, foolish, counterproductive sensitivity will soon be the death of it. For evidence, see the year’s biggest bomb — Steven Spielberg’s politically corrected West Side Story.

* * * * * * * *

But in West Side Story, Spielberg literally went woke for broke — down to long stretches of Spanish dialogue with no English subtitles, and his painful justification for it: “I felt that subtitling the Spanish was disrespectful to the second language of this country,” Spielberg said. “It would make English the dominant language, because then there would be two being spoken: the English by the characters speaking and the English that would [be written] underneath the spoken Spanish words.” It also helped convince potential moviegoers to avoid the picture like the plague.

Spielberg bespoke a madness that makes Hollywoke not just toxic to the normal people it abhors but an object of derision. Power players like him can decry the casting of white Natalie Wood as a Puerto Rican “Juliet” in the 1962 classic all they want. Wood’s beauty, grace, and performance will continue to inspire young Latinas long after the culturally appropriate new Maria, Rachel Zegler, has been forgotten.

Unlike his simplistic virtue-signaling colleagues, Being the Ricardos writer-director Aaron Sorkin, for all his leftism, understands the complexities of art, and defiantly stood by his casting of Bardem as Desi. “It’s heartbreaking and a little chilling to see members of the artistic community resegregating ourselves,” Sorkin said. “This should be the last place there are walls. Spanish and Cuban are not actable. If I was directing you in a scene and said: ‘It’s cold, you can’t feel your face.’ That’s actable. But if I said: ‘Be Cuban.’ That is not actable. Nouns aren’t actable. Gay and straight aren’t actable. You can act being attracted to someone but can’t act gay or straight. So this notion that only gay actors should play gay characters? That only a Cuban actor should play Desi? Honestly, I think it’s the mother of all empty gestures and a bad idea.”

“Unexpectedly,” the very un-woke Spider-Man: No Way Home is printing money at the box office this month: Nolte: Woke-Free ‘Spider-Man’ Crushes Box Office With $50M Thursday.

UPDATE: The horror! Spanish actor plays a Cuban-American. Plus, “The plot centers around (1) the marital problems of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and (2) the turmoil stemming from reports that Ball once registered to vote as a Communist. There’s also a heavy dose of feminism, which is natural in a film about a female television pioneer in the 1950s. The anti-anti-communism is another matter. Seventy years after the fact, the same people who wanted an investigation of possible Russian influence in the outer reaches of social media are still incensed that, at the outset of the Cold War, Congress investigated, with reasonable cause, possible Soviet influence in Hollywood — the utterly dominant force in American culture at the time.”