Oh-oh. This is more depressing news.

Althouse’s shtick is beginning all of her blog posts with a quote from another article, then she weighs in. Let me start this post the same way: here is part of what Ann writes regarding the news media’s rapid rush to condemn President Biden’s debate performance, what she calls ” a stampede.”

I’d really like to know who decided a stampede was the right approach and unleashed it while the President was still on the debate stage. Immediately after the debate, CNN’s John King was cued up to describe a stampede already in motion…As King described it, it’s hard to see how they even watched the debate. They seem to have gone into cabal mode to capture the post-debate narrative. Was it — to use Solnit’s phrase — “a sort of insider coup”? Who did this without knowing that they could — via stampede — drive their own candidate out of the race?…I want to know who led the “deep… wide… very aggressive panic” that “started minutes into the debate” and communicated it to John King and motivated CNN to present this as the narrative, right after the debate, preempting any normal post-debate analysis and throwing the Democratic Party into chaos. Did someone decide to risk everything to shock and awe Joe Biden into submission? Who could do that? Who would do that? And how did that old man — that supposedly broken down hopeless old man — resist? How could he resist? Who’s helping him with his hero story, which is going strangely well against the deep, wide, aggressive panickers… whoever they are?

What the hell?

It must be hard being a relentless contrarian, which is Althouse’s brand There is an obvious peril in working to say the opposite of what the conventional wisdom is, which is that occasionally the conventional wisdom is right, and a contrarian looks ridiculous. I hope that’s the explanation for that passage; if not, one of my long-time favorite bloggers has lost her frick’n mind.

What led her into this morass was an essay at The Guardian titled “Why is the pundit class so desperate to push Biden out of the race?”

It’s a dumb article by a climate change activist (among other things). Maybe Ann was having trouble finding blog topics; it’s happened to me. But come on: isn’t it clear why anyone with eyes, ears and a brain would be desperate to push Biden out of the race? He’s sliding into full dementia, that’s why; it’s been obvious for a long time, and dementia-sufferers shouldn’t be President of the United States!

The “pundit class” has another very good reason to “stampede”: trying to somehow salvage a scrap of public trust after being exposed as fully complicit in the Democrats’ Soviet-style cover-up. Is this so difficult to figure out? For Althouse? A lawyer, social critic and law professor Emeritus?

Apparently it is. Althouse’s commentary quoted above is at least as laughable—and ethically warped— as the Trump-Deranged Guardian article that inspired it:

Continue reading →