The debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump has been one for the ages. It was like lifting a fallen log in the forest and exposing all the creepy crawlers that moved around unseen underneath it.
George Clooney has called for Old Joe, his buddy, his pal, to drop out of the race and to pick a new nominee. Who’s next? Barack Obama’s other buddies like Bruce Springsteen? Tom Hanks? Netflix?
As one of the high-status aristocrats, Clooney knows that sooner or later, people will wonder how he could have helped raise $30 million for Biden several weeks before the debate. The truth is, he would never have said a thing if Biden wasn’t losing to Trump in the polls.
An excerpt from Clooney’s letter, per the New York Times:
It is disingenuous, at best, to argue that Democrats have already spoken with their vote and therefore the nomination is settled and done, when we just received new and upsetting information. We all think Republicans should abandon their nominee now that he’s been convicted of 34 felonies. That’s new and upsetting information as well. Top Democrats — Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi — and senators, representatives and other candidates who face losing in November need to ask this president to voluntarily step aside.
Well, they are the ones who have walled themselves off from the “right-wing” media. If they hadn’t, they would have heard about Biden’s cognitive problems long before debate night. I’ve been writing about it for years by now.
“Would it be messy? Yes. Democracy is messy. But would it enliven our party and wake up voters who, long before the June debate, had already checked out? It sure would. The short ramp to Election Day would be a benefit for us, not a danger. It would give us the chance to showcase the future without so much opposition research and negative campaigning that comes with these ridiculously long and expensive election seasons. This can be an exciting time for democracy, as we’ve just seen with the 200 or so French candidates who stepped aside and put their personal ambitions on hold to save their democracy from the far right.
Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.
It’s good that he didn’t launch into a that bad of a Trump Derangement Syndrome tirade, but he doesn’t have to. That they’re all claiming they and they alone can save democracy says it for him. My eyes water with embarrassment that the Democrats believe that is what they are doing. They’re LOSING THE RACE. That is what is happening. They were losing it before the debate. The debate only made it worse.
Note how Clooney doesn’t talk about the problems with the Left overall, what they’ve done to Hollywood, how they’ve divided this country. He doesn’t talk about the wide open border, which is why Trump is polling ahead. He doesn’t talk about the mass hysteria, the lawfare against Trump. He doesn’t talk about why Trump won in 2016. Why? Because he’s a movie star, and he lives in an alternate universe.
The disconnect from reality has never been more glaringly obvious than it is right now. Has Clooney read the two pieces in the Wall Street Journal that expose the corrupt lawfare for what it is in the Alvin Bragg case? No. He exposed his ignorance and stupidity by saying “convicted for 24 felonies.”
Here is Barton Swaim:
Did any earnest progressive journalist care, as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg pretended to care, that Donald Trump once “falsified business records” in furtherance of an unnamed second crime? Of course not. Mr. Trump’s business records were irrelevant to Mr. Bragg and his defenders. What they cared about was convicting him of a felony. Any felony.
Or from today’s Editorial Board:
The concocted nature of Mr. Bragg’s indictment, the first one to be unveiled, may have tainted the others in the public mind. Mr. Bragg secured a jury conviction this May, but it didn’t move the polling, since voters can see that this business records prosecution would not have been brought against any businessman not named Donald Trump.
Clooney seems to think after all the Democrats have done to rig the primary in Joe’s favor, that they should get a do-over. Sorry, it doesn’t work like that.
RFK Jr. and Dean Phillips would have been happy to debate Biden. And guess what? The Democratic Party said no. Had they said yes and cared for one second about their own voters, they all would have seen how weak Biden’s cognitive skills were. But they didn’t. They hid it from their own voters!
The corruption within the Democratic Party must be dismantled and extinguished. They aren’t going to get there by kicking the can down the road.
It was better, once
Once, a very long time ago, the New York Times journalist David Carr became a mentor of mine. He was the new Oscar blogger for the NY Times way back in the early 2000s. He called himself the Carpetbagger. Here is my goodbye post to him. The date is wrong. He didn’t die in 2023. He died in 2015, so he never lived to see Trump win. He never lived to see the collapse of ethics in journalism at his beloved New York Times. But back in 2012, he came to LA, and he brought me to meet George Clooney.
The Oscar race had never seen a wit and a mind like Carr’s. He classed up the joint like nobody’s business. I remember feeling so special that, out of all of the Oscar bloggers out there, he circled in on me, and we became good friends.
I only made any money on my site because of David Carr, who told me I should advertise directly to the studios. I was working as a janitor at the time. I’ll always be grateful. He hired me to transcribe his interviews for his memoir, The Night of the Gun, so I learned so much about his life as a former drug addict.
Carr would have been a victim of the fanaticism on the Left. He’d have been Me Too’d because of his complex history with women. I’m glad he never lived to see that. He might have even been fired, Donald McNeil style, from the Times.
America, Hollywood, and the New York Times feel a world away from where they were back when Carr was around. I think of him often and wish I could hear him call me on the phone one more time, “SASHINO!” That’s what he called me.
When he introduced me to Clooney, things were very different in Hollywood. It was the choice of people on the Right not to watch their movies if they didn’t want to. They weren’t being constantly lectured at quite as badly as they are now but it was enough to turn people off, even then.
When Trump won, however, Hollywood lost its mind. It took a side and, in so doing, lifted the drawbridge and closed itself off to everyone except those who thought the same way, lived the same way, spoke the same way, and believed the same things as it did.
But that kind of elitism, besides the incurable disease of wokeness, has all but killed the business. The best thing they could do would be to divorce the Democratic Party.
How can George Clooney think writing this op-ed is a good idea? Well, for starters, he’s rich enough not to have to care. And read the comments. The Times readers are fully on board with the do-over—anything to stay in power. Clooney himself should run. He could do much better than any of the potential replacements for Biden. Oh right, Kamala.
There isn’t much left of Clooney’s career now, although he does have a movie coming out soon with Brad Pitt. It will make decent enough money. Yet, he’s cut his potential audience in half by drawing that hard line between “us and them.”
It’s a shame they don’t care about the whole country anymore. Then again, they don’t have to. Wolfs is distributed by Apple, which means it will live in the rarified air of the Left for the foreseeable future.
All hope is not lost. I saw this TikTok video the other day and it made me think maybe someday, actors will get a clue.
My old friend David Carr was too smart to be as stupid as people like George Clooney. Even if he hated Trump and wanted Biden to step down, he would never say the reason was “saving democracy.” He would know you'd better understand the word's meaning before you start throwing it around.
“Joe Biden is a hero.” Oh spare me. He’s anything but. Hollywood has lost its way and may never right the ship. Eff them all, especially the sanctimonious George Clooney.
I'm old enough to remember a time when Hollywood stars did more for their country than shill for a party or its candidates. In the 30s and 40s many of the leading men served in the military during World War II. Actress Hedy Lamar, whose brilliance equaled her beauty, invented a guidance system that helped win the war. In my younger days, Bob Hope, Ann-Margret, and other stars went to Vietnam to entertain the troops. (https://www.truthorfiction.com/annmargret/) They didn't do it to make a political statement, or to make their audiences adore them more. They did it because they were Americans and they wanted to support their country.