Programming note: Please join me later today for the latest episode of our brand new Tale for Our Time - Bulldog Drummond by Sapper.
~In a placid and peaceable society, the hip-hooray and ballyhoo of the Republican Party convention would have been the biggest story of the week in the United States. Instead, it was subordinate to another story too horribly real for most Americans to accept the implications of - the ever more disturbing revelations of what led to a major-party candidate taking a bullet at a campaign rally.
Because Trump's reaction to that was brilliant and instinctively sure-footed, the contrast with an enfeebled husk of an opponent unable to recall the name of his Defence Secretary ("the black man") was too much. So Joe's team pulled their man off the campaign trail ...on the grounds that he'd come down with the Covid. Which for 99.99 per cent of the planet's population isn't a thing anymore. But Biden has led by example and had at least six shots of the old jabba-jabba, so his doctor has now diagnosed a bad dose of Jimmy Carteresque "general malaise".
With Joe reduced to even more of a void than he is usually, his enemies - ie, the same close friends who just last month or (in the case of The Washington Post's Jen Rubin) just last week were hailing him as "the best Biden ever" - took the opportunity to re-animate their sputtering palace coup: Joe could withdraw as soon as Sunday! Kamala is auditioning running-mates! Jon Meacham is working on the farewell speech!
Not so, says Jon:
NEWS: Historian Jon Meacham to me just now via text: "the report about my doing anything with a speech is totally false."
Comes as Meacham is being talked about by some Democrats as a Biden confidant who might be working on an "exit the race speech" for President Biden.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) July 19, 2024
Which would make it a fake story planted to increase pressure on the Bidens.
But in America a fake story can become real - or real enough: see, inter alia, the Russia hoax. And, to the gossip girls of the Washington media, planted drivel is preferable to sticking with the real story - which remains: why, even as they knew an armed assassin was on the roof, did the Secret Service allow Donald Trump to walk out on stage?
~Notwithstanding the biggest story of the week, the biggest story of our time is that the entirety of western civilisation is sliding off the cliff, and very fast. From The Daily Mail:
Riot thugs torch bus and wreck police car on night of shame in Leeds: Residents are told to stay indoors as huge mob tears through streets following stand-off with dozens of officers
Leeds is apparently the UK's second most populous municipal borough, and this was in the Harehills district of the city. If "Harehills" rings a vague bell with our non-English readers, that's because it turned up on these pages just two months ago:
Here is the winning candidate for the Green Party, which I had hitherto thought was something to do with Michael E Mann and global warming, giving his victory speech in Gipton and Harehills:
'We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!'
Allahu Akbar: It's not just for diving under the table to anymore.
The above representative of the people, Mr Mothin Ali, now says the streets and buses and police cars of his district are ablaze because the West Yorkshire constabulary do not speak Urdu.
My former GB News colleague, Calvin Robinson, cuts to the chase:
England is cooked.pic.twitter.com/hXcMkOtdZn
— Fr Calvin Robinson (@calvinrobinson) July 19, 2024
Alternatively, it could just be yet another example of "the world's most successful multi-faith democracy" that the editor of a supposedly "right-of-centre" magazine is drooling about.
~As to the girl power of the Secret Service and its five-foot-two Keystone chorus girls, Trump had a thought on that a decade ago:
From 10 years ago! There is always a tweet. https://t.co/5Y1kge59nK
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 18, 2024
A quarter-century ago, at a public meeting in New Hampshire, I heard an official begin to tiptoe into an obvious lie. And, from the cheap seats, I interrupted him to say if he went down that road and actually told the lie to his fellow citizens, I would demand his resignation immediately. Because no official should be able to tell the public what he knows at the point of utterance to be false. The locals cheered - even though, then as now, I'm an unlikeable foreigner. And the official - the superintendent - backed off, and retreated to some hastily improvised alternative.
Ah, but that's at a school-board meeting in a small town in the Granite State. At the highest levels of American government, lying to the people is not a problem. Thus the slopey-time gal:
That building, in particular, has a sloped roof at its highest point. And, so, you know, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof...And, so, you know, the decision was made to secure the building from inside.
The SS Director knew at the point of utterance that this was false. At the same event, her snipers were photographed in position on other "sloped roofs" - more severely sloped, in fact. On Wednesday we posted a photograph of a federal colleague of hers, from the FBI, standing on the very same "sloped roof" and hosing down the crime scene. Don't ask me why he was doing that: it would seem an odd priority given everything else going on. But the point is it was apparently safe for a fed to stand on a "sloped roof" without benefit of safety harness and with running water everywhere.
Many people have demanded the resignation of Kimberly Cheatle for what she permitted to happen last Saturday. But in fact the above lie ought itself to be disqualifying: given the gravity of what occurred, it is hugely corrosive to whatever remains of the integrity of American government for senior public officials to spout obvious bollocks. She should have gone days ago.
Instead, she has informed Donald Trump that he cannot attend today's funeral for slain fireman Corey Comperatore "because of Secret Service concerns": they cannot guarantee his safety. Well, last Saturday, they couldn't guarantee his safety either, could they? Nor that of poor Mr Comperatore.
Why does Trump still listen to guys who stood by and let him get his ear perforated? If he's going to let the duplicitous Director and her all-secrets no-service agents determine his public appearances between now and November, he will lose.
~Baroness Hallett, one of those bedevilling baronesses who so afflict the realm, has now issued the first part of her UK Covid inquiry. You can download the full pdf here, and I urge you to read it- which is not a thing I expected to say. But that's because I was going by the instant reaction of the Brit wanker media, which, having spent four years as pom-pom girls for lockdown, is not prepared to give up on it. From the Beeb:
UK 'failed citizens' with flawed pandemic plans
From the news coverage of Lady Hallett's report, it all sounds very Starmeresque: the only mistake governments made was not to lock down harder and faster.
In fact, her ladyship is (by the standards of these things) fairly brutal on the way "non-pharmaceutical interventions" (lockdown) were adopted with no consideration of "their potential side-effects". A few morsels:
6.52. The scientific advice received by the UK government ...was not subject to sufficient external challenge by either ministers or officials.
There was no institutional guard against the risks of conventional wisdom becoming embedded in the institutions responsible... Mr Hunt accepted that 'collectively we didn't put anything like the time and effort and energy' into... challenging the consensus. The Inquiry agrees.
6.59. The aim should be to end the culture of consensus in which orthodoxy becomes entrenched.
6.95. What happens if the disease affects only a particular section of the population? Is there a point at which the collateral impact of interventions may not be worth the price, because not enough lives are saved compared with the societal and economic costs of the interventions?
I will have more to say about this in the days ahead, but, for the moment, I am struck by the significant difference between the actual report and the media headlines about it.
~I thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead, and I look forward to your company on Tales for Our Time tonight, and Mark Steyn on the Town tomorrow.
