Five Quick Things: Eric Adams, Jive Turkey
Well, for you folks it might have been a tough week.
And particularly for you folks in Florida who have had to get ready for Helene, that sky-monster due to pound the length and width of your state, you have my sympathies. Here in Louisiana, we had one roll through a couple of weeks ago, and though Beryl was a relatively benign hurricane as hurricanes go, there were nonetheless lots of people with flooded cars, flooded houses, roof damage, and power outages.
All of which sucks.
That said, this has been a pretty good week for us here at The American Spectator. After all, Tuesday night was our 56th annual Robert L. Bartley gala, and we had two political titans come forth to address the crowd — Sen. Rand Paul, whom I also had the pleasure of interviewing for this week’s Spectacle Podcast, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Paul Kengor’s 45-minute sit-down with Kennedy at the gala, which was a tour de force of an interview, is well worth your time.
So yep. We’re pretty happy in this quarter. We’re a lot happier than, say, Eric Adams…
1. He Didn’t Know It’s Bad to Get a Visit From The Turk
In NFL lore, a visit from The Turk is another way to say that you’re about to be cut from the team. You don’t want to get a visit from The Turk.
Eric Adams, New York’s just-indicted mayor, might be finding out that a visit from The Turk is not a good thing even if you’re not in the League:
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted Thursday on federal charges alleging that he secured bribes from foreign nationals and illegal campaign contributions in exchange for favors that included helping Turkish officials get fire safety approvals for a new diplomatic building in the city.
Adams, a former captain in the New York City police department, faces conspiracy, wire fraud and bribery charges in a five-count indictment that describes a decade-long trail of crimes.
At a news conference announcing the charges, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for Manhattan, said Adams had a duty to disclose gifts he received, but year after year “kept the public in the dark.”
At a separate news conference outside Gracie Mansion, meanwhile, Adams said he doesn’t plan to resign from his job running the country’s largest city, telling reporters he hopes New Yorkers will wait to hear his legal team’s defense before making any judgments.
Adams’ reaction to the indictment was passionate, and he’s pulling zero punches in claiming that this is political retaliation for his having trashed the Biden administration’s atrocious border policies.
The guess here is these things aren’t mutually exclusive. Adams can be a crook — and he probably is — and still be persecuted for his heterodoxical opposition to Dirty Joe’s migrant invasion.
Which he probably is.
Unless this is the start of some Merrick Garland Justice Department crusade to clean all the crooks out of America’s big blue cities. I’ll raise a glass to that, and say happy hunting, but we all know that urban graft and corruption goes wholly unpunished in this country up until the point when it becomes inconvenient for the Democrats.
And that’s Eric Adams’ great sin.
Nevertheless, you do want to stay away from the Turk.
2. Ted Cruz Just Firebombed Colin Allred
This ad caught my eye, because of a couple of things. First, it’s absolutely true. And second, the likely reaction to it will magnify how true — and relevant — that it is.
It’s an ad about how Cruz’s opponent for reelection, a wacko leftist congressman named Colin Allred who’s a bit like a poor man’s Beto O’Rourke — he’s somehow palatable to dumb upscale white chicks — is a big fan of men competing against women.
The ad points this out in a way that is not kind to Allred:
NEW AD
Colin Allred could have stopped men from competing in girls’ sports, but instead he voted against our daughters and stood with the radical left.
What kind of man does that? Colin Allred is too extreme for Texas. pic.twitter.com/MlwC2RKTOL
— Truth and Courage PAC (@tandcpac) September 26, 2024
Cruz is almost certainly going to win that race, but he might not win it by a lot. He’s simply not the kind of politician who wins races by a lot. And that’s OK, because you need people willing to be the guy who has to slug it out in every race. It’s harder to be that guy than to be Good-Time Charlie who wants to be liked by everybody.
The Democrats are throwing a massive amount of money at Allred in hopes they can save the Senate by knocking Cruz off. Maybe running somebody who doesn’t want to victimize female athletes in the name of transgender ideology would yield better results.
3. Kamala’s Just Not a Great Interview, Is She?
Stephanie Ruhle is a joke, of course. You don’t get to host a show on MSNBC unless you’re a joke. And her infomercial-in-interview-form of Kamala Harris this week was a joke.
Don’t take my word for that. The New York Post put this pretty succinctly:
Since Ms. Harris began granting more interviews in recent days, her media strategy has been to sit with friendly inquisitors who are not inclined to ask terribly thorny questions or press her when her responses are evasive.
Nothing about that changed during her interview with Ms. Ruhle before her audience on MSNBC, the liberal cable channel whose viewers overwhelmingly favor Democratic candidates.
[…]
Ms. Ruhle joined Ms. Harris in attacking Mr. Trump (“His plan is not serious, when you lay it out like that”) and avoided posing tricky questions about positions Ms. Harris supported during her 2020 presidential campaign or what, if anything, she knew about Mr. Biden’s physical condition or mental acuity as his own campaign deteriorated.
Which is perhaps why Ms. Harris agreed to the interview in the first place.
Whoops! Sorry. That was the New York Times’ take on the interview. This was the Post’s review:
How utterly vapid is VP Kamala Harris?
She just flunked an interview with a “journalist” who’d announced days before that demanding to know where the veep actually stands on policy is as unreasonable as wanting to live in a state of nirvana.
Under mild questioning from MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, Harris still managed to flop and flail and word-salad her way into ever greater depths of inanity.
Consider this sample exchange on the subject of how Harris will pay for her estimated $1.7 trillion spending plan:
“If you can’t raise corporate taxes, or if the GOP takes control of the Senate, where do you get the money to do that? Do you still go for those plans and borrow,” asked Ruhle.
A key question, one that every candidate should have a detailed answer ready for.
Harris’ response: “Well, but we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes.”
Ruhle let this nonsense pass with zero meaningful probing.
But things somehow got even more sycophantic from there: Ruhle simpered, “You have laid out policy in great detail.”
To which Harris gave an utterly mendacious “Yes.”
That’s literally the one thing Harris hasn’t done — including in the interview Ruhle was conducting at the time, the first solo interview the candidate has given a major network so far.
There’s a reason the legacy corporate media is going to seed.
Here’s hoping the GOP has enough gumption that if things go well in November, enough power exists to break up the media oligopolies that prop up these failing “news” organizations and force them to compete in the marketplace.
Kamala Harris should have been exposed as the nincompoop she is by now. Tulsi Gabbard did it in a debate. Instead, she’s been coddled and protected by jokes like David Muir and Stephanie Ruhle.
Which tells you something.
Rand Paul said a hundred times more meaningful things in a 19-minute interview I did with him than Harris has in any of these hagiographic exercises she’s consented to. It’s a damn shame.
4. Thank You, John Stossel
Thursday, I had a post at The Hayride, and I wanted to give this a little larger airing here, about the evisceration that John Stossel laid on Robert Reich in his latest podcast:
Reich is a prolific podcaster and social media influencer, as well as a contributor on the various cable news networks. This is the case despite the fact that he’s almost universally wrong in every particular – from his unhinged Trump Derangement Syndrome attacks on the Republican presidential nominee to his stupid pronouncements about the economy.
He’s a fundamentally unlikeable figure, which is probably a good thing; if Reich were more charismatic, there is a danger that more people would take him seriously. But the stupid things he says – it’s corporate greed and not government spending which causes inflation, billionaires ought to be outlawed, foreign trade exploits black and brown people in the Third World – are echoed by others who do have some charisma.
And that’s unfortunate. It’s also dangerous, particularly when the people who would otherwise correct these idiocies and blow Reich out of the water are so often suppressed by social media platforms.
Stossel, fortunately, doesn’t get suppressed, or at least not universally. So it’s good to see him annihilate Reich for being wrong about more or less everything.
And here’s the annihilation:
I do take issue — somewhat — with Stossel’s doctrinaire position on free trade, in that when you’re dealing with a communist country like Cuba where you literally cannot find a trade partner there who isn’t an arm of the Castro regime, or an effectively fascist country like China where there is some nominal private sector you could buy from or sell to but not without a great deal of “input” from the regime, the trade might be free on your side but it won’t be on the other side, and as such, you’re going to get some perverted results from the trade relationship.
And I talk a bit about that in the Hayride post.
But otherwise, Stossel nails Reich to the wall. For which he deserves thanks. Melissa and I have been going back and forth about how best one or both of us could take a shot at that irritating little lunatic, and along comes Stossel to do some of that work for us. Much obliged, John.
5. The Critical Drinker Likes The Penguin (And Rightfully So)
Last weekend, HBO dropped the first episode of the new Colin Farrell–led Batman spinoff series, The Penguin, and it was somewhat surprising how understated the hype was for it.
Maybe it’s that the comic book/superhero genre is fading out and everyone knows it, and as such, the investment in marketing another property within that genre would justifiably be smaller. Or maybe it’s that The Penguin was always something of a minor villain within the Batman story; he’s a freaky character with less panache than the Joker or Catwoman or even the Riddler. On film, Danny DeVito’s portrayal in Batman Returns (1992) was well done as far as it went, though DeVito wasn’t given a great deal to work with:
It’s not really a shock that, as the Critical Drinker says, this series wasn’t all that heralded.
But something interesting has happened. I’ll let him take it over from here:
He’s right.
The ambiance of the show carries over from the last Batman flick, The Batman, which was quite well done even though for me the Christopher Nolan Dark Knight movies will always be the real Batman productions. Actually, The Penguin wouldn’t be all that out of place in Nolan’s telling, either, and the portrayal of Gotham is pretty much the same.
What’s best about this show, of course, is Farrell’s portrayal of the lead — to me, Colin Farrell is the funny Irish hit man in In Bruges or the depressed, rejected friend in The Banshees of Inisherin, or the lover in A Winter’s Tale, and this is pretty much a 180-degree change from those roles. Then again, Farrell played the Penguin in The Batman, so the massive makeup job and the completely different voice aren’t anything new. He was good in the role then, and he’s even better in this. Give Farrell credit — the guy has some serious range as an actor.
But The Penguin offers something else. The Drinker noted the similarities to The Sopranos, and that really hits home. This is a slightly comic-booky version of that massive HBO hit, and I’d say it was an exceptionally good choice to go in that direction with this series. Oz Cobb, which is a lot more believable name for the character than the Oswald Cobblepot DeVito was stuck with, turns out to be a pretty complex character. He’s ugly and he’s deformed and he’s a villain mostly because life dictated that he had to be, but he’s human in a way that James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano was human. He’s also ambitious, strategic, and ruthless only when he has to be. In other words, identifiable, as is the situation he finds himself navigating in the first episode.
This has the makings of a show worth watching, as the Drinker notes. It might just be the oasis in the television desert we find ourselves subjected to at present.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Further Examinations: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 3
The Spectacle Ep. 149: Israel’s Exploding Pagers Send a Warning Message About Future Weaponization
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