The New Hampshire primary produced the expected result: Trump inevitability and a tiny lane for Nikki Haley to keep going. Whether she has a real chance of making a difference in the general election is open for discussion, but she has already come a long way in establishing her credibility in the post-Trump era. When will that be?
Mainstream media has no idea. When people like David Jolly and other never-trumpers pop up on news networks, it’s instructive to realize they are all failed Republicans, isolated by their bucking the MAGA trend and neutered by their removal from the electoral system. If they had donors before, they don’t now. The networks have harvested the cream of the political crop, MSNBC in particular and Fox for the out-of-power Trump crowd. CNN is playing this right down the middle editorially, with former Biden partisans like David Axelrod trying to force Biden out for age. Won’t work, but Fox picks up the comments for its coverage. Net is that they’re all former Republicans on both sides.
Substack’s new transcript function is great for unpacking the Gang conversations. I wish they supported the web version of the feature in their iOS app, but at some point they’ll make it available as the interactive tool it is on the Web. You can scroll through the transcript and click to jump the video forward or backward to skim the conversation, where individual opinions give way to the flow and rhythm of the show. I’ve tried to manage the flow of dialogue toward this result, but sometimes it’s been a victim of the partisan underpinnings of the various contributors. It’s too frequently a jumbled mess of an effect, and on this show was finally enough for one of the members of the gang who decided he’d had enough. I am sorry to see him go. As the guy on one of our streaming shows says: Be You.
Our friend Peter Schickele1 of PDQ Bach fame died this week in Bearsville, a Woodstock hamlet. Peter’s concerts at Town Hall and Lincoln Center were a symphony of bad puns and pratfalls, rooted in the deepest of classical musics. I made the common mistake of thinking him immortal, but I will never forget recordings he and I made of his compositions in my home across the hill. As with many of those home recordings, I lost track of them in the throes of a divorce. They were beautiful, his songs, like everything about him.
Be You