Great article. Worth clicking over.
Roger Kimball:
“…Consider this headline: ‘Anthony Scaramucci talks to Bill Kristol about trying to force Trump off the GOP ticket in 2020.’ Can you guess the source? If you said ‘The Onion,’ you would have made a perfectly rational judgment. After all, Anthony ‘The Mooch’ Scaramucci is a metrosexual clothes-horse, hedge-fund guru, communications director for President Trump for 11 minutes — I mean ‘days,’ 11 days. (Calling up a reporter for The New Yorker and treating him to an insane, profanity-laced tirade does tend to be a career-shortening gambit.) What could this character have to do with Bill Kristol, destroyer of The Weekly Standard, serial endorser of failed political candidates, real and imagined, would-be thorn in the side of Donald Trump? Surely putting those two together was a joke, an absurdity.
But no. A joke it may be — an absurdity, too — but the source of that story is not The Onion but CNBC, not exactly an unimpeachable source, I know, but at least one with some pretensions to reporting as distinct from satire.
Still, I think we have to categorize the gist of this story under two headings: 1) truth can be stranger than fiction and 2) even the simplest fact can be the occasion of humor. Consider this elaboration: ‘Asked whether he has spoken to Scaramucci about trying to find another presidential candidate to replace Trump on the top of the GOP ticket next year, Kristol said: “Yup.”’…”