Holy heck, it's been 24 hours and Democrats still aren't screwing this up

It feels wonderful to live through a major news event and not be required to come up with some hot take about it. But then I remembered my lot in life and dragged myself to a keyboard anyway, so here are some brief and only slightly belated notes on Joe Biden dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee.

1) I'm still furious about how all of this went down. The New York Times and other outlets proved once again that they will speculate, opinionate, and obsessively push forward any theory they want to on their front pages—if they want to. That the Times has never filled its frontpage with a half-dozen stories about Donald Trump's shocking unfitness for office, as demonstrated by dozens of scandals and one violence-provoking attempted coup, so it's quite clear at this point that none of the quote-hunting "journalists" scampering through the halls of power find "violence-provoking attempted coup" to anywhere near as scandalous as being old.

Every time an executive from the Times or CNN or other media outlets drone on about Objectivity and the need to deliver the news from the distant plains of "nowhere," they are always lying, all the time. America wouldn't be in crisis if our "journalism" wasn't nearly giddy in its determination to treat democracy and fascism as two equally legitimate approaches to governance, sniffing that the hallowed conventions of the form simply can't accommodate the public need to know which of the two poses the greatest danger.

If journalists wanted to mount a full-throated cry warning Americans of the crookedness of the seditionist felon candidate and his gleefully racist party, they would. They don't care. There is a reason there are only the barest handful of left-of-center pundits who appear on op-ed pages or on CNN's payroll, even as executives rush to hire an unending series of hard-right aligned misinformation-spewers plucked from white nationalist-friendly halls of the The Daily Caller or National Review or the Heritage Foundation. Our media is corporatist first, entertainment second, public interest never.

2) I'm still harboring deep suspicions—and that is putting it nicely—that this entire episode may have been a "shark attack summer"—a national bout of mass hysteria based not on any known facts about Biden's supposed health or infirmity, but a narrative that media outlets produced almost entirely on their own, which caused Democratic billionaires and powerbrokers who had little to no contact with Biden to believe a bunch of things that may not be true, such that the whole nation began to take every misstatement and stutter from Biden as evidence of supposed deterioration.

The best evidence for that is the total lack of evidence "journalists" gathered for their case. There was none. There were a lot of speculations about a single debate, followed by a lot of speculations about whether presidents were allowed to get tired after 10 hours of work or a dozen different plane flights, and a bunch of purple-monkey-dishwasher not-quotes from lawmakers that many of those lawmakers then immediately denied making, and in general none of that is anywhere near the usual supposed "standards" of what should make it to the New York Times frontpage.

Fortunately, we'll soon know the answer to this. We circle back in February and see if Biden has, in fact, declined rapidly and proven the anonymous not-quotes right. If he hasn't, then that's pretty good evidence that the Times pushed a dishonest, sensationalized false story onto us, which is precisely what they did during the election that gave us "President" Coup-Boy to begin with. (When was the last time you heard any media outlet give a flying damn about the Trump administration's use of personal emails?) What can we do about it if that's the case? Not a damn thing.

3) I'm genuinely stunned that the Democratic Party rallied around Kamala Harris so quickly, simply because Democratic donors, major media outlets, and pretty much anyone else who exists in politics primarily to be insufferable have been demanding the party instead put on a televised carnival of souls, some sort of complex star-studded cavalcade that would turn the nomination into a reality television show. Instead, once Biden endorsed Harris the party did ... the only sensible thing?

I've been following Democratic politics long enough be stunned by that. No matter what the situation or how favorable the odds, Democratic leaders can always screw things up. It's one of the party's favorite hobbies. But this is astonishingly good news, because it means the media ghouls who want a gaudy, vapid circus won't be getting one, we won't be spending the next few weeks with a half-dozen ambitious Democrats knifing each other for the nomination, the convention will simply consist of passing the torch to the vice president that we all voted for as the person the torch should be passed to when Biden named her four years ago. It all feels too good to be true.

So I still think Joe Biden has a right to be the angriest person in America right now; the Times' speculation on his supposed health or not-health was grotesque and unethical. But if he couldn't staunch the resulting bleeding, he couldn't; bowing out became a necessity once it became clear that this was going to be the press narrative from here on in. And once that became the decision, immediately endorsing Harris was the only plausible role.

And, so far, it's ... worked brilliantly. Nobody's screwed it up, no matter how loudly national-outlet shitposters have screamed for it. Uniting immediately around Harris blocks the opportunities for intraparty squabbling, the grassroots has stepped up with $100 million in donations to Kamala in a day, solidly showing "the base" to be behind the move, and now the major story of the election becomes, once again, that Donald Trump is a coup-attempting felonious shithead who has assumed the role of Dear Leader in a movement of authoritarians vowing to do harm to as many Americans as they possibly can.

We can expect the Times to be committing their frontpages to that story anytime now, one imagines. As opposed to, say, fifteen separate stories probing anti-Harris conspiracy theories as posited by ignorant Fox News-watching racists interviewed in small-town diners.