As we now know, for many white Democrats, the problem with Joe Biden’s age was that his vice president was a Black and Indian woman. Their concerns about President Biden’s age were inextricably linked to the fact that if anything happened to him, Kamala Harris would be president. That was what was so bizarre to me last year – I voted for Biden in 2020, knowing that he was already a very old man, but I loved the fact that he chose Kamala Harris as his VP and his successor. Choosing Kamala made me love Biden even more, and it made me more eager to vote for him. But for people like George Clooney, they simply lost their f–king minds at the idea of a Harris presidency or Harris presidential nomination. All of the “Biden must drop out” bullsh-t was tied to the podbro pipe dream of an “open primary” and “contested convention” bypassing Kamala Harris (then the sitting vice president) in August, just a few months before an election. They simply never wanted Kamala to be Biden’s successor, period, the end. Well, George Clooney has returned to his favorite topic:
George Clooney has called out Hunter Biden for “outright lies” in his expletive-laden rant trashing Clooney’s role in pushing former President Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race. An interview on CBS Sunday Morning gave Clooney the chance to address the comments made by President Biden’s son. Hunter, 55, took aim at Clooney, 64, during an interview on Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan in July, roughly a year after the actor wrote a consequential New York Times op-ed urging Biden not to seek re-election.
“F— you. What do you have to do with f—ing anything? Why do I have to f—ing listen to you?” Hunter said. “What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his f—ing life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the f—ing New York Times to undermine the president…”
Clooney—who has previously defended the op-ed as a “civic duty”—fired back in the interview with Sunday Morning’s Seth Doane, saying, “I could spend a lot of time debunking many of the things [Hunter] said because many of the things he said were just outright lies: Obama didn’t put me up to it, it wasn’t my fundraiser—it was my fundraiser, all the things.”
“But the reality is I don’t think looking backwards like that is helpful to anyone, particularly to him. I don’t think it’s helpful for the Democratic party, and so I’m just gonna wish him well on his ongoing recovery and I hope he does well and just leave it at that. I have many personal opinions about it, but I don’t find it to be helpful to have a public spat with him.”
On Sunday, Clooney again defended his op-ed while calling Biden’s decision to effectively hand then-Vice President Kamala Harris the Democratic nomination after dropping out a “mistake.”
“We had a chance. I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary. Let’s battle-test this quickly and get it up and going. I think the mistake with it being Kamala is she had to run against her own record and it’s very hard to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person,’” Clooney told Doane. “It’s hard to do, and so she was given a very tough task. I think it was a mistake, quite honestly. But, we are where we are.”
We’re now, what? About sixteen months past Clooney’s NYT op-ed, and here are some things I believe about that moment now: I don’t think Clooney wrote it, but he put his name to it because he agreed to the general ideas therein. I also believe that Clooney’s perspective, and the perspectives of the men behind the op-ed and the “open primary/contested convention” pipe dream, are fundamentally anti-democratic. Think about what they’re arguing – that the sitting Democratic vice president should have been ignored and passed over so they could have a sausage-party mini-primary in August, but Kamala wouldn’t be allowed to participate and it was somehow unfair to the bros that Kamala… simply got the support and convention delegates she needed to take over the nomination in a matter of days. Kamala’s name was already on the real primary ballots as well, earlier in 2024. But it was a “mistake” for… people to support her, George swears! The Democrat bros should have run someone else without the support Kamala was getting! Keep in mind, George and his family live in France and Italy now.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
