Hunting for Clicks in Silly Season

It’s silly season here in Washington, the sun-tortured, soupy days when journalists, stuck to their ergonomic chairs, struggle to fill column inches because anybody of political interest is off tanning their flabby folds at the beach. August recess is around the corner: the sacred month when American pols go Gaul, begging off the grueling work of lobbyist dinners and ordering aides to draft legislation renaming post offices, for some deserved R&R with their googly-eyed, balayaged mistresses.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tried skedaddling town early to avoid any more scrutiny directed toward the so-called “Epstein Files,” the fabled grimoire detailing the salacious frolics of the carnivorous upper crust. Senate Majority Leader and human-menhir John Thune is mulling keeping the Senate melted in place, swelteringly passing the President’s administrative nominees for such unexpendable stations as deputy-assistant-stapler-refiller at the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.

Even prime cable-news pundits are packing for their annual summer sabatticals, handing anchor duties over to divorced, blue-chinned understudies who fill airtime interviewing hairnetted ice-cream vendors complaining about teenage miscreants skateboarding in the parking lot.

Hard to blame anyone booking a next-day floatplane out of The Swamp. The last weekend of July featured triple-digit temperatures across the DMV; Twitter sightings of the Thomas Jefferson monument coming alive, wiping profuse hidrosis from its brass mien, and diving into the Tidal Basin were probably some torpor-induced mirage. Trump’s opportunity for an autogolpe was never higher with an emptied capital city, yet he too stole out of Washington to hit a quick 18 on his Scotland golf course.

Such sticky doldrums threatened to dip the multi-billion-dollar rage-click industry, sending profits into tailspin. Without any news to report, how, oh how, could headline mongers crank the country’s collective temperature to equatorial heights?

Then, Hussah! Refreshing relief rained from the heavens like manna, or, in this case, purified puff balls of devil’s dandruff. Hunter Biden, troubled heir of the previous president, decided that someone, somewhere, was in desperate need of his tetchy opinion. He offered his unguarded views to one of the most-eyed, dearly respected broadcasters in America: YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, whose Channel 5 program is somewhere in the top 5,000 most-subscribed semi-political channels. Rachel Maddow must have been all booked solid.

Five minutes into the sprawling, 3-hour shoot-the-bull session, it becomes limpid why Hunter abstained from chinwagging with the legacy press. The interview mainly rounds his past bombed-out buffoonery, including ample ingestion of the kind of street poisons favored by ragged transients. What guy wants to jaw about nose nachos with Savannah Guthrie?

Callaghan offers ample space for Hunter’s reminiscing over nearly dying every day of his father’s 50-year elected-office tenure. Soon enough, he can’t resist the raw urge for easy views. The public’s taste for scuttlebutt must be fancied! Hunter is the fortunately unfortunate son of a disgraced president, the Cain to his promising brother Abel who was denied his destiny of higher service. The Biden surname was meant to carry on in the family business of government power; Hunter merely leveraged his lineage for payola and a West Wing crashpad. He sold his blood for a pottage of Ukrainian pelf. With his dad dismissed from office, and lingering disdain from the party faithful, this was Hunter’s chance to settle a few scores, in a fashion most befitting of his burnished class: talking absolute shit.

First on the slag list: A-lister George Clooney, who, despite his burro allegiance, had ChatGPT draft an infamous editorial calling for Biden to drop out shortly after the fatal debate with Trump. “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***** New York Times to undermine the president?” Hunter vented, ignoring the First Amendment. Count him out for the next Ocean’s film!

Hunter also kicked dirt at a soft target: those dastardly, money-grubbing, champagne-gulping, Corvette-tooling consultants. He smeared David Axelrod as a flukish ankle-biter whose success on the Obama/Biden campaign was overstated and James Carville as a washed-up bobblehead. Their real offense? Politely nudging Joe Biden to hang it up after it was apparent America wasn’t going to re-elect a doddering gaffer.

The whingefest wasn’t dried out yet. The resentful fils dug his gnawed-down cuticles into D.C. royalty: the perma-staffers who essentially run the country. Hunter so fulminated: “The Anita Dunns of the world, who’ve made $40, $50 million off the Democratic Party, they’re all going to insert their judgment over a man who has figured out, unlike anybody else, how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times, how to pass more legislation than any president in history, how to have a better midterm election than anyone in history and how to garner more votes than any president that [sic] has ever run?”

Well, since he asked so politely: Yes. The Svengalian courtiers can and did. Biden signed his own walking papers at their behest.

Hunter disburdening his bitterness is, in a way, noble. Filiation is a fading virtue. The son standing by his dad, revenging his foul and most unnatural murder at the hands of his advisors, calling out the vulturine instincts of the bureau-class, longing for a loyalty that wasn’t so easily sold with an election is at stake—in another era, this behavior would be regarded as normal, even expected. Today it makes broadsheet copy to be giggled over by raybathers on the Montauk coast.

Our political Parcae have a mad sense of humor, if the current president is any indication. Hunter Biden, the prodigal crackhead nobody expected to succeed, may have planted the seed for his future by deep weeding his party’s garden.