The Dolt in the Arena

it says on this index card that my face is marred with sweat and blood

In the wake of the Biden debacle, Jonathan Turley describes the District of Columbia as the “city of Claude Rains” — a place where people are shocked, shocked that gambling is going on here. All of insider D.C. suddenly woke up at the same moment to the possibility that the President of the United States is maybe not at the top of his cognitive game, and gasp!

But he also says this:

No one would think of the Beltway as being a place of the naive innocents of our society. Washington is the only ecosystem composed entirely of apex predators. Yet, this week everyone seems to be eternally shocked by what has been obvious for years.

Yeah, no. The story insider Washington tells about itself is that “Washington is the only ecosystem composed entirely of apex predators.” It’s the place where the shrewdest, toughest, hardest people go, the testing ground where all the big swinging dicks swagger up to spend a life as gladiators in the arena, faces marred with sweat and blood.

Congress is 535 Frank Underwoods, each and every one of them with knives up their sleeves, locked in daily battle, every nerve alive to the dangers of the contest — the ones who “actually strive to do the deeds,” and face the brutal costs.

So here’s the D.C. congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton parking a car:

For crying out loud. Ninety-plus percent of the apex predators are shiteating slogan-chanters, staff-dependent adult children who are led around by the arm and given index cards with words on them that they’re supposed to read when it’s their turn.

The very most powerful argument that D.C. isn’t an “ecosystem composed entirely of apex predators” is that Joe Biden rose to the top of it.

Stop flattering this gathering of gasbags and timeservers. Martin Amis described the Chekist assault on Soviet society as the brutal work of career functionaries: “terror from halfway up — the terror of the janitoriat.” We have the palest photocopy of that dynamic, an effort by people of modest talent and limited ability to cosplay at dominance on the basis of their capacity for reciting talking points and pretending to believe what they’re expected to pretend to believe. I assert with confidence that there aren’t twenty members of Congress, or a dozen directors of federal agencies, who could run a Panda Express. “YOU take YOUR seat.”

Ditto the national media figures who, having risen to the top of their profession, spent three years proclaiming that Joe Biden is “sharp as a tack,” before turning to the recitation of the new narrative they were given this week. The “ecosystem of apex predators” is a sequel to No Exit made up mostly of minimally conscious semi-people who have the shamelessness to repeat their lines without deviation. Give it the precise amount of respect it actually merits.