People I don’t want to see next year
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Froma Harrop
There are media heavies we saw written about, talked about, day after tedious day, month after tiresome month. May the obsession over them fade in 2023.
Mehmet Oz. Donald Trump’s hand-picked TV doctor lost his quest to win an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, but his ads live on. One showed him cruising a supermarket for vegetables because his wife wanted “crudite” at home.
“Crudite,” pronounced “croo-dee-tay,” is French for raw food. Plenty of people in central Pennsylvania probably serve raw vegetables with a dip, but you wonder how many folks in Altoona call it crudite.
The point of the ad was to highlight inflation. “Here’s broccoli, two bucks,” Oz says, picking up a perfect specimen. “Here’s some asparagus, that’s four dollars.” Then the candidate holds up a plastic container that, he contends, pushed the bill to $20. “God, that’s $20 for crudite,” said the man worth an estimated $200 million. “It’s outrageous.”
Elon Musk. Liked him once. Really, really tired of him now. Trolling is usually an unpleasant activity, and Musk’s mocking of libs on his social media site lacked the wit to pull it off. But his opening Twitter to misinformation about COVID-19? That was evil.
There’s a business reason why sites moderate their content. While private companies have the right to set their own rules, the public has a right to not patronize them. Certain speech hurts the broader society, causing the broader society to rebel. That Musk doesn’t get this is a remarkable flaw.
One thing about the guy that will continue to fascinate into 2023: His seeming masochistic joy in torching his own companies’ revenues. That is one strange act.
Harry and Meghan. I haven’t watched their documentary and avoid most commentary on it. Seeing the duo rake in money by unfairly scorching their kin is most unseemly and of interest to multitudes only because the family has the word “royal” before it.
Especially grating was Harry’s complaint that his brother yelled at him. (William raised his voice?) My brother has yelled at me. Want to hear about it? Didn’t think so.
To be clear, I also don’t care about the other “royals” or understand what makes them special. I don’t even want to hear the word “monarchy” except for historical references to head chopping.
Kevin McCarthy. As of this writing, hope flickers that that McCarthy won’t succeed in oiling his way into the job of Republican House speaker. Sadly, there may still be depths for him to plumb.
It’s hard to sum up how appalling McCarthy is, but Justin Amash does a pretty good job. Amash was the Michigan Republican rep who left the party in disgust over the Trumpian depredations.
“Kevin McCarthy,” he tweeted, “is likely the most incompetent, unprincipled, and duplicitous person in the whole GOP conference” — and also “a known dedicated liar.” McCarthy voted to overturn the 2020 election results and celebrated the Jan. 6 mob that trashed the Capitol. Yuck.
AOC. I’m adding the celebrity socialist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to the gripe list, not just for some political balance but out the conviction that she is a pointless attention hog. The object of her “protest votes” are inevitably fellow Democrats. Playing the enemy of the party off which one feeds is an ugly ploy.
Ocasio-Cortez was the only Democrat to oppose the recent spending bill and famously voted against Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, to the disgust of many progressive constituents. Democrats need to start preparing a primary challenge to her. Today.
OK. America is chilling (literally), and I want to chill with it in the sense of ignoring publicity-seeking provocations. May 2023 bring less of them.
