The single best explanation for Bari Weiss’ management of CBS News is that she is just not very smart. Bringing Ross Douthat into “60 Minutes” from the New York Times is not 11th-level chess. It’s just that she and the nepo baby who hired her, David Ellison, suffer from a delusion common among rich right-wingers, which is that everyone else secretly thinks like them and just needs to be freed from liberal guilt in order to realize it. 

Douthat brings no large audience with him. He’s not a compelling person. He’s only gotten as far as he has because major newspapers feel the need to have some conservative representation on their opinion page, and he seems less dumb than most of the alternatives. CBS News will continue to lose viewers until it changes hands or is put to bed. 

The mainstream press is all a-flutter, and not because of Donald Trump’s lies but because, for once, he told the truth. At Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral, Trump said, “He's never seen a war that he didn't like.” The cable news pearl-clutching over this was especially obnoxious after the Wall Street Journal published previously unreleased footage of Graham cackling gleefully as Trump’s military rained bombs on Iran.

I was surprised to see Trump as restrained as he was, though. He was eulogizing one of the men who was most responsible for persuading him that the Iran war would be an empowering experience for the MAGA base, rather than a humiliating defeat. Graham didn't survive to deal with the fallout of this foolish decision. Trump, however, is still with us, and in normal circumstances would be eager to seize this opportunity to whine in public. 

Not that anyone should feel sorry for Trump, whose narcissism and stupidity made it all too easy for Graham to flatter him into this idiotic war. The Journal clip is interesting mostly because of how much Graham gloats about getting one over on Trump.

"How long have we been pushing it?" the late senator declares triumphantly. "This is the best thing I've ever done."

"He loves blowing stuff up," Graham adds, laughing so hard at Trump's gullibility that he starts coughing.

Trump also said in his eulogy that Graham had the “last laugh.” That was framed in the text as a gentle ribbing about how Graham won him over after initial uncertainty. But as Trump spoke live, his plaintive tone was hard to miss. After all, Graham really did screw him over, talking him into a failed war and then dying without paying any political price for it. It’s too bad the rest of us have to suffer the consequences as well.

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I know Republicans are going to make hay out of the fact that Dr. Anthony Fauci had to plead the Fifth repeatedly during Wednesday’s cockamamie hearing on Capitol Hill, where he endured repeated and ridiculous accusations that he was somehow responsible for the virus that causes COVID-19. 

None of this is Fauci’s fault. Republicans are so desperate for some distraction from their own failures that they would absolutely gin up a bullshit prosecution of the retired public health official on the thinnest possible pretext. So Fauci had to do what he had to do. 

My question is why, of all things, they are going back to this nonsense about the virus being created in a lab? Most voters want the pandemic to be way back in the rearview mirror, not constantly being relitigated by bug-eyed conspiracy theorists who failed upward into government office because they live in red states. 

No, I don’t think this is a clever political calculation. Instead, it’s a reminder that MAGA is essentially a movement of alleged adults who can’t grow up. COVID conspiracy theories are rooted in a childish unwillingness to face basic realities that we all can get sick and we’re all going to die. 

For most people, the knowledge that the universe is cold and chaotic is scary, but authoritarians especially cannot deal with that. Telling themselves that China was to blame for the pandemic is a form of self-soothing, a way to avoid the ugly truth, which is that sometimes bad things happen for no reason.

That, plus the fact that viral mutation provides real-time proof that evolution is real — a lot of people on the right don’t want to accept that either. 

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