George Clooney Should Shut Up.

In June 1972, The New Yorker Magazine published an article by Frances Fitzgerald, ‘Fire in the Lake,’ which tore to shreds the lies that three successive Presidents beginning with JFK had been feeding the American public about Viet Nam.

My biggest regret about what George Clooney has said about Joe Biden hasn’t been analyzed with the same painstaking commitment to accuracy and detail which made Fitzgerald’s article (and then her book) the most remarkable piece of political journalism that I have ever read.

And I have been reading political journalism since my father used to hand me the editorial page of The (failing) New York Times after he read it every night beginning in 1957 or maybe it was 1958.

Since when does a Hollywood actor become a self-appointed leader of a political movement to upend a national campaign of an incumbent President who saved the country in 2020 from four more years of the then-President who referred to a worldwide Pandemic as the ‘Chinese flu?’

Do you recall that at some point during our battle against that dread disease, a large hospital whose location I forget ran out of beds and converted a floor of their parking into a Pandemic ward? And do you further recall that Trump’s reaction to the pictures of patients lying in gurneys where cars were usually parked was to accuse the hospital of using some computer software like Photoshop to fake the whole thing?