Potemkin Government And The Crisis Of Competence

I note a piece by Joy Pullmann in The Federalist, It’s Not Just Joe Biden. The United States Has A Potemkin Government:

Joe Biden’s shameful performance at the White House Easter egg roll Sunday was another strong visual indicator that he is not really governing this country. And he’s not the only sham authority in this country — our nation is replete with them.

The term “Potemkin village” arose in Russia to describe empty buildings set up as propaganda, to give a false impression of industry and life. The fake villages were intended to hide the regime’s mass mismanagement and infliction of suffering upon its own people.

Ms Pullmann opens things up to an obvious parallel with her reference to Potemkin -- but she holds back! I did a search for "Putin" anywhere in the piece, and no such word was to be found. Yet the single point that every analyst of the Russia-Ukraine War (which I think is only a theater of the worldwide Plebe War) will agree about is that the entire Russian invasion can be characterized as incompetent, driven as far as anyone can see by an incompetent despot at the top, surrounded by incompetent yes-men.

If the US has a Potemkin government, what about the Russian Federation, whose predecessor invented the term? But the problem isn't just government. What about CNN?

Warner Bros. Discovery laid off CNN’s chief financial officer Brad Ferrer with Discovery’s current chief financial officer Neil Chugani as the media giant attempts to restructure the finance team, Axios reported Tuesday, citing five unidentified sources.

. . . While Warner Bros. Discovery moves to make CNN+, which has approximately just 150,000 subscribers, more profitable, executives within CNN see the streaming service as a possible lifeline for the network in years ahead, according to Axios. Had CNN+ been profitable, CNN’s long-term revenue would’ve increased given the boom around digital media, but things don’t seem to be turning out according to plan.

Hot Air has fujrther analysis:

There’s also a question of why CNN insisted on launching an expensive, dubious new platform so soon before the merger with Discovery. Axios claims that Discovery didn’t want to communicate internally with Warner Bros. before the deal for fear of attracting government interest, so they opted instead to say some discouraging things about CNN+ publicly in hopes that CNN would take the hint and postpone the launch. But they didn’t.

. . . The fact that WBD has now slashed marketing spending raises the possibility that they’re going to shutter it anyway, which would make this a “New Coke”-scale debacle.

But there’s another possibility, per Axios. WBD may try to bundle CNN+ with other streaming services it owns to sweeten the pot for consumers by broadening the variety of content available.

. . . HBO Max and Discovery+ alone include a lot of archived programming. Package them with a news service like CNN+ for an extra buck or two a month and cordcutters may find that hard to say no to, especially if CNN+ eventually includes CNN’s live newscast. That’s another key takeaway from Axios’s report today — WBD wants CNN to get back to hard news programming, to the point where they’re even toying with doing a traditional newscast in the 9 p.m. hour instead of bringing in a new opinion-ish host to replace Chris Cuomo. If CNN+ is already headed to the trash bin, I assume that’s where Chris Wallace will end up. But WBD may already have so much money sunk into the platform that they have to at least try to bundle it in order to recoup some of those expenses. CNN+ likely can’t survive independently, but maybe it can if it’s hooked up to HBO/Discovery life support.

In other words, the traditional corporate media and news model is falling apart. It almost sounds like Putin withdrawing from Kyiv to regroup and win the war in Donbas. But this fits with other developments in the COVID theater of the Plebe War:

Just days after President Joe Biden’s Centers for Disease Control ordered yet another extension of the federal mask mandate, a Florida judge ruled that the agency had no authority to impose it in the first place, saying that “our system does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.”

To public cheers, the TSA, Amtrak, the Washington Metro system, and other public transportation systems immediately ditched their mask requirements, even though the Biden administration is appealing the ruling in hopes overturning it. No one, it seems, trusts the CDC anymore.

But all of this comes as COVID cases appear to be on the upswing.

. . . So, Biden now faces a dilemma. Does he relent on mandates and get blamed for another spike in COVID cases? Or does he invite an intense hostility from a public that is sick and tired of being bossed around by the likes of Anthony Fauci?

. . . Biden and the rest of the left have been drunk on power ever since COVID hit the scene. They needlessly rushed in sweeping and destructive lockdowns, closed churches, hampered businesses, tried – illegally – to turn employers into vaccine enforcers, upended election laws at the last minute to help their friends get elected, shuttered schools, and made kids wear masks, despite the widely known harm those last two have inflicted.

And the left has given every indication that it won’t give up its newfound power willingly. Thus, the CDC announced on April 13 it was extending its federal mask mandate for another two weeks because … well, presumably because it wanted the mandate in place forever.

We may feel certain that whatever option Biden chooses, it will be about as effective as CNN or Putin. The problem is bigger than any of them individually.