A teeming, heaving mass of back-biting mountebanks

It is fun to have old Conrad Black back in circulation. He is a writer of the old-school. Reporting, yes, but reporting and opining in vivid and original language. Where the reading is entertainment as well as news acquisition. You may or may not agree with his interpretation of facts or the quality of his argument, but it is hard not to be taken by his verve.

From Tired, Irrelevant Democratic Candidates Point To Trump Reelection by Conrad Black his most recent column, some of his vigorous turns of phrase.

His opponents are now reduced to fluttering like ancient dowagers and complaining that he is too ungentlemanly and uncouth to be president. What might they have thought of Jackson, William H. Harrison, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, Warren Harding, or Lyndon Johnson?

This is all the Democrats have left: snobbery, the moronic pretensions of a party whose leaders politicized the intelligence and national police agencies to try to undo an election, and many of whose contenders abuse public credulity by comparing resisting the will-o’-the-wisp of climate change with the invasion of Normandy (Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey), and announcing the scientific unanimity of certainty about imminent planet-threatening global warming (Beto O’Rourke of Texas).

The Democratic field is a teeming, heaving mass of back-biting mountebanks. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is not an American Indian, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) has worn out his schtick, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a facile novelty, unqualified by any traditional criterion to be president. (I do not for these purposes consider his sexual orientation to be relevant.)

[snip]

The Democrats have departed this planet as we know it; the forces of sanity and respect for that party’s history are clinging desperately to the water-logged raft of Joe Biden as he tacks to the left, scattering malapropisms like Casey Stengel on steroids.

[snip]

This is all the Democrats are left with: a group of radical nonentities that constitute a monotone Götterdämmerung: the self-immolation not only of the America of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney, but also of Bill Clinton and even of candidate Barack Obama.

[snip]

The flatlined new normal of yesteryear will be hung around the necks of the Democrats like a toilet seat.

Theodore Dalrymple, Conrad Black, Mark Stein - all first class writers with knowledge, wit, and fluency. Agree or not, they compel you to want to engage.