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Friday’s Final Word – HotAir

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July 25, 2025
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Friday's Final Word – HotAir

Everybody’s (punitive) tabbing for the weekend …

Ed: It’s always punitive for thee but not for we, eh?





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The [Washington Post’s] longtime obit chief, Adam Bernstein, announced Tuesday that he was joining the New York Times. Even if the paper chooses to replace him, it’s not quite clear who could do it: I’ve learned that all but one person on the obit desk has taken the organization’s buyout offer, which aims to shed staff by the end of July. The lone holdout is too junior to qualify for the buyout deal.

A Post spokesperson declined to comment on personnel matters or future plans. “It’s just an absolute exodus,” one staffer said of the buyout, whose total damage won’t be known until July 31. So far, departures include longtime political reporter Dan Balz, veteran columnist David von Drehle, and dozens of others. “They have no idea” how or if they’ll replace the expertise, another longtime Postie said. (People I spoke to at the Post asked to remain anonymous to talk about what remains a wrenching and uncertain experience for the organization.)

The obituary team doesn’t have that name-brand staff, but its fate actually matters quite a lot institutionally.

Ed: It does seem like Jeff Bezos finally had enough of the old guard at the WaPo. It’s not clear whether those left will get the message that the days of narrative boosting have to end if the paper is to survive. That’s what is killing their obituary section — the massive loss of confidence by its readers in every other aspect of its product. 

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Ed: Who needs an obit department when your newsroom is already deceased?

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We can forget that Kessler and everyone else at his paper has known for years that “careful” investigators like Comey, Brennan, and James Clapper included the “salacious and unverified” Steele Dossier in that 2017 Assessment; forget also that Kessler has neglected to mention the use of the dossier in that Assessment even after an annex containing it was declassified in 2020, leaving no doubt about its importance to the document; and even forget Kessler implied the two documents were separate, in a 2023 article bemoaning the damage Comey did to the “accurate Intelligence Community Assessment” by briefing Trump on “red herring” Steele material.

We can likewise forget Kessler and his paper have been consistently wrong about the Trump-Russia story, screwing every available pooch since this buffoonery started, including historically important mutts like the April 11, 2017 “FBI obtained FISA Warrant to monitor former Trump adviser” that reported there was “probable cause” to believe Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.” The Post will wash its hands of that mess by noting it was factually true that a FISA court approved such surveillance, but once upon a time it was supposed to matter to residents of Planet Fact that the FBI corrupted the process to get that warrant, and the man you identified as a foreign agent, wasn’t. But this is the Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for stories like “FBI was to pay author of Trump dossier; Arrangement fell apart, but shows bureau found his inquiry credible,” omitting the minor detail that the FBI had fired Christopher Steele for lying and launched a worldwide search for corroboration destined to end in a single word: “Zero.”





Ed: Matt Taibbi’s excellent review should be read by all. By the way, if you’re digging the Final Word posts and would like to join the conversation, this is a great reminder of why our VIP membership program is so vital. This same collusion by the Protection Racket Media and the Biden administration tried hard to put us out of business by driving off advertisers, in order to stifle debate and dissent. Our members made sure our platform could stand up to the Left by joining the fight. Sign up for VIP membership, and especially for our VIP Gold and VIP Platinum levels. Use the promo code FIGHT to get 60% off new memberships AND upgrades!

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Ed: The question was about the idea that Ghislaine Maxwell could get a commutation. Trump pushed that aside to go on the attack. It seems he knows that this topic won’t go away unless it gets tied more to Democrats than himself, and Bill Clinton is practically the poster boy in that regard. Let’s hope that no one’s entertaining the idea of a commutation for Maxwell, though. 

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“I will never book Hunter Biden. I have no interest in what he has to say for a couple reasons. Number one, he’s not the candidate. He wasn’t on the ballot. Anything he says in defense of his father, I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it doesn’t matter,” [Chuck] Todd said. “He’s a son defending his father. And my guess is he’s going to defend him to the hilt. So I take every one of his pieces of anger and criticism and I just sort of chalk it up to, yeah, he’s defending his dad and he loves his dad. I have a real problem with the folks that are booking him. If you’ve chosen to book Hunter Biden, you’ve chosen to book spectacle.”





“[T]he two interviews that have gone viral were both designed to get attention, not to surface new facts, not to give you a better understanding of what may have happened. It was just, ‘Let’s give him a platform to settle some scores that maybe he wants to settle.’ I don’t think this does Hunter Biden any good,” he continued. “I don’t think this does Joe Biden any good. Certainly doesn’t do the Democratic Party any good. That’s why it’s surprising to see the former DNC [Democratic National Committee] Chair [Jaime Harrison] start a podcast and decide that the best way to market it is Hunter Biden.”

Ed: Chuck Todd is correct here, but it’s worth noting that no one’s really booking Hunter except podcasters looking to boost their profiles, too. That tells you something about Hunter’s credibility … and that of the podcasters chasing him for clicks, too. I get a different vibe from Hunter than Todd does. He may be defending his dad, but it seems as though he’s doing that in an attempt to resurrect his own commercial prospects. The family influence-peddling business just went as defunct as the Clinton Global Initiative did after the 2016 election, and for the same general reason. 

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Ed: It’s a keeper! I think Trump is trying to humiliate Powell to get him to resign. Trump can’t fire him, because (a) the Supreme Court made it clear they would reverse it if challenged, and (b) the Fed doesn’t exercise any executive authority. The US Constitution gives Congress the sole jurisdiction over monetary policy in Article I, Section 8. Powell will likely avoid these get-togethers in the future. 





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What he’s saying: “Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I think they want to die and it’s very bad. It got to a point where you have to finish the job.”

  • Trump added that the Israelis “are gonna have to fight and they are gonna have to clean it up — you will have to get rid [of Hamas],” Trump told reporters before departing for a trip to Scotland.
  • He added that he always thought Hamas wouldn’t want to release the remaining hostages because the group didn’t want to lose their “bargaining chip” and “their protection.”
  • “Now they are going to be hunted down,” Trump said of Hamas.

Ed: Good. Can we get back to “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” being the official policy of the United States? And maybe convince Israel to do the same?

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Ed: Via Twitchy. This is mostly ‘res ipsa loquitur,’ and no one really cares why this woman doesn’t want to reproduce. But it takes some real childish cluelessness to post an all-caps rant about that decision and then call it “triggered” when people mock your self-importance. Maybe growing up first is a good idea. 

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The Democrats kept insisting that he wasn’t “viable” as a candidate, while denying he was incapacitated to serve as president.

But why was he not “viable”? Because, of course, the country had seen that he was not mentally fit to continue on as president.

But they don’t concede that part. They just say “The polls showed him losing, despite being the most successful president of the modern era.”





Well if he’s the most successful president of the modern era — spoiler, he was not — then why are the polls showing he can’t win?

Because, of course, the country had seen that he was not mentally fit to continue on as president.

Ed: Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, baby. And not all of this was denial either — some of it was just outright fraud. 

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Ed: Hans could have stopped at “the sheer absurdity of Jen Psaki.” 

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And for the finale of his rant, Stewart brings in a choir, which might otherwise have been lovely. I think this is why the show is still taking up needed space in my mind. What would otherwise be a surprising turn of beauty, wound up being used for just anger and misery and the f-word bonanza. The Daily Show is on cable, so they sing it out. Again and again. Jon Stewart makes like a conductor, having them bring it down, and high again. Range on the f-word is about as creative as we get.

It’s like Jon Stewart wants to punish America for CBS’s cancelling Colbert by torturing us with an earworm. And so he has. Congratulations.

Ed: This stopped being about ‘funny’ years ago on late-night TV. It’s about validating increasingly narrow (in all senses of the word) left-wing audiences who want to agitate rather than be entertained. 





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And your feel-good story of the week … 

Ed: Beege had more on this earlier, too. 







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