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It's Friday, October 25.
Tonight: On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times announced that it would refrain from issuing an endorsement in the presidential election, meaning it would not instruct its readers to vote for Kamala Harris. Today, The Washington Post followed suit. In both papers, top editors were prepared to issue endorsements of Kamala. They had the draft written, but the owners of each paper, a family that runs the L.A. Times and Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post, decided that the paper should not explicitly choose sides in the 2024 election by telling people for whom they should vote.
To say that liberal elites were enraged by this news and have gotten into a spiraling meltdown of hysteria and betrayal is to understate the case. Some of these journalists and editors actually resigned in protest, including one of the longest-time and most influential neocons, Robert Kagan, who resigned today from The Washington Post. If you don't know who he is, he has been Bill Kristol's writing partner for three decades. He's the co-founder with Kristol of the neocon advocacy group in the 1990s called Project for a New America, where they architected and advocated countless U.S. wars in the Middle East and he is also the husband of the United States’ effective ruler of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland. Unsurprisingly, yet notably, it is these kinds of warmongers – Dick Cheneys, Bill Kristols and Robert Kagans – who are the most passionate about electing Kamala and defeating Donald Trump and Kagan rage quit today over what he viewed as The Post's supreme betrayal in not endorsing his candidate, Kamala Harris.
But in these events and the reactions to them, one finds many important revelations about the state of our corporate media, the real function they are expected to perform, and the genuine mania and hysteria now consuming the elite liberal class as polls become increasingly discouraging for them. Yes, I will confess there is great entertainment value in taking a look at all of this hysterical media reaction – and we will not deny that to ourselves, nor to you – but the events of the last couple of days are really a very clear mirror about how these people think and what they expect and what they believe the media is now for. So, we will hold that mirror up to them and to these events for educational purposes as well as entertainment.
Then: It receives way too little attention that the United States, virtually alone in the democratic world, is utterly incapable of counting all the votes cast on Election Day and releasing a full, complete, reliable tally that night. Increasingly, in fact, it takes the United States and various states within the country not just days, but even weeks and sometimes months to count all of the ballots cast, all while most countries in the democratic world, including ones far less rich and far less technologically advanced than the United States, reliably count all votes and announce the results on Election Day just a few hours after the polls close. It's an expectation nobody would even think it would be a different way now, as American officials in various states again warn this year that they will be unable to count all votes for many days after what is called Election Day. The question again arises: what explains this unique inability in the United States, especially given how much distrust and doubt in the integrity of the electoral process this failure understandably engendered?
And then finally: Niall Harbison is a fascinating and I think inspiring figure. The Irish-born 44-year-old had a difficult life of a lot of childhood trauma that led to alcoholism and addiction in his later life: an increasingly common story in the modern Western world. But then he found a mission, a reason to live, a spiritual connection, rescuing, caring for and saving as many street dogs as he possibly can in Thailand, the country where he now lives. As is usually true of people devoted to animal rescue, the dogs he's saved have done at least as much to save Harbison as he's done to save them. He has built an impressive and growing project, and we'll speak to him about what led him to this noble mission, the role it played in saving him from various demons, and some of the inspiring stories that he's encountered: not just an interesting but uplifting way to end the week.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
