I spent part of my summer with George Clooney.
Well, I was in a villa 500 yards from his sumptuous Italian home in Lake Como, where he was holidaying with his old pal Brad Pitt.
And we didn’t meet as such, despite my sons suggesting we pop round for a lads’ night of pool and Peronis, which would probably have gone down as well as suggesting to Tim Waltz that he take a lie detector test about his military record.
Actor George Clooney, President Biden, actor Julia Roberts and former President Barack Obama posing at a campaign fundraiser in June 2024. X/Chris Jackson
But given our proximity, I did ponder on how Clooney was feeling about his other old pal, Joe Biden.
After all, it was he who first publicly plunged the knife into Biden’s back with a withering op-ed in the New York Times in which he demanded his presidential head on a plate.
Clooney unsheathed his political dagger after seeing how badly Biden performed on stage at a glitzy fundraiser he hosted for him in Los Angeles in mid-June, and then in the now-infamous, catastrophic TV debate with Donald Trump.
The op-ed headline was blunt: “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee.”
But it was the details of Clooney’s reasoning that were so brutal.
“It’s devastating to say it,” he wrote, “but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F— deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate … we are not going to win in November with this president.”
George Clooney attended the Venice International Film Festival world premiere for Apple Original Films’ “Wolfs” at Palazzo del Cinema this past weekend. Apple TV+ via Getty Images
For Clooney, a lifelong Democrat and major party donor, to turn on his friend in such a brutal manner was extraordinary and must have been so personally hurtful to Biden given their decades-long relationship.
The op-ed was the catalyst for many other leading Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, to join in the humiliating campaign to force Biden to quit the 2024 race, something he had made absolutely clear he didn’t want to do.
We know that Biden’s not spoken to Pelosi since she betrayed him.
I wonder if he’s spoken to his old pal George either, since that op-ed.
After all, what kind of friend takes you down in such spectacular fashion just weeks after lavishing praise on you at a Hollywood fundraiser he’s hosting for you?
I don’t doubt Clooney believed he was acting in a principled manner, putting the party before personal relationships.
Nor do I doubt he was right in his assessment: As I wrote in numerous Post columns for the past two years, Biden was a dead man walking and Trump would have flatlined him in November.
However, where I do have a problem with Clooney is in his shockingly cynical new effort to pretend that he wasn’t a cold-blooded contract killer of the kind he played in his hit movie “The American.”
What he did to Biden was a political hit job of the most ruthless kind.
George Clooney helped end President Biden’s 2024 candidacy with a New York Times op-ed. AFP via Getty Images
He took a cold, calculating sniper aim at his friend and metaphorically sprayed him with a hail of bullets designed to leave his career as dead as a dodo.
And he did it because he knew aged, decrepit Biden was now a washed-up electoral loser on course for a crushing defeat in the election, and he wanted the whole world to know that too.
Yet now the same George Clooney wants us to believe Biden’s in fact the new George Washington, who many polls of Americans say was not only the nation’s first president but also its greatest.
In a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, he waxed lyrical about the man he’d just politically assassinated: “The person who should be applauded is the president, who did the most selfless thing that anybody’s done since George Washington. All the machinations that got us there, none of that’s gonna be remembered, and it shouldn’t be. What should be remembered is the selfless act of someone who … you know, it’s very hard to let go of power. We know that. We’ve seen it all around the world. And for someone to say, ‘I think there’s a better way forward,’ all the credit goes to him, and that’s really the truth.”
It’s not, though, is it, George?
In fact, it’s to imagine a bigger whopper.
Joe Biden didn’t make a “selfless” decision to quit the race; he was bullied, shamed and humiliated into doing it by his so-called friends like you.
He didn’t voluntarily “let go of power” — he was told by Nancy Pelosi that his nomination would either end the easy way or the hard way, in language that would have done John Gotti proud.
And much as you and Nancy would conveniently like us to forget all about the “machinations” of Biden’s execution, it’s not as simple as that.
Nobody, as Judas Iscariot could attest, forgets a famous friend who so publicly betrays another famous friend.
Least of all Joe Biden, who is reportedly still spitting blood at the way you all set him up.
Ironically, in George Clooney’s new movie, “Wolfs,” he plays a shady underworld fixer who specializes in making problems disappear, including an apparently dead body.
Even more ironically, he made the Biden problem disappear by throwing him to the wolves.
Source link : https://nypost.com/2024/09/02/opinion/george-clooneys-weasel-words-cant-hide-his-wolf-like-killing-of-bidens-career/
Author :
Publish date : 2024-09-02 04:33:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
