September 30 – October 9: Where y’all speech writers at?
Prime week to be a high profile politician. For our second entry in the cynic’s newscycle we turn our attention to questionable as well as shockingly reasonable utterations brought to life by the creme de la creme of global leading figures.
1 – THE ABHORRENT – Is Genocide Joe sabotaging his own folk at the most critical juncture of the pre-election period?
It’s entirely possible that Biden gets kicks out of utilizing trivial phrases that send the world into a spiral. Questioned about the US’s intentions in the event of an Israeli attack on Iran’s oil infrastructure, his genius response essentially was “We’ll discuss this, feel free to hold your breath”. The only equivalent one could think of is asking a hungry 6 year old if they’d like an ice cream, with the kid responding ‘We’ll see about that, perhaps tomorrow’.
Of course, as speculation and markets don’t wait for Bibi to press red buttons, oil prices surged at about 5% the moment these words were popped out. Sure, Asian powerhouses and smaller countries in the region are way more reliant on Iranian oil compared to their Western counterparts, so a conspiracist could claim that Biden is employing the good’ol “What’s bad for us is even worse for our enemies” angle. Yet the fact remains: Joe and his team can’t help themselves digging the Democrats’ own grave, persistently failing to prep for the simplest of questions regarding the worst conflict of the millenium.
2. – THE UGLY – Javier Milei’s speech writers save their best for the United Nations
Your grandmother’s favourite skater-turned-politician took it up a notch. During a speech where he perhaps deliberately dropped a deuce on the institution of the UN, Milei plagiarized his speech, borrowing a talk from Charlie Sheen’s dad enacted in the incredibly popular series The West wing. Now, make no mistake. This was not a sophisticated talk about a sophisticated topic where you’d understandably struggle to form an opinion. Here’s a sample of phrases our man elected to copy: “We believe in defending everyone’s lives. We believe in defending everyone’s property. We believe in freedom of speech for everybody……freedom to worship for everybody……freedom of trade for everybody … we believe all people should live free from tyranny and oppression, whether in the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism…….. it has to be supported by deeds: diplomatically, economically and materially.” Since we started with equivalents, that feels like the equivalent of a teacher asking you for the sum of 6+7, you using ChatGPT to copy paste the answer, but then forgetting to delete the “translated by DeepL: free version” tail of the text.
What’s more at stake, and definitely more interesting in this discussion, concerns the president’s speech writers, and specifically the value of that job position in 2024. In an era characterized by AI advancement, to the extent where entire books can be effectively plagiarized without definite fraudulence proof, there’s people making serious paychecks while permitting this shit to go through. Then again, the speech writers associated with Milei were perhaps fired after instructing their boss not to steal a quote from the most infamous political series on international TV.
3 – THE UGLY – WHY IS THE UK EXCLUSIVELY ELECTING HOPELESS PRIME MINISTERS?
Keir Starmer is the first Labour PM in 14 years. It’s clear Labour didn’t have it in them to elect a truly decent person as their leader, but not all was lost. It finally looked like the UK had found an indifferent figure who could last a full term. Someone neither ridiculous and reactionary enough to make the news all the time, nor constantly provoke one side of the spectrum in virtue of their silliness, rendering their demise inevitable. It felt like they’d found the perfect moderate bore. But that wasn’t attractive to Sir Keir Starmer. After launching a slow-cooked attack on populism, possibly aiming to reinstate the allure of British posh-superiority to the world, he’s decided that bad publicity is good publicity, beefing with his chief of staff leading to her resignation and bringing dissent within his ranks. The problem with all this, though, is that he doesn’t give off the vibes of a guy that people can keep taking seriously for very long (and that has nothing to do with his perfectly dull appearance).
This post is not to suggest that other world leaders are exactly inspiring. But many of them do have an air around them. Erdogan is a lunatic, but he has a presence; Xi is a lowkey psychopath, but you wouldn’t wanna be on the ring against him, fight to the death. Obama bombed whatever Bush hadn’t yet managed to bomb, but he was a charismatic speaker. Zelensky used to be a comedian, but his rejection of suits and serious frowns gives him a vintage aura, and in the end, he always gets the money he asked for. Tsipras ignored the vote of the referendums he himself called, but we all still believed that he had posters of Che in his bedroom. Trump was comedy and depression, but nobody could ignore him, lest because of the harm he could cause. Netanyahu is the Antichrist. Macron….we’ll talk about Macron very soon.
It’s sad, but was Margaret Thatcher the last British PM with a real flavour? Do the Brits have to vote for another dictator in order for their PM to be taken seriously by the rest of the world?
4 – THE.. GOOD? MACRON DOUBLES DOWN ON NETANYAHU PULLED PORK
Manu’s wild redemption tour perseveres. A week after turning heads in leading the kind request for a 3-week ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah (which was nonetheless magnificently ignored), he took a long hard look at death and asserted Israel should stop receiving weaponry via the ‘civilized world’. He called for the world to stop sending arms to Bibi! It truly says a lot about our current condition when such level-headed quotes make for shocking first page news. Whether this is an intelligent ploy to assure outside forces France is a neutral country that wants no piece of missiles from either direction, or whether Macron has inexorably grown a heart, shall remain controversial.
It’s been quite an eventful 18 months for the prezidente. First, he set fire to his popularity by increasing the retirement age, using shady loopholes and maneuvres that would make dictators proud. Next up, Niger and seemingly the entirety of Western Africa kicked his butt and sent his troops home, effectively saying they’d rather be patronized by Putin than by the Frenchies and their Western entourage. He proceeded to lose a meaningful chunk of his voters to Le Pen, after which he put on some pants and pulled off one of the most impressive gambles seen by modern politicians, calling for elections right before his country hosted the Olympics. And after spending a good part of the last year defending both wars and promising EU interference by means of sending soldiers, he’s now 180ed that bad boy and filling EU’s void of the reasonable adult in the room.
His wife is throwing cameos in ‘Emily in Paris’, potentially taking pages off the Taylor Swift-Kamala book in reinstating some popularity with Gen Z. You’d be forgiven if your opinion on Manu had reached cesspit levels, but you gotta give it to him: He’s no longer willing to play the role of the pseudo-Democrat puppet; he’s going for the Grammies; he demands and will get your attention. We’ve said it: Whether for good or bad, Emanuel Macron is no longer boring.