• Headline of the day:
The few books that have been written about the Bidens have not exactly been flying off the shelves. . .
New York magazine writer Gabriel Debenedetti’s “The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama” has sold fewer than 1,500 copies, according to NPD BookScan. The Associated Press’ Julie Pace and Darlene Superville’s “Jill: A Biography of the First Lady” has sold fewer than 2,500 and Chris Whipple’s “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House” and POLITICO’s Ben Schreckinger’s “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power” have each racked up fewer than 5,000 books sold.
That’s in contrast to the almost million copies that Michael Wolff’s Trump-focused “Fire and Fury” sold, according to NPD BookScan, and the more than 400,000 copies that Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s “Peril” sold, among many other Trump-focused books on which publishers made a killing.
How can this be? I am reliably informed that Joe Biden received the most votes for president ever!
• Elizabeth Stauffer does a wonderful beat down on Kamala Harris immediately below, with the comparison to the hapless Miss South Carolina from 15 years ago a nice cherry on top. I’ll add merely that (P)resident Biden decided not to attend the current ASEAN conference underway in Jakarta, even though our ASEAN alliance may be more important (because China) than the NATO alliance right now. The presumption must be that Biden is not up to the travel, and thus he has sent Kamala Harris in his place. Where she offers up this:
• Ross Douthat thinks James Bond is going woke—at least in the newest Bond novels:
After so many decades fighting evil masterminds bent on Britannia’s destruction, the 21st-century version of James Bond has found a very 21st-century antagonist. In the newest Bond novel, “On His Majesty’s Secret Service,” 007 is charged with protecting King Charles III from a dastardly plot hatched by a supervillain whose nom de guerre is Athelstan of Wessex — in other words, a Little Englander, a Brexiteer, a right-wing populist, apparently the true and natural heir to Goldfinger and Blofeld.
The novel’s Bond, who carries on a “situationship” with “a busy lawyer specializing in immigration law” (not to worry, he’s not taking advantage, “he wasn’t the only man she was seeing”), must travel to Viktor Orban’s Hungary to infiltrate the vast right-wing conspiracy and avert a terrorist attack at Charles’s coronation; along the way the secret agent muses on the superiority of the metric system and the deplorable dog whistles of populism.
Pretty easy to predict that if they make a film version along these lines, it will bomb so hard at the box office that the Bond franchise might die not another day, but that day.