Programming note: Please join me later today for a brand new Tale for Our Time. If you missed last month's airing of The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen, that can be found here.

~Two years ago tomorrow - July 13th 2022 - GB News became the first over-the-airwaves (and, in UK terms, Ofcom-regulated) broadcast network anywhere to air a one-hour special on victims of the Covid vaccines. All that year, I had covered the story in nightly segments with concerned medical professionals and, more importantly, with individual victims triply injured - first by myocarditis or Guillain–Barré syndrome or some other affliction, next by government stonewalling, then by the media's denial of their very existence. But at some point we thought it worth tying it all together for our first ever single-issue show with a studio audience:

Before a crowd of those injured and bereaved by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, we covered various aspects of a great injustice to entirely blameless citizens. My guests included the very first widows of the vaccine I had had on the show some months earlier, Vikki Spit and Charlotte Wright, both of whom eventually received (as did other squeaky-wheel show regulars) a derisory £120,000 in government compensation.

Also present was the only MP interested in doing anything about the issue, Christopher Chope. (He was subsequently joined by Andrew Bridgen. A week ago, Sir Christopher became one of the few Tories to survive the electoral bloodbath; Mr Bridgen did not.)

An old friend from Fox News, Jedediah Bila, appreciated the significance of the broadcast:

I had assumed, the dam having been breached, that other networks would follow. Instead, within six months of the broadcast, GB CEO Angelos Softcockoulos and his stooge Mick (The Taxi) Booker had locked me out of the studio and done their deal with the UK state censor. The ratings-starved station has been so thoroughly Ofcomwashed it no longer has any corporate memory of the trail it once blazed:

~I miss the Steyn Show, because, on the vax and on the industrial-scale child-rape in English cities by Pakistani Muslim gangs and on various other issues, I felt we were making a difference. Most so-called "current affairs" TV is just third-rate drama criticism about fifth-rate repertory companies. The critics aren't any good at their job, and the actors are even lousier at theirs. In that sense, forcing grown men and women to pretend that Biden knows his lines and isn't bumping into the furniture is the perfect distillation of this lame-o showbiz substitute.

Still, just when you think American public discourse can't get any more stupid, it does. Truly, you can't put anything past the world's most lavishly funded "intelligence community":

Foreign spies likely knew of Biden's age-related decline, former NSA counterspy says

You don't say! That must be some seriously "deep cover" they were in:

Intelligence operatives from China, Russia and Iran are targeting White House secrets on President Biden's health and likely informed their governments on his apparent declining mental acuity, according to a former National Security Agency counterintelligence official.

John Schindler, who spent nearly a decade with NSA as a counterintelligence officer and intelligence analyst, stated in an online post that a multi-year White House silence on Mr. Biden's physical and mental condition did not fool either hostile spies in Washington or U.S. allies.

Good grief. For this, you need an "intelligence community"? G7 leaders are openly mocking the way they've been pressganged into supporting roles for this unconvincing summer stock:

~Somewhere or other in recent days I heard Ann Coulter make the sharp point that, if George Stephanopoulos had really wanted to pull off a memorable effective interview with the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock puppet, all he had to do was ask him to name his Treasury Secretary or the Chancellor of Germany.

But you can't out-Biden Joe. Yesterday the "Leader of the Free World" introduced Zelensky as "President Putin" and referred to Kamala Harris as "Vice President Trump". Needless to say, his "big boy" press conference (as his spokespersons tellingly referred to it) was regarded as a triumph. This is the official statement from the White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary and Deputy Assistant to the President:

The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin agrees with him:

So the leaden dinner-theatre staggers on, to what eventual dénouement we know not.

~I thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead, and I look forward to your company on Tales for Our Time tonight.