Perhaps it’s a sop to the aging liberals who still make up the bulk of the readership of the New York Times, but, for some reason, this weekend James Carville was a featured subject in a well-traveled column by Maureen Dowd.
Yes, that James Carville.
Most of us, and particularly Republicans here in Louisiana — Carville’s home state and current place of residence — would like to forget him. For practical purposes, we surely have. Carville hasn’t been relevant in state political races for years, and now the political party whose face he helped shape both here in Louisiana and nationally isn’t relevant anymore in this state.
That’s true across the Deep South, by the way. Because Carville’s politics was Bill Clinton’s politics. And that’s not a game without a time limit.
Carville understood this well. Several years ago, he took a job as an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University, his alma mater and the institution whose logo Carville simply will not stop displaying on shirts, hats, and other paraphernalia on those occasions he’s still exposed to the public through the legacy corporate media. Running to academia when the practicalities of professional work are no longer favorable is a time-honored play of the Democrats, so it’s no surprise that Carville landed at his state’s flagship university.
But Dowd’s column, in which Carville is cast as an aging anti-woke hero, begins with Carville’s academic denouement:
A few years ago, when James Carville was teaching at Louisiana State University, he heard that one of his students had gotten into the school of her dreams to work on an advanced degree. He wanted to toast her.
“I get a $25 champagne and four plastic flutes,” he recalled, “and I said to the students: ‘All right. You are not going to get out of James Carville’s class unless you know how to properly open a bottle of champagne.’
“I said: ‘Here’s what you’re going to do. You don’t pop it like you see in the movies or you’re going to poke somebody’s eye out. You take the foil off. Now you’re going to take a dishcloth, and you’re going to execute the classic counterclockwise movement. The bottle is going to go one way; the cork is going to go the other way. You just ease it out, and the sound that you are looking for is the sigh of a satisfied woman.’
“The next Tuesday, the dean comes into my office and he said: ‘I’m closing the door. We need to have a talk.’”
A female student had complained about the sighing line.
Yes, James Carville’s comparison didn’t go over well with a snowflake coed. He tells Dowd that his response to a talking to from the dean was to tell the ribald, over-the-top Gilbert Gottfried “Aristocrats” joke to the class, which was probably a poor choice for a number of reasons — most importantly because Martin Mull’s version was considerably funnier and not as cringe-inducing.
And then, he says, he quit:
This was L.S. freaking U., not Oberlin. It was terrible. I wouldn’t take the coeds to dinner after class. I would take the male students. I was scared to death in my job. I was like: “I don’t need L.S.U.’s money. I don’t need to drive up there and listen to that crap.” I just said: “That’s it. I’m done. This is not for me.”
Why, yes, James. LSU is a woke indoctrination factory just like every other major university, save for a very few.
It’s terrible you don’t find comfort in the faculty making off-color jokes at the expense of the female students — most of whom are happy to listen to the most vulgar, foul, satanic pop music ever imagined.
But what’s true of politicians is true of their henchmen: Nobody cares about your problems.
And particularly Carville’s problems of living in a world that he and the rest of the villains running the Democrat Party for the past two generations have made.
Perhaps nobody wanted to hear James Carville talking about women and sex because they remember his role as the hatchet man protecting Bill Clinton, the serial rapist and sexual abuser whose pants were down around his ankles for his entire political career. Carville wouldn’t stop trashing the women Clinton abused for the entire time he was on the political scene.
Remember this quote following one of Clinton’s “bimbo eruptions“?
“Drag a $100 bill through a trailer camp and there’s no telling what you will find.”
Yeah, that’s why nobody wants to hear you make references to “satisfied” women, professor. Perhaps leave those to someone with less of a signature on the Creep-O Richter scale.
Clinton’s time in office had consequences, you know. His abuses made society less open and less collegial. Carville and the Clinton team politicized Clinton’s sexual abuse of that train of female victims — from Paula Jones to Gennifer Flowers to Kathleen Willey to Monica Lewinsky (and others) — such that it was no longer OK to simply note the moral failings of a man whose appetites outweighed his discipline. Instead, we got trench warfare, and we’ve never shed it.
Carville laments that. Asked by Dowd about a documentary being made about him, Carville harkens back to the Clinton years as the Good Old Days:
If you were going to ask me what I’d want the title of the documentary to be? “When Politics Was Fun.” There was actually a time when people loved doing this. People would go out, they’d drink, they’d talk to everybody, they’d leak stories. Generally, when it was over, you’d go sit with the other side and have drinks together.
“When politics was fun”?
The Clinton years were not fun politics.
Ask R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the founder of this publication. Tyrrell fought off the personal ruin the Clintons attempted to foist on him for simply telling the truth about Carville’s boss. The toll amounted to more than $1 million in legal fees, thanks to an independent prosecutor investigation, wire taps, break-ins at this publication’s offices, and other elements of a campaign of attrition by Team Clinton. (RELATED: Christian Josi: ‘R. Emmett Tyrrell Is a National Treasure’)
Surely Carville had no knowledge of any of that, though, right? He was too busy making politics fun.
Carville said nothing while the Democrat Party lurched communist after the Clinton years (it was certainly beckoning left during those years, even if that was attenuated by the shellacking Team Clinton took in the 1994 midterms), and now he whines horribly about wokeness and political and cultural hegemony on the part of the radicals. It’s no fun, he complains:
“Hubert Humphrey used to describe himself as ‘the Happy Warrior,’” he said. “If somebody said, ‘I’m a happy guy’ right now, they’d go: ‘What’s wrong with that guy? Don’t you realize the evil in this world?’
“It’s not like it used to be, where everybody would have these huge media scrums with hundreds of reporters and local news,” he said nostalgically. “The latest fad is campaigns unionizing. Who the hell ever wanted to work on a campaign that didn’t want to work on a Sunday? It was a sprint to the end.”
Carville has been sounding an alarm about progressives getting too censorious since he advised Hillary Clinton in 2016. He disparaged liberals’ snooty, elitist “faculty lounge” attitudes long before he blew off the faculty lounge himself. He complained that “woke stuff is killing us,” that the left was talking in a language that ordinary Americans did not understand, using terms like “Latinx” and “communities of color,” and with a tone many Americans found sneering, as in Hillary’s infamous phrase “basket of deplorables.”
“There are a lot of people on the left that would rather lose and be pure because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel superior,” Carville said. And that, he said, is how you end up with Dobbs.
Adding to his complaints, Carville argues that his own party is bitchy and feminist:
“No one wants to live like this,” he said. “Who ever thought it was a good idea to tell people you can’t hug them or you’ve got to be careful or you’ve got to think about names to call them other than the name you know them by? There’s nothing wrong with me being white or you being white or them being Black or me being male or you being female. It’s a giant, stupid argument.” …
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of his party. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’
“If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’”
Perhaps now it’s time for him to admit it: He’s a dinosaur.
Carville might have some cultural leanings toward the middle or even a traditional American view of life. But he’s spent his entire adult existence doing damage to the country — first, to the moral norms by touting a satyr and chronic liar as his political stake horse; and then to the political consensus by turning American politics into a blood sport no decent man or woman would participate in, for fear of having one’s life destroyed by hatchet men like Carville.
And then when that game passed him by, Carville retreated to the ivory tower in his semi-retirement to pitch the politics of the Good Old Days when you had the FBI send over its files on all your political opponents.
Somehow we’re supposed to give this man any quarter for his lament of what he and his side have wrought?
It’s mind-boggling. And it’s an exhortation from Mother Nature herself that we should ignore James Carville intently from now on, regardless of Maureen Dowd and the New York Times’ earnest efforts to make him relevant once more.
