Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Biden’s Petard Hanging
My OCD compels me. I must, I must. Correct what I consider an egregious error, that is. In a Commentary Magazine podcast, discussing Biden’s possession of classified documents at the U Penn center and his home and garage, the Editor (John Podhoretz, I presume) titles the podcast “Biden’s Petard Hanging.” Early in the podcast, Eli Lake appropriately and correctly uses the term from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘hoist by his own petard,’ a phrase now ineradicably embedded in the English language.
The term”hanging” used in the title of the podcast, as above, reflects a misconception about the term “hoist” in the context of this saying. While that term references being lifted into the air, the assumption that that occurs as in a hanging, is incorrect. A ‘petard’ is a small explosive device, and ‘hoist’ in this phrase means to be blown into the air by one’s own small explosive device. Not as in a hanging, but as seen in many action movies, of someone actually being blown into the air by the explosion of the petard.
That John is misinformed on this point, as suggested by the title word chosen for the podcast, reflects a certain degree of cultural unawareness that is rather surprising from someone sporting a University of Chicago education, and the son of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter.
Published in General
Exactly. Good catch.
Thank you!
@Nanoceltthecontrarian Thanks. What a marvelously eclectic group of readers/commenters at this site.
By the way, your Ricochet handle suggest that either you are either an extremely tiny Celt, or a billionth part of Celtic ancestry. Care to explain??
Anyone who expects John Podhoretz to live up to his father – or mother, for that matter – has been very disappointed for a very long time.
Same with Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, and the list goes on.
Greg Gutfeld also talked about Biden being hoisted by his own petard on the show tonight.
Starting around 10:00:
I am of Celtic descent, at least in part, and am a very very tiny representative of that fabled barbarian population that used to fight the Romans by stripping themselves naked, bleaching their hair and arranging it to stand upright, and rushing en masse into battle screaming. Indeed, in physical strength and daring, I am about the billionth part of them. And of course, the first 5 letters backwards are Conan; and rather than a barbarian I am a mere contrarian. An attempt to borrow glory from my wild ancestors but having to be a little bit honest by quantifying my comparative stature. But I am larger than Gutfeld.
I am no Hamlet expert, but I’ve always thought it was “ hoist with …” not “hoist by …”
You’re probably right. I’ll look it up.
A common misconception
https://youtu.be/KuuafUtVte0
Correct you are. Sorry for butchering Shakespeare. So I, too, qualify as being hoist with my own petard. Those little petards are dangerous.
Thanks for the explanation. Somewhen I decided it must refer to being “hoisted” by the ropes in a sailing ships rigging. I should have looked it up long ago.
@NanoceltTheContrarian, we are all indebted to your OCD for gracing us with this illuminating and scintillating discussion! May it favor us often with more such enlightenments . Thank you.
Most people are.
When you have very little on which to base any claim to significance, you take what you can get.
The bards will sing your glory to the ages.
I hadn’t previously considered the Shakespearean references in the road runner cartoons.
Horribly, I’d always thought a “petard” must be a spear, and someone hoist by his own petard was impaled on his own spear. Oooghhhh.
I like Nanocelt’s much better! Very cool!
Actually. I would think that the parents of John Podhoretz, Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg would be very proud of their sons in that they resisted the pied piper of populism, and did not stray from Barry Goldwater/Ronald Reagan conservatism.
Do you think Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan weren’t populists?
Exactly.
The same people hated Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.
“They said if I voted for Trump, the U.S. would be defeated in Afghanistan.
“I voted for him anyway — and they were right!”
(Inspired by an old joke about Barry Goldwater.)
Norman Podheretz is on record as a Trump supporter because he had a great appreciation for ordinary Americans who supported Trump. His view was the exact opposite of John’s. Irving wasn’t around to opine. Gertrude is not on record on the issue that I am aware. I am not aware of Lucianne Goldberg’s views, God rest her soul, but I doubt she shared her son’s avid never-Trumpism.
Goldwater was a Libertarian masquerading as a Conservative. Reagan was a New Deal Democrat for a good part of his life but moved Right as head of SAG when he saw first hand what communists were up to in Hollywood. He succeeded electorally where Goldwater failed because he did not try to distance himself from a populist base (the Birchers for example) as Goldwater did by enlisting the Elitist William Buckley to savage the Birchers (the greatest effort at suppressing one’s own base in American political history). Reagan accepted their support with the simple line”They support me but I don’t support them.” He shared their anti-communist stance, though not in an unhinged, but rather realistic but optimistic way. In my book, Reagan was more of a populist, with a very broad coalition, than Goldwater.
Could be. I thought it was his 2nd wife who p____-_____d him into becoming more of a libertarian than a conservative. But I could have been wrong about that.
Do you have any further details to substantiate how this happened? I remember those days and remember how Bircher was used as an epithet to smear anyone who could support Goldwater.
Look up the last column Buckley wrote for National Review before he died. In that column he described his efforts, at Goldwater’s behest, to distance Goldwater from the Birchers, essentially by smearing the Birchers. You can get the information from Buckely himself, who was very proud of his effort on Goldwater’s “behalf”. I was about 14 years old at the time, growing up in Southern Nevada. Arizona was a hot bed of card carrying Birchers. Indeed, most of the businessmen in Pheonix were Birchers, because of their anti-Communism. I saw Buckley’s effort as base suppression.
As an aside, try to go back and watch Bucklery’s debate with Reagan on the Panama Canal (Buckley favored Jimmy Carter’s approach, of turning the canal over to Panama). I thought Reagan absolutely cleaned Buckley’s clock in that delayed. Reagan was knowledgeable and prepared, whereas Buckley appeared to be winging it. As it worked out, Panama got the canal, and the world hasn’t ended. But Reagan made the better case for keeping it.
I am not an historian or political commentator. That’s the way I see it. I doubt anyone agrees with me, but I’m sticking to my story. No real way to corroborate my view at this late date I suspect.
I find this very interesting. I’m not sure how to go about looking those things up, but I’ll give it a try, especially for the last column Buckley wrote. I never paid a lot of attention to Buckley toward the end, though I knew he was there. There were times when I even read his columns. I sometimes subscribed to NR starting in the late 70s.
I’m not absolutely sure it was him, but in looking back on it, I think it was probably Buckley who pushed me away from conservatives and Republicans for a few years in the early 70s. I don’t remember having an NR subscription back then, but I probably read his columns somewhere. The name wasn’t as significant to me then as it later became, which is why I’m not sure.
I have Birchers among some of my relatives. I don’t know how long they’ve been members. The one who was most outspoken about it is no longer with us. I certainly wasn’t aware of until the 80s. From what I hear, the organization almost seems to serve more of a social function than anything else. I’m not going to go into detail here, but some folks might be surprised at the kinds of people who can be Birchers. Think “diversity.”
No they weren’t.
Why do you think people have called them populists, then? (You could look it up, if that helps.)
He can’t believe Reagan et al were populists, because he thinks being a populist is bad, therefore nobody he likes could be or have been a populist.
That is my suspicion not only with Gary, but with a lot of other uses of the word “populist.” But I didn’t want to be accused of leading the witness any more than I’ve already done.