The New Yorker used to be one of the greatest magazines in the world. A mere forty years ago it still sported some of the best writing printed anywhere. Before that, back to its inception in 1925, it published at the very top of the American literary scene. Editor William Shawn is a legend.

Cartoonists like Charles Adams and James Thurber and writers like Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley graced its pages. But around the 1960s, like so many other paladins of our culture, The New Yorker felt the pull of the left wing counterculture and instead of fighting it and remaining an adult publication, it succumbed to Bolshie culture pressure to render it the effete poodle of a periodical it is today.

Close

And that brings us to the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg. A Harvard programmed former Jimmy Carter speechwriter, New Republic editor, and Obama bootlicker, the close to 80 Hertzberg is one of those journalists who writes for people who know very little about a subject but who are also convinced they are experts on it. Which pretty much sums up the bi-coastal pseudo-elite. So when a like guy that writes something your smartest option is to yawn and turn the page, such is the quality of political writing these days at the once glorious magazine. Thus, poor irrelevant Hertzberg of the New Yorker has to wax outrageous to get a little legitimate attention.

His ploy on Sunday to get noticed? Asking in a tweet whether it was time for a military coup against President Trump.

This is laughable for a couple of reasons.

First Hertzberg, who is a Navy vet, has not perhaps since his service been the kind of an individual a potentially rebellious general would follow into insurrection and very probably not even then. Unintentionally gauche Manhattan cocktail parties rarely offer those kind of tactical connections.

Second, Hertzberg forgets, though he took an oath once to defend it, that our military has a profound loyalty to the Constitution and frowns on military coups. Also, non-regulation national sedition, which could start a civil war, can put a strong letter of reprimand into an Army officer’s personnel file.

However, a desperate need for attention, the lack of democratic scruples, and the sheer political frustration of the Left as they watch Donald Trump succeed has brought them, and not for the first time, to the point of asking our military to overthrow a duly elected president. That is their commitment to this republic. That is their commitment to America.