Is there anyone in legacy media in Louisiana more vapid and irritating than Clancy DuBos? If there is, we haven’t seen him or her.
There is certainly some competition, of course, as the newspapers and TV stations in this state are peppered with personalities who never had what it took to hit the big time. That’s life in the collection of small markets that is Louisiana. But none of the others seem as full of themselves as DuBos, whose slavery to old-line conventional wisdom and yawn-inducing takes should have made him utterly irrelevant a long time ago.
DuBos made his name as the publisher of Gambit Weekly, which a million years ago was a somewhat-relevant free publication which did its best work covering the music and entertainment scene in New Orleans. For some reason DuBos thought that gave him a platform to opine on politics, though what he really did was spend his columns kissing up to whatever local machine was in power in the Crescent City. We’ve never seen a Clancy DuBos column that didn’t come off as what an AI chatbot cooked up in City Hall in New Orleans would turn out.
And the one he wrote on Monday is no exception.
DuBos’ column now runs at the Advocate, because John Georges bought Gambit Weekly (why?) a few years ago and he’s gradually trying to consolidate the entities in his failing media empire. So now he’s opining more about state politics than the local stuff.
And he really, really doesn’t like Jeff Landry’s anti-crime TV commercial. It has a little different spin depending on what market it runs in – pointing out different Democrats who suck in Shreveport, Baton Rouge and New Orleans – but it says essentially the same thing.
The Shreveport version directly calls out the city’s Soros DA James Stewart, and the New Orleans version name-drops LaToya Cantrell and James Williams, both of whom were recipients of support from the Soros-funded entities that run the Big Easy these days.
What DuBos is angry about is that the Baton Rouge version doesn’t name anybody. He notes that the DA in Baton Rouge is Hillar Moore, who is a white Democrat, and because Moore isn’t named in the ad like Stewart, Cantrell and Williams are in the Shreveport and New Orleans versions that means Jeff Landry is a “racist” and his ad is a “dog whistle.”
Or maybe the ad hits Stewart, Cantrell and Williams because unlike Moore, they’re Soros-funded advocates for street criminals in positions which demand a responsible commitment to fighting crime, and Clancy DuBos doesn’t want to talk about that.
Which would make sense seeing as though it’s left-wing nonprofits like the Ford Foundation which are now propping up the Advocate as its subscribership dives beneath the waves. You can’t really complain about the rich out-of-state leftist wreckers who’ve trashed our cities with hard-core cultural Marxism and stupid socialist policies when that’s who’s covering your paycheck, can you?
Surely that’s got nothing to do with it. Right?
Our guess is if Landry changed his anti-crime ad to talk about the direct influence of George Soros and his empire of radical-leftist cash on the breakdown of our criminal justice system, Clancy DuBos would be along to call him an anti-Semite, because that’s the stock comeback to any criticism of George Soros.
Forget about the fact that as a kid Soros went around Hungary helping the Nazis steal all the valuables from that country’s Jews when they were sent off to the camps, George Soros is the very epitome of American Jewry in the Left’s telling of it.
But we digress.
DuBos is also quite put out by the fact that Landry doesn’t delve into specifics of how he’s going to fight crime. In his 30-second ad.
Which is so stupid it’s actually impressive.
Nobody talks about specific policy in a 30-second ad at the beginning of a political campaign, and Clancy DuBos knows that. When it comes to crime you wouldn’t want to do that really in any event, because most of what you’d do is going to depend on getting the legislature to pass it in the first place.
And most of the rest consists of things which are going to be “controversial.”
Landry has already hinted at what fighting crime in those cities will look like. Things like staffing up the State Police and deploying it into New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport to buttress the failing and embattled local police. Like working to get the Attorney General’s office into taking over some prosecutions of violent crime where the local DA is falling short. Like embracing some judicial reforms that the judges really, really won’t like. Maybe rolling back some of the excessively lenient “criminal justice reforms” passed under John Bel Edwards’ time in office.
Those are the kinds of things he would pursue.
But there are constituencies who would oppose each and every one of those items. The Advocate panders to all of those constituencies, though strangely enough most of the people belonging to them are not Advocate subscribers.
So DuBos won’t acknowledge any of that. He just pretends that Landry doesn’t have an anti-crime policy because he didn’t articulate specifics in a 30-second spot which runs in May.
This is not somebody who has any room to talk about the shallowness of anyone else.
DuBos says Landry’s running against the black elected officials in the cities rather than the “six other candidates” for governor. Oooh, sick burn. Because it would REALLY be an effective ad for Landry to critique John Schroder or Stephen Waguespack on their crime proposals. In May. When nobody even knows what those proposals are.
So you’ll know, Clancy, that’s what a Republican frontrunner is supposed to do – Republican voters in this state, who mostly live in the suburbs because urban Democrats have made the cities mostly unlivable, want something done about the mess LaToya Cantrell has made.
Or Sharon Broome has made. Or the one Adrian Perkins made before the voters turned him out for a Republican.
Of course, Clancy DuBos has kissed the asses of those urban Democrats his whole career. So of course he’s angry that Landry calls them out.
And if you’re Landry, you’ll be more than happy to run against Clancy DuBos, too – because that’s a pretty easy way to win the votes of a majority of Louisianans.