Hooray for Hollywood? You can bet that White House and Team Biden staffers won't sing that tune today, not after George Clooney's op-ed in the New York Times. Clooney, a long-time supporter of Biden and the Democrat Party, just stripped both of their main post-debate spin -- the "one bad night" narrative.

It wasn't just a bad night, Clooney writes, and he should know -- because Biden was just as bad three weeks earlier at his fundraiser. And what's more, Clooney declares that he's done with the gaslighting:

I love Joe Biden. As a senator. As a vice president and as president. I consider him a friend, and I believe in him. Believe in his character. Believe in his morals. In the last four years, he’s won many of the battles he’s faced.

But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate. 

Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign. The George Stephanopoulos interview only reinforced what we saw the week before. As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, who we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.

Clooney then accuses Democrat officeholders of a conspiracy of silence:

We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate. This isn’t only my opinion; this is the opinion of every senator and congress member and governor that I’ve spoken with in private. Every single one, irrespective of what he or she is saying publicly.

Just how many elected Democrats does Clooney know? Most of them, probably, because he raises money for them constantly. That's damning information all on its own, underscoring the rank dishonesty of Democrats about Biden's condition. Although Clooney doesn't address it, it also raises questions about why the DNC opted to prevent any challenge to Biden in the primaries despite obvious evidence of his cognitive decline, going back to at least April 2022 when the Easter Bunny ordered Biden away from reporters on the White House lawn. 

What does Clooney want? He proposes what Jon Stewart proposed on Monday evening -- an emergency open convention. Clooney dismisses talk of difficulties and legal obstacles, not to mention that other Democrats and factions -- such as Big Labor -- have already lined up behind Biden:

Let’s hear from Wes Moore and Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom and Andy Beshear and J.B. Pritzker and others. Let’s agree that the candidates not attack one another but, in the short time we have, focus on what will make this country soar. Then we could go into the Democratic convention next month and figure it out.

Would it be messy? Yes. Democracy is messy. But would it enliven our party and wake up voters who, long before the June debate, had already checked out? It sure would.

All of this is predicated, however, on Clooney's "hero" withdrawing from the nomination. Biden has already made it clear he won't go quietly, or at all. Clooney's op-ed probably intends to shame Biden into changing his mind, but that's not going to change Biden's lifelong aspiration to this particular office and his grip on it. Nor will it change the fact that the Biden family businesses are all tied to Biden's grip on power, and that a withdrawal will put an end to the cashflow, permanently. And it also ignores that this will rip off the bandage on factional disputes that nearly derailed the Democrats in 2020 without any way to resolve them in a few short weeks of what would be merely a televised "smoke filled back room" to determine who wields the power within the party.

The time for Clooney to speak up was in 2023, or 2022, when public evidence made Biden's decline obvious to everyone. For that matter, why didn't Clooney himself speak up after the fundraiser, or immediately after the debate? He's part of the gaslighting brigade; he's only speaking out now because it's clear that the con has stopped working.