The British used to call the month of August the media’s “silly season,” because virtually the whole class of British hommes sérieux (as they then were), the Lords and the Commons, the journalists and the politicians alike, left “town”—for their second homes in Tuscany or the Dordogne, or to go yachting in the Mediterranean or salmon fishing in Norway or grouse shooting in Scotland—leaving the public prints in the hands of the junior varsity, which had not much of substance to write about anyway. The A-teams didn’t reconvene until it was time for the party-conference season in late September.

Now, of course, it’s never not the media’s silly season, and this is the case in America no less than in Britain. But this past August appears to have set a standard for silliness that we must hope remains unsurpassed during our lifetimes. Throughout the media, Left and Right, our own party-conference season—beginning with the Republicans in July and ending with the Democrats in August—cried out for metaphors drawn from the world of entertainment.

For Christopher F. Rufo of City Journal, for example, the two conventions were symbolized by “Oprah vs. Hulk.” For the excellent Niall Ferguson of The Free Press, writing even before the Democrats’ final night of Kraft durch Freude, it was “The Barbenheimer Election,” reminiscent of last year’s titanic box-office battle between Barbie and Oppenheimer:

Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for the presidency, the architects of the