On the other hand, nothing about Greta Thunberg qualifies her as a celebrity

Donald Trump's boorishness is not news. But Charlie Sykes is right: turning Greta Thunberg into some sort of celebrity because she is a sympathetic child speaking out on behalf of a cause which TIME magazine, the media, and liberal elites generally favor is cynical and kind of disgusting in itself.

She's a kid. Ok, she's a bright kid. Whether her anger over her elders' inattention to the threat of climate change is fueled by her autism or not, she isn't newsworthy, no matter how appealing a symbol she might be. Being cute and appealing makes one an authority on absolutely nothing.

TIME's selection of Greta as Person of the Year (overlooking the Hong Kong democracy demonstrators, the Ukraine whistleblower, Kim Jong Un, Pete Buttigieg- the first serious openly gay candidate for a major party's presidential nomination- and many others who actually made a significant impact on the world this past year) is kind of like Barack Obama's Nobel Prize for not being George W. Bush: a cynical political gesture which ought not to be taken too seriously, and for which those responsible ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Nothing that Greta Thunberg is or has done qualifies her as a celebrity. To be blunt about it, she's being used- and while the global left's use of an autistic teenager as a gimmick to advance even a worthy cause may not be as boorish and crude as President Trump's mockery of her, in its own way it's just as cynical and deplorable.

Image by Donkey Hotey from a photograph used under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike license granted by the originator, Anders Hellberg.