Pneumonia struck in 2014!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2016

Josh Marshall sees no evil: Until last summer, a long-time friend of ours would come to Baltimore each summer to house-sit for one of her friends.

Our friend is a former teacher and principal. The person for whom she would house-sit had been one of her colleagues in the Baltimore City Schools. Her annual visit would let her catch up on her Baltimore friends, and on her former colleague's cat.

Two summers ago, our friend wasn't feeling well by the end of her stay. When her friend returned from her annual travels, she took our friend to a clinic. The diagnosis surprised us:

Pneumonia.

At the time, we didn't know that people even get pneumonia, let alone in the summer. In this amusing post by Kevin Drum, he says it's fairly common. He also mocks the press.

Liberals might see a silver lining in Hillary Clinton's illness. Her illness might distract attention away from her "basket of deplorables" comment.

Hillary Clinton has always been a bit of gaffe machine. The pattern began with her first major national appearance, on the famous 60 Minutes from New Hampshire in 1992, when she committed the unforced political error of snarking at Tammy Wynette.

The "basket of deplorables" comment was a major groaner, both on the politics and on the merits. The fact that many liberal pundits can't see this—well, our tribe's determined moral/intellectual blindness strikes us as very depressing. We'll plan to discuss the deplorables comment tomorrow.

Concerning the pneumonia matter:

In recent posts, Kevin Drum and Charlie Pierce have both discussed the way the press corps' long-standing behavior plays into this development. We'll only note that the liberal world has begun complaining about this behavior extremely late in the game.

Conservatives have assaulted the press corps for alleged bias for the past fifty years. Through all the pseudo-scandals of the 1990s; through the subsequent twenty-month war against Gore; through the repulsive coverage of Candidate Clinton in 2007 and 2008, often by major "liberals;" through all those episodes, we the liberals averted our gaze from the mainstream press corps' strange behavior concerning the Clintons.

Our careerists were looking out for themselves, and we in the rank and file just aren't real good at this game. Conservatives continued attacking the press; we continued averting our gaze from what the press was doing. This continued through the Washington Post's ridiculous treatment of Hillary Clinton's speaking fees in the summer of 2014. It continued through the New York Times' astonishing "bombshell report" about the scary uranium deal.

It continued through the New York Times' disgraceful pimping of the late Beau Biden's death. We liberals have been disqualifyingly slow to complain about the upper-end mainstream press. We've finally started complaining now, extremely late in the game.

By the way:

Drum has been doing excellent work about the press corps in recent weeks. Many, many people keep saying we drove him to it.

We hate it when so many people say such stupid stuff. If we might borrow from John McCain, such statements "make our skin crawl." That said, we can't stop all those people from saying such things, or from wondering where we liberals and pseudo-liberals would be if our tribe had been willing to push back decades ago, when the ongoing nonsense began.

Conservatives have pushed back forever. We've been asleep in the woods.

Tomorrow, we'll discuss the "basket of deplorables" remark. If you want to know why our tribe is so unsuccessful, all you really have to do is review our leaders' sad reactions to that unwise, undisciplined remark.

Meanwhile, Clinton has pneumonia everywhere except at TPM! At TPM, this incident barely seems to have occurred. Let's all see no evil, friends!

Drum and Pierce are trying to create some badly-needed perspective. TPM? Not so much!