BREAKING: "Dripping with decadence and corruption!"

MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2018

Plato gets it right: For starters, we have to compliment Joe Scarborough for some of his reactions this morning.

At the start of Morning Joe, Scarborough noted that Anderson Cooper did a miserable job last night on Anderson's Playpen. He also noted the fact that Stephanie Clifford's reptilian lawyer had vastly over-promised regarding this TV event.

For what it's worth, this was the sixth straight morning that Joe and Mika have failed to appear on the morning program together. The break-up dates to Friday, March 16, when Joe seemed to offend Mika by his mocking comments about the reptilian's lawyer slithery appearance on their TV show.

Maybe it's all a coincidence! But we got the impression that Mika was offended that day, and that Joe was backpedaling on his remarks in subsequent segments. At any rate, the lovebirds haven't been on the air together since that point in time.

(Mika hosted alone all last week, rarely mentioning Joe's absence. Because the program's called Morning Joe, this struck us as odd.)

So it goes as our failing nation's silly elites wait for Mr. Trump's War. Luckily, we have Anderson's Playpen to keep us amused as we await our fate here out here On the Beach, to borrow from Nevil Shute.

Scarborough reacted with skepticism today, as he did on March 16. Elsewhere, the children have reacted to last night's performance much as one might have expected.

Perhaps most strikingly, the children have almost wholly lost the ability to distinguish between an allegation and an established fact. (This became clear on Morning Joe as soon as Joe stopped speaking.)

Clifford has now said that she was once threatened, on one occasion in 2011, but she has offered no evidence or proof. She has advanced an allegation, an allegation which is widely being treated as an established fact.

An allegation isn't a fact! At one time, this was an easy distinction to make, one so simple that it could even be made by major American journalists.

Today, that distinction is so elusive that it's right up there with Sanskrit and whatever followed string theory, at least to judge from the childish work of our "journalist actors."

Needless to say, the children have failed to serve in another way. They haven't helped you remember the fact that false claims about physical threats have been made by other sex accusers in the not-too-distant past.

Back in May 1999, Kathleen Willey's false claim about being threatened came close to getting Cody Shearer killed. But this false claim was quickly hushed up at the time, and it's been disappeared ever since. Given their moral and intellectual disorder, our journalists [HEART] those sex accusers, and they always will.

We'll review reactions to last night's program over the next several days. For today, we thought you ought to consider last Friday's post at New York magazine by Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is no fan of our president, Donald J. Trump. Last Friday, his fear about our society's declining state of affairs took him back to his Plato.

As he started, he described our society to a T. Headline included, here's how Sully began:

SULLIVAN (3/22/18): America Takes the Next Step Toward Tyranny

Every now and again, when I find myself buried in the latest blizzard of invariably disturbing news emanating from the Trump White House, I go back and remind myself of the core narrative. I read Plato’s Republic again, the prism through which I first raised the alarm about Donald Trump’s emergence. The prism is essentially how a late-stage democracy, dripping with decadence and corruption, with elites dedicated primarily to enriching themselves, and a people well past any kind of civic virtue, morphs so easily into tyranny.

Sullivan got it right! We are indeed "a late-stage democracy, dripping with decadence and corruption."

Starting with people like Cooper and Avenatti, our elites are "dedicated primarily to enriching themselves" (and to increasing their fame).

Are we Americans, as a people, "well past any kind of civic virtue?"

We'd stay away from assessments like that, but that's certainly a decent description of large chunks of our own liberal elites, not to mention the belly-crawling, corrupted elites widely found Over There.

We do indeed live in a democracy which is "dripping with decadence and corruption!" Without any question, our elites do strongly tend to be "dedicated to enriching themselves."

You can see this any night of the week if you simply tune in to cable—and we refer to the cable you like!

As Sullivan's description continued, he continued getting it right. Debased elites are all around—but again and again, we can only spot the debased elites Over There, the ones on the other side.

Did Plato mention that blindness too? We throw it back to Sullivan, who may be writing from Provincetown, perhaps even On the Beach.

Where was Joe: We wondered about Joe's absence last week. For whatever it may be worth, this guy was wondering too.