BREAKING: How did we ever make it this far?

TUESDAY, JUNE 5, 2018

Craig Melvin's deepest beliefs: Before we say another word, we want to establish one point:

Savannah and Hoda had no idea about their colleague, Matt Lauer. Neither did Craig Melvin.

Everyone had heard about Matt, but those three hadn't heard. If they had heard about Matt, they would have spoken up right away, their moral greatness and their sincerity are so achingly clear.

We've always thought well of Melvin. We overlooked his role on MSNBC's weekend Dateline reruns, in which he covers for the channel's headlong rush to stop pretending to be doing "the news" and to entertain us with murders instead.

He just does what his owners tell him to do! That's what we've always said.

We're less inclined to respect Melvin after watching his sliced-and-diced, heavily-edited interview with Bill Clinton. The children can't seem to stop playing this game, and it looks like they never will.

We have no idea why Clinton would waste his time writing a novel with James Patterson. We don't know why he agreed to sit for a sliced-and-diced interview overseen by a bunch of hacks like the owners of Savannah, Heda and Craig, none of whom had any idea about what Matt was doing.

It was dumb to write the book; it was dumber to sit for the interview. Dumbest of all was the slicing-and-dicing, followed by the various analyses which have left us wondering how our human race ever made it this far.

In this country, we'd guess the answer has two parts. First, we had the frontier to conquer. In the last century, we had external enemies.

Today, we have a bunch of overpaid children paid to pretend to be journalists. And good lord! The things they've said so far!

Over at The Atlantic, we celebrate the return of "the 21-year-old intern," the famous novelized figure who of course never existed.

This nonexistent person has reappeared in various locales, but in that essay at the Atlantic, the "21-year-old intern" is specifically cited two separate times. She was born in the Young Adult novels from which these journalists have drawn their most basic ideas.

Watching Don Lemon last night, we actually saw a legal analyst saying some version of what appears in this typically garbled CNN transcript. We can't find videotape of the segment, so we can't do their proofreading for them, as we typically do:

"I would have been more satisfied had he addressed what I thought was the most obvious reason why a married man would not have addressed the woman who was his mistress 20 years ago with a personal phone call and perhaps with some conciliatory flowers." That was obvious to me...

Seriously! It would have been better if he'd sent her some flowers! That was actually said on the air! How in the world did our human race actually make it this far?

That said, we were most struck by Christina Cauterucci's rumination at Slate. All through her piece, she showed no sign of having noticed how sliced and sliced the Today Show broadcast was. She didn't feel the need to explain her reference to "bad sexual behavior."

We were struck by several things she said, but we were most struck by this passage:

CAUTERUCCI (6/4/18): If feminist responses to Patterson and Clinton’s defenses sound tired, it’s because many of us have already used them against Trump. Yes, it was also bad for JFK to sleep around in office, but no, he didn’t lie under oath about it; no, Marilyn Monroe was not a White House intern; and no, that’s not what the question was about.

Watching that interview, does anyone ever have any idea "what the question was about?" Given the way the interview was edited, that seems unclear throughout.

Cauterucci writes almost exclusively about sex and gender issues. Her remarks about JFK are remarkable. We'll run through several points:

Monica Lewinsky wasn't an intern during her intermittent two-year affair with Clinton. She was a 22- to 24-year old full time federal employee. (Clinton played no role in getting her the job, which she had accepted before the two ever met.)

That said, President Kennedy did have an intern in his White House. She had just turned 19 when she started; she'd never had a boy friend.

She was also conventionally good looking. On her fourth day in the White House, she was essentially procured for Kennedy, and she was then essentially raped.

She wrote a well-written memoir on the subject a few years ago. Cauterucci knows everything on the face of the earth, but despite her area of specialization, she doesn't seem to know this.

Did Kennedy sleep with Marilyn Monroe? As far as we know, that has never been established one way or the other.

At any rate, why did he never lie under oath? Because in that era, journalists agreed that they wouldn't spend their time hiding in the bushes trying to catch public figures in the act of having a girl friend. Perhaps because we had an external enemy, they had decided that they wouldn't spend their time doing that.

In 1987, that rule changed. Journalists literally hid in the bushes overnight, hoping to catch Gary Hart.

They did catch Gary Hart that night, and they ended his career. As with Lewinsky, so too with Donna Rice. This astounding array of creepy crawlers also made things difficult for her.

In the current situation, the denizens of our celebrity press corps have never stopped attacking Clinton for once having had such a relationship himself. President Clinton had a girl friend over the course of two years, and by the rules of the game in our dying culture, that isn't allowed.

None of those facts about Kennedy tell us what to think about Clinton. Did he engage in "bad sexual behavior" with Lewinsky, as Slate's young Dimmesdale says?

He engaged in very stupid behavior, but that's largely because a gang of creeps were hiding in the bushes around his life. Some of these people were Ann Coulter's friends, but the bulk of these people were "journalists."

Cauterucci is one of the modern Dimmesdales. So is Rachel Maddow. When it turned out that Governor Bentley had a girl friend, she played the tape of a telephone call between the two lovers over and over again, childishly pretending to be embarrassed. You really have to be a sick puppy to dumb the world down that way for bog pay, but that's where our culture now stands.

America has always had its Dimmesdales; today, they pretend to be journalists. They focus on who's zoomin' who because, not unlike Cauterucci, they don't care about black kids in Chicago, or about older women in Kentucky who can't afford to go to the doctor despite having paid for Obamacare.

Bill Clinton shouldn't have interacted with Monica Lewinsky, who was neither 21 nor an intern. But it was mobs of children posing as journalists who chased the pair to ground.

Personally, we're glad that Governor Bentley found someone he liked. We only wish our modern Dimmesdales were able to do the same thing.

Important closing point: Why hasn't Cauterucci ever heard of Mimi Alford?

Simple! The idiots who hated Clinton just luvvvv their JFK!