Candidate Harris once dated Brown!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2019

Malfunctioning minds want to know: In a world which largely lacks talent among its elites, it has been an amazing thing to see new talent emerge.

Last year, we thought that campaign ad by Candidate Ocasio-Cortez was one of the greatest political statements we had ever seen. In part, its greatness lay in the way the candidate delivered the text of her ad.

We were thrilled to see her talent put on display once again when she spoke with Stephen Colbert last week.

More on that appearance below. To watch the first segment, click here.

We were also struck to see the way talent emerged when Kamala Harris held her initial rally in Oakland last Sunday. Harris displayed a rare command presence on stage—and the highly important ability to laugh and broadly smile.

When others liked Harris' lines of questioning in several Senate hearings last year, we found her a bit demagogic. That said, we were thrilled to see talent emerging last Sunday.

Because real talent is very rare, we've been thrilled to see it emerge. Then we found ourselves reading this, the start of a very short op-ed column by California honcho Willie brown, for whom we did radio spots for a number of months not that many years back:

BROWN (1/29/19): I've been peppered with calls from the national media about my "relationship" with Kamala Harris, particularly since it became obvious that she was going to run for president. Most of them, I have not returned.

Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago...

That was the start of Brown's confession. Where we were thrilled to see talent emerge, the malfunctioning machines who constitute a large part of our upper-end press apparently wanted to talk about dating and sex.

These idiots simply can't help it. As we've told you again and again, this is the only type of topic they actually care about.

They care about who's zoomin' who. They also care about wardrobe and hair, and they acre a great deal about the phony quotations they choose as a group to invent.

These idiots simply can't help it. But neither can the corporate pseudo-progressives who are currently defining the scripts for our own floundering tribe.

We hate to criticize Monica Hesse again, but we think her new column in the Washington Post offers a case in point. Our analysis will run on this post-Aristotelian fuel:

"Man [sic] is the animal which lives by script alone."

We humans love to peddle our various tribal scripts. Under prevailing rules of the game, all the facts must be rearranged to fit these treasured narratives. It seems to us that this rule was in play even as Hesse got started:

HESSE (1/30/19): As of this week, women are running for president—multiple women—and lo, the country has been awarded the chance for a do-over. This time, we swear, we won’t order them to smile more if they really want our votes. This time, we’ll stop using phrases such as “likable enough?” when what we really mean is, “too many ovaries?”

Sigh.

Columnist, "sigh" right back at you! Hesse starts by pimping the silly idea that male candidates haven't been dogged, in recent decades, by the question of "likability." Beyond that, she pretends that Candidate Obama's giant smile wasn't correctly cited, again and again, as one of the secrets to his success.

Harris' completely believable smile and laughter will be an important weapon for her, just as large believable smiles have helped male pols in the past. Indeed, when we watched Ocasio-Cortez speaking with Colbert last week, we were struck by her amazing ability to bring the spirit of pleasure, enjoyment and fun to her discussion, as Bill Clinton did so long ago, agreeing to blow on his sax.

Beyond that, AOC's smile is very large, as was Obama's before her. This is a very large part of her talent, with which she's advancing important progressive ideas at an astounding rate.

A smile is a very important tool, in entertainment or politics. So is likability, even if the malfunctioning cyborgs of the upper-end press have massively overplayed likability in recent decades, routinely using it as a weapon against those pols they disfavor.

A smile is a very important tool but, in tribal journalism, the script is all there is. For that reason, we keep encountering inane discussions from everyone including Samantha Bee, in which progressives pretend that likability questions are visited on female candidates only.

Aristotle is said to have said that we human are "the rational animal." If he meant what he's often taken to have meant by that, it's clear that, for all his erudition, the great Greek never had cable.

All across the modern landscape, man [sic], including women, does little except peddle script. Every fact is made to fit the pre-existing story line. Distinctions will always be drawn to further the narrative, no matter how flimsy or tedious:

HESSE: Plenty of us have, after all, spent an awful lot of time discussing Bill Clinton’s willie and Anthony Weiner’s wiener: it’s not that we don’t talk about the sexual predilections of male candidates.

But we do talk about them in a different way. We talk about men abusing power. We talk about women not even deserving power. The distinction matters...

These peddlers will always find a distinction designed to Keep Script Alive.

The idiots of the mainstream press have been chasing the sex lives of male pols ever since they literally hid in the bushes to take out Gary Hart. On liberal cable, the deranged Rachel Maddow just couldn't stop playing the Bentley telephone sex tape. She'd cover her ears and play "little girl" to pretend that she hated doing it.

These idiots have been doing this since 1987. They've changed the course of world history as they play their childish games. People are dead all over the world because they misfire this way and no, they don't plan to stop.

But in the mind of the reader of script, the current preferred tribal story line must always prevail. In the world of script-readers like Hesse, female pols have been attacked in unique, special ways—and that assertion must be the end of the story.

Citizens, can we talk? It isn't that these manifest idiots need to stop discussing the sex lives of female pols. They have to stop diddling themselves in this way in general.

They need to get their small, empty heads our of the nation's underwear drawers. But if you're the Washington Post "gender columnist," you will never say such a thing. Instead, you'll end your column peddling script in this way:

HESSE: [Willie Brown] wasn’t her boss. The relationship was consensual. Dating a technically still-married man 30 years one’s senior might not be the relationship choice that most of us would make, but it’s understandable that smart government officials in San Francisco’s political scene would end up socializing with each other. Was Harris supposed to date only morons with whom she had nothing in common?

Welcome to the 2020 campaign. I’m not saying there are easy answers to all of my questions. But the only way a woman is ever going to be elected to the top of anything is if we stop making insinuations about how she got there.

Hesse isn't claiming that there are easy answers to all her questions. That said, here's the last question she asked:

"Was Harris supposed to date only morons with whom she had nothing in common?"

Is Hesse so broken that she means to imply that we should be trying to answer that question? Aristotle's error is on full display whenever these script-readers scrawl.

Actual talent has been emerging, on TV and in the public square. As it does, the broken machines of the national "press corps" struggle to drag it on down.

Tomorrow: At the childish, Hamptons-based New York Times, script must now rule all