THE MILBANK FILES: George Will jumps in to denounce Josh Hawley!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2022

"How did it get so far?" Dana Milbank is certainly right in one of his book's key points:

The current lunacy of our American discourse didn't start with Donald J. Trump. Having said that, let's also say this:

In his new book, Milbank isn't trying to trace the history of "the current lunacy of American discourse." He limits his field in a pleasing way, under this slightly odd title:

The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party

Milbank is tracing the crack-up of the Republican Party alone. There's no question that such a crack-up has occurred, but what about everyone else?

Full disclosure! For ourselves, we'd always seek to draw a distinction between Republican office-holders / opinion leaders and plain old Republican voters

Under current arrangements, the first group works to mislead the second. The second group gets misled.

It's true that a crack-up has occurred among both parts of the GOP. But Milbank fails to mention the crack-up of everyone else, including his own mainstream press corps—and, of course, himself.

All too plainly, the Republican Party has cracked up over the past (let's say) thirty years. As we noted in Tuesday's report,  Milbank traces it back to Newt Gingrich in 1997.

In this way, Milbank gifts himself with a nice round quarter century—with a nice round twenty-five years.

In fact, Gingrich was promoting the crack-up long before that, urging voters to demonize Others in the ugliest, stupidest ways. But those were the demonization wars. Other elements of our societal crack-up were already underway in those ancient days, and not only on the right.

Belief in The Crazy was well underway, with the Reverend Falwell urging the flock to believe that the Clintons had engaged in a wide range of murders. 

In 1994—that was 28 years ago—Rush Limbaugh gave nationwide voice to the ugly idea that Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, was involved in the death of Vince Foster. It was already working that way as of then.  

(For the record, Limbaugh's radio program had gone national in 1988, on the ABC Radio Network.)

As it turned out, there seemed to be a substantial market in full-blown belief in The Crazy. As of 1996, former FBI agent Gary Aldrich was selling a book which included the claim that the first lady had decorated the White House Christmas tree "with drug paraphernalia, condoms and c*ck rings."

Like Meredith Willson's Music Man, Aldrich was peddling belief in The Crazy. His book was a major best-seller.

As it turned out, belief in The Crazy was amazingly easy to sell by that time. In fairness, this belief in The Crazy, during this era, didn't exclusively come from the right.

Way back in the 1980s, improbable belief in child sex abuse seemed to have swept through the country. On the basis of utterly lunatic claims, operators of several preschools were subjected to endless trials and then to long prison terms.

These episodes proceeded through the courts, not through the organs and instruments of the Republican crack-up. 

Belief in The Crazy was easy to sell. So was the ugly demonization of Others engineered by Gingrich and his remarkably ugly, remarkably braindead, quite lengthy vocabulary lists.

Belief in The Crazy and love of The Ugly were peddled by GOP organs. But at some point, an honest historian must mention at least two other groups. 

One such group would be the mainstream press. The other would be us, The Blue Voters.

Tomorrow morning, we'll skip ahead to the role those two groups played in our society's wider crack-up—the crack-up we're still undergoing. 

There is no doubt that Donald J. Trump now serves as drum major for this headlong decline. But the mainstream press corps, and we the blue people, have also played a steady role in this dangerous downward spiral.

So, some say, has Milbank himself—though he's right to trace one part of this wider societal crack-up to the years before Trump's arrival.

"How did things ever get so far?" That's what Vito Corleone is reportedly said to have said. 

How did things get so far? In his new book, Milbank traces one highly significant part of our societal decline—but he omits all the rest.

Tomorrow, we'll quickly recall the role the mainstream press corps played in our ongoing crack-up. We'll mention the ways our own slumbering tribe has failed to confront this problem.

We'll also look at a statement which appears in George Will's new column. In the Washington Post, the headline above the new column says this:

Josh Hawley, senator-as-symptom of a broken news business

It's a broken news business, the columnist says. Even as he batters Josh Hawley around, Will offers this startling statement:

"More than half of Americans between ages 16 and 74 read below the sixth-grade level."

We'd never seen that claim before, and so we began clicking links. 

How well do our journalists reason and read? That's one of the anthropological factors at play in the crack-up Milbank is chronicling.

How well do our journalists reason and read? Tomorrow, your answer appears.

Tomorrow: Today we have clicking of links


36 comments:

  1. Holly, poor Josh.

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  2. Today is Thurs Aug 11 — wrong date again.

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  3. "Under current arrangements, the first group works to mislead the second. The second group gets misled."

    Yeah, dear Bob, that's what politicians do.

    ...may we suggest, however, that as far as misleading (aka 'goebbelsian lying') goes, R-politicians are pitiful amateurs -- compared to your tribe's D-party politicians...

    ...some of whom, amazingly, keep lying long after their brains are completely gone -- can you imagine?..

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    1. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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  4. Somerby sees Republican voters as victims of misinformation, but they have contributed actively by insisting on remaining rock stupid and undereducated. That is on them, the voters.

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  5. Maddow was arrested for riding stolen lambs. Her and her partner stole some lambs and put saddles on them and were caught riding them in Westchester County.

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    1. And they were wearing cowboy hats which I find really disrespectful.

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    2. Has Maddow Nationalized the fossil fuel companies yet?
      Right-wingers are getting hoarse begging her to.

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    3. Witnesses said they were using mallets on the lambs. Where is she going stop? That's what my question is.

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    4. But did they lay down with the lambs? And did little child lead them?

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    5. Maddow is the extremist on the Left.
      The Republican Party and the modern conservative movement, post Reagan, are the extremists on the Right.

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    6. No, both sides are not equal. Factual reporting is not extremism, except for people on the right.

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    7. Maddow did come clean about her addiction to helium in a recent Vanity Fair article.

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    8. When will Republican voters come clean about their addiction to white supremacy?

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    9. This is a media criticism site, so the real question is “When will the media come clean with Republican voters addiction to white supremacy?”

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    10. Maddow has addressed it on her show.

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  6. It is the ultimate both-siderism to claim that we have all cracked up. We have not. This is Somerby’s gaslighting and I find it lazy and disrespectful and majorly offensive when so many of us have maintained our sanity.

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    1. Alas not you when it comes to keeping sanity

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  7. Vito Corleone is a fictional character, not a real person who said anything.

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  8. "How did things ever get so far?" That's what Vito Corleone is reportedly said to have said.

    He said that at the meeting, to his enemies.
    He said something quite different in car after they left the meeting.
    Shortly thereafter, Michael had all his enemies assassinated along with his own treacherous brother-in-law.
    As we speak, the judge magistrate who approved the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago is receiving death threats from the trump cultists.

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  9. Why hasn’t Lindsey Graham been indicted yet.

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  10. Everyone knows Donald Trump has way more moral fiber than any Christian.

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    1. And Trump isn’t so dim-witted he believes in God.
      Let’s at least give him credit for that.

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  11. One reason Republicans follow unreliable media is that there aren't any reliable media remaining. When the New York Times can no longer be automatically believed, it's all too tempting to believe some unknow blogger whose posts things that one wants to believe.

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    1. The media has always been the propaganda arm of corporations.
      You think they don’t KNOW raising taxes reduces the inflation they’ve been pounding zbiden with?
      I realize you are very, very gullible, but even you aren’t that clueless.

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    2. “but even you aren’t that clueless”
      Are you new here?

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  12. I can’t believe Somerby, who taught school, doesn’t know basic literacy stats.

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  13. "How did things ever get so far?" That's what Vito Corleone is reportedly said to have said.

    On the other hand, Frank Pentangeli wisely observed, "how can you be fair to animals?".

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  14. A man who didn’t support Biden or Hillary when Trump was running is not a blue voter.

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  15. The reasoning of journalists is not the problem. Red voters cannot reason or read. And they lack empathy. That’s why we’re in trouble.

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    1. You’ll quickly realize they also don’t know anything about economics, nor basic mathematics, if you listen to them.

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  16. Somerby lists nothing crazy from the left but just asserts without evidence that we’re all crazy. Only the right reasons that way.

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  17. Polls tend to split along partisan lines. Today’s poll shows that only Republicans disapprove of the Mar a Lago search. How can both sides be crazy when poll results keep following this pattern?

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  18. Personally, I want Trump to return the paintings he stole from the White House.

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    1. He sold them to help pay for the wall he wants to build to keep Americans from escaping the hellhole Republicans are creating.
      Try to keep up.

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