George is the one whose shoes got stolen!

TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2023

Rachel's the one who got drunk: Yesterday, we showed you Gail and Bret's assessments of the Biden classified documents.

Today, we'll consider their takes regarding George Santos. After discussing Biden's documents, the pair continued as shown:

STEPHENS (1/24/23): Switching to Republican embarrassments, Gail, we never got around to talking about George Santos, Republican of Long Island. I’m not sure there’s anything new to say about the sad, surreal, scuzzy, scamming, shameless, soulless man that he is. But boy, what a comment on today’s Republican Party.

COLLINS: Well, Bret, a lying, weird Republican who seems to have made up almost everything in his biography including his prowess at volleyball would have been your problem in a different era. But you’ve spent so much of your time crusading against the deficiencies in your old party, you’re the last one I could blame.

STEPHENS: The G.O.P. should be renamed B.T.P., for Bermuda Triangle Party. Enter it, weird stuff happens, and you go straight to the bottom.

COLLINS: To be honest, he’s so terrible I’m kinda fascinated. And the writers for all the late-night comedy shows really do owe Santos some gratitude for making their lives so easy lately.

Pretty clear the House Republicans don’t think they can afford to lose him, though. Any chance they’ll take the high ground?

STEPHENS: I’d be surprised. George Santos is what you inevitably get once you’ve already normalized Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Lauren Boebert and “Space Laser” Greene. After them, what’s another pathological liar, more or less?

For the past several years, we've been deeply involved in what might be called "the anthropology of human intelligence." These lazy assessments of Santos strike us as the latest case in point.

Collins and Stephens bang the drum in the simplest possible way concerning the conduct of Santos.  

According to Stephens, the fabulizing House member is "sad, surreal, scuzzy, scamming, shameless and soulless." To Collins, he's just another "lying Republican." 

Indeed, Santos "seems to have made up almost everything in his biography," the insightful Times columnist notes.

Collins also resorts to the most simple-minded possible fallback, saying the late-night shows owe Santos a debt of gratitude for making their job so easy. This is the kind of hackwork in which these limited lifeforms used to engage when they were pretending that Candidate Gore was also the world's biggest liar.

Does it make sense to think that Santos is just another run-of-the-mill liar? Stephens even refers to Santos at one point as a "pathological liar," but so what? Even the use of that psychiatric term doesn't stop the pundit pair from engaging in what we'd be inclined to call "the moralization of everything."

Is there really such a thing as a "pathological (compulsive) liar?" Given the craziness of his various claims, Santos would certainly seem to be some such creature.

That said, the world of our upper-end mainstream press is so compulsively unintelligent that its denizens don't seem to recognize the realm of mental illness and personality disorder, even when they use terms explicitly drawn from that branch of medical science. 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our human capacities turn out to be extremely limited. That brings us to Rachel Maddow, who entertained the masses with the latest videotape of Santos last night.

At this point, Rachel only works one night per week. Last night, she burned a healthy chunk of her program wasting time on Santos.

She played a videotape of Santos making deeply ludicrous claims in a recent interview session for a Brazilian podcast. (It was an exclusive!) She rolled her eyes, then mugged and clowned, about all the new fun she had found.

Just so you can keep them straight:

Santos is the one who now claims that he had his shoes stolen, in broad daylight, on New York City's Fifth Avenue. Also, that he survived an assassination attempt.

Maddow is the one who told us the crazy tale about the way she bought her first TV set, with the channel backing her up. (She and Susan got blackout drunk and ordered the set from Amazon. Why else would she ever have bought one?) 

Also, she had no idea why her (inaccurate) claim about the gender wage gap had been challenged on Meet the Press. The following night, her performance in defense of her misstatement was one of the most complex snow jobs in the long and ridiculous history of "cable news." 

You may need a scorecard to keep these lifeforms separate. Such is the way of human intelligence and our failing culture, top major experts insist.

"Surreal is one word for it," Rachel said last night. If not for our anthropological knowledge, we might tend to agree with that statement!

16 comments:

  1. With the arrest and indictment of former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office, Charles McGonigal, I guess we can finally put to rest the laughable theory that Donald J Chickenshit wasn't in bed with the Russian government.

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  2. Hmm. Surely Mr Santos is one of the most honest politicians in Washington, dear Bob. Certainly more honest than any liberal politician.

    ...he's just new to the business, dear Bob. Granted, he may never get as good as the Clintons and such, but -- without a doubt -- he'll get better at it...

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  3. The Beatles were the greatest rock group ever.

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  4. The wuestion is not what kind of liar Santos is, but how he got elected and why he is still in Congress.

    I’ll bet Maddow doesn’t still own that first TV set, given how long ago that was. Somerby has no evidence that wasn’t a true story.

    Why does he hate Maddow so much?

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  5. "fabulizing"
    What a twerp.

    ReplyDelete
  6. "For the past several years, we've been deeply involved in what might be called "the anthropology of human intelligence."

    No, Somerby hasn't discussed anything remotely like this.

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  7. "That said, the world of our upper-end mainstream press is so compulsively unintelligent that its denizens don't seem to recognize the realm of mental illness and personality disorder, even when they use terms explicitly drawn from that branch of medical science. "

    Oddly, Somerby doesn't recognize that there is another branch that also uses such terms, called clinical psychology. Not only does it study "intelligence" (which anthropology does only tangentially), but it is the field that discusses what is normal for human behavior and defining what is abnormal, whereas medicine looks at organic (primarily physical) causes of dysfunction.

    Physics is referred to as a theoretical science whereas engineering is an applied science (in which theory is used to solve problems). Anatomy and Physiology (subfields of Biology) are theoretical sciences whereas medicine is an applied science. Psychology is a theoretical science but clinical psychology is an applied science. Somerby avoids mentioning psychology like the plague. He appears to have never taken a psychology course. He routinely attributes findings that originated in psychology to other fields (the laughable anthropology of intelligence).

    People like Somerby do not define academic fields to suit their own tastes or deficits. Academia does that by how they organize their pursuits of knowledge. It is helpful to know how such things are organized so that one may look things up. Somerby is an incurious person, so he perhaps doesn't look much up, but that doesn't mean he gets to impose his own taxonomy on the rest of the world, pretending that his analysts and interns are real, gulling ignorant people into thinking he reads anything beyond the books of his Freshman year at Harvard and the preface of an occasional biography or science-for-dummies trade book.

    He perhaps intendfs these offhand remarks to be funny, but they are actually insulting to better educated people. Why? Because acquiring knowledge is hard work. Somerby is the George Santos of educated people, making shit up, claiming expertise when he has none, and otherwise mocking what other people know. Santos is an affront to genuine Congress members. Somerby is an affront to thinking, reading, participants in public discourse. If he doesn't want to know things and he doesn't want to talk seriously about them, he should stop mocking those who do, and use his blog for something more meaningful.

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    Replies
    1. This is the best evaluation of Somerby.

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  8. Maddow told a (probably true) anecdote about a TV. Mmmk.

    And Somerby was reamed in his comments for misrepresenting her statement about the gender wage gap.

    Yet somehow, Maddow = Santos because of those two things??

    She was not doing political reporting during the 2000 election, yet she inherits the guilt of the journalists who were?

    Has Somerby finally gone off the deep end?

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  9. If anyone can explain to me the purpose of Bob's post besides letting off some more of his Maddow bile, please do so.

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    Replies
    1. To recognize and not forget that our side has our fair share of quite insane liars and fableists, using Maddow as an example.

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    2. Her Ultra project was great. Unfortunately, probably makes the current Magat crop of treasonous bastards a little too uncomfortable so Bob hasn't praised her work. Hits a little too close to home.

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    3. Hi. Your comment is completely incoherent. Have a good day.

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    4. 7:21: He has not shown any equivalence with Santos, nor has he given any actual evidence to support the idea that Maddow is a fabulist.

      Delete
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