FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2023
Scarborough briefly agrees: Scanning the playing field today, does anyone doubt that Norman O. Brown, crazed visionary that he was, may have had it right?
Way back in 1960, he said it sometimes seemed to him that American civilization, such as it was, may be "ending in exhaustion." He said our exhausted civilization would have to be "renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries," whatever that was supposed to mean.
One year earlier, Brown had published Love Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. The book is wholly forgotten today, but as you can recollect here, it was extremely big at the time.
One year later, Brown described an exhausted civilization in a Phi Beta Kappa address. Once again, we'll show you what he semi-famously said:
BROWN (May 1960): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.
At the time, no one knew what Brown was talking about, but by the end of that decade, he was very hot. At this point, does anyone doubt the possibility that Professor Brown—visionary that he was—may have had this vision right?
Brown has been visiting us of late, accompanied by Carlotta Valdes. For the record, they communicate through the nocturnal submissions the haters refer to as dreams.
Within that context, we sat and watched last Friday morning's Morning Joe cable news broadcast. As we noted yesterday, Joe Scarborough eventually confronted Walter Isaacson with this important plea:
SCARBOROUGH (10/29/23): So Walter, let's discuss this because, obviously, you're from the Deep South. I'm from the Deep South.
You know a lot of people that voted for Trump. You know a lot of people that are still with Trump. Same here.
What's your best answer to why—
For people who have lived on the upper West Side their entire life—God bless them! What's your best explanation for why [those voters] are still with Donald Trump?
Good question! Why are "those people"—those tens of millions of Others—"still with Donald J. Trump?" Scarborough presented that question to Isaacson, a major journalist and now a best-selling biographer.
Why are those tens of millions of Others still with Donald J. Trump? As everyone knows, our blue tribe's corporate-paid tribunes have an established answer to that question.
That answer makes us blue tribe members feel good. On corporate cable, it's good for ratings—also, for profits and for salaries—when that Storyline gets recited.
In this instance, something different occurred! With Halloween month approaching, Isaacson voiced sympathy for the devil. This is what he said:
ISAACSON (continuing directly): There's a lot of reasons, legitimate, for resentments in this country, and it keeps getting stirred up. And I think we have to realize that people got left behind with—when the economy expanded, that we decimated working class jobs.
Even the border. I think people in New York now are getting, finally, what people Down South have felt about the border—
SCARBOROUGH: Right.
ISAACSON: —and about the crime problem in cities. I'm not justifying all of this, but I mean, heavens! There are a lot of reasons to be upset at the old meritocratic elite.
Is Isaacson allowed to say that? Isn't he supposed to say that the Others—the people who don't agree with the perfect wisdom of our blue tribe's "meritocratic" elite—are just a bunch of deplorable racists and book banners?
That's the script which has been written—but Isaacson, a ranking member of that elite, had wandered way off script. He seemed to say that there are legitimate reasons to be upset with the "meritocratic" elites of our own self-impressed blue tribe!
Under current arrangements, TV ratings and corporate profits can be harmed by confusions like that. And then, dear God! Making matters that much worse, Scarborough jumped in with this:
SCARBOROUGH (continuing directly): Willie, it's fifty years of resentments. It's fifty years of people thinking they've been looked down upon by the media, by Hollywood, by elites on college campuses. And there has been a lot of that.
You'll note that Scarborough had turned to his reliable sidekick, Willie Geist. and away from his renegade guest.
As you can see if you watch the tape, Isaacson never spoke about the topic again. If you decide to watch the tape, you'll see that Joe and Willie soon had the discussion back on track.
Still and all, this brief exchange had introduced a highly unusual thought. According to Isaacson, there are many reasons to be unhappy with our blue elites—with our journalists, with our academics, with our political leaders!
That's what Walter Isaacson said—and briefly, Joe seemed to agree!
Scarborough spoke of fifty years of resentments. He said the Others have correctly felt looked down upon over those fifty years.
We'd be inclined to take things back one decade further. We'd journey back to the mid- and late-1960s, when it almost began to seem that our civilization, such as it was, might be coming apart.
Brown had delivered his Phi Beta Kappa address at the start of that tumultuous decade. He said we need to discover some "new mysteries"—some new set of "secrets"—in order to be "renewed."
In our view, we may have moved well past the point where our civilization, such as it was, can be saved or renewed. But if there is a way to accomplish that task, we've come to think that we actually know what that new "mystery" is.
For today, though, good grief!
Isaacson said that our own blue tribe's elites have failed—our scholars and our journalists! Briefly, Joe seemed to agree.
Those who feed from Storyline never say such things! Quickly, Joe turned to his reliable sidekick.
They got script back on track.
Next: The nature of the secret
Cue the haters.
ReplyDelete1. Somerby is a bought-and-paid-for stooge of Putin and some billionaire conservative.
2. Somerby seems to say X.
3. Somerby doesn’t say Y.
4. But the Others really are brain-dead morons.
Does anyone doubt any of this? Norman, Norman...?
DeleteBoy Dogface, we are all in snowflake mode this morning eh? Sorry that Bob’s double talk generally collapses under the faintest scrutiny.
DeleteI told you they'd wear you out, DG.
DeleteMaybe Dogface would like to say something about Bob’s actual post? Or is abject agreement the only acceptable response?
Delete>It's fifty years of people thinking they've been looked down upon by the media, by Hollywood, by elites on college campuses. And there has been a lot of that.
DeleteThey need examples of this downthread...
Projection, 12:34
DeleteI'm outta here before I catch whatever is infecting these people.
It's 'this person'. It's all primarily one troll.
DeleteI forgot:
Delete5. The Others are all racists.
@1:12 PM
DeleteThey need to be deprogrammed.
@1:32 PM - Matt Taibbi?
DeleteLOL!
Generally the more pronounced take is the Right's contention that there is no such thing as white racism in America anymore. One can easily imagine you signing on for this, Dogface.
DeleteI think you could just write "No. 5" and save space.
DeleteSomerby’s post is beyond dumb, any of you fanboys able to puzzle out why? (at least as dumb as Issacson’s nonsensical claim - there’s your clue, fanboys)
DeleteNo?
There you go.
Your Norman O. Brown is too clever by half. His "civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries" sounds like some quasi-fascist drivel.
ReplyDeleteAlso, your Walter Isaacson's "old meritocratic elite" is bullshit; there's nothing meritocratic about it. It's all about economics. Globalization. And garden variety class war.
Agree.
DeleteNorman goes on and says the solution to society is some “undemocratic but sovereign power”, which sounds like straight up fascistic drivel.
Meritocracy is a myth.
The rationalization of what really just comes down to circumstances that create the urge for dominance - knife’s edge existence, wealth inequality, hoarding of surpluses, alienation, atomization, over specialization, over commodification - are goofy and nonsensical, in reality: right wingers dominate our media, right wing neoliberals killed our working/middle class, crime is relatively low in cities (cities don’t even vote for Trump), the border issue is manufactured - the only real issue there are our own human rights violations in dealing with those at the border and their native countries.
Republicans have no policies or plans for dealing with any of the issues that matter. The brief discussion between Scarborough and Issacson was ignorant, inaccurate, and irrelevant.
"does anyone doubt that Norman O. Brown, crazed visionary that he was, may have had it right?"
ReplyDeleteI doubt it. Crazed visionaries have little to offer our society, especially its real problems. Norman O. Brown is in the same category as the crazed visionary who thought Keanu Reeves was her mentor and that the CIA is subverting people. I don't know if that is standard issue Q-Anon thinking or her own delusions, but we need less of the crazy and more reality-based pragmatic problem-solving in these troubled times.
Somerby is supposedly one of the adults in the room. He should know better than to encourage fantasies like this, including his own.
"One year earlier, Brown had published Love Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. The book is wholly forgotten today, ..."
ReplyDeleteHell, Freud is wholly forgotten today. Does Somerby know what a psychoanalytical analysis is?
Woody Allen made a movie called Love and Death around that same time period but it is a satire on Russian literature. Perhaps Norman O. Brown was writing satire too? If so, Somerby will never tell us.
I think Norman O’s observations are fine, but
ReplyDeletehow to they connect in any way from the exchange on morning Joe? Unless Bob is
creating a new Mystery here we will revitalize
ourselves by trying to figure out.
good point, anon 11:48. I don't see how Norman O. Brown ties in with TDH's ongoing attempt to convince his readers that they should consider that the "liberal" opinion makers, our "side", aren't always that brilliant, that we should try to understand where the other side is coming from with more of an open mind, etc. What does Brown have to do with that? I will say that when I was in college, decades ago, one of the courses I took, I don't remember which one, assigned Life Against Death, which I read. One thing he said stuck out in my mind, that, in our unconscious, money is the equivalent of shit. TDH quotes one paragraph from the book, which isn't enough to evaluate it, however.
DeleteTo understand why money is shit, you have to understand Freudian analysis. A toddler regards his shit as a creative act that he is proud of. Shit comes to represent all acts of creation, including getting rich. So hoarding money is constipation.
DeleteHere is a quote from a review of a later Brown book, discussing Brown's intentions in "Closing Time":
ReplyDelete"When he speaks about sexual coupling with reference to writers, he is not, I think, being modishly new; rather he is reviving one of the more interesting (and least studied) traditions of knowledge, the one by which one author sees the world almost obsessively in terms of another author he is never weary of addressing. Aristotle's philosophy is unthinkable without the more than intellectual passion, not ever the simply negative rejection, he felt for Plato; similarly Kierkegaard and Hegel, Nietzsche and Socrates, and, says Brown who brings them together, Joyce and Vico."
I think this explains Somerby's infatuation with Wittgenstein. He seems to have read Brown at an impressionable age and decided to model his own reading habits on those of the fictional characters in this book, fusing himself with a handful of authors who he reads obsessively, over and over, fusing himself with the author and then refusing (or being unable) to differentiate himself from their conceits.
Psychoanalysts do not believe in "crazy" but they might find Somerby's approach to knowledge insufficiently grounded for sanity. No one but Somerby has thrown out all language and the thought that goes with it, because Wittgenstein presented linguistic problems for philosophy. And here we find that Norman Brown gave him permission to do it. This is what happens when someone who is excessively literal collides with the new age froth of the 60s.
"by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new." Norman O. Brown (Phi Beta Kappa Address, no date given)
ReplyDeleteLookee lookee, Brown is using a political metaphor that includes the words "undemocratic," "sovereign," "power," "legislators." Those words, not Brown's overall thought conveyed, make this quote relevant to today's political problems, in Somerby's mind. That's because he becomes hooked by the superficial meaning of phrases and then drags them, kicking and screaming, into an entirely different, irrelevant context. As when Somerby quotes Dylan's "pity the poor immigrant," and claims it applies to Trump or Zevon's "excitable boy" and claims it is about Tucker Carlson.
Who knows what Brown meant. We do not have the context of his longer speech to interpret this single paragraph. He may have been calling the graduates in Phi Beta Kappa, undemocratic themselves, for all we know. But he wasn't talking about legitimate or illegitimate resentments, because he wasn't talking about Democrats or Scarborough or anything current, legitimate or not. Brown is safely dead and not part of this discussion.
"And I think we have to realize that people got left behind with—when the economy expanded, that we decimated working class jobs."
ReplyDeleteAnd yet the jobs report is strongly up again this month. (Thanks, Biden) Has anyone bothered to tell the working class that their stats are improving? Or are pundits making too much money off of stoking class resentments?
I know it has been said that all us liberals are condescending elitists. It’s a sacred belief amongst right wingers, aka “real Americans.”
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, nobody seems to provide any actual concrete examples of this.
I know, I know, Obama with his tan suit, and Gore with his petulant sighing and weird buttons, and Clinton with his fancy elitist education, but, you know, examples of this actually happening.
I do recall meeting conservative relatives of a friend of mine who lived in the north. They were rather snooty in their disdain for the south. Did I mention they were Republicans?
We sort of answered Bob’s question about
ReplyDeletethe poor little MAGA lambs yesterday, though
Bob had never had anything to say on
The subject that is interesting or
Helpful.
When, like a willful nitwit, he covers his
ears and starts chanting “Trump Trump
Trump” he is missing at least part of
the answer too. It did not take Trump
for people to notice that people have a
taste for strongmen leaders. They can
make the weak feel they have a big
Daddy to protect them, avenge their
foes, real and imagined. We never
could have imagined how close we were
to that line in the US, and Bob’s early
work demonstrated how political
reporting was getting dumbed down,
turned into entertainment., and this
DID offer part of the answer.
But Bob’s work gradually became
ridiculous, with Bob the avenger
protecting the (usually white,
southern) working man. And sorry
Dogface, the change was pretty
abrupt, and seemed to have to do
with resentment of liberal crowing
over Obama, and certainly suggested
It’s own commercial considerations.?
I’m still waiting for Somerby to examine anti-Biden media reporting and stick up for him, the way he did for Gore. Especially since Somerby, perhaps performatively, perhaps not, implies that the election of Trump could be the end of our democracy as we slide into the sea or some such dire prediction. Instead, he repeats nothing but criticism of Biden (he’s old! He has gaffes! As if the mainstream media isn’t full of such stuff).
ReplyDelete"I’m still waiting for Somerby to examine anti-Biden media reporting and stick up for him, the way he did for Gore."
DeleteLet's unpack this. Back in the day, Somerby severely criticized the mainstream media for brain-dead attacks on Gore (and earlier, for brain-dead attacks on Bill Clinton, and later, for brain-dead and misogynistic attacks on Hillary Clinton).
He also criticized liberal elites for failing to vigorously defend Gore and the Clintons.
Somerby now believes, I think, that all his criticism fell on deaf ears, and so his critique has evolved.
He now sees our society as split in two, each one hating the other. He sees each tribe isolated in its own silo, endlessly repeating tribal shibboleths. He despairs of healing this division; now he sees an Apocalypse coming.
I think those who believe Somerby is not a true "liberal" miss the evolution of his thinking. They think that liberals must be rabid partisans to prove their bona fides. But I think Somerby is a true liberal who is looking more generally at the soundness of the entire political/media ecosystem, and finding it sorely wanting.
The problem of the mainstream media is still with us, and is just as pernicious as ever. He was right back in the day. His criticism falling on deaf ears as a reason to shift focus away from that truth is a petulant response. What hubris would justify him thinking that his blogging would alter anything anyway? He needed a wider audience, and you have to work to achieve that. “I didn’t get my way, so now I’m going to join with the media in sliming liberals and repeating criticisms of Biden, while pleading pity for Donald Trump.”
DeleteToo much to respond to here in a short comment, but let me respond to your attack that Somerby is "pleading pity for Donald Trump."
DeleteI think what Somerby says is that Trump seems to have some serious psychological disturbance, and if that is true, then we should feel some sympathy for his pain, as we would for anyone suffering in a like fashion.
I do not believe that this is in any way an endorsement of Trump or his policies.
I didn’t say he endorsed trumps policies. I have no idea what policies Somerby does endorse, because he never says. I also want to remind you that Somerby got mad at liberals back in the day for not pushing back against the media nonsense against Al Gore. He called it “sleeping in the woods.” Here I am trying to push back against media narratives against Biden, the same media narrative, by the way, that Somerby is PUSHING today, and I get reamed in comments, because I disagree with Somerby. Ironic isn’t it?
DeleteIt's certainly not my intent to "ream" anyone, and particularly not you, whom I respect. Indeed, it's my intent to persuade you. I see your goal and Somerby's goal as identical. Let me make that goal concrete: Biden wins reelection. I see the tactics you espouse and the tactics that Somerby prefers as differing.
DeleteYou believe, I think, that the Others simply cannot be persuaded, so it's critically important for us to rally the troops. Thus, anyone on our side who offers a smidgen of argument that varies from the party line is aiding and abetting the enemy. (I'm sure that's an exaggeration of your position.)
Somerby feels, I believe, that we must pick off 1% or 2% of the Others in order for Biden to be reelected, so we should try to find ways to persuade that 1-2%.
In short, I feel you differ on tactics, not on ideology.
The "evolution in Bob's thinking" involved that in critiquing the media, he would now examine only one side. Why he thought this was valid is anybody's guess, but it yielded inevitably dubious results.
DeleteThis reached the point of true nonsense, the press
misrepresented the Republican claim that Jan
6 was legitimate political discourse, and much
more. That Trump should be viewed as a pathetic
figure (no sensible person at some level does not
think this) is not consistent with the amount of
compassion Bob does not extent to others, including Trump's victims, TV political hosts (well, he seems
to think the ones on Fox are basically OK), and others.
He hasn't come right with it, but he seems to
prefer Trump pay no penalty for his crimes, this
idiotic viewpoint shows no compassion for the people he has robbed from, or gotten killed or injured.
It's much like his hand wringing over the Crumbly
family, where he utterly forgot about the slaughtered
young people and their families.
@12:58 PM - diatribe acknowledged. Still waiting for pseudo-Somerby whisperer to unpack something.
DeleteHow might one try to persuade 1-2% of the others? Here's one thought:
Delete"In private, Trump expresses contempt - contempt! - for those who serve in the military."
Any other thoughts?
How about:
Delete"Biden inherited an economy in shambles, turned it around, and now we have the best economy since Clinton."
Isn't it, rather, the best economy since Trump?
DeleteWhen Trump left the economy was a complete mess. Just like when Bush II left. Just like when Bush I left.
Delete@3:21 PM
DeleteComplete mess? Ah, yes, COVID, "God’s gift to the left".
Before "God’s gift to the left", however, there was 3.4% unemployment and the highest real median household income in history. As I remember.
But actually, that's pretty snarky, and Anon 2:55 you deserve a better response. Obama was handed a terrible economy and completely turned it around. When he handed it off to Trump, all the indicators were going in the right direction. Trump, to his credit, did not screw it up, and the economy steadily improved until the pandemic paralyzed the economy.
DeleteBiden was handed a terrible economy, turned it around, and all the indicators are now going in the right direction. If the election were held today, I think you'd have to agree that Biden's handling of the economy was a terrific success.
And, frankly, I think liberals should be screaming about this success at the top of their lungs.
"And, frankly, I think liberals should be screaming about this success at the top of their lungs."
DeletePerhaps it would make more sense to gently remind the public that the economy could be easily ruined again, if they are not elected.
There can be other God’s gifts to the left.
"Obama was handed a terrible economy and completely turned it around"
DeleteWasn't it commonly described as "the slowest recovery in history"?
How do you pick off any % of Trump voters by emphasizing Biden’s age, as Brooks did today (see Somerby’s other essay)?
DeleteSorry Dogface, but a failure to condemn Trumps actions in any serious way is tantamount to an endorsement. It’s seeing a rape or murder across the
Deletestreet and looking and the ground
as you increase your pace.
How much more obvious does
this have to be? Blaming grudges
you have against other people
won’t really do.
Somerby’s fanboys have a trick pony where they always take his word at face value and are only willing to consider context when it aides their own agenda.
DeleteIf you read Somerby long enough, it’s easy to see through his coyness, excessive literalism, and other similar techniques, and it’s clear Somerby is bitter, angry, and right wing.
Somerby provides no evidence to support his “peel off” strategy, indeed, evidence seems to suggest that his theory is bunk and the best strategy is to motivate voters - Republicans are outnumbered by Dems yet they also prefer the motivation-based strategy, that’s because it’s more effective.
Trump is at fault for the degree to which Covid tanked the economy because he was so incompetent in handling the pandemic.
CNN and MSNBC cover Biden’s accomplishments, but as Dr Bandy Lee (former Somerby fav) notes, Republicans are stuck in survivor mode and thus are immune to rational persuasion.
"Obama was handed a terrible economy and completely turned it around"
DeleteHere, George, you risk reminding people of one of the most shameful, most egregious performances of that clown: bailing out banks while giving no help to people who were losing their homes.
It sounds like that perhaps what you've been conditioned to see as success, most people see as a failure.
Dogface, I don't agree that TDH''s point is that dems could peel some percentage of Trump supporters by emphasizing, e.g., about how Biden turned the economy around. It's more than dems take absurd positions on many things. One example, the frenzy about Trump allegedly working in concert with Putin to get elected in 2016 the so-called "Russia hoax>" Dems have gone off he rails on gender and race. That has a lot to do with it. Unfortunately, the right has gone off the rails too. It appears to be a stalemate, and for that TDH feels despair, as do many others. It may be that going off the rails doesn't hurt the dems chances of winning. It's not so much winning over 1% to 2% of the hard core right but getting less entrenched people who are more moderate to switch from the GOP to vote for dems, or not vote at all. Also, a lot of times the economy can improve or decline, and the President then in office takes the credit or the blame, even though forces beyond his control are the most predominant factors.
DeleteSinging praises to glorious bidenomics to people who actually visit supermarkets and gas stations every week might prove to be counterproductive, George.
DeleteYou -- and Bob Somerby -- are fooling yourselves. In a two-party system, the best -- nay, probably the only -- way to win is demonization of your opponent.
ACMA,
DeleteDon't be coy. Tell us exactly which group of people should not have their rights protected, without using the word "woke".
AC/MA, the Dems are not engaged in voter suppression.
DeleteIsaacson writes books that are probably
ReplyDeleteWorth your time. But he is a corporate
scribe in the fashion of Woodward.
His down the middle take on Musk
looks shakier the more we know
about this “genius.” It’s not surprising
he had a banal defense of the great
unwashed on his fingertips.
Agree
DeleteWhy didn’t Norman O “Nobby” Brown save us from Trump? After all, he said this:
ReplyDelete“I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things. You will remember that I discovered these things as a late learner. Polymorphous perversity in the literal, physical sense is not the real issue. I don't like the suggestion that polymorphous perversity of the imagination is somehow second-best to literal polymorphous perversity.”
Was he familiar with Wittgenstein … the later Wittgenstein?
Pat Buttram, Mr Haney from Green Acres, once said that Arkansan Bill Clinton’s southern boy act didn’t fool anyone.
ReplyDeleteI never saw Green Acres, but I remember Buttram as Gene Autry's side-kick. Clinton and Gore were in fact southerners. Republicans like Buttram make strange comments about their political foes.
Delete“There are a lot of reasons to be upset at the old meritocratic elite.”
ReplyDeleteSomerby of course translates that to “our blue tribe's "meritocratic" elite.”
Is that solely what Isaacson meant?
As I recall, a lot of Republicans supported NAFTA too.
Al Gore worked hard on behalf of NAFTA. Is Somerby now going to reassess his friend’s efforts at decimating working class jobs?
DeleteHillary Clinton is dumb as fucking dirt.
ReplyDeleteOH, as a poor suffering working class victim, whose greatest sin was to be a descendant from the old gentlemen of the South, I fully admit your discontent is all my fault.
DeleteHow did I do Bob?
Last night she made another major political gaffe and gave another enormous gift to Trump. Any objective Democrat that wants to defeat Trump can see this woman is dumb as fucking dirt and a piss poor politician. My God. What she said is deranged on a simple political level. She should know this after deplorables. WTF??
Delete@2:20 PM - italic flourishes noted. Still waiting for content.
DeleteMaybe the rhetoric that has driven you insane originated primarily from her. Because she must be insane. What she said was INsane. And you always sound insane.
Delete2:26 PM
DeleteDon't worry. You'll be hearing about it for decades. You'll be hearing about it for the rest of your life
@ (second) 2:26 & 2.27 - repetitive projections noted. Still waiting for content.
DeleteWhat did Hillary, who is neither an incumbent nor a candidate, say?
DeleteClinton was interviewed on CNN about the dysfunction in the House GOP conference. She characterized the small, extremist faction that seems to be able to drag the rest of the party around by the nose as a cult. She speculated that only a "formal deprogramming" would free this faction from Trump's grip.
DeleteAnon 1:24, like the GOP social media apparatus, wants to pretend she said something else, that all 74 million Trump voters should be sent to re-education camps or something.
She didn't.
The Trump voters are not who Clinton was referring to. But don't let that stop the Right Wing Mighty Wurlitzer twisting this into a convenient way to bash Hillary. It's great sport for the beltway media. Have fun.
DeleteAnon 3:57: I have no idea and that's not who Clinton was discussing in this interview.
DeleteShe was referring to "MAGA extremists". Are the Trump voters MAGA extremists or not?
Delete"But don't let that stop the Right Wing Mighty Wurlitzer twisting this into a convenient way to bash Hillary. It's great sport for the beltway media. Have fun."
DeleteThat's why making such a comment in the first place was not prudent. It provides ammunition to Trump's supporters to make the claims you've described, forever. And this was entirely avoidable. She just contributed to the Trump campaign about the biggest gift they could get. Oy vey. That woman is a massive loser.
Hahahaha!! Otherwise they would have nobody to go after besides Hunter Biden. Just to be clear, you are referring to magats who haven't said a word about Trump's daily fire hose of bullshit, including the suggestion that the Chairman of the JCS should be executed? And you are worried about these people opinions?
DeleteHillary is a private citizen, not running for anything. She can say whatever she wants.
Delete@4:55 PM
DeleteIt's odd, then, that despite of being nobody (as you suggest), she is interviewed by CNN, and the interview is broadcast for everyone to watch. Go figure.
She fucked up massively. Again. It can't be spun.
DeleteI remember when Hillary said that she wasn't "some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette."
DeleteHillary showed that she did not understand the song, at all; she insulted Tammy Wynette, of all people, and did so gratuitously; and she put her contempt for those who liked the song on full display.
If Bill had been able to keep his pants zipped, or Hillary had been able to keep her mouth zipped, this country would be in a much, much better place right now.
Tammy Wynette was a jerk. She should have redeemed herself by endorsing Clinton.
DeleteLet me know when Hillary agrees with House Republicans that the USA is a nation of deadbeats, who can't even pay their own bills.
Delete6:25, I don't know if she endorsed Clinton, but she did perform at a fundraiser for Hillary.
DeleteThat song was released in 1968.
I wouldn’t respect Hillary if she didn’t stand by her opinions, even if they upset country music fans. I admire the Dixie Chicks too. And Taylor Swift. These are women who stick their necks out in the face of Republican efforts to make them 2nd class citizens.
DeleteHillary lost because Trump colluded with Russia and Comey, not because of anything she said..
DeleteI've seen the quote. When it comes to Republican voters, she's a rosy-eyed optimist.
DeleteAfter Hillary’s Tammy Wynette comment, Bill became the Comeback Kid, more likely not from the content of Hillary’s comment but the motivational aspect of fighting back, not dissimilar from when Biden debated Trump, looked him in the eye and called him a clown to his face.
DeleteThe mystery that will revive our civilization is quantum gravity. When it's solved, Walter Isaacson will explain it.
ReplyDelete@2:11 PM - not quite. It would still need to be reconciled with the theory of Special Relativity.
DeleteThe question remains unanswered, though: Why Trump, specifically?
ReplyDeleteTrump seems to have been correct when he boasted he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters. No matter what norms he breaks or crimes he commits, he die-hard supporters become more devoted than ever.
He's been held liable for fraud and sexual harassment. He has denigrated our troops and our intelligence agencies. He snuggles up to foreign dictators and domestic extremists. He's a poseur of a Christian. He sent a mob to attack Congress during the transition of power after a clean election. He took classified documents with him after leaving office and tried to hide them from authorities. He pushed his way to center stage during a public health crisis and then bungled the government response. He regularly claims credit for things he had nothing to do with and deflects blame for obvious failures.
It's one thing to say that there are voters who are reasonably frustrated with our politics. It's another to say that this specific person deserves their undying support.
That's not a huge mystery. There's only one feasible candidate universally and intensely hated by "our politics".
DeleteRight wingers, of which Republicans are a subset, have no ideology, they are people obsessed with hierarchy and dominance, which makes them susceptible to cults of personality; Trump has a big, bullying, domineering personality.
Delete