WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2024
Better (way) late than never: This morning, we sat and watched Morning Joe all the way through to 7:30 a.m.
We did so because the group was having a lengthy discussion about the role of misogyny—alleged, apparent or fully performed—in modern-day politics, with a focus on the recent pitiful nonsense directed at Taylor Swift.
Eventually, Scarborough even played videotape of Colin Cowherd's discussion of this topic from yesterday's FS1 show (Fox Sports 1).
It's very rare for Cowherd to deal with topics which aren't directly sports-based. Yesterday, he did so. To watch the surprising four-minute monologue, you can just click here.
Yesterday, we saw Cowherd's discussion in real time, as it occurred. This morning, Scarborough played the tape at substantial length. This was all part of a very lengthy discussion this morning of a very important topic.
This morning's discussion was largely aimed at red tribe "MAGA" figures. For the record, smutty, misogyny-adjacent "just joking" ugliness is all over every Fox News "cable news" program which features the silly frat boy Jesse Watters or the angry and glowering Greg Gutfeld.
Below, we'll link you to Amanda Marcotte's treatment of Gutfeld's work. Before we do, we'll add this:
This has been going on forever. Starting in the 1990s, this weird gender-based pseudo-politics was all over the mainstream press corps, principally aimed at Hillary Clinton—with a weird offshoot aimed at male Democratic pols, Candidate Gore in particular.
Back then, it wasn't a couple of hacks like Watters and Gutfeld who kept playing those cards. For starters, it was Chris Matthews, very powerful then as the host of a daily cable news show when there weren't that many such programs around.
Going on Hardball built careers. Presumably for that reason, Matthews received little pushback. A very young Norah O'Donnell pushed back several times, and Chris would simply hammer her for it. Eventually Norah gave up, but we still admire her for the fact that she tried.
Chris' denigrations of Hillary Clinton were often batslurp crazy. So too with his lunatic denunciations of Candidate Gore, who he slimed as "today's man woman" because he was wearing three-buttons suits, allegedly as some sort of sexual signal to female voters.
It's hard to describe the degree of the crazy emerging from Chris at that time. It's all over the archives to this site, but all the blue tribe careerists knew that they mustn't notice his lunatic conduct and that they mustn't speak up.
Some of those people are still on our tribe's favorite shows. (Gene Robinson didn't say boo, but neither did anyone else.) Amazingly, Chris was maybe ten years into his jihad before any actual women's groups actually stood up and complained. At that time, Mathews threw David Schuster under the bus, then kissed and made up with Hillary Clinton, motoring forward from there.
(Stating the obvious, all that pounding, over all those years, helped send Trump to the White House.)
Maureen Dowd's gender politics were routinely very strange during that era. In Dowd's formulations, very Democratic male was a girly man, while every Democratic woman was a secret man.
The people our gullible tribe respects all sat around saying nothing. We posted and posted and posted and posted but, as the famous song says:
I woke from my dream,
My idol was clay...
Our advice to you would be this—do not trust the people you see on your "cable news" channels. Do not trust the people who write for our biggest newspapers.
At most, you should "trust but verify," because they and their predecessors have failed you again and again and again. Among other things, people are dead all over the world because of the way they and their predecessors have frequently chosen to play.
As for the pitiful Gutfeld and Watters, three cheers for Amanda Marcotte! Yesterday, we stumbled upon the essay she recently wrote for Salon about an episode of the rancid show Gutfeld!
We ourselves alluded to that episode, though only briefly, within the past week or so.
On that occasion, AOC was the termagant's target—and simply put, he needs to become a better person. As of today, he specializes in a sudden glowering anger which is routinely directed at women.
As a general matter, he quickly moves to hide anger through a well-designed getaway in which he presents himself as just a very naughty boy and also a hopeless scamp.
When we cited the Gutfeld! show in question, we mentioned the way Gutfeld had played on the idea that it must be hard for AOC because her balls are so much bigger than those which belong to her boyfriend. Gutfeld and Watters play variants of that naughty-boy routine over and over and over again, as a much wiser person named Dana Perino just sits there and enables it.
As in the 1990s, so too today—these people are willing to do whatever they're told to rake in the big TV bucks. As with the other tribe, our own tribe has been played by the people we're taught to trust again and again and again.
Last week, Marcotte did a lengthy essay which dealt in part with that same Gutfeld! show. Headline included, we offer this excerpt. We'll suggest that you read the whole thing
Greg Gutfeld's sexual obsession with AOC accidentally reveals the insecurities of the MAGA man
[...]
Earlier this week, Gutfeld tried to argue that Ocasio-Cortez is just projecting "her own insecurities about her boyfriend’s masculinity." And then he engaged in a gross, racist sexual fantasy about her: "This is why she is so pro-illegal immigration: she is projecting her secret desires for young, virile men who are coming here in droves."
Certainly, someone thinks a lot about the "virility" of immigrant men, but it's not the congresswoman from New York. Perhaps it is unfair to characterize Gutfeld as completely talentless: He certainly has a knack for provoking the sexual insecurities of his audience. Likely it's because he shares their entirely correct fear that others can see through their chest-thumping to, in Gutfeld's words, the "soft and buttery" condition of a typical Ford F-Series pick-up truck driver. The next day, Gutfeld doubled down on his unhinged attacks on Ocasio-Cortez, reassuring viewers that it's "OK" to use the word "retarded" to describe her.
This was a two-fer of cheap political incorrectness, punching down at people with mental disabilities, while also being a sexist slight against a woman's intelligence. Does anyone, even in the credulous Fox News audience, actually buy Gutfeld's attempt to insinuate that someone as pretty, charming and talented as Ocasio-Cortez is hard up for male attention? No, but obviously there is value for his viewers in the fantasy of it. The toxic masculinity that is the beating heart of the MAGA movement is fundamentally a psychological defense mechanism of men who, often for very good reason, secretly believe themselves to fall short of masculine ideals like courage and vitality.
For ourselves, we'll only remind you that non-MAGA men (and women) have played these same cards. Today, blue tribe TV stars may tend to perform in the opposite direction, in part because that's what they're bosses are telling them to do.
For ourselves, we'd prefer to stay away from the sweeping diagnoses offered by Marcotte and even by Cowherd. That said, Watters are Gutfeld are a daily clown show. They behave this way night after night and no one says a word.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Our corporate-paid tribal leaders aren't always what you imagine.
Also, the campaign is on, and Candidate Biden is behind in seven of seven swing states. It's time to get extremely serious. It's time to stop playing around, to drop the dumb entertainment.
San Mateo's own Greg Gutfeld needs to get much better. The lords and ladies at our finest newspapers need to stop ducking away from Fox.