CAMPAIGN: The commander in chief has decided to act!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2024

On MS, entertainment and error: In yesterday morning's Washington Post, David Ignatius defined the new lay of the land.

President Biden would soon be acting in his role as commander in chief. Ignatius, a deeply experienced foreign policy writer began his column as shown:

Biden calibrates his response as a slow-motion crisis arrives

“Target Tehran” after this past weekend’s drone strike on a U.S. base in northeastern Jordan, thundered Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.). Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sneered that President Biden would be “a coward unworthy of being commander in chief” unless he attacked Iranian forces and their proxies, inside and outside the country.

Calling for irresponsible actions without bearing responsibility for the outcome is a senatorial “perk,” I guess. Fortunately, Biden is thinking carefully about how to respond to the attack by an Iranian proxy that killed three U.S. soldiers and wounded some 40 others—without, in the process, getting the United States into another open-ended Middle East war.

As the Biden White House weighs options, what thoughts are going through policymakers’ minds? Based on conversations with current and former officials, we can make some guesses about the president’s decision-making. He’s likely to take decisive action, but think hard about the consequences of the option he chooses.

So wrote David Ignatius at a deeply serious time. On the front page of the Post's print edition, above the fold, these sobering headlines appeared:

Biden faces treacherous choices in responding
White House fears wider conflict as Republicans call for decisive action

On Morning Joe, yesterday's program opened with an extended bit of clowning—but after that, an intensely serious discussion broke out. 

The program routinely turns to a trio of highly experienced guests—Ignatius, James Stavridis and Richard Haass—when it discusses serious foreign policy topics. In this case, the discussion featured Haass, long-standing former president of the Council on Foreign Relation.

A serious discussion broke out. On the whole, Scarborough said he was ready for war with Iran, Haass served as a voice of caution. 

By last night, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had made it clear that President Biden had made his assessments as to how the U.S. military was going to respond. On the merits and on the politics, it was a very serious time—but blue tribe cable news programs tended to open with lighter fare.

On Alex Wagner Tonight, Wagner discussed the impending military situation shortly after 8:30 p.m. She had opened with the day's most entertaining topic, and with a representation which was entertaining but inaccurate in at least one way.

She opened her program with Taylor and Travis—with the new excitement about Taylor Swift's romance. You can see her opening framework just by clicking here:

WAGNER (1/30/24): Bear with me here. A segment of right-wing media is convinced that the Kansas City Chiefs qualifying for the Super Bowl this year, it's actually a vast left-wing conspiracy. 

This plot all centers around the relationship between Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce and superstar musician Taylor Swift. a relationship the right wing now believes is actually a Deep State conspiracy to elect Joe Biden.

I am not kidding!

[VIDEO CLIPS]

Men [sic] labor under a mistake, Thoreau once famously said. At various times, so do hosts of cable news shows, even those who serve our own tribe and vote the same way we do.

Under the rubric of that framework, Wagner proceeded to play videotape from several cable shows. 

The first clip came from the January 9 broadcast of Jesse Watters Primetime. The second clip was drawn from yesterday morning's broadcast of Fox & Friends.

Jesse Watters Primetime may be the stupidest show ever presented as an example of "cable news." The segment in question was truly astounding. Equally astounding is this fact:

This utterly D-minus, silly boy-child hosts a nightly "cable news" program—and his ludicrous conduct goes unmentioned all over the upper-end press. 

By now, such clowning has been normalized, in a process dating back roughly twenty-five years. This normalization began with the toleration of bizarre behavior on cable news programs run by NBC News in the late 1990s.

Below, we'll link you to tape of the Watters segment from January 9. According to the chyron above which he performed, Watters spoke with "STUART KAPLAN, FORMER FBI AGENT." 

What the two said was so utterly stupid that we won't summarize it here. We will say that Kaplan suggested that Swift may be operating as a Deep State "psy-op," perhaps unknowingly, as part of her current romance.

The Watters program actually gets that stupid! That said, the conversation on yesterday morning's Fox & Friends had nothing to do with any claim that the romance in question is part of a left-wing or Deep State conspiracy.

Nothing like that was said. All too often, to entertain and reassure viewers, corporate-paid cable news hosts labor under mistakes of this ratings-friendly type.

Instantly, let's be clear! The trio on Fox & Friends did discuss Taylor Swift during yesterday's program. But at no time were they saying anything about any kind of conspiracy involving her new romance. 

Instead, they simply discussed a front-page report from yesterday morning's New York Times. Headline included, then starting in paragraph 5, the New York Times was now reporting this:

Inside Biden’s Anti-Trump Battle Plan (and Where Taylor Swift Fits In)

[...]

Biden aides are drafting wish lists of potential surrogates, including elected officials, social media influencers and the endorsement of their wildest dreams: the global superstar Taylor Swift.

“It’s game on, the beginning of the general election,” said Representative Ann McLane Kuster of New Hampshire, the chair of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of 97 centrist House Democrats. “We’ve got to win this.”

[...]

The biggest and most influential endorsement target is Ms. Swift, 34, the pop sensation and N.F.L. enthusiast, who can move millions of supporters with an Instagram post or a mid-concert aside. She endorsed Mr. Biden in 2020 and, last year, a single Instagram post of hers led to 35,000 new voter registrations. Fund-raising appeals from Ms. Swift could be worth millions of dollars for Mr. Biden.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a top Biden surrogate, all but begged Ms. Swift to become more involved in Mr. Biden’s campaign when he spoke to reporters after a Republican primary debate in September.

“Taylor Swift stands tall and unique,” he said. “What she was able to accomplish just in getting young people activated to consider that they have a voice and that they should have a choice in the next election, I think, is profoundly powerful.”

The chatter around Ms. Swift and the potential of reaching her 279 million Instagram followers reached such intensity that the Biden team urged applicants in a job posting for a social media position not to describe their Taylor Swift strategy—the campaign had enough suggestions already. 

So it went in the New York Times. For the record, the reported desire to acquire Swift as a surrogate does in fact make perfect sense now that the campaign has reached the point of "game on."

Yesterday morning, two of the friends on Fox & Friends discussed these very points. They accurately quoted the New York Times report. Nothing they said fit under the rubric of the crazy right-wing media discussing a Deep State conspiracy. 

They displayed the headlines from the Times report, then conducted a perfectly sensible discussion of the way some such endorsement could help the Biden campaign. You can see their discussion by clicking here, though we'll offer one word of warning:

They discussed the matter with Jimmy Failla, one of the Fox News Channel's current roster of ten thousand comedians. It's Failla's new book that the channel is aggressively selling to its millions of viewers this week.

Inclusion of the Fox & Friends gang was a minor error by Wagner. There was nothing crazy about what they said. They pimped no conspiracy theory. 

That said, for those of us within our blue tribe, claims like those are entertaining and fun. We wonder if the time has come, with the campaign now underway, to stop entertaining us blue tribe viewers and instead to take ourselves where the rubber will meet the road.

Watters played the fool on January 9, as he persistently does. 

We link you here to that gong-show pseudo-discussion. Almost surely, American "news" programming has never been this stupid at any time in the past.

Concerning the other clips that Wagner aired, let us say this about that. Vivek Ramaswamy did play the fool in the way her framework advertised. So too, or so it seems, did a ridiculous on-air host at the gong-show channel, OAN.

Jesse Watters had played the fool all the way back on January 9. Yesterday, though, the trio of friends on Fox & Friends didn't follow suit.

Instead, they discussed the contents of the report in the New York Times. So did the Morning Joe gang on this morning's program.

Each conversation made decent sense. The Fox stars made no ridiculous claims, although they frequently do.

On the merits and on the politics, our blue tribe now finds itself in a very serious time. President Biden will soon be acting as commander in chief. What happens will be very important. 

The political campaign has already started. Will we ever stop entertaining ourselves? Will we ever see our multimillionaire corporate stars put their feet right square on the ground in a long drive of our own—a long drive toward November?

According to a new Bloomberg survey, Biden's behind in all the swing states. When if ever do we blue denizens plan to stop playing around?

This afternoon: A brilliant discussion on Morning Joe concerning modern misogyny. 

Also, dim-bulb misogyny from Watters and Gutfeld. Hat tip Andrea Marcotte, though this story goes back many years.