ARMIES: Sheer idiocy, the commander said!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2024

The foot soldiers fell into line: As the coming year's siege of the White House continues to pick up steam, yesterday turned into a full-blown example of "That Was the [Day] That Was." 

As with the earlier siege of the towering walls of Troy, a wide array of armies—rather, of battalions within two larger armies—have assembled themselves in the field.

Within the realm of red tribe corporate America, one such battalion assembles each night on Gutfeld!, a Fox News Channel program. Last Friday night's hour was especially rank, though also quite instructive. 

A red nation army was aligned in the field. Near the start of the program's last segment. the program's angry commander-in-chief was angrily saying this:

GUTFELD (2/2/24): It's so weird, Walter, to start the morning by trying to make yourself stupid. 

It's like getting up and going, "Hey, you know what? I feel smart. I've got to shave off thirty I.Q. points. What's on Morning Joe?"

To watch the full segment, start here.

Sure enough! For his hour's closing segment, the field general had decided to feature the sheer stupidity of the blue tribe show, Morning Joe. 

In a new report, Politico had reported that President Biden often watches the MSNBC program. Also, Politico was reporting that Biden sometimes consults with Joe Scarborough, namesake of Morning Joe.

Joe Biden watches Morning Joe! The general took that as his cue to tell the world how stupid the program ism and his foot soldiers fell into line. 

The general had directed his comment at a resentful novelist, Walter Kirn. Kirn had replied in this manner:

KIRN (continuing directly): So we find out that Morning Joe is programming Naptime Joe every day, OK? This used to happen with Days of Our Lives and my grandma...

This program's "President Poopy Pants" had now been rendered as "Naptime Joe." Kirn seems to have become an "insult novelist," albeit one who meekly repeats whatever he's been told. 

At this point, the other troops took turns amplifying their leader's storyline. Eventually, Todd Piro, cohost of the 5 a.m. program Fox & Friends First, summed it up as shown below, with Gutfeld then throwing to Kat:

PIRO: Morning Joe is a D.C. bubble for the old people that were hippies that are no longer, you know, cogent and cognizant of life, and the D.C. establishment. So, it's a circular line of thinking, and it's useless. It's useless for the country. Completely useless.

GUTFELD: It's a stupid loop. 

[APPLAUSE]

Kat, it's a stupid loop. You have stupidity coming one way, gets reinforced, sends it back, and it just keeps going around and around and around.

A merry-go-round of idiocy. If you will, Kat. If you will!

Full disclosure:

In our view, there are several problems with the general thrust of Morning Joe. That said, we were a bit surprised to see this Fox News Channel program attacking that program as "stupid."

In our view, Joe Scarborough tends to clown around a bit too much. (That said, his sense of humor is much more refined than that of the angry child Gutfeld.)

Also, Morning Joe does seem to serve as a vehicle for the Biden White House line, sometimes in ways which strike us as uninsightful on the merits and unhelpful on the politics.

That said, the program also offers extremely careful discussions of our struggling nation's role in the wider world. We regard them as the most intelligent such discussion was ever see on any cable news program. 

Like the vast bulk of the population, we have no particular knowledge in the realm of foreign affairs. For that reason, we're grateful for the chance to watch those Morning Joe discussions.

There's no such thing as a perfect discussion. But those discussions are intelligent and nuanced—and they're routinely driven by a trio of highly experienced analysts.

Who drives these discussions of Morning Joe? Once again, let's call the roll:

Principal foreign policy analysts, Morning Joe

Admiral James Stavridis: Retired United States Navy admiral. NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (2009 to 2013). Commander, United States Southern Command (2006 to 2009). 

Chair emeritus of the board of directors of the United States Naval Institute. Senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Richard Haass: President of the Council on Foreign Relations, 2003 through June 2023. Prior to that, director of policy planning for the United States Department of State.

David Ignatius: Since 1999, twice-weekly columnist for the Washington Post on global politics, economics and international affairs.

There's no such thing as a perfect discussion. There's no such thing as a perfect roster.

That said, the Morning Joe foreign policy roster is deeply experienced and highly informed. Did we remember to mention the fact that Admiral Stavridis, a transparently sane public figure, is also a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab?

At any rate, so it goes on Morning Joe as it drives its stupid loop forward. By way of contrast, here's the roster of low-grade nudnicks who were appearing on Field Marshall Gutfeld's remarkably crabbed TV show on the evening in question:

Five-member panel, Gutfeld! 

Greg Gutfeld: Comedian. Former editor-in-chief of Stuff.

Tyrus: Now touring with new comedy show. Former professional wrestling heavyweight champion.

Kat Timpf: Comedian and "best-selling author." Co-host, Fox News Radio podcast Tyrus and Timpf.

Walter Kirn: American novelist, essayist. Author of eight novels, most notably Up in the Air.

Todd Piro: Co-host, Fox & Friends First, 5-6 a.m.

Once again, we've called the roll. On this occasion, this assembly of flyweights were happy to tell us how stupid Stavridis is!

Please understand! There's no reason why a low-grade comedian, or a former professional wrestler, can't be an insightful analyst. 

In fact, Tyrus is a highly skilled raconteur. That doesn't necessarily mean that he has a ton of policy chops, or that he's qualified to opine on every policy question producers might throw on the air.

Below, we'll show you the circumstance under which Timpf is now routinely introduced as a "best-selling New York Times author." For now, let's examine where she took this discussion after receiving the throw from her boss.

By now, the others had each taken a turn deriding the sheer stupidity of the program aimed at those who are no longer cogent or cognizant.  It would now be Kat's turn.

How brilliant are the nightly discussions which unspool on the primetime "cable news" program? Accepting the throw from her commander in chief, the analyst started like this:

TIMPF (continuing directly): I was just wondering like, Do you think Mika gets jealous? 

[NERVOUS LAUGHTER]

Do you think they fight about it? 

Because I definitely would! I would be like, "Oh sorry, like you don't have time—  Oh, the president is on."

[NERVOUS LAUGHTER]

 She probably—

[GESTURING TO LARGE PHOTO OF MIKA]

Look how upset she looks right over there.

GUTFELD: She always looks upset. She has resting upset face!

TYRUS: Well played!

So it went as the brilliant Timpf discussed the other tribe's amazingly stupid program.

Near the end of The Iliad, the body of Hector, breaker of horses, is dragged through the dirt and the dust outside the walls of Troy.

Three thousand years later, the building blocks of our own democracy are dragged through the dust on a nightly basis when these consummate flyweights are thrown on the air to offer name-calling insults for millions of people who don't understand that they're getting played—with Timpf agreeing to earn her keep by mocking Mika's comical face.

There is no perfect way to grade or rate a discussion. Within our own grade book, Morning Joe's foreign policy discussions are routinely highly erudite.

The discussion we see the Gutfeld! show are routinely among the dumbest, and the ugliest, ever seen in this part of the earth.

This week, as we've limned last Friday's program, we haven't been able to get to the ugliest parts of that show—to the parts of the show where the angry host kicks down at every demographic group which threatens his extremely fragile comfort level.

We haven't gone to the parts of the show where he kicks down at women; kicks down at gays; kicks down at trans kids; kicks down at "blacks" like Williams and Ford; kicks down at all demographic comers. 

Even Achilles beat back his great anger; the astoundingly privileged Greg Gutfeld rarely does. He will then duck behind his disguise, behind which he portrays himself as just a harmless little scamp.

We don't have the slightest idea how this 59-year-old man ever got to be this way. That said, the world would be a better place if San Mateo's own Greg Gutfeld could somehow make himself better. 

He could of course retain his "libertarian" views, slender and brittle as those supposed views seem to be. 

Democracy is being dragged through the dust as the suits at the Fix News Chanell broadcast this braindead prime time program. In this instance, the program ended with a segment in which a bunch of low-grade comedians commented on the blinding stupidity being churned by such experienced figures as Stavridis, Haass and Ignatius.

Each person will have to score the panels on those two cable programs in the way which makes most sense. We're sorry to have beaten up on Timpf in the way we've done in the past two days, but her commentaries have been utterly brainless, even as she agrees to recite the scripts her owners hand her.

By the way, how did this flyweight-adjacent figure ever become a "New York Times best-selling author?" That designation was awarded to Timpf's rarely reviewed 2023 memoir, You Can't Joke About That: Why Everything Is Funny, Nothing Is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. 

Almost all the low-grade comedians at Fox have books about what one of them calls "the war on fun." But how did an avowed libertarian like Timpf become a best-selling author? 

In this report from last December, the New York Times' Elizabeth Egan seems to explain, twin headlines included:

Snapshot of a Year in the Land of Best Sellers
Surprising ascensions, Hollywood migrations and daggers to the art—it’s all part of life at the top.

[...]

In 1995, the authors of a book on successful business practices were accused of purchasing tens of thousands of copies of their own book to manipulate their way onto best-seller lists. That’s when The Times started printing a small dagger after certain titles, indicating that bookstores reported bulk orders of these books.

Of the 22 titles that were appended with a dagger in 2023, seven were published by Broadside, a conservative-leaning imprint of HarperCollins, and, with two exceptions, are by current or former political figures or are affiliated with Fox News. Mike Pompeo, Ron DeSantis, Kat Timpf, Jason Chaffetz and Johnny Joey Jones fall into this category.

"So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed, high-collared clerks and bookkeepers!"

So says Willa Cather's narrator in My Antonia as he comes to understand the hypocrisy of the Anglo boys who refuse to act on their attraction to the vibrant beauty of Black Hawk's immigrant girls.

That story is told in Book II, Chapter IX of Cather's famous and real book. In a somewhat similar vein, Timpf is the kind of libertarian who gets her bills paid by Fox. 

The channel promotes her comedy appearances on the air, such as those outings are. The channel also promotes the sales of her book. 

Also, someone apparently buys her book in bulk! As a result, Gutfeld introduces her as a "best-selling New York Times author" night after night after night.

As for Timpf, she isn't nasty on a regular basis, the way her battalion chief is.  To her vast credit under the circumstances, she's rarely nasty at all.

On this occasion, she did decide to go after Mika's face.  Are these the things these flyweights are willing to do to stay on the gravy train?

The Iliad records the end of a fictional, ten-year siege of Troy. Ten thousand years later, we plan to provide a year-long history of this year's siege of the Biden White House.

Red battalions are already in the field. Blue battalions are also active. We plan to create a history of the way this siege unfolds. As a person who will be voting blue, we almost think that we can sense a possible very bad outcome.

In a very general way, we tend to agree with some of the things which get said on Gutfeld! At present, the red nation army possesses certain weapons whose power is hard to deny.

That said, the tone of the show is very stupid and very ugly, sometimes in ways we haven't yet had time to discuss.

Red tribe voters watching this program don't know that they're getting played. In closing, let us add this:

Gutfeld! isn't a comedy show. It hasn't been quixotically placed in a primetime slot on our highest-rated "news channel."

Almost surely, Fox is moving in this direction because research has shown that its expanding comedy tilt provides a more successful way to advance its preferred lines of propaganda and misinformation.

 Producers assemble a gaggle of hacks. The gaggle of hacks proceed to pimp their various insults and their mandated party lines.

Democracy is being dragged in the dust as the corporate suits at the Fox News Channel produce this nightly show. At times, its programs get uglier than we've yet shown you. 

Meanwhile, riddle yourself this:

Stavridis is stupid, but Greg Gutfeld isn't! As our nation splits into two, is rationality itself being dragged through the dust? Is sanity turned on its head? 

Still coming, though we don't know when: The most soul-damaged segment ever. 

Also, what Kat told Bill Maher