SATURDAY, MARCH 30, 2024
But mainly, Drum gets it right: We're so old that we can remember when topics like the ones we'll cite might have seemed to matter.
In fact, topics like these never mattered. We're so old that we can remember when you could still pretend.
We refer to several pieces of excellent work authored yesterday by Kevin Drum. We'd give one piece of Drum's work a straight-A grade. We'd give the second piece of work a grade of I, for Incomplete.
Let's be clear! No one cares, or ever did care, about the topics involved in Drum's reports. On the brighter side, we can report this one small advance in public understanding:
By now, it has at least become quite clear that no one of consequence cares.
All that matters at this late date is the ugly war which is developing, day by day, between spear-chuckers from Red America and their Blue America counterparts. This morning, that ugly war involved an array of angry claims concerning the shooting death, this past Tuesday, of Jonathan Diller, a 31-year-old officer with the New York City Police Department.
The war about Diller's death was quite ugly this morning on Fox. The larger war between the two Americas will only get uglier and more heated as the year proceeds.
On the "cable news" Fox News Channel, you have a gang of flyweight droogs who are pushing propaganda about several topics where the merits are so clear that even they can get it right in their basic stance.
On the "cable news" MSNBC, a group of more distinguished propagandists propagandize on our behalf is more sophisticated ways, largely by disappearing the topics which serve our own tribe poorly.
Regarding the topics which Drum explored, let us say this about that:
Propagandists from Blue America don't care about these topics. Propagandists from Red America don't give a flying fark either.
That said, Drum discussed one topic which we ourselves have been discussing since the 1970s. He then discussed a second topic, specifically citing something we ourselves recently wrote.
We're so old that we can remember when topics like these almost seemed to matter! At this time, very few people are still involved in any such pretense.
Topic 1: The good, decent children of Flint
The first post to which we'll refer you involves the good, decent children of Flint.
Drum's post involves an erroneous report in the Washington Post about the way those kids were affected by the 2014 Flinton water crisis. The post appears beneath this headline:
Here’s yet more misleading “science” about the Flint lead crisis
The background here would be this:
Starting in the mid-1960s, our major mainstream and liberal orgs began to pretend that we actually care about children like these. By now, it's clear that no one actually does or ever did—that these efforts tend were largely performative all the way down.
Also, there's the never-ending journalistic and academic incompetence. We'll summarize like this:
Drum links to this March 13 report in the Washington Post about one alleged consequence of the Flint water crisis. More specifically, he links to a Post report about the alleged drop in test scores by Flint's school kids in the aftermath of that high-profile event.
As Drum explains, the report in the Post was grossly inaccurate. So was a formal academic study which the Post's reporter took at face value.
You can peruse Drum's post for yourselves. We'll add this bit of information concerning the Washington Post:
The reporter of the Post's report is two years out of college. She's officially listed by the Post as "a weather and climate reporter."
In other words, she's a young reporter with no background, experience or expertise in the realm of public schools and public school test scores. If an editor was involved in the report, he or she was apparently similarly clueless.
The Washington Post is a major newspaper which engages in all sorts of performative posing concerning the interests of low-income black and brown students. Just as it has ever been, the paper seems to have exactly zero accumulated expertise regarding a topic as basic as the one Drum's post explores.
This is the way it has always worked at our major newspapers! Even within the major orgs of Blue America, there's no sign that anyone actually cares about low-income kids or that anyone ever will.
We've been writing about bungled test score reporting since the 1970s. It's impossible to get major newspapers to report such topics with anything resembling even the more modest degree of technical competence.
Simply put, it can't be done. By their works and their indolence you can know them, unless you prefer to pretend.
By the way, no one behaved more irresponsibly with respect to Flint's water crisis than Blue America's Rachel Maddow. She persistently failed to explore the scientific merits of various claims, focusing instead on trying to get Michigan's Republican governor frog-marched off to jail.
Today, getting Donald J. Trump locked up is our tribe's one major project. Our tribal leaders then to be very dumb, very obedient and extremely unhelpful.
Special bonus: Don't miss this statement from the academic study on which the Post was reporting:
"Between 2011 and 2019, including the 2014-15 crisis period, the incidence of elevated blood lead in Flint children was always at least 47% lower than in the control city of Detroit."
That's right! Kids in Flint were always better off, with respect to lead, than their counterparts in Detroit! Our multimillionaire cable thought leaders never told us that. Our thought leaders, much like theirs, tend to be borderline clowns.
Topic 2: How do border procedures work?
We'd give Kevin a straight A grade for that post about Flint. We'll give him an I for Incomplete concerning his very promising second post, which appears beneath this headline:
About a third of all border crossers ask for asylum
In that second post, Kevin lays out some basic facts about the way border procedures are driven by certain laws concerning asylum requests. We'll direct you to this nugget passage from Kevin's post:
I've written about asylum before, but usually I just assume everyone knows it's a problem and then move on from there. So in case you don't, here it is in plain words: If you get across the border and claim asylum, international law—long ago incorporated into US law as well—requires that we hear your case. You get to stay until we do.
According to Kevin's account, current procedures at the southern border are being directed by "international law," which was "long ago incorporated into US law as well."
We don't doubt that those statements are true. That said, a whole lot more that remains unexplained, and the point we were making was this:
You never hear such explanations offered on Blue Tribe cable. On Bue Tribe cable, as on Red Tribe cable, you simply hear the recitation of a few mandated talking-points, followed by this exclamation by the next pundit up:
That's exactly right!
In that post, Kevin reproduces a graphic we've linked to earlier—a graphic which shows the massive rise in asylum requests (and subsequent entries) over the past few years.
He also refers to our complaint about President Biden. That complaint would go like this:
President Biden has offered no fireside chats. He has offered no Oval Office address. He said and did nothing in recent years as the situation at the border turned into an obvious administrative farce. If he loses his re-election bid, it will largely be because of that remarkable act of silence and apparent indifference in the face of a baldly absurd state of affairs.
The obedient children at Blue America's "cable news" channels also disappeared this topic over the past several years. At Fox, they kept thumping the drums very hard.
In this way, even the clown-car denizens at Fox got to be more right than wrong when it came to the ludicrous lack of action by our own tribe's public officials and media stars.
The Fox News Channel is largely peopled by flyweights and clowns—but so what? Our own tribe's behaviors have often been so absurd and so inexplicable that even a bunch of clowns like Gutfeld and Watters and Judge Jeannine can't avoid getting it basically right.
If President Biden loses this year, it will largely be due to this. The stars of Blue America's "cable news" channels have politely kept their traps shut, just as they did in several major episodes in the past.
Our stars are former Rhodes scholars. Their stars are wrestlers and clowns!
