CLAN: George Conway also nodded off!

THURSDAY, APRIL 18, 2024

Chris Hayes and the children's hours: At some point, George T. Conway III decided to switch his clan.

In 2001, he married Kellyanne FitzPatrick, who we'd once known the tiniest tad. Roughly seventeen years after that, the gentleman switched his clan. 

Back in the 1990s, he had started out with Ann Coulter as one of the "the elves." The secretive group was struggling to bring Bill Clinton down, largely on the basis of unverifiable sexual claims.

To read the Lyons / Conason account of the elves, you can just click here. Concerning Conway, to clip one passage:

"In his early thirties, he had made partner at New York's Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one of the biggest and richest litigation shops in the country. His primary occupation was defending the major tobacco companies, and he reportedly made as much as $1 million a year doing it."

These are some of the ways Conway started out. But in 2018, as a somewhat belated reaction to the works of President Donald J. Trump, the Harvard College / Yale Law School graduate signed on with one of the higher-profile clans in Blue America.

This November, he's going to vote the same way we're going to vote! Yesterday afternoon, he was numbered in the first panel of guests on Deadline: White House.

At 4:07, he started to speak. Eventually, he authored a claim which the cowardly lions of Blue America have begun to sneak in the back door:

CONWAY (4/17/24): [Trump] hate-watches this network, right?

WALLACE: [Laughter]

CONWAY: He might be watching right now. And he'd probably be throwing something at the television. I don't know.

I mean, he can't—he can’t help himself but emotionally react to things. And one of the things—

He’s a narcissistic sociopath, and that’s the thing everyone has to kind of get used to. It’s the reason why you cannot normalize him. 

You cannot treat him like a normal human being because he’s not. He is unwell. And that's why he can’t follow, he’s not going to be able to follow his lawyers’ directions.

Is Trump "a narcissistic sociopath?" Is he in fact "unwell?"

We've been advancing that presumption for years. In Dr. Bandy X. Lee's best-selling but thoroughly disappeared book, thirty-seven medical specialists argued some form of that claim.

Later, Conway restated his psychiatric assessment for a delighted Wallace. In fairness, she's light-years over her head at this point in time. 

She was in her element in Campaign 2004, when she was spokesperson for George W Bush, helping him sell the war in Iraq and helping him win the state of Ohio though the ballot measure which would have banned gay marriage and thereby brought many more voters out.

(According to the leading authority: "Many political experts credit the amendment with bolstering turnout in rural Ohio, leading to many religious supporters of President George W. Bush to turnout to the polls, helping him win the state of Ohio by a narrow two-point margin.")

Since those glorious gay-trashing days, Wallace has switched her clan and Conway has switched clans too. 

At present, he alone is out there attributing Trump's ongoing behavior to a severe psychiatric disorder. For ourselves, we're inclined to assume that Conway's general assessment is correct. 

That said, people like Wallace don't have the integrity to bring medical specialists onto her show to discuss such possibilities in the cool, clear open air. In fairness, she's paid millions to do things the way she does. She does it for two hours each weekday afternoon

Back to Conway:

He's been expressly ascribing a severe psychiatric element to Trump at least since this lengthy article appeared in the Atlantic in October 2019.

Our other "journalists" and news orgs simply aren't willing to consider such possibilities. Their guild retains rules against seeking the truth. We're living in primitive times.

To our eye, Conway remains a fairly obvious lifelong nerd who has finally achieved a spot at the cool kids' table. Yesterday, speaking with Wallace and seeming to bask in his role in the fray, he offered a personal aside even before he offered his psychiatric assessment of Trump.

In doing so, he was repeating himself. He had already offered that same aside right at the start of his new essay for The Atlantic. 

To his credit, the former elf is working in the bright lights now. Dual headlines included, his new essay starts like this:

The Trump Trial’s Extraordinary Opening
The first days of the criminal case against the former president have been mundane, even boring—and that’s remarkable.

By George T. Conway III

The defendant nodded off a couple of times on Monday. And I have to confess, as a spectator in an overflow courtroom watching on closed-circuit television, so did I.

Legal proceedings can be like that. Mundane, even boring. That’s how the first couple of days of the trial in new People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Indictment No. 71543–2023, felt much of the time. 

Did Donald J. Trump nod off in court? Apparently, George Conway nodded off too!

We can't swear that he actually did. But it made for an amusing open, and he instantly made the same claim when he spoke with Wallace.

In his essay and also with Wallace, Conway went on to offer some underwhelming thoughts about what the "mundane" court session suggests. He said it means that our nation's much-maligned court system is actually working.

Astoundingly, it seemed to us that Judge Jeanine Pirro had a much stronger point of view at the start of yesterday's broadcast of The Five. She argued that the trial should have been moved to a jurisdiction where voter sentiment is roughly 50/50 Red America versus Blue, as opposed to the massive Democratic / Blue America majority sentiment which will likely prevail among the jurors selected for the "hush money" trial.

All day yesterday, then last night, we thought we saw our own tribe's journalistic elite finally crash and burn. It culminated with the first 18 minutes of All In With Chris Hayes, an embarrassing spectacle presided over by someone who once seemed too smart to us for us to believe he's all in.

How much is Hayes paid to do with he currently does? We aren't allowed to know such things, but we'll once again tell you this:

As a political matter, we don't have the slightest idea how this will work in November. We regard this as an election in which, by normal standards, each candidate is unelectable.

That said, we pray that very few undecided voters are watching Wallace and Hayes and their dear friends as they chuckle and clown and play the fool for their millions of viewers and dollars.

Even yesterday—two full days later!—the corporate children who feed our tribe were still opening their broadcasts with jokes about Donald J. Trump nodding off in court. We've finally drawn a deep conclusion:

This is actually all they have. Believe it or not, this is the best they can do!

 They really aren't capable of anything more. Our best guess would be this:

These children have no freaking idea how they look to the people who aren't members of our own clan. They have no idea how much sympathy they may engender for the hotly pursued Orange Man.

(Will they engender such sympathy? We have no idea. But we recall the way Bill Clinton gained in the polls when Kenneth Starr emerged from the realm of the elves and overplayed his hand. Also, there's Pretty Boy Floyd.)

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is said to have said.

As that statement is understood, it's surely true up to a point. But to a much larger extent, we humans are, as a matter of basic fact "the deeply immature animal which tends to run in clans."

Blue America is now being serviced by a gang of corporate hirelings who are tasked with keep ratings and profits up.

At present, they're devoted to wasting your time with jokes about Trump nodding off. 

George Conway now says that he nodded off too! In our view, nodding off amid the tedium of that court session may be a sign of high intelligence, especially right after lunch.

The analysts sat and watched the clowning as Hayes and his guests simpered through last evening's first segment.

The segment ran a full eighteen minutes. In our view, Hayes is basically faking it now, even if his guests are not.

We began to see the sheer futility of the search for an American public discourse. When the commercial break finally came, one of the analysts rose and declaimed:

"People are dying all over the world, and that's what these *ssholes are doing?"

One irate analyst stood and declaimed. We didn't quite know what to tell her.

Tomorrow: We still hope to discuss that $93 million

This afternoon: Acyn rides again, or possibly Charlie Sykes