SUNDAY, JULY 14, 2024
No Bad Judgment Left Behind: Full disclosure! We watched two hours of Fox & Friends Weekend this morning.
We watched the 6 o'clock and 7 o'clock hours. The three regular weekend "friends" were on hand, joined by two members of the weekday Fox & Friends cast.
We watched what happened for two solid hours. We'd described what we saw this way:
No Impossibly Bad Example of Pseudo-Journalism Left Behind
For now, we won't attempt to report or transcribe what we're talking about. We may do so tomorrow.
That said, the uninformed speculations were virtually endless. They went on and on, then on and on. Very few unfounded speculations were omitted from the mix.
For today, we'll offer two assessments:
First, this sort of thing is inevitable when a nation organizes its journalism in the way much of our journalism is now organized—on the (thoroughly undisguised) basis of "segregation by viewpoint."
Today's five friends all share the same tribal viewpoint. No alternate viewpoint, inclination or impulse was present on the set.
In such situations, the participants will all agree with whatever the last friend said—or they'll try to top it. On and on and on they'll go, leaving no impossibly unwise insinuation behind.
Our second point would be this:
Under such arrangements, the bad judgment won't all be found Over There.
In our view, there has been a lot of bad judgment within our own Blue America over the past several years. In certain respects, we'd say that our tribe's self-defeating behavior dates back something like sixty years
During the Trump era, quite a few misstatements have become established parts of Blue America's treasury of memorized tribal dogmas. In our view, the focus on trying LOCK HIM UP has constituted a relentless case study in bad political / moral judgment—bad political / moral judgment which has tended to be self-defeating.
(That focus on trying to LOCK HIM UP is also "human, all too human." We humans will always be inclined to tilt that way in the absence of wise leadership.)
The friends went on and on, then on and on, in the two hours we watched this morning. Along the way, they did allege one example of very bad judgment by an unnamed staffer to an unnamed member of the January 6 committee.
At 8 a.m., we sat down and googled it up. Sure enough! It looks like that one allegation was basically accurate. For a preliminary news report, you can just click here.
We humans are prone to bad judgment. That doesn't mean that we're bad people—it means we're people people. But especially at times of tribal or national war, our powers of discernment may be strikingly limited.
The results are bound to be horrible when we let our corporations split us into warring tribes in search of ratings and profits. As one result of this ongoing arrangement, the performance on today's Fox & Friends was just gruesomely bad.
Two days ago, we cited President Lincoln again. As we've noted many times, he insisted, again and again, on regarding his neighbors as friends.
ReplyDeleteHumans are not prone to bad judgment, Bob. Had they been prone to bad judgment, they would've become extinct hundreds of thousands years ago. And brainwashed liberals don't do judgements. They have talking points instead.
Somerby wasn’t watching liberals on Fox.
DeleteAnd brain-dead trolls misspell 'judgment.'
DeleteAu contraire: brain-dead trolls don't misspell.
DeleteSo says Monaco Mao, who robotically defends everything his orange god does and says.
DeleteI love how we're all supposed to pretend that we wouldn't have been massively relieved if the guy had succeeded yesterday. It's not politically correct (or politically advantageous) to admit it.
We're supposed to think it would have been a tragedy if this national scourge was no longer able to threaten the country and world with what would undoubtedly be four years (or more) of lawless, single-party tyranny and revenge (revenge for trying to uphold the rule of law). Please.
The party whose leader indirectly encouraged the assassination of his political rival during the 2016 campaign and joked about Paul Pelosi being savagely attacked with a hammer now expects us to condemn violence. The same party that just cheered on the unimaginable SCOTUS ruling that will give Trump immunity to commit all the violence he wants, as long as he can construe it as an "official act." Some of these nut jobs are now baselessly promoting the theory that Biden was behind the attempted assassination. Hey fascists, doesn't Biden have total immunity for "official acts," like protecting the country from all threats foreign AND domestic?
And then there's Trump's long history of encouraging violence, the most salient example being January 6th, which he not only incited but could have instantly stopped but instead sat and watched for nearly three hours, until he saw the effort was going to fail. There are countless other examples -- he wanted to execute a staffer who embarrassed him by leaking that he had hid in a bunker during protests. He very clearly insinuates that people like Mark Milley and Liz Cheney should be executed for treason. Please spare me any lectures.
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DeleteFrom The Atlantic:
DeleteThe outcome of the presidential campaign, Republicans believed, was a fait accompli. “Donald Trump was well on his way to a 320-electoral-vote win,” Chris LaCivita told me this past Sunday as Democrats questioned, ever more frantically, whether President Joe Biden should remain the party’s nominee in November. “That’s pre-debate.”
LaCivita paused to repeat himself: “Pre-debate.”
This could be interpreted as trash talk coming from a cocky campaign: If you thought Biden was in trouble before he bombed at the June 27 debate, imagine the trouble he’s in now. But I heard something different in LaCivita’s voice. One of the two principals tasked with returning Trump to the White House, LaCivita had long conceived of the 2024 race as a contest that would be “extraordinarily visual”—namely, a contrast of strength versus weakness. Trump, whatever his countless liabilities as a candidate, would be cast as the dauntless and forceful alpha, while Biden would be painted as the pitiable old heel, less a bad guy than the butt of a very bad joke, America’s lovable but lethargic uncle who needed, at long last, to be put to bed.
As the likelihood of a Trump-versus-Biden rematch set in, the public responded to the two candidates precisely as LaCivita and his campaign co-manager, Susie Wiles, had hoped. The percentage of voters who felt that Biden, at 81, was too old for another term rose throughout 2023, even as the electorate’s concerns about Trump’s age, 78, remained relatively static. By the end of the primaries, the public’s attitude toward the two nominees had begun to harden: One was a liar, a scoundrel, and a crook—but the other one, the old one, was unfit to be president.
In the months that followed, Trump and his campaign would seize on Biden’s every stumble, his every blank stare, to reinforce that observation, seeking to portray the incumbent as “stuttering, stammering, walking around, feeling his way like a blind man,” as LaCivita put it to me. That was the plan. And it worked. Watching Biden’s slide in the polls, and sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars for an advertising blitz that would punctuate the president’s visible decrepitude, Trump’s team entered the summer believing that a landslide awaited in the fall.
Only one thing could disrupt that plan: a change of candidates atop the Democratic ticket.
There was always a certain danger inherent to this assault on Biden’s faculties. If Wiles and LaCivita were too successful—if too many Democrats decided, too quickly, that Biden was no longer capable of defeating Trump, much less serving another four years thereafter—then they risked losing an ideal opponent against whom their every tactical maneuver had already been deliberated, poll-tested, and prepared. Campaigns are usually on guard against peaking too soon; in this case, the risk for Trump’s team was Biden bottoming out too early.
[continued from above] In my conversations with LaCivita and Wiles over the past six months, they assured me multiple times that the campaign was planning for all contingencies, that they took quite seriously the possibility of a substitution and would be ready if Biden forfeited the nomination.
DeleteBy mid-June, however, not long before the debate, their tone had changed. Trump was speaking at a Turning Point USA rally in Detroit and the three of us stood backstage, leaning against the wall of a dimly lit cargo bay, a pair of Secret Service vehicles idling nearby. When I asked about the prospect of Trump facing a different Democratic opponent in the fall, LaCivita and Wiles shook their heads. They told me it was too late; the most influential players in Democratic politics had become too invested in the narrative that Biden was fully competent and capable of serving another four years.
“We’re talking about an admission that the Democratic Party establishment would have to make,” LaCivita said. “We’re talking about pulling the plug—”
“On the president of the United States,” Wiles interrupted.
LaCivita nodded. “Who they’ve been saying up to this point in time is perfectly fine.”
No, Wiles and LaCivita agreed, the general-election matchup was set—and they were just fine with that.
“Joe Biden,” Wiles told me, allowing the slightest of smiles, “is a gift.”
https://bit.ly/4cXx1FY
On August 3, 2019, Patrick Crusius walked into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, carrying and AK-47, and calmly murdered 23 persons and seriously wounded another 22 individuals.
Delete"This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas," Crusius posted shortly before the shooting on a website popular with white supremacists. He said immigrants were seeking to "replace" white Americans.
Most of the victims were Mexican or Mexican-American, you know, the rapists and criminals and released people from asylums that Mexico is sending here to poison our blood.
This was won of several mass shootings during Trump's presidency that can be directly linked to his reckless inflammatory rhetoric.
I'll be goddamned if I tone down my criticism of that orange abomination while he raises a clenched fist and screams "fight" over and over again to his cult followers.
“Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence" -
Delete@davidfrum
on a challenging concept to enunciate in a fraught time. (Tim Miller)
“The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator
Violence stalks the president who has rejoiced in violence to others.”
By David Frum
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/07/donald-trump-democracy-dictator/679006/
Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptly turned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.
DeleteYet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.
One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.
Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—[nearly] every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.
The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.
The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.
DeleteNobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.
The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subdued to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.
Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.
But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.
Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life [Lol. I guess I'm not a decent person; I suspect there's tens of millions like me]. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.
Our nation didn’t “organize” its journalism at all. It grew willy nilly because that’s how capitalism works.
ReplyDeleteSomerby should not poison his mind watching Fox like that.
Anonymouse 10:44am, you spent a lot of years telling Somerby that he should be watching and reporting upon the perfidy of FNC, only to now say the opposite when he took you up on it.
DeleteYou don’t have any ground to stand on and you’re none too bright.. At this point you’re merely punching a time clock.
Fox News is for people who don't own a dog they can kick.
DeleteAnonymouse 11:08am, my guess is that Bob serves the same function for anonymices, the only drawback being ridden like mule by the coven.
Delete11:01,
DeleteWatch how many people who said the 2nd Amendment is to fight the tyranny of the government, pivot to being outraged now that someone tried to use that right.
It's all performative.
Anonymouse 11:24pm, Trump isn’t the government. Neither is Biden, but for a different reason.
DeleteThe shooter might very well have tried to shoot Trump because he felt Trump was threatening his life. Best to reserve judgement, until all the facts are known.
Delete11:31,
DeleteNo matter hw you slice it, it's all performative.
Anonymouse 11:38am, it’s your lack of outrage that is utterly sincere.
DeleteOutrage over what? Gun violence? Yesterday is what we call "Saturday" in this country.
DeleteBesides, now is definitely not the right time to be talking about gun violence. First we need to pretend we care about mental health, but not take any actions on it for a few months, or until people move on from yesterdays "news".
Are you new to the USA?
Anonymouse 12:28pm, there’s not a person on the planet who thinks you’d be reserving your outrage over an attempted assassination of Biden, due to current gun regulations and public mental health financing
DeleteYou’d be joyously using that as a springboard for those causes. The difference is that now you can’t even work yourself up in the interest of those policies when they are the salient, because you’ve far more concerned that this attack might help Trump.
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Delete“ you’ve far more concerned that this attack might help Trump.”
DeleteClassic projection. No one mentioned the possibility of a poll bounce for Trump except Cecelia.
This attack didn’t happen because Trump was prosecuted and convicted of crimes.
ReplyDeleteAnonymouse 10:46am, we don’t know anything yet, and every symbol that this shooter has ever typed on the internet is now offline and locked down so as to have complete control of the narrative.
DeleteMy guess is you’re not a psychic, you’re merely a jerk.
White male is all we know.
DeleteChecks out.
Anonymouse 11:17am, in other words, same as your daddy.
DeleteTrump's daddy is Vladdy.
DeleteThat's how blackmail works.
Anonymouse 11:40am, anonymices have more daddy issues than the entire Jackson family.
DeleteDiana Hill and Joe Engle have died.
ReplyDeleteShannon Doherty has died.
DeleteI didn't even know she was in cognitive decline.
DeleteBig funny joke. She had breast cancer.
Delete
ReplyDeleteDonald Trump is a real-life Superman.
It’s open now, and it’s on. I don’t see any way that Trump, at the least, will not be taught to shut his mouth and to be a good boy, even if he dropped out tomorrow.
DeleteWhat?
DeleteThe second amendment is poo-poo.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you waste your time watching Fox. Everybody knows what they are going to sayd. Try doing something constructive with those two hours.
ReplyDelete