How dumb is our American discourse?

FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2024

But also, how vulgar and crass?  In our view, the New York Times has taken a major step in the right direction with a lengthy, detailed report by Bensinger, Yourish and Gold. 

It starts to go where the rubber is meeting the road. Its dual headline says this:

Trump Keeps Turning Up the Dial on Vulgarity. Will He Alienate the Voters He Needs?
Donald J. Trump has been reposting racially and sexually charged insults of Kamala Harris, continuing a history of crass attacks.

In the lengthy, detailed report, the three reporters describe the vulgar and crass, racially and sexually charged insults which that candidate relentlessly traffics. This kind of reporting has been long overdue. 

Yesterday, the Times report appeared online; it hasn't yet appeared in print editions. We hope it appears on the Times front page this Sunday morning. The report describes a major change in the moral and intellectual content of American political life.

As part of this same descent, Candidate Vance recently told a crowd at a campaign event that Candidate Harris "can go to Hell." The Washington Post asked Vance if he thinks this kind of language is appropriate.

At that point, The Dumbness comes in! Headline included, here's how the Post's subsequent news report starts:

Vance defends telling Harris to ‘go to hell’ for nonexistent cemetery criticism

Former president Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, doubled down Wednesday on telling Vice President Kamala Harris to “go to hell,” falsely repeating that she had feigned outrage over an altercation between Trump’s campaign and an Arlington cemetery worker when she had not.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Vance defended his attack on Harris—saying “go to hell” is “a colloquial phrase”—and tied it to broader criticism of the administration’s handling of an Islamic State attack that killed 13 U.S. troops during the August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Don’t focus on Donald Trump showing up to grieve with some people who lost their children. Focus on your own job. Don’t do this fake outrage thing. If Kamala Harris was really outraged about what happened, then she would do her job differently, start a real investigation, and fire some of the people who are involved.”

Sad! Vance had told Harris to "go to Hell" for voicing outrage about the incident at the Arlington National Cemetery—as the Post report explains in detail. for something she hasn't done. 

We'd call that a tiny bit crass. Concerning the dumbness quotient, look again at that third paragraph:

Vance is wondering why Harris doesn't "start an investigation," then "fire some of the people who were involved" in the withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Question! Would some such investigation show that someone should be fired? “Sentence first, verdict afterward,” as the Queen of Hearts once said.

A bit of Wonderland lurks in that statement. In the main, the dumbness to which we refer enters the picture here:

On what basis could Candidate Harris decide to launch an investigation, then start firing people? It's as we've been noting in the past few weeks:

Amazingly, people like Vance seem to think that vice presidents are the people who are in charge inside an American White House.

This may seem like a minor point—but on its face, the dumbness here is undisguised. As we've noted, the peculiar idea that Harris can do whatever she wants, and has been in charge for the past three years, has been driving the discourse among Fox News pundits for the past month, morning, noon and night.

That framework is very, very dumb. Here's the question we would ask:

Why doesn't Candidate Vance start an investigation, then start firing people? The answer to that is amazingly simple:

Whatever the merits of that suggestion might be, Candidate Vance doesn't possess that authority to do some such thing. But then again, neither does Vice President Harris!

That specific brand of dumbness has been ruling the airwaves at Fox. Regarding the crass and vulgar behavior of one of the two major candidates, the Times has finally decided to treat that behavior as actual news, which is what it quite plainly is.

We hope their report appears on page one. When it does, or perhaps if it doesn't, we'll show you what the three Times reporters have said.