HOW WE GOT HERE: How did it [ever] get this far?

MONDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2024

One candidate's Garden Party: On balance, Sid Rosenberg isn't a well-known national figure.

Yesterday, he was a featured speaker at a Garden Party. 

It wasn't Rick Nelson's Garden Party, concerning which he wrote and recorded this song in 1972. It was the Garden Party of one of the candidates—of Candidate Donald J. Trump.

Rosenberg was just one speaker among quite a few, including the policy nutcase Elon Musk. Providing a rough idea of the vibe along with a walk down memory lane, here's who Sid Rosenberg is:

Sid Rosenberg

Sidney Ferris Rosenberg (born April 19, 1967) is an American radio personality. He is currently the host of Sid and Friends in the Morning and "Sid Sports Sunday" plus sports reporter on 77 WABC in New York City.

[...]

His radio career started in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he hosted the syndicated sports radio program The Drive on Sports Fan Radio Network in the late 1990s...In 2000, he returned to New York City to co-host WNEW-FM's turbulent morning show, the Sports Guys. A year later, he joined the Imus in the Morning program...

Rosenberg was no stranger to controversy on the Imus show, which was also simulcast on MSNBC cable television. Among other things, he said on-air that Venus Williams was an "animal," and that she and Serena Williams would be better suited for National Geographic magazine than for Playboy, that "faggots play tennis" and that the United States women's national soccer team were "a bunch of juiced up dykes."

Rosenberg was fired from the Imus show after making crude remarks about Australian singer Kylie Minogue's breast cancer diagnosis...As a substitute sportscaster on April 4, 2007, Rosenberg reported on Rutgers University's 59-46 loss the previous evening to the University of Tennessee, in the final game of the NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Championship. This served as a lead-in to Imus and other cast members, who made comments that resulted in the cancelation of the program one week later.

That's who Rosenberg is, or at least who he was in the past. His role on Imus recalls the era when this garbage can behavior was working its way inside the culture in various disguised and camouflaged forms, with major members of Blue America's media elite straining to get on board.

(We think here of the early Howard Stern, along with the more presentable Imus.)

That's who Rosenberg seems to be, or at least that's who he's been in the past. Yesterday, speaking at one candidate's Garden Party, he offered such thoughtful ruminations as these:

ROSENBERG (10/27/24): She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party—a bunch of degenerates. Low lives. Jew-haters and low lives. Every one of them. Every one of them.

So said the "radio personality" at one hopeful's Garden Party.

For better or worse, you can hear the full seven minutes of his remarks through the auspices of 77ABC, a corporate entity which apparently isn't embarrassed by the conduct of this employee. Included will be this remark—a remarks which were plucked by Acyn from the stew and subsequently headlined in this post at Mediaite:

ROSENBERG: But the fucking illegals, they get whatever they want.

You can hear the full seven minutes here, but we'll offer a type of warning. In the midst of Rosenberg's ugly, profanity-strewn rant, you'll possibly be exposed the some of the ways those of us in Blue America have actually managed to get here.

In our view, we've done that over the past sixty years. As is true of human tribes all across the globe and all through the annals of time, those of us in Blue America aren't especially skilled at seeing such things about ourselves and about our own behavior.

Yesterday's Garden Party was full of ugly denunciations and rants. Perhaps the stupidest boy of them all was comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, whose remark about a certain "floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean" was later disowned by the Trump campaign itself.

That said, the vitriol, and the sheer stupidity, were general over the Garden. In the course of the rally's mayhem, a journalistic rule of thumb seems to have emerged:

When this is done on the Fox News Channel, the New York Times (and other such orgs) will avert their gaze. But when it's done at Madison Square Garden, in a highly-publicized event, even the finer people apparently feel they have to report what happened.

That' what the Times has done, at long last, in today's news report:

Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism

Donald J. Trump’s closing rally at Madison Square Garden on the second to last Sunday before the election was a release of rage at a political and legal system that impeached, indicted and convicted him, a vivid and at times racist display of the dark energy animating the MAGA movement.

A comic kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.

Another speaker likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” A third called her “the Antichrist.” And the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Ms. Harris—the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father—with a made-up ethnicity, saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

By the time the former president himself took the stage, an event billed as delivering the closing message of his campaign, with nine days left in a tossup race, had instead become a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism.

[...]

Later, the television host Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, lectured the crowd on why Mr. Trump did not fit the definition of “a bully” because a bully requires “an imbalance of power,” seeming to ignore the fact that Mr. Trump has enormous power as a billionaire and former president.

During the speech by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mr. Vance, the entire arena spontaneously burst into chants of “Tampon Tim” to disparage Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate.

[...]

David Rem, a childhood friend of Mr. Trump, called Ms. Harris “the devil.”

You can't get dumber than Dr. Phil. At long last, that's perfectly clear.

That said, even the New York Times couldn't get to everything that was said in this news report. Unmentioned was the ugly oral sex insult the former "professional wrestler" known as Hulk Hogan directed at Candidate Harris. 

In fairness, this insult may have gone unmentioned in the Times because it was too hard to explain. Mediaite explains the oral sex insult here, with background from last summer offered here and also offered here.

(Warning! Dagen McDowell sightings!)

For the record, insults of this type, directed at Candidate Harris, have been general over the Fox News Channel in the past few months. 

We regard that as a remarkable fact; it's a remarkable fact which we've been noting in our own reports. It's also a fact which we've seen no one among Blue America's journalist crowd mention anywhere else.

The candidate who staged this Garden Party may well get elected next week. (Or not.) Polling suggests that the race is very close, though there's no way to be sure even about that widely stated assessment.

The candidate who staged yesterday's mess may get elected next week! At some point, those of us in Blue America might want to ponder an extremely basic question.

Many people have been asking this question of late; in our experience, few people have tried to address it. This very morning, Mika Brzezinski asked the question on Morning Joe after describing the Garden Party:

BRZEZINSKI (10/28/24): It's discouraging that so many people would rally to hate. Oh my God, how did we get here? How did we get here?

How did we get here, Mika asked. She was asking a very good question. 

In our view, the answer takes us back perhaps sixty years. In our view, it does involve unattractive and unintelligent behavior by us in Blue America. 

Some of that Blue American behavior takes us back in time. On the other hand, we also think of this unanswered, highly significant question from just the past four years:

Key unanswered question:
Why did President Biden (not Vice President Harris) do what he did, for three-plus years, with respect to the southern border? Why did the president do that?

As we've noted, Candidate Harris has been asked that question again and again. Again and again, she has refused to answer—and that unexplained conduct by President Biden may send Donald Trump to the White House! 

How did we ever get to this place? We'll discuss the border, and other topics, over the course of this week.

Warning! Some of the answers lurk in the comments which got edited out of Acyn's posts about yesterday's Garden Party. We even refer to the fuller remarks by Tucker Calson—to the fuller remarks he offered after mocking Candidate Harris on an angry "racial"/ethnic basis.

Acyn gives us what we want. Does he give us what we need?

Tomorrow: Stephens and Kristof and Bouie and Klein! A tale of four New York Times columnists