SATURDAY: "The images are disturbing," he said!

SATURDAY, JULY 26, 2025

In Gaza, mother and child: We've heard it said that starvation can be a difficult way to die.

It can also be a difficult thing to see, especially so if the starving person is, in fact, a child.

This was the week when the major news orgs began showing photos of such starving children. Yesterday morning, the New York Times did exactly that.

The Times published a very large photograph—a photo which dominated the space above the fold on the front page of its print editions. The caption beneath the photo said this:

Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, about 18 months, with his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, who said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition. A doctor said the number of children dying of malnutrition in Gaza had risen sharply.

That was a tough photo to look at. Subscribers didn't need to be physicians to suspect that the child in the photograph was perhaps approaching death.  

For those blocked by the newspaper's paywall, the photo can be seen here. To our eye, there's a hint of the Pietà there.

It was a very large photograph. Beneath that photo, a front-page report bore this headline:

Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: 'There Is Nothing'

Online, the dual headline says this:

Gazans Are Dying of Starvation
After 21 months of devastating conflict with Israel, Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians—the young, the old and the sick—are facing what aid groups say is impending famine.

On Thursday evening, the PBS NewsHour had aired a similar report—a report which condemned its viewers to look at similar visuals. Online, the PBS report carries this title:

Inside Gaza’s neonatal wards where babies born into a war zone battle the odds

You can watch that report by clicking here. "A warning," Nick Schifrin says before the visuals start. "The images in this story are disturbing."

We'd offer a different characterization: 

Extremely hard to watch.

Viewing the visuals, we thought of somewhat similar visuals which emerged from Europe, in the last century, after General Eisenhower's troops finally reached some of the sites where, among other atrocities, starvation was occurring. Anne Frank, a sacred child who's known all over the world, was almost able to hang on long enough to be saved.

We thought of a saying—"Never again"—and of a major American movie. 

More on that movie below. For now, this is the way a front-page report begins in today's New York Times:

No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say

For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.

But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from—and dying of—starvation.

For ourselves, we don't know why the food aid system has failed to work. But as the Times report continues from there, the reporting becomes more dire:

More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.

Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.

David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.

Israel moved in May toward replacing the U.N.-led aid system that had been in place for most of the 21-month Gaza war, opting instead to back a private, American-run operation guarded by armed U.S. contractors in areas controlled by Israeli military forces. Some aid still comes into Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.

The new system has proved to be much deadlier for Palestinians trying to obtain food handouts. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, almost 1,100 people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food handouts under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fired on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.

Last evening, on CNN, we watched as a doctor reported from Gaza about those food aid-related shootings. We can't give you the perfect truth about any of these disputed events. But that's what the news report says in today's New York Times.

Never again, or so the vow claimed. Then too, there's the painful 1964 film to which we've already referred:

The Pawnbroker

The Pawnbroker is a 1964 American drama film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, Jaime Sánchez and Morgan Freeman in his feature film debut. The screenplay was an adaptation by Morton S. Fine and David Friedkin from the 1961 novel of the same name by Edward Lewis Wallant.

The film was the first produced entirely in the United States to deal with the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor. It earned international acclaim for Steiger, launching his career as an A-list actor... 

In 2008, The Pawnbroker was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

Plot

In Nazi Germany, Sol Nazerman, a German-Jewish university professor, is sent to a concentration camp along with his family. He witnesses his two children die and his wife raped by Nazi officers before she is killed.

Twenty-five years later, Nazerman is haunted by his memories. He operates a pawnshop in an East Harlem slum while living in an anonymous Long Island housing tract with his sister-in-law, who is also a Holocaust survivor, and her husband. Numbed and alienated by his experiences, he has trained himself not to show emotion. He describes himself as beyond bitter, viewing the poor people around him as "scum" and "rejects." He acts uninterested and cynical towards his desperate customers and gives them much less than their pawned goods are worth.

The plot continues from there. For better or worse, the film suggests that a person who, through no fault of his own, becomes the victim of unspeakable viciousness may perhaps, through no immediate fault of his own, be robbed on his own humanity in the process.

We frequently think of [NAME WTHHELD] at such times as these. More specifically, we think of the things she said about President Obama in the first few weeks after October 7.

We marvel anew at the remarkable things she said! We also marvel at the fact that we still see her on cable news programs—sometimes on CNN, sometimes on the Fox News Channel.

Last week, we even saw her praising God, along with Rachel Campos-Duffy, on Fox & Friends Weekend. Once again, we couldn't help remembering what she had said back then.

For the record, very few of us do as much as we possibly could about such events as the ones we're discussing. (We always marvel at the doctors and nurses who volunteer to go to such places to serve.)

Few of us do as much as we could! It might be worth keeping such thoughts in mind before we unload on the others.

FRIDAY: We humans aren't built for this line of work!

FRIDAY, JULY 25, 2025

Trump, Christopher do it again: Everybody makes mistakes. Tommy Christopher just made one.

Also, score a win for Donald J. Trump—a very slimy win.

Below, you see part of a transcript published by Christopher as part of this new report for Mediaite. The transcript includes a flaming misstatement made today by the highly erratic Trump.

It's a flaming misstatement by Trump. Christopher let it go:

REPORTER (7/25/25): Would you offer a pardon or clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell?

TRUMP: Well, I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to say is that Todd is a great attorney.

But you ought to be speaking about Larry Summers. You ought to be speaking about some of his friends that are hedge fund guys. They’re all over the place.

You ought be speaking about Bill Clinton, who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.

"I never went to the island," the fellow said.  As far as we know, that statement's correct. As far as we know, no one has ever shown anything different.

On his way to that denial, the sitting president had tossed in a different sort of statement. He said that President Clinton "went to the island 28 times."

He made that claim about Bill Clinton. Christopher let it go.

Our discourse has been hounded by this sort of conduct for at least the 33 years. People are dead all over the world because various people, not excluding mainstream journalists, made bushel baskets of such statements over those many long years, and because other journalists happily repeated the statements or chose to let them go.

What does the record actually show? Within the past week, Clinton has said, for the ten millionth time, that he never went to the island in question. 

As far as we know, no one has prevented any evidence showing anything different. For the record, Clinton managed to present this (repeated) denial without adding a bogus claim about the disordered fellow named Trump.

Trump seems to be borrowing his number—"28 times"—from an actual public record, but it's a public record of something totally different. We take you now to a report by FactCheck.org—a report which was published in August 2019, shortly after Epstein's death:

The Epstein Connections Fueling Conspiracy Theories

In the absence of information about how sex offender Jeffrey Epstein managed to die in prison by an apparent suicide on Aug. 10, outlandish conspiracy theories have cropped up across the political spectrum.

Among the more prominent theories are claims that the Clintons or President Donald Trump is somehow involved. Trump himself shared a comedian’s tweet peddling the baseless suggestion that former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were responsible.

When a reporter asked Trump about that on Aug. 13, the president said he had “no idea” if the Clintons were involved and referenced trips that Bill Clinton had taken on Epstein’s plane.

It’s true that Clinton had ties to Epstein, a wealthy financier who stood accused of sexually abusing dozens of young girls, and that the former president had traveled on Epstein’s plane. But Epstein had ties to Trump, too, and to other politicians who have been named in recently released court documents.

That's the way the report began, with Trump already peddling bogus accusations. Later on, the report detailed the published information about Bill Clinton's rides on that jet:

The Clinton Connection

[...]

By 2002, after Clinton had left office, the former president began to be listed as a passenger on Epstein’s private plane, a fact confirmed by Clinton’s spokesman on Twitter in July. Between Feb. 9, 2002, and Nov. 4, 2003, we counted a total of six trips; two of them were just one-way flights, though. In all, there were a total of 26 flights taken during the six trips, since several trips included multiple stops.

The flight logs for Epstein’s plane were recently unsealed in a lawsuit brought by one of his accusers. Here’s what we found:

Feb. 9, 2002—Clinton hopped a flight from Miami to Westchester, New York, where he lives.

March 19, 2002—Clinton was listed as flying from New York to London and then returning two days later.

May 22, 2002—Clinton flew from Japan to Hong Kong. The next day he flew to Singapore (by way of Shenzhen, China), where he gave a speech. On May 25, he left for Brunei, by way of Bangkok.

July 13, 2002—He attended a wedding in Morocco and then hopped a flight to New York, stopping in the Azores.

Sept. 21, 2002—Clinton left for a nine-day trip to Africa with actors Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, visiting Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique and South Africa. While there, he worked on HIV and AIDS prevention projects, democratization, and economic development. He finished the trip in England, where he addressed the Labour Party during its annual conference. In a 2002 profile of Epstein, Clinton is quoted as saying through a spokesman, “Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science. I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.” According to the flight records, this was the longest trip Clinton took on Epstein’s plane, and it accounted for 11 of the 26 total flights.

Nov. 4, 2003—About a year after the Africa trip, Clinton took what appears to be his last trip on Epstein’s plane. He flew from Brussels to Oslo, where he had a two-day visit with officials to work on his project to prevent HIV and AIDS in developing countries. He then flew to Hong Kong, by way of Siberia, and finished the trip in Beijing.

Shortly after Epstein’s death, Trump sowed confusion about Clinton’s use of the plane...

And so on from there.

For the record, all these trips were taken before Epstein's criminal conduct became publicly known. In 2019, Trump quickly got busy "sowing confusion," as he's done once again today. 

Now for a look at the record:

As you can see, Clinton was known to have taken 26 "flights," but those 26 flights were part of just 11 "trips." 

Several of the "trips" involved multiple flights around the world in support of the Clinton Foundation's work on AIDS prevention, democratization and economic development. In September 2002, the former president took an extended trip through several continents in support of the foundation's missions. 

That one trip accounted for eleven (11) of the 26 "flights." The trip in November 2003—the trip from Brussels to Oslo to Siberia, then on to Hong Kong and Beijing—also accounted for a substantial number of Clinton's 26 "flights."

He was working on AIDS prevention. Today, as only someone like Trump would do, those journeys were converted into 28 trips to the island—and hapless news orgs around the world are letting his statement go. 

Everybody makes mistakes. Thanks to Christopher's bungle, Mediaite joins the ranks of those orgs.

We've been trying to tell you us something for the past quite a few years. We base our assessment on roughly forty years observing this kind of behavior:

We human being simply aren't built for this line of work! 

We aren't smart enough to do this work, and we aren't sufficiently honest. We prove this again and again and again. Then we prove it some more.

We had actually planned to write about Tulsi Gabbard's latest amazing statement. Before we could accomplish that task, this tired old groaner popped up. 

This sort of thing simply never stops. At present, given the speed of the discourse, there's no possible way to keep up. 

We'll score it as Donald J. Trump's latest win as we move down the road to perdition.

DEAD SOULS: The deadened souls of Blue America...

FRIDAY, JULY 25, 2025

...can't see what's already occurred: Quite famously, "The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day."

As of yesterday afternoon, the outlook also didn't seem all that great for the current administration. The people at Gallup had surveyed the nation. As we noted yesterday afternoon, here's what they said they had found:

Independents Drive Trump's Approval to 37% Second-Term Low

Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has dipped to 37%, the lowest of this term and just slightly higher than his all-time worst rating of 34% at the end of his first term. Trump’s rating has fallen 10 percentage points among U.S. adults since he began his second term in January, including a 17-point decline among independents...

And so on from there, according to Gallup's report.

Possibly making matters worse, the polling had been conducted from July 7 through July 21. Much of the polling thereby predated any possible hit to the president's standing which may (or may not) he taking place due to the Epstein affair.

Polls can be wrong in many ways. That said, the outlook didn't seem to be brilliant for the MAGA squad—until Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) showed up on CNN in the 9 o'clock hour and told Kaitlan Collins this about the Epstein matter:

MORENO (7/24/25): No matter how much is disclosed at this point, there's going to be a small segment of the population, fueled primarily by media and the Democrats, that are never going to be satisfied with what's out there. So look, my point—

COLLINS: Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer are not fueled by the media and Democrats. I think they would probably take offense to that.

MORENO: I said, I said—I said a small population of Republicans. President Trump's approval rating has never—

COLLINS: Yes, but that's the president's base.

MORENO: President Trump has never been more popular than he is right now. Almost 94 percent of Republicans—compare that to Democrats, by the way. 

"President Trump has never been more popular than he is right now!" So said the Buckeye solon. 

He then cited a very high approval number—a number which included the stated opinion of Republican citizens only. His number may have been (slightly) enhanced—but a certain type of suggestion may have loomed.

Hours after that Gallup poll dropped, CNN viewers were told that the sitting president "has never been more popular!" They were told this by a Republican senator who now seems to consider the views of Red America only.

In such ways, we nominal Americans continue to divide into two separate countries. As such, the American experiment, imperfect as it always was, may already have come to an end.

Over here in Blue America, do we have sufficient imagination to see where the current drift may be headed? On balance, we'd say that we quite possibly don't—that we may resemble the fictional citizens of the fictional Oran in the famous novel by Camus.

They failed to see that a literal plague was already underway. Even Dr. Rieux couldn't quite manage to see it:

Albert Camus, The Plague

The word “plague” had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor’s uncertainty and surprise—since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townfolk. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that come crashing down on our heads from a blue sky. 

[...]

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views? They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. 

The fictional citizens of Oran couldn't see what was already happening. One thinks of such failures when one watches a TV program like last night's Gutfeld! show.

As always, the Fox News Channel had booked a four-member panel, all of whom had agreed to agree with the claims of the program's host. Three of the four couldn't even pretend to have subject matter competence

As for the host of this prime time "cable news" show, his factual claims this night were astounding, possibly even for him. Those claims were offered to a cheering studio audience, but also to millions of viewers across Red America—to millions of people across the country who didn't know they were being clownishly misinformed.

Way back at the start of the week, we alluded to Gogol's Dead Souls. The novelist had come down hard on certain elements of Russian society back in the 1840s. 

We also marveled at the claims Director Gabbard had spread all over the Fox News Channel over the course of the weekend. As she had accused President Obama of engaging in treason, gaggles of Fox News Channel corporate messengers had agreed to cheer her on.

Everyone agreed with everyone else! Then too, we also cited this highly instructive profile:

Greg Gutfeld’s Disruptive Rise: How a Fox News Prankster Broke Late-Night

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show is over, and while the official reason has yet to be confirmed, reports suggest CBS was hemorrhaging money to the tune of $40 million a year. The show reportedly employed more than 220 staffers and cost an eye-popping $100 million annually to produce... In an age of media belt-tightening and digital fragmentation, that model may simply no longer be sustainable.

Which brings us to Greg Gutfeld.

Yes, Gutfeld—the often smirking, occasionally cringeworthy Fox News host who somehow emerged as a legit force in late-night-style comedy...

Colby Hall is a good, decent person. In spite of that fact, he seems to think that the Fox News Channel's baldly disordered Greg Gutfeld can sensibly be viewed as a "prankster."

Remarkably, Hall even said this in that profile for Mediaite:

Suzanne Scott, Fox News CEO, deserves credit for greenlighting the 10 p.m. shift that let Gutfeld own a bold new time slot—a gamble that paid off big. Launching a late-night show on a cable news network was risky, but she recognized the post-pandemic appetite for smart, fun, non-lecturey comedy.

Throughout his profile, Hall said that he himself isn't inclined to favor Gutfeld's "comedy." But he never quite got around to telling his readers why.

We think we see a certain resemblance here. A bit like the denizens of the fictional Oran, Hall seems to be blind to the dangerous events already underway all around him.

For starters, Hall seems to think that, when he's watching the Gutfeld! program, he's watching a comedy show. For remarkably, he's even willing to describe that "comedy" as smart!

As we noted on Monday, Hall's profile echoes the profile of Gutfeld! which appeared in Variety in February of this year. Like the citizens of Oran, we seem to be unable to recognize the event which has already wormed its way into our lives through our nation's infested back alleys.

Colby Hall is not a "dead soul." That said, Greg Gutfeld and the corporate entity he fronts have already devoured the established norms of the former American nation. It seems to us that Hall's inability to see that fact deserves a long, detailed look.

In his opening monologue last night, Gutfeld dissembled in astonishing ways in support of Tulsi Gabbard's astonishing claim—her that President Obama engaged in a "treasonous conspiracy" as his second term eared its end. 

A studio audience cheered him on—and so did last night's conclave of stooges. At this point, let's say their names:

Gutfeld!: Thursday, July 24, 2025
Joe Germanotta: owner, Joanne's Trattoria
Kennedy: former VJ
Guy Benson: Fox News contributor
Michael Loftus: comedian

With a furious incel heading the cast, it was the perfect "populist" assembly of world-class major know-nothings!

Millions of people were watching this prime time show on the nation's most-watched "news channel"—and as with Variety, so too with Hall. He seems to think those millions of people were watching a "prankster" offering "comedy"—offering a brand of comedy he was even prepared to call "smart!"

In fact, the program in question specializes in the delivery of propaganda—in the use of the weapons of the Information Age—and the program isn't even dimly smart. That said, the people of sacred Troy had perhaps resembled the unwitting people of Oran in their innocent inability to save themselves from ruin. 

Here's what Professor Knox said about the fall of Troy in his introduction to Professor Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad. On a brutal evening, long ago, this is the way Troy fell:

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

In fairness, it isn't just the Gutfeld! program. Bizarre behavior is the norm all over the Fox News Channel. Its endless array of corporate Stepfords gather to broadcast the poisonous claims generated at the top of the MAGA movement. 

Barack Obama engaged in treason, stooges like these will insist. They conduct their modern night assault with the tools of the Information Age, with Colby Hall waving them on.

Do those of us in Blue America understand what's going to happen as MAGA keeps coming over the walls? It seems to us that our Blue elites still aren't able to see what's likely to come. Indeed, they still aren't willing to report and discuss what's already here!

Next week, we'll look at Hall's piece in more detail, and at Gutfeld's behavior.  We'll also say the names of the many dead souls, within the palaces of us Blues, who insist on looking away.

Where will the president's anger take him? How bad might it possibly get?

It's very hard to answer that question. That said, the president has never been more popular! We know that because a dead soul said it last night, on CNN, during the nine o'clock hour.

In the ten o'clock hour, Gutfeld appeared with his gaggle of stooges. The assault became much, much worse. 

Tomorrow: Starvation

THURSDAY: Gallup reports a punishing poll!

THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2025

A poll from two different Americas: Presumably, there has never been any such thing as a perfectly accurate poll.

Also, if by some happenstance some poll was actually perfect in the moment, there would, of course, be no way to know that the poll was correct.

So it goes with the statistical artefact known as "margin of error." And just for the record, straight-up statistical margin of error is only one of the three million ways a poll can perhaps be wrong.

We offer this to soften the blow concerning the latest offering from Gallup. Gallup decided to take a poll. Headline included, its report on the poll starts like this:

Independents Drive Trump's Approval to 37% Second-Term Low

Six months into his second term, President Donald Trump’s job approval rating has dipped to 37%, the lowest of this term and just slightly higher than his all-time worst rating of 34% at the end of his first term. Trump’s rating has fallen 10 percentage points among U.S. adults since he began his second term in January, including a 17-point decline among independents...

For their part, Republicans’ ratings [of Trump] have remained generally steady near 90% and Democrats have been consistently in the low single digits.

These latest findings are from a July 7-21, 2025, Gallup poll, which began days after Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4. The law addresses many of Trump’s second-term priorities...

Trump’s ratings for handling each of eight separate foreign and domestic issues are also generally poor. He earns the highest marks for his handling of the situation with Iran (42%) and foreign affairs (41%). Approval is slightly lower for his job on immigration (38%), the economy (37%), the situation in the Middle East between the Israelis and Palestinians (36%), and foreign trade (36%). Americans’ ratings of Trump’s handling of the situation in Ukraine (33%) and the federal budget (29%) are even lower.

This poll was taken at a moment of triumph—shortly after the Republican Congress managed to pass Trump's megabill by the tiniest possible margins. Republican solons passed the bill—but American voters don't seem to like it all that much. 

(Only 29 percent of respondents said they approve of Trump’s handling of the federal budget? Think how low that number might have been if Blue America's journalists knew how to report what is actually projected to happen to the national debt under terms of the One Big Bill!

(To see Stephane Ruhle under-describe that projected result, click here for our July 2 report. In fairness to Ruhle, she under-described the projected result in the typical, thoroughly standard, extremely lazy manner.)

In the rest of its report, Gallup outlines the staggering gaps which obtain between responses from three major groups—Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Here are the "job approval" numbers for President Trump, followed by his slightly better "favorables:"

President Trump, job approval
Republicans: 89 percent
Democrats: 2 percent
Independents: 29 percent
Overall: 37 percent

"Favorable view" of President Trump
Republicans: 93 percent
Democrats: 4 percent
Independents: 34 percent
Overall: 41 percent

Go figure! At least four percent of all respondents don't approve of the way the president is doing his job but have a favorable view of him anyway!

Numbers like these can always be wrong to greater or lesser degree. On the other hand, those numbers may reflect the numbers the Trump administration is getting in its own polling efforts.

 If the numbers get even worse, that could trigger various types of reactions from the occasionally angry president. That said, also this:

As long as the Republican numbers stay high, President Trump can in theory keep Republican solons in line. He could continue to pass X, Y and Z through the Congress, no matter how much everyone else didn't like it.

We're living in two different countries now. Imaginably, some actual bombshell from the Epstein probe could bring the president all the way down—but then again, possibly not.

We're living in two different countries! We get our impressions from two different silos. So how should we deal with this mess?

DEAD SOULS: Who the heck are we the people?

THURSDAY, JULY 24, 2025

Anthropology 101: Is something wrong with Tulsi Gabbard? Much remains to be said with respect to that very sound question.

(We suggest that you remember to pity the child, who may have been raised in a cult.)

Is something wrong with Gabbard? Much remains to be said! As for (the rest of) us the people, we were struck today by the highlighted passages which appear near the start of this Wall Street Journal report:

Justice Department Told Trump in May That His Name Is Among Many in the Epstein Files

When Justice Department officials reviewed what Attorney General Pam Bondi called a “truckload” of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein earlier this year, they discovered that Donald Trump’s name appeared multiple times, according to senior administration officials. 

In May, Bondi and her deputy informed the president at a meeting in the White House that his name was in the Epstein files, the officials said. Many other high-profile figures were also named, Trump was told. Being mentioned in the records isn’t a sign of wrongdoing.

The officials said it was a routine briefing that covered a number of topics and that Trump’s appearance in the documents wasn’t the focus.

They told the president at the meeting that the files contained what officials felt was unverified hearsay about many people, including Trump, who had socialized with Epstein in the past, some of the officials said. One of the officials familiar with the documents said they contain hundreds of other names.

When this report appeared yesterday, it became the latest "bombshell" within our own Blue America's prevailing cable news realm.

That said, what was surprising about that report? Should anyone have been surprised to hear that President Trump's name appears within "the Epstein files?" 

Also, should anyone have been surprised by such assertions as these?

Claims about the Epstein files:
The files contain unverified hearsay about many people.
The files contain the names of hundreds of people other than President Trump.

If we assume those claims are true, should anyone be surprised? Why wouldn't a sensible person have assumed such things all along?

"Being mentioned in the records isn’t [necessarily] a sign of wrongdoing," the Journal says early on.

 Wouldn't that also have been a fairly obvious fact? And if so, why would this report by the Wall Street Journal qualify as the latest bombshell—as the bombshell of the moment?

Did President Trump engage in the type of grave criminal misconduct for which the late Jeffrey Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, have each been convicted?

We can't answer that question. Having made that admission, we can also say this:

An overwhelming amount of focus is now being directed on this matter. That overwhelming degree of focus comes to us, live and direct, from a certain set of textbooks.

We refer to the textbooks with which a wise academic would be teaching some current version of Anthropology 101.

The massive focus on this topic teaches us something about ourselves—about who we the people actually are. Consider the recent history upon which this bombshell exploded:

We're so old that we can remember when we the people, along with our tribunes, struggled to maintain a focus on such matters as these:

Recent significant matters:
The claim that the legislation childishly named the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" would result in ten to twenty million people losing their health coverage.

The claim that the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" was going to add $3.5 trillion to the deficit—or possibly to the debt—or at least that it was going to do something vaguely like that.

(Full disclosure: As we noted in this report, the business specialist on Blue America's cable news channel couldn't even seem to describe this claim in an accurate way.)

The claim that President Trump's chaotic tariff regime was going to fuel a great deal of inflation. 

(Full disclosure: Just this past Tuesday night, NBC's Christine Romans, in a report for Nightly News, seemed to misstate who will pay the newly announced tariffs on products which arrive here from the Philippines. Yesterday morning, Steve Rattner called attention to Romans' bungled presentation during a segment on Morning Joe.)

Stephanie Ruhle couldn't explain what was projected with respect to annual deficits and accumulated debt. Romans incorrectly explained who actually submits the payments known as tariffs. 

This is the way our world typically works when we the people, along with our major journalists, try to make ourselves focus on matters of apparent major importance,

We people! We find it hard to focus on questions of health care or tariffs or deficits or debt. But when it comes to questions of sexual conduct, including gross sexual misconduct, suddenly we sit right up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!

Everything else is swept away. It's the one topic on which we can focus. The modern history rolls out something like this:

President Kennedy engaged in remarkable sexual conduct during his time in the White House. In 2011, one part of that history was described in Mimi Alford's well-written book, Once Upon a Secret

We the people weren't told about this in real time. Perhaps a bit like Pepperidge Farm, the leading authority remembers:

Mimi Alford

Marion Fay "Mimi" Alford (née Beardsley; born May 7, 1943) is an American woman who had an affair with President John F. Kennedy while she served as an intern in the White House press office between 1962 and 1963.

Despite the affair's consuming influence over her life at the time, Alford managed to keep the illicit trysts a secret for 40 years, until clues were leaked in 2003. Alford published her own book about the affair, Once Upon a Secret, in 2011.

The young Mimi Beardsley was only 19 when she, a brand-new White House intern, was procured for President Kennedy by several of his aides. As far as we know, no one doubts that Alford's account of this matter is accurate—but at the time, there was a strict rule against reporting such matters in major news orgs, and the so-called "democratization of media" hadn't yet occurred.

Journalists who knew about President Kennedy's general conduct agreed that it mustn't be reported or discussed. By the early 1990s, that rule had begun to disappear.

From that moment on to this, one basic piece of anthropology can be observed by anyone who's willing to study our flailing attempts at conducting a national discourse:

We the people like to talk and think about matters involving sex! As a people, we find it very hard to focus on much of anything else. 

That doesn't mean that we're "dead souls." It doesn't even mean that we're bad people.

It does suggest that we're people people! But however you choose to score it, those are the fairly obvious facts about who we actually are. It would be silly to say something different:

As of early 1992, the democratization of media had produced radio stars like that era's version of Howard Stern. When Gennifer Flowers appeared on the scene, reaping a very large series of paydays, people like Howard Stern and his sidekick, "Stuttering John," had soon gone wild. 

The exciting tales which Flowers told almost overturned that year's presidential election. Despite the obvious problems with the stories she told, she was still being dragged out in 2016 as the debates between Candidates Trump and (Hillary) Clinton approached.

After Flowers, the deluge! When Kathleen Willey came along, the lovesick boys of the national press fell in love with her obvious rectitude. When her credibility came into serious question, that story got disappeared.

After that, there followed years of pleasure involving the 21-year-old intern—the 21-year-old intern who wasn't actually 21 and wasn't actually an intern. Those were days of serious pleasure and enormous fun.

The backwash of these sexual stories dogged Candidate Gore for two years, and then Candidate (Hillary) Clinton. By the time the 2024 cycle came along, we the people of Blue America were thrilling to the disputed claim—a claim we would assume was true—that Candidate Trump had engaged in (consensual) sexual relations on one occasion, in 2006. with someone who wasn't his wife.

By that time, Candidate Trump had been accused of sexual misconduct, including criminal misconduct, by a large number of women. Regarding that alleged act of consensual sex in which he may have engaged in 2006, we the Blues came up with what may have been the dumbest idea in recorded human history:

In support of an actual criminal trial, we alleged that we had needed to know, back in 2016, if that one assignation had actually taken place. We had needed to know about that before we could have decided how to vote!

Incredibly enough, our tribunes all over Blue America bought into that very strange notion. In that way, we the people got a chance to see who we actually are.

Who are we the actual people? Who are our putative journalists?

We the people struggle and strain to pretend that we care about health care and federal budgets and possible fiscal ruin. The truth of the matter seems to be somewhat different:

We the people really want to sit around pondering sexual conduct. Only then do we sit up, fully engaged.

What may emerge about President Trump? We have no earthly idea—but for the record, this:

Five years ago, the president's niece—a clinical psychologist—told the world such things as this about her very important uncle:

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

[...]

None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather’s sociopathy and my grandmother’s illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

The mere fact that she made those assessments doesn't mean that her assessments are accurate. 

That said, she is a trained clinical psychologist—and the book was a major best-seller.  Our journalists quickly agreed that the medical analyses made by the niece must never be discussed—must instead be disappeared. Do it goes within the frequently juvenile national discourse created by us the people.

Is something wrong with President Trump? Our journalists continue to struggle to find the way to pursue, or perhaps to avoid, that fairly obvious question.

Also, how many people could lose their health coverage under terms of his megabill? What will happen to our annual deficits and to our accumulated national debt?

How the fark do tariffs work? We the people, including our journalists, struggle to stay awake when we're asked to focus on such questions. 

But starting in 1992, textbooks used in Anthropology 101 have added a fairly obvious chapter. There's only one topic which seems to let us the people fully focus.

This doesn't mean that we're bad people—and no, we aren't dead souls. It does suggest that we're people people, with all the imperfections that flesh is heir to. 

Most chillingly, it suggests that we the people may not be built for this particular type of work. 

Girls (and boys) just wanna have fun! Or at least, that's what the major anthropologists may already be teaching.

The current hubbub may work out well. Or then again, possibly not!

Tomorrow: In support of Gabbard's sad presentation, young Master Gutfeld explodes!


WEDNESDAY: Is something wrong with Tulsi Gabbard?

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 2025

The New York Times lays it out: The New York Times has done an excellent job summarizing the latest assault—the assault which started with Tulsi Gabbard's pathetic conflations at the end of last week.

Their report also suggests an obvious pair of questions—a pair of questions which ought to be asked. 

In print editions, the report appeared today on page 14—but online, it sits at the very top of the "Today's Paper" website. Broadwater and Barnes have done such a good job that we thought we'd run you through their report.

Headline included, the report starts as shown below, with the latest peculiar meltdown by the sitting president: 

Trump Escalates Attacks on Obama and Clinton as Questions Swirl About Epstein

President Trump, under fire over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files, escalated his distract-and-deflect strategy on Tuesday, accusing former President Barack Obama of treason and declaring, “It’s time to go after people.”

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump condemned questions about the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as “sort of a witch hunt,” and then launched into a rant against a now-familiar string of rivals and the media.

“The witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama,” Mr. Trump said, referring to a report from Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, that tried to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored his election in 2016.

“Obama was trying to lead a coup,” Mr. Trump said. “And it was with Hillary Clinton.”

Sad—but so went the latest meltdown. And you thought the highly erratic Agamemnon was bad!

"Mr. Trump’s extended digression...was a stark example of his campaign of retribution against an ever-growing list of enemies that has little analogue in American history," Broadwater and Barnes then wrote.

As they started their report, the reporters were stressing yesterday's attack from President Trump himself. They under-reported the past several days of flamboyant claims by Gabbard—flamboyant charges she had advanced across a group of Fox programs. 

Soon, though, they summarized Gabbard's absurd behavior, all of which had been uniformly praised by the gaggle of Stepfords on Fox:

Ms. Gabbard’s report, which claimed there was a “treasonous conspiracy” by top Obama officials, contradicted a lengthy study by the Senate Intelligence Committee that was signed by all Republican members of the committee, including Marco Rubio, now the secretary of state.

The Obama administration never contended that the Russians had manipulated votes; instead, the administration, and the Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee, concluded that Russia mounted a major effort to influence voters.

Still, in his remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Trump claimed that he could have sent Mrs. Clinton, the former secretary of state and another of his political rivals, to prison but chose not to. He said he would show no such leniency to Mr. Obama.

There the president went again. On the other hand, sad! Let's scope out the basic conflation: 

Back in the fall of 2016, it had been established that the Russians hadn't "manipulated votes" in that year's election. That is, they hadn't hacked into any American voting systems in such a way as to change vote totals. 

Later, President Obama asked for a full report on the various ways the Russians had tried to influence voters. When he did, he wasn't denying that previous finding. In fact, he restated that previous finding when the new study was launched.

Last week, up jumped Gabbard! She contended that Obama's request for that fuller probe had involved a devious repudiation of the earlier finding—the finding that no vote totals had been changed by Russian hacking operations. 

At that point, a full-blown "treasonous conspiracy" managed to spring full-blown from the director's head. Over the course of the past five days, it's been driven along by waves of shaky paraphrase performed by the waves of deviants who perform on the Fox News Channel:

According to Gabbard, Obama had manufactured a "treasonous conspiracy" designed to undermine the earlier finding about the one particular way in which the Russkies hadn't caused Trump's election. 

This allegation was stupid all the way down, especially since that Republican-led Senate committee had agreed, after years of study, that the Russkies did interfere in the 2016 election, in various ways, with the intention of helping Trump.

Is something "wrong" with Tulsi Gabbard? While we're at it, is it possible that something is even wrong with President Trump?

Also, is something wrong with a Blue American world which just keeps averting its gaze from what is said and done on the Fox News Channel? Is something wrong with a political tribe which insists on looking away—which refuses to say their names and report what they keep doing? 

Is something wrong with Gabbard? We'd call that an excellent question!

How about with the various people whose names we keep saying? With the various people who read from script on Fox & Friends, on Fox & Friends Weekend, on The Big Weekend Show, but also on Jesse Watters Primetime, on Gutfeld! and on The Five? 

What is stopping the New York Times from reporting the things that are said and done on that succession of gong-shows? Why do Brooks and Kristof and O'Donnell and Maddow just keep looking away?

The judgment displayed by Blue America's various orgs has been bad enough. The Fox News Channel is a corporate assault on the fading hope that the rapidly failing American nation can hope to produce something resembling an intelligent national discourse.

Is something wrong with the ludicrous Gabbard? Over on the Fox News Channel, the tools all said they loved what she said!

We're living in two countries now. Two is the most destructive number. Two countries is one country too much!

DEAD SOULS: Gabbard dopped bombs all over Fox!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 2025

CNN's viewers weren't told: For the record, the deadest souls to which we refer are those on the Fox News Channel. 

One of those souls takes the stage each night at 10 p.m. We'll offer one tiny sample, observed in passing last night, of his undisguised living death:

GUTFELD (7/22/25): [Wonderful quip about Hillary Clinton's unacceptably large hips. Rewarded with audience applause]

It was a bit of a callback to the Rush Limbaugh days! But so it goes, night after night, as this deadest of all the souls extends his attacks on the overweight, unattractive women who don't share his infallible views. 

(The gentleman hails from San Mateo. How could anyone from such a sunny land have ended up like this?)

At any rate, the deadest souls are the souls crawling all over Fox. As part of a deadly pas de deux, the comatose souls in the rest of realm refuse to report their conduct.

For one example of what we mean, we'll ask you to ponder this:

Starting on Friday night, on the Hannity show, a major federal official was all over the Fox News Channel, alleging that Barack Obama had engaged in "treasonous" conduct—had engaged in "a treasonous conspiracy"—back in 2016.

On Saturday morning, starting in the 7 o'clock hour, the dead souls of Fox & Friends Weekend thrilled to Director Gabbard's use of the T-bomb. You can observe their excitement by clicking here

"God bless Tulsi Gabbard," Rachel Campos-Duffy said, "for letting us see what actually happened." 

Gabbard appeared on the program that day during the 8 o'clock hour, littering T-bombs behind her. The next day, she completed the rule of three, speaking at length with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business show, Sunday Morning Futures.

Tulsi Gabbard is President Trump's Director of National Intelligence. Over the course of three days, she had made a series of astonishing claims about a former president.

She made these claims to the denizens of Red America—to the people who were watching Fox Business or the Fox News Channel. Over the weekend, on programs like The Big Weekend Show, employees of the Fox News Channel repeated her remarkable claims and praised her all up and down.

The Fox News Channel has the biggest viewership, by far, among our three major "cable news" channels. The DNI had made her claims about Obama's treason all weekend long, with the channel's endless array of Stepfords dim-wittedly cheering her on.

Now for the rest of the story:

Let's suppose that you're a dedicated viewer of CNN's primetime nightly news programs. More specially, we refer to these three weeknight CNN shows:

CNN weeknight shows
7 p.m.: Erin Burnett Outfront
8 p.m.: Andeson Cooper 360
9 p.m.: The Source with Kaitlan Collins

Suppose you watched all three programs, for the full three hours, on both Monday and Tuesday nights. We have an amazing fact to report:

If you watched all three program on each of those nights, you never heard that Gabbard made those remarkable claims on those Fox News Channel shows. In fact, you never saw any CNN host or reporter mention Gabbard at all.

We know! You think we must be mistaken. But Gabbard's name has never been mentioned by any of the journalists on any of those three shows. If that's where you as a citizen think you're getting your news, you haven't yet heard a single word about what Gabbard has said and has done.

(Monday night's transcripts are available here. For Tuesday night's transcripts, click this.)

We know—it seems a bit hard to believe! That said, how did last night's three-hour prime time news block begin? 

We're sorry to be the ones to say, but it began with Burnett saying this:

BURNETT (7/22/25): Outfront next! Breaking news, new images of Trump and Epstein together. 

You'll see them here first, outfront, along with brand new reporting from our KFILE team.

Plus, Jeffrey Epstein's brother Mark is outfront. What he says about Trump and his brother, and when Jeffrey Epstein first confessed his crimes to him.

And Obama tonight fighting back hard, not giving Trump an inch. Is Obama now the Democrat who knows to take on Trump?

Let's go outfront! And good evening, I'm Erin Burnett.

That's the way the excitement began. As always, Burnett repeated the name of her show again and again and again. 

That's a minor branding matter, but that's how the program began. In fairness, Obama was briefly mentioned, but the broadcast continued like this

BURNETT (continuing directly): Outfront tonight, the breaking news, a CNN exclusive! Tonight outfront:

KFILE has unearthed photos of Jeffrey Epstein that we've never seen. And they shed new light on his relationship with President Trump. 

The revelations come as Trump is under fire from his own base for his Justice Department's handling of the so-called Epstein files. Trump has tried, of course, to distance himself from Epstein every which way.

But one of the photos that KFILE found confirms that Epstein actually attended Donald Trump's wedding to Marla Maples. And this is the proof. 

Again, this has never been published before. So, this is a new image. You haven't seen it out there on X or anything like that.

We won't say that nonsense like that is the work of dead souls. We will suggest that, as was the case at sacred Troy, a modern nation is destined to die in the hands of such studied inanity.

Fellow citizens, please! Everyone has always known that Trump and Epstein had a lengthy friendship. Plenty of photos already existed from their days as friends.

Had KFiles turned up some photos which no one seen before? In fact, the new photos shed exactly zero new light on Epstein's relationship with President Trump. But on CNN, in the hands of Burnett, they were treated as BREAKING NEWS. 

The photos were treated as BREAKING NEWS. But all through Burnett's hour-long programs on Monday and Tuesday nights, Tulsi Gabbard was never mentioned. Viewers were never told about the remarkable things she had said.

In this way, the comatose souls at CNN disappear the conduct of the dead souls over at Fox. And let us repeat what we've already said:

At no point on Monday or Tuesday night were viewer of these primetime cable news shows told about the remarkable claims the DNI had made on the Fox News Channel. Nor were they told about the way that channel's endless array of Stepfords had affirmed every word Gabbard said,

At no point on either night were viewers told about the dead souls of that other "news channel"—about the way they'd pimped the ludicrous, conflation-based claims of the cult-raised and perhaps dead soul.

Yesterday, President Obama pushed back against five days of attacks with a concise public statement from an Obama spokesperson. As best we can tell, this was its full text:

Statement by Patrick Rodenbush, Obama spokesperson: 
Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one.  
These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction. Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. 
These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.

So said the Obama spokesperson. Here's "the document" to which he referred. It came from the office of Director Gabbard.

Last night, after 35 minutes of pointless blather, Burnett finally got around to reporting what Obama had said—and yes, the conflation at the heart of Gabbard's claim is there in Obama's statement.

(Simple story: When Obama called for a study of the ways "Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election," he wasn't refuting the pre-existing conclusion, stated by himself, that Russia hadn't manipulated any votes by hacks of our voting systems.) 

Full disclosure:

CNN is fully happy only in the aftermath of an earthquake, a fire or a flood. The remains of this original cable news channel are most fully expressed in the standard question its anchors will caringly ask when some such event has occurred:

How did you feel when you saw your grandmother swept away by the flood?

CNN lives for "human interest." Information about players like Gabbard may not always make the cut.

Last night, some photos were pimped as BREAKING NEWS. The photos had zero news value.

The same was true of the pointless interview with Jeffrey Epstein's brother. Thirty-five minutes into the program, President Obama's pushback finally appeared.

The dead souls are found all over Fox. The channel's viewership is substantially larger than that of MSNBC and CNN combined—and when those viewers are told remarkable things, friends and neighbors in Blue America never hear about it. 

What happens on Fox stays right there as a large nation falls apart.

Also this:

Might something be "wrong" with President Trump? Everyone knows that the answer is yes, but the slumbering souls of the upper-end press have all agreed to move on.

As we noted in Monday's report, Gogol apparently thought that he'd spotted "dead souls." Sometimes, such impressions may even perhaps have merit.

TUESDAY: Sommers says the magic word!

TUESDAY, JULY 22, 2025

Something we've been withholding: Is it possible that President Trump is serious? 

Is it possible that he's serious about pursuing criminal charges against former President Obama? Or is he, for whatever reason, simply playing Director Gabbard's "treasonous conspiracy" card as a way of distracting attention away from the Epstein files, whatever may be lurking in that haunted forest?

We have no idea. We ask that question because earlier today, in the Oval Office, there he went again!

As you can see on this first chunk of videotape, he started off like this

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/22/25): The witch hunt that you should be talking about is, they caught President Obama absolutely cold—Tulsi Gabbard. 

What they did to this country in 2016, starting in 2016 but going up all the way, going up to 2020 in the election—they tried to rig the election and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that.

[...]

Obama’s been caught directly. So people say, “Oh, you know, a group.” 

It’s not a group, it is Obama...And what they did in 2016 and in 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. 

The conduct which Gabbard has uncovered was criminal at the highest level! Moments later, the president added this, as you can see on this second chunk of tape:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: You know what? If you look at those papers, they have him stone cold—and it was President Obama...

The leader of the gang was President Obama—Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him? And except for the fact he gets shielded by the press his entire life, that's the one they—

Look, he's guilty!...It's there—he's guilty. This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election...And we have all the documents. And from what Tulsi told me, she's got thousands of additional documents.

Tulsi has told him all about it! It was treason, the president said. Treason committed by Barack Hussein Obama!

In one respect, it's true! Over the weekend, on one Fox News Channel program after another—serviced by waves of Fox News Channel "messaging persons"—Gabbard charged President Obama with taking part in a "treasonous conspiracy," but also in "sedition" and in "a yearslong coup."

As we noted in this morning's report, treason is criminal at the highest level, with consequences which can be severe.

In spite of Gabbard's absurd presentations, is President Trump actually serious about pursuing such charges? We don't have the slightest idea—but this is why we ask:

Over the weekend, then on into Monday and Monday night, viewers of Fox News Channel programs were swamped with tribal affirmation of Gabbard's absurdly flimsy, conflation-based allegations.

On Saturday and then again on Sunday, Rachel Campos-Duffy was calling for the former president's head. So were the tools on The Big Weekend Show. As of Monday night, so was Laura Ingraham.

(She was helped along by the always gloomy Victor Davis Hanson, then by the comedy stylings of the persistently silly Raymond Arroyo.)

Tens of millions of people in Red America were being propagandized hard. As they kept hearing the caterwauling about Obama's treasonous conduct, our major pundits in Blue America were staring off into air.

Our own cable stars barely mentioned the four-day onslaught. They were still burning time away, hoping that Trump would somehow turn out to be a pedophile, just like his one-time friend.

You can't stop people from pursuing the strategies which badly failed the last time. But as we Blues continue to dream about catching Trump is some such conduct, tens of millions of fellow citizens were being propagandized in a way our stars wouldn't even address.

Can a major nation expect to survive this astounding degree of (unacknowledged) tribal division? We'd say the answer is increasingly obvious.

In a second manifestation, we turn to something Christina Hoff Sommers (no relation) has said. You can read about it in a Mediaite report which starts like this, edited headline included:

Trump White House Roasted Over ‘Cultish and Cringe-Inducing’ Graphic Depicting Trump as ‘The Hunter’

Observers on social media reacted to a graphic shared by the Trump White House on Monday night with equal parts horror and embarrassment.

The graphic, which depicted Trump in the foreground with American flags, eagles, and fireworks in the background included a quote attributed to Trump that read, “I was the hunted—NOW I’M THE HUNTER.”

“They came after the wrong man,” added the White House’s official X account in its caption. On the campaign trail in 2023 and 2024, Trump oscillated between promising retribution against his enemies and insisting that success in office would be his ultimate revenge.

The post provoked a wide range of critical reactions, including from conservatives.

“Cultish and cringe-inducing. Also, insane,” commented The American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers.

Sommers is a thoroughly intelligent pre-Trump conservative. She was speaking colloquially—but what might a medical specialist possibly say?

"Something we were withholding made us weak!" So said Robert Frost, in a poem which became instantly famous on a snowy day in Washington, D.C. in January 1961.  

Back when we were still colonials, Something we were withholding made us weak, or so Frost mused in his poem. Today, we run and hide from the Fox News Channel every hour of every day of every single week.

We also run away from the understandings of modern medical science. 

Could something be wrong with President Trump? Is something wrong with the collection of broken toys, Gabbard included, with whom he has littered his playroom?

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, that's a tragic loss of human capability and potential.

Sommers said the magic (colloquial) word. What makes us refuse to inquire further?

DEAD SOULS: Barack Obama engaged in a treason?

TUESDAY, JULY 22, 2025

Dead souls spread the word: By now, the brilliance of the DNI had been on display for everyone to see. 

Mainly, though, her brilliance had been put on display for denizens of Red America to see. 

Last Friday night, she had appeared on the Fox News Channel's Hannity program. On Saturday morning, she sat for an "imitation of life" interview with a trio of friends on the Fox & Friends Weekend program.

On Sunday morning, in her most ludicrous interview yet, Director Gabbard sat with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business program, Sunday Morning Futures. Again and again, then again and again, the solon stated her finding:

According to the DNI, President Barack Obama had engaged in astounding misconduct—in "a treasonous conspiracy!" Indeed, he had engaged in a "seditious conspiracy," the equivalent of an attempted "yearslong coup," the director repeatedly said 

The treasonous conduct had starting in the immediate wake of President Trump's surprising win in the 2016 election. So said Director Gabbard, employing that inflammatory language again and again and again.

The T-bomb littered the countryside as the director reported what she said she had found. To some, it could almost sound like a serious charge. According to the leading authority on the matter, conviction of treasonous conduct can lead to such outcomes as this:

Treason laws in the United States

In the United States, there are both federal and state laws prohibiting treason. Treason is defined on the federal level in Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution as "only in levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." 

[...]

Penalty: Under U.S. Code Title 18, the penalty is death, or not less than five years' imprisonment (with a minimum fine of $10,000, if not sentenced to death). Any person convicted of treason against the United States also forfeits the right to hold public office in the United States.

Many traitors would happily take the five years! But there you see the seriousness of the charge Gabbard seemed to be slinging around.

In fairness, she may have grown up in a cult. Over the years, that possibility had been explored by everyone from The New Yorker on down, including last December's report by the Honolulu Civil Beat

That triggers a full disclosure:

At this site, we aren't inclined to blame the adult for the damage which may have been done to the child. But whether it had been a cult or merely a sect, this was plainly hard-hitting stuff from the DNI.

Gabbard was saying that the former president had engaged in treasonous conduct! Beyond that, she said that she'd forwarded a recommendation of criminal charges on to Attorney General Bondi, who had sworn up and down, in the late fall of 2020, that President Trump had lost re-election only because the election was rigged.

With giants like these in control of the game, the criminal pursuit of President Obama was potentially major stuff. 

By Monday morning, it fell to the gang on Fox & Friends to inform the Red American nation about these fast-moving events. On that morning, a certain car had rolled up to the studio and it had disgorged these friends:

Fox & Friends: July 21, 2025
Lawrence Jones: co-host, Fox & Friends
Ainsley Earhardt: co-host, Fox & Friends
Brian Kilmeade: co-host, Fox & Friends

That was the new morning lineup. After almost thirty years, original co-host Steve Doocy had been banished to the road, apparently suspected of possibly being too soft. 

Fox & Friends goes on the air each morning at 6 o'clock sharp. At 6:05, those friends began to attempt to discuss, or perhaps began to pretend to discuss, the startling claims DNI Gabbard had made. 

First, though, this:

Earlier that morning, on Fox & Friends First, co-host Todd Piro had already tackled the matter, dim-wittedly offering the following statement as he spoke with Chris Swecker, a former FBI official. 

With this minor malaprop, the spread of the message began:

PIRO (7/21/25): I want to get your thoughts on this—DNI Tulsi Gabbard revealing even more details about the Obama administration's alleged, quote unquote, "treacherous [sic] conspiracy" against Trump. 

The administration's treacherous conspiracy? Sad! 

The fellow had explicitly said "quote unquote"—and he'd then proceeded to misquote Gabbard's language! At that point, he played tape of Gabbard with Bartiromo, after which Swecker wandered the countryside, discussing everything except the specific claims Gabbard had brought forward.

That said, it was "close enough for cable news" in this degraded era! When Swecker's wandering finally ended, Piro told viewers this:

PIRO: Could be the scandal of our lifetime! Chris Swecker, thank you for your time.

It could be the scandal of our lifetime! That's what Fox News Channel viewers were told as the week began.

For the record, Piro is an occasional Friday night panelist on the Gutfeld! program. On that show, he's lampooned as a guy who can name all the major porn stars. 

That version of the Fox News Channel crawls out of the garbage can each evening at 10 p.m. The broadcast day starts at 5 a.m., and on this occasion, the day was starting with Red America being told this:

It could be the scandal of our lifetime! 

That's what Piro said. His co-host, Carley Shimkus, didn't speak up. She's sharper than Piro, but she too works for the Fox News Channel. Attention must be paid!

With that imitation of a report, the stage had been set for the three friends on the three-hour Fox & Friends program. They went on the air at 6 a.m. Their imitation of a report about Gabbard started five minutes later.

For the record, one slight surprise was involved this day. For a background report on what Gabbard had said, Earhardt threw to reporter Doug Luzader, and he quickly offered this

Critics say Gabbard is conflating two issues—whether Russia was trying to directly interfere with vote counts, or whether they were trying to influence the U.S. electorate.

That's exactly what critics were saying—and Luzader said so right on the air! For the record, that's also what Gabbard had plainly been doing, whether she knew it or not.

Good lord! Luzader was reporting the possibility of a major hole in Gabbard's presentation. But when Luzader's report was done, the attention swung back to the trio of friends who had emerged from the car that morning.

Now it came time for the friends to speak! Doocy's replacement offered this, the very first thing which was said:

JONES (7/21/25): James Comey should be in jail! He just straight-up—Ainsley, you're right. He just flat-out lied to the American people!

James Comey should be in jail! The ball of confusion continued from there as the three friends wandered the countryside, thundering about almost everything except what Gabbard had actually said.

Full disclosure! As the day wound on, several major players aggressively challenged Gabbard's presentation:

In this piece for National Review, Fox News contributor / legal analyst Andy McCarthy trashed her presentation up one side and down the other.  At Mediaite, Isaac Schorr's report appears beneath this headline:

Fox’s Andy McCarthy Torches Gabbard Over ‘Misleading’ Attack on Obama and Russia Investigation

So wrote Andy McCarthy. After that, along came Dan Abrams, founder of Mediaite, on his eponymous YouTube show. You can get the overview here:

‘This Is So Dishonest’: Dan Abrams Systematically Dismantles Tulsi Gabbard’s Alleged Obama Scandal

So Dan Abrams now said.

Right from the start, the New York Times had reported that Gabbard's remarkable claims were based upon a bone-simple act of conflation.  Now, McCarthy and Abrams were spelling that out. But over here in Blue America. others were still staying silent.

All through the course of the day, viewers of the Fox News Channel were sold the Gabbard line. McCarthy and Abrams spoke up—but in the wider reach of Blue America, the regulars kept looking away.

The Fox News Channel is a cancer on the possibility of a discourse, spread by a gaggle of clowns who are paid to agree with each other's jibes as they read their talking points. Yesterday morning, the clowning began in the 5 o'clock hour, then continued on through the long day.

Barack Obama had engaged in a treason! "Dead souls" were spreading the message around. 

Over here in Blue America, did other such souls look away?

Tomorrow: The nature of the conflation

MONDAY: Fox News, DOJ make it official!

MONDAY, JULY 21, 2025

The current state of play: Just a bit over a month ago, Tulsi Gabbard seemed to have fallen from favor with the commander in chief.

According to most reports, she had made an accurate statement during testimony before a Senate committee. Inevitably, this annoyed the commander in chief, or so said NBC News in this June 18 report:

Tulsi Gabbard sidelined in Trump administration discussions on Israel and Iran

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, an outspoken critic of past U.S. military interventions abroad, appears to have fallen out of favor with President Donald Trump as he weighs military action against Iran, according to multiple senior administration officials with knowledge of the matter.

Gabbard allies insist that, while there is some White House tension, some of the public blowback is overstated, and none interviewed by NBC News expect her to leave the administration as a result of the president’s Iran policy, even if that includes direct U.S. involvement.

Gabbard’s politically perilous position burst into the open this week when Trump brushed her back over her testimony to Congress in March. At that time, she said the U.S. intelligence community did not believe Iran was building a nuclear weapon—a comment at odds with Trump’s recent public statement about the threat posed by Iran’s potential nuclear program.

“I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one,” Trump told reporters Tuesday on Air Force One.

As far as we know, her testimony in March had been accurate. Inevitably, that now seemed to have the Hawaiian out in the cold!

All in all, whatever! Meanwhile, we're going to guess that Director Gabbard may be in fuller favor today. Or then again, possibly not—how's a mere person to know?

For the record, Gabbard has passed an extremely hot potato on to Attorney General Bondi. Fox News digital has made the whole thing official today, and so has the Justice Department.

Just to establish the record, here's the start of the Fox News report concerning the state of play:

DOJ receives Gabbard's criminal referral on bombshell claims Obama admin 'manufactured' Russian collusion hoax

The Department of Justice confirmed Monday that it has received Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's criminal referral related to her bombshell claims that Obama-era officials "manufactured and politicized intelligence" to create the narrative that Russia was attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election, Fox News has confirmed. 

The Department of Justice declined further comment, but confirmed to Fox News that the department received the referral. 

Gabbard released unclassified documents Friday that reportedly show "overwhelming evidence" that then-President Barack Obama and his national security team laid the groundwork for what would be the yearslong Trump-Russia collusion probe after Trump's election win against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016.

"Their goal was to usurp President Trump and subvert the will of the American people," Gabbard had posted to X on Friday regarding the criminal referral. "No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The integrity of our democratic republic depends on it. We are turning over all documents to the DOJ for criminal referral." 

Gabbard joined Fox News' Maria Bartiromo Sunday, where she detailed evidence uncovered in the case, which she said showcases "overwhelming" proof that Obama-era officials laid the groundwork for what would be the yearslong Trump-Russia collusion probe after the 2016 election.

"The implications of this are frankly nothing short of historic," Gabbard said Sunday. 

"Over 100 documents that we released on Friday really detail and provide evidence of how this treasonous conspiracy was directed by President Obama just weeks before he was due to leave office after President Trump had already gotten elected. This is not a Democrat or Republican issue. This is an issue that is so serious it should concern every single American because it has to do with the integrity of our democratic republic," she continued.

Following Gabbard's revelations, Trump shared a video to his Truth Social account showing a handful of Democrats, including Obama, vowing that "no one is above the law." Later in the clip, an AI-generated video showed Trump and Obama sitting in the Oval Office before Obama is arrested while the song "YMCA" plays in the background. 

That's the current state of play as this situation begins to take shape. 

If anything, the Fox News report played down the sweep of Gabbard's remarks on a succession of Fox programs over the weekend. Speaking on Saturday's Fox & Friends Weekend, then on Sunday's Sunday Morning Futures, Gabbard repeatedly accused President Obama of having engaged in a "treasonous conspiracy" and a "seditious conspiracy," with the term "attempted coup" also tossed around.

Treason can be punishable by death. People, we're just saying!

Dems went after President Trump; now the inevitable payback seems to be underway. Over the weekend, Gabbard persistently dropped the T-bomb on the head of President Trump's predecessor. This triggered cheers from an array of the usual pundits on Fox News Channel programs.

We offer this post to let you see the current state of play. Gabbard has recommended that the DOJ act, and President Trump has posted a video of his predecessor being frog-marched away.

Tomorrow, we'll show you the several different questions Gabbard has run together—has conflated—as she stages her dramatic assault. That said, it looks like the commander in chief has aligned himself with what Gabbard has said and done. 

To Blue America's pundit class, we will only say this:

Blue American pundits, please! Speaking at length about Jeffrey Epstein isn't likely to be the way out!

Tomorrow: Conflation all around

MONDAY: Just that quickly, this!

MONDAY, JULY 21, 2025

Barack Obama in chains: Even as we sat here typing, the sitting president offered this:

Trump Shares AI Clip of Obama Being Arrested After Tulsi Gabbard ‘Coup’ Claims

President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video showing former President Barack Obama being arrested by the FBI after his intelligence chief accused the Democrat of leading a “years-long coup.”

The TikTok video, posted to Truth Social, shows Obama being approached by agents and handcuffed in the Oval Office before appearing in an orange jumpsuit behind bars, all soundtracked with The Village People’s hit song and Trump favorite, “YMCA.” The manipulated footage repurposes clips from Obama and Trump’s 2016 White House meeting and twists Obama’s real quote, “no one is above the law,” into the video’s ironic punchline.

The post came just hours after a Sunday announcement on Fox Business by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who accused the Obama administration of plotting to “usurp” Trump by deliberately manipulating intelligence on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

And so on from there. 

David Gilmour did the post at Mediate. This weekend, even as we Blues kept discussing the previous topic of the moment, the sitting president and his soldiers were hurrying ahead to this.

Say goodbye to the previous topic! Presumably, Gabbard is back in her leader's good graces. Also, even as the zone keeps getting flooded, this may start to signal the shape of a very ugly long fight.

DEAD SOULS: Gabbard keeps charging Obama with treason!

MONDAY, JULY 21, 2025

"God bless us everyone:" The dead souls which fuel our nation's discourse were widely visible, for all to see, over the warm, humid weekend.

The Fox News Channel crawled with the repeated charge that President Obama played an active role in a "treasonous conspiracy"—in a "seditious conspiracy," no less.

It was the sitting president's Director of National Intelligence who kept making the charge. Indeed, she has now said, again and again, that the former president should be indicted and prosecuted because of his treasonous conduct. 

She says she has forwarded the files to Attorney General Bondi. It will be Bondi's decision.

As we noted in Saturday's report, Director Gabbard appeared on Saturday morning's Fox & Friends Weekend to repeat the charges she had made on Friday night's Hannity program. A trio of friends wee thrilled:

Fox & Friends Weekend: July 19, 2025
Charlie Hurt: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend
Rachel Campos-Duffy: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend
Griff Jenkins: co-anchor, Fox News Live

The trio of friends believed every word. When they asked Gabbard if Obama and his henchmen should face criminal charges, Gabbard responded with this:

I'm not a lawyer. We're referring this to the Department of Justice. I know Attorney General Pam Bondi is committed to bringing about justice to those who have broken the law. And in this case, again, what these documents detail, to me, in my view, cannot be explained as anything but a treasonous conspiracy.

At this site, we're scoring that as a yes.

A collection of flyweights on The Big Weekend Show excitedly ran with the charges on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, Gabbard made her most dramatic presentation yet, interacting at length with the near-hysterical Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business program, Sunday Morning Futures.

To watch that lengthy interview, you can just click here.

As we noted on Saturday, the New York Times had quickly reported a basic fact—a groaning conflation lies at the heart of Gabbard's remarkable charges. That said, even this very morning, mainstream news orgs continue to ignore the conduct which is now general on the Fox news Channel—conduct which comes live and direct from the heights of the Trump administration, with the clear suggestion of criminal charges to come.

President Obama might be headed for a "treasonous conspiracy" charge! On its face, this apparent madness emerged full-blown from the head of some massively bungled reporting, but it swept across Red America's "cable news" channel as the weekend rolled along.

On Sunday morning's Fox & Friends Weekend program, it was Campos-Duffy who continued to lead the charge. That evening, Dr. Saphier was back on The Big Weekend Show. With respect to Gabbard's charges, she led this ragtag congregation at the start of the two-hour show: 

The Big Weekend Show: July 20, 2025
Kevin Corke: Fox News Channel correspondent
Katie Pavlich: Fox News contributor
Dr. Nicole Saphier: chyroned as BOARD CERTIFIED RADIOLOGIST
Tom Shillue: Gutfeld!-affiliated D-list comedian

Citizens, we're just saying! In the hands of that aggregation, Obama's treasonous conduct continued to be the topic of the moment.

So it went on Fox. In a separate manifestation, the New York Times published an illuminating colloquy between Ezra Klein and Will Sommer about the previous topic of the moment. This was the headline atop the lengthy interview:

Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein

How did Epstein get back in the news? At this point, we ourselves can hardly remember.

That said, Epstein had suddenly been very much back—and this lengthy interview took Times readers deep into an ongoing realm of apparent madness. After a prologue by Klein, the interview started like this:

Why Trump Can’t Shake Jeffrey Epstein

[...]

KLEIN: Will Sommer, welcome to the show.

SOMMER: Thanks for having me.

KLEIN: I want to begin with the dominant conspiracy theory of Donald Trump’s first term. For the uninitiated: What was QAnon?

SOMMER: QAnon, in a nutshell, is the idea that Donald Trump was recruited by the military to take on a pedophile cabal that runs the world—or what we might also call the deep state.

Trump supporters got this idea because starting in late 2017, someone named Q was posting cryptic messages online, and then they would decode them. That’s really what formed the basis of QAnon.

That's how the lengthy interview started. As Klein continued to question Sommer, on and on the apparent madness went, reminding us that an ancient nostrum—Man [sic] is the rational animal—actually has little to do with the most primal instincts of our vastly imperfect species, or with the peculiar shape of the current political time:

Barack Obama has engaged in a seditious conspiracy—in an act of treason! 

Also, powerful elites have sexually abused and murdered children in satanic rituals, drinking their blood as they did—and this behavior is apparently still underway within the thought patterns of the tortured souls who inhabit large parts of our world.

Klein and Sommer were exploring the background to the previous topic of the moment. Meanwhile, all across the Fox News Channel, employees were excitedly spreading Gabbard's conflation-fueled new message about President Obama's seditious / treasonous crimes. 

This is the shape of what's left of our discourse, such as it ever was! We're going to cite a third manifestation as we try to define the actual tenor of the actual times—as we try to define the cognitive and ethical boundaries within which that discourse now functions.

We're going to cite a third manifestation. On Saturday afternoon, it appeared at Mediaite:

Greg Gutfeld’s Disruptive Rise: How a Fox News Prankster Broke Late-Night TV

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show is over, and while the official reason has yet to be confirmed, reports suggest CBS was hemorrhaging money to the tune of $40 million a year. The show reportedly employed more than 220 staffers and cost an eye-popping $100 million annually to produce.  Yes, there is the whole corporate fealty to Trump at play, which I went into great detail on Friday, but this blockbuster-movie money for a nightly talk show. In an age of media belt-tightening and digital fragmentation, that model may simply no longer be sustainable.

Which brings us to Greg Gutfeld.

Yes, Gutfeldthe often smirking, occasionally cringeworthy Fox News host who somehow emerged as a legit force in late-night-style comedy...

And so on from there.

For the record, the author of this piece—Colby Hall—is a good, decent person. Along with the higher-profile Dan Abrams, he was co-founder of Mediaite, the site where his essay appears.

In his unintentionally revealing essay, he offers a hall of mirrors adjacent account of the way a certain "prankster" has risen to the top of the "late-night" comedy world! All this in spite of the fact that the Fox News Channel program in question doesn't air in "late night," not even on the east coast.

(In fact, the program airs in prime time, at 10 p.m.—though only on the east coast. Out on the Pacific coast, the program airs at 7 p.m.—and no, that isn't late night. Within the standard entertainment context, it isn't even yet prime time!)

Colby Hall isa good, decent person. but he fails to capture the actual nature of the Gutfeld! program. His headline describes Greg Gutfeld as "a prankster," one who seems to be part of "late-night TV." 

In both representations, that headline defers to Fox News Channel messaging about the program in question. In that way, Hall follows the lead of the wildly distorted profile of Gutfeld which appeared in Variety in February of this year.

Is Greg Gutfeld a "prankster?" Does his (primetime) "cable news" program really offer "smart, fun, non-lecturey comedy," the characterization Hall is somehow able to offer at one point in his piece?

Those questions lead directly to another:

Are we humans up to the challenge of running a modern "democracy?" Sadly, but unmistakably, the evidence continues to suggest that the answer may not be a yes.

Sad! At any rate, we'll be examining these three topics this week:

We'll examine the remarkable charges by Gabbard, along with the stumblebum way those charges are being pimped across the widely-viewed programs of the Fox News Channel.

We'll look at Klein's detailed interview with Sommer—at what it teaches about the ways our human minds actually work. Also, we'll look at Hall's portrait of the Fox News Channel's popular "prankster"—at the actual nature of the smart, fun, non-lecturey "comedy" he and his flyweight companions churn out night after night.

We'll be looking at the actual shape of the actual world in which we all actually live. You'll rarely hear about that world from the journalists our corporate minders in Blue America keep saying that we can trust.

 Meanwhile, also this, from the leading authority:

Dead Souls

Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle aristocracy of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an "epic poem in prose."

[...]

The original title, as shown on the illustration (cover page), was "The Wanderings of Chichikov, or Dead Souls. Poema," which contracted to merely "Dead Souls."

In the Russian Empire, before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, landowners had the right to own serfs to farm their land. Serfs were for most purposes considered the property of the landowner, who could buy, sell or mortgage them, as any other chattel. To count serfs (and people in general), the classifier "soul" was used: e.g., "six souls of serfs." 

The plot of the novel relies on "dead souls" (i.e., "dead serfs") which are still accounted for in property registers. On another level, the title refers to the "dead souls" of Gogol's characters, all of which represent different aspects of poshlost (a Russian noun rendered as "commonplace, vulgarity," moral and spiritual, with overtones of middle-class pretentiousness, fake significance and philistinism).

As always, we'll suggest a kinder reading than that as you ponder the struggling souls of the moment.

In truth, we've never read Dead Souls, not even in the original Russian. That said, the title of the book popped into our heads as we watched the nation's largely undisclosed demise unfolding across the various platforms on this warn humid weekend.

"God bless us everyone!" That's what Tiny Tim said. That statement came to mind too.

Tomorrow: Well scripted, every one