GREETINGS FROM BABEL: The demonization that never ends!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 9, 2016

Twin servants to President Trump: Charles Blow's recent column is so journalistically awful, in so many ways, that it ought to be taken to the Smithsonian, or perhaps to some underground site.

Blow's column could be preserved at that underground site for the edification of the survivors. It would be part of an exhibit which was mounted beneath this title:

How bad "journalistic" performance became during the age before the deluge, during the age when the public discourse collapsed

Blow's column was bad in so many ways it would take a month to explore them all. Unless you're reading the works of Josh Marshall, in which case it was "a very good piece" by Blow, of whom Marshall is "a huge fan."

Is Marshall really a huge fan of Blow? Did he really think Blow's column was "a very good piece?"

We don't know how to answer those questions. In our view, Marshall became a businessman during the last decade. It seems to us that, in that role, he is now inclined to say the various things that work, including various things he may not exactly believe.

As a piece of journalism, Blow's column was horrifically bad. One example:

Why did Ashley Williams, age 23, seem to think that Hillary Clinton called her a super-predator in 1996?

The question is blindingly obvious. But so what? When he interviewed the "young graduate student," the journalist didn't ask!

It would take a million analysts at a million typewriters to discuss Blow's column in full. For today, though, we want to restate one very basic point:

We want to stress the way the column continues two decades of demonization. As we do, we want to note the way the column is a virtual in-kind contribution future President Trump.

The demonized party is Hillary Clinton, a person you may or may not be planning to vote for.

(We plan to vote for Candidate Clinton or Candidate Sanders in November's general election. We can't say with certainty who we'll vote for in next month's Maryland primary.)

The demonized party in Blow's column was, of course, Hillary Clinton. The column continues a culture of demonization which started, on the national stage, in January 1992.

In many ways, that culture of demonization got started on the front page of Blow's current newspaper.

It continued through the vehicle of Pat Buchanan's convention speech about "Clinton and Clinton." It produced an era of pseudo-scandals during Bill Clinton's two terms in office.

That era was passively accepted by our hapless liberal world, except to the rather large extent that our tribe's "intellectual leaders" were actually running at the front of the mob.

Starting in March 1999, the demonization was seamlessly transferred to Candidate Gore. Twenty months later, this seamless transfer of demonization produced a disastrous result.

Once again, the New York Times played a major role in the invention of the new demon, who "had a problem with the truth" and "didn't know who he was." (At the Washington Post, Colbert King kept trashing the new official demon right to the bitter end.)

Once again, the liberal world just sat and accepted this demonization, even as our own tribe's "journalists" played leading roles in the new hunt.

By 2007, people were dead all over the world because of the silence in which we the brilliant liberals engaged during that earlier campaign. Now, Hillary Clinton began her first run for the White House.

The demonization started again. In February 2008, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz toted up some of the misogyny which our team was perfectly happy to take, in this case from the previous era's number-one slimer of Candidate Gore:

KURTZ (2/14/08): [T]he "Hardball" host has been particularly hard on the former first lady...And there is a history here. In 1999, amid speculation that Clinton might seek a Senate seat in New York, Matthews told viewers: "No man would say, 'Make me a U.S. senator because my wife's been cheating on me.' "

The following year, he said: "Hillary Clinton bugs a lot of guys, I mean, really bugs people—like maybe me on occasion...She drives some of us absolutely nuts."

In 2005, when Clinton criticized the administration on homeland security the day after terrorist bombings in London, Matthews said: "It's a fact: You look more witchy when you're doing it like this."

In recent weeks, he has asked whether Clinton's criticism of Obama makes her "look like Nurse Ratched." He has said that "Hillary's loyal lieutenants are ready to scratch the eyes out of the opposition" and likened her to Evita Peron, "the one who gives gifts to the little people, and then they come and bring me flowers and they worship at me because I am the great Evita."

It was against that backdrop that Matthews sparked a furor last month when he said: "I'll be brutal: The reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner, is her husband messed around." The counterattack was fierce.

"The counterattack was fierce?"

Ever so briefly, we the liberals got off our ascots to complain about Matthews' relentless behavior. Matthews and his corporate bosses decided to offer Matthews' sidekick, David Shuster, as a sacrifice to the gods.

That said, Matthews had begun trashing Clinton as "Evita Peron" all the way back in 1999, to complete and total silence from our own pitiful tribe. Indeed, Kurtz hadn't been able to include all of Matthews' gender-trashing in this one profile.

Regarding that endless gender-trashing, Kurtz noted that Matthews had called Clinton “witchy”—but not that he had compared her to a “strip-teaser.”

He reported that Matthews had said that Clinton “bugs” him—but we were left unaware of his earlier statement: “I hate her. I hate her. I hate everything she stands for.”

Also unmentioned was Matthews' astonishing statement about Gore: "He doesn’t look like one of us. He doesn’t seem very American, even."

Matthews said that to the idiot Imus shortly after 9/11. We liberals have meekly accepted this relentless behavior for the past twenty-four years.

Today, we tolerate people like Marshall and Blow, who extend this demonization, perhaps for career advancement and/or profit. That said, whatever the motives may be, the demonization speaks for itself:

We refer to the point we made yesterday. We refer to the fact that Blow named exactly one name in that appalling column.

In what way did that column by Blow produce a "demonization?"

Thank you for asking! Here's how he engaged in a demonization. This is very important:

Blow's column concerned the 1994 crime bill and "mass incarceration in general." As he pandered and fawned to a "young graduate student" who may or may not have known what the freak she was talking about, Blow named exactly one person who supported that bill.

He named the demon, Hillary Clinton. He named no one else!

Anyone who reads Blow's column will of course understand that Clinton is being demonized as a race-baiter. That's why it counts as demonization when Blow forgets to mention the fact we've mentioned before—the fact that two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for that same bill.

How do you discuss that bill in the context of race without mentioning that fact? You do it if you're engaged in demonization—if you're extending a pattern of demonization which began in 1992.

Whose names did Blow forget to cite? Among others, he forgot to name Kweisi Mfume, an extremely impressive person who was our own congressman at that time.

Mfume voted for the 1994 crime bill, then became head of the NAACP. How do you omit that name while trashing Clinton for supporting that bill?

The answer to that ugly question extends back 24 years. Meanwhile, people are dead all over the world because of the decades of demonizing engaged in by life forms like Blow.

Blow's column is a classic example of demonization. Life forms select the latest pig, then engage in the killing.

They did this in 1999 and 2000; in the end, this sent George Bush to the White House. Today, life forms like Blow are demonizing in a way which is destined to serve the interests of our future president, the disastrous President Trump.

"A very good column," Josh Marshall said in response to the demonization. We're so old that we can remember the days before he became a mogul devoted to dumbing the liberal world down.

Again, a few basic statistics: Once again, we thought you ought to consider a few basic numbers which didn't appear in Blow's column. Below, you see the number of murders in New York City in the years when Bill Clinton ran for president, as opposed to the number of murders last year:

Number of murders in New York City
1991: 2154
1992: 1995

[...]

2015: 345

We can't say why the number has dropped, and last year's number is still very large. That said, compare it to the gigantic numbers which helped create the 1994 bill.

Those gigantic numbers help explain why black and Hispanic congressmen from New York City voted for the 1994 crime bill. As they stage their latest demonization, life forms like Blow refuse to say their names.

In the years after the deluge, survivors will understand that this demonizing column by Blow was a gift to America's final president, the disastrous short-termer, President Trump.

The people who favored Candidate Sanders will be able to see that. So will those who favored Candidate Clinton. Among the scattered bands of survivors, even liberals, at long last, will know.

BREAKING: We continue our struggle to have nice things!

TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2016

We're returning to Einstein on Monday: Thanks to the Blows, the Marshalls, the Kings and the Taubs, it becomes increasingly clear—we actually can't have nice things.

Tomorrow, we'll return to Amanda Taub's attempt to say that over half the people in the U.S. are "authoritarians."

(Forty-four percent of white Americans are "high authoritarians!" So says Professor Taub, behaving much like the easily frightened people she describes in her endless Vox piece.)

Next Monday, we'll return to our award-winning seminar on The Culture of Incoherence. For those who are eager to read ahead, we incomparably offer these links:

In 1916, Einstein wrote his own Einstein-made-easy book. In the U.S., the book is in the public domain. You can read the whole thing here.

In 1920, Einstein's book was published in English for the first time. To read a 1920 review of the book in a American publication called The Weekly Review, you can just click this.

Three years later, the reviewer took his own life. (This was a tragedy, of course.) People, we're just saying.

We plan to return to these topics next week. Barring more trouble from King and Taub, Nova's recent Einstein-made-easy broadcast lies straight ahead.

To watch that hour-long program, click here. Like the hair of the werewolf at Trader Vic's, the visuals are perfect.

Campaign watch: Margaret Sullivan gets it right!

TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2016

Concerning the state of the campaign coverage at the glorious Times: How empty, how worthless is campaign coverage at the New York Times?

This Sunday, Margaret Sullivan asked and answered that very question. Here's what makes that interesting:

Margaret Sullivan is the New York Times' public editor!

Sullivan started by listing complaints she has received from readers. One example:

“We really want to be informed,” one Times reader had told her (his emphasis). Instead, Sullivan said the reader had described the famous newspaper's campaign coverage as “easy horse-race, fight-night, ‘let’s get ready to rumble!’ coverage with terms like ‘jab,’ and graphics of who attacked whom.”

It's true! The famous former newspaper's coverage is largely strategy and speculation, mixed with insults and polls and alleged character profiles.

It's much as that reader, and others, have said. And ohourgod! As she continued, Sullivan proceeded to agree—to say those readers were right!

Is this sort of thing allowed? "Sully" proceeded like this:

SULLIVAN (3/6/16): With these [readers'] concerns in mind, I analyzed The Times’s political reporting, including First Draft and Upshot articles, in recent weeks. Are these readers’ impressions accurate? And, despite what readers may claim, what do they actually prefer to read?

With plenty of help (thanks to Joumana Khatib, Jaclyn Peiser and Evan Gershkovich), I looked at 14 days of Times political reporting, beginning Sunday, Feb. 14, and ending Saturday, Feb. 27.

And while examining only two weeks of coverage may not tell us everything we need to know, it was revealing. The findings: Of the 234 political stories in that period (an astonishing number in itself), 180 could reasonably be called “horse-race” stories. That’s more than three of every four articles.

Oof! According to Sullivan, three-fourths of the newspaper's campaign reports were, in fact, horse-race stories. And, as Sullivan continued, her portrait became even less flattering. In this passage, she threw in two actual headlines:

SULLIVAN: Of the remaining quarter, some were issues-oriented, some were a blend of horse-race and issues, and some were simply hard to categorize. In that category:

Donald Trump on Protester: "I’d Like to Punch Him in the Face"

This Week’s Trump Insults: The R.N.C., a Poll and (Sort of) Pope Francis

And even among the issue-oriented articles we found in the two-week period, many treated the issues only glancingly, and very few compared the stances of various candidates in a way that might be most helpful to readers.

Sullivan delivered a very negative assessment. According to Sullivan, three-fourths of the newspaper's campaign reports were horse-race stories. After that, we reach the reports about Candidate Trump's latest insults, and about his highly authentic desire to punch folk right in the nose.

"Very few" of the paper's issue-oriented reports would be helpful to readers, she said.

From there, Sullivan advanced to the part of her column where the Times' top-ranking editors deny every word she has said. As Sullivan's readers will know, this is a standard part of her critiques of this former newspaper.

Can the Times really be this feckless? Let's forget campaign coverage for now. Instead, consider a recent news report about the situation in Flint.

Monica Davey's report appeared on the front page of Sunday's Times. The report ran almost 1500 words. Below, you see her complete report about the current state of the water in Flint:

DAVEY (3/6/16): Five months after state authorities announced that it was unsafe to drink unfiltered water because of high lead levels caused by government errors over the past two years, federal officials said here last week that the water still was not safe, and, as testing goes on, offered no promise for when it would be.

According to Davey, "federal officials said last week that the water still was not safe."

That's an extremely sketchy account of the current state of Flint's water. But in a full-length front-page report, it was literally all she wrote about this extremely fundamental question.

When we read that lengthy report, we were somewhat surprised by that highlighted statement. It seemed to us that we'd read and heard, again and again, that the water in Flint had been improving at a fairly rapid rate.

Davey's statement seemed to contradict that impression. But as is typical at the Times, Davey devoted virtually no space to this very basic, fundamental life-and-death question from Flint.

A few hours later, our puzzlement grew when we read a post by Kevin Drum. He stated his own puzzlement over Davey's single-sentence account:

DRUM (3/6/16): I understand the need for caution, as well as the obvious distrust that Flint residents have for official pronouncements that everything is now hunky-dory. But I wonder if this has paralyzed us in a way that's now causing more harm than good? There have been more than 13,000 residential tests of Flint's water since the beginning of the year, and it sure looks to me like the water is now pretty safe.

Drum went on to offer some data about the ongoing testing. His post appeared beneath this headline:

"The Water in Flint Looks Pretty Drinkable These Days"

How drinkable is the water in Flint? The chances are poor that you'll ever find out in the modern Times.

Unless Candidate Trump threatens to punch the mayor of Flint in the nose, you aren't likely to see that question answered in this floundering former newspaper. All in all, the New York Times rarely shows any sign of caring about such trivial matters.

The Times is empty, broken-souled, failing. But so is the bulk of our discourse, including that from our own tribe.

Concerning Trump and the pope: The New York Times' front-page report about Trump and the pope was even worse than we knew at the time.

It's a question of what a "quotation" looks like. We hope to return to this pitiful topic. Our original post is here.

For a full transcript of what the pope actually said, you can just click this. Presumably, the Times could have told you what the pope actually said. Judging from appearances, the paper decided to take a more thrilling route.

The power to paraphrase is the power to spin! We first told you that years ago, during the previous century.

GREETINGS FROM BABEL: Josh Marshall refuses to say their names!

TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2016

Conclusion—A very good column, he says: Incomparably, we have a suggestion.

We want to suggest that you should feel sympathy for a wide range of decent young people.

For purposes of specificity, we want you to picture a single well-intentioned young person. It could be a young man or a young woman.

This decent young person is 23, or maybe 26. Politically, he or she identifies as a progressive or as a liberal.

Most likely, he or she is a Democrat, or a Democrat-leaner. Also, and this is key, he or she reads TPM.

He or she thinks of TPM's founder, 47-year-old Josh Marshall, as one of the more reliable figures from the generation which went before. Why does he or she think that? He or she may have read the account shown below. It comes from the leading authority on Marshall's brilliant career:

Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker, compares Marshall to the influential founders of Time magazine. "Marshall is in the line of the great light-bulb-over-the-head editors. He’s like Briton Hadden or Henry Luce. He’s created something new."

The "something new" which Marshall created is, of course, TPM.

(In passing, we recall what Edison is said to have said when asked to explain the way he conceived of his greatest invention. "It was just like a light bulb went off in my head," the great inventor replied.)

Why should you feel sympathy for youngish TPM readers? Consider the TPM founder's response to Charles Blow's column last week.

Full disclosure: we're so old that we can remember when Marshall did very good work. In 1999 and 2000, we would have given his published work for The American Prospect a straight A, assuming we were grading on a curve.

If we were grading on the actual merits, he still might have gotten a C. That set his work light-years above the era's typical journalism.

Those days are long behind us. In the early part of the last decade, Marshall became a businessman, starting a robust web site.

Today, that site tends to pander to our tribe's less sagacious instincts. It tends to hire reporters who are very young. Presumably, this lets the founder pay low wages. Presumably, the youth and inexperience of TPM's writers contributes to the low-IQ nature of much of the site's current work.

As for Marshall himself, his posts now often seem like hurried afterthoughts. For an example of his recent work, just click here, then proceed to cringe, even though we all understand that everyone makes mistakes.

The mistake in that post was rather basic. When he responded to Blow's column last week, the founder failed his many young readers in ways which are massively worse.

Last Monday, Marshall responded to Blow's new column, a column which dealt, in a very loose fashion, with the 1994 crime bill.

In his column, Blow failed to provide the most basic context about that bill. He failed to note that two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the bill. He failed to describe the horrendous crime rates out of which it emerged.

Blow let readers emerge with the idea that the 1994 bill was heavily responsible for our (very high) incarceration rates, which it basically wasn't. Most disgracefully, he refused to say the names of the many "families and whole communities" who were "devastated" by the homicide rates which were raking our cities at the time that bill was passed by the House and the Senate and signed into law by Bill Clinton.

Blow refused to say the names of those "vanishing black people," the people who were "swept away" by the wave of murders which defined the context in which that bill was passed. Those families, communities and individuals don't seem to exist to players like Blow. For whatever reason, when Blow pretends to discuss that era, he disappears their names.

Blow said exactly one name from that era; he said the name "Hillary Clinton." He omitted the names of the many black congressmen, and of the black senator (the only one we had at the time), who voted for that bill.

Let's review:

Blow refused to say the names of the many people who were killed during the era in question. He refused to say the names of the people who voted for the bill.

Blow refused to tell his readers that the 1994 bill had little effect on our (very high) incarceration rates, which had begun their steady climb long before that bill was passed. He failed to list the many provisions found in that big giant bill.

Instead, Blow used his column to pander and fawn to a "young graduate student" who may or may not understand the various factors Blow chose to disappear. People who read Blow's column were handed a dramatic, pander-heavy tale—a melodramatic tale from which all context had been disappeared.

At TPM, a businessman who used to be sharp quickly called it a "very good piece." He too didn't bother to say the names of the many good, decent people who had been killed during the era from which that bill emerged.

We feel sorry for young liberals who are exposed to this kind of work. Once again, let's picture the youngish liberals and progressives who believe they can trust Josh Marshall.

Let's suppose you're a youngish liberal. Let's suppose you start your news day at TPM.

Last Monday, you read Marshall's post. You then clicked over to read Charles Blow's "very good [column]."

By the time you were done, you had read two separate pieces about that 1994 crime bill. In neither piece were you informed about those homicide rates, or about those votes by the CBC, or about the actual arc of our (very high) incarceration rates.

In neither column did anyone say the names of the many people who were killed in the early 1990s. Instead, in a rather typical example of his current work, here's the start of the objection the founder raised to Blow's "very good column:"

MARSHALL (2/29/16): With that introduction I wanted to focus your attention on this column by Charles Blow in the Times. It's based on an interview with Ashley Williams, the 23-year-old graduate student who confronted Hillary Clinton last week at a private fundraiser in Charlotte over her use of the word "superpredator" in 1996 and her broader complicity in the rise of mass incarceration. It's a very good piece. But there's one small part that stunned me when I read it. I quote it here at length at the point where Blow is amazed and incredulous that this really could have been the first time anyone had ever called Clinton on her use of this term:

In that passage, Marshall flogs Clinton for her "complicity in the rise of mass incarceration." He also praises Blow for his "very good piece."

Having said that, he admits that he was "stunned" by one thing Blow said in his column. Below, you see the three-paragraph chunk of Blow's column which Marshall proceeded to quote.

We'll highlight the three-word chunk of Blow's column which Marshall set in bold. Then, we'll highlight the founder's objection, in which he misstates what Blow said:

MARSHALL (continuing directly, quoting Blow): "Could this be true? How was this possible? How is it that of all the black audiences she has been before in the interceding two decades, and all the black relationships she has cultivated, no one person ever asked her what this young graduate student was asking?

"In that movement, I knew that the people of my generation had failed the people of Williams’s. Her whole life has borne the bruises of what was done, largely by Democrats, when I was the age she is now.

"She said she has grown up knowing families and whole communities devastated by vanishing black people, swept away into a criminal justice system that pathologized their very personage. That night, Williams forced a reckoning."

Yes, I'm zeroing in on this bolded line which claims that the demonizing of black youth, the rise of mass incarceration and all the collateral damage brought in their wake was mainly the work of Democrats...

From there, Marshall proceeds to flay himself for his own sins in this area. "I was a big Clinton supporter," he writes. "So I am implicated in this at some personal level," he dramatically says.

He hadn't bothered to say the names of the many people who were being killed at the time of that crime bill. He didn't note that Blow had omitted this very basic context.

He didn't note that Blow omitted the names of the many black legislators who voted for the bill in question. He didn't note that the bill in question seems to have had very little effect on our (very high) rates of incarceration.

Marshall didn't seem to care that Blow had refused to say the names of the dead. Instead, in the incompetent way which now typifies his work, he was "stunned" because he thought Blow had claimed that the rise in mass incarceraton was "mainly the work of Democrats."

We're sorry, but Blow didn't say that. Earth to harried businessman Marshall—"largely" does not mean "mainly."

Sorry, Charlie! For all the many faults in his column, Blow didn't say that our (very high) incarceration rates are mainly the work of Democrats. He said those rates are largely the work of Democrats, a claim which is so wonderfully imprecise that it's almost certainly true.

As usual, Marshall was in such a rush that he didn't quite comprehend what Blow's column had said. If you think this isn't typical of his current work, go ahead and visit that other groaner from the next day, the one we cited above.

Marshall went on to argue, at length, that our incarceration rates aren't mainly the work of Democrats. As he did, he bleated and wailed about Hillary Clinton's "complicity," and about the ways he himself was "implicated" in our incarceration rates.

He flogged himself in all the ways which would keep him current with the latest ideological cant being churned by people like Blow. He served young liberals very poorly as he peddled this highly selective crap.

That said, might we note a very basic fact at this point? In fact, Democrats were "mainly" responsible for the passage of the 1994 crime bill.

When the crime bill passed the House, it passed with votes from 188 Democrats and only 46 Republicans. (Among other objections, Republicans had opposed the bill because it spent too much money on projects designed to help the nation's black communities.)

At any rate, Blow didn't say the names of any "Democrats" other than Hillary Clinton. The reason for that seems fairly obvious:

Included in those 188 Democrats were two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus. As he pandered to "a young graduate student," Blow forgot to say their names. Trembling in his businessman's clothes, Marshall didn't dare add that very basic context, which might have suggested that you didn't have to be a race-baiting demon to have supported that bill.

If it's journalism this Edison does, Marshall's post was the latest sad disgrace. We feel sorry for the many young liberals who believe they can trust this man, who was once extremely sharp, but is now a businessman.

Might we state the obvious? Young liberals should be given the full range of information about that 1994 bill. But alas! Young liberals who read Marshall's post, then clicked over to read Blow's column, were deprived of the most basic context by each of these pitiful hacks.

Marshall used to be extremely sharp. Today, he seems to be minding the store. We're curious—how much does he pay himself and his wife from the proceeds from his low-IQ, presumably low-wage site? Having said that, we're much more curious about this basic point:

Why did Our Own Thomas Edison refuse to say their names? What kept this man from saying the names of the many good and decent people who were killed in the streets during the era in question?

Beyond that, what kept him from saying the names of the two-thirds of the CBC who voted for the bill? Why was he willing to say Clinton's name even as he refused to say theirs?

Marshall flayed Clinton, then flayed himself. He refused to say the names of the people who were killed in the streets during the era in question.

We feel sorry for young liberals and progressives who are being dumbed down by the likes of Marshall and Blow. Meanwhile, does Marshall feel sorry for those who were killed?

When he refuses to say their names, he speaks loud and clear, in the businessman's way:

Actually, no, he seems to say. Actually, no. I don't!

Concerning the rise in those (very high) rates: To what extent did the bill in question create or drive our (very high) incarceration rates? To what extent did the bill in question create "mass incarceration?"

That's a very basic question! For those who don't want to be blown in the wind, Kevin Drum's graphic is here.

Campaign watch: Authoritarians to the right of me!

MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2016

So Professor Taub has now said: A terrible but important fact just keeps on emerging.

Here it is:

Along with our intellectual leaders, we the liberals just aren't especially sharp.

This flies in the face of our tribal self-image, which holds that we liberals are the smart honest people while the dimwits are all Over There.

That said, it's more clear all the time that we just aren't especially sharp. Consider something Amanda Taub wrote last week in a long, lengthy piece at Vox.

Taub is an adjunct professor in International Law and Human Rights at Fordham. She's also a lawyer who's nine years out of Georgetown Law.

Her most recent Vox piece, which is quite lengthy, appeared on March 1. The lengthy report bears this scary headline:

"The rise of American authoritarianism"

Taub's piece inspired Colbert King's bomb-dropping column in Saturday's Washington Post. King's column carries this headline on line:

"Trump: The authoritarian’s candidate of choice"

For our previous report on King's piece, you can just click here.

We expect to spend a few more days looking at different aspects of Taub's lengthy piece. For today, let's consider one particular thing she wrote.

In her piece, Taub excitedly claims that recent work in the social sciences has uncovered "an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group [in the United States]—authoritarians."

In her next paragraph, she expands on that claim in dramatic fashion. She says that, by 2009, "the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies."

Let's ask and answer two questions:

Does the American electorate contain a "surprisingly large" number of "authoritarians?"

Everything is possible! Needless to say, it all depends on what the meaning of "authoritarian" is! Also "surprisingly large!"

Does the electorate contain "a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies?"

Once again, it all depends on what the meaning of "authoritarian tendencies" is! Also, how big is "vast?"

How many "authoritarians" are found in the U.S. electorate? We can't answer that question. That said, sensible people should perhaps be a bit careful when they start employing that term—a term which is almost guaranteed to produce more heat than light.

Professor Taub isn't that person! Later in her lengthy report, she describes the result of some polling she and Vox undertook in connection with her piece. She wrote what follows without betraying the slightest sign that her findings may perhaps seem a bit odd:

TAUB (3/1/16): The first thing that jumped out from the data on authoritarians is just how many there are. Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high." That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare.

The key thing to understand is that authoritarianism is often latent; people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how, over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful political constituency without anyone realizing it.

For whatever reason, Taub doesn't say how many black or Hispanic respondents turned out to be authoritarians. That said, let's marvel at the outcome she was prepared to report:

At first glance, a reader might think that Taub said the following: A reader might think she said that 44 percent of white respondents turned out to be authoritarians.

To our mind, that would be a rather remarkable finding. But that isn't what Taub said. She said something much more striking.

Here's what Taub and Vox actually found in the course of their research. They actually found that 44 percent of white respondents are "high" or "very high" authoritarians!

Presumably, the total number of authoritarians would be substantially larger than that! That 44 percent just represents the number of folk who are highly authoritarian, perhaps very highly so.

At times when tribal juices are flowing, does any result make a person like Taub stop to rethink her procedures, her assumptions, her claims?

Apparently not.

Based upon what Taub has written, it seems that substantially more than half of all white Americans turned out to be "authoritarians" in the course of her research. A walloping 44 percent were determined to be "high" or "very high" authoritarians.

Depending on one's definitions, of course, everything is possible. Tomorrow, we'll look at the questions Taub seems to have used to determine Where The Authoritarians Are.

When we do, you may start to feel that her findings aren't quite as startling as they may seem at first glance. But we'll put that off till tomorrow.

That said, the term "authoritarian" carries a very large amount of historical baggage. In our view, people who work with such loaded terms ought to be careful if they venture outside the narrow, egg-headed environments found inside academe.

(Tomorrow, we'll note a peculiar passage from Taub's report concerning this very problem.)

Taub and Vox haven't been especially careful as they have toyed with this term. Last Saturday, they got their first major result—a name-calling column in which Colbert King said he didn't want to paint all Trump voters with the same brush, then proceeded to do something that looked very much like that.

Are 44 percent of us the people highly authoritarian? Taub reported that startling result without even batting an eye.

On the merits, that strikes us as a very unwise claim to make in a non-academic setting. On the politics, it strikes us as the latest horrible gift to Candidate Trump—but when people like Taub start getting scared, they start doing damn-foolish things.

For the past few months, we've been asking a basic question: Do we liberals know how to talk about politics at this point except by dropping our various bombs on the heads of The Others?

Professor Taub and her dean, Ezra Klein, have emerged with a lusty response to our question.

Tomorrow: The banality of (testing for) evil

GREETINGS FROM BABEL: Did Williams know whereof she spoke?

MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2016

Part 4—Charles Blow didn't ask: Did Ashley Williams, age 23, know what she was talking about?

We ask for an obvious reason. A few weeks back, Williams interrupted Candidate Clinton at a campaign event, making a statement which struck us as rather odd.

In last Monday's New York Times, Charles Blow wrote a column about this interruption. His column seemed to be straight outta Babelstan. It left us asking such questions as these:

Did Ashley Williams have any idea what she was talking about? We'll get more specific, based on the nature of Williams' remarks:

How much does Ashley Williams know about the 1994 crime bill? About that bill's effects on the nation's (very high) incarceration rate?

Does Williams know who voted for that bill? Against it? How much does she know about the specific contents of the bill? How much does she know about the social conditions surrounding its enactment—more specifically, about prevailing crime rates in the early 1990s?

Most specifically, these questions came to mind:

Why does Williams seem to think that Hillary Clinton has called her a super-predator? How much does she know about the context in which that term gained currency when she was two years old? How much does she know about the one speech in which Clinton used that term on one lone single occasion?

We ask these questions for a reason, and Williams' age is involved. In his silly subservient column, Blow referred to Williams as a "young graduate student."

At age 23, Williams isn't super-young. But we will say this:

We ourselves turned 23 in December 1970. At that time, we weren't gigantically well versed on the politics and sociology of 1948 and 1950, when we ourselves were one to three years old.

When she interrupted Candidate Clinton, Williams referred to a bill which was signed into law in 1994. She also referred to a speech Clinton made in 1996. We hope it doesn't seem condescending to make a fairly obvious point:

Most people who are 23 don't know a great deal about events which happened when they were one. How much does Williams, age 23, know about that crime bill? About that one lone speech, which took place when she was three?

How much does Williams actually know about the 1994 bill which fueled her interruption? This seems like a blindingly obvious question.

Charles Blow didn't ask! We'll suggest that his silence is a marker of a Babel-rich era.

Blow is paid by the New York Times to pretend to be a journalist. By tradition, a journalist would have wondered why Ashley Williams offered this peculiar remark when she took it upon herself to interrupt a campaign event:

“I’m not a super predator, Hillary Clinton.”

Why in the world did Williams say that? It didn't occur to Blow to ask! Instead, he took that statement by Williams and used it as the headline for his column.

At no point did Blow try to explain why Williams would have made that statement. At no point did he try to explain the way in which that statement even makes sense.

A journalist would have taken those steps, but journalism is dying fast in the ever-expanding empire of Creeping Babelstan. Instead of asking those obvious questions, Blow got busy apologizing to Williams for his own failures in the past twenty years.

Or something! Here's where the pundit went after quoting Williams:

BLOW (2/29/16): Williams: “I’m not a super predator, Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton, obviously caught off guard, struggles to find an appropriate response as Williams continues to pressure her and the crowd begins to grumble, “That’s inappropriate,” and the Secret Service closes in on Williams.

Then Clinton says something about answering for her statement and mass incarceration in general that left me flabbergasted:

“You know what, nobody’s ever asked me before. You’re the first person to ask me, and I’m happy to address it, but you are the first person to ask me, dear.”

Could this be true? How was this possible? How is it that of all the black audiences she has been before in the interceding two decades, and all the black relationships she has cultivated, no one person ever asked her what this young graduate student was asking?

In that moment, I knew that the people of my generation had failed the people of Williams’s. Her whole life has borne the bruises of what was done, largely by Democrats, when I was the age she is now.

[In an interview, Williams] said she has grown up knowing families and whole communities devastated by vanishing black people, swept away into a criminal justice system that pathologized their very personage. That night, Williams forced a reckoning.

Are the highlighted statements true? To state the obvious, those accusations are extremely significant. That said, to what extent are they true?

More specifically:

Is it true that Williams' whole life "has borne the bruises of what was done, largely by Democrats, when [Blow] was the age she is now?"

To state the obvious, that's an extremely significant claim—but to what extent is it true? More specifically, to what extent has Williams's whole life "borne the bruises of what was done" by the 1994 crime bill? To what extent has Williams "grown up knowing families and whole communities" who were "devastated by" that bill?

To what extent did that 1994 crime bill create the effects Blow describes? To what extent did that bill produce "families and whole communities devastated by vanishing black people, swept away into a criminal justice system that pathologized their very personage?"

To state the obvious, Blow was presenting an extremely serious set of charges. To what extent were his highly dramatic charges actually true?

Blow made no attempt to answer that obvious question! He merely accepted the statements in question as true, then began to flay himself, and his whole generation, for not having directed such accusations at Candidate Clinton sooner.

For today, we have one more question:

Does something about that presentation perhaps not quite make sense? This is why we ask that:

Twenty-two years have passed since that 1994 crime bill was passed by the House and the Senate and signed into law by Bill Clinton. (Twenty years have passed since Hillary Clinton used the term "super predator" one time, in one lone single speech.)

Twenty-two years have passed since that bill was passed. If that bill actually had the effects described in that passage, does it make really make sense to think that no one in Blow's whole generation would have mentioned this fact to Clinton by now?

Crackers, please! To state a blindingly obvious point, people in Blow's generation actually have mentioned "mass incarceration." In some cases, people have done so at great length.

To name one well-known name, Michelle Alexander wrote an entire book on the subject, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The book appeared in early 2010.

It's true! You haven't seen Alexander on our corporate pseudo-liberal channel, where Blow has often cavorted and played, dreaming up facts, with the likes of Lawrence O'Donnell. Presumably, the corporate suits don't want to depress the folks with such gruesome, depressing topics. Rachel and the other stars have happily played along with that and a million other decisions—with decisions which disappear the needs and the interests of this nation's black kids, except on the rare occasions when someone gets shot.

Alexander wrote an aggressive book. It has largely gone undiscussed by our corporate stars, who much prefer reading worthless polls while mugging, snarking and clowning. This leaves our basic question unanswered:

To what extent are Blow's extremely aggressive claims actually true? To what extent did that 1994 crime bill produce the effects he described?

That's a very important question; as a pseudo-journalist, Blow didn't attempt to address it. Nor did he make any attempt to introduce some obvious context, the type of context we listed in last Friday's report.

Blow didn't mention the gruesome crime rates which helped define the age in which that bill was passed. He didn't mention the many "families and whole communities" who were being "devastated," at that time, by the horrible crimes which created those horrific crime rates.

Many people were being killed. Blow didn't stoop to recall this.

Blow forgot to mention something else. He seemed to say that the "devastation" Williams has known was created "largely by Democrats."

He named exactly one such person; he named Hillary Clinton. If he's talking about the 1994 crime bill, he forgot to say that the Democrats in question included two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus!

Why would two-thirds of the CBC vote for a bill like that? Because Blow kept forgetting to mention key facts, his readers didn't have to worry their vapid little New York Times heads with such obvious questions.

Blow also didn't trouble his readers with another buzzkill fact—the 1994 crime bill seems to have had very little effect on the nation's incarceration rate! What does Williams say about that? Did Blow even bother to ask?

One week ago, that column by Blow came straight from a particular region in Creeping Babelstan. When we liberals pleasure ourselves in such ways, we are begging—begging; begging!—for the joys of a President Trump.

Journalistically speaking, Blow's readers were handed a big pile of crap in last Monday's column. Later that day, along came the latest embarrassment from The House of Josh, an enterprise found in a different province of Our Own Modern Babelstan.

Tomorrow: "A very good column," he said

Campaign watch: Colbert King doesn't want to generalize!

SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 2016

Proceeds to throw A-bomb around: It's important to understand one key point:

The Washington Post's Colbert King doesn't want to generalize! More specifically, he doesn't want to generalize about the nation's Trump voters.

We know King doesn't want to do that because he tells us so. He says so early in his weekly column in today's Washington Post:

KING (3/5/16): A stipulation: It would be unfair and dishonest to paint all Trump supporters with the same brush.

That heartfelt stipulation comes early in King's piece. But uh-oh! After presenting his stipulation, he proceeds to "paint all Trump supporters" with a rather unpleasant brush.

With which brush does our columnist paint? This is the headline which sits atop his column on line:

"Trump: The authoritarian’s candidate of choice"

(That's the current headline on-line. In our hard-copy Post, the headline employed a milder brush: "What Trump voters are afraid of.")

According to the current headline, Donald Trump is "the authoritarian’s candidate of choice." Presumably, King didn't compose that headline himself. But we'd have to say that it's a fair summary of the column he wrote.

Please note:

That headline doesn't say that all Trump voters are "authoritarian," whatever that unpleasant term will be taken to mean. The headline doesn't even say that most Trump voters fit that unpleasant description.

That said, we'd have to say that King's column does paint with a very broad brush. We'd also say it's terrible work, of a familiar, destructive and dangerous type.

Why are people supporting Candidate Trump? Given what is happening this year, that's an important question.

Not wishing to be "authoritarian" ourselves, we'd assume that the answer to that question would differ depending on which Trump supporter you spoke to. We also note this fact:

We see no sign that King spoke to any Trump supporters in the course of assembling his column. A certain type of semi-"authoritarian" mind will typically function that way.

King plays a familiar game. As he proceeds in his piece, he simply tells us what Trump supporters think—and what he tells us about their imagined thinking tends to be highly unflattering. Highly privileged folk at the top of the heap will frequently function that way.

Could there imaginably be valid reasons explaining some voter's support for Trump? Let's just say that King hasn't worked his imagination real hard in pursuit of that question.

In our view, King's column is horrifically bad, but it's also quite instructive. Overall, we wouldn't describe King as a liberal. But his column shows how we in our liberal tribe tends to function when we're at our intellectual worst, which is where we can be found a large amount of the time.

Because King's column is so instructive, we'll almost surely return to it next week. For today, though, let's only note where King ends up.

King ends his column by saying what follows. As he does, we'd have to say that columnist King is ignoring his own gruesome history:

KING: Trump’s willingness to flout all the conventions of civilized discourse when it comes to out-groups and others that his authoritarian supporters find so threatening is, as Vox observed, a benefit rather than a liability for him.

Even if Trump is out of the picture, Vox’s Taub points out, the authoritarians “will still look for candidates who will give them the strong punitive leadership they desire.”

Thus a seminal finding: There is a sickness in our body politic that Trump’s candidacy exposes.

We agree! Over and over, again and again, Candidate Trump has shown a "willingness to flout all the conventions of civilized discourse when it comes to out-groups and others."

Here's the problem. We're so old that we can remember when King and his horrible Washington in-group spent many years engaged in the same highly destructive practice.

In our view, Colbert King was Donald Trump long before Trump came to town. So were the many others who rode around, year after year, in the insider establishment Washington clown-car with him.

This in-group was assaulting our journalistic conventions long before Candidate Trump came along. Trump has come along in the past year and destroyed things a tiny bit better.

Colbert King and his gruesome in-group were destroying our discourse long ago. His newest column continues to do so, in a way which is pleasing to liberals. Let's close with a basic point:

In the past few months, we've frequently asked a basic question. Here it is:

Can we the liberals discuss modern politics without the use of our bombs?

King said he doesn't want to generalize. Then just like that, he started throwing his A-bomb around.

Again and again, this seems to be the only play our liberal tribe knows. As we've noted many times, we liberals love our various bombs.

We don't leave home without them! It's a vaguely authoritarian practice, and it makes you-know-who strong.

Campaign watch: Drum reviews the Trump "health plan!"

FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2016

As we wait for Godot: For weeks and months, Candidate Trump has given us in this weary world an overview of his health plan.

It would be terrific, the candidate said. Also, no one would die in the streets!

(The candidate said he got a standing ovation every time he mentioned that second point. Did he ever get any such ovation? We're just asking, friend!)

Trump has now released his "plan." Kevin Drum reviews it here.

We're leaving you with one question. Will the New York Times ever subject this "plan" to a serious front-page review?

We don't have the answer to that. Crackers, we're just asking!

BREAKING FROM BABEL: The New York Times finds Allentown!

FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2016

Will Maddow follow suit: This morning, right on the front page, the New York Times has finally found Allentown.

You might say the famous newspaper has located life outside Flint. Hard-copy headline included, this is the way Michael Wines began his news report, which carries a Cleveland dateline:

WINES (3/4/16): Beyond Flint, Lead Poisoning Persists Despite Decades-Old Fight

CLEVELAND—One hundred fifty miles northwest of here, the residents of Flint, Mich., are still reeling from the drinking water debacle that more than doubled the share of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood—to a peak, in mid-2014, of 7 percent of all children tested.

Clevelanders can only sympathize. The comparable number here is 14.2 percent.

The poisoning of Flint’s children outraged the nation. But too much lead in children’s blood has long been an everyday fact in Cleveland and scores of other cities...

Say what? According to Wines, Flint had a 7 percent excessive exposure rate at the worst point in its current ordeal. (We don't know where he got that number.)

In Cleveland, the rate of excessive exposure is twice as high! Eventually, Wines even said this:

WINES: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that four million of those most dangerous households have children. A half-million children—in Atlantic City, Philadelphia and Allentown, Pa., where a remarkable 23.1 percent of children tested had excessive lead—are believed to have enough lead in their blood to merit a doctor’s attention.

Say what? At its worst point, seven percent of children in Flint displayed excessive exposure to lead. The corresponding figure from Allentown is 23.1 percent—more than three times as high!

Thanks to other people's work, we've been noting such facts for the past two months. It took the Times a while to get off its ascot and do this reporting. But Wines goes into detail about the scope of the problem in today's front-page report.

Eventually, returning to Cleveland, Wines even tells us this:

WINES: In 2010, researchers estimated that 7.7 percent of the nation’s black children younger than 6 had blood lead levels above five micrograms per deciliter. But in Glenville, 26.5 percent of children tested in 2014—286 children in all—exceeded that standard. Two registered more than 45 micrograms, the threshold for hospitalization to remove lead from the body.

Cleveland tested less than half its under-6 population. How many other children are at risk is unknown, but an Ohio State University analysis suggests that in some census tracts, it could be more than four in 10.

In Flint, the alarm was triggered when Dr. Hanna-Attisha's study showed that the exposure rate had gone from 2.1 percent up to 4.0 percent after the switch to Flint River water. According to Wines, the exposure rate may be ten times that high in some census tracts in Cleveland! As recently as 2010, the exposure rate was twice that high for the nation's black kids as a whole.

Wines explains a key point. In most of these instances, the exposure to lead is caused by exposure to lead paint, not by ingestion of lead in drinking water. That said, the potential damage is the same, however a child is exposed.

We'd say Wines is guilty of one or two key omissions. He doesn't explain what exposure rates were like in earlier decades. We think those extremely high exposure rates help provide some basic context for people who want to understand this nationwide state of affairs.

We'd also say he does too little explaining about the types of damage one should expect at lower rates of excessive exposure. "Lead poisoning" is a scary term. For journalistic purposes, it may spread more heat than light.

That said, the fact that the Times has finally done this background reporting raises an important question. Will someone tell the Maddow Show to stop its disgraceful clowning around with this national state of affairs?

For viewers of the Maddow Show, overexposure to lead is a problem for children in Flint and for children nowhere else. In a highly typical manner, Maddow has played the state of affairs in Flint as a way to attack Rick Snyder, one of her favorite political demons. (For better or worse, she has several—and she's thrilled when they end up in jail.)

If you watch the Maddow Show, lead poisoning exists in Flint, and it exists nowhere else. Maddow has never so much as mentioned the fact that exposure rates are much higher elsewhere. On Maddow's highly novelized program, Flint represents "a humanitarian crisis of international proportions." The lead-exposed children in Cleveland and Allentown don't even seem to exist.

In many ways, Rachel Maddow has become our own tribe's Donald Trump. This is why we say that:

Over in the other tribe, many voters can't see through the silly scams they're constantly sold by Trump. Over here in our own brilliant tribe, we tend to have the same problem with the endless mugging and clowning and pimping of self which is constantly peddled by Maddow.

Exposure rates in Cleveland and Allentown are substantially worse than that in Flint. The same can be said of many other cities. At sites like Vox and Kevin Drum, this news has been spreading for months. As of today, even the Times has gotten around to reporting this basic fact.

Will the day ever come when Maddow, who isn't obsessively honest, tells her viewers the rest of the story? Or will she keep using the children of Flint as stars of a private morality tale in which Governor Snyder is the key villain and she herself is cast in the role of one of the genius heroes?

We'll guess that Maddow will never tell. Whether we tribals can see it or not, she tends to play it that way, something like Candidate Trump.

GREETING FROM BABEL: Basic facts you can't learn from Blow!

FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2016

Part 3—Contextually clueless in Babel: Today, we plan to have naming of parts. We'll have naming of parts in this morning's report, then again in an afternoon post.

This morning, we'll start with naming of parts concerning crime in Gotham. According to the leading authority, these were the numbers of murders in New York City in the early 1990s:

Number of murders in New York City, 1990-94
1990: 2245
1991: 2154
1992: 1995
1993: 1946
1994: 1561

Last year, the number of murders was 345. That's still a lot of murders, of course, especially for the people killed and for their families and friends.

Next, we'll have the naming of homicides in Chicago during that same era. According to the leading authority, those numbers look like this:

Number of homicides in Chicago, 1990-94
1990: 851
1991: 928
1992: 943
1993: 855
1994: 931

Last year, the number was 488. By standards of the developed world, that's still a very large number (and it makes Chicago our current "Murder City"). But it's roughly half as large as those figures from the early 1990s.

(According to the leading authority, New York City's numbers were dropping at that time. Chicago's numbers were not.)

Next we'll have the naming of parts concerning the vote in the House on the 1994 crime bill. By most counts, this is the way the voting broke down within the Congressional Black Caucus:

Final vote, 1994 crime bill, Congressional Black Caucus
Voting yes: 23 members
Voting no: 11 members

We're not saying those votes were right or wrong. We're just saying those votes were cast.

(Our own congressman, Kweisi Mfume, voted for the 1994 bill. Two years later, he was named president of the NAACP. Just for the record, Mfume is a very impressive person.)

As you may have heard, Bernie Sanders voted for the 1994 bill. In the Senate, so did Paul Wellstone. So did Carole Mosely-Braun. At the time, she was the nation's only black senator.

According to this mid-level authority, it's also true that "a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the 1986 law that created the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine." We name that part to offer even more context concerning a recent New York Times column.

We'd like to name one additional part, although this part is somewhat complex. It concerns the extent to which the 1994 crime bill created, or contributed to, our current rates of incarceration.

Breaking! By the norms of the developed world, our incarceration rates are extremely high—so high that our current practice is often described as "mass incarceration."

That said, to what extent did the 1994 crime bill contribute to those current rates? There's no simple statistic with which that question can be answered, unless it's this statistic, reprinted in a recent post by Kevin Drum:

"In the US, federal prisons house only about 13 percent of the overall prison population."

In that post, Drum added these further bits of context. They involve the naming of some very basic parts:

DRUM (2/11/16): [B]y 1995, when the crime bill took effect, state and federal policies had long since been committed to mass incarceration. Between 1978 and 1995 the prison population had already increased by more than 250 percent. Between 1995 and its peak in 2009, it increased only another 40 percent—and even that was due almost entirely to policies already in place.

Drum includes a striking graphic which illustrates these parts:

Incarceration had already displayed a steep rise before 1994. Federal incarceration rose after 1994, but that constituted a small part of the overall rise.

Were those 1986 votes a mistake? How about those votes on the 1994 crime bill?

In today's naming of parts, we aren't trying to answer those questions. We're trying to offer amazingly basic context concerning those bills and those votes.

As we do, we'll name one further part:

If you read Charles Blow's latest imitation of journalism, you weren't exposed to any of this extremely basic context. You weren't offered any of these extremely basic facts.

Instead, you saw an increasingly familiar sight, here in the Babel where we all live. You saw a grown man with a very high platform pandering to someone much younger.

You saw that grown man refusing to play the role of the serious journalist. You saw him refusing to play the traditional role of the elder. Instead, you saw the amazing reversal of roles which, by now, has come to define Our Own Ridiculous Babel.

According to Blow's ridiculous column, Ashley Williams, age 23, is a "young graduate student." Recently, she interrupted a presidential campaign event to make a somewhat peculiar statement, a peculiar statement the slacker Blow tied to the 1994 crime bill, and to the heinous first lady who spoke once on its behalf.

Blow didn't provide the most obvious context. Instead, he pandered and fawned and pimped script.

In the Babel we all inhabit, Blow is one of the ultimate slackers. In his highly dramatic column, he hurried past all the parts we have named today.

He didn't make the slightest attempt to determine if his young graduate student had the first freaking idea what the freak she was talking about. Instead, he played the role of the penitent hero, part of a nauseating morality play in which so many of our tribal leaders are now profitably engaged.

If she read Blow's column, the young graduate student wasn't challenged by the simple facts we've assembled. (We wouldn't prejudge her response.) Subscribers to the New York Times didn't encounter any of this basic context either.

Instead, they encountered the usual crap which now routinely gets shoveled at us here in Our Own Private Babel.

In comments, our liberal tribals swung into action, reciting our memorized tribal scripts. Moments later, up jumped Josh Marshall, newly refashioned as Gramps.

Tomorrow: Tugging his forelock, confessing his guilt, Josh plays an appalling sad game

Campaign watch: It took a village named Mitt Romney!

THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2016

In search of the national press: We haven't watched Mitt Romney's full speech about Candidate Trump. That said:

Perusing a transcript of the speech, we were struck by this excerpt:

ROMNEY (3/3/16): Dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark.

He claimed that he had spoken clearly and boldly against going into Iraq.

Wrong. He spoke in favor of invading Iraq.

He said he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating 9/11.

Wrong. He saw no such thing. He imagined it.

His is not the temperament of a stable, thoughtful leader. His imagination must not be married to real power.

Concerning those alleged "thousands of Muslims," Romney is being too kind, of course.

It isn't clear that Trump "imagined" that event. It's just as likely that he simply made it up.

At any rate, he kept insisting the event had occurred long after it became clear that it hadn't. Romney's statement seems to be true:

"Dishonesty is Donald Trump's hallmark."

Romney cites two remarkably bogus claims. Because Romney is playing to the anti-Obama crowd, he skipped a third heinous example—Trump's endless claims, in 2011 and 2012, that he had sent investigators to Hawaii, and that these investigators were stunned by what they were learning about President Obama's birth status.

Obviously, Trump was lying about that. By any normal standard, his conduct was disgraceful, appalling.

Today, Romney cited two episodes in denouncing Trump's dishonesty. To see a few more of Trump's crazily inaccurate policy claims, read Kevin Drum's recent post.

(Also, do you remember the time he said he got friendly with Putin?)

Today, Mitt Romney has denounced this deeply strange behavior. We ask you to ask yourself this:

Why did Romney have to do this? What ever became of the nation's "national press?"

As a candidate, Trump has engaged in a pattern of apparent lying which is basically without precedent. You'd never know this from the treatment he has received from that "national press."

Simply put, the national "press corps" has refused to address Trump's apparent pathological lying. Their avoidance of his birtherism is the ugliest case in point.

Good God! When Trump announced his candidacy last June, a few reporters actually tried to ask him about his repeated birther claims. Trump told them he no longer wished to discuss that topic—and they bowed to his request!

We haven't seen a single news org revisit that ugly, destructive episode or challenge Trump about it. In all the Republican debates, the topic has never been raised. As the national "press corps" fumbles about, looking for lies they can pin on Clinton, they've all agreed to turn tail and run from that ugly, destructive history.

In fairness, the "press corps" has also turned tail and run from Trump's ridiculous claims about Iraq. From the blatant craziness of his blatantly crazy tax proposal. From the endless series of giant misstatements about a wide range of policy matters.

Still, of all the lunacy they've agreed to avoid, the ugliness of the birther claims is the most egregious. This brings us back to the strangest press event of last year—Rachel Maddow's behavior when Trump announced he was running for president.

As you may have heard by now, MSNBC's corporate brass changed the channel's orientation during the course of the past year. Presumably, the decision to rework the channel's mission has been reflected in the massive dumbing-down of Maddow's now-ridiculous program.

That said, Maddow's a world-class hustler. She hustled the liberal world hard last June, back when Trump announced.

We discussed her bizarre coverage of Trump's announcement in real time, when it actually happened. Long story short:

On Day Two of the Week of Trump, she completely ignored the ugly speech with which Trump had launched his campaign. On Day One, she weirdly stressed the fact that she had nothing against Mr. Trump:

MADDOW (6/15/15): In 2014, he said he was going to run for governor of New York. At the last minute, he decided he wouldn't run for governor of New York after all.

Now, apparently, we are on the eve of him announcing whether or not he is going to run for president this time, in 2016, as a Republican.

And here we get to the limits of my abilities as a person who has a job like this. Because it is not at all that I dislike Mr. Trump and, therefore, don't see the appeal because I don't share the affection for him that his supporters have.

It's nothing like that. It's not qualitative at all.

I do not recognize—what's going on here is that I don't recognize, I cannot see that what he is doing is something that might conceivably, to anyone, have any political appeal.

[...]

Frankly, I think he is going to run. I think he is also very easily going to make the debate cut, when a lot of serving Republican governors of major states are not going to make that cut.

But at a very base and a very present level, I just don't understand this. I don't know how this works politically. I don't know how to analyze this phenomenon because part of me does not believe it is real. It is real. Republican voters believe it is real, but I do not get it. I do not understand it.

It wasn't that she disliked Mr. Trump! People, it was nothing like that. It wasn't qualitative at all!

Forget the fact that Maddow couldn't see the political appeal to a Candidate Trump. What amazed us was the way she stressed the fact that she didn't "dislike Mr. Trump."

It wasn't like that at all! It was nothing qualitative!

Three years before, Trump had gone through the endless birther disgrace. But there was Rachel, stressing the fact that she didn't see anything there to dislike.

The following day, on June 16, Trump made his ugly speech about all the Mexican rapists. But so what? Our Darling Rachel clowned her way through that evening's program.

Weeks went by before she saw that it was safe to criticize Trump for that speech. The liberal world was being played by its leading corporate hustler.

(To visit her award-winning TV room/bathhouse, go ahead—just click here. Be sure to view the slide show!)

Today, it took a village by the name of Romney to state the obvious about Trump. He decided to skip the birther lies, concerning which the national "press corps" has chosen to hide in the woods.

Rachel was hiding there right from the start. We can't explain her pathetic performance in that initial Week of Trump, but of one thing you can be fairly sure:

She was playing some sort of political game, a political game which involved her career. Maddow's our tribe's number-one con man. She's quite good at playing us marks.

A final question: Again and again in recent weeks, Trump has claimed that he constantly gets standing ovations when he says he won't let anyone die in the streets.

Our question:

Has he ever received any such ovation? Inquiring minds may want to know, but the national "press corps" does not.

GREETINGS FROM BABEL: Blow abandons traditional roles!

THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2016

Part 2—Instantly joined by Gramps: Did Hillary Clinton, a White House candidate, aim an ugly insult at Ashley Williams, a "young graduate student?"

(Despite being so young, Williams is 23 years old.)

More specifically, did Clinton call Williams a "super-predator?" Did she do so in an "infamous speech?" Why would a person like Hillary Clinton stoop to conduct like that? Is there any insult which won't be directed by people like Clinton at deserving young people who are both "proudly queer" and black?

By normal standards of construction, questions like these emerge from Charles Blow's most recent New York Times column, whose headline quoted a plaintive cry:

"I'm Not A Super Predator"

That's the headline the columnist Blow chose to put on his piece.

Midway through Blow's Babel-fueled piece, we learn who said that, and why. In this passage, Williams is interrupting Candidate Clinton at a campaign event:

BLOW (2/29/16): The night of the event, she nervously made her way through security with her secret banner hidden away, and took up position near where she assumed Clinton was to speak. As soon as Clinton descended the stairs of the mansion, took the microphone and began her remarks, Williams turned to the crowd and unfurled her banner. Then she turned to Clinton, who was confronted with her own worst words:

''We have to bring them to heel.''

On the video of the encounter, recorded by a friend of Williams who accompanied her to the event (After all, in this age, an action without a video is like a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear it), an exchange follows:

Williams: ''We want you to apologize for mass incarceration.''

Clinton: ''O.K., we'll talk about—

Williams: ''I'm not a super predator, Hillary Clinton.''

''I'm not a super predator, Hillary Clinton," Blow's young student said.

In the course of Blow's Babel-fueled babble, we learn that Williams is referring to a single comment Clinton made in a single "infamous speech."

The speech was delivered in 1996, some twenty years ago. Williams actually was quite young at that time. As Blow notes, she was three years old.

Did Clinton call Williams a super predator in 1996? By normal construction, that's what the young student seemed to imply when she interrupted that campaign event by whipping her banner out.

That's what William's statement implied; Blow took that somewhat puzzling statement and used it as his headline. Again, though, we ask our obvious questions:

Did Clinton actually call Williams that? What exactly did Williams mean by her dramatic assertion?

''I'm not a super predator!'' What the heck did Williams mean when she told Clinton that? By normal standards, you'd almost think a person like Blow would want to address that obvious question in the course of a column which used Williams' cry as its eye-catching headline.

What did William mean by her statement? By traditional standards, a journalist would want to address this blindingly obvious question.

Blow took a different approach. He interviewed the young graduate student in the course of composing his column. By the traditional norms of his profession, he would have asked the proud young student what she meant by her impassioned statement to Clinton. He would have asked her why she felt so strongly about the matter that she was willing to interrupt a presidential campaign event.

That's what a journalist would have done, in line with traditional rules of the game. We don't prejudge Williams' possible answers to these questions. We simply note that these obvious questions don't seem to have been asked.

In that sense, Blow has ceased to be much of a journalist, at least in columns like this. He operates more like a priest in the expanding caliphate in which we're all currently living.

The name of that caliphate is Babel. As we'll note in tomorrow's award-winning report, Josh Marshall seems to be a priest in that sprawling caliphate too.

Why did Williams interrupt Clinton, then offer that plaintive cry? In the course of his dramatic 900-word column, Blow never quite asked or explained.

He went on to criticize Bill Maher for his reaction to this incident, and he criticized Clinton herself. Late in his column, Blow struggled onto a platform in Babel and let us admire his greatness:

BLOW: Perhaps most stinging was Bill Maher, who used an expletive to call protesters like Williams ''idiots,'' and said: ''People need to learn the difference between an imperfect friend and a deadly enemy. You want to tear Hillary Clinton down? Great. Then enjoy President Trump.''

But this is a false choice, one too often posed to young activists who insist on holding power accountable. It's the same argument they hear from the police: Allow us to operate in your communities with impunity and abandon or the criminals will do so to even more devastating effect. Following this line of reasoning, silent absorption of pain and suffering is the only option. I wholly reject that.

After the encounter, Clinton said in a statement published by The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart: ''Looking back, I shouldn't have used those words, and I wouldn't use them today.''

The statement isn't really an apology for championing the bill itself, and as such, I find it wanting. But at least Williams's action provoked a response that many of us who came before her failed to demand.

For the record, we wouldn't call Williams an "idiot" either. Nor would we do so with respect to Blow, who 1) "wholly rejects" the "silent absorption of pain and suffering" he says is demanded of people like Williams and 2) heroically finds Candidate Clinton's recent statement to be "wanting."

Blow spent much of his time in this column apologizing to Williams. He's failed her in the past, he says, and blah blah blah blah blah.

Later that day, Marshall popped up, engaged in the same acts of silly self-flagellation. Here's what our high-ranking Babelonians didn't do:

They didn't perform normal acts of journalism. More specifically, Blow didn't do this:

He didn't ask Williams to explain her rather peculiar disavowal—"I'm not a super predator." He didn't ask why Williams seems to think that Clinton called her that.

He didn't ask Williams if she thinks it makes sense to build approaches to White House candidates around single remarks made in single speeches twenty years in the past. He didn't ask Williams to explain what is wrong with the term in question if it's used, let's just say, to refer to serial killers who have thoroughly lost their way in the world at the cost of great damage to others.

Perhaps most strikingly, he didn't ask Williams what she knows and believes about the bill at the heart of all this babble, the 1994 crime bill.

In the first passage we posted above, Williams is quoted saying this to Clinton: ''We want you to apologize for mass incarceration.''

Blow didn't ask Williams why she thinks Clinton is responsible for current rates of incarceration. He didn't ask Williams to explain the extent to which the 1994 crime bill created those rates of incarceration.

He didn't ask Williams what she thinks about Clinton's previous comments on this subject. Indeed, there's no sign that Blow even knows that such statements have occurred.

There are other obvious questions and facts which play no role in Blow's column. Blow never asks Williams to explain why so many members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the bill in question.

He doesn't ask Williams to evaluate the conditions which helped create that bill and that congressional vote. He doesn't ask the young graduate student if she even has any freaking idea what was in the bill in question, a bill which moved through the House and the Senate when she was one year old.

Does Ashley Williams, a young graduate student, have any idea what she's talking about? By tradition, a journalist, or even an elder, would want to examine that question.

By tradition, an obvious possibility would occur to the journalist. It would occur to a journalist that a young student, however sincere, might not know what she's talking about, might not understand her own brief.

By tradition, a journalist would examine these obvious questions. By global tradition, so would an elder.

But in our time, people like Marshall and Blow have abandoned those traditional roles. They no longer serve as journalists. They refuse to play the traditional role of the elder.

Imaginably for profit and glory, they're turning those traditional roles on their head. In the process, they're handing us the pitiful Babel in which we all currently live.

Tomorrow: In the absence of questions and information, apologies from "Gramps"

Still coming in auxiliary posts: Babel concerning the public schools; Babel concerning Hollywood.

Babel concerning the treatment of candidates; Babel in "cable news" guest selection. Babel concerning the "evil" behavior of corporate boss MSNBC.

Starting next week: Nova makes Einstein easy!

Campaign watch: Donald Trump couldn't get no respect!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016

Making Mika visibly angry: In one way, we sympathize with Candidate Trump.

We don't like it when people are forced into mandated speech, a practice described by experts and scholars as the "Cordelia effect." On Sunday, Candidate Trump was cast in that role when he was asked, again and again, to denounce the KKK.

For whatever reason, he just wouldn't do it. Later, he improbably blamed his refusal to speak on the effects of a very bad hairpiece!

(Or perhaps on a bad ear piece. Due to bad staff work on this end, we couldn't exactly hear.)

At any rate, Candidate Trump kept refusing to renounce the Klan. This is such a stupid offense that even our seven-figure cable "journalists" are even able to spot it.

As a result, Joe and Mika were soon attempting to deny their past eight months of bizarre Trump Love. They even directed their staff to create a deceptive videotape.

The tape was designed to make you think that they only predicted Trump's success—that they haven't spent the past eight months cheering their best friend on.

They played the deceptive videotape this morning. To watch the tape, click here.

The collection of clips from Morning Joe programs runs just over three minutes. We were struck by this fact:

Good grief! Morning Joe staffers couldn't even assemble a tape of that length without including a clip in which Mika and Joe are praising Trump for his "searing" honesty—for having the guts to say the "truthful" things no one else will utter.

Go ahead—watch that tape! Just after the one-minute mark, you'll see Mika and Joe raining praise on Candidate Trump. This apparently happened last June 18, two days after The Last Great Man entered the race.

This is what the Peculiar Pair said on that occasion. The horrible Mika is visibly angry about the lack of respect being aimed at the man she has spent the past eight months seeming to love:

SCARBOROUGH (6/18/15): When he's on a debate stage, and he turns to Scott Walker or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush and hits them, not with something mean-spirited—

BRZEZINSKI: Searing!

SCARBOROUGH: But searing and truthful, that nobody else in polite political society would say, it can shape a race.

BRZEZINSKI (with visible disgust): Nobody has the guts to say.

SCARBOROUGH: And so all these people saying that he's going to have no impact, they don't get it!

BRZEZINSKI: Sam Stein, what's so funny?

STEIN: I mean, listen. No one's doubting his entertainment value—

BRZEZINSKI: No, no, no, no, no.

Careful, Stein! Players like Mika will routinely deploy their 18-inch rulers!

Mika's sullen contempt for the critics of Trump is visible in that clip. Two days into Trump's campaign, she and Joe were praising Trump for his "searing" honesty—for the way he'll say the truthful things no one else has the guts to say.

Good God! This program's staffers couldn't assemble three minutes of clips without including this type of resentful affirmation of Trump! Especially coming from Mika, who's supposed to be Morning Joe's resident liberal, it's the sort of thing which has made this program completely bizarre over the past eight months.

Go ahead—watch that tape! Two days into the Trump campaign, Mika was already visibly angry about the lack of respect for the man who had the guts to discuss all those Mexican rapists.

Joe and Mika weren't predicting—they were affirming Trump that day! But wouldn't you know it?

After Trump hugged the KKK, the seemingly store-bought cable pair turned tail and ran for the woods. According to various experts and scholars, it's increasingly hard to get good help, no matter how much you're willing to pay!

GREETINGS FROM BABEL: Babel and Blow!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 2016

Part 1—Babel all the way down: The sages have a famous old saying. Their saying goes something like this:

You can't spell "liberal" without four-fifths of "Babel."

The sages have mouthed this for decades. We thought of this saying when we read Charles Blow's most recent New York Times column.

Blow's column appeared in Monday morning's Times. Its headline contained the quotation marks we include below:

"I'm Not A Super Predator"

In his headline, Blow seemed to be quoting someone. As the pundit began his labors, we learned who that person is:

BLOW (2/29/16): Days before Hillary Clinton thundered to an overwhelming victory over rival Bernie Sanders in South Carolina—largely on the strength of black voters who supported her by an even higher percentage than they supported Barack Obama with in 2008—a young, proudly queer, black activist, Ashley Williams, was in Charlotte, N.C., plotting an action that would make a statement of its own.

Is Ashley Williams proudly queer? We have no idea. Nor did Blow ever attempt to explain what that description had to do with the "statement" he would discuss in the rest of his column.

It was Williams who was quoted in the headline to Blow's piece. As he continued, Blow began to paint a picture of a type of Babel, a type of Babel from which that quoted statement emerged:

BLOW (continuing directly): She was planning to attend a private Clinton fund-raiser in Charleston, S.C., and confront the candidate about her support of policies—specifically the 1994 crime bill—that contributed to the explosion of racially tilted mass incarceration in this country.

Williams and her friends decided to make a sign—but what to put on it? They toyed with phrases from a now infamous speech Clinton gave in 1996—when the 23-year-old Williams was a toddler—in which Clinton said:

“We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels. They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called super predators: no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.”

They settled on a phrase and over a couple of hours they blocked out the letters on a pillowcase. Williams practiced in a bathroom mirror folding the banner into her bra and whipping it out. (She figured that she’d have to hide it on her body so that it wouldn’t be confiscated before she revealed it at the fund-raiser.) But it was too thick. So she cut away the back half that had no writing. Perfect.

Several claims are packed into that passage. Ever so quickly, let's list them:

According to Blow, the 1994 crime bill "contributed to the explosion of racially tilted mass incarceration in this country."

That is almost certainly true, though it all depends on what the meaning of "contributed to" is. And on what the meaning of "racially tilted" is. And on what the meaning of "explosion of" is.

Whatever! Also according to Blow, Hillary Clinton gave a speech in 1996 about that 1994 bill. According to Blow, that speech is "now infamous."

It sounds like Clinton gave a horrible speech! By traditional standards, we'd expect a journalist to justify such a claim in a reasonably careful way.

Blow proceeded to quote an excerpt from the now-infamous speech. As the excerpt starts, Clinton refers to "these people."

Blow never sketches the antecedent although, based on what follows in the excerpt, Clinton said the people in question were "often connected to big drug cartels" and had "no conscience, no empathy."

This seemed to be the key part of Clinton's now-infamous speech. This seemed to be the part of the speech which spurred Williams to take action.

At any rate, Williams practiced whipping her banner out. It was "perfect," Blow judged.

As Blow continued his story-telling, we finally encountered the statement which formed his headline. This is what the activist said to the candidate who had delivered an infamous speech when the activist was three years old:

BLOW (continuing directly): The night of the event, she nervously made her way through security with her secret banner hidden away, and took up position near where she assumed Clinton was to speak. As soon as Clinton descended the stairs of the mansion, took the microphone and began her remarks, Williams turned to the crowd and unfurled her banner. Then she turned to Clinton, who was confronted with her own worst words:

“We have to bring them to heel.”

On the video of the encounter, recorded by a friend of Williams who accompanied her to the event (After all, in this age, an action without a video is like a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear it), an exchange follows:

Williams: “We want you to apologize for mass incarceration.”

Clinton: “O.K., we’ll talk about...

Williams: “I’m not a super predator, Hillary Clinton.”

When Williams whipped it out, her banner contained what Blow described as Clinton's "worst words." Those worst words (from 1996) were revealed to be these:

“We have to bring them to heel.”

More significantly, we finally learned the meaning of Blow's headline:

“I’m not a super predator, Hillary Clinton,” Williams had said.

By standard construction, Williams apparently thought Clinton called her a super-predator back in 1996, when she apparently said the worst thing she has said in the past twenty years. Adding to the ugliness, Williams had only been three when Hillary Clinton did that! It's no wonder she wanted to protest!

American citizens, welcome to Babel! Truth to tell, that's the journalistic world in which we all currently live.

People like Blow seem determined to prove that a person can have a top-shelf journalistic career without ever making clear sense. One day later, along came Josh, adding his own brand of super-confusion to the Babel in which we all live.

The journalists fawned to the graduate student, who had been one when the bill in question was passed. Neither one of these high-ranking journalists offered even the most basic contextual facts as they discussed the protest by the graduate student. By normal standards, they should have shared those facts with their readers, perhaps even with Williams herself.

Did Hillary Clinton say that Williams is a super-predator? Somehow or other, that's the claim Williams denied that night, after she whipped it out in a perfect gesture.

Or something like that.

Presumably, we the people have never had a perfect public discourse. Depending on how tough a grader you are, we'll assume that this nation's public discourse has never even risen to the level of "good."

Today, though, just take a look around. As we'll note in the course of the next few days, it's Babel all the way down!

Tomorrow: "Gramps" rushes past the mere facts

BREAKING: American people now living in Babel!

TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 2016

Full services to resume: We're hurrying back to our sprawling campus on this less-than-super Tuesday.

Full services will resume tomorrow. For today, we only have questions, most of which revolve around Charles Blow's recent New York Times column and Josh Marshall's reaction to same.

Some questions:

Does Marshall really think Blow's column was "a very good piece?" Does he really feel he has to apologize for "sounding like a middle-aged man lecturing the younger generation about not knowing how it was?"

Here's another question:

Does anyone think it really makes sense to do politics the way we seem to do now—by grabbing single comments from 1996 and using them as the basis for our evaluations of candidates?

Our political discourse has completely collapsed; we're living in a Babel. As Blow says, a generation of "leaders" has badly failed us. It just hasn't happened in the way Blow describes.

We'll return to full services tomorrow; we'll probably start with Marshall's response to Blow's column. But on this less-than-super Tuesday, we're living in a full-blown Babel, where very few statements make sense.