Silence of the journalists watch: We finally watched Gone Girl!

TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2016

The deference of the lambs: Over the weekend, we noticed that the 2014 film, Gone Girl, was available as part of On Demand's ballyhooed annual Watchathon.

We decided to watch it. We were surprised by what we saw.

First, we were surprised by the way the film derived its juice from the Insanely Jealous Crazy Woman stereotype—the same portrait exploited by Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle before it.

Did insanely jealous, crazy Glenn Close boil a bunny to help sell a film? In Gone Girl, insanely jealous, crazy Rosamund Pike goes her several times better.

We were surprised by the extent to which this absurdly improbable film works from that ugly old libel. We were even more surprised when we went back and reread the reviews.

We seemed to recall a somewhat puzzling real-time discussion about the gender politics of Gone Girl. When we started rereading the reviews after watching the film this weekend, we were surprised to see that the reviewers hadn't seemed to notice the fact that the Pike character was built on that ugly old, bunny-boiling portrait.

Eventually, we turned to David Edelstein, writing for Vulture. We've loved Edelstein ever since his review of In America back in 2003. That said, even Edelstein started off suggesting that the characters played by Ben Affleck and Pike in Gone Girl are pretty much two of a kind:

"Fincher and his cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, shoot their characters from just below eye level. The angles [are] just slanted enough to catch the ceilings, to suggest how hemmed in these people are by circumstance and stupid choices and a house...that’s like purgatory in beige."

Here's the problem with that formulation. While one of these characters may perhaps be "hemmed in by circumstance and stupid choices and a house that’s like purgatory in beige," the other character is a crazy psychopath who 1) successfully frames her husband for murder, actually getting him arrested; 2) plans to kill herself after her husband is executed, just to drive home her point about the way he has misused her; and 3) viciously murders a former boyfriend to create a cover story after her initial scheme starts breaking down.

The husband in Gone Girl is unattractive. The wife is completely insane, in the familiar old way. We were amazed by the way the reviewers kept erasing the latter fact. Eventually, the highlighted statement by Edelstein seemed to confirm a suspicion:

EDELSTEIN (10/1/14): I never thought I’d write these words, but [Affleck] carries the movie. He’s terrific. Fincher exploits—and helps him ­transcend—his most common failing, a certain handsome-lug lack of commitment... Affleck’s Nick doesn’t mourn convincingly or look remotely ­honest—even when he tells the truth. In one scene, his hotshot lawyer (a genial Tyler Perry) rehearses him for a TV appearance and pelts Nick with candy when he sounds like he’s lying. He gets pelted a lot. It’s an almost impossible task to get Affleck’s Nick to sound like he’s speaking from the heart, and you can see the frustration in Affleck’s eyes at his own inability to get fully into the role. He’s trying to connect his face with his head and falling short.

About Pike I must—at the behest of the movie’s publicists—say less, although her acting is also a study in acting. In those few moments when the mask slips, she’s tight, frightened, childishly vulnerable, desperately grasping for a sense of control that the universe has denied her. I loved looking at her.

Edelstein tells us quite a bit about "Affleck's Nick." About Pike and her character, he says he "must say less." He says he must say less "at the behest of the movie's publicists!"

What an astounding admission! This journalist said less than he was inclined to say "at the behest of the publicists" from the industry he covers!

Did everyone else downplay the crazy bunny-boiling portrait at the heart of Gone Girl "at the behest of the publicists?" Over the years, we've noted that reviewers often seem to defer to major directors in various standardized ways. Was this an especially egregious example?

We call it egregious because this film's reworking of the Insanely Jealous Crazy Woman stereotype was ugly, and cried out for comment. As Edelstein ended his review, it almost seemed that he wanted to complain but couldn't quite make himself do it. This was his closing paragraph:

EDELSTEIN: I can’t leave Gone Girl without going back to its depiction of women, though here I risk the dreaded “spoiler.” (Stop reading if you wish.) The timing for a film that ­features instances of trumped-up sexual assaults could hardly be worse, and while it’s nowhere near as extreme as Fatal Attraction—which discredited feminist shibboleths by putting them in the mouth of a psychopath—the movie, like the novel, plays to the stereotype of weak men entrapped by pretend-­helpless women. The Spider Woman is, of course, a noir archetype, and I’m not prepared to renounce my affection for ­Double Indemnity and its ilk. But I can’t say those movies don’t have real-world ­consequences, and coming in the middle of mounting outrage over the pervasiveness of sexual abuse, I’d hate to see the likes of Rush Limbaugh buoyed by the film’s bloodcurdling specimen of a predatory slut. For the rest of us, it’s preferable to view Gone Girl as a profoundly cynical portrait of all sides of all relationships: First you’re blind to the truth of other people, then you see and wish you could go back to being blind. See it with your sweetie!

We're finally told, though only in passing, that the film in question offers a "bloodcurdling specimen of a predatory sl*t." (We don't recommend the term.)

Meanwhile, are you shitting us? Edelstein thought the movie he was reviewing didn't put "feminist shibboleths in the mouth of a psychopath?" The Glenn Close character was a psychopath, but this character wasn't?

Gone Girl is a ludicrous film. It ends with the Insanely Jealous Crazy Woman making a falsifiable claim; she claims that the ex-boyfriend she viciously killed abducted her from her home. As viewers, we know this claim is false; we also know that half of American law enforcement is present as she makes this claim, and some of them already know or suspect that she's totally crazy.

But so what? No one tries to confirm or falsify this claim. The police simply give up and go home, and her husband meekly resumes living with someone he knows to be a killer. This is the kind of stupid shit we're asked to swallow all through this ridiculous movie.

That said, the recurrent stupidity of this film isn't its defining characteristic. That would be its use of an ugly old libel straight outta Fatal Attraction. Meek reviewers across the board agreed not to notice that problem. Edelstein seems to have told us why—the publicists told them to chill.

(He then blames his silence on Rush Limbaugh, who he wouldn't want to enable. "It’s preferable to view Gone Girl as a profoundly cynical portrait of all sides of all relationships," he says, describing the very approach that makes the reviews seem so strange.)

The publicists told Edelstein to hush his mouth! Increasingly, this is the way our discourse works in a wide array of areas. Increasingly, it's corporate scripting all the way down, corporate scripting helped along by the deference of the lambs.

EINSTEIN'S OWN WORDS: Fortune-tellers arrested in Gotham!

TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2016

Part 1—We think of that Nova broadcast: In this morning's New York Times, Michael Wilson pens an intriguing report about the arrest of two "self-proclaimed fortunetellers."

On Sunday, the second self-proclaimed fortuneteller was led away from a Times Square shop in handcuffs. Apparently, it's now against the law in New York to engage in conduct like this:

WILSON (4/26/16): Ms. Delmaro, 27, was arrested in May and charged with taking money, sometimes in increments as high as $100,000, from a marketing executive from England temporarily working in New York. The man, Niall Rice, 33, had met a woman in a drug rehabilitation facility in Arizona months earlier and had fallen in love, but she broke it off. Distraught, he first visited a different psychic in Manhattan, then Ms. Delmaro.

When Mr. Rice came to learn that the object of his affections had died of an overdose, Ms. Delmaro continued to promise a reunion with the woman, who she said had been reincarnated into a new body—with the help of special crystals, a time machine and an 80-mile bridge made of gold.

Mr. Rice eventually went to the police and pressed charges. He told detectives he paid $713,975 to the two psychics. He said in an interview in November that he was depressed and desperate at the time, and that he thought he would get his money back in the end.

Apparently, New York City police have come to believe that Delmaro and her mother-in-law were deliberately scamming their clients—that they can't deliver the types of results they have repeatedly promised.

Wilson's report is intriguing. At this point, though, we'll make an admission:

When we read Wilson's report this morning, we thought of the many people, down through the year, who have claimed to make Einstein easy.

We thought of Nova's hour-long broadcast, Inside Einstein's Mind, in which the PBS program seemed to offer an explanation of special relativity.

(The program aired last November. To watch the whole program, click here.)

We even thought of Walter Isaacson's 2007 best-seller, Einstein: His Life and Universe, in which the former Rhodes scholar seemed to explain the same part of Einstein's work, with the ballyhooed assistance of eighteen physics professors.

Let's offer a quick review:

Albert Einstein propounded the special theory of relativity in the year 1905, when he was just 26. In 1916, he published a book intended for general readers, in which he attempted to explain the special and general theories.

To peruse that book, click here.

Over the course of the past hundred years, professors, journalists and publishers have offered Einstein-made-easy work. In these presentations, they've attempted to explain, or they have pretended to attempt to explain, Einstein's revolutionary work.

We'll admit it! When we read today about those fortunetellers in chains, our thoughts drifted off, if only briefly, to this century of high-minded work.

Did these people really believe that they could make Einstein easy? Let's review what Nova said in its broadcast last fall.

The broadcast was written and directed by Jamie Lochhead. The program seems to constitute his first writer credit for Nova.

His previous effort as a director was for the three-part BBC series, The Wonder of Dogs, which appeared in 2013. Another director credit that year: Easter Eggs Live, a British series in which "Mark Evans explores the weird, wonderful world of eggs."

Did Lochhead believe that he'd made Einstein easy? To be honest, we don't really doubt that he did. At any rate, here's what his Nova program said about special relativity:

About ten minutes into that program, Nova's narrator pictured a man standing on a railroad platform and a woman moving past on an extremely fast train.

(For the relevant transcript, click here.)

As the woman's train is passing the man, lightning strikes occur on either side of the man, up and down the line. We're told that the man is standing exactly halfway between the two strikes. When the lightning strikes occur, the woman on the fast-moving train is directly adjacent to him.

Because he's halfway between the two strikes, the light from the two lightning strikes reach the man simultaneously—at the exact same time. But because the woman has sped ahead, toward one strike and away from the other, the light from one strike will reach her sooner than the light from the other strike.

"For the woman on the train, time elapses between the two strikes," the Nova narrator says. (He's already deep in an array of conceptual weeds.) "For the man on the platform, there is no time between the strikes."

"The simple thought has mind-blowing significance," the Nova narrator says as he continues. He draws these mind-blowing conclusions from that simple example:

"There's no such thing as simultaneity."

"Simultaneity, and the flow of time itself, depends on how you're moving."

"The flow of time is different for an observer that is moving versus one that is standing still."

Let's make another confession. When we read about those fortunetellers, we briefly recalled those statements. That said, similar statements have been sold to us rubes over the past hundred years!

In recent weeks, we've explored the way the logic of this presentation breaks down. We imagined a second man, Man B, standing way down at the end of the railway platform, in the direction the train was going.

Man B is standing stock still, like the first man on the platform. But for him, "time elapses between the two strikes," as it does for the woman on the fast-moving train.

We also imagined a Woman B, riding in the caboose of the train. She is moving at very high speed, just like the original woman who is riding in a middle car on the train.

Woman B is moving at very high speed. But she draws adjacent to the original man on the platform just as the light from the two strikes arrives. For her, as for the original man, "there is no time between the strikes." (To simplify our presentation, we're agreeing to use Nova's shaky formulations.)

As we've noted in previous weeks, we don't understand the point Nova was trying to make in that part of its broadcast. Do you know who else didn't understand?

Everyone else who watched the program! Everyone else—and you!

When we watched that Nova program, it struck us as one of the most obvious non-explanation explanations we had ever seen. Sadly though, this sort of thing has been quite routine in the past hundred years as professors and journalists have pretended to make Einstein easy.

We can't explain that presentation by Nova—and dear reader, neither can you! In fairness, though, we note a key point:

In that part of its broadcast, Nova was working directly from Chapters 8 and 9 of Einstein's 1916 book!

That book was written for general readers. Its chapters were very brief.

Early on, in Chapters 8 and 9, Einstein presented the famous scenario with the railway platform, the fast-moving train and the lightning strikes. For the past hundred years, programs like Nova have rushed along like that fast-moving train, pretending they knew how to make sense of the words Einstein wrote.

Was Einstein able to make Einstein easy? In the next two days, we'll look at Chapters 8 and 9 of that historic book, his book for general readers.

The chapters in question are very brief. One hundred years later, we don't understand what those chapters say, and neither, dear reader, do you!

Tomorrow: Chapter 8, "On the Idea of Time in Physics"

Flint watch: A basic question concerning Flint!

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 2016

Such questions rarely get clarified: In this morning's New York Times, Monica Davey discusses last week's criminal charges concerning events in Flint. To read her report, click here.

Charges were filed against three public workers. In this passage, she describes the charges which have been lodged against two "state water regulators:"

DAVEY (4/25/16): Charges against Mr. Prysby, 53, and Mr. Busch, 40, include misconduct in office, accusing them of knowingly misleading federal and county officials about whether the water was safe, as well as conspiring to tamper with evidence and tampering with reports on lead.

The pair also are charged with failing to require the city of Flint to add chemicals to its new water supply to prevent lead from leaching from service lines, which is standard protocol for dealing with aged water systems; with improperly manipulating water-testing samples by directing residents to “pre-flush” their taps, which would decrease lead levels; and with failing to collect enough samples from homes that were known to have lead service lines.

[...]

In February 2015, Mr. Busch told a concerned Environmental Protection Agency official, who was asking about some high lead findings, that Flint was indeed using chemicals to prevent leaching from the pipes, a process known as corrosion control, though the state now acknowledges that no such controls were in place at the time.

The highlighted passages describe a key failing here. When the city of Flint switched to the Flint River as its (temporary) water supply, it failed to "us[e] chemicals to prevent leaching from the pipes, a process known as corrosion control."

According to the basic theory of the case, this failure to use standard "corrosion control" explains the subsequent high levels of lead in the city's water.

According to these criminal charges, Prysby and Busch failed to require the city to employ standard corrosion control when the city's water supply was switched. Later, according to these charges, Busch falsely told the EPA that corrosion control was being used.

By now, everyone seems to agree that this basic breakdown occurred. The failure to employ standard corrosion control led to high levels of lead in the city's water.

This leaves a basic question unanswered. Was anything essentially wrong with the decision to use the Flint River as a temporary water source? If standard corrosion control had been employed, would a problem have arisen?

This is a very basic question about what happened in Flint. As usual, this basic question has typically gone unaddressed in reporting about this matter.

Was anything essentially wrong with the decision to use the Flint River? On the Maddow Show last week, Rachel Maddow and Curt Guyette were trying to determine responsibility for the decision to use the river as Flint's water supply. Parts of Davey's report today turn on the same question.

Who made the decision to use the Flint River? The answer remains unclear. That said, we've never seen anyone ask the more fundamental question:

If corrosion control had been used, would a problem have arisen? Was anything fundamentally wrong with the decision to use the Flint River?

This is a very basic question—but so what? The way our broken discourse works, even the most fundamental questions rarely get identified, let alone answered.

That said, here's our question for Professor Marc Edwards, who actually knows what he's talking about concerning such basic matters:

If standard corrosion control had been used, would a problem have arisen? Was anything essentially wrong with the decision to use the Flint River?

Maddow seems immune to the logic of this question, but that should come as no surprise. Basically, she's been sketching a cartoon about Flint from the day this story started.

Davey also seemed a bit muddled concerning this point in this morning's Times. That said, this is the way our discourse typically works as our journalistic culture keeps sliding into the sea.

Increasingly, this is the way our discourse works: If it weren't for the lack of clarity, we'd have no clarity at all!

Kasich watch: Five years ago, Kasich made a mistake!

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 2016

Maddow wants you to hate him for it: Five years ago, in May 2011, John Kasich, governor of Ohio, made an embarrassing mistake.

Kasich's mistake was so utterly trivial that virtually no one discussed it at the time. Two Fridays ago, Rachel Maddow used the trivial, five-year-old event as her first example in a poisonous display which she described as "our child's treasury of John Kasich engaging with women voters."

Five years later, Kasich's embarrassing, trivial error was dealt to us the rubes as part of a poisonous portrait of Kasich. We were being taught how to loathe The Other.

Warning! Because Kasich's mistake was so utterly pointless, it seems that no one ever developed any background material about it. The videotape of the incident seems to be rather truncated. At any rate, this is the way the whole thing went down, as shown by the poisonous Maddow:

MADDOW (4/15/16): John Kasich ran for state legislature in Ohio starting in the '70s. He won nine straight congressional races in Ohio. He won two governor races in Ohio. This is the second time he's running for president. And that is an impressive amount of experience.

It's marked him out as someone who has gone far in politics, given what tends to happen when he talks to people, or about them, particularly when those people are women. It doesn't have to be women but it's usually women.

Behold, happy Friday night! This is our child's treasury of John Kasich engaging with women voters.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KASICH: Is this your mom?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you serious?

KASICH: I didn't know. Oh, girl friend!

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Definitely not kidding.

To watch Maddow's full segment, just click here. Warning! Probable brain cell loss!

Basically, this is what happened in this first incident from Rachel Maddow's aptly named "child's treasury of John Kasich." It happened five years ago:

A couple seems to have asked Governor Kasich if they could take a photograph with him. As they approached him for the photo, Kasich asked the rather young-looking man if the woman with him was his mom.

As it turned out, the woman in question was the young man's girl friend. The videotape is highly truncated, but it looks like folks were embarrassed.

You can watch the videotape here. It's part of a blog post which is five years old.

Five years later, Rachel Maddow thought you needed to see that videotape. She offered it as part of an opening segment in which she tried to help us rubes learn to hate Kasich more.

Make no mistake, and don't be a hack. Maddow's segment was designed to teach us to hate and loathe Kasich. Her basic theme in that opening segment was this:

Candidate Kasich says horrible things to and about women.

Does Kasich actually do that? We'll answer your question with a question. If Kasich behaves that way on a regular basis, why would Maddow have to go back five years to present an embarrassing but utterly pointless example like that? People, we're just asking!

Why did Kasich think the woman in question was the guy's mother? We'll take a guess. The guy in this incident looked very young. By conventional standards, the woman was substantially overweight. This may have made her look older.

At any rate, Kasich made the kind of mistake which counts as embarrassing in our culture. Five years later, Maddow used it as part of a poisonous segment designed to teach liberals to hate.

Consider a quick bit of background:

For the record, Candidate Kasich is a bit like Their Own Joe Biden. Each man comes from working-class roots. Each man's political persona is built around a type of non-stop "hail fellow well met" verbalizing which emphasizes his connection with regular people.

The word for these fellows is "garrulous." When you talk as much as these guys do, eventually things may come out wrong.

Biden has produced some awkward moments down through the years. Because Biden belongs to our tribe, propagandists like Maddow will treat such incidents as a sign of his good heart.

Kasich has produced some awkward moments too. On April 15, Maddow devoted the first segment of her show to an ugly goal—she tried to help us learn to hate Kasich for these scattered, largely trivial moments.

The incident we've discussed today happened five years back. Because it was so insignificant, virtually no one said anything about it at the time.

On April 15, it became the opening play in the recitation of horribles which Maddow described as "our child's treasury of John Kasich engaging with women voters." We think a person who plays it this way ought to be pulled off the air.

Maddow was working to make her liberal viewers stupid and ugly that night. Increasingly, this seems to be her program's principle play. Increasingly, her work is designed to take liberal viewers into the realm of prehistoric tribal sorting. In that realm, you can't simply oppose a public figure like Kasich. You have to see him as an evil example of Those People, the evil tribe found Over There.

Maddow's program has become a low-IQ rolling embarrassment. It's now a steady-stream purveyor of the hateful and dumb.

In the next few days, we'll show you more of what she did to help us learn to loathe Kasich that night. Maddow's work is now bad for the liberal soul. In a better, less corporate world, she'd no longer be on the air.

EINSTEIN'S OWN WORDS: About that fast train and those two lightning strikes!

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 2016

Prelude—A review of our story so far: You have to feel sorry for us the people, what with our inquiring minds and our endless desire to learn!

For exactly one hundred years, we've been told that a certain "thought experiment" helped Albert Einstein form his revolutionary special theory of relativity, which he presented to the world in 1905.

We've been reviewing the logic behind that famous thought experiment in our series of reports about "the culture of incoherence." Let's review the basic history, as we've pursued it so far:

In 1905, at age 26, Einstein experienced a "eureka moment," according to biographer Walter Isaacson. Within six weeks, he had sent off "his most famous [scientific] paper," a paper bearing this title:

"On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies."

In that paper, Einstein explained "the great conceptual step" which emerged from that "eureka moment." The paper laid out the revolutionary theory known as the special theory of relativity.

In 1915, Einstein was able to expand on that earlier work. Isaacson describes a complex rumination which resulted in "an exhausting, four-frenzy during which Einstein wrestled with a succession of tensors, equations, corrections and updates that he rushed to the Prussian Academy in a flurry of four Thursday lectures."

According to Isaacson, these efforts "climaxed, with the triumphant revision of Newton's universe, at the end of November 1915."

According to Isaacson, Einstein produced "a set of covariant equations that capped his general theory of relativity" in the last of those four Thursday lectures. As such, the general theory was the "triumphant revision of Newton's universe" to which Isaacson referred.

By now, Einstein was well-known. Beyond that, many people had heard of relativity, but virtually no one understood it.

This led to Einstein's attempt to explain his work in a short book aimed at general readers. This book was called Relativity: The Special Theory and the General Theory. To peruse that book, click here.

In 1916, Einstein's book was published. This is where our current problem starts.

For the past one hundred years, we the people have been told that relativity was made comprehensible in that brief, historic book. In our current series, we've been suggesting that this maybe just isn't exactly the case.

Consider:

Last November, the PBS series Nova produced an hour-long program, Inside Einstein's Mind. It was timed to mark the hundredth anniversary of general relativity. To watch that program click this.

Around the ten-minute mark in that program, Nova described the "brilliant thought experiment" which lay behind Einstein's production of special relativity in 1905.

The thought experiment which Nova described was taken straight from Chapters 8 and 9 of Einstein's brief book for general readers. It concerned a fast-moving train and a pair of lightning strikes.

Here's the problem: At least as Nova explained it, Einstein's famous thought experiment didn't seem to make sense.

Eight years earlier, Isaacson had explored the same material in his best-selling biography, Einstein: His Life and Universe. In a detailed set of acknowledgments, Isaacson named eighteen ranking physics professors who had reviewed the science in his book. In his chapter on special relativity, he too described the "thought experiment" found in Chapter 8 and 9 of Einstein's brief book.

Once again, we'd have to say that Isaacson's account of that famous thought experiment simply doesn't make sense. In Isaacson book, as on Nova's program, we the people were confronted with a logical fail.

Last November, as we watched in real time, we thought Nova's presentation of that "thought experiment" was one of the most obvious non-explanation explanations we had ever seen. This leaves us the people in the peculiar situation our series has been exploring.

One hundred years later, here we sit! Einstein is widely understood to be one of human history's greatest intellectual giants. In his special and general theory of relativity, he is understood to have transformed our understanding of the universe.

Having said that, how odd! One hundred years after Einstein produced his own book for general readers, academic and journalistic authorities don't seem to be able to explain the "great conceptual breakthrough" which led to special relativity all the way back in 1905.

In 1916, Einstein explained that breakthrough in his own book. But doggone it! One hundred years later, we the people are forced to pretend we understand that breakthrough as we read Isaacson's best-selling book, or as we watch Nova's high-profile PBS program.

In our view, Nova's explanation of Einstein's thought experiment made no apparent sense. Eight years earlier, Isaacson had failed to clarify the same material, despite the help he got from eighteen physics professors.

In their attempts to explain special relativity, Nova and Isaacson worked directly from Chapters 8 and 9 of Einstein's brief, historic book. One hundred years after the book's publication, we'd say they utterly failed in their attempt to explain this historic material.

Thanks to our culture of incoherence, we the people just can't seem to get a break around here! If you watched that Nova program, you saw an explanation of special relativity that basically didn't make sense. If you read Isaacson's best-selling book, you had the same the basic problem.

That said, Nova and Isaacson were working straight from Einstein's own book! For that reason, we'll now review the original material they were trying to explain. We'll look at Einstein's own words about that fast-moving train and those lightning strikes.

How did Einstein explain that material back in 1916? One hundred years later, we'll ask a very basic question:

Was Einstein able to make Einstein easy? When he tried to explain his work to us general readers, how well did Einstein fare?

This week: What Einstein said in his book

Coming next: The later Wittgenstein and the search for coherence

A WEEK IN THE LIFE: Rachel Maddow's Hannityism!

SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2016

Bad facts and "grown-ass white men:" It's very hard to describe the morass into which the Maddow Show has descended.

The intellectual illness which now lies at its core pervades every minute of every hour. It's hard to describe a moral illness which is so vast and pervasive. But these are a few basic markers:

The Maddow program avoids one important topic after another. This includes substantive and political topics.

Instead, the program teaches us to loathe The Others. In the process, we're treated to two type of facts:

We're treated to facts which are grossly selective. We're treated to facts which are false.

On Friday evening, April 15, the big cable star who fronts this program decided to cap an appalling week with an opening segment about the vile Candidate Kasich.

The segment was designed to teach us how to loathe this candidate. It's hard to describe this segment's illness, so many thumbs were on so many scales during its execution.

Today, we'll discuss one part of this segment. Next week, we'll be returning to the world of Einstein, but we'll return to other parts of this segment in supplementary posts.

First, a bit of background about the vile person in question:

Candidate Kasich is "pro-life." As a general matter, he is opposed to abortion rights except in cases involving rape, incest or a threat to the life of the mother.

Many people won't be surprised to learn that fact about this candidate. On the presidential level, abortion rights create a hard and fast dividing line between the two major parties.

It has been a long time since a major Republican candidate wasn't "pro-life." Candidate Trump flipped on this issue when he decided to be a Republican. All the way back in 1980, George Bush the elder had to flip on this issue to make himself a viable GOP candidate.

In 1987, Dick Gephardt flipped from pro-life to pro-choice in the course of becoming a Democratic candidate, and so on. In the world we inhabit, Republican candidates are "pro-life." Democrats are "pro-choice."

Pretty much everyone knows this.

Candidate Kasich is "pro-life!" For ourselves, that's one of the reasons—there are others—why we wouldn't vote for Kasich.

That said, a lot of people are "pro-life." There's a name for people like these. They're known as "fellow citizens."

Theoretically, we aren't allowed to invent fake facts about such people just because we disagree with their stance on this issue. Such theories no longer hold on the Maddow program, which has almost totally lost its bearings and should be removed from the air.

On Friday evening, April 15, the giant star who fronts that program decided to help us learn how to loathe Candidate Kasich more fully. She devoted her opening segment to that rather familiar task.

Her deepening craziness took many forms during this course of this segment. Today, we'll restrict ourselves to her first demonstration of Kasich's moral squalor.

Her demonstration was based on selective facts, and on one fact which was false. A lot more craziness would follow as this opening segment proceeded. For today, we'll restrict ourselves to Maddow's first attack on the vile Ohio governor.

Maddow opened with a kooky attempt to "decode" (her term) photographs of two bill-signing ceremonies from the great state of Mississippi. But that was just the warm-up act. Quickly, it led the cable star to this remarkable diatribe:

MADDOW (4/15/16): When Ohio Governor John Kasich, signed legislation in 2011 that ended up closing nearly half the clinics that provide abortions in the state of Ohio, notice something similar. This was his photo op that day.

That's the photo op that Governor John Kasich staged in Ohio for signing that anti-abortion legislation. It was just him and a bunch of grown-ass white men.

And for good measure, they included, in that bill signing ceremony, a very, very young man. They also brought in a little boy who the governor invited to sit on his lap and dot the "I" in the word "Kasich" as the menfolk of Ohio got together to show the boyfolk of Ohio how women's pregnancy can be controlled by the law.

Rather plainly, Kasich had engaged in a vile act back in 2011. As he staged his vile photo op, "it was just him and a bunch of grown-ass white men."

(To watch Maddow's whole segment, click here.)

Question: As liberals and progressives, are we comfortable when a multimillionaire corporate employee throws around language like that?

We think the use of language like that betrays extremely bad judgment. On the other hand, it's clear that this Ohio governor had engaged in a deeply vile act.

As he signed that anti-abortion bill, he even brought in a little boy, to help him learn how to rule over women. Kasich and the rest of that "bunch of grown-ass white men" were helping Ohio's boyfolk learn their role in the world.

Sadly, there's a minor problem with the story as Maddow told it. The bill-signing in question happened in 2013, not in 2011. And it wasn't exactly an anti-abortion bill.

With the help of his grown-ass friends, Governor Kasich was actually signing a giant Ohio budget bill into law that day. The bill contained 5,557 pages. You can see those pages stacked on Kasich's desk in the tape Maddow aired.

The little boy was the son of one of Kasich's grown-ass cabinet members, a few of whom stood in the background. The signing took place on June 30, 2013. To see the photo, click here.

Let's be fair! There were some abortion restrictions in the mammoth budget bill, which ran to 5,557 pages. But no, it wasn't mainly an anti-abortion bill.

It was the state of Ohio's mammoth budget bill. For Maddow's purpose—for the purpose of teaching us how to loathe Kasich—the story works a good deal better if you don't tell the rubes that.

Having said that, please make no mistake—Kasich is "pro-life." For a review of his work with respect to this topic, you can read this slightly confusing report by Michelle Ye Hee Lee in the Washington Post.

Candidate Kasich is "pro-life!" In that respect, he's like every Republican White House candidate since at least 1980. The question we would ask you is this:

By what process did we get from that fact to the story this cable star told? How did we get to a story built around a false fact, a story which featured some very odd language?

That 4-year-old boy was actually dotting the "i" on a giant budget bill on the day in question. There were some abortion restrictions in the bill; Maddow could have reported what they were. Instead, she hurried ahead to some crazier nonsense as she performed her full segment.

It's hard to capture how deceptive and how crazy Maddow's full segment was. The segment was crafted to help you to loathe. Let's mention some facts it left out, just from that opening salvo.

As we'll see next week, Maddow seemed eager to give us peons the impression that Kasich has a bad reputation in Ohio. That intended impression is false. Maddow forgot to mention the giant size of his 2014 re-election. She forgot to mention his sky-high approval ratings in the state of Ohio.

Because that segment was designed to teach us to loathe, Maddow ignored something else. She forgot to mention another provision of that 2013 budget bill, which she had misdescribed and placed in the wrong year.

There actually were some abortion restrictions in that giant bill. Like every Republican for the past forty years, Kasich is "pro-life."

That said, another key provision of that bill helps explain why Candidate Kasich is having trouble in the current White House campaign. Maddow didn't tell us about it, and she never will.

Uh-oh! As part of that bill signing, Kasich used his line item veto to remove a provision concerning Medicaid. Ohio's Republican legislature had included a provision blocking the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare.

Kasich vetoed that part of the bill before he and the little boy signed it. Later that year, he circumvented his legislature and expanded Medicaid to 330,000 Ohioans completely on his own.

This heresy is one of the reasons why Kasich has failed to gain favor at the pools with Republican regulars. Later, Kasich sounded off at a Koch-organized conference IN 2014, explaining why he committed that heresy.

Politico's Alex Isenstadt describes the stormy scene here:

ISENSTADT (6/9/15): Randy Kendrick, a major contributor and the wife of Ken Kendrick, the owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks, rose to say she disagreed with Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid coverage, and questioned why he’d expressed the view it was what God wanted.

The governor’s response was fiery. “I don’t know about you, lady,” he said as he pointed at Kendrick, his voice rising. “But when I get to the Pearly Gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.”

The exchange left many stunned. Around 20 audience members walked out of the room, and two governors also on the panel, Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, told Kasich they disagreed with him. The Ohio governor has not been invited back to a Koch seminar—opportunities for presidential aspirants to mingle with the party’s rich and powerful—in the months since.

Uh-oh! When that little boy dotted the "i" on that bill that day, he was indeed dotting the "I" on some abortion restrictions. That said, he was also dotting the "i" on health coverage for 330,000 low-income residents of his state.

Maddow will let you hear one of those facts; she will withhold the other. To make her demonization work better, she'll misstate the nature of the bill the little boy signed, and she'll singe your ears with language about grown-ass white men for which her own undergrown, struggling ass ought to be thrown off the air.

We wouldn't vote for Candidate Kasich. We also wouldn't go on TV and do the things Maddow did that night, the things she now does every night.

As her segment continued that night, her selective facts and her demonization continued to the point of near-lunacy. The cable star is working hard to make her viewers extremely dumb. Assuming she hasn't lost control of herself, she has long since stopped being even minimally honest.

Next week, we'll show you more of what happened as she taught us how to loathe Kasich. Journalistically, Maddow's childish, dishonest program has become a toxic waste site. There's a word for what the corporate star is now doing:

Maddow has bought into Hannityism. This familiar corporate cable approach is bad for grown-ups and four-year-old children and for all living things.

Flint watch: Maddow's cartoonized version of Flint!

FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2016

The things you were never told: On Wednesday, three individuals were charged with crimes stemming from their alleged conduct in the Flint water mess.

That evening, Rachel Maddow reported these charges. In the passage shown below, she continued to build her cartoonized version of what happened in Flint.

Can you spot a few thumbs on the scale?

MADDOW (4/20/16): Today, these first charges, it turned out they were brought by the state attorney general in a big, splashy press conference, with tons of media there, the state attorney general himself making the announcement, giving a big speech. He's widely known to have higher political aspirations in the state of Michigan.

If today's press conference about these criminal charges felt like kind of a well-staged political event, that probably was not by accident. The three people who were charged today, they were, as you probably expected, they were fairly low-level folks, one engineer and one supervisor from a state agency and one guy from Flint who worked at the water treatment plant.

But in addition to being low-level government officials, there's also a sense in which these guys were the low hanging fruit in terms of criminal culpability.

Attorney General Bill Schuette today went out of his way to praise and thank and talk up the skills ands credentials of his crack investigating team that he formed on this matter. And this is not to take anything away from them, but all three of these people who were charged today, the things they were charged for are all things that have been basically reported out in great detail in public by journalists in Michigan.

The allegations against these three low level public officials, they're now spelled out in a criminal indictment from the attorney general, but they were first spelled out in great detail in the public domain.

According to Maddow, the attorney general—he's a Republican— announced these charges "in a big, splashy press conference." But then, he's "widely known to have higher political aspirations in the state of Michigan."

If his press conference "felt like kind of a well-staged political event," that probably wasn't an accident! And not only that. "As you probably expected," the three people who were charged "were fairly low-level folks."

Maddow offered one more grumbling semi-complaint. The actions for which these people were charged "have been reported in great detail in public by journalists in Michigan," Maddow said. The allegations were being spelled out by the attorney general, "but they were first spelled out in great detail in the public domain."

Not that Maddow was trying to take anything away from the attorney general, or from his team!

Rachel Maddow has the soul of a propagandist. Since December, she has been treating Flint as one of her favorite cartoons. She seems annoyed by anything that doesn't fit the cartoon she's been drawing, in which a mustachio-twirling Governor Snyder engaged in cartoon-level criminal conduct from beginning to end.

Might we state the obvious? It's common in prosecutions of various types to charge the lower-level participants first. Beyond that, if the alleged misconduct by these three people has been widely described in the press, it isn't hard to see why they would have been charged.

In the course of his big, splashy, well-staged press conference, the attorney general said these charges were just the start. It remains to be seen if anyone else will be charged. It remains to be seen if Tuesday's charges will be upheld in court.

For today, we thought you ought to consider something else Maddow said Tuesday night. After her initial grumbling and spinning, she interviewed Curt Guyette, an investigative reporter for the Michigan ACLU who has been deeply involved in this matter.

Uh-oh! Guyette said he's been impressed by the work of Attorney General Schuette's team, by whom he has been interviewed.

("The people he brought in to really conduct the investigations independently have really, really good reputations," Guyette said. "I was one of the person they talked to because of the work that we had done. And they were very thorough. I really got a good opinion of what they were doing as far as the state attorney general's office." It sounds like Guyette has been turned!)

Guyette was interviewed by Schuette's team because of his investigative work concerning the water disaster. During her opening presentation, Maddow played videotape of an interview Guyette conducted with one of the people who have now been charged.

For ourselves, we're never happy when people get themselves into serious trouble. But in this videotaped interview with Guyette, Flint water supervisor Mike Glasgow seems to acknowledge substantial wrongdoing:

GUYETTE: How were you able to determine that every single house had a lead service line?

GLASGOW: We're not, really. We throw bottles out everywhere just to collect as many as we can to try to hit a number. And that's why, we just turn in every result that we get in.

GUYETTE: You indicated on those reports that all those lines were lead service lines—

GLASGOW: To the best of our knowledge.

GUYETTE: When you didn't have actual documentation for each house where you put that down.

GLASGOW: Yes, we're still looking for the records.

For the videotape of Maddow's first segment, just click here. The Guyette/Glasgow interview occurs at 7:30.

Regarding that interview, Oof. Once the problem began, Glasgow seems to have been involved in falsifying inspection records.

Guyette does not seem amused on that tape. That said, here's the problem:

According to Maddow, all the conduct for which Glasgow and the two others were charged has been "reported out in great detail in public by journalists in Michigan." Their conduct has been "spelled out in great detail in the public domain."

Here's the problem:

According to the Nexis archives, Glasgow's name has never been mentioned on the Maddow Show. A cynic would tell you why:

Glasgow was an employee of Flint. He didn't work for Governor Snyder, the cartoon villain Maddow has been cartoonishly trying to hang.

Can we mention two other names you've never heard on the Maddow Show? We refer to Michael Prysby and Stephen Busch, the two state workers who were criminally charged this week along with Glasgow.

How odd! According to Maddow, the alleged misconduct by these three people has been laboriously described in the Michigan press. (Presumably, the videotape of Glasgow speaking with Guyette may have been available.) But how strange! Maddow has never mentioned their names or told you what they apparently did.

A cynic could explain that omission. In reality, Maddow has been pretending to report what happened in Flint. In reality, she has been offering viewers a deeply selective cartoon, in which she has been carefully sifting the information we are allowed to hear.

She hasn't interviewed Professor Edwards, or even told you what he has said about what happened in Flint. (Edwards has said that state employees were systematically lying to others in the state government and to the EPA. That doesn't fit Maddow's cartoon.)

Maddow hasn't been willing to tell you what Edwards has said. Beyond that, she hasn't reported the apparent conduct of the three people who got charged, none of whom are Snyder hacks.

Can we talk? Ever since the start of Flint, Maddow has been crafting her latest cartoon, aiming her narrative at one of her long-time favorite villains. At this point, cartoonizing favorite demons is pretty much all Maddow does.

Maddow shouldn't be on the air. She's tremendously skilled at selling herself, much less than obsessively honest regarding everything else.

In our view, Maddow needs help. So do her misused viewers.

A WEEK IN THE LIFE: "Our child's treasury of John Kasich!"

FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2016

Part 5—Cable's dumbest week ever: Monday, April 11, 2016 dawned both clear and cold.

(Presumably, this was true somewhere. On occasion, we'll follow modern cable news practice, replacing balanced presentations of fact with familiar, novelized formats.)

As that Monday dawned clear and cold, liberals and progressives found themselves confronted by a wide range of issues, concerns, inventions and substantive topics.

Candidates Clinton and Sanders were locked in a war for the state of New York. Below, you see just a few of the questions which were involved in their glorious fight:

How should progressives view the provisions of the 1994 crime bill?

Was Candidate Clinton a snarling racist for having used the term "superpredator" on one occasion in 1996? What about the snarling racism of Candidate Sanders, who kept denigrating Democratic voters in the Deep South?

Which candidate had the better proposals concerning "big banks?" Which candidate had the better ideas about federal, state and local minimum wage proposals?

Which candidate had the better proposals concerning international trade? Which candidate had the better proposals concerning low-income schools?

(Tell the truth! Have you ever heard our corporate progressives so much as mention that last topic? On even one occasion? Why do you think that is?)

Should Candidate Clinton be raising money at exclusive $353,000-a-plate galas? Should she release the transcripts of her paid speeches to you know who?

Should Candidate Sanders have flown to the Vineyard to appear at those swish soirees? Should Candidate Sanders raise money for congressional candidates, as Candidate Clinton has done?

Which candidate is more upset about police misconduct and error? Has either candidate offered any actual proposals in this general field?

Has either candidate made any sense concerning recent events in Flint? If so, what has that candidate said? Why haven't we heard it discussed?

Many topics were being churned as the hopefuls fought for New York. In the course of all the hubbub, candidates were denigrated in various ways, sometimes in ways which may have been a tiny small bit less than obsessively honest.

That very same Monday night, Professor Dershowitz paraded his way onto CNN and offered a rather peculiar account of his real-time views concerning that ancient crime bill. In this and a million other ways, the nation's hustlers, pundits, grabbers and con men were distorting the nation's recent past in service to their own reputations and in search of advancement and profit.

A person with a cable news show could have performed a wide range of valuable services during the course of this week. A real news program could have performed a wide range of journalistic services.

Instead, the eponymous show of a big major star responded with one of the dumbest weeks ever performed in the already awful, thirty-plus years of so-called "cable news." We refer to The Rachel Maddow Show, the rapidly devolving "cable news" show whose multimillionaire TV star has been in a headlong state of decline for at least the past year.

The Maddow Show began the week with guest host Steve Kornacki forced to read a silly account of that 1994 crime bill. Later, he was forced to tease the declining program's latest explosive and highly exciting sexy-time big major sex scandal:

KORNACKI (4/11/16): What do the FBI, the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. and the embassy of Japan all have in common? It turns out they have a pretty interesting connection to the D.C. madam scandal. Some new reporting on that tonight.

Stay with us.

Alas, poor Kornacki, the analysts cried. Involuntarily, we averted our gaze during the subsequent segment, which dripped with the thrill of very raw sexy-time sex. That said, the monster dumbing didn't begin until the program's star returned to the air, dragging her endless array of performance tics behind her.

As we all know, ticks can spread all sorts of disease as the weather warms. In the realm of intellectual health, so can the mugging and routine dissembling of this borderline corporate star.

A year or so back, the cable star's corporate bosses decided to adopt their latest new corporate approach. The channel would become "the place for politics," or rather for an imitation of same.

In the course of that latest adjustment, Professor Harris-Perry ended up on the junk heap. The major star of whom we speak seems to have made an adjustment.

Rachel Maddow has dumbed her show down within an inch of its life. She gambles each night that we liberals won't notice.

So far, that gamble has worked.

That said, the monster dumbness of last week's programs calls out for description. Also, the ugliness of the lessons she taught—the ugliness of her endless, cartoonized lessons in cartoon tribal loathing.

Assuming basic emotional competence, it would be hard to get more cynical than this program's star has become. That said, the host has discussed her emotional problems at several points in the past.

For ourselves, we don't assume that the cable star is in full command at this point. All too often, she doesn't quite seem to be.

We say that because we watch the show, and marvel at what we see each night. That said, last week's programs set a new standard for insults to the viewer's intelligence and for the sheer joy of the cartoonized loathing which dominated the week.

How dumb were Maddow's performances last week? How many times can you say it? If you want to see what dumb looks like, we'd recommend the segments she did on Thursday night concerning a huge invented concern:

The cable star fears, or says she fears, that delegates to the Republican convention in Cleveland may be bribed by Candidate Trump this summer. Even worse, they may be bribed in a way which is perfectly legal, because the very large bribes will be paid outside the state of Ohio!

Maddow had already wandered into the woods when she asked a former U.S. attorney to help her evaluate this dystopian nonsense. Needless to say, she had burned away her initial segment on this imagined concern with a meandering, time-wasting review of an obscure Ohio state law, a law which emerged from the 1876 Republican convention, which was held in Cincinnati.

Repeatedly, Maddow killed time last week with pointless trips to the past. As she endlessly wasted time in this way, she failed to address the many real issues surrounding the current campaign.

In this instance, she devoted one segment to Rutherford B. Hayes, then rubbed her hands, as Hamlet once did, concerned about what might be coming this summer. Like Cassandra, she could see the disaster:

"Under federal law, arguably, a rich candidate like, say, Donald Trump, could spend a few tens of millions of dollars of his personal wealth buying a few hundred delegates new houses, or new cars, or just writing them checks in order to seal up the nomination for himself. Federal law apparently would not stop that," the cable star excitedly said.

It wasn't clear why this very strange person thought she knew such a thing about federal law. In her second segment concerning this nonsense, she brought on a former U.S. attorney to help her think the problem through.

Credit where due! The former U.S. attorney somehow managed to keep a straight face as he kept telling the cable star how thoroughly she misunderstood the way federal and state laws really work. That said, nothing could get the nagging fear of these crimes out of this strange person's head. After dismissing the U.S. attorney, she closed the second segment like this:

MADDOW (4/14/16): Steven Dettelbach, former U.S. attorney, thank you for helping us understand this. This is a strange aspect of this story, but it's good to be forewarned. Thank you, sir.

DETTELBACH: Thanks.

MADDOW: The prospect of Ohio prosecutors prowling the Cleveland convention site to try to suss out bribery when one of, when one of the contenders for the nomination is the Ohio governor because they're going to prosecute this under state law? God, let it not come to that!

All right. Much more ahead. Stay with us.

Say what? No one had raised "the prospect of Ohio prosecutors prowling the Cleveland convention site to try to suss out bribery"—in this case, bribery by Candidate Trump involving tens of millions of dollars!

Instead, Dettelbach had simply told Maddow that, despite her time-wasting trip to the past and despite her attempts to define federal law, any such bribes could be prosecuted under federal or state law. Along the way, he had batted away her silly idea that Ohio law wouldn't hold if Candidate Trump simply paid these bribes across the state line in Indiana.

Rachel Maddow didn't go down without a ridiculous fight. In this exchange, note the way she pushed back against the idea that Indiana was out as a locale for the safe legal paying of bribes:

DETTELBACH: So we talk about, in the criminal law, a thing called venue, jurisdiction. Where can something be done? And you know, just as if you committed fraud and part of the fraud occurred in Ohio and part of the fraud occurred in Indiana, or a crime of violence or rape or any horrible crime, you know, if part of this crime occurs in Ohio, you're going to have to face an investigation and prosecution in Ohio.

MADDOW: In terms of— I don't mean to get too technical, but in terms of what you mean by "taking place in Ohio," how would that apply to basically a bribe that was consummated in Cleveland, right? So let's say someone in the U.S. Virgin Islands makes a deal, is offered a bribe, accepts the bribe and then turns up in Cleveland and all they do in Cleveland is vote. Would that still be—

DETTELBACH: Well, "all they do." That's a pretty big thing to do! That's what you're being bribed for, is the vote.

She didn't mean to get too technical with the former U.S. attorney!

Dettelbach did a good job not laughing in the cable star's face. But even after he told the star that she'd pulled her concerns right out of her ascot, she closed the segment with a dystopian image of federal prosecutors prowling the waterfront, trying to run down these crimes.

God, she hoped it didn't happen, she said. To state the obvious, these two segments were her way of helping us think that it would.

Maddow burned two segments last Thursday night on this fanciful nonsense. As she repeatedly did last week, she began with a time-wasting trip to the past, then pretended to examine her fanciful concerns with a former U.S. attorney.

As she did this, serious topics went wholly unexplored. In the broader sweep of the week's programming, a cynic would say the purpose of this strange excursion was clear:

In the absence of any such occurrence, Maddow had associated Candidate Trump with the most cartoonish type of criminal conduct. He might bribe the delegates with new houses or, on the cheap, with new cars!

He might spend tens of millions of dollars on these bribes! Not to get too technical about it, but if he bribed them in Indiana (or in the Virgin Islands), his bribes might be A-OK!

No one has suggested that Candidate Trump has tried to do any such thing. But Maddow's program is now built around cartoonized portraits of the many Very Bad People whom she cartoonishly loathes.

She picks and chooses and dreams up facts to help you share her loathing. The most pitiful example of this cartoonized loathing was performed by the star Friday night.

"Behold, happy Friday night," the major star said at one point. "This is our child's treasury of John Kasich engaging with women voters."

In that moment, the cable star offered an apt review of her ongoing behavior. Her cartoonized portraits of those whom she loathes now operate on the level of an 8-year-old child.

Maddow repeatedly deceives her viewers to deliver these cartoonized portraits. In the process, liberal brain cells wither and die. This conduct may keep her ratings up. But this conduct is bad for the world.

Maddow opened last Friday's show with a long cartoon portrait of Kasich. We wouldn't vote for John Kasich ourselves. But if we ran a cable show the way this cable show is now run, we'd fall to our knees, debase ourselves, and apologize to the whole world, especially to the liberal viewers who Maddow keeps treating like dumbbells and dirt.

Did last week's programs constitute the dumbest week "cable news" ever aired? We don't know how to answer that, but those embarrassing cartoonized programs surely came fairly close.

Tomorrow: Cartoonizing Kasich—and us

Concerning that interview: To watch Maddow's interview with Dettelbach, you can just click here. Tape of the previous segment wasn't posted.

Don't waste your time with the program's transcript. Like many transcripts from this channel, it bears a shaky connection to the words the star and her guest really said.

Does this cable star possibly need some help? Sadly but inevitably, we don't think she's going to get it.

Slightly shaky narrator watch: Professor Dershowitz and the crime bill!

THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2016

What he said in real time: This Monday night, we happened to catch Professor Dershowitz chatting with Don Lemon.

Mainly, they were discussing free speech, on campus and elsewhere. At one point, though, the thoughtful professor said this:

DERSHOWITZ (4/18/16): As an liberal Democrat, I wrote against the crime bill in 1994 and 1995. It was a disaster and I was opposed to it then and I'm glad there's a debate about it. Just don't stop other people from expressing different views.

We're not saying that statement is wrong. We just thought you might like to see what we found when we fact-checked Professor Dershowitz's claim.

For the record, Dershowitz was involved in the O.J. trial during much of that period. No one can say that he was trying to get everyone locked up!

That said, we haven't found anything he wrote in opposition to the crime bill. We did find these remarks from Crossfire in February 1994, Chief Justice Sununu presiding:

SUNUNU (2/16/94): Alan Dershowitz, how come it's the rich limousine liberals that seem to have the toughest time understanding that if you get habitual crime committers off the street, then you keep them from committing crimes?

DERSHOWITZ: I want to get the habitual offenders off the streets. I'm very tough on crime. This is not a liberal-conservative issue.

SUNUNU: Sure, it is.

DERSHOWITZ: I'm very anxious to see the maximization of getting people off the street. Three strikes, you're out will increase crime. It is not tough, it is not smart. Let me tell you why it'll increase crime—

SUNUNU: How about four strikes, you're out?

DERSHOWITZ: Any number of those strikes, you're out, any kind of mandatory life imprisonment. Let me tell you why.

No matter what point you get them off, if the goal is to put them in jail between the ages of 50 and 80, and remember, life expectancy for prisoners exceeds that of life expectancy for the rest of us. So we're talking about supporting people in prison during their 50s, 60s, 70s, and even 80s.

The problem is, people don't commit crimes when they're 50, 60, 70, and 80, at least not violent crimes, and for every cell that's taken by an 80-year-old, that means there's a 20-year-old who can't be put in a cell. So I think "three strikes, you're out" is not smart. It's not tough, it's just kind of bumper sticker criminology and it won't work.

SUNUNU: You've gotten them off the streets at a time when they are most likely to commit crimes. You've put them away for a long time—

DERSHOWITZ: I want to do all that. I just don't want to put them away mandatorily for life. I don't want them in jail when they're 70 and 80 years old. I'm happy to have them in jail when they're 25 and when they're 30 and when they're 35 and 40, but I want to have some discretion to let them out so that the 20-year-olds, the guys who are out there robbing the convenience stores and killing the Ma and Pa owners, the really violent people, are the ones who are put in those jail cells, not the octogenarians who, 30 years ago, may have had three offenses separated out by 15 years. It just makes no sense.

SUNUNU: You've now got the geriatrics argument against bringing people who are habitual criminal offenders into prison permanently.

DERSHOWITZ: No, I want to put them— John, you're missing my point. I just don't want to leave them in there until they're 80 years old.

Professor Dershowitz wanted to spring the 80-year-olds so he could lock up the 20-year-olds! We're not sure Lemon got that sense from his thoughtful remarks Monday night.

Final thought: What absolute creeps those Clintons were to ignore this real-time advice!

Weirdness watch: How weird is the Rachel Maddow Show?

THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2016

Last night's first eight minutes: How weird is the Rachel Maddow Show? Consider the way the program's host burned away her first eight minutes last night.

Maddow started in a familiar way. "We've got a big show tonight," she said. "There's a lot going on today in the news. There's a lot going on in politics."

Maddow listed a few of the things which were going on in the news. She then burned the next eight minutes ignoring those newsworthy topics.

She started in one of her typical ways, discussing something she can't explain—and talking about someone's mustache. No, we actually didn't invent this typical, ill-advised bullshit:

MADDOW (4/20/16): I want to start tonight with something that I'll tell you, off the bat, I cannot explain it. It's legitimately weird. Maybe you can explain it, but I can't.

And it concerns this guy—concerns this handsome gentleman. His name is Eliot Engel.

He's one of the more recognizable members of Congress. In any setting, in any picture, if people are holding still or moving really fast, you can tell if he's somewhere in the frame because Eliot Engel, as you can see, he has a truly heroic, giant mustache.

It's a completely different size than the whole rest of him. Clown shoes are to clowns what Eliot Engel's mustache is to Eliot Engel.

I say that with total affection. My dad had a mustache for most of my life that looked exactly like Eliot Engel's mustache. He has since shaved it, but I still think of him as kind of looking like Eliot Engel, at least between the nose and top lip.

Anyway, because he reminds me of my dad before my dad shaved, because he has inarguably the best Democratic mustache in American politics, Congressman Eliot Engel of New York was easy to spot on stage last night as a whole giant crowd of New York state Democrats crowded on stage with Hillary Clinton, as she finished up her victory speech in Manhattan.

So amid former Mayor David Dinkins, and current mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the attorney general for New York, Eric Schneiderman, all these other New York officials, all these people up there, there unmistakably, right, is Eliot Engel, right behind Hillary Clinton there.

See, there's the mustache? Mr. Mustachio!

Eliot Engel and his mustache represent a district just north of New York in Westchester County. It's a very heavily Democratic district. It also turned out last night to be a very pro-Clinton district. Hillary Clinton won that congressional district last night by a 38-point margin.

To peruse the full transcript, click here.

At this point, Maddow is about to describe the news event she says she can't explain. Before we discuss that topic, consider what she had already done.

In that opening passage, you see several of Maddow's defining traits. For starters, you see her unfailing instinct to talk about herself in every conceivable circumstance.

Before her news show reported any news last night, she decided to talk about her father's mustache. This is fairly typical stuff from this weirdly self-referential person.

You see a second familiar instinct in that opening passage. In her string of comments about Engel's mustache, you see the instinct she announced long ago, when she said she doesn't want a more grown-up public discourse.

Maddow went on and on, for several minutes, about Rep. Engel's mustache. We said that conduct was ill-advised. Here's why:

Do you know how hard it is to convince our "journalists" that they shouldn't engage in such discussions? That they shouldn't engage in endless, trivial, irrelevant talk about public officials' appearances, including their clothing, their shoes and their hairstyles?

Given the nature of the baboons who constitute the American "press corps," it takes a lot of work by their trainers to convince them not to do this—to convince them that they shouldn't be talking about earth tones, three-button suits, polo shirts and cowboy boots. Or about the hairstyle and wardrobe of Howard Dean's wife, as Maureen Dowd did in two disgraceful columns about Dr. Judith Steinberg back in 2004.

Especially in the age of Dowd, the baboons who serve in our national press corps love discussing such matters. It's hard to get them not to do it. Along comes Maddow, with her vast sense of license, encouraging them to dispense with this wise sense of restraint.

Maddow is one of the least disciplined people we've ever seen in the press. Her sense of entitlement is overpowering, vast. For some reason, she thinks it makes sense to say that Rep. Engel's mustache represents a form of clown shoes, as long as she says that she offers that comment with total affection.

Maddow burned roughly three minutes discussing Engel's mustache. Her sense of entitlement is vast. It's a shame that she's still on the air, but the firm is making money from her incessant clowning.

That said, the larger weirdness to this opening effort came when Maddow began to discuss the topic she can't explain. This seems to involve a reporting error from Tuesday's election in New York, but there's no way to say, given Maddow's lack of effort and discipline.

Once Maddow finally stopped musing about Engel's mustache and the way it makes her think of dear old dad, she described some peculiar election results from Engel's congressional district. According to Maddow, an early return on Tuesday night showed Ben Carson getting a strangely large number of votes.

Also according to Maddow, when the final results were released, they showed Carson getting a substantially smaller number of votes.

Maddow said she can't explain it, but that maybe we can. This raises a fairly obvious question—why would she open her show with an apparently trivial matter which she can't explain? Maddow's weird instincts then came to the fore when she proceeded to express a view about this thing which she can't explain. Here you see some very bad judgment joined to some very dumb thinking:

MADDOW: Ben Carson went from 2,056 votes to 162 votes...That saved Ted Cruz from a fourth place finish [in that one congressional district] to a guy who is no longer running and hasn't been for weeks.

What happened there?

New York is a cosmopolitan, fairly well off state that just had presidential primaries in both parties that were unusually consequential and exciting. Millions of dollars were spent by the candidates to inspire voter turnout. Dozens if not hundreds of candidate events were held in New York City and in New York state. Palpable enthusiasm across New York for this presidential contest this year and still, New York is so screwed up.

New York makes it so difficult to vote in this state that New York's voter turnout was worse voter turnout than every other state that has held a primary so far this year other than Louisiana, which is also a disaster, but everybody expects that from Louisiana. New York has archaic, arcane, terribly run, non-transparent, super-sketchy elections and they have forever, thanks to the fact that the elections in this state are organized and administered by the state of government of New York, which proudly features what I think is inarguably the most inconsistently and flagrantly corrupt state legislature in the entire nation, at least as measured by indictments and convictions, right?

I mean, there's a lot of competition for most corrupt state legislature. But New York.

Even so, even with Ted Cruz appearing to benefit from a last minute surge of minus 1,800 votes for Ben Carson in one congressional district—Ben Carson, who was apparently beating him in that district! Huh? What?

Nevertheless, the results were stark enough in New York that even the disaster that is the election system in this state, it cannot disguise the overall story of what happened here.

That is a very strange rant. That said, it's par for the course for the very strange person who fronts the Maddow Show.

Maddow opened this rumination by saying she doesn't know why Carson's vote total changed in that congressional district.

One possibility? It could have been an initial reporting error, a type of event which seems to happen fairly often in American elections. But after wasting about three minutes discussing the local congressman's mustache, Maddow headed down a road which ended with her denouncing the whole state of New York for its allegedly "super-sketchy" elections.

Maddow marveled at the fact that New York had a lower turnout rate than other primary states this year. She failed to note one obvious factor—unlike other states, New York's primaries are restricted to registered Republicans and Democrats.

Other states let everyone vote. You can even jump into the other party's primary, trying to screw up their candidate selection process. Whatever one thinks of these different approaches, it isn't especially hard to see why New York's turnout would be lower than that in an "open voting" primary state.

Maddow took a different approach. She implied that scandal was involved, or something like that. It's impossible to say, from her long formless rant, what point she was trying to make.

She almost seemed to be suggesting that someone was trying to help Ted Cruz avoid the embarrassment of finishing fourth behind Carson in one congressional district. Strange as Maddow is becoming, this undisciplined semi-suggestion is basically par for the course.

(For what it's worth, New York's total Democratic vote this Tuesday was roughly equal to that from the primary in 2008.)

Let's review:

Maddow started last night's show with a long discussion of a congressman's mustache. She then embarked on a weird discussion of something she can't explain.

Almost twenty-four hours later, had she even tried to figure it out? Had she asked election officials about the changed total for Carson?

There was no indication that she had. Instead, she was off on a rant.

Here's the ultimate problem:

By now, the Maddow Show's peculiar host had burned eight minutes off the start of her alleged news program. She had started the program by listing the important events taking place in the world. She then proceeded to burn eight minutes talking about her father's mustache and ranting about a set of alleged problems she didn't bother defining.

Maddow wastes time the way other folk breathe. This practice is becoming one of the defining traits of her ridiculous "cable news" program.

One last point:

You can't see what we're about to mention. The Maddow Show had enough sense not to post the videotape from this latest ridiculous effort.

That said, Maddow didn't seem to have done a thorough review of the election data which had her so upset. In the preliminary results which she showed on the air, Carson was shown receiving 12% of the Republican vote in Engel's 16th congressional district.

That would seem like a strangely large number of votes. However, the same document which Maddow displayed on the air showed Carson getting 9% of the vote in the 17th district. Whatever was happening in the 16th district, it also seemed to be happening over there.

Normally, journalists try to learn what they're talking about before they go on the air and spout. Maddow, though, is profoundly undisciplined.

She's getting more so all the time. Inevitably, this is what happens when you pay people millions of dollars and shower them with sudden, massive fame.

Final plea: it's very hard to get these baboons to stop discussing public officials' boots, shoes, polo shirts, sweaters, pant suits, bald spots and hair.

That said, the peculiar host of the Maddow Show doesn't want a grown up discussion. We're all paying the price for this Peter Pan's very strange privileged conduct.

A WEEK IN THE LIFE: The Candide of major cable news stars!

THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2016

Part 4—It's the best of all worlds Over Here: Is a $15 minimum wage a good idea? A $15 federal minimum wage?

Like you, we don't have the slightest idea how to answer that question. In part, that's because we get our "news" from "The Carrot Top of Cable News Stars," as she's now often described.

Last week, this major star performed her show from Tuesday through Friday night. On Tuesday night, she opened her week by killing a whole lot of time, and a lot of brain cells, with a pair of numbing segments about Phyllis Schlafly, 91, who ceased to be a significant player many years ago.

Before she wasted our time on Schlafly, she wasted our time by letting us know what Prescott Bush thought about Nelson Rockefeller's divorce. What he thought about that divorce in 1964!

On Wednesday night, this same cable star opened her show with footage from the Tricia Nixon/Edward Cox wedding, a glorious event which took place in 1971. This particular killing of time had been preceded by footage of President Nixon's final address. We were told that he was weeping throughout, though it didn't quite look like that.

Question: Has anyone ever killed more time on "cable news" than this particular star? As it turned out, Wednesday evening's long journey through Nixon and Cox had led to that $15 federal minimum wage, which the cable star took pains, all week, to avoid discussing with respect to the substance or merits.

Would a $15 federal minimum wage be a good idea? This question was in the ether last week as Candidates Clinton and Sanders fought for the state of New York.

That said, you never saw a substantive discussion of this proposal on this major star's cable show. Instead, she used the exciting, unexamined proposal as a way to kill brain cells in one of the oldest ways there is--by insisting that the Very Bad People are all Over There, while our own tribe is able to boast The Best of All Possible Candidates.

Quick hint—our tribe isn't able to boast the best of all possible candidates. Each of our candidates is substantially flawed, as is often the case in the world.

That said, you'll rarely learn that saddening fact from this major star. Last week, she taught us something utterly different. She taught us how to loathe The Others, in the present and in the past tense.

She also taught us to love Our Own, as tribal players always will do. A cynic would say that the cable news star does this to fluff her ratings, and to keep corporate earnings up.

"Is everybody happy?" Long ago, Ted Lewis made the question famous.

In modern times, a cynic would say that this cable star asks herself the very same question as she plans her eponymous TV show. To justify her massive salary, a criterion must be met:

Her ratings are built upon the eyeballs of Clinton fans and Sanders fans. Both groups of viewers must be kept happy all through her hour-long show!

Last Tuesday night, she addressed each of the groups after the endless time waste built around the irrelevant Schlafly. Here's how the fawning went down:

In her next segment, the cable star wasted time with the suggestion that Vice President Biden and President Obama had both endorsed, or semi-endorsed, Candidate Clinton that day.

In fact, no one had endorsed anyone, but it was a good way to kill more time and to fluff Clinton supporters. She closed her segment with a promise to Sanders fans:

MADDOW (4/12/16): In the Democratic Party that really, really likes President Obama and Vice President Biden, if you are the woman who is running for president right now, both of those comments have got to be very welcome.

But I should also tell you, in that hard-fought Democratic primary, there was also some really, really good news for Bernie Sanders today. And that's next.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Clinton fans got to be happy about those non-endorsements. But Sanders fans were going to get some good news too!

In the next segment, the star made them happy this way:

MADDOW: The New York primary is a week from tonight. On the Republican side of this race, Donald Trump is leading by such huge numbers, he may be breaking records for this primary season actually...On the Democratic side, it's not nearly as dramatic, but Hillary Clinton continues to hold a big lead in the state of New York.

All that said, though, there is one way on the Democratic side in which Bernie Sanders is really cleaning up in New York. No idea what it's going to mean for the ballot box, but Bernie Sanders' rally crowds right now are freaking enormous.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Clinton is ahead in the polls, but Sanders is drawing really big crowds! Everyone gets to be happy!

The cable star rattled pointless statistics about those Sanders crowds. At the end of this waste of time, she oohed and aahed about a rally which would take place the next night:

MADDOW: And at this event, there are going to be more celebrities and bands than usual for a big Bernie Sanders event. But even still, look at this! So far, 17,000 people have RSVP'ed for the event on Facebook already and counting, and it's not until tomorrow night!

I mean, in terms of history here and context, in the 2008 presidential race, you might remember that Barack Obama also did a massive event at Washington Square Park. In the 2008 race, he drew a crowd of 24,000 people at the same location where Bernie Sanders is going to be tomorrow.

And turning out 24,000 people in New York City, that was almost an unimaginable number that year for candidate Barack Obama. But after he turned out 24,000 people in Washington Square Park, he went on that year to lose the New York primary to a candidate named Hillary Clinton.

So rallies are not votes, but they're something. The number of people Senator Bernie Sanders is turning out is a political phenomenon unto itself.

Watch this space.

A cynic would say that "Watch this space" was the key message there. The cable star is constantly telling us not to go away.

At any rate, this time-wasting segment gave both groups of viewers a way to feel good. Clinton was ahead in the polls—but Sanders was drawing amazing crowds! Within our own exalted tribe, it was the best of all possible worlds, especially when you considered Prescott Bush's views on divorce! In 1964!

Also, Schlafly's gay son!

It was all good in our glorious tribe, even as the bulk of the hour had been burned away. And sure enough! The following night, the cable star used that footage from the Nixon-Cox wedding to drive her point home again!

Forty-five years after the wedding in question, it turns out that Nixon's son-in-law is chairman of the New York State GOP! And as we showed you yesterday, it turned out, last Wednesday night, that he was about to do a horrible thing, perhaps as a reflection of his "troubled Republican royalty pedigree!"

As we showed you yesterday, the cable star revealed that "Edward Cox, Dick Nixon's son-in-law" was going to hold a black tie, $1000-a-plate fund-raising dinner that Thursday night! "In one of these huge midtown hotel ballrooms!" "In the heart of New York City!"

The "exclusive sold-out" gala event was "going to raise a gazillion dollars for the Republican Party of New York State," the major cable star said. Surely, no one else would ever behave that way!

In the course of her tribe-pleasing segment, she said the event would be "black tie" three separate times; six times, she called it a "gala." She failed to mention an obvious fact—all the pols for whom she pimps have attended a million such dinners.

Might we cite an example? Two nights later, Candidate Clinton was going to attend an exclusive gala in California. That exclusive gala was going to be up to $353,000-a-plate!

The cable star forgot to say that. Instead, she pushed the troubling Cox event into one of her brain cell-killing frameworks. She noted that people were going to protest the Cox event, demanding that $15 minimum wage.

She never discussed the actual merits of a $15 federal minimum wage. Given cost-of-living differences, should rural Mississippi have the same minimum wage as a place like San Francisco? Could a $15 minimum wage be harmful in low cost-of-living areas?

If the minimum went to $15 in Mississippi, where would it have to go in Seattle? Would these arrangements actually make good economic sense?

All week long, the cable star avoided such boring discussions. She avoided mentioning the fact that our two candidates differ on this proposal.

Instead, the cable star used that black tie gala to pimp the tribal greatness of her viewers, who she was making happy this night. Below, you see the way she closed her segment about that troubling exclusive event.

Her message was unusually clear. We are The Very Good People. We are Their "exact opposite."

We are living in "Oppositeland" as compared to Them:

MADDOW (4/13/16): On the Democratic side of the presidential race, we had stunning visuals today that showed how, on the Democratic side of the race, it's basically the exact opposite right now of the party-crashing we are expecting tomorrow night from the minimum wage protesters at the New York State black tie $1000-a-plate Republican gala. It is Oppositeland to that in the Democratic Party right now.

And that's next. Stay with us.

"Stay with us" may have been the key message there. The cable star was holding her crowd by saying they're morally great.

The Others are holding black tie galas! Over here, it's Oppositeland.

The cable star never discussed the merits of that $15 proposal. She never discussed the differing views of Candidate Clinton and Sanders, even after those differences came into question at Thursday night's debate. When she returned from that break on Wednesday night, the cable star pimped the various ways in which "the Democratic candidates in this primary spent today trying to outdo each other supporting working people, with trying to prove that they mean it."

She never mentioned any differences between the two Democratic candidates on any issues concerning working people. She never mentioned any specific proposals. It was fawning to her viewers, straight outta some imagined place.

Bill Clinton came from a place called Hope. We're now from Oppositeland.

The cable star spent large chunks of her week pandering to both major groups of her viewers. Clinton fans and Sanders fans got to be happy alike.

They all got fed the same old gruel about Schlafly and the weeping Nixon and his black tie son-in-law with the wedding we should resent and the exclusive gala. On Friday, they all got fed the same denunciation of Candidate Kasich, a borderline-demented attack which we'll review tomorrow.

They all got fed the same factual errors; such "errors" are a common part of this strikingly truth-challenged program. Later on that Wednesday night program, each group got fed a fawning interview with a United States senator who is supporting their hopeful.

Good God. Senator Merkley went first. He'd endorsed Candidate Sanders.

Quickly, the cable star started fawning. "When I described you as an iconoclastic liberal, I meant that in the nicest possible way," she said. "Iconoclastic in kind of a lot of different ways, at a lot of different levels," she said, "...because I think you have shown you're willing to go your own way and come up with your own policy positions and cast the political winds wherever they are."

Merkley supported Sanders well; he also spoke well of Clinton. And sure enough! When the cable star interviewed Senator Murphy, a Clinton supporter, she actually started with this:

MADDOW: I imagine you might have been able to hear my conversation there with Jeff Merkley. One of the things I thought was notable about his news-making endorsement today is that he is very positive about the Democratic field. He told us that Democrats are spoiled for choice. They're both two great candidates.

Do you feel that same way about this race?

Senator Murphy said he did! As she finished a notably worthless three-question interview, the cable star began gushing again:

"You and Senator Merkley are both—you go your own way, you're both such principled progressives. I really appreciated the chance to have you both here tonight."

She closed the show in her favorite way this night. Deliciously, we were headed back to her favorite sexy-time tale:

MADDOW: We have yet more news tonight, this time on a story we've been following more closely than sometimes feels comfortable. It's about the D.C. Madam case from about a decade ago and the fight by one lawyer involved in that case to release what he says are previously unseen phone records from the D.C. Madam escort service at the center of that scandal.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! It would be her program's fifth segment about the D.C. Madam, "a story we've been following more closely than sometimes feels comfortable." What else can you do when Governor Bentley refuses to "shtup" former aides?

The major star in question performed four programs last week. Given our own constraints of length, it's hard to capture all the ways she dumbed her viewers down—insulted their flagging intelligence, degraded the national discourse.

That said, her program is built on the wasting of time—the wasting of time and the love of loathing, delivered by any means necessary. She's dedicated to something else too:

Avoiding discussions of substance.

On Friday night, the cable star taught us how to loathe Candidate Kasich. Her lessons involved some astonishing logic and several flat misstatements.

Her segment about the ways to loathe Kasich was just this side of demented. Our view?

The cable star who performed that segment should be taken by the arm and led away, by attendants who really care.

Tomorrow: How to loathe Candidate Kasich. Also, how to bribe GOP delegates!

The cable star pretends: This was the cable star's second question for Senator Murphy, the Clinton supporter:

MADDOW: One of the reasons I want today talk to you tonight, sir, is you've been so forward about trying to define a progressive foreign policy and a progressive national security agenda on the Democratic side. Is that also key to your endorsement decision here?

Murphy said that was a part of his endorsement decision. "I think Bernie gets that as well," he said. "I just know in her work as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton was pioneering in some of these ideas how you use softer power rather than harder power to influence world events."

Let's face it. That isn't the way Clinton is viewed by many of the cable star's viewers.

That statement begged for a follow-up question. The cable star followed with this:

MADDOW: Do you think you have a bead on how your state is going to vote? The Connecticut primary is not far off. There has not been much polling. But we have seen the polling tighten in Connecticut like it has in so many states over the course of this race.

The cable star was playing it dumb. The D.C. Madam was next!