YEAR(S) IN REVIEW: Most Consequential Narrative of the Year(s)!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2016

Part 3—From Whitewater through to the emails: On August 3, 2004, the New York Times' Paul Krugman was right on target, as he routinely has been.

He was explored a striking new concept, a striking new concept called "script." Headline included:

KRUGMAN (8/3/04): Reading the Script

A message to my fellow journalists: check out media watch sites like campaigndesk.org, mediamatters.org and dailyhowler.com. It's good to see ourselves as others see us. I've been finding The Daily Howler's concept of a media ''script,'' a story line that shapes coverage, often in the teeth of the evidence, particularly helpful in understanding cable news.

For example, last summer, when growth briefly broke into a gallop, cable news decided that the economy was booming. The gallop soon slowed to a trot, and then to a walk. But judging from the mail I recently got after writing about the slowing economy, the script never changed; many readers angrily insisted that my numbers disagreed with everything they had seen on TV.

If you really want to see cable news scripts in action, look at the coverage of the Democratic convention...

Krugman continued from there. All in all, the liberal world has ignored the good sound advice he offered that day.

"Script," of course, is a specialized offshoot of "narrative." The mainstream press corps may adopt specialized scripts in service to some ongoing "narrative"—in service to some story line to which they will cling in the face of the facts, or even in the face of onrushing cultural death.

One such narrative dominated the coverage of the year's presidential campaign. Our judges have named it the most consequential narrative of the year(s).

We pluralize the word "year(s)" for an obvious reason. In the beginning was the end!

The potent media narrative to which we refer was hatched in 1992. From that day to this, the mainstream press corps has run with this poisonous story line, while pseudo-liberal corporate quislings have agreed to avert their gaze from this narrative and the many scripts it has spawned.

Almost surely, this combination of behaviors has now sent Donald J. Trump to the White House. This outcome has made "Candidate Clinton is corrupt" the most consequential narrative of the year(s).

"Candidate Clinton is corrupt!" Our judges have named it the most consequential narrative of the year(s). In the course of their exposition, our judges have linked this award to several others:

Their annual "Narrative Which Didn't Bark" prize goes to the absence of a controlling narrative about Candidate Donald J. Trump.

Also, the judges' annual award for "Most Favored Player Status" goes to FBI Director James B. Comey, the latest Republican figure extolled, all through the press, for his obvious moral rectitude.

Let's walk through the interplay of these narratives, including that absence-of-narrative.

The narrative about Clinton's corruption was hatched on the front page of the New York Times in 1992. Through a set of bungled news reports, the Times invented the Whitewater pseudo-scandal—the pseudo-scandal which gave its name to an entire era.

In 1995, Gene Lyons and the editors of Harper's magazine published Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater.

Harper's was one of the nation's oldest and most respected journals. That said, the notion that "the media" had done something wrong made Lyons' book unsuitable for serious review or even for discussion.

Lyons' book, and its claims, were quickly disappeared. Almost all career liberals understood that such notions could not be discussed.

Practices spiraled from there. Starting in March 1999, the mainstream press corps began extending its narrative about corruption to President Clinton's chosen successor, Candidate Gore. Gore was defined by his many lies and by his troubling clothes.

From Week One, one award-winning web site discussed this unfolding narrative and the many scripts it spawned. From that day to this, almost all career liberals knew they mustn't ever discuss what occurred in those next two years.

The narrative about Clinton corruption thus lived to fight another day. In the past two years, it was principally tied to a series of scripts about Candidate Clinton's past email practices. Corporate liberals like Rachel Maddow understood that they must never examine the claims and the deceptions involved in this new set of scripts.

(In the fall of 2012, Maddow had averted her gaze as Susan Rice was thrown under the bus in the wake of the Benghazi attacks. In these ways, the two stories which most undermined Candidate Clinton were invented partly thanks to Maddow's relentless silence. On the brighter side, Maddow continued receiving millions of dollars per year from her corporate owners. Soon, she was splashing about in an Epsom salt enhanced pool as she enjoyed her favorite TV shows. To admire the layout, click here.)

Starting in March of 2015, the mainstream press corps wailed away concerning the Clinton emails. Almost without exception, corporate liberals made no attempt to analyze, explain, critique or challenge the varied assertions and claims.

On July 5 of this year, James B. Comey took advantage of his Most Favored Player Status, making his first intrusion on the White House campaign. The very next day, Slate's Fred Kaplan issued a challenge to Comey's assertions and claims.

As with Rice in 2012, Kaplan went unmentioned on MSNBC all through the rest of the year. The children continued to gambol and play, serving us nightly tribal porridge, with "the great Steve Kornacki" assuring us that the polls looked extremely good.

In these ways, a 25-year-old narrative exacted tremendous damage. Meanwhile, Candidate Trump was helped along by The Narrative(s) Which Didn't Bark.

In the face of a blizzard of weird behavior, the mainstream press corps never created a controlling narrative about the former non-reality star. Concerning this overall absence of narrative, a few key points must be stated:

It isn't clear that a sprawling entity like the mainstream press corps should create a controlling narrative for a White House contender. The larger problem here was the existence of a controlling narrative concerning Clinton, not the absence of same in the case of Trump.

That said, even as they pounded Candidate Clinton, the mainstream press showed an amazing ability to avoid challenges to Candidate Trump's most gruesome behaviors. Their refusal to question his birtherism was perhaps the most glaring and repulsive example, but other behaviors stood out.

On several occasions, Anderson Cooper played pool boy to Trump concerning his relentless bogus claims about his alleged opposition to the war in Iraq. Starting in June 2015, Maddow stood out for her weird, presumably self-dealing deference to the Birther King.

In these brief remarks, we've tracked the confluence of narrative, and absence of same, which decided this year's election. To see how slavishly these imperatives will be followed by the press, consider a news report from this morning's New York Times.

The news report is suitably buried inside the paper, on page A19. All too suitably, it shares space on the page with three other obituaries. The four headlines in question are these:

New York Times headlines, page A19:
Esther Wilkins, Dental Hygiene Pioneer, Dies at 100
Fran Jeffries, 79, Singer, Dancer and Film Actress
Garrett Gomey, 44, Leading Jockey Who Battled Addiction

Filing Reveals Reasoning of F.B.I. in Clinton Case

Photographs accompany the reports about Wilkins, Jeffries and Garrett, with Jeffries looking remarkably "hot." (Boxed sub-headline: "A career celebrated for a sexy samba in The Pink Panther.")

No photograph accompanies the fourth report. Decorously, editors kept the name of Comey the God out of their remarkably anodyne headline.

Does anyone know why that fourth news report was buried next to Jeffries? The report concerns the conduct of Comey the God late in the White House campaign.

If you read to paragraph 7, you'll be exposed to a startling charge. Well-known mandates of mainstream scripting decreed that this had to be buried:

WEISER AND GOLDMAN (12/21/16): David E. Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, said in a statement Tuesday that the unsealed affidavit “highlights the extraordinary impropriety of Director Comey’s Oct. 28 letter, publicized two days before the affidavit, which produced devastating but predictable damage politically and which was both legally unauthorized and factually unnecessary.”

He added that what is “unassailably clear” is that “as the sole basis for this warrant, the F.B.I. put forward the same evidence the bureau concluded in July was not sufficient to bring a case—the affidavit offered no additional evidence to support any different conclusion.”

Say what? The high-profile lawyer for Candidate Clinton said that Director James B. Comey engaged in "extraordinary impropriety?"

Is David E. Kendall allowed to say that? Apparently not, based on the placement this news report received in this morning's Times.

To understand the world in which you live, you have to understand the interplay of narratives, from which scripts emerge. In the case of that underplayed news report, you must understand these points:

James B. Comey had long been defined as a figure of unquestioned rectitude. Hillary Clinton had long been defined as a figure who was corrupt.

Donald J. Trump was never defined by a controlling press narrative. To the extent that cable news "defined" him in a uniform way, he was defined as the amusing former reality star at whose ridiculous statements our pundit stars never stopped chuckling.

Liberals must understand one last point about this destructive interplay. Throughout this campaign, their favorite corporate TV stars made little attempt to fight these mandated narratives.

Rachel Maddow is often called The Nun; her friend Chris Hayes is sometimes called The Puppy. Together, they're often described as "the children."

Along with Maddow's consultant-invented, incessant weird grin, these nicknames have helped establish these stars as trusted liberal figures—as the liberal viewer's imaginary cable friends. This makes it hard for liberals to see what these corporate stars haven't done for them lately, all through the past brutal year(s).

Starting in early July, Comey the God got a pass from these stars. Back in 2012, they'd agreed to throw Susan Rice under the bus as an array of scripts about Benghazi were being invented. These silences enabled the invention of the powerful scripts which sent Donald Trump to the White House.

This year, the stars agreed to ignore what Comey the God had done; they never breathed a serious word about the existence of that 25-year-old Clinton narrative. By the time Maddow appeared with "the great Tom Brokaw" on November 1 of this year, our analysts were actually posing a question to us:

Is it possible that Maddow supported her beloved "Poppy Bush" in 1992? We didn't know how to answer their question, but Maddow's weird remarks, through the years, about both Clintons and about "Poppy Bush" had finally made this a sadly reasonable question.

Alas! In this recent post, Kevin Drum showed the front page of the New York Times in late October, the morning after Comey the God struck again.

Drum scorned the New York Times in his post. On cable, our corporate liberals would jump off a bridge before they'd engage in such conduct.

Their silence, and that of their peers through the year(s), helped create this year's interplay of narratives. Those narratives have now sent you-know-who you-know-where.

On the brighter side, these cable stars spoon-feed us our porridge each night. We learn how foolish Rick Lazio was! We go to bed happy and warmed.

Tomorrow: An array of awards

Friday: Reality need not appear

Kelly describes "corrupt" coverage of Trump!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2016

Mika belts out a warning: The Washington Post's Eric Wemple has posted an interesting interview with Megyn Kelly. At one point, Kelly describes the thinking behind some of the coverage of Candidate Trump.

Why did people air those uninterrupted Trump rallies? Kelly explains it thusly:

KELLY (12/19/16): I think that in particular in the primary season, very few people were offering any critical Trump coverage, virtually anywhere...And in particular, some of these folks who put on his campaign rallies, Erik. His campaign rallies, not a policy speech, just rallies. Which we never would have done to Scott Walker or Hillary Clinton. Ever. And to me that seemed unfair to the other candidates and wrongheaded journalistically.

WEMPLE: That analysis applies to colleagues at your own network, correct?

KELLY: Well, listen, Fox was not without sin in that department either. I can say that on “The Kelly File,” we did not do that. And listen, it was not the easiest thing to do because Trump rates. You pop up that campaign rally, you could let it roll for an hour and your ratings would shoot through the roof. Easy, done. Huge number. [inaudible] your average for the month.

If you aired an uninterrupted Trump rally, it goosed your ratings for the month. We'll only note that MSNBC did a lot of that too.

In a second part of the interview, Kelly says that certain anchors engaged in a type of "corruption" with respect to the questions they asked Trump. This part of the interview isn't especially clear:

WEMPLE: You mention in the book, and this is an interesting part . . . you say that there were anchors who did this game-out sort of thing with Trump [wherein they rehearse questions for an interview in advance of the interview]. But you don’t name them; who are they?

KELLY: Obviously I’m not going to name them now because I chose not to do so in my book.

[...]

I think people are smart enough to figure out who the likely candidates are. And in any event, this is not a nightly news report on “The Kelly File.” It’s a book, I mean there’s a lot in there that—it’s not something I would report at night on Fox News, but it’s my take on a situation. And I think, again, this is something that people should know took place and you don’t need the names to know that there was corruption in the coverage of this race. That was deeply problematic.

WEMPLE: But everybody’s corrupt now [since Kelly won't name the malefactors].

KELLY: I think any reasonable person knows which reporters to eliminate.

We don't agree with that last statement; overall, the discussion here is pretty fuzzy. Still, it's interesting that Kelly was willing to describe this as "corruption."

Let's throw in a final passage from a recent interview with Mika Brzezinksi. Ben Terris profiled Mika and Joe for the Washington Post. At one point, Mika offered this:

TERRIS (12/13/16): [Brzezinksi] maintains that just because they build sources and conduct interviews with newsmakers doesn’t mean they should be held to the rigid standards of journalism. “If you're going to call us journalists,” said Brzezinski, who came up through the ranks as a CBS reporter before joining the pundit class, “you can take every tenet of journalism and show that we’re breaking it.”

It's hard to know just what that means, but it certainly does feel right. If we might borrow from Norman Chad:

Pay the woman, Shirley!

Josh Marshall speaks out on the white working class!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2016

May not care much for Those People: Based on last month's election disaster, is it possible that Democrats should pay more attention to the circumstances, needs and experiences of white working class voters?

Would that make sense from a political perspective? Would it make sense as a matter of basic fairness, humanity, decency?

It seems to us that the answers are yes. That said, we're amazed by the hostility that seems to pour forth in some quarters when such bland suggestions are advanced. Consider yesterday's post by the irate Josh Marshall.

In fairness, Josh seems to have scribbled the post in such haste that its meaning isn't entirely clear. That can happen when very smart people decide to become business moguls.

That said, Josh had watched a (very) short segment on CNN; it seemed to leave him disgusted. As he started his post, he gave this basic account of what he had seen:

MARSHALL (12/19/16): I was just watching a brief segment on CNN about, among other things, the future of the Democratic party. The Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy was one of the two panelists. And it was, frankly, embarrassing.

Murphy said in so many words that Democrats aren't able to move forward because they have no theory of why they lost and in many cases think they actually won (because of the popular vote). "So when you have that kind of an attitude going forward there's very little soul searching, very little effort to look inside and say what do we need to say and do differently in order to get more people to win? They're writing off a large portion of the electorate as a group of people they don't even want."

Links to the actual CNN transcripts are offered below.

So far, we're not sure why Murphy's statement would be "embarrassing," at least not in the way Marshall meant. Some people have perhaps been a bit cavalier about the import of Clinton's win in the popular vote. Beyond that, we think some liberals and progressives are perhaps a bit inclined to "write off a large portion of the electorate"—that is, the white working class—"as a group of people they don't even want."

We thought that attitude seemed to be present in Professor Dyson's piece in this weekend's Sunday Review. So far, we don't see what's so hideously wrong about what Murphy is said to have said.

That said, Murphy's remarks seemed to have Marshall upset. As he continued, he produced a great deal of thunder, though perhaps not a great deal of light:

MARSHALL (continuing directly): I listen pretty closely to what Democrats say and if anything I hear more "throw the baby out with the bathwater" talk in terms of targeting working class white voters in the industrial Midwest than writing off whole portions of the electorate. This whole riff was, I think, a good example of why Democrats generally should do as much as they possibly can to ignore this kind of gilded DC-centric pablum. It also points our attention to why how the Democrats move forward is actually more complicated than a lot of people really get, a lot more complicated than a lot of commentators want to get.

We're still not entirely sure what that means. Would Democrats be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" if they decide to "target working class white voters in the industrial Midwest?" Is that what Marshall was saying?

The name-calling there is unmistakable; the analysis is still unclear. In fairness, we'll assume Marshall had important balance sheets to return to. But later in his post, his meaning seemed a bit more clear—and to us, a good deal more puzzling:

MARSHALL: The fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes makes it very hard to see the 2016 election as a referendum on the Democratic party or Democratic governance or a rejection of either. This isn't just a matter of salving hurt feelings or looking on the bright side. The import is more concrete and unforgiving. All politics involves trade-offs. One bundle of issues gets you one coalition of voters. If you toss that bundle overboard you'll probably lose some or possibly a lot of the voters you have. That's difficult when you're still pretty close to winning majorities of votes. It's especially tough when you're actually already winning majorities, at least of the two party vote. (This does not even get into the infinitely consequential issue of the political morality of potentially abandoning your most vulnerable and political loyal supporters.)

To us, that's just very strange. It sounds like Marshall is assuming that Democrats will "lose a lot of the voters they have"—will even be tweaking "the political morality of potentially abandoning their most vulnerable and political loyal supporters"—if they decide to care about industrial workers in coal country and the Rust Belt who have seen their jobs and their communities going up in smoke.

By the way, those industrial workers have children. Is there some reason why liberals and progressives shouldn't care about them?

We have no idea why sympathy for some struggling group would represent the abandonment of some other group. Is Marshall perhaps expressing the very attitude Murphy was talking about? If not, we don't know an emerging lefty mogul when we bow to one.

Marshall is making the money now, so let us help him here. There are children all through the Midwest who see their family incomes going away. There is no reason why a progressive party, or a decent person, shouldn't care about that.

What is Marshall talking about here? Is he imagining that black voters will be lost to Democrats if Democrats show concern for these white voters too? It sounds like that may be what he's talking about. If so, we'll suggest he may not understand the moral depth of this country's "black" population.

We have no clear idea what Marshall was saying in this post. By the time he'd finished, he had returned to the name-calling—and he seemed to be throwing those children away again:

MARSHALL: There is a huge amount of work for Democrats to do. But a key part of that work is resisting the demand from the supercilious center that Democrats don sackcloth and ashes and repent of their ideals and even of themselves. Demography and ideology are critical. But require a politics and relentless organizing to give them force. That is where Democrats should be focusing their attention.

Marshall has perhaps grown too great to understand these matters. Speaking very slowly, let us try to explain:

Progressives aren't donning sackcloth and ashes, let alone repenting of their ideals, if they look for ways to take the side of children whose families are in trouble.

Josh sounds a bit like the mine owner here, not much like the coal miner's daughter. Or is that too crude a reference for our emerging high tech upper class?

Tomorrow: Professor Dyson tackles race and class

To peruse the CNN transcripts: Murphy's brief segment with Carol Costello starts at the end of this CNN transcript.

Their brief conversation continued from there. For the supercilious remarks which inflamed Marshall so, you can just click here.

YEAR(S) IN REVIEW: Worst Journalist, News Org of 2016!

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2016

Part 2—Their horrible work stood out: In the end, the decisions were fairly easy.

In the beginning, a sensible person could have seen this year's horrible end.

Our award-winning "Year(s) in Review" panel of judges has named Rachel Maddow as the worst journalist of 2016. They've also selected the New York Times as the worst news org.

In the end, routinely horrible work led to these decisions. In each case, though, the worst journalistic work of 2016 may have occurred last year!

Let's start with Maddow, a unanimous choice for Worst Journalist of 2016.

The judges awarded Maddow for a long list of offenses. For starters, they noted her constant mugging and clowning, mixed with her potent self-adoration. "Only Trump matches her absurd self-regard," one of the judges said.

The judges noted Maddow's willingness to politicize important substantive matters. Most of all, they hailed her as a skillful dodger. They cited her skill at presenting herself as a fiery liberal while taking a dive on the issues which decided the 2016 presidential campaign—and while cashing large corporate checks.

In the judges' formal citation, Maddow was hailed for "a skillful, persistent con." Still, in the beginning was the end! Paradoxically, the judges cited some of Maddow's work from 2015 as some of the current year's worst.

Regarding her work from 2015, the judges cited her ludicrous "thirteen weeks," the period she devoted to nightly ranting about the way the Fox News Channel was planning to stage the first Republican debate. Here's how that went down:

Confronted with seventeen certified Republican candidates, Fox News announced that it would include only ten candidates in its first debate. CNN announced a similar plan for the second debate.

Confronted with these unremarkable decisions, Maddow swung into action. With an 18-month pseudo-campaign beginning, MSNBC was rebranding itself as "the place for politics." Maddow jumped in with a substantively ludicrous, tribally pleasing, 13-week attack on Fox News.

Psychiatrists continue to debate a basic question: Could Maddow possibly have been sincere in her nightly keening and wailing about the way the lineup for the first debate would be chosen? Or was this simply a con?

It's hard to know how to answer that question. But Maddow shrieked about Fox for a full thirteen weeks, rarely mentioning the fact that CNN was going to limit participation in the same way. In this manner, the judges have found, Maddow signaled that her election coverage would be fake, faux and phony throughout.

(The judges also called attention to Maddow's reactions when Donald J. Trump announced his decision to seek the White House in June 2015. She said she had no personal beef with the self-made Birther King; chuckled and clowned in the immediate wake of his announcement; and barely mentioned his "rapist" announcement speech until several weeks had passed and tribal opinion was clear. In this beginning, the judges found markers of the end; Maddow's coverage of Campaign 2016 would be a con throughout.)

As for Maddow's work in this calendar year, the judges were unanimous. Her refusal to discuss the "emailgate" matter turned out to be the defining mark of her year. The strategic silence she maintained echoed her silence in 2012, when the Benghazi scripts were being invented. The judges were unanimous in their assessment of these twin refusals to speak:

Maddow was protecting her career through lengthy, elaborate silence. Here's how it happened this year:

On July 5, 2016, FBI kingpin James B. Comey interjected himself into the White House campaign. Comey is widely known as Comey the God; he's a very powerful insider establishment figure.

Presumably for that reason, Maddow never mentioned Comey's name until late in October, when he struck again. But then, back in the beginning, the judges had seen this end. All through the fall of 2012, Maddow never mentioned the name of Susan Rice as she was pilloried and left for dead in the wake of the Benghazi attacks.

First Benghazi, then the emails! In each case, Maddow maintained total silence as the scripts which would defeat Candidate Clinton hardened, then turned to stone.

Clinton was pilloried for her email practices over the last twenty months of the 2016 campaign. Maddow was scrupulous about maintaining a self-protective silence. The judges were especially amused by her report on May 25 of this year, when she pretended to respond to a damaging State Department report.

Adopting her typical "here look me over" approach, Maddow mugged and clowned with large stacks of paper, complaining about the way the State Department's emails are archived. As she clowned in these familiar ways, she transplendently failed to address that actual claims at issue, while giving gullible viewers the impression that she had.

(Is it possible that Maddow is really that dumb? The judges have ruled that she isn't.)

On a corporate branding basis, Maddow was sold to the liberal public as "their own Rhodes Scholar." The judges were unanimous—she stood out in the past several years for her refusal to put her intellectual skills to actual use.

In an appendix to their report, the judges noted another beginning which suggested this end. This too involved Maddow's relentless branding.

The judges recalled the way Maddow originally defined herself as "the TV star who didn't own a TV (not that she was saying that she was smarter than you are)." This branding was everywhere when Maddow burst upon the scene. It aligned her with other branded NBC stars, such as the kid from New Jersey who loves Nascar and the working-class kid from Buffalo whose Dad rode a garbage truck.

A few years later, the news finally broke—Maddow had bought a TV set! She earned "special demerit" in the judges' eyes for a ridiculous story she told at least one profile writer—her claim that she and Susan had purchased the TV set on-line when they were drunk one night. She claimed they were surprised to wake up the next day and find evidence of their on-line purchase scattered about in the bed.

In this bizarre beginning, we should all have seen this year's gruesome end, the judges have now reported. (To see Maddow's current TV room, you can just click here.)

Maddow was an easy pick for Worst Journalist of 2016. Similarly, the New York Times was a runaway winner of the Worst News Org award.

Here too, the judges ruled that the Times' worst work of 2016 was done in earlier years. In the case of the Times, the horrible work extended all the way back to the paper's bungled Whitewater reports—work which began in 1992!

In that horrible beginning, we had this year's end! Within the past two years, the judges pointed to a string of front-page reports by what they called "this most foppish of all major American news orgs."

They cited last year's hapless, sprawling front-page report about the scary uranium deal. They cited this year's Sunday front-page report about Beau Biden's use of his last few nouns.

They cited the newspaper's refusal to challenge Donald J. Trump's ugly birtherism, even in a Sunday morning front-page report on the topic in July of this year. They cited the front-page report in early October which sought to rehabilitate the credibility of three truth-challenged Clinton sex accusers from the distant past.

For their topper, the judges simply linked to this Kevin Drum post. It shows the front page of the New York Times on October 29, the morning after Comey the God intruded on the White House campaign again.

That intrusion was so blatant that even Maddow felt forced to respond! The New York Times chose to fill its front page with the latest collection of gorilla dust. According to the judges, that recent front page tracks to a distant beginning in 1992.

In the beginning was the end! This campaign was decided by a poisonous narrative which started on the Times' front page in early 1992. (More on that "Most Consequential Narrative" to come.) Right to the end, the Times emitted the requisite blather in support of that old story-line. Maddow kept avoiding related topics over the past several years.

In closing, the judges made one final point. The New York Times was awful this year, but liberals could be sure one thing. They could be sure that Rachel Maddow would never tell them that!

Maddow is part of an insider guild that's strongly built around self-interest and self-dealing. According to the panel of judges, speaking truth to and about this institutional power is simply never done.

Her mugging and clowning insult us all. As we liberals praise ourselves for our moral greatness and our intellectual brilliance, we make it clear, night after night, that we like being conned this way.

Tomorrow: Most Consequential Narrative and other related awards

Maddow never ends: Judges noted Maddow's skill at killing time while serving tribal porridge. Several judges noted a November 28 time-killer which started out like this:

MADDOW (11/28/16): Good evening, Chris [Hayes]. Thanks, my friend. And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour.

Sixteen years ago, 16 years ago, this man set a record. He ran for a seat in the United States Senate 16 years ago, and he lost that race, which is why you probably don't recognize him.

But in the course of losing that race that year, he did set a record. And this was the record that he set. He spent more money losing a U.S. Senate race than anyone had ever spent losing a U.S. Senate seat ever before. Whoo!

And his name was Rick Lazio. And the person he lost to in that Senate race in the year 2000 was somebody you will recognize, Hillary Clinton.

2000. That was the first year Hillary Clinton ran for the United States Senate from New York state. She beat Rick Lazio badly. She clobbered him by 12 points.

Over the course of that campaign, he spent himself into oblivion. He outspent her by a mile. He outspent her by something like—she spent $29 million and he spent $40 million. He ended up millions of dollars in debt and he lost, and he lost by a lot, and he had to give up his day job for all that.

Rick Lazio had been a member of Congress but you can't hold on to a seat in the House while you run for the Senate. So he was like quintuply crushed in that Senate race in 2000.

Well, Hillary Clinton became the United States senator. And then at the end of her first term in the Senate, so six years later, Republicans went up against her again, but they had a hard time getting somebody to run against her...

The bullshit continued from there. This was Maddow's rambling, crowd-pleasing way of discussing one of Donald J. Trump's less consequential nominations to date, that of K. T. McFarland as deputy national security adviser.

Along the way, Maddow pleasured us liberals by ridiculing Lazio; by ridiculing the awful Jeannine Pirro; and by ridiculing a little-known Republican mayor of Yonkers. Eventually, she started ridiculing McFarland herself, in an overtly sexist manner, while placing thumbs on several scales.

That's our Rachel! Even after Hillary Clinton gets beaten by someone she vastly outspent, we get to hear how ridiculous Lazio was, and how badly the marvelous Clinton beat him.

Lazio was "quintuply crushed!" No, it doesn't get dumber than this, but it's like this all the time on this childish program.

(Please note: Maddow loves to show photographs of minor Republicans while chortling about the fact that no one can recognize them. It's a regular part of our porridge.)

By the way, did Clinton "clobber" Lazio "by twelve points" while he "spent himself into oblivion?" Yes, she did, but that wasn't an especially huge win in a blue state like New York. In that same 2000 election, Candidate Gore beat Candidate Bush by twenty-five points across that same state of New York.

There was exactly zero reason to waste time with this silly piddle last month. But that election might have been seen as a harbinger of Clinton's relative weakness as a vote-getter, not as a sign of her overpowering greatness.

Homey doesn't play it that way! Rachel Maddow serves tribal porridge as she jams corporate cash in her pants. For these reasons, she's been named Worst Journalist of the Year(s) by our panel of judges.

Fighting words in the New York Times!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2016

John Nixon goes to Iraq: We can't evaluate the content. But this morning's New York Times featured a fascinating book review by James Risen.

We'll call it "Nixon goes to Iraq." Risen reviews a new book by John Nixon, "the first C.I.A. officer to interrogate [Saddam] Hussein after his capture in December 2003."

This is a tale of Saddam Hussein the heavily disengaged novelist. It's also a tale of a CIA which is compared, in the end, to—

Well, we think we'll let you read it yourself. According to Risen, Nixon flays the basic competence of the modern CIA. From the journalistic perspective, it's interesting to see that these have become fighting words:

RISEN (12/19/16): Mr. Nixon thoughtfully argues that the C.I.A.’s overeagerness to please the White House has led to a serious degradation in the quality of its intelligence. Virtually the entire analytical arm of the C.I.A. is focused on quickly pumping out short memos on the issues of the day that are immediately read at the White House. But the agency has largely abandoned its tradition of freeing up analysts to engage in deeper, long-term research. As a result, Mr. Nixon writes, few analysts at the agency now know very much about anything. “Expertise is not valued, indeed not trusted.”

The C.I.A.’s brief memos have become like “crack cocaine for consumers of classified information,” Mr. Nixon says. It’s as if the C.I.A.’s analytical branch has been transformed from a college faculty into a cable news network.

Few analysts know much of anything. According to Risen, it's almost like the CIA has become cable news!

In 2003, Nixon went to Iraq. Thirteen years later, Risen read his account of what occurred, then delivered a brutal attack.

The public editor wallops the Times!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2016

We nitpick the public editor: How many people of different "races" and ethnicities should a newspaper employ?

We don't know the answer to that. Beyond that, as a general matter, we tend to be a bit chary concerning arguments from hypocrisy.

That said, public editor Liz Spayd came out swinging yesterday morning at the New York Times. As she started, she blasted the Times 1) for displaying too little diversity and 2) for exhibiting too much hypocrisy:

SPAYD (12/18/16): Only two of the 20-plus reporters who covered the presidential campaign for The New York Times were black. None were Latino or Asian. That’s less diversity than you’ll find in Donald Trump’s cabinet thus far. Of The Times’s newly named White House team, all six are white, as is most everyone in the Washington bureau.

Traveling to other departments, Metro has only three Latinos among its 42 reporters, in a city with the second largest Hispanic population in the country. Sports has one Asian man, two Hispanics and no African-Americans among its 21 reporters, yet blacks are plentiful among the teams they cover and the audience they serve. In the Styles section, every writer is white, while American culture is anything but.

The executive editor, Dean Baquet, is African-American. The other editors on his masthead are white. The staff with the most diversity? The news assistants, who mostly do administrative jobs and get paid the least.

The Times can be relentless in questioning the diversity at other institutions; it has written about the white ranks of the technology sector, public schools, police departments, Oscar nominees, law firms, legislatures, the major leagues and the Ivy League. Fixing its own problems comes less easily.

Modest diversity, lots of hypocrisy? Plainly, that's what Spayd said.

In these opening grafs, Spayd described the level of diversity in what she later describes as some of the paper's most prestigious postings. A bit later, she offered overall diversity numbers. When she did, we thought something basic was missing:

SPAYD: Overall, newsroom diversity [at the Times] is at 22 percent, up slightly but below newsrooms in most big metropolitan areas. And of those who head departments here, only three are people of color.

[...]

When you ask managers about the issue individually, everyone genuinely seems to care. Collectively, however, not much changes.

They begin by saying this is an industrywide problem, not just a New York Times problem. That is true, unquestionably. On the other hand, it’s also true that data from the American Society of News Editors shows that The Times is less diverse than large papers like The Washington Post (31 percent), The Los Angeles Times (34 percent) and The Miami Herald (41 percent). The Times is more diverse than The Boston Globe (17 percent) and The Philadelphia Inquirer (14 percent).

For what it's worth, Spayd never defined what counts as "newsroom diversity." Most people would likely be able to guess, but such a significant term ought to be defined.

We were annoyed by a larger flaw at this point—by the failure to say what racial/ethnic diversity looks like nationwide.

How diverse must a newsroom be before it "looks like America?" According to the Census Bureau, the national numbers currently stand as shown below.

We mention this because no such data appear in Spayd's piece, and because erroneous data did appear in comments. For the record, it's easy to misunderstand Census data concerning race, since Hispanics also get classified as either black or white. These are the numbers which are relevant to Spayd's discussion:

U.S. population, 2015 estimate, Census Bureau
White: 61.6 percent
Hispanic: 17.6 percent
Black: 13.3 percent
Asian-American: 5.6 percent
American Indian/Native Alaskan: 1.2 percent
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander: 0.2 percent
Multiracial: 2.6 percent
Some other race: 0.2 percent

Based on those data, the "diversity" of the general population stands at something like 38 percent. According to Spayd, the Times newsroom checks in at 22 percent.

Should the Times be more diverse? We can't answer that. We were struck by Spayd's second claim—her claim that the Times tends to lecture everyone else, applying standards it doesn't follow itself.

We haven't studied this matter. But that certainly sounds like the New York Times to us!

According to Spayd, the Times is a significant shirker, and a serious hypocrite, on matters of race and ethnicity. For ourselves, we were struck by this fleeting reference to something like social class:

SPAYD: I asked [executive editor Dean] Baquet what he believes minorities in the newsroom would say about his senior team’s dedication to diversity.

“I think they’d say we have a problem,” he said. “We’re not diverse enough. But I think they’d say I have a commitment to it and that it’s gotten better in the past year.” He added, “My effort to diversify has been intense and persistent.”

By that, Baquet particularly means the handful of prominent black journalists he’s helped attract or promote, stars like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham, all coveted by The Times’s competitors.

Their writing styles offer a refreshing break from The Times’s rather institutional voice, which—as one black editor put it to me—is older, white, male, Ivy League and authoritative. “That’s who The Times is at a dinner party,” she said.

We're not sure what that statement about the Times' "rather institutional voice" actually means.

As for the Ivy League reference, Morris prepped at Girard, then graduated from Yale. Hannah-Jones and Wortham are graduates of Notre Dame and UVa, schools which aren't technically Ivy League but are generally viewed as less than plebeian, perhaps as a bit Ivy-like.

Spayd's column appears in the Sunday Review. Yesterday, on that section's front page, Professor Dyson was sounding off about race as opposed to class. As is this professor's wont, he was beating up on Bernie Sanders for some statements the professor didn't quite bother to explain, elucidate or explore.

In the wake of last month's election, arguments have billowed up about the Democratic Party's attention, or lack of attention, to issues of social class, especially concerning the white working class. We'll discuss Dyson's piece tomorrow; we thought it was typically bumptious, weak and unhelpful.

As a general matter, we think the liberal world is a bit weak at this time in the general area of class. On the bright side, our contempt for The Others makes us feel good. But it helped elect Donald J. Trump, and this makes us feel bad.

For herself, Spayd appended this italicized note to the end of her report:

SPAYD: Note: This column explores The Times’s diversity crisis, primarily through race. Future columns will address the struggles to fix this issue, news coverage, the widening gender gap, and the limited geographic, religious and ideological diversity. Stay tuned.

We think that note was written in English. At one point, it seems to make a "category error." It never mentions any possible gain which might result from a newsroom which was more diverse from the standpoint of social class.

Aside from issues of race and ethnicity, is it possible that the Times might suffer from a bit of class myopia? We don't know the answer to that. Tomorrow, on to Professor Dyson!

YEAR(S) IN REVIEW: In the beginning was the end!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2016

Part 1—These Macedonian teens today: "In the beginning was the end." We believe T.S. Eliot said that.

(Actually, he only said something like that. He said it in East Coker, one of the Four Quartets, after saying similar things in the preceding quartet, Burnt Norton. For today, let's agree not to quibble. You can fact-check here.)

"In the beginning was the end?" As we review this past crushing year, we're forced to reach a bone-crushing conclusion:

Eliot got it right!

November's election has sent our liberal world reeling. But as we review the press corps behaviors which helped produce this astounding result, it must be said that those behaviors all had deep roots in the past.

For that reason, our "Year in Review" reports this week will cover a set of years. When we pick our Worst Journalist of 2016, for example, we will rule that her worst reports of 2016 actually occurred last year!

When we pick our Worst News Org of 2016, we'll claim that its worst news report of 2016 may have occurred last year!

It goes on from there. When we pick our Most Consequential Journalistic Narrative of 2016, we'll find that it began in 1992. When we pick our Least Authentic Journalistic Cohort, we'll find that their behavior has also stretched back through all those years, even as we in the liberal masses agreed to avert our gaze from their conduct.

Tomorrow, we'll start our hardest-hitting reports. For today, let's just limber up a bit. Let's select the Silliest Scapegoat of the Year(s).

For Silliest Scapegoat of 2016, we're going to name These Macedonian Teens Today, what with the malicious "fake news" you'd think these damn kids invented!

It has to be one of the phoniest moral crusades of the year(s). In the weeks since November's election, the mainstream press corps has suddenly spilled with denunciations of the practice which has been named "fake news."

Make no mistake—"fake news" can be a destructive phenomenon. But just as fake as the fake news itself is the opprobrium which has emerged from the mainstream press concerning this troubling new practice.

The lunacy about Comet Pizza has sent the mainstream press corps over the edge. So have the revolting events in which a bunch of Macedonians teens were found to be inventing phony factual claims for fun and profit.

Just for the record, how widespread is the press corps' outrage about the invention of fake facts? So widespread that NBC News has even come out against it!

These Macedonian teens today! Everyone has agreed to agree that they mounted a massive, and apparently new, challenge to our sacred discourse.

In truth, it has been darkly amusing to watch our journalists stand in line to denounce "fake news"—and to give the impression that the practice is something new. Let's consider that one recent episode which has been described as "fake news." As we do, let's consider a similar example of "fake news" from the ignored and forgotten, disappeared past.

Question 1: Was Hillary Clinton running a child sex ring out of that pizza restaurant?

Actually no, she wasn't! Widespread claims to the contrary have now been dubbed "fake news."

Moving right along:

Question 2: Did Hillary Clinton and her husband conduct a string of murders in the 1990s, perhaps including the (non-murder) death of Vince Foster?

Actually no, they didn't! But instead of denouncing these disgraceful claims, the press corps turned a blind eye to their purveyors in real time and beyond.

You see, those purveyors of fake news included some powerful, well-known people. We think of Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh first, but we'll name two more purveyors below.

Can you see the similarities between these two episodes? In the more recent episode, a bunch of idiots went on-line to create a vicious, idiotic tale about (imagined) child abuse.

In the earlier episode, a group of major cultural figures created and promulgated a vicious, idiotic tale about a string of (imagined) murders.

Can you see the similarities? Almost anyone could! That said, the newer episode is being denounced as "fake news." The other episode hung around for years—did so right into October of this year, as we'll note below.

Did the practice of "fake news" have its roots in the past? We'd have to say it did! Indeed, the promulgation of crazy claims about Clinton and Clinton has been a part of our news culture ever since Bill Clinton emerged on the national stage in 1992.

Many people believed those crazy, fake claims. Presumably, crazy belief in those crazy fake claims contributed to Clinton's defeat this year.

That said, the press corps has been giving the impression of late that this troubling "fake news" thing is just extremely new. A string of liberals have even jumped up to insist that we should maintain a narrow definition of "fake news," just so no one gets confused or gets the wrong sorts of ideas.

Those liberals are what we'd almost call useful journalists. In fairness, though, let's observe the differences between this year's "fake news" about child sex abuse and all those earlier fake claims about all those Clinton murders.

In what way were these episodes different? The best we can give you is this:

This year's "fake news" about Comet Pizza was spread on the Internet. Because there was no such medium in the 1990s, Jerry Falwell spread his fake claims about those murders by selling a videotape, The Clinton Chronicles.

In a similar vein, Limbaugh spread his insinuation about Vince Foster through the medium called "talk radio." We were actually listening that day!

Can you see how different the fake news of that era was, as compare to the fake news of this year? This year's fake claim was spread on the Net. Those earlier fake claims were pimped through different media.

Can you see how different this year's "fake news" was? We can't see a real difference either! What we do see is the reliably fraudulent behavior of the big stars of the mainstream press, supported by vassals a bit lower down on the career crystal stair.

Let's be clear. This year's fake news about that (imagined) child sex ring needed to be confronted. So, of course, did the earlier fake news about those (imagined) murders.

That said, in the beginning was the end! So much fake news has been spread for so long that this year's version apparently seemed convincing to a lot of gullible people.

Inevitably, that was due, in part, to the press corps' past refusal to challenge, analyze or examine widespread fake claims. How did the upper-end mainstream press continue that practice this year? Consider what the New York Times was doing right through the first week of October.

Of course! As the second Trump-Clinton debate approached, Donald J. Trump was lionizing Bill Clinton's past sex accusers.

Two of the more famous accusers were deeply sunk in the practice of selling the fake news about all those past murders. But as you'll recall, the press corps hadn't yet discovered "fake news" when they engaged in this conduct.

Result? The New York Times ran a front-page report on October 3 of this year rehabilitating these earlier purveyors of fake news. For perhaps the millionth time, Kathleen Willey and Gennifer Flowers were pimped to the public again.

Thanks to Megan Twohey and unnamed editors, readers weren't told about the ways those famous sex accusers had conspired to sell that earlier, ugly fake news.

Readers weren't allowed to ponder what this repulsive conduct might say about their general credibility, which the Times was now pimping again. If we might borrow from Eliot again, this is the way the world ends within our mainstream press corps.

The claim that Candidate Clinton was running kids out of a pizza point? That repulsive, stupid claim now qualifies as "fake news."

The claim that she murdered all those people? Right up through October 3, that claim apparently didn't! Willey and Flowers were vouched for again. We hate Macedonian teens today. We loved sex accusers back then!

In the beginning was the end! We'll explore this framework all week. For today, we'll offer this warning:

We liberals! The people we accept as our heroes have accepted this crap every step of the way. This November, the wages of their endless conduct helped bring electoral death.

In the beginning was the end? This year's horrible journalism stretches back through many years. To borrow from a Nobel laureate, as these practices took hold, our heroes "just stood there grinning!"

Tomorrow: Worst Journalist of the Year(s)

F-bombs and bar brawls by-the-sea!

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2016

Is this a film about race: This past Thursday night, Anderson Cooper aired two worthwhile segments about white working-class Trump voters.

During the 8 o'clock hour, Martin Savidge reported from West Virginia coal country. During the 9 o'clock hour, Van Jones was back in Trumbull County, Ohio, exploring the view from the Rust Belt.

We thought those reports were valuable. Over here in our own liberal bubble, we're so eager to display our lack of racial bias that we sometimes race to display our class bias.

We offer sweeping generalizations about the (bad) motives of Those People in the white working class. Intellectually and politically, this is a dumb way to roll.

That said, we've spent a good chunk of the week thinking about a movie we saw last Sunday. The movie is Manchester by the Sea, which we largely found groan-inducing.

Many others have liked it a lot; reactions to films are like that. For ourselves, we bring some history to the film, and to the review of the film by the New York Times' A. O. Scott.

We're so old that we can remember when Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts went by a humbler name—plain old Manchester, Mass. In 1989, the name of the town was officially changed, first in a town meeting vote, then in an act by the Massachusetts legislature.

Way back when, we would go Manchester's famous Singing Sand Beach, whose actual name, we now learn, seems to be Singing Beach. Whatever! The widely-praised movie is named for this town, in which it was filmed.

Let's start with a point which either is or isn't irrelevant.

In real life, Manchester-by-the-Sea isn't a "working class fishing village," as the fictional town has been described in quite a few reviews. In real life, Manchester-by-the-Sea is an upscale North Shore community with a median family income of $143,750 (2010 census).

The real-life town is small and upscale. But to tell you the truth, that's pretty much the way the fictional town looks in the film. In the film, the town doesn't look like a fishing village, and it doesn't look working-class. That hasn't stopped reviewers from copying text from the film's press releases—from doing what they're told.

In the film, the town doesn't look working-class, but its characters act like they're working class, at least in Hollywood terms. That is to say, they shower one another with F-bombs as they live in their large, middle-class looking homes and prepare their middle-class looking children for college.

They also seem to punch other people whenever they enter a bar. No one seems to mind them doing this, and no one gets arrested. That seemed slightly odd to us.

Back on November 17, A. O. Scott reviewed the film for the New York Times. He gave it what seemed like a glowing review, but he didn't make it a "Critic's Pick." Also, his review may have ended slightly strangely.

In the last seven grafs of his lengthy review, Scott offered an analysis which gave some readers pause. He also said something with which we may not completely disagree. He seemed to say that the film is ripped from today's headlines, race and gender wise:

SCOTT (11/17/16): But "Manchester by the Sea" is not only about Lee and his family, and not only about their houses and boats and drinking habits and marriages. It is also about what all those things mean, and what kinds of sentimental and ideological value are attached to them. The movie takes up, indirectly and perhaps inadvertently but powerfully and unmistakably, a subject that has lately reinserted itself dramatically into American political discourse. It's a movie, that is, about the sorrows of white men.

Scott continued from there. "Maybe its sounds like I'm over-reading, or making an accusation," he eventually said. "But to deny that 'Manchester by the Sea' has a racial dimension is to underestimate its honesty and overlook its difficult relevance."

Does Manchester by the Sea "have a racial dimension?" Truth to tell, we're not entirely sure what Scott meant by that.

Scott went on for seven grafs exploring the film in terms of "the prerogatives of whiteness" and the nation's "myths of post-ethnic -class white identity." (That's the way that second phrase was punctuated, perhaps by a puzzled Times editor.)

To us, it isn't clear what point Scott was making. And uh-oh! As sometimes happens when we try too hard, he was soon saying this:

SCOTT: Cast out of this working man's paradise, [the Casey Affleck character] is also exiled from the prerogatives of whiteness. He lives in a basement room, earning minimum wage, answering to an African-American boss and accepting a tip from a black tenant whose toilet he has cleaned and repaired. He doesn't complain, but it is also clear that he has chosen these conditions as a form of self-abasement, as punishment for his sins.

Does the Affleck character see "answering to an African-American boss" as "a form of self-abasement?"

We saw no sign of that in the film. At least one commenter was unpleasant enough to wonder if that perspective had perhaps emanated from Scott's own racist head!

Is this film a study of race in some way? We'd have to say that Scott was stretching a bit. We don't think he established or even defined his point.

That said, we think this film could be said to "be about" class in more obvious ways. Let's start with a comment by a reader who, like us, didn't like this film much at all.

We didn't like Manchester by the Sea. We were surprised by how poor it seemed. We found it groan-inducing.

In part, that may be because we've seen lesser versions of the film's dysfunctions played out in real life, in those same accents no less. We don't think such turmoil is humorous, though this is alleged to be one of the film's many gifts.

An observer in Hollywood was underwhelmed too. We'll highlight one remark:

COMMENTER FROM HOLLYWOOD: You need to go into this movie with full foreknowledge of what happened in the past, the circumstances of the family, and the reasons for its dysfunction, no problem it seems for Mr. Scott. There's no love, or if there is, it must be in code. No setup, but lots of jumping-around-in-time confusion. How am I supposed to care about the one-expression anti-hero as victim, who seems to create his own "mistakes" leading to incredible misfortunes? The writer/director needs to sit down with a book about story story story, how to fuel ideas, and how to order scenes. The editor could have been a little more helpful in that regard. I did not believe a word of what I watched. I tried hard. Every sentence is uttered with a sprinkling of the f-word, even between family members, parents, children and friends. And btw, if that's how some parts of Boston society works, it's no wonder we're lost...

"I did not believe a word of what I watched?" We basically felt that way too.

More specifically, we didn't believe that that's the way families talk to each other. Let's narrow that down even further—we didn't believe the film's widely praised, interruption-based conversations came from lived experience.

It seemed to us that those conversations came out of somebody's head. It seemed to us that that's the way a writer believed that people in working-class villages talk.

As Scott whimsically notes, this widely praised film "is a product of the Damon-Affleck industrial complex." In films which emerge from that complex, Hollywood actors tend to fashion themselves as members of Boston's white working class.

We get our F-bombs; we see bar fights. We get to hear those accents. Hollywood actors' effete public images get toughened a bit in the balance. Is it possible that we're also getting sold a bill of goods—and perhaps a soupcon of class bias?

Like that commenter, we didn't believe what we saw in this film. We didn't believe that it came from real life. It seemed to us that it came out of Kenneth Lonergan's upscale Manhattan-based head.

Beyond that, it didn't seem to us that Lonergan actually cares about the people we saw in the film. Consider what Scott said on the Diane Rehm Show, explaining why he didn't pick Manchester by the Sea as one of the year's top ten.

Scott said he "has problems with the story." We'll guess we know what he meant:

SCOTT (12/12/16): I'm not quite as in love with "Manchester By the Sea" as a lot of other critics. I mean, I think that the—the writing is superb, the acting is superb. I have some problems with the story, actually. I mean, I think that there is a kind of melodramatic inflation of emotion. There's something that happens that I won't say, or that is revealed to have happened, that explains the state that the Casey Affleck character is in that—

I couldn't write about this in my review because it would be a spoiler but that I objected to, and tend to object to, when things like this happen in a story. So it was flawed for me...

What is Scott criticizing here? We're willing to guess it's this:

Midway through this film, the story turns on a major catastrophe. This catastrophe "explains the state that the Casey Affleck character is in."

This is a major catastrophe. We'll guess that Scott is objecting to the cheap-but-easy practice of building a story around such a gigantic event. Beyond that, though, we'll also say this:

The film ignores the catastrophes which are already happening, in two different families, before this operatic catastrophe occurs. In that sense, the film is built on an easy narrative hook, but it ignores the life which is on display before that hook appears.

Shortly before that catastrophe, we see another catastrophe even as it is occurring. Three children are sleeping in their rooms, or perhaps they're trying to sleep, as their mother and father loudly empty their bank of F-bombs on each other. Quite a few "A-holes" fly around too, delivered in Boston accents.

In another home, we see a child ushered upstairs as his mother lies half-naked and unconscious on the living room sofa. Kenneth Lonergan shows no sign of caring about these gruesome events, or about these children, with which and with whom he entertains us.

Who are the people in this film? Does the writer care? We were struck by the basic facts we never learned about these two families in the working class fishing village which looks like nothing of the sort:

What did the Affleck character do for a living before he became a janitor? What did his brother do for a living?

Were they commercial fishermen? Is this fact ever made clear?

To whom did that fishing boat belong? Was it used for commercial fishing, or was it just used for pleasure? Who exactly was that other guy? Little of this is made clear.

We also learn nothing about the women in this film. Why was the half-naked woman unconscious? Why was the other woman showering her husband with loud F-bombs with her children right upstairs?

Later in the film, we're rewarded with an excursion to the new home of the half-naked woman. She is now a stereotypical crackpot Christian, with a new husband who seems to be fashioned on the cruel, second-husband pastor in Fanny and Alexander, a film which does care about the children named in its title.

These crackpot Christians today! From the Little Boxes exterior of this couple's home to the ridiculous end of the portrait, we're treated to the standard put-down of the religious right. This is what lives inside Lonergan's head. The world would perhaps be a better place had he just left it there.

Catastrophes are being played out before the catastrophe occurs. Lonergan doesn't seem to care about the children involved, or about the women. Or even about the men!

That said, many people love Manchester by the Sea. In the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday ended her review like this:

HORNADAY (11/25/16): In case the point isn’t obvious by now, “Manchester by the Sea” is a tear-jerker, made all the more so by Lonergan’s steadfast unwillingness to indulge in tidy reversals of heart or convenient happy endings. In that way, this might be the most joy-inspiring movie of the year, proving that there’s still space in the cinematic universe for genuine compassion rather than cheesy uplift; rigorous honesty rather than pandering ma­nipu­la­tion. “Manchester by the Sea” is a film of surpassing beauty and heart. Even at its most melancholy depths, it brims with candid, earnest, indefatigable life.

We know Hornaday a tiny tad. We've loved her work ever since her glowing review of Blue Crush.

Still, we're puzzled by that reaction (which many people share). We don't have the slightest idea where the "joy" is by the end of this film. To our eye, another young person—he's now 16—is getting remarkably little help from the adults around him.

He deserves a lot more help, but he still seems to be surrounded by a lack of emotional "life." Along the way, though, we've seen a film which brims with F-bombs and bar brawls and truly awful dysfunction.

In our view, Scott was stretching when he tried to see this as a film about race. In the end, we wouldn't say that this is a film "about class."

That said, we liberals swim in a sea of class derision which we aren't inclined to challenge and aren't real skilled at seeing. In this film, the naked lady ends up a prude. We're invited to chortle.

F-bombs fly all around in the night as Daddy acts out in the basement. Why wasn't that a sufficient problem in this film-by-the-sea?

Estonia at the top of the world!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2016

What propaganda looks like: We've begun reviewing the 2015 Pisa scores. We may start to discuss them next week, or we may wait till the new year.

That said, we were struck by a familiar old point as we reread Amanda Ripley's December 8 news report in the New York Times.

Is this what propaganda looks like? Ripley was discussing some of the "handful of places" around the world which have "created brilliance," to borrow an earlier phrase:

RIPLEY (12/8/16): [A]ffluence is no guarantee of better results, particularly in science and math: The latest PISA data (which includes private-school students) shows that America’s most advantaged teenagers scored below their well-off peers in science in 20 other countries, including Canada and Britain.

The good news is that a handful of places, including Estonia, Canada, Denmark and Hong Kong, are proving that it is possible to do much better. These places now educate virtually all their children to higher levels of critical thinking in math, reading and science—and do so more equitably than Americans do.

It's clear now that Estonia has in fact been selected as "the new Finland." Much of what you read in mainstream reports is simply recycled script dictated by the Pisa honchos.

That said, tiny Estonia did score quite well on last year's Pisa. But so did a larger place of which you may have heard:

We refer to Massachusetts.

In population, Massachusetts is five times Estonia's size (6.8 million v. 1.3 million). For various reasons, its student population involves the kind of demographic challenges Estonia's pretty much doesn't.

Here's what you won't read in the Times. In science and reading, Massachusetts matched Estonia's scores. It fell short only in math. Estonia scored at the top of the world in science and reading—but so did Massachusetts.

(To access all scores, click here.)

When Massachusetts participated as an independent entity in the 2011 Timss, it scored near the top of the world in both science and math. In reading and science, it has now performed near the top of the world on the 2015 Pisa.

You won't read such things in the Times. The Times, which has now disappeared the Timss, seems to be giving you only such news as it's desirable for you to hear.

Massachusetts is bigger and closer to home. Except for reasons of propaganda, why can't the public be told?

Meanwhile, what's the story with Denmark: Denmark didn't score especially well on last year's Pisa at all. In reading and science, its scores are statistically indistinguishable from the United States as a whole.

It scored near the middle in science and reading, did somewhat better in math. What makes it one of that "handful of places?"

We have no idea. King Andreas said?

Brian slams Name Withheld's talking points!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2016

Denounces them three nights later: As we noted on Wednesday, Brian Williams got waylaid by former CIA Director James Woolsey on Monday evening's 11th Hour.

Woolsey is part of the Trump transition team. He produced a ton of gorilla dust during his solo interview segment with Brian.

Brian wanted to know if Donald J. Trump should stop contradicting the findings of the intelligence community. This was his perfectly sensible opening question to the perfectly ludicrous Woolsey:

WILLIAMS (12/12/16): Director Wooley, is the president-elect wrong to so openly dismiss the findings of his incoming intelligence community?

Woolsey proceeded to burn the entire segment with reams of misdirection. He kept saying there was no evidence that the Russians had hacked into any voting machines. As such, he was doggedly denying a claim no one had actually made.

Brian just say there and took it. To see him let Woolsey have his way, you should just click here.

That was Monday night. Three nights later, Brian struck.

Last night, he spoke with Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia. Midway through the interview, Brian finally pushed back, if a bit imprecisely:

WILLIAMS (12/15/16): Back to Mr. Putin, to the point you made about him. I'm sure you join us in being fascinated at the normalization effort by some this past week, the folks who are going out of their way to give him the benefit of the doubt.

We've had a former CIA director on this broadcast this week, we've had a Republican senator, both doing the same thing, and very similar talking points. Tell us about the Vladimir Putin you came to know.

Three nights later, Brian was pushing back against Woolsey's talking points. Except he didn't mention Woolsey's name or say what the talking points were.

He also didn't say what was wrong with the talking points. Most important, he didn't challenge Woolsey's gorilla dust when Woolsey was actually there.

To watch last night's interview with McFaul, just click here.

On Monday night, Williams let Woolsey eat him for lunch. Three nights later, grateful viewers were treated to a vague no-name rebuttal.

Concerning that Republican senator: The senator in question seems to have been Wisconsin's Ron Johnson. He appeared with Brian on Tuesday night.

To watch Johnson push his alleged talking points, you can just click here. That said, we'll have to be honest: to our ear, he didn't sound much like Woolsey.

We'd have to say that Brian's work with these worthies has been a bit weird this week. Maybe he was suffering flashbacks from one of his old firefights.

DRUM AND JONES—AND US: We love to loathe the white working class!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2016

Say their name, Lilla prescribes: We liberals!

We love to loathe the white working class. In the wake of last month's election, a person might even call this a bit of a fatal flaw.

"Sounding like a frustrated Cassandra," Vice President Biden lamented this tribal proclivity yesterday on CNN. The description comes from today's New York Times, which quotes part of what Biden said.

“I mean these are good people, man!” Biden is said to have exclaimed. “These aren’t racists. These aren’t sexists.”

Or so Biden said. We liberals tend to know different. For a recent example of what we mean, consider what Markos said. First, though, consider Sarah Kliff's detailed report for Vox.

Kliff spoke to several Trump voters who had managed to get health insurance through Obamacare. She reported from Corbin, Kentucky, part of Whitley County.

For many people, life in Corbin ain't no crystal stair. According to the American Community Survey, 22.8% of the population are living below the federal poverty level.

In Whitley County, the figure stands at 26.0%. That compares to the national figure of 15.5%.

Why would lower-income rustics cast those votes for Trump? Kliff spoke with Kathy Oller, who has spent the past three years "signing up fellow Kentuckians for Obamacare."

Oller did this as her full-time job, a job whose provenance Kliff never explained.

Why would someone insured through Obamacare vote for Candidate Trump? At one point, Oller described one woman's situation, which may have been fairly typical. Highly-evolved progressives like Markos don't seem to care about this:

KLIFF (12/13/16): Oller has traveled around Corbin enrolling residents in health care plans since the coverage expansion started in 2014. And lately, she says, she’s watched the plans get more and more expensive.

[...]

Oller renewed a 59-year-old woman’s coverage (who asked her personal information be left out of this story) just after lunchtime on a Tuesday. She and her husband received a monthly tax credit that would cover most of their premium. But they would still need to contribute $244 each month—and face a $6,000 deductible.

The woman said she had insurance before the Affordable Care Act that was significantly more affordable, with $5 copays and no deductible at all. She said she paid only $200 or $300 each month without a subsidy.

The deductible left her exasperated. “I am totally afraid to be sick,” she says. “I don’t have [that money] to pay upfront if I go to the hospital tomorrow.”

Her plan did offer free preventive care, an Obamacare mandate. But she skips mammograms and colonoscopies because she doesn’t think she’d have the money to pay for any follow-up care if the doctors did detect something.

The woman said she only buys insurance as financial protection—“to keep from losing my house if something major happened,” she says. “But I’m not using it to go to the doctor. I’ve not used anything.”

The woman was mad because her costs felt overwhelmingly expensive. These are some of the most common frustrations with the Affordable Care Act. Surveys show that high deductibles are the top complaint; 47 percent of enrollees told the Kaiser Family Foundation they were dissatisfied with their deductible.

A study from the Commonwealth Fund earlier this year found that four in 10 adults on Affordable Care Act plans didn’t think they could afford to go to the doctor if they got sick. Fewer than half said it was easy to find an affordable plan.

If we might borrow again from Dylan: But oh, what kind of health care is this which goes from bad to worse?

Oller was describing people who are paying for insurance each month but can't afford to see a doctor. We're relying here on Kliff's reporting and expertise. We don't have independent knowledge of the way the ACA works.

That said, this is the third time, in the past few weeks, that we've encountered working-class people offering such complaints. We heard the Colombian immigrant on Brian Lehrer's NPR program describing a similar problem faced by her sister. And when Van Jones went to Trumbull County, Ohio, lifelong Democrat Scott Seitz told him this:

"I think that [Obama] is a good man and he did all he could and we supported him for two elections. And then when those changes really didn't come about and Obamacare actually affected me personally with my own mother, I think we needed a change once again."

Obamacare affected him personally with his own mother? Seitz wasn't asked to explain. But when Kliff spoke to Oller, she was told about economically struggling people who have coverage under Obamacare but can't afford actual health care.

Because we loathe these people so much, this produces little sympathy from our most highly-evolved liberal stars. We liberals! We roll our eyes and wonder why these "idiots" voted for Trump.

In this piece for Salon, Gary Legum criticized those Corbin voters for their "selective hearing." In the process, he produced a world-class example of selective hearing himself.

(Note how quickly Legum skips past the problem we've just described.)

At one point, Legum linked to Markos, who had offered some uplifting thoughts about a related situation in Pennsylvania coal country. Why should We give a fig about Them? Thoughtful headline included:

MOULITSAS (12/12/16): Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance. They're getting exactly what they voted for

Hillary Clinton won the election, but a system designed to let a powerful minority override the will of the majority selected some asshole. For now, we have to deal with that bullshit reality, and lots of good people will suffer serious consequences. But don’t feel sorry for the ones who enabled this nightmare by voting for the incoming Trump-Putin administration. For example, why should we weep for the retired coal miners who will now lose their health insurance thanks to the GOP majority—despite the best efforts of coal-state Democrats to change the outcome?

Yes, this will be a terrible outcome for a group of people who have really drawn a shitty lot in life. But how sorry should we be for this crowd? Coal country swung hard for Donald Trump, winning 70 to 80 percent of the vote in some of these counties.

Don’t weep for these coal miners, now abandoned by their GOP patrons. They are getting exactly the government that they voted for. Democrats can no longer offer unrequited love and cover for them. And isn’t this what democracy is all about? They won the election! This is what they wanted!

"This is what they wanted!" Increasingly, snark is Us.

People like Markos love to loathe "this crowd." As everyone seems to know except Us, this loathing has long been part of our liberal identity.

At the New Republic, Sarah Jones filed her report under this headline: "Liberals should try not having so much contempt for the poor."

After quoting part of what Markos had said, she cited Paul Krugman, who had responded to Kliff by saying, for the third time, that working-class people only "imagine" that we liberals look down on their kind. In a tweet which seemed to be about Kliff's report, Krugman had snarked a bit:

"People voted Trump to spite liberals who (they imagined) thought them ignorant, are now shocked that they may lose health care. Just saying."

Krugman was just saying! He should have less contempt for "the Joe Sixpacks," Jones was willing to say.

All this week, we've been asking a basic question. Is it possible that last month's election result reflects some possible shortcoming in Us? Is there some way we could improve our game?

During a kitschy CNN town hall program, Van Jones answered in the affirmative. Responding to one of Krugman's tweets, Kevin Drum acknowledged that of course we liberals do tend to sneer at the white working class.

Krugman doesn't seem to understand this; that's a remarkable fact about an invaluable policy maven. That said, Drum himself seemed to skip past the major way we liberals now sneer at the white working class. In comments, Drum's readers seemed to have no idea about the way this syndrome currently works.

How do we liberals sneer at Those People? Let's return to Van Jones.

When Van Jones went to Ohio, Seitz seemed to express a great deal of hostility toward Hillary Clinton. "She hurt us," Seitz said. He seemed to say that Clinton had completely ignored Ohio's white working class.

If only! We recalled what Clinton had said on that one self-defeating occasion:

"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it!...Now some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."

Oof! Clinton went on to say that the other half of Trump's supporters aren't deplorables. But this was an amazingly impolitic thing to say.

Let's be fair. During a long campaign, every candidate says something dumb or unwise. The problem here isn't the fact that Candidate Clinton unwisely said this. The larger problem here is the fact that she may actually think this.

She may think that she's somehow able to make such sweeping assessments. But clearly, that's what multitudes think within our self-impressed tribe.

One again, let's be fair. In damning only half of Trump's voters, Clinton was being the softy. Again and again, we liberals seem to say that all Trump voters are in that first basket. We're filled with contempt for these people, much as Sarah Jones said.

Krugman keeps saying that The Others are just imagining this. Rolling his eyes at this foolishness, Drum said we sneer at The Others in a wide array of ways. But he didn't mention the sweeping way we bomb them as racists and bigots.

In comments, Drum's readers discussed these ideas. Almost no one seemed aware of the main way We trash Those People.

We trash them as racists and bigots—and, as commenters quickly showed, we also trash them as "idiots." Our loathing erodes our hearts and our minds. When we read about low-income women who can't afford to go to the doctor, we aren't able to understand the words we've just read.

Why should we care about people like Them? On the tuffet he has built, Markos wants to know this.

Shortly after Election Day, Professor Lilla wrote a lengthy piece for the New York Times' Sunday Review. We'll skip his wider-ranging thoughts to focus on one suggestion.

Lilla thinks the liberal world is sunk in "identity politics." You can assess those claims for yourself. We'll only recommend the one highlighted point:

LILLA (11/18/16): One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don't, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.

If you mention one group, you need to mention them all! When Jones went to Ohio to speak with Seitz, Seitz complained that Candidate Clinton hadn't said his group's name.

Clinton had mentioned every group. Every group but his.

In this morning's New York Times, Tom Vilsack joins Biden in suggesting more outreach to the white working class. He says Democrats should advocate for blacks and for Hispanics. But he says we should also advocate for Them—for women in Colonel Sanders' home town who can't afford to go to the doctor.

Most of us don't know how to contemplate that. Stretching back perhaps fifty years, loathing for the white working class has been a key part of our game. This leaves us mocking those who were failed by our glorious, pissant health plan—the health plan in which we lazily failed to tackle the interests which have made American health care clownishly expensive as compared to that in the rest of the world.

We're too lazy and too dumb to kick up at The Interests. Instead, we kick down at low-income women who can't afford to go to the doctor. Given the fact that they voted for Trump, why should we care about them?

We agree with Vilsack, and with that one prescription by Lilla. Liberals should learn to say their name—also, to show less contempt.

Granted, our loathing makes us feel good. But how did it work out this time?

In which we recommend a new heart and mind!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2016

She comes from way down there: As we mentioned a few weeks back, southwest Virginia coal country is so far southwest that you're out somewhere beyond Oklahoma by the time you finally get there.

Long ago, we used to perform there, at the aptly-named Down the Shaft lounge in the Norton Holiday Inn. Just this afternoon, we're heartened to learn about a new voice who started out in that region.

Her name is Sarah Jones. She's at The New Republic.

We'll suggest that you start with this. This serves as the headline for the short piece:

"Liberals should try not having so much contempt for the poor."

How much more do you need to hear? We strongly suggest that you read it.

After that, we'll recommend her twitter feed. You can just click here.

In reading through those tweets, we learned that Krugman has fallen for the third time. Two days ago, he said it again. Those People "imagine" that we liberals look down on them!

How blind we liberals manage to be! Blind, helpless, natural-born losers.

More on these topics tomorrow: We'll go ahead and quote the other professor now:

"If you're going to mention groups in America, you'd better mention all of them."

DRUM AND JONES—AND US: Thinking hard about fast food!

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2016

Part 4—Drum lists the ways we sneer: On December 9, Matt Yglesias was thinking hard about fast food.

Nothing he said was actually "wrong." But it led to a mindless debate.

More precisely, Yglesias was thinking hard about the politics of fast food. More specifically, he was talking about the politics of fast food in relation to those rude blokes, the white working class.

You see, Donald J. Trump had nominated a fast food baron to head the Department of Labor. To some sensibilities, this was the latest in a succession of nominations which have seemed a bit like a serial from The Onion.

The nomination got Yglesias thinking about the way we liberals disapprove of fast food—more precisely, about the signals we liberals send when we display this cultural prejudice.

Nothing he said was necessarily "wrong." He closed his piece like this:

YGLESIAS (12/9/16): Working-class people who enjoy both fast-food burgers and beer are well aware that Trump likes Big Macs too, while Democrats think it’s very important to make sure SNAP benefits are redeemable at farmers markets so rich and poor alike can enjoy the benefits of eating local, seasonal produce. Trump doesn’t drink beer, but he doesn’t advertise that fact.

This is identity politics just as much as campaigning with the Mothers of the Movement is. Neither Trump nor Puzder is, obviously, a real working-class person. But there’s an old joke about two barefoot guys in the woods who come across a bear.

One starts lacing up his sneakers, and the other asks why, pointing out that he’s never going to outrun the bear.

“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” he explains. “I just need to outrun you.”

A Thickburger or two doesn’t make Trump a member of the white working class. But it’s good enough to outrun the vast majority of Democratic Party elected officials from either of the main factions.

None of this was necessarily "wrong." But it led to a silly debate.

First in was Professor Krugman. He linked to Yglesias' "interesting post," then said, once again, that he thinks Those People in the white working-class are just imagining things when they say that We ridicule Them.

Krugman had made that specific assessment in this column just two weeks before. On this day, responding to Yglesias, he said this in a Times blog post:

KRUGMAN (12/9/16): Do the liberals sneer at the Joe Sixpacks? Actually, I’ve never heard it—the people I hang out with do understand that living the way they do takes a lot more money and time than hard-pressed Americans have, and aren’t especially judgmental about lifestyles. But it’s easy to see how the sense that liberals look down on regular folks might arise, and be fanned by right-wing media.

Long ago and far away, Times film critic Pauline Kael became famous for saying that she knew only one person who'd voted for President Nixon. (Nixon had won 49 states, gaining 61 percent of the vote.)

Now, in response to Yglesias' post, Krugman said he's never heard any liberals sneering at "the Joe Sixpacks." He did say it was easy to see how this misimpression might arise—and after that, the misimpression would be fanned by right-wing media! It would be all Their fault!

Kevin Drum said this was totally nuts. In saying this was totally nuts, Drum was totally right.

Having said that, we must also say this—we think Drum may have been pulling some punches this day. At best, we're forced to compare his analysis to a value-sized fries, as opposed to a full Happy Meal:

DRUM (12/9/16): I'm not here to get into a fight with Krugman, but come on. Sure, the right-wing media fans the flames of this stuff, but is there really any question that liberal city folks tend to sneer at rural working-class folks? I'm not even talking about stuff like abortion and guns and gay marriage, where we disagree over major points of policy. I'm talking about lifestyle. Krugman talks about fast food, and that's a decent example. Working-class folks like fast food, which explains why Donald Trump liked to show pictures of himself eating McDonald's or KFC. It's a sign that he's one of them. Ditto for Trump's famous trucker hat. (Did you even know that it's a trucker hat, not a baseball cap? He did.)

If I felt like this was something that actually needs evidence, I could produce a million examples in a very short time. But everyone gets this, don't they? We sneer at their starchy food. We sneer at their holy-roller megachurches. (But not at black churches; never that.) We sneer at their favorite TV shows. We sneer at their reading habits. We sneer at their guns. We sneer at their double-wides. We sneer at the tchotchkes that litter their houses. We sneer at their supermarket tabloids. We sneer at their music. We sneer at their leisure activities. We sneer at their blunt patriotism. We sneer at—

Again: come on. Maybe you personally don't do it—though judging from the comments here, a lot of you do—but you hardly need to be an anthropologist to recognize that this kind of sneering shows up on TV, in newspapers, on Twitter, in books, on Facebook, and in private conversations all the time. It's hard to believe that anyone is really blind to this.

Drum rolled his eyes at what Krugman had said. He listed millions of ways we liberals sneer at Those People. "It's hard to believe that anyone is really blind to this," he said.

Incomparably, we read many of the 539 comments which readers appended to Drum's post. We'd have to say Krugman wasn't alone. In our view, the substantial bulk of those people seemed to be "blind to this" too,

And uh-oh! Perusing the long list of Drum's examples, we'd almost say that he might be a tiny bit blind to this too. He'd ordered the McDonald's hotcakes, but he'd passed on the sausage!

Sneermeisters, let's be fair! Drum was right in every example he offered. And yes, we sneer at Them about fast food. Just consider what Sarah Kliff did.

In service to Vox, Kliff recently ventured to wildest southeastern Kentucky to talk to some of Those Voters. Why had these idiots voted for Candidate Trump? More specifically, why had people receiving insurance through Obamacare voted for a candidate who had vowed to repeal the program?

Kliff's report is lengthy; it's also very much worth reading. That said, before Kliff began exploring those questions, she sketched the cultural landscape:

KLIFF (12/13/16): Corbin is a small town in southeastern Kentucky, a place where cross-country truckers driving up and down I-75 will stop for the night. Its biggest tourist attraction is the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, which boasts an impressive collection of Harland Sanders memorabilia.

Beneath that bit of travelogue, Kliff included two color photos.

One was a photo of Sanders himself—the colonel, not the senator. The other photo was a close-up of some Christmas decorations. "By early December, downtown Corbin was heavily decorated for Christmas," Kliff's caption analytically said.

In the photo proffered by Kliff, the decorations look a bit kitschy. That said, the level of decoration doesn't look very heavy. Cities and towns all over the country prepare for Christmas this way.

Was Kliff perhaps sneering at Corbin a bit on a fast-food basis? We stopped to wonder why this passage had been included in her valuable piece at all. The population of ridiculous little Corbin stood a bit above 7200 in 2012. Do we normally describe such towns in terms of their tourist attractions?

We ourselves grew up in two towns—Winchester, Mass. (population roughly 18,000 at the time) and San Mateo, California (roughly 65,000). Today, each community lands on the affluent, chic-and-cool side of the cultural scale. But does either town boast a "tourist attraction?" When did that become the way we introduce such places to readers?

A sensitive soul could have seen a quick sneer in Kliff's excursion into Kentucky Fried Chicken and kitschy Christmas fare. That same soul might have taken giant offense at what happened after Kevin Drum commented on Kliff's report.

Drum posted excerpts in which three Obamacare enrollees discussed their reasons for supporting Trump. "We can complain about this all we want, but that's the reality out there," he wrote, or perhaps almost sniffed.

A person could have heard a bit of a sniff in that comment. Drum had also included an aside about one of these voters, Ruby Atkins, which seemed to suggest that she'd made a very dumb comment to Kliff. (Based on Kliff's report, we can find no reason to think that.)

Drum's readers ran with this tone. In his post, Drum cited "several smallish problems" with Obamacare. Mainly, he discussed the way the Obama Administration didn't "bust the budget" to fund the program and didn't "oversell" it.

To our ear, Kliff's report seems to suggest that those "smallish problems" were actually very large problems for Corbin enrollees. More specifically, they said their deductibles were so high that, while they technically had health insurance, they simply weren't able to use it.

To our ear, Drum blew past the gist of Kliff's essay; his readers took things from there. As we noted yesterday, they began staging the standard discussions of what "idiots" Those Corbin Folk were.

What other word could they possibly use? Inquiring minds couldn't imagine!

Those readers didn't give a flying fark about the problems confronting Those People. Meanwhile, at the very top of our liberal food chain, the most important journalist of the past fifteen years had just said, for the second time, that Those People are just imagining things when they say that we liberals sneer.

Back to Drum's rebuttal to Krugman:

Drum listed roughly a thousand ways we liberals sneer at Those People. That said, the most obvious ways we liberals sneer were missing from his list.

Tomorrow, we'll consider those omissions from this Christmas list. We'll also return to the resentment of Scott Seitz—the resentment Van Jones didn't have time to explore in his kitschy "town hall" CNN special.

We'll also mention one key part of what Professor Lilla said. For today, we'll issue a spoiler:

"Say their name," Lilla said.

Tomorrow: The sneering that didn't bark