TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 2017
The analysts want to know: Here on the site of our sprawling campus, we became Al Franken fans in 1996 and not a minute before.
It was in that year that Franken published his book, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.
We didn't become a Franken fan because he said Limbaugh was fat. It happened because Franken explained the pseudo-debate about Newt Gingrich's Medicare plan, the pseudo-debate which had baffled American journalists day after day, and night after night, for at least the previous year.
Was Gingrich proposing a cut in Medicare? Or was he simply slowing the rate at which the program would grow? The best-known minds at our biggest news orgs had fanned on the question night after night after night after night on such programs as Crossfire.
Our journalists simply weren't up to the task. As part of a generally humorous book, it turned out that Franken was.
(We had solved the same riddle in an op-ed for the Baltimore Sun; apparently, you had to be a comedian to solve the riddle of the Medicare pseudo-debate in 1995. When this site went on-line, we posted three versions of the explanation. You can read all three award-winning versions here—short, medium and long.)
As you know, we never discuss our joke-writing for former presidential candidates. But during one campaign, we teamed telephonically with Franken and others to produce award-winning jokes for a leading contender. Franken was very good at that task. It made us admire him more.
True story:
In November 1999, Candidate Gore went on Imus to discuss the famous "pop quiz" which Candidate Bush had just failed.
Perhaps because the appearance was so funny, you weren't encouraged to hear much about it. We couldn't find tape of the session on YouTube this morning, although it may exist. The New York Times discussed the appearance in this tiny news report.
Inevitably, the Times was required to throw some shade. They did so the very next day.
We had nothing to do with that very funny appearance. We've always assumed it was Franken's work, although the candidate delivered the material perfectly. It's always possible that the candidate prepared the material himself, though we'll guess he may have been otherwise occupied, consulting Naomi Wolf about clothes and sewing more buttons on suits.
Al Franken was very good at giving candidates jokes; he was also very smart. We also admired the way he made the turn to his Senate career. During his first term, he put a lid on his previous persona, smartly playing to win.
Today, we had the misfortune of reading a new report at Slate. Even worse, we watched the videotape which accompanies the report.
Slate's report seems to have been written for troubled 9-year-olds. It appears beneath this silly headline:
"Chuck Grassley Yells at Al Franken Over the Jeff Sessions Controversy During Senate Hearing"
When you read the Slate report, you're supposed to be appalled at the way Senator Grassley "yelled at" Franken during today's hearing, creating a terrible "blow-up." You're supposed to admire the way our champion stood by his heroic question to then-Senator Sessions, the one he asked on February 10.
Our reaction to the 8-minute videotape was completely different. We were dismayed and disappointed by Franken's self-important bloviation displays.
We don't agree with Grassley's claim that Franken asked Sessions a "gotcha question;" his question was fuzzy but fair. But what have they done with the real Al Franken? His self-importance in that tape is about a thousand times worse than anything Grassley does.
Citizens, can we talk? Franken didn't do a very good job questioning Sessions that day. He didn't follow up on his one question about meetings with Russkies—not during the next round of the hearing itself, not later in written questions.
When Senator Leahy did pose a written question, he assumed that Sessions may have held such meetings, but he only asked if the 2016 election had been discussed at such sessions. No one was busting his ascot about such questions until the chance to stage a moral stampede came along.
At least on the Slate videotape, Franken's new round of questioning today was also unimpressive. When he asked the possible Deputy AG what he will do if he learns of such meetings, he was basically told that he won't do much and won't he please just go away.
Franken let this blow-off stand. Beyond that, he still doesn't seem to have heard that it isn't a crime, or even a scandal, to meet with a Russian official.
Even more strikingly, Franken postures on today's tape like a self-impressed Senator Foghorn. It's depressing to see this decline occur.
These are the wages of moral stampede. Moral stampede and its twin, moral rampage, are very, very bad for the brain and equally bad for the soul.
For the record: That session with Imus may have been the funniest such session a candidate ever performed. (We'll continue to assume that it was Franken's work.)
Helped along by fan boys like Frank Rich, Imus trashed and name-called Candidate Gore every step of the way during Campaign 2000. Despite his hostile predisposition, even the hideous Imus was laughing out loud, and laughing hard, during that rarely-discussed performance.
We always assumed that was Franken's work. What have they done with Al Franken?
THE POLITICS OF MORAL STAMPEDE: Dionne reports what Sessions said!
TUESDAY, MARCH 7, 2017
Part 2—Exactly as we'd predicted: In the street-fighting year of 1966, Susan Sontag published a famous book: Against Interpretation and Other Essays.
It opened with an eponymous essay, Against Interpretation. According to the leading authority, that essay "famously finishes with the words, 'in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.' "
Is that still true? In place of a hermeneutics, do we need an erotics of art today? We'd be inclined to answer your question this way:
In a sense—but not as such!
At any rate, recent attempts to discuss the words of Attorney General Sessions have made us think of Sontag's famous work, or at least of its title. Within the realm of journalism, it's time for us to stop interpreting, as least until we learn to interpret better.
In the modern journalistic context, interpretation frequently starts with shaky paraphrase, fueled by confidence in moral assessments and built upon shards of quotation. So it went in yesterday's Washington Post, when E. J. Dionne reported Sessions' now-famous exchange with Al Franken in precisely the way we described in last Friday's post.
In this passage from Dionne's column, shards of quotation may perhaps have tilted our interpetive scale. At any rate, Dionne reports what was said in exactly the way we predicted:
Personally, we'd skip that interpretation. We'd also skip the snark about Sessions' "convenient memory lapse." (We see no obvious evidence that Sessions suffered a "memory lapse" at all.)
Let's put these issues to this side in favor of something more grand! As you can see in the mark-up we show you below, Dionne reported that February 10 exchange in precisely the way we described last week.
Shards of quotation were found in Dionne's account. A reader of Dionne's column was told that this exchange occurred:
In Dionne's column, three little dots told the reader that some of Franken's remarks had been omitted. There was no sign that Sessions' reply had been edited at all.
Our view? For our money, Dionne's editing may have tilted the interpretive scale a tad. He omitted the part of Franken's (somewhat rambling) question in which he referred to new allegations 1) that "Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump" and 2) that "there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump's surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government."
(Franken was quoting CNN. If these new claims are true, he said, "it's obviously extremely serious.")
Dionne also omitted the part of Sessions' brief reply in which he said, "Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities." As Sessions started his answer, he thereby signaled that he was discussing the "obviously extremely serious" activities to which Franken had referred.
Might these omissions keep us from seeing what Sessions meant in the part of his answer we were allowed to see? Did Sessions possibly mean something like this:
"I didn’t have communications with the Russians of that obviously extremely serious type."
Plainly, that isn't what Sessions said. Could that be what he meant? We don't have the slightest idea. Nor do we massively care.
In our view, the moral stampede surrounding that answer is more significant, by far, than Sessions' intention in giving his rather brief answer. We say that because you can always ask Sessions what he meant by his answer. But once a moral stampede occurs, it's hard to recall the political forces it may have unloosed.
What did Sessions mean by his answer? Franken didn't ask a follow-up question that day, nor did he follow up with later written questions.
When Senator Patrick Leahy did pose a written follow-up question about any possible meetings between Sessions and Russian officials, he framed his question extremely narrowly. He didn't seem to care about any such meetings, except to the extent that the 2016 election might have been discussed at such meetings.
Leahy asked if the election has been discussed in any such meetings. He didn't ask if any such meetings had occurred.
In all candor, Franken, Leahy and other Democrats didn't seem hugely interested in meetings with Russian officials as a general matter. In his follow-up written question, Leahy inquired about any such meetings, but only in a narrow context.
(As soon as the moral stampede began, Leahy ran to CNN and flatly misstated what he had asked. No one in our tribe's moral stampede seemed offended by that.)
Are we after information concerning Trump and the Russians? Or is it really moral outrage we seek?
(As Moses asks in the Paul Reiser joke: Are we here to play golf? Or are we just gonna f*ck around?)
Have we liberals simply been seeking the latest chance to voice our high-minded moral outrage? We'll postpone our search for an erotics of art until we examine that question in more detail.
For ourselves, we aren't real concerned by Sessions' answer to Franken. The moral stampede, which feels quite familiar, seems like a larger concern.
We're also concerned by the lack of interpretive skill put on display in this episode. Again and again in the past thirty years, our politics has been been defined by interpretive episodes of this highly charged type.
What did Politician A actually mean by Statement Y? Alas! When we try to answer such questions, our level of interpretive skill often seems strikingly low.
In the next few days, we'll look at a few such interpretive episodes. Again and again, we'll see a large amount of moral heat producing an absence of light.
First example: Did Donald J. Trump blame the generals for what happened in Yemen last month? When Hewitt and Maddow clashed by night concerning this somewhat minor point, we almost thought we saw the role of unyielding true belief in our moral stampedes.
Tomorrow: Did Donald J. Trump blame the generals for what happened in Yemen? Coming Thursday: The most consequential interpretive episode of the past twenty-five years.
The full text of the exchange: Here's the full text of the exchange from which Dionne drew his shards:
Part 2—Exactly as we'd predicted: In the street-fighting year of 1966, Susan Sontag published a famous book: Against Interpretation and Other Essays.
It opened with an eponymous essay, Against Interpretation. According to the leading authority, that essay "famously finishes with the words, 'in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.' "
Is that still true? In place of a hermeneutics, do we need an erotics of art today? We'd be inclined to answer your question this way:
In a sense—but not as such!
At any rate, recent attempts to discuss the words of Attorney General Sessions have made us think of Sontag's famous work, or at least of its title. Within the realm of journalism, it's time for us to stop interpreting, as least until we learn to interpret better.
In the modern journalistic context, interpretation frequently starts with shaky paraphrase, fueled by confidence in moral assessments and built upon shards of quotation. So it went in yesterday's Washington Post, when E. J. Dionne reported Sessions' now-famous exchange with Al Franken in precisely the way we described in last Friday's post.
In this passage from Dionne's column, shards of quotation may perhaps have tilted our interpetive scale. At any rate, Dionne reports what was said in exactly the way we predicted:
DIONNE (3/6/17): The Post’s revelation last week that Attorney General Jeff Sessions misled the Senate about his two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak came after Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, lied about the nature of his own Russian contacts. Flynn stuck to false claims about his conversations with Kislyak until The Post and other media blew them out of the water. Flynn had to resign.Credit where due. Dionne didn't thunder that Sessions "lied" to Franken. He did judge that Sessions "misled the Senate."
Sessions’s convenient memory lapse (“I didn’t have—did not have communications with the Russians”) was especially jarring because it came after an inquiry from Sen. Al Franken in which the Minnesota Democrat did not even ask Sessions whether he met with Russians.
Franken’s query ended this way: “. . . if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?”
Why did Sessions think he had to respond to a question that wasn’t even posed?
Personally, we'd skip that interpretation. We'd also skip the snark about Sessions' "convenient memory lapse." (We see no obvious evidence that Sessions suffered a "memory lapse" at all.)
Let's put these issues to this side in favor of something more grand! As you can see in the mark-up we show you below, Dionne reported that February 10 exchange in precisely the way we described last week.
Shards of quotation were found in Dionne's account. A reader of Dionne's column was told that this exchange occurred:
FRANKEN: . . . if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?For the full text of that exchange, see below. Let's return to Dionne's account of that exchange:
SESSIONS: I didn’t have—did not have communications with the Russians.
In Dionne's column, three little dots told the reader that some of Franken's remarks had been omitted. There was no sign that Sessions' reply had been edited at all.
Our view? For our money, Dionne's editing may have tilted the interpretive scale a tad. He omitted the part of Franken's (somewhat rambling) question in which he referred to new allegations 1) that "Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump" and 2) that "there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump's surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government."
(Franken was quoting CNN. If these new claims are true, he said, "it's obviously extremely serious.")
Dionne also omitted the part of Sessions' brief reply in which he said, "Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities." As Sessions started his answer, he thereby signaled that he was discussing the "obviously extremely serious" activities to which Franken had referred.
Might these omissions keep us from seeing what Sessions meant in the part of his answer we were allowed to see? Did Sessions possibly mean something like this:
"I didn’t have communications with the Russians of that obviously extremely serious type."
Plainly, that isn't what Sessions said. Could that be what he meant? We don't have the slightest idea. Nor do we massively care.
In our view, the moral stampede surrounding that answer is more significant, by far, than Sessions' intention in giving his rather brief answer. We say that because you can always ask Sessions what he meant by his answer. But once a moral stampede occurs, it's hard to recall the political forces it may have unloosed.
What did Sessions mean by his answer? Franken didn't ask a follow-up question that day, nor did he follow up with later written questions.
When Senator Patrick Leahy did pose a written follow-up question about any possible meetings between Sessions and Russian officials, he framed his question extremely narrowly. He didn't seem to care about any such meetings, except to the extent that the 2016 election might have been discussed at such meetings.
Leahy asked if the election has been discussed in any such meetings. He didn't ask if any such meetings had occurred.
In all candor, Franken, Leahy and other Democrats didn't seem hugely interested in meetings with Russian officials as a general matter. In his follow-up written question, Leahy inquired about any such meetings, but only in a narrow context.
(As soon as the moral stampede began, Leahy ran to CNN and flatly misstated what he had asked. No one in our tribe's moral stampede seemed offended by that.)
Are we after information concerning Trump and the Russians? Or is it really moral outrage we seek?
(As Moses asks in the Paul Reiser joke: Are we here to play golf? Or are we just gonna f*ck around?)
Have we liberals simply been seeking the latest chance to voice our high-minded moral outrage? We'll postpone our search for an erotics of art until we examine that question in more detail.
For ourselves, we aren't real concerned by Sessions' answer to Franken. The moral stampede, which feels quite familiar, seems like a larger concern.
We're also concerned by the lack of interpretive skill put on display in this episode. Again and again in the past thirty years, our politics has been been defined by interpretive episodes of this highly charged type.
What did Politician A actually mean by Statement Y? Alas! When we try to answer such questions, our level of interpretive skill often seems strikingly low.
In the next few days, we'll look at a few such interpretive episodes. Again and again, we'll see a large amount of moral heat producing an absence of light.
First example: Did Donald J. Trump blame the generals for what happened in Yemen last month? When Hewitt and Maddow clashed by night concerning this somewhat minor point, we almost thought we saw the role of unyielding true belief in our moral stampedes.
Tomorrow: Did Donald J. Trump blame the generals for what happened in Yemen? Coming Thursday: The most consequential interpretive episode of the past twenty-five years.
The full text of the exchange: Here's the full text of the exchange from which Dionne drew his shards:
FRANKEN (1/10/17): OK. CNN has just published a story—and I'm telling you this about a news story that's just been published. I'm not expecting you to know whether or not it's true or not.
But CNN just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week that included information that, quote, "Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump." These documents also allegedly say, quote, "There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump's surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government."
Now again, I'm telling you this as it's coming out, so—you know. But if it's true, it's obviously extremely serious, and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?
SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn't have, did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it.
In a word, their efforts are sad!
MONDAY, MARCH 6, 2017
Cable pundits try to discuss Trump's claims: We've just watched the usual suspects on CNN and MSNBC as they attempt to discuss Donald J. Trump's wiretapping claims.
In a word, sad! Their skills are virtually non-existent. Donald J. Trump is playing a game they can barely name.
Let's start with the key word "legally." They keep going over the ways Obama could have wiretapped Trump in a legal manner.
Who said anything about legal? Donald J. Trump has never said that Obama wiretapped him legally. It's sad to see the way the straights all blow past this basic point. For one example, here is E. J. Dionne in this morning's Post:
For this reason, there's only one approach to take to claims of this type. You have to note that the accuser—in this case, Donald J. Trump—has offered zero evidence in support of his claim.
Zero evidence; none at all. Pretty much full freaking stop!
You need to draw attention to that fact, and to very few others. But alas! In the hands of our under-skilled cable talkers, we've already seen Trump's wiretap claim end up seeming more credible than it is a very large number of times. By the time they finish will all their talk, they've made it sound like Trump just may be right!
Our pundit corps has peddled bullshit for many, many years. Much of the bullshit has been their own. They've also carried water, for decades, for very shaky accusers. They're much more practiced at selling bullshit than at knocking it down.
They have little experience at trying to ferret the truth. They're mainly skilled at reciting script, not at challenging demagoguery, on which their own engine runs.
Several days later, they still seem to have few skills for dealing with this new unfounded charge. They're so dumb they don't even know that, just as no one "ordered tax" in the famous old joke, Donald J. Trump, the accuser-in-chief, hasn't said squat about "legal."
They've recited for decades now. They're good on Q-ratings, makeup and clothes, unskilled at everything else.
While we're at it: While we're at it, check this guy's idea of a "Muslim ban:"
On cable, they have few skills. On line, our brightest players know how to adjust their game to serve our needs when we start to stampede.
Cable pundits try to discuss Trump's claims: We've just watched the usual suspects on CNN and MSNBC as they attempt to discuss Donald J. Trump's wiretapping claims.
In a word, sad! Their skills are virtually non-existent. Donald J. Trump is playing a game they can barely name.
Let's start with the key word "legally." They keep going over the ways Obama could have wiretapped Trump in a legal manner.
Who said anything about legal? Donald J. Trump has never said that Obama wiretapped him legally. It's sad to see the way the straights all blow past this basic point. For one example, here is E. J. Dionne in this morning's Post:
DIONNE (3/6/17): It appears that Trump issued his wild tweet storm Saturday morning largely on the basis of reports in conspiracy-minded right-wing media."Trump has a problem either way," Dionne says, working from DNC script of the past few days. He imagines two possibilities:
He signaled his lack of evidence first by reportedly pushing his White House staff to ransack sensitive intelligence information to find support for his claim. Then on Sunday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump wanted Congress to look into the matter and that the administration would offer no further comment.
Trump has a problem either way. If he was not wiretapped, he invented a spectacularly false charge. And if a court ordered some sort of surveillance of him, on what grounds did it do so?
1) Trump didn't get wiretapped at all.E. J. Dionne graduated summa cum laude from Harvard. But because he was working from script, he didn't consider the obvious third possibility. It's hard to believe that we won't hear it bruited around in the end, if only on right-wing talk shows:
2) Trump got wiretapped legally, with "a court order[ing] some sort of surveillance of him."
3) Trump was wiretapped illegally, by a gang of "plumbers."Earth to six- and seven-figure journalists: Donald J. Trump is playing a game it's fairly easy for him to win, at least within his own tribe. As a general matter, neither Barack Obama, nor anyone else, can prove that he didn't engage in a certain action. If Trump wants to claim that Obama sent in a gang of plumbers, no one will ever be able to prove that it didn't happen.
For this reason, there's only one approach to take to claims of this type. You have to note that the accuser—in this case, Donald J. Trump—has offered zero evidence in support of his claim.
Zero evidence; none at all. Pretty much full freaking stop!
You need to draw attention to that fact, and to very few others. But alas! In the hands of our under-skilled cable talkers, we've already seen Trump's wiretap claim end up seeming more credible than it is a very large number of times. By the time they finish will all their talk, they've made it sound like Trump just may be right!
Our pundit corps has peddled bullshit for many, many years. Much of the bullshit has been their own. They've also carried water, for decades, for very shaky accusers. They're much more practiced at selling bullshit than at knocking it down.
They have little experience at trying to ferret the truth. They're mainly skilled at reciting script, not at challenging demagoguery, on which their own engine runs.
Several days later, they still seem to have few skills for dealing with this new unfounded charge. They're so dumb they don't even know that, just as no one "ordered tax" in the famous old joke, Donald J. Trump, the accuser-in-chief, hasn't said squat about "legal."
They've recited for decades now. They're good on Q-ratings, makeup and clothes, unskilled at everything else.
While we're at it: While we're at it, check this guy's idea of a "Muslim ban:"
UNNAMED LIBERAL PUNDIT (3/6/17: The big difference here is that the [new] Muslim ban applies only to new visa applicants, not to folks who already have a visa. In addition, Iraq has been removed from the list and green card holders are exempt. The temporary refugee suspension, which applies to every country, appears unchanged."Iraq has been removed from the list," joining dozens of other Muslim countries around the world. But so what? To promote your endless tribal pleasure, it's still a "Muslim ban."
On cable, they have few skills. On line, our brightest players know how to adjust their game to serve our needs when we start to stampede.
An important column by Charlie Peters!
MONDAY, MARCH 6, 2017
From Krugman, a puzzling claim: Paul Krugman makes a puzzling claim in this morning's column. First, though, let's consider yesterday's essay by Charlie Peters.
Peters was born in West Virginia—in 1926! He founded the Washington Monthly in 1969. According to the leading authority, he continued to write his "Tilting at Windmills" column until 2014.
Today, Peters is 90 years old. Yesterday, in the New York Times' Sunday Review, he published an important political memoir beneath a sad headline:
"I Remember When Appalachia Wasn’t Trump Country"
Peters discusses the political history which turned his native West Virginia from blue to red. But uh-oh! He builds his analysis around an unpleasant topic—the alleged arrogance and snobbishness of our liberal elites.
He starts in 1965, "the year everything began to change." In that year, he says we liberals began to sneer at the unwashed concerning Vietnam. What follows is hard to read, but it isn;t untrue:
From there, he runs through a series of topics, culminating with this:
It seems to us there's a great deal of merit in Peters' observations. He discusses the important issues and topics which have defined American politics in the roughly fifty years since he founded the Monthly.
Concerning each topic, he says "the liberal position is on the whole the right one." But uh-oh! In every instance, he says the "snobbish disdain" of liberal elites has helped create the modern world, the one in which Donald J. Trump swept the votes of his once-liberal state, with the more liberal party's candidate telling large swaths of the electorate that they were "irredeemable" "deplorables.
(If we might borrow from Jeff Foxworthy: You may be irredeemable if...you're thinking of voting for Trump.)
We're inclined to think that Peters is right in his basic outline. We'll offer more thoughts on the topics he raises as the week proceeds. We think of that kid our freshman year (1965) disrespecting that cafeteria lady. We think of Name Withheld in South Carolina and her fascinating rage about "northern condescension" (circa 1989).
With that, we turn to Brother Krugman's column. What on earth—what in the world—led him to make these puzzling statements about the GOP's long-standing, flim-flammable pledge to replace Obamacare with something "terrific" and better?
According to Krugman, Republican leaders "have belatedly discovered what [people like Krugman] tried to tell them all along" about the difficulty of replacing Obamacare. They "seem utterly shocked to find themselves facing reality" about this problem, because "they’ve never bothered to understand how anything important works."
Where does this lunacy come from? In that passage, Krugman clearly says that Republican leaders didn't understand the things he's repeatedly said about Obamacare. We have no idea why he would think or say such a thing.
It's always possible that some Republican office-holders didn't (and don't) understand the nature of the problem. But why would Krugman want to vouch for their honesty as a group?
Krugman has explicitly said, for years, that Paul Ryan is a con man peddling versions of flimflam. Now, he says the Republican leadership simply didn't understand!
Moral stampedes tend to weaken the mind. When our smartest player writes this way, you can see the problems we're facing as we replace attempts at outreach with outrage and moral thunder.
Back to Charlie Peters:
Liberals need to find ways to explain topics like "repeal and replace" to the many voters we've lost. We need to tell them they've been conned by the leaders they've come to trust, and that they have a citizen's duty to consider this claim.
Alas! Those voters are disinclined to listen to us, in part because of the decades of snobbery Peters cites. If they did, they'd find us saying bewildering things like this. Who knows? Maybe Donald Trump really believed that Obama was born in Kenya!
Baseball season starts in four weeks. Seven years into this rolling con, can anyone here play this game?
Coming attraction: Way back in 2005, Krugman wrote important columns about the ridiculous per-person cost of American health care. For one example, click here.
Questions:
1) Why didn't our other liberal heroes follow Krugman's lead on this topic, which has completely disappeared from our public discourse?
2) Does their silence derive from what Peters said about their money chase?
From Krugman, a puzzling claim: Paul Krugman makes a puzzling claim in this morning's column. First, though, let's consider yesterday's essay by Charlie Peters.
Peters was born in West Virginia—in 1926! He founded the Washington Monthly in 1969. According to the leading authority, he continued to write his "Tilting at Windmills" column until 2014.
Today, Peters is 90 years old. Yesterday, in the New York Times' Sunday Review, he published an important political memoir beneath a sad headline:
"I Remember When Appalachia Wasn’t Trump Country"
Peters discusses the political history which turned his native West Virginia from blue to red. But uh-oh! He builds his analysis around an unpleasant topic—the alleged arrogance and snobbishness of our liberal elites.
He starts in 1965, "the year everything began to change." In that year, he says we liberals began to sneer at the unwashed concerning Vietnam. What follows is hard to read, but it isn;t untrue:
PETERS (3/5/17): Opposition to the war tended to divide the country along class lines, with the college-educated elite avoiding service and the fighting and dying left to the average man.Hard to read, but far from untrue.
I was against the war but worried about the class division. It seemed to me that too many members of the educated elite not only felt they were morally superior to those who supported the war but even began to feel a snobbish disdain toward the less sophisticated in matters ranging from not attending the right schools to not knowing about wine or, horror of horrors, wearing polyester suits.
From there, he runs through a series of topics, culminating with this:
PETERS: For me, the most maddening failure of the liberal elite was that too many of its members became indifferent to the declining share of corporate income devoted to wages. By the early 1980s, you could see clear evidence of their growing interest in accumulating wealth for themselves, of their focus on corporate profits that would pay them dividends and increase the value of their stocks; “Wall Street Week” soared to popularity on PBS—it was the “Downton Abbey” of its time. Profits have increased since 1980, yet wages have stagnated.Oof! According to Peters, some of our leading liberals may perhaps just possibly have started to chase the greenbacks themselves! He says we increasingly haven't seemed to give a hoot about what was happening to Them, the lesser breed, Down There in the lower orders.
It seems to us there's a great deal of merit in Peters' observations. He discusses the important issues and topics which have defined American politics in the roughly fifty years since he founded the Monthly.
Concerning each topic, he says "the liberal position is on the whole the right one." But uh-oh! In every instance, he says the "snobbish disdain" of liberal elites has helped create the modern world, the one in which Donald J. Trump swept the votes of his once-liberal state, with the more liberal party's candidate telling large swaths of the electorate that they were "irredeemable" "deplorables.
(If we might borrow from Jeff Foxworthy: You may be irredeemable if...you're thinking of voting for Trump.)
We're inclined to think that Peters is right in his basic outline. We'll offer more thoughts on the topics he raises as the week proceeds. We think of that kid our freshman year (1965) disrespecting that cafeteria lady. We think of Name Withheld in South Carolina and her fascinating rage about "northern condescension" (circa 1989).
With that, we turn to Brother Krugman's column. What on earth—what in the world—led him to make these puzzling statements about the GOP's long-standing, flim-flammable pledge to replace Obamacare with something "terrific" and better?
KRUGMAN (3/6/17): The whole party, it turns out, has been faking it for years. Its leaders’ rhetoric was empty; they have no idea how to turn their slogans into actual legislation, because they’ve never bothered to understand how anything important works.In the highlighted passages, Krugman plainly implies that Republican leaders didn't understand their rolling con of the past seven years.
Take the two lead items in the congressional G.O.P.’s agenda: undoing the Affordable Care Act and reforming corporate taxes. In each case Republicans seem utterly shocked to find themselves facing reality.
The story of Obamacare repeal would be funny if the health care—and, in many cases, the lives—of millions of Americans weren’t at stake.
First we had seven—seven!—years during which Republicans kept promising to offer an alternative to Obamacare any day now, but never did. Then came the months after the election, with more promises of details just around the corner.
Now there’s apparently a plan hidden somewhere in the Capitol basement. Why the secrecy? Because the Republicans have belatedly discovered what some of us tried to tell them all along: The only way to maintain coverage for the 20 million people who gained insurance thanks to Obamacare is with a plan that, surprise, looks a lot like Obamacare.
According to Krugman, Republican leaders "have belatedly discovered what [people like Krugman] tried to tell them all along" about the difficulty of replacing Obamacare. They "seem utterly shocked to find themselves facing reality" about this problem, because "they’ve never bothered to understand how anything important works."
Where does this lunacy come from? In that passage, Krugman clearly says that Republican leaders didn't understand the things he's repeatedly said about Obamacare. We have no idea why he would think or say such a thing.
It's always possible that some Republican office-holders didn't (and don't) understand the nature of the problem. But why would Krugman want to vouch for their honesty as a group?
Krugman has explicitly said, for years, that Paul Ryan is a con man peddling versions of flimflam. Now, he says the Republican leadership simply didn't understand!
Moral stampedes tend to weaken the mind. When our smartest player writes this way, you can see the problems we're facing as we replace attempts at outreach with outrage and moral thunder.
Back to Charlie Peters:
Liberals need to find ways to explain topics like "repeal and replace" to the many voters we've lost. We need to tell them they've been conned by the leaders they've come to trust, and that they have a citizen's duty to consider this claim.
Alas! Those voters are disinclined to listen to us, in part because of the decades of snobbery Peters cites. If they did, they'd find us saying bewildering things like this. Who knows? Maybe Donald Trump really believed that Obama was born in Kenya!
Baseball season starts in four weeks. Seven years into this rolling con, can anyone here play this game?
Coming attraction: Way back in 2005, Krugman wrote important columns about the ridiculous per-person cost of American health care. For one example, click here.
Questions:
1) Why didn't our other liberal heroes follow Krugman's lead on this topic, which has completely disappeared from our public discourse?
2) Does their silence derive from what Peters said about their money chase?
THE POLITICS OF MORAL STAMPEDE: Thrilled to say that Sessions lied!
MONDAY, MARCH 6, 2017
Part 1—With the other three, not so much: Did Jeff Sessions lie to a group of exalted senators during his confirmation hearing last month?
Last Friday, in a thundering column, Paul Krugman said he did. The night before, at Vanity Fair, T. A. Frank said, "Not so fast."
Frank's analysis resembled the one we offered the next day. In our view, Frank overstated the case in Sessions' favor—if you're inclined to care about this shiny object at all.
Did Sessions lie during the hearing? We post Frank's nugget passage below. After posting the text of the rambling question Sessions was asked (by Al Franken), Frank offered his basic assessment:
He makes it sound like it's obvious that Sessions had an "innocent" intent. We don't think it's obvious one way or the other. Nor so we hugely care.
We don't think Sessions' intentions were obvious in this brief exchange. We don't know if Frank has captured the essence of what Sessions meant in his "shorthand" reply.
We do think something else is obvious. Obvious, and much more interesting, and a whole lot more important.
Did Sessions lie to that Senate committee? Did he at least intend to mislead his colleagues, morally great as they so plainly are?
We don't know, and we don't hugely care. We do care about the politics of the moral stampede—the unfortunate politics with which we all increasingly live, the politics which has come to life, once again, in the thunder surrounding Sessions.
Did Senator Sessions, or someone else, collude with Russians interference in last year's election? That would be an enormous matter. We hope there will be a full investigation of the Russkies' conduct.
(On yesterday's Meet the Press, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, said no evidence of collusion on anyone's part had surfaced as of January 20, Obama's last day in office.)
We hope there will be a full probe of the Russkie misconduct. What we don't need is the latest moral stampede, in which we pretend to be deeply concerned about people failing to "tell the whole truth"—as long as the troubling people in question belong to the other tribe.
Did Sessions "tell the whole truth" to that exalted committee? In our view, he may have deliberately chosen to do somewhat less in response to Franken's rambling question, although we can't say that we're sure.
It may be that Senator Sessions dissembled! But before you join the Lady of Carlisle in "lying speechless on the ground," consider these additional, wonderfully comical facts:
On March 1, it was revealed that Sessions had met with the Russian ambassador last September. The very next day, Senator Patrick Leahy went on CNN to thunder about Sessions' conduct.
Uh-oh! Leahy flatly misrepresented what he asked Sessions in a written follow-up question after last month's Senate hearing. For details, see this award-winning post.
That very same day, Senator Claire McCaskill tweeted (with thunder) about the fact that she had never met with the Russian ambassador. The relevance of that claim was unclear—and it was instantly shown that her statement had been inaccurate, as with Leahy before her.
After that, it was Nancy Pelosi's turn! On March 3, Pelosi told Politico that she had never met the Russian ambassador. But oops! Her thundering statement was inaccurate too, producing this later Politico headline:
"Photo contradicts Pelosi's statement about not meeting Kislyak."
We liberals! We thundered, roared, expounded and writhed about the way Sessions failed to provide "the whole truth" in his extemporaneous statement to Franken. We were so upset by his imperfection that three of our leading lights quickly issued misstatements of their own!
We then got busy making excuses for the misstatements made by our team. Among our tribe's excuses was this:
But they weren't speaking under oath! Senator Sessions was!
We're so old that we can remember a lot of this pitiful bullshit. We can remember when pitiful bullroar of this very type was directed at both Clintons and at Candidate Gore.
This led to several major disasters, including one last fall.
In our view, the politics of the moral stampede is bad for the head and the heart. In our view, it's very bad for the soul.
It tends to keep us from getting the information we need. In the moral sphere, it drags us all down toward perdition, into a moral hole.
All this week, we'll examine the culture of the moral stampede. Sadly, it seems to be the only way we know how to do politics at this time.
Our view? This latest stampede shows how soft our moral standards actually are. It also shows our pitiful lack of basic intellectual skill.
Toward: "Against interpretation," Susan Sontag said
Speechless on the ground: In this recently-posted YouTube clip, the late Mike Seeger tells an audience that The Lady of Carlisle was his favorite ballad. When we heard this recorded version by Seeger in 1964, it pretty much became ours.
In many ways, the lady of Carlisle is an admirable, mysterious character from the British/American song book. In Seeger's version of the song, her story begins like this:
Down in Carlisle there lived a lady,
Being most beautiful and gay.
She was determined to live a lady,
No man on earth could her betray.
"No man on earth could her betray!" We always liked her for that.
That said, the song proceeds to portray an extremely old-fashioned courtship ritual, or at least so it might seem. We modern liberals are constantly losing votes through our excited public reaction to such topics, important though they may be.
Question: Why did this "fair young lady" "lie speechless on the ground?" You can see the question debated at this site.
(An interesting factual claim appears. "There were lions kept at the Tower of London until 1834," one participant says.)
Regarding Mike Seeger's performance from that early New Lost City Ramblers album:
In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan says he decided to start writing his own songs because he felt he would never be able to sing these old songs as well as Mike Seeger could.
"He was too good," Dylan wrote, in an astonishing tribute to a fellow performer (page 69). "In order to be as good as that, you'd just about have to be him."
Upon his arrival in New York City, Dylan had seen Seeger singing at private house parties. "The thought occurred to me that maybe I'd have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn't know."
So Dylan remarkably said. He was thinking of Seeger's performance of songs like The Lady of Carlisle.
One last thing we always admired about Seeger as a performer: he never sang the voices of women, like that of this "fair young lady," in falsetto or anything like it. He always respected the voices of the women whose ancient stories he told.
For a more modern mysterious woman from the American songbook, we strongly endorse the unnamed heroine of The Ranger's Command.
She too is described in the song as "a fair maiden." But when the cowboys wanted to run, "she rose with a gun in each hand."
Part 1—With the other three, not so much: Did Jeff Sessions lie to a group of exalted senators during his confirmation hearing last month?
Last Friday, in a thundering column, Paul Krugman said he did. The night before, at Vanity Fair, T. A. Frank said, "Not so fast."
Frank's analysis resembled the one we offered the next day. In our view, Frank overstated the case in Sessions' favor—if you're inclined to care about this shiny object at all.
Did Sessions lie during the hearing? We post Frank's nugget passage below. After posting the text of the rambling question Sessions was asked (by Al Franken), Frank offered his basic assessment:
FRANK (3/2/17): [I]f you care about this, then let’s back up and see the exchange in context:For our money, Frank overstates the case for Sessions. He makes it sound like it's obvious what Sessions had in mind when he gave that answer to Franken—the answer which has launched a thousand thunderous ships.
FRANKEN: CNN just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week that included information that, quote, “Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” These documents also allegedly say, quote, “There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”
Now, again, I’m telling you this as it’s coming out, so you know. But if it’s true, it’s obviously extremely serious, and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?
SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have—did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.
FRANK: Now, unless you’ve gone into full “time for some game theory” mode, you would be hard-pressed to miss that that “communications with the Russians” is shorthand for “communications of the sort that CNN is alleging,” not “any sort of communication with any Russian official ever.”
He makes it sound like it's obvious that Sessions had an "innocent" intent. We don't think it's obvious one way or the other. Nor so we hugely care.
We don't think Sessions' intentions were obvious in this brief exchange. We don't know if Frank has captured the essence of what Sessions meant in his "shorthand" reply.
We do think something else is obvious. Obvious, and much more interesting, and a whole lot more important.
Did Sessions lie to that Senate committee? Did he at least intend to mislead his colleagues, morally great as they so plainly are?
We don't know, and we don't hugely care. We do care about the politics of the moral stampede—the unfortunate politics with which we all increasingly live, the politics which has come to life, once again, in the thunder surrounding Sessions.
Did Senator Sessions, or someone else, collude with Russians interference in last year's election? That would be an enormous matter. We hope there will be a full investigation of the Russkies' conduct.
(On yesterday's Meet the Press, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, said no evidence of collusion on anyone's part had surfaced as of January 20, Obama's last day in office.)
We hope there will be a full probe of the Russkie misconduct. What we don't need is the latest moral stampede, in which we pretend to be deeply concerned about people failing to "tell the whole truth"—as long as the troubling people in question belong to the other tribe.
Did Sessions "tell the whole truth" to that exalted committee? In our view, he may have deliberately chosen to do somewhat less in response to Franken's rambling question, although we can't say that we're sure.
It may be that Senator Sessions dissembled! But before you join the Lady of Carlisle in "lying speechless on the ground," consider these additional, wonderfully comical facts:
On March 1, it was revealed that Sessions had met with the Russian ambassador last September. The very next day, Senator Patrick Leahy went on CNN to thunder about Sessions' conduct.
Uh-oh! Leahy flatly misrepresented what he asked Sessions in a written follow-up question after last month's Senate hearing. For details, see this award-winning post.
That very same day, Senator Claire McCaskill tweeted (with thunder) about the fact that she had never met with the Russian ambassador. The relevance of that claim was unclear—and it was instantly shown that her statement had been inaccurate, as with Leahy before her.
After that, it was Nancy Pelosi's turn! On March 3, Pelosi told Politico that she had never met the Russian ambassador. But oops! Her thundering statement was inaccurate too, producing this later Politico headline:
"Photo contradicts Pelosi's statement about not meeting Kislyak."
We liberals! We thundered, roared, expounded and writhed about the way Sessions failed to provide "the whole truth" in his extemporaneous statement to Franken. We were so upset by his imperfection that three of our leading lights quickly issued misstatements of their own!
We then got busy making excuses for the misstatements made by our team. Among our tribe's excuses was this:
But they weren't speaking under oath! Senator Sessions was!
We're so old that we can remember a lot of this pitiful bullshit. We can remember when pitiful bullroar of this very type was directed at both Clintons and at Candidate Gore.
This led to several major disasters, including one last fall.
In our view, the politics of the moral stampede is bad for the head and the heart. In our view, it's very bad for the soul.
It tends to keep us from getting the information we need. In the moral sphere, it drags us all down toward perdition, into a moral hole.
All this week, we'll examine the culture of the moral stampede. Sadly, it seems to be the only way we know how to do politics at this time.
Our view? This latest stampede shows how soft our moral standards actually are. It also shows our pitiful lack of basic intellectual skill.
Toward: "Against interpretation," Susan Sontag said
Speechless on the ground: In this recently-posted YouTube clip, the late Mike Seeger tells an audience that The Lady of Carlisle was his favorite ballad. When we heard this recorded version by Seeger in 1964, it pretty much became ours.
In many ways, the lady of Carlisle is an admirable, mysterious character from the British/American song book. In Seeger's version of the song, her story begins like this:
Down in Carlisle there lived a lady,
Being most beautiful and gay.
She was determined to live a lady,
No man on earth could her betray.
"No man on earth could her betray!" We always liked her for that.
That said, the song proceeds to portray an extremely old-fashioned courtship ritual, or at least so it might seem. We modern liberals are constantly losing votes through our excited public reaction to such topics, important though they may be.
Question: Why did this "fair young lady" "lie speechless on the ground?" You can see the question debated at this site.
(An interesting factual claim appears. "There were lions kept at the Tower of London until 1834," one participant says.)
Regarding Mike Seeger's performance from that early New Lost City Ramblers album:
In his 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan says he decided to start writing his own songs because he felt he would never be able to sing these old songs as well as Mike Seeger could.
"He was too good," Dylan wrote, in an astonishing tribute to a fellow performer (page 69). "In order to be as good as that, you'd just about have to be him."
Upon his arrival in New York City, Dylan had seen Seeger singing at private house parties. "The thought occurred to me that maybe I'd have to write my own folk songs, ones that Mike didn't know."
So Dylan remarkably said. He was thinking of Seeger's performance of songs like The Lady of Carlisle.
One last thing we always admired about Seeger as a performer: he never sang the voices of women, like that of this "fair young lady," in falsetto or anything like it. He always respected the voices of the women whose ancient stories he told.
For a more modern mysterious woman from the American songbook, we strongly endorse the unnamed heroine of The Ranger's Command.
She too is described in the song as "a fair maiden." But when the cowboys wanted to run, "she rose with a gun in each hand."
Ruy Teixeira is full of good cheer!
SUNDAY, MARCH 5, 2017
We offer a tiny buzzkill: In this morning's Washington Post, Ruy Teixeira seems to be full of good cheer.
His piece appears on the front page of Outlook. On-line, the headlines say this:
It would take a giant weather event! Professor Wang flawlessly said!
Will liberals beat Donald J. Trump in the end? Will values and priorities of the left eventually triumph?
That's certainly possible, of course. But we'll issue our latest warning, just in case you haven't heard:
The current president seems to be nuts. And he has the nuclear codes.
On the brighter side: On the brighter side, we liberals have begun to fight back.
In typical fashion, we started to fight exactly one day after Trump got sworn in. As we've frequently told the world, no one is smarter than we are!
We offer a tiny buzzkill: In this morning's Washington Post, Ruy Teixeira seems to be full of good cheer.
His piece appears on the front page of Outlook. On-line, the headlines say this:
Things look bleak for liberals now. But they’ll beat Trump in the end.Those tidings my turn out to be true, of course. On the other hand, these insidery Washington types kept telling you, week after week after week, that Trump could never win.
He and his movement will fade, and the values and priorities of the left will eventually triumph.
It would take a giant weather event! Professor Wang flawlessly said!
Will liberals beat Donald J. Trump in the end? Will values and priorities of the left eventually triumph?
That's certainly possible, of course. But we'll issue our latest warning, just in case you haven't heard:
The current president seems to be nuts. And he has the nuclear codes.
On the brighter side: On the brighter side, we liberals have begun to fight back.
In typical fashion, we started to fight exactly one day after Trump got sworn in. As we've frequently told the world, no one is smarter than we are!
Don't blame all millennials, Post reader says!
SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 2017
Some versus all, two ways: This was going to be the day when we discussed those studies of school voucher programs.
Is it possible? Do low-income kids end up doing worse when they get to attend "better" schools through the use of vouchers? When they don't have to stay in their ratty, inferior public schools with their ratty, unionized teachers?
Do kids end up doing worse when they receive vouchers? According to this recent report in the New York Times, that's what three recent studies have shown.
Why might kids end up doing worse when they get to attend "better schools?" We had planned to offer one possible answer today. For reasons we'll explain below, we've decided to postpone.
The report appeared in the New York Times on February 24. As liberals, you haven't heard a word about it, because 1) no one actually cares about the lives of low-income kids, certainly no one Over Here; and 2) because we liberals are currently on one of our moral stampedes. There's no time for anything else!
More on our current stampede next week. We'll also postpone our report about vouchers until this because of a letter which appears in today's Washington Post.
The letter appears beneath this headline: "Don't blame all millennials." We certainly agree with that plea. But what makes this letter so great?
In yesterday's award-winning report, we discussed the problem we humans have negotiating the baffling distinction between the puzzling concepts "some" and "all." Along came this letter, which frisks some-versus-all two different ways, while adding a classic third point!
The letter isn't long; we agree with its basic sentiment. Here it is, headline included:
The news report in question concerns a study which fingers only one group of millennials, those aged 19-24. To review the original news report, you can just click here.
The news report savaged the crazy reckless behavior of people aged 19-24. But uh-oh! That age group contains some millennials, not all! According to the letter, the Post's problematic news report should have pointed that out.
So far, the letter writer is on solid ground. The problematic news report concerned some millennials, not all.
On the other hand, the writer seems to stumble over these concepts himself! You can't blame all people aged 19-24 for the driving infractions in question. Only some respondents in that age group copped to such conduct, not all!
Quite correctly, the writer didn't want to see all millennials thrown under the bus for the actions of some. But just like that, he seemed to back his own bus over all people aged 19-24!
(Based upon an extensive study, the letter writer seems to hail from an older "generation.")
Some-versus-all may seem like a simple distinction. That said, it gives us humans an amazing amount of trouble. That includes us humans Over Here within our liberal tents.
In recent years, we've frequently noted a tendency which widely obtains when we conduct our liberal moral stampedes. Here's how the stampede goes down:
Someone conducts a study, survey or poll, or possibly speaks to three people. In the study, 60 percent of conservatives cop to some racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic or all-around awful belief.
By way of contrast, only 40 percent of us liberals cop to the belief.
Instead of noting an obvious fact—there's more overlap than difference among the two groups, at least within the parameters of the study—we liberals hop in our sleek sports cars and roar down a different road:
We tend to turn our "somes" into "alls!" We announce that the study shows that We are the good and decent people, while They are deranged and bad Over There. Because our score was better, we announce that We're good. Full stop!
Our weak liberal minds adore that play; we make it all the time. And by the way, note what today's letter writer does in his final paragraph.
Sure enough! The writer casts about in the water looking for tribal escape. In a way which is perfectly valid, he finds a way to suggest that the group the Post assailed may really be best of all:
"The study was based on answers to a questionnaire regarding driving habits—not driving enforcement numbers. It is possible then that drivers ages 19 through 24 were more willing to admit to driving infractions than those in other age groups, not necessarily that they committed more infractions than others."
It's possible that drivers aged 19 through 24 are actually morally best! It may be that they're most likely to tell the truth, not that their driving is worst!
That suggestion is perfectly valid, of course. From all this, we'll draw one conclusion concerning assessment of groups:
Moral stampedes are morally bad. More on this topic next week.
Also next week: Why might kids end up doing worse if they go to a "better" school? The imagination of the Times seemed limited on that point.
Some versus all, two ways: This was going to be the day when we discussed those studies of school voucher programs.
Is it possible? Do low-income kids end up doing worse when they get to attend "better" schools through the use of vouchers? When they don't have to stay in their ratty, inferior public schools with their ratty, unionized teachers?
Do kids end up doing worse when they receive vouchers? According to this recent report in the New York Times, that's what three recent studies have shown.
Why might kids end up doing worse when they get to attend "better schools?" We had planned to offer one possible answer today. For reasons we'll explain below, we've decided to postpone.
The report appeared in the New York Times on February 24. As liberals, you haven't heard a word about it, because 1) no one actually cares about the lives of low-income kids, certainly no one Over Here; and 2) because we liberals are currently on one of our moral stampedes. There's no time for anything else!
More on our current stampede next week. We'll also postpone our report about vouchers until this because of a letter which appears in today's Washington Post.
The letter appears beneath this headline: "Don't blame all millennials." We certainly agree with that plea. But what makes this letter so great?
In yesterday's award-winning report, we discussed the problem we humans have negotiating the baffling distinction between the puzzling concepts "some" and "all." Along came this letter, which frisks some-versus-all two different ways, while adding a classic third point!
The letter isn't long; we agree with its basic sentiment. Here it is, headline included:
LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (3/4/17): Don't blame all millennialsOur analysts loved that letter! It starts by making a perfectly accurate point:
The Feb. 15 news article “Millennials eclipse teens as worst drivers on the road, AAA study finds” was problematic.
First, the headline and article identified the group studied as “millennials,” whose members are normally identified as those born between roughly 1982 and 1994. However, the age range given in the article was 19 to 24, meaning the study and article should have noted that some millennials, but not all, were implicated.
The study was based on answers to a questionnaire regarding driving habits—not driving enforcement numbers. It is possible then that drivers ages 19 through 24 were more willing to admit to driving infractions than those in other age groups, not necessarily that they committed more infractions than others.
The news report in question concerns a study which fingers only one group of millennials, those aged 19-24. To review the original news report, you can just click here.
The news report savaged the crazy reckless behavior of people aged 19-24. But uh-oh! That age group contains some millennials, not all! According to the letter, the Post's problematic news report should have pointed that out.
So far, the letter writer is on solid ground. The problematic news report concerned some millennials, not all.
On the other hand, the writer seems to stumble over these concepts himself! You can't blame all people aged 19-24 for the driving infractions in question. Only some respondents in that age group copped to such conduct, not all!
Quite correctly, the writer didn't want to see all millennials thrown under the bus for the actions of some. But just like that, he seemed to back his own bus over all people aged 19-24!
(Based upon an extensive study, the letter writer seems to hail from an older "generation.")
Some-versus-all may seem like a simple distinction. That said, it gives us humans an amazing amount of trouble. That includes us humans Over Here within our liberal tents.
In recent years, we've frequently noted a tendency which widely obtains when we conduct our liberal moral stampedes. Here's how the stampede goes down:
Someone conducts a study, survey or poll, or possibly speaks to three people. In the study, 60 percent of conservatives cop to some racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic or all-around awful belief.
By way of contrast, only 40 percent of us liberals cop to the belief.
Instead of noting an obvious fact—there's more overlap than difference among the two groups, at least within the parameters of the study—we liberals hop in our sleek sports cars and roar down a different road:
We tend to turn our "somes" into "alls!" We announce that the study shows that We are the good and decent people, while They are deranged and bad Over There. Because our score was better, we announce that We're good. Full stop!
Our weak liberal minds adore that play; we make it all the time. And by the way, note what today's letter writer does in his final paragraph.
Sure enough! The writer casts about in the water looking for tribal escape. In a way which is perfectly valid, he finds a way to suggest that the group the Post assailed may really be best of all:
"The study was based on answers to a questionnaire regarding driving habits—not driving enforcement numbers. It is possible then that drivers ages 19 through 24 were more willing to admit to driving infractions than those in other age groups, not necessarily that they committed more infractions than others."
It's possible that drivers aged 19 through 24 are actually morally best! It may be that they're most likely to tell the truth, not that their driving is worst!
That suggestion is perfectly valid, of course. From all this, we'll draw one conclusion concerning assessment of groups:
Moral stampedes are morally bad. More on this topic next week.
Also next week: Why might kids end up doing worse if they go to a "better" school? The imagination of the Times seemed limited on that point.
Selective quotation all the way down!
FRIDAY, MARCH 3, 2017
The night the change locked into place: Last night, it seemed to us that it had finally happened.
Cable seemed partisan all the way down. We felt we saw nothing else.
On CNN and MSNBC, the stars were chasing Sessions around. Virtually every factual statement was being tilted in pursuit of desired outcomes. We thought we saw nothing else, in a way we felt we'd never seen before.
Lawrence said some of the dumbest things. A long stretch of work by Good Lawrence seemed to give way last night. Bad Lawrence reappeared.
Beyond that, let's discuss doctored quotation.
The pundits were all chasing Sessions around, insisting that he lied. Insisting that he'd lied under oath! That can send you to jail!
Did Sessions lie under oath? For ourselves, we aren't hugely inclined to judge that he did. That said, we also aren't hugely inclined to try to send people to jail.
Such assessments must start with fair quotation, of course. And good God! Aside from gong shows like Patrick's Leahy's gong-show account of what he asked Sessions, we've been struck by the selective quotation going on all over the world.
In this fiery essay at Slate, Michelle Goldberg quotes one part of what Sessions said to Al Franken during his Senate hearing. The part she quotes seems quite selective. She doesn't quote Franken at all.
In videotape on today's Morning Joe, the program presented one small part of what Franken said to Sessions. This program wastes time for three hours each day. But they chose to chop Franken's question was down, tilting the scales as to what Sessions was asked.
In this editorial in the Washington Post, the editors pull one lone sentence out of Sessions' reply to Franken. Franken isn't quoted at all. This is a very poor way to pursue criminal claims, except when the chimps are running wild in the streets and the scripts are coming from Kafka.
What did Franken say to Sessions? What did Sessions say in reply? Below, for the very first time, you'll see the text of the full exchange! Everyone else has been showing you the tiny fragments which will serve their side.
Sessions' confirmation hearing in the Senate occurred on January 10. Let's start with a bit of background:
Rather late in the session, Franken had been asking Sessions about the recent report in which the Director of National Intelligence stated, "We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election."
"You said earlier that you accept the FBI's conclusion," Franken said. Sessions didn't challenge that statement, but said he couldn't discuss President Trump's assessment.
Franken then asked about a new report by CNN, a report which had just appeared that day. This was the report about the British dossier with exciting charges about the Russians Trump.
Franken assumed that Sessions hadn't seen the brand new report. The following exchange ensued. In the past day, you've been seeing carefully-selected shards of this exchange:
Within that ominous framework, he was asked what he would do if it turned out that "anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign."
Presumably, these ominous claims were new to Sessions, and they arrived in a jumble. CNN's report, which Franken childishly called a "story," had just appeared that day.
Given this framework, we're not super-concerned by the way Sessions answered. It may be that he was attempting to conceal information about his September 2016 meeting with the Russian ambassador. But when he said he wasn't "aware of of any of those activities," it may be he was simply saying that he hadn't taken part in an "extremely serious" "continuing exchange of information with intermediaries of the Russian government" and didn't know of anyone else who had.
He may have thought he was being asked about the types of "obviously extremely serious continuing exchanges" he had just heard described. Indeed, that seemed to be what Franken was asking about. He didn't seem to be asking about routine exchanges which weren't "extremely serious."
Was Sessions trying to conceal his meeting with Kislyak? It's possible; it's also possible that he wasn't. What is clear is the fact that Democrats never asked him if he had engaged in any meetings with Russian "intermediaries," except in the follow-up question by Leahy, which Leahy flatly misdescribed on CNN yesterday morning.
(To state the obvious, Leahy misdescribed his question in a way which made it sound moire incriminating for Sessions. This is the way these horrible 78-year-old children play.)
In our view, it's time for the doddering Leahy to go. For what it's worth, this was Franken's follow-up exchange with Sessions during the actual hearing:
Dems and liberals have fared very poorly in previous stampedes of this type. But now that the rope is in our hands, we're chasing our target around the square, pretending to be upright.
We aren't upright. We also aren't real competent.
Last night, we saw a truly ridiculous set of claims made by Lawrence O'Donnell. On the Maddow Show, we saw an astounding presentation in which Michael Beschloss expounded on the greatness of the "special prosecutor" route.
Gone were decades of agreement about the pitfalls of special prosecutors. Maddow, of course, seems to know even less than the average orangutan about the politics of the 1990s, the period in which almost everyone came to agree that the special prosecutor system is loaded with pitfalls. A pleasing conversation ensued, dedicated to the proposition that Maddow's viewers were born some time last week.
The children are running wild in the streets. These episodes rarely serve the public interest. The recent history also says that these episodes tend to turn out poorly for the more liberal party.
Last night, it seemed that all pretense was gone. The chimps and the children were running wild. If only by way of comparison, we almost thought the chimps and the children were making Sessions look good. Final point—this is the way that exchange went, if you trust the shards of that exchange you're shown in the mainstream press:
Did Sessions lie to Franken that day? In our view, only a nation of children and chimps would want to insist that he did.
That said, your nation is that nation. It has been that nation for a long time. Have you heard about the Clintons' murders? About Candidate Gore's many lies?
Goldberg writes her novel: Over at Slate, Goldberg was imagining what must have been discussed between Sessions and the ambassador.
When the chimps and the children start playing these games, it's time for them to go:
Pitiful, horrible, low-IQ, dumb? What's the word a fair person would choose to describe such bald-faced novelization?
You aren't well served by players like this. In the pursuit of good jobs at good pay, they've been killing your interests for years.
The night the change locked into place: Last night, it seemed to us that it had finally happened.
Cable seemed partisan all the way down. We felt we saw nothing else.
On CNN and MSNBC, the stars were chasing Sessions around. Virtually every factual statement was being tilted in pursuit of desired outcomes. We thought we saw nothing else, in a way we felt we'd never seen before.
Lawrence said some of the dumbest things. A long stretch of work by Good Lawrence seemed to give way last night. Bad Lawrence reappeared.
Beyond that, let's discuss doctored quotation.
The pundits were all chasing Sessions around, insisting that he lied. Insisting that he'd lied under oath! That can send you to jail!
Did Sessions lie under oath? For ourselves, we aren't hugely inclined to judge that he did. That said, we also aren't hugely inclined to try to send people to jail.
Such assessments must start with fair quotation, of course. And good God! Aside from gong shows like Patrick's Leahy's gong-show account of what he asked Sessions, we've been struck by the selective quotation going on all over the world.
In this fiery essay at Slate, Michelle Goldberg quotes one part of what Sessions said to Al Franken during his Senate hearing. The part she quotes seems quite selective. She doesn't quote Franken at all.
In videotape on today's Morning Joe, the program presented one small part of what Franken said to Sessions. This program wastes time for three hours each day. But they chose to chop Franken's question was down, tilting the scales as to what Sessions was asked.
In this editorial in the Washington Post, the editors pull one lone sentence out of Sessions' reply to Franken. Franken isn't quoted at all. This is a very poor way to pursue criminal claims, except when the chimps are running wild in the streets and the scripts are coming from Kafka.
What did Franken say to Sessions? What did Sessions say in reply? Below, for the very first time, you'll see the text of the full exchange! Everyone else has been showing you the tiny fragments which will serve their side.
Sessions' confirmation hearing in the Senate occurred on January 10. Let's start with a bit of background:
Rather late in the session, Franken had been asking Sessions about the recent report in which the Director of National Intelligence stated, "We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election."
"You said earlier that you accept the FBI's conclusion," Franken said. Sessions didn't challenge that statement, but said he couldn't discuss President Trump's assessment.
Franken then asked about a new report by CNN, a report which had just appeared that day. This was the report about the British dossier with exciting charges about the Russians Trump.
Franken assumed that Sessions hadn't seen the brand new report. The following exchange ensued. In the past day, you've been seeing carefully-selected shards of this exchange:
FRANKEN (1/10/17): OK. CNN has just published a story—and I'm telling you this about a news story that's just been published. I'm not expecting you to know whether or not it's true or not.Sessions was asked about "a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump's surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government." He was told that, if the claim about the surrogates and the intermediaries was true, it was "obviously extremely serious."
But CNN just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week that included information that, quote, "Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump." These documents also allegedly say, quote, "There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump's surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government."
Now again, I'm telling you this as it's coming out, so—you know. But if it's true, it's obviously extremely serious, and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?
SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn't have, did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it.
Within that ominous framework, he was asked what he would do if it turned out that "anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign."
Presumably, these ominous claims were new to Sessions, and they arrived in a jumble. CNN's report, which Franken childishly called a "story," had just appeared that day.
Given this framework, we're not super-concerned by the way Sessions answered. It may be that he was attempting to conceal information about his September 2016 meeting with the Russian ambassador. But when he said he wasn't "aware of of any of those activities," it may be he was simply saying that he hadn't taken part in an "extremely serious" "continuing exchange of information with intermediaries of the Russian government" and didn't know of anyone else who had.
He may have thought he was being asked about the types of "obviously extremely serious continuing exchanges" he had just heard described. Indeed, that seemed to be what Franken was asking about. He didn't seem to be asking about routine exchanges which weren't "extremely serious."
Was Sessions trying to conceal his meeting with Kislyak? It's possible; it's also possible that he wasn't. What is clear is the fact that Democrats never asked him if he had engaged in any meetings with Russian "intermediaries," except in the follow-up question by Leahy, which Leahy flatly misdescribed on CNN yesterday morning.
(To state the obvious, Leahy misdescribed his question in a way which made it sound moire incriminating for Sessions. This is the way these horrible 78-year-old children play.)
In our view, it's time for the doddering Leahy to go. For what it's worth, this was Franken's follow-up exchange with Sessions during the actual hearing:
FRANKEN (continuing directly): Very well. Without divulging sensitive information, do you know about this, or know what compromising personal and financial information the Russians claim to have?You've been seeing many doctored excerpts from this exchange. You've seen the usual chimps pulling the tiniest possible fragments from that exchange, trying to make the exchange look as bad as possible for whoever their target may be.
SESSIONS: Senator Franken, allegations get made about candidates all the time and they've been made about president-elect Trump a lot sometimes. Most of them, virtually all of them, have been proven to be exaggerated and untrue. I would just say to you that I have no information about this matter. I have not been in on the classified briefings and I'm not a member of the intelligence committee, and I'm just not able to give you any comment on it at this time.
FRANKEN: OK. Totally fair.
Dems and liberals have fared very poorly in previous stampedes of this type. But now that the rope is in our hands, we're chasing our target around the square, pretending to be upright.
We aren't upright. We also aren't real competent.
Last night, we saw a truly ridiculous set of claims made by Lawrence O'Donnell. On the Maddow Show, we saw an astounding presentation in which Michael Beschloss expounded on the greatness of the "special prosecutor" route.
Gone were decades of agreement about the pitfalls of special prosecutors. Maddow, of course, seems to know even less than the average orangutan about the politics of the 1990s, the period in which almost everyone came to agree that the special prosecutor system is loaded with pitfalls. A pleasing conversation ensued, dedicated to the proposition that Maddow's viewers were born some time last week.
The children are running wild in the streets. These episodes rarely serve the public interest. The recent history also says that these episodes tend to turn out poorly for the more liberal party.
Last night, it seemed that all pretense was gone. The chimps and the children were running wild. If only by way of comparison, we almost thought the chimps and the children were making Sessions look good. Final point—this is the way that exchange went, if you trust the shards of that exchange you're shown in the mainstream press:
FRANKEN: If there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?Inanely, that's the exchange which is being described in the "mainstream press." That account of what Sessions said is the stand-alone quote in today's editorial in the Washington Post.
SESSIONS: I did not have communications with the Russians.
Did Sessions lie to Franken that day? In our view, only a nation of children and chimps would want to insist that he did.
That said, your nation is that nation. It has been that nation for a long time. Have you heard about the Clintons' murders? About Candidate Gore's many lies?
Goldberg writes her novel: Over at Slate, Goldberg was imagining what must have been discussed between Sessions and the ambassador.
When the chimps and the children start playing these games, it's time for them to go:
GOLDBERG (3/2/17): If Sessions was taken aback by Franken’s question, he should have had time to compose himself before Sen. Patrick Leahy submitted a similar query in writing seven days later. “Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?” Leahy asked. This time Sessions gave a one word answer: “No.” When the Washington Post’s story came out on Wednesday night, Sessions released a statement saying he “never met with any Russian officials to discuss issues of the campaign.” The word “to” is doing a lot of work here. Even if you believe that the meeting wasn’t set up in order to discuss the campaign, it seems inconceivable that campaign issues didn’t come up. Sessions himself didn’t exactly deny this at Thursday’s press conference: “Most of these ambassadors are pretty gossipy, and this was in the campaign season, but I don’t recall any specific political discussions.”"It seems inconceivable that campaign issues didn’t come up!" In this act of imagining what must have been said, Goldberg channels yesterday's performance by the hapless Leahy himself.
Pitiful, horrible, low-IQ, dumb? What's the word a fair person would choose to describe such bald-faced novelization?
You aren't well served by players like this. In the pursuit of good jobs at good pay, they've been killing your interests for years.
THE WAY WE ARE: Hopelessly devoted to "Them!"
FRIDAY, MARCH 3, 2017
Part 4—The concept of some versus all: On Thursday, February 23, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof made a set of deeply offensive statements.
Most horrifically, he seemed to say that Those People, the 63 million Trump voters, aren't all exactly alike! We liberals saw this as fake news.
The 63 million people in question aren't all "hateful bigots," the columnist strangely said. (They aren't all "bigoted unthinking lizard brains," he offensively suggested at another point.)
Kristof even said that liberals shouldn't "stereotype" the 63 million as "misogynist bigots." He said we shouldn't "demonize" the 63 million, or even engage in "name-calling!"
At one point, the offensive journalist even claimed that millions of those Trump voters could be won by Democrats in future elections. As evidence in support of these claims, he cited friends of his from his lower-class hometown of Yamhill, Oregon.
According to Kristof, he thinks his friends were "profoundly wrong" in deciding to vote for Trump. But he described Them as "well-meaning people"—and he even said that we liberals have tended to "otherize" such rustics.
The 63 million aren't all alike? Plainly, this was offensive speech. We liberals fought back, the very next day, with three letters in the Times.
We think those letters help us see The War We (liberals actually) Are.
Throw away our reams of self-praise, which we tend to juxtapose with the insults we aim at The Others. Instead of listening to our self-praise, look at the other things we say and do. In our view, those three letters to the Times help display The Way We Are.
They help display how dumb we liberals (frequently) are. They help display how much we love to demonize and stereotype The Others, preferably in very large groups, millions of Them at a time.
Yesterday, we looked at the first two letters of protest which appeared in the Times. In the first letter, the writer agreed that we shouldn't demonize, stereotype and name-call Trump voters. He then proceeded to do little else all through the rest of his missive.
In the second letter, the writer quickly agreed with Kristof. "Clearly," the 63 million are "not all bigots," she said.
Despite this instant admission, the writer said she can't understand why Kristof thinks We should "be magnanimous" to Them. Let us suggest that she was stumped by a simple distinction—the distinction between "some" and "all."
In his column, Kristof explicitly said that some Trump voters really are racists or bigots. ("Yes, the Trump camp includes some racists and other bigots.") He simply said that isn't true of all.
At first glance, this might seem like the simplest distinction on Earth. But when we humans get our loathing freak on, we flee, in remarkably stupid ways, from this simplest of all distinctions.
When we decide to otherize, we cease to think in terms of "some." We insist on thinking in terms of All. We happily take 63 million people and say they're all just alike.
The first letter-writer was quickly explaining what all Trump voters know and believe. This is a very dumb thing to do, but at highly partisan times like these, we tribals instinctively do it.
The second letter writer explicitly said that They aren't all bigots Over There. But even as she made this admission, she instantly lost the thread.
We humans! When we put our tribal shoes on, we long to demonize The Others, preferably in very large groups. We long to say that the members of our tribe are good and smart (full stop), and that the members of their tribe are very bad and stupid.
This unintelligent manner of thinking is wired in our lizard brains. Prehistory bred this in the bone. This thinking was once a survival skill. Today, it's simply ugly and dumb, and it washes all through our low-IQ, self-impressed liberal culture.
We liberals love to loathe The Others, preferably in large groups. Consider the way the third letter-writer responded to Kristof's suggestions.
"What is truth?" Pontius Pilate once said. The third letter was just one sentence long, but its writer played Pilate as he sought to undermine Kristof:
More to the point, the letter seeks to undermine Kristof himself. The writer is willing to assume, perhaps for argument's sake, that Kristof imaginably might have a point about low-income Trump voters. But what would he say about middle-class voters? our own Pilate skillfully asks.
What would Kristof say about middle-class voters? We have no idea! We would say that they aren't all alike—that this self-impressed hater should go and speak to such voters, if he's so curious, and assess them one at at time.
Our own Pilate seems to think he's found the flaw in Kristof's holier-than-Us presentation. We'll give Kristof the low-income voters, he says, but aha! He didn't mention the many Trump voters who are better off!
In one fell swoop, this writer accomplishes two tasks. He undermines the offensive person who failed to kiss the hem of his tribe's flowing robes. Even better, he gives us a way to continue to loathe The Others en masse, tens of millions of Trump voters at a time.
(We can't loathe 63 million? he says. Can we loathe 43 million?)
We humans love to loathe The Others in very large groups. This loathing has been a large part of liberal culture for as long as we ourselves have been alive. (Hooray for Hollywood! Examples below.)
People like these letter writers may be unaware of those facts. But everyone else can see The Way We Are. The Others have known this about Us for a long time. In recent years, our loathing is getting more obvious.
In closing, might we briefly work the numbers in one part of Kristof's brief? We refer to the third part of his column, in which he made these offensive political claims:
The three letter-writers all blew past this offensive statement—an offensive claim which seeks to keep us from insulting The Others en masse. But if you want to win elections, consider how the numbers work.
As Kristof says, a majority of Trump voters are probably unattainable. Those people are Republican voters. They vote that way every time, as do many Dems.
That said, let's imagine that as few as ten percent of Trump voters are "winnable." Imagine what would have happened if Candidate Clinton had won only half those voters last November—had flipped only five percent of Trump's 63 million voters.
Go to this site and do the math. (Warning: Math is hard.) Here's what you may find:
Clinton would have won Michigan by roughly 250,000 votes. She would have won Wisconsin by maybe 120,000 votes.
She would have won Pennsylvania by 250,000. She would have won Florida by 360,000. She would have squeezed through in North Carolina. She even might have won Georgia.
Is five percent a lot of votes to flip? We have no idea. Beyond that, there are other ways to change election results.
Flipping votes from R to D is only one way for Democrats to gain. Dems can also gain by increasing blue voter turnout and depressing turnout among red voters. With that in mind:
One of these times, the Bernie and Nader Bros will perhaps stop hugging defeat and disaster. The black assistant professor crowd may stop telling black voters to stay home based on random, one-time remarks from the mid-1990s.
One of these times, the Hollywood crowd will rein themselves in long enough to stop costing Democrats votes. Susan Sarandon will stop telling folks that it would be better for Trump to win. The rest of the A-team will put a lid on their masterful skill at losing votes through unfortunate jokes.
Still and all, Kristof was making a sensible suggestion about our tribe's persistent, stupid name-calling. Aside from the fact that our sweeping claims are factually wrong, couldn't this be a way to lose votes among those who are winnable?
Inquiring minds might want to know! At times like these, we tribals don't have such minds. Our lizard brains prefer to loathe. We tend to prefer it to winning.
At highly partisan times like these, our lizard brains instruct us to loathe The Others en masse. Over here in the liberal world, we've been inclined to behave this way for a good many years.
Those three letter-writers all sought ways to "keep name-calling alive." It's been an unfortunate part of our "liberal" culture at least since the 1950s.
The Others have their own orgs now. More and more, it's become easy for The Others, and for people around them, to see what we can't see about ourselves—to see The Way We Are.
Hooray for Hollywood: For extra credit, review the 1950s films of William Inge, in which the white working class in the flyover states all turn out to be secretly nuts. Suggestions: Picnic, Splendor in the Grass. We especially recommend Rosalind Russell's crazy meltdown in Picnic. Everyone was nuts in the states where They live.
Also, try the 1950s films in which the white working class all turn out to be nuts as long as they live in the South. Strongly suggested: Baby Doll. Also, try God's Little Acre.
We've tended to do this forever. More and more, The Others have started to notice The Way We Are, even if We ourselves remain a bit barefoot and clueless.
Part 4—The concept of some versus all: On Thursday, February 23, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof made a set of deeply offensive statements.
Most horrifically, he seemed to say that Those People, the 63 million Trump voters, aren't all exactly alike! We liberals saw this as fake news.
The 63 million people in question aren't all "hateful bigots," the columnist strangely said. (They aren't all "bigoted unthinking lizard brains," he offensively suggested at another point.)
Kristof even said that liberals shouldn't "stereotype" the 63 million as "misogynist bigots." He said we shouldn't "demonize" the 63 million, or even engage in "name-calling!"
At one point, the offensive journalist even claimed that millions of those Trump voters could be won by Democrats in future elections. As evidence in support of these claims, he cited friends of his from his lower-class hometown of Yamhill, Oregon.
According to Kristof, he thinks his friends were "profoundly wrong" in deciding to vote for Trump. But he described Them as "well-meaning people"—and he even said that we liberals have tended to "otherize" such rustics.
The 63 million aren't all alike? Plainly, this was offensive speech. We liberals fought back, the very next day, with three letters in the Times.
We think those letters help us see The War We (liberals actually) Are.
Throw away our reams of self-praise, which we tend to juxtapose with the insults we aim at The Others. Instead of listening to our self-praise, look at the other things we say and do. In our view, those three letters to the Times help display The Way We Are.
They help display how dumb we liberals (frequently) are. They help display how much we love to demonize and stereotype The Others, preferably in very large groups, millions of Them at a time.
Yesterday, we looked at the first two letters of protest which appeared in the Times. In the first letter, the writer agreed that we shouldn't demonize, stereotype and name-call Trump voters. He then proceeded to do little else all through the rest of his missive.
In the second letter, the writer quickly agreed with Kristof. "Clearly," the 63 million are "not all bigots," she said.
Despite this instant admission, the writer said she can't understand why Kristof thinks We should "be magnanimous" to Them. Let us suggest that she was stumped by a simple distinction—the distinction between "some" and "all."
In his column, Kristof explicitly said that some Trump voters really are racists or bigots. ("Yes, the Trump camp includes some racists and other bigots.") He simply said that isn't true of all.
At first glance, this might seem like the simplest distinction on Earth. But when we humans get our loathing freak on, we flee, in remarkably stupid ways, from this simplest of all distinctions.
When we decide to otherize, we cease to think in terms of "some." We insist on thinking in terms of All. We happily take 63 million people and say they're all just alike.
The first letter-writer was quickly explaining what all Trump voters know and believe. This is a very dumb thing to do, but at highly partisan times like these, we tribals instinctively do it.
The second letter writer explicitly said that They aren't all bigots Over There. But even as she made this admission, she instantly lost the thread.
We humans! When we put our tribal shoes on, we long to demonize The Others, preferably in very large groups. We long to say that the members of our tribe are good and smart (full stop), and that the members of their tribe are very bad and stupid.
This unintelligent manner of thinking is wired in our lizard brains. Prehistory bred this in the bone. This thinking was once a survival skill. Today, it's simply ugly and dumb, and it washes all through our low-IQ, self-impressed liberal culture.
We liberals love to loathe The Others, preferably in large groups. Consider the way the third letter-writer responded to Kristof's suggestions.
"What is truth?" Pontius Pilate once said. The third letter was just one sentence long, but its writer played Pilate as he sought to undermine Kristof:
LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (2/24/17): Assuming that one were inclined to give economically stressed Trump voters a pass, I wonder what justification Nicholas Kristof would attribute to those who voted for Donald Trump who were middle class, wealthy or super-wealthy other than bigotry and greed.Despite its brevity, that letter is very dumb. It's also filled with insinuations, designed to undermine the suggestions that Kristof directed at Us.
More to the point, the letter seeks to undermine Kristof himself. The writer is willing to assume, perhaps for argument's sake, that Kristof imaginably might have a point about low-income Trump voters. But what would he say about middle-class voters? our own Pilate skillfully asks.
What would Kristof say about middle-class voters? We have no idea! We would say that they aren't all alike—that this self-impressed hater should go and speak to such voters, if he's so curious, and assess them one at at time.
Our own Pilate seems to think he's found the flaw in Kristof's holier-than-Us presentation. We'll give Kristof the low-income voters, he says, but aha! He didn't mention the many Trump voters who are better off!
In one fell swoop, this writer accomplishes two tasks. He undermines the offensive person who failed to kiss the hem of his tribe's flowing robes. Even better, he gives us a way to continue to loathe The Others en masse, tens of millions of Trump voters at a time.
(We can't loathe 63 million? he says. Can we loathe 43 million?)
We humans love to loathe The Others in very large groups. This loathing has been a large part of liberal culture for as long as we ourselves have been alive. (Hooray for Hollywood! Examples below.)
People like these letter writers may be unaware of those facts. But everyone else can see The Way We Are. The Others have known this about Us for a long time. In recent years, our loathing is getting more obvious.
In closing, might we briefly work the numbers in one part of Kristof's brief? We refer to the third part of his column, in which he made these offensive political claims:
KRISTOF (2/23/17): Yes, a majority of Trump voters are probably unattainable for Democrats, but millions may be winnable. So don’t blithely give up on 63 million people; instead, make arguments directed at them. Fight for their votes not with race-baiting but with economic pitches for the working and middle classes.Are millions of Trump voters "winnable" in future elections? In perhaps his ugliest moment, that's what Kristof said.
Clinton’s calling half of Trump voters “deplorables” achieved nothing and probably cost her critical votes. Why would Democrats repeat that mistake?
The three letter-writers all blew past this offensive statement—an offensive claim which seeks to keep us from insulting The Others en masse. But if you want to win elections, consider how the numbers work.
As Kristof says, a majority of Trump voters are probably unattainable. Those people are Republican voters. They vote that way every time, as do many Dems.
That said, let's imagine that as few as ten percent of Trump voters are "winnable." Imagine what would have happened if Candidate Clinton had won only half those voters last November—had flipped only five percent of Trump's 63 million voters.
Go to this site and do the math. (Warning: Math is hard.) Here's what you may find:
Clinton would have won Michigan by roughly 250,000 votes. She would have won Wisconsin by maybe 120,000 votes.
She would have won Pennsylvania by 250,000. She would have won Florida by 360,000. She would have squeezed through in North Carolina. She even might have won Georgia.
Is five percent a lot of votes to flip? We have no idea. Beyond that, there are other ways to change election results.
Flipping votes from R to D is only one way for Democrats to gain. Dems can also gain by increasing blue voter turnout and depressing turnout among red voters. With that in mind:
One of these times, the Bernie and Nader Bros will perhaps stop hugging defeat and disaster. The black assistant professor crowd may stop telling black voters to stay home based on random, one-time remarks from the mid-1990s.
One of these times, the Hollywood crowd will rein themselves in long enough to stop costing Democrats votes. Susan Sarandon will stop telling folks that it would be better for Trump to win. The rest of the A-team will put a lid on their masterful skill at losing votes through unfortunate jokes.
Still and all, Kristof was making a sensible suggestion about our tribe's persistent, stupid name-calling. Aside from the fact that our sweeping claims are factually wrong, couldn't this be a way to lose votes among those who are winnable?
Inquiring minds might want to know! At times like these, we tribals don't have such minds. Our lizard brains prefer to loathe. We tend to prefer it to winning.
At highly partisan times like these, our lizard brains instruct us to loathe The Others en masse. Over here in the liberal world, we've been inclined to behave this way for a good many years.
Those three letter-writers all sought ways to "keep name-calling alive." It's been an unfortunate part of our "liberal" culture at least since the 1950s.
The Others have their own orgs now. More and more, it's become easy for The Others, and for people around them, to see what we can't see about ourselves—to see The Way We Are.
Hooray for Hollywood: For extra credit, review the 1950s films of William Inge, in which the white working class in the flyover states all turn out to be secretly nuts. Suggestions: Picnic, Splendor in the Grass. We especially recommend Rosalind Russell's crazy meltdown in Picnic. Everyone was nuts in the states where They live.
Also, try the 1950s films in which the white working class all turn out to be nuts as long as they live in the South. Strongly suggested: Baby Doll. Also, try God's Little Acre.
We've tended to do this forever. More and more, The Others have started to notice The Way We Are, even if We ourselves remain a bit barefoot and clueless.
Al Capone meets General Sessions!
THURSDAY, MARCH 2, 2017
Leahy's pathetic play: Way back when, the Chicago police couldn't get Al Capone for his actual crimes, including the Saint Valentine's Day massacre.
So the feds nailed him on a tax evasion rap! To this day, it's a famous play.
In our view, the modern-day Democratic Party is involved in similar conduct. We've increasingly shown that we can't win elections or convince the public concerning our basic beliefs. So we pray instead for the chance to get our rivals locked up.
We pray for scandal, for more Watergates, for Republicans to be caught in sex scandals involving congressional pages,as in the glorious year 2006. Given the gerontocracy running the party, it's our only way.
This produced an embarrassing moment on CNN today. The party is looking for a way to create a Trump scandal. Spirits soared when the story broke about Jeff Sessions last night.
Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! This new report in the Washington Post gave Democrats a chance to say that Sessions lied in the course of his confirmation hearing. Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Perhaps we can get him on that!
Is it true? Did Sessions lie in his confirmation hearing?
It's certainly possible—but then again, everything is. In the case of a verbal exchange with Al Franken, we'd say the claim is currently pretty slender. (Your lizard brain will tell you different. Your lizard is constantly wrong.)
In the case of a later, written exchange with Leahy, there's no current claim at all.
What the heck did Leahy ask Sessions? Below, you see the text of the written question from Leahy, along with Sessions' one-word written reply:
Like almost everyone else on the planet, we have no way of knowing whether that statement is accurate. But at present, there is zero evidence supporting the claim that Sessions' statement was false.
In September 2016, Sessions had a private meeting in his office with the Russian ambassador. Earlier, at the Republican Convention, Sessions had briefly spoken to the Russian ambassador after giving a speech at an event where something like twenty other ambassadors were present.
Did they speak about the election? Everything's possible, but at present, there's zero evidence that they did. At present, there is zero evidence that Sessions' reply to Leahy was false.
Unless you speak to the doddering Leahy! This morning, we caught his embarrassing effort on CNN, near the end of the 10 o'clock hour.
Leahy spoke with CNN co-hosts John Berman and Poppy Harlow. Here's what happened when the bumbling gerontocrat pretended to discuss the written question he submitted to Sessions:
Uh-oh! You'll note that Leahy offered an "edited" version of what he had actually asked. To his credit, Berman called him on it—and Leahy embarrassed himself further:
To his credit, Berman reminded Leahy of what he had actually asked. We'd only criticize Berman for using the suggestive term, "wiggle room," as he discussed a reply by Sessions which may well be perfectly accurate.
At that point, Leahy began clowning about what Sessions surely must have said during that brief discussion at the Republican Convention. Watching live, we were surprised, but not surprised, by Leahy's disingenuous presentation. Once again, to their credit, the CNN pair pushed back:
Why do we speak of "gerontocrats?" A few weeks ago, we had the misfortune of seeing the Democratic House leadership, three million strong, stumble through a horrible press event at which Reps. Cummings and Pelosi recited a fake tweet which they mistakenly thought had come from Michael Flynn.
(Note: The fake tweet had appeared beneath this bold header: "Not Michael Flynn." Even that hint wasn't enough for the party's top sleuths. For details, just click here.)
Cummings is no gerontocrat; others that day plainly were. It was a horrible press event, capped by Pelosi's unwatchable explanation of what the word "scapegoat" originally meant, long ago, on some unnamed Greek isle.
It was an unwatchable presser. Even on a dull news day, the cables quickly fled. Conservatives have heard about the way our team swallowed the "Not Michael Flynn" fake tweet. Over Here in our liberal tents, we have of course been shielded from such knowledge.
This morning, we saw another senator-for-life embarrass himself on CNN. They don't know how to win elections or debates. They're praying for scandal instead.
That's exactly the problem: Later in the CNN session, Leahy was asked if he thought that Sessions had lied to Al Franken during his hearing.
At present, we'd say the complaint is extremely thin. But so what? Here's what Leahy said:
"You know, I was a prosecutor. I would not have accepted that answer."
That's exactly the problem, we flawlessly thought. The other problem lies in the fact that the nation's more liberal party lies in the hands of a gang of increasingly hapless gerontocrats.
They haven't won a debate for years. They're forced to pray for sex with pages or some other form of disgrace.
Leahy's pathetic play: Way back when, the Chicago police couldn't get Al Capone for his actual crimes, including the Saint Valentine's Day massacre.
So the feds nailed him on a tax evasion rap! To this day, it's a famous play.
In our view, the modern-day Democratic Party is involved in similar conduct. We've increasingly shown that we can't win elections or convince the public concerning our basic beliefs. So we pray instead for the chance to get our rivals locked up.
We pray for scandal, for more Watergates, for Republicans to be caught in sex scandals involving congressional pages,as in the glorious year 2006. Given the gerontocracy running the party, it's our only way.
This produced an embarrassing moment on CNN today. The party is looking for a way to create a Trump scandal. Spirits soared when the story broke about Jeff Sessions last night.
Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! This new report in the Washington Post gave Democrats a chance to say that Sessions lied in the course of his confirmation hearing. Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Perhaps we can get him on that!
Is it true? Did Sessions lie in his confirmation hearing?
It's certainly possible—but then again, everything is. In the case of a verbal exchange with Al Franken, we'd say the claim is currently pretty slender. (Your lizard brain will tell you different. Your lizard is constantly wrong.)
In the case of a later, written exchange with Leahy, there's no current claim at all.
What the heck did Leahy ask Sessions? Below, you see the text of the written question from Leahy, along with Sessions' one-word written reply:
LEAHY: Several of the President-elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after election day?As you and every sane person can see, Sessions was specifically asked if he had spoken to any Russkies "about the 2016 election." In his written reply, he said that he had not.
SESSIONS: No.
Like almost everyone else on the planet, we have no way of knowing whether that statement is accurate. But at present, there is zero evidence supporting the claim that Sessions' statement was false.
In September 2016, Sessions had a private meeting in his office with the Russian ambassador. Earlier, at the Republican Convention, Sessions had briefly spoken to the Russian ambassador after giving a speech at an event where something like twenty other ambassadors were present.
Did they speak about the election? Everything's possible, but at present, there's zero evidence that they did. At present, there is zero evidence that Sessions' reply to Leahy was false.
Unless you speak to the doddering Leahy! This morning, we caught his embarrassing effort on CNN, near the end of the 10 o'clock hour.
Leahy spoke with CNN co-hosts John Berman and Poppy Harlow. Here's what happened when the bumbling gerontocrat pretended to discuss the written question he submitted to Sessions:
LEAHY (3/2/17): I asked a very, very specific question. I think, you know, you've— You have had it—He thought his question was very clear! For the full transcript, click here.
HARLOW: Yes, we have it. We'll pull it up.
LEAHY: And—but what I said in it, I said, asking him about it, remember, now, these answers are under oath, under oath, and I said, "Did you have any contact, either before or after Election Day?" I thought my question was very clear. His answer is very clear. He said "No." Well, that's not what happened. And I think this raises questions.
Uh-oh! You'll note that Leahy offered an "edited" version of what he had actually asked. To his credit, Berman called him on it—and Leahy embarrassed himself further:
BERMAN (continuing directly): You asked him— Senator, just to be clear, you asked him if he had contact before or after the election "about the 2016 election." To that he answered "no." So does that give him wiggle room because he could say he met—Are we really "all grown-ups here?" Or are some of our hapless leaders really gerontocrats?
LEAHY: No.
BERMAN: OK, why?
LEAHY: It doesn't because one of those was at the Republican National Convention when he, when he met with the Russians. Gosh, what did they talk about? "Hey, gee, the food is really great here?" Come on. We're all grown-ups here. "Well, Senator—"
To his credit, Berman reminded Leahy of what he had actually asked. We'd only criticize Berman for using the suggestive term, "wiggle room," as he discussed a reply by Sessions which may well be perfectly accurate.
At that point, Leahy began clowning about what Sessions surely must have said during that brief discussion at the Republican Convention. Watching live, we were surprised, but not surprised, by Leahy's disingenuous presentation. Once again, to their credit, the CNN pair pushed back:
BERMAN (continuing directly): Well, there are ambassadors—ambassadors always go to conventions, senator.We'd say that Leahy embarrassed himself. We'd also say that this recalls the chase after Al Capone.
HARLOW: And this was a big gathering. Now, because they met on the grounds, it was a Heritage Foundation event at the convention, doesn't necessarily mean they talked about it.
Why do we speak of "gerontocrats?" A few weeks ago, we had the misfortune of seeing the Democratic House leadership, three million strong, stumble through a horrible press event at which Reps. Cummings and Pelosi recited a fake tweet which they mistakenly thought had come from Michael Flynn.
(Note: The fake tweet had appeared beneath this bold header: "Not Michael Flynn." Even that hint wasn't enough for the party's top sleuths. For details, just click here.)
Cummings is no gerontocrat; others that day plainly were. It was a horrible press event, capped by Pelosi's unwatchable explanation of what the word "scapegoat" originally meant, long ago, on some unnamed Greek isle.
It was an unwatchable presser. Even on a dull news day, the cables quickly fled. Conservatives have heard about the way our team swallowed the "Not Michael Flynn" fake tweet. Over Here in our liberal tents, we have of course been shielded from such knowledge.
This morning, we saw another senator-for-life embarrass himself on CNN. They don't know how to win elections or debates. They're praying for scandal instead.
That's exactly the problem: Later in the CNN session, Leahy was asked if he thought that Sessions had lied to Al Franken during his hearing.
At present, we'd say the complaint is extremely thin. But so what? Here's what Leahy said:
"You know, I was a prosecutor. I would not have accepted that answer."
That's exactly the problem, we flawlessly thought. The other problem lies in the fact that the nation's more liberal party lies in the hands of a gang of increasingly hapless gerontocrats.
They haven't won a debate for years. They're forced to pray for sex with pages or some other form of disgrace.
THE WAY WE ARE: Kristof denounced!
THURSDAY, MARCH 2, 2017
Part 3—Learning to loathe all the way: We humans!
We've always loved to loathe The Others. It's one of our greatest joys.
It lies at the heart of our many long wars. Once we've learned to loathe Those People, it only makes sense to kill them.
Within the modern political context, we the liberals are quite sure that only The Others behave this way. Only The Others loathe The Others! We're much too high-minded for that.
Do we liberals loathe The Others too? Actually yes, we do. And our love of loathing was quite clear in last Friday's New York Times.
We refer to three letters from fiery liberals that day. The letters were written in response to Nicholas Kristof's offensive column, which had appeared in the Times exactly one day before.
In service to a puzzling logic, Kristof had said that we liberals shouldn't describe all 63 million Trump voters as "bigoted unthinking lizard brains."
We liberals found this suggestion offensive. The very next day, the Times published three letters rejecting Kristof's advice.
In fairness, it was only three letters. There's no way to know what kinds of letters the Times chose to discard.
Still, we thought these letters portrayed the way we liberals routinely reason and think. We even thought they might help us see The Way We (quite frequently) Are.
We liberals! In the past ten years or so, we've lost local and state elections all across the country. Last fall, we even managed to lose a White House election to the craziest, dumbest person who ever sought the office.
Plainly, we're among the least effective political players in history. At this point of ultimate defeat, we thought those letters might help us see The Way We (quite commonly) Are.
What are we liberals actually like? Good God, how we love to loathe!
In his column, Kristof gave three reasons why it's a bad idea to say that those 63 million Trump voters are all just alike.
The very next day, his reasoning was soundly rejected. Name Withheld, the first correspondent, started his letter like this:
He starts by explicitly agreeing with Kristof's three points; he denounces stereotyping, demonizing and name-calling, the three practices Kristof denounced. Having fulfilled this obligation, he turns to stereotyping, demonizing and name-calling all through the rest of his letter.
He calls the biggest name of all. He says it's "entirely possible" that all 63 million Trump voters are "the true enemy," presumably of Us.
As you can see, this fiery liberal just isn't especially sharp. In fairness, his greatest shortcoming is ancient. He assumes that his own perceptions and understandings are shared by everyone else.
He says that all 63 million Trump voters cast their votes "knowing full well who Donald Trump was." Presumably, that means they shared the writer's assessments of Trump—for example, they knew him to be "an unabashed bigot," just as the writer believes he does.
Obviously, it would be very stupid to assume that everyone shares the writer's assessments. In an unintentionally comical turn, the writer moves directly to the Standard Liberal Claim: The Others just aren't very smart!
From there, he lists the various things "all reasonable people know." You're right—it's hard to get much dumber than that. And yet, this is (quite frequently) Us.
By his fourth and final paragraph, this self-assured New York City resident is semi-contradicting himself, much as Donald J. Trump routinely does. His arrogance here is enthralling:
"So while Donald Trump is certainly the enemy of both reason and compassion, I’m much more frightened of the 63 million people who either didn’t know they were voting against everything this country stands for, or didn’t care."
All of a sudden, Trump's voters may not have fully understood what they were doing. Tied to that hint of a self-contradiction is the arrogance of the belief that the writer can define "everything this country stands for," as if this were a question of fact.
That letter was extremely dumb, as is so much of our "liberal" work. The second letter was shorter and less bombastic. For better or worse, the writer cops to a puzzling incomprehension right in her opening sentence:
Perhaps it's just a manner of speaking! In his column, Kristof listed, and even numbered, three reasons for his offensive suggestions. He even cited the claim with which she says she agrees—Trump's voters aren't all bigots.
Can we talk? It wasn't hard to spot Kristof's three listed reasons. The first letter to the Times started by rattling them off.
But this writer seemed to say she had no idea why Kristof had made his weird suggestion. And sure enough! In her second paragraph, she basically proved this claim.
According to this omniscient narrator, "many of" the 63 million people in question "purposefully set their consciences to sleep" when they voted for Trump. She doesn't say how she can know such a thing, but she proceeds to make a second claim:
She says she "suspects" that some or all of these "many" people "knew Trump is morally bankrupt."
"Many" is an imprecise term; it doesn't even mean "most." For that reason, only in the dull-witted world of the tribal loather would a writer think that these assessments contradict what Kristof said.
Unlike Hillary Clinton before him, Kristof didn't state an exact percentage of the racists and deplorables numbered among Trump voters. But he clearly said this:
While some of those voters are probably racists, some of those voters aren't! He said we liberals should try to win those winnable votes. In what way would the writer's claim about "many" Trump voters contradict what Kristof said?
(Personally, we'd advise omniscient dreamers to leave the indictments of racists to God. But what would make this fiery liberal think that she was disagreeing with Kristof?)
As she ends, this writer delights herself by imagining that Trump voters won't "take responsibility for their votes" if Trump continues to engage in such outrages as "railing against the press."
Will Trump voters renounce their votes if Trump does something vastly destructive? Presumably, some of them will, and some of them won't! Some already have!
Some of them may change their minds about Trump; that was one of Kristof's points. But tribal loathing is built on a prehistoric belief:
Those People are all just alike!
Kristof said they aren't all alike; early on, this second writer seemed to agree. But alas! People like these letter writers are sunk too deep in the joy of loathing to grasp so simple a claim, even to be able to hear that this is what Kristof has said.
The third letter was the shortest. In some ways, it was the most interesting. For that reason, we'll leave it for tomorrow.
We'll warn you—some math will be involved. And as Professor Wang has helped us liberals learn, math and logic are hard!
Tomorrow, we'll review that short third letter. For today, let's consider a final obvious point, a point which slid right past the repellent certainty of Writer One and the incomprehension of Writer Two.
Writer One was appalled by the thought that Those People voted for Candidate Trump even though he's "an unabashed bigot, a baldfaced liar and someone who bragged about groping women." Due to the thickness of his head, he doesn't seem to have considered what many of those voters believed about Candidate Clinton!
Many of the 63 million thought that Clinton was "a baldfaced liar" too, perhaps even more so than Trump. Many of the 63 million thought she had spent decades attacking women who had been groped by her husband, or perhaps had been flatly raped.
The paper to which he wrote his letter had encouraged these ideas in an appalling, front-page news report quite late in the campaign. Did the writer write to protest that? Or was he too busy stroking himself?
Many of the 63 million believed she was a liar too! (And an abuser of women.) They'd heard these claims for several decades. They believed those claims last fall.
The arrogant dimwit who wrote that first letter doesn't seem to know that. Perhaps he's just writing his own pleasing tale. Complications needn't apply.
He won't question the liberal gods who failed to challenge, or even advanced, these claims down through all those years. He didn't challenge the Times itself, which has spent the past twenty-five years spreading such thoughts all around.
It's a great deal like what Sinatra said. When we liberals loathe you, you know that we'll loathe you aaaalllll the way.
We'll swear that only The Others do that. Our claim will be dimwitted, wrong.
Despite our vast tribal self-regard, our work will be ugly and dumb. More and more, with awful results, The Others can see how we are.
Tomorrow: The greatest loathing of all
Part 3—Learning to loathe all the way: We humans!
We've always loved to loathe The Others. It's one of our greatest joys.
It lies at the heart of our many long wars. Once we've learned to loathe Those People, it only makes sense to kill them.
Within the modern political context, we the liberals are quite sure that only The Others behave this way. Only The Others loathe The Others! We're much too high-minded for that.
Do we liberals loathe The Others too? Actually yes, we do. And our love of loathing was quite clear in last Friday's New York Times.
We refer to three letters from fiery liberals that day. The letters were written in response to Nicholas Kristof's offensive column, which had appeared in the Times exactly one day before.
In service to a puzzling logic, Kristof had said that we liberals shouldn't describe all 63 million Trump voters as "bigoted unthinking lizard brains."
We liberals found this suggestion offensive. The very next day, the Times published three letters rejecting Kristof's advice.
In fairness, it was only three letters. There's no way to know what kinds of letters the Times chose to discard.
Still, we thought these letters portrayed the way we liberals routinely reason and think. We even thought they might help us see The Way We (quite frequently) Are.
We liberals! In the past ten years or so, we've lost local and state elections all across the country. Last fall, we even managed to lose a White House election to the craziest, dumbest person who ever sought the office.
Plainly, we're among the least effective political players in history. At this point of ultimate defeat, we thought those letters might help us see The Way We (quite commonly) Are.
What are we liberals actually like? Good God, how we love to loathe!
In his column, Kristof gave three reasons why it's a bad idea to say that those 63 million Trump voters are all just alike.
The very next day, his reasoning was soundly rejected. Name Withheld, the first correspondent, started his letter like this:
FIRST LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (2/24/17): It’s hard to disagree with Nicholas Kristof: Stereotyping is indefensible; demonizing the opposition feeds the dysfunction; and name-calling will win no votes. But it’s also entirely possible that Mr. Kristof has it backward: President Trump is not the true enemy; his voters are.As you can quickly see, this writer just isn't real sharp. Or perhaps it's just his primal instincts, which dull his intellectual skills and lead him on toward loathing.
Donald Trump is an unabashed bigot, a baldfaced liar and someone who bragged about groping women. But as nightmarish as it seems to have those qualities in the White House, sooner or later his presidency will come to an end. And when it does, we will be faced with the true American nightmare: that almost 63 million of us, knowing full well who Donald Trump was, voted for him anyway.
They will not be smarter than they were in 2016—they will have spent the interim being lied to constantly—and they will not be less angry, because the Trump presidency will certainly have failed them. As all reasonable people know, trashing trade deals won’t bring industrial jobs back; building walls won’t make us safer; and market forces won’t deliver health care or educate our children...
He starts by explicitly agreeing with Kristof's three points; he denounces stereotyping, demonizing and name-calling, the three practices Kristof denounced. Having fulfilled this obligation, he turns to stereotyping, demonizing and name-calling all through the rest of his letter.
He calls the biggest name of all. He says it's "entirely possible" that all 63 million Trump voters are "the true enemy," presumably of Us.
As you can see, this fiery liberal just isn't especially sharp. In fairness, his greatest shortcoming is ancient. He assumes that his own perceptions and understandings are shared by everyone else.
He says that all 63 million Trump voters cast their votes "knowing full well who Donald Trump was." Presumably, that means they shared the writer's assessments of Trump—for example, they knew him to be "an unabashed bigot," just as the writer believes he does.
Obviously, it would be very stupid to assume that everyone shares the writer's assessments. In an unintentionally comical turn, the writer moves directly to the Standard Liberal Claim: The Others just aren't very smart!
From there, he lists the various things "all reasonable people know." You're right—it's hard to get much dumber than that. And yet, this is (quite frequently) Us.
By his fourth and final paragraph, this self-assured New York City resident is semi-contradicting himself, much as Donald J. Trump routinely does. His arrogance here is enthralling:
"So while Donald Trump is certainly the enemy of both reason and compassion, I’m much more frightened of the 63 million people who either didn’t know they were voting against everything this country stands for, or didn’t care."
All of a sudden, Trump's voters may not have fully understood what they were doing. Tied to that hint of a self-contradiction is the arrogance of the belief that the writer can define "everything this country stands for," as if this were a question of fact.
That letter was extremely dumb, as is so much of our "liberal" work. The second letter was shorter and less bombastic. For better or worse, the writer cops to a puzzling incomprehension right in her opening sentence:
SECOND LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (2/24/17): I don’t understand why Nicholas Kristof encourages us to be magnanimous to Trump voters. Yes, they are clearly not all bigots. Still, they elected to the highest office in the land, and arguably the world, a man who ginned up his campaign crowds by encouraging racism, sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, vilification of the press and violence.This writer starts with a strange admission. Perhaps it's just a manner of speaking, but she says she "doesn't understand" why Kristof made his offensive suggestion about the 63 million.
Many of them purposefully set their consciences to sleep and pulled the lever for a man I suspect that they know is morally bankrupt.
If Donald Trump continues to be the president he has been thus far—one who makes up facts, hires his cronies from Wall Street, refuses to vet his cabinet nominees even as much as immigrants are now vetted, rails against the press and shoots from the hip on some of the most delicate of the world’s problems—will they take responsibility for their votes?
Perhaps it's just a manner of speaking! In his column, Kristof listed, and even numbered, three reasons for his offensive suggestions. He even cited the claim with which she says she agrees—Trump's voters aren't all bigots.
Can we talk? It wasn't hard to spot Kristof's three listed reasons. The first letter to the Times started by rattling them off.
But this writer seemed to say she had no idea why Kristof had made his weird suggestion. And sure enough! In her second paragraph, she basically proved this claim.
According to this omniscient narrator, "many of" the 63 million people in question "purposefully set their consciences to sleep" when they voted for Trump. She doesn't say how she can know such a thing, but she proceeds to make a second claim:
She says she "suspects" that some or all of these "many" people "knew Trump is morally bankrupt."
"Many" is an imprecise term; it doesn't even mean "most." For that reason, only in the dull-witted world of the tribal loather would a writer think that these assessments contradict what Kristof said.
Unlike Hillary Clinton before him, Kristof didn't state an exact percentage of the racists and deplorables numbered among Trump voters. But he clearly said this:
While some of those voters are probably racists, some of those voters aren't! He said we liberals should try to win those winnable votes. In what way would the writer's claim about "many" Trump voters contradict what Kristof said?
(Personally, we'd advise omniscient dreamers to leave the indictments of racists to God. But what would make this fiery liberal think that she was disagreeing with Kristof?)
As she ends, this writer delights herself by imagining that Trump voters won't "take responsibility for their votes" if Trump continues to engage in such outrages as "railing against the press."
Will Trump voters renounce their votes if Trump does something vastly destructive? Presumably, some of them will, and some of them won't! Some already have!
Some of them may change their minds about Trump; that was one of Kristof's points. But tribal loathing is built on a prehistoric belief:
Those People are all just alike!
Kristof said they aren't all alike; early on, this second writer seemed to agree. But alas! People like these letter writers are sunk too deep in the joy of loathing to grasp so simple a claim, even to be able to hear that this is what Kristof has said.
The third letter was the shortest. In some ways, it was the most interesting. For that reason, we'll leave it for tomorrow.
We'll warn you—some math will be involved. And as Professor Wang has helped us liberals learn, math and logic are hard!
Tomorrow, we'll review that short third letter. For today, let's consider a final obvious point, a point which slid right past the repellent certainty of Writer One and the incomprehension of Writer Two.
Writer One was appalled by the thought that Those People voted for Candidate Trump even though he's "an unabashed bigot, a baldfaced liar and someone who bragged about groping women." Due to the thickness of his head, he doesn't seem to have considered what many of those voters believed about Candidate Clinton!
Many of the 63 million thought that Clinton was "a baldfaced liar" too, perhaps even more so than Trump. Many of the 63 million thought she had spent decades attacking women who had been groped by her husband, or perhaps had been flatly raped.
The paper to which he wrote his letter had encouraged these ideas in an appalling, front-page news report quite late in the campaign. Did the writer write to protest that? Or was he too busy stroking himself?
Many of the 63 million believed she was a liar too! (And an abuser of women.) They'd heard these claims for several decades. They believed those claims last fall.
The arrogant dimwit who wrote that first letter doesn't seem to know that. Perhaps he's just writing his own pleasing tale. Complications needn't apply.
He won't question the liberal gods who failed to challenge, or even advanced, these claims down through all those years. He didn't challenge the Times itself, which has spent the past twenty-five years spreading such thoughts all around.
It's a great deal like what Sinatra said. When we liberals loathe you, you know that we'll loathe you aaaalllll the way.
We'll swear that only The Others do that. Our claim will be dimwitted, wrong.
Despite our vast tribal self-regard, our work will be ugly and dumb. More and more, with awful results, The Others can see how we are.
Tomorrow: The greatest loathing of all
On the west coast, it was just 9 PM!
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1, 2017
What our own "news channel" did: Donald J. Trump finished his speech at roughly 10:15 Eastern.
Until midnight, Brian, Rachel and Chris—and the whole rollicking gang, of course—proceeded to pretend to discuss the speech.
Jocularity continues to be a stock in trade for this rollicking gang of "our MSNBC friends," as Rachel tagged them last week. Last night, the network's suits finally stopped pretending about their programming thrust.
We refer to the hour Chris Matthews hosted at 12 midnight. Which is, just for the record, still 9 PM on the coast.
In Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, it was just 9 PM. How was The One True Liberal Channel reviewing the ballyhooed speech?
The suits had Matthews do an hour with no one but comedians and actors for guests! One long segment belonged to Kathy Griffin, who has no political background, expertise or knowledge. Her lengthy chain of "analyses" started off like this:
Meanwhile, were all the white guys saying that about Melania? Was Schumer saying it? What about the blacks?
At any rate, this is the bullshit you were served if you tuned to the "liberal" channel at 9 PM on the coast.
Griffin said that she'd been forced to watch a "so-called speech." Two hours later, we watched her on a so-called news network, a so-called network which was conducting a pseudo-discussion.
It was still just 9 PM on the coast. People tuning in on the coast saw a full hour of crap like this, on the cable news channel which once gave us Our Own Rhodes Scholar.
The dangerous dumbing-down of the culture has been a widespread corporate choice. The hour Matthews ran last night was about as dumb as it gets.
Matthews spoke to no one who wasn't a comedian or an actor. Only one guest was a Trump supporter. We didn't catch his name, but he came on right at the end of the hour, speaking for roughly one minute.
As bad as Griffin was, Rob Reiner may have been worse. On balance, we'd have to say that he was worse, because he has a political background and Griffin doesn't.
(By the way: when did Michael Moore become a starry-eyed Hillary lover?)
Your culture is being dumbed way down so people like Matthews, Williams and Maddow can continue to roll around in big giant piles of cash. With the hour that Matthews did, MSNBC surrendered any semblance of any pretense.
They're running a gong-show, just like Trump. Warning:
Trump does it better.
Horrible, terrible stuff: Griffin was a corporate-culture embarrassment. To watch her twelve minutes, click here. In fairness, she didn't book herself.
Reiner may have been worse. For some of his masterfully hackneyed remarks, you can just click this.
This program was an embarrassment during the midnight hour here on our sprawling campus. It was still just 9 PM on the coast. What did it look like there?
What our own "news channel" did: Donald J. Trump finished his speech at roughly 10:15 Eastern.
Until midnight, Brian, Rachel and Chris—and the whole rollicking gang, of course—proceeded to pretend to discuss the speech.
Jocularity continues to be a stock in trade for this rollicking gang of "our MSNBC friends," as Rachel tagged them last week. Last night, the network's suits finally stopped pretending about their programming thrust.
We refer to the hour Chris Matthews hosted at 12 midnight. Which is, just for the record, still 9 PM on the coast.
In Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, it was just 9 PM. How was The One True Liberal Channel reviewing the ballyhooed speech?
The suits had Matthews do an hour with no one but comedians and actors for guests! One long segment belonged to Kathy Griffin, who has no political background, expertise or knowledge. Her lengthy chain of "analyses" started off like this:
MATTHEWS (2/28/17): What did you think of the show tonight, the show that went on in the Congress? What did you make of it?"But you know!" Ladies and gents, in her opening minute, she said it two different times!
GRIFFIN: Well, it was actually shorter than I thought. I actually thought, "Oh no, this fool is going to go on for four or five hours. I'm going to have to give him the light?"
But you know Chris, what an idiot! I mean, we've got to watch this idiot for, you know, an hour and nine minutes. He just says one hateful thing after the other. He's so embarrassing.
Just from the beginning, you know, Melania comes in with the sequin jacket, and all the white guys are like, "Hey, she's hot! Maybe if I'm like him, I can get her." The whole sham from the beginning!
But you know, as I was watching the so-called speech...
Meanwhile, were all the white guys saying that about Melania? Was Schumer saying it? What about the blacks?
At any rate, this is the bullshit you were served if you tuned to the "liberal" channel at 9 PM on the coast.
Griffin said that she'd been forced to watch a "so-called speech." Two hours later, we watched her on a so-called news network, a so-called network which was conducting a pseudo-discussion.
It was still just 9 PM on the coast. People tuning in on the coast saw a full hour of crap like this, on the cable news channel which once gave us Our Own Rhodes Scholar.
The dangerous dumbing-down of the culture has been a widespread corporate choice. The hour Matthews ran last night was about as dumb as it gets.
Matthews spoke to no one who wasn't a comedian or an actor. Only one guest was a Trump supporter. We didn't catch his name, but he came on right at the end of the hour, speaking for roughly one minute.
As bad as Griffin was, Rob Reiner may have been worse. On balance, we'd have to say that he was worse, because he has a political background and Griffin doesn't.
(By the way: when did Michael Moore become a starry-eyed Hillary lover?)
Your culture is being dumbed way down so people like Matthews, Williams and Maddow can continue to roll around in big giant piles of cash. With the hour that Matthews did, MSNBC surrendered any semblance of any pretense.
They're running a gong-show, just like Trump. Warning:
Trump does it better.
Horrible, terrible stuff: Griffin was a corporate-culture embarrassment. To watch her twelve minutes, click here. In fairness, she didn't book herself.
Reiner may have been worse. For some of his masterfully hackneyed remarks, you can just click this.
This program was an embarrassment during the midnight hour here on our sprawling campus. It was still just 9 PM on the coast. What did it look like there?
THE WAY WE ARE: Kristof says liberals should stop dropping bombs!
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1, 2017
Part 2—We quickly reject his advice: Last Thursday morning, Nicholas Kristof offered some good sound advice.
We shouldn't generalize about The Others, the pundit offensively said.
Kristof started his column by recalling a tweet he'd recently loosed on the world. In response to his tweet, we liberals had produced a sample of The Way We (quite frequently) Are:
Jason defended the practice. Another reader marveled at Kristof's tolerance for "a whole bunch of bigoted unthinking lizard brains."
To Kristof, these comments reflected a "troubling condescension" on the part of us liberals. But so it frequently goes when we liberals discuss The Others these days.
In the rest of last Thursday's column, Kristof tried to explain and justify his original tweet. Yesterday, we showed you the heart of his argument.
Kristof said he knows plenty of people in his hometown (Yamhill, Oregon) who voted for Candidate Trump. He said he thinks their judgment was "profoundly wrong." But they aren't "hateful bigots," he said, and it's bogus to think that they must be.
Poor Kristof! He was offering human history's least welcome piece of advice. He was telling a gang of tribals that we shouldn't generalize about The Others in the ugliest possible ways.
We shouldn't voice sweeping moral denunciations, Kristof said. When people offer such advice, it rarely turns out well.
One day later, the New York Times published three letters about Kristof's offensive column. As we read the letters, we were struck by the way we liberals will fight for the modern-day right to party—for the right to make sweeping generalizations about those in The Other Tribe.
Tomorrow and Friday, we'll review those instructive letters. For today, let's consider why Kristof thinks we shouldn't generalize, especially in such unpleasant ways.
Why shouldn't we morally brilliant liberals generalize about The Others? In last Thursday's column, Kristof offered three reasons. In our view, two of his reasons were quite strong. One was perhaps a bit fuzzy.
Why shouldn't we liberals generalize about the bigoted lizard brains? For starters, Kristof says such claims will be wrong on the merits.
Kristof explains this ridiculous notion below. Warning: Math is hard!
The modern liberal will understand how silly such nit-picking is. Like Bannon, we're bomb-throwing Leninists Over Here now. We enjoy the practice of drowning all the cats in one huge burlap bag.
Perhaps anticipating such a response, Kristof supplied a second reason why we shouldn't generalize. In our view, this argument isn't exactly wrong, but it's rather abstruse:
(Our view? Alas! When we name-call The Others, we do heighten the polarization which has increasingly made political action impossible on the national level. This type of paralysis has long been a goal of those "on the right.")
We think Kristof's second point is basically right, but it's highly abstruse. You'll never get tribals to retract their bombs with fuzzy thinking like that!
That brings us to Kristof's third reason. Why shouldn't we liberals name-call The Others, all 63 million of Them at a time? Even people like Us ought to be able to grasp the point advanced in this potent passage:
Once again, our liberal attention will likely fade as Kristof hauls out his big numbers. Still, what he says in that passage is very basic—and in our tribe's subsequent letters of protest, we liberals seemed preternaturally skilled at failing to grasp or consider his point.
In that passage, Kristof makes a perfectly sensible point. Let's review his logic:
Most Trump voters are probably unattainable for Democrats, he quite sensibly says. But then, he makes another key point:
Millions may be winnable!
Presumably, liberals and Democrats might want to win some of those Trump voters in future elections. Dropping our B-bombs on all their heads may not be the best way to do this.
You'd think this point would make so much sense that even we liberals could grasp it. But we're the people who have now managed to lose so many elections that "Republicans now control 68 percent of partisan legislative chambers in the U.S."
We were even able to get the craziest candidate in human history elected to the White House! After twenty-five years of ridiculous failure to function, that's how hapless we liberals are!
The day after Kristof's column appeared, the New York Times published three letters about it. In all three letters, fiery liberals found ways to push back against Kristof's silly advice.
In fairness, it was just three letters. There's no way to know what kinds of letters the Times chose not to publish.
Still and all, those letters were the ones which appeared. As we read them, we were struck by the zeal with which we liberals will fight for the right to bomb The Others.
We were struck by the zeal with which we liberals will fight for the right to make transparently unintelligent statements—and of course, for the right to lose future elections, our one transcendent skill.
Tomorrow: Three liberals respond
Part 2—We quickly reject his advice: Last Thursday morning, Nicholas Kristof offered some good sound advice.
We shouldn't generalize about The Others, the pundit offensively said.
Kristof started his column by recalling a tweet he'd recently loosed on the world. In response to his tweet, we liberals had produced a sample of The Way We (quite frequently) Are:
KRISTOF (2/23/17): A few days ago, I blithely tweeted a warning that Democrats often sound patronizing when speaking of Trump voters. That provoked a vehement reaction.In his original tweet, Kristof had said that Democrats often sound patronizing when speaking about Trump voters.
“Sorry,” Jason tweeted back, “but if someone is supporting a racist ignoramus who wants to round up brown ppl and steal my money, I’m gonna patronize.”
“This is normalization of a hateful ideology and it’s shameful,” protested another.
“My tone isn’t patronizing,” one person responded. “It’s hostile. Intentionally. I won’t coddle those who refuse to recognize my humanity.”
“What a great idea!” another offered. “Let’s recruit a whole bunch of bigoted unthinking lizard brains because we could possibly ‘WIN!’”
And so the comments went, registering legitimate anxieties about President Trump—but also the troubling condescension that worried me in the first place.
Jason defended the practice. Another reader marveled at Kristof's tolerance for "a whole bunch of bigoted unthinking lizard brains."
To Kristof, these comments reflected a "troubling condescension" on the part of us liberals. But so it frequently goes when we liberals discuss The Others these days.
In the rest of last Thursday's column, Kristof tried to explain and justify his original tweet. Yesterday, we showed you the heart of his argument.
Kristof said he knows plenty of people in his hometown (Yamhill, Oregon) who voted for Candidate Trump. He said he thinks their judgment was "profoundly wrong." But they aren't "hateful bigots," he said, and it's bogus to think that they must be.
Poor Kristof! He was offering human history's least welcome piece of advice. He was telling a gang of tribals that we shouldn't generalize about The Others in the ugliest possible ways.
We shouldn't voice sweeping moral denunciations, Kristof said. When people offer such advice, it rarely turns out well.
One day later, the New York Times published three letters about Kristof's offensive column. As we read the letters, we were struck by the way we liberals will fight for the modern-day right to party—for the right to make sweeping generalizations about those in The Other Tribe.
Tomorrow and Friday, we'll review those instructive letters. For today, let's consider why Kristof thinks we shouldn't generalize, especially in such unpleasant ways.
Why shouldn't we morally brilliant liberals generalize about The Others? In last Thursday's column, Kristof offered three reasons. In our view, two of his reasons were quite strong. One was perhaps a bit fuzzy.
Why shouldn't we liberals generalize about the bigoted lizard brains? For starters, Kristof says such claims will be wrong on the merits.
Kristof explains this ridiculous notion below. Warning: Math is hard!
KRISTOF: There are three reasons I think it’s shortsighted to direct liberal fury at the entire mass of Trump voters, a complicated (and, yes, diverse) group of 63 million people.Uh-oh! In that passage, Kristof notes that we're talking about 63 million different people when we drop our bombs. He says those people aren't all bigots. On the merits, he says our claim will be wrong.
First, stereotyping a huge slice of America as misogynist bigots is unfair and impairs understanding. Hundreds of thousands of those Trump supporters had voted for Barack Obama. Many are themselves black, Latino or Muslim. Are they all bigots?
The modern liberal will understand how silly such nit-picking is. Like Bannon, we're bomb-throwing Leninists Over Here now. We enjoy the practice of drowning all the cats in one huge burlap bag.
Perhaps anticipating such a response, Kristof supplied a second reason why we shouldn't generalize. In our view, this argument isn't exactly wrong, but it's rather abstruse:
KRISTOF (continuing directly): Second, demonizing Trump voters feeds the dysfunction of our political system. One can be passionate about one’s cause, and fight for it, without contributing to political paralysis that risks making our country ungovernable.According to Kristof, we feed our political system's growing dysfunction when we demonize all Those People. This is probably true, but Kristof makes little effort to explain his point in sufficiently low-IQ ways.
Tolerance is a liberal value; name-calling isn’t. This raises knotty questions about tolerating intolerance, but is it really necessary to start with a blanket judgment writing off 46 percent of voters?
(Our view? Alas! When we name-call The Others, we do heighten the polarization which has increasingly made political action impossible on the national level. This type of paralysis has long been a goal of those "on the right.")
We think Kristof's second point is basically right, but it's highly abstruse. You'll never get tribals to retract their bombs with fuzzy thinking like that!
That brings us to Kristof's third reason. Why shouldn't we liberals name-call The Others, all 63 million of Them at a time? Even people like Us ought to be able to grasp the point advanced in this potent passage:
KRISTOF: The third reason is tactical: It’s hard to win over voters whom you’re insulting.Replace race-baiting with economic pitches? Who will want to do that?
Many liberals argue that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and that the focus should be on rallying the base and fighting voter suppression efforts. Yes, but Democrats flopped in Congress, governor races and state legislatures. Republicans now control 68 percent of partisan legislative chambers in the U.S.
If Democrats want to battle voter suppression, it’s crucial to win local races—including in white working-class districts in Ohio, Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Yes, a majority of Trump voters are probably unattainable for Democrats, but millions may be winnable. So don’t blithely give up on 63 million people; instead, make arguments directed at them. Fight for their votes not with race-baiting but with economic pitches for the working and middle classes.
Once again, our liberal attention will likely fade as Kristof hauls out his big numbers. Still, what he says in that passage is very basic—and in our tribe's subsequent letters of protest, we liberals seemed preternaturally skilled at failing to grasp or consider his point.
In that passage, Kristof makes a perfectly sensible point. Let's review his logic:
Most Trump voters are probably unattainable for Democrats, he quite sensibly says. But then, he makes another key point:
Millions may be winnable!
Presumably, liberals and Democrats might want to win some of those Trump voters in future elections. Dropping our B-bombs on all their heads may not be the best way to do this.
You'd think this point would make so much sense that even we liberals could grasp it. But we're the people who have now managed to lose so many elections that "Republicans now control 68 percent of partisan legislative chambers in the U.S."
We were even able to get the craziest candidate in human history elected to the White House! After twenty-five years of ridiculous failure to function, that's how hapless we liberals are!
The day after Kristof's column appeared, the New York Times published three letters about it. In all three letters, fiery liberals found ways to push back against Kristof's silly advice.
In fairness, it was just three letters. There's no way to know what kinds of letters the Times chose not to publish.
Still and all, those letters were the ones which appeared. As we read them, we were struck by the zeal with which we liberals will fight for the right to bomb The Others.
We were struck by the zeal with which we liberals will fight for the right to make transparently unintelligent statements—and of course, for the right to lose future elections, our one transcendent skill.
Tomorrow: Three liberals respond
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)