THE PERILS OF SKILL-FREE LIVING: Androids gone wild!

TUESDAY, JULY 11, 2017

Part 2—Westworld v. David Leonhardt: Back in 1973, Michael Crichton scored his first job as a feature film director.

He wrote and drected Westworld, a fascinating feature film better known as "androids gone wild."

In this case, it was Yul (Yul Brynner), not HAL, who began causing trouble for us alleged humans. The leading authority on the film recalls the way they were:

In the then-future year of 1983, a high-tech, highly realistic adult amusement park called Delos features three themed "worlds"—Westworld (the American Old West), Medieval World (medieval Europe), and Roman World (the ancient Roman city of Pompeii). The resort's three "worlds" are populated with lifelike androids that are practically indistinguishable from human beings, each programmed in character for their assigned historical environment. For $1000 per day, guests may indulge in any adventure with the android population of the park, including sexual encounters and even a fight to the death.

[...]

The technicians running Delos notice problems beginning to spread like an infection among the androids....When one of the supervising computer scientists scoffs at the "analogy of an infectious disease," he is told by the chief supervisor, "We aren't dealing with ordinary machines here. These are highly complicated pieces of equipment, almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they've been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work."

Say what? Guests were allowed to indulge in sexual encounters with the androids?

You betcha! One key point becomes clear in the feature film Westworld. Once androids become fully life-like and sufficiently cheap, a substantial percentage of human "dating" will come to a screeching halt.

At any rate, visitors to the Westworld park found themselves surrounded by surprisingly lifelike androids. Down through the years, we've often reported the same odd feeling as we've read the puzzling work produced by our mainstream press.

Is it possible that our upper-end journos are a collection of misfiring androids? Might this explain the skill-free living which is commonly on display within our upper-end press?

Consider a recent example. Last evening, who could have watched the first hour of Anderson Cooper's CNN show without getting the sneaking suspicion that a gang of androids were misfiring, sometimes badly, right there on our TV machine?

The pundits' performance was marked by the apparent lack of any analytical skill. And yet, this type of performance has become fairly routine during these, the skill-free years.

Cooper's panel misfired at will. For a second example, consider David Leonhardt's effort in the June 25 New York Times.

Could Leonhardt be some type of misfiring android? We ask for an obvious reason.

Leonhardt prepped at Horace Man. He then moved on to Yale, where he served as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.

He graduated in 1994. Not long after, troubling signs began to appear.

According to the leading authority, he won a Peter Lisagor Award in 1998 for Exemplary Journalism in the Business Journalism category—"for a Business Week story he wrote about problems at McDonald's."

It's hard to imagine winning a prize for a "story" about problems at your favorite fast food restaurant. But that's what Leonhardt seems to have done.

Soon after, Leonhardt arrived at the Times. He won a Pulitzer in 2011, after being branded, for years, as one of the actual smart ones. It's that branding which gives us pause.

On his better days, Leonhardt is capable of work which seems to be vaguely upper-end human. Today, for example, he offers this column about Medicaid spending in the small state of Rhode Island.

Aside from his usual silly remarks about what sorts of practices count as "conservative," the column is well worth discussing. Though that of course will never happen within our skill- and discussion-free world.

On his better days, Leonhardt can seem to function in a recognizable human manner. Then too, he's capable of offering work like this.

We link you to Leonhardt's puzzling work from the June 25 Times, more specifically from the back page of the Sunday Review. It's very, very hard to believe that Leonhardt's "story" that day reflected adult human origins.

Leonhardt shared a byline with Stuart Thompson, a youngish "graphics director" for the Times. (He graduated from a Canadian university in 2010.) Presumably, Thompson designed the many graphics featured in the report.

Presumably, the text of the report was written by Leonhardt. He misfired in such a way as to raise our long-standing question about the human or non-human status of those in our upper-end press corps.

In fairness, Leonhardt's "story" was an eyeball grabber this day. Beneath a giant, exciting headline, this summary appeared:

LEONHARDT (6/23/17): Trump's Lies

Many Americans have become accustomed to President Trump’s lies. But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them. So we have catalogued nearly every outright lie he has told publicly since taking the oath of office.

These weren't just lies, they were outright lies! Leonhardt had catalogued nearly every one Trump has told since the day he took office!

Nearly every outright lie? Already, the analysts were rattling the chains with which we keep them at their study carrels.

In little tiny very small print, Leonhardt proceeded to list a vast array of outright lies. Below, you see the second such item. Our question is blindingly obvious:

How do we know this was a "lie" at all, let alone an outright lie?

JAN. 21 “A reporter for Time magazine—and I have been on their cover 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.” (Trump was on the cover 11 times and Nixon appeared 55 times.)

Regarded as a statement of fact, Trump's statement would seem to have been false, wrong and even inaccurate.

But how do we know it was a "lie," let alone an outright lie? How do we know that Donald J. Trump didn't believe the particulars found within this inaccurate remark?

Leonhardt didn't seem to know or care. Infected androids are like that.

Is Yale's David Leonhardt human? It's very, very hard to believe that a human being who went to Yale would be able to compose a passage as puzzling, and as bereft of basic skill, as what you see below.

Yet this is how the actual text of Leonhardt's report began. Skill-free living of this type has helped create our current disintegrating political world:

LEONHARDT (6/25/17): All the President’s Lies

President Trump’s political rise was built on a lie (about Barack Obama's birthplace). His lack of truthfulness has also become central to the Russia investigation, with James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testifying under oath about Trump's “lies, plain and simple.”

There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths. Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president—of either party—has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant.

We have set a conservative standard here, leaving out many dubious statements (like the claim that his travel ban is “similar” to Obama administration policy). Some people may still take issue with this standard, arguing that the president wasn't speaking literally. But we believe his long pattern of using untruths to serve his purposes, as a businessman and politician, means that his statements are not simply careless errors.

We are using the word “lie” deliberately. Not every falsehood is deliberate on Trump's part. But it would be the height of naïveté to imagine he is merely making honest mistakes. He is lying.

Does Leonhardt know what a "lie" is? Assuming Leonhardt is human at all, it's very hard to be sure.

In paragraph 4, it seems to be clear Leonhardt understands that a falsehood isn't a "lie" unless it's told deliberately. He seems to know that an "honest mistake" doesn't qualify as a "lie."

(In paragraph 5, he seems to throw it all away. We'll show you that below.)

In paragraph 2, Leonhardt makes a statement with which we'd be inclined to agree. He overdramatizes his claim, but we would be inclined to agree with this scaled-down version:

"There is no precedent for an American president to tell so many untruths."

Indeed, no American president has ever told so many deeply peculiar untruths! That doesn't explain why Leonhardt feels comfortable listing his large catalog of falsehoods as a list of (deliberate) "lies."

Note the weirdness of some of the functioning here. At one point, Leonhardt claps himself on the back for not counting "dubious statements" as lies. Would an upper-end human intellectual make so silly a move?

In paragraph 4, Leonhardt says it's silly to think that Trump is making honest mistakes. Note how strange that is!

Isn't it possible that Trump is making some "honest mistakes"—even some tremendously stupid honest mistakes—while telling some (deliberate) "lies?" On its face, this seems like an obvious possibility. Leonhardt never quite puzzles it out.

At certain points, the apparent android tries to fashion the types a of distinction a functioning human might make. Consider this passage again, where Leonhardt defines his "conservative standard" for calling a statement a lie:

LEONHARDT: We have set a conservative standard here, leaving out many dubious statements (like the claim that his travel ban is “similar” to Obama administration policy). Some people may still take issue with this standard, arguing that the president wasn't speaking literally. But we believe his long pattern of using untruths to serve his purposes, as a businessman and politician, means that his statements are not simply careless errors.

"Some people may still take issue with this standard, arguing that the president wasn't speaking literally?" Possible android, please!

Such a claim would make little sense unless it was applied to some specific statement by Trump. Leonhardt doesn't seem to grasp this point.

Once again, it doesn't seem to occur to Leonhardt that Trump may not have been speaking literally in some of his apparent misstatements. To Leonhardt, there can't be some "careless errors" mixed in with some non-literal statements and some "outright lies." To a unit which may be infected, it has to be all or none!

With a bit of revulsion, we'll note Leonhardt's early suggestion that, if Comey the God referred to lies by Trump, the obvious greatness of Comey the God must be slavishly honored. This unit is unwilling to say that Comey's good faith is open to question in recent years too. But then, this is the way these units have functioned over the past twenty-five years as they've honored the Powells, the Starrs and the Ryans as truth-telling great moral gods.

We'll mention one other problem here. Leonhardt doesn't consider the possibility that Trump's most peculiar misstatements may be the work of a man who is mentally ill. Consider one of Trump's most peculiar claims, as debunked by Leonhardt:

JAN. 25 “Now, the audience was the biggest ever. But this crowd was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive.” (Official aerial photos show Obama's 2009 inauguration was much more heavily attended.)

Can we talk? By January 25, the reference to "the audience" was probably a reference to the world-wide viewing audience, which actually was the largest ever (as far as we know).

That said, Trump did seem to push the claim that his physical, in-person crowd was also the biggest ever. This claim seemed to be blatantly false, but it kept getting angrily pushed by Trump's embattled spokespersons.

Did it ever occur to Leonhardt that some of these peculiar claims may be the crackpot ravings of someone who "isn't well?"

We don't normally accuse the mentally ill of "lying" when they make wildly inaccurate statements. But apparently, the answer is no. This possibility with respect to Trump doesn't seem to have entered Leonhardt's apparent head. He keeps it very, very simple. Very simple and dumb.

Is Leonhardt man or machine? We've asked such questions many times over the past twenty-five years as journalists have stuck to mandated establishment scripts about a wide array of deeply important matters.

At present, mainstream journalists are in love with the claim that Trump is the world's biggest liar. They have tended to shrink from the possibility that he may also be mentally ill.

Leonhardt sticks to these company lines as he lists Trump's "outright lies." That said, does he even know what a "lie" is? Does this man-or-machine understand this well-known human term?

By paragraph 5, he seems to be thoroughly breaking down. Weirdly, here's what he wrote:

LEONHARDT (continuing directly from above): The list above uses the conservative standard of demonstrably false statements. By that standard, Trump told a public lie on at least 20 of his first 40 days as president. But based on a broader standard—one that includes his many misleading statements (like exaggerating military spending in the Middle East)—Trump achieved something remarkable: He said something untrue, in public, every day for the first 40 days of his presidency. The streak didn’t end until March 1.

Weirdly, Leonhardt seems to say, in that first, barely literate sentence, that a statement qualifies as a "lie" if it's "demonstrably false." He seems to say that this is a "conservative standard" for defining the term "lie."

Crackers! The fact that a statement is "demonstrably false" doesn't qualify it as a lie! Such statements are made in good faith every day. Any human would understand that. It almost seems that this possible android may not.

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at Masha Gessen as she engages in similar reasoning during a public lecture. For today, we'll offer a tiny thought:

When we see people like Leonhardt function this way, we get a very distinctive feeling. We get the feeling that they have exactly one skill—the skill of adhering to script.

He prepped at Mann, then went to Yale. Today, it's far from clear that he knows how to define or apply the well-known human term "lie."

He does know how to stick to script. In these years of skill-free living, that seems to be our upper-end press corps' one observable skill.

This is the best modern androids can do. To us, this makes them seem less than human. Dating procedures are safe.

Tomorrow: We'd say she embarrassed herself

Various ways to pronounce potato!

MONDAY, JULY 10, 2017

Human history's most obvious point: Here at this incomparable site, we could never be mad at Kevin Drum.

Yes, we preferred the old Kevin Drum, the one who hadn't been radicalized. But we've now surveyed every one of our youthful analysts. They all say, to a man, to a woman, that they still love their Uncle Drum.

That said, good grief! When it comes to skill-free living, we're required to post the brief excerpt shown below. In it, we're back to the question of when to call something a "lie:"

DRUM (7/8/17): [The Daily Howler] says "profoundly misleading," I say "lie." Potato, potahto.

In the post we're citing, Drum quotes something we wrote in 1995 to generate a contradiction or inconsistency of some type. In the process, though, he misses the basic point, which appears in these various raiments:

Misleading statements aren't necessarily lies.

False statements aren't necessarily lies.

Even profoundly misleading statements aren't necessarily lies.

The vast majority of false or misleading statements are probably made in good faith. A lie is an inaccurate statement which was made deliberately.

As happenstance has it, we're going to be discussing this point again this week. But good God! This is a distinction so basic that any third-grader can grasp it, and does. But we liberals are so eager to shout "liar" and "lies" that all previous knowledge fades away, like the morning dew

Just to be clear:

A "lie" is a false statement made with the knowledge that the statement is false. By way of contrast, a false or misleading statement can be made in total good faith.

If we might borrow from Groucho:

They're simple mistakes, of the kind that get made every day.

People! Almost surely, most false or misleading statements aren't lies! Everybody understands this, except in these tribal times.

What is the potential problem with calling a politician's statement a "lie?" Here we go, for the ten millionth time:

When you say a statement is false, you're making a single claim. When you call a statement a "lie," you're actually making two claims:

You're claiming that the statement is false. Plus, you're saying the false statement was made deliberately.

In most instances, the Kellyanne Conways jump with joy when we move from "misstatement" to "lie." They do so for the following reason:

Confronted with the obvious fact that their client is making false statements, they can now create a different dispute—a dispute about the claim that he did so deliberately. They get to move from a point on which they can't win to a point on which they basically can't lose.

Let's be clear:

It isn't that there's some ultimate rule about calling some statement a "lie." It's just that it tends to be a bad way to win a debate.

Beyond that, Jesus Christ! At what point will we liberals advance all the way to fourth grade? Misleading statements and false statements are not necessarily lies!

Might we adjust Drum's old saw? Here we go:

We say potato, you say "let me think of a way I can fail in a cable debate I should win."

A "lie" is always told in bad faith. Misleading/false statements are not.

You can't find a 9-year-old who isn't familiar with this logic. In this tribalized land of skill-free living, you can't find a professional liberal who is.

Also this, regarding the mystery of cuts: In his post, Drum refers to the 1995 debate about the GOP Medicare proposal. That gong-show debate went unresolved for at least a year. It turned on this utterly tedious question, which completely overwhelmed the journalists of that time:

Were Republicans proposing a Medicare cut? Or were they merely slowing the rate at which Medicare would grow?

We wrote about this in the Baltimore Sun in 1995 or 1996. In August 1999, as a hedge against future confusion, we posted three treatments of this baffling conceptual problem—medium, short and long.

We've linked to those reports many times. Krugman linked to them once. People, we're just saying!

Absolutely nothing about this conundrum is new. It's just that, in our land of skill-free living, it's impossible to move information or insight along.

In this land of skill-free living, our professional journalist/pundit class seems to exist to keep such things from happening. No analytical error is ever dispelled. We live for confusion and ignorance.

THE PERILS OF SKILL-FREE LIVING: What ever happened to basic skills?

MONDAY, JULY 10, 2017

Part 1—Professor Horwich's post: For the past year or two, we've been looking for ways to discuss Professor Horwich's essay.

The essay first appeared, in March 2013, as a post at the New York Times' Opinionator site. On that occasion, the post was credited to a sub-site called The Stone, the New York Times' site for questions from the world of academic philosophy.

We didn't see the professor's post when it first appeared. We saw it perhaps in 2015, when the New York Times got a snootful and published The Stone Reader, a compilation of 133 different posts from The Stone.

Surprised by the book at a local book store, we scanned its table of contents. The title on Horwich's essay said this:

"Was Wittgenstein right?"

Lustily, we turned to page 133 (sic), where the essay began. We've been looking for ways to get to that essay ever since that day.

Professor Horwich, a Brit, was at NYU, and apparently still is. We think his essay helps explain our failing society's love affair with low-IQ, skill-free living.

The perils of skill-free living are many. That said, this love affair is just as strong in our own liberal tents as it is Over There, among Those People.

You're going to we're stretching as we make that award-winning statement. In thinking that, though, you'll be wrong.

As noted, Professor Horwich's essay entered the world as a post. He sought to explain why the world of academic philosophy has largely soured on Wittgenstein.

We expect to return to Horwich's text at some time to review his thinking in detail. For today, all you really need to do is read his first six paragraphs (excerpt below).

For today, we'll simplify the claim Horwich makes in those first six grafs. Essentially, he says something we've occasionally joked about on the world's most illustrious comedy stages.

This is what he says:

He says philosophy professors quit Wittgenstein because, if they accepted what Wittgenstein said, they'd have to stop teaching the carbuncle-laden courses upon which they've based their careers.

Let's spell that out a bit:

Wittgenstein said that most academic philosophy was based upon "grammatical confusion." He said the statements which define the field aren't actually wrong.

He said those statements don't rise to the level of being wrong! Wittgenstein said that these philosophical statements are actually incoherent.

If you accept this general claim, you pretty much may have to stop teaching your Critique of Pure Reason course. In a simplified nutshell, so says Horwich, explaining why Wittgenstein has lost favor, bigly, in the halls of academe:

HORWICH (3/3/13): The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy—what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject—concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them—a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others.

Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment—certainly not many professional philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters, the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.

[...]

Given [Wittgenstein's] extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy—perhaps tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject—it is hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her life’s work is confused and pointless?

Is that analysis correct? In the past, we've often wondered if Wittgenstein lost favor within the academy because his work invalidates the work which comprises the canon. In his essay, Professor Horwich was basically trying to say that we had been right all along!

Whatever! For today, we'll only note that Horwich says that Wittgenstein hugely lost favor in professional circles. We think that helps explain why we live within a rapidly failing, remarkably skill-free national culture.

This is why we say that:

Horwich is talking about the "later" Wittgenstein, the fellow whose famous text, Philosophical Investigations, was published, posthumously, in 1953.

As Wittgenstein noted in his Preface, the book is very hard to follow, define, summarize, explain, dance to or discuss. "I should have liked to produce a good book," Wittgenstein gloomily wrote. "It has not turned out that way, but the time is past in which I could improve it."

Still, the book introduces analytical techniques which facilitate clear expression in a wide array of areas. The professors who have quit this book are the same people who have proven to be of so little use as incoherence, dissembling and demagoguery have come to define our political and journalistic culture in the past (let's say) thirty years.

The most elementary basic skills are mainly notable by their absence from our political journalism. As we've sunk beneath the waves from this experience in skill-free living, our philosophy professors have hung back, providing no help, offering no guidance or instruction.

Our logicians have thoroughly failed us. In his essay, Professor Horwich says they walked off the job because they wanted to make their professional lives easier to maintain.

Out logicians have thoroughly failed us. We'll invite you to connect this point to another fact:

Again and again, we've asked you to notice an highly improbable state of affairs. Our highest journalistic elites are almost completely unskilled.

Again and again and again and again, the most basic skills of their trade have proven to be beyond their reach. When the professors quit Wittgenstein, they threw in their lot with this corrosive state of affairs.

What does skill-free journalism look like? We plan to explore that question all week, reviewing the work of several journalists who exist at the top of the professional heap.

We'll focus on Masha Gessen's recent lecture/interview at the 2017 PEN World Voices Festival. To watch the event, click here.

We'll also focus on David Leonhardt, one of the New York Times' best and brightest.

Gessen is unusually bright and extremely sincere. Her personal history gives her a unique perspective on many contemporary issues.

By the norms of American journalism, Gessen is unusually bright. That said: in its most significant and most lauded passages, her lecture at the PEN event was strikingly skill-free.

Skill-free living? It's been the norm within our journalism for the past quite a few years. Plainly, this skill-free living has been leading our nation to ruin.

We'll explore the peculiar practice all week. In our view, Professor Horwich has helped describe one part of the story—the unfortunate process in which the guardians decided to walk off their posts.

Tomorrow: Leonhardt emotes

The Polish handshake snub that wasn't!

SATURDAY, JULY 8, 2017

New York Magazine's fake news: Those people!

Where do conservatives get the idea that our mainstream press corps is constantly pimping fake news?

In part, they get the idea from the fact that our "press corps" likes to traffic in silly piddle which looks a great deal like "fake news!"

Today, we'll focus on this childish New York Magazine post about the handshake diss that wasn't. But similar dissembling nonsense appeared all over the mainstream press in the wake of Thursday's shocking handshake incident.

Later, this nonsense was trumpeted by conservative orgs as the latest example of mainstream "fake news." It's hard to say that this assessment was wrong. This is how Donald Trump wins.

The nonsense unfolded on Thursday. To acquire the general lay of the land, let's review this pathetic report at Mediaite, a major site which allegedly was funded and established to critique the American press.

Sad! The report was written by Joe DePaolo, who lists himself as "senior writer/sports editor" at the watchdog site.

Sad! DePaolo seemed to be very excited by what he had seen on videotape from the G-20 meeting. Beneath a highly exciting headline, he filed an excited report:

DEPAOLO (7/6/17): Handshake Fail: Watch Poland’s First Lady Totally Snub Trump in Warsaw

There’s no getting around this one. This was a snub, pure and simple.

Thursday in Warsaw, President Donald Trump went in for a handshake with Poland’s First Lady, Agata Kornhauser-Duda.

And Kornhauser-Duda was having absolutely none of it.

The Polish First Lady just completely snubbed Trump, bypassing his outstretched hand as if it weren’t even there. She instead made a beeline for her American counterpart, Melania Trump.

Check out the GIF posted above. Watch it again. (And again, and again.) It is plain as day.

The nonsense continued from there. Videotape was provided. It included an edit which was so abrupt that any reporter with half a brain would have been suspicious.

Since you're wondering, we'll tell you this about that report: No, you can't get dumber. Still, many other journalists were eager to tell the pleasing tale of Trump's latest handshake fail.

The edited tape was thrown on-line at a wide array of major news sites. Four hours later, though, DePaolo was back with an UPDATE.

Sad! He pretended that he was providing all the facts about his own "handshake fail:"

DEPAOLO: UPDATE 3:54 p.m.—It certainly looked to us like a snub at the time. But further evidence (see below) suggests that it may not have been a snub. Truth is, who knows what was truly in the heart of Polish first lady Agata Kornhauser at that moment other than Ms. Kornhauser herself? We’ll let you be the judge.

In fact, there was no handshake snub. And by the way, Donald J. Trump and President Duda are ideological allies. There would never have been a reason for Polish first lady Kornhauser-Duda to "totally snub" Donald J. Trump by creating a handshake fail.

DePaolo's pathetic pair of posts help establish the lay of the land for this latest nonsense. For ourselves, we first encountered the alleged handshake fail at New York Magazine, a major, long-established news org which is increasingly turning itself into mush.

We encountered the magazine's post at its Daily Intelligencer site, which we review several times daily. The post was written by a youngish person who probably shouldn't be a journalist, at least not at this time.

Before we clicked, we saw this:

7/6/2017 at 12:58 p.m.
Poland’s First Lady Expertly Curves a Handshake From Trump
By Madison Malone Kircher
Agata Kornhauser-Duda avoided shaking the president’s hand like a pro.

Yay yay yay yay yay yay yay! Trump had been dissed again! To understand the times in which we all live, we'll suggest that you review Kircher's awful report.

As noted above, the basic insinuation lodged in that headline was entirely wrong. In fact, Trump hadn't been avoided or dissed at all. A review of the unedited tape makes this abundantly clear.

Sadly, Kircher already seemed to understand that as she composed her report! This is the way she started:

KIRCHER (7/6/17): Canada’s Justin Trudeau went for the skeptical-stare approach. Japan’s Shinzo Abe tried a shake for the entire duration of Trump’s term maneuver. Panama’s Juan Carlos Varela opted for verbally owning Trump while shaking his hand. But none of them can top today’s viral Trump handshake, or rather non-shake, starring the First Lady of Poland, Agata Kornhauser-Duda. During a visit to Warsaw this week, Trump shook Polish president Andrzej Duda’s hand, but when he went to shake Kornhauser-Duda’s, she passed over his hand and went for the shake with Melania Trump instead. (It’s unclear if she just didn’t see Trump extending his hand, but either way, the optics are, well, not great for the U.S. president.) Kornhauser-Duda eventually did end up shaking Trump’s hand, but only after people online recorded many, many excellent video clips of her skipping the initial handshake.

Just for the record:

By "eventually," Kircher meant this: "roughly two seconds later."

Clown car! Kircher actually seemed to know that Trump hadn't been dissed. But so what! The optics weren't great for the president! From there, she moved straight ahead to the fun.

Kircher proceeded to post a trio of tweets from three numbskulls eager to claim or suggest that Donald J. Trump had been dissed. After we'd been entertained by their tweets, she closed her pathetic report with this manifest garbage-can work:

KIRCHER: Perhaps the First Lady studied up on the Tiffany Trump Curve Method before meeting with the president today. Trump’s daughter knows a thing or two about avoiding physical contact with her dad while the cameras are rolling.

A further link was provided. If you want your brain cells to die, you should go to New York's report and click.

This post appeared at New York Magazine, which was, for many years, a real and actual news org. The post still sits on the Daily Intelligencer site without a hint of correction or amplification.

The post exists to make you dumber. Meanwhile, who is Kircher? She's three years out of Hamilton College—and she probably shouldn't be in journalism, at least not at this time.

Her other recent posts at the Intelligencer are built around the twin maypoles of mindless snark and snide. She seems to have snark and snide down cold, with access to nothing else.

In fairness, many major sites and orgs pimped the diss that wasn't. The excitement got its start from a misleadingly edited piece of videotape—a piece of tape edited in such a way that anyone with an ounce of sense would have been very suspicious of what it seemed to portray.

Our journalists tend to lack such skills. In this case, an abrupt edit was widely used to promote the idea—yay yay yay!—that Trump had been dissed again!

The outcome here is obvious. By now, everyone from President Duda on down has denounced this rank stupidity as the latest example of the mainstream press corps' devotion to "fake news."

Conservatives have widely heard this claim. It's very, very hard to say that this claim isn't basically accurate in this particular case.

Every conservative has been told about this latest "fake news." DePaolo and Kircher and all the others have fed their monumental dumbness into this Putin-approved script for strongmen worldwide.

As we've said, many orgs ran with this nonsense once it exploded on Twitter. In many of their reports, it's clear that the reporters already knew that J-Trump hadn't been dissed.

But so what? They wanted to give their readers a thrill. They wanted to give them the thrill of believing, pretending or imagining that Donald J. Trump had been dissed.

They sold their readers a chunk of fake news. What else should somebody call it?

We met it first through Kircher's post. That said, the ubiquity of this foolishness brought past events to mind.

Starting in 1999, an earlier generation of "journalists" played similar games for two years. Their games, which were aimed at Candidate Gore, sent Candidate Bush to the White House.

That generation played silly games about statements Gore had supposedly made. They played silly games about his clothes and also about his hair.

As Election Day drew near, they even played a silly game in which they pretended he'd stuck a sock in his pants to make his crotch seem bigger. Kircher was maybe seven years old when this earlier ship of fools played the pitiful, death-dealing games which sent George Bush to the White House.

There was no pushback to that earlier clowning. Today, the Trump alliance around the world pushes back extremely hard at the DePaolos and the Kirchers and their general like.

Conservatives are being told that this episode was "fake news." It's hard to say that the claim is wrong. Putin got a win from this. Duda voiced his concern.

Meanwhile, a question:

Are we humans bright enough to handle our own affairs? Increasingly, the answer emerges from the silly, snarky scribes at our "liberal" sites.

Putin is betting the answer is no. The deeply thoughtful Russian strongman may well turn out to be right.

File this as our own pet peeve!

FRIDAY, JULY 7, 2017

But also, as a sign of the times: We don't know why people want to do things like this so badly.

We refer to this, the start of a new post by Kevin Drum:

DRUM (7/7/17): A couple of weeks ago, Kellyanne Conway denied that the Senate health care bill cut Medicaid. “These are not cuts to Medicaid,” she said. “This slows the rate for the future.”

This is the lamest, tiredest trope imaginable, and it’s flat-out false. In inflation-adjusted dollars—the only kind that honest people use—CBO estimates that the Senate bill cuts Medicaid spending by about 18 percent over the next decade. As a result, 15 million fewer people will receive Medicaid by 2026. That’s a cut by anyone’s definition.

Was Conway's statement "flat-out false?" Was she describing "a cut by anyone's definition?"

Plainly, she wasn't defining a cut by her own definition. And no, we'd have to say that her statement wasn't "flat-out false" in any obvious sense.

What was her statement? We'd rewrite Drum's critique this way:

DRUM REWRITTEN: This is the lamest, tiredest trope imaginable. Conway's statement can be defended as technically accurate. That said, her statement is also grossly misleading. It's a type of claim which has been used, for decades, to create confusion among the public—to create a false impression about an important topic.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, the CBO estimates that the Senate bill would cut Medicaid spending by about 18 percent over the next decade. As a result, 15 million fewer people would receive Medicaid by 2026.

Medicaid spending would rise from this year's level, by a relatively small amount. But due to ten years of inflation, Medicaid services would have to be sharply cut.

I have no idea why someone would rather say Conway's statement is "flat-out false" than make a more accurate statement which is perhaps more scathing.

Or maybe we do know why:

When we say the statement is flat-out false, it makes us feel good inside. Our body parts swell with blood and with pride.

We have expressed our partisan outrage in a bold, vibrant manner. We've said that we're the good people, unlike Them.

It's also likely that we have extended and clouded an utterly pointless debate. Along will come a range of hacks, not excluding Conway herself, who will spend the next several hours creating confusion out of our fiery statement.

People like Drum are easy meat for skillful dissemblers like Conway. His type has been eaten alive, on cable TV, for lo these many years.

(We first wrote about this particular type of confusion in 1995. The liberal world's inability to settle this question with respect to the Gingrich Medicare proposal was one of the year-long gong shows which led us to start this site.)

Conway's statement is grossly misleading. It has long been part of the dissembler's trade.

That said, when we say the statement is "flat-out false," we're preaching to the cheers from our own choir. As we do, we tend to extend a pointless debate which we tend to lose in the end.

Drum declared himself a convert in the wake of November's election. This was very impressive, of course, but his is the kind of childish statement the dissembler tends to pummel the convert with.

The convert is teaching us how to lose. But dear lord, it feels so good, so fine!

(Needless to say, Drum's headline refers to "lies." We tend to lose games that way too. It's a claim The Others adore.)

Drum was long our favorite blogger. With his conversion, we had to make an adjustment. In secular matters, we simply don't trust the religious type. They tend to lose games for our side, even games which should be easy to win.

POSTCARDS FROM THE PLAGUE: No exit?

FRIDAY, JULY 7, 2017

Part 4—Notes from our failing Oran: At the end of Camus' famous novel, The Plague, the sun-splashed city of Oran has been liberated from the grip of a pestilence.

The gates to the city are open again as a long quarantine is lifted. According to Camus' narrator, "ecstatic couples, locked together, hardly speaking, proclaimed in the midst of the tumult of rejoicing, with the proud egotism and injustice of happy people, that the plague was over, the reign of terror ended."

It's left to Dr. Rieux, newly revealed as the story's narrator, to note that "the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good...and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats and send them forth to die in a happy city."

With that unpleasant observation, Camus' famous novel ends.

Do we live in our own Oran? Has the bacillus roused up its rats again? Is Trumpism our own modern plague? If so, is there any real likelihood that we will emerge from its grip?

Regarding those questions, we tilt toward the negative. In truth, the pioneers of our current infestation began crawling into our lives at least fifty years back.

The people we liberals trust most have agreed to ignore the conduct of these pioneers. Indeed, by the early 1990s, the people we liberals trust most had, in many cases, become pioneers themselves!

Today, Rachel Maddow is the heralded star who sits atop our "liberal" world. She has vouched for virtually every one of these pioneers, pioneers who might elsewhere be taken for bearers of cultural pestilence.

Matthews, Greta Van Susteren, even Howard Stern? Maddow has vouched for each! But she's so good at selling the car, and she's part of so wide an act of denial, it rarely occurs to us in Oran that this conduct is deadly and strange.

The plague of Trumpism didn't begin with Donald J. Trump! The stupidification he keeps selling entered our city a long time ago. So too with the misogyny which had the press corps so upset at this exact time last week.

The mainstream press corps was selling that dumbnification long before Trump came along. Meanwhile, anyone offended by misogyny should be revolted by a corporate star who hails the greatness of Chris Matthews—or who appears on the Howard Stern Show, while hailing Stern as "my hero."

(Inevitably, she made that remark in a Playboy interview! For fuller context, click here.)

The art of the con is endless and vast within the upper-end press corps. Donald J. Trump has taken Trumpism to a deeply stupid new level, but he's built on an ugly, stupid foundation laid by our favorite stars.

By "our," we refer to us in the liberal world. We refer to the stars of our own pathetic brigade, not to the stars Over There.

Has long has it been since the pioneers of Trumpism began to creep into our homes? Earlier this week, we suggested that Trumpism may have begun with the brief, meteoric rise of Les Crane, who invented a broadcast style which linked feigned partisan anger to rude insult and shock-based dumbnification.

Thanks to the bosses who count the money, the basic elements of that broadcast style spread, though perhaps somewhat slowly at first. Eventually, dumbnification and overstatement became the reliable norm on our political shouting-match programs. Within the more secular realm of the morning "shock jock," programming was built upon the two-step Howard Stern plan:

Step 1: Select the least appropriate thing to say.
Step 2: Say it as quickly as possible.

Les Crane was gone, but Howard Stern and Don Imus eventually thrived. Because their dumbnified, shock jock conduct drew many ears, pioneers from our mainstream press corps were eager to go on their programs.

These people pretended they didn't know the nature of the product Stern and Imus were selling. When Imus overreached in 2007 with an explicitly racial sliming of the Rutgers women's basketball team, these mainstream press corps pioneers declared themselves to be "shocked, shocked" by Imus' surprising conduct.

They quickly swam from the sinking ship. Pioneers are like that!

It wasn't hard to get from figures like Imus and Stern to a figure like Rush Limbaugh. In 1984, he replaced the dumbnified shlock jock Morton Downey, Jr. at Sacramento's KFBK. According to the leading authority, here's what happened next:

"On August 1, 1988, after achieving success in Sacramento and drawing the attention of former ABC Radio President Edward McLaughlin, Limbaugh moved to New York City and began his national radio show."

Back in 1962, ABC had loved Les Crane. Now, the network loved Rush Limbaugh. By 1994, he was pretending that Hillary Clinton was involved in the death of Vince Foster. Presumably fearing his audience power, mainstream news orgs left him alone, as they did with the stupidified conduct of Jerry Falwell, who was peddling a videotape about the Clintons' long string of unfortunate murders.

With that deference to Limbaugh and Falwell, our biggest mainstream news orgs joined the many pioneers crawling into Oran. As Crane had shown in 1961, dumbnification leads to big money. Many folk wanted to play.

That said:

By the time of Vince Foster's death, the mainstream press corps had largely thrown in its lot with the pioneers who were infesting our culture. Major players like Jack Welch had taken "news" in a mercantile direction. Major players repeatedly showed that they were willing to play.

Let's ignore the many years devoted to the Whitewater pseudo-scandals. By 1999, one of the most remarkable episodes in this long infestation arrived center stage.

With pioneers like Chris Matthews leading the way, our major mainstream news orgs declared a war on Candidate Gore and, in some cases, on Candidate Hillary Clinton. And yes, we're talking about the mainstream press corps, not the right-wing machine.

The dumbnification was astounding. Outright dissembling ruled. Beyond that, Matthews' misogyny was endless and rank. All your favorite liberal stars pretended they couldn't see this.

(Later, the Corns and the Walshes became cable stars through Matthews' program. We hope their money is spending well as Oran crumbles around them.)

Did Donald J. Trump invent Trumpism? Deluded liberal, please! During Campaign 2000, Maureen Dowd wrote seven columns which centered on Candidate Gore's bald spot, a male version of the face-lift. This included her column on the Sunday before the fateful 2000 election, a column which started like this, pathetic headline included:

DOWD (11/5/00): I Feel Pretty

I feel stunning
And entrancing,
Feel like running and dancing for joy . . .

O.K., enough gloating. Behave, Albert. Just look in the mirror now and put on your serious I only-care-about-the-issues face.

If I rub in a tad more of this mahogany-colored industrial mousse, the Spot will disappear under my Reagan pompadour.

That was her seventh such column. That would also be an earlier version of facelift-style dumbnification.

Dumbnification is part of Trumpism. Has Donald J. Trump ever been dumber than Dowd was that day? Than Dowd was on so many days?

Last week, we were told that misogyny is also part of Trumpism. Has Donald J. Trump ever been more so than Dowd was in 2004, when she authored one of her patented attacks on Candidate Howard Dean's wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg?

Steinberg's coiff was not just so. Also, her wardrobe was wrong. Behold our Pulitzer-winner:

DOWD (1/15/04): The doctors Dean seem to be in need of some tips on togetherness and building a healthy political marriage, if that's not an oxymoron.

Even by the transcendentally wacky standard for political unions set by Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Deans have an unusual relationship.

She is a ghost in his political career. She has never even been to Iowa, and most reporters who have covered Howard Dean's quest here the last two years would not recognize her if she walked in the door, which she is not likely to do, since she prefers examining patients to being cross-examined by voters and reporters.

The first hard evidence most people had that Howard Dean was actually married came with a startling picture of his wife on the front page of Tuesday's Times, accompanying a Jodi Wilgoren profile.

In worn jeans and old sneakers, the shy and retiring Dr. Judith Steinberg Dean looked like a crunchy Vermont hippie, blithely uncoiffed, unadorned, unstyled and unconcerned about not being at her husband's side—the anti-Laura. You could easily imagine the din of Rush Limbaugh and Co. demonizing her as a counterculture fem-lib role model for the blue states.

You could imagine Limbaugh slagging Steinberg. But you could read Dowd doing it!

Has Donald J. Trump ever been more stupidified than Dowd was that day? Shrugging off complaints from the rabble, Dowd returned to this topic ten days later, describing a TV interview conducted by the ludicrous Diane Sawyer, she of "was sex with The Donald the best you ever had:"

DOWD (1/25/04): The flagellation peaked with Diane Sawyer prodding the Deans and making them watch the yelping tape and the Bill-and-Hillary "stand by your man" tape until you thought he would leap at her buttery throat. Dr. Dean, who has not practiced medicine in 12 years, entwined his fingers with those of Mrs. Dean, as Dr. Steinberg said she preferred to be called when she's not at her medical office.

It's impossible to know how her style of being a style agnostic would wear during a campaign, and some reporters thought that thrust into her first national television interview, Judy Dean seemed as fragile as Laura in "The Glass Menagerie."

At moments on ABC, the couple seemed so far from mainstream American life and so disconnected from each other's careers, they were like characters who had walked into the wrong play.

Howard Dean suddenly talking about "leading with my heart" and being "a dad and a human being" was a bit much. But I found Judy Dean, gussied up with unfamiliar lipstick and blush, charming. She seemed as antithetical as possible to the notion of a first lady—and that ain't all bad.

Dowd did this to quite a few daughters and wives. Democrats only, of course!

At any rate, stick a pin in that stupidified indecency. As Dowd continued to weave her gong-show gender magic, Matthews was in the midst of a decade of astonishing gender-based attacks on Hillary Clinton, who he routinely disparaged as "Evita Peron" and, of course, as "Nurse Ratched."

Go ahead! Drink in the squeals which followed Trump's remark about Mika's alleged face-lift. Try to find even one of those highly principled pseudo-journalists who has said a word about this decade in Matthews' disordered career.

The Trumpism of Donald J. Trump is heavily built around factual misstatements, which the children and the pioneers have decided to refer to as "lies." Ask yourself this:

In all of Trump's misstatements, has any misstatement ever been more extreme than the two-year campaign, by the entire mainstream press corps, to pretend that Candidate Gore was telling a series of ludicrous lies? By the press corps' claims that these puzzling lies seemed to suggest that Candidate Gore had some sort of mental problem?

By the craziness with which the press corps picked at his troubling clothes? By the ugliness with which they savaged Naomi Wolf?

Starting on his first day in office, President Trump has emitted a string of bizarre misstatements. Have any of them really exceeded the conduct displayed by the entire mainstream press corps over those two years? Without a peep from our liberal leaders.

Our leaders, who are so troubled today, now that it's too late?

Last week, you heard endless wailing about Trump's face-lift remark. You heard zero, all those years, about the astonishing conduct of players like Matthews, who kept trashing Candidate Gore as "today's man-woman."

You heard nothing for an obvious reason: what happens within the guild stays within the guild! The Chaits, the Dionnes, the Robinsons, the Marshalls will never discuss the giant volume of Trumpism which was dragged into our own Oran by the people whose ascots they kiss before Trump came on the scene.

They will squeal long and loud about Donald J. Trump. Concerning the guild, these deeply principled fiery liberals always bowed to the code of silence, thus paving the way for Trump.

Our own Oran was being devoured long before Donald J. Trump stumble-bummed into the ring. Our own Oran was being eaten long before Trump began to pretend that he had sent investigators to Hawaii to examine Obama's birth.

Our own Oran had been infested long before Trump endorsed Trumpism. Today, your favorites complain about Donald J. Trump. But they cheered, or they averted their gaze, as pioneers from their own guild crawled into Oran.

Rachel Maddow, a consummate con man, has vouched for virtually every one of these pioneers.

She sings the praises of Chris Matthews, her amazing colleague/dear friend. She says Howard Stern is her hero. She even appears on his loathsome program, which is built, as everyone knows, on the firm foundation of stupidified misogyny.

(To review her hero's many chats with Trump, you can start here, or here. Warning—wear a raincoat. Eventually, you'll find Rachel's hero asking Trump about the size of his new baby daughter's breasts. This is our leader's hero!)

When Donald J. Trump threw his hat in the ring, he was four years into his birther campaign. Astonishingly, Maddow announced that she had no problem with Trump the night before he announced.

Over at Fox, Greta Van Susteren was the principal caddie for Trump's birtherism over the course of those years. When Greta got hired by MSNBC, Rachel announced that Greta had long been her wonderful pal, also her drinking buddy.

Recently, chatting with Howard, Rachel even described her friendship with Roger Ailes! But we the liberals are so weak, so desperate for true tribal belief, that we aren't even prepared to be puzzled by this string of behaviors.

Stupidification and falsification were devouring our own Oran long before Trump ran for office. For ourselves, we were already so troubled by this emerging plague that we began planning this site in 1997!

Your favorite stars refuse to discuss such things because 1) they're chasing the dream and 2) they're cashing the checks. In truth, the conduct of your favorite stars has long since eaten away at Oran. Donald J. Trump has merely bumped their repellent conduct to a different, more clownish level.

Will this new pestilence be turned back, as occurred in Oran?

The devastation has already gone quite far. Does Putin want to "undermine our institutions?" People like Matthews and Dowd beat him to it, way back!

Will this latest pestilence be turned back? We know of no reason to think so.

Just look at your tribe's "intellectual leaders!" Why aren't they all mere handmaids to Putin, Donald J. Trump included?

Paul Waldman gets it right!

THURSDAY, JULY 6, 2017

Though also, he gets it wrong: We couldn't resist the headline at the Washington Post.

"The dumbest criticism of single payer health care," it said. Helplessly, we clicked.

When we got there, Paul Waldman did something journalists never do. He battered two major journalists, by name, for making a dumb presentation.

Needless to say, the hapless pair were on-air at CNN. They'd made a dumb presentation about the alleged cost of adopting a "single payer" health care system.

Their names? John Berman and Poppy Harlow. If you read the Waldman post, you'll see that he got it right.

Along the way, we'd have to say that Waldman also got something wrong. His error lurks in this passage:

WALDMAN (7/6/17): There is simply no critique you can make of single payer health care that is more wrong than “It’ll be too expensive.” That is 180 degrees backwards. Single payer is many things, but above all it is cheap. And what we have now is the most expensive system in the world, by a mile.

"Single payer is cheap?" Tain't necessarily so! You could establish a single payer system which ran the cost of health care to the moon. A great example is found here at home, within our own Medicare program.

As everyone knows, Medicare massively overpays for prescription drugs. Under George W. Bush, the program was designed to do that, as a sop to the industry, and the design has succeeded.

That said, a "single payer" program could overpay for every medical cost and procedure. It's all a matter of the way the program is designed. A "single payer" system isn't guaranteed to be low-cost, inexpensive, frugal, money-saving or cheap.

While we're on the subject of "single payer," we'll recommend an informative recent post by Kevin Drum. It returns us to a question we asked sometime back:

Why do we call single payer systems "single payer?"

Drum listed the various types of programs which provide universal coverage. He then explained what percentage of medical costs various governments actually pay under terms of these various plans:

DRUM (6/11/17): None of these systems cover literally every dime of health care coverage. Canada, for example, is single-payer but doesn’t cover all prescription drugs. Different provinces have different rules. In most countries, it’s possible to purchase supplementary insurance to cover the gaps in the national system, something that’s necessary because they all have various copays and exceptions:

[CHART]

You can put all this together to get a single number that represents how generous a national health care system is. For example, Switzerland covers about 65 percent of all medical costs. Canada covers about 70 percent. France covers about 78 percent. Medicare in the US covers about 80 percent. Denmark and Germany are the most generous, covering about 84 percent.

You can see our problem. If the Canadian government pays only 70 percent of medical costs, why in the world would we call its program "single payer?"

Plainly, there seem to be two major payers—the government and the health care recipient him- or herself. There's nothing "wrong" with that, of course. But if two different parties are paying the freight, what's up with the term "single payer?"

This doesn't exactly "matter," of course, unless you think we should avoid a basic rule of American discourse. Under terms of that unwritten law, every discussion must begin with some built-in point of confusion.

"Flat tax" plans aren't actually flat; "single payer" health care plans involve two different payers. And Al Gore said he invented the Internet! It's how we discuss all major topics in this best of all possible worlds.

POSTCARDS FROM THE PLAGUE: Voicing our (newly discovered) disgust!

THURSDAY, JULY 6, 2017

Part 3—Pretending we weren't "benumbed:" Soon after the attacks of September 11, Tony Judt revisited Albert Camus' famous novel, The Plague, in the pages of the Guardian.

All in all, we're not sure we understand or agree with Judt's implied perspective. "In New York, in November 2001, we are better placed than we could ever have wished to feel the lash of the novel's astonishing final sentence?"

In that final sentence, which Judt later quotes, Camus' narrator reminds his readers that the human race is never free from the possibility of pestilence. Here is The Plague's final sentence, as presented in the current standard translation:

"[Rieux] knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books; that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats and send them forth to die in a happy city."

That final sentence warns us of what is eternally possible. In his treatment of Camus' novel, Judt helps us recall the basic ways we humans let plague re-emerge.

Camus, of course, had written a fable about a sun-splashed city, Oran. Beneath its sun-drenched surface, his story was meant to describe the way Europe had become the victim of a vastly destructive political plague.

In Part 1 of this report, we noted the way Camus' fictional townspeople were unprepared to recognize the onset of plague in Oran. In this passage, Judt also recalls what those townsfolk did after the plague had passed:

JUDT (11/16/01): Camus's account of the coming of the rats echoed a widespread view of the divided condition of France itself in 1940...

For a long time people don't realise what is happening and life seems to go on—"in appearance, nothing had changed"; "The city was inhabited by people asleep on their feet." Later, when the plague has passed, amnesia sets in—"they denied that we had been that benumbed people." All this and much more—the black market, the failure of administrators to call things by their name and assume the moral leadership of the nation—so well described the recent French past that Camus's intentions could hardly be misread.

Camus' townspeople engage in two forms of denial. When people start dying, they refuse to consider the possibility that an actual plague may be underway.

After it's over, the deny that they ever were so benumbed. They deny their own prior denial.

Today, we live in a type of Oran. We're afflicted by a type of pestilence widely described as Trumpism.

That said, Donald J. Trump's version of Trumpism didn't "crash down on our heads from a blue sky," to use more of Camus' language. Waves of Trumpists established the culture of Trumpism long before Trump crawled along.

Within the world of the mainstream and liberal press, several generations of career players chose to ignore those earlier waves of Trumpists. Today, they're in denial about the fact that they played the role of Camus' "benumbed people"—that they constantly chose to avert their gaze as the rats crawled all through Oran.

This group denial is being enacted all over the play-for-pay press corps. What are these people denying? Let's return to Rachel Maddow's account of the basic way Trumpism works.

Last Friday night, Maddow gave a good account of the way her colleagues react to the conduct of Donald J. Trump. Her analysis started with her account of the way Trump himself functions.

All politicians seek to distract us, Maddow proclaimed as she started. ("Look who's talking!" one analyst cried.) She then described, quite correctly, what makes Trump so different:

MADDOW (6/30/17): What our new president does is different. What our new president does is really a special twist on that tradition. There is a special ingredient that he is willing to cook with, that nobody else is.

And that is that he deliberately tries not just to distract, but to offend. He doesn't just merely distract people, he disgusts people. He breaks the bounds of decency. Breaks the bounds of what people generally agree are the moral rules for engagement in public discourse, and he breaks those rules in a way that doesn't just start a new narrative, it stops all normal politics and all normal media coverage of current events.

His specialty, what marks him out is really a different kind of cat, is that he is very willing, happy even, deliberately trying to go past the merely controversial. He goes past provocative. He goes right to language, right to public discourse and behavior, that instead of just being controversial or provocative is considered abusive, or even repulsive.

Just to be clear: many people would not agree with that account of Trump's conduct. They would be inclined to describe his behavior in a more affirmative way.

But that is a very good description of the way Trump's behavior strikes a wide range of professional journalists. In their view, Trump's behavior "breaks the bounds of [conventional] decency." His behavior takes us all the way to the realm of disgust.

People feel compelled to respond to such disgusting behavior, Maddow said. Trump's bahavior "makes us want to express our opposition, to weigh in as being opposed to this vile thing, this vile behavior that we have seen from somebody in that kind of position," Maddow correctly said.

Maddow said this feeling is understandable, even commendable. But rather clearly, she seemed to say that this reaction plays into Trump's hands.

Maddow was speaking in the wake of Trump's attack on Mika Brzeznski's alleged bleeding face-lift, which of course never occurred. In the passage shown below, Maddow said she shared that sense of disgust.

She also said she thought the resulting wave of outrage played into Trump's hands. She said she doesn't know the cure for this problem, which borders on a pestilence:

MADDOW: What the president said yesterday about two of our colleagues here at MSNBC is absolutely worthy, worthy of shock and condemnation, which it has rightfully earned and which I share. And honestly, which everybody shares. And if it goes beyond what it appears to be and it reflects an underlying effort at extortion or coercion, that should be investigate as a potential criminal matter.

And on top of that, we also, as a country, have to decide exactly how much we're going to play requests from him. Exactly how much we're going to talk what he wants us to talk about. How much we're going to behave the way he wants us to behave. How much we're going to snap to attention, snap our attention to him when he commands it.

All politicians learn to distract. This metastasized version of distraction that he plays, though, is deliberately and I think we'll realize in the end seriously harmful to the country, and to the presidency specifically. That is the magic ingredient that he is willing to cook with that no other politician will.

And, again, no, I don't know what the cure is to that. When people are willing to do harm of that kind, and there is no way to stop them from doing it.

I don't know what the cure is to that...

Maddow went on to theorize about the motives behind what Trump had said. In these speculations, she was on spectacularly shaky ground—but then, what else is new?

In this part of her opening monologue, Maddow gave a good account of the way the mainstream press corps responds to Donald J. Trump's version of Trumpism.

To state the obvious, she was wrong in saying that "everybody shares" this reaction to Trump's comments. Indeed, the fact that Maddow would be inclined to make such a claim is part of the problem we face.

That said, Maddow gave an excellent account of the way the people she considers decent respond to Trump's behavior. She's right—his behavior takes his critics to the level of moral disgust. To those who oppose this latest Trumpist, his behavior moves well past standard political norms to the level of "repulsive."

In some ways, that's how his behavior strikes us, though we'd be inclined to see his behavior as stupid, fallen and pitiable rather than "vile." (We'd make the same assessment of Joe and Mika's ridiculous conduct over the past dozen years.)

Beyond that, we tend to agree with Maddow's assessment. When the press corps widely expresses disgust, their reactions may play into Trump's hand.

That said, we offer this observation:

Behavior like Trump's has been a major part of our discourse for perhaps fifty years. It may have started with 27-year-old Les Crane in the summer of '61!

The Trumpism of Donald J. Trump actually didn't "crash down on our heads from a blue sky." It has been practiced by a wide array of major players ever since Crane decided to try insulting people as he slammed down the phone.

Where was the outrage all those years as these endless self-dealing pioneers kept crawling into Oran? A major array of pioneers established the repulsive norms of Trumpism long before Donald J. Trump came along. Today, our press corps denies that they were ever the "benumbed people" who let all this pestilence pass.

A major array of pioneers established Trumpism's repulsive norms. With her endorsement of Howard Stern, Maddow, herself a pioneer, has chosen to praise every one!

Tomorrow: Where was this exquisite sense of revulsion back then?

Tears of rage, the afternoon after the Fourth!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 5, 2017

Sometimes a generation gap is just a...: On this day after the Fourth of July, we stumbled back upon Tears of Rage, the Dylan song which opened The Band's inaugural album, Music from Big Pink.

The painful song started like this:

We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day
And now you throw us all aside
And put us all away
What dear daughter 'neath the sun
Could treat a father so
To wait upon him hand and foot
Yet always tell him, “No?”

To hear The Band sing it, click here.

It occurred to us that we'd never read a critical appraisal of the song. We turned to the leading authority, where we learned, among other things, that Roger Waters called Music from Big Pink the second "most influential record in the history of rock and roll," after Sgt. Pepper.

Regarding the song itself, we were struck by this interpretive summary:

Andy Gill likens the song to King Lear's soliloquy on the blasted heath in Shakespeare's tragedy: "Wracked with bitterness and regret, its narrator reflects upon promises broken and truths ignored, on how greed has poisoned the well of best intentions, and how even daughters can deny their father's wishes." He suggests that Dylan is linking the anguish of Lear’s soliloquy to the divisions in American society apparent in 1967, as the Vietnam War escalated: "In its narrowest and most contemporaneous interpretation, the song could be the first to register the pain of betrayal felt by many of America’s Vietnam war veterans. … In a wider interpretation [it] harks back to what anti-war protesters and critics of American materialism in general felt was a more fundamental betrayal of the American Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights."

A strong Biblical theme runs through the song, according to Sid Griffin, who also notes that "life is brief" is a recurrent message in the Old Testament books Psalms and Isaiah. As a father, Dylan realizes now that "no broken heart hurts more than the broken heart of a distraught parent." Griffin calls the four minutes of this song "as representative of community, ageless truths and the unbreakable bonds of family as anything in The Band's canon—or anyone else's canon."

Greil Marcus suggests that the "famous beginning"—"We carried you/In our arms/On Independence Day"—evokes a naming ceremony not just for a child but also for a whole nation. He writes that "in Dylan's singing—an ache from deep in the chest, a voice thick with care in the first recording of the song—the song is from the start a sermon and an elegy, a Kaddish."

We were struck by how politicized that summary was on balance. Was the song about Vietnam vets? Was the song about anti-war protesters? It has always seemed to us that the song is about what it seems to be about—the breakdown between parents and children which was widely occurring at that time.

When Dylan wrote the song, he was a very new parent. It's hard to know what would have led him to write these painful lyrics:

It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse
But oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?

Good God, that's a pain-wracked song! But as a matter of interpretation, it seems to us that sometimes a brutally painful generation gap may just be a generation gap.

For the record, "false instruction" is everywhere now. False instruction has become extremely big business.

(And now the heart is filled with gold, as if it was a purse.)

Go ahead—click on your TV! If it weren't for false instruction, would there be any at all?

POSTCARDS FROM THE PLAGUE: San Francisco, 1961!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 5, 2017

Part 2—Les Crane invents a world: At the time of his death in 2008, Les Crane was hardly a household name.

Despite this fact, the New York Times published an obituary which ran almost 900 words. Les Crane had "predated Howard Stern as a 'king of all media,'" the piece somewhat obscurely said.

Three weeks earlier, the Times had published a scathing critique of its own Maureen Dowd. The piece was written by Clark Hoyt, the Times' public editor at the time.

Hoyt savaged Dowd for her gender-driven attacks on Hillary Clinton all through the 2007-2008 Democratic presidential campaign. As far as we know, Hoyt's piece is the only serious critique of Dowd's work ever published within the upper-end mainstream press corps.

(In 1992, Katherine Boo had published her prescient account of the "creeping Dowdism" which, she said, was threatening to consume the mainstream press. Boo's piece appeared in the Washington Monthly. It can't be seen on-line.)

In a piece ignored all over the mainstream press, Hoyt savaged Dowd for the way she'd covered the Clinton campaign. Three weeks later, the Times published a surprisingly lengthy review of Crane's brief, long-forgotten career.

Who the heck was Les Crane? We bring a bit of personal experience to that question.

Crane was one of the people who created the culture known as Trumpism. He did this long before Donald J. Trump entered the political ring.

You could almost claim that Crane was the start of the political/journalistic pestilence with which we struggle today. You could almost say that he started us down the road to Camus's plague-ridden Oran.

Crane helped introduce the form of insincere, low-IQ bombast which has made a joke of our national discourse. Who the heck was Les Crane? A bit of personal history:

In the summer of 1960, our family moved from the suburbs of Boston to the suburbs of San Francisco. We were 12 at the time.

The next year, along came Crane, who wasn't a whole lot older. In the passage shown below, the Times explained his role in our current pestilence, which is, in Frost's words, "now too much for us."

Les Crane arrived on the scene in a burst of bombast and feigned anger. His bosses at ABC quickly saw that this approach seemed to sell. The Times' Bruce Weber explains:

WEBER (7/15/08): An early, and by later standards, tame incarnation of a shock jock, Mr. Crane was a radio star in San Francisco in the early 1960s. From a studio in the hungry i, a nightclub that was a launching pad for performers like Mort Sahl, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce, he took listeners’ calls from all over the West Coast, fielding their questions, sometimes with a celebrity guest, and often dismissing callers’ comments on current events and culture with brusque wit or outright disdain, simply hanging up on some in what was then a startling breach of accepted etiquette.

His station, KGO, was owned by ABC, and the parent company transferred Mr. Crane first to the local television affiliate and then to its flagship station, WABC in New York. The show, initially with the title “Night Line ... With Les Crane” and later as “The Les Crane Show” was first broadcast in September 1963, beginning at 1 a.m. Within two months it was the object of civil rights picketers protesting the appearance on the show of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama.

Calling him “the bad boy of late night television,” The New York Times described Mr. Crane’s role on the show as “public relations expert, complaint-department chief, psychiatrist and tough hero to the callers.”

The show was well-received, and Mr. Crane, telegenic, blithely confrontational and at least partly hip...was attractive enough that the following summer the network gave him a weeklong tryout in the 11:30 p.m. slot with a more conventional talk show, again called “The Les Crane Show,” which was broadcast in five big cities.

Long story short: Crane didn't succeed as a late-night, national TV host. Before long, he left the world of broadcast altogether, becoming a producer of video games such as Pong—and no, we aren't making this up.

But in that early incarnation, he seems to have invented the format in which the deliberate dumbness of the radio "shock jock" is turned loose on the issues of political world. Inexorably, this has led to our current world, which resembles the pestilence-ridden world Camus described in The Plague.

In our recollection, the Times obituary glossed the distinctive trait of Crane's stint at KGO. We recall being puzzled, in a manner the Times describes, by the way he would insult the late-night callers with whom he disagreed. He would then dramatically slam down the phone as he showered them with invective.

(At one point, Variety was more direct in its description of Crane. It described him as "the popular, confrontational and sometimes controversial host of San Francisco's KGO. Helping to pioneer talk radio, he was outspoken and outraged some callers by hanging up on them." What an exciting game!)

In our recollection, this "startling breach of accepted etiquette" lay at the heart of the controversy which quickly swirled around Crane. "And the less the better," was one instant refrain as he succeeded mightily on the local level.

Crane was stupid, abrasive, rude. And alas! Bringing the eternal note of sadness in, the corporate suits apparently liked what they heard and saw.

His loud, bombastic insult shtick was an instant attention- and ratings-grabber. The suits believed they could make money with Crane. They moved him to the national level, where he didn't succeed at that time.

Crane didn't succeed at the national level. But the Times obituary seems to say that he invented something new in that short stint at KGO, when his stupid, rude and faux behavior helped create a world.

Could it be true? Did Les Crane invent a world, a world which still exists?

We've never seen an attempt at a full history of the road to the serfdom of modern "talk." But as it turned out, it was a short step from Crane's insincere insult shtick to the world of national low-IQ ratings stars like Don Imus and Howard Stern, whose entire approach is based upon deliberate reversals of standard decorum.

Once you let Imus and Stern on the air on a national basis, it turns out to be a short step to Rush Limbaugh, and then to his million imitators. And after Rush, we got Fox News—and Chris Matthews, and Keith Olbermann. And Brian Williams whining and crying about the disgraceful intentions which lay behind Candidate's Gore's three-button suits.

Williams, who plays a liberal on cable today, was being paid at that time by Jack Welch, the near-billionaire conservative boss of NBC News.

Today, this insincere, low-IQ style is spreading through the liberal world in broadcast form and on the Net. The mainstream press corps complains about this kind of behavior when it comes from Donald J. Trump. They observe a code of silence when it comes from influential colleagues within their own money-clutching guild.

Did Les Crane invent a world? As an example of how faux his whole exercise was, Crane was winning a Grammy, in 1971, for his spoken word recording of the poem Desiderata.

Ten years earlier, he had possibly created a world by slamming down the phone on callers as he heaped insults on their heads. Now he was bullshitting the world with his thoughtful rendering of lyrics such as these:

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

You really can't make this sh*t up! But this is part of the way our failing nation has become a pitiful, hopeless version of Camus' plague-ridden Oran.

Unfortunately, Crane's success at KGO displayed some basic facts. We the people are eager to chase the excitement of feigned anger and hyperbolic misstatements.

Money can be made that way. Warning:

Pestilence follows.

Tomorrow: Maddow discusses Trump

For extra credit only: The leading authority on Crane's career describes the topic here

The Post headlines a "Trump before Trump!"

TUESDAY, JULY 4, 2017

Right on today's front page: The Washington Post has discovered a "Trump before Trump!"

The major newspaper uses the term right on this morning's front page. On page A1 of our hard-copy Post, the following headline appears atop this news report:

'Trump before Trump': Beach photos sink Christie's image

Snore! The report concerns the latest "distraction news" involving New Jersey's Chris Christie. In the pointless Post report, Michael Steele is quoted saying that the blustery governor was actually "Trump before Trump."

In fact, many, many other people were also "Trump before Trump!" In this case, Steele—he's now an "MSNBC political analyst"—is taking an acceptable approach to this important fact.

Steele has named a "Trump before Trump" who hails from the political world. In our view, the more significant "Trump before Trumps" hail from the various branches of the American press and pundit corps. This includes several major "Trump before Trumps" from Steele's own "cable news" channel!

Here on our sprawling campus, our Calendrical Research Bureau has informed us that this is, in fact, the Fourth of July, a well-known American holiday. For that reason, we'll postpone Part 2 of our current report, Postcards from the Plague, until tomorrow, July 5.

How did our current cultural plague ever take control of our land? Many "Trump before Trumps" have been involved—and when they work within the press, the rest of the guild looks away.

This practice—this well-known code of silence—continues to this very day.

Many such "Trump before Trumps" paved the way to our current degraded cultural state. Our pestilence involves many such Trumps.

Tomorrow, we'll start with Les Crane.

Worth remembering: All through 2015, Joe and Mika kept themselves busy pimping Donald J. Trump. Who did they pimp in the years before that?

Of course! Endlessly, they pimped Governor Christie, a substantially lesser version of "Trump before Trump."

Today, they're hailed within the guild, especially "wealthy" Mika.

They've been cast in opposition to Trump. For this reason, we must be told that Mika is "smart" and "strong!"

POSTCARDS FROM THE PLAGUE: Camus describes our current plague!

MONDAY, JULY 3, 2017

Part 1—Maddow also explains: In his award-winning novel, The Plague, Albert Camus explored the way a moral and political pestilence made its way across Europe.

He did so by way of a story set in Oran, on the sun-splashed Algerian coast. In his story, the pestilence in question is a literal plague, a deadly disease spread by rats.

At one point, Camus' narrator explains the way Oran's citizens had averted their gaze as their plague took hold. The description bears obvious relevance to the spreading cultural and political plague eating away at our own alleged nation.

Dr. Bernard Rieux is the main character in Camus’ novel. In the passage shown below, it suddenly occurs to him that a series of fatal illnesses in Oran may be part of a much larger problem.

Could it be that those seemingly random deaths are part of a literal plague? Just like that, the horrible thought occurs to Rieux, who isn’t prepared to believe it.

In what follows, Camus' narrator explains how the pestilence called Nazism managed to take hold in Europe. He also explains the pestilence which started invading our own failing culture many years ago:

CAMUS (page 34): The word “plague” had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor's uncertainty and surprise, since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townsfolk.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

"Plagues always take people by surprise"—or so Camus' narrator says. We people are never quite willing to see the rats as they make their way into our sun-drenched communities.

We humans find it hard to believe that a pestilence is crashing down on our heads! As Camus' text continues, this reluctance is further explored:

CAMUS (continuing directly): In fact, like our fellow citizens, Rieux was caught off his guard, and we should understand his hesitations in the light of this fact; and similarly understand how he was torn between conflicting fears and confidence. When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions.

Does stupidity get its way? That's what the narrator says. He says stupidity gets its way because we people are too wrapped up in ourselves to believes that a terrible price will be paid for our lack of vigilance and our immodest self-involvement.

He says the townspeople of Oran were "humanists." He says this made matters worse.

For ourselves, we wouldn't describe the people who have enabled our own culture's plague that way. We refer, of course, to the plague we "humanists" now tend to describe as Trumpism.

The pioneers of the current plague have been crawling into our cultural life for at least the past fifty years. These pioneers began to spread the current plague long before Donald J. Trump announced he was running for office.

These pioneers aren't "humanists" in any observable way. Neither are the enablers within the mainstream press who kept ignoring their work.

These pioneers weren't and aren't humanists. But they were laying the groundwork for our own plague long before Trump won office, partly by agreeing to ignore his pestilent behavior.

Camus had more to say about the way his plague invaded Oran. In the passage shown below, his narrator continued to explain the way townspeople refused to take action against its spread.

According to the award-winning author, this is the way a pestilence spreads in a lazy, immodest land:

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

Indeed, even after Dr. Rieux had admitted in his friend's company that a handful of persons, scattered about the town, had without warning died of plague, the danger still remained fantastically unreal...

It couldn't happen there!

According to Camus' narrator, the townspeople "went on doing business" even as the pestilence was taking hold in Oran. So did the biggest stars of our mainstream press corps as the pestilence they've finally spotted ate its way through our own land.

On Friday night, Rachel Maddow described the way Donald J. Trump does politics. She also described the way decent people feel forced to respond to his conduct.

She described the way Donald J. Trump traffics in disgust and "shock." She described the way his "repulsive" pronouncements lead decent people to feel that they must respond.

Maddow gave a good account of this syndrome. She's also a person who likes to chat with the person she has described as "my hero," shock jock Howard Stern.

All this week, we'll explore the way our current pestilence ate its way into our culture. Along the way, we'll look at Maddow's presentation in more detail.

We think her 22-minute statement is well worth watching; to do so, just click here. We also think that, although she certainly didn't create our plague, her complicity in its spread is clear.

"I don't know what the cure is to this," Maddow said at several points. Luckily, we do.

We can't say that we expect that any such cure will take hold. But we'll explore the rise of our cultural plague in our reports all this week.

Tomorrow: For starters, we'll start with Les Crane, star of KGO

The Homer of the Yankees speaks!

SATURDAY, JULY 1, 2017

An excellent time for Directive: Has there ever been a better time to ponder Robert Frost's Directive?

It's generally taken to be one of his last major poems. He started up like this:

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.

For today, we'll focus on that opening line:

"Back out of all this now too much for us."

After decades of rapidly creeping nonsense, has "all this" finally become "too much for us?"

Are we a culture that is no more a culture? Are we in need of "a guide?"

Has "all this" become "too much?" We ask that question for a reason. We ask because a front-page report in today's New York Times actually starts as shown below, hard-copy headlines included:

GRYNBAUM (7/1/17): The Battle of ‘Morning Joe’: A Presidential Feud
A Spectacle Fit for TV Rages with Talk of Extortion

President Trump remained embroiled in a rumpus with two cable talk-show hosts on Friday, a surreal dispute featuring allegations of extortion, dueling tweets and low-rent insults that has little precedent in recent political history.

With major policy battles over health care and taxation looming, Mr. Trump has devoted several days to squabbling with the stars of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, who on Friday accused the White House of demanding they apologize to the president to keep a gossip magazine from unmasking their romantic relationship.

The spectacle might seem too outlandish even for the pages of a supermarket tabloid were The National Enquirer not the magazine in question.

Two "cable news" hosts, a gossip magazine—and the fellow who holds the nuclear codes. In a surreal dispute!

Last night, that surreal dispute dominated the small-bore world of cable news pseudo-discussion. "Major policy battles" over health care be damned!

We'll only add this: the dumbness of this episode is heightened by the presence of a new form of cultural assessment. As with James B. Comey (Comey the God), so too now with Mika and Joe:

They're judged to be major white-hatted stars because they stand opposed to Donald J. Trump. In effect, they're part of the class now known as NABATs:

Not As Bad As Trump.

Directive is a difficult poem. That said, we woke with that opening line in our heads. Fifty years after the arrival of our radio "shock jocks," we finally have our first "shock president." And let's be truthful:

Though he bumps a fifty-year trend to a new level, that trend predated his behavior. Our mainstream press corps was full of Trumps by the time of the Clinton/Gore years. Trump has simply accelerated a cultural trend which has been underway, largely unnoticed, for decades.

That said:

Our crack team of calendrical analysts came to us early this morning with the news that this is the start of a four-day holiday weekend. After carefully checking their work, we have endorsed their claim.

We still plan to return to this piece at the new Salon, which captures the way our own liberal tribe has added to the decay in question. But this morning, Joe and Mika, and the Enquirer, are hogging page one of the Times.

"Drink and be whole again beyond confusion?" Easier said than done!

Trump before Trump: Below, you see a (very) small sample of Trump before Trump from December 1999.

This particular Trump before Trump was talking about Senate candidate Hillary Clinton with biographer Gail Sheehy. What follows is a tiny sample of his ranting that night and that month:

MATTHEWS (12/6/99): First of all, Hillary Clinton got the message wrong. The American people want to have health care for people who work for a living.

Working families should get a good wage and they should get health care as part of a living income. She said, "I'm going to give you universal coverage. I want to give every man who gets into this country, legally or illegally, free health care, and they're going to have to thank me for it, and bring flowers to me like I'm Evita." That's different than giving people workers' rights, or giving them what they go out and work for a living for, including health care.

She didn't want to sell it as a workers' benefit. She wanted to sell it as socialism, because then she could get credit for it. She and the government, like Eleanor Roosevelt, her hero.

SHEEHY: Well, I don't think she wanted to sell it as socialism...

According to this particular Trump before Trump, first lady Hillary Clinton wanted to give health care to everyone, whether they were legal or illegal, so they would have to bring flowers to her like she was Evita.

She wanted to be a socialist, like her hero Eleanor Roosevelt.

This particular Trump before Trump was working for CEO Jack Welch at this time. This is a very tiny sample of his highly disordered behavior during the death-dealing era. For more of his madness, click here.

Candidate Gore? “He doesn’t look like one of us...He doesn’t seem very American, even,” this horrific Trump before Trump once told his shock jock pal, Don Imus. The name-calling, misstatements and craziness went on, unremarked, for years.

Our current president didn't invent the lunatic syndrome in which we're immersed. Through our laziness and our silence, we the ridiculous liberals did, in concert with other groups badly in need of a guide.