ACCUSATION MEETS INCOMPETENCE: Is Tara Reade a credible person?

FRIDAY, MAY 8, 2020

The Professor Mannes don't know: Who the Sam Hill is Matt Stieb? We ask for an obvious reason.

Yesterday, Tara Reade did an online interview with Megyn Kelly, late of Fox News and NBC. Excerpts have been posted on Twitter!

In a short post, Stieb reported the session for New York magazine. His short post carries this headline:

Everything We’ve Learned From Tara Reade’s Megyn Kelly Interview

The headline sounds promising. Unfortunately, here's the first thing Stieb chose to report:

STIEB (5/7/20): On her online show, Kelly asked Reade about a Biden statement from 2018 in which he said that accusers should start off with the presumption that they are telling the truth. “Do you think he’s afforded you that presumption?” Kelly asked. “No,” Reade replied, and referred to alleged harassment online, including a death threat, following her decision to come forward. “His campaign is taking this position that they want all women to be able to speak safely. I have not experienced that.”

Kelly asked if Biden is affording Reade the presumption that she's telling the truth!

Since Biden has said that Reade's accusation is false, that was a fairly silly question. Also, under the circumstances, that would be a very strange thing for Biden to do.

Why would Kelly ask such a stupid question? She asked because the question highlights something Biden said two years ago.

In his remark, Biden was playing a modified version of the "Believe Women" card, one of the several extremely dumb memes our own liberal tribe has churned out in recent years.

By some, we're now told that "Believe Women" never meant that people should believe all women. This recalls the high-profile, absurdist joke told by Steven Wright:

I went down to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door.

I said, "Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours." He said, "Yes, but not in a row!"

Wright is a comedian, but so are our human tribes. With that in mind, let's return to what Biden said back in 2018.

Let's use some common sense! Surely, even Biden couldn't have meant that a person being falsely accused by a woman should somehow afford her the presumption that she's telling the truth.

Even Biden isn't that dumb, but our progressive stampedes often are. And this is the nonsense with which Stieb began his review of the session.

How strongly do we sometimes truly believe in our tribe's truest beliefs? So strongly that Stieb's short report already bears a correction of an extremely basic point—a point he apparently misstated when his report first appeared.

Everybody makes mistakes. That said, this particular glaring misstatement tilted the field in Reade's direction. In fairness, this is the story of human behavior all through the annals of time.

Should (female) accusers "start off with the presumption that they are telling the truth?"

We're forced to add the gender qualifier for n obvious reason. In the current standoff, Biden is accusing Reade of saying something that isn't true, and Kelly didn't ask if he should be afforded the presumption that he is telling the truth.

Should women start with that presumption? Yes, they should, if you want to reside in the Eden of dimwitted True Belief.

Is Tara Reade telling the truth? Like you and like Professor Manne, we have no way of knowing. That said, it has turned out, in recent years, that other accusers weren't telling the truth. This brings us back to Emily Bazelon's concerns about Tara Reade.

Last Thursday, over at Slate, Bazelon said that she didn't regard Reade as highly credible. She seemed to suggest that Reade could be lying—or that she might "have problems."

To her credit, Bazelon didn't claim to know whether Reade is telling the truth. She merely said that she had concerns, questions, doubts.

We have concerns and question too. Meanwhile, accusers sometimes do "have problems." The tribal mind discards such facts, but such facts remain true.

We're currently living in the age of the White House campaign sex claim. Gennifer Flowers threw out the first pitch in early 1992.

In a high-profile New York City press event, Flowers claimed that she'd had a torrid, twelve-year love affair with "my Bill"—with Candidate Bill Clinton. In this way, Flowers inserted herself, and her thrilling claims, into the middle of a major world event.

That said, was it possible that Flowers "had problems?" In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter quickly reported some problems with Flowers' claims:

ALTER (2/3/92): Gennifer Flowers also has credibility problems. Among them...

* Flowers claims she met Clinton at the Excelsior Hotel in 1979 or 1980. The hotel didn't open until late 1982...

* Flowers claims to have taken 50 hours of classes at the University of Arkansas. There is no record of her having attended the school.

* Flowers claims to have been Miss Teen Age America, 1967. She wasn't—that year, or any other.

Oof! The hotel wasn't open yet, and she hadn't been Miss Teen Age America. Meanwhile, Flowers achieved paydays totaling more than $500,000 in return for her thrilling claims. (Previously, she'd been earning $18,000 in an Arkansas state job.)

Did Flowers perhaps "have problems?" We have no ultimate way of knowing, but in 2000, Joe Conason and Gene Lyons wrote The Hunting of the President, a history of the mainstream press corps' endless pursuit of Bill Clinton.

Conason and Lyons are major journalists. They extended the list of Flowers' peculiar past claims:

CONASON/LYONS (page 25): Musicians and club owners who had worked with Flowers described her as manipulative and dishonest. Her resume falsely proclaimed her a graduate of a fashionable Dallas prep school she’d never attended. It also listed a University of Arkansas nursing degree she’d never earned and membership in a sorority that had never heard of her. Her agent told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that contrary to her claims, Flowers had never opened for comedian Rich Little. A brief gig on the Hee Haw television program had come to a bad end, the agent would later confirm, when Flowers simply vanished for a couple of weeks with a man she’d met in a Las Vegas casino—and then concocted a tale about having been kidnapped. She had never been Miss Teenage America. Even her “twin sister Genevieve” turned out to be purely a figment of Flowers’ imagination.

Oof. Meanwhile, was Flowers the sort of person in whom you'd want to place your trust? In 1995, she published her own book, Passion and Betrayal—a book in which she didn't name a single time and place where she and "her Bill" had canoodled together.

On that basis, none of her specific claims could fall apart, as the Excelsior Hotel claim apparently had. She did remember to include this recollection of the time she met Hillary Clinton:

FLOWERS (1995): I was shocked. She looked like a big fat frump with her hair hanging down kind of curly and wavy. She had big, thick glasses; an ugly dress; and a big, fat butt.

It's hard to have sufficient contempt for that bit of prose, but so wrote Gennifer Flowers. Is that the kind of person in whom you'd want to place your trust? Is it possible that Flowers might, in some way, possibly "have problems?"

You've never seen such questions asked because, by 1998, the mainstream press corps had anointed Flowers as a major truth-teller. This was based on a minuscule point of agreement:

By now, Clinton had testified that he'd had, on one occasion, one sexual encounter with Flowers, not involving intercourse. Flowers, of course, was still claiming a twelve-year love affair with her heart, in the end, being broken..

That point of agreement was close enough for mainstream press corps work. Flowers was now paraded around, accompanied by the claim that we now knew that she had been telling the truth all along.

In October 2016, Donald J. Trump threatened to bring her to one of his debates with Hillary Clinton. That same month, the New York Times wrote a ridiculous front-page report in which the rehabilitation of this truth-teller was extended.

In that way, Gennifer Flowers became the era's inaugural sex accuser. In March 1998, along came Kathleen Willey, appearing on Sixty Minutes.

Willey was instantly treated as the world's most credible person. She was upper-middle class in habillement—in fact, she and her husband had been fairly wealthy—and she was conventionally attractive.

Perhaps for those reasons, smitten male journalists stood in line to swear she was telling the truth. She said she'd been semi-attacked by President Clinton, in the Oval, on one occasion.

It would be hard to overstate the extent to which our smitten pundits vouched for the credibility of the fabulous Willey. Later that year, the problems began, with the press corps constantly withholding such facts from public view:

October 1998: In October 1998, Kenneth Starr executed a major "document dump." Included was sworn testimony by Linda Tripp, a friend and associate of Willey.

Under oath, Tripp had testified that Willey had been trying to arrange a tryst with President Clinton. She'd said that Willey had been thrilled by her Oval Office encounter.

This sworn testimony contradicted the story Willey had told. Our major press organs hushed it up—and then, we had the disaster.

May 1999: In May 1999, Willey accused a journalist of threatening her outside her Richmond, Virginia home. She claiemd that the journalist had been acting on behalf of the murderous Clinton. She lodged the claim on the crackpot cable show Hardball, goaded on by a deeply irresponsible Chris Matthews.

Fortunately, the journalist was able to prove that he'd been in California on the date Willey had named. Before he could do so, a person with a history of mental illness appeared at the journalist's home with a gun, apparently planning to shoot him..

Matthews apologized, after which the astonishing incident was never mentioned again. Stampeding tribes take care of their own, as do such guilds as the press corps. Very few people ever heard about this astounding event.

March 2002: In March 2002, Robert Ray, Kenneth Starr's successor, published his final report on the Lewinsky matter. In an appendix to the report, Ray said that Willey had lied to his investigators so often that they had to negotiate two (2) immunity agreements with her.

Willey went on from there to become a crackpot right-wing radio host. We're omitting various aspects of her troubled personal history.

Willey had seemed amazingly credible when she first appeared. But was it possible that she had been lying, or that she might have "had problems?"

Other accusations have been false during this era, although you'll never be able to get the tribal true believers to believe any such thing.

Some accusers have lied, or they've perhaps "had problems." Consider the tragic story of the (false) accuser in the 2006 Duke lacrosse case.

Her name is Crystal Magnum, and she has a tragic history. It's fairly clear that she "had problems," as William Styron's "beaten children of the earth" are known to do.

Mangum's accusation was exciting but it turned out to be false. Her tragic history reads, in part, like this:

Mangum was born and grew up in Durham, North Carolina, the daughter of Travis Mangum, a truck driver, and his wife Mary. She was the youngest of three children. She attended Hillside High School, graduating in 1996.

In 1996 she filed a police report alleging that three years earlier, when she was 14, she had been kidnapped by three assailants, driven to Creedmoor, North Carolina, and raped. One of those she accused was her boyfriend, who was 21 at the time, which would be statutory rape. She subsequently backed away from the charges, a move relatives claimed was motivated by fear for her life. Mangum's father said he did not believe she was raped or injured, though her mother believed such an incident could have occurred—but not in 1993. She thinks it is more likely to have happened when Crystal was 17 or 18 years old, shortly before she made the police report.

[...]

In 2002, she was arrested on 10 charges after stealing the taxicab of a customer to whom she had given a lap dance. This prompted a police pursuit at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour, occasionally in the wrong lane. After being stopped, she nearly ran over a police officer, succeeding only in hitting his patrol vehicle. She was found to have a blood alcohol content of just over twice the legal limit. Ultimately, she pleaded guilty on four counts: assault on a government official, larceny, speeding to elude arrest, and driving while impaired, serving three weekends in jail, paying $4,200 in restitution and fees, and being given two years' probation.

[...]

In March 2006, she was hired as a stripper at a party organized by members of the Duke University men's lacrosse team. After arriving in an intoxicated state, having earlier consumed alcohol and cyclobenzaprine, to perform with another stripper at a house rented by three of the team captains, she became involved in an argument with the occupants of the residence and subsequently left. She then became involved in an altercation with her fellow stripper that necessitated police assistance. The officer who arrived on scene took her to a local drug and mental health center, where she was in the process of being involuntarily committed when, after being asked a leading question, she made an allegation that she had been raped at the party...

In 2008, Mangum published a memoir written with Vincent Clark. The book gives her version of events. She continued to insist that she was assaulted at the party and says that the dropping of the case was politically motivated. The book also outlines her earlier life, reasserting her claim that she was raped at the age of 14.

We'd start by noting the appalling lack of adult supervision which allowed that gruesome "party" to take place at all.

That said, a tragic personal history suffuses these events. In April 2007, the Raleigh News-Observer published a long, sympathetic profile of Mangum which included this report:

"The 28-year-old woman has struggled with poverty, alcohol abuse and psychological instability. In recent years she turned to therapists for help with bipolar disorder and other mental problems and took anti-psychotic medication."

The murder arrests came later:

In February 2010, she was arrested on charges of attempted murder of her live-in partner, Milton Walker. She was eventually convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile, injury to personal property and resisting a public officer.

In November 2013, she was found guilty of second-degree murder after she stabbed boyfriend Reginald Daye, who died 10 days after. She argued that she acted in self-defense, fearing that Daye would kill her. She was sentenced to 14 to 18 years in prison.

We're strongly inclined to recommend pity for the many "beaten children of the earth." We do not recommend believing their accusations on the basis of their gender, as large segments of the Duke faculty instantly rushed off to do.

In fairness, they were simply Believing Women, as they'd been told they should do!

Recent history has taught us that some accusations aren't true. That said, nothing will stop the Professor Mannes from urging us to disregard this blindingly obvious fact.

For us over here in the liberal world, the Professor Mannes cast themselves in the role of Our Own Donald Trumps. That said, nothing will ever curtail their true belief, or their impossibly faulty judgment.

Is Tara Reade telling the truth? Like the hapless Professor Manne, we have no way of knowing. But just as no one knew Kathleen Willey when she first appeared, no one knows Reade today. Meanwhile, reports of "corroborating evidence" have been greatly exaggerated, not unlike Mark Train's death.

Why did Emily Bazelon express concern about Reade? To read about the horse rescue allegations, you can just click here.

To puzzle about the ways she has praised Biden in recent years for his work on behalf of women, you can just click this. Or you can peruse Reade's bizarre essay in praise of Putin, who she had been savaging in the preceding years. Her essay includes such wisdom as this:

READE (11/27/18): President Putin’s genius is his judo ability to conserve his own energy and let the opponents flail, using up their energy, while he gains position. Currently, President Putin has a higher approval rating in America then the American President, particularly with women. President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity. It is evident that he loves his country, his people and his job. Although his job may seem like in the words of writer, Elizabeth Gilbert on genius, “ trying to swallow the sun.” This is a whole lot to deal with for one mere mortal… President Putin’s obvious reverence for women, children and animals, and his ability with sports is intoxicating to American women. Especially since the bloated, American President is so negative, denigrating and dismissive of anyone but himself as he stumbles even playing golf (which is not a real sport anyway but a past time, sorry golfers).

Is it possible that something "is wrong" with the person who composed this essay? Since everything has always been possible, that has to be possible too!

It's also possible, as some have suggested and said, not without hints of evidence, that Reade is now on the Russkie payroll. And by the way—it's possible that she's on the Russkie payroll and that she's telling the truth!

No one had ever set eyes on Kathleen Willey when she lodged her exciting accusation on Sixty Minutes. To people who were chasing Clinton, she seemed amazingly credible.

Now we have the Professor Mannes. They're vouching for the credibility of another person no one knows.

Tara Reade may be telling the truth. It also could be that she isn't.

Her claim could be true, and her claim could be false. Above all else, remember this:

The true believers in our deeply flawed tribe have no way to know.

Watching a nation get disassembled!

THURSDAY, MAY 7, 2020

Trump says the death count is wrong: Let's take a quick step back.

Mr. Lincoln fought a war to keep the union together. At present, our union is rapidly being disassembled under the aegis of Mr. Lincoln's current successor.

The post office is about to go. Each of the fifty states is on its own in the ongoing war against the virus.

This is the widely disassembled Eden Ron Paul used to dream about. We're not even saying it's right or it's wrong. We're just saying that this is what's happening.

As part of this process, we're losing all access to logic and fact. Logic and information are being disassembled, along with the rest of the architecture and infrastructure of our failing union.

Our progressive teams contribute to this game in matters concerning gender and race. When we can't understand this fact about ourselves, we contribute to the ongoing disintegration of national feeling.

The refusal to discuss Trump's apparent mental disorder also furthers this process. That said, nobody plays this game like Donald J. Trump and the various Millers around him.

This recent post by Jonathan Chait leads to the one of saddest example of this lunacy we have ever seen. We refer to the president's apparent desire to start claiming that the number of coronavirus deaths is being inflated as part of the latest Deep State scam.

Below, you see the basic nugget from Chait's post. Through a link, it leads to an astounding background report:

CHAIT (5/7/20): The next step, reports Axios, will be to begin publicly questioning the listed totals of coronavirus deaths. “Trump has vented that the numbers seem inflated,” it reports, as have several people around him who believe the same.

This is not just a matter of public spin, like Trump’s campaign to pressure the news media into reporting that his tiny inauguration crowd was larger than it was. The news source he trusts, Fox News, has been running hours of programming questioning the death totals. One Fox theory has seized on changes to official tabulation by the CDC. Another misinterprets the categorization of pneumonia deaths. Axios reports that Trump himself has repeated yet another theory, which raises questions about an increase in previously uncategorized nursing-home deaths in New York.

Regarding the CDC tabulation, Chait links to this recent report by the Washington Post's Aaron Blake. Blake describes stupidity so vast that it seems hard to believe, even in this era.

We're going to let you scan Blake's report yourself. Simply put, some CDC numbers lag behind the actual totals because they're a count of official death certificates, not of actual deaths.

A lag time in filing official death certificates keeps the running total low in this particular CDC tabulation. This fact is explained all through the CDC accounting in question, but it has apparently generated the latest wave of insanity in Trump/Miller land.

For some time, we've been telling you this—we don't quite see a way out of this mess. When we let our own tribe be ruled by our own single-minded brigades, we only speed up this post-Lincoln process.

A truly sad example: For a truly sad example of the Trumpism practiced by our own team, we recommend this essay at The Nation by Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne.

Simply put, Manne presents endless evidence supporting the fact that Tara Reade may be telling the truth. Manne seems to think that this evidence means that Reade is telling the truth.

It ought to be amazing to think that a person like this could possible be a Cornell philosophy professor. It ought to be amazing to think that, but the history of the past five decades tells us that it isn't.

This is the way we feed the madness. We feed the madness daily.

ACCUSATION MEETS INCOMPETENCE: Professor Hirshman says she believes!

THURSDAY, MAY 7, 2020

But could Reade "have problems?" In her column in Sunday's New York Times, Maureen Dowd was trying to figure whether it actually happened.

Just for the record, there's no way that Dowd can possibly know that it actually happened. Also, there's no way Dowd can possibly know that it didn't happen.

On balance, it maybe doesn't seem likely to Dowd that it actually happened. But then, she added a pair of wrinkles to her discussion:

DOWD (5/3/20): I’ve covered Biden my entire political career, and he is known for being sometimes warmly, sometimes inappropriately, hands-on with men and women. What Reade accuses him of is a crime and seems completely out of character.

But that is how my brother, who coached Kavanaugh in basketball at Georgetown Prep and stayed friends with him after, felt about [Christine Blasey Ford's] allegations.

In the end, these moments highlight the hypocrisy of both parties. Each case has to stand or fall on its own facts, patterns, corroborations, investigations—not on viewing it only through partisan goggles.

Based upon her knowledge of Biden, Tara Reade's accusation seems a bit unlikely to Dowd.

Of course, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Meanwhile, Dowd's brother, who knows Brett Kavanaugh, had the same reaction to the allegations of Christine Blasey-Ford!

Can we talk? As a matter of simple logic, it could be that both accusations are true. It's also possible, of course, that both accusations are false.

To her credit, Dowd doesn't claim to know if it actually happened.. But then, the scribe adds this:

"Each case has to stand or fall on its own facts, patterns, corroborations, investigations."

That statement seems to suggest that there could be some "investigation" which could settle this matter.

Almost surely, that isn't true. But such fantastical musings are widely found among journalistic reviews of this high-profile matter.

(In last Saturday's editorial, the Times editorial board offered a somewhat similar thought. Claims against President Trump should also be investigated, the board somewhat comically said, four years later.)

Almost surely, nothing will ever prove the truth of Reade's accusation. Also, nothing will ever prove that her accusation is false.

That said, we humans are poorly equipped to deal with uncertainty, especially in high-impact matters. Our faltering brains aren't wired for that task.

Our brains aren't wired for that task. Along comes Professor Hirshman.

According to the leading authority, Linda Hirshman "is a retired distinguished professor of philosophy and women's studies at Brandeis." This fact may go to a wider case we've been advancing about the faulty functioning of our intellectual elites.

We say that because of the column Hirshman has written for the New York Times. Mercifully, it hasn't appeared in print editions, but the column was featured yesterday near the top of the front page of the New York Times website.

Hirshman may not be one for uncertainty. Her column starts like this:

HIRSHMAN (5/6/20): Let’s be clear: I believe Tara Reade. I believed Anita Hill, too. Remember the buttons? I wore one. What’s the constant here? Joe Biden, then the bumbling head of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

Long before Ms. Reade, before the reports of the rubbing and the sniffing, I interviewed an adviser to Ms. Hill, who said she’d tried to warn Mr. Biden of what was happening in the Thomas hearings—how unchecked Republicans were smearing an upright woman’s character. But “the United States Senate was still very much a boys’ club” back then, the adviser told me, and there was no getting through to him. Democratic primary voters knew all about Mr. Biden’s membership in that boys’ club when there was still time to pick someone else. Alas.

Professor Hirshman "believes" Tara Reade. She wants that to be clear.

In other words, she believes that Joe Biden committed a sexual assault in 1993, as Tara Reade has charged. In these first two paragraphs, she seems to believe that accusation based on the way Biden "bumbled" during the Thomas hearings.

The bulk of what she says in that passage is based on a second-hand report. But could that really be all she has? Biden handled the hearings poorly, so she believes he committed a sexual assault?

As she continues, Hirshman outlines a fuller basis for her clear belief. Her assessment could be right, of course. But could her assessment be wrong?

HIRSHMAN (continuing directly): So what’s a girl to do now? Discounting Ms. Reade’s accusation and, one after another, denigrating her corroborating witnesses, calling for endless new evidence, avowing that you “hear” her, is nonsense. We are now up to four corroborating witnesses—including one contemporary corroborating witness, unearthed by Rich McHugh, who was Ronan Farrow’s producer at NBC News during the Harvey Weinstein #MeToo reporting and one “Larry King Live” tape.

So stop playing gotcha with the female supporters of Mr. Biden or the #MeToo movement, making them lie to the camera—or perhaps to themselves—about doubting her to justify their votes.

I’ll take one for the team. I believe Ms. Reade, and I’ll vote for Mr. Biden this fall.

"What a girl to do now?" Hirshman asks. (Hirshman is 76.) As she continues, she seems to say it's "nonsense" to disbelieve, or even to doubt, what Tara Reade has said.

(Explicitly, she says it's nonsense to "discount" it? Do you know what that means?)

Hirshman seems to say that female supporters of Biden have been lying about what they believe. (Needless to say, they've been forced.) Eventually, she bases her claim on evidence which she severely glosses.

She glosses that phone call to Larry King Live, which she doesn't even describe. She glosses the apparent strength of the "corroborating witnesses."

Her assessment may be right, of course—but then too, it might be wrong. Despite this, she states a clear belief? Should wise people do that?

Concerning those corroborating witnesses, several of whom are rather shaky, they're only as good as what they were told. And what they were told is only as good as the person who told it.

It's certainly possible that Hirshman's assessment is correct. Dowd says that doesn't seem like Biden, but Dowd's sense could be wrong.

For better or worse, it's also possible that Hirshman's "belief" is wrong. Last week, at Slate, Emily Bazelon suggested a different possibility—the possibility that Reade may be lying, or that she may "have problems."

We're now in the 33rd year of this era of White House campaign sex claims. To the credit our our journalists, they've largely transitioned from firestorms about consensual sex to accusations of criminal assault.

Here's the problem. During this era, it has turned out that some of the most heralded accusers did in fact seem to "have problems."

Kathleen Willey was one such accuser; Gennifer Flowers seems to have been another. Tomorrow, we'll review the "problems" they seem to have had, and we'll finally get to the material which Bazelon seemed to be citing when she said that she doesn't consider Reade to be hugely credible.

For today, Professor Hirshman stands as the latest member of a malfunctioning intellectual class. With 50 cents and an upscale professor's bruited "belief," you're halfway to owning a dollar.

The professors at Duke stampeded to say that they believed the accusation in the Duke lacrosse case.

As it turned out, the claim was false. But then, the professors at UVa staged a similar stampede. Nothing seems to convince these people to proceed with traditional good sense in these matters, to proceed with caution.

The accusers in each of those cases did turn out to "have problems." We'd list them among William Styron's "beaten children of the earth."

(On Saturday, we expect to take you through the tragic story of the accuser in the Duke case. Journalistically, we're allowed to discuss mental illness in such cases, though not in the constantly-devolving case of President Trump.)

Many people "have problems!" Few things could be more clear in this crackpot age of Trump, unless you're one of our high-end professors, imbued with a type of tribal belief and with a willingness to gloss some rather imperfect evidence.

Many people "have problems." Our professors sometimes forget such facts, and our mainstream journalists have covered for people like Willey and Flowers for roughly the past thirty years.

Professor Hirshman is just one part of this unimpressive, perhaps incompetent class. It's at the Times that you're most likely to find the work of this floundering group.

Hirshman's assessment could be right, but then too it could be wrong. That said, she wants her "belief" to be clear, and the Times was there to oblige.

Tomorrow: A whole lot of people "have problems"

S. E. Cupp (almost) gets it right!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6, 2020

Trump very sick, unwell: Last evening, we watched our personal hero, Kaitlin Collins, being interviewed on CNN.

We were surprised by the gratitude we felt.

We'd seen Collins behave like an actual journalist at several of President Trump's most recent gong-show "briefings." As we watched her interviewed last night, we felt a true sense of admiration for the way we'd seen her perform.

This morning, along comes S. E. Cupp, a columnist at the New York Daily News. Her new column isn't as perfectly correct as Collins' recent performances were. But Cupp comes pretty darn close.

All across the upper-end press, journalists have agreed not to say what they actually think about President Donald J. Trump. As of this morning, Cupp and the Daily News have walked away from that "gentleman's agreement."

Her column carries the headline shown below. Others should go there too:

The president is not well: The umpteenth reminders of Trump’s mental state and the consequences

Cupp comes very close today to saying what she means. She almost says that President Trump seems to be mentally ill in some way, or cognitively impaired.

She does say that he seems to need professional help. And in her closing paragraph, she refers to him as "our very sick president."

In our view, comparing Trump to a "mentally unstable" child is a bit of a dodge on Cupp's part. We also think she could have been a bit more clear in her use of language.

We'd like to see Dr. Bandy X. Lee directly acknowledged, with her analysis described in straightforward professional terms. A columnist doesn't have to say she agrees with Lee's diagnosis of Trump. But it would be constructive and accurate to report that sensible, high-ranking specialists think he's dangerously disordered.

We think Cupp could have done a bit better. But he's pushing in the right direction when she writes copy like this:

CUPP (5/6/20): It’s a frightening commentary on the slow normalization of this completely abnormal behavior that we can greet the undeniable deterioration of the president of the United States with mere shrugs. And the only concerns from his inner circle seem not to be about the mental instability itself, but the political ramifications of it being exposed in daily press briefings.

[...]

The giant orange elephant in the room isn’t that Trump’s impaired judgment might cost him the election; it’s that it may well have already cost American lives.

Waiting until November to get Trump out of harm’s way is the only real option we have. The Constitution’s 25th Amendment, designed to remove a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” is inarguably applicable but politically impossible.

So, like worried parents, we’ll just wait anxiously, hope the worst doesn’t happen and that there’s a light at the end of this very dark tunnel. Until then, who knows what our very sick president will do next?

Cupp says Trump is "very sick." She says he may well be “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

She calls his behavior "completely abnormal." She describes an "undeniable deterioration."

We'd like to see her say it in a slightly more straightforward way—this president seems to be suffering from a major psychiatric, psychological or cognitive disorder. That said, she's rowing the boat in the right direction—though that does take her upstream.

Elsewhere, the children refuse to visit this topic. Each day, they pretend to be shocked, shocked by Trump's most recent statement or behavior.

They keep clucking at this daily parade like it's a moral issue. They simply won't say that he seems to be disordered—that he may well be some dangerous version of "mentally ill."

ACCUSATION MEETS INCOMPETENCE: Reade's accusation could be true!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 6, 2020

Also, it could be false: Is it possible that Tara Reade's accusation is true? Is it possible that Joe Biden assaulted Reade in 1993, as Reade has now said?

Yes, of course it's possible! In part, Reade's accusation is possible because every accusation is.

Stating the obvious, every claim is possibly true until someone can prove that it isn't. That's true of Tara Reade's accusation, which could of course be true.

Unfortunately, it's also possible that Tara Reade's accusation is false. Until someone can prove that her claim is true, that's totally possible too!

Some claims do turn out to be false. Ineptly, let's try to remember:

Eventually, the accusation in the Duke lacrosse case turned out to be false. After that, the accusation in the UVa frat party case also turned out to be false.

The tragic accuser in the Duke lacrosse case is now in prison, where she's serving 14 to 18 years for second-degree murder. The accuser in the UVa case left school and was presumably treated for mental health issues.

Meanwhile, are we still supposed to believe that Julie Swetnick's claims concerning Brett Kavanaugh were true? Like all other claims, her claims certainly could have been true. But they also could have been false!

Swetnick's champion, Michael Avenatti, has been in and out of jail himself since the glorious days when we liberals stampeded to believe his latest client's latest claims—since the days when we even thought the great man might maybe should run for the White House himself.

(Also, since the days when we swallowed the manifest nonsense being served by Stormy Daniels. Since the days when we keened and wailed about the fact that we hadn't been able to hear her say that Candidate Trump had engaged in consensual sex with her, on one occasion, a full ten years before. These are the sorts of claims our tiny brains clamor to hear.)

Many accusations are true; some accusations are false. In all honesty, we liberals have a flawed track record distinguishing one group of claims and claimants from the other.

Above all else, we deeply limited human beings have always had a difficult time coming to terms with a basic fact. In the current context, we'll add a second basic fact we've had a hard time processing:

Two basic facts:
1) In many cases of this type, there will never be a way to show that the accusation is true (or false).

2) Sometimes, the claims of female accusers are false.

The human brain just isn't wired to deal with that first basic fact. Our human brain is wired to come to conclusions, and we persistently do.

In the current context, we liberals are constantly devising ways to sidestep that second basic fact. But only because we're so moral and so high-minded!

Is Tara Reade lying in this case? Might she "have problems," as Emily Bazelon seemed to suggest in that podcast at Slate?

We have no way of knowing how to answer those questions. Obviously, though, it's possible that her claim is false—but also, that it isn't.

Concerning this case, let us make the following statement. Almost surely, there will never be a way to demonstrate whether Reade's claim is true, although of course it could be.

There will also never be away to demonstrate that it's false.

Why do we offer that assessment? As a partial answer to your question, consider another recent claim made against Joe Biden.

This claim has apparently been proven false, though it's very hard to make any such demonstration in a way which will satisfy all comers.

What is this other recent claim? All too briefly, Michelle Goldberg provided the grisly play by play in her column in yesterday's New York Times. We apologize for repeating an ugly claim which seems to have been shown to be false:

GOLDBERG (5/5/20): On Friday, the website Law & Crime reported that a niece of Christine O’Donnell, a former Republican Senate candidate in Delaware, said that Biden commented on her breasts at a 2008 Gridiron Club dinner, when she was 14. Several people said they were told about this at the time, but it emerged that Biden wasn’t at the dinner. O’Donnell then said it might have happened at the Gridiron dinner in 2007, but Biden wasn’t at that one either. It was a demonstration of how easily #MeToo can be misused as a political weapon.

Somewhat remarkably, O'Donnell was indeed the Republican nominee for the United States Senate from Delaware in both 2008 and 2010. On balance, she has been seen as a highly marginal figure by major figures in both major parties, though she also got a lot of votes on each of those occasions.

In the case of this recent accusation, a basic mistake was made. The O'Donnell group named a particular time and place at which the alleged misconduct had allegedly occurred!

This gave the accused a chance to prove that he had been somewhere else at the time of the alleged misconduct. When a second, replacement time and place was offered, a second proof appeared.

The O'Donnell camp had made a basic mistake! They had stated a time and a place, thereby giving the accused a chance to prove that the specific claim was false.

(Needless to say, true believers will always believe that the offense must have happened somewhere. This is the way our humans brains have always taught us to react.)

The O'Donnell camp had made a rookie mistake. But in the current claim under review, Reade cites no date on which the alleged offense occurred.

This means there will be no way that the accused could show that he was somewhere else at the specified time. Of course, he might have been right there in that Senate hallway, committing the alleged offense! Or he might be innocent of the charge, though present in that Senate office building on the day in question!

Stating the obvious, human history stinks with false accusations. Here's another example:

In May 1999, Kathleen Willey accused a journalist of having threatened her outside her Richmond, Virginia home. The journalist was allegedly carrying out this threat on behalf of President Clinton, or on behalf of his murderous gang.

Willey made the accusation on Hardball. She was goaded into voicing her claim by Chris Matthews, whose anti-Clinton/Gore behavior was routinely out of control at this point in time.

(This helped send George Bush to the White House, and the U.S. army into Iraq. Hardball was much more influential at that time than it was in recent years.)

At the time of this accusation, Willey had been hailed, by one and all, as the most credible accuser in the history of the planet. Smitten male journalists had stood in line to say how blatantly honest she blatantly was in her various accusations, which surely had to accurate.

Luckily, the accused journalist was able to show that he had been in California at the time of the alleged incident. Matthews apologized for his astonishing conduct, and in line with Mandated Standard Press Corps Behavior, the incident was never mentioned again.

(Before the journalist was able to show that Willey's accusation was false, a man with a history of mental illness was arrested at his home. He had gone there with a gun, apparently planning to shoot the man who had threatened the highly credible Willey.)

This morning, we give up! We give up because we read the bullroar shown below. It comes from the keyboard of Susan Matthews (no relation), who has done good work in the past.

The bosses were willing to print it at Slate. For fuller context, read Matthews' piece. For now, gaze upon the endless works of our human race:

MATTHEWS (5/5/20): And, more relevantly, the 25-year window does not reach back to 1993, when Biden’s then-interns recall Tara Reade being abruptly removed from her duties as their supervisor, and when Reade’s mother phoned in to Larry King Live to say her daughter had been mistreated by a prominent senator. People may have strong reasons to want to believe Biden’s flat declaration that “it didn’t happen,” but if Biden didn’t reach his fingers up her skirt, what did happen then?

In 1993, did Reade's mother "phone in to Larry King Live to say her daughter had been mistreated by a prominent senator?"

Actually, that isn't what the woman in question said—a woman who seems to have been Reade's mother. That's only what the caller said when her words are filtered through human ears—through the ears of at rue believer.

The woman who called Larry King said something quite different from that. It's also true that Tara Reade's mother would have no first-hand way of knowing what had, or hadn't occurred.

At any rate, that isn't what the caller said to Larry King that night. But all through our frequently gruesome human history, true believers have always heard such things being said when they've made their ardent pleas on behalf of some tribal verity.

Around the world, this has led to killing fields and to detention camps. Over Here, it helped produce the election of Donald J. Trump, and it may yet keep him in office.

Nothing will stop misparaphrase from emerging from our human brains. Nothing will stop editors from waving such claims into print.

Meanwhile, is it possible that Tara Reade's accusation true? As with every claim that's ever been made, yes, it certainly is!

That said:

Tomorrow, we'll show you what Emily Bazelon was apparently talking about when she seemed to be say that Reade wasn't all that credible—that she might even "have problems," as with other high-profile accusers in recent years.

None of this will matter, of course. Our press corps has covered for the Willeys all along, and large chunks of it always will.

Also, Reade's accusation could be true! Every claim could be true until someone can show that it isn't—and with this, as with most claims, we can all feel fairly sure that nobody ever will.

Tomorrow: Back to Bazelon

Do you understand the new Times report?

TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2020

Deaths lag behind cases, which skyrocket: Do you understand the New York Times' new front-page report?

Frankly, we do not.

We refer to the scary report which tops today's front page. It's been the lead topic among all the cables. It starts with some puzzling statistics:

STOLBERG AND SULLIVAN (5/5/20): As President Trump presses states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in coronavirus infections and deaths over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1—nearly double the current level.

The projections, based on data collected by various agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and laid out in an internal document obtained Monday by The New York Times, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of May, up from about 30,000 cases now. There are currently about 1,750 deaths per day, the data shows.

Do you understand those statistics? According to the Times report, projected "cases" will rise almost seven-fold, from the current 30,000 per day to 200,000 per day by June 1.

("Cases" seems to be synonymous here with "infections.")

That would be a giant rise in "cases." But projected deaths lag far behind. According to the Times report, projected deaths don't even double. They only go from the current 1,750 per day to something like 3000.

Why would the projected rise in deaths lag so far behind the projected rise in cases? This is the featured report on the Times' front page, but at no point do Stolberg and Sullivan make any attempt to say.

They don't even note the apparent incongruity in these dueling statistics. So it sometimes goes in our nation's paper of record.

For what it's worth, paragraph 3 is also a pip. In paragraph 3, we learn this:

STOLBERG AND SULLIVAN (continuing directly): They are not the only ones forecasting more carnage. Another model, closely watched by the White House, raised its fatality projections on Monday to more than 134,000 American deaths from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, by early August. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington more than doubled its previous projection of about 60,000 total deaths, an increase that it said partly reflects “changes in mobility and social distancing policies.”

Oops! Even as its projections began to depart from reality to an extreme degree, the IHME was suddenly able to notice “changes in mobility and social distancing policies.”

Just like that, their projected number of deaths had doubled. Their forecast was back on track!

Returning to the basics:

To what extent does this new "internal document" represent an actual administration prediction?

We have no idea. But on their face, do those reported numbers make sense?

They make no apparent sense to us. That said, the Times didn't seem to notice. So far, we've seen no one explain.

ACCUSATION MEETS INCOMPETENCE: Elizabeth Bruenig's true belief!

TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2020

Elizabeth Bruenig knows: Somewhere in some Senate hallway, did Joe Biden commit a sexual assault in 1993?

We have no way of knowing. Beyond that lies a very important, very key basic point:

Almost surely, there will never be a way for any of us to know.

Almost surely, there will never be an investigation which demonstrates the truth of Tara Reade's accusation. Almost surely, there will never be an investigation which demonstrates that her claim is false.

Almost surely, no one will ever "know"—will ever be able to demonstrate—the truth of falsity of this accusation. That said, the human mind is ill-equipped to come to terms with this basic point.

We human beings will never know, except for our clairvoyants. And so, we state this additional point:

Elizabeth Bruenig does know!

Bruenig is a young, true-believing columnist for the New York Times. Rather plainly, she knows the truth about this otherwise difficult matter.

Elizabeth Bruenig knows! We can tell that Brueng knows because of the way she started her recent column. She started her column like this:

BRUENIG (5/3/20): If you’re lucky when you report your sexual assault, you’ll become known as a person who was sexually assaulted. If you’re unlucky, you’ll become known as a person who lied about being sexually assaulted.

It could still go either way for Tara Reade.

Elizabeth Bruenig knows! In that passage, it's clear that Reade is being described as "a person who was sexually assaulted." She's being described as someone who has "reported [her] sexual assault."

According to Bruenig, there are two different groups of sexual assault victims/survivors. According to Bruenig, it could "go either way for Tara Reade"—but she fits into one of those camps.

For those of us who struggle with uncertainty, we should always remember to thank the gods for sending us the Elizabeth Bruenigs. Also, for newspapers like the New York Times, who hire the Bruenigs at early ages, then publish their work.

(Mercifully, Bruenig's column didn't run in print editions. That said, it attracted plenty of notice. It had generated almost 5300 comments when the Times cut comments off.)

We who struggle with uncertainty should be thankful for the clairvoyants, who know! Elizabeth Bruenig is such a person—until you reach paragraph 5:

BRUENIG: I have my own impressions regarding Ms. Reade’s allegations, but no one—save Ms. Reade and Mr. Biden—knows with certainty whether her claims are true. What I can assert with firm conviction is that Democrats ought to start considering a backup plan for 2020.

Say what? No one knows "with certainty" whether Reade's claims are true? Tara Reade's high-profile claim could be a (viciously) false accusation? Bruenig only has an "impression" concerning what's true in this case?

We're handed this disclaimer, in passing, in a subordinate clause, inside a rather brief paragraph 5. But all through the rest of Bruenig's 13-paragraph column, we are led to believe that Bruenig does know what is true.

You see, Bruenig doesn't just know. She also truly believes.

For members of our flailing species, true belief in tribal verities was once a survival skill. Today, it's a curse on our journalism and on our rapidly crumbling national culture. That said, it's found all through our warring tribes, even among our true-believing tribes over here on the cultural "left."

Bruenig truly believes. In paragraph 4, she gives readers a heavily slanted account of some of the evidence cited by "those who believe [Tara Reade]." In fairness, she starts her paragraph 6 with a comically odd endorsement:

"Ms. Reade’s account is not nearly as incredible as some have argued."

If this weren't such a serious matter, that endorsement would merely be humorous. But true belief is a deadly virus, and it exists all through our tribes, wherever the human mind lurks. In the following passage, Bruenig gives us a familiar picture of the way it now works Over Here:

BRUENIG: Ms. Reade’s account is not nearly as incredible as some have argued. In the course of my reporting, I have worked closely with many survivors of sexual assault. It isn’t unusual, in my experience, for survivors to exhibit behavior that seems unstable or erratic to others. They may initially disclose to investigators or journalists only a fragment of what happened, and then reveal more over time—some even falsely recant, either because they sense the police don’t believe them, or because they fear the consequences of pressing their claims. And victims often maintain relationships with their attackers or harbor mixed feelings about them.

“It’s not at all uncommon for someone to still have positive feelings about aspects of the person who assaulted them, or to admire or respect them,” Scott Berkowitz, the founder and president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) told me. “With people who work for politicians, there’s usually a strong measure of loyalty or respect in that relationship. So it’s not indicative that someone wasn’t telling the truth.”

As far as we know, everything Bruenig says in that passage is true, at least as a general matter:

It's true! Survivors may change their accounts in various ways. Some may falsely recant.

Beyond that, we'll assume that the statements by Berkowitz are also true. We'll assume that some victims may continue to "have positive feelings about aspects of the person who assaulted them, or to admire or respect them."

Possibly due to her true belief, Bruenig isn't forthcoming enough to explain why she's making these points. The points are being made because Reade has made quite a few statements over the years in which she praises Biden for his work on behalf of women's interests and rights.

This doesn't mean that her claim of assault is false. It simply means that Bruenig was a bit parsimonious in her account of the (many) behaviors which have led some people to doubt Reade's accusation—to linger in the land of uncertainty instead of passing over into the Eden of true belief.

Bruenig truly believes. You can see it in the passage we've just quoted, in which she traces the tribal logic according to which anything an accuser says will be taken as further proof of the depth of her trauma.

That's the logic of true belief. You can also see that logic in the passage which follows:

BRUENIG (continuing directly): Sexual assault is a crime unlike any other, and its hideous uniqueness is often manifest in the ways its victims cope. Cavalier dismissal of Ms. Reade’s story therefore runs the risk of advancing misconceptions about sexual assault and its aftermath.

True believers—adepts of the tribe—will consider the tribe and its tribal members only. In this passage, Bruenig considers the harm that could result from "cavalier dismissal" of Reade's accusation.

Stating the obvious, "cavalier" dismissal of any claim is a bad way to go. That said, Bruenig doesn't consider the harm which could result from cavalier dismissal of Joseph Biden's denial.

What kind of harm could result from that? As a matter of basic wiring, the true believer won't consider or wonder or write about any such problem as that.

Before she's done, Bruenig has touched quite a few of the bases. She suggests that Democrats, or at least some Democrats, are subjecting Reade's accusation "to a level of scrutiny not widely applied to accusers in similar circumstances," with Christine Blasey Ford being named.

That may or may not be true; to a large extent, it all depends on what the meaning of "similar" is. That said, there is no doubt that some major Democrats have embarrassed themselves concerning this topic in the recent past.

That said, Bruenig's citation pushes us toward the dangerous point where we decide that, if we've behaved stupidly in the past, we have to be equally stupid now. Soon, she's telling us this:

BRUENIG: Liberal thinkers and organizations have begun to realize this, and many have responded accordingly. Feminist author Jessica Valenti has emphasized the import of believing women “even when it’s politically inconvenient,” and Rebecca Traister has observed that the credibility of Ms. Reade’s allegations puts any female politician who might agree to join a Biden ticket in a poisonous bind.

Is it important to believe women “even when it’s politically inconvenient?" Presumably yes, it is—or at least, it may be.

But is it a good idea to believe a woman when you don't have any way of knowing if her claims are true? True believers will bypass such nagging points, while offering an unspecified claim about the accuser's "credibility."

True belief will be found wherever the human brain lives. It will often be put into print by the New York Times.

Elizabeth Bruenig is well regarded for many valid reasons. In this case, an intelligent newspaper would never have published this column.

The column should have been rejected as soon as an editor read its first two paragraphs. In those paragraphs, Bruenig turns an accuser into a victim. That's the behavior of a clairvoyant or a magician, not of a competent journalist.

The human mind is poorly equipped to deal with matters like this. The human mind is strongly inclined to settle matters of uncertainty by leaping to premature conclusions, especially those which adhere to tribal verities and norms.

This was once a survival skill. Today, it's a virus, a toxin.

Tomorrow: What the heck was Emily Bazelon actually talking about?

Was Mike Pompeo made in a lab?

MONDAY, MAY 4, 2020

Can anyone here play this game?: "Can't anybody here play this game?"

According to legend, and possibly in accordance with fact, the remark was "made by New York Mets manager Casey Stengel, expressing his frustration over the team's ineptitude" in its inaugural season.

This brings us to Mike Pompeo's appearance on ABC's This Week. Below, you see a portion of the official transcript.

Pompeo spoke with a puzzled Martha Raddatz. Can anyone here play this game?

RADDATZ (5/3/20): Do you believe [the coronavirus] was man-made, or genetically modified?

POMPEO: Look, the best experts so far seem to think it was man-made. I have no reason to disbelieve that at this point.

RADDATZ: Your, your Office of the DNI says the consensus, the scientific consensus was not man-made or genetically modified.

POMPEO: That's right. I, I—I agree with that.

Yes. I've—I've seen their analysis. I've seen the summary that you saw that was released publicly. I have no reason to doubt that that is accurate at this point.

RADDATZ: OK, so just to be clear, you do not think it was man-made or genetically modified?

POMPEO: I've seen what the intelligence community has said. I have no reason to believe that they've got it wrong.

RADDATZ: And—

POMPEO: Martha, you have to put this in context...

From there, Pompeo proceeded to deliver a speech. The speech was designed to kill a lot of time and put the whole thing in context.

This was an especially strange performance by Pompeo. But the same can be said of a great deal of activity from all around the political spectrum at the present time.

Changes in media technology have turned us into an array of small, highly tribalized nations. Each small nation has its own tribal story line.

We humans take over from there. We bend all points of logic and fact to adhere to our tribal line.

Can you see a way out of this mess? We're not sure we can!

ACCUSATION MEETS INCOMPETENCE: As Candidate Biden stands accused...

MONDAY, MAY 4, 2020

...should you believe the accuser? As you may have heard, Joe Biden has been accused of committing an act of sexual assault—presumably, of committing a crime—in a Senate office hallway in 1993.

As you may have noticed, accusations of sexual misconduct have become a standard part of our presidential campaigns. This started in the 1988 and 1992 campaigns with accusations of very bad consensual conduct by Democratic front-runners Gary Hart and Bill Clinton.

(Our interest in consensual conduct continued in 2016. Had Candidate Trump had sex, on one occasion, with Stormy Daniels ten years before? Inquiring minds badly wanted to know. This is who, and what, we are.)

Accusations of sexual misconduct have become a standard part of our White House campaigns. So has the astoundingly incompetent way such accusations are handled by members of our mainstream press corps and by our vast array of highly incompetent pundits.

So who the heck is Emily Bazelon? We thought you'd never ask!

Last Thursday, Bazelon offered the type of skeptical commentary which basically isn't allowed when such accusations are made. She did so in a podcast at Slate, where she spoke with two better-behaved male colleagues.

Bazelon spoke with John Dickerson, the former host of Face the Nation, and with David Plotz, the former editor of Slate.

Judged by prevailing rules of the game, the gentlemen behaved themselves during the meandering 28-minute discussion. Bazelon plainly didn't.

That said, who the heck is Bazelon? The leading authority tells us this:

Emily Bazelon is an American journalist. She is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, a senior research fellow at Yale Law School, and co-host of the Slate podcast Political Gabfest. She is a former senior editor of Slate.

Her work as a writer focuses on law, women, and family issues. She has written two national bestsellers published by Penguin Random House: Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy (2013) and Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration (2019)...

Bazelon graduated from Yale in 1993, from Yale Law School in 2000. Last Friday, in the sadly-named Slate Political Gabfest, she said the sorts of things to which, by the rules of the game, top pundits must never give voice.

Bazelon did the types of things which simply mustn't be done. Even as her male companions kept lamenting liberal hypocrisy, she voiced some doubts, and raised some questions, about the current accuser.

Indeed, she even said this:

She said that, as a matter of basic fairness, the credibility of such accusers has to be explored. Dating back to Gennifer Flowers and then to Kathleen Willey, then moving on to Julie Swetnick and Stormy Daniels, this has long been the sort of thing which simply mustn't be done.

Bazelon isn't real sure about Reade. Early on, she said this:

BAZELON (4/30/20): You know, in some cases, we’ve had people who’ve seemed incredibly durable as witnesses in terms of their credibility coming forward. So I’m thinking of Anita Hill. I’m thinking of Christine Blasey Ford. And I don’t see Tara Reade in that category.

Now, I realize in saying that I’m basically showing my own bias against people who are alleged victims who also have a lot of, like, questionable actions in their past. I mean, reading about Reade’s activities with this horse rescue operation she was involved with, where the owner and employees are saying, like, "You stole stuff from us," and it just looks really like not credible.

And I guess my own basic bias is that, if you are going to bring a really long-ago serious allegation against a public official, and you can line up some pieces of corroboration but not real proof, your reliability is going to be on the line. And we should not err in the direction of deciding to let people destroy the careers of the men they accuse in those settings without some real sense that we are sure, because otherwise we are in a world in which the MeToo movement has turned into a place where we’re perilously close to letting people who, who lie, or who have problems, destroy other people. And like, that cannot be the end result here.

For a truly sad "transcript," click here.

Are pundits allowed to say such things? Bazelon said she doesn't see Reade as someone with super credibility. She even seemed to suggest that Reade might be lying, or that she might "have problems."

It got even worse in that middle paragraph, where Bazelon referred to a matter her male colleagues never broached during the 28-minute discussion.

In that middle paragraph, Bazelon seemed to say that Reade might have "a lot of questionable actions in [her] past." She even seemed to cite an example, referring to Reade’s "activities with this horse rescue operation she was involved with."

Say what? Was Reade once accused of stealing from a horse rescue operation? That's what Bazelon seemed to say. Plotz quickly steered the discussion back to the horrors of liberal hypocrisy.

Make no mistake! Liberal hypocrisy concerning such matters has been a gruesome reality, but it isn't the principal question at hand. That said, Plotz and Dickerson seemed most concerned with showing the world that they themselves could never be accused of any such transgression.

(In pursuit of such absolution, they almost seemed to advocate a growing "liberal" consensus: Because we've been stupid in the past, we have to be stupid again.)

Bazelon wasn't done at this point. Speaking of the cultural "taboo about questioning [alleged] victims," she seemed to say that that such accusers are sometimes lying! She even seemed to say that some such examples exist, and that we all know about them!

BAZELON: I don’t know what to do about the taboo about questioning victims and their credibility in a situation like this, because in the end, that’s what it all comes down to. And I mean, I’m not a real lawyer, but as someone who went to law school and thinks about legal standards, like, I just don’t know how you get away from that. I mean, we have to have some kind of faith that people are telling the truth and that we haven’t created a situation in which, you know, the, quote, idea of "Believe women," which I have never ascribed to, is something that journalists or people determining consequences can, can run with.

Like if your friend comes to you, should you believe her? Sure. But like, the notion that that is going to carry us through all these tricky questions when people’s careers and reputations are at stake. Like, no! I’m sorry! Sometimes people lie, and we have examples of that. It has been very rare. It’s really important not to damage all credibility of sexual assault victims by saying that something occasionally happens. But you also can’t rule it out.

"Sometimes people lie," Bazelon said, "and we have examples of that." She seemed to be saying that some people are known to have lied in cases like this! "We can't rule it out," she said.

Later, Bazelon voiced skepticism about Reade once again, saying she "has red flags about reliability." She even went so far as to complain about one of the pundit corps' favorite games—the game of "having people presumed guilty when there's no way to prove yourself innocent."

Bazelon said she isn't a Biden fan. Despite this fact, she did the improbable. Speaking with major scribes at a major upper-end site, she stated some obvious facts:

She said that accusers of this type are sometimes lying. She stated the world's most obvious fact—we have recent, high-profile examples in which this was the case.

She was also willing to say that Reade may not be the most credible person on earth. In the past, it has been standard press corps practice to disappear embarrassing facts about high-profile sex accusers.

Dickerson and Plotz showed little interest in addressing these claims. Like others around the pundit corps, they adopted a more conventional stance.

Reade's accusation is being widely discussed. If you look closely, you will see that these rules almost always apply:

True or false and who cares: Almost surely, there will never be a way to demonstrate whether Reade's accusations is true. Pundits will routinely show an amazing inability to come to terms with this fact.

Past examples of false accusation: We've had recent examples of high-profile sex accusers who were making false accusations. Pundits will routinely disappear this obvious fact.

Believe the accusers: Pundits will swear that they don't believe that we should always believe the accuser. As they say this, they'll do what our pundits have done for thirty years—they'll gloss, finesse and disappear the facts which may cast doubts on this accuser's credibility. In this way, they'll steer you toward always believing accusers.

Everything but the matter at hand: Pundits will discuss hypocrisy until they're blue in the face. In this way, they'll adhere to the greatest maxim of their species and their guild—No Distraction Left Behind.

Is Tara Reade telling the truth? Almost surely, there will never be a way to know—and our amazingly weak-minded pundit corps will never come to terms with that fact.

Anthropologically, this is what we humans are like—we self-impressed "rational animals."

Tomorrow: What was Bazelon talking about? Why isn't it being discussed?

Slate identifies new set of "lies!"

SATURDAY, MAY 2, 2020

No way out, Sartre said: William Styron ended Sophie's Choice with a sad memorial to "the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth."

Alan Pakula's 1982 film ends with a similar musing.

One such beaten child was Nathan Landau, a principal character in the book and the film. As we eventually learn, his lying and his gruesome behavior stem from the fact that he's been diagnosed, since he was a child, as "a paranoid schizophrenic."

Another beaten child was Sophie herself, who was confronted with a terrible choice after finding herself in the middle of one of the most savage episodes in all of human history.

In the months before she was faced with that choice, she had failed to behave as a true hero might have. In that sense, she was a regular human being—and she, in the end, joined Nathan in death.

They were just two in a long list of people Styron describes as among the world's beaten children.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war, attempting to find our way through the issues raised by President Trump and by an accusation against Joe Biden. As we watch our reporters and pundits fumble and flail with such assignments, we can't help thinking, again and again, that we have met the world's beaten children and the world's beaten children are us.

"No Exit," Sartre gloomily said, in a 1944 play. Two years earlier, Casablanca had turned that assessment on its head, confronting the gloom of nascent "existentialism" with American humor and the promises of redemption.

That said, history sometimes creates situations from which there really is no exit. As we watch our beaten children try to deal with current divisions, we can't help thinking that we've reached a point where we can't be saved, not even by brilliant comic relief.

We'll offer three examples:

Wallace and Bash: Yesterday afternoon, we watched a discussion between Nicolle Wallace and Jeremy Bash which was astonishingly bad. They badly misrepresented something President Trump had said about the possible or likely source of the coronavirus. They seemed to confuse the chronology, and the contents, of a recent statement about that question by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Wallace selectively quoted a front-page report in the Washington Post. Bash ran right alongside her. All in all, their discussion was terrible horrible classic "fake news." If MSNBC provided transcripts for Wallace's show, we'd show you what we mean.

Slate claims it hears a who: Yesterday, Kayleigh McEnany conducted her first briefing as Trump's most recent press secretary. Perhaps unwisely, she sampled Jimmy Carter, saying this to the assembled reporters:

"I will never lie to you:"

She told the reporters she wouldn't lie. Inevitably, this headline emerged at Slate:

New White House Press Secretary Vows “I Will Never Lie to You” Before Telling a Few Lies

In the article itself, Daniel Politi listed three examples of McEnany's alleged "falsehoods and lies." His analytical skills struck us as quite poor this day.

Below, you see his first example. To his credit, he calls the statement in question a falsehood, not a lie, though we aren't sure that we would even go that far::

POLITI (5/1/20): The first notable falsehood peddled by the press secretary was concerning the news of the day, former Vice President Joe Biden’s staunch denial of sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade. Trump had said Reade’s accusations were “far more compelling” than those made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and McEnany was asked to comment. “I think it was a grave miscarriage of justice with what happened with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There’s no need for me to bring up the salacious, awful, and verifiably false allegations that were made against Justice Kavanaugh,” she said. But of course, there’s no way you could actually accurately characterize the accusations against Kavanaugh as “verifiably false.”

Sad! By normal rules of interpretation, McEnany hadn't said that all the accusations against Kavanaugh were "verifiably false," though she'd clearly said that some were.

Which accusations did she mean? If reporters had wanted to know, they could of course have asked her. (We'll guess she might have gone to Michael Avenatti's intervention in that discussion. As a general matter, Avenatti is a deeply embarrassing topic for our own floundering team.)

Were some of the accusations "verifiably false?" We don't know, but it's certainly possible.

Having said that, so what? Politi called this statement a falsehood, and some editor turned it into a lie. So it constantly goes as we the beaten keep revealing our tribal nature.

Politi never says which of his three examples constitutes a "lie." By his third example, he merely says that McEnany "wasn’t quite truthful" when asked about Michael Flynn and the FBI.

He closes with a sad and snarky remark: "For now at least, it seems McEnany will continue having the same complicated relationship with the truth as her predecessors." Almost surely, that is true, but then again so will we all.

Inevitably, we all have a "complicated relationship with the truth!" That's the nature of human discourse in a world where it's possible to describe various complicated states of affairs in wide arrays of ways—in a world where there's no perfect way to describe most situations.

We live in a complicated world, but we beaten children tend to flee to a simpler, tribal realm. The other people are constantly "lying." We ourselves are upright and pure.

Donald J. Trump's last stand: As we noted on Wednesday, Olivia Nuzzi thought the cable networks did the right thing in airing Commander Trump's prime-time propaganda/misstatement storms.

Nuzzi seemed to think that we the people could sort through all the misstatements. Along the way, she mentioned the fact that she had asked a certain question at Donald J. Trump's last storm.

Below, you see the question Nuzzi asked, along with Trump's non-answer. This is the sort of monumental nonsense the cables insisted on airing:

QUESTION (4/27/20): If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?

NON-ANSWER ANSWER: So, yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people. But if you look at what original projections were—2.2 million—we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000. It’s far too many. One person is too many for this.

And I think we’ve made a lot of really good decisions. The big decision was closing the border or doing the ban—people coming in from China—obviously, other than American citizens, which had to come in. Can’t say, “You can’t come in. You can’t come back to your country.”

I think we’ve made a lot of good decisions. I think that Mike Pence and the task force have done a fantastic job.

I think that everybody working on the ventilators—you see what we’ve done there—have done unbelievable. The press doesn’t talk about ventilators any more. They just don’t want to talk about them and that’s okay. But the reason they don’t want to talk—that was a subject that nobody would get off of. They don’t want to talk about them.

We’re in the same position on testing. We are lapping the world on testing. And the world is coming to us. As I said, they’re coming to us, saying, “What are you doing? How do you do it?” And we’re helping them.

So, no, I think we’ve done a great job. And one person—I will say this: One person is too many.

Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Stating the obvious, Nuzzi's question was really an opinion column in the form of a question. The commander responded exactly as anyone would have known he would—with greatest-hit excerpts from a stream of memorized monologues.

He started with the several million lives he has saved. He mentioned his heroic decision with respect to travel from China.

He mentioned his heroic action with regard to ventilators. He mentioned the way the Fake News refuses to talk about his great success in that area. He mentioned the miraculous work he has done with testing.

At another time, he might have orated at much greater length in response to that non-question question. He might have directed asteram of insults at Nuzzi herself.

Trump had behaved that way night after night. But this was the final question at his final prime-time briefing, the one which occurred last Monday in the Rose Garden.

Given the timing, he merely hit a few of his most familiar highlights, then said "Thank you" and left.

Does anyone know why a news channel would want to broadcast nonsense like that night after night after night after night, week after week after week?

Almost no information was ever provided at these ridiculous sessions. Instead, the public was assailed with repetitive strings of standard groaning misstatements.

News orgs have largely abandoned the task of attempting to identify and correct those endless misstatements. Many questions at these sessions were as pointless and unhelpful as the one Nuzzi tossed.

In our view, cable channels should have issued, and then reissued, detailed statements as to why they were airing these misinformation storms.

If they were going to air these storms, they should have created high-profile, nightly programs dedicated to assessing the misstatements they insisted on airing, full and complete total stop. No other "stories" allowed!

Major newspapers should, by now, have created dedicated daily pages which chronicle and assess the president's endless misstatements. No president in American history has ever come close to behaving in such a deeply disordered way. Our major news orgs, and journos like Nuzzi, have normalized this by now.

Casablanca said this:

After trying everything else, we the people will rise and sing the Marseillaise. After trying everything else, we'll stand and fight, with plenty of comic relief thrown in, derived from our essential good nature.

On the personal level, we'll even find a way to say that we'll always have Paris. We'll then move on with our lives.

Casablanca's optimism laughed in the face of existentialist gloom. At present, are we beaten children of the earth possibly confronting a difficult storm from which our limited abilities will really provide no exit?

Commander's crazy statements continue!

FRIDAY, MAY 1, 2020

As do normalization, indifference: Even after the apparent suspension of the commander's nightly "briefings," the crazily inaccurate statements continue.

Yesterday, the commander did a press avail with New Jersey's governor, Phil Murphy. Luckily, it wasn't nationally televised during prime time, with millions of people listening to wildly inaccurate statements.

That said, the Q-and-A was still highly disordered. Once the brief Q-and-A began, the commander launched his trademark Ventilator Monologue.

Here's how the nonsense began:

TRUMP (4/30/20): I think our whole group has been spectacular. We had ventilators; we didn’t have any. We built them. We have thousands—tens of thousands are right now under construction. And we’ve given—as Phil said, you got, I think, more ventilators than anybody in the United States.

MURPHY: I believe that’s correct.

TRUMP: New Jersey needed them very badly.

MURPHY: Yep.

TRUMP: And there was never a person that needed a ventilator that didn’t get one in any state. Not one person that needed a ventilator. So we didn’t say, “He didn’t get a ventilator and somebody passed away. Somebody didn’t make it.”

Now, we had a mask problem. Now we have so many masks we don’t know what to do with them. We had a big problem. And you have to understand: When we took over, the cupboards were bare.

According to President Trump, now that we don't actually need them, we have tens of thousands of additional ventilators under construction. Also, we now have so many masks, we don't know what to do with them!

Is that second statement accurate? We ask for the following reason:

Roughly one month ago, the upper-end press corps spilled with reports about shortages of personal protection equipment for our heath care workers. That included shortages of various kinds of masks, including N-95 masks.

According to the commander, we now have so many masks that we don't know what to do with them. But is that claim accurate?

For ourselves, we have no idea. In our experience, our big news orgs dropped this topic weeks ago, never to go there again.

Last night, we saw several medical workers on cable news shows referring to ongoing shortages of PPE. Do widespread shortages still exist? The topic was hot a month ago, but it has largely disappeared from cable news and from our major newspapers.

We're left with the things we hear from Trump—and yesterday, as he continued, he was soon saying this:

TRUMP (continuing from above): And you have to understand: When we took over, the cupboards were bare. And the thing that—frankly, it’s not as tough as the ventilator situation. We’re the king of ventilators. But what we have done is—on testing, we’re doing numbers the likes of which nobody has ever seen before.

And I told you, the president of South Korea, President Moon, called me to congratulate me on testing. And we did more tests than any other country anywhere in the world. And I think they told me yesterday a number—if you add up the rest of the world, we’ve done more testing. And it’s a higher quality test.

Again, the president repeated the bogus claim about our doing more tests than the rest of the world combined. This drew an instant "Pants on Fire" from PolitiFact, but it was rated as "Officially Normalized" by our major news orgs, who no longer treat repeated obvious groaning misstatements as significant news events.

The president wasn't done. Before another question could be asked, he returned to this:

TRUMP: Let me just tell you, we have—we started off with empty cupboards. The last administration left us nothing. We started off with bad, broken tests and obsolete tests.

What we’ve come up with, between the Abbott Laboratories, where you have the five-minute test. Did they test you today?

MURPHY: They did test me.

TRUMP: Good. Now I feel better. (Laughter.)

A bit of towel-snapping repartee ensued. But Trump's claim about the empty cupboard and the broken tests triggered the day's second question.

A reporter asked a very familiar question. See if you can find an actual answer to the highlighted part of his query:

REPORTER: But the Obama administration—people from the Obama administration would disagree on your assessment that the cupboards were bare. They said that there was equipment in the national stockpile—

TRUMP: Well—well— I know, Jim. Let me just tell you—I—that’s fine.

REPORTER: —and as for, you say, "broken tests," it’s a new virus. So how could the test be broken when you needed a new test?

TRUMP: We had a broken—Jim, we had broken tests. We had tests that were obsolete. We had tests that didn’t take care of people.

Did Trump really mean that Obama had left him a "broken test" for the coronavirus? His endless statements about "broken tests" have never quite seemed to make sense.

Yesterday, a reporter actually asked! What you see was Trump's complete answer to the rather obvious question about the "broken tests" for the virus which didn't yet exist. He simply repeated what he had said. "Jim, we had broken tests!"

Things continued on from there during the relatively short Q-and-A session. In some ways, things got worse.

Luckily, this wasn't televised for two solid hours during prime time, exposing millions of people to all sorts of bogus assertions as the nation's major news orgs normalized this manifestly crazy behavior.

And make no mistake, this behavior has been normalized by our high-end orgs. Cable channels scrambled to broadcast this manifest lunacy every night for more than a month. Major orgs like the Post and the Times have long since come to ignore the president's endless array of misstatements.

In fairness, it would take a substantial amount of effort to record and report his many misstatements on a daily basis. That said, no president in American history has ever behaved this strangely.

Our big news orgs, and our major journalists, have never cared a whole lot about facts. But should they care if our sitting president seems to be out of his mind?

Our question, and it's important:

Is it true? Do we now have so many protective masks for our health care workers that we don't know what to do with them? Have our various PPE problems actually been resolved?

That's what the commander-in-chief seemed to tell a bunch of reporters. Was his statement true?

For ourselves, we don't have the slightest idea whether the statement was true or false. The topic in question has run its course. Does anyone actually care?

DIAGNOSING PRESIDENT TRUMP: It's too late to help us now!

FRIDAY, MAY 1, 2020

The question the Times wouldn't ask: Long ago and far away, Rhonda Freeman published a lengthy discussion of the disorder known as malignant narcissism.

Her piece was written for Psychology Today—and actually, it wasn't that long ago. Johnson's report appeared in February 2017, the first full month of Donald J. Trump's tumultuous term in office.

Below, you see part of Johnson's description of the malignant narcissist. Again and again, she almost seems to be describing a well-known public figure of the present day:

JOHNSON (2/22/17): This condition reflects a hybrid or blending of narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. Psychologist Erich Fromm termed the disorder in 1964. Psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg later delineated the symptoms of the condition and presented it as an intermediary between narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders.

Individuals with this profile can form connections with others. However, they process information in ways that can hurt society in general, but also the people who love or depend on them. Family, co-workers, employees, and others in their lives often have to walk on eggshells to appease a fragile ego and minimize the occurrence of their unstable, impulsive, or aggressive behaviors.

They lash out or humiliate others for infractions of even the most frivolous nature (for example, you gave an opinion that differed from theirs; you demonstrated confidence, and it made them look bad; you told a joke that involved poking fun at them).

For some, their grandiosity and protection of their fragile "true self" can be at such extreme levels that they will lie and give the impression that simply because they say it, that makes it reality. Many will become angered if their lies are challenged with truth or facts. Of course, this can create problems for the people close to them, as this pattern of behavior can easily veer into gaslighting.

Malignant narcissism is a blend of two disorders that pose problems interpersonally for their victims—narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders. It is not uncommon for others to feel anxious, intimidated by, and fearful of people with this condition. The combination of poor empathy coupled with aggression, hypersensitivity, and suspiciousness can bring pain to others.

Those who interact with malignant narcissists often consider them jealous, petty, thin-skinned, punitive, hateful, cunning, and angry. Given their shallowness, they are not regulated emotionally and have beliefs that swing from one extreme to the next.

Their decisions can hurt others, because they rank relationships and people based on superficial standards and categories. They want to land on top, even when pretending to be altruistic or engaging in an activity that should not be "all about them." They often view the world through a primitive binary lens (for example, winner/loser; smart/dumb; rich/poor; pretty/ugly; black/white)—all the while sustaining the belief that they are superior. This is likely associated with problems processing emotional information, which reflects faulty neurobiology.

According to Johnson, the person afflicted with this condition will lash out or humiliate others for even the simplest infractions.

People who suffer from this condition will lie, and will then become angry if their lies are challenged with facts.

Co-workers and employees often have to walk on eggshells due to the unstable, impulsive, aggressive behaviors of people afflicted with this condition.

The beliefs of people with this condition may swing from one extreme to the other. People who interact with them will regard them as petty, thin-skinned, punitive, angry.

People who suffer from this condition will typically want to land on top, even when they deal with something which shouldn't be "all about them." Through thick and thin, they sustain the belief that they are superior.

In the mind of the person with this condition, the world is made of winners and losers. Or so Johnson said.

For people who don't support President Trump, this may sound like a comically accurate portrait of our sitting president. Indeed, Johnson almost sounds clairvoyant, so accurately did she describe the ways President Trump is being described, this very day, by those who don't support him.

Who knows? Johnson may have been thinking of President Trump when she composed this portrait. At any rate, the last remark which we have posted brings the eternal note of sadness is, or so it says around here.

Johnson says that the destructive traits of people suffering from this condition are likely due to "faulty neurobiology." We don't know what that means, in part because topics like these are so rarely discussed within our mainstream discourse.

What exactly does it mean to diagnose someone this way? In what way is such a person in the grip of a mental "illness?"

What's the difference between a person with a major "personality disorder" and a person who simply has terrible values? Does this syndrome have some sort of biological cause? Can a person with this syndrome "help himself?" Where does this syndrome come from?

Questions like these are rarely discussed in our upper-end discourse. Within our occasionally unimpressive public culture, "sociopaths" are Hannibal Lecter, and everyone else is some version of normal.

Because these topics are discussed so rarely—because our perceptions in this area are so strongly shaped by Hollywood—we the people have little ability to discuss or analyze such topics. When someone like President Trump comes along, we possess few tools which help us discuss his highly peculiar behavior.

Should Trump be pitied as a person who is suffering from an "illness?" Or should be he assailed in moral terms, or perhaps as a "moron?" Within or primitive public discourse, such questions don't even exist.

What does it mean to be suffering from a (major) "personality disorder?" Our unimpressive mainstream culture rarely visits such a place.

That leaves us poorly equipped to deal with the question of Donald J. Trump. We liberals tend to lash out in anger at his behavior, even as people like Dr. Gartner say that he's in the grip of a syndrome which lies in or near the realm we refer to as mental "illness."

So it goes, this very day, among us "beaten children of the Earth." So it goes as we try to discuss the destructive behavior, and the apparently dangerous impulses, of President Donald J. Trump.

It's too late to develop the capacity to discuss Trump's peculiar behavior. At best, we may slowly develop the ability to discuss some similar public figure at some point in the distant future.

For today, though, we'll leave you with one final question. It steams from the editorial in which the New York Times decreed that journalists shouldn't discuss President Trump in psychiatric terms.

The editorial appeared on January 10, 2018. The editorial board was so immature and childish that day that they chose to publish their editorial under this childish headline:

Is Mr. Trump Nuts?

Then as now, the journalists couldn't put on their big boy [sic] pants and use their grown-up words. For current examples of such behavior, see Tuesday's report.

The editors wanted to know if Donald J. Trump was "nuts." Having displayed this second-grade level of sophistication with respect to concepts of mental health, the editors started like this:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (1/10/18): Is Donald Trump mentally fit to be president of the United States? It’s an understandable question, and it’s also beside the point.

Understandable because Mr. Trump’s behavior in office—impulsive, erratic, dishonest, childish, crude—is so alarming, and so far from what Americans expect in their chief executive, that it cries out for a deeper explanation.

It’s beside the point not because a president’s mental capacity doesn’t matter, nor because we should blindly accept our leaders’ declarations of their own stability, let alone genius. Rather, we don’t need a medical degree or a psychiatric diagnosis to tell us what is wrong with Mr. Trump. It’s obvious to anyone who listens to him speak, reads his tweets and sees the effects of his behavior—on the presidency, on the nation and its most important institutions, and on the integrity of the global order.

According to this childish group, Trump's behavior was so alarming that it "cried out for explanation." But any such (psychiatric) explanation would have been "beside the point!"

It would have been beside the point because "we don’t need a psychiatric diagnosis to tell us what is wrong with Mr. Trump." All we have to do is look at his public behavior.

Who needs an explanation? the editors said. We can see the way he behaves. Why should we go beyond that?

For us, the possible answer to that question is obvious. We'll state our answer in the form of a question:

If Trump is suffering from some major psychiatric disorder, might that make it more likely that he will behave in disastrous, unimaginable ways when the chips are down?

A person who simply has horrible values may pull himself back from the brink. But at the moment of truth, might a genuine sociopath throw the world over the edge?

In the end, at the moment of truth, might a person with the postulated disorder be crazily dangerous in a way which is hard to conceive? Might he be more crazily dangerous than a person who simply has horrible values?

Might his behavior go beyond anything we could imagine? We don't know the answer to that, and the childish editors—"Is Mr. Trump Nuts?"—weren't inclined to wonder or ask. They could conceive of no need to ask a specialist, someone with lifelong experience in such tragic realms.

They saw no need for further discussion, or for "expert" opinion. But so it has gone, for decades now, within our upper-end discourse.

Our high-end journalists just aren't super sharp. Our lives have long been in their hands.

All next week: Fumbling efforts to discuss Tara Reade's accusation