The New York Times largely avoids the conflation!

THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2024

Distinguishes falsehoods from lies: At times of partisan conflict, we humans often like to accuse our opponents of lying.

Sometimes people do lie, of course. It's just isn't especially easy to know that they actually have.

Our own work was widely cited in Al Franken's 2003 book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. In fairness, Al—he was still a comedian then—was occasionally working a bit tongue in cheek. In part, he was writing a "satirical book," one with an eye-catching title.

How can you know if a public figure has lied? How do you know that a misstatement of some kind isn't a simple mistake, even perhaps a delusion?

There's no perfect answer to such questions. But saying the others are lying has become a standard way to proceed for pundits from Red America, and from Blue America too.

Directed at Donald J. Trump's endless claims, it strikes us as a lazy way to go. Also, as an approach which hasn't necessarily been gigantically helpful.

At any rate, Laura Ingraham started that way last night, one minute into her 7 o'clock prime time show on the Fox News Channel. 

Her initial focus was on the southern border. As 7:01 turned to 7:02, this is what she said:

INGRAHAM (4/10/24): From the beginning, whenever the Biden folks were pressed about the border, they started lying. And, of course, blame-shifting. 

Now first, you'll remember, it wasn't a crisis at all, said our border Caesarina. Thank you, Kamala.

It's the easiest thing in the world to do! 

The paraphrased claim that the border "wasn't a crisis at all" seemed to be the main example of "lying" to which Ingraham referred. A few minutes later, our analysts came right out of their chairs when Ingraham discussed a new approach to reducing asylum claims Biden seems to be considering.

You can read about that possible new approach in this brisk report at Axios. Last evening, Ingraham showed Biden answering a question in an interview with Univision. Then she offered this:

INGRAHAM: At this point, I'm not even sure that he knows that he's lying. But that was a lie.

If a person "doesn't know" he's lying, can he really be said to be lying? If you think the statement you're making is accurate, can it be scored as a lie?

Traditionally, the answer has strongly tended to be no, and it's been that way for obvious reasons. Traditionally, distinctions have been observed, all over the world, between two groups of misstatements:

1) A simple misstatement, made in good faith, by a person who believes that his statement is true. 

2) That less attractive type of misstatement—the kind of misstatement made by a person who knows that his statement is false.

Within mainstream American journalism, this distinction has largely been washed away in the past thirty years, first by the virulent verbal bombast of the Gingrich Revolution, then again as journalists of the center left began to challenge claims made by the George W. Bush administration.

Today, though, everyone is said to be lying all the time! If you watch the Fox News Channel, the Democrats are constantly lying. If you watch MSNBC, the lies are coming thick and fast from the people Over There.

As we noted this morning, this accusation tends to shut down discussion and debate. In our view, this has been a generally unhelpful way our own blue elites have chosen to go, but we've come to see that it's really the best the vast bulk of this cadre can manage.

There is no point in trying to argue for other approaches to misstatement and / or apparent misstatement. Blue America is wed to our current approach, in which we talk to ourselves about locking Trump up and castigate everyone who tries to speak to Red America's many millions of others.

We'll only say, once again, that this strikes us as a lazy and unproductive way to proceed. For example, was the 2020 election really stolen? Trump keeps saying that it was. Here are two ways Blue America can package this for the gentleman's voters:

1) Donald J. Trump is lying to you.

2) Donald J. Trump has never presented a white paper in support of this repeated claim. He's had three years to document his various claims. Why do you he's made no attempt to do so?

As for us, we don't know what Trump may believe. We don't know if he believes anything. 

We regard Trump as (presumptively) mentally ill. We have no idea what he thinks, and the journalists we're told we should trust have all agreed that medical specialists must never be consulted about his apparently disordered mental state.

That cuts off the route to a fuller discussion. It leaves us in thrall to the same people who spent many years, decades ago, insisting to everyone who would listen that Candidate Gore was the world's biggest liar, just like his boss, President Clinton.

That was the best those people could do. Here's a basic fact about our world:

They didn't bring a lot to the table, and neither do their descendants.

This morning, we linked again to the new essay in the Washington Post which conflates falsehoods, untruths and false claims with a flashier entity—lies. We thought we'd link you to another recent essay in which the New York Times took a different approach.

The analysis appeared beneath a double headline. Dual headline included, this is the way it starts:

The Method Behind Trump’s Mistruths
A close examination of every public word from the former president during a crucial week of his campaign.

Since the beginning of his political career, Donald J. Trump has misled, mischaracterized, dissembled, exaggerated and, at times, flatly lied. His flawed statements about the border, the economy, the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 election have formed the bedrock of his 2024 campaign.

Though his penchant for bending the truth, sometimes to the breaking point, has been well documented, a close study of how he does so reveals a kind of technique to his dishonesty: a set of recurring rhetorical moves with which Mr. Trump fuels his popularity among his supporters.

In the week starting with Mr. Trump’s victory speech in Iowa through his win in the New Hampshire primary—the contests that put him on the path to becoming his party’s nominee for the third consecutive time—The New York Times analyzed all of his public statements, including speeches, interviews and social media posts.

His words focused heavily on attacking his political rivals, self-aggrandizing and stoking fear to make his case for 2024. In doing so, Mr. Trump often relied on repeated falsehoods and half-truths. He has yet to deviate from this approach in the general election.

Here’s a look at how he does it.

At that point, the Times starts to list Trump's alleged techniques and approaches. Please note:

In the material we have posted, the Times only claims that Trump has "flatly lied" at times. 

Is a "repeated falsehood" always a lie? The Times makes no such assertion. In our own view, some such falsehood may represent the delusional belief of someone who's (severely) mentally ill, assuming anyone really believes in such constructs.

By the way, how does the Times know that Trump has ever "flatly lied?" They never attempt to nail that down, nor is it likely that they will ever try to do so. The question involved is too complex. It pretty much can't be answered.

According to the New York Times, Donald J. Trump has emitted "mistruths" and also "flawed statements."  He has relied on "falsehoods," but also on "half-truths." 

But is a falsehood just a lie? The New York Times doesn't say that. Nor will there ever be an easy way to know when some public official has "lied"—and at a time of partisan conflict, there is no imaginable way to get people to form a consensus concerning such matters, one partisan group with some other.

It all becomes a loud, angry Babel. Under current arrangements, that's good for ratings, profits and salaries, and very bad for you.

Donald J. Trump has never made a serious attempt to document his most striking claims. To our neighbors and friends, we would be inclined to say this:

Why do you think that is?

Along the way, we'd quickly acknowledge that our own side has sometimes been horrible too. After that, we'd remind our friends and neighbors of this:

You have an unending citizen's duty, just as we blue voters do.

In our view, each side has thoroughly earned its way out. That said, we'll be voting for President Biden and his strange behavior concerning various major issues, assuming things ever get that far, which they may never do.

It's the dumbness of this which drives us wild. And yet, as the poet once said—and yet, "This is [us]."

MADNESS: Blue America spots the LIES!

THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2024

The joy of fighting words: Perhaps surprisingly, there aren't a whole lot of "fighting words" in the verses of The Iliad.

Within the modern American legal context, what the heck are "fighting words?" The leading authority on the concept offers the following thumbnail:

Fighting words

Fighting words are spoken words directed to the person of the hearer which would have a tendency to cause acts of violence by the person to whom, individually, the remark is addressed. The term fighting words describes words that when uttered inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.

The "fighting words doctrine," in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine by a 9–0 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. It held that "insulting or 'fighting words', those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" are among the "well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech the prevention and punishment of [which] … have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem."

Such automatically "insulting" terms are remarkably rare in The Iliad, an ancient poem of war. As we've noted, the lengthy, fictional siege of Troy was a war between two different civilizations, with the Achaeans (Argives, Myceneans, Greeks) venturing to Asia Minor to try to get "Helen, radiance of women" back.

For those present at the scene, there was little question which side you were on—which side you wanted to win. There was little need to stir up partisan juices.

Helen, radiance of women, was now living with her second husband inside the towering walls of Troy. The Achaeans wanted her back. 

As far as we know, the Trojans are never shown considering any such action. And so it came.

(In a somewhat similar way, our only slightly more modern nation starts next week with the trial of a former president concerning Stormy Daniels, our nation's most famous "porn star." 

(That president is accused of having consensual intercourse with Daniels on one lone occasion, back in 2006, ten years before he ran for the office. Perhaps somewhat comically, Blue America's pundits agree to refer to this one alleged event as "an affair."

(In what strikes us as a constant embarrassment, Blue America's major pundits go on TV and say that voters needed to know about that allegation before they could know how to vote in November 2016.

(Such pundits operate under a hard tribal law—they repeat the term "porn star" as frequently as possible, Would voters have needed to know if the former president stood accused of having consensual relations, on one occasion ten years before, with a corporate accountant? 

(Presumably, many fewer would care. It was all about the control of women back when men fought on the plains outside Troy. Given the tiny parameters of our limited human minds, it works in somewhat similar ways in the modern context now. Just watch Gutfeld! any night if you want to see a more aggressive, even stupider form of the gender political rollback by the underfed modern humans who want the ancient order retained, or watch Eyes Wide Shut again.)

(It's still all about who's zoomin' who inside our small human brains.)

Back to the fighting words! The Achaeans wanted Helen back. Troy's King Priam loved his daughter-in-law of ten years, and the Trojans wanted to keep her.

Everyone knew the siege would continue until one side or the other won. There was no need to stir tribal hatreds. People knew which side they were on.

In our modern pair of Americas, the laws of war are different. Members of the two Americas live on the same streets in the same towns and show up for the same jobs. When the martial spirit flares, we need to find ways to heighten the eternal human desire to split ourselves into angry tribes so we can march off to a brutal war.

And so the fighting words come out, as one did, just yesterday, in the Washington Post. We refer to the start of this analysis piece by Kessler at al., in which a Rubicon seems to have been crossed:

Which Trump lies stick? Republicans believe some falsehoods more than they did six years ago, our poll finds.

Fictions, misleading claims, wild exaggerations, lies—former president Donald Trump dispenses untruths of one variant or another relentlessly. The falsehoods range from the inconsequential, like the crowd size at his inauguration, to the democracy-shaking, like the “stolen” 2020 election.

With Trump barreling toward November, when Americans will have a chance to choose him to lead the nation again, The Washington Post Fact Checker sought to get a sense of the staying power of his lies—whether people are more or less likely to believe them over time and which lies prove the stickiest—as well as measure the value Americans place in a president’s honesty, however they define it.

Midway through Trump’s presidency, in 2018, we documented through a poll that most Americans, including Republicans, did not believe many of his most repeated claims.

A fresh Washington Post-Schar School poll shows that remains largely the case, with an average of 28 percent of Americans believing Trump’s false claims tested in the poll.

But Trump has made significant inroads in convincing Republicans that his lies are the truth. That applies to election integrity especially—the basis of Trump’s “big lie.”

"Even more significant, Americans appear to have diverged on the meaning of honesty itself," the three authors write as they continue. At that point, their use of the terms of everyday language has become almost wholly incoherent.

The headline spoke about Donald Trump's "falsehoods." In the body of the piece, the language quickly turned to "lies," then moved back to "untruths." 

Falsehoods, untruths, false claims—and lies! It's as we noted yesterday:

For Glenn Kessler's Washington Post, that seems to mean that a Rubicon has finally been crossed. And yes—terms like "lying" and "lies" function as a species of fighting word within the modern political context.

Were we omniscient like the great god Zeus, how many of Donald J. Trump's (many) "false claims" would qualify as "lies?" It isn't easy to know such things, no matter how tempting it may be to pretend that "falsehoods," "untruths" and "lies" are all the same kettle of fish.

Over the centuries—over the millennia—speakers of the world's many languages developed the semantic distinctions which let them speak in a more intelligent way about the real events which really take place in the real human world. 

Today, the Post had decided to pleasure its readers with the promiscuous use of a specialized term—a term which provokes the kind of reaction, within a political discourse, which is recognized under constitutional law with respect to the insults delivered by "fighting words."

Instead of "using our words" to report what we actually know, we turn to this fighting word. It's a deeply childish turn of mind—but it helps us create the onset to war between our Red and Blue Americas, a pathway no one needed to take back when a conglomeration of angry white males fought on the plains outside Troy.

At the Post, they're no longer "using their words" as carefully as they did in the past. Instead, they seem to have decided to offer a form of pleasure to their audience, 

The term "honesty" plays the same role in that childish opening passage—a passage to which Kessler has apparently agreed. 

How often is Donald Trump being "dishonest" when he makes some sort of false statement? Once again, it's quite hard to say. 

In our reading of the Post's analysis piece, its reporters have a hard enough time discerning when some of Trump's statements are actually false without providing themselves the pleasure of deciding what may have been going on inside his mind—a mind which 37 medical health professionals have said, in a major best-selling book, may be in the grip of a (severe) mental illness.

When is Donald Trump "lying?" Kessler and his colleagues don't exactly know. But the assertion that someone is lying tends to end all political discourse. It acts as a fighting word within the political context.

So, of course, does the claim that members of the other tribe are racist, misogynist, bigoted (and on and on and on). We'll postpone till tomorrow this recent attempt by the PBS NewsHour to come to terms with those ubiquitous fighting words—to tell us Where Those Wild Things Are. For today, let's look at the instinct to trigger modern political war, as that instinct was put on display in some of the comments to Kevin Drum's recent post about NPR.

Like Kevin, we almost never listen to NPR. We have no pre-existing view as to how its journalism currently works.

When Uri Berliner published an essay accusing the org of a type of political bias, we didn't have much to go on. But at one somewhat comical point, Berliner authored this claim:

BERLINER (4/9/24): For nearly all my career, working at NPR has been a source of great pride. It’s a privilege to work in the newsroom at a crown jewel of American journalism. My colleagues are congenial and hardworking. 

I can’t count the number of times I would meet someone, describe what I do, and they’d say, “I love NPR!” 

[...]

It still happens, but often now the trajectory of the conversation is different. After the initial “I love NPR,” there’s a pause and a person will acknowledge, “I don’t listen as much as I used to.” Or, with some chagrin: “What’s happening there? Why is NPR telling me what to think?”

In recent years I’ve struggled to answer that question. Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None. 

So on May 3, 2021, I presented the findings at an all-hands editorial staff meeting. When I suggested we had a diversity problem with a score of 87 Democrats and zero Republicans, the response wasn’t hostile. It was worse. It was met with profound indifference. I got a few messages from surprised, curious colleagues. But the messages were of the “oh wow, that’s weird” variety, as if the lopsided tally was a random anomaly rather than a critical failure of our diversity North Star. 

Stating the obvious, we have no way of knowing if any of those statements are accurate. We don't know if Berliner's reported census created an 87-0 count. Assuming that's what actually happened, we can't verify Berliner's account of staff reaction inside the D.C. headquarters. 

For the record, Berliner says, early on, that he himself "eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly." 

We can't verify those claims either, but they may seem to suggest that Berliner himself was one of the NPR 87—though some commenters to Kevin's post aggressively pushed back against any such thought, name-calling Berliner as an obvious right-wing hack as they bowed to the ancient impulse to create a state of war between the Very Good People (Us) and the Very Bad.

This war will be, and is, an internal war within a pre-existing nation state. It's being promoted inside Red America, and inside Blue America too.

Some commenters inside Drum's post were eager to use even harsher fighting words against their fellow commenters. We refer to insults coming from the edges of Blue America in ways which are every bit as stupid as the garbage peddled on Gutfeld! each night, possibly even more so.

We humans are not "the rational animal," except in limited contexts. We long for division into tribes. Also, we know what we know, even when we may not exactly know it.

This comment came from a good, decent person early on in the Comments wars:

COMMENTER: I largely quit listening to NPR years ago. Two much "both sides do it" and a serious lack of insightful reporting. It took them four years to use the L-word (LIE!) in describing Trump's claims. They reported Trump's claim that he would be meeting with union workers in Detroit when he was actually meeting with paid actors at a non-union plant. From their reporting it is clear they view Biden's age as a greater existential threat than Trump’s dictatorial ambitions. Like the NYT, their inevitable lead is "How does this hurt Jor Biden."

The commenter—a good, decent person—seems to have longed for a type of moral certainty and for a clear moral division. He wanted to hear the term LIE. "Flatly false, repeated misstatement" simply wouldn't do.

Concerning the way NPR "reported Trump's claim that he would be meeting with union workers in Detroit when he was actually meeting with paid actors at a non-union plant," here's the transcript from Morning Edition on the morning after the visit, whose location had been shrouded in mystery during the previous week:

GONYEA (9/28/23): The event was at a small automotive supplier, a factory in Macomb County that's half-hour north of the city or so. Trump did not talk about the [Republican Party] debate at all. He said he was there with a vision for a revival of American nationalism. He accused President Biden of killing the auto industry. He promised to put tariffs in place to protect that industry.

It's notable, Steve, that he came here with a message for UAW members who are on strike, and this was a non-union shop. And over and over, he returned to the ongoing transition to electric vehicles, saying it would be such a failure, that it would completely wipe out the industry. This is where he mentioned the strike:

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

INSKEEP: OK. You mentioned the United Auto Workers who are on strike. He referred to striking workers. Were they listening?

GONYEA: The room was full, maybe 500 people or so—a rough guess. There were UAW members there. They stood on risers in the front on either side of the stage. Still, they were nowhere near the majority in the room—maybe 1 in 5 or so.

No reporting can ever be perfect. Our recollections can be faulty or limited too. When our brains instruct us to move toward a state of war, we may be inclined to remember the reporting we didn't especially like. We ourselves have sometimes "remembered" reporting which never took place at all! 

(That's why we try to check.)

Do our brains instruct us to move toward war? Fighting words help us do that! They make us feel moral and good, and they bring discourse to a halt.

Early in the feature film Gone With The Wind, the silly, cavorting Southern boys are trying to impress Miss Scarlett on the staircase outside Tara. Miss Scarlett was their Helen of Troy. (Their "21-year-old intern," to adopt a bungled but thrilling formulation our journalists ran with for years.)

Boldly, they tell Miss Scarlett what they plan to do to "the Yankees." Midway through the film, the camera pulls back from many acres of land in Atlanta, where many acres of Southern boys are stretched out on litters.

Their fighting words felt good at the time. Now they were dying or dead.

That one good and decent person wanted to hear the word LIES. Other comments to Kevin's post are actively poisonous—and ugly and deeply stupid. We're speaking here of poisonous comments which are delivered from Blue America's side of the aisle.

We'll offer an example or two tomorrow, reminding you that the human brain is still inclined to march off to war, even all these thousands of years after the death and dying which took place on the plains outside Troy.

Our brains instruct us to create two warring sides. Fighting words make us feel very good, and they help us accomplish that task!

Did Trump have sex one time in 2006! Inquiring minds need to know!

Could this all be a form of madness? As always, you decide!

Tomorrow: PBS spots the racists

This afternoon: Ingraham spots Biden's "lies"

Tormented termagant's madness mounts!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2024

And the band keeps refusing to play:  At 10 p.m., the nightly assurance was extended to several million viewers by the Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity.

Full disclosure! On one lone occasion, we appeared on Hannity & Colmes. Hannity now says this every night, just as he did last night:

Greg Gutfeld is standing by to put a smile on your face. Have a good night!

Just like that, the good night began! This is the way the termagant chose to put that smile on our face:

TERMAGANT (4/9/24): Happy Tuesday, everybody! 

[AUDIENCE CHEERING] 

All right, all right! Let's get started.

During a fund-raiser Saturday, Donald Trump claimed that Joe Biden soiled himself in the Oval Office.

[PAUSE]

This is factually untrue. President Biden did not soil himself in the Oval Office. 

He soiled himself in the Oval Office, the Rose Garden, the Lincoln Bedroom, the State Dining Room, the Library, the East Room, Air Force One, Air Force Two, the state car, Marine One and in front of the Pope in Rome.

[RESTRAINED, UNCERTAIN LAUGHTER]

All right.

As you can see y clicking this link, a visual sourced Trump's alleged statement to the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail sourced it back to an anonymous claim reported in the New York Times. 

Donald J. Trump was said to have made that statement about President Biden. Inevitably, the termagant took it and ran. 

As you can further see by clicking that link, another visual listed all the places where this imagined soiling took place.

The broken child of whom we speak is 59 years old, but this is the way the termagant plays.  At the age of 59, this is the unparalleled depth of his failure and his resentment.

There followed a doctored "audiotape" of a phone call by President Biden, accompanie by a joke no one seemed to get. By 10:02 p.m., the termagant got to this:

GUTFELD: Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough is 61 today. He's five years older than his wife, Mika, but only a year older than her face.

[AUDIENCE GROANS]

That was the evening's first Botox joke, aimed at its first liberal woman. He followed with his first joke about the way the women on The View are all just way too fat.

This is all this unparalleled idiot knows. He's on the air at 5 and 10 o'clock each weekday night.

By 10:03, the termagant had ended his attempt to open with some jokes. For the evening's second serious topic, he led his panel through a debate about who the dumbest panelist on The View is

Several of our youthful analysts screamed and rent their garments. There certainly are a large number of underwhelming discussions on The View. But one analyst screamed as she tore at her hair:

Panelists on the termagant's program are asking that question? she asked.

You'd think that the sheer stupidity of this "cable news" show would be its distinguishing characteristic. But nothing compares to the way this defeated post-human spreads his own soil around.

The higher-class world averts its gaze as this garbage is broadcast each night. The program is stupid beyond all belief, and its host is walking dead to the world besides.

It airs as a primetime "cable news" show! Can anyone really fail to see that this nation's experiment,  imperfect as it has been, has possibly started to fail?

We wish Greg Gutfeld could make himself better. In our view, it would be a gift to himself but also to the world.

(He wouldn't have to abandon his "beliefs." As we'll get around to showing, his basic views aren't necessarily "wrong.")

That said, his anger and resentment seem to be overwhelming. And the panelists are there on the set every night, some of them knowing no better. 

The Fox News Channel puts this garbage and this nonsense on the air every weekday night. Starting with the New York Times, Blue America's loftier orgs are all averting their gaze.

That's exactly what they did when Trump went king-of-the-birthers. "I have no complaints about Trump," Rachel said four years later.

Her drinking pal had served as Trump's caddy for those four years of garbage on Fox! We've spelled it out in detail in our archives, but this is the way the world goes.

Briefly, let's be fair: As bombastic and propagandistic as he is, Sean Hannity would never engage in such conduct himself. He's taking one for the corporate bosses when he throws to Gutfeld that way every night.

MADNESS: Madness is as madness does!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2024

Blue America meets Forrest Gump: "Stupid is as stupid does," Forrest Gump famously said.

On occasion, the statement is also attributed to his mother. We can't instantly confirm Mrs. Gump as the original source of the quote.

Stupid is as stupid does? Except in the most egregious cases, we try to avoid that word. We all say dumb or misleading or mistaken things on occasion. 

Also, it's the rare occasion when anyone's views can be said to be wholly and indisputably correct.

That said, Stupid is as stupid does—the statement has lived on within the culture! In our view, it's a bit like that with madness too—and with that state of mind's second cousins.

As we noted yesterday, the madness was general over that forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The fairies were out in force that night, and they crept inside human minds.

About a decade later, Shakespeare presented King Lear, taking us to the place where a lord of men was raging on the moors. Subsequently, President Nixon sobbed and punched the floor—and 37 medical health specialists wrote essays saying that another American president seemed to have a (very serious, indeed "dangerous") mental illness problem.

It was obvious madness when Arianna sewed that deeply disturbing fourth button on Candidate Gore's disturbing suit of clothes. That form of madness went on for years, and the sane people knew to shut up.

Along with its second cousins, our madness comes in varied forms! Some forms are more virulent—they may involve clinical "mental illness. But other forms can sweep through crowds in something like a type of tulip mania. 

The term Groupthink is often used in such circumstances, as is the term True Belief. As for the other term we have just used, this is where it comes from:

Tulip mania 

Tulip mania was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history.

In many ways, the tulip mania was more of a then-unknown socioeconomic phenomenon than a significant economic crisis. It had no critical influence on the prosperity of the Dutch Republic, which was one of the world's leading economic and financial powers in the 17th century, with the highest per capita income in the world from about 1600 to about 1720. 

The term tulip mania is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values.

Forward markets appeared in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century. Among the most notable was one centered on the tulip market. At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan. 

"Your money or your life," Jack Benny said he once heard a mugger say.

"I'm thinking! I'm thinking!" the exasperated skinflint replied.

In the matter of this famous mania, the stakes were a bit different. The madness had driven Dutch citizens to this:

Your wages over the course of a decade for a single tulip!

The tulip mania came and went. Over here, so did the Salem witch trials, roughly sixty years later. In fairness, everyone believed in witchcraft then, including Isaac Newton.

(Full disclosure: Our own Cousin Elizabeth married the Reverend Hale after the madness ended. Reverend Hale had turned against the Salem trials when his own first wife, later deceased, was suddenly accused.)

Madness is as madness does, and it comes in various forms. Sometimes, it can take the form of TribeThink, or even Red or Blue NationThink, especially inside fevered brains.

In fairness, what should be scored as a "fevered brain?" No mathematical formula allows us to make foolproof designations! We're left with matters of subjective assessment—ideally, with us the people trying to form our assessments in good faith.

This brings us to a pair of remarkable documents which have now appeared on the front. Yesterday afternoon, hey sent us back in search of two other documents on which we've never remarked. 

(Also, to Al Sharpton's speech.)

We're going to link you to those four documents now, just to create the resource. We'll start with the two documents which appeared yesterday, then include the two others:

I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.
Uri Berliner. The Free Press, April 9, 2024.

Which Trump lies stick? Republicans believe some falsehoods more than they did six years ago, our poll finds.
Glenn Kessler, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin. The Washington Post, April 9, 2024.

Trump deploys racist tactics as Biden rematch appears likely
Laura Barron-Lopez, Amna Nawaz. The PBS NewsHour, January 26, 2024.

Interview with cult expert Steven Hassan
Joy Reid, The ReidOut, April 2, 2024.

Then too, we'll cite an astoundingly negative book review, recently published by The Atlantic. 

Long ago, we knew one of the book's two authors a tad. He's a very good guy, and we vote the same way--but does a cousin to madness possibly lurk in the book which was reviewed beneath this headline?

An Utterly Misleading Book About Rural America

Are fairies dancing in a forest inside that new book? We haven't read the book, but we can't say the idea is impossible.

Wow! For scholars of mania and / or madness and its various cousins, yesterday was truly A Day That Was. 

For starters, we'll direct you to Kevin Drum's post about the first document on that list—the document which emerged from deep inside NPR. Kevin's post appears beneath this headline:

The peculiar tale of NPR’s decline and fall

We had read the FreePress essay in question before we saw Kevin's post. We had reacted to the first three items in that essay in much the same way Kevin did—though we will record one difference:

Kevin opined that the author, NPR's Ira Berliner, had "fallen prey to a sort of conventional centrist wisdom." We were struck by the lack of basic analytical skill on display in those first three chunks of Berliner's essay, even coming from a highly regarded member of the American mainstream press elite.

(More on that tomorrow.)

Full disclosure! We also agreed with some criticisms of Kevin's post—criticisms which were offered in comments. We also thought that some of the other comments to Kevin's post showed the shape of the problem we now all live with—the (alleged) problem under review at this site this week.

We'll have to spend a few more days critiquing the contents of those four documents. We think they show a type of madness-adjacent behavior which is infesting, and failing to help. our own Blue America tribe.

For today, we'll leave it at this:

We were most directly struck by the headline atop that Washington Post report. Has an editorial Rubicon been crossed? Once again, the headline says this:

Which Trump lies stick? Republicans believe some falsehoods more than they did six years ago, our poll finds.

To our eye, it looks like an editorial Rubicon has been crossed. 

During the Trump presidency (and beyond), Kessler's long list of Trump's misstatements never used the term "lies." 

At the Post's FactChecker site, Kessler would report the precise number of Trump's misstatements, a slightly overwrought type of journalistic act in itself. 

But when Kessler counted the many misstatements, he would only refer to falsehoods and misleading statements; he wouldn't refer to "lies." Now, it looks like that bond-simple, age-old distinction has been tossed.

It's the most obvious distinction in the book!  A misleading statement or a simple falsehood won't typically be a "lie!" 

That's such a boneheaded, age-old distinction that it defies belief when major journalists and academics decide to conflate the terms. But when fairies start dancing in the forest, it turns out that our most "highly-educated" leadership cadres are eager to wipe away such distinctions. 

At times like these, when the tulips scream, our flawed brains tell us to go there. Fairies danced in the forest and Lear raged on the moors; and Blue America's elites love to do that.

We blame it all on David Corn, who we knew and very much liked long ago. We blame it all on Lawrence O'Donnell.

At Fox, Mark Levin is now "The Man Who Screams." To see (a small part of) Lawrence's famous screaming attack from the days of the Bush-Kerry campaign, you can just click here.

We saw it happen live! It went on and on, then on and on, right through a commercial break and into the next segment. For the record, it wasn't a helpful performance at all. Nor was it clear that John O'Neill was even wrong in his assertions, let alone that he was lying.

Was a bit of madness involved that night? If so, such things sometimes happen. This seems to be the full transcript.

Madness once gripped Agamemnon, lord of men. It held him for more than nine years.

Madness gripped Chris Matthews for twenty months all through Campaign 2000. Earlier, we had lunched with Chris at The Palm.

The mainstream madness was all around during that twenty-month campaign. We chronicled it day after day, sending out mailers as we did, but no one stood up and said so.

Later, Kevin asked, in a slightly annoyed fashion, why we kept saying it so much. Our answer came to us straight from Olympus:

We've kept saying it because we can't get anyone else to do so!

The people we're told to trust today all knew it was going on. Aside from a few tiny dollops here and there, they also chose not to tell you.

In fairness, we wouldn't call that madness at all. We'll guess it was income protection!

Tomorrow: What Uri Berliner said

This afternoon: Amazingly, Gutfeld! again

Silly and childish and numbingly stupid!

TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2024

But not always totally wrong: Last evening, viewers had to wait until 10:29 to enjoy their first Lizzo joke.

The theme of the joke was required by law. Delivered by a fellow named Tyler Fischer, the joke went exactly like this:

I was one of the idiots that didn't wear the glasses when looking at the eclipse about four hours ago. And fun fact, I just found out—it was actually just Lizzo standing in front of the sun.

It's hard to believe what devoted throwbacks these Gutfeld! regulars are! Eight minutes later, in the next segment, this same fellow went there again:

Actually, fun fact, another fake news conspiracy. It wasn't an earthquake the other day, it was The Rock and Lizzo landing at Newark Airport.

Fun fact: The children on Gutfeld! were upset with The Rock because he didn't endorse Candidate Trump last week. (He also didn't endorse President Biden.) You could tell this one fellow was very upset because he said The Rock has "little rocks" if he can't really say what he thinks. 

(He was pounding away with the Lizzo "fat jokes" because those are the jokes this program's male children love. Women panelists get paid to sit on the panel and act like this makes perfect sense.)

If nothing else, the Gutfeld! program is an anthropology lesson. It's amazing to see how hard some masculine children will fight to resist even the simplest advances in simple courtesy respecting the basic dignity of certain groups of others. 

They'll fight and claw to maintain the right to party in the way they've always enjoyed. The fat jokes aimed at liberal women come thick and fast on this "cable news" show. Along the same lines, the host had started the program at 10:01 with this, his second sally:

Nancy Pelosi also watched the eclipse, but she had no choice. She has been unable to close her eyes since 2004.

There followed the usual clutter from the host of the show, including two photos of Hunter Biden from his stoned super-addict days. One of the photos showing him in his white underparts (and nothing else), though there was no explicit reference to the Hunter penis this night.

Anyone who has worked in the comedy world knows about these people. As audience members, they tend to dominate the Friday night late shows. They want to hear a bunch of dick jokes and not a whole lot else.

That doesn't mean that they're bad people; many are surely very good people. That said, we'd be slow to offer such routes of escape for the children who go on "cable news" TV shows and insisting on behaving this way. 

All in all, this program's devotion to fat jokes aimed at disfavored women demonstrates the way a certain kind of undergrown male resists any give-back of the braindead gender status that dates all the way back to the days when men fought over possession of Helen, radiance of women, on the wide plains outside Troy.

These boys just can't quit their advantage! And how deeply throwback is this gang of droogs? Two minutes into the show, one of the host's jokes actually journeyed all the way back to this amazing groaner:

A Kentucky man has admitted to faking his own death to avoid paying over a hundred grand in child support. Man, was his sister pissed! 

Does Henny Youngman's grandfather write this guy's jokes? Really and truly, good God!

The boys and men who people this show seem to love their throwback entitlements. (Eyes Wide Shut, come on down!) That said, it was the blinding stupidity of last night's "subject matter" monologue which made the program such a remarkable anthropology lesson.

The host of the show went on and on about the alleged differences between liberals and conservatives. We can only tell you this:

The analysis got dumber and dumber the further it went. Soon, it was just tragically stupid. We won't attempt to transcribe or critique the volumes of Stupid the product contained, but the host was soon trafficking in the land where liberal men are controlled by their wives and lack "the upper-body strength" to help women change their flat tires.

Inevitably, producers had ransacked the vineyards  of TikTok to find a liberal engaged in a loud, silly diatribe/screed. This was played to convince Red America's mistreated viewers that this is what The Others are secretly like.

As we've mentioned in the past, our own high school—San Mateo's Aragon High—is one mile up the Alameda de las Pulgas from the termagant's Serra High. As a freshman at that very school, we took its one journalism class. 

In the textbook, we were told to avoid certain logical errors. We remember one by name:

Avoid the "glittering generality." 

We've mentioned the teaching of that bromide in our freshman year once before. At the time, it seemed to refer to denigrations built around race. That said, the basic concept was easy to grasp even then.

Last night's program was brutally stupid. That said, it was also built, at times, on a certain measure of truth.

At this point, it's hard to be totally wrong for a full hour on the Fox News Channel! Have we denizens of Blue America escaped out own attractions to madness to such an extent that we are able to see the truth in that unfortunate statement?

Go ahead! Starting here, at 10:03 p.m., watch the termagant host's "subject matter" monologue and the subsequent "group discussion." You'll be looking at work that is blindingly stupid, with occasional elements of unfortunate truth scattered in.

. 

The host is 59 years old! You'll be looking at work from him that is blindingly stupid and reeking of endless resentment.

In our view, Blue America should be asking itself how he ever got that way. Can it really be because Joy Behar is way too fat?

Has our team possibly played some role in this truly remarkable fail? Ladies and germs! Have we possibly done so today?

MADNESS: When we're gripped by the soul of the propagandist...

TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2024

...are we gripped by a form of madness? In one of Shakespeare's best-known works, a midsummer dream state—a possible near cousin to madness—seems to command the stage.

We'll let the leading authority set the scene, including some modern analysis:

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. 

One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. A Midsummer Night's Dream is considered one of Shakespeare's most popular and widely performed plays.

[...]

Some of the interpretations of the play have been based on psychology and its diverse theories. In 1972, Alex Aronson argued that Theseus represents the conscious mind and Puck represents the unconscious mind. Puck, in this view, is a guise of the unconscious as a trickster, while remaining subservient to Oberon...In 1973, Melvin Goldstein argued that the lovers cannot simply return to Athens and wed. First, they have to pass through stages of madness (multiple disguises) and discover their "authentic sexual selves."

It's even set in Athens! That said, you have to go way down the page to find that single reference to madness, along with the suggestion that the lovers in question have to find a way to discover their authentic selves.

Earlier—much, much earlier—King Agamemnon, lord of men, had confessed to more than nine years of madness, tears streaming down his face, in the pages of the western world's earliest extant poem of war. For ourselves, we've begun to see near cousins to something like madness whenever our dueling American nations' "cable news" channels appear our TV screen.

Briefly, let's be fair:

As we noted yesterday, there has been a fair amount of the crazy in the politics of our flailing nation over the past many years. 

As we noted yesterday, Candidate Ross Perot puckishly adopted Crazy as his campaign's theme song at the end of the 1992 White House race. That selection involved a tad of Shakespearean whimsy—but decades earlier, President Richard M. Nixon, who "had already been drinking," had knelt in prayer with Henry Kissinger in the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House and had "punched the floor and sobbed."

Or so it said in The Final Days, with sourcing for these claims undisclosed. So the Washington Post reported again, last fall, under this banner head:

Kissinger held a sobbing Nixon just before the president resigned

Assuming it actually happened, that was an American lord of men, possibly with a bit of clinical "madness" involved. Meanwhile, in the wider realm, were forms of madness perhaps involved in the years which followed, when children's faces appeared on milk cartons and some very disordered preschool sexual abuse cases sent innocent people to prison and drove the nation wild?

All in all, forms of madness may be where you want to find them! Was it something like a form of madness when the mainstream press corps spent several years examining Candidate Gore's troubling clothes? 

Some of the commentary was flatly insane, if only in the colloquial sense. Was it a form of madness when no member of the upper-end mainstream press was willing to stand up and speak?

Also, was this episode driven by a form of madness? Is it possible that a clinical "madness" may yet lurk within this ongoing episode?

In 2017, a Yale psychiatrist named (Dr.) Bandy X. Lee edited a book which became a New York Times best-seller, even as it was being disappeared by the Times and all other such orgs. 

The book went medically literal on the concept of "madness." The leading authority on the matter starts to offer the background:

In 2017, [Dr.] Lee organized a conference at Yale on the mental health of Donald Trump with the participation of other psychiatrists including Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. Following the conference, in March 2017, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement reaffirming the Goldwater rule that restricts comments related to the mental health of public figures without their consent or evaluation. Lee characterized the statement as silencing concerns raised by psychiatrists about the Trump presidency.

Lee reconvened the conference the following month, and later in the year edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays warning about the dangers of Trump's mental instability that became a New York Times bestseller. It was reported that White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly secretly consulted the book as a guide for dealing with Trump. 

So it was reported! In its original form, the book's full title ran like this: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. The leading authority offers a fuller profile:

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is a 2017 book edited by Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist, containing essays from 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals describing the "clear and present danger" that US President Donald Trump's mental health poses to the "nation and individual well being." A second edition updated and expanded the book with additional essays. Lee maintains that the book remains strictly a public service, and all royalties were donated to the public good to remove any conflict of interest.

Synopsis

Authors argue that the President's mental health was affecting the mental health of the people of the United States and that he places the country at grave risk of involving it in a war, and of undermining democracy itself due to his dangerous pathology.

Consequently, the authors claim, Trump's presidency represents an emergency which not only allows, but requires psychiatrists in the United States to raise alarms. 

For the record, these psychiatrists and mental health professionals were alleging literal, clinical (severe) mental illness—a tragic, clinical form of what may get described as "madness" in more colloquial contexts. 

In the second edition of Dr. Lee's book, thirty-seven medical specialists offered such claims about the president's mental health. Was it something like a form of madness when major news orgs agreed that their work couldn't be discussed? Or was that a sound journalistic decision—a recognition of the fact that our American discourse lacks the maturity which would be needed to handle some such discussion within the context of major party politics?

At any rate, we've come a long way, Americas!  We've moved from the candidate whose puckish theme song was Crazy to the disappearing of a major best-selling book by acknowledged medical specialists. 

Fuller disclosure! In a few of Blue America's news orgs, claims that Candidate Trump is a "sociopath" have begun to be permitted of late. Just yesterday afternoon, for better or worse, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a perfectly sensible person, was permitted to make that claim, with no pushback offered, on MSNBC's Deadline: White House.

(This very morning, on Fox & Friends, we saw TikTok tape of an overwrought actress accusing Candidate Trump of "mental illness." The friend who presented the tape quickly said that the actress has mental health issues. There was little sense that anyone on this Red American program had ever heard that there was any conceivable issue involving the candidate's possible mental health.)

Was what we saw on last evening Gutfeld! also a form of madness? We'll detail some of what we saw in this afternoon's post. For now, we'll offer this:

What we saw was a master class in the deeply dumbnifying consequences of "segregation by viewpoint." 

What we saw on last night's Gutfeld! was often deeply "stupid"—of that there could be little doubt. But in its basic structure, was it also something like a form of madness? Were the fairies dancing in the forest surrounding a Red American Athens as this "news" program wore on?

Larger question:

Is our current journalistic arrangement something like a form of madness? We refer to the arrangement in which pundits from Red America speak only to others from Red America, while pundits from Blue America speak only to fellow Blues.

(Standard response to every assertion: "That's exactly right!")

We refer to the arrangement in which these journalistic cadres sift facts and topics and videotape to provide reinforcement and pleasure to each of our two Americas—to Red America and to Blue. Is this hardening corporate arrangement a bit madness-adjacent too?

People who live in Blue America see videotape of police officers being beaten on January 6. People who live in Blue America are never asked to view videotape from that day, unless Tucker Carlson has clipped it. 

Instead, people who live in Red America are shown videotape of migrants streaming across the southern border—videotape which was only offered to Blue America when 60 Minutes finally bit the bullet roughly one month ago.

Is it a form of madness to construct our "national" discourse this way? Are we letting the fairies dance in our heads as we watch our carefully sifted "news shows," even as fairies dance in the dreamscapes in our heads each night when we've gone to sleep?

If so, this is more than a midsummer dream. This is now the way we construct our non-discussion discussions all through midwinter, the spring and the fall. 

Is it madness when the people we've come to trust go on the air and con us this way? We'll grant you that it's good for ratings, for profits and for salaries. But does it start to resemble a form of madness as well?

Just for the record, we the humans actually aren't "the rational animal!" And you can forget about Freud and Darwin! Writing for the New York Times, here's the way Professor Horwich summarized the work of the man who was selected, in several major surveys of academics, as the most important philosopher of the 20th century:

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained...

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. 

That's the way Professor Horwich limned the later Wittgenstein's poorly formed but important work—correctly, we'd be inclined to say. At the highest levels of alleged academic distinction, it's been "linguistic illusion and muddled thinking" all the way down! 

(Just as every college freshman in history has always guessed!)

According to Horwich on Wittgenstein, that's the way it has worked at the very top of the pile! To that, we now add the tribal pleasures provided by the sifting of information, viewpoints and videotape as the "democratization of media" destructively rolls along. Are we happily locked in a form of madness, Blue World as well as Red? 

Wherever President Roosevelt looked in the 1930s, he saw a nation ill-clothed and ill-fed.

Wherever we look today, we see that modern form of sifting of viewpoint, insult and fact. Also, we see what we saw last night on the Gutfeld! clown show.

When we see this type of sifting, it seems to us that we as a nation have been gripped by the soul of the propagandist. When we succumb to that ancient impulse—when we sign on to be a Trojan, or perhaps to be an Achaean—have we perhaps succumbed to a modern form of something resembling madness? Also, can some such "people" survive?

We'll borrow from Melvin Goldstein! Like the lovers in the forest, do we need to find our authentic selves? Will we "have to pass through stages of madness" before we can dream of the (fat chance) possibility of emerging, somewhat sanely, on the other side?

Gutfeld! excerpts will follow today. Tomorrow, what you were told in the New York Post as opposed to the New York Times.

(Do you know whose version was more instructive? We'll acknowledge it right here—we don't!)

Tomorrow: The dangerous case of the $93 million

President Biden shut the Houthis down...

MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2024

...except on Fox & Friends: Let it be said that Max Boot might be wrong in his assessment. 

Also, Kevin Drum might be wrong in assuming that Boot is right.

That said:

In this column for the Washington Post, Boot asserts that President Biden shut the Iran-sponsored Houthis down in the wake of the January 28 drone attack which took the lives of three American soldiers on a base in Jordan.

According to Boot, the president accomplished this through a set of subsequent military strikes. Boot's column in the Post appears beneath this headline:

In the shadow war with Iran, Biden just scored an unheralded victory

For Kevin's account of what Boot said, you can just click here. Kevin's headline reads like this:

President Biden forced Iran to back down

Again, we don't have the expertise to say that Boot is right. But we'll remind you of the reaction on Fox & Friends Weekend on the Saturday and Sunday mornings which followed the first two sets of retaliatory attacks.

It was Saturday morning, February 3. On Fox & Friends Weekend, Pete Hegseth seemed quite sure about what had happened, as we reported that day. 

At 6:03 a.m., he set the tone quite quickly. He paraphrased a congressman who had said, according to Hegseth, that last night's strikes were "really nothing more than a fireworks display."

In fairness, that was Hegseth's paraphrase of what the congressman had said. At that point, producers played tape of the congressman's actual statement. The statement had been made to Sean Hannity, and it had gone like this:

"Sean, I just heard tonight from soldiers who are down range right now, and they're telling me this is going to equate to nothing more than a multimillion-dollar fireworks show."

So the congressman had said, based on what he'd heard from a bunch of soldiers who would have had no obvious way of knowing what they were talking about.

Hegseth paraphrased the assessment and then, at 6:04, on came retired Brigadier General Anthony Tata, who seems to specialize in spotting the traitors found all over the land. The general's most memorable statement came at 6:07:

"This is all a psyop on the American people and the world, quite frankly."

On Fox, Taylor Swift had been said to be psyop by the nitwit Jesse Watters. Now, it turned out that these first air strikes were just a psyop too.

The friends kept this going through the weekend, with Hegseth reinforcing the "fireworks display" idea and Rachel Campos-Duffy wondering, as he constantly does, if this whole thing was all Barack Obama's doing and idea.  

We offered three reports on those two mornings, reports we'll link to below. The first report concerned all the inflammatory claims Tata had made down through the years since his retirement as a (one-star) general.

That's what happened on Fox & Friends Weekend. Here's what isn't going to happen: 

No one is ever going to ask Hegseth to evaluate what Boot has now said. 

That "fireworks display" has now been termed a success. Is it possible that Hegseth's initial assessment, delivered that first Saturday morning, was less than exactly correct? 

This is the way American journalism works when its participants are strictly "segregated by viewpoint." Did the fireworks display turn into a win?

No one is going to ask Pete Hegseth. For that reason, the instantly self-assured Fox News friend will never have to tell.

This works the other way too, of course. Given the segregation of staffing by viewpoint, statements made on Blue America's cable news program also go completely unchallenged, unchecked and unassessed.

We'll offer a first example tomorrow, with others along the way.

Hitting the links: We posted three reports that first weekend. You can click the links:

SATURDAY: Who the Sam Hill is Anthony Tata?

UPDATE: Now for the rest of the Tata tape!

SUNDAY: A second wave of airstrikes last night!

On Fox & Friends Weekend, Rachel was sure that it must be Obama. Hegseth seemed sure it was fake.

No one was there to question their views. Red tribe viewers heard no other viewpoint. 

They'll never be asked about what they said, and they'll never be forced to tell.

We need to learn to see ourselves!

MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2024

To see our own conduct more clearly: You're right! We continue to lead with an unconventional theme, based on this improbable bromide:

Everything We Ever Needed to Know We Could Have Learned from Reading The Iliad

As we explained last week, this bromide is patterned on Robert Fulghum's big best-seller from 1988, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. 

That gentleman learned from kindergarten. We'll go with an ancient poem of war. Our basic view is this:

We Americans—we citizens of Blue America as well as Red—badly need to step outside our current political context to see ourselves (and our behaviors) as we and they actually are. The madnesses of our present state can all be found in that ancient text—and Book Nine, The Embassy to Achilles, is one of the poem's most compelling.

At one point, Agamemnon, lord of men, confesses that he has been gripped by a type of madness for the previous nine years. At present, we see madnesses wherever we look on the American political and journalistic stage—and no, these madnesses are not confined to the obvious nutcases and flyweights who are floating around in some of the major leadership cadres of our current Red America.

As a minor aside, some episodes in The Iliad seem to be torn right from our own modern history. When Odysseus and Ajax beg Achilles to return to the field of battle in the endless siege against Troy, this is what the rage-filled warrior tells them. He's speaking of the blow to his honor occasioned by Agamemnon at the start of the poem:

And the swift runner Achilles answered warmly,
"Ajax. royal son of Telarnon. captain of armies,
all well said, after my own heart. or mostly so.
But my heart still heaves with rage
whenever I call to mind that arrogance of his—
how he mortified me, right in front of the Argives—
that son of Atreus treating me like some vagabond,
like some outcast stripped of all my rights."

One thinks of the way President Obama famously mocked Donald J. Trump at the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. 

In a series of inexcusable appearances on the Fox News Channel, Trump had begun establishing himself as king of the birthers. Obama humiliated him from the stage that night. For Frontline's treatment of the incident, you can just click here.

(CNN Business asked this question: "Was this the night Trump decided to run?")

Trump decided to run for the White House that night, or so some readers of the flight of birds have suggested or maintained. We don't know if that really happened. If so, the incident in question didn't turn out real well from the perspective of Blue America.

That isn't the sort of event from which we can draw the greatest improvement in self-awareness. But Trump was mortified "right in front of all the Argives," like the rage-filled, sulking Achilles thousands of years before him.

Our tribe's many smaller behaviors have had many other effects. Can we blues ever learn to see ourselves more clearly? 

In many ways, Red America's leadership cadres often behave as if they're out of their minds. How well have Blue America's cadres been functioning over here? 

Do we sometimes create a world where the even the most furious Reds—even the ranting Mark Levins—can't help being somewhat, even basically, right? We'll be exploring such questions this very week.

We need to see ourselves more clearly. Are some of our madnesses on dim display right there in that ancient war poem?

MADNESS: Levin went off the rails again!

MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2024

"I'm Crazy," Patsy Cline said: A hint of the crazy was floating around during the late Ross Perot's 1992 White House campaign.

Some people thought Perot was a little bit nuts to launch such a run in the first place. But one month before the July 1992 Democratic Convention, Candidate Perot was running substantially ahead of Candidate Bush and Candidate Clinton in at least two major national polls:

Reuters on the Gallup poll: Perot led a Gallup Poll five months before the election with 39 percent, compared to 31 percent for incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Democrat Bill Clinton..

E.J. Dionne on the Washington Post / ABC News poll: In a three-way race, Perot...was the choice of 36 percent of registered voters to 30 percent for Bush and 26 percent for Clinton, who has clinched the Democratic nomination. Among likely voters, Perot rises to 38 percent, while the percentages for Bush and Clinton stay the same. 

Perot seemed to have taken a lead! Then, on the eve of the Dem Convention, small hints of madness-adjacent behavior may perhaps have arrived on the scene.

The leading authority remembers—and yes, this actually happened:

On July 15, [co-campaign manager] Ed Rollins resigned after Perot fired advertisement specialist Hal Riney, who had worked with Rollins on the Reagan campaign. Rollins would later claim that a member of the campaign accused him of being a Bush plant with ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. Amid the chaos, Perot's support fell to 20%. 

The next day, Perot announced on Larry King Live that he would not seek the presidency. He explained that he did not want the House of Representatives to decide the election if the result caused the electoral college to be split. Perot eventually stated the reason was that he received threats that digitally altered photographs would be released by the Bush campaign to sabotage his daughter's wedding. 

Yes, he actually said that! The Bush campaign was going to sabotage his daughter's wedding, so he had to get out of the race.

If memory serves, there was another, even odder claim made at this time. But at this point, front-runner Perot stepped aside.

Eventually, Perot got back into the race. He ended up receiving a remarkable 19% of the national vote.

Still and all, right at the end, the official reference to crazy appeared. On the eve of Election Day, he seemed to adopt something resembling a campaign theme song.

Headline included, straight from the Washington Post

PEROT OFFERS THEME SONG FOR CAMPAIGN: 'CRAZY'

DALLAS, NOV. 2—Only a few days ago, Ross Perot had predicted a last-minute surprise, and today he delivered. "I found the theme song for our campaign," Perot told supporters here halfway into his standard stump speech. "And here it comes."

With that cue, a Dixieland band hired to warm up the crowd suddenly started playing. "We're crazy," crooned the band leader, improvising on the famous Patsy Cline song "Crazy." Perot signaled to his youngest daughter, Katherine, and, as his supporters roared with laughter and applause, led her dancing about the stage.

It was, in short, not your usual election-eve political rally. The crowd was disappointingly small, only about 4,000 people in Dallas's 19,000-capacity Reunion Arena. But after spending $60 million of his own money on an often strange and unconventional quest for the presidency, Perot today was clearly determined to have a good time.

After finishing his 45-minute speech and predicting he would "landslide this thing" to victory, Perot danced again. He sang, belting out the words to "America the Beautiful." He shouted requests to the band. Embracing with relish attacks leveled by the White House, Perot shouted: "We're all crazy again now! . . . Don't worry folks. We got buses lined up outside to take you back to the insane asylum after all this is over!"

Ross Perot was a giant high achiever in his long, eventful life. For the record, he had started his 1992 campaign by comparing the national debt to "the crazy aunt you keep down in the basement."

That reference to the national debt as a "crazy aunt" garnered a fair amount of attention and served as comedy gold. That said, time doesn't permit a rumination today on that.

(At the time, the national debt stood at a relatively meager "$4 trillion and rising." In the wake of President Clinton's first term, the annual budget came into balance and the nation actually ran surpluses for four straight fiscal years.)

Having established this bit of background, let's return to the theme song the candidate ironically semi-adopted:

Man [sic] is the rational animal, we've long been told, at least here in the West. 

Sometimes, the ancient claim, as understood, is almost pretty much true. We humans are capable of building extremely tall buildings and inventing reliable technologies. But we aren't always especially good at pretty much anything else. 

The claim that we're the rational animal is commonly tracked to Aristotle. Centuries earlier, a mighty leader of the Achaeans (the Argives; the Greeks) had copped to a form of madness.

We refer to Agamemnon, lord of men, commander of the Achaean forces in the endless, largely mythical, long, deranged siege of Troy. 

Alas! After almost ten years of combat, the tide of war had turned against the lord of men and his forces. We've posted this part of what the lord of men now said, during a tear-drenched night-time council, quite a few times of late:

Lord marshal Agamemnon rose up in their midst,
streaming tears like a dark spring running down
some desolate rock face, its shaded currents flowing.
So, with a deep groan, the king addressed his armies:
"Friends, lords of the Argives, all my captains!
Cronus' son has entangled me in madness, blinding ruin.
But now, I see, he only plotted brutal treachery..."

Needless to say, Cronus' son was Zeus himself! Modern experts largely agree that no such god even existed.

That said, Agamemnon believed that Zeus was in control of the world. He also believed that he himself—the king of the Argives—had been deliberately "entangled in madness" by that greatest god's earlier conduct.

According to sources, tears were streaming down his face as the lord of men confessed to nine years of madness. As he continued, he made a suggestion which must have seemed like an additional type of madness within the context of the time:

"But now, I see, he only plotted brutal treachery;
now he commands me back to Argos in disgrace,
whole regiments of my men destroyed in battle.
So it must please his overweening heart, who knows?
Father Zeus has lopped the crowns of a thousand cities,
true, and Zeus will lop still more-his power is too great.
So come, follow my orders. Obey me, all you Argives.
Cut and run! Sail home to the fatherland we love!
We'll never take the broad streets of Troy."

Was it madness when Agamemnon decided to stage a siege of Troy, or was this an act of madness? The lord of men was telling his troops their siege of Troy would never succeed—that they should cut and run.

As it turned out, this prediction was mistaken. At any rate, this passage comes from Book Nine of The Iliad, within which brilliant story-telling follows.  

Eventually, Nestor the noble charioteer challenges the recommendation of his putative king. Odysseus is sent to reason with Achilles, whose own bout of madness has created the Argives' predicament. 

Agamemnon has stolen the woman Achilles had taken as his sexual slave. In response to this insult to honor, Achilles has retreated to his tents in a rage, saying he would fight no more forever.

Odysseus is sent to reason with this greatest warrior. Achilles would be given enormous gifts in the hope that would beat back his rage and return to the fight.

The Fagles translation describes the start of the embassy:

"Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag, praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth that they might bring the proud heart of Achilles round with speed and ease." 

To us, they sound like modern men. When they arrive at Achilles' tents, they find this familiar ridiculous scene:

Reaching the Myrmidon shelters and their ships,
they found him there. delighting his heart now,
plucking strong and clear on the fine lyre—
beautifully carved, its silver bridge set firm—
he won from the spoils when he razed Eetion's city.
Achilles was lifting his spirits with it now,
singing the famous deeds of fighting heroes.
Across from him Patroclus sat alone, in silence,
waiting for Aeacus' son to finish with his song.

As he sits sulking in his tents, Achilles is delighting himself, lifting his spirits by singing the famous songs of fighting men. Offered a giant set of gifts if he would only  return to the war, he's overtaken again by his rage.

Once again, Achilles refuses to return to the battle. The Achaeans' deadly military problem thereby lingers on.

A lot of madness is on display in this ancient poem of war. Is man [sic] really the rational animal? If so, that may not have happened yet.

This week, we're going to start to explore a basic question:

To what extent might well-disguised forms of madness be driving our various American populations, even now, at this time of political war? 

Last night, on Fox, it happened again! On his weekly Sunday night broadcast, Mark Levin started off as shown below, right at 8 p.m. Eastern:

LEVIN (4/7/24): Hello America, I'm  Mark Levin, and this is Life, Liberty and Levin Sunday. 

We have two great guests tonight—we have Pete Hegseth and Brent Bozell—but before we get to our friends, I want to pick up where I left off last night and really dig deeply with you. 

I hope you're sitting down. This is a tale of two democracies, the United States and Israel, and one man who is seeking to destroy both of them. 

I know he has a praetorian guard media to protect him and attack anybody who challenges him.  But Joe Biden is a very diabolical, evil politician who is trying to imprison Donald Trump and clear the political playing field for his re-election...

Joe Biden is at war with two democracies, our country and Israel, and I'm going to prove it.

As we noted yesterday, Levin had spent the first seventeen minutes of Saturday's program declaring that President Biden and those around him aren't just wrong but are "evil."

Last night, he spent the first seventeen minutes on the same theme, adding the term "diabolical" and childishly thinking that there is some possible way a person can "prove": some such assessment.

Again, Levin declaimed for seventeen minutes. When he introduced his first guest at 8:21, he restated his basic theme:

LEVIN: So Pete [Hegseth], you heard my monologue as I understand it. And my intention—

My position is, Joe Biden is an evil man. He's always been an evil man.

He started out supporting the Confederates of the Old South and segregation and racism and opposed public school integration. He will ride any wave to retain power so he's trying to put Donald Trump in prison...

He keeps threatening that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. No, it is Joe Biden who is destroying our republic and destroying Israel's democracy. 

It's a twofer for him. So what do you think of that?

Finally permitted to speak, Hegseth rose to the challenge. "I agree completely, Mark," he instantly said. "A phenomenal set-up."

In this temple to true belief, the basic theme was abundantly clear. It was No Scintilla of Possible Nuance or Doubt Left Behind! 

As we noted yesterday, this sort of analytical work once led an observer to opine that Levin is in the grip of "a penchant for hysteria." 

Others might see this type of presentation as a form of something resembling madness—might see this as an ancient, atavistic construct, in the grip of which no large modern nation can possibly hope to achieve serious goals or move forward in some constructive way.

Has Mark Levin, like that ancient lord of men, been caught in the grip of a madness? More generally, is it possible that various forms of "madness" still dog our allegedly "rational" species—that we humans are occasionally still perhaps a bit crazy, even after all these years?

To what extent do aspects of the crazy perhaps appear within our modern-day national discourse—perhaps as Hegseth and his Fox & Friends Weekend co-hosts denounce those with whom they disagree as Communists, Marxists and pagans?

As they do so without ever interviewing any of the people in question? Without interviewing anyone who shares such views?  

Without ever giving any such people a chance to explain the source of their views? Without ever breaking out of the box created by the practice of "segregation by viewpoint," in which fallible people speak to the like-minded and the equally crazy and to nobody else?

Can a large modern nation really function this way? Or is it possible that this is a lingering form of a basic human madness? A madness hard-wired by human evolution, though perhaps not induced by Zeus himself?

Agamemnon lord of men said he'd been gripped by a madness. Decades later, Ross Perot, tongue in cheek, adopted Crazy as a type of theme song.

Is it something like crazy when people like Levin are turned loose on the Fox News Channel? Having posed that question today, we'll explore a few other question s this week. We'll even bring the eternal note of sadness in, questioning our own blue tribe:

Is it something like a type of madness when people like Levin behave this way and the highest news orgs in Blue America avert their gaze—when this sort of conduct occurs without any mention or notice?

Also this:

Is it possible that our own blue tribe is occasionally caught in the grip of some affirmative types of "madness?" Are there players within our blue orb whose impulses lead off the path of constructive discourse within a democracy, even such as our actually is?

Is it possible that forms of madness infest our own blue tribe too, in something like the way they may infest the red? Is it possible that Levin has actually touched on some such actual problems within our blue world, even as he has ranted and railed the past two nights, in the manner which got his crowned as the lord of those with a penchant for hysteria?

Do elements of madness still exist within us blue denizens too? We'll start to explore such questions this week. Remember, this is all anthropology now—anthropology all the way down. 

Agamemnon confessed to a madness. Are we sometimes and occasionally perhaps dogged by madnesses too?

Tomorrow: Did the gang on Fox & Friends Weekend get something partially right?

SUNDAY: Levin was instantly shouting last night...

SUNDAY, APRIL 7, 2024

...and saying the others are evil: As always, it didn't take long for Mark Levin to start shouting.

For reasons only its owners can explain, the Fox News Channel broadcasts Levin's hour-long program at 8 o'clock Eastern on Saturday and Sunday nights. Usually, he's shouting within a few minutes.

Last night, by our reckoning, the shouting began about four minutes in. But even before the shouting began, the Fox adjunct was telling us this:

LEVIN (4/6/24): I got to thinking—what is this election about? In fact, what is society about? It’s good versus evil, isn’t it? 

Forces of good, forces of evil constantly clashing. And who’s going to win? This election is about good versus evil. And I’m going to make the case—just part of it—that electing Joe Biden is electing evil.

Evil! Not just a radical leftist. Not just a buffoon. Not just Obama staffers, but evil!

He couldn't simply be a buffoon. To Levin, he had to be evil.

For the record, Mark Levin hadn't started shouting yet. As you can see from the link we'll provide below, that part of Levin's opening monologue started exactly twenty seconds into last evening's performance.

He wasn't screaming or shouting yet. He wasn't name-calling Communists or Marxists. Nor had he named any pagans.

Instead, he went straight to the ancient "good versus evil" construct, the construct which has always driven our imperfect species' tribal and civilizational wars. 

Soon, the fiery fellow was shouting about it. And as he continued, he advanced his general claim at substantial length. 

To be clear, it wasn't just Biden who was said to be evil. At 7:06, clearly shouting now, "The Man Who Screams" (hat tip, the feature film In America) was now shouting this:

LEVIN: But I'm getting ahead of myself. This guy Blinken is not about politics. He's about ideology. He is an evil man. He has always been an evil man.

The nation's current secretary of state "has always been an evil man" too.

By our own subjective assessment, the shouting started at 8:04 p.m. That said, the atavistic diatribe continued from 8 o'clock right through to 8:17 p.m., with no let-up in the aggressive analysis.

"Forget about what the Democrat [sic] Party media tell you," this nutcase said at 8:17. "They're on the side of evil too. We'll be right back."

Then came the first commercial break.

When we awoke today, we saw that Mediaite's Caleb Howe had also been watching last evening's Fox News presentation. Making our job that much easier, he offers the following partial transcript of what this shouting man said.

Warning! Levin likes to stage public readings. Sometimes, he even reads lengthy passages from his own remarkably fatuous books. We won't discuss the childishness of Levin's instant assessment of where the truth lies in every factual matter under current review:

LEVIN (continuing directly from above): And we’re going to start with this. 

Obviously, this week, as you’re well aware, as the whole world is aware, as Biden and Blinken and the rest have made aware, the Israelis, while defending themselves against an unprovoked terrorist horrendous attack, has been fighting like hell for six months in its longest war in history. 

And the other day, they accidentally took out a convoy of trucks, seven trucks, which had civilians. Civilians who were bringing food and medicine into Gaza.

And Joe Biden, Anthony Blinken, and this guy Kirby, they immediately went to the microphones—I think, in fact, Blinken was in Europe for a NATO meeting—trashing Israel, trashing Israel for something that they didn’t mean to happen, and they apologized for, and are independently investigating.

Biden said, in part, this: “I’m outraged and heartbroken by the deaths of seven humanitarian workers from World Central Kitchen, including one American, in Gaza yesterday. They were providing food to hungry civilians in the middle of a war. They were brave and selfless. The deaths are a tragedy.” 

He goes on later. “Even more tragically, this is not a stand-alone incident. This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed. This is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult, because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians. Incidents like yesterday simply should not happen. Israel has also not done enough to protect civilians. The United States has repeatedly urged Israel to deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations in order to avoid civilian casualties. The United States will continue to do all we can to deliver humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians in Gaza through all available means. I will continue to press Israel to do more to facilitate that aid, and we’re pushing hard for an immediate cease fire as part of a hostage deal. I have a team in Cairo working on this right now.”

This is full of evil. Full of evil. First of all, he decoupled the release of the hostage from the cease fire in the UN Resolution in which he directed his U.N. ambassador to vote present or to abstain. So that’s a lie, Number one. 

Number two, the only country in Gaza that is ensuring, or trying to, the delivery of food and medicine to Gaza civilians is Israel! Not Egypt! Not the United States! Not Jordan! Not Iran! Israel!

And I hate to tell Biden this, the IDF is not the Peace Corps. You want to send the Peace Corps over there? Go ahead! Hamas is stealing up to 70% of all food and fuel that’s coming into Gaza. He knows that! We all know it! Then they’re selling what they what they leave over at some exorbitant price to their own citizens! They’re firing artillery into their own hospitals, they’re killing their own citizens.

Biden doesn’t mention this once, and he continues to use, throughout the day, throughout the weeks, the lies from the Hamas terrorists about the number of civilians that are killed. 

No matter how many statisticians and experts tell him he’s wrong, he doesn’t care. Because Biden is evil.

When Biden said that he was heartbroken, that helped us see that he's evil! 

Full disclosure! That chunk of transcript only takes us up to 8:05 p.m. For the record, that passage finishes with Levin's ninth use of the term "evil." 

This time, the term was directly applied to Biden. Before he broke for commercials at 8:17, Levin had employed the term (at least) nineteen times.

A note on Mark Levin, then a note on the basic structure of this conceptual framework.

Who the heck is Mark Levin? A month or so back, we showed you some of what the leading authority on the maximal shouter says. Today, we'll repeat one excerpt:

Political Views

A 2016 study which sought to measure incendiary discourse on talk radio and TV found that Levin scored highest on its measure of "outrage." The study looked at 10 prominent radio and television programs, known for incendiary discourse on political matters, and scored content on the basis of whether it used "emotional display," "misrepresentative exaggeration," "mockery," "conflagration," "slippery slope," "insulting" or "obscene language," and other factors, finding that Levin was the radio host who engaged in the most outrage. 

The study found that he utilized "outrage speech or behavior at a rate of more than one instance per minute." In How Democracies Die, Harvard University political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky write that Mark Levin was among the popular right-wing talk radio hosts who "helped to legitimate the use of uncivil discourse" in American politics, and contribute to the erosion of democratic norms. According to Politico, Levin has a "penchant for hysteria."

We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy, or perfect fairness, of each of those assessments. That said, by clicking this link, you can watch the first seventeen minutes of last night's presentation, thanks to the invaluable (but useless) work of the Internet Archive.

Concerning the conceptual framework, we ourselves will offer this:

As noted above, the shouter started with this construct—with a construct which dates to the dawn of time in the sphere of "the rational animal:"

LEVIN: I got to thinking...What is society about? It’s good versus evil, isn’t it? 

Forces of good, forces of evil constantly clashing. And who’s going to win? This election is about good versus evil. 

Is society a constant clash between forces of good and forces of evil? 

You can always parse it that way! But is it possible that society sometimes involves something different?

Is it possible that society sometimes involves differing assessments devised in good faith by people with different views of the world? Is there any such thing, in a world like our own, as simple disagreement?

 Is there any such thing as good-faith difference of opinion, assessment, judgment? In the oldest corners of our flawed human brains, the answer has always been no.

In the oldest corners of our brains, the Others are always lurking. On occasion, they may be Communists and / or Marxists, or they may even be pagans. 

Last night, the shouter promoted a simpler view. Last night, the others were simply evil.

According to Levin's latest commentary, President Biden was already evil in his first few years in the Senate (8:05 p.m.). Last night, The Man Who Screams was screaming extremely hard, possibly even for him.

There's no way to argue or reason with this atavistic construct. There's no way to maintain a modern nation, even an imperfect nation, when in thrall to this ancient rule of the clan.

By way of contrast, The Fox & Friends Weekend gang were on their best behavior in the 6 o'clock hour today. It was much as we told you yesterday:

We thought they argued several points which, quite plainly, could be said to be basically right. You might not agree with the views they expressed—but the views they expressed weren't transparently crazy, insane or nuts.

They worked from remarks made by Senator Fetterman—in an interview the Pennsylvania Democrat had given to Red America's New York Post!

They called no names. They staged no meltdowns. They didn't claim that anyone was "spitting in the faces of the people who are hurting the most in this country."

In fact, they were on even better behavior than that! They didn't say that the others were evil!

Starting tomorrow, our controlling term for the week will be the important term CRAZY. 

The gods "entangled me in madness," Agamemnon lord of men once said, thousands of years ago, as dark tears streamed down his face in his tenth year of a war.

The lord of men briefly acknowledged that he had been crazy! Even today, in this best educated of all possible worlds, that ancient problem has not chosen to go away.

We close today with a pair of questions concerning our two Americas:

Why does Fox News put this guy on the air? Also, why do our own blue tribe's loftiest orgs all choose to avert their gaze?