Was that the best hour of cable news ever?

TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 2017

Chris Hayes in West Virginia: Last evening, midway through the hour, we found ourselves asking a question:

Is this the best hour of cable news we have ever seen?

We were watching Chris Hayes' town hall event in McDowell County, West Virginia. Apparently, the program was called Bernie Sanders in Trump Country, although it's hard to tell from MSNBC's who-gives-a-flying-fig web site for Hayes' All In program.

Hayes had brought Sanders along to coal country; we thought they were both fantastic. The keeper moment occurred fairly late in the hour, when a retired coal miner stood and said this to Sanders:

RETIRED MINER: I never dreamed that I'd get to thank you personally, myself, for the bill that you have co-sponsored, the Senate Bill 175, the Miners Protection Act, which—

[audience applause]

I'm one of those miners that will lose his health care at the end of April if they don't pass that law. I come from Local 1440 in Matewan...We have over 800 members, all inactive. They're all retired. So we look at things different. And we look at our health care and what we've already worked out.

We're not going to mine any more coal. Our coal mining days are over. And we look to have the funds that we worked for—

SANDERS: And were promised!

RETIRED MINER: —that were promised to us taken care of. That's all we asked. And it's— I think it's kind of ironic that a senator from the northeast—

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes!

RETIRED MINER: —takes care of my benefits better than someone like Mitch McConnell.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: All right!

[Long round of applause]

Let us repeat that nugget statement, live and direct from Trump Country:

"I think it's kind of ironic that a senator from the northeast takes care of my benefits better than someone like Mitch McConnell."

As politics, as journalism, the evening was astounding. We're not sure we've ever seen an event that good on cable.

As we type, MSNBC hasn't posted a transcript of the hour. (Indeed, the channel hasn't even posted a transcript from last Friday's Hayes program.)

The channel hasn't posted easily accessible tape of last night's full event, easily one of the most striking programs the channel has ever produced.

This channel's disinterest in its own product has long been fairly obvious. That said, we strongly recommend the hour, if you can find a way to view it.

We plan to discuss the program in more detail once a transcript becomes available. But this hour was light years better than the fare one normally sees on this channel.

The very next hour, CNN aired a fascinating program by Fareed Zakaria, a program about the political history of Vladimir Putin. We had a few uncharitable thoughts as we watched these outstanding back-to-back hours of cable news.

Those thoughts involved the journalism these channels could perhaps produce if they weren't squandering so many tens of millions of dollars on their silliest, most self-involved stars. For now, though, we'll simply recommend an additional half-hour of tape:

Musically, John Cohen made his name long ago as a member of the New Lost City Ramblers. In 1963, he also made a documentary film, The High Lonesome Sound, about life in Kentucky coal country, with an emphasis on the region's music.

You can watch The High Lonesome Sound here. At roughly the 16:45 mark, you will see three young girls, apparently sisters, who 1) are full of fun and 2) are sporting extremely thin arms, and may not be rich in shoes.

Today, those girls are roughly the age of the women we liberals delighted in mocking and disregarding not too many weeks ago, when Sarah Kliff reported that they can't afford to go to the doctor despite the fact that they have insurance under Obamacare. (Just for the record, the USA 9400 were missing from Kliff's report.)

Hayes and Sanders were both superb in their visit to coal country. In our view, we upper-class liberals have a lot to learn from the example the two men created last night.

We hope to return to The High Lonesome Sound before the week is over. The question we would ask is this:

Can you see those three girls, and their low-income rural parents, as examples of Us? Or given our highly refined sensibilities, are they, inevitably, simply examples of Them?

We've tended to play it the latter way for a good many years. Could our attitudes explain why those girls, unless they've moved, are now living deep inside "Trump Country?"

IN SEARCH OF THE USA 9400: Conspiracy dooms current health care reporting!

TUESDAY, MARCH 14, 2017

Part 1—American group disappeared: Six days ago—it was Wednesday, March 14—the New York Times published an editorial about American health care.

On the whole, the editorial wasn't half bad. Still and all, a highly important group was ruthlessly disappeared.

We refer to the USA 9400, whose very existence is constantly kept from public awareness or view. First, though, let's recall the most interesting part of the editorial the New York Times published that day.

The editorial was an attack on the current Republican health plan, or Ivankacare for short. On the whole, the editorial was basically and pretty much essentially right on the money.

The editors savaged the GOP plan. Headline included, this is the way they began:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (3/8/17): No Wonder They Hid the Health Bill

Republican House leaders have spent months dodging questions about how they would replace the Affordable Care Act with a better law, and went so far as to hide the draft of their plan from other lawmakers. No wonder. The bill they released on Monday would kick millions of people off the coverage they currently have. So much for President Trump's big campaign promise: ''We're going to have insurance for everybody''—with coverage that would be ''much less expensive and much better.''

More than 20 million Americans gained health care coverage under the A.C.A., or Obamacare. Health experts say most would lose that coverage under the proposal.

Yesterday, the CBO released a more detailed estimate of the number of people who would lose coverage (or something like that) under the GOP plan. Some journalists have published accurate accounts of that CBO estimate. Other scribes, not so much.

Whatever! The New York Times editorial was right in the ballpark last week. That said, we thought the most interesting part of the editorial occurred in the highlighted passage shown below, in which the editors spoke to Jason Chaffetz:

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: House Speaker Paul Ryan and Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, have railed against high premiums and deductibles for plans sold on the health exchanges, but that problem would only worsen under their proposal because insurers would almost certainly raise their prices as the pool of the insured shrank. Republican lawmakers seem to think that people who can't afford insurance are simply irresponsible. Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, for instance, told CNN that people should invest in their health care, ''rather than getting that new iPhone.'' Word to Mr. Chaffetz: Health insurance costs more than $18,000 a year for an average family; an iPhone costs a few hundred dollars.

Word up! "Health insurance costs more than $18,000 a year for an average family," the editors said.

More than $18,000 per year, possibly for a family of four? To the demographic now known as "the losers," that's a lot of dough!

Health insurance costs more than $18,000 a year for an average family? We're going to assume that the editors were right in that somewhat murky assertion. Having made that assumption, we're going to say that their statement leads to two obvious questions:

Two obvious questions:
1) Why does insurance cost so much?
2) Why does it cost so little?

We'll unpack those equal-but-opposite questions as the week continues. For today, let's establish the absence of that constantly disappeared group, the so-called USA 9400.

Modern American history involves quite a few numbered groups. Two prominent examples:

Through their determination and their courage, the Little Rock Nine played a key role in civil rights history. Meanwhile, in a way which was heinous and stupid even by his own standards, Donald J. Trump aggressively semi-urged the execution of the falsely-convicted Central Park Five.

This leads us to the story of the USA 9400, a group whose very existence is constantly disappeared.

Over the next few days, we're going to ask you to ponder the meaning of this mandated disappearance. For today, our point of departure is this:

At the present time, we're seeing tons of journalism about American health care. We're seeing news reports, editorials and opinion columns. We're even seen some cable stars try to discuss this topic!

Within that body of work, you're going to see endless accounts of the costs of American health care. And yet, we can issue a strange guarantee:

You'll never see the USA 9400 mentioned. You won't see that disappeared group mentioned even once!

You won't see this essential group mentioned in the New York Times. They won't be mentioned by Rachel Maddow as she mugs, clowns, minces, grins her weird, consultant-ordered grins and histrionically chuckles.

You'll hear about the white working class. You'll hear about effects on Trump voters.

But you won't hear a single word about the USA 9400. We issue that as a guarantee, and we offer this question:

Why is that?

Tomorrow: The poet has said that "Momma tried." Way back in 2005, so did our most valuable journalist.

Concerning that murky claim: "Health insurance costs more than $18,000 a year for an average family?"

How many people are in that family? The New York Times didn't say.

We assigned our Click Research Team to follow the trail of the murky claim. The editorial's link took them here, where the number of dollars was precisely nailed down but our question remained unexplained, at least at the point where they grimaced, moaned, tore their and sulkingly gave up.

Us and Them and Kevin Drum's chart!

MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2017

What Bernie might have said: After posting our last award-winning post, we turned straight to this new post by Kevin Drum. It's called, A Note on the Perils of Caricature.

On the one hand, we agree with every word Drum said. On the other hand, his graphic verges on what we were talking about in our own last award-winning post.

Drum starts with an exchange from tonight's All In program. Chris Hayes and Bernie Sanders have taped a program in McDowell County, West Virginia. At one point, this exchange occurs:

LOCAL WOMAN: I think a lot of people think we're just a bunch of hillbilly rednecks.

SANDERS: I don't think that.

Below, we'll suggest a better response. First, though, we'll suggest that you go to Drum's post and see what he said.

We agree with every word he said. We think his analysis is very sensible, very much on point.

That said, take a look at the graphic he constructed. It characterizes the most "extreme" red and blue voters in terms of one variable. But uh-oh:

It characterizes their most "extreme" voters in an extremely critical way. It characterizes our most "extreme" voters in a morally neutral way.

Liberals, we're just saying! We liberals sometimes tend to be like that!

As for the exchange we posted above, we'll now suggest a better answer by Sanders. For ourselves, we would have stood and cheered had he offered this:

LOCAL WOMAN: I think a lot of people think we're just a bunch of hillbilly rednecks.

SANDERS: I agree with you. I think a lot of people who may be right about other things do have an attitude like that.

I think their attitude is wrong. I don't think like that.

Trust us. Our suggested answer would be remembered much, much longer.

It's a basic part of comedy training: Tell the truth about whatever it is that just occurred in the room.

Go ahead—cop to the truth. Everybody else in the room already knows it's true!

"A game plan to repair some of this!"

MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2017

Best ways to speak to The Others: In this morning's Washington Post. E. J. Dionne discusses the ways liberals and Democrats might approach those Trump voters who are potentially persuadable.

How many such voters are there? How should they be approached? We think these remarks make sense:

DIONNE (3/13/17): Liberals who rightly condemn demeaning stereotypes of African Americans and Latinos must also oppose stereotyping Trump’s white working-class supporters. The Trump camp was not monolithic. Many of Trump’s ballots, after all, came not from blue-collar strongholds but from precincts dominated by well-off conservatives who routinely back Republicans.

And the decisive votes for Trump were not cast by the passionately committed. The media exit poll found that only 38 percent of those who participated in the 2016 election had a favorable view of Trump. That’s the base. The contest was settled by those who viewed both Trump and Hillary Clinton negatively. These pox-on-both-houses voters made up 18 percent of the electorate, and went 47 percent to 30 percent for Trump over Clinton, with most of the rest opting for third-party choices. These are the Trump agnostics. They are central to our political future.

Moreover, an important minority of white working-class Trump voters in the election’s three key states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan) favored Obama four years earlier. They are not right-wingers. For example, in 2012 in Erie County, Pa., Obama prevailed over Mitt Romney, 68,036 to 49,025. But in 2016, Trump carried the county, 60,069 to 58,112 for Clinton.

In our view, those remarks all make sense. By the way:

According to that presentation, almost nine percent of the electorate (47 percent of 18 percent) voted for Candidate Trump even though they didn't have a favorable view of him. They just disliked Candidate Clinton more.

Twenty-five years of demonization played a key role in that part of the story. For the record, Dionne is one of the many major journalists who didn't resist that demonization down through the many long years, when it was aimed at Clinton and Clinton and when it was aimed at Gore.

In the beginning was the end! The remarkable notion that Clinton was a bigger liar than Trump was several decades in the making, permitted by relentless group silence on the part of many liberal journalists.

Other such journalists played active roles in building the narrative according to which Clinton, Gore and Clinton were history's biggest liars. Twenty-five years of story-telling put Donald J. Trump where he is.

Past failure to serve to the side, Dionne makes a a good point at the start of that passage. We liberals need to stop turning to "Those People" and "Them" when we picture Trump voters.

Those 63 million Trump voters aren't all exactly alike. Nor are we encouraging you to try to imagine what percentage of Those People really are deplorable after all.

Dionne's comments made us think of something we saw yesterday on C-Span, live and direct from the Tucson Festival of Books.

A genial woman from Wisconsin posed a question to Wisconites David Maraniss and John Nichols, who seemed to know her. After some initial jesting, this is what she said:

WOMAN FROM WISCONSIN (3/16/17): I just remember the gut punch, the terrible evening that the returns came in, and I'm increasingly concerned that people get their news from people who agree with them only. I've had friends cut me off on Facebook, I would never do that to anybody, because of political discourse.

To resist is important and maybe there are enoiugh people to resist, but to resist evokes counter-resist. What is the game plan to talk to one another again? What is the game plan to talk to people who vote against their own economic and, at best—interest? How have we lost the discussion about what's good public policy? Why is our politics all about "get power and maintain power at all costs?"

Can we start talking about a game plan here to repair some of this?

This woman was well-intentioned, and very upbeat. She wanted to know how we can start to talk to each other again.

That said, we were struck by the first thing she said after that. We'll simplify her construction:

"What is the game plan to talk to one another again? What is the game plan to talk to people who vote against their own economic interest?"

We liberals tend to be like that! This woman wants to talk to people who voted the other way. But she almost seems to start with the assumption that she, not they, is the best judge of what their interests are.

That may not be the best way to start that discussion. It seems to us that we tend to be like that Over Here in our own liberal tribe. We tend to be prepared to instruct, perhaps not so much to listen.

That woman is very well-intentioned. She poses her question right at the end of this C-Span videotape.

We always recommend this poem: "No people are uninteresting." Or so Yevtushenko said.

THE POLITICS OF MORAL STAMPEDE: The Stupid, how it burns!

MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2017

Part 5—Milbank and Maddow, and the national interest: It may be the stupidest piece of journalism the Washington Post ever published.

It was published by Dana Milbank on the front page of yesterday's Outlook section. Then too, there was Friday night's twenty-minute opening segment by the ludicrous Rachel Maddow.

The Stupid, how it burns! Also, of course, the self-indulgence. But mainly, the deeply dumb.

Take Maddow's latest effort. We start by asking a factual question about General Michael Flynn.

For the record, Flynn strikes us as a genuine full-blown nut. Presumably, we should all be glad he's gone from the White House, along with any possible influence from his even nuttier son.

That said, we now pose a factual question:

Last year, was the apparently crazy Flynn "on the payroll for a foreign government while he was advising Trump on the campaign, and during the transition?"

Putting it a slightly different way, was the apparently crazy Flynn "on the Turkish payroll during the presidential campaign?"

Maddow kept making such claims during the opening segment of last Friday's TV show. During that same segment, she flatly misquoted an AP report, even as the actual quote appeared beneath her on the screen, where anyone could read it.

Along the way, she offered a humble-brag account of a report she said she herself had delivered last November. Inevitably, her humble bragging "song of self" was simply, flatly false:

MADDOW (3/10/17): This wasn't like a rumor or like a secret. The Daily Caller reported it, Politico reported it, CNN reported it, the AP reported it, Bloomberg reported it. On the 11th of November, some dumb cable show even did a big long story on it at the top of the hour at 9 o'clock Eastern on MSNBC.

It was widely and publicly known and discussed that Michael Flynn and his consulting company were taking money to represent the Turkish government. They were lobbying for the Turkish government's interests while he was the top of the national security apparatus in the Trump transition. While he was advising Trump on national security matters, he was taking that money. He'd been on the Turkish payroll during the presidential campaign.

If MSNBC ever posts a transcript, it will turn up here.

From that presentation, a person might think that five news orgs reported, back in November, that Flynn was "on the Turkish payroll during the presidential campaign." And that the Maddow Show did "a big long story" to that effect on November 11!

In fact, none of the news orgs named by Maddow ever made such a claim. Meanwhile, go ahead! Review the transcript of Maddow's show from last November 11.

In fairness, she did present "a big, long story at the top of the hour," as she does every night. (You can assign it the "dumb cable" quotient which you think it deserves.)

That said, General Flynn was barely mentioned in that November 11 report. In fact, it wasn't until November 15 that Maddow seemed to suggest that Flynn was on the Turkish payroll. (His firm was being "paid to lobby for a foreign government...being paid to lobby for the nation of Turkey.")

That apparent claim, which was discussed quite briefly that night, was factually wrong at that time. It was also factually wrong last Friday night, when Maddow explicitly made the claim again and again.

No, Virginia! Michael Flynn may be a nut, but he wasn't "on the Turkish payroll" at any point last year. Guess what? Under terms of the relevant federal statute (the Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA), you don't have to be in the employ of a foreign government to qualify as a "foreign agent," and no one but Maddow has ever said that Flynn was.

(For the basics on FARA, click here.)

On the front page of Saturday's New York Times, Baker and Rosenberg flatly stated, in paragraph 4, that Flynn wasn't on the Turkish payroll ("did not work directly for the Turkish government"). On the front page of the same day's Washington Post, the always-fuzzy Ashley Parker even seemed to report that it isn't even hugely unusual for "senior campaign officials" to be registered as "foreign agents" under terms of FARA, though that's a different question.

No, Virginia! The transparently nutty General Flynn wasn't "on the Turkish payroll" during last year's campaign. Beyond that, the contract under which he served a Netherlands-based entity was terminated after Trump's election. This made Maddow's claim that he was "on the Turkish payroll during the transition" doubly inaccurate although, admittedly, it was thrilling to the tribal mind.

Please don't make us review all the howlers which littered Maddow's Friday show, including her claim about the "big, long story at the top of the hour" last November 11—the big, long story her "dumb cable show" never actually presented. We'll only tell you that Maddow's exciting reports were littered with howlers all last week, even as she offered the speech about the greatness of her staff, a ludicrous speech which came close to being Trump-level nutty.

Please don't make us review all the howlers which littered Maddow's shows. We'll only tell you that Maddow is one of the least reliable "journalists" currently found on the range.

Her relentless self-dealing ranks right up there with her persistent misstatements and embellishments. Good God, how The Stupid burns when Maddow cons the liberal world into buying her songs of self.

It was very bad for the republic when conservatives learned to put their trust in disordered media figures like Limbaugh and Hannity. Similarly, it's dangerous when we liberals decide to put our trust in a disordered tribal con man like Maddow.

The Stupid, how it burns when Maddow gets her tribal on! When we liberals put our faith in Maddow, we're extending a national problem which started Over There, on the corporate right.

The Stupid, how it burned on Maddow's program last Friday. Then too, consider the way The Stupid burned in yesterday's Washington Post.

On page one of the Outlook section, Milbank penned a ludicrous, admiring review of a new and ludicrous book. It's stunning to think that work so dumb can appear in a high-profile spot in a major American newspaper, penned by a major journalist who graduated, somehow, from Yale.

We won't even try to discuss all the ways The Stupid burned in Milbank's review. For an overview, we'll just offer this:

You have to be extremely dumb to believe in "generations" at all, in the way you must believe for Milbank's thoughts to even begin to make sense.

You have to be several stops past very dumb to take your thoughts about "generations" to the ludicrous place Milbank's author does. (For the record, the author is a wealthy, extremely dumb Big Corporate Money Man who seems to have written a very dumb vanity book.)

How dumb does an author have to be to claim that an entire "generation" of Americans—in this case, the so-called baby boomers—are "sociopathic," as the author claims in his title? An author has to be dumb enough to make factual errors like these:

MILBANK (3/12/17): The core of Gibney’s argument, that the boomers are guilty of “generational plunder,” is spot-on. He accuses them of “the mass, democratically-sanctioned transfer of wealth away from the young and toward the Boomers,” and he’s right. In addition to making a mess of Social Security and Medicare, Gibney notes, they dragged the national savings rate down to 5 percent between 1996 and 2016, from 10 percent between 1950 and 1985.

But Gibney blames the boomers for everything: abortion, divorce, overeating, high inflation, taking deferments during Vietnam, failing to launch a mass movement calling for the rebuilding of Vietnam after the war, crime, poor educational standards, corporate tax rates, adjunct professors. At one point, he rails about “Pat Robertson fulminating about homosexuals, feminists, and praying for the deflection of hurricanes while his website minions opined on the afterlife of pets.” Robertson was born in 1930, a decade before the oldest boomer. Gibney also has words for “feckless non-entities like Marco Rubio.” Rubio, born in 1971, is nearly a decade younger than the youngest boomers.

How dumb does a person have to be to write a book like this? So dumb that he blames the boomers for Pat Robertson, who's (at least) ten years too old to qualify.

He also blames the boomers for Marco Rubio, who's almost ten years too young.

(With respect to Robertson: Milbank tracks this "generation" back to 1940. Most folk start at 1946. This would make Robertson sixteen years too old to qualify. The Stupid, how it burns in a book as dumb as this!)

The sheer stupidity of such errors might serve as a warning sign about an author like this. Not to Milbank, who rushes to show us how dumb he is by praising the book's ridiculous thesis—and by praising the claim, which he doesn't explain or justify, that someone has "made a mess of Social Security," however old those alleged culprits may be.

Maddow went to Stanford, Milbank went to Yale. The suits sold Maddow as Our Own Rhodes Scholar. Milbank was Skull and Bones.

It's stunning to think that losers like these sit at the top of American journalism—in Maddow's case, at the top of its "corporate liberal" strain. The Stupid burns extremely hot, and that burn is a threat to the national interest, every bit as much as the national interest is threatened by the widespread acceptance of "corporate conservative" figures like Limbaugh and Hannity.

On page one of today's New York Times, we read about a misused soul who has recently discovered Maddow, part of his reaction to these partisan times. Grynbaum and Koblin paint a portrait of the way that old bugaboo, ditto-headedness, is growing Over Here on the gullible left:

GRYNBAUM AND KOBLIN (3/13/17): There is a new safe space for liberals in the age of President Trump: the television set.

Left-leaning MSNBC, after flailing at the end of the Obama years, has edged CNN in prime time. Stephen Colbert’s openly anti-Trump “Late Show” is beating Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight” for the first time. Bill Maher’s HBO flock has grown nearly 50 percent since last year’s presidential primaries, and “The Daily Show” has registered its best ratings since Jon Stewart left in 2015.

Traditional television, a medium considered so last century, has watched audiences drift away for the better part of a decade. Now rattled liberals are surging back, seeking catharsis, solidarity and relief.

“When Obama was in office, I felt like things were going O.K.,” Jerry Brumleve, 58, a retiree from Louisville, Ky., said last week as he stood in line for a “Daily Show” taping in Manhattan.

These days, he is a newfound devotee of Rachel Maddow of MSNBC—“She’s always talking about the Russians!” his wife, Yvonne, chimed in—and believes Mr. Stewart’s successor, Trevor Noah, has finally “hit his stride.”

“With Trump in office, I really feel the need to stay more informed,” Mr. Brumleve added. “You just don’t know what the hell this guy is going to do.”

Brumleve thinks he's getting "informed" by all that shit "about the Russians." In fact, there wasn't a single night last week when Maddow's monologues didn't spill with silly misstatement and overstatement, all of it tending to serve thrilling belief in the tribal line.

Conservatives think they're being informed when they watch Sean Hannity. Brumleve thinks he's being informed when he tunes in to Our Own Corporate Mess.

Might we tell you one more thing about both Maddow and Milbank? Our observation will stem from this statement by Brumleve:

“When Obama was in office, I felt like things were going O.K."

Earth to Brumlese: Things actually weren't "going OK" when Obama was in office. Consider what happened in the fall of 2012, as Maddow ran off and hid in the woods.

Starting in September 2012, the Republican Party and the mainstream press began inventing bogus claims about what happened in Benghazi. This included a welter of bogus claims about What Susan Rice Said.

Those bogus claims about What Rice Said began as soon as she finished talking on the Sunday morning shows of September 16, 2012. People like Maddow ran off and hid, leaving it to people like John McCain, a Maddow favorite, to misstate What Susan Rice Said.

Maddow was very skilled, in the past few weeks, telling us what Sessions meant and what Trump had said. She was too afraid, and/or too unskilled, to challenge the bogus, destructive claims about What Susan Rice Said.

Those bogus claims helped invent Benghazi, one of the propaganda tools which put Donald Trump where he is. Things weren't "going OK" as these propaganda tools were being invented in the face of Maddow's self-dealing silence.

Maddow, self-dealing as always, ran off and played it safe. (Astoundingly, Chris Hayes actually endorsed what was being said.)

Rachel Maddow ran and hid while Rice was being attacked. She also ran and hid last summer after James B. Comey—Comey the God—made his irregular attack on Candidate Clinton in early July.

(Good God! Guest hosting on Maddow's show, Steve Kornacki actually seemed to endorse what Comey had said.)

Back in 1999, Milbank played the same game. At that time, the mainstream press had gone to war with Candidate Gore, Bill Clinton's chosen successor. Starting in March 1999, they began inventing claims about the various crazy things he had supposedly said.

Milbank was covering the campaign for the New Republic. He could have challenged the claims which were being made, but those claims were coming from the Washington Post, with whom Milbank accepted employment at the end of 1999.

Did Al Gore say he invented the Internet? Our liberal leaders are still so timid, so self-protective, so completely unskilled, that they've never quite been willing to say that all those alleged crazy claims by Gore were really a press corps scam, a set of alternative facts.

They've never challenged the narrative which locked into place at that time, the narrative in which both Clintons and Candidate Gore were sketched as the world's biggest liars. The Milbanks all ran off and hid. A powerful narrative was invented—a powerful, decades-old narrative which helped elect Trump last year.

(Incredibly, many voters believed that Clinton was a bigger liar than Trump! This was the fruit of decades of silence by hustlers like Milbank and Maddow.)

They ran and hid in 1999. Maddow played the same game in 2012, then again in 2016.

Today, Brumleve is upset. Seeking information, he has turned to one of the eight-figure corporate-paid toys whose self-dealing self-adoration helped put us in this mess.

Maddow's program last week was a mess. Jerry Brumleve doesn't know that. Sean Hannity's viewers are similarly misled Over There, in the other tribe.

More and more, Rachel Maddow is a disordered clown. As with Hannity, so with her. Her position, and the trust it engenders, are threats to the republic.

At any rate, no, Virginia! The overtly crazy General Flynn wasn't on the Turkish payroll last year.

The AP didn't say what Maddow quotingly said it said. Those five news orgs didn't say what Maddow seemed to say that they had said. And she didn't do that "big long story" last November 11.

Her earlier reports last week were full of standard bullshit too.

The disordered version of Maddow which has developed in recent years shouldn't be on the air. For that very reason, we gullible liberals love the things she says and does.

Her ratings are going through the roof. The corporate suits adore her for that, and The Stupid continues to burn.

Remind us to show you: Remind us to show you what Maddow said last Tuesday about that subpoena threat. The Stupid, how it burned last week as Maddow discussed the Russians!

Starting tomorrow: In search of the USA 9400!

The dangerous rise of the tribal and dumb!

SATURDAY, MARCH 11, 2017

Little Library in the Dark Woods: The rise of talk radio and the Internet have fueled the rise of The Crazy.

It's surprising to see how many people are drawn to the way of The Crazy. Ben Carson recently took that road with his silly, absurd account of the outlook of people who were brought in chains from their homes in Africa to this brutal new land.

It's surprising to see how many people are drawn by the allure of The Crazy, or at least by the thrill of The Dumb. Over Here, within our infallible tribe, we've spotted some recent examples.

To ponder what recently happened at Middlebury College, we'll suggest you read this appraisal by New York Magazine's Andrew Sullivan, or this piece by the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf. We'll especially suggest that you watch chunks of the videotape of the incident.

The videotape runs 43 minutes. By the end of the evening, a professor had gone to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with a concussion.

Sullivan blames the incident on the rise of the "academic craze" of "intersectionality." We can't assess his claims. For ourselves, we were mainly struck by how young the Middlebury students looked—and by how dumb their conduct seemed.

In fairness, we all tend to be dumb when we're young. Beyond that, the fact that the conduct looks dumb to us doesn't establish the fact that it actually was.

Today, though, the promotion of dumbness within all our tribes is a big business. Increasingly, the evidence suggests that this promotion works.

It's amazingly easy to spot The Dumb when it occurs Over There. To consider its possible role within our own liberal tents, liberals might consider this letter in today's Washington Post.

The writer complains about an earlier letter, one we cited in real time. That original letter complained about the "racist content," overt and otherwise, in Laura Ingalls Wilder's famous "Little House" series of books.

The original letter came from a librarian in Takoma Park, Maryland, a Washington suburb with a reputation as the Berkeley of the mid-Atlantic states. Today's rebuttal complains about the librarian's attitudes and her professional conduct.

We thought the librarian's letter included some good points, but also that she was perhaps a bit inclined to the tribally crazy and dumb. We thought she had her thumb firmly on the scales as she described the contents of Wilder's books. We were especially struck by her criticism of the second paragraph of Wilder's very first book.

Quite literally, this librarian is brought up short by the second paragraph in Wilder's first book! Here's the full text of her original letter:

LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (2/25/17): Regarding the Feb. 7 Style article “A ‘Little House’ still leaves a big impression,” about the 150th birthday of “Little House” author Laura Ingalls Wilder:

This otherwise well-written article failed to mention that the “Little House” books actually have a problematic reputation among many children’s librarians these days because of racist content and stereotyped characters, particularly in Wilder’s portrayals of American Indians.

One of the most egregious examples of this racism occurs in “Little House on the Prairie,” when Wilder states that her mother believed that “the only good Indian was a dead Indian.” There are numerous other examples of Ma Ingalls’s racism—highlighted by the illustrations by Garth Williams of fierce-looking Indians—found in that same book. Less overt is the racism contained in the second paragraph of “Little House in the Big Woods,” when Wilder details her surroundings and neglects to mention the presence of American Indians who also lived there: “There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them.”

At our library, we’ve opted to keep the books in our collection, as they still offer a window on a certain slice of Americana. However, we don’t highlight them or otherwise give them special attention, and I don’t recommend them when asked for book suggestions. When a patron asks for the books, I mention the problem of racist content and suggest that the books offer a good way to talk with children about racism and how we have worked to change things since the books were published decades ago. I also recommend reading the Birchbark series by Louise Erdrich. This critically acclaimed series is set in much the same time period as the “Little House” books but features protagonists who are Ojibwe; Erdrich herself is American Indian.

The “Little House” books are beloved by many generations of readers who grew up reading them (and I’m one of the people who grew up loving these books—I still have the set my father was able to buy me by giving up his lunches for a month). While I may have happy memories of reading the books as a child, that nostalgia doesn’t justify keeping on blinders about them as an adult.

We salute the sacrifice of this woman's father. Beyond that, we agree with one part of her critique. Because they emerge from lived American history, the brilliantly-crafted Little House books do create interpretive challenges for modern readers, who may not be many years old.

Then too, we have the challenges posed by tribal minds, including the occasional mind Over Here:

In her letter, the librarian cites a remark which is said to arise from Ma Ingalls' "racism" toward the American Indians who play a key role in Wilder's third book, Little House on the Prairie. She doesn't mention the specific historical context Ma cites when she makes that remark.

She also doesn't mention the fact that Pa Ingalls has a very different set of reactions to those same Native Americans.

Pa Ingalls constantly speaks with admiration of these neighbors, who are sometimes angry and menacing. Indeed, an array of characters express an array of views about these American Indians. This may reflect the array of views which may have obtained among settlers like the Ingallses.

In Little House on the Prairie, Pa Ingalls is respectful and admiring of the American Indians around him. Little Laura, the star of the book, is enthralled by, and envious of, the relative freedom of the Indian children she sees.

The book involves a fascinating array of reactions and views within the Ingalls family itself. The librarian, who may have some blinders on, managed to mention just one.

As noted above, the librarian was brought up short by the second paragraph of Wilder's first book, Little House in the Big Woods. She complains that Wilder "neglects to mention the presence of American Indians who also lived there" at that time, around 1870, in Wisconsin's "Big Woods."

(Wilder was born in Wisconsin in 1867.)

Did Wilder disappear her Indian neighbors in her famous first book? We don't know, but an historical tract by the state of Wisconsin seems to suggest something different.

According to that historical tract, The Treaty of Prairie du Chien had "demarcated boundaries between settlers and American Indians" as early as 1825 in Wisconsin. Here's the fuller text, with one typo corrected:

In 1804, the government forced the Sauk and Fox tribes to cede their land claims in southern Wisconsin in a treaty they had not agreed to. These actions led to the Black Hawk War of 1832. The largest American Indian population in Wisconsin, the Menominee, was pressured to sell away 11,600 square miles of land along the lower Fox River. The Treaty of Prairie du Chien of 1825 was significant in the history of American Indians in Wisconsin, after European settlement. The treaty was facilitated by the United States government to end the inter-tribal warfare that was disrupting the fur trade and creating tensions between settlers and the tribes. The tension between tribes was created because the United States government had used them against each other to gain more lands. The Treaty of Prairie du Chien established a treaty of peace among the tribes and demarcated boundaries between settlers and American Indians.

By [1871], most American Indians had been placed on reservations and the government discontinued its use of treaties with them. The government changed its focus to "de-Indianizing" this population, creating schools that attempted to rid them of their cultural traditions and ways of life by breaking tribal ties and molding them into the image of white settlers. However, before this time, between the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the federal government aimed to mainstream Native Americans through the policies of assimilation and allotment. Some of these schools included Menominee Boarding School at Keshena, Oneida Boarding School at Oneida, Lac du Flambeau Boarding School at Lac du Flambeau, and Tomah Industrial School at Tomah.

That history of the state of Wisconsin isn't meant to sound attractive. If it's accurate, it suggests that Wilder's family wouldn't have encountered a lot of Native Americans until they moved to Kansas, the part of their family history which is fascinatingly described in Little House on the Prairie.

In Little House on the Prairie, Pa Ingalls speaks of the local Indians with great respect; Little Laura wishes she was allowed to ride ponies across the prairie the way the Indian children do. The book provides a fascinating, varied portrait—until it reaches Takoma Park, where an easily-stereotyped liberal critic sifts and condemns and even starts dropping bombs.

The letter in this morning's Post portrays the librarian as a book-burner. Comments to her original letter help us see how we liberals, with our true-believing ways, often contribute to the perception that we're just a bunch of tribalized nuts.

We lose votes in such ways every day. This too sent Donald J. Trump to the White House. In the future, these tribal behaviors may serve to keep him there.

The librarian had the germ of a perfectly reasonable point. But then, she put her thumb on the scale and she started to sift.

People notice such unforced behavior by Us. It makes them think we're foolish. At that point, Rush steps in.

Donald J. Trump with his bathrobe on!

FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2017

Remembering Vincent The Chin: Last night, David Gergen made a bit of a point on CNN.

Don Lemon threw to him out of a break. Gergen noted a downside to the focus on the Donald J. Trump [HEART] Putin-and-Russia stuff:

LEMON (3/9/17) FBI Director James Comey meeting with lawmakers today as the House and Senate intelligence committees ramp up their investigations of Russia's meddling in the election.

Back with me, David Gergen, Kirsten Powers, Alex Burns, and Jack Kingston. We're in the middle of a conversation before the break. David, you wanted to weigh in on what?

GERGEN: Of course we need to be covering this story if the FBI has got major investigations underway—and there's something very fishy underneath all of this, we all know that. At the same time, Jack Kingston has a point, but I disagree with, on where he came out with it.

And that is, while we're doing this so much, the administration is enjoying the fact that we're distracted from covering this health care bill. And they're jamming it through in the middle of the night. Nobody knows what's in it. Nobody knows how much it's going to cost. And nobody really understands what it's going to do to Americans who so desperately need health insurance. And that's a major, major story. It's hard to cover in the midst of all this other stuff, but we have to do both.

"There's something very fishy underneath all of this" Donald-and-Vladimir stuff, Gergen said. "We all know that."

Given Gergen's insider status, we were glad to see him say that. That said, we agree with his assessment of that possible downside.

We've especially thought about this with respect to Trump's tweets last weekend. Discussion of those wiretap tweets has eaten enormous time and space. That time and space is being taken away from discussion of the health care bill and the new executive order.

As we've seen the health care bill moving along under cover of wiretap tweets, we've begun to think about the late Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who we didn't personally know.

According to the leading authority, Gigante was "a New York mobster in the American Mafia who was boss of the Genovese crime family from 1981 to 2005." That same authority describes the gambit for which he may have been best known:

With the arrest and conviction of [John] Gotti and various Gambino family members in 1992, Gigante was officially recognized as the most powerful crime boss in the United States. For the better part of 30 years, Gigante feigned insanity in an effort to throw law enforcement off his trail. Dubbed "The Oddfather" and "The Enigma in the Bathrobe" by the press, Gigante often wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself, in what Gigante later admitted was an elaborate act to avoid prosecution.

We don't know to what extent that foolishness actually happened. But by the middle of this week, the apparent craziness of Trump's recent tweeting had us thinking about Gigante's feigned incoherent mumbling, in his bathrobe, out in the streets.

Is it even dimly possible that Trump is playing a form of chess? That he chose to take the crazy route last weekend, not that he really went crazy?

In some ways, it doesn't much matter. The mainstream and liberal worlds have almost completely lost the ability to stage a national discussion. The discourse has splintered apart into tribal strains. We're very much living in Babel.

That said, Trump's tweets last Saturday morning stole a lot of focus. Was he really raging on the moors? Could his incoherent tweeting really have been a game?

Where's the justice: Decades earlier, Bob Dylan mumbled incoherently in Greenwich Village too. They gave him a Nobel Prize!

THE POLITICS OF MORAL STAMPEDE: Now that it's too late!

FRIDAY, MARCH 10, 2017

Interlude—Maddow's staff is great: We humans!

When we go on our moral stampedes, we tend to start hearing voices. We're sure we know what the voices are saying, especially if the voices belong to those in The Other Tribe.

Everything we think we hear supports our pre-approved tribal scripts. We tend to paraphrase with high confidence during our moral stampedes.

In our state of moral fervor, we also tend to swell with certainty about our all-around greatness. Here within our liberal tribe, where a stampede is occurring too late, one of our most prominent stars offered these peculiar remarks at the start of a segment this Wednesday night:

MADDOW (3/8/17): I've got the best staff, the best producers, the best researchers of anyone who works on any show on television. Better than any cable show on any network, better than any news show, period.

I put up the staff for this show against anyone. And one of the hallmarks of how we do our work, one of the things that has evolved in our own culture as a show, is: You read to the end.

The headline might not be the most important thing! The 15th paragraph of whatever it is you're reading, that might not be the news right now, but it might be the lead story tomorrow night. So you better make sure you read it, and remember it, maybe make a file.

[Drums rim-shot on desk]

And because we are like that as a group, we end up as a staff sort of competing among ourselves for, like, "Who can name the date of the next state Senate special election, and in what state, and what is the partisan breakdown of that district?"

[Self-appreciatively chuckles]

Or, "Who knows the partisan split of the Connecticut state legislature off the top of their head, both houses? Go!"

We're like that.

Tonight, we are going to deal you in on one of those stories about which we have a file. Can you identify on sight the person in this picture? Do not shout the answer if you happen to know...

We're sorry, but no; we didn't make that up. To watch that strangeness, click here.

Maddow proceeded to an underwhelming report about a person who plans to challenge Jason Chaffetz in next year's congressional election. For ourselves, we were struck by Maddow's profoundly peculiar account of her staff's obvious greatness.

What makes Maddow's staff so great? If we were able to follow her explanation, her staff is expected to read all the way to the end of a news report. They might even make a file! This "culture" explains their greatness!

We're sorry, but one of our liberal tribe's most prominent intellectual leaders really did deliver that speech. With apologies, we often think that no one in journalism resembles Donald Trump more than Rachel Maddow does. We think this is an important matter for liberals to contemplate.

(We also understand that that will never occur.)

In part, we were struck by Maddow's account of her staff's greatness because of her work this week. Now that it is precisely too late, Maddow has thrown herself into a deep dive concerning Trump-and-Russia.

Almost surely, that's an important topic. Working from long reports in Politico and The New Yorker, Maddow has been offering long segments whose story-telling, while captivating, often seems to escape the bounds of the texts from which she is working.

So it has gone the past two nights as she discusses Konstantin Kilimnik, "a Kiev-based operative with suspected ties to Russian intelligence who consulted regularly with Paul Manafort last year while Manafort was running Donald Trump’s presidential campaign."

We're quoting Ken Vogel's new report in Politico, a report Maddow has been adapting for her exciting tales over the past two night. As she has discussed Kilimnik and others this week, Maddow has been crafting tales as exciting as any told on The Americans. But she has frequently overstated or misstated her source material as she and her nonpareil staff have assembled these tales.

Will Kilimnik turn out to be important, or is he a nothingburger? Like Maddow, we can't tell you at this point. We hope a competent investigation will unfold somewhere, although that possibility is greatly lessened by our nation's current tribal divide.

We don't know if Kilimnik will turn out to be important. We do know that Maddow has frequently misstated her source material. We also know this:

If her staff read all the way to paragraph 24 in Vogel's new report, they could have made a file with the highlighted comment:

VOGEL (3/18/17): When Kilimnik traveled to the U.S. in late summer, he drew the attention of U.S. authorities, according to a Washington consultant with ties to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

And when Kilimnik returned to Ukraine after that trip, he suggested to Kiev political operatives that he played a role in a move by Trump’s representatives to dilute a proposed amendment to the GOP platform calling for the U.S. to provide “lethal defensive weapons” for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian incursion.

“He led me to believe that he was involved in the platform fight, but not necessarily through Paul [Manafort],” said a Kiev-based operative who travels in the same circles as Kilimnik. The operative added that Kilimnik could have been “just bullshitting like political consultants do.”

Did Kilimnik play a role in the crafting of the GOP platform? After reading Vogel's report, we have no idea, in part because Vogel makes no such assertion.

As for Maddow, she keeps putting her thumbs on the scale, overstating an array of claims in Vogel's two reports about Kilimnik. (Vogel's first report appeared last August.)

What Maddow didn't do, in two nights of discussing this matter, is mention that highlighted text, in which one of Vogel's sources say Kilimnik may have been “just bullshitting like political consultants do" when he (reportedly) "suggested that he played a role" in the platform change.

That word of caution, which Vogel chose to include, would undercut the thrill of the tale. Even within Maddow's "long form," let-me-tell-you-an-endless-story narrative style, there has been no time, in the past two nights, for such a word of warning.

Maddow did find time on Wednesday night to tell you this about Kilimnik:

"He reportedly later told people that what he came to the United States for last summer, around the time of the Republican convention, was to get that language changed in the Republican Party platform on the issue of Russia."

There's no such claim in Vogel's report, from which Maddow was working. Last night, Maddow said this about Kilimnik:

"Politico reports that he's now under scrutiny by U.S. authorities, including the FBI."

If her staff read to paragraph 4 of Vogel's report, they would have found Politico saying something different:

"The FBI declined to comment on Kilimnik, while the State Department did not respond to a request for comment. It’s unclear whether either agency launched any kind of official inquiry into Kilimnik, nor is it clear whether the interest from the U.S. authorities is ongoing."

In paragraph 2, Vogel seems to say that Kilimnik "came under scrutiny" last year. The story got better when Maddow said the FBI is on his case right now, a point Vogel explicitly says isn't clear.

Last night, Maddow kept saying and implying that Kilimnik "is a GRU guy. He's a Russian intelligence guy." She tended to slide this description into the present tense. You might want to compare that exciting characterization to the material in Vogel's pair of reports.

Without question, Maddow's reports have been exciting. They've dealt with an important topic—with the possibility that Donald J. Trump, and/or his associates, have been involved in improper collusion with, and service to, Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Her reports have been exciting. They've also been full of misstatements, overstatements and omissions, with one silly editing trick. Indeed, Wednesday night's show featured the most comical "Maddow edit" we've seen yet. Here's how that edit went down:

Maddow played tape of CNN's Jim Acosta discussing something he said he'd been told by Trump associate J. D. Gordon. At the end of the tape, some wonderful clownistry occurs:

Acosta's lips keep moving, but the sound has been edited out.

Lip-reading is easy in this case; the muted words are "back in March." As students of the "Maddow edit," we'll offer a fairly obvious guess:

Those words were muted because the story sounds more incriminating once those words are gone. (Gordon's reported story has always sounded shaky because of those three words.)

In a normal "Maddow edit," a piece of videotape is awkwardly cut right in the middle of somebody's statement. The awkwardness of the edit signals that the viewer is maybe perhaps getting conned just a small tiny tad.

In this instance, Maddow's staff was clumsy. They eliminated the sound of Acosta's words, but retained the look of Acosta's lips. This is part of the way we all ended up in our current dangerous place.

(To watch this wonderful "Maddow edit," click here, move ahead to roughly 8:00. You're allowed to laugh.)

Maddow has been telling stories about a very important topic this week. We don't know how these matters will turn out. Indeed, we don't know if these matters will ever get resolved or clarified at all.

We do know this:

Now that it's monstrously too late, Maddow has gone on a bit of a moral stampede. With the help of her nonpareil staff, she's telling the stories we want to hear about those important topics.

She also says her staff is best. As part of the greatness of her work, she seems to feel entitled to lean on the scales just a tad.

By normal standards, such work would be viewed as "less than obsessively honest." If we assume good faith on the part of her staff, such work isn't hugely competent.

That said, this work is being done at a time of moral stampede. At times of stampede, people like Maddow, driven by fervor, tend to start taking interpretive liberties.

They'll tell you what various people plainly meant by the various things they said. At times like these, every interpretation will tend to please the tribe.

Maddow is doing this only now, now that it's too late. She and those who came before her spent long years asleep in the woods before this stampede began.

Uh-oh! In the years before Trump reached the White House, Maddow and her predecessors failed two major interpretive tests. These interpretive failures created the narratives which put Trump where he is.

Tomorrow, we'll run back through those interpretive failures, in which Maddow and her predecessors ran off and slept in the woods when they should have been serving the public. Now that it's too late, Maddow's fervor is thrilling our liberal world.

Maddow and her predecessors failed us badly in the past. To state the obvious, their laziness, and their endless self-dealing, are what brought Trump to power.

Now that it's too late, Maddow and her nonpareil staff are filled with moral fervor. It looks like they're doing good journalism. On Wednesday, she told us that, straight out.

We think you need a fuller sense of the way our devolving world works. We say that because people are dead all over the world, with many more people to follow.

The endless failures of our liberal world helped put Trump where he is. Our lizard brains say this can't be true. We're going to tell you that it is, although we'll be the first to acknowledge that you'll never believe it.

Tomorrow: Two major interpretive failures, back when it wasn't too late

Concerning misstatements and overstatements: There have been other such critters this week, concerning Kilimnik and others. Did you catch the foolishness Tuesday night about the foiled subpoena?

Are you well served by such "bullshitting?" Because these topics are so important, we're saying the answer is no.

The corporation is well served. Ratings are through the roof!

Our day for critiquing fiery language!

THURSDAY, MARCH 9, 2017

Erik Wemple and Ball Four: Is this our day for fiery language? In this new post, the Washington Post's Erik Wemple endorses the use of the fiery term "lie" by big major fact-checkers.

His nugget passage appears below. Lori Robertson of FactCheck.org argues against the use of the term "lie."

In response, Wemple says fact-checkers should maybe use the term in certain cases. We were struck by the alacrity with which he wanted to go there:

WEMPLE (3/9/17): Asked to elaborate on FactCheck.org’s aversion to “lie,” Robertson cites the industry-standard explanation: “Was there intent to deceive?” That’s a question that’s tough to answer, and it’s required to prove the definition of “lie.” There’s another layer to the rationale, too: “Our official policy is the ‘intent’ argument, but … if we said somebody lies every other day, to me it sounds like name-calling,” says Robertson.

That’s not to say that Robertson hasn’t heard the cries for “lies.” “My question for people who want us to say this: Why? Why is that so important to you?” says Robertson. “I mean, is that valuable in some way for us to say somebody lied? Or is it more valuable for us to explain, ‘This was false and let us explain why. Let us give you some other information.’ I think that larger context is maybe more important than the label.”

How about this: Both are important. When the president states falsehoods that have been contradicted numerous times by well-distributed reporting—sometimes directly to him in interviews and the like—it’s fair to reach the conclusion that he has lied.

Is Wemple right? If a politician "states falsehoods that have been contradicted numerous times by well-distributed reporting," is it "fair to reach the conclusion that he has lied?"

Maybe! But before you used that thrilling term, wouldn't you want to ask the pol, or his staff, why he keeps making the claim in question? Wouldn't you want to tell your readers what the pol said in response?

Politicians are not required to agree with fact-checkers, even those as celebrated as Robertson or Wemple. We were struck by Wemple's thinking here:

In his head, he wanted to go to the supposition before he sought and transmitted all the relevant information. Even in these enlightened times, we humans tend to be like this.

We recall the famous statement by Gene Brabender in Jim Bouton's classic, Ball Four: "Where I come from we just talk a little while. After that we start to hit.”

Travel ban versus Muslim ban versus Muslim ban lite!

THURSDAY, MARCH 9, 2017

What's in a word: In his new executive order, has United States president Donald J. Trump proposed a "Muslim ban?"

Yesterday, the New York Times published two letters on the subject. The second letter writer didn't seem to be buying the use of that term.

He stated no definitive view on the order itself, but seemed to reject the thinking behind the use of the term:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (3/8/17): While there can be reasoned objections to President Trump’s revised executive order excluding six heavily Muslim countries from entry into the United States, the Op-Ed essay by Farhana Khera and Johnathan Smith (“Don’t Be Fooled, Trump’s New Muslim Ban Is Still Illegal,” nytimes.com, March 6) degenerates into an emotionally charged denunciation of the order as an “all-out assault on Islam and Muslims.” They lose all credibility with that indictment of Mr. Trump.

Among the countries not included in the ban are Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. All of them are predominantly Muslim states, and Saudi Arabia in particular is an avowedly Islamic theocracy with a very strict brand of Sunni Islam at the core of its official identity. So how, pray, is President Trump’s visa ban an assault on Islam and Muslims as such?

Excitingly, the opinion column in question had used the exciting term, "Muslim ban." This writer stated no definitive view on the executive order itself, but he seemed to reject the use of that thrilling term.

With respect to the use of that term, we tend to agree with this writer. That could be because, as native speakers of English, we're familiar with the general meaning and application of the familiar term, "ban."

Under the terms of the new order, Muslims will be granted new visas to enter the U.S. from a long list of Muslim nations. Muslims already holding such visas will be admitted from the six nations which are principally affected by the new executive order. (Iraq is no longer affected.)

As such, we aren't sure why a person would want to refer to this as a "Muslim ban." We grant you, though, the use of the term is exciting and signals our moral greatness.

The first letter in yesterday's section stated a different view. The writer of this fiery letter explicitly supported the use of that fiery term:

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (3/8/17): The Trump administration does not have a leg to stand on here. It cannot believe that the ban is truly necessary to protect the United States from a terrorist attack; otherwise it would not have delayed the announcement of the revised ban to allow positive press from the address to Congress to sit for a few days. This ban cannot be about public safety either. Study after study shows that the immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans.

To see this order as anything other than a Muslim ban is willful blindness. This is just another tragic example of this astonishing lack of empathy for anyone the administration believes is different.

This writer opposes the new executive order. He's says you're crazy if you don't view it as a "Muslim ban," but he doesn't remember to explain why he holds that view.

It seems to us that we liberals need to understand the way we're seen by others. Again and again, people read letters like the second one we've posted and come away thinking we're slightly dumb.

It's also true that the second letter we've presented contains a type of shortcoming which Charlie Peters addressed in his essay this Sunday. It seems to us that its writer fails to understand and address the types of objections The Others might have, rightly or wrongly, to current travel practices.

"Study after study shows that the immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans?" Let's assume that's a valid factual claim. Does the writer understand why some of The Others may say this fact isn't hugely relevant? Has the writer tried to understand the way the world looks to someone who doesn't share his admittedly superior points of view?

At the present time, our liberal team is on the type of stampede which borders on moral rampage. We seem to take pleasure from our use of fiery tribal language.

We seem to enjoy the terms we use and the signals they send about Us and our manifest greatness. Across the country, other people think we're dumb when they see us expounding that way.

Other people roll their eyes. At this point, is it clear that they're wrong?

Solomon splits the difference: Editorially, the New York Times split the baby in half, much as Solomon would have done during an earlier era.

Without explaining their use of the term, the board described the executive order as a "Muslim Ban Lite."

We tend to agree with the newspaper's view of the new executive order. We're still looking for an explanation of the (admittedly thrilling) use of that high-minded term.

THE POLITICS OF MORAL STAMPEDE: Picking and choosing what Rudy said!

THURSDAY, MARCH 9, 2017

Part 4—Our liberal thumbs on the scales: Back in 1969, Harvard professor Stanley Cavell published a set of essays under this title:

"Must We Mean What We Say?"

In a world where we're told to say what we mean, the title was somewhat eye-catching. It was also the title of the volume's first essay.

Forty-eight years later, Cavell's book is still in print. At the time it appeared, we were writing our senior thesis under Cavell's award-winning supervision. A study of Wittgenstein's "private language argument," it could perhaps be summarized thusly:

"Say what?" Or words to that effect.

Whatever! In recent weeks, we've thought of the title of Cavell's book as a certain moral stampede has been taking shape. As a key part of that stampede, we liberals have pleasured ourselves by interpreting what The Others have meant by a variety of extemporaneous emissions and comments.

We've performed this task with great aplomb, and with repetitive dumbness. Moral stampedes are bad for the head. They're also quite bad for the soul.

Might we make a general point? Quite routinely, it's hard to know what someone else has meant by some comment.

Routinely, this will be the case even when you're speaking with your closest friends. The problem of interpretation may grow when you try to interpret fleeting, extemporaneous remarks by public figures you've never met, folk you don't happen to know.

If we're willing to try to be honest for once, the interpretation of fleeting remarks may be especially difficult in the case of a person like Donald J. Trump, who is remarkably inarticulate in almost all instances; rarely has the slightest idea what the heck he's talking about; and contradicts himself with remarkable frequency, often within single statements.

You can actually ask your friends what they meant by some comment. You can't do that with Donald J. Trump. That said, another fact is clear:

Over and over, again and again, our tribal leaders pleasure us with their accounts of what The Others plainly meant by the various things they have said. These leaders—they're often corporate hacks—will tend to adopt the least flattering interpretation of whatever The Others have said.

Thus pleasured, we continue to watch our leaders' TV shows. We also get meaner and dumber. We end up being even dumber than we were at the start.

It's hard to believe that we need to massage Trump's remarks to build a case against him. The fact that we're strongly inclined to do so only shows—if we remember our Shakespeare correctly—"what tribals we mortals be."

Alas! As it turns out, the bard was right in that widely-cited assessment.

Alas! Our tribal leaders will rarely admit that it's frequently hard to say what someone else "meant" by whatever it is they said. Instead, we're handed the most pleasing account of what somebody meant, as has been done in the case of the statement transcribed shown below.

Yesterday, we discussed these remarks. Today, we'll mark a few highlights:

DONALD J. TRUMP (2/28/17): Well, this was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something that was, you know, just—they wanted to do. They came to see me, they explained what they wanted to do, the generals—who are very respected. My generals are the most respected that we've had in many decades, I would—I believe. And they lost Ryan. And I was at the airport when the casket came in, the body came in, and it was a very sad—with the family,and it's a great family incredible wife and the children. I met most of the family. And I can understand people saying that. I'd feel, you know, I'd feel— What's worse? There's nothing worse.

But again, this was something they were looking at for a long time doing. And according to General Mattis, it was a very successful mission. They got tremendous amounts of information.

In that statement, was Donald J. Trump "blaming the generals" for what happened in Yemen?

In fairness, that's a highly unflattering account of what Trump meant. For that reason, it's tribally pleasing.

It's the least flattering account of what he said, but to what extent is it accurate? If we might borrow from our Wittgenstein: "No such thing was in question here, only how the opportunity to pleasure us rubes was used."

Was Donald J. Trump "blaming the generals" for what happened in Yemen? We'll note that, in the statement in question, he praised the generals for their greatness, and declared the mission a howling success.

Surely there was something more salient and overarching for which we could have blasted Trump that day. But tribal loathing must always be fed, and our leaders are massively paid for their skill at providing comfort food.

We're offering a basic thought here—the tribal soul loves to loathe. We'll also suggest a more sweeping point—we humans love to complete the circle!

We humans! We hate to say that it isn't clear what Person A meant by Statement Y. We humans love to finish the story. All too often, we finish the story in a low-IQ way which fluffs the views of our tribe.

Rachel does this; Lawrence does too. To state what is blindingly obvious, they're paid huge sums to perform this task. You are left with a decision:

Are you willing to get swept away?

Donald J. Trump is the craziest, most dangerous person who ever got anywhere near the Oval Office. We badly need to seek out ways to explain this fact to the wider public.

Instead, on cable TV each night, we play our reindeer games.

We did the same thing, not long ago, with Rudy Giuliani. At this point in his career, he too is an inarticulate, blustering blunderbuss. In fairness, though, we'll show you the gentleman's full remarks on the occasion in question.

He was asked, by Jeanne Pirro, about the so-called travel or Muslim ban. To watch the exchange, click here:

PIRRO (1/28/17): I want to ask you about this ban and the protests. Does the ban have anything to so with religion? How did the president decide the seven countries? I understand the permanent ban on the refugees. OK—talk to me about it.

GIULIANI: I’ll tell you the whole history of it. When he first announced it, he said "Muslim ban." He called me up, he said, "Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally."

I put a commission together with Judge Mukasey, with Congressman McCaul, Pete King, a whole group of other very expert lawyers on this. And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger. The areas of the world that create danger for us, which is a factual basis, not a religious basis.

Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible, and that's what the ban is based on. It's not based on religion. It's based on places where there are substantial evidence that people are sending terrorists into our country.

As you know, our tribe has selected shards from that statement to prove a pleasing point. We've claimed that Giuliani acknowledged that the current plan really is a "Muslim ban."

To make that claim, we engaged in picking-and-choosing at its very best. We built our case around the meaning of the word "it" in the reported statement, "Show me the right way to do it legally." (Yesterday, we saw Hewitt and Maddow battling over the meaning of the word "they" in the statement by Trump which we've posted above.)

With respect to Rudy's remarks, we built our case a second way—by disappearing the repeated statements in which he said that the new directive wasn't based on religion. Our leaders felt we'd be better off if we weren't asked to consider those remarks.

Back in the day, Olivia Newton-John was hopelessly devoted to you. Today, as part of our tribal stampede, we're hopelessly devoted to this.

We aren't very bright and we aren't super honest. We still can't see that we aren't very bright, even after we managed to lose an election to the craziest, dumbest person who ever sought the office.

We still can't see how hapless We are. We're still blaming Them.

We also aren't especially moral, even as we stampede. But let's set our moral squalor aside for now. Tomorrow, we'll show you this:

We'll show you how preternaturally dumb we liberals actually are. How preternaturally dumb, and how preternaturally lazy.

Tomorrow: What did they mean by what they said? Our useless leaders nap in the woods on two consequential occasions.

In which we're chastised by the gods!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 2017

Al Franken's appearance with Lawrence: Late last night, we found ourselves chastised by the gods.

First, though, let's channel the late John Lennon. Let's try to imagine something:

At this time of moral stampede, have you ever imagined a possibility? Have you ever imagined the possibility that much of what we liberals say is just silly scripted cant, as is the case Over There?

At this time of moral stampede, you ought to consider that possibility. We think of what happened just last night when Al Franken was Lawrence O'Donnell's guest.

Senator Franken came on The Last Word to say that Jeff Sessions has perjured himself. As became clear long ago during some of his greatest meltdowns, this general topic is right up Lawrence's alley.

The nonsense began with the throw from Rachel. Here's what the cable stars said:

O'DONNELL (3/7/17): Hey Rachel, we have an open invitation to Jeff Sessions to come on the program. He has not made it yet, but tonight we do have Senator Al Franken, whose question created this gigantic Jeff Sessions controversy.

Is it perjury? We'll ask Senator Franken if he believes it's perjury, we will roll the tape of exactly what was said. Which today, as you know, in the Judiciary Committee, they had a fight, the chairman arguing about what was actually said in the video where Al Franken asked that question—

MADDOW: As if we don't have a record of it, as if we can't all check it—

O'DONNELL: Yes, and in the hearings, Senator Franken said to the chairman, "Show—just check the video."

Sad! "As if we don't have a record of it, as if we can't all check it," Rachel said.

This was Rachel's way of suggesting that the videotape interprets itself. Rachel Maddow was talking down to us liberal speak-chuckers again!

That said, we liberals seem to love that treatment, or so last night's program suggested. Lawrence started with a monologue about lying. Along with the evils of Mormonism, it's one of Lawrence's favorite topics. The topic has led to some of his most famous meltdowns.

Soon, Lawrence was priming the pump. "We've already seen a national security adviser forced to resign because of lying," he said. "We now have an attorney general caught in an apparent lie in his Senate confirmation hearing by Senator Al Franken, who will be joining us in a moment."

So far, Sessions only stood accused of an apparent lie. Much later, after much more than "a moment," that changed when Franken appeared.

Lawrence played videotape of the full exchange on February 10 between Franken and Sessions. After we got to watch the tape, this first Q-and-A occurred:

O'DONNELL (3/7/17): Was Jeff Sessions' response to you perjury?

FRANKEN: It is hard for me to draw any other conclusion given the letter that he wrote. We asked him, the Democrats on the committee, asked him why he didn't, in the seven weeks after he misled us there, why he didn't correct it. And the response is absurd.

He said, "Having considered my answer responsive and no one having suggested otherwise, there was no need for a supplemental answer." We, of course, didn't know he was giving us misinformation, so of course we wouldn't have asked for a supplemental response.

Look, this is very, very serious stuff. He's the second administration official who has lied about contact with the Russians, and this all goes to the fact that the Russians interfered with our elections.

This is very serious stuff, Franken said, even as he and Lawrence treated it like a joke.

Why do we offer that assessment? Consider what Franken had said.

Had Sessions engaged in perjury? According to Franken, it became hard to avoid that conclusion given the letter Sessions now sent to the committee at the start of this week. Forget what Sessions said at the hearing last month! The letter he sent the committee this week really revealed his crime!

What was so incriminating about Sessions' letter? Below, you see the part of the letter that really tipped Franken off. In this passage, Sessions was explaining why he hadn't supplemented his original testimony sooner:

"Having considered my answer [at the hearing] responsive, and no one having suggested otherwise, there was no need for a supplemental answer."

According to Sessions, he had considered his original answer to be responsive to Franken's question. Since no one had suggested otherwise, Sessions had seen no need to supplement what he'd said.

Franken ridiculed this statement, which had pretty much convinced him of Sessions' perjury. How could we have told him his answer wasn't responsive? the funnyman/senator thoughtfully asked. "We didn't know he was giving us misinformation" [at the original hearing].

Franken's point made perfect sense, except for the fact that it didn't. Might we offer a tiny guess as to what Sessions actually meant?

Did Sessions mean that no one on the Senate committee had "suggested otherwise"—had suggested that he supplement what his testimony? Or did he possibly mean that no one on his own staff had made such a suggestion?

We don't know, and neither does Franken. But so what? In line with the law of the moral stampede, Franken only considered the interpretation which convicted his target of crime.

(For Sessions' full letter, click here. The meaning of the sentence Franken quoted isn't clarified.)

This is what precisely happens at times of moral stampede. Such stampedes tend to make tribal players immoral, indignant and dumb.

Throughout the interview, Franken railed about that "absurd" statement by Sessions. With Lawrence eagerly egging him on, he kept saying that SEssions' letter had convinced him of Sessions' guilt:

O'DONNELL: In Jeff Sessions' letter to the committee, he said, "My answer was correct." Now that means that, if he was lying in his answer, then he's lying again in his letter?

FRANKEN: Yes. The letter really is, just sort of insults your intelligence in a way that is just mind boggling. That's why I say there's no other conclusion that can you can come to other than that he was lying and was committing perjury.

[...]

O`DONNELL: So just to clarify your own thinking on Jeff Sessions` testimony, you were given reason to suspect that there was perjury once it came out that he indeed had contacts with Russian officials, but it's his letter to the committee, combined with his testimony, that then leads you to the actual conclusion that he committed perjury?

FRANKEN: Yes. I can't come up with any other conclusion, but I would like him to come and testify before the committee, before—so he can at least explain this, but this letter is just ridiculous and insulting to anyone's intelligence.

Poor Franken! The letter insulted his intelligence, or so he kept insisting. Sadly, his specific complaint about the letter doesn't exactly make sense.

Late last night, the gods of Olympus came to us a dream. "What ever made you say, in the past, that Franken is smart?" they said.

The worst thing is, the gods weren't angry at us last night; they said they were just disappointed. Somehow, it always seems worse when they take that tack.

Why did we think that Franken was smart? From our vantage point in this time of stampede, it's a question we can't really answer.

THE POLITICS OF MORAL STAMPEDE: Did Donald J. Trump blame the generals for Yemen?

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 8, 2017

Part 3—What Hewitt and Maddow said: On Thursday morning, March 2, Hugh Hewitt made an extremely dumb remark in the Washington Post.

Hewitt is a conservative talk radio host and a frequently-used MSNBC contributor. His opinion column in the Post concerned Donald J. Trump's address to Congress two nights before.

We highlight the dumb remark:

HEWITT (3/2/17): The heart of the speech...was the president's tribute to Chief Special Warfare Operator William "Ryan" Owens and his widow, Carryn, who in an act of incredible courage attended the speech and allowed the nation to grieve with her. By doing so, she invited every patriot to thank in their hearts and prayers all families who have suffered such losses, every veteran who has absorbed a wound. It was a transcendent moment, and indeed a defining moment. This president will stand by his troops.

"This president will stand by his troops?" Whatever a person may think of Trump's tribute to Owens that night, that comment was strikingly dumb.

In what way did Trump's remarks show that "he will stand by his troops?" We thought of the previous dumbness which brought Hewitt to these pages. We refer to the moment when Hewitt was shown applauding one of Trump's statements during a presidential debate—a debate at which Hewitt himself was serving as a moderator.

Hewitt is a high-IQ person given to the occasional dumb remark. His remark about Trump standing by his troops was one such nonesuch moment. That said:

Needless to say, our own liberal team swung into action in response to Trump's remarks about Owens that night. In one such manifestation, we stood in line to complain that Trump had "exploited" Carryn Owens and/or her husband's death during his speech.

Our lizard brains screamed this assessment and so we rushed to repeat it. For one example, click here.

Did Donald J. Trump exploit Carryn Owens? The judgment is easily uttered. Did he prove that he "will stand by his troops?" That was dumb all the way down.

That said, these are times of moral stampede. Such times encourage endless stiff-necked moral judgment, including interpretations of extemporaneous remarks based on stiff-necked true moral belief.

We refer, of course, to the debate which occurred on the evening of February 28 between the aforementioned Hewitt and his cable colleague, Rachel Maddow. Their debate followed a brief preliminary debate between Hewitt and Brian Williams, a reformed TV fabulist of the pre-Trump strain.

The Hewitt-Maddow debate involved conflicting interpretations of earlier remarks by Trump. Dumb as his subsequent comment was, we thought Hewitt displayed the better judgment in this debate, in which his stiff-necked, true-believing adversary seemed unable to grasp the fact that she interpreting Trump's earlier comments at all.

At issue was a pleasing script our liberal tribe quickly adopted. According to this pleasing script, Trump had semi-contradicted himself in his remarks about Owens that night.

In his address to the Congress, Trump clearly said that the raid in which Owens died had been a success. Anonymous sources had said different, many pundits noted.

(Trump directly attributed this assessment to General Mattis. Because all mainstream pundits have sworn by the greatness of Mattis, cable stars and liberal columnists have tended to hurry past this point as they denounce Trump's assessment.)

Liberal pundits tended to denounce that assessment by Trump. That said, the debate between Hewitt and Maddow turned on a different point.

On the morning of Trump's speech, Trump had appeared on Fox and Friends, the pitiful program he has described as the TV press corps' most honest. He was asked about Owens' death, and about the fact that Owens' father had refused to meet with Trump.

Owens' father had pleased our stampeding tribe greatly. On Fox and Friends, Trump offered this. Because dueling interpretations are involved in what came later, we'll offer no points of emphasis:

TRUMP (2/28/17): Well, this was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something that was, you know, just—they wanted to do. They came to see me, they explained what they wanted to do, the generals—who are very respected. My generals are the most respected that we've had in many decades, I would—I believe. And they lost Ryan. And I was at the airport when the casket came in, the body came in, and it was a very sad—with the family,and it's a great family incredible wife and the children. I met most of the family. And I can understand people saying that. I'd feel, you know, I'd feel— What's worse? There's nothing worse.

But again, this was something they were looking at for a long time doing. And according to General Mattis, it was a very successful mission. They got tremendous amounts of information.

You can watch the Q-and-A here.

Our lizard brains told us liberals to say that Trump was "blaming the generals." But had he really been blaming the generals? That was the deathless, largely pointless debate in which Hewitt and Maddow engaged that night.

Alas! In its typical scattershot way, MSNBC never got around to transcribing its programs on the night of Trump's speech. If you want to see the opening round of the debate we're discussing—the opening round between Williams and Hewitt—you can just click here.

Because we get tired of doing MSNBC's work, we won't transcribe their exchange. Starting around the two-minute mark, Williams asks Hewitt if "you will concede" that Trump had seemed to "blame the generals" on Fox and Friends that morning.

Hewitt says no, he won't concede that point. He says he didn't hear Trump's remarks that way. He explains what he thinks he heard Trump say instead.

A few minutes later, Maddow returned to this topic; her sense of annoyance was showing. To watch her great debate with Hewitt, you can just click here.

On that second tape, Maddow jumps in to challenge Hewitt's interpretation of Trump's remarks on Fox and Friends. Here's what we recommend for your consideration:

As she speaks with Hewitt, Maddow refuses to accept the fact that she's offering an interpretation of Trump's remarks! Her moral certainty is so strong that she thinks she's simply reporting facts. At one point, our own stiff-necked true believer engages in the fascinating highlighted exchange:

MADDOW (2/28/17): Hugh, his quote was, "This was a mission that was started before I got here. They explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected. My generals are the most respected that we've had in many decades, I would—I believe. And they lost Ryan."

I mean, he was asked about his reaction to this loss in this raid and to the grief of this seal's father, who has spoken publicly about the fact that he didn't want to meet this president on that tarmac at Dover.

He responded by saying, "This was started before I got here." As in, this wasn't me. Don't put this on me.

HEWITT: Yeah, well we just have to disagree, Rachel—

MADDOW: That's what he said. I'm not doing psychoanalysis.

HEWITT: I know! No, but it's not. It's interpretation.

In that last remark, Hewitt tells Maddow that she is interpreting Trump's remarks. Here's the interesting part of this debate:

Maddow refuses to concede or accept that basic point! She denies, to the very end, that she's offering an interpretation of what Trump said that morning. She maintains this stance to the end.

Near the end of the great debate, as Maddow signals displeasure with Hewitt, Hewitt offers this:

"I heard it completely differently. And that's the divide in the country. People hear things differently."

That's a very important point. Flatly, Maddow rejects it. Again, she seems to say that she's simply repeating facts. Hewitt is wrong and Maddow is right. Thus spake Maddowthustra!

Was either of these debaters right in his or her interpretation of Trump's remarks? We'd be inclined to say no. We think both parties were over-interpreting Trump's extemporaneous comments.

Was Donald J. Trump blaming the generals for what happened in Yemen on Fox and Friends that day? Our liberal lizards told us he was. It was a pleasing moralistic interpretation of Trump's remarks.

We'd say his remarks were less clear.

Was Trump blaming the generals? In our view, it's hard to say, in part because nobody asked him.

Extemporaneous remarks are often unclear; that's why follow-up questions were invented. No one followed up on Fox and Friends, cable TV's greatest program. At that point, the tribes took over, offering dueling accounts of what they said they heard.

We think Hewitt over-interpreted Trump's remarks; so did the stiff-necked Maddow. Having said that, there was a key distinction between the two, a distinction which made that debate a real keeper:

Hewitt acknowledged the fact that he was interpreting Trump's remarks. Maddow made no such admission. She seemed to think she was simply reporting the facts. Insisting on that stiff-necked claim, she was very, very not-smart.

A moral stampede is under way at the present time. Our own liberal and pseudo-liberal tribe is now stampeding quite hard.

Our lizards keep telling us what to see, think and say. This provides a great chance for us to spot the gross shortcomings which exist Over Here, within our own highly unskilled, vastly self-impressed tribe.

Tomorrow: A moral stampede of the past! The most consequential moral stampede of the past twenty-five years

Coming Friday: As part of our liberal moral stampede, we doctored what Rudy said