ACHAEANS: Are we all Achaeans now?

WEDNESDAY, MAY 8, 2024

In one key respect, we aren't: At the start of this week, we raised a pair of award-winning questions concerning those of us who live in present-day Blue America.

Regarding November's election, we raised this awkward question:

Have we possibly "earned our way out" through some aspects of our behavior?  

With regard to that possibility, we raised this related, as yet unspecified question: 

Are we all Achaeans now?

Are we all Achaeans now?  And what do we even mean by that peculiar question?

Tomorrow, we'll start to explore the behaviors within our own Blue America which have called that question to mind. For today, let's examine one basic way in which the "thought leaders" of our own Blue nation have been falling short of the behaviors put on display by the Achaeans who are alleged to have walked the earth during the late Bronze Age.

We return at this point to the western world's first, famous poem of war. In the Iliad's fast-moving Book One, the Achaeans (the Argives, the Mycenaeans, the Greeks) are in the tenth year of their violent siege of Troy.

They're conducting that siege for one reason only. As a matter of basic anthropology, we'll turn to that topic tomorrow.

As the Achaeans conduct their deadly siege, their conduct is constantly driven by rage. That said, please understand this:

On the opposite, far side of Europe. the Magna Carta was still two millennia away!

What the heck was the Magna Carta? We can tell you this:

As we noted yesterday, Agamemnon, lord of men, ruled the Achaeans (in effect) by the divine right of kings. Despite his frequent emotional meltdowns, Agamemnon carried the royal scepter which had come to him through a long line of descent, a line of descent which had started on Olympus with Zeus himself.

Deference to the divine right of kings is a basic part of human mental history. In 1215, on the far western end of Europe, a group of rebel barons cut into the reign of that ancient impulse. The leading authority on that topic starts to explain:

Magna Carta

Magna Carta Libertatum (Medieval Latin for "Great Charter of Freedoms"), commonly called Magna Carta or sometimes Magna Charta, is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. 

First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift and impartial justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood by their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War.

We note that this royal charter of rights protected barons against illegal imprisonment. It would seem that it offered no such protection to anyone else. 

Still, the charter codified a limitation of the monarch's absolute power. After everyone broke their commitments, the sacred isle was subjected to the events of First Barons' War.

Whatever! The Magna Carta was still two millennia away as the Argives (the Achaeans) fought on the  plains outside Troy by day, then conducted their wartime councils by night.  And to their credit, understand this:

Agamemnon may have held the royal scepter. But he was subjected to scathing criticism during those nighttime assemblies.

Agamemnon held the royal scepter, but lesser chieftains were prepared to dispute his actions and views. Consider:

In Book Nine of the deathless war poem, Agamemnon has melted down again. He has said that the Argives should abandon their plan to take Troy and should sail for home instead. 

Agamemnon (AKA Atrides) had melted down again. He was the anointed successor to Zeus (AKA the son of Cronus), but a lesser chieftain dissented:

Silence held them all, struck dumb by his orders.
A long while they said nothing, spirits dashed.
Finally Diomedes lord of the war cry broke forth:
"Atrides—I will be first to oppose you in your folly,
here in assembly, King, where it's the custom.
Spare me your anger. My courage—
mine was the first you mocked among the Argives.
branding me a coward, a poor soldier. Yes, well,
they know all about that, the Argives young and old.
But you—the son of Cronus with Cronus' twisting ways
gave you gifts by halves: with that royal scepter
the Father gave you honor beyond all other men alive
but he never gave you courage, the greatest power of all...

Oof! The headstrong young lord of the war cry had risen to savage his king. At this point, Nestor scrambles to his feet to offer his standard good, sound advice, with which he saves the day.

Diomedes was willing to challenge the acknowledged lord of men. In Book One, the Iliad quickly describes another night-time assembly. In this instance, it's Achilles who voices his rage against the Argive monarch:

But Achilles rounded on Agamemnon once again,
lashing out at him. not relaxing his anger for a moment:
"Staggering drunk, with your dog's eyes, your fawn's heart!
Never once did you arm with the troops and go to battle
or risk an ambush packed with Achaea's picked men—
you lack the courage, you can see death coming.
Safer by far, you find, to foray all through camp,
commandeering the prize of any man who speaks against you.
King who devours his people! Worthless husks, the men you rule—
if not, Atrides, this outrage would have been your last."

Tomorrow, we'll start to examine the alleged "outrage" which has triggered Achilles' vast rage. But Achilles continues his furious dissent, holding the scepter which lets him speak in assembly:

This scepter will be the mighty force behind my oath:
someday, I swear, a yearning for AchiIles will strike
Achaea's sons and all your armies! But then, Atrides,
harrowed as you will be, nothing you do can save you—
not when your hordes of fighters drop and die,
cut down by the hands of man-killing Hector! Then—
then you will tear your heart out, desperate, raging
that you disgraced the best of the Achaeansl"
Down on the ground
he dashed the scepter studded bright with golden nails,
then took his seat again. The son of Atreus smoldered,
glaring across at him, but Nestor rose between them,
the man of winning words, the clear speaker of Pylos...

Nestor saves the day again, but Achilles has angrily said that he'll fight no more forever. As we explained yesterday, he held the less powerful scepter—the scepter studded bright with golden nails which gave a chieftain permission to speak—as he denounced the lord of men.

Thousands of years before the Magna Carta, Agamemnon held the royal scepter--but he was subject to rebuke and challenge by the lesser Argive chieftains. In thissense, the Argives were practicing an early form of democracy--a form or democracy which has keeled over and died within the withered thought leaders of our own Blue America.

They embarrassed themselves on cable last night, then again this very morning. Within their own withered night-time councils, they agree to repeat our tribe's standard claims, with this memorized motto emblazoned on our Blue nation's coat of arms:

That's exactly right!

Our thought leaders are paid by their corporate owners. They're paid extremely well. As a general matter, you aren't allowed to know how much.

They know they must go on the TV machine and tell us the stories we like. The "thought leaders" who crowd Red America's stages behave the same way. Frequently, though not always, their behavior is even dumber and worse.

Tomorrow, we'll move ahead to the question of motive, where we're all Achaeans now. But before we move on in that way, we wanted to assure you of this:

In this one major way, the lunatic men who laid siege to Troy were our moral and intellectual betters. They weren't willing to take dictation, not even from the lord of men. 

The lord of men held the royal scepter. It had come to him from Zeus himself.

Despite that fact, lesser chieftains were prepared to rise in council and state their actual views. Our cable stars know that they mustn't do that. None of them rise to the level of being Achaeans now.

Tomorrow: Why these crackpots sailed

The Times also starts to try to explain!

TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2024

Also, Hannah Dreier's Pulitzer Prize: Yesterday, to its credit if somewhat belatedly, the Washington Post finally began to try to explain.

In yesterday afternoon's report, we linked you to David Nakamura's report. Yesterday morning, his report had appeared online under this dual headline:

This obscure N.Y. election law is at the heart of Trump’s hush money trial
Prosecutors say a misdemeanor state conspiracy statute spells out the underlying crime Trump aimed to conceal when he made hush money payments in 2016. 

Nakamura was trying to explain the nature of the felony—actually, the nature of the 34 felonies—with which Trump stands charged. Perhaps because the Post had finally made this effort, the New York Times followed suit yesterday afternoon:

Why Does Trump Face Felony Charges? Prosecutors Say He Was Hiding Other Crimes.
Donald J. Trump faces 34 felony counts in his Manhattan trial, but none involve the other misconduct that prosecutors say he engaged in.

Now the Times has started to try to explain! It seems to us that these "explainer" attempts have arrived rather late in the game.

That said, better somewhat late than never! At any rate, it seems that almost everyone agrees with some version of the following:

The New York election law is obscure, or at least is conceptually complicated. Also, Trump is faced with 34 counts—but for some reason, none involve "the other misconduct that prosecutors say he engaged in."

Do you understand that small fandango? At this site, we'll request another day or two to work our way through these reports.

For today, we turn to yesterday's announcement of this year's Pulitzer Prizes. We especially direct your attention to one of the three million topics those of us in Blue America don't seem to give a flying felafel about.

We refer to the reports in the New York Times for which Hannah Dreier won this year's Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting. Headline included, this morning's report in the Times tells us this:

The New York Times and The Washington Post Win 3 Pulitzers Each

[...]

The prize for investigations went to Hannah Dreier of The Times, for an exposé of migrant child labor in the modern United States, and the governmental blunders and disregard that have allowed the illegal practice to persist. This was the second Pulitzer awarded to Ms. Dreier, who won the 2019 feature writing prize for her coverage of the criminal gang MS-13 for ProPublica.

That was the thumbnail in the Times.  In its official list of winners, the Pulitzer organization describes Dreier's work as shown:

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
Hannah Dreier of The New York Times

For a deeply reported series of stories revealing the stunning reach of migrant child labor across the United States—and the corporate and governmental failures that perpetuate it.

"Deeply reported?" You can say that again! Also, widely ignored—but then, what else is new?

Dreier's first report about this topic appeared on the front page of the Times on Sunday, February 26, 2023. 

We wrote about it the next day. To review that report, just click here.

As the year proceeded, Dreier followed with several other reports on this topic. You've never heard about those reports because nobody actually cares.

Nobody cares in Red America; nobody cares in Blue. In Blue America, we spend the hours of our days talking, in endless, thoroughly useless detail, about the chances of getting Donald J. Trump frog-marched off to jail.

Nicolle doesn't seem to care about exploited kids, including those 12-year-old roofers. Judging from appearances, neither do her favorite reporters and friends.

To borrow from sacred Thoreau, we denizens of Blue America "labor under a mistake." Over the years, we've managed to persuade ourselves that we're very, very smart and that we deeply care.

Neither proposition is especially true. Our thought leaders spend their days talking to themselves and to their various friends and to no one else.  They talk about the tiny handful of topics which please them, and they talk about no one and nothing else.

Might we denizens of Blue America learn to see ourselves more clearly?  The chances of that are very poor. 

That said, Dreier's work was deeply impressive. Also, no one gives a flying farthing about her prize-winning front-page reports, and no one ever will.

Donald J. Trump may have had consensual sex, on one occasion, in 2006! As with the Argives, so too here:

We care about that with all our hearts, and we care about little else.

ACHAEANS: Although he never won an election...

TUESDAY, MAY 7, 2024

...Agamemnon was the elect: Agamemnon, lord of men, never won an election. As far as we know, there were no elections, as we know them, during the late Bronze Age. 

 Agamemnon, lord of men, never won an election. Clearly, though, Agamemnon was the elect.

In the following passage, the leading authority on the fictional figure explains the source of his status:

Sceptre

A sceptre (or scepter in American English) is a staff or wand held in the hand by a ruling monarch as an item of royal or imperial insignia, signifying sovereign authority.

[...]

Among the early Greeks, the sceptre was a long staff, such as Agamemnon wielded (Iliad, i) or was used by respected elders, and came to be used by judges, military leaders, priests, and others in authority. It is represented on painted vases as a long staff tipped with a metal ornament. When the sceptre is borne by Zeus or Hades, it is headed by a bird. 

It was this symbol of Zeus, the king of the gods and ruler of Olympus, that gave their inviolable status to the kerykes, the heralds, who were thus protected by the precursor of modern diplomatic immunity. When, in the Iliad, Agamemnon sends Odysseus to parley with the leaders of the Achaeans, he lends him his sceptre.

We're puzzled by several parts of that account. That includes its description of Agamemnon wielding a scepter in Book One of the Iliad. 

In Book One, it's actually the enraged Achilles who "swears a mighty oath" upon a "scepter studded bright with golden nails." After swearing his mighty oath, he then "dashes it to the ground." 

Within the Robert Fagles translation, Agamemnon isn't shown wielding a scepter until we reach Book Two. In Book One, it's Achilles who is wielding a scepter during a furious meeting of Argive chieftains. 

Argive chieftains weren't reluctant to state their views during these nighttime councils. In an end note regarding that passage in question, Fagles distinguishes between two different types of scepter:

1.273 This scepter. The scepter [held by Achilles] is passed by the heralds to anyone in the assembly who wishes to speak—while he holds it, he has the floor. It is a symbol of royal and divine authority, and also stands for the rule of law and due process in the community. 

It is not the same as Agamemnon's own royal scepter (2.118-26), which has come down to him from Zeus through several generations of Argive kings.

According to Professor Fagles, Achilles was wielding the type of scepter which allowed a chieftain to speak during an Argive assembly. 

As noted, Achilles is savaging Agamemnon, lord of men, during this part of the meeting. By the norms of the day, Agamemnon's exalted status doesn't exempt him from the most remarkable types of criticism, even within the tribe.

As for Agamemnon, he wielded a different type of scepter; he wielded a royal scepter. Agememnon's scepter has come down to him through several generations of kings, but it originated with Zeus himself.

In this way, Agamemnon was seen to stand in a line of authority stretching directly back to the most powerful of the Olympian gods. Early in Book Two, the poem describes Agamemnon (AKA "Atrides") rousing himself from a dream, then striding forward to exercise his authority:

But rousing himself from sleep, the divine voice
swirling round him, Atrides sat up, bolt awake,
pulled on a soft tunic, linen never worn,
and over it threw his flaring battle-cape,
under his smooth feet he fastened supple sandals,
across his shoulder slung his silver-studded sword.
Then he seized the royal scepter of his fathers—
its power can never die—and grasping it tightly
off he strode to the ships of Argives armed in bronze.

The power of Agamemnon's royal scepter could never die. Later in Book Two, the line of descent of the royal scepter is explicitly described:

King Agamemnon
rose to his feet, raising high in hand the scepter
Hephaestus made with all his strength and skill.
Hephaestus gave it to Cronus' son, Father Zeus
and Zeus gave it to Hermes, the giant-killing Guide
and Hermes gave it to Pelops. that fine charioteer,
Pelops gave it to Atreus, marshal of fighting men,
who died and passed it on to Thyestes rich in flocks
and he in turn bestowed it on Agamemnon, to bear on high
as he ruled his many islands and lorded mainland Argos.
Now, leaning his weight upon that kingly scepter
Atrides declared his will to all Achaea's armies...

The scepter had been fashioned by Hephaestus, one of the Olympian gods. Hephaestus had given it to Zeus. Eventually, the scepter had been handed down to Agamemnon himself.

As Agamemnon declares his will in this instance, he is having one of his various breakdowns. Later, in Book Nine, as Agamemnon melts down again, a trusted elder reassures the lord of men about his state of election:

Nestor was first to speak—from the early days
his plans and tactics always seemed the best.
With good will to the chiefs he rose and spoke,
"Great marshal Atrides, lord of men Agamemnon—
with you I will end, my King, with you I will begin,
since you hold sway over many warriors, vast armies,
and Zeus has placed in your hands the royal scepter
and time-honored laws, so you will advise them well."

As we've noted in the past, madness was constantly gripping Agamemnon. Nestor, offering sound advice, reminds him of the role assigned to him by Zeus. 

In essence, this is the divine right of kings, built upon the deference shown to those whose authority came to them from the gods. 

In theory, we regard such thinking as silly today. That said, dating back to the dawn of the west, it has been the norm for us the humans to bow to the divine right of kings. 

This kind of deference is bred in the born. It adopts various forms.

In our modern political context, we citizens of Bue America are inclined to ridicule members of Red America for building a cult around Candidate Trump—for deferring to him as if he carried divine authority. 

In fairness, this pattern is deeply bred in the bone—and obvious elements of this impulse are observable within our own Blue America, though elements of our own behavior may be invisible to us. 

In our current two Americas, we Blues tend to mock voters in Red America for deferring to the divine right of Trump. But we Blues segregate ourselves within our own tribal circles, and the Achaeans were ready to challenge Agamemnon n a way which never occurs when "our favorite reporters and friends" gather on our corporate "cable news" channel to tell us the stories we like to hear and to mock the cult which we can see—the cult which is operating Over There, among the Others.

At present, leadership cadres of Red America are routinely an undisguised, astonishing mess. That said, those of us in Blue America tend to fall in line behind our own leadership cadres in ways which make the Argive leaders seem like free-thinking iconoclasts.

We repeat the embellished claims our leadership cadres invent. We talk about locking the other guy up—and as we'll note this afternoon, we often seem to care about little or nothing else.

The leadership cadres of Red America are routinely (not always) an undisguised mess. But those of us in Blue America may not always see ourselves as we actually are. Is it possible that we can learn to see ourselves more clearly through a trip back in time to the western world's first poem of war?

Consider our current embarrassing state:

We want to send the other guy to jail because he allegedly hid the fact that he allegedly had (fully consensual) sex on one occasion with a woman who wasn't his wife! And yet we love our own Dear Jack—we continue to love him so dearly!

When a population loses its way that badly, it might be time to journey back to the dawn of the west and make an effort to figure out how we reached this embarrassing point.

Will a look at the Iliad help us see ourselves more clearly? The odds of that are very slight. But what else is left to try?

Agamemnon never won an election! It seems to us that we should be embarrassed, chastened in a good-natured way, by the way we the Blues are now approaching ours.

Tomorrow: Then and now, sources of rage

This afternoon: Hannah Dreier's Pulitzer prize

The Post begins to try to explain!

MONDAY, MAY 6, 2024

Also, Welker's repeated question: Kudos to the Washington Post for what it has started to try to do.

In a lengthy report by David Nakamura, the paper has now started to try to explain the legal basis on which Donald J. Trump has been charged with a felony—actually, with 34 felonies—in the ongoing "hush money" trial.

The report appeared online this very morning at 5 o'clock Eastern. Online, a pair of headlines say this:

This obscure N.Y. election law is at the heart of Trump’s hush money trial
Prosecutors say a misdemeanor state conspiracy statute spells out the underlying crime Trump aimed to conceal when he made hush money payments in 2016.

The N.Y. election law is obscure, and the legal theory involved in the matter seems to be complex. We want to take another day to work through what Nakamura has written, but this type of report is long overdue, and the Post deserves our somewhat belated applause.

We feel differently about Kristen Welker's repeated question for Tim Scott. On yesterday's Meet the Press, she asked the question again and again, and then again and again.

 She asked the question at least six times. The effort started like this:

WELKER (5/5/24): Well, senator, will you commit to accepting the election results of 2024, bottom line?

SCOTT: At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump, and I'm excited to get back to low inflation, low unemployment—

WELKER: Wait— Wait, senator, yes or no? Yes or no? Will you accept the election results of 2024 no matter who wins?

SCOTT: That is my statement.

The effort continued from there. To peruse the full back-and-forth, you can just click here.

For the record, Welker didn't just ask the question six times. She kept asking for a "yes or no answer," a highly unhelpful type of journalistic practice.

Question:

How can you ask a pol to declare that he'll accept the result of an election which hasn't yet taken place? Suppose some real irregularity happens this time in some state? Is a pol really supposed to say, in advance, that he'll just let it go?

Example:

Candidate Gore challenged the initial results in Florida in Election 2000. There's no reason why he shouldn't have done so, and it would have been silly to make him pledge, before the fact, that he'd never do such a thing.

Or did Welker mean something different by her repeated question? We have no sympathy for Scott in this matter, or for his tedious, time-killing non-answer answers. But it seems to us that Welker's question made and makes little sense, and it makes absolutely no sense as a "yes or no" type of question.

Are we the people bright enough to run a so-called democracy? That's one of the questions we'll be asking over the next few months.

The Post has started to try to explain the legal basis for the Gotham "hush money" trial. We think the Post deserves at least two cheers, but we don't think Welker's (rather familiar) question made a whole lot of sense.

ACHAEANS: As Blue America earns its way out...

MONDAY, MAY 6, 2024

...are we all Achaeans now? We start today with a question:

What is the total student enrollment at Columbia University?

You're asking an excellent question! At this site, we have a close relative who will be a freshman there in the fall. Her exploits as a schoolwide spelling bee star were described in these pages way back when she was in the third grade!

How many students will she be joining in September? According to Columbia's provost, these were the enrollment figures as of the fall of 2022:

Columbia University enrollment, fall 2022:
Undergraduate schools: 9,739
Morningside graduate and professional schools: 22,063
Medical center graduate schools: 4,825
Special programs: 22 

Total enrollment: 36,649

That's the best we can show you. As of the fall of 2022, there were over 36,000 students enrolled at the well-known Gotham school.

Now for our second question:

How many Columbia students were arrested last week—arrested for their participation in the takeover of the school's Hamilton Hall?

As we noted yesterday, the numbers have been all over the place in the New York Times. That said, according to this report by NPR, "city officials" have set the total number of arrests at Columbia at a whopping 112.

We're never happy to hear that someone has been arrested. (Sometimes such action is necessary.) Meanwhile, here's a supplementary call of the roll from the Times:

HARRIS ET AL (5/6/24): After pro-Palestinian demonstrators occupied a building on Columbia’s campus this [sic] week, demanding that the university end all financial ties with Israel, the New York Police Department moved in and arrested more than 100 people there.

[...]

A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country. One man who was taken into custody inside Hamilton Hall, the occupied campus building, had been charged with rioting and wearing a disguise to evade the police during a demonstration in California nearly a decade earlier.

On Saturday, that account appeared online. Today, the report appears in the Times' print editions.

According to the Times report, of the "more than 100 people" who were arrested, there were "nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university." 

If we stick with the semi-official number of arrests (112), that suggests that something like eighty people who did have ties to Columbia were arrested last week.  

If all eighty of those people were students, that would mean that 80 Columbia students—out of more than 36,000 in all!—were arrested in connection with the building takeover which produced so much commentary nationwide.

Something like eighty students tops, out of something like 36,000! Using the numbers we have, 360 students would have been one percent of the student population. Eighty students—or maybe just sixty or seventy?—would be something like one-fifth of one percent.

In short, a tiny percentage of Columbia students got arrested last week. We doesn't necessarily mean that those students were "wrong" in what they did, though we ourselves aren't major fans of their highly dramatic behavior.

The small number of participants doesn't necessarily mean that the takeover of Hamilton Hall was "wrong." It may suggest that something is "wrong"—that something is lacking—in the way we, as a floundering nation, report and then pretend to discuss such high-profile events.

In fact, ludicrous conduct has been observed at some of our floundering nation's largest, best-known "news orgs." Consider what happened on the Fox News Channel when Howard Kurtz attempted to discuss the protests at UCLA.

To its credit, the Fox News Channel has seemed to be making an adjustment in the way it presents such events. At issue is the following question:

When students conduct the protests in question, how should those students be described?

Should they be described as pro-Palestinian? Should they be described as anti-Israel?

On Fox News Channel programs, hosts were frequently describing such students as "pro-Hamas," full stop. This is the way the jackals are inclined to behave on the clown-car "cable news" channel.

Over the weekend, the term "pro-Hamas" had seemed to disappear from this channel's chyrons. But sad! Sunday morning, on Kurtz's MediaBuzz program, the rank designation was suddenly back in a chyron you can see simply by clicking here:

4 UCLA REPORTERS ATTACKED 
PRO-HAMAS ATTACKERS SEND ONE TO HOSPITAL

That's what the chyron said. To his tiny credit, Kurtz didn't use that noxious term of art as he discussed this topic. Somewhat oddly, though, he failed to describe the people who conducted this attack in any way at all.

We decided to fact-check the incident. When we did, sure enough! 

In fact, the handful of people who conducted this violent attack were actually pro-Israel! For the Daily Bruin's report, click here. Headline included, here's the relevant part of the report from the Los Angeles Times:

Four UCLA student journalists attacked by pro-Israel counterprotesters on campus

Four student journalists who work for the UCLA Daily Bruin were attacked shortly before 3:30 a.m. Wednesday by pro-Israel counterprotesters during a campus demonstration that turned violent.

Daily Bruin news editor Catherine Hamilton, 21, told The Times she recognized one of the counterprotesters as someone who had previously verbally harassed her and taken pictures of her press badge. The individual instructed the group to encircle the student journalists, she said, before they sprayed the four with Mace or pepper spray, flashed lights in their faces and chanted Hamilton’s name.

As she tried to break free, Hamilton said, she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen; another student journalist was pushed to the ground and beaten and kicked for nearly a minute. The attack was first reported in the Daily Bruin.

This handful of violent people were actually "pro-Israel." Somehow, Kurtz failed to say anything, one way or another—and someone inside the belly of the breakdown tagged them as "pro-Hamas."

That's the way this garbage frequently works at the Fox News Channel. That said, how well are we the people of Blue America doing over here?

Long ago ad far away, the western world's first poem of war was composed. As the famous poem begins, Achaean forces had spent almost ten years conducting a siege of Troy.

Judged by conventional modern norms, the Achaeans were pretty much out of their minds. That said, the current "hush money" trial in Gotham reminds us of their early ways.

Are we all Achaeans now? Is it possible that our own tribe, here in Blue America, is in the process of earning its way out?

This morning, a new survey by ABC News/Ipsos has Biden leading Trump by four points in the nationwide popular vote. On the down side, that's a margin which might suggest a close outcome in the Electoral College.

It's entirely possible that President Biden will be re-elected this year. But are we all Achaeans now? And is it possible that this bromide is actually true:

Everything we ever needed to know we learned from reading the Iliad.

Over here in Blue America, are we all Achaeans now? We'll start to explore that complex question this week—though in our view, the anthropological answer may possibly tilt toward yes.

A tony percentage of Columbia students took part in the Hamilton Hall takeover.

Despite that fact, a deluge of media coverage followed. This may well best we best we know how to do, even at this point in time.

We Blues! Are we earning our way out? Perhaps more to the ultimate point, are we all Achaeans now?

Tomorrow: Before the Magna Carta

SUNDAY: How many outsiders were arrested?

SUNDAY, MAY 5, 2024

The New York Times doesn't seem sure: For starters, we strongly agree with Nia Prater concerning one basic point.

Last week, Prater began writing for New York magazine about the arrests by the NYPD at Columbia University.

On Wednesday, she did an initial post on the subject. On Thursday, it was updated. 

For starters, we agree with the general thrust of the observation with which Prater closed her piece. In this passage, she's speaking about a term of art employed by Mayor Adamas and by the NYPD:

The term outside agitator is notably fraught: It was frequently deployed by authorities to undermine civil-rights protests in the 1960s. And in 2020, New York’s then-police commissioner Dermot Shea used the term to justify harsh police crackdowns on social-justice demonstrators in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

"Outside agitators" were in the house! Like Prater, we'd been struck by the oddness of the adoption of that heavily fraught old term.

(For the record, we'd been struck by the way the term was being used by journalists, principally by the Morning Joe team.)

According to Mayor Adams, "outside agitators" had been in the house! In our view, that term has a terrible, murder-soaked history. It ought to be laid to rest.

In our view, Prater's aim was true concerning the use of that term. That said, Prater was mainly examining a different question:

How many people who got arrested at Columbia weren't affiliated with the university?

Prater seemed to be a hard sceptic concerning the NYPD's claims. In her updated report, she said the NYPD had been refusing to offer specific numbers, even as she linked to sites where something resembling specific numbers seemed to be provided.

Say you want a revolution? These complaints about the lack of specifics struck as an unfortunate brand of weak Blue American tea. That said, no one has played the fool concerning this question in quite the way the New York Times has.

In this morning's print editions, the Times offers a profile of a veteran organizer who played a role in the takeover of Columbia's Hamilton Hall. Along the way, headline included, the Times report says this:

The 63-Year-Old Career Activist Among the Protesters at Columbia

Among the throng of Columbia University student protesters gathered outside Hamilton Hall on campus early Tuesday morning was a gray-haired woman in her 60s.

In a video captured by The New York Times, the protesters can be seen trying to push their way toward the building as the woman—decades older than the crowd—pleads with two young counterprotesters trying to block them from barricading the occupied building.

“This is ridiculous,” the woman says, as the men stand with their backs against the doors, apparently trying to keep protesters away from the building. “We’re trying to end a genocide in Gaza.”

The woman at the center of this encounter on the night protesters stormed and then occupied the building was Lisa Fithian, a longtime activist and trainer for left-wing protesters whom the Police Department would later publicly describe as a “confirmed professional agitator.”

[...]

City and university officials have not said how many of the protesters arrested were not affiliated with the school.

Linda Fithian wasn't present during the arrests and she wasn't arrested. That said:

According to the New York Times, "city and university officials haven't said how many" of the people arrested "were not affiliated with the school."

It seems to us that various police officials actually have offered some such numbers. That said, someone else has called this particular roll. 

We refer to the New York Times! Yesterday, the New York Times called the roll concerning this question in this online news report:

Outsiders Were Among Columbia Protesters, but They Dispute Instigating Clashes

A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country. One man who was taken into custody inside Hamilton Hall, the occupied campus building, had been charged with rioting and wearing a disguise to evade the police during a demonstration in California nearly a decade earlier.

Yesterday, the Times reported that "nearly three dozen" of the people arrested "lacked ties to the university." As of today, a reader could almost get the impression that no one has any idea.

For what it's worth, yesterday's head count wasn't the first attempt by the Times to address this knotty question. On Thursday, the Times had published a report which nailed the numbers down in the following way:

Locks, Chains, Diversions: How Columbia Students Seized Hamilton Hall

[...]

Most of those arrested on and around Columbia’s campus appeared to be graduate students, undergraduates or people otherwise affiliated with the school, according to a Police Department list of people who were arrested that night that was obtained by The Times.

At least a few, however, appeared to have no connection to the university, according to The Times’s review of the list. One was a 40-year-old man who had been arrested at anti-government protests around the country, according to a different internal police document. His role in the organization of the protest is still unclear.

[...]

On the list of protesters arrested at or near Columbia were a handful of people without clear ties to the university, including one man who apparently lives in the neighborhood and who was arrested outside, and a woman who describes herself online as a “poet and farmer” who went to college in Vermont.

According to that Times report, the number of arrestees who weren't affiliated with Columbia was either "a handful" or "at least a few." The Times knew that because they'd reviewed a Police Department list.

(How many arrestees were affiliated? According to the Times, the specific number was "most.")

Yesterday, the Times reported that the actual number of unaffiliated arrestees is "nearly three dozen." (On Thursday morning's Morning Joe, we saw the NYPD's John Chell set the number of outsiders arrested at Columbia at 30-35.)

Today, the Times may give readers the impression that the actual number remains unknown. There's no mention of yesterday's report that the actual number is "nearly three dozen." 

There's no mention of the paper's earlier claim that the actual number was "a handful," and there's no mention of the ongoing claim that police officials haven't been willing to say.

This is the way the game is played by our brightest Blue Tribe newspaper. In fairness, the official organs of Red America are sometimes even worse. 

We agree with Prater about the use of that noxious, blood-soaked term. That said, she hasn't updated her  own claim about the NYPD's refusal to offer numbers or to back up its assertions.

How many outsiders got arrested? What role had they played in these events? We're not entirely sure, but it sounds like the number may have been 30-35!

Meanwhile, at the New York Times, does anyone know what anyone else is saying? It's a bit like with New England weather:

If you don't like the New York Times' numbers, you can just wait a while.

The prosecutors had to go out and got drunk!

SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2024

What viewers were told on Fox: It's the wonderful thing about "cable news." Everybody gets to go to bed happy!

Yesterday, starting at 4 p.m., Blue America was reassured about what Hope Hicks had said. Late last night, in the 11 p.m. hour, viewers in Red America were handed its own reassuring account before turning in for the night.

Normally, Fox News at Night is hosted by Trace Gallagher, live and direct from Los Angeles. Last night, he was replaced by Jonathan Hunt, who has a British accent.

Such accents are widely understood to signal erudition. In this instance, here's the way Hunt began his segment about the Gotham trial session:

HUNT (5/3/24): Dramatic testimony today, in what is of course the first-ever criminal trial of a former president, from ex-Trump insider Hope Hicks. Nate Foy has those details tonight, live from outside New York Stater Supreme Court.

Quite a day in court, Nate! 

FOY: Oh, it certainly was, Jonathan!

That's the way the handoff occurred. To watch this entire segment, you can start by clicking here.

It had been quite a day in court! Foy continued from there:

FOY (continuing directly): Today we got new insight into former president Donald Trump's mindset in the days leading up to the 2016 presidential election when women came forward and stories went public concerning alleged affairs that Trump denies.

His former adviser, Hope Hicks, testified that Trump was very much concerned about his family—that he didn't want anything embarrassing coming out during the campaign that would hurt his family, that he very much wanted to make his family proud of him and that he was concerned specifically with his wife, former first last Melania Trump, instructing Hicks to make sure that newspapers were not to be delivered to the residence so that she might see articles detailing the allegations. 

Here's Trump speaking after a busy day in court:

In short, Foy mentioned Trump's reported concerns about his family, forgot to mention any concerns about the way the reports about the shakedowns by Daniels and McDougal might affect his White House campaign.

At this point, Hunt and Foy played tape of Trump's statement outside court. Eventually, Foy continued from there, mentioning no part of Hicks' testimony that could imaginably implicate Trump in any wrongdoing or criminal conduct.

When Foy had finished his absurdly selective report, Hunt introduced criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor David Gelman. 

Presumably, it's hard to book top talent at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday. Gelman started like this: 

GELMAN: Well, I'Il tell you one thing—the prosecutors, I think, are having a very strong drink tonight because nothing that came out of the testimony from Miss Hicks had anything to do with the matter and it didn't affect President Trump whatsoever...

The pair continued along in that semi-fantastical vein. Summarizing:

On Blue America's cable news channel, the testimony by Hicks had Trump down for the count. In Red America, the prosecutors were said to be out at a bar, pretty much getting shitfaced.

Variants of this account were performed through the course of the evening on Fox. These are the wages of cultural  / political / intellectual death as mandated by the pseudo-journalistic practice called "segregation by viewpoint."

We humans! We just get dumber, then dumber and dumber, when there's no one there to push back, howl or complain.

SATURDAY: Who was helped by what Hope Hicks said?

SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2024

It depends on which channel you watch: Do we the people get the national discourse we deserve?

We wouldn't recommend such a sour outlook. That said, the question popped into our heads this morning when we reviewed the online Washington Post.

Oof! As of 8:30 this very morning, these were the famous newspaper's five "most read" submissions:

MOST READ, The Washington Post

1) Advice: 
Carolyn Hax chat: My boyfriend’s closest confidante is his on-again, off-again ex

2) Tom Selleck is 79 and, whew, just look at this magnificent specimen

3) Analysis:
Kristi Noem just won’t stop talking about killing her dog

4) Advice:
Carolyn Hax: Longtime friend won’t forgive being last-minute canceled for a guy

5) Hope Hicks gets teary testifying at Trump’s hush money trial

As Shelley once suggested, gaze upon our works! 

In this morning's print edition of the Post, the news report about the Hicks testimony is the featured report on the paper's front page. In the paper's online edition, we had to scroll way down the page on order to find it at all.

Dogs and Tom Selleck and boyfriends oh my! So Blue America's reading selections may be inclined to drift.

Regarding yesterday's testimony by Hicks, we'd say that the Associated Press joined the Post in offering an account which seemed to be fair and balanced. 

Did her testimony help the prosecution, or may it even have helped the defense? Especially for those who weren't physically present, there's no perfect way to tell.

That said, you can read the AP's treatment just by clicking here. Headline included, here are some of the relevant sections of the Post's front-page report:

Hope Hicks gets teary testifying at Trump’s hush money trial

[...]

Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office wanted Hicks to show the jury how worried the 2016 Trump campaign was about negative stories about him and women—a key element in Trump’s alleged motive in the hush money case.

Her testimony seemed to accomplish that limited goal, but overall her tenor was respectful and complimentary of Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president in the November election; far from an aide turning against her former boss, she came across as a still-loyal and reluctant participant in his prosecution.

[...]

For prosecutors, the main purpose of Hicks’s testimony seemed to be showing that Trump and his campaign were very concerned about allegations made against him by women.

When it came to the Daniels story, which surfaced publicly [in 2018] while he was in the White House, Hicks said Trump told her that “it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”

As soon as Hicks said that, prosecutors ended their questioning.

Her testimony, while emotional at one moment, did not offer any major revelations or surprises, but it adds to prosecutors’ larger point that Trump was motivated to keep scandalous stories out of the public eye during the election.

But Hicks’s account also made clear that her former boss was concerned about the potential effect of the allegations on his family.

When the Journal published a story in early November 2016 about the National Enquirer buying the rights to a Playboy model’s tale of an affair with Trump—a purchase the tabloid made for the express purpose of keeping the allegation quiet—Hicks said the presidential candidate worried about Melania Trump’s reaction.

She said Trump was “concerned about the story, he was concerned about how it would be viewed by his wife, and he wanted me to make sure that the newspapers weren’t delivered to their residence that morning.”

In the judgment of the Post's reporters, the testimony had cut one way, then also cut another. The judgment of the AP's reporters followed a similar track.

As Walter Cronkite might have said, and that's the way it possibly was! Unless you were watching cable news, where a pair of battling corporate cadres seemed inclined to offer tribal viewers the stories such viewers might like.

On Blue America's channel of record, the onslaught began at 4 o'clock when Nicolle Wallace went on the air. Soon, she was introducing "some of our most favorite reporters and friends" to help her with the task at hand.

(Is "most favorite" a redundancy? We still aren't entirely sure.)

"Lucky for us," the New York Times' Susanne Craig was at the table, we were apparently told. (Wallace swallowed her words at this point.) 

Wallace then threw to "my friend and colleague, NBC News' Vaughan Hillyard," who was reporting live and direct from outside the Manhattan courtroom.

We viewers knew we were safely ensconced within the cocoon of the clan. What followed was a highly selective account of what Hicks had said, and of what it had plainly meant.

Within a matter of minutes, the gilding of the lily was general over the cable news program. By 4:09, Wallace and Craig were completing each other's sentences:

CRAIG (5/3/24): It felt like a confession that she had come forward and said this.

WALLACE: Well, I mean, that's the heart of their case, is that by [20]18, he said, "Yeah, I paid for it, but thank God it didn't come out"—

CRAIG (interrupting): —"Thank God it didn't come out and influence the election." And it was just this moment. And then she kept tearing up as the cross-examination of her continued, and it was such an emotional moment today.

The panelists had the official transcript of the testimony. By now, though, they were paraphrasing rather freely. They may have seemed to be quoting Hicks or Trump as they pleasured us in this manner.

 At this point, up stepped former prosecutor Kristi Greenberg, who proceeded to offer this:

GREENBERG (continuing directly): Yeah, and what I would say, you cannot overstate just how significant this testimony was...She went up there and she told the truth. She said, "Yeah! This clearly mattered to him. This was about the campaign."  As you said, that is the whole ballgame here...

This was like the mike-drop moment the prosecution ended with. And then, she really, you know, said, "Yes! You know, this mattered, he understood this was about the campaign."

She didn't have to do it, and she did. And it, I think, is so damaging to his case.

She was paraphrasing freely too, with her paraphrases possibly seeming to take the form of apparent quotations.

"I felt like it was a confession," Craig said all over again.

"I mean, this is whole case," Wallace added. "This was the bombshell testimony that proves this was it."

On Blue America's corporate channel, reliable favorites offered creative paraphrase of the various things Hicks supposedly said that Donald J. Trump had said.

Her testimony had been a bombshell. It had been the whole case. 

You couldn't overstate how significant it had been. It was the whole ballgame, viewers were told. "It felt like a confession."

These town criers restricted themselves to roughly half of what it seems that Hicks actually said. Later, on the Fox News Channel, the sifted accounts of what had been said were almost surely crazier and were more absurdly selective.

According to the banshees of the Fox News Channel, Hicks' testimony had pretty much cinched the trial—in this case, in favor of Donald J. Trump! 

Wallace and her gaggle of favorites had skipped past the remarks Trump apparently made about keeping the news from his family and his wife. Now, the gaggle of gargoyles on the Murdoch machine mentioned nothing else.

For whatever reason, the Internet Archive is currently struggling. We can't link you to Fox News programs at the present time.

But just as the Wallace gang offered the moments which cut one way, Fox personnel spent the night stampeding their viewers off in the other direction. In their account, the case against Trump had basically come to an end, thanks to what Hicks had said.

Meanwhile, how about that man, Tom Selleck? Good lord, is that guy a hunk! 

(We'll try to link you to Fox News accounts later on, once the Internet Archive is back.)

Final point:

How will Hicks' testimony cut with the Gotham jury? We don't have any way of knowing, and neither does anyone else.

CONCERNS: Their concerns are our concerns!

FRIDAY, MAY 3, 2024

Except they're totally different: Their concerns are our concerns! Except. of course, for the fact that they're totally different.

The two different leadership guilds agree on one basic point. In Red America and in Blue America, those guilds are speaking out, on a daily basis, against "election interference."

The leadership guilds of the two Americas share that basic concern. The problem is, they disagree about the way in which election interference has occurred.

On the Fox News Channel, the fact that one candidate us on trial—the fact that he's facing a highly complex legal charge—represents a form of election interference. 

A gag order keeps him from stating certain views concerning that trial. In Blue America, we're rarely told that the ACLU declared Judge Merchan's gag order to be unconstitutional, just like the Red cadre says.

On MSNBC, we voters who live in Bue America are told something different. We're told that the events of January 6 were an attempt at election interference—and that Candidate Trump is planning to do it again if he loses again this year.

Each side decries election interference. The problem is, they can't agree on where the misconduct is!

(“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God," President Lincoln once said. That was March 4, 1865, but it's a bit like that today.)

Over here in Blue America, our concerns are strongly felt and repeatedly announced. We're concerned about the possibility of losing "our democracy."

The ability to conduct free and fair elections is a basic part of that highly complex political system. Today, we ask you to consider a question:

Where did "election interference" come from in the matter of the 2016 presidential campaign?

We start with an obvious observation. Such interference can come from more than one place.  

In the case of that campaign, it may have come from James Comey. It may have come from Russian hackers.

It may have come from "the dodgy dossier." People's assessments will differ. 

Now we ask a highly theoretical question. We ask you denizens of Blue America to squint your eyes and stretch your assumptions a bit as you consider this question:

Might such election interference also have come from Stormy Daniels herself? 

Is it possible that Michael Cohen—and, allegedly, Donald J. Trump—headed off a case of interference when he gave Daniels a sack of cash to keep her from "telling her story?" To keep her from "telling her story" about the utterly pointless matter she said she was itchin' to tell?

Our question takes us back through time, back to the 1992 campaign. Is it possible that Gennifer Flowers staged a type of "election interference" when she stepped forward with an elaborate tale about a torrid love affair with "my Bill"—a thrilling tale which was almost surely bogus, but which almost knocked the eventual president out of that White House campaign? 

Flowers achieved instant fame—and a very large bundle of cash. Can her conduct be seen as a form of "election interference?" If so, how about Daniels' initial request for a million dollars, in the absence of which she would be forced to tell her pointless story?

Daniels' story might be true and it might be false, but it's utterly pointless. That said, given the way our human brains work, it imaginably could have changed the outcome of the 2016 campaign.

If Daniels hadn't been handed a smaller sack of cash, might she have engaged in "election interference?" Also, are we even sure that her story was true? 

Are we sure that her (current) story is true? Consider the Daniels denials. 

Eventually, there were two such denials. Yesterday, those denials were examined during Day 10 of the Trump "hush money" trial.

In Blue America, we rarely hear about those denials. For the record, we're not saying that the denials were accurate. As far as we know, her pair of denials were false.

That said, Daniels was seeking a big bag of cash, and we don't consider her to be a fully reliable narrator. 

Daniels says that, as a child, she was sexually abused for years. Trump was born to a sociopathic father. 

You can't believe a thing he says. In this excerpt from an earlier version of the current New York Times report, the two denials are described in all their deviousness and in all their gong-show dumbness.

The thoroughly clownlike Keith Davidson is the extortion-adjacent rep who helped Daniels acquire the cash:

BROMWICH AND MCKINLEY (5/2/24): The testimony from Mr. Davidson on Thursday, his second day on the stand, painted a vivid portrait of fevered efforts by the witness, Mr. Cohen and others to keep allegations of extramarital affairs by Mr. Trump out of the public eye.

Those included a January 2018 denial that Ms. Daniels issued after inquiries from The Wall Street Journal.

Ms. Daniels said she had not had a “sexual and/or romantic affair” with the president, and on the stand, Mr. Davidson took pains to explain why that was “technically true.” He said that the one-night stand in a Lake Tahoe hotel, which Mr. Trump denies occurred, was not romantic.

[...]

Mr. Davidson painted a portrait of life within a Los Angeles demimonde, complete with meetings in the Marilyn Monroe Suite of the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel—“a classic,” he called it—where Ms. Daniels drafted a second denial of an affair with Mr. Trump. (Mr. Davidson said this one, too, was technically true, as it denied a “relationship,” a word that he felt conveyed an “ongoing interaction.”)

So much technical accuracy, so little attempt at conveying what's said to be true at this time!

At any rate, did you follow the narrow logic employed by Daniels' former rep? Her first denial was technically accurate because her alleged encounter with Donald J. Trump actually wasn't "romantic."

Her second denial was technically accurate because that same alleged encounter didn't even rise to the level of being a "relationship!" So it went back in the day, when Daniels was giving the impression that she and the future commander didn't get it on.

Now she says the two did get it on—though just that once, in 2006, in a way which was fully consensual. We don't doubt that this statement is true. But we can't exactly prove it. 

For the record, the complexified charge against the defendant doesn't turn on whether Daniels' claim is true. That said, we're asking you to ponder a different question:

Everyone is concerned about election interference. When she was seeking a million dollars to tell a story which may or may not have been true, is it possible that Stormy Daniels was engaging in such interference? 

Starting next week, we plan to return to the late Bronze Age to place these more recent events in a broader perspective. 

Can we learn to see ourselves more clearly by revisiting the western world's first great poem of war? It seems to us that we possibly can—and it's time to take the leap.

For today, we leave you with the lady or the tiger. In your view, who was involved in election interference in this now famous exchange:

Who was threatening or attempting a type of election interference?

The person who wanted to tell an irrelevant, unconfirmable story about a single alleged event from ten years before?

Or the person who gave her a big sack of cash to eliminate this distraction?

Who was engaged in election interference in that case? In Bue America, we're told that the people who paid Daniels to shut up were engaged in that behavior—were withholding information we voters needed to have!

Also, how about this?

Who was threatening or attempting a type of election interference?

The doorman who was threatening to tell a flatly false story from thirty years before about a "love child" who didn't exist?

Or the person who gave the doorman a big sack of cash to head off this distraction?

"Your concerns and my concerns," the Hemingway character said. She did so in 1979, in the film Manhattan. 

Today, their concerns are our concerns. We all hate election interference.

We want our elections to be free and fair—and we want them to be about sex!

This afternoon: Who got arrested in Hamilton Hall?

Starting Monday: Why the Argives sailed

Kilmeade wants to see everyone's face!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2024

Please remove their protective gear! Watching cable news was especially painful this morning.

On Morning Joe, the message was gloomy. The messages went like this:

The barricade brigade at UCLA aren't helping anyone in Gaza. In fact, they have the whole American nation talking about what they themselves are doing on their beautiful Tinseltown campus. 

That discussion has replaced the pre-existing conversation about actual events in Gaza, where people have been suffering for a very long time with little interest being displayed by major American news orgs.

The mother of all gloomy messages arrived around 6:25. We still can't link you to videotape. This morning, we recorded the exchange as shown:

PANELIST ONE: This is great for Donald Trump.

PANELIST TWO: He loves this.

Joe Scarborough was one of the two panelists. We're fairly sure that that comes close to being an exact capture of the gloomy exchange.

Could this roiling movement possibly help Donald J. Trump get elected? Presumably yes, it could.

In this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof is extra-nice as he tells a version of that story to the youngsters manning the ramparts. Headline included, the passage in question says this:

How Protesters Can Actually Help Palestinians

[...]

Student protesters: I admire your empathy for Gazans, your concern for the world, your moral ambition to make a difference.

But I worry about how peaceful protests have tipped into occupations of buildings, risks to commencements and what I see as undue tolerance of antisemitism, chaos, vandalism and extremism. I’m afraid the more aggressive actions may be hurting the Gazans you are trying to help.

I’m shaped in my thinking by the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Students who protested then were right on the merits: The war was unwinnable and conducted in ways that were reckless and immoral.

Yet those students didn’t shorten that terrible war; instead, they probably prolonged it. Leftist activists in 1968 didn’t achieve their goal of electing the peace candidate Gene McCarthy; rather, the turmoil and more violent protests helped elect Richard Nixon, who pledged to restore order—and then dragged the war out and expanded it to Cambodia.

For our money, Kristof may have been overdoing the niceness. More to the point, could these events help Candidate Trump as similar events once helped Nixon?

Everything is possible. This was a gloomy morning, and perhaps especially so for those of a certain age.

On Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade finally defined himself for us as cable's number-one red-ass. As barricaders who had been detained waited to be taken away by police, the Fox friend offered this:

KILMEADE (5/2/24): They look so organized. They've got their masks, they've got their glasses.

Why are they allowed to keep their masks and glasses, by the way? If there is something in the air, it's their fault. Their people shot it up in the air.

In fact. both sides had been using chemical irritants, according to reports on the ground. But to Kilmeade, if even one protester had done that, every other protester should be stripped of protective gear and forced to pay the price, even after they were in the custody of police.

A few minutes later, Kilmeade had another complaint. As zip-tied protesters were being taken away, the long-standing Fox friend said this:

KILMEADE: Take the masks down. We want to see all their faces.

This particular friend rarely fails.

Moments later, Steve Doocy offered a comment which struck us as the dumbest, and the most pander-heavy, comment of the morning. He was asking a perfectly sensible journalistic question—Where is the (obvious) money behind these group actions coming from?—when he launched his Storyline-obedient comment, which we won't transcribe.

In fairness, Fox did some decent reporting from L.A. over the course of the past few days. That said, the friends all come from the same part of town, and that's a formula which is destined to produce repetition, recitation, embellishment, dumbness, faux anger, stupidity, sloth.

The friends remain true to Red storyline. It's like that on our Blue channel too.

CONCERNS: Their concerns may not be the public's concerns!

THURSDAY, MAY 2, 2024

Joe Scarborough's major concern: For roughly 90 minutes today, the whole (cable news) world was watching.

The Fox News Channel had stayed live from L.A. all through the past two nights. 

For two straight nights, its overnight reruns were kicked to the curb. In their stead, Jonathan Hunt stayed live on the ground at the scene of the action, right there on the UCLA campus. 

This morning, at 6 o'clock, Morning Joe opened with its standard discussion about what will happen if Donald J. Trump is elected again. At some point around 6:20, they too went live at UCLA. 

They remained live there until 8 o'clock. For that hour and forty minutes, the whole cable news world was watching as the LAPD began to address a wide range of concerns.

"Your concerns are my concerns," the Hemingway character said. She made her statement in 1979. You can watch the full scene from the feature film Manhattan simply by clicking here.

She was 17 years old. As it turned out by the end of the film, she almost surely had better judgment and more wisdom than the much older man.

Back to this morning's maelstrom:

As the LAPD began removing the barricades and arresting protesters, Morning Joe joined Fox & Friends in looking on. 

This afternoon, we may show you more of what was said on the respective programs. At one point, it seemed to us that Brian Kilmeade formally cemented his place as cable's number one red-ass.

Also, it seemed to us that Steve Doocy made the day's most pathetic remark. But Joe Scarborough's major concern was also a top concern of ours.

He first gave voice to the concern around 6:40 a.m. He went there again at 7:05. Speaking of his mother and father, this is what he said they said, back in the street-fighting days of 1968:

"We used to be Democrats. We're not Democrats any more."

He said his parents had always been Democrats—until they saw the vast disorder which swept the nation that year.

Later today, or perhaps tomorrow, we'll be able to post a fuller account of what Scarborough said. But at 6:24, as the panel watched what was occurring at UCLA, these comments were offered by two panel members:

PANELIST ONE: This is great for Donald Trump.

PANELIST TWO: He loves this.

Not too much later, Candidate Trump offered his first tweet about the events in L.A. On Morning Joe, Al Sharpton agreed with the NYPD's John Chell:

The conduct by the protesters at UCLA was pure Grade A bullroar. It should have been nipped in the bud.

Meanwhile, back at the New York Times:

In this morning's print editions, the New York Times finally got around to publishing a long-delayed type of report. 

Like many other major news orgs, the Times had largely averted its gaze ever since October 7. Finally, almost seven months later, Jeremy Peters offered a report about the views of student protesters.

It seems to us that major news orgs have been ducking the touchy subject matter involved in this line of inquiry. This morning, Peters offers a first, extremely sketchy attempt to explore the views of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

Online, the report appears beneath this dual headline. 

It’s Not Just Gaza: Student Protesters See Links to a Global Struggle
In many students’ eyes, the war in Gaza is linked to other issues, such as policing, mistreatment of Indigenous people, racism and the impact of climate change.

"Jeremy Peter wrote a good piece," Jennifer Palmieri said on Morning Joe. 

That struck us as a typical bit of professional courtesy extended within the guild. It seemed to us that Peters' report was very sketchy, and in arriving this very morning, it was arriving remarkably late.

"Say you want a revolution," a well-known singing group said. The song was released in July 1968. The mop-tops were perhaps a bit skeptical concerning the push for change. 

Their final verse went like this:

You say you'll change the Constitution
Well, you know
We'd all love to change your head.
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead.

If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow

Don't you know it's gonna be all right?
Don't you know it's gonna be all right?
Don't you know it's gonna be all right?

But was it going to be all right? That was easy enough for them to say. For God's sake, they were the Beatles!

Starting in our senior year in high school, we did several very dumb things. We were only 17 at the start of this era, but it amazes us to think about how dumb those actions were. 

They were disrespectful to our mother, and also very dumb. We think about the way we constantly hear that the human brain isn't fully formed until you're 25.

Can Joe Biden win re-election? Well yes, of course he can.

Will he win re-election? Or is the footage from UCLA the latest boon for Candidate Donald J. Trump?

It seems to us that, wherever this leads, our team has earned its way out. We've found it very hard to understand how dumb our own cadres can be at times. As a group, we have little ability to understand the way we look to others.

"There's no such thing as woke," we've sometimes recently said. We've said that we've drawn that conclusion because no one can define the term! 

As humans, we're all inclined to reason poorly. That's true of us in Blue America, and it's true of them in Red.

In November 1968, we stayed up till the early morning hours, hoping that Humphrey could win California. By the end, only one roommate was sitting there with us in front of a small TV set.

Humphrey didn't make it that night. Decades later, the roommate ran, and he won the popular vote!

Joe's concern strikes us as a real concern. Having said that, we have no way of knowing how this year's race will turn out.

O'Donnell praises the NYPD!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 2024

O'Donnell gets it right: Lawrence O'Donnell remembers. He also broke out of a type of box with some comments he made last night.

In this age of "segregation by viewpoint," it's very rare to see someone on cable news do what O'Donnell did. He made a significant observation which may have tended to tilt away from the more typical line of his own political / cultural tribe.

As he started his MSNBC program at 10 o'clock Eastern, O'Donnell recalled police conduct from his own late high school / early college years. As he spoke, Columbia students were being arrested, and removed from Hamilton Hall, by the NYPD.

In our view, O'Donnell's aim was true. Speaking with Alex Wagner, he praised the progress put on display by the behavior of New York City's police. Here's the bulk of what he said:

O'DONNELL (4/30/24): Good evening, Alex. I have of course been watching all your coverage here, and what we have seen on the videos so far is actually the most organized and calmest and most professional police intervention we have ever seen on a college campus.

There is not a huge collection of those. But there is enough, beginning in 1968, to show how different this one is. 

The 1968 version [at Columbia], those 700 arrested students were gleefully beaten by the NYPD.  In those days, the police departments that were going into campuses were gleeful about the violence that they were visiting upon those anti-war protesters. And it was relentless, and it was vicious, and it was cruel, and it was extended to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where what happened there was declared, by the commission who investigated, "a police riot."

That's not what we are seeing tonight. Our screen has been filled with what clearly do appear to be Columbia students walking out calmly, escorted by a police officer, both of them, the police officer and the student, walking very calmly to whatever that arrest destination is, what vehicle they will put those kids in and take them where they are going.

So this, this so far, is nothing like what we've seen in the previous dramatic and violent interventions by police departments in the past on campuses.

It could get worse. We could get an after-action report that indicates that really rough things went on there. But so far, there hasn't been even the slightest hint of violence in what we've seen tonight.

To watch O'Donnell's statement, you can start by clicking here. We'll note that some of the people arrested last night may not have been college students. That said:

As far as we know, O'Donnell's portrait of the late 1960s is basically accurate. The "police riot" which took place in Chicago is, of course, a matter of historical record.

It was during that era that our own modern-day Blue America began losing contact with the white working-class contingent of modern-day Red America. At that time, the stresses of the Vietnam War and the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius were driving a powerful wedge between different groups. 

There was a lot of imperfect conduct on the part of angry members of the white working class. There was a lot of imperfect conduct from some of Blue America's various contingents.

In Blue America, we've never quite abandoned the condescension and disdain we began to show toward our obvious lessers at that point in time. On the whole, we've failed to walk back that tribal mistake. One result may be the election of Donald J. Trump to a second stint in the White House.

New York's finest skipped the violence last night. O'Donnell chose to take notice.

Our blue tribe rarely has anything good to say about those who live and work on the other side of our failing culture's lines of demarcation and class divide.

Last night, O'Donnell praised the NYPD for its professionalism. It seems to us that the gentleman had the right idea.

CONCERNS: New York Times merges with Enquirer!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 2024

Agamemnon will have to wait: As it turns out, the rage of Achilles—along with the rage of Agamemnon himself—is going to have to wait. 

So too for that one overwhelming human concern—the one concern which lay behind their famous bouts of rage. Can we learn to see ourselves more clearly by reviewing the western world's first great "poem of war?" 

As the trial of Donald J. Trump grinds on, we will have the next several weeks to revisit that Bronze Age war poem.  For today, a journalistic merger has forced its way center stage:

We refer to the way the New York Times has announced its merger with the National Enquirer. More accurately, we refer again to the tabloid-adjacent way the Times is reporting the Gotham trial.

In this morning's print editions, the trial returns to the top right-hand corner of the Times' front page. Reporters Protess and Bromwich are joined by reporters Feuer and Rashbaum in producing the tabloidy news report which appears. in online editions, under this dual headline:

Trump Jurors Hear How Seamy Hush-Money Deals Were Made
Keith Davidson, a lawyer for Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, will resume testimony on Thursday.

Those weren't just any "hush-money deals." They were seamy hush-money deals, the Times has now declared! 

Seamy may be as seamy may do! Principal headline included, the news report starts like this:

Trump Jurors Hear How Seamy Hush-Money Deals Were Made

He was the man behind the hush money, the amiable Beverly Hills lawyer who specialized in celebrity dirt—unearthing it, and then, for the right price, burying it forever.

But in 2016, the lawyer, Keith Davidson, was on the verge of something grander than a run-of-the-mill sex tape or affair. He had two clients shopping stories so big they might sway a presidential election: Their names were Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, and they were ready to tell the world about their sexual encounters with Donald J. Trump.

That kind of reporting will draw readers in. That said, we'll start with the type of claim we addressed in yesterday afternoon's post.

According to the quartet of Times reporters, the amiable Attorney Davidson was "shopping [two] stories so big they might sway a presidential election." 

For the record, the lawyer began by seeking an extremely large payday for those stories. According to his testimony, he started by asking for a million dollars, according to CNN and also according to Rubin.

The New York Times left that part out. But those stories must have been very big. They must have been very important!  

In our view, the stories in question may tell us something about ourselves—about our deepest concerns. As we noted yesterday, one of those major stories went exactly like this:

On one occasion in 2006, Donald J. Trump allegedly had (fully consensual) sex with a woman who wasn't his wife!

For the record, Trump says it never happened. The woman in question says it happened exactly once, way back in 2006, in a fully consensual manner.

That's the extremely big story around which the Gotham trial turns. We start with the obvious question:

Could the broadcast of that (unconfirmable) story have changed the shape of the 2016 race?

We'd say it could have changed the race—though in whose favor, we can't necessarily say. But it seems to us that this fact tells us a great deal about us the people—about our concerns, ourselves.

Did Donald J. Trump commit a felony in paying (a fraction of) the very large sum the amiable lawyer had originally sought? 

Everything is possible! But as we noted yesterday, the tortured legalities of this situation aren't our main concern.

We're mainly interested in what this remarkable episode may say about us—about the things we secretly care about, about our most basic concerns.

As with the ten-year siege of Troy, so too here—there seems to be one major concern which lies at the heart of this silly, dumb story. And while we're at it, let's consider what Jonathan Alter has said.

Alter's a very experienced, very capable journalist, and a thoroughly decent person. We even know him tiny tad.  

Way back when, writing for Newsweek, he broke the story about the very strange personal history of Gennifer Flowers, who also wanted to tell a story. As far as we know, the story Flowers told turned out to be almost totally false.

Yesterday afternoon, at this link, Alter filed a short report for the Times about yesterday's testimony at the trial. Was Alter a spectator at the trial? His dispatch doesn't say.

At any rate, Alter's brief report lets us touch on several key points. Headline included, here's one part of what he wrote:

Karen McDougal Almost Went on ABC News, but Then Trump's Team Paid Her

[...]

Much of Davidson’s testimony involved McDougal, whose hush-money deal was a kind of a dress rehearsal for the alleged crime, which is Trump and Cohen covering up the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. For a time, American Media Inc., the owner of The National Enquirer, was in competition with ABC News for McDougal’s story, which led to a memorable moment in court. Davidson claimed a group of women he derided in a text as “the estrogen mafia” wanted her to tell her story to ABC News.

With what crime does Trump charged? Based on the highlighted passage, Alter seems to think that the additional unlawful act Trump was allegedly trying to conceal was the money paid to Stormy Daniels. As we noted yesterday morning, Lisa Rubin thinks the additional crime is the money paid to McDougal.

Meanwhile, the Times published a detailed essay in which Rebecca Roiphe says that the additional unlawful act could be any one of a number of things—and that "we may never learn which crime the jurors believe Trump was seeking to commit or cover up."

Legal analysts on the Fox News Channel routinely describe this undetermined state of affairs as a legal outrage. Due to the "segregation by viewpoint" which now controls "cable news," this claim is never tested by legal analysts from Bue America.

That said, it doesn't sound like a crazy claim. We've now finished Day 9 if this trial and no one seems to be sure concerning the nature of the crime the defendant is charged with!

Continuing directly, Alter wrote this passage. In our view, this helps us become more clear on a very basic point:

“We had it all set. We picked the date, camera crews, makeup,” Brian Ross, the ABC News correspondent, told me this afternoon by phone. “Then she called and said, ‘My family doesn’t want me to do it.’” Ross thinks the real reason this explosive story didn’t come out was that ABC News, which doesn’t pay for stories, became leverage: “In retrospect, they were using us to get to Trump for the money.”

For better or worse, ABC News wanted to report McDougal's story in standard journalistic fashion. According to Brian Ross, the effort fell through for a basic reason:

McDougal could have "told her story" any time she chose. But McDougal didn't want to tell her story. McDougal wanted to tell her story for a large mountain of cash. 

So too with Stormy Daniels. In that sense, Daniels was "silenced" by Trump, or by his associates, in precisely the way she had sought.

Alter also offered the passage shown below. On this morning's Morning Joe, Lisa Rubin confirmed the key part of this passage:

After American Media paid off McDougal, David Pecker, the former publisher, backed out of paying hush money to Stormy Daniels.

But when Davidson demanded the payment, Cohen began offering a million excuses for why Trump couldn’t pay. “I thought he was trying to kick the can down the road until after the election,” Davidson testified, which will be an important part of the prosecution’s case.

When it was clear Trump wouldn’t pay, Davidson testified that Cohen said, “Goddammit, I’ll just do it myself.” It was then that Cohen set up a dummy corporation to send Davidson the money and began trying to get reimbursed by Trump.

All of the texts and phone calls between Davidson and Cohen are still one step removed from Trump. But they pre-corroborate what Cohen will say “the boss” told him to do, and that is critical.

Say what? According to Alter's account, it became clear at one point that Trump wasn't willing to pay Daniels. At that point, Cohen stepped in and said he'd have to do it himself.

This morning, Rubin quoted Davidson quoting Cohen the same way. Does that undermine some of the  story-telling in Blue America surrounding this alleged crime?

McDougal and Daniels came looking for cash, perhaps like Flowers before them. Tabloid outlets like the Times go for this sort of thing all the time—and this sort of thing almost surely leads a nation down a long and winding road which leads to a long, slippery slope.

Tabloid entities simply love "seamy" stories like this! Does this possibly tell us something about the actual state of our own concerns? Does it tell us something about Our Concerns, Ourselves?

The rage of Achilles will have to wait. But how much has human nature changed since the Achaeans sailed to Troy with only one thing on their minds?

Tomorrow: Whatever comes next

Two ways of viewing Donald J. Trump!

TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2024

George Conway, One Other Guy: We just saw George Conway on Deadline: White House refer to Donald J. Trump as "a narcissistic sociopath." 

He also used the term "psychopathy" as he discussed Trump's mental / emotional state. As we've recently noted, Conway has been walking that lonely road since at least October 2019. 

We just saw Conway take that approach. Then we visited The Atlantic, which currently features a new analysis piece bearing this pair of headlines:

Trump’s Contempt Knows No Bounds
Judge Juan Merchan sanctioned the former president for the first, and likely not the last, time.

The Atlantic's writer is shocked, just shocked, that Trump continues to behave this way.

Fundamentally, there are two basic ways of describing Donald J. Trump. The approach that seems to make scientific / medical sense is the one the mainstream journalistic culture almost wholly rejects.  

The fellow just keeps doing these things! Why do you think that is?

As heard on yesterday's Deadline: White House!

TUESDAY, APRIL 30, 2024

Suppressing the doorman's (false) tale: Once again, it's time for us to fess up. We'll start by quoting the first paragraph of the guest essay we discussed in this morning's report. 

The essay appeared in the New York Times. Headline included, it starts exactly like this:

I Was an Attorney at the D.A.’s Office. This Is What the Trump Case Is Really About.

Now that the lawyers are laying out their respective theories of the case in the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump in New York, it would be understandable if people’s heads are spinning. The defense lawyers claimed this is a case about hush money as a legitimate tool in democratic elections, while the prosecutors insisted it is about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”

That's how the essay starts. Its author correctly quotes the prosecutors in the "hush money / porn star" case. 

The prosecutors allege that the defendant, Donald J. Trump, engaged in “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” For all we know, that may turn out to be a provable legal case. 

That may turn out to be a winnable legal case. But as we noted last week, we aren't especially interested in the legalities of this utterly silly affair.

We're interested in what we regard as a type of cultural absurdity. We refer to the claim, widely made by Blue America's leadership cadres, that we voters needed to hear Stormy Daniels "tell her story" before we could decide how to vote in 2016.

That notion strikes us as embarrassing, silly—absurd. Let's recall what Daniels' story is:

Daniels claims that on one occasion, in 2006, she engaged in (fully consensual) sexual relations with Donald J. Trump. 

Donald Trump says it didn't happen. At any rate, that's the story Daniels claims she wanted to tell.

Ten years after the alleged sexual congress, did we the people need to hear that allegation before we could know how to vote? The notion strikes us as a form of madness. It strikes us as crazy, absurd.

A few weeks ago, we spent a week working from the basic concept of "madness." The notion that we the voters needed to hear Daniels tell her (unconfirmable) story strikes us as a prime example of that familiar but unfortunate state of affairs.

Had Trump engaged in consensual sex, on one occasion, ten years before the election in question? We're now told that he "corrupted the 2016 election" by keeping us from hearing that claim.

For what it's worth, we don't doubt that the allegation is true, though we also don't know how to prove it. We're saying something different:

We're saying it's crazy to think that voters should be encouraged to base the way they vote on factors of that type. Eventually, we'll walk you through the long and winding slippery slope which follows that kind of thinking.

Sad! Once you buy a concept like that, there's little turning back. Consider something Andrew Weissmann said on yesterday's Deadline: White House.

The statement was made early in the four o'clock hour. Susanne Craig asked Weissmann a question:

Did he think that Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal would be called to the witness stand during the "porn star" trial? Would that be necessary? she also asked.

Due to a glitch at the Internet Archive, we can't like you to videotape of the exchange. But this is what Weissmann said:

WEISSMANN (4/29/24): It's not necessary to know whether, in fact, it was true or not true. Because if you just look at what the opening was with respect to the three pieces—the doorman, Karen McDougal, Stormy Daniels—those are the three pieces. 

And everyone agrees, including the D.A., that the doorman's story was false. But that doesn't mean that you don't have a motive to suppress it, because you don't want the risk of how it's going to play out.

Now the one reason it might be useful to put it on is you might have a stronger motive to squash it if you know that it's true. So I think that they might [testify], but—

At that point, Weissmann was interrupted. That wasn't the clearest possible statement, but we were struck by this:

Within Weissmann's formulation, Donald Trump and David Pecker had caused the doorman's story to be "suppressed." 

Because the doorman's sleazy story was false, we're wondering why they shouldn't receive the Medal of Honor for arranging to do just that?

As Weissmann notes, everyone agrees that the doorman's salacious story was false. Why shouldn't we the people be glad that our 2016 election wasn't affected by the promulgation of a bogus story like that?

Question:

Did Donald Trump really "corrupt the 2016 presidential election" by arranging for an NDA with a woman who wasn't his wife? 

Should we really regard her silence as a corruption of our democracy? Or did her attempt to "tell her story" possibly constitute the real attempt to corrupt an election?

Also this:

Did Trump and Pecker "corrupt the 2016 presidential election" when Pecker purchased the doorman's (false) tale? 

Weissmann didn't use that language, but when he says the story was "suppressed" and "squashed," it seems to us that his language is taking us in that peculiar direction.

In our view, it's an embarrassment to see Blue America's thought leaders repeatedly saying it—repeatedly saying that we needed to hear Daniels "tell her story" before we could decide how to vote. 

Have we reached the point where we think that's the way our most important political judgments should work? Because a wide array of presidential candidates, including some of those we love the most, have kept their infidelities to themselves as they've sought the White House.

Did they "corrupt" the elections they won by suppressing news of their sexual histories?  Should candidates be filing their tax returns and their list of sexual partners?

At one point, we all agreed that it made better sense to avoid such subject matter in running our White House elections. Today, we Blues are so desperate to find a way to beat Donald J. Trump that we're walking away from a long list of things we once said. 

It's reached the point where it can almost sound like Trump "corrupted the 2016 election" when he kept us from hearing a story which he presumably knew to be false! Trust us:

A slippery slope leads downhill from there if we run our elections like that. We'll be inviting waves of sexy stories—some of them true, some false. 

David Pecker "suppressed" a false story! By normal standards, that almost sounds like an action which might seem morally good!

For ourselves, we're not interested in the legalities of this unusual legal case. For ourselves, we're thunderstruck by the poor judgment, and the political desperation, found within the culture!