FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2017
Please don't touch Charles Blow: We're going to call it must-see TV. We refer to the new cable rule from Charles Blow:
You must not touch Charles Blow!
Kayleigh McEnany got out of line. To see Blow tell her how it works, you can just click here.
(The whole tape runs 2:42. You can skip the first minute.)
Final note: When CNN books Betsy McCaughey, the channel's approaching rock bottom.
As it turns out, Jerry Vale had it right!
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2017
Two moments from yesterday's presser: Having watched the whole of yesterday's presser, we'd say that Donald J. Trump wasn't quite as unhinged, on the whole, as some on our own side have said.
That said, we run an amateur bookie business on the side, just as a bit of a hobby. We've received a lot of play from these thoughtful remarks:
As part of our amateur betting service, we've been offering a May 1 over/under on when Donald J. Trump will use his first nuke. A lot of money moved yesterday after that comment by Trump.
Beyond that, let's consider the way we now live in two different worlds. The story starts with Trump assailing the guy who asked him about anti-Semitism.
The reporter in question was Jake Turx, an Orthodox Jew from Ami magazine. After explicitly saying that no one in his community is accusing Trump of anti-Semitism, Turx tried to ask what Trump plans to do about an alleged "uptick" in anti-Semitic incidents.
Trump interrupted Turx, insulted him in several ways and mischaracterized what he had said. Along the way, he answered a question he hadn't been asked:
Last night, conservatives saw Turx interviewed on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Ed Henry served as guest host. This is what conservatives saw Turx say:
On Fox, Turx was bashing the media too! He praised Trump all up and down and said he understands his reaction. That's what conservative viewers saw.
As it turns out, Jerry Vale had it right.
"Two different worlds," the crooner sang. "We live in two different worlds..."
(To listen to Vale, just click here.)
Jerry Vale had a giant hit with his controversial claim. All these years later, the American people can finally see that Jerry Vale had it right.
Our newest betting line: We're now offering a May 1 over/under on Donald J. Trump's possible use of a nuclear weapon against journalist Jake Turx.
Two moments from yesterday's presser: Having watched the whole of yesterday's presser, we'd say that Donald J. Trump wasn't quite as unhinged, on the whole, as some on our own side have said.
That said, we run an amateur bookie business on the side, just as a bit of a hobby. We've received a lot of play from these thoughtful remarks:
TRUMP (2/16/17): If we could get along with Russia, that's a positive thing.Masterfully, Trump explained that starting World War III wouldn't be great. Despite what everyone else would say!
We have a very talented man, Rex Tillerson, who's going to be meeting with them shortly, and I told him. I said, "I know politically it's probably not good for me."
The greatest thing I could do is shoot that ship that's 30 miles offshore right out of the water. Everyone in this country's going to say, "Oh, it's so great."
That's not great. That's not great. I would love to be able to get along with Russia.
As part of our amateur betting service, we've been offering a May 1 over/under on when Donald J. Trump will use his first nuke. A lot of money moved yesterday after that comment by Trump.
Beyond that, let's consider the way we now live in two different worlds. The story starts with Trump assailing the guy who asked him about anti-Semitism.
The reporter in question was Jake Turx, an Orthodox Jew from Ami magazine. After explicitly saying that no one in his community is accusing Trump of anti-Semitism, Turx tried to ask what Trump plans to do about an alleged "uptick" in anti-Semitic incidents.
Trump interrupted Turx, insulted him in several ways and mischaracterized what he had said. Along the way, he answered a question he hadn't been asked:
TRUMP: See, he said he was gonna ask a very simple, easy question. And it's not, it's not, not—not a simple question, not a fair question.At our own sites, we liberals have seen this reaction by Trump criticized. We thought you should see what conservatives saw on Fox.
OK sit down, I understand the rest of your question. So here's the story, folks.
Number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen in your entire life. Number two, racism, the least racist person. In fact, we did very well relative to other people running as a Republican—
Quiet, quiet. Quiet!
See, he lied about—he was gonna get up and ask a very straight, simple question. So you know, welcome to the world of the media.
But let me just tell you something.
I hate the charge. I find it repulsive. I hate even the question, because people that know me—and you heard the prime minister, you heard Bibi Netanyahu yesterday, did you hear him, Bibi? He said, I've known Donald Trump for a long time. And then he said, "Forget it."
So you should take that, instead of having to get up and ask a very insulting question like that.
See, it just shows you about the press, but that's the way the press is.
Last night, conservatives saw Turx interviewed on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Ed Henry served as guest host. This is what conservatives saw Turx say:
TURX (2/16/17): I've worked with the president, his people throughout the campaign, throughout the transition.At the presser, Trump insulted Turx in various ways and failed to address his question. We liberals have heard about that.
So many times I've seen some of our colleagues in the media describe certain events as—in the way it relates to the Jewish community in a certain light that no one in our community saw it that way.
There were certain acts that were described as anti-Semitic, or certain people described as anti-Semitic. And the people in our community who know these people personally said, "That's not true." Why are people who aren't Jewish deciding what is considered anti-Semitism?
The president's relationship with the Jewish community—I've only seen it first time for the last two years, but he has done an unprecedented amount of outreach with the orthodox Jewish community. And so, we understand why this is so hurtful for him, to see himself being called anti-Semitic when this—
HENRY: You don't believe it.
TURX: Not just I don't believe it, I've seen him firsthand. I mean, there is—
HENRY: My point is, you feel it is unfair?
TURX: It is very unfair what's been done to him and I understand why he is so defensive. And I'm with him when it comes to being outraged about him being charged with this anti-Semitism.
On Fox, Turx was bashing the media too! He praised Trump all up and down and said he understands his reaction. That's what conservative viewers saw.
As it turns out, Jerry Vale had it right.
"Two different worlds," the crooner sang. "We live in two different worlds..."
(To listen to Vale, just click here.)
Jerry Vale had a giant hit with his controversial claim. All these years later, the American people can finally see that Jerry Vale had it right.
Our newest betting line: We're now offering a May 1 over/under on Donald J. Trump's possible use of a nuclear weapon against journalist Jake Turx.
HOW WE GOT HERE: Home alone!
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2017
Part 5—The need for liberal leadership: Have you watched yesterday's press event? If not, have you seen it described?
We'll go ahead and quote David Brooks. This is what David Brooks saw:
"I still have trouble seeing how the Trump administration survives a full term. Judging by his Thursday press conference, President Trump’s mental state is like a train that long ago left freewheeling and iconoclastic, has raced through indulgent, chaotic and unnerving, and is now careening past unhinged, unmoored and unglued."
Trump is moving past unhinged and unglued! That's what David Brooks saw!
In our view, Brooks falls short of a straightforward statement. He still doesn't say, in a straightforward way, that we need to discuss the possibility that President Trump is unfit for office, or handicapped in his performance, by issues involving his mental health.
That said, Brooks describes a dangerous situation—the same dangerous situation Paul Krugman describes in his own new column. Concerning that, we'll only say this:
We think Brooks understands the situation better than Krugman does. That may seem like a shocking statement, but it returns us to the topic of this week's reports.
According to Brooks, the person who gave yesterday's presser seems unhinged, unmoored, unglued, or perhaps something worse than that. We liberals thrill to such declarations, without considering this corollary:
We liberals just managed to lose an election to this unhinged man!
Granted, Trump lost the popular vote—though it should be said that he won the overall popular vote in the 49 states which aren't California. Our question, which our team will tend to skip past:
What does this say about us? What does it say about us that we managed to lose an election to an unhinged, unglued, unmoored man?
Does it say anything about Us? Or was November's election result just a reflection on Them?
We all know the standard reply which will emerge from our liberal tents. Unfortunately, that standard reply is in error.
Alas! The fact that we lost to a person like Trump stands as a massive indictment of us. In the main, it stands as an indictment of 25 years of self-dealing and lethargy on the part of our liberal leaders and the mainstream press.
That said, it also speaks to the shortcomings of our liberal rank and file, which is frequently quite self-impressed. We love to note the dumbness of Them. As tribal groups have always done, we blow past the dumbness of Us.
Next week, we'll look at some of the leadership groups who have so massively failed us. We'll look at the nation's professors, and at the emerging, younger group of black assistant professors.
We'll look at the lefty cohort, which can be too cool for school. We'll look at the Hollywood types, who seem to be happy only when costing Democrats votes. (Last week, were you able to spot the way Meryl Streep did it again?)
We'll look at our corporate cable stars, including our corporate liberal stars, some of whom sat out the last election, some of whom, in earlier corporate lives, created the stupid and noxious themes which sent Clinton down to defeat.
We'll look at the liberal voices within the mainstream press—the Riches, the Drums, the Chaits, the Dionnes, the Robinsons, Kristofs and even the (MVP) Krugmans.
We'll look at the mainstream press corps itself—at the jihads it invented in the 1990s. We'll look at the 20-somethings who now swarm all over that mainstream press, helping keep labor costs down while trailing their youthful cluelessness behind them.
(Where on earth did Slate ever go to find its newest, most fatuous star? What does it say about Us that there must be a cohort which wants this?)
As we roll our eyes at The Others, we tend to look past the conduct of our own leadership groups. We do so because we liberals are dumb, like all tribal groups before us.
How dumb can we the liberals get? Last November, we were shocked when Donald J. Trump drew an inside straight and won.
We were shocked because our professors and pundits told us it couldn't possibly happen—and because, left on our own, we were dumb enough to believe them. In last Sunday's Washington Post, Dana Milbank described the "collective trauma" we now experience, in which "millions of people feel powerless and out of control, which leads to anxiety, anger and despair."
Depending on how you want to score it, Milbank is one of the liberal voices within the upper-end mainstream press. How should we now respond to Trump?
Boldly, Milbank laid out of his ideas. Here's the way he began:
You should join a book club!
In fairness, Milbank moved on from there. He went on to offer suggestions which are slightly less unglued—though as he ended, he also suggested that you might consider the Elks Club.
To the extent that he makes any good suggestions, Milbank's ideas have arrived just in time to be completely too late. At his worst, his suggestions make him seem about as moored, hinged and glued as Trump currently is.
Join a book club! Milbank's suggestion appeared in an especially comical Sunday edition of the Washington Post.
Possibly for the first time, the Outlook section offered an informative "Five Myths" feature in which none of the myths the authors "corrected" could sensibly be described as myths. Meanwhile, Outlook's featured front-page report appeared beneath this eye-catching hard-copy headline:
"Why do we still let 12-year-olds get married?"
It was an eye-catching headline. Unfortunately, the example with which the report began involved someone who got married at age 16—in 1986! In the course of the lengthy report's 1900 words, we were never told how many 12-year-olds have been married in recent decades.
The topic may well be very important. The journalism was bad.
Bad journalism has been par for the course in the decades of cultural / intellectual slide which led to the triumph of Trump. The strangest piece in the Outlook section concerned the liberalish world's heroic reaction to his shocking triumph.
Two nights before, a multimillionaire cable star who mugged and clowned through the last election praised us proles for the brilliant way, "all of a sudden," we are "now" learning to fight. As she did, she stuffed another bag of corporate money into her big corporate pants.
Two days later, the Washington Post went the star somewhat better. They published this ludicrous Outlook piece by a woman in Richmond, Virginia—a previously non-political woman who has now learned to fight.
We're going to call her "Name Withheld;" her piece was just that awful. It isn't her fault that the Washington Post chose to publish her ludicrous piece, in the Outlook section no less. But the utter foolishness of the piece shows us how bad the marriage can be when the rank-and-file, lacking competent leadership, interacts with the strange cluelessness of the upper-end mainstream press.
How old is Name Withheld? We have no idea. In its identity line, the Post only tells us this:
"[Name Withheld] currently resides in Richmond, Va., and works in the insurance field."
We'll assume that Name Withheld is a good, decent person. In our experience, most people are.
We'll assume she does good work in the insurance field. That said, as she starts, she identifies herself as the modern liberal nightmare, especially in a purple state like Virginia:
There was something wrong—something badly wrong—with the Washington Post's decision to publish this ridiculous piece.
According to this lengthy piece, Name Withheld had always been apolitical. But then, along came DeVos!
More broadly, along came Trump! As a result, Name Withheld "has found a political voice I didn’t know that I had."
Name Withheld is telling a story from a dime novel, a story of personal triumph. "All of a sudden," Name Withheld is woke! For some reason, the Washington Post decided to publish this mess.
Why do we call this piece a mess? Because even in the case of DeVos, Name Withheld still seems utterly clueless. She seems to know virtually nothing about DeVos, but the Washington Post is helping Name Withheld, and us, think she's heroically woke.
Name Withheld is still uninformed. She knows that DeVos went to private schools, seems to know nothing else.
Franklin Roosevelt attended only private schools; so did John F. Kennedy. As far as we know, the same is true of Barack Obama, during the years in which he lived in the United States.
The fact that DeVos went to private schools just isn't hugely important. But it seems to be all that Name Withheld knows. This has led her to think that she's now politically active in a way that's likely to help.
Name Withheld, a good decent person, is in need of political and intellectual leadership—as are we all, of course. Will such leadership come from within our own liberal tribe?
As you ponder that question, consider this next ridiculous piece. For unknown reasons, it turned up in The Atlantic, three days ago.
The piece was written by Elizabeth Limbach, "editor in chief of the bimonthly surf lifestyle magazine Santa Cruz Waves." In her own ridiculous piece, Limbach catches the most recent wave of push-back against Tyrant Trump:
All of a sudden, liberals and progressives are agreeing that we shouldn't say his name! And no, we really aren't kidding about that. Limbach has even consulted an ethical theorist and assistant professor of philosophy concerning this emerging act of resistance:
"Join a book club," Milbank says. Don't say his name," adds Limbach. Name Withheld has learned one fact.
Let's set aside the peculiar fact that the Post and The Atlantic have chosen to publish such manifest crap. Will we liberals ever be willing to see what this pitiful state of affairs says about self-impressed Us?
Next week: Our own unfaithful servants
Part 5—The need for liberal leadership: Have you watched yesterday's press event? If not, have you seen it described?
We'll go ahead and quote David Brooks. This is what David Brooks saw:
"I still have trouble seeing how the Trump administration survives a full term. Judging by his Thursday press conference, President Trump’s mental state is like a train that long ago left freewheeling and iconoclastic, has raced through indulgent, chaotic and unnerving, and is now careening past unhinged, unmoored and unglued."
Trump is moving past unhinged and unglued! That's what David Brooks saw!
In our view, Brooks falls short of a straightforward statement. He still doesn't say, in a straightforward way, that we need to discuss the possibility that President Trump is unfit for office, or handicapped in his performance, by issues involving his mental health.
That said, Brooks describes a dangerous situation—the same dangerous situation Paul Krugman describes in his own new column. Concerning that, we'll only say this:
We think Brooks understands the situation better than Krugman does. That may seem like a shocking statement, but it returns us to the topic of this week's reports.
According to Brooks, the person who gave yesterday's presser seems unhinged, unmoored, unglued, or perhaps something worse than that. We liberals thrill to such declarations, without considering this corollary:
We liberals just managed to lose an election to this unhinged man!
Granted, Trump lost the popular vote—though it should be said that he won the overall popular vote in the 49 states which aren't California. Our question, which our team will tend to skip past:
What does this say about us? What does it say about us that we managed to lose an election to an unhinged, unglued, unmoored man?
Does it say anything about Us? Or was November's election result just a reflection on Them?
We all know the standard reply which will emerge from our liberal tents. Unfortunately, that standard reply is in error.
Alas! The fact that we lost to a person like Trump stands as a massive indictment of us. In the main, it stands as an indictment of 25 years of self-dealing and lethargy on the part of our liberal leaders and the mainstream press.
That said, it also speaks to the shortcomings of our liberal rank and file, which is frequently quite self-impressed. We love to note the dumbness of Them. As tribal groups have always done, we blow past the dumbness of Us.
Next week, we'll look at some of the leadership groups who have so massively failed us. We'll look at the nation's professors, and at the emerging, younger group of black assistant professors.
We'll look at the lefty cohort, which can be too cool for school. We'll look at the Hollywood types, who seem to be happy only when costing Democrats votes. (Last week, were you able to spot the way Meryl Streep did it again?)
We'll look at our corporate cable stars, including our corporate liberal stars, some of whom sat out the last election, some of whom, in earlier corporate lives, created the stupid and noxious themes which sent Clinton down to defeat.
We'll look at the liberal voices within the mainstream press—the Riches, the Drums, the Chaits, the Dionnes, the Robinsons, Kristofs and even the (MVP) Krugmans.
We'll look at the mainstream press corps itself—at the jihads it invented in the 1990s. We'll look at the 20-somethings who now swarm all over that mainstream press, helping keep labor costs down while trailing their youthful cluelessness behind them.
(Where on earth did Slate ever go to find its newest, most fatuous star? What does it say about Us that there must be a cohort which wants this?)
As we roll our eyes at The Others, we tend to look past the conduct of our own leadership groups. We do so because we liberals are dumb, like all tribal groups before us.
How dumb can we the liberals get? Last November, we were shocked when Donald J. Trump drew an inside straight and won.
We were shocked because our professors and pundits told us it couldn't possibly happen—and because, left on our own, we were dumb enough to believe them. In last Sunday's Washington Post, Dana Milbank described the "collective trauma" we now experience, in which "millions of people feel powerless and out of control, which leads to anxiety, anger and despair."
Depending on how you want to score it, Milbank is one of the liberal voices within the upper-end mainstream press. How should we now respond to Trump?
Boldly, Milbank laid out of his ideas. Here's the way he began:
MILBANK (2/12/17): Until now, the response to Trump has been ad hoc: demonstrations arranged on social media or flooding the Capitol switchboard. That does some good, and the rallies are a balm for people feeling isolated. But the activities are wasted if those involved don’t join a larger movement.Has the man with the nuclear codes moved past unhinged and unglued? Friend, Dana Milbank knows what to do:
“We need to shift from a reactive to a strategic response,” [Marshall] Ganz says. His solution: Join something. “To the extent it brings you into a relationship with others, it’s worth doing. Unless it has that further dividend, it gets old.”
So what to join? My friend Eric Liu, author of the forthcoming book “You’re More Powerful Than You Think,” says even a book club will do. That’s true, in the long run: The idea is to rebuild structures of civil society, the breakdown of which allowed the demagogic Trump to take root.
You should join a book club!
In fairness, Milbank moved on from there. He went on to offer suggestions which are slightly less unglued—though as he ended, he also suggested that you might consider the Elks Club.
To the extent that he makes any good suggestions, Milbank's ideas have arrived just in time to be completely too late. At his worst, his suggestions make him seem about as moored, hinged and glued as Trump currently is.
Join a book club! Milbank's suggestion appeared in an especially comical Sunday edition of the Washington Post.
Possibly for the first time, the Outlook section offered an informative "Five Myths" feature in which none of the myths the authors "corrected" could sensibly be described as myths. Meanwhile, Outlook's featured front-page report appeared beneath this eye-catching hard-copy headline:
"Why do we still let 12-year-olds get married?"
It was an eye-catching headline. Unfortunately, the example with which the report began involved someone who got married at age 16—in 1986! In the course of the lengthy report's 1900 words, we were never told how many 12-year-olds have been married in recent decades.
The topic may well be very important. The journalism was bad.
Bad journalism has been par for the course in the decades of cultural / intellectual slide which led to the triumph of Trump. The strangest piece in the Outlook section concerned the liberalish world's heroic reaction to his shocking triumph.
Two nights before, a multimillionaire cable star who mugged and clowned through the last election praised us proles for the brilliant way, "all of a sudden," we are "now" learning to fight. As she did, she stuffed another bag of corporate money into her big corporate pants.
Two days later, the Washington Post went the star somewhat better. They published this ludicrous Outlook piece by a woman in Richmond, Virginia—a previously non-political woman who has now learned to fight.
We're going to call her "Name Withheld;" her piece was just that awful. It isn't her fault that the Washington Post chose to publish her ludicrous piece, in the Outlook section no less. But the utter foolishness of the piece shows us how bad the marriage can be when the rank-and-file, lacking competent leadership, interacts with the strange cluelessness of the upper-end mainstream press.
How old is Name Withheld? We have no idea. In its identity line, the Post only tells us this:
"[Name Withheld] currently resides in Richmond, Va., and works in the insurance field."
We'll assume that Name Withheld is a good, decent person. In our experience, most people are.
We'll assume she does good work in the insurance field. That said, as she starts, she identifies herself as the modern liberal nightmare, especially in a purple state like Virginia:
NAME WITHHELD (2/12/17): Like a lot of Americans, I’ve never been particularly political. I’ve never voted in a midterm election. I’ve never voted in a local race, never voted for mayor. I don’t recall voting ever, except in presidential elections. I’d read political articles and keep up with the news, but I didn’t do much research before heading to the polls every four years. My Facebook feed was mostly cat photos.There's nothing "wrong" with posting cat photos on Facebook. There's nothing "wrong" with discussing this or that at happy hour with friends.
But then President Trump was elected, and he nominated Betsy DeVos to be secretary of education.
Before DeVos, I hadn’t followed a single Cabinet nomination, which is probably true of most people. (Surveys regularly show that we aren’t particularly informed about our government.) At happy hour with my five girlfriends, we probably could have named two members of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, and the secretary of education was not one of them. I feel bad saying it, but it’s the truth: I simply didn’t think I needed to know. Why? Because I always had a sense that things would be okay, regardless of who was in charge; if Mitt Romney had won instead of Obama, things would have been fine.
This was the first time I felt like things could not be okay. And I have found a political voice I didn’t know that I had—or that I even wanted to have.
There was something wrong—something badly wrong—with the Washington Post's decision to publish this ridiculous piece.
According to this lengthy piece, Name Withheld had always been apolitical. But then, along came DeVos!
More broadly, along came Trump! As a result, Name Withheld "has found a political voice I didn’t know that I had."
Name Withheld is telling a story from a dime novel, a story of personal triumph. "All of a sudden," Name Withheld is woke! For some reason, the Washington Post decided to publish this mess.
Why do we call this piece a mess? Because even in the case of DeVos, Name Withheld still seems utterly clueless. She seems to know virtually nothing about DeVos, but the Washington Post is helping Name Withheld, and us, think she's heroically woke.
Name Withheld is still uninformed. She knows that DeVos went to private schools, seems to know nothing else.
Franklin Roosevelt attended only private schools; so did John F. Kennedy. As far as we know, the same is true of Barack Obama, during the years in which he lived in the United States.
The fact that DeVos went to private schools just isn't hugely important. But it seems to be all that Name Withheld knows. This has led her to think that she's now politically active in a way that's likely to help.
Name Withheld, a good decent person, is in need of political and intellectual leadership—as are we all, of course. Will such leadership come from within our own liberal tribe?
As you ponder that question, consider this next ridiculous piece. For unknown reasons, it turned up in The Atlantic, three days ago.
The piece was written by Elizabeth Limbach, "editor in chief of the bimonthly surf lifestyle magazine Santa Cruz Waves." In her own ridiculous piece, Limbach catches the most recent wave of push-back against Tyrant Trump:
All of a sudden, liberals and progressives are agreeing that we shouldn't say his name! And no, we really aren't kidding about that. Limbach has even consulted an ethical theorist and assistant professor of philosophy concerning this emerging act of resistance:
LIMBACH (2/14/17): Like the Obamas, many of Trump’s critics have become rather skilled at speaking about him without ever saying his name. In his January State of the State address, California Governor Jerry Brown didn’t utter “Trump” once, even though the politician had been vocal and explicit about his opposition in the past. Nor was the name said by Representative John Lewis when the civil-rights leader responded to attacks Trump lobbed at him via Twitter. Meryl Streep’s viral Golden Globes speech took aim at the new president while never acknowledging him by name, and “a coarse blowhard who has boasted about assaulting women” was the closest the humorist Calvin Trillin came to naming the man in a recent piece in The New Yorker. Last week, Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice King shared a widely circulated list to her Facebook page offering tips for resisting Trump. The top suggestion: “Use his name sparingly so as not to detract from the issues.”It's sad that such nonsense exists. It should be astounding that The Atlantic would decide to publish such crap.
In all of these instances, it’s what’s missing that is loudest. “Absences can be significant,” James Sias, an ethical theorist and assistant professor of philosophy at Dickinson College, told me. “What stood out to most people about Michelle Obama’s speech is what she didn’t say.”
For some, the refusal to name Trump amounts to denial or dissociation. But for many of the tactic’s adoptees, it’s a signal of resistance...
"Join a book club," Milbank says. Don't say his name," adds Limbach. Name Withheld has learned one fact.
Let's set aside the peculiar fact that the Post and The Atlantic have chosen to publish such manifest crap. Will we liberals ever be willing to see what this pitiful state of affairs says about self-impressed Us?
Next week: Our own unfaithful servants
Why would Flynn favor Russia so much?
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2017
An actual answer exists: In our view, the Trump administration seems to be in the grip of apparent madness.
In our view, we need to learn how to discuss the administration's peculiar behaviors in terms of possible mental health issues. We see few signs that major journalists are going to learn how to do that.
That said, Nicholas Kristof asks a basic question in today's New York Times column. Rather, he quotes a former general counsel to the CIA asking the question:
“The bigger issue here is why Trump and people around him take such a radically different view of Russia than has been the case for decades. We don’t know the answer to that.”
Let's start with Trump himself. We have no idea why Trump would "take such a radically different view of Russia than has been the case for decades."
Many people have suggested the possibility of nefarious motives on Trump's part. Certainly, that could be the case.
We also don't know why Michael Flynn has "take[n] such a radically different view of Russia than has been the case for decades." But in Flynn's case, there's a fairly straightforward possible answer. That answer is found in David Ignatius' column in yesterday's Washington Post.
In his column, Ignatius outlined the path which led to Flynn's recent dismissal by Trump. Along the way, he described the reasons why a person with Flynn's global views would be inclined to favor friendly relations with Russia.
Below, Ignatius describes Flynn's apparent worldview. Broadly speaking, Ignatius described a person who thinks the pre-existing "east-west" split between the US and Russia should be replaced by a "north-south" split, with the US and Russia aligning against the Islamic world:
We can't picture Donald J. Trump holding this view of the world, or any other view of the world. Presumably, though, this type of thinking may help explain Flynn's attraction to alignment with Russia.
Flynn struck us as one of the dangerous nuts within TrumpWorld. At the Republican convention, he led chants of "lock her up." He retweeted PizzaGate. His son, who was his chief of staff in the private world, seems overtly crazy.
We're in slightly better shape with Flynn gone, though the most dangerous player remains. Again, we need to find ways to discuss Donald Trump's strange behavior.
That said, Ignatius' column provides a possible answer to the question Kristof posed. In our view, Trump's motive for loving the Russkies remains completely unclear. However deranged you may judge it to be, FlynnThink may be less mysterious.
Concerning Russia Today and Big Ed: Did you know that Ed Schultz is now "the lead news anchor for RT America, the domestic network of what was once known as Russia Today?"
Shortly before Christmas, Paul Farhi profiled Schultz for the Washington Post. He focused on Schultz's denial that Russia interfered in the Trump/Clinton election. According to Farhi, Schultz dismisses the claim as fake news. He blames the BS on Clinton.
We'll recommend caution with a topic like this, but it's an interesting read.
Schultz started out as a right-wing radio talker; became a progressive host on MSNBC, now works for the Russkies. We haven't seen his work for RT, but there seem to be quite a few miles on his car.
Not to mention Schultz's private plane, with which Farhi closes his profile. Its previous owner was Arnold Palmer.
Ain't work as a newsman grand?
An actual answer exists: In our view, the Trump administration seems to be in the grip of apparent madness.
In our view, we need to learn how to discuss the administration's peculiar behaviors in terms of possible mental health issues. We see few signs that major journalists are going to learn how to do that.
That said, Nicholas Kristof asks a basic question in today's New York Times column. Rather, he quotes a former general counsel to the CIA asking the question:
“The bigger issue here is why Trump and people around him take such a radically different view of Russia than has been the case for decades. We don’t know the answer to that.”
Let's start with Trump himself. We have no idea why Trump would "take such a radically different view of Russia than has been the case for decades."
Many people have suggested the possibility of nefarious motives on Trump's part. Certainly, that could be the case.
We also don't know why Michael Flynn has "take[n] such a radically different view of Russia than has been the case for decades." But in Flynn's case, there's a fairly straightforward possible answer. That answer is found in David Ignatius' column in yesterday's Washington Post.
In his column, Ignatius outlined the path which led to Flynn's recent dismissal by Trump. Along the way, he described the reasons why a person with Flynn's global views would be inclined to favor friendly relations with Russia.
Below, Ignatius describes Flynn's apparent worldview. Broadly speaking, Ignatius described a person who thinks the pre-existing "east-west" split between the US and Russia should be replaced by a "north-south" split, with the US and Russia aligning against the Islamic world:
IGNATIUS (2/15/17): Along the way, Flynn became enthusiastic about improving liaison with Russia, which he saw as a natural counterterrorism partner. He visited the Russian military-intelligence agency, the GRU, in 2013, and came back advocating greater cooperation in monitoring Syrian chemical weapons. Even after Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Flynn proposed inviting the intelligence chiefs of its various theater commands to Washington for discussions. His superiors rejected what they saw as a supremely ill-timed proposal.For a person who thinks that "Islamic terrorism" represents an existential threat to the US, a new alignment with Russia would make an obvious type of sense. This seems to be Flynn's general view of the world.
After Flynn was forced out in 2014, he complained that his ouster reflected disagreements about Middle East strategy. Colleagues at the time say it was simply a story of management failure—a good officer in the wrong job.
An embittered Flynn continued to advocate closer cooperation with Russia—and began issuing strident denunciations of the Obama administration. He told Al Jazeera television in August 2015 that the rise of the Islamic State was a “willful Washington decision.” He told the German magazine Der Spiegel in November 2015 that U.S. military operations in Iraq and Libya had been a “mistake” and a “strategic failure.” These became major themes for Donald Trump, whose campaign Flynn informally began advising in late 2015.
Flynn did something in December 2015 that has haunted him ever since. He gave a paid speech in Moscow at the 10th-anniversary celebration of Russia Today, a global cable network described by U.S. intelligence as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” The RT interviewer pushed him to say positive things about U.S.-Russian cooperation, and Flynn complied.
“Stop being like two bullies in the playground!” Flynn said in Moscow. “It’s a marriage, whether we like it or not, and that marriage is very, very rocky right now,” he said. In a separate RT interview in Moscow, he urged that the two countries share intelligence and operations centers against Islamic terrorism. Flynn sat next to President Vladimir Putin at a celebratory dinner on that 2015 trip.
We can't picture Donald J. Trump holding this view of the world, or any other view of the world. Presumably, though, this type of thinking may help explain Flynn's attraction to alignment with Russia.
Flynn struck us as one of the dangerous nuts within TrumpWorld. At the Republican convention, he led chants of "lock her up." He retweeted PizzaGate. His son, who was his chief of staff in the private world, seems overtly crazy.
We're in slightly better shape with Flynn gone, though the most dangerous player remains. Again, we need to find ways to discuss Donald Trump's strange behavior.
That said, Ignatius' column provides a possible answer to the question Kristof posed. In our view, Trump's motive for loving the Russkies remains completely unclear. However deranged you may judge it to be, FlynnThink may be less mysterious.
Concerning Russia Today and Big Ed: Did you know that Ed Schultz is now "the lead news anchor for RT America, the domestic network of what was once known as Russia Today?"
Shortly before Christmas, Paul Farhi profiled Schultz for the Washington Post. He focused on Schultz's denial that Russia interfered in the Trump/Clinton election. According to Farhi, Schultz dismisses the claim as fake news. He blames the BS on Clinton.
We'll recommend caution with a topic like this, but it's an interesting read.
Schultz started out as a right-wing radio talker; became a progressive host on MSNBC, now works for the Russkies. We haven't seen his work for RT, but there seem to be quite a few miles on his car.
Not to mention Schultz's private plane, with which Farhi closes his profile. Its previous owner was Arnold Palmer.
Ain't work as a newsman grand?
HOW WE GOT HERE: No one believed that Trump could win!
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2017
Part 4—At long last, Maddow confesses: Why did Rachel mug and clown her way through the Trump/Clinton campaign?
Why did she duck every serious issue? Why did she use her time to entertain us, helping us learn to adore her more fully?
Last night, the multimillionaire corporate star finally spilled concerning her own past indolence. She made her confession roughly ten minutes into her TV show as she read from a 1996 police report, and from divorce records, concerning domestic violence charges brought against Steve Bannon.
Maddow spent the first nine minutes reading from those records, which became public last August. Then, she made her confession:
Last evening, Maddow spent her first nine minutes reading from the police report which became public last August. After that, she explained why "eventually, that story just faded out of the news."
You might have thought she was explaining why other news orgs let the story go. Just for the record, it might be worth recording the amount of attention the story received on her show.
Last night, Maddow spent the first ten minutes reading from the 1996 police report about Bannon. Back in August, she herself barely discussed this matter at all.
On August 26, she offered a perfunctory, two-minute overview of the facts which had just surfaced that day. After that, on Maddow's show, the story instantly "faded away." To all intents and purposes, she never mentioned it again.
Should Maddow have mentioned this topic more often during the campaign? Not necessarily, no. For today, we're most interested in the reason she gave for the way the story "eventually faded away."
This is what she said:
"And honestly, I think part of the reason that story went away...is because in, you know, late August, early September, nobody really believed Donald Trump could conceivably win the presidency. Right?"
We're glad to see that the cable star was being honest this time. But nobody believed that Trump could win?
We're sorry, but that isn't right. We're sorry, but that's just wrong.
Most likely, it's true! World-class flyweights—people like Maddow—may have believed there was no way Trump could possibly win. After all, our biggest stars were filling our heads with that enjoyable pap.
As late as the Friday before the election, Professor Wang was telling us, on Lawrence's show, that only a major weather event could conceivably give Trump a chance to win! True-believing bloggers had spooned this porridge on a weekly basis, endearing themselves to the liberal readers who were thus misled.
Last night, to her credit, Maddow at last confessed! Apparently, she too had been among the group who assumed there was no way Trump could win. Is that why she clowned for seventeen months during this White House election?
Next week, we'll offer a slightly more detailed review of the remarkable ways Maddow avoided the major issues which defined this election. But on November 8, Donald J. Trump pulled an inside straight and won.
Given the manifest craziness of the winner, it was one of the most embarrassing losses a political party, movement or group has ever arranged to sustain. Last night, Rachel confessed the reasons for her role in this dangerous debacle.
Will we liberals now stage an "autopsy" of last year's election? Will we examine the varying roles our cluelessness played in this embarrassing gong-show?
Not real freaking likely! As you know, we prefer to blame the debacle on Them, Those People, the ones Over There. It rarely enters our extremely thick heads that we had been paving the road to defeat for at least twenty-five years.
In Rachel Maddow's clowning clown world, we savants were shocked, just shocked, by the fact that Trump pulled that inside straight and won. In fact, it had always been possible that he could win. But, as Rachel admitted last night, corporate stars were too dumb to know that. This explains why they gamboled and played.
On November 9, we were shocked, just shocked. This Sunday, in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank described the troubled state in which some of us have found ourselves in the wake of our latest disaster:
We do think people have every right to feel depressed and fearful about our new President Trump. We also know who failed those people during the 25-year nap in the woods which largely explains how we got here.
Rank-and-file liberals have been badly served by their overpaid, self-dealing leadership groups. They've been badly served by cable stars who mug and clown to help us adore them. They've been badly served by other major groups too.
Next week, we'll call the roll of some of those groups. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at why we do need leaders.
As he continued, Milbank told his readers what they could do to battle their fear and depression, and to battle Trump. Some of his suggestions were strange. We've seen others which are worse.
The rank and file will always need guidance from leaders who offer good, sound advice. Tomorrow, we'll show you how true that truism is.
We'll show you several ideas which have emerged concerning the way we can battle Trump. We've started our fight exactly too late. Plus, our ideas are no good!
Tomorrow: Join a book club, Milbank says. Or possibly join the Elks!
Part 4—At long last, Maddow confesses: Why did Rachel mug and clown her way through the Trump/Clinton campaign?
Why did she duck every serious issue? Why did she use her time to entertain us, helping us learn to adore her more fully?
Last night, the multimillionaire corporate star finally spilled concerning her own past indolence. She made her confession roughly ten minutes into her TV show as she read from a 1996 police report, and from divorce records, concerning domestic violence charges brought against Steve Bannon.
Maddow spent the first nine minutes reading from those records, which became public last August. Then, she made her confession:
MADDOW (2/15/17): The Trump campaign actually never commented as to whether or not they were aware of this stuff in Steve Bannon's past when he was brought on to run the campaign.To watch the whole segment, click here. The confession starts around the 9:20 mark.
And you know, eventually that story just faded out of the news.
To be fair, there was a lot going on at the time. And honestly, I think part of the reason that story went away, after it was first reported in August, is because in, you know, late August, early September, nobody really believed Donald Trump could conceivably win the presidency. Right?
So whatever kind of characters he was bringing on to rescue his sinking ship of a campaign, I think everybody assumed they would all be out of the news sooner or later. Why bother going into too much depth?
But then they won. And Steve Bannon leapt from the campaign to the White House.
Last evening, Maddow spent her first nine minutes reading from the police report which became public last August. After that, she explained why "eventually, that story just faded out of the news."
You might have thought she was explaining why other news orgs let the story go. Just for the record, it might be worth recording the amount of attention the story received on her show.
Last night, Maddow spent the first ten minutes reading from the 1996 police report about Bannon. Back in August, she herself barely discussed this matter at all.
On August 26, she offered a perfunctory, two-minute overview of the facts which had just surfaced that day. After that, on Maddow's show, the story instantly "faded away." To all intents and purposes, she never mentioned it again.
Should Maddow have mentioned this topic more often during the campaign? Not necessarily, no. For today, we're most interested in the reason she gave for the way the story "eventually faded away."
This is what she said:
"And honestly, I think part of the reason that story went away...is because in, you know, late August, early September, nobody really believed Donald Trump could conceivably win the presidency. Right?"
We're glad to see that the cable star was being honest this time. But nobody believed that Trump could win?
We're sorry, but that isn't right. We're sorry, but that's just wrong.
Most likely, it's true! World-class flyweights—people like Maddow—may have believed there was no way Trump could possibly win. After all, our biggest stars were filling our heads with that enjoyable pap.
As late as the Friday before the election, Professor Wang was telling us, on Lawrence's show, that only a major weather event could conceivably give Trump a chance to win! True-believing bloggers had spooned this porridge on a weekly basis, endearing themselves to the liberal readers who were thus misled.
Last night, to her credit, Maddow at last confessed! Apparently, she too had been among the group who assumed there was no way Trump could win. Is that why she clowned for seventeen months during this White House election?
Next week, we'll offer a slightly more detailed review of the remarkable ways Maddow avoided the major issues which defined this election. But on November 8, Donald J. Trump pulled an inside straight and won.
Given the manifest craziness of the winner, it was one of the most embarrassing losses a political party, movement or group has ever arranged to sustain. Last night, Rachel confessed the reasons for her role in this dangerous debacle.
Will we liberals now stage an "autopsy" of last year's election? Will we examine the varying roles our cluelessness played in this embarrassing gong-show?
Not real freaking likely! As you know, we prefer to blame the debacle on Them, Those People, the ones Over There. It rarely enters our extremely thick heads that we had been paving the road to defeat for at least twenty-five years.
In Rachel Maddow's clowning clown world, we savants were shocked, just shocked, by the fact that Trump pulled that inside straight and won. In fact, it had always been possible that he could win. But, as Rachel admitted last night, corporate stars were too dumb to know that. This explains why they gamboled and played.
On November 9, we were shocked, just shocked. This Sunday, in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank described the troubled state in which some of us have found ourselves in the wake of our latest disaster:
MILBANK (2/12/17): I’ve heard it scores of times from Americans frightened, angry or depressed about President Trump: “What can I do?”We'll be honest—we didn't know what Everclear was, and Milbank mentioned it three times. For a full report from the leading authority, you can just click here.
I recommend to each of them the same regimen I follow myself: Exercise regularly, spend time with family and drink a quart of Everclear every night.
But such self-care, as the mental-health practitioners call it, only goes so far. For much of America—the majority of the country that did not vote for Donald Trump—the election has brought about what’s known as a “collective trauma,” not unlike the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Then, we stockpiled duct tape, packed go bags and hatched family escape plans—giving us an illusory sense of control over the unimaginable (and, in retrospect, overblown) threats of chemical, biological and radioactive attacks. Now a majority of those on the left, as well as many moderates and conservatives, fear not some unknown terrorist cell but our own president, wary of the calamity he could unleash with his recklessness. One moment he’s attacking the federal judiciary; the next moment he’s assaulting Australia—or Nordstrom.
The erratic behavior makes millions of people feel powerless and out of control, which leads to anxiety, anger and despair.
We do think people have every right to feel depressed and fearful about our new President Trump. We also know who failed those people during the 25-year nap in the woods which largely explains how we got here.
Rank-and-file liberals have been badly served by their overpaid, self-dealing leadership groups. They've been badly served by cable stars who mug and clown to help us adore them. They've been badly served by other major groups too.
Next week, we'll call the roll of some of those groups. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at why we do need leaders.
As he continued, Milbank told his readers what they could do to battle their fear and depression, and to battle Trump. Some of his suggestions were strange. We've seen others which are worse.
The rank and file will always need guidance from leaders who offer good, sound advice. Tomorrow, we'll show you how true that truism is.
We'll show you several ideas which have emerged concerning the way we can battle Trump. We've started our fight exactly too late. Plus, our ideas are no good!
Tomorrow: Join a book club, Milbank says. Or possibly join the Elks!
High excitement can breed lousy work!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2017
The chase after Flynn and Trump: Without any question, the chase is on.
Blood is in the water; the journalists are excited. Every six hours, something new pops. It has the feel of the Watergate days, where this level of excitement was sustained for several years.
That sort of excitement won't always produce good journalism. Let's note one current journalistic leap which is cutting against Donald J. Trump, and one current journalistic leap which almost cuts in his favor.
For starters, let's note the journalistic fail which cuts against Trump and Flynn:
Last night, the highly exciting new excitement emerged from this exciting report in the New York Times. The exciting report tops today's hard-copy front page. "Trump Aides Had Contact With Russian Intelligence," the hard-copy headline says.
Last night, on cable, the troops were excited by this report's emergence. Just so you'll know, this is the way the report begins. We're going to highlight a significant disclaimer in paragraphs 2 and 3:
So far, intelligence agencies "have seen no evidence of such cooperation?" They've seen no evidence that the Trump campaign "was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election?"
Depending on how many phone calls the agencies may have intercepted, that sounds like a fairly striking admission. But go ahead! Read last night's account from Slate of what that Times report says.
You'll see that Elliott Hannon completely skipped the passage we've highlighted. After reporting the overview—Trump aides were in contact with Russkie spies—he skipped right down to the passage about the way "the intercepts alarmed American intelligence agencies."
We'd call that bad journalism. We'd also call it rather typical work.
At times like these, people want instant answers, and they they often want the answers they like. This tends to produce hurried work, with elbows and thumbs on the scales.
We'd say that Slate's report betrayed an obvious anti-Trump slant. Meanwhile, a type of tilt which is almost pro-Trump has been quite widely adopted. It's found all over this morning's Washington Post.
This tilt has gifted Vice President Pence with an instant "not guilty" verdict. For one example out of many, this is the way Costa and Parker began the report which sits atop the front page of today's Post:
Across the media landscape, this story-line has been widely adopted. The claim may be perfectly true, of course. But it's hard to know what makes journalists feel they know it's true at this time.
Was Pence completely out of the loop? Was he misinformed by Flynn, or perhaps by Flynn and Trump? Was he misinformed, full stop?
That's certainly possible! It's possible Pence had no idea that he was spreading misinformation. But this possibility has been accepted as fact by reams of reporters and pundits.
Our journalists love to run ahead of what's been established. Especially at times like this, they tend to settle on hard-and-fast script at roughly the speed of light. (For the record, positioning Pence as an innocent victim tends to increase the indictment of Flynn and Trump.)
In our view, you should be skeptical of all claims at times like this, including the claims you like. You should be skeptical concerning the motives of unnamed sources, and perhaps concerning the ways their leaks get reported. You should be skeptical concerning the claims which are settled on by our best-known liberal-ish scribes. You should stop insisting on speed.
It's a famous phrase: "rush to judgment." We people tend to rush all about at times as exciting as these.
The chase after Flynn and Trump: Without any question, the chase is on.
Blood is in the water; the journalists are excited. Every six hours, something new pops. It has the feel of the Watergate days, where this level of excitement was sustained for several years.
That sort of excitement won't always produce good journalism. Let's note one current journalistic leap which is cutting against Donald J. Trump, and one current journalistic leap which almost cuts in his favor.
For starters, let's note the journalistic fail which cuts against Trump and Flynn:
Last night, the highly exciting new excitement emerged from this exciting report in the New York Times. The exciting report tops today's hard-copy front page. "Trump Aides Had Contact With Russian Intelligence," the hard-copy headline says.
Last night, on cable, the troops were excited by this report's emergence. Just so you'll know, this is the way the report begins. We're going to highlight a significant disclaimer in paragraphs 2 and 3:
SCHMIDT, MAZZETTA AND APUZZO (2/15/17): Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.The Times report proceeds from there. That said, the highlighted passage strikes us as rather significant.
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.
The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.
But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.
So far, intelligence agencies "have seen no evidence of such cooperation?" They've seen no evidence that the Trump campaign "was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election?"
Depending on how many phone calls the agencies may have intercepted, that sounds like a fairly striking admission. But go ahead! Read last night's account from Slate of what that Times report says.
You'll see that Elliott Hannon completely skipped the passage we've highlighted. After reporting the overview—Trump aides were in contact with Russkie spies—he skipped right down to the passage about the way "the intercepts alarmed American intelligence agencies."
We'd call that bad journalism. We'd also call it rather typical work.
At times like these, people want instant answers, and they they often want the answers they like. This tends to produce hurried work, with elbows and thumbs on the scales.
We'd say that Slate's report betrayed an obvious anti-Trump slant. Meanwhile, a type of tilt which is almost pro-Trump has been quite widely adopted. It's found all over this morning's Washington Post.
This tilt has gifted Vice President Pence with an instant "not guilty" verdict. For one example out of many, this is the way Costa and Parker began the report which sits atop the front page of today's Post:
COSTA AND PARKER (2/15/17): For nearly two full weeks, nobody told Vice President Pence that he had been misled by national security adviser Michael Flynn.At the end of paragraph 3, the writers finally seem to acknowledge that they're simply providing stenography for Lotter, the Pence spokesman. Before that, they seem to be saying, in their own voice, that Vice President Pence had no idea that he was misstating the facts.
After privately being assured by Flynn that he had never had any discussions about Russian sanctions with that country’s ambassador, Pence went on TV in mid-January and publicly parroted Flynn’s denial. But on Jan. 26, President Trump and a small group of senior aides learned that the Justice Department had evidence that Flynn had, in fact, discussed sanctions and misled the vice president.
Yet it would take almost a fortnight for Pence to learn the truth—and only then because of a report in The Washington Post, according to Marc Lotter, a spokesman for the vice president.
Across the media landscape, this story-line has been widely adopted. The claim may be perfectly true, of course. But it's hard to know what makes journalists feel they know it's true at this time.
Was Pence completely out of the loop? Was he misinformed by Flynn, or perhaps by Flynn and Trump? Was he misinformed, full stop?
That's certainly possible! It's possible Pence had no idea that he was spreading misinformation. But this possibility has been accepted as fact by reams of reporters and pundits.
Our journalists love to run ahead of what's been established. Especially at times like this, they tend to settle on hard-and-fast script at roughly the speed of light. (For the record, positioning Pence as an innocent victim tends to increase the indictment of Flynn and Trump.)
In our view, you should be skeptical of all claims at times like this, including the claims you like. You should be skeptical concerning the motives of unnamed sources, and perhaps concerning the ways their leaks get reported. You should be skeptical concerning the claims which are settled on by our best-known liberal-ish scribes. You should stop insisting on speed.
It's a famous phrase: "rush to judgment." We people tend to rush all about at times as exciting as these.
HOW WE GOT HERE: All of a sudden, we're getting real good!
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2017
Part 3—We know this because Rachel says: On November 9, after decades of napping, we liberals arose to a new reality:
The craziest candidate in American history was president-elect!
Showing our infallible judgment, we liberals saw what this meant. It was time for us the liberals to get involved!
Ten weeks later, Rep. Keith Ellison chuckled about our new ardor. Two days after the mammoth women's march, his comment appeared at the start of this front-page report in the Washington Post:
This isn't a criticism of Ellison's niece, who began her fight for the cause about twenty-five years too late. We offer this as a criticism of liberal leadership cadres—the people who failed, for twenty-five years, to rally the rank-and-file concerning the need for a fight and concerning the skills that are needed.
On balance, it's good that all those people marched that day. On balance, it's good that many liberals and liberal groups are now engaged in a series of fights.
That said, the giant damage had been done by the time the niece decided to fight. People like her had been failed, for many years, by their slumbering, hapless/inept, self-dealing leadership cadres.
Just in time to be too late, we liberals are pushing back hard! The people who failed us are cheering us on. It's the new way of selling the car.
As this embarrassing chain unfolds, we think a question should be asked. Will we ever come to terms with the ludicrous ways we liberals managed to get here?
Granted, the election of the world's craziest candidate is completely the fault of Those People. No one can think that losing to such a ludicrous person could possibly, in any small way, reflect some shortcoming in Us.
The craziest candidate got where he is because of the bigotry of The Others! That said, will we liberals ever be able to understand the admittedly tiny ways in which we ourselves may have failed, admittedly in some tiny way?
Almost surely, the answer is no. Last Friday, a cable star was selling the car by praising us for our greatness.
The cable star was Rachel Maddow, who clowned her way through sixteen months of masterful campaign non-coverage. Ever since Donald J. Trump got elected, Maddow has been selling the car by telling us how fun and exciting it will be to see what happens in the Trump era.
(Easy for Maddow to say! By now, we'll guess that she's being paid $10 million per year.)
Maddow has been selling the car by saying how fun and exciting it will be. Also, by praising us, in ludicrous ways, for how smart we've now become.
Starting in May 2015, did anyone sleep through the last campaign more than Rachel Maddow? We'll briefly review her performance next week, when we review the liberal cadres who have helped put Trump where he is.
For today, let's note the way Maddow was selling the car at the end of last Friday night's program. As usual, she was talking down to us viewers, confident that we wouldn't be able to see her for the hustler/clown she has become.
The segment started with footage of an exchange outside the office of a Republican congressman. A fiery liberal peppered an aide to the congressman with a series of questions about the congressman's stand on the Affordable Care Act.
After playing the tape, Maddow told us how smart we've become. For the record, she included a minor factual error as she poured it on:
All of a sudden we're getting real good! Presumably, we were supposed to swell with pride when we heard Rachel say that. But uh-oh! Here on our sprawling campus, our youthful analysts had a different response.
They tore their hair and wailed and moaned about Maddow's familiar fawning. "Why didn't we 'get really good' in 2009?" one of the youngsters asked.
We'll answer that youngster's question next week. For today, let's continue to watch as the car gets sold.
Maddow now played tape of a young woman speaking at a congressional town hall meeting in Tennessee. The young woman offered a passionate exposition of the principles she sees expressed in Obamacare.
Maddow then did it again:
Maddow continued on from there, pleasuring us with standard remarks about Price's "ethics problems." Then, she turned to Andy Puzder—and told us to get some rest:
We were going to need that rest. We had unpaid labor ahead!
No one sat out Campaign 2016 quite the way Maddow did. Too dumb to see this, we kept tuning in to her program. Her corporate bosses have rewarded her for her corporate labor. Now, she's telling us to rest up so we can get out there and picket!
Last Friday night, Rachel was telling us how really good we're getting "all of a sudden." In truth, we aren't getting really good at all, and the damage, which is extensive and dangerous, has of course already been done.
We got here through decades of gruesome failures by our own leadership groups. Next week, we'll run through some of those fails. Tomorrow, we'll show you some of the brilliant ideas we devise when we're left on our own.
In truth, we aren't "getting really good." Meanwhile, our leadership cadres are just as inept, and overfed, as ever.
We got here through our own endless fails. Will we ever see this?
Tomorrow: Home alone!
Part 3—We know this because Rachel says: On November 9, after decades of napping, we liberals arose to a new reality:
The craziest candidate in American history was president-elect!
Showing our infallible judgment, we liberals saw what this meant. It was time for us the liberals to get involved!
Ten weeks later, Rep. Keith Ellison chuckled about our new ardor. Two days after the mammoth women's march, his comment appeared at the start of this front-page report in the Washington Post:
WEIGEL AND PORTNOY (1/23/17): Alex Ellison, a senior at Boston's Emerson College, was thrilled by what she saw at the women's marches. She called her uncle, and Rep. Keith Ellison listened as the niece he'd struggled to get involved in the 2016 campaign described how inspiring it was to be surrounded by women, fighting for a cause.Rep. Ellison spotted the humor. To be honest, we didn't.
"I was like—oh, now you're interested?" Ellison (D-Minn.) remembered with a laugh.
The scale of Saturday's marches, in Washington and elsewhere, surprised even the most optimistic boosters. Democrats who had tried and failed to generate enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton saw crowds conquering cities, as well as small towns she'd badly lost.
This isn't a criticism of Ellison's niece, who began her fight for the cause about twenty-five years too late. We offer this as a criticism of liberal leadership cadres—the people who failed, for twenty-five years, to rally the rank-and-file concerning the need for a fight and concerning the skills that are needed.
On balance, it's good that all those people marched that day. On balance, it's good that many liberals and liberal groups are now engaged in a series of fights.
That said, the giant damage had been done by the time the niece decided to fight. People like her had been failed, for many years, by their slumbering, hapless/inept, self-dealing leadership cadres.
Just in time to be too late, we liberals are pushing back hard! The people who failed us are cheering us on. It's the new way of selling the car.
As this embarrassing chain unfolds, we think a question should be asked. Will we ever come to terms with the ludicrous ways we liberals managed to get here?
Granted, the election of the world's craziest candidate is completely the fault of Those People. No one can think that losing to such a ludicrous person could possibly, in any small way, reflect some shortcoming in Us.
The craziest candidate got where he is because of the bigotry of The Others! That said, will we liberals ever be able to understand the admittedly tiny ways in which we ourselves may have failed, admittedly in some tiny way?
Almost surely, the answer is no. Last Friday, a cable star was selling the car by praising us for our greatness.
The cable star was Rachel Maddow, who clowned her way through sixteen months of masterful campaign non-coverage. Ever since Donald J. Trump got elected, Maddow has been selling the car by telling us how fun and exciting it will be to see what happens in the Trump era.
(Easy for Maddow to say! By now, we'll guess that she's being paid $10 million per year.)
Maddow has been selling the car by saying how fun and exciting it will be. Also, by praising us, in ludicrous ways, for how smart we've now become.
Starting in May 2015, did anyone sleep through the last campaign more than Rachel Maddow? We'll briefly review her performance next week, when we review the liberal cadres who have helped put Trump where he is.
For today, let's note the way Maddow was selling the car at the end of last Friday night's program. As usual, she was talking down to us viewers, confident that we wouldn't be able to see her for the hustler/clown she has become.
The segment started with footage of an exchange outside the office of a Republican congressman. A fiery liberal peppered an aide to the congressman with a series of questions about the congressman's stand on the Affordable Care Act.
After playing the tape, Maddow told us how smart we've become. For the record, she included a minor factual error as she poured it on:
MADDOW (2/10/17): That's what it's been like with constituents expressing themselves toward, in this case, New York Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin. Today, Congressman Zeldin canceled a town hall two months in advance of when it was supposed to happen, in April, because I think he is not particularly liking what it means for him and his staff to hear from his constituents these days."All of a sudden" we're getting really good, this corporate fraudster declared. For the full transcript, click here.
But you know what? I wanted to show you that clip of that confrontation over the Affordable Care Act. I think it shows that people in general are getting very good, at being very articulate about Obamacare all of a sudden, right? Whatever the fights in the past had been about, right? With the people on the right saying, "Oh, it's socialized medicine" and it's "death panels" and stuff, and people in support of it not necessarily being able to be that snappy.
People, all of a sudden, are really good about articulating what's good about the Affordable Care Act when they're talking to their member of Congress, when they're talking to congressional staffers. This, for example, was last night in Tennessee:
All of a sudden we're getting real good! Presumably, we were supposed to swell with pride when we heard Rachel say that. But uh-oh! Here on our sprawling campus, our youthful analysts had a different response.
They tore their hair and wailed and moaned about Maddow's familiar fawning. "Why didn't we 'get really good' in 2009?" one of the youngsters asked.
We'll answer that youngster's question next week. For today, let's continue to watch as the car gets sold.
Maddow now played tape of a young woman speaking at a congressional town hall meeting in Tennessee. The young woman offered a passionate exposition of the principles she sees expressed in Obamacare.
Maddow then did it again:
MADDOW: That was at a meeting last night in Tennessee with Republican Congresswoman Diane Black. People are getting very good at putting their member of Congress on the spot about health care right now.Actually, "that skill" would have been extremely important back in 2009! Maddow failed to note this obvious fact. Once again, she gave us stickers, noting the high skill levels we are displaying "right now."
And for people who want to save the Affordable Care Act, that skill is about to become important. It's about to become way more important than it's even been thus far, because last night at 2:15 in the morning, the Senate confirmed Tom Price to be the new health secretary.
Maddow continued on from there, pleasuring us with standard remarks about Price's "ethics problems." Then, she turned to Andy Puzder—and told us to get some rest:
MADDOW: On Tuesday, a court in Missouri will decide whether or not to unseal his divorce records from back in the day. The government watchdog is asking that those records should be unsealed because they reportedly include claims of domestic violence made by Mr. Puzder's ex-wife toward him. Mr. Puzder has denied those allegations. His ex-wife now says she takes them back.Pharoah, many thanks! Maddow, who's paid millions of corporate dollars per year, told us proles to get our rest.
But his critics argued that those claims, if they're true, would make him plainly unfit to be in charge of efforts like combating workplace harassment and violence.
So Monday, the protests at Carl's Jr. and Hardee's. Tuesday, we have the court hearing on the domestic violence allegations in his divorce records. And Thursday, we get Puzder's confirmation hearing, the one that`s already been delayed four times.
So like the Senate, get some rest this weekend. You're going to need it!
That does it for us tonight. See you again Monday. Now it's time for The Last Word, Ari Melber sitting in for Lawrence.
We were going to need that rest. We had unpaid labor ahead!
No one sat out Campaign 2016 quite the way Maddow did. Too dumb to see this, we kept tuning in to her program. Her corporate bosses have rewarded her for her corporate labor. Now, she's telling us to rest up so we can get out there and picket!
Last Friday night, Rachel was telling us how really good we're getting "all of a sudden." In truth, we aren't getting really good at all, and the damage, which is extensive and dangerous, has of course already been done.
We got here through decades of gruesome failures by our own leadership groups. Next week, we'll run through some of those fails. Tomorrow, we'll show you some of the brilliant ideas we devise when we're left on our own.
In truth, we aren't "getting really good." Meanwhile, our leadership cadres are just as inept, and overfed, as ever.
We got here through our own endless fails. Will we ever see this?
Tomorrow: Home alone!
It was hard to read today's Washington Post!
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2017
Immigration raids and the Logan Act: Let's start on a positive note:
In this morning's Washington Post, Colby Itkowitz offers a superb report about the way a Syrian family has been welcomed to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In hard copy, the headlines said this:
The Post report ends with a question from the admirable Lancaster woman who has supervised the resettlement of this family. We would answer her question like this:
Concerning local people who may not feel the same way you do: try to be as understanding toward them as you've been toward this family. Don't succumb to what Dr. King called "corroding anger."
This was a superb report in this morning's Post. Elsewhere, we found it hard to understand the Post's work. Let's consider two topics:
Immigration raids:
Hauslohner and Somashekhar wrote a puzzling news report about the arrest of 680 people in immigration actions last week. In hard copy, the headline said this:
680 in U.S. illegally are arrested in raids
On what basis were these people arrested? We found it hard to decipher the Post's report. Early on, we encountered this:
Who are the other 25 percent? The issue is only further confused by the comment about "serious crimes," a term which is cited again late in the piece without ever getting defined.
Already, we were caught in a muddle. As the reporters continued, so did the confusion:
Meanwhile, it sounds like that puzzling 25 percent "had no prior convictions." No prior convictions for what? Unless there's something we're missing here, this work is indecipherable.
In theory, it shouldn't be this hard to read the Washington Post. That said, we had a similar problem with the featured front-page report concerning Michael Flynn.
Michael Flynn and sanctions on Russia:
Granted, events have been moving fast in this area; Flynn still hadn't resigned when this morning's hard-copy report went to print. Still and all, this passage didn't quite seem to make sense:
Let us say this about that:
The scent of blood is in the air. At such times, lynch mobs will form, even among those who vote the same way you do.
Unless you just enjoy running with mobs, you should continue to insist on clarity. You should also exercise appropriate skepticism, even concerning players like Yates and even concerning top reporters.
We thought that passage was a bit murky concerning Yates' thinking. Meanwhile, right at the start of this report, Post readers encountered this:
But why would Yates even have believed that? How could she possibly have known whether Flynn had "misled senior administration officials," including Pence?
It's possible that Pence (and Trump) were misled by Flynn, of course. It's also possible that they weren't misled by Flynn—that they all agreed to misstate the facts. Why would Yates already have formed a "belief" which would exculpate Trump and Pence? This point of puzzlement comes right at the start of this front-page report.
People are running in the streets, chasing Flynn with ropes. At such times, you're likely to hear a lot of things that don't quite make sense, even from people you may be inclined to favor.
(Needless to say, Rachel Maddow will be trying to get everyone thrown in jail.)
At a time like this, you're likely to see and hear serial leaps of logic. We'd advise you to keep your eye on the prize, with clarity preferably being a very key part of the deal.
Always room for one more: Maddow loves to dream about throwing people in jail. That includes Governor Bentley, who had a "sex scandal," as the Puritanical cable star reminded us again last week, for perhaps the ten millionth time.
Governor Bentley had a girl friend, and even talked about the enjoyment of touching her breasts! Rachel reminded us of these points again last week. She does have a bit of a problem in the general areas of 1) seeking punishment for The Others and 2) loathing the idea of Those People ever finding happiness or experiencing pleasure.
We don't admire these parts of her game. We don't think you should either.
Immigration raids and the Logan Act: Let's start on a positive note:
In this morning's Washington Post, Colby Itkowitz offers a superb report about the way a Syrian family has been welcomed to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In hard copy, the headlines said this:
"You are welcome here, and you are loved"We recommend every word, especially about the 4-year-old who's teaching the nursery rhyme.
A Pennsylvania church group helps a Syrian refugee family settle into their new lives
The Post report ends with a question from the admirable Lancaster woman who has supervised the resettlement of this family. We would answer her question like this:
Concerning local people who may not feel the same way you do: try to be as understanding toward them as you've been toward this family. Don't succumb to what Dr. King called "corroding anger."
This was a superb report in this morning's Post. Elsewhere, we found it hard to understand the Post's work. Let's consider two topics:
Immigration raids:
Hauslohner and Somashekhar wrote a puzzling news report about the arrest of 680 people in immigration actions last week. In hard copy, the headline said this:
680 in U.S. illegally are arrested in raids
On what basis were these people arrested? We found it hard to decipher the Post's report. Early on, we encountered this:
HAUSLOHNER AND SOMASHEKHAR (2/14/17): DHS, which overseas U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said Monday that approximately 75 percent of those arrested were “criminal aliens,” including some who had been convicted of crimes such as homicide, sexual assault of a minor and drug trafficking.Already, we were lost. According to the middle paragraph, the term "criminal aliens" seems to include everyone who's in the country without authorization. (People who entered the country illegally, plus those who overstayed a visa.) But in the top paragraph, we're told that only 75 percent of those arrested were "criminal aliens."
Asked to provide further clarification, a DHS official confirmed that the term “criminal aliens” includes anyone who had entered the United States illegally or overstayed or violated the terms of a visa. There are an estimated 11 million people in the United States who fit that profile.
ICE declined to provide the names and locations of those who were detained in the raids, nor would the agency say how many of the 680 people had committed serious crimes.
Who are the other 25 percent? The issue is only further confused by the comment about "serious crimes," a term which is cited again late in the piece without ever getting defined.
Already, we were caught in a muddle. As the reporters continued, so did the confusion:
HAUSLOHNER AND SOMASHEKAR (continuing directly): Field offices in Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, Atlanta and New York City released a total of 15 examples of people ICE took into custody last week, including one who was a “self-admitted MS-13 gang member” and one who was wanted for murder and attempted murder in Mexico. Seven had prior convictions for sexual assault or for lewd or indecent acts with a child, and three, including the gang member, had convictions for drug trafficking or distribution.In the first of those two paragraphs, it almost sounds like a fairly small number of those arrested had committed truly serious crimes. That said, the logic of that paragraph isn't clear.
ICE carried out the arrests in New York, California, Illinois, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana and Wisconsin. Of those, about a quarter had no prior convictions.
Meanwhile, it sounds like that puzzling 25 percent "had no prior convictions." No prior convictions for what? Unless there's something we're missing here, this work is indecipherable.
In theory, it shouldn't be this hard to read the Washington Post. That said, we had a similar problem with the featured front-page report concerning Michael Flynn.
Michael Flynn and sanctions on Russia:
Granted, events have been moving fast in this area; Flynn still hadn't resigned when this morning's hard-copy report went to print. Still and all, this passage didn't quite seem to make sense:
ENTOUS, NAKASHIMA AND RUCKER (2/14/17): Yates, then the deputy attorney general, considered Flynn’s comments in the intercepted call to be “highly significant” and “potentially illegal,” according to an official familiar with her thinking.According to that passage, Yates "suspected that Flynn could be in violation of the Logan Act," but "knew there was little chance of bringing against Flynn a case related to the Logan Act." As that third paragraph continues, the reporters try to iron out this wrinkle. We can't really say they succeed.
Yates and other intelligence officials suspected that Flynn could be in violation of an obscure U.S. statute known as the Logan Act, which bars U.S. citizens from interfering in diplomatic disputes with another country.
At the same time, Yates and other law enforcement officials knew there was little chance of bringing against Flynn a case related to the Logan Act, a statute that has never been used in a prosecution. In addition to the legal and political hurdles, Yates and other officials were aware of an FBI investigation looking at possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia, which now included the Flynn-Kislyak communications.
Let us say this about that:
The scent of blood is in the air. At such times, lynch mobs will form, even among those who vote the same way you do.
Unless you just enjoy running with mobs, you should continue to insist on clarity. You should also exercise appropriate skepticism, even concerning players like Yates and even concerning top reporters.
We thought that passage was a bit murky concerning Yates' thinking. Meanwhile, right at the start of this report, Post readers encountered this:
ENTOUS, NAKASHIMA AND RUCKER: The acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail, current and former U.S. officials said.Granted, that opening sentence only says that Yates "believed" that Flynn "had misled senior administration officials."
The message, delivered by Sally Q. Yates and a senior career national security official to the White House counsel, was prompted by concerns that Flynn, when asked about his calls and texts with the Russian diplomat, had told Vice President-elect Mike Pence and others that he had not discussed the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, the officials said. It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the information.
But why would Yates even have believed that? How could she possibly have known whether Flynn had "misled senior administration officials," including Pence?
It's possible that Pence (and Trump) were misled by Flynn, of course. It's also possible that they weren't misled by Flynn—that they all agreed to misstate the facts. Why would Yates already have formed a "belief" which would exculpate Trump and Pence? This point of puzzlement comes right at the start of this front-page report.
People are running in the streets, chasing Flynn with ropes. At such times, you're likely to hear a lot of things that don't quite make sense, even from people you may be inclined to favor.
(Needless to say, Rachel Maddow will be trying to get everyone thrown in jail.)
At a time like this, you're likely to see and hear serial leaps of logic. We'd advise you to keep your eye on the prize, with clarity preferably being a very key part of the deal.
Always room for one more: Maddow loves to dream about throwing people in jail. That includes Governor Bentley, who had a "sex scandal," as the Puritanical cable star reminded us again last week, for perhaps the ten millionth time.
Governor Bentley had a girl friend, and even talked about the enjoyment of touching her breasts! Rachel reminded us of these points again last week. She does have a bit of a problem in the general areas of 1) seeking punishment for The Others and 2) loathing the idea of Those People ever finding happiness or experiencing pleasure.
We don't admire these parts of her game. We don't think you should either.
HOW WE GOT HERE: Professor critiques the president's ties!
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2017
Part 2—With decades of similar nonsense: Just try to fathom the craziness of that perfectly non-crazy vote.
Candidate Clinton was running for office against Candidate Donald J. Trump. No major candidate has ever dissembled, misstated and self-contradicted more crazily than Candidate Trump.
And yet, that voter in Pennsylvania switched her vote from blue to red for the reason described below. When compared with the ludicrous Trump, Clinton was seen as the liar!
And yet, this voter flipped her vote because Clinton was such a big liar!
Angey Hartman's vote for Trump was, of course, just one vote. That said, the craziness of that vote wasn't especially crazy.
That vote reflected 25 years of laziness, lethargy and dumbness on the part of Our Own Liberal Team. It reflected a powerful, decades-long narrative pushed by the mainstream press corps—and, eventually, by many within Our Own Tribe.
This narrative was aimed at Bill Clinton, then seamlessly transferred to Candidate Gore. For twenty months during Campaign 2000, the mainstream press just kept inventing troubling "lies" by Gore.
Despite our self-admitted brilliance, we liberals just say there and took it. Sixteen years later, this narrative beat us again, in one of the most embarrassing defeats any group has ever arranged to sustain.
Good God! Last November, the Democratic candidate was widely perceived as the big liar as compared to Candidate Trump! When you lose an election that way, you've established yourselves as one of the most incompetent groups who ever drew breath on the planet.
Did the Green Bay Packers ever lose a game to an 80-pounds-and-under sixth grade team? If they had, it would perhaps have been as embarrassing as the way we self-impressed liberals managed to lose Angey Hartman's vote.
This raises an obvious question. Is it possible that last November's outcome is, in some very minor way, perhaps an unflattering reflection on Us?
We liberals love to trash The Others, the people like Hartman, taking special care to highlight their bigotry and their dumbness. Is it possible that the world-class dumbness in this story in some way belongs to Us?
If you know our liberal tribe, you already know the answer. Nothing will ever make us see the role we've played in our endless defeats. We're a parody of a satire about bubble-encased true belief.
Can anything ever make us see the roads which led to November's defeat? We are quite brilliantly able to see the racism of Everyone Who Isn't Exactly Like Us. In our manifest group dumbness, will we ever be able to see the other roads which led to that gong-show defeat?
Almost surely not. But in last Saturday's New York Times, the editors displayed a bit of the wider cultural dumbness which helps explain how we managed to get here, to this ridiculous place.
For the next several weeks, we plan to describe the various ways we created our own defeat. For today, let's take it slow and easy. Let's discuss Professor Ford, he of the Stanford Law School.
Last Saturday morning, a thoughtful piece by Professor Ford dominated the New York Times' op-ed page. Thanks to a sprawling, imaginative, hard-copy layout, the professor's column ate three fifths of the page above the fold. It continued a bit below that.
The professor's column—he's from Stanford Law—concerned a deeply significant aspect of Donald J. Trump's puzzling presidency. Believe it or not, these were the hard-copy headlines in our most brilliant newspaper:
(The piece took up enormous space because its text was published in lines of print which ranged from very short to much longer. Cleverly, this let the printed text affect the outline of a necktie! Which is what the piece was about!)
Professor Ford was attempting to answer a basic question: What can we learn from Donald J. Trump's shiny ties, which are badly-knotted?
If you have two brain cells to rub together, you may already know the answer. We can learn nothing from Donald Trump's ties, though the thoughtful professor said different.
We won't bother quoting today from this jackass column. We'll proceed directly to our own question:
What might we learn, from this jackassed piece, about the ways we liberals managed to lose an election to Donald J. Trump?
Our answer spreads back over several decades. The sheer inanity of this column reflects on the failings of the upper-end professoriate, whose perceived wisdom we gullible liberals have never been able to quit.
Is it possible to be a bigger ninny than the man who wrote that column? Don't bother asking that question! We liberals are congenitally unable to see the way this foppish academic guild has failed us in the past quarter century, through action and inaction.
The sheer inanity of that column also reflects on the New York Times, whose behavior we liberals have never been able to bring into focus. In large part, that's because our career liberal leaders refuse to discuss the New York Times, an institution which plays a key role in the development of their all-important careers. Good jobs at good pay!
Finally, the sheer inanity of that column will remind any sentient liberal of the types of indignities we've tolerated down through the years. During the twenty months of Campaign 2000, we sat by and stared into space as the more liberal candidate was assailed for his deeply troubling wardrobe—for his boots, his suits, his polo shirts; for the "earth tone" color of one of his suits; for the number of buttons on his suit jackets (three); for the nefarious purposes put on display by the choice of those polo shirts!
For the way he "let a woman teach him to be a man!"
We sat by as Chris Matthews brought a body language expert onto his show to pretend to discuss such manifest nonsense—to pretend to explain how the candidate's choices showed how "that woman with all the hair" had transformed him into "this new today's man-woman." To pretend to discuss the way a three-button suit was a sexual signal to voters like Hartman.
Today, Matthews is sold to us as Darling Rachel's very bestest, most brilliantest friend. Back then, we just sat there and took it, in the lazy, low-IQ way which has long defined our tribe, which loves Rachel's mugging.
Will we liberals ever be willing to see the truth about our defeats? Not likely!
That would require an honest assessment of the world-class dumbness residing in Us. We much prefer to tell ourselves about The Others, the racists.
Out on The Farm, Professor Ford "is writing a book about dress codes." So the New York Times told us this weekend in its identity line.
The professor wrote his stupid piece to pimp his important forthcoming book. The Times ran to put his nonsense in print, just as it ever was.
Will we ever be willing to say that this bullshit has to stop? If you have those two brain cells, you may know the answer.
Tomorrow: If we might borrow from our Woolf, we're now declaring ourselves to be "siting bolt upright... Awake."
Part 2—With decades of similar nonsense: Just try to fathom the craziness of that perfectly non-crazy vote.
Candidate Clinton was running for office against Candidate Donald J. Trump. No major candidate has ever dissembled, misstated and self-contradicted more crazily than Candidate Trump.
And yet, that voter in Pennsylvania switched her vote from blue to red for the reason described below. When compared with the ludicrous Trump, Clinton was seen as the liar!
SULLIVAN (2/13/17): Angey Hartman, 50, lives about an hour away in Benton, where every day she walks to the newspaper box to buy the Bloomsburg Press Enterprise.No candidate ever dissembled, misstated and self-contradicted more crazily than Candidate Trump. Within the political context, he'd been making ludicrous claims since early 2011.
An antiabortion Christian, Hartman voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. But she flipped from blue to red after deciding that Clinton was untrustworthy and weak on national security.
“I didn’t want to feel like she’d be lying to me,” said the stay-at-home mother, whose autistic son attends Luzerne’s community college. Her husband, a laborer at Girton Manufacturing in Millville, voted for Trump, too, she said.
And yet, this voter flipped her vote because Clinton was such a big liar!
Angey Hartman's vote for Trump was, of course, just one vote. That said, the craziness of that vote wasn't especially crazy.
That vote reflected 25 years of laziness, lethargy and dumbness on the part of Our Own Liberal Team. It reflected a powerful, decades-long narrative pushed by the mainstream press corps—and, eventually, by many within Our Own Tribe.
This narrative was aimed at Bill Clinton, then seamlessly transferred to Candidate Gore. For twenty months during Campaign 2000, the mainstream press just kept inventing troubling "lies" by Gore.
Despite our self-admitted brilliance, we liberals just say there and took it. Sixteen years later, this narrative beat us again, in one of the most embarrassing defeats any group has ever arranged to sustain.
Good God! Last November, the Democratic candidate was widely perceived as the big liar as compared to Candidate Trump! When you lose an election that way, you've established yourselves as one of the most incompetent groups who ever drew breath on the planet.
Did the Green Bay Packers ever lose a game to an 80-pounds-and-under sixth grade team? If they had, it would perhaps have been as embarrassing as the way we self-impressed liberals managed to lose Angey Hartman's vote.
This raises an obvious question. Is it possible that last November's outcome is, in some very minor way, perhaps an unflattering reflection on Us?
We liberals love to trash The Others, the people like Hartman, taking special care to highlight their bigotry and their dumbness. Is it possible that the world-class dumbness in this story in some way belongs to Us?
If you know our liberal tribe, you already know the answer. Nothing will ever make us see the role we've played in our endless defeats. We're a parody of a satire about bubble-encased true belief.
Can anything ever make us see the roads which led to November's defeat? We are quite brilliantly able to see the racism of Everyone Who Isn't Exactly Like Us. In our manifest group dumbness, will we ever be able to see the other roads which led to that gong-show defeat?
Almost surely not. But in last Saturday's New York Times, the editors displayed a bit of the wider cultural dumbness which helps explain how we managed to get here, to this ridiculous place.
For the next several weeks, we plan to describe the various ways we created our own defeat. For today, let's take it slow and easy. Let's discuss Professor Ford, he of the Stanford Law School.
Last Saturday morning, a thoughtful piece by Professor Ford dominated the New York Times' op-ed page. Thanks to a sprawling, imaginative, hard-copy layout, the professor's column ate three fifths of the page above the fold. It continued a bit below that.
The professor's column—he's from Stanford Law—concerned a deeply significant aspect of Donald J. Trump's puzzling presidency. Believe it or not, these were the hard-copy headlines in our most brilliant newspaper:
The Ties That BlindActually, yes; you're reading that right! Professor Ford, from Stanford Law, had penned a piece about the way Donald J. Trump knots his ties and secures them to his person.
What do those shiny, badly-knotted neckties say about the president?
(The piece took up enormous space because its text was published in lines of print which ranged from very short to much longer. Cleverly, this let the printed text affect the outline of a necktie! Which is what the piece was about!)
Professor Ford was attempting to answer a basic question: What can we learn from Donald J. Trump's shiny ties, which are badly-knotted?
If you have two brain cells to rub together, you may already know the answer. We can learn nothing from Donald Trump's ties, though the thoughtful professor said different.
We won't bother quoting today from this jackass column. We'll proceed directly to our own question:
What might we learn, from this jackassed piece, about the ways we liberals managed to lose an election to Donald J. Trump?
Our answer spreads back over several decades. The sheer inanity of this column reflects on the failings of the upper-end professoriate, whose perceived wisdom we gullible liberals have never been able to quit.
Is it possible to be a bigger ninny than the man who wrote that column? Don't bother asking that question! We liberals are congenitally unable to see the way this foppish academic guild has failed us in the past quarter century, through action and inaction.
The sheer inanity of that column also reflects on the New York Times, whose behavior we liberals have never been able to bring into focus. In large part, that's because our career liberal leaders refuse to discuss the New York Times, an institution which plays a key role in the development of their all-important careers. Good jobs at good pay!
Finally, the sheer inanity of that column will remind any sentient liberal of the types of indignities we've tolerated down through the years. During the twenty months of Campaign 2000, we sat by and stared into space as the more liberal candidate was assailed for his deeply troubling wardrobe—for his boots, his suits, his polo shirts; for the "earth tone" color of one of his suits; for the number of buttons on his suit jackets (three); for the nefarious purposes put on display by the choice of those polo shirts!
For the way he "let a woman teach him to be a man!"
We sat by as Chris Matthews brought a body language expert onto his show to pretend to discuss such manifest nonsense—to pretend to explain how the candidate's choices showed how "that woman with all the hair" had transformed him into "this new today's man-woman." To pretend to discuss the way a three-button suit was a sexual signal to voters like Hartman.
Today, Matthews is sold to us as Darling Rachel's very bestest, most brilliantest friend. Back then, we just sat there and took it, in the lazy, low-IQ way which has long defined our tribe, which loves Rachel's mugging.
Will we liberals ever be willing to see the truth about our defeats? Not likely!
That would require an honest assessment of the world-class dumbness residing in Us. We much prefer to tell ourselves about The Others, the racists.
Out on The Farm, Professor Ford "is writing a book about dress codes." So the New York Times told us this weekend in its identity line.
The professor wrote his stupid piece to pimp his important forthcoming book. The Times ran to put his nonsense in print, just as it ever was.
Will we ever be willing to say that this bullshit has to stop? If you have those two brain cells, you may know the answer.
Tomorrow: If we might borrow from our Woolf, we're now declaring ourselves to be "siting bolt upright... Awake."
Repeating the other side's propaganda!
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2017
On the need to rebuild our cruel schools: This was a remarkably strange weekend in the Washington Post and in the New York Times.
We don't want to enumerate all the strangeness yet. That said, the strangest piece may have been this personal essay from yesterday's Outlook section. In the essay, a previously apolitical person explains that she has become politically engaged because of new education secretary Betsy DeVos.
In truth, the writer still seems to know little about DeVos. On a journalistic basis, the essay, and the mere fact that it was published, struck us as rather strange. We expect to go into more detail before the week is done.
Why has Betsy DeVos produced so much reaction? We can't necessarily answer that question. That said, a letter in yesterday's Post concerning DeVos called to mind an unfortunate fact. Especially concerning the public schools, we liberals often repeat propaganda from The Other Side.
Let's offer some quick background concerning that letter:
In the wake of her confirmation, the Post had written an editorial criticizing DeVos. In the process, the Post reaffirmed its support for public charter schools, as long as they're carefully monitored, and for "the judicious use of private school vouchers."
The letter writer seems to disapprove of vouchers and of all charter schools. There's nothing "wrong" with those views, but in the course of writing his letter, he flattened several straw men—and he channeled right-wing propaganda about our horrible schools.
Let's focus on the part of the letter shown below. We've already skipped past several straw men. We'll leave two straw men in:
Have charter schools in New Orleans "not succeeded in preparing students for college?" The statement is spectacularly vague. In its spectacular vagueness, the statement is utterly silly.
(Whose schools have succeeded, across the board, in "preparing students for college?" The writer's implied complaint makes no apparent sense.)
Those were a couple of straw men. It's in this passage that the writer channels right-wing cant:
"Charter schools and vouchers have allowed politicians to avoid the difficult work of rebuilding urban public school systems that largely serve black and Latino students."
Do politicians need to "rebuild" urban public school systems? This implies the existence of some sort of golden age, a better educational era which has now gone by the boards.
No such golden age existed. Based on the only reliable data we have, students in our urban systems are currently doing much better in reading and math than was the case in 1970, when measurements began.
In that passage, the writer reinforced the picture which is constantly used to argue the need for "education reform" of the type DeVos advocates. Despite our fiery ways, we liberals never tell the public about the substantial improvement in urban test scores. Instead, this writer pushes a portrait of educational decline, the very portrait The Other Team very much wants him to push.
Over at Slate, Dana Stevens served the same peculiar god in her review of Moonlight. Last week, we posted the passage shown below. Today, let's add one additional comment:
In Moonlight, that "troubled" (read traumatized) 9-year-old boy is never shown encountering a "cruel educational system." He's constantly shown being badly mistreated by his drug-addicted mother.
Presumably for political reasons, Stevens didn't want to say that a drug-addicted woman who's black could possibly be cruel to her 9-year-old son. Instead, she lists the actress who plays the mother as one of the people who show their love for Chiron, and she tosses off the easiest putdown in all of American politics.
Stevens was channeling Betsy DeVos. So was that letter-writer.
We self-impressed liberals do this all the time. Presumably, the gods on Olympus rock with laughter each time.
Black kids' test scores are way up! Do we liberals ever tire of pimping the other's team's pap?
On the need to rebuild our cruel schools: This was a remarkably strange weekend in the Washington Post and in the New York Times.
We don't want to enumerate all the strangeness yet. That said, the strangest piece may have been this personal essay from yesterday's Outlook section. In the essay, a previously apolitical person explains that she has become politically engaged because of new education secretary Betsy DeVos.
In truth, the writer still seems to know little about DeVos. On a journalistic basis, the essay, and the mere fact that it was published, struck us as rather strange. We expect to go into more detail before the week is done.
Why has Betsy DeVos produced so much reaction? We can't necessarily answer that question. That said, a letter in yesterday's Post concerning DeVos called to mind an unfortunate fact. Especially concerning the public schools, we liberals often repeat propaganda from The Other Side.
Let's offer some quick background concerning that letter:
In the wake of her confirmation, the Post had written an editorial criticizing DeVos. In the process, the Post reaffirmed its support for public charter schools, as long as they're carefully monitored, and for "the judicious use of private school vouchers."
The letter writer seems to disapprove of vouchers and of all charter schools. There's nothing "wrong" with those views, but in the course of writing his letter, he flattened several straw men—and he channeled right-wing propaganda about our horrible schools.
Let's focus on the part of the letter shown below. We've already skipped past several straw men. We'll leave two straw men in:
LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (2/11/17): ...School choice has been a disaster in Detroit. After Hurricane Katrina, the public school system in New Orleans was replaced with charter schools that have not succeeded in preparing students for college or achieving equity for students with special needs.Has DeVos-style school choice "been a disaster in Detroit?" Quite possibly yes, but the Post editorial basically said as much.
Charter schools and vouchers have allowed politicians to avoid the difficult work of rebuilding urban public school systems that largely serve black and Latino students. Instead, school choice allows them to use our children’s educations to peddle influence through crony contracts, keep citizens disenfranchised, bust unions and pander to religious extremists.
Political and media advocacy for this system led us to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and a tomorrow with no national public education. In advocating school choice, the editorial might as well have sung Ms. DeVos’s praises.
Have charter schools in New Orleans "not succeeded in preparing students for college?" The statement is spectacularly vague. In its spectacular vagueness, the statement is utterly silly.
(Whose schools have succeeded, across the board, in "preparing students for college?" The writer's implied complaint makes no apparent sense.)
Those were a couple of straw men. It's in this passage that the writer channels right-wing cant:
"Charter schools and vouchers have allowed politicians to avoid the difficult work of rebuilding urban public school systems that largely serve black and Latino students."
Do politicians need to "rebuild" urban public school systems? This implies the existence of some sort of golden age, a better educational era which has now gone by the boards.
No such golden age existed. Based on the only reliable data we have, students in our urban systems are currently doing much better in reading and math than was the case in 1970, when measurements began.
In that passage, the writer reinforced the picture which is constantly used to argue the need for "education reform" of the type DeVos advocates. Despite our fiery ways, we liberals never tell the public about the substantial improvement in urban test scores. Instead, this writer pushes a portrait of educational decline, the very portrait The Other Team very much wants him to push.
Over at Slate, Dana Stevens served the same peculiar god in her review of Moonlight. Last week, we posted the passage shown below. Today, let's add one additional comment:
STEVENS (10/20/16): Moonlight’s most noteworthy achievement, in the age of both Black Lives Matter and the backlash against identity politics, is that Jenkins mounts no soapboxes and brandishes no manifestos in his attempt to illuminate the inner life of this troubled boy turned teenager turned man. Instead he shows us the love that other characters feel for Chiron, made tangible by the generous performances of co-stars Harris, Ali, Monáe, and Holland. Chiron’s search for sexual and personal identity matters because he himself does—if not to the often cruel educational, social, and legal systems that surround him, then at least to that small group of people who love him. By the time Moonlight reaches its ravishing conclusion, that group includes us, too.Buddy Holly always said how easy it is to fall in love. In this passage, Stevens lets us see how easy it is to channel right-wing cant.
In Moonlight, that "troubled" (read traumatized) 9-year-old boy is never shown encountering a "cruel educational system." He's constantly shown being badly mistreated by his drug-addicted mother.
Presumably for political reasons, Stevens didn't want to say that a drug-addicted woman who's black could possibly be cruel to her 9-year-old son. Instead, she lists the actress who plays the mother as one of the people who show their love for Chiron, and she tosses off the easiest putdown in all of American politics.
Stevens was channeling Betsy DeVos. So was that letter-writer.
We self-impressed liberals do this all the time. Presumably, the gods on Olympus rock with laughter each time.
Black kids' test scores are way up! Do we liberals ever tire of pimping the other's team's pap?
HOW WE GOT HERE: Creating Trump!
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2017
Part 1—Liberal and mainstream denial: We'll grant you, it was only one vote. That said, it might start us on a shining path—on the road toward understanding how we managed to get here.
The vote was cast by Angie Hartman, a 50-year-old Pennsylvanian. Margaret Sullivan describes the vote in today's Washington Post.
Sullivan interviewed voters in Luzerne County, Pa. Located in northeastern Pennsylvania, it's part of the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre–Hazleton Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Disaster struck in that statistical area. Here's the way Hartman voted:
Hartman's vote was just one vote. That said, it may not be a bad place to start if we want to figure out how we managed to get here.
According to Sullivan, Hartman voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. This time, she voted Republican. She voted for Donald J. Trump.
“I didn’t want to feel like [Clinton would] be lying to me,” Hartman is said to have said. Hartman's vote was one of the votes which turned Pennsylvania red.
Hartman's explanation for her vote strikes us as highly striking. Imagine! Candidate Clinton was running against the greatest dissembler the political world has ever seen. And yet this voter, like many others, was so concerned about Clinton's perceived lying that she says that this perception helped determine her vote.
Clinton was running against Candidate Trump—but she was seen as the troubling liar! On the one hand, this can be seen as a wondrously comical fact—as the latest practical joke engineered by Homer's Olympian gods.
It could also be a starting point for the "autopsy" our own team needs to conduct, but almost certainly won't.
How can a person run against Trump and get rejected for lying so much? The answer to that remarkable question takes us back many years.
How can a person run against Trump and be perceived as the liar? The answer involves decades of lazy, inept, self-dealing behavior by the mainstream American press, and by the career liberal world.
Just think of it! The liberal world lost an election to Donald J. Trump because its candidate was perceived as the liar! Let's offer the analysis you're likely to see almost nowhere else:
A political movement has to be completely inept to lose an election that way. Who could possibly be that inept?
We liberals come to mind!
Eight years ago, the Republican Party conducted an "autopsy" in the wake of its election defeat. Dems and liberals badly need to conduct a such a study now.
We aren't likely to do that, of course. Almost surely, our vast, overweening self-regard will keep us from even imagining a fact which is blatantly obvious:
We got here through acts of laziness, incompetence and fraud—acts committed by Us Liberals, not by Them Over There.
These acts stretch back twenty-five years. Our mainstream press corps was deeply involved in this misconduct too. Like us, they're currently plowing ahead in a state of self-dealing denial.
We liberals love to blame The Others. Like dumbkopfs through the annals of time, we're very strongly disinclined to take a look at ourselves.
Somehow, we managed to lose Hartman's vote. Over the course of the next few weeks, we're going to review a few of the ways we amazingly managed to do that.
Tomorrow: Let's start by taking it slow and easy:
Stanford Law School professor speaks out—concerning the look of Trump's ties!
Part 1—Liberal and mainstream denial: We'll grant you, it was only one vote. That said, it might start us on a shining path—on the road toward understanding how we managed to get here.
The vote was cast by Angie Hartman, a 50-year-old Pennsylvanian. Margaret Sullivan describes the vote in today's Washington Post.
Sullivan interviewed voters in Luzerne County, Pa. Located in northeastern Pennsylvania, it's part of the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre–Hazleton Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Disaster struck in that statistical area. Here's the way Hartman voted:
SULLIVAN (2/13/17): Angey Hartman, 50, lives about an hour away in Benton, where every day she walks to the newspaper box to buy the Bloomsburg Press Enterprise.Sullivan offered an underwhelming piece about where voters get their information and what they think of those news orgs. Along the way, she offered that profile of one of the votes which sent Donald J. Trump to the White House, dragging Bannon and Miller behind him.
An antiabortion Christian, Hartman voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. But she flipped from blue to red after deciding that Clinton was untrustworthy and weak on national security.
“I didn’t want to feel like she’d be lying to me,” said the stay-at-home mother, whose autistic son attends Luzerne’s community college. Her husband, a laborer at Girton Manufacturing in Millville, voted for Trump, too, she said.
Hartman is not on Facebook and doesn’t watch cable news. Like many others, she relies on her local newspaper and on broadcast TV: Channel 16 and ABC’s “World News.”
Hartman's vote was just one vote. That said, it may not be a bad place to start if we want to figure out how we managed to get here.
According to Sullivan, Hartman voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. This time, she voted Republican. She voted for Donald J. Trump.
“I didn’t want to feel like [Clinton would] be lying to me,” Hartman is said to have said. Hartman's vote was one of the votes which turned Pennsylvania red.
Hartman's explanation for her vote strikes us as highly striking. Imagine! Candidate Clinton was running against the greatest dissembler the political world has ever seen. And yet this voter, like many others, was so concerned about Clinton's perceived lying that she says that this perception helped determine her vote.
Clinton was running against Candidate Trump—but she was seen as the troubling liar! On the one hand, this can be seen as a wondrously comical fact—as the latest practical joke engineered by Homer's Olympian gods.
It could also be a starting point for the "autopsy" our own team needs to conduct, but almost certainly won't.
How can a person run against Trump and get rejected for lying so much? The answer to that remarkable question takes us back many years.
How can a person run against Trump and be perceived as the liar? The answer involves decades of lazy, inept, self-dealing behavior by the mainstream American press, and by the career liberal world.
Just think of it! The liberal world lost an election to Donald J. Trump because its candidate was perceived as the liar! Let's offer the analysis you're likely to see almost nowhere else:
A political movement has to be completely inept to lose an election that way. Who could possibly be that inept?
We liberals come to mind!
Eight years ago, the Republican Party conducted an "autopsy" in the wake of its election defeat. Dems and liberals badly need to conduct a such a study now.
We aren't likely to do that, of course. Almost surely, our vast, overweening self-regard will keep us from even imagining a fact which is blatantly obvious:
We got here through acts of laziness, incompetence and fraud—acts committed by Us Liberals, not by Them Over There.
These acts stretch back twenty-five years. Our mainstream press corps was deeply involved in this misconduct too. Like us, they're currently plowing ahead in a state of self-dealing denial.
We liberals love to blame The Others. Like dumbkopfs through the annals of time, we're very strongly disinclined to take a look at ourselves.
Somehow, we managed to lose Hartman's vote. Over the course of the next few weeks, we're going to review a few of the ways we amazingly managed to do that.
Tomorrow: Let's start by taking it slow and easy:
Stanford Law School professor speaks out—concerning the look of Trump's ties!
Small-minded tribe in the big culture war!
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2017
Moonlight meets little Laura: We've written all week about Moonlight, a striking film which generated fascinating reviews.
Around us swirls a political war our team won't be able to win. Our rank and file isn't bright enough. Much more significantly, our leadership barely exists.
How pitiful is our liberal team at this difficult hour? On the front page of today's Washington Post, four reporters capture some members of our team explaining what democracy looks like:
We're now shouting and yelling at town hall meetings. It's the type of behavior we said we despised when Those People, the teabaggers, displayed it eight years ago.
We've picked up our fire hoses exactly twenty-five years too late, only after we managed to lose the White House to the world's craziest person. That said, this isn't the fault of the rank and file. It's the fault of our miserable leadership.
It's the fault of Kevin Drum. It's the fault of Jonathan Chait.
It's even the fault of Professor Krugman! It's the doing of Chris Matthews, the crackpot Maddow's very best and much beloved corporate friend.
(Maddow's work was appalling this week, a point we may explore next week. Truly, she has become Our Holy Highness, Reigning Queen of Thumbs, Butts and Elbows on Scales.)
Simply put, our team isn't up to the challenge of functioning in a democracy. In no small part, that's due to our adherence to the outlooks and behaviors which get derided as "political correctness."
We've never used that highly-charged term ourselves but, in fairness, the conduct in question deserves derision. How dumb can we be in thrall to its norms? Moonlight's reviews provided one set of examples. So did Maria Russo's lengthy "Reader's Notebook" piece in yesterday's New York Times.
Russo's 2000-word essay is an examination of Laura Ingalls Wilder's famous "Little House" books. Nothing will turn on Russo's piece. Her essay doesn't actually "matter."
That said, her piece does serve a purpose. It lets us marvel at the way we put our elbows and butts on the scale in service to the mode of thinking which frequently leaves us widely derided and also a whole lot dumber.
Russo reread the Little House books to mark the 150th anniversary of Wilder's birth. Her piece is silly right from the start. Go ahead! Just try to make sense of the topic sentence in either of her first two paragraphs.
After that, the real fever hits. Early in her 2000 words, Russo let us know how troubled she was by something she encountered in Wilder's books. This is her fourth paragraph:
Poor Russo! She was "shocked by the stereotypical treatment of Native Americans" as she reread Wilder's books. She was so shocked that she addressed this topic at the very start of her lengthy essay.
To record her shock, she picks-and-chooses from Wilder's books in a way which would seem baldly dishonest if we didn't allow for the way our tribal lore can blind us to all that's before us.
It blinded us to the suffering of a 9-year-old child in the striking film Moonlight. It blinds us to the portrait of Native Americans in the famous book Russo cites.
In the passage we've posted, Russo is referring to the second book in Wilder's nine-volume series, the book which bears the title Little House on the Prairie. In that book, the Wilder family moves to "Indian territory" in Kansas, but eventually has to leave when the federal government decrees that they must move on.
The book is full of encounters with Native Americans, referred to an Indians. In the main, this seems to involve members of the Osage nation.
The Wilder family expresses many views about these neighbors, with whom they're rarely able to speak due to language gaps. Russo has masterfully picked and chosen the attitude and examples she cites.
That said, it's true about Ma—or is it?
In the course of this fascinating book, Ma often cites her fear of the Indians. Given some of the incidents the book describes, and given the history of the time, it's surprising that she doesn't use stronger language.
That said, as best we can tell from electronic review, Ma never says that she "hates" the Indians. It's Jack, the brindle bulldog, who is said, on several occasions, to "hate" the Indians, at whom he persistently growls.
On page 227, Ma gets a snootful and says she doesn't blame Jack for his outlook. This may have caused Russo to put the book down in shock and surprise, then move to her fainting couch.
Ma is afraid of the Indians. Conscientiously, Russo keeps us from knowing that Pa, rather strangely, is not. Pa defends the Osage against fearful assessments by other settlers. He frequently expresses admiration for some Osage leaders, especially for the man named Soldat du Chene.
Late in the book, in the chapter called "Indians Ride Away," little Laura admires the pony of "the Osage chief" as he rides past the Wilders' home. She describes his "proud, still face. No matter what happened, it would always be like that," she thinks as he rides away.
Laura is enthralled by the scene before her. Her father goes her one better:
Can we talk? In the famous book in question, it's the family bulldog who hates the Osage. Quite plainly, Laura and her father do not.
In fascinating passages from the book, Laura is enthralled by the freedom she sees her young counterparts within the Osage nation enjoying. She's envious of the way they dress, of the way they're allowed to ride their ponies.
Pa repeatedly expresses his respect for Osage leaders and his faith in their good intentions. On page 284, he expresses his overall view:
"He figured that Indians would be as peaceable as anyone else if they were left alone. On the other hand, they had been moved west so man times that naturally they hated white folks."
Pa was almost in Russo's camp, overt correctness-wise! If so, why did he "hush Laura up" in the passage Russo cites?
Easy! Because Laura was in bed for the night, and she had already asked the "one more question" she'd begged for the chance to ask. Laura's comment about the Indians being forced to move west is left hanging right there, at the end of a chapter. It presages Pa's later remark.
As for poor Dr. Tan, he gets a warm reception at the Wilder home, which is dealing with a dangerous bout of an illness they later learn was malaria. Even the brindle bulldog Jack extends the warm hand of friendship:
Are there undesirable aspects of Wilder's portrait of Native Americans? Everything is possible! What's amazingly clear is the bald-faced, ridiculous picking-and-choosing in which Russo has engaged.
Work like hers is baldly dishonest, except among those who've been swept away by some form of true belief. Again and again, then again and again, our weak-minded, losing liberal tribe finds its good sense swept away by the fever of the tribal conduct which persistently gets derided in the way we've already described.
We'd love to pose one more question about the striking film Moonlight. If we, unlike Laura, could ask one more question, we'd ask you to ponder this:
Could such a film have been made if the 9-year-old boy in question turned out to be straight, not gay? Could our pitiful liberal tribe have responded to such a tableau?
Plainly and simply, the answer is no. Critical reaction to Chiron was confined to the fact that he's gay. The fact that his life has been stolen from him in every other way is of no interest to us.
As is clear in the strange reviews, it's hard to picture our unpleasant tribe responding to a straight kid who gets abandoned and abused in the way Chiron does. Over here in our pitiful, self-impressed tribe, we walked away from poor black kids as a general class a very long time ago.
We're dumb and unpleasant and nobody likes us. Now, we're howling about the craziest person on earth, twenty-fives years too late.
This is a failure of leadership, of which our pitiful tribe has none. How very badly our pitiful tribe could use even one du Chene!
Moonlight meets little Laura: We've written all week about Moonlight, a striking film which generated fascinating reviews.
Around us swirls a political war our team won't be able to win. Our rank and file isn't bright enough. Much more significantly, our leadership barely exists.
How pitiful is our liberal team at this difficult hour? On the front page of today's Washington Post, four reporters capture some members of our team explaining what democracy looks like:
SNELL ET AL. (2/11/17): Organizers searched through a sea of at least 200 people, many carrying Planned Parenthood signs, to find friendly faces to help fill the 80 or so seats at the “Ask Your Reps” event featuring [Rep. Diane] Black, the House Budget Committee chairman, and three other local officials. Activists booed and chanted as the group, flanked by armed campus security, handpicked people to help fill the room in hopes of keeping the conversation civil.Sad! As soon as we saw that the house had burned down, our self-impressed team knew it was time to pick up our fire hoses!
Inside the room, audience members rose to ask Black for specific proposals to replace ACA programs that have become a health lifeline for many residents in this mostly rural slice of central Tennessee. Black carefully insisted that House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has a plan, but that wasn’t enough to soothe the crowd.
“Answer the question!” some in the audience shouted.
Black demurred on at least one question as the moderator pleaded for respect.
The tense, tightly controlled scene inside the small lecture room was a sharp contrast to the frustrated energy just outside the doors. Chants of “this is what Democracy looks like” and “let us in” erupted after security officers blocked the majority of hopeful attendees from entering the room, citing fire marshal rules.
We're now shouting and yelling at town hall meetings. It's the type of behavior we said we despised when Those People, the teabaggers, displayed it eight years ago.
We've picked up our fire hoses exactly twenty-five years too late, only after we managed to lose the White House to the world's craziest person. That said, this isn't the fault of the rank and file. It's the fault of our miserable leadership.
It's the fault of Kevin Drum. It's the fault of Jonathan Chait.
It's even the fault of Professor Krugman! It's the doing of Chris Matthews, the crackpot Maddow's very best and much beloved corporate friend.
(Maddow's work was appalling this week, a point we may explore next week. Truly, she has become Our Holy Highness, Reigning Queen of Thumbs, Butts and Elbows on Scales.)
Simply put, our team isn't up to the challenge of functioning in a democracy. In no small part, that's due to our adherence to the outlooks and behaviors which get derided as "political correctness."
We've never used that highly-charged term ourselves but, in fairness, the conduct in question deserves derision. How dumb can we be in thrall to its norms? Moonlight's reviews provided one set of examples. So did Maria Russo's lengthy "Reader's Notebook" piece in yesterday's New York Times.
Russo's 2000-word essay is an examination of Laura Ingalls Wilder's famous "Little House" books. Nothing will turn on Russo's piece. Her essay doesn't actually "matter."
That said, her piece does serve a purpose. It lets us marvel at the way we put our elbows and butts on the scale in service to the mode of thinking which frequently leaves us widely derided and also a whole lot dumber.
Russo reread the Little House books to mark the 150th anniversary of Wilder's birth. Her piece is silly right from the start. Go ahead! Just try to make sense of the topic sentence in either of her first two paragraphs.
After that, the real fever hits. Early in her 2000 words, Russo let us know how troubled she was by something she encountered in Wilder's books. This is her fourth paragraph:
RUSSO (2/10/17): I tore through the nine novels once again. They are every bit as charming and emotionally powerful as I remembered, though this time around I was shocked by the stereotypical treatment of Native Americans that must have seemed par for the course in my 1970s childhood. Ma freely voices her hatred of Indians; Laura conveys a slightly more ambiguous attitude. ''Won't it make the Indians mad to have to—'' she tries to ask at one point about the forced marches west, only to be hushed by her father. The books are, in a sense, one giant hushing of Native American history. As for black people, including the slaves only recently freed by the Civil War and also in search of safe homes, there are none besides the smiling Dr. Tan, who appears only to save all the white settlers along the Kansas creek from ''fever 'n' ague,'' though at one point the townspeople put on a horrid minstrel show.We'll discuss the passage about Native Americans, who are called Indians in Wilder's books. We do so because Russo's passage is so grossly selective and misleading.
Poor Russo! She was "shocked by the stereotypical treatment of Native Americans" as she reread Wilder's books. She was so shocked that she addressed this topic at the very start of her lengthy essay.
To record her shock, she picks-and-chooses from Wilder's books in a way which would seem baldly dishonest if we didn't allow for the way our tribal lore can blind us to all that's before us.
It blinded us to the suffering of a 9-year-old child in the striking film Moonlight. It blinds us to the portrait of Native Americans in the famous book Russo cites.
In the passage we've posted, Russo is referring to the second book in Wilder's nine-volume series, the book which bears the title Little House on the Prairie. In that book, the Wilder family moves to "Indian territory" in Kansas, but eventually has to leave when the federal government decrees that they must move on.
The book is full of encounters with Native Americans, referred to an Indians. In the main, this seems to involve members of the Osage nation.
The Wilder family expresses many views about these neighbors, with whom they're rarely able to speak due to language gaps. Russo has masterfully picked and chosen the attitude and examples she cites.
That said, it's true about Ma—or is it?
In the course of this fascinating book, Ma often cites her fear of the Indians. Given some of the incidents the book describes, and given the history of the time, it's surprising that she doesn't use stronger language.
That said, as best we can tell from electronic review, Ma never says that she "hates" the Indians. It's Jack, the brindle bulldog, who is said, on several occasions, to "hate" the Indians, at whom he persistently growls.
On page 227, Ma gets a snootful and says she doesn't blame Jack for his outlook. This may have caused Russo to put the book down in shock and surprise, then move to her fainting couch.
Ma is afraid of the Indians. Conscientiously, Russo keeps us from knowing that Pa, rather strangely, is not. Pa defends the Osage against fearful assessments by other settlers. He frequently expresses admiration for some Osage leaders, especially for the man named Soldat du Chene.
Late in the book, in the chapter called "Indians Ride Away," little Laura admires the pony of "the Osage chief" as he rides past the Wilders' home. She describes his "proud, still face. No matter what happened, it would always be like that," she thinks as he rides away.
Laura is enthralled by the scene before her. Her father goes her one better:
WILDER (page 305): "Du Chene himself," Pa said, under his breath, and he lifted his hand in salute.Helpfully keeping us dumb as rocks, Russo disappears such material from her pleasing upsetting account.
Can we talk? In the famous book in question, it's the family bulldog who hates the Osage. Quite plainly, Laura and her father do not.
In fascinating passages from the book, Laura is enthralled by the freedom she sees her young counterparts within the Osage nation enjoying. She's envious of the way they dress, of the way they're allowed to ride their ponies.
Pa repeatedly expresses his respect for Osage leaders and his faith in their good intentions. On page 284, he expresses his overall view:
"He figured that Indians would be as peaceable as anyone else if they were left alone. On the other hand, they had been moved west so man times that naturally they hated white folks."
Pa was almost in Russo's camp, overt correctness-wise! If so, why did he "hush Laura up" in the passage Russo cites?
Easy! Because Laura was in bed for the night, and she had already asked the "one more question" she'd begged for the chance to ask. Laura's comment about the Indians being forced to move west is left hanging right there, at the end of a chapter. It presages Pa's later remark.
As for poor Dr. Tan, he gets a warm reception at the Wilder home, which is dealing with a dangerous bout of an illness they later learn was malaria. Even the brindle bulldog Jack extends the warm hand of friendship:
WILDER (page 192): Dr. Tan was a doctor with the Indians. He was on his way north to Independence when he came to Pa's house. It was a strange thing that Jack, who hated strangers and never let one come near the house until Ma and Pa told him to, had gone to meet Dr. Tan and begged him to come.Jack hates everyone, not just the Osage, but he loves Dr. Tan! No doubt, Russo was on her couch at this point, shocked by the patriarchal locution, "Pa's house."
Are there undesirable aspects of Wilder's portrait of Native Americans? Everything is possible! What's amazingly clear is the bald-faced, ridiculous picking-and-choosing in which Russo has engaged.
Work like hers is baldly dishonest, except among those who've been swept away by some form of true belief. Again and again, then again and again, our weak-minded, losing liberal tribe finds its good sense swept away by the fever of the tribal conduct which persistently gets derided in the way we've already described.
We'd love to pose one more question about the striking film Moonlight. If we, unlike Laura, could ask one more question, we'd ask you to ponder this:
Could such a film have been made if the 9-year-old boy in question turned out to be straight, not gay? Could our pitiful liberal tribe have responded to such a tableau?
Plainly and simply, the answer is no. Critical reaction to Chiron was confined to the fact that he's gay. The fact that his life has been stolen from him in every other way is of no interest to us.
As is clear in the strange reviews, it's hard to picture our unpleasant tribe responding to a straight kid who gets abandoned and abused in the way Chiron does. Over here in our pitiful, self-impressed tribe, we walked away from poor black kids as a general class a very long time ago.
We're dumb and unpleasant and nobody likes us. Now, we're howling about the craziest person on earth, twenty-fives years too late.
This is a failure of leadership, of which our pitiful tribe has none. How very badly our pitiful tribe could use even one du Chene!
MOONLIGHT AND SCRIPT: Could major reviewers see Chiron?
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2017
Conclusion—Invisible boy and man: Is Moonlight "a perfect film?"
In our view, no—it isn't. We don't mean that as a criticism. Presumably, there are no perfect films.
We ask the question because Ann Hornaday called Moonlight "a perfect film" in her Washington Post review. In our view, the comment captures the unattractive, throwback fawning visited by major critics upon Bary Jenkins' Oscar-nominated film.
To our own practiced ear, that fawning recalls an earlier era—an era of major condescension in the arena of so-called "race."
Before we discuss that matter, let's discuss a possible imperfection in Moonlight. We refer to Jenkin's "episodic" narrative style.
Jenkins' impressionistic story-telling leaves basic facts unresolved. Basic questions go unanswered, questions such as these:
What the heck happened to Juan? Also, who is Teresa?
Juan is the neighborhood drug dealer who shows compassion for Chiron when Chiron is only 9. Teresa is the woman with whom Juan lives in a "tidy airy house" which carries just the slightest scent of a Miami-based Ozzie and Harriett.
Juan's brilliant scenes with Chiron dominate the first of Moonlight's three chapters, in which Chiron is 9. But how strange! In the middle chapter of the film, Chiron is 16 or 17—and Juan is no longer there.
In a fleeting remark, Chiron's mother says she hasn't seen Teresa "since the funeral." Is Juan, Chiron's role model, dead?
(In the New York Times, A. O. Scott says "a significant death takes place in the interval between two of the chapters," but he doesn't say how he knows this, and he doesn't say who died. In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers notes that "Juan is gone" by the second part of the film and "it's not hard to figure out" why. In fact, it's impossible to figure out why, and Travers doesn't share his idea. This type of confusion stems from Jenkins' choices as story-teller.)
Juan has disapeared by the time Chiron is 16. Teresa, meanwhile, is still on the scene—and she's still shown being kind to Chiron. She lets him spend the night at her house when life at his own house is too chaotic.
She gives him money, and we see his mother steal it from him. Amounts are not disclosed.
Who the heck is Teresa? She seems a bit on the college-y side, and, whenever we see her, she's being kind to Chiron. But we get no explanation of where her money comes from, or of how she has managed to remain in that nice, airy home with extra rooms and clean sheets.
We don't know what happened to Juan. We know little about Teresa. Why was she ever with Juan?
Question! Is Teresa involved in the drug trade too—the drug trade which has turned Chiron's mother into an addict and an abuser of her own child? We're given no way to answer such questions. Nor did such unpleasant questions occur to any reviewer.
As part of Jenkins' narrative style, we're left in the dark about basic facts. For what it's worth, this isn't the way you'd normally tell someone a story.
This fuzzy, "poetic" narrative style can be frustrating at times. Beyond that, it helps mainstream reviewers fashion accounts of Moonlight in the airbrushed ways they may prefer.
Make no mistake—our major critics often told us the stories they like in their reviews of Moonlight. In Hornaday's review, for example, the 9-year-old Chiron is "the son of a loving mother (Naomie Harris) battling an addiction to drugs."
In truth, there is no scene in this film which justifies that cheerful account of Chiron's addicted, abusive mother. At Slate, Dana Stevens colored with the same box of crayons, but she bore down a bit harder. She closed her review like this:
Chiron's abusive mother is loving—it's his school which is cruel! Welcome to the world of our upper-end "journalistic" elite, a world in which people present all the news that's fit for you to hear.
We're sure that Stevens is a good decent person. We knew Hornaday and her husband a tad, some time ago, along with their adorable daughter. We can assure you that Hornaday's a good decent person!
That said, our journalists will twist and writhe to keep their accounts presentable. In this case, this involves the kind of conduct which routinely gets derided as "political correctness." We never use that highly charged term ourselves. But increasingly, that highly charged, politicized term refers to actual conduct.
In our view, Stevens is sanitizing her account of this striking film. In the process, we think she turns Chiron into an invisible boy and man.
According to Stevens, Moonlight starts with "a troubled boy" but eventually reaches a "ravishing conclusion." We'd say both parts of that claim are distorted and cruel—although, in fairness, it must be said that everyone else describes some upbeat version of this narrative arc.
(According to the Boston Globe, Chiron "finally emerges from the mutilated chrysalis of his life." According to the Chicago Tribune, Moonlight ends "with a plaintive, perfect final shot of a man who has found a measure of peace at last." According to the Wall Street Journal, Jenkins has "mapped out a journey that’s transformative." According to the New York Times, Chiron has "grow[n] toward an understanding of himself and his world." According to the Washington Post, Moonlight is "a film that, in its knockout of a final sequence, turns out to be all heart, all the time." Stop us before we cut-and-paste more!)
Does Moonlight feature a "ravishing conclusion?" In this profile, Jenkins says he doesn't regard the closing image of his striking film as "hopeful" (though "there's a sense of healing to it").
In that assessment, Jenkins is virtually alone. All across the critical landscape, reviewers found ways to claim that Moonlight reaches a ravishing, upbeat conclusion. We had to travel to Canada to find someone saying this:
"It's a story of robbed innocence, of a trepid, almost smashed adolescence, of a barren adult life...Did [Chiron] survive? It was as if the depth and texture of his life was stolen."
That was LaLi Mohamed, describing a film no reviewer seems to have seen. He says it's not even clear that Chiron has "survived" at the time of Moonlight's ravishing conclusion.
Why would Mohamed say that? Could it because he actually watched the film in question? Let's leave the sunshine brigade for a minute and talk about who Chiron has become by the time of Moonlight's conclusion, which so many critics have struggled to portray as upbeat, hopeful, ravishing:
We're sorry, but by the time of Moonlight ravishing conclusion, we've seen a series of deeply tragic events. We've seen a traumatized 9-year-old boy—a 9-year-old boy who's being abandoned and abused by his "loving mother"—evolve into a nightmare-ridden drug dealer who could be shot and killed at any time.
But so what? In the land of the critics, we're supposed to think we're observing a triumph because Chiron is finally able to identify as gay in a way he's never done before. We're supposed to regard this advance as a ravishing conclusion. In the New York Times, A. O. Scott even says this:
Let's be clear. In a normal situation, it's presumably a very good thing when kids who come to see that they're gay are able to identify as gay and seek out love in the world on that basis. Presumably, it's even an advance that Chiron is now able to do that, to the extent that we've seen that occur.
That said, Chiron's is not a normal situation. He already seemed to be traumatized when he was only 9. Now, at age 26, he is several blocks over from "free."
Luckily, Chiron is not a real person. He's a fictional character, and he's being put to good use with our liberal tribe.
Quickly, let's explain:
There was a time when the liberal world officially cared about black kids. When Jonathan Kozol wrote Death at an Early Age, the liberal world was eager to hear about children who were eight years old and were, through no fault of their own, "tiny, desperate, unwell."
That was 1967. Within a decade or two, we liberals came to see that it wouldn't be supremely easy to deal with the punishing deficits our brutal American history had visited upon kids like Kozol's Stephen or Barry Jenkins' Chiron.
It wouldn't be easy to straighten this out! We abandoned low-income black kids at that time, and we've never looked back.
(One exception: When a black kid gets shot and killed, we invent phony facts, or hide real facts, to make the tragic event in question seem more outrageous than it actually was. In this way, we prove to ourselves that we aren't the people we actually are.)
For years and years, we've discussed the contempt our mainstream and liberal worlds hold for kids like the 9-year-old Chiron. Long ago, we stopped discussing the circumstances such kids face at school. We're so disinterested in kids like Chiron that we won't even tell the world how much better black kids are doing in reading and math than was the case in the 1980s, when Jenkins' film begins.
Black kids are doing much better in school! But we're so full of contempt for such kids that we won't even mention this fact. Rachel would jump off the Golden Gate Bridge before she'd agree to mug and clown her way through such a ratings-killing segment.
We don't care about those kids. Nothing could be plainer.
Within liberal orthodoxy, it was once mandatory to care about low-income black kids. Today, our orthodoxies have moved on. Today, we care about kids who are gay or transgender, as of course we should.
Our orthodoxies have moved on. For that reason, when critics looked at Chiron, they saw the one thread, discarded the other. (Stevens: Chiron is conducting a "search for sexual and personal identity.") That said, they were careful to smooth the edges of Chiron's social circumstances, avoiding possible angry claims that they were snarling racists.
We no longer care about kids like the black and poor Chiron; we only care about posturing. We smooth the edges of Chiron's addict mom to keep the R-bombs away from our heads. We act like something "transformative" has happened to Chiron, though he could, with enormous ease, be shot and killed tomorrow.
In the New York Times, we even read that Chiron is "free." Amazingly easy for you to say, double professor white boy!
We found Moonlight very depressing because of the abandonment and abuse we saw being visited on Chiron. To the mainstream liberal critics, the only thing that really matters is the fact that a traumatized boy turned traumatized man has haltingly acknowledged the fact that he is gay.
Thanks to that, he's free!
In our view, Moonlight, a striking film, opens with a 9-year-old boy who's being subjected to massive abandonment and abuse. Things spiral downward from there.
We found the portrait very depressing. When we came home and read the reviews, we were surprised to see that no one else did.
Still to come at some point: Radical chic and Scott
Time magazine limns Invisible Man: Back in 2010, Time magazine included Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man on a list of the hundred best English-language novels. This was Lev Grossman's capsule:
Regarding Ellison's protagonist, "everybody seems to have their own ideas about who he is and what purpose he can serve." Now that gay is in and poor black is out, gay is all the reviewers could see when they looked at Chiron. He was put in service to our new tribal purpose.
They thought they saw a loving mother. They thought Chiron was free.
Conclusion—Invisible boy and man: Is Moonlight "a perfect film?"
In our view, no—it isn't. We don't mean that as a criticism. Presumably, there are no perfect films.
We ask the question because Ann Hornaday called Moonlight "a perfect film" in her Washington Post review. In our view, the comment captures the unattractive, throwback fawning visited by major critics upon Bary Jenkins' Oscar-nominated film.
To our own practiced ear, that fawning recalls an earlier era—an era of major condescension in the arena of so-called "race."
Before we discuss that matter, let's discuss a possible imperfection in Moonlight. We refer to Jenkin's "episodic" narrative style.
Jenkins' impressionistic story-telling leaves basic facts unresolved. Basic questions go unanswered, questions such as these:
What the heck happened to Juan? Also, who is Teresa?
Juan is the neighborhood drug dealer who shows compassion for Chiron when Chiron is only 9. Teresa is the woman with whom Juan lives in a "tidy airy house" which carries just the slightest scent of a Miami-based Ozzie and Harriett.
Juan's brilliant scenes with Chiron dominate the first of Moonlight's three chapters, in which Chiron is 9. But how strange! In the middle chapter of the film, Chiron is 16 or 17—and Juan is no longer there.
In a fleeting remark, Chiron's mother says she hasn't seen Teresa "since the funeral." Is Juan, Chiron's role model, dead?
(In the New York Times, A. O. Scott says "a significant death takes place in the interval between two of the chapters," but he doesn't say how he knows this, and he doesn't say who died. In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers notes that "Juan is gone" by the second part of the film and "it's not hard to figure out" why. In fact, it's impossible to figure out why, and Travers doesn't share his idea. This type of confusion stems from Jenkins' choices as story-teller.)
Juan has disapeared by the time Chiron is 16. Teresa, meanwhile, is still on the scene—and she's still shown being kind to Chiron. She lets him spend the night at her house when life at his own house is too chaotic.
She gives him money, and we see his mother steal it from him. Amounts are not disclosed.
Who the heck is Teresa? She seems a bit on the college-y side, and, whenever we see her, she's being kind to Chiron. But we get no explanation of where her money comes from, or of how she has managed to remain in that nice, airy home with extra rooms and clean sheets.
We don't know what happened to Juan. We know little about Teresa. Why was she ever with Juan?
Question! Is Teresa involved in the drug trade too—the drug trade which has turned Chiron's mother into an addict and an abuser of her own child? We're given no way to answer such questions. Nor did such unpleasant questions occur to any reviewer.
As part of Jenkins' narrative style, we're left in the dark about basic facts. For what it's worth, this isn't the way you'd normally tell someone a story.
This fuzzy, "poetic" narrative style can be frustrating at times. Beyond that, it helps mainstream reviewers fashion accounts of Moonlight in the airbrushed ways they may prefer.
Make no mistake—our major critics often told us the stories they like in their reviews of Moonlight. In Hornaday's review, for example, the 9-year-old Chiron is "the son of a loving mother (Naomie Harris) battling an addiction to drugs."
In truth, there is no scene in this film which justifies that cheerful account of Chiron's addicted, abusive mother. At Slate, Dana Stevens colored with the same box of crayons, but she bore down a bit harder. She closed her review like this:
STEVENS (10/20/16): Moonlight’s most noteworthy achievement, in the age of both Black Lives Matter and the backlash against identity politics, is that Jenkins mounts no soapboxes and brandishes no manifestos in his attempt to illuminate the inner life of this troubled boy turned teenager turned man. Instead he shows us the love that other characters feel for Chiron, made tangible by the generous performances of co-stars Harris, Ali, Monáe, and Holland. Chiron’s search for sexual and personal identity matters because he himself does—if not to the often cruel educational, social, and legal systems that surround him, then at least to that small group of people who love him. By the time Moonlight reaches its ravishing conclusion, that group includes us, too.According to that presentation, Jenkins shows us the love Chiron's mother feels for him, along with the love of Juan and Teresa. We're told that it's Chiron's school which is cruel, although there's no real basis, within the film, for making that scripted claim either.
Chiron's abusive mother is loving—it's his school which is cruel! Welcome to the world of our upper-end "journalistic" elite, a world in which people present all the news that's fit for you to hear.
We're sure that Stevens is a good decent person. We knew Hornaday and her husband a tad, some time ago, along with their adorable daughter. We can assure you that Hornaday's a good decent person!
That said, our journalists will twist and writhe to keep their accounts presentable. In this case, this involves the kind of conduct which routinely gets derided as "political correctness." We never use that highly charged term ourselves. But increasingly, that highly charged, politicized term refers to actual conduct.
In our view, Stevens is sanitizing her account of this striking film. In the process, we think she turns Chiron into an invisible boy and man.
According to Stevens, Moonlight starts with "a troubled boy" but eventually reaches a "ravishing conclusion." We'd say both parts of that claim are distorted and cruel—although, in fairness, it must be said that everyone else describes some upbeat version of this narrative arc.
(According to the Boston Globe, Chiron "finally emerges from the mutilated chrysalis of his life." According to the Chicago Tribune, Moonlight ends "with a plaintive, perfect final shot of a man who has found a measure of peace at last." According to the Wall Street Journal, Jenkins has "mapped out a journey that’s transformative." According to the New York Times, Chiron has "grow[n] toward an understanding of himself and his world." According to the Washington Post, Moonlight is "a film that, in its knockout of a final sequence, turns out to be all heart, all the time." Stop us before we cut-and-paste more!)
Does Moonlight feature a "ravishing conclusion?" In this profile, Jenkins says he doesn't regard the closing image of his striking film as "hopeful" (though "there's a sense of healing to it").
In that assessment, Jenkins is virtually alone. All across the critical landscape, reviewers found ways to claim that Moonlight reaches a ravishing, upbeat conclusion. We had to travel to Canada to find someone saying this:
"It's a story of robbed innocence, of a trepid, almost smashed adolescence, of a barren adult life...Did [Chiron] survive? It was as if the depth and texture of his life was stolen."
That was LaLi Mohamed, describing a film no reviewer seems to have seen. He says it's not even clear that Chiron has "survived" at the time of Moonlight's ravishing conclusion.
Why would Mohamed say that? Could it because he actually watched the film in question? Let's leave the sunshine brigade for a minute and talk about who Chiron has become by the time of Moonlight's conclusion, which so many critics have struggled to portray as upbeat, hopeful, ravishing:
"Who is you, Chiron?" Who Chiron has become:That's what has become of the "indescribably mild and unmalicious," 9-year-old boy we met at the start of this film—a 9-year-old boy who is already "tiny, desperate, unwell." Could this be what Mohamed was referencing with his ridiculous comments?
Chiron is now 26 or 27. He's a street-level drug dealer in Atlanta. We see that he carries a gun on the street. As with Juan, so too with Chiron. He could be killed tomorrow.
He has apparently served a prison term for a brutal assault he committed while in high school, his reaction to a brutal assault committed against him.
He now dresses and looks like Juan; his car is outfitted like Juan's. He is cartoonishly muscled, in a way which is hard to reconcile with the unkempt, skin-amd-bones mess we saw him to be in the film's second chapter, when he was 16.
Cinematically, Jenkins portrays Chiron's other-worldly musculature in a way which seems meant to convey the idea that it's an inhuman form of armor. When he reunites with his old friend Kevin, he's chided for his cartoonish muscles and for his gold fronts (coverings for his teeth).
When Chiron visits his mother at a rehab facility of some kind, he lashes out at her with anger and contempt. He says he still can't sleep at night because he still has nightmares.
When Chiron speaks with Kevin, he reports the fact which struck us as most depressing of all. He has apparently had one intimate sexual experience in his entire life. That experience occurred ten years before, and it consumed perhaps two minutes. He's had the benefit of no intimacy or human touch since then.
We're sorry, but by the time of Moonlight ravishing conclusion, we've seen a series of deeply tragic events. We've seen a traumatized 9-year-old boy—a 9-year-old boy who's being abandoned and abused by his "loving mother"—evolve into a nightmare-ridden drug dealer who could be shot and killed at any time.
But so what? In the land of the critics, we're supposed to think we're observing a triumph because Chiron is finally able to identify as gay in a way he's never done before. We're supposed to regard this advance as a ravishing conclusion. In the New York Times, A. O. Scott even says this:
SCOTT (10/20/16): And perhaps the most beautiful thing about "Moonlight" is its open-endedness, its resistance to easy summary or categorization. I guess I'm back where I started, trying to decide what this movie is about. As with any original and challenging work, the answer may take a while to emerge, but what strikes me now is less the pain of Chiron's circumstances than the sense that, in spite of everything, he is free.We're sorry, but that is just utterly silly. In the eyes of A. O. Scott, Chiron has become an invisible man.
Let's be clear. In a normal situation, it's presumably a very good thing when kids who come to see that they're gay are able to identify as gay and seek out love in the world on that basis. Presumably, it's even an advance that Chiron is now able to do that, to the extent that we've seen that occur.
That said, Chiron's is not a normal situation. He already seemed to be traumatized when he was only 9. Now, at age 26, he is several blocks over from "free."
Luckily, Chiron is not a real person. He's a fictional character, and he's being put to good use with our liberal tribe.
Quickly, let's explain:
There was a time when the liberal world officially cared about black kids. When Jonathan Kozol wrote Death at an Early Age, the liberal world was eager to hear about children who were eight years old and were, through no fault of their own, "tiny, desperate, unwell."
That was 1967. Within a decade or two, we liberals came to see that it wouldn't be supremely easy to deal with the punishing deficits our brutal American history had visited upon kids like Kozol's Stephen or Barry Jenkins' Chiron.
It wouldn't be easy to straighten this out! We abandoned low-income black kids at that time, and we've never looked back.
(One exception: When a black kid gets shot and killed, we invent phony facts, or hide real facts, to make the tragic event in question seem more outrageous than it actually was. In this way, we prove to ourselves that we aren't the people we actually are.)
For years and years, we've discussed the contempt our mainstream and liberal worlds hold for kids like the 9-year-old Chiron. Long ago, we stopped discussing the circumstances such kids face at school. We're so disinterested in kids like Chiron that we won't even tell the world how much better black kids are doing in reading and math than was the case in the 1980s, when Jenkins' film begins.
Black kids are doing much better in school! But we're so full of contempt for such kids that we won't even mention this fact. Rachel would jump off the Golden Gate Bridge before she'd agree to mug and clown her way through such a ratings-killing segment.
We don't care about those kids. Nothing could be plainer.
Within liberal orthodoxy, it was once mandatory to care about low-income black kids. Today, our orthodoxies have moved on. Today, we care about kids who are gay or transgender, as of course we should.
Our orthodoxies have moved on. For that reason, when critics looked at Chiron, they saw the one thread, discarded the other. (Stevens: Chiron is conducting a "search for sexual and personal identity.") That said, they were careful to smooth the edges of Chiron's social circumstances, avoiding possible angry claims that they were snarling racists.
We no longer care about kids like the black and poor Chiron; we only care about posturing. We smooth the edges of Chiron's addict mom to keep the R-bombs away from our heads. We act like something "transformative" has happened to Chiron, though he could, with enormous ease, be shot and killed tomorrow.
In the New York Times, we even read that Chiron is "free." Amazingly easy for you to say, double professor white boy!
We found Moonlight very depressing because of the abandonment and abuse we saw being visited on Chiron. To the mainstream liberal critics, the only thing that really matters is the fact that a traumatized boy turned traumatized man has haltingly acknowledged the fact that he is gay.
Thanks to that, he's free!
In our view, Moonlight, a striking film, opens with a 9-year-old boy who's being subjected to massive abandonment and abuse. Things spiral downward from there.
We found the portrait very depressing. When we came home and read the reviews, we were surprised to see that no one else did.
Still to come at some point: Radical chic and Scott
Time magazine limns Invisible Man: Back in 2010, Time magazine included Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man on a list of the hundred best English-language novels. This was Lev Grossman's capsule:
GROSSMAN (1/7/10): A nameless young black man wends a tortuous path from a southern town—where a local white men’s club mockingly awards him a scholarship to a black college—to the streets of New York City, where everybody, black and white, left and right, man and woman, seems to have their own ideas about who he is and what purpose he can serve. Evenhandedly exposing the hypocrisies and stereotypes of all comers, Invisible Man is far more than a race novel, or even a bildungsroman. It’s the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century.It wasn't a bildungsroman. It was a picaresque!
Regarding Ellison's protagonist, "everybody seems to have their own ideas about who he is and what purpose he can serve." Now that gay is in and poor black is out, gay is all the reviewers could see when they looked at Chiron. He was put in service to our new tribal purpose.
They thought they saw a loving mother. They thought Chiron was free.
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