KAFKA'S DESCENDANTS: As we watched the stumblebums try to report...

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2026

...we were driven to thoughts about Kafka: Early this morning, the haplessness known as Stumblebum Chic had us flashing on Kafka. 

On cable TV and in major newspapers, we the people were trying to report the progress of the Guthrie search. The sheer incompetence concerning the glove[s] returned us to thoughts about this:

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his works fuse elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically feature isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926)...

And so on from there. According to that leading (and rather highbrow) authority, he trafficked in "the fantastique" (click here), especially in this famous novella:

The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis, also translated as The Transformation, is a novella by Franz Kafka published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, The Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. "monstrous vermin") and struggles to adjust to this condition, as does his family. The novella has been widely discussed among literary critics, who have offered varied interpretations...

Plot

Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin." He initially considers the transformation to be temporary and slowly ponders the consequences of his metamorphosis. Stuck on his back and unable to get up and leave the bed, Gregor reflects on his job as a traveling salesman and cloth merchant, which he characterizes as being "plagued with ... the always changing, never enduring human exchanges that don't ever become intimate."

As the novella continues, the circumstances of Samsa's transformation become increasingly awful. 

Is Gregor Samsa facing "a bizarre or surreal predicament," to which he "struggles to adjust?" At present, our struggling nation finds itself in a similar stew, though that isn't the main component of the instruction we find lurking there. 

Early this morning, we began to flash on this awful tale as we clicked through the efforts of our flailing American press corps to report on the various glove[s].

With apologies, the gloves in question are the various gloves which have been found by investigators in Tucson. Especially in major organs of Red America's press, the stumblebums to whom we've referred have attempted, for almost a week, to report how many gloves have been found, and to explain their potential significance.

How many gloves had police investigators found? Was it one glove, or possible two, or was it as many as three? Last Thursday, Fox News Digital went with this:

Nancy Guthrie case investigators find black gloves near roadside

A pair of black gloves recovered near Nancy Guthrie’s Tucson-area home is being tested for DNA, marking the latest development in the investigation into her disappearance.

Authorities said the gloves were found roughly a mile and a half from her Catalina Foothills residence, though it is not yet known whether they are connected to the masked individual captured on surveillance video at the home. There were conflicting reports about whether there was one glove or a pair of gloves.

Deputies and FBI agents were seen searching desert brush along a nearby roadside late Wednesday into early Thursday, focusing on terrain about a mile from the property...

Had they found two gloves, or had they found only one? It doesn't get much clearer than that!

That night, it fell to Jesse Watters, to host the announcement that a glove had been found right inside Nancy Guthrie's house! The announcement was excitedly made on Jesse Watters Primetime last Thursday night. It was then excitedly repeated on Hannity and on Fox News Tonight, and then on Fox & Friends the next morning.

Later that day, it fell to the sheriff of Pima County to report the fact that this claim had been pure bunk. That night, Watters offered a roughly three-word non-retraction retraction as the stumblebum conduct rolled on.

As of this very morning, how many (relevant) gloves actually have been found? Is the number one, or could it be two? Even this morning, major news orgs continue to offer contradictory reports on that point—and not only that:

Bizarrely, a new number has crawled out on the scene—sixteen. When PBS reposted an AP report, here's how the news report ended:

Glove found near Guthrie home with traces of DNA appears to match those worn by masked suspect

A glove containing DNA found about two miles from the house of "Today" show host Savannah Guthrie's mother appears to match those worn by a masked person outside her front door in Tucson the night she vanished, the FBI said Sunday. 

[...]

The FBI also has said approximately 16 gloves were found in various spots near the house, most of which were searchers' gloves that had been discarded.

Say what? Approximately sixteen gloves have been found "near the house?" Most of them were simply "gloves which had been discarded" by searchers? 

Some of the searchers threw them away? Other searchers came along and "found" them?

Why would law enforcement personnel discard their own gloves in the course of conducting their search? On this morning's Morning Joe, we finally saw someone raise that obvious question, though with no explanation given.

Meanwhile, as you can see, that PBS / AP report says that one glove appears to be relevant. But this is what the New York Times is reporting this morning, even now, as we type:

The F.B.I. said Sunday that gloves found about two miles from Nancy Guthrie’s home carried an unknown man’s DNA. Authorities planned to enter the DNA profile into a database in an effort to identify the person. The bureau said in a statement that the gloves appeared to match a pair worn by the man who was captured on Guthrie’s doorbell camera on the night she was abducted. The F.B.I. added that most of the other gloves recovered during its searches were those of investigators who had discarded them while conducting sweeps near the home.

The New York Times refers to "gloves"—plural. The Times also reports that other gloves found near the home had in fact simply been discarded by investigators, but it spares readers the mystery of learning that the number of those discarded gloves lands somewhere in the mid-teens.

(Why would investigators litter an active crime scene that way? Like others, the Times doesn't ask. For the record, the Times offers no link to the text of that FBI statement.)

So it goes as we the humans attempt to report the basic facts about an event which the Fox News Channel has heavily prioritized for at least the past nine days. On balance, we'd limn it like this:

Red America's press has gone all in on this news topic. By way of contrast, and perhaps more sensibly, Blue America's press has treated it as one news topic among many. 

For that reason, the stumblebums of Fox News and the New York Post have driven the reporting of the tiny handful of available facts. For us, the maddening bungles found all through the reporting has driven us straight back to Kafka.

Full disclosure! We've seen several major figures make intelligent comments about various matters in the past several days. We would include such names as these:

Marco Rubio. AOC. Barack Obama. Governor Wes Moore, regarding the topic of this earlier opinion piece by Colby Hall.

We've seen some people make sensible statements in the past few days. But over at the Fox News Channel, the stumblebums and the even more deranged individuals decided to drive the reporting of this matter. As a result, citizens have been told that it was one glove, or two, or maybe three—and now it seems to turn out that the number is really sixteen!

Gregor Samsa turned into a cockroach? Have you ever watched the Gutfeld! show—a "cable news" program which airs in prime time each weekday night? 

(That program's vulgar, dimwitted presentations often reflect unregulated anger turned loose on reasonable complaints and critiques.)

Starting tomorrow, we want to tell you why we flashed on Kafka this morning as we tore our hair about the journalistic transformations which now threaten our faltering nation.

According to the leading authority, Kafka's protagonists, including the instantly transformed Gregor Samsa, frequently found themselves "facing bizarre or surreal predicaments." This nation is facing such a predicament, though our leading lights in Blue America may not be describing it well.

Kafka may have been deeply depressed—or he may have been able to see something about the human condition. We haven't mentioned the sitting president yet, though he will be a key player in this story as the week rolls along.

As our exploration continues, we'll return to his apparent affliction, and to the refusal of major Blue American orgs to discuss what's right there before them—to attempt to report and fully describe the transformation at hand. We'll even discuss, if only briefly, the intelligent things which have been said by AOC, by Barack Obama, by Wes Moore, and even perhaps by Rubio, we're willing to say right here.

Was Franz Kafka severely depressed—or could he simply see something? For today, how many (relevant) gloves have been found? 

Citizen, don't even ask!

Tomorrow: In our view, it's rather hard to disagree with what AOC said!

SATURDAY: The miracle suddenly looks like this!

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2026

Eighth-graders bypass Lourdes: We'd call it one of his weak spots. 

As we noted in Monday's report, Nicholas Kristof has endorsed the claim of that "Mississippi miracle" in a recent column for the New York Times.

(To his credit, he didn't use the term "miracle," nor has he done so in the past. Almost everyone does.)

The miracle involves the miraculous Naep scores produced by that state's (good, decent, deserving) public school kids. As you may know, the Naep is a highly regarded federal program which tests reading and math, every few years, in Grade 4 and Grade 8. 

(For most purposes, there are reasons to skip the Grade 12 scores.). 

The Naep is a highly regarded program. On Tuesday, we focused on this miraculous finding, as cited in Kristof's column:

These Three Red States Are the Best Hope in Schooling

[...]

Black fourth graders in Mississippi are on average better readers than those in Massachusetts, which is often thought to have the best public school system in the country (and one that spends twice as much per pupil).

Say what? Mississippi's black fourth graders outperformed their counterparts in Massachusetts? 

At least on its face, that claim is correct! Whatever the explanation might be, here are the relevant scores from the most recent testing:

Average scores, 2024 Naep 
Black kids, Grade 4 reading
Massachusetts: 202.86
Mississippi: 205.93

If genuine, that may or may not constitute a miracle. But given the circumstances mentioned by Kristof, it looks like a major accomplishment.

(According to a very rough rule of thumb, a gap of 10-11 points on the Naep is often said to correspond, very roughly, to one academic year.)

As if to prove that everyone makes mistakes, we then uncorked a whopper. (As we've mentioned several times, the incessant flooding of the zone has had us feeling overwhelmed. Plus, the Super Bowl!)

As of today, a double groaner has been corrected in Tuesday's report. What we had meant to present can be seen below—Mississippi's white fourth graders also came fairly close to matching the kids up north:

Average scores, 2024 Naep
White kids, Grade 4 reading
Massachusetts: 233.21
Mississippi: 230.85

(By the way: When we look at the giant gaps between white and black kids in each of those states, do we really want to claim that anyone's producing a miracle at this point in time?)

At any rate, there you see the fourth grade scores from the most recent Naep. Mississippi's black kids outscored their peers in Massachusetts. Mississippi's white kids came close.

If nothing is "wrong" with those test scores, that result would seem to represent a substantial, surprising accomplishment. That said, adult life doesn't begin after fourth grade—and here are the corresponding scores from that same year for eighth grade students in those two states:

Average scores, 2024 Naep
Black kids, Grade 8 reading
Massachusetts: 252.03
Mississippi: 242.94

Average scores, 2024 Naep
White kids, Grade 8 reading
Massachusetts: 275.88
Mississippi: 263.83

Borrowing from the early Dylan: But oh, what kind of miracle is this, which goes from great to worse?

There you see a puzzling aspect of this alleged miracle. Over the course of quite a few years, Mississippi's fourth graders have been racking up surprising, nearly miraculous test scores. But by the time the state's kids reach Grade 8, the scores continue to look quite a bit like what they were in the past.

Quickly, let's state the obvious:

The fourth graders who performed so well in 2024 may still be performing that well when they reach the eighth grade and are tested in 2028. But Mississippi's well-intention education reforms have been in place for a long time, and this same pattern keeps showing up:

A miracle seems to be present in Grade 4. But there's no sign of any such phenomenon when you look at the scores from Grade 8.

Why might such a pattern obtain? After fifty years of flogging varieties of this horse, we won't waste our time going there today. For today, we'll only ask you this:

If kids are doing well in fourth grade, but have regressed by the time they finish eighth grade, then what good was that early achievement—assuming it really existed?

Kristof cited the Grade 4 scores; he didn't cite Grade 8. In the process, he retold a type of story which has been told ever since the 1960s, when we the people began to pretend that we actually care about black kids.

It's the story of the (alleged) public school miracle, allegedly produced by the handful of people who actually care! Versions of this story have floated around at least since 1967, when 36 Children appeared. 

In the early 1970s, by total coincidence, we stumbled upon one of the ways miraculous test scores will sometimes appear. (Two friends described the outrageous cheating taking place in their high-scoring, low-income school—a school which was endlessly praised in the Baltimore Sun.)

By the early 1980s, we had stumbled into a telephone relationship with a top executive at one of that era's major testing companies. He was the first to tell us how bad this phenomenon can sometimes get. 

(He told us that school districts can pay to have their students' answer sheets scanned for unusual erasure patterns. Three decades later, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution blew the whistle on the "erasure parties" staged within Atlanta's schools, in which teachers gathered to change reams of wrong answers on students' completed answer sheets to the answers which was correct.)

We know of zero reason to assume that any such fraudulent behavior ever took place in Mississippi. As far as we know, no such misconduct is even possible with respect to the Naep, given the way the Naep is administered.

That said, one event after another, through many long years, convinced us that no one should ever accept these miracle claims on their face. Simple story:

Our journalists love to tell these stories—and repeatedly, these stories turn out to be bogus.

We the humans have pleasing stories we simply love to tell! The story of the educational miracle engineered by the handful of people who actually care is one of these treasured tales.

Note to Kristof, whose overall work we marvel at and greatly admire:

Our "education experts" were endlessly asleep at the switch, down through the many long years, as these feel-good stories came and went. So was the New York Times! When the whistle was finally blown on major cheating scandals in Atlanta and (apparently) in D.C., it was the Atlanta paper, and the much-maligned USA Today, which finally did the work.

(When Michelle Rhee was nominated to be chancellor of the D.C. schools, it was obvious that something was crazily wrong with the test score gains she was claiming from her short teaching career. It was obvious that her claims didn't make statistical sense—but so what? The Washington Post agreed to roll over and pretend that nothing was wrong.)

(Also, Philadelphia.)

Yes, Virginia! We were even present, behind the scenes, when Dr. John Cannell unveiled his Lake Wobegon Reports in the late 1980s—when he reported, perhaps a bit inaccurately, that every state in the nation was reporting that their statewide test scores were, in fact, above average! 

That was a wonderfully comical narrative hook, and the nation's journalists briefly took note. After that, our education journalists went back to sleep, snoring loudly alongside our education experts.

(Back in 2006, we demonstrated that the miracle story concerning one Washington area elementary school was in fact horribly wrong. The Washington Post's Jay Mathews, with whom we share the old school system tie and whose work we greatly admire, told the tale right here.)

Full disclosure: There are certain feel-good stories we humans love to tell! We continue to tell those stories, no matter how often such stories turn out to be bogus.

As to the apparent anomalies in Mississippi's scoring patterns, we know of zero reason to think that overt acts of fraud have ever been part of the story. (Repeat—we know of zero reason.) 

That said, the scoring pattern doesn't seem to make sense. Still, the story lives on.

Anthropologists crowd our dreams at night, telling us things like this:

This is who, and this is what, we actually are as a species!

For the record, there's a different possible explanation for those anomalous Mississippi scoring patterns. We don't know if it's right or wrong.

(Then too, we can think of one or two more.)

We're no longer going to bother with such maddening explorations. That's especially true at this point, as the entire American political structure may be crashing to the ground. 

Is something "wrong" with those Grade 4 scores? To this day, we can't answer that question. We can say that Mississippi's eighth grade scores don't seem to be playing along.

Again, we apologize for Tuesday's dispiriting blunder. We've corrected the blunder in Tuesday's report. The flooding of the zone!

Now for the rest of the story: Still in the early 1980s, that high executive told us that he was leaving the testing business. He said that his company was losing market share to a rival testing company—and he said they felt they couldn't compete, because the rival company was allegedly faking its data (its "norms") so as to produce better test scores.

The executive, who is no longer living, went on to a different public career. Just for the record: 

At that time, it was publicly reported that the Iowa Test of Basic Skills was losing substantial market share to the California Achievement Test. At some point, the switch was made here in Baltimore, perhaps because it was widely bruited that urban systems ended up with better scores on the latter test.

We're telling you what the executive said. We don't know if his suspicions were accurate. 

FRIDAY: Inflation was running at three percent!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2026

On Fox, the friends made it nine: Yesterday afternoon, then again this morning, the Fox News Channel continued to focus heavily on the search for Nancy Guthrie.

In all honesty, there hasn't a huge amount of news to convey about this deeply unfortunate matter. On Fox, by way of contrast, there seems to be plenty of time to kill. 

Has this helped erase the sitting president from the news stream at a time when his numbers seemed to be sinking? We don't know if that has been some part of the channel's motives. 

But as of yesterday afternoon, CNN and Fox had spent the past week staging virtual filibusters on this unfortunate topic. Consider the Fox News Channel's Will Cain Show, which airs each weekday at 4 p.m. Eastern.

Yesterday afternoon, Cain discussed nothing but the Guthrie case from 4 o'clock down to 4:27 p.m. After a commercial break, he devoted three (3) minutes to yesterday's Senate hearing in which, in Cain's basically accurate rendering, "GOP lawmakers were tearing into Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, grilling him on alleged fraud, anti-ICE rhetoric and everything in between."

Cain spent three (3) minutes on that topic, then returned to fruitless, repetitive discussions about the search for Guthrie. The last five minutes of the show were devoted to a conversation with the actress Candace Cameron Bure about her Christian faith. 

As for this morning, the Fox & Friends program devoted at least half its airtime every hour to the Guthrie matter. Finally, during the third and final 8 o'clock hour, Karoline Leavitt showed up.

As we noted yesterday, performers on Fox News Channel shows don't really need help from "human interest" events when they want to tilt the news in the sitting president's favor. Quite routinely, they disappear the topics they don't like and they reinvent the facts about the topics they prefer.

Leavitt was at her best today. After discussing the Guthrie matter, she was asked about the forthcoming monthly inflation report. Inevitably, Leavitt said this:

LEAVITT (2/13/26): Well look, the report will be released in a few minutes, and I can't get ahead of it. But what we do know are the facts. President Trump inherited an economic mess from the Biden administration. Inflation was at a record high—nine percent...

"What we do know are the facts," she said. She then proceeded to change them.

Leavitt continued from there, picking and choosing her measure of current inflation. But no—as Leavitt surely knows, inflation wasn't running at nine percent when President Biden handed off to President Trump. 

As Leavitt presumably knows, inflation was running at three percent on that fateful occasion.

Inflation was running at three percent. On Fox, that number is always nine. Jones, Earhardt and Kilmeade, good friends all, politely listened to Leavitt's misstatement without attempting to offer correction. Presumably, they all knew that her statement was bogus, but they also knew that it was bogus in the standard Fox News Channel way.

What has happened to Nancy Guthrie? At this point, nobody knows. 

Fox hardly needs to stage filibusters concerning the search for Nancy Guthrie to make the news work out better for Trump. We don't know why they've focused so heavily on this matter since at least last Saturday morning, but has anyone on Fox & Friends ever mentioned that sad visual rendering of the Obamas the president reposted last week? 

We haven't had time to check that out. Based on experience, we can guess what that search would most likely find.

Full disclosure: In this morning's report, inflation was down to 2.5%. That's much better than 9!

PROOF OF LIFE: "Racist," the one observer said!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2026

The other said something different: We can't exactly say he's wrong. We also can't swear that he's right.

For those of us in Blue America, we may be inclined to love the claim he makes. The accuracy of the claim is frequently, for better or worse, devoutly to be wished. 

We're speaking here of Jamelle Bouie's recent assessment of the sitting president. He gave voice to that assessment in a New York Times newsletter column which started exactly like this:

This Is Just Who Trump Is

What motivates President Trump?

Not what motivates Trumpism, whatever that is. Not what motivates his MAGA supporters. Not what motivates the infrequent and marginal voters who delivered him his victories in 2016 and 2024.

No. What specifically motivates Donald J. Trump? What brought him into national politics? What drives him as a national political figure?

Who in the world is President Trump? It's an outstanding question! Over the course of the past fifteen years, the sitting president has rather plainly turned American political culture on its head. 

Even if his party loses this year's midterm election—there's still no proof that the GOP will—he will remain in the Oval Office and he'll still be commander in chief. Some things he's done as president have actually made sense—but his doctorate-wielding therapist niece has described him as "the most dangerous man in the world," and we can't exactly say she was wrong in making that assessment.

Bouie was asking an excellent question, and Bouie is very sharp. For our taste, he may sometimes know too much American history—but we say that only because we're looking for voices which can explain our failing society in a helpful way, without leaving too many of our fellow citizens behind.

Bouie is a good, decent person. In the wake of an infamous Truth Social post, he was asking an excellent question—but we can't really say we exactly agree with where his rumination took him.

In the passage shown below, we're omitting some of Bouie's reasoning process. We'll suggest that you try to read his whole essay, but here's where he ended up:

The best way to understand the president’s motivations is to find him at his most unfiltered, which is to say, on social media, late at night. And Thursday night, Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account that depicted President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. The clip, which runs for roughly a minute and shows the Obamas at the end, is set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

I try to avoid superlatives in my writing, but there is simply no question that this is the most flagrant display of presidential racism since Woodrow Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” in the White House in 1915. And for a sense of the racism of Griffith’s film, recall that it both reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan and gave the organization its modern iconography.

[...]

Let’s walk back to where we started. What motivates Trump? The answer is simple: racism. You might also say ego and raw self-interest, but the two are connected. Racism, among other things, is a kind of chauvinism, a belief in one’s inherent superiority, based on nothing other than a meaningless accident of birth. It’s an ideology that papers over feelings of inadequacy, that tells you that—no matter what you have or have not accomplished in your life—you’re still better than someone, some group.

We apologize for posting, once again, that account of the visual which appeared at the end of that Truth Social post. At any rate, so the Times columnist said.

Centuries of gruesome human suffering are entangled with the imagery which appeared at the end of that post. In his essay, Bouie correctly says that the visual in question "uses an old white supremacist trope to denigrate the Obamas and, by extension, every American who shares their racial background."

Without question, that statement is accurate. But is there a "simple answer" to Bouie's question? And if there is a simple answer, is it the answer Bouie provided? 

Is that "just who Donald Trump is?" Is that a correct simple answer?

Maybe yes, but maybe no. In all honesty, we can't necessarily say that Bouie's assessment is necessarily correct.

Is the president motivated by racism, full and complete total stop? For just the briefest of tribal moments, we think the following ought to be said:

Over here in Blue America, we love directing our bombs against the others—and "racist" and "bigot" are two of the bombs we deliver at moments like this.

Without any question, some such impulse is fully understandable. But does it lead us to assessments which are actually correct? And if we're actually trying to create a more humane world, does it lead us to presentations which are actually helpful?

We're going to say that it probably doesn't. Just for today, let's describe this as A Tale of Two Explanations:

Who or what is the sitting president? It's an important question!

The columnist's explanation is "racist." The niece's explanation is "mentally ill," though that may be an obsolete term.

For ourselves, we'll tell you this:

We know of no reason to assume that the most dangerous man in the world knew that a bit of soul-draining imagery was sitting there at the end of his Truth Social post. He may have known that the visual was there, but we know of no reason to assume that.

He was on one of his frenzied reposting sprees on the evening in question. He had stumbled upon a lunatic post asserting that Campaign 2020 was rigged—that the presidential election was stolen from him that year as part of history's greatest known hoax.

He came upon that braindead post; inevitably, he reposted it. Are we supposed to assume that he read that post all the way to the end? Given the mania with which he presents, why should we think that?

The president's conduct that night was insane—but then again, what else is new? Through whatever process of cultural evolution, we Blues know how to lash out at racism now, but we don't know how to lash out at the kind of insanity which has prevailed in the past five years as President Ahab continues to chase the claim that he won that election.

It's easier to call him a bigot. It's harder to name-call that.

The president's craziness didn't end with that crazy repost that night. The other reports kept coming in—for example, about his desire to rename Penn Station and Dulles Airport after himself, to align them with the renamed Kennedy Center.

That was one of quite a few other strange behaviors—but what did racism have to do with that? Or with the way he tore the East Wing down? Or with the giant ballroom he plans to build—like the giant arch he's now planning to build, a giant Ozmandias-style monument to his unparalleled self?

The list of this person's disordered behaviors goes on and on and on. Some of this conduct seems to be entangled with matters of race and ethnicity.

A lot of this conduct just isn't.

Is racism the simple answer—the answer which lies at the heart of it all? Bouie also mentions "ego and raw self-interest," and in her book about her uncle, the niece describes the process by which the uncle was raised to be the person who crazily believes that he aced an extremely simple cognitive test in a way no other human has done.

She explains how he ended up being, to use an outmoded term, many varieties of "mentally ill."

Joe Scarborough was trashing the racists and the bigots at the start of the week. For those of us in Blue America, it's easy and pleasing to do that.

On Wednesday, his bosses told him to stay home and rest. We'll only offer this passing thought—his conduct on Monday and Tuesday was neither helpful nor smart.

Unfortunate name-calling by Candidate Clinton helped President Trump reach the Oval the first time around. He squeaked by in 2024 thanks to some of the dumbest conduct ever put on display by either major party.

Even then, he barely managed to squeeze by (Replacement) Candidate Harris, who had agreed, in the Biden years, to be the one who went out and said the southern border was locked up tight as a drum.

Jamelle Bouie is plenty sharp. On the whole, we humans quite frequently aren't.

That even includes us self-impressed Blues. We love to call the others names. Meanwhile, our journalists agree that we'll never discuss the most important diagnosis in the world.

Did the president know that the visual was there? Maybe yes and maybe no, but we know of no reason to assume that he did.

Meanwhile, we Blues, as brilliant as we are, greased his skid back into the White House all through 2024. He'll remain there for two more years, even if his party loses the mid-term elections:

What might this person do then?

What might this person perhaps do then? There is no possible way to know. This is the tribal pleasure we've chosen, and our unhelpful political conduct isn't going to stop.

We've been searching for proof of life this week—for proof of intelligent life. Also, for proof of empathy-driven life, but let's not get totally crazy.

We've been looking for proof of intelligent life. New (anthropological) rule:

Our species is skilled at building tall structures. It tends to go downhill from there.

"Racist," the one observer said. The other said something different.

Jamelle Bouie is very sharp. His answer emerges from the horrors of a brutal past, but we think his assessment is too simple and we think it ain't totally helpful.