Enlightenment values must die!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2024

Gutfeld proves Hector right: According to this report by The Hill, the invaluable Internet Archive is fighting to get back online after some sort of cyber-attack.

The Archive is widely ignored, but it performs what would be an invaluable service in some other society. For today, we thought we'd keep you semi-current with the attack on Enlightenment values launched in prime time every night by the Fox News Channel's remarkable Gutfeld! program.

As we've tried to explain, the program starts with a few minutes of jokes by its host. It then stages inane pseudo-discussions of various news topics. 

These pseudo-discussions are conducted by panels of D-list comedians and assorted others. All panelists have agreed to agree with the host on every possible point, all of which will slavishly serve current pro-Trump interests.

Last night, the fun started instantly. Right away, at 10 o'clock sharp, this was the very first joke:

GUTFELD (10/10/24): Good evening, everyone. So!

The porn industry has launched a $100,000 ad campaign in support of Kamala Harris. 

Makes sense. They're both known for sucking.

If you think that S-bomb was meant to be taken in an inoffensive colloquial sense, you may not be a regular viewer of this prime time "cable news" program. On Gutfeld!, explicit sexual insults directed at Harris are a regular part of the stew. 

Indeed, a few minutes later last night, the host returned to his favorite nickname for Harris, referring to her as "Cackles McKneepads." This remarkable garbage can gets opened by Fox every night.

With respect to the program's host, this is pretty much all he seems to have at this point in his life. Fox News uses this braindead program for propaganda purposes. The program offers braindead propaganda services pretty much all the way down.

That first joke was a sexual insult. Two jokes later, the host indulged another favorite impulse—his relentless attraction to necromancy:

GUTFELD: Harris appeared on Stephen Colbert's show, where the host asked if she'd drink a Miller High Life with him. 

Normally, when she sits down with a cold one it's Joe Biden.

[APPLAUSE]

GUTFELD: Ha ha ha! Yeah! Because he's dead!

For whatever reason, Greg Gutfeld loves to imagine opponents being dead. Meanwhile, liberal women with whom he disagrees are persistently said to be way too fat. 

At this point in his life, this seems to be what he is.  

By 10:01, we had moved on from sexual insult to the standard suggestion that Harris is some version of a "drunk." The little guy now offered this:

GUTFELD: She also appeared on Howard Stern, where he said that he'd even vote for a wall over Trump.

Harris replied, "I'm not a wall, but I am plastered."

Along with the standard sexual insults, this has become a standard theme on this angry, soul-draining program. Next came a reference to Candidate Walz, triggering a typically sad battle cry: 

"Tampons!" the cable star yelled. 

This is all this little imp has. Sadly but instructively, his audiences eat it up.

By 10:02 p.m., we had moved to the evening's initial pseudo-discussion. At issue was a guest essay in Tuesday's New York Times which appeared beneath this headline:

We Can Do Better Than "Positive Masculinity"

The essay was written by Ruth Whippman, a British "mother of three rowdy boys" and the author of BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. 

We thought Whippman's essay was perfectly sane blending into insightful, but any such headline is sure to trigger this program's host. Even before inviting his flyweight guests to offer their comments, he was offering such analytical treasures as this in reaction to Whippman's column:

GUTFELD: It's not unlike Howard Stern. Talk about a transition! On Tuesday, he conducted an interview with Kamala Harris that was so simpering and feminine I got my period while listening to it.

[AUDIENCE: APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]

Stern's interview was way too "feminine," Gutfeld opined—and his audience plainly agreed. Nothing resembling a serious discussion of Whippman's column ever appeared.

(Tuesday afternoon, on The Five, he had expressed his instant anguish more directly. He simply denounced Stern as "a pussy" while the women of The Five looked away.)

These programs serve as anthropology lessons as our national culture dies. They offer windows onto a world of cultural conflict—a world which began taking shape in the mid-1960s, as the U.S. Army was sent into Vietnam and the Age of Aquarius dawned.

Blue America hasn't been without fault as this revolt from below has steadily taken form. Along the way, the world has gained an army of Gutfelds—people who seem unable to use their indoor voices as they angrily react to an array of contemporary liberal values and views—views and values both real and imagined.

This show is a garbage can all the way down. The Five is a vastly different kettle of fish, but as an example of "cable news," it isn't a whole lot smarter or a whole lot less clownish. 

Making matters that much worse, Jesse Watters Primetime comes on Fox at 8. 

What's happening here is a corporate-sponsored propaganda assault employing the usual gang of overpaid suspects. The New York Times doesn't talk about this. Neither do the tribunes Blue America is encouraged to love, the ones on MSNBC.

There's plenty to criticize (or not!) about Blue America's contemporary culture and politics. The people Fox puts on the air do so through clownish demagoguery pushed along by vulgar insults of the classic dimwitted kind.

The TV star is an angry child. He's also sixty years old!

TWO SILOS: When is a salad more like a meringue?

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2024

Enlightenment values must die: Candidate Trump was waxing poetic out on the campaign trail.

It happened yesterday, in Detroit. As far as we know, no one has yet discerned what he may have been talking about in the highlighted passages shown below.

As anyone can see from the videotape, his rumination proceeded as shown. For the record, and in full fairness, the candidate seemed to mean "rockets" when he referred to "engines:"

TRUMP (10/10/24): And then all of a sudden, you hear that [manufacturers are] leaving Milwaukee, or they’re leaving wherever they may be located. It’s very sad to see it. And it’s so simple. 

I mean, you know, this isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within twelve inches on the moon where they wanted to land. Or he gets the engines back. That was the first I realized. I said, “Who the hell did that?” I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming—cylinders, no wings, no nothing. And they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace with a circle. Boom.

Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill them up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. I don’t know. I don’t know. Couldn’t fill up the eight circles. 

I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful. They were so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person that did them—that was the best thing about his—the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the press stand in those circles because they couldn’t get the people. 

Then I heard we lost. Oh, we lost. No, we’re never gonna let that happen again. But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries.

So spoke the major party nominee who may well win this race.

As far as we know, no one has figured out what those "eight circles" were. With that, we offer an instant warning:

Below, we'll show you the previous inexplicable comment by Trump which was cited on the front page of Monday's New York Times. In that case, it was obvious, and a matter of record, what the candidate was talking about—except atop the front page of Blue America's paper of record.

That said, what was the candidate talking about yesterday in Detroit? We don't have the slightest idea at this time! Then too, and in a slightly similar vein, there was the front-page "Political Memo" about Candidate Harris which we cited at the start of the week. 

As we noted on Monday, the lengthy, front page political memo was written by Rebecca Davis O'Brien. O'Brien is a Harvard graduate—and as we noted on Monday, we tended to agree with her basic points.

On the whole, we agreed with her basic points—but then, she kept on going! Right at the end of paragraph 5, O'Brien was now saying this:

POLITICAL MEMO
Harris Has a Lot of Strengths. Giving Interviews Isn’t One of Them.

[...]

In her dizzying ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket, Ms. Harris has proved to be a disciplined and effective debater and a tireless campaigner, nimble and energetic in rallies. But one-on-one televised interviews with journalists have long been a weakness in her political arsenal. She often winds her way slowly toward an answer, leaning on jargon and rehearsed turns of phrase, using language that is sometimes derided as “word salad” but might be better described as a meringue.

According to this lengthy front-page memo, Candidate Harris is sometimes derided for her "word salad." But according to the New York Times, the alleged "word salad" in question is really more like "a meringue!"

Question! Did anyone reading this lengthy memo have any idea what that meant? As published, the memo makes no attempt to explain. 

Perhaps O'Brien wrote it that way, or perhaps the published form of her memo was the work of some unnamed editor. But in the face of such manifestations, we recall the prophetic words of Hector, son of King Priam, as recorded at the dawn of the West, way back in the Iliad:

Sacred Troy must die.

Sacred Troy must die, the noble prince told his generous wife. As every Greek citizen knew for generations after that, his statement proved to be prophetic.

For ourselves, we were somewhat puzzled by O'Brien's lengthy memo. We agreed with her basic assessments, but the memo spun downhill from there.

In fairness, part of the word salad v. meringue critique was perfectly accurate. At that time, Candidate Harris was in fact being derided—was being mocked and derided around the clock—for her alleged "word salad."

Around the clock, from morning till night, she was being derided in that specific way on the Fox News Channel. As published, O'Brien's laborious memo doesn't cite that high-profile source of derision—but it soon echoed what was occurring on Fox without ever citing a source:

These days, when Ms. Harris gives an interview, she hews to a set of well-rehearsed talking points, at times swimming in a sea of excess verbiage. Her first answer is often the most unsteady, a discursive journey to the point at hand. Like all politicians, she sometimes answers the question she would prefer to address, rather than the one actually asked of her—but not always artfully.

She tends to muddy clear ideas with words or phrases that do not have a precise meaning. On Wednesday night, in response to a question about how the federal government could encourage the building of affordable housing despite stringent local regulations, she used the word “holistic” three times in the space of one long sentence:

“For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people.”

Shocking, isn't it? As part of the meringue which wasn't really a salad, Candidate Harris had used "holistic" three separate times "in the space of one long sentence!"

In our view, that presentation by Harris wasn't the most perfectly crafted statement we'd ever seen a candidate make.  At the same time, and under the circumstances, we wouldn't necessarily say that this merited front-page treatment in the Times—and for the record, this:

At that time, the monkeys on the Fox News Channel were playing the tape of that very same statement pretty much around the clock. They were playing tape of that very statement as part of their relentless derision campaign. 

Was O'Brien taking dictation from this "cable news" channel? Frankly, we began to wonder—and then, continuing directly, her memo moved on to this:

She relies on rhetorical touchstones: In many ways. Let’s be clear. And when she is asked about her economic agenda, in particular, she tends to begin with a familiar windup: I grew up in a middle-class family.

“I think we can’t and we shouldn’t aspire to have an economy that just allows people to get by,” she said on Wednesday night. “People want to do more than just get by. They want to get ahead. And I come from the middle class.”

Seriously? During her interviews, Harris employs such locutions as In many ways and even Let’s be clear? Can any serious person really explain how this could be part of any journalistic analysis, let alone a lengthy analysis on the front page of Blue America's paper of record?

We said we found this memo to be especially strange "under the circumstances." The principal circumstance to which we refer is the circumstance in which Harris is running against Candidate Donald J. Trump, whose bizarre behaviors, in his interviews and in his speeches, had gone largely unexamined at that time within this famous newspaper.

Now, Candidate Harris was being frisked within an inch of her life! We'll admit that we found ourselves asking such questions as these:

Did it really make sense to give such prominence to this lengthy memo so late in this White House campaign? 

Would it have been possible to publish a pair of his-and-her memos? His-and-her memos which examined the interview styles of each of the two nominees?

We'll admit that we wondered about such things. Having made that admission, we must quickly add this:

Whether about Candidate Harris or Candidate Trump, there is no excuse for publishing a murky journalistic stew which contrasts an alleged "word salad" with an unexplained "meringue." The American discourse has died on the vine when we the people are fed such gruel by an experienced, highly "educated" journalist (or by her editor) at our nation's most famous newspaper.

When is a salad more like a meringue? According to our best reckoning, only The Shadow knows! 

In fairness, the Times proceeded to drop a stand-alone bomb on Candidate Trump this Monday morning. In print editions, the profile appeared atop the front page. It appeared beneath this headline:

Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age

Coming amazingly late in the game, this was a highly unflattering profile of the candidate's speeches. In our view, it adopted a framework we'd describe as tapioca, even as it touched upon a decade of highly unusual conduct:

As you can see in the headline, this profile of Candidate Trump adopted the framework of advanced age. Candidate Trump may be in a familiar type of decline, like Candidate Biden before him. 

In full fairness, it may be true! It may be true that Candidate Trump is experiencing some sort of age-related cognitive decline.

That said, the larger problem with his behavior has long preceded some such possible state of affairs. It involves the possible sociopathy first warned against, in great volume and in great detail, back in 2017.

This possible sociopathy has manifested itself through a decade of crazy factual claims, accompanied by an angry attraction to violence and a highly unusual apparent disregard for standard democratic norms: 

Also, through a decade of false or unsupported factual claims—highly inflammatory factual claims which the candidate has kept repeating in the face of relentless correction.

The Times has largely chosen to avoid establishing this major anomaly as a fundamental news topic.  When it finally offered Monday's report, it took the safest approach to establishing a framework, focusing on what Candidate Trump has perhaps been like "lately."

As he ages, is this candidate experiencing some sort of cognitive decline? That's certainly possible. But in 2017, dozens of medical and psychological specialists described his psychological condition as "dangerous"—and they explicitly said that his apparent clinical disorders would only get worse.

From the start, the New York Times has taken a dive on that possibility and on those behaviors. Now, it fills its front page with lengthy analyses in which we learn that the other candidate uses such terms as "Let’s be clear" when she sits for an interview. She does it all the time!

A dirty little secret seems to be lurking here. That secret involves a basic question about human intellectual and moral capability. 

Are we humans up to the task of playing this game? In the end, are we wired for the challenging task of maintaining Enlightenment values?

If you've watched the Fox News Channel lately, you may be starting to see the shape of an answer to that question. 

That said, the New York Times has decided that what happens on the Fox News Channel will stay on the Fox News Channel.  The spotless minds of Times subscribers won't be encumbered with any of that. 

(For better or worse, the corporate suits at MSNBC have made the same decision.)

We'll set aside for another day the early example in Monday's report which the Times somehow failed to fact-check. For now, we'll leave you with this:

The New York Times is a newspaper which is willing to let us know when an alleged word salad is actually more like a meringue. It's a paper which almost seems to be taking dictation from Fox without ever identifying the detractors to whom it alludes—which actually goes to its front page to tell us that one nominee is inclined to say such things as these:

In many ways. Let’s be clear.

One of the nominees does that! The other nominee has been parading about bare naked for years, repeating highly inflammatory claims in the face of endless correction, with his endless array of crazy statements generally going unmentioned.

Sacred Troy must die, Hector prophetically said. In the face of to the so-called "democratization of media"—as we see what our tribe's Harvard grads are actually like—we can't help asking if that's also true of "our democracy," imperfect as it has been.

Putin says we aren't going to make it. There's no word salad there.

He's a classic pre-Enlightenment strongman. Could it be that this strongman is right?

How did Candidate Obama "plan to pay for it?"

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2024

When's the last time anyone did? How competent are the mainstream journalists at the very top of the pile? A remark today in the New York Times called this question to mind.

Once again, the Times is offering a detailed "Political Memo" concerning Candidate Harris's interview style.  Under current circumstances, this strikes us as perhaps a bit strange all by itself, but we'll leave that topic for tomorrow. 

For now, consider the highlighted statement about Harris's "economic plan:"

POLITICAL MEMO
In Interviews, Kamala Harris Continues to Bob and Weave

[...]

Politicians, and presidents in particular, have long treated the ability to bob and weave through uncomfortable questions while remaining on message as a skill to be mastered, like the precise footing required of a carpenter navigating a high-pitched roof.

Bill Clinton’s famous line, “I feel your pain,” was deployed to diffuse an activist’s plea for details on how to end the AIDS epidemic. George W. Bush sabotaged questions about climate change by treating facts as partisan assertions. Barack Obama took his message to social media and largely avoided interviews with White House beat reporters.

This week, Ms. Harris put her own stamp on the art of the dodge.

On “60 Minutes,” she declined to answer a question about whether she considered Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, to be a close ally. She also refused to detail how she would pay for a $3 trillion economic plan.

Borrowing from Candidate Reagan, There [they] go again!

Question: Has Candidate Harris actually proposed "a $3 trillion economic plan?" We're not even sure what that's supposed to mean!

Clearly, that statement seems to refer to this question from Monday evening's 60 Minutes interview:

WHITAKER (10/7/24): It is estimated by the nonpartisan Committee for A Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you going to pay for that?

That was Bill Whitaker's question. As we noted yesterday, we thought the question was strange. 

But even Whitaker didn't say that Harris had proposed "a $3 trillion economic plan." He said that (according to one estimate) she had proposed a plan which would increase "the federal deficit" by that amount over the next ten years.

No, those aren't the same thing! (For the record, Whitaker probably should have said that her plan, as assessed by that one org, would increase "federal deficits" by that amount, or would increase "the federal debt over what is currently projected.")

That said, is it true? Has Candidate Harris proposed "a $3 trillion economic plan?" We're not even sure what that means. 

Presumably, the federal spending her plan contemplates would vastly exceed that amount. So would the amount of federal revenue collected. 

How would we get from that to "a $3 trillion plan?" Also, just how literate are our mainstream journalists and orgs, even at the highest levels?

We'll move on to riddle you this question:

Question! When was the last time any major party nominee proposed to "pay for" his or her economic plan? Putting it another way, when was the last time any such nominee offered a plan which contemplated balanced budgets or budget surpluses over the course of ten years.

As we noted yesterday, all four major candidates in Campaign 2000—Gore and Bradley, Bush and McCain—contemplated budget surpluses over the course of ten years. 

At that time, the OMB and the CBO were projecting annual surpluses as far as the eye could see. Given that circumstance, everyone's budget plan contemplated reducing the national debt over the course of ten years. 

(Even after Candidate Bush's tax cut proposal, the budget authorities were still projecting surpluses.)

That said, the fiscal situation rapidly changed. Has anyone proposed balanced budgets, or budget surpluses, in any election since then?

As far as we know, no one has! Here's an account from the Washington Post which mentions Candidate Obama's budget proposals in each of his two campaigns:

Obama’s 2013 budget proposal launches election-year debate

[...]

The president's plan would push this year's deficit above current projections, with the budget gap growing to $1.33 trillion—slightly higher than last year's $1.3 trillion deficit and $200 billion more than congressional budget analysts recently projected for the fiscal year that ends in September.

The deficit would fall to $900 billion in 2013, and government borrowing would continue to slow through 2022, leaving the debt elevated by historic standards but no longer growing faster than the overall economy.

Senior administration officials said the blueprint offers a balanced approach that would protect the middle class while asking for greater sacrifice from the most fortunate. Every dollar in tax increases would be matched with $2.50 in spending cuts, they said, counting $1 trillion in previously adopted cuts to agency budgets.

Republicans immediately attacked the higher deficit figures, noting that Obama had failed to achieve his 2009 goal of cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term.

"Government borrowing would continue to slow," but federal deficits would not go away. Looking ahead, the president wasn't proposing to "pay for" his various spending plans, nor had he proposed doing so during his first campaign.

We don't mean this as a criticism of Obama! But as you can see, he never said that he would balance the budget or run surpluses. When it came to his budget plans, he never claimed that he would be able "to pay for it."

Suddenly, Bill Whitaker was wondering how Candidate Harris was planning "to pay for it!" As we noted yesterday, the answer is amazingly simple—she isn't proposing "to pay for it!" As far as we know, neither has any other nominee, R or D, in recent White House campaigns.

Whitaker seemed confused by the logic of this situation. Today's report in the Times is even worse.

We tend to assume that these people are sharp. Time and again, it almost seems that, on the rare occasion, they perhaps and possibly aren't!

TWO SILOS: Charlie Hurt comes across as a genial guy!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2024

Everything he said that night was just blatantly wrong: The Fox News Channel's Charlie Hurt seems like a genial person.

Also, he comes from excellent stock. In addition to what we showed you on Tuesday, the leading authority on his background and his career offers this overview:

Charles Hurt

Charles Hurt (born 1971) is an American journalist and political commentator. He is currently the opinion editor of The Washington Times, a Fox News contributor, a Breitbart News contributor, and a Drudge Report editor. Hurt's views have been considered to be Republican leaning.

[...]

Hurt was born in Chatham, Virginia. Hurt is the son of investigative journalist and former Reader's Digest editor Henry C. Hurt and his wife, Margaret Nolting Williams. His older brother, Robert Hurt, is a former United States congressman. Charles Hurt had been a possible congressional candidate before his brother's term ended in 2016. 

He comes from excellent stock, and he seems like a genial person. On the down side, he's an employee of the Fox News Channel, an enterprise we would consider to be a cancer on the democracy, imperfect as it has been. 

Journalistically, the work Hurt does on the Fox News Channel often seems to come from "a distant land." Subscribers to the New York Times aren't told about any of this.

Below, we'll continue Tuesday's report, in which we started to show you what Hurt said, in prime time, about Candidate Harris's recent interview with MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle. If we expect reports on "news channels" to align with the most obvious facts, the various things Hurt said that evening came to several million Americans from a far distant land. 

People watching Fox News that night didn't know that they were being clownishly misinformed. If you read the New York Times, you will never be told about this ongoing process.

Below, we'll show you the rest of what Hurt said about that high-profile interview. First, we want to show you what was being said on Fox & Friend First quite early this very morning.

In response to Hurricane Melvin, Fox & Friend First came on the air one hour early today. Below, you see the list of players whose comments we will report:

Dramatis personae, 10/10/24
Todd Piro: Co-host (2020–present)
Carley Shimkus: Co-host (2021–present)
Kevin Corke: Fox News Channel correspondent

They were the players whose strutting and fretting we watched at 4:30 this morning. Sadly, though, we can't post a transcript of what they said at this point.

For reasons which strike fear in our hearts, the invaluable Internet Archive site is currently down. It was down for a time last evening, then it came back up again.

This morning, the site is down once again. If that invaluable site disappears, there goes with it the ability to report on a distant land.

Amazing! The Internet Archive site posts videotape for every hour of every day on every "cable news" channel. In a marker of the way our nation's imitation discourse works, we don't think we've ever seen anyone link to the Internet Archive or cite it as a source.

Under current arrangements, what happens on the Fox News Channel stays on the Fox News Channel—remains within that channel's silo. We think of a high-profile film from 2004, Eternal Silence of the Spotless Mind:

Through a type of eternal silence, those of us who live in Blue America are allowed to maintain our spotless minds. Through what is said on the Fox News Channel, friends and neighbors in Red America are allowed to stay clueless too.

Currently, that's the way it works within the siloed arrangements of our failing national discourse. 

That said, we'll now move on from what was already being said at 4:30 this morning. Instead, we'll return you to what the Fox News Channel's Charlie Hurt said on the prime time "cable news" program, Gutfeld!, all the way back on Thursday evening, September 26.

As we noted on Tuesday, MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle had interviewed Candidate Harris one day before. Now, the Fox News Channel was pretending to tell several million viewers what Harris and Ruhle had said.

By our count, Ruhle had presented Harris with sixteen (16) questions that day. The vast majority of the questions dealt with serious policy questions. 

In Tuesday's report, we showed you the text of the first five questions Ruhle asked. For the record, there was no mystery about any of this. MSNBC had published a full transcript of the interview.  MSNBC had also posted a full videotape of the session.

Ruhle's questions were policy-based pretty much all the way down. Unless you were watching Charlie Hurt on an imitation of a "cable news" show, in which case you encountered a certain genial fellow who was instantly telling you this:

GUTFELD (9/26/24): Charlie, it seems to me that she didn't answer a single question. But would the campaign regard that as a success?

HURT: Oh, I think without a doubt. I think that "First, do no harm" is definitely their motto here. But I mean— You know, Trump used to talk about making Biden take a drug test. He should start ordering a drug test for this woman.

[...]

HURT: And then she sits down, Stephanie Ruhle...sits down and does this interview with her, and the first question was about had you ever worked, actually, at McDonald's. 

As we noted on Tuesday, Gutfeld himself had already said that Candidate Harris, the sitting vice president, seems like "a wine drunk." Hurt came along and said that President Biden should make Harris take a drug test

Hurt then he made the first of his several flagrant and clownish factual misstatements concerning what Harris and Ruhle had actually said. 

No, Virginia—and North Carolina and Georgia and all the other swing states! Ruhle's first question had nothing to do with McDonald's, or with working at McDonald's, or with anything dimly related to that.

Anyone could see that from the published transcript. Anyone could see that from the videotape.

That said, our rapidly failing "national discourse" doesn't work in any such way at this dangerous point. Instead, spotless minds were now being fed a mystery meat by the genial man from Chatham, Virginia. 

In fairness, Hurt may not have known that what he was saying was clownishly inaccurate. We wouldn't assume that he had actually taken the time to research what had been said.

Simply put, it doesn't work that way at Fox, our most heavily watched "cable news" channel (by far). To a very large degree, Fox is actually a propaganda channel—a channel devoted to advancing Approved Standard Corporate Storylines—and in accord with that corporate purpose, the genial fellow from Chatham, Virgina continued misstating this night.

With the Internet Archive down, we can't show you exactly what Charlie Hurt said as his presentation continued. That said, it's fairly easy to paraphrase what he said. As he and his comrades chuckled and laughed, the genial fellow said this:

The genial fellow told his disordered host that Harris broke in to answer that question before the word McDonald's had even been spoken! He said this made it clear that Harris had been told what the questions were going to be before she and Ruhle sat down!

According to Charlie, Harris broke in with her answer so quickly that she gave the game away! All the other defectives enjoyed what the genial fellow now said.

Now for the rest of the story:

In fact, Ruhle did ask Candidate Harris if she'd ever worked at McDonald's. That tiny part of Hurt's presentation was factually accurate. Everything else was invented.

There actually was such a question! But as anyone can see from the transcript or from the tape, this was  the fourteenth question Ruhle asked that night, not the first. 

Beyond that, Ruhle explained why she was asking the question. Also, it was obvious what she was asking about by the time Harris broke in with the start of her answer.

Here's the transcript of what was said. We're sorry that we can't show you the inexcusable pile of bullroar Charlie Hurt later said:

RUHLE (9/25/24): I want to just ask you about a little job and a big job. The first one, just a fact-check, because your opponent almost every day—

HARRIS: There is no little job. There is no such thing as a little job.

RUHLE: OK. Fair, fair. 

(LAUGHTER) 

RUHLE: Because your opponent, almost every day, seems to be talking about this. So I just want to ask you, yes or no:

At any point in your life, have you served two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions—

HARRIS (laughing): On a sesame seed bun?

RUHLE: —on a sesame seed bun, working at a McDonald’s? Yes or no? That’s it!

HARRIS: I have. But it was not a small job...

The exchange continued from there. Let's consider what Charlie Hurt said along with the mockery he directed at Harris and Ruhle:

For starters, this was the fourteenth question Ruhle asked (of sixteen). No, it wasn't the first.

Also, Ruhle explained why she was asking the question. She was asking the question because Candidate Trump had been parading about, saying that Harris never did work at McDonald's.

In a somewhat humorous moment, Ruhle was seeking a response. Also this:

It was perfectly obvious what Ruhle was asking about before Candidate Harris broke in. There was zero reason to think that Harris had somehow been told this question was coming in advance. 

In fairness, all the defectives enjoyed Charlie Hurt's performance this night. It's even possible that he didn't know that what he was saying was utterly, clownishly bogus.

That said:

Journalistically, we citizens currently live in two different Americas. With respect to the "national discourse," some of us live in Red America and some of us live in Blue.

Journalistically, the Fox News Channel is a propaganda arm of certain political and corporate interests. Hurt's performance this night was factually clownish, but it extended the preferred Storylines of these powerful interests.

From start to finish, he baldly misstated what had occurred during this high-profile interview. His initial statement was clownishly false. As he continued, things only got worse.

If the Fox News Channel was a journalistic enterprise, something like this might have happened:

Someone might have taken Hurt by the ear and escorted him to the door. He would then have been deposited on the sidewalk and told he should never return.

His gargoyle-adjacent host would have been next. Someone would have gone on the air the following night and corrected what these former employees had said.

Nothing like that is going to happen to this apparently genial man. On paper, he comes from the finest Virginia stock, but everything he said that night was baldly and flagrantly wrong.

The game is played this way at Fox. At the Times, a massive silence about this ongoing state of affairs keeps our blue minds spotless.

We stumble ahead in a type of sunshine. Our beloved tribunes have agreed not to tell us what is going on.

Meanwhile, pray for Rosemary's baby and for the Internet Archive. Of course, given the way our "discourse" works, we have never seen anyone cite its invaluable work as a source!

Tomorrow: Two recent profiles in the New York Times

"How are you going to pay for that?"

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2024

Bill Whitaker gets it wrong: Yesterday afternoon, we said that Bill Whitaker got something right when he interviewed Candidate Harris for 60 Minutes.

He asked her the world's most obvious question—a question about border policy over the bulk of the past four years. Because the candidate kept failing to answer his question, he asked it three separate times.

In our view, Whitaker got that right. Today, we focus on a puzzling matter when he seems to have gotten it wrong.

We refer to a question Whitaker posed several times about Harris's budget proposals. Below, we highlight the question to which we refer. Unless there's something we don't understand, we'd say that he's getting it wrong.

Warning! Socratic method ahead:

WHITAKER (10/7/24): You want to expand the child tax credit.

HARRIS: Yes, I do.

WHITAKER: You want to give tax breaks to first-time home buyers.

HARRIS: Yes.

WHITAKER: And people starting small businesses.

HARRIS: Correct.

WHITAKER: But it is estimated by the nonpartisan Committee for A Responsible Federal Budget that your economic plan would add $3 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade. How are you gonna pay for that?

HARRIS: OK, so the other economists that have reviewed my plan versus my opponent and determined that my economic plan would strengthen America's economy. His would weaken it. 

WHITAKER: But—

HARRIS: My plan, Bill, if you don't mind, my plan is about saying that when you invest in small businesses, you invest in the middle class, and you strengthen America's economy. Small businesses are part of the backbone of America's economy.

WHITAKER: But— But pardon me, Madame Vice President. I— the— The question was, how are you going to pay for it?

HARRIS: Well, one of the things is I'm gonna make sure that the richest among us, who can afford it, pay their fair share in taxes. It is not right that teachers and nurses and firefighters are paying a higher tax rate than billionaires and the biggest corporations.

WHITAKER: But—but—

HARRIS: And I plan on making that fair.

WHITAKER: But we're dealing with the real world here...

"We're dealing with the real world here," the triumphant newsman said. The comment has been widely cited as a telling putdown of Harris.

What was "wrong" with Whitaker's question? Let's start with what he got right:

It's true! According to the Committee for A Responsible Federal Budget, Candidate Harris's economic proposals would add $3.5 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.

You can see that organization's report right here. For the record, Whitaker didn't mention the second part of that same report:

According to that same report, Candidate Trump's budget proposals would add more than twice as much—$7.5 trillion—to the national debt over those same ten years! Candidate Harris will add to the debt, but Candidate Trump will add to the debt a lot more.

That said, Whitaker's question dealt with Harris's proposals. In the face of the committee's projection, he wanted to know "how she planned to pay for it"—how she planned to pay for that $3.5 trillion in additional debt.

Is there something we're missing here? The answer to the question is simple—just like Candidate Trump, she isn't planning "to pay for it!" Just like Candidate Trump, she's planning to accept additional debt.

She isn't planning to balance the budget—to produce ten years of balanced budgets. Instead, she's proposing an array of plans knowing they'll add to the federal debt. Candidate Trump is doing the same thing, except to a larger extent.

Now for a quick bit of background:

As of 1999, the federal government was running annual budget surpluses—and the OMB and the CBO were projecting federal surpluses as far as the eye could see. For twenty months, the entire 2000 campaign turned on a basic question:

What did the four major candidates—Gore and Bradley, Bush and McCain—plan to do with the large federal surpluses which would be rolling in?

The current situation is different. The federal government is running large annual deficits, and neither candidate has proposed the kinds of plans which would balance the annual budget. 

According to that committee's report, each candidate's budget proposals will continue to produce substantial deficits, thereby adding to the national debt.

"How are you going to pay for it?" Whitaker strangely asked. In fact, she isn't planning "to pay for it!" Neither is Candidate Trump!

Whitaker seemed to be confused by the logic of the situation. For obvious reasons, Candidate Harris may not have wanted to help him get straightened out.

Our major journalists are frequently bollixed by such elementary matters. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but we aren't a nation of intellectual giants, as our press corps often makes clear.

Neither hopeful is "going to pay for it!" Insistent though he wanted to be, it looked like the sputtering scribe who kept saying "But" perhaps didn't quite understand!

TWO SILOS: Vice President Harris slimed in a cab!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2024

A new Martian culture at Fox: As you may already know, Stranger in a Strange Land is a highly regarded science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein.

Don't get us wrong—we've never read it! But one thumbnail describes it like this:

Stranger in a Strange Land 

Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1961 science fiction novel by American author Robert A. Heinlein. It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians.

[...]

Stranger in a Strange Land won the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Novel and became the first science fiction novel to enter The New York Times Book Review's best-seller list. In 2012, the Library of Congress named it one of 88 "Books that Shaped America."

Did Heinlein's novel really "shape America?" We have no idea—that said:

Heinlein's main character—a person named Smith—is technically human but culturally Martian. With surprising frequency, an observer can seem to be dealing with something like that when he watches an array of primetimes "cable news" shows on the present-day Fox News Channel.

We're often surprised by the behaviors, and by the views, of the people Fox puts on the air. Consider an exchange which occurred last weekend on the primetime "cable news" program, Fox News Saturday Night with Jimmy Failla.

Failla was once a New York City cabbie. Today, he's a comedian who hosts his own Saturday night primetime program on Fox.

Last Saturday, his program included a videotaped segment in which he was back to driving a cab. More specifically, he was shown driving the Fox News Channel's Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (stage name, Kennedy) through the streets of Gotham as the pair of "cable news" stars gossip and degrade the culture and chuckle.

In our view, Failla and Kennedy each seem a bit "Smith-adjacent." To watch their peculiar conversation, you can start by clicking here.

The segment starts with the two Fox stars directing sexual insults at Kamala Harris. (By now, this sort of thing is quite common on Fox.) 

The insults are triggered when Kennedy, in the back seat of Failla's cab, offers this portrait of Harris:

KENNEDY (10/5/24): She's a bland, overcooked piece of chicken.

FAILLA: Yeah.

KENNEDY: Like, doesn't have any flavor. The texture is kinda gross. but you can pour teriyaki sauce on it and serve it over rice.

Somehow, that portrait of the sitting vice president seems to trigger Failla. He instantly mentions Willie Brown, and things spin downhill from there. 

At this point, the pair enjoy some smutty musings in which they imagine aspects of the candidate's relationship with Brown in the mid-1990s. While they're at it, they throw in some smutty talk in which they imagine aspects of her dating relationship with Montel Williams, which apparently tracks to the late 1990s. 

On what manner of Martian meat doth such lifeforms feed?  We began to think of Heinlein's cultural alien when this smutty exchange occurred:

KENNEDY: Great move on her part, though...Just like a total hooch! 

FAILLA; Oh, yeah!

KENNEDY (musingly): A part of me, like—I respect it. 

FAILLA: Yeah.

KENNEDY: Very ahead of her time. She put the "head" in "ahead of her time."

FAILLA (laughing): She was several heads ahead of her time. Several heads ahead of her time.

KENNEDY: (Cackles knowingly)

FAILLA (thoughtfully): Yeah, that's her. (Pauses) "We shouldn't talk about that." That's what they'd tell us.

Just so you'll know, Kennedy is 52 years old; Failla is 47. We say that so you won't think they're a pair of angry 14-year-olds angrily rebelling against "what [the adults] tell us."

As we've noted, the practice of directing sexual insults at Vice President Harris is now quite common on Fox. Over at the New York Times, a finer class of the better people insist that there's nothing to look at as this culture takes form.

As we watched this segment on Saturday night, what we've shown you already struck us as culturally Martian. But we really began to think about Heinlein's character from a distant land when the astonishing Kennedy, arrayed in the back seat of Failla's cab, somehow came up with this:

KENNEDY (continuing directly): If the sexual stuff before you're elected doesn't matter, then don't talk about what happened with Trump and E. Jean Carroll, or Trump and the Access Hollywood tape.

FAILLA: Yeah. How about that?

By now, you may think we're making this up. Go ahead—look at the tape.

The strange ruminations continue briefly from there. But for our money, we've already entered a very strange land.

Who on earth is the 52-year-old human woman who analyzed the situation in the manner shown?

For reasons we've never understood, she's been in the public eye roughly forever by this time. This comes from the standard thumbnail:

Kennedy (commentator)

Lisa Kennedy Montgomery (born September 8, 1972), referred to mononymously as Kennedy, is an American libertarian political commentator, radio personality, author, and former MTV VJ. She is a commentator on Fox News Channel, a primary guest host of Fox's Outnumbered and The Five, host of the podcast Kennedy Saves The World on Fox News Radio and a columnist for The Daily Mail...She hosted Kennedy on the Fox Business Network from 2015 to 2023.

[She] was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and raised in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a wealthy suburb of Portland...She attended Santa Monica College before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles on an academic scholarship. She later completed a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 2005.

Kennedy interned as a DJ at KROQ radio in Los Angeles as a teenager. She was known on KROQ as "the Virgin Kennedy."

[She] began her career as a VJ on MTV in 1992. She hosted Alternative Nation from 1992 to 1997. By 1995, she had become such a recognizable cultural figure that the sitcom Murphy Brown introduced a new character named McGovern, modeled after her.

From Murphy Brown to Willie Brown, she has just kept moving along!

For ourselves, we were always puzzled by Kennedy's presence as an MTV VJ. We don't recall any specifics, but we recall being puzzled by what the appeal might be.

At any rate, Kennedy's career has traveled on from MTV, through a great many twists and turns. According to that same leading authority, she's always trended in the way she put on display last Saturday night:

At the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, Kennedy was involved in an on-air verbal altercation with host Roseanne Barr over a fellatio joke involving Rush Limbaugh.

Way back in 1986, we knew Roseanne a bit, if only briefly. We thought she was strikingly sharp, and we liked her a lot. 

We were sorry when she headed down that road. Kennedy remains on that road today, on prime time "news" shows no less.

Back to what was said in the cab:

Kennedy is 52 years old. She is said to hold a degree in philosophy from one of "the finest schools."

Somehow, though, also this:

She apparently can't discern a difference between 1) a jury-adjudicated incident of sexual assault, described by one judge as equivalent to an act of rape; and 2) her own imagined accounts of imagined consensual acts—imagined acts she imagines happening a very long time ago.

To Kennedy, this all seemed to be the same thing. To Failla, this all seemed to make sense. 

As we've noted, sexual insults directed at Harris are now standard fare on primetime shows on this "cable news" channel. Finer people at the Times (and at other orgs in Blue America) seem to feel there's nothing to look at as this culture takes hold. 

We humans often think we understand the basic cultural landscape within which we're leading our lives. At such surprising times as this, we sometimes flash on what Thoreau said, in paragraph 2 of Walden:

I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.

Failla and Kennedy may have been speaking "sincerely" last Saturday night. But if they were, it seems to us that they were speaking from some very distant land. 

On what meat have these two stars fed? On what meat were they raised? What explains the culture which has surfaced on the Fox News Channel and is now broadcast every night? 

What explains the thinking of the people who put these two on the air? What explains the culture within which the loftier tribunes of Blue America insist that there's nothing to look at as these Martian-adjacent figures toss their musings around?

Tomorrow: We expect to return to Charlie Hurt's invented account of Harris's interview with Stephanie Ruhle.

On Friday, it will be back to that pair of front-page pieces from the New York Times—though knowing how way leads on to way, an Earth-dweller can never be sure.