THE ERA WHICH WAS: This has become a Week Which Was!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2020

"Don't even ask," experts say: Plainly, this has become a Week Which Was.

We cringe now when we look at the tapes from Tuesday night's "debate." How far apart were the candidates standing for ninety-five minutes?

Not real far apart.

In retrospect, it's amazing that the debate commission didn't position the candidates farther apart. According to the constitution, what do we do if both nominees have died by November 3?

In fairness, bad judgment lies at the heart of human behavior and drives most human history. Over the course of the past several years, we've been schooled in such understandings by a group of anthropologists.

They report to us from the years which lie beyond the conflagration they refer to as Mister Trump's War. They school us through nocturnal submissions which the haters deride as mere dreams

"Simply put, our species was never wired for adherence to Enlightenment values and understandings," these experts have patiently told us, again and again and again. 

"Our species has always been wired for full investment in tribal narrative," they despondently say. 

"Claims to rationality came much later," they say, "and resemble Trumpism itself."

We humans are rational in much the same way Trump is a very stable genius, or  so these experts claim. As we near the end of The Era Which Was, they identify two dueling sources of societal misperception.

The intellectual disorder of Donald J. Trump:

On Tuesday night, Chris Wallace tried to chastise Donald J. Trump for his constant interruptions of Candidate Biden.

When he did, Candidate Trump began interrupting him.

"How much more do you need to know?" our glum future scholars ask. There has been no limit to the clownish disorder emerging from Donald J. Trump.

The intellectual disorder of the New York Times:

A second strand of argument is a bit more puzzling. The lunacy of the current era didn't start with Trump, these scholarly experts insist.

This lunacy, for which we're wired, has been building for decades, they say. Surprisingly, they point to repeated work by the New York Times, a newspaper which is branded as our liberal tribe's best and brightest.

For basic reasons of wiring, our liberal tribe has had a hard time seeing this source of disorder and misperception, these scholarly experts keep saying. They point to endless peculiar conduct by the ballyhooed Times—and as they do, pitiful weeping can be hard in the caves where they now live.

How strange! These experts claim that the modern era began in 1987, when the Miami Herald hid in the bushes outside Gary Hart's home. 

The Herald was afraid that Candidate Hart might have a girl friend. Responding to impulses which date to prehistory, they felt a strong need to be find out.

This was backwash to the pursuit of President Nixon, these experts insist. Simple-minded journalists had somehow got it into their heads that they themselves were the good, decent people and the pols were immoral and bad.

A tribal perception took form. Soon, journalists were hiding in the bushes concerning Candidate Hart and calling us to ask if Candidate Gore had ever smoked marijuana when he was 19 years old.

Yes, they actually did that! They also chased minor errors by Candidate Biden, driving him from the White House race.

 In this way, and in that year, a dimwitted era was born.

The pivotal role by the New York Times begins in 1992. It begins with Jeff Gerth's bungled front-page reports about the Whitewater pseudo-scandal. (Have you ever seen a journalist try to explain how Gerth's claims came out, or even what they were?)

Gene Lyons dissected the bungling in Harper's, one of our most respected liberal journals (except at moments like this). His essay was expanded into a 1995 book, Fools For Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater.

The media to which Lyons referred were the New York Times and the Washington Poat. For that very reason, his book was ignored by the upper-end press corps. 

Gerth's bungled front-page reporting was never acknowledged by the rest of the guild. This led to a decade of pseudo-scandals, and eventually onward to Trump.

Other debacles followed at the Times. In 1999 and 2000, Maureen Dowd devoted seven (7) columns to Candidate Gore's troubling bald spot, including a mocking column on the Sunday before the nation voted. 

Meanwhile, Katharine Seelye joined the Post's Ceci Connolly in one of the longest-running, dumbest assaults on a nominee in journalistic history. 

In December 1999, their Love Canal bungle was wondrously comic. (Their flat misquotation of Gore was debunked by videotape from a class of New Hampshire high school kids!)  But because the bungle came from the Times and the Post, it had to be covered up.

Because this was being done at the Times and the Post, other "journalists" refused to discuss it. As the years wore on, the Times extended its stunningly dimwitted war, aimed now at Hillary Clinton.

By 2016, the newspaper's love of Emailgate was so egregious that liberal bloggers were even prepared to complain. In 2015, the paper's crazy Uranium One maxi-report met with little such opposition.

The crazy report resulted from an explicit business deal between the wholly ridiculous New York Times and Trump crackpot Steve Bannon. But so what? The Times put the transparently bungled report in print, and our "journalists" all kept their mouths shut.

Dowd had remained quite active. In the summer of 2016, she came up with the strangest piece of journalism of the 2016 campaign—her unsourced claim that Beau Biden had trashed Candidate Hillary Clinton as he lay dying, using his last few nouns.

Inevitably, the Times took Dowd's unsourced claim and used it in a Sunday morning front-page news report. This may have been the craziest piece of journalism of this whole  Era Which Was.

According to major experts, there were few limits on the dumbness of the Times. The paper even resurrected Gennifer Flowers in a front-page report in October 2016, another attack on Candidate Clinton.

Along the way, Dowd had been a constant source of dysfunction and misperception—not just with her reports about The Spot, but also with her repeated denigrations of Obama, "the diffident debutante," and of Candidate Edwards, who she'd dubbed The Breck Girl. 

Howard Dean's wife was an unsightly mess. Dowd devoted two columns to this theme as the feminist world skillfully looked away.

In 2016, Clark Hoyt, then the Times' public editor, amazed the world by savaging Dowd her her sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton. Given the power of Dowd and the Times, the others averted their gaze. 

(Our tribes often take the form of guilds, despondent anthropologists claim.)

This past week, we were all allowed to see the way the Times frequently plays. We also got to see the predictable way our own liberal tribe reacted.

In a giant front-page report, the Times created a transparently bogus claim about Commander Trump's past income tax payments. A central claim was transparently bogus, but our team failed to notice.

Imagine," these major experts say. "You have a completely disordered figure like Trump, and the New York Times still feels the need to invent embellished claims!"

Overnight, Trump's insanity has been put on high display. He clowned about the virus all year. Now, the virus has him.

For members of our liberal tribe, it's easy to see the lunacy among the other tribe. It's hard to see the work of the Times for what it actually is.

The  Times is part of our own liberal tribe, and one's own tribe can't be wrong. These are the basic rules of the game as set by our war-inclined brains. 

This explains how "a parallel income tax" can be "no income tax at all!" And yes, that's what the New York Times wrote this very week, in an endless and comic report.

"The human brain was wired this way from the day our earliest ancestors crawled out onto the land!"

So these expert scholars say, as weeping is hard within their caves and the band at the Times plays on.

On Tuesday, the candidates were maybe ten feet apart. "Don't even ask," experts say.


36 comments:

  1. With all due respect, you typed a whole lot of bullshit, dear Bob. Your liberal-hitlerian media do not target both sides.

    Your liberal demigods are never smeared as foreign secret agents. Secretly recorded personal conversations of their wives are never published and subjected to mockery. Etc, etc, etc. We have never observed so much hatred spewed by your liberal media; it's far, far beyond the normal, dear Bob. And you know it, so don't be disingenuous, dear.

    Yes, the Clinton were treated with a bit of contempt at the beginning, but that's not even close.

    And you're wrong about the Emailgate, dear Bob: it was a real scandal. Public officials puting so much effort into hiding their official communications are, without a doubt, corrupt public officials.

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  2. yes mao
    Yes yes
    YES GODDAMMIT YES

    ReplyDelete
  3. Turn out the lights
    The party's over

    ReplyDelete
  4. The Ghost of Shitstain PresentOctober 2, 2020 at 2:52 PM

    what happened mao mao?
    It wasn't supposed to be that way.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Somerby's ego has taken a hit so he is reviewing his past to mine for an ego boost. Even so he still types out this garbage:

    "In a giant front-page report, the Times created a transparently bogus claim about Commander Trump's past income tax payments. A central claim was transparently bogus, but our team failed to notice."

    "This explains how "a parallel income tax" can be "no income tax at all!" And yes, that's what the New York Times wrote this very week, in an endless and comic report."


    Except there was nothing bogus about the claim, and the NY Times never said that a parallel tax is no income tax. The NY Times reported that out of 17 yrs Trump paid the AMT 7 times, and zero taxes 10 times. Somerby seems to not realize that 2016 and 2017 were two of the AMT years. That leaves 5 yrs of AMT between 2000-2015, which then still leaves 10 YEARS OF PAYING ZERO.

    This is not complicated. 17-7=10!

    We all make mistakes, this is a "denounce white supremacist" moment for Somerby and he is failing just as badly as Trump.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "17-7=10"

      Basic math is akin to advanced rocket science for Right-wingers.

      Delete
  6. "They report to us from the years which lie beyond the conflagration they refer to as Mister Trump's War."

    I find this repeated bit of idiocy offensive every time Somerby says it. Wars aren't funny. If anything, the war against covid should be called Trump's war (which he is losing on both a personal and national level).

    Why does Somerby think this kind of thing is cute or funny? Why does he think any self-respecting anthropologist would buy into anything he says?

    ReplyDelete
  7. "The Herald was afraid that Candidate Hart might have a girl friend."

    The Herald reporter was upset with Hart because he told a baldfaced lie to his face.

    That may seem quaint now, but that was something politicians didn't do, if they wanted to maintain good press relations. So the press got even with Hart.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Somerby is carrying water for a sick old man Trump. By attacking the NY Times tax story, he provides a rationale for liberals who might want to support Trump by undermining the veracity of the tax scandal. Somerby's goal is obvious. It is the same one he pursues nearly every day, trying to portray the press as fake news so that voters have permission to ignore the facts that appear there. Somerby is doing the devil's work while pretending to be a media critic and a liberal. We know he is not liberal, and now we know his media criticism is bogus too.

    The more people call each other's cherished beliefs bogus, the more likely folks will throw their hands up and say that they don't know who to trust. But I would certainly trust the NY Times before I would trust a cranky old fart with no training or expertise in taxes, who spends most of his time remembering his glory days when he defended Al Gore, and occasionally watering his pear tree.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All fine and good, but it is not a matter of trusting the NY Times over Somerby, and it requires no expertise in taxes.

      Somerby asserts the NY Times claim that Trump paid no taxes for 10 years is somehow false because they are conflating the AMT with paying no taxes. They do not make this claim. This arises from Somerby's confusion about which years were AMT years. In fact the NY Times actually list the amount of AMT for 2 of those years, so clearly they are defining the "AMT" and "paying no taxes" as separate items.

      This is not a matter of trust, this is a matter of Somerby's ignorance, perhaps willful, perhaps not.

      Delete
  9. and then one day...
    Poof!
    He will dissappear like magic

    ReplyDelete
  10. On the one hand Somerby presents the disordered mind of Donald Trump. On the other hand, what he considers to be a mistake by the NY Times. Do these balance each other in any way?

    ReplyDelete
  11. Well said about the state of journalism.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-preemptively-pens-dying-wish-canceling-out-rbgs-dying-wish

      Delete
    2. If he has the decency to die, I'll be even fine with his dying wish being honored. Although, more likely: Democratic senate rightfully ignores Trump's dying wishes.

      Delete
    3. Babylon Bee isn’t a think tank. It’s parody.

      Delete
    4. I hope he dies tonight. What an awful piece if shit. I hope he dies tonight and goes straight to hell where he belongs.

      Delete
    5. Donald: Only old people die from COVID.
      Melania: Thank God!

      Delete
  12. GOP isn't a party, it's a parody.

    ReplyDelete
  13. o/t

    https://consortiumnews.com/2020/10/02/john-pilger-eyewitness-to-the-agony-of-julian-assange/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wonder if Assange regrets releasing those documents strategically to hurt the Democratic Party, instead of dumping them all at once like someone who isn't a Republican Party ratfucker would do.

      Delete
  14. It’s only a matter of time before Somerby resurrects the “Al Gore invented the internet” diatribe. It’s an oldie but a goodie. One of his greatest hits. It keeps us all hanging on to the notion that he gets it and is not a concern troll. Talented and experienced tax lawyers have weighed in on the published reports of Trump’s tax shenanigans but Somerby has his own take based upon a narrow reading of the times piece that suits his narrative. Excoriating the NYT for this does not exonerate Trump or soften the experts’ consensus on the illegal machinations of Trump and his family members.

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