CAMPAIGN: Our tribe has started its drive toward November!

MONDAY, JANUARY 29, 2024

Something we may be withholding: "It is finished," Jesus is said to have said.

That's what Jesus is said to have said. In our country, it's just getting started!

We refer to this year's campaign for the White House. Rather plainly, the general election campaign has begun. Here's our question, as borrowed from Frost:

Over here, within our blue tribe, could it be that we're "withholding something" as we conduct our campaign? Could it be we're withholding something that is "making us weak?"

Fuller text from Frost will follow! Frost recited the poem in question at President Kennedy's bitterly cold, snow-covered inauguration ceremony, way back in 1961. We watched, on a black and white TV set, in a small stucco home in San Mateo, California.

Last Saturday night, in South Carolina, President Biden delivered a fully vigorous speech. He included several strong campaign points—about the Affordable Care Act and about Roe v. Wade, to cite two examples.

Candidate Trump wants to repeal the ACA. He doesn't want to establish Roe v. Wade as a matter of law. 

Presumably, those will be potent campaign points. But the southern border is lingering there, and other problems exist.

There is no scientific way to fashion a perfect campaign. That said, our basic question returns:

Are we withholding, or possibly doing things which may be making us weak?  Are we doing so in our role as private citizens? How about the people we see on our "cable news" TV programs?

As of this very morning, the campaign was clearly underway. MSNBC's new broadcast day began at 5 a.m.

Morning Joe sidekick Jonathan Lemire went on the air with his broadcast of Way Too Early. We sat there watching, just as you did. At 5 a.m. sharp, he began with a tease of these topics:

A major escalation in the Middle East is putting new pressure on President Biden. Three U.S. service members were killed, and more than thirty others injured yesterday, by a drone strike in Jordan near the border of Syria. We'll go through the details of the attack and show you how the president is responding.

Plus, Donald Trump is now on the hook for a massive payout to E. Jean Carroll after a jury awarded the writer $83 million in defamation damages. We'll get expert legal analysis on that as well as the looming case that could further impact Trump's bank account.

And a stunning second-half comeback sends the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl setting up a rematch of the 2020 big game with the Kansas City Chiefs. 

Good morning, and welcome to Way Too Early...

To watch that intro, you can start by clicking here. Three full days after that jury rendered its verdict, that $83 million assessment was still included by Lemire among only two featured news topics.

It's possible that this selection made sense; it's possible that it didn't. The impeachment attempt concerning the border was finally discussed at 5:15—but at 5:10, in a sign of a deeply disordered time, Lemire told viewers this:

Meanwhile, Trump at the campaign trail in Nevada over the weekend. In Las Vegas on Saturday, Trump bragged at length about his ability to pass a cognitive test, but at the same time he struggled to get basic words out and made a number of highly questionable statements.

Lemore then played brief video clips from Trump's speech in Vegas. We saw no sign that Trump had "struggled to get any basic words out." We saw no sign of that reported problem at all.

To watch that video, just click here. For the record, this:

Donald J. Trump has been making "highly questionable statements" since he came down the escalator in June 2015. For four years preceding that date, he had been making "highly questionable statements" about the place of President Barack Obama's birth.

In doing so over the course of four years, he had stablished himself, on the Fox News Channel, as the mother of all birthers.

For the record, Trump's caddy during those four years was Greta Van Susteren. As we extensively documented in the past, it was on her nightly Fox News show that Trump would appear to make his moronic claims.

(We've met Greta several times. Nicest person on earth.)

Trump was pushing his ludicrous claims. Greta was being paid millions of dollars to sit there and let him do it. Years later, MSNBC hired Van Susteren to host a nightly news show and Rachel Maddow vouched for her journalistic greatness.  

Amazingly, Maddow even said that Geta and her husband had been two of her best drinking buddies during those previous years—during the ugly, stupid, destructive years when Greta was hosting the birther.

We have no idea why a person like Maddow would have behaved in such ways—would have tolerated such appalling misconduct from Van Susteren or would then have vouched for her journalism. 

On the night before Trump came down the stars, Maddow said she had no problem with Mr. Trump. After four years of his appalling misconduct, we have no idea why a blue tribe corporate star would have said such a strange thing.

Alas! From our perspective, our tribe has had an unfortunate lack of success in encouraging millions of American voters to be disturbed by Trump's "highly questionable statements"—by his endless display of ludicrous claims and ugly, disordered behaviors. 

In the face of that failure, we've now been turning to Storyline. We've begun to pretend that Trump's "mental acuity" is being called into question by occasional slips of the tongue, some of which never occurred.

Did Al Gore ever say he invented the Internet? No, he never did! But we humans love to make things up. Journalism is easier, and much more fun, when we grant ourselves such rights.

Did Trump really struggle to get basic words out during his speech in Las Vegas? To our eye and ear, there is no sign of any such problem in the tape Lemire played. 

For the record, this is the sort of thing they do routinely on Fox. They make a claim about a piece of tape and assume their word will be believed, even when they play the tape and the claim is not supported.

At Fox, they do that sort of thing all the time. Now, our massively overpaid corporate hirelings are punking us that way too.

At 6 a.m., Joe and Mika came on the air with a cold open video clip from Saturday Night Live. In the clip, an actor shows Trump using the word "debank" in a recent speech. 

The actor then says that he doesn't know what the word "debank" means. The implication is obvious.

Other people do know what "debank" means. In our view, this is the sorry state into which our corporate multimillionaire tribal thought leaders are now increasingly falling.

"Something we were withholding made us weak?" Frost's poem became famous on January 20, 1961, when blinding light off the snow from an overnight blizzard made it impossible for him to read the text of a new poem he had written for the occasion.

As we close, we return to our initial question. Is there something our anxious team is withholding on this very day and in this dangerous hour?

As of today, our understandably anxious blue team has launched our current campaign for the White House. Is there something we're withholding? Borrowing from Casey Stengel, "Can anyone here play this game?" 

 Can anyone here play this game? Because at the present time, a great deal is at stake.

The future conduct of life on earth may perhaps hang in the balance. And the woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our human minds are inclined to be soft.

There's no perfect way to run a campaign. Campaigning is not a hard science. But of one fact you can be sure:

Like every human tribe on earth, our own blue tribe is highly fallible. The bullshit, dissembling and limited judgment aren't all found Over There.

Are you willing to keep an open mind about the way our blue team is functioning? Or will you prefer to insist that our tribal thought leaders—the people who vote the same way we do—simply have to be noble and right?

Lemire opened with a three-day old story—a three-day old news event which makes blue viewers feel good. A few minutes later, he made an increasingly scripted claim for which he had no evidence.

In our view, there was no sign that Donald J. Trump was struggling to get some basic words out. But when the cable star said that, we were supposed to believe him.

Our view?  We think it's time for us to do better, to demand a bit more from our "dear, dear friends." (Official corporate branding.)

We're going to offer many ideas about the way our team is campaigning. That said, there is no science to this task, and you will be free to reject them.

At any rate, they do it all the time on Fox! This morning, the slithery practice had once again slithered its way over here.

Coming: Endlessly, much, much more

The Gift Outright: Frost's poem concerned the decision to break away from colonial rule by the mothership in England. 

We'll reproduce the relevant lines in a separate post.