CAMPAIGN: Governor Hochul joins Reverend Sharpton!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2024

Not a word from the New York Times: Yesterday morning, Morning Joe arrived at the topic at 6:02 sharp.

Thanks to the invaluable Internet Archive, we're now able to link you to the videotape of that detailed discussion. 

The discussion started with this:

SCARBOROUGH (2/1/24): Talk about a bipartisan issue, this is a crazy New York story, Mike Barnicle.  

You have illegal immigrants in New York that beat the hell out of cops, they get sent to jail, they get released the next day. The next day!

As he spoke, Scarborough displayed the front page of the New York Daily News. 

Why did he have to display that paper? Below, we'll get unto that.

Barnicle fleshed out more of the facts, as they were known at the time. Perhaps most strikingly, the violent assailants—who represent no one but themselves—had been released back into the streets. They had been released without bail. 

The videotape which Morning Joe played shows a group of as many as 12 young men beating two police offers in a very serious, very dangerous manner. For the record, we don't know if they were "illegal" immigrants, or if they were in this country as a result of legal asylum requests.

By 6:04 a.m., Al Sharpton had joined yesterday's discussion. As you can see by clicking this link, he too denounced the decision to release these young men. 

SHARPTON: Even for those of us who have fought for reform... 

I'm right around the corner from where this happened. So to have people just walking around being able to do this is not reform and is not progressive. We need to deal with how we handle policing in a way that police, nor citizens, are victims of people that are reckless. And we need to be mature about that.

Later in the day, Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) announced that she favored deportation for these assailants, assuming they can still be found. That said:

To this day, there hasn't been a single word about any of this in the New York Times.

Yesterday morning, it was on the front page of the Daily News. It was on the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. But if you subscribe to the New York Times, none of this has happened! 

On the other hand, if you watch the Fox News Channel, as millions of friends and neighbors do, you've seen that ugly videotape again and again and again. Updates were offered all last night. Those updates continued this morning.

You've also heard, again and again, that these assailants were released without bail. You've heard this everywhere you look, except on our own tribe's primetime "cable news" shows, and except in the New York Times.

This morning, starting at 6:50, the Morning Joe panel discussed this ugly event again. Reverend Sharpton was there once again, along with the segment's principal guest, chyroned thusly:

CHIEF JOHN CHELL, NYPD CHIEF OF PATROL 

"I challenge my progressive friends to step up and say this is not what we condone," Reverend Sharpton said. "Don't act like we're anti-cop. We're anti bad cop." (Those quotes may be slightly imperfect.)

Yesterday morning, Scarborough displayed the front page of the Daily News, and he did so for a reason. To this day, there hasn't bene a single world about this event in the upper-class, blue New York Times.

In fairness, the Times is no longer a local newspaper in the way it once was. There is no "New York" section today. More and more, the New York Times and the Washington Post have gone fully national.

That said:

Even with the governor on board, Times subscribers haven't seen a single word about this widely-discussed event. So it goes within our tribe's blue bayou, as this year's fateful presidential campaign takes its start. 

So it goes inside our blue bubble. So it goes inside our blue Babel.

So it goes inside our blue silo. So it goes inside our aggressively segregated, pure baby blue, blue tribe tribal lands.

So it goes as our blue cable stars keep us barefoot and clueless. As they maintain their "viewer maintenance" cable news diet. As they keep feeding us the stories and the topics we like, thereby building ratings and corporate profits and keeping their own salaries high.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Because we're all just a bunch of people, we blues are strongly inclined to be just as tribal, and just as human, as the others are.

Over the course of the past dozen years, our tribal judgment has often been extremely poor. Will we be able to save ourselves? As November approaches and dreams of trials fade, we're left with little time.

Our judgment is often quite poor. Last night, Alex Wagner, followed by Lawrence O'Donnell, largely gamboled and played as they reassured and entertained us with a succession of baby blue topics.

It makes us feel good when we're fed tribally pleasing porridge. It also keeps moving us closer to a potential November debacle.

On this newest morning, we come to you with two signs of hope. For starters, we offer hope in the form of the discussions we've seen on Morning Joe in the past two days.

We were especially glad to see Al Sharpton lending his voice to the consensus stated in this those discussions. 

He's smarter than the average bear, and he has a superb sense of humor. That said, Sharpton and Hochul are both on board, but not yet a word in the Times!

We'll suggest that you watch yesterday morning's discussion, courtesy of the Internet Archive. We can't link you to this morning's sequel yet.

We can link you to our second cause for hope. We refer to a superb blog post by that self-same Kevin Drum.

Two days ago, we thought Kevin had essentially given up—had lost the will to exercise judgment—when he offered this weirdly snarky post about the problems which have arisen in Fulton County, Georgia. 

Oddly, he offered no evidence for the stance he took. He blew right past the various progressive legal analysts who have said that an actual problem may well be lurking there.

We almost thought that he'd given up, had decided to accept the comforts of pure Storyline. But this morning, we clicked over to his site and we found a very clearly stated post. 

Drum's new post starts this way, headline included:

Why aren’t Democrats steamrolling Republicans?

Ezra Klein asks today, "Why haven't the Democrats completely cleaned the Republicans' clock?"

Actually it's Ruy Teixeira who asked that question, and it's one I share. I mean, Republicans have turned into complete loons. Democrats should have been able to build a huge and enduring lead over the past decade. Why haven't they?

As Jon Lovitz said on Saturday Night Live, almost forty years ago, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy!" 

How is it possible that our blue tribe could end up losing to Donald J. Trump all over again? We'll suggest that you read every word of Kevin's clearly written post. That said, he ends with this:

DRUM (2/1/24): Research suggests that Fox News generates about 3% more votes for Republicans than they'd otherwise get. In a 50-50 electorate, that's a lot. And it doesn't help that Democrats make themselves so easy to attack.  From "Defund the Police" to extreme softness on the border to defending trans girls competing in high school sports, liberals have been pushing the boundaries of social conventions pretty hard. That scares ordinary people and costs votes.

There's probably not a lot we can do about race. Some people are racists and that's that. We just have to fight them. But we could probably tone down the cultural leftism and adopt moderately more populist economic policies. It wouldn't take a lot. But it might make enough of a difference to sink the Republicans for the coming decade.

We disagree with only one point. 

We've long since recommended replacing the key word in that second paragraph with more precise formulations. That said, and sadly enough, it's surely true that "some people are racists." 

Sadly enough, that's true. It isn't necessarily true that the way to build a better world is "to fight them." We'd recommend pitying such lost souls first, while also praising the various people, including those within the red tribe, who have moved forward into the future when it comes to certain issues of race.

(More on such red tribe people to come.)

Some fights can't be won by fighting! When it comes to matters of race, the performative value can be very high when we stage our fights, but the gains which accrue to the Fox News Channel have often been stunningly real.

(Kevin cites "defund the police." The list moves forward from there.)

At any rate, so it stands, on this day of the lord, as the general campaign takes its start. Just as Kevin  says, our tribe routinely insists on making itself easy to attack.

We do so through our performative conduct. And yes, this takes us to the concept of "woke," a topic we'll touch on tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we're going to pleasure ourselves with a report about a major figure in the NFL. Almost surely, our specific topic will end up having nothing to do with the outcome of this year's campaign.

Our specific topic will be separate from the campaign. That said, our discussion may help us think about two major topics:

Storyline and Woke

Our tribe insists there's no such things as woke. As is true of all human tribes, our tribe can be very silly.

That doesn't mean that we're bad people. It does mean that we're people people, pretty much like everyone else.

It does mean that we're tribal people. It means we frequently can't see ourselves in the way the others do.

This is the way to lose votes, Kevin correctly says. His post is very clearly composed, and it lands right on the money.

We have a dream for the coming year, and this is what it is:

We want Kevin to be a national treasure. At this very, very late hour, we want him to save the world.

This afternoon: Judge Jeanine goes off

Tomorrow: The attractions of Storyline and Woke, NFL / ESPN variants 

In summation: Scarborough held up the Daily News; Sharpton supported every word. The governor of the state of New York came out for deportation of the assailants (who we suggest you should pity).

Our tribe hasn't heard a word about this. Your friends and your neighbors all have.