SATURDAY: The cleaning crew scoured the office!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2025

Fox & Friends Weekend holds forth: We'll start today with something puzzling—with an apparent look at the puzzling way Blue America's elites sometimes work.

The snapshot comes from Maureen Dowd's new column. Headline included, her column starts like this:

The Way They Were

In 1986, my most prized possession was a little pink phone message slip written by a hotel clerk.

“Miss Dowd,” it read, “Robert Redford called. He’s at the same number as last night.”

I’d never met Redford, but that piece of paper was a magic portal to all kinds of pink-cloud fantasies. I stuck it up on my cubicle in the Washington bureau of The Times and gazed at it whenever I needed a lift.

Then, one night, the bureau chief went on a crazed cleaning campaign and sent a crew in to throw out every stray piece of paper around our desks.

I came in the next morning and my beloved message was gone.

The column continues from there. But can that possibly be the way Blue America's most important newspaper works?

Really? One night, out of the blue, a bureau chief ordered a cleaning crew to go through the cubicles of the paper's Waashington staff? The crew had been ordered to "throw out every stray piece of paper around [their] desks?" 

That's what Dowd reports. She herself lost a note she treasured as a keepsake. But what else could have ben thrown away—what important telephone number of what elusive source—if some such cleaning campaign was really sent through that office?

Is that the way our Blue elites work? Is that the size and the shape of their basic intelligence?

We don't have the slightest idea! But if you've watched this cadre for the past forty years, you'd have to say that it's possible.

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is said to have said. Over here in Blue America, we remarkably self-impressed Blues have tended to rework that claim:

"We Blues are the rational and moral animal," we Blues have long messaged and thought. The others—the ones over there—are the dumb and immoral ones. That's the picture we Blues have conveyed.

In fact, our Blue elites aren't actual giants. And in our view, at the present time, the Red elites are even worse!

(We're speaking here about "journalists," academics and office holders. We're not speaking about the tens of millions of regular people who show up to vote for the Reds, or perhaps for the Blues, in our election years.)

As it suddenly happens, we may be away from our sprawling campus today, but we want to give you a minor hint of what we just saw. 

Before we do, we offer this query:

Does anyone really think that those of us in Blue America haven't already earned our way out?  As the Achaeans keep coming over the walls, does anyone think, for even a minute, that we Blues are going to find a way to roll back this assault and prevail?

We're speaking about a segment we just watched on this morning's Fox & Friends Weekend program. The segment was teased at 7:21. A few minutes later, the deluge.

The segment involved what Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) said yesterday about the late Charlie Kirk. More specifically, it involved (some of) what Sherrill said about Kirk "after the passage of a House resolution honoring the conservative activist."

Sherrill voted in favor of the resolution, then sought to explain her vote. Dual headline included, Fox News Digital offers this report about the basics of the matter:

Far-left Dem says Charlie Kirk wanted to 'roll back rights of women and Black people' after House tribute
Rep. Mikie Sherrill made the controversial statement after the House honored Kirk following his assassination

Rep. Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., the far-left Democratic nominee for governor, called Charlie Kirk a Christian nationalist who wanted to roll back the rights of women and Black people after the passage of a House resolution honoring the conservative activist.

The House adopted a resolution to honor Kirk's "life and legacy" Friday, just over a week after he was shot and killed during a college campus speaking event in Utah. The measure got bipartisan support in a 310-58 vote, with both Democrats and Republicans condemning political violence after Kirk's assassination.

The vote divided Democrats, however, with 95 lawmakers, including Sherrill, voting to adopt the resolution, 58 voting against it and 22 not voting at all.

"I take my oath to the Constitution seriously. I believe in free speech and that the First Amendment wouldn’t be necessary if it were only meant to cover language we agreed with," Sherrill said in a statement. "It is meant to protect people like Charlie Kirk who present vile dissenting views. But it is also meant to protect teachers, doctors and TV comedians who may express views the president doesn’t like.

"Charlie Kirk was advocating for a Christian nationalist government and to roll back the rights of women and Black people. This flies in the face of every value I hold dear and that I fight for," she added. "But the Constitution protects free speech, even for those I vehemently oppose."

For ourselves, we probably would have voted "Present." But that's part of what Sherrill said.

Sherrill is especially important today because she's the Democratic nominee in this year's gubernatorial election in New Jersey. She was savaged, in deeply instructive ways, during the Fox & Friends segment in question.

The three official co-host/friends brought Lara Trump onto the set to assist in the trashing of Sherrill. The insults were flowing freely all through the remarkable segment.

At present, Achaeans of this type are coming over the walls of our own sacred Troy. Blue America's journalists and office holders don't seem to know how to react.

Increasingly, the Democratic Party is being represented in the public square by Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas). She strikes us as a gift which won't stop giving for propagandists of the MAGA right. 

Other members of the party seem to have no idea how to respond to the present Red American onslaught. That said, this morning's journalistic behavior by the three Fox friends, with Lara Trump thrown in, struck us as a study in ongoing societal downfall:

We start with the "editing" of the remarks made by the targeted "far left" player in question. (She's so "far left" that she voted in favor of the resolution!)

From there, we move to the creative paraphrase of what that target said and must surely have meant—but mainly to the aggressive name-calling which characterized the segment.

Fox viewers were given little chance to hear what Sherrill had said. No attempt was made to let viewers decide if there was some sort of rational basis for what she had said.

The name-calling took the place of such traditional journalistic niceties as the three friends, joined by the poisonous daughter-in-law, offered an array of insults about how "gross" and "insulting" Merrill's "lies" had been.

("The most disgusting thing I've ever seen!" So several of the spear-chuckers actually said.)

Even by the norms of this TV show, the propaganda seemed extreme. Did we mention the fact that Rep. Sherrill is running for governor this year?

Can a large modern nation survive the arrangements which have given birth to inanities of this type? To wit:

The Democratic Party (assisted by MSNBC) seems to be trying to align itself behind a self-defeating figure like Rep. Crockett. Meanwhile, Blue America's major journalists and major news orgs refuse to report or discuss what happens on the Fox News Channel—on this nation's most-watched "cable news" channel by far.

According to Dowd, she lost her note about Robert Redford when an unannounced cleaning crew rampaged through the office one night. Are Blue elites really that feckless? 

Based upon the behaviors of the past forty years, you can bet your sweet bippy they are!

As for the rest of us in our struggling nation, how did we get from "the way we were" to the way we currently are? 

Nothing to look at! Look over here, our Blue elites tend to say.

Will Putin get tired of all the winning? At this point, there's no sign of any let-up from the determined spear-chuckers at the Fox & Friends Weekend program. 

(Later today, for two solid hours, The Big Weekend Show will likely be worse.)

They continue to work under cover of darkness. Over here in Blue America, our elites seem to like it that way!