tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86118106945719304152024-03-18T21:50:46.162-04:00the daily howlermusings on the mainstream "press corps" and the american discourse<b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.comBlogger7373125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-90643538922076821692024-03-18T11:21:00.000-04:002024-03-18T11:21:59.702-04:00A culture change in the red tribe world!<p><b>MONDAY, MARCH 18, 2024</b></p><p><b>The New York Times gets it right:</b> We were struck by a front-page report in this morning's New York Times.</p><p>The report discusses a culture shift we've been struck by at the Fox News Channel. The headlines on the Times report say this:</p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here</span></b><br />In the Trump era, a surprising number of evangelicals are rejecting modesty and turning toward the risqué.</blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p>Has "family values" red tribe culture taken a major turn? After offering a few examples, Ruth Graham, a writer on religion, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/evangelicals-christians-conservative-trump.html" target="_blank">offers this thumbnail account</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>GRAHAM (3/18/24): As a core faction in the Republican coalition, <b>conservative evangelicals have long influenced the party’s policy priorities</b>, including opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. And<b> the influence extended to conservative culture, where evangelical norms against vulgarity were rarely challenged in public.</b></p><p>In some ways, they remain intact. Most pastors don’t cuss from the pulpit, or at all. Mainstream conservative churches still teach their young people to save sex for marriage and avoid pornography.</p><p><b>Yet a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class,</b> accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>For decades, "family values" conservative culture stressed evangelical norms against vulgarity. As of now, that culture is being replaced in some conservative circles by "a raunchy, boobs-and-booze ethos," Graham reports.</p><p>As we've noted in recent months, one such conservative circle is the Fox News Channel, where primetime hosts Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld are best described as "a little bit nutty and substantially smutty." </p><p>For the record, the "raunch" this pair of mossbacks provide is typically laced with throwback, misogyny-adjacent behavior.</p><p>We'll offer examples as the week proceeds, but we were struck by Graham's report due to our own observations. We've been amazed by the degree to which Fox has moved in the direction of the "raunch" and the misogyny which are now prevalent in much of its primetime culture.</p><p>Just within the past week, Spring Break "coverage" has been widespread on Fox, with a heavy emphasis on teen-aged women in bathing suits. Watters is skilled at finding ways to report—in smarmy and condescending ways—on young women who are no longer<i> in</i> their suits.</p><p>At least two of his subjects in recent weeks have plainly been mentally ill. There seems to be<i> nowhere</i> this haunted fellow won't go, with help from his hidden producers. </p><p>To our eye, these fellows strongly exhibit smarmy, throwback gender values. By the way, was 47-year-old comedian and primetime weekend host Jimmy Failla <i>totally</i> sh*tfaced as he cavorted with those college coeds in that Spring Break footage this past Saturday night?</p><p>Graham says this change is happening within evangelical culture. We've been surprised to see its dominance all through the world of Fox News.</p><div>Within the past month, we've criticized the upper-end press for averting its gaze from this behavior at Fox. This morning, bowing to our will, the Times has started to describe what's happening out there in the real world.</div><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-41578110428176749782024-03-18T09:00:00.000-04:002024-03-18T09:00:04.248-04:00SKILLS: This time around, has Candidate Trump...<p><b>MONDAY, MARCH 18, 2024</b></p><p><b>...perhaps improved his skills?</b> As a courtesy, we're going to show you the fuller text of what the candidate said.</p><p>Our guess would be that he knew what he was doing—that he was employing one of skills—when he used the word we highlight in this bit of transcript.</p><p>That would be our current guess, although we can't say that we<i> know</i>. As you can see, Candidate Trump was discussing the developing state of the American automobile industry when he employed the word:</p><blockquote><p>CANDIDATE TRUMP (3/16/24): If you look at [the leadership of] the United Auto Workers, what they've done to their people is horrible,</p><p>They want to do this all-electric nonsense, where the cars don't go far, they cost too much and they're all made in China. And the head of the United Auto Workers probably never shook hands with a Republican before. They're destroying—</p><p>You know, Mexico has taken, over a period of thirty years, 34 percent of the automobile manufacturing business in our country. Think of it. Went to Mexico.</p><p>China now is building a couple of massive plants where they're going to build the cars in Mexico and think—they think they're going to sell those cars into the United States, with no tax at the border.</p><p>Let me tell you something to China. If you’re listening, President Xi—and you and I are friends—but he understands the way I deal. Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now—and you think you're going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans and you’re going to sell the cars to us, no. </p><p>We’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line—</p><p>[APPLAUSE]</p><p>—and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected!</p><p>Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be <b>a bloodbath</b> for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be <b>a bloodbath</b> for the country. That will be the least of it. But they’re not going to sell those cars. They’re building massive factories.</p><p>A friend of mine—all he does is build car manufacturing plants—he's the biggest in the world...</p></blockquote><p></p><p>And so on from there. </p><p>(To watch the entire speech, <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?534259-1/president-trump-campaigns-bernie-moreno" target="_blank">click here for the C-Span videotape</a>. You should jump ahead to minute 32 for the part of the speech in question.)</p><p>And so on from there! Meanwhile, the word in question is "bloodbath." As of<i> yesterday</i> afternoon, the candidate's use of that colorful term had launched a thousand ships. For the basic report from NBC News, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-bloodbath-loses-election-2024-rcna143746" target="_blank">you can just click here</a>.</p><p>Candidate Trump made the statements in question on Saturday afternoon. We've shown you a reasonably large chunk of his actual text.</p><p>With blinding speed, a much smaller chunk of the candidate's text had been propelled into the world. It came from Acyn Torabi, a former "Internet influencer" who now seems to direct a great deal of liberal commentary <a href="https://www.meidastouch.com/page/about-us" target="_blank">through his work as "researcher and senior digital editor"</a> for the website MeidasTouch.com. </p><p>(Torabi tends to post as "Acyn," full stop. Does his work really shape that much liberal commentary? It's hard to be totally sure.)</p><p>At any rate, the candidate delivered his speech on Saturday. We've shown you a fairly large chunk of what he said in the passage which created the latest firestorm.</p><p>With lightning speed, Acyn posted a much shorter chunk of what he had said. <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1769102618213638350" target="_blank">As you can see</a>, this is what Acyn quickly posted:</p><p></p><blockquote>CANDIDATE TRUMP: Now, If I don't get elected, it's gonna be a bloodbath. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country. </blockquote><p></p><p>Acyn's post was stripped of context, as his posts typically are. </p><p>He even dropped part of that short segment out! At this site, we may know what you need, but Acyn may know what you want!</p><p>Given the skill levels of American journalists and pundits, stripped-down versions of this candidate's statements will often be warmly received. Sometimes, Acyn "paraphrases" what the candidate said—reinvents his words in such a way as to make his statement even more exciting for us in the blue tribe world.</p><p>We aren't big fans of Acyn's approach; your assessment may differ. That said:</p><p>In this case, what did the candidate mean by his statement? More precisely, what did he mean by the part of his statement in which he predicted "a bloodbath" is he <i>doesn't</i> get elected?</p><p>The candidate's campaign quickly said that he was referring to an <i>economic</i> bloodbath. If President Biden gets re-elected, we'll have a<i> general</i> economic mess.</p><p>They said <i>that</i> was what he meant. That's what his campaign quickly said.</p><p>Helped along by Acyn's editing, blue tribe members more quickly announced that he meant something quite different. According to various blue tribe observers, he meant there would be rioting in the streets if his campaign failed.</p><p>We'll be discussing this question as the week proceeds, but we'll do so in a larger context—in a context which involves an array of things we saw over the weekend.</p><p>We'll refer to the (genuinely idiotic) discussions we saw on the Fox News Channel last Friday afternoon and evening—idiotic discussion which may be quite effective in driving the red tribe's messaging forward.</p><p>We'll be discussing the remarkably calm and orderly interview the candidate gave to the Fox News Channel's Howard Kurtz—an interview which, in edited form, consumed the full hour of yesterday morning's weekly program, MediaBuzz.</p><p>We'll be discussing the skill levels of our own blue tribe's high-end pundit corps—and the (possibly diminished) skill levels of our own Candidate Biden. For the record, the skill levels of the professional pundit corps have often been extremely low, dating back to the days when they insisted, for years on end, that an earlier candidate had actually claimed that he <i>invented the Internet</i>.</p><p>(A thousand other embellished claims followed that first embellished claim. We refer to embellished claims <i>by the mainstream press,</i> not by that particular candidate.)</p><p>Concerning Candidate Trump, our current guess would be this:</p><p>We'll guess that his skill levels have developed to the point where he uses language of the type in question as a way of "trolling" our own blue tribe. In the present instance, our current best guess would be this:</p><p>According to this provisional theory, we'll guess that he dropped the term "bloodbath" into his discussion to generate a reaction from our own blue tribe. Strikingly, we saw this specific possibility being explicitly discussed, last evening, <i>on a Fox News Channel program! </i></p><p>We'll also discuss a remarkable front-page report in this morning's New York Times. We think that report is so instructive that we'll discuss it this afternoon.</p><p>The woods are lovely, dark and deep—and events now move<i> very</i> quickly. It seems to us that Candidate Trump's skill levels as a campaigner may now be advanced over where they once stood.</p><p>The skills in question may be fiendish, but they're skills nonetheless! In other sectors of the modern American discourse, the skill levels are virtually nonexistent.</p><p>Who will end up winning in November? We can't tell you that. There is<i> one</i> thing we're able to tell you as we close this morning's report. We're able to tell you this:</p><p>Almost surely, you've seen none of our blue tribe's pundits discuss the substance of what the candidate said!</p><p>Is it true? Has thirty-four percent of the American automobile industry really decamped to Mexico? Are electric vehicles all being built in China?</p><p>Is it true, as the candidate went on to say, that<i> giant</i> plants are being built in Mexico—but new plants being built in the United States are much smaller?</p><p>The candidate's comments to that effect generated applause from his audience. Those substantive comments went undiscussed on today's Morning Joe as pundits said that major American journalists are behaving like "idiots" when they try to figure out why voters might support Candidate Trump.</p><p>We told you this a long time ago—you can't run a middle-class democracy with a multimillionaire press corps! Has this candidate developed the kinds of skills which will let him take advantage of that current group of "thought leaders?" Which will let him get elected again?</p><p>We can't answer that question. At present, though, we've begun to wonder if this candidate's array of skills is simply better than ours at this point in time.</p><p>Was the candidate trolling our tribe when he used that colorful word? </p><p>We'll offer that as a possible theory. But as of this morning, we haven't seen that larger discussion about the American auto industry, and the chances are fairly good that we never will.</p><p><b>This afternoon: </b>The red tribe's world is going raunchy, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/evangelicals-christians-conservative-trump.html" target="_blank">the New York Times has now said</a></p><p>.</p><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com55tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-40004761926428017252024-03-16T10:17:00.001-04:002024-03-16T10:17:20.107-04:00SATURDAY: MSNBC aired a special program!<p><b>SATURDAY, MARCH 16, 2024</b></p><p><b>It seemed like <i>every</i> program: </b>We didn't exactly hate yesterday's Daily Howler. But it did leave us disquieted.</p><p>Partly, we were dealing with fatigue, based upon the loss of an hour last Saturday night. Thanks a lot, President Biden!</p><p>We're willing to call spade a spade! Mainly, though, the problem involved this disquieting fact:</p><p><span style="font-size: large;"></span></p><blockquote><i>In our view, the other tribe has been more right than wrong concerning one major topic.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Say what? The other tribe has been more right than wrong about something? So it has seemed to us:</p><p>In our view, the other tribe has seemed to be more right than wrong in the degree of emphasis it has placed on issues involving the southern border.</p><p>At times like these, it hurts to voice some such assessment. But so it has seemed to us as the other tribe has stressed an array of worries concerning the southern border, and as our own tribe has largely pretended that the border doesn't even exist.</p><p>So it went in recent years among our blue tribe's journalistic "thought leaders," but also among our major elected officials:</p><p>Biden officials kept insisting that the border was "secure" and "closed," even when it plainly wasn't. Our major blue pundits focused on the various trials of Donald J. Trump, and on little else.</p><p>As our blue tribe was adopting this stance, the red tribe plainly wasn't. They kept stressing a number of concerns about the border—concerns which seem valid to us. </p><p>The questions they've raised have gone unaddressed as our own floundering tribe has kept trying to send Trump to jail. Full disclosure:</p><p>In our view, our blue tribe's efforts reached the point of parody at 10 o'clock last night. At that time, MSNBC aired a one-hour special which carried this name:</p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">The Trump Indictments</span></b></blockquote><p></p><p>For the record, that's the title of<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/the-trump-indictments" target="_blank"> a new book by Melissa Murray and Andrew Weissman</a>, a pair of highly capable MSNBC legal analysts. Murray and Weissman served as co-hosts of last night's one-hour special. Their book is published by Norton. </p><p>Somewhat parodically, The Trump Indictments is also the name of <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-trump-indictments-ali-velshi?variant=41099623530530" target="_blank">a <i>different</i> new book</a>! That new book was edited by Ali Velshi, another major figure at MSNBC. </p><p>At some point, it might be easier to list the names of MSNBC personnel who <i>haven't</i> published new books called The Trump Indictments. At any rate, Murray and Weissman served as co-hosts of last night's hourlong special. It was Velshi who brought them on, after serving as substitute host for last night's edition of Alex Wagner Tonight.</p><p>Nothing which follows is intended as a criticism of Murray, Weissman or Velshi. That said, last night's hourlong special opened <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240316_050000_The_Trump_Indictments/start/60/end/120" target="_blank">with Murray saying this</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Good evening and welcome to a special hour devoted to the Trump indictments... </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: medium;">Donald Trump is charged with 88 felony counts in four different jurisdictions. In this hour, we will cover the latest developments in Donald Trump's criminal cases starting with Fulton County, Georgia today.</span></i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>That's the way the program started. Our immediate question was this: </p><p>What primetime program on MSNBC within the last year hasn't been "devoted to the Trump indictments?" Within the last year, what hour<i> hasn't</i> "covered the latest developments in Donald Trump's criminal cases?"</p><p>The analysts yowled and tore at their hair as Murray offered that somewhat parodic introduction to last night's "special" hour. Briefly, though, let be clear:</p><p>The various indictments of Donald J. Trump do, in fact, constitute a set of major news events. There's no reason why they shouldn't be covered by major news orgs.</p><p>That said, the border has been a major news topic too, even as MSNBC has seemingly tried to ignore it.</p><p>Putting it mildly, the Fox News Channel <i>hasn't</i> ignored the southern border. In turn, the Fox News Channel has done its best to ignore or erase the events of January 6 and the role the former president played in those astounding events.</p><p>So it has gone as these two news orgs have stressed one major set of events while disappearing another. Here's our sad admission:</p><p>In our view, Fox has been more right than wrong in its focus on the border. Also, Fox has been more right than MSNBC in the amount of coverage it has given to border / immigration topics.</p><p>In our view, MSNBC has badly misfired in the massive amount of emphasis it has placed on the Trump indictments. In fairness, the channel has presumably pleased its target audience with this unyielding emphasis.</p><p>There were matters we didn't get to yesterday. We'll link you to several today.</p><p>We'll start with three posts in which Kevin Drum has attempted to explain some basic provisions of the proposed (and quickly discarded) border bill. All in all, this sort of thing is pretty much never done:</p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Kevin Drum on the border bill:</span></b><br /><b><a href="https://jabberwocking.com/senate-immigration-bill-expands-detention-increases-asylum-judges-and-allows-the-president-to-shut-the-border/" target="_blank">February 4, 2024</a>: </b>Senate immigration bill expands detention, increases asylum judges, and allows the president to shut the border</blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p><b><a href="https://jabberwocking.com/heres-a-quick-look-at-objections-to-the-senate-immigration-bill/" target="_blank"></a></b></p><blockquote><p><b><a href="https://jabberwocking.com/heres-a-quick-look-at-objections-to-the-senate-immigration-bill/" target="_blank">February 5, 2024</a>:</b> Here’s a quick look at objections to the Senate immigration bill</p><p><b><a href="https://jabberwocking.com/why-did-republicans-vote-down-the-immigration-reform-bill/" target="_blank">March 9, 2024</a>:</b> Why did Republicans vote down the immigration reform bill?</p></blockquote><p></p><p>That sort of thing is rarely done. On cable, here's what happens instead:</p><p>On MSNBC, personnel repeat a talking-point about how great the border bill was. On Fox, personnel have tended to mumble imprecise claims about the bill's alleged flaws and limitations while saying that President Biden could fix the border all by himself, with no legislation needed.</p><p>Those are the dueling memorized claims. Depending on which channel you watch, you hear one claim or the other, with no disputation allowed.</p><p>We were also interested in Christopher Wray's testimony last week before a Senate committee. His testimony drew little press coverage. Headline included, here the start of<a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fbi-director-warns-dangerous-individuals-coming-southern-border/story?id=108024830" target="_blank"> a poorly-proofread report by ABC News</a>:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">ABC News: FBI director warns of 'dangerous individuals' coming across southern border</span></b></p><p>Amid a bitter election-year debate over illegal immigration,<b> FBI Director Chris Wray told a Senate panel on Monday that dangerous individuals have entered the United States illegally at the southern border.</b></p><p>"We have had dangerous individuals entering the United States have a variety of sources," Wray said at the annual "Worldwide Threats" congressional hearings at which the heads of U.S. intelligence agencies testify.</p><p><b>"We are seeing a wide array of very dangerous threats that emanate from the border, " he said</b>, citing drug trafficking in particular. "The FBI alone seized enough fentanyl in the last two years to kill 270 million people," he said.</p><p>[...]</p><p>"There is a particular network that has—some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have—ISIS ties that we're very concerned about, and we've been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating," Wray said.</p><p><b>Overall, he said, threats from various groups have reached a "whole other level."</b></p><p><b>"Even before October 7, I would have told this committee that we were at a heightened threat level from a terrorism perspective</b>—in the sense that it's the first time I've seen in a long, long time," he said...<b>"[S]ince October 7, though, that threat has gone to a whole other level.</b> And so, this is a time I think for much greater vigilance, maybe been called upon us," he said.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>On Fox, they talk about such alleged threats all the time. On MSNBC, rightly or wrongly, little of this gets mentioned.</p><p>We also would have liked to direct you to something Senator Katie Britt said on last weekend's Fox News Sunday. </p><p>Britt was doubling down on a grossly misleading anecdote she uncorked as part of the official GOP response to President Biden's State of the Union address. Here's part of The Hill's report <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4522243-katie-britt-defends-human-trafficking-story-in-state-of-the-union-response-amid-backlash/" target="_blank">about what Britt now said</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>ROBERTSON (3/10/24): <b>Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) defended herself on Sunday </b>after she used a story of sexual violence from two decades ago in Mexico as an attack on President Biden in her State of the Union response.</p><p>[...]</p><p>The senator brushed off the criticism, claiming the story [she told] is emblematic of the president’s border policy.</p><p>“I’ve said, in [Biden’s] first 100 days he had 94 executive actions, and those executive actions didn’t just create the crisis. They invited it,” Britt said in a “Fox News Sunday” interview with Shannon Bream. </p><p>“The truth is, and the media knows that they’re not covering it, that<b> human trafficking has gone up under President Biden,”</b> she continued. <b>“If you look back under 2018, it was a $500 million industry, human trafficking by the drug cartels. It is now a $13 billion dollar industry</b>. Shannon, the drug cartels are winning under this. This is a story of what is happening now.”</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Say what? Human trafficking by the drug cartels is now a $13 billion industry?</p><p>As it turns out, Britt was citing a pair of accurate dollar figures. Inevitably, she was doing so in a somewhat misleading / inaccurate way—though we tend to agree with her claim that "the media" tends not to cover this topic.</p><p>At any rate, they talk about "trafficking" all the time on the Fox News Channel! When it comes to topics like this, MSNBC tends to play Goofus to that channel's Gallant, broadcasting hourlong special programs designed to do the same thing they do during <i>every</i> primetime program.</p><p>Fox pleases red tribe viewers with its topic selection. MSNBC provides the same service to us blue tribe viewers.</p><p>This isn't the doing of Murray and Weissmann. It <i>is</i> a way to create a pair of warring populations, in much the way we read about on the wide plains outside Troy back in ancient times.</p><p>Last night, our blue channel offered a special broadcast. For better or worse, it seemed like every other broadcast—like the ones they <i>don't</i> call special!</p><p>Has the red channel been more right than wrong about this particular point? </p><p>Much of their work comes straight outta clown college, astoundingly and inexcusably so. But is it conceivable that the others have maybe been more right than wrong, if only this once, just when it comes to<i> this?</i></p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com127tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-87625509268875742392024-03-15T14:15:00.004-04:002024-03-15T14:19:53.455-04:00Jesse Watters breaks the news...<p><b>FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2024</b></p><p><b>...concerning the CNN smear: </b>Did Aaron Rodgers really say that the murders at Sandy Hook were a government hoax?</p><p>Yesterday, we discussed CNN's report to that effect. Then, shortly after 8 o'clock last night, we saw the Fox News Channel's Jesse Watters turn CNN's story to dust.</p><p>Well, not exactly! This is the way it went down:</p><p>Watters excitedly started his 8 p.m. show with the thrilling possibility that Rodgers may run for vice president under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. </p><p>He was filled with excitement at that prospect—and he assured his viewers that CNN's report was just the latest "smear" by the liberal press in support of the Biden White House. </p><p>Behind him, that's what the backdrop said—the backdrop said RODGERS SMEARED.</p><p>CNN's report was the real "hoax," the channel's silly child said. "This is just another dirty disinformation campaign to distract from the lifeless Democratic ticket," the smarmy Fox host declared. </p><p>At that point, Watters dropped his purported bombshell. He played an audiotape from 2012 in which Rodgers said, on his Milwaukee radio show, that the incident was a terrible tragedy which he hoped we could learn from.</p><p>To see Watters play that audiotape from 2012, <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240315_050000_Jesse_Watters_Primetime/start/600/end/660" target="_blank">you can click right here</a>.</p><p>Does that audiotape mean that CNN's report is <i>itself</i> a hoax and a SMEAR? Not really! Here's the problem:</p><p>The audiotape played by Watters seems to have been made in real time—in December 2012. According to CNN, the statement in which Rodgers claimed Sandy Hook was a government hoax was made five months later, at the Kentucky Derby in May 2013.</p><p>(In standard fashion, Watters seems to say that the reported statement by Rodgers was made at the Derby<i> in 2012.</i> In a thoroughly typical mangling of facts, he's off by one full year.)</p><p>In short, CNN's report isn't necessarily undermined by the fact that Rodgers made the earlier statement. It may be that Rodgers signed on to the growing conspiracy theories surrounding Sandy Hook in the months that elapsed between the two incidents.</p><p>Also, maybe Rodgers never did say that Sandy Hook was a hoax! We have no personal knowledge concerning this matter. Also, we have no desire to encourage hatred of Rodgers.</p><p>Did Rodgers really believe and say that Sandy Hook was a hoax? We can't answer that question, and we aren't looking to turn people into haters.</p><p>As we noted yesterday, so we'll note again today:</p><p>Many people <i>do </i>believe this least plausible of all possible claims. We regard that as an important, major new fact about the way we human beings frequently function. </p><p>It's an anthropology lesson—anthropology all the way down:</p><p>Despite the ways we tend to describe ourselves, we human beings are inclined to believe all sorts of highly implausible, wholly unfounded claims. Unfortunately, this is a modern-day, important new fact about the way our politics functions. </p><p><b>One final point about Watters:</b> His disordered, throwback behavior concerning women is the most startling thing about his program, but also about the way the reinvented Fox News Channel now functions. Eventually, we'll force ourselves to return to this unpleasant, delicate topic, with one other prime time host thrown into the mix.</p><p>That said, we recommend pity for the stunted emotional growth of people like this. At the same time, we pose these questions:</p><p>Why in the world is the Fox News Channel constantly putting this misogyny-adjacent, broken-souled content out there on its air? Also, why does this conduct engender exactly zero comment from the profoundly aware, high-end blue tribe press?</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-21107934068754834372024-03-15T11:08:00.003-04:002024-03-15T11:08:29.919-04:00WARS: Britt lodged some strenuous accusations!<p><b>FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2024</b></p><p><b>As always, blue leaders ignored them: </b><a href="https://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2024/03/wars-president-biden-agreed-with-britt.html" target="_blank">It's as we noted yesterday</a>. Midway through his State of the Union address, President Biden described his stance regarding the southern border.</p><p>He went all the way back to Day One. This is what he said:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>PRESIDENT BIDEN (3/7/24): Unlike my predecessor, <b>on my first day in office I introduced a comprehensive plan to fix our immigration system, </b>secure the border, and provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and so much more. </p><p>Because unlike my predecessor, I know who we are as Americans...</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Actually, that was pretty much all the president said about his initial policies and proposals concerning the southern border. He went on to call for the passage of this year's proposed border bill.</p><p>Roughly an hour later, the president was met with some strenuous pushback from Senator Katie Britt. Citing his first <i>hundred</i> days in office, she offered this assessment:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>BRITT (3/7/24): President Biden inherited the most secure border of all time. But <b>minutes after taking office, he suspended all deportations, halted construction of the border wall</b>, and announced a plan to give amnesty to millions.</p><p>We know that <b>President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.</b></p><p>[...]</p><p><b>From fentanyl poisonings to horrific murders, there are empty chairs tonight at kitchen tables</b> just like this one because of President Biden’s senseless border policies. <b> </b></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote>Just think about Laken Riley...She was brutally murdered by one of the millions of illegal border crossers President Biden chose to release into our homeland.</blockquote><p></p><p>Britt was giving the official Republican response to the president's address. In her account, President Biden had issued 94 executive actions with respect to the border in his first hundred days. </p><p>She said he <i>created</i> the "border crisis" through the "senseless policies" embedded in those executive actions. She said that people had lost their lives. </p><p>Rightly or wrongly, she even named Laken Riley.</p><p>Stating the obvious, Senator Britt was lodging a deeply severe set of accusations. Along the way, she also recounted an anecdote about sexual trafficking with respect to the border—an anecdote which turned out to be grossly misleading with respect to the most basic facts.</p><p>Something else happened that night during the president's speech. As is becoming a bit of a norm, President Biden was interrupted—was heckled—midway through his address.</p><p>The interruption came from the usual suspect. According to the AP's transcript of the evening's live remarks, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/state-of-union-transcript-biden-2024-e84f5134e5201987eb441629aef5240c" target="_blank">these are the words which were spoken</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>PRESIDENT BIDEN: I’m told my predecessor called members of Congress in the Senate to demand they block the [proposed border] bill. He feels political win—he viewed it as a—it would be a political win for me and a political loser for him. </p><p>It’s not about him. It’s not about me. I’d be a winner—not really. I—</p><p>REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE: <b>What about Laken Riley?</b></p><p>(Crosstalk.)</p><p>AUDIENCE: Booo—</p><p>REP. GREENE: <b>Say her name!</b></p><p>PRESIDENT BIDEN: (The President holds up a pin reading “Say Her Name, Laken Riley.”) Lanken—<b>Lanken (Laken) Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed.</b></p><p>REP. GREENE: <b>By an illegal!</b></p><p>THE PRESIDENT: <b>By an illegal. That’s right. </b>But how many of thousands of people are being killed by legals?</p><p>(Crosstalk.)</p><p>To her parents, I say: My heart goes out to you. Having lost children myself, I understand.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>At that point, Biden went on to describe some of the contents of the proposed border bill, moving beyond the contents of his prepared text. </p><p>But there you see the interruption—the heckling directed at Biden. Like Senator Britt's grossly misleading anecdote, the interruption—the heckling by Greene—launched a thousand ships.</p><p>As we've noted, Senator Britt doubled down on her misleading anecdote on Fox News Sunday last weekend. Offered a chance to disown the gross misdirection she had authored, the young solon refused to relent.</p><p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/14/karla-jacinto-katie-britt-human-trafficking/" target="_blank">According to the Washington Post</a>, Britt's office took the same approach just last night in response to further questions. This is the way the game now tends to be played within our deeply destructive Red Nation / Blue Nation divide.</p><p>Senator Britt has now <i>tripled</i> down on her grossly misleading anecdote! This is the way the game is played as a political war continues to grow.</p><p>That said, there was another predictable reaction to Senator Britt's accusations concerning Biden's border policies:</p><p>Blue tribe pundits completely ignored the senator's claims concerning those border policies. Blue tribe pundits walked away from the merits, or the lack of same, inhabiting Britt's critique.</p><p>Instead, blue tribe pundits lambasted Britt for her misleading anecdote. Also, they scolded President Biden for his impromptu use of an inappropriate word.</p><p>At this point, we'll repeat what we said at the start of the week. For ourselves, we wouldn't use "illegal" as a noun, the way the president did.</p><p>We wouldn't refer to someone as "an illegal," as is the norm on Fox. We also aren't inclined to regard that point of language as more important than the actual facts concerning Britt's accusations—accusations which are made on a daily basis on Fox.</p><p>We <i>aren't</i> inclined to regard that point of language as more important than the actual life-and-death facts concerning the southern border. Inevitably, that is what our blue tribe punditry instantly did.</p><p>Progressive thought leaders pummeled Biden for having used that word. Did anyone address the claim that Biden's first three years of border policy had led to fentanyl poisonings and horrific murders?</p><p>Essentially, no one did. Here's what happened instead:</p><p>In the wake of his address, the president appeared on Jonathan Capehart's little-watched weekend program on MSNBC. </p><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240309_230000_The_Saturday_Show_with_Jonathan_Capehart/start/180/end/240" target="_blank">During Capehart's interview</a>, the president was instantly asked about his use of that word. The president said he should have said "undocumented" instead.</p><p>The president said he regretted using that word. Inevitably, that's where any discussion of the border ended.</p><p>A few days later, Paul Krugman's column emerged. The column appeared in Tuesday's print editions under this headline:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Sex Trafficking, De Facto Lies and Immigration</span></b></blockquote><p></p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/opinion/katie-britt-trump-immigration.html" target="_blank">In his column</a>, Krugman focused on Senator Brit's grossly misleading anecdote. We don't disagree with what he said about that.</p><p>With perfect justice, he pummeled Britt for her misleading anecdote. At the same time, he paid exactly zero attention to the claims Britt had made about the effects of Biden's border policies over the past three years.</p><p>Along the way, he offered an extremely weak refutation of a claim we've seen no one make. But so it has gone, within our pair of warring nations, within (let's say) the past year. </p><p>Red tribe observers constantly talk about the crisis at the border—a crisis they say the president's policies caused.</p><p>They talk about fentanyl deaths. They talk about the dangers of letting unvetted people into the country <i>en masse</i>, as has become the norm. </p><p>They talk about human sex trafficking, including the trafficking of children. They talk about the number of apprehensions which have involved people on terrorist watch lists—and they wonder how many such "got-aways" may have occurred under current arrangement.</p><p>They relate the murder of Laken Riley—and other similar violent crimes—to the alleged chaos at the border under the president's policies. Our blue tribe pundit corps has responded in the following way:</p><p>On the whole, they've responded by pretending that the border doesn't exist. So it has gone as our two nations agree to a journalistic arrangement built upon "segregation by viewpoint:"</p><p>On Fox, the border is discussed around the clock. The events of January 6 are almost completely disappeared. </p><p>On MSNBC, the southern border barely exists. Instead, we're fed constant legal minutia, with dreams of criminal convictions dancing in our heads.</p><p>Two groups of pundits behave in such ways, and never the twain shall meet. On each channel, no one is asked to consider the possibility that the other group might actually be<i> right</i> about something, if only in some tiny way.</p><p>Blue tribe viewers see police being beaten on January 6. Red tribe viewers never see any such tape. Instead, they see tape of people streaming across the border. Blue viewers are shielded from that.</p><p>Eventually, northern Democratic pols began to say that the immigration situation had become unsustainable. Only then did blue pundits and pols move to address a situation which may cost us the White House this year.</p><p>We don't mean to single Krugman out. His column reflects the general way the blue world reacted to last Thursday night's events.</p><p>Blue pundits hammered Senator Britt for her act of misdirection. Progressives also challenged Biden for his use of that word.</p><p>Speaking with the reliable Capehart, he said he regretted the use of that word. Our tribe then returned to its usual fare.</p><p>Endless clowning continues on Fox from people like Gutfeld and Watters. But when they focus on the border, can anyone swear that they're wrong?</p><p>There's a great deal more which ought to be said about these red and blue tribal reactions. Most simply put, artificial segregation by viewpoint is a good way to gear up for a dangerous war.</p><p>There's a great deal more which ought to be said. We <i>can</i> promise you this:</p><p>If you stopped a thousand liberals on the street, no more than three could tell you what President Biden's original policies were. Only a handful could tell you what's been proposed in that new border bill. </p><p><i>We </i>certainly couldn't do those things! Instead, our blue tribe lives in splendid isolation—and they're living the same way over on Fox. This is good for ratings, profits and salaries—at their channel but also at ours. </p><p>The woods are lovely, dark and deep. President Biden may win re-election this year—or then again, he may not!</p><p><br /></p><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com172tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-25508976813935943942024-03-14T15:18:00.005-04:002024-03-14T15:18:55.660-04:00Did Aaron Rodgers ever believe...<p><b>THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2024</b></p><p><b>...the planet's least plausible claim?</b> Did Aaron Rodgers ever believe the planet's least plausible claim?</p><p>In a new statement posted today, Rodgers has seemed to say that no, he never did. On the other side of the ledger, we direct you to a partially first-person report by Jake Tapper and Deborah Brown of CNN.</p><p><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/13/politics/aaron-rodgers-sandy-hook-conspiracy-theories/index.html" target="_blank">According to the CNN report</a>, Rodgers once said he believed that least plausible claim. He believed that the murders at Sandy Hook were a hoax—or at least, so CNN says:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>CNN knows of two people with whom Rodgers has enthusiastically shared these stories</b>, including with Pamela Brown, one of the journalists writing this piece.</p><p><b>Brown was covering the Kentucky Derby for CNN in 2013 when she was introduced to Rodgers,</b> then with the Green Bay Packers, at a post-Derby party. Hearing that she was a journalist with CNN, Rodgers immediately began attacking the news media for covering up important stories. <b>Rodgers brought up the tragic killing of 20 children and 6 adults by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School, claiming it was actually a government inside job</b> and the media was intentionally ignoring it.</p><p>When Brown questioned him on the evidence to show this very real shooting was staged, Rodgers began sharing various theories that have been disproven numerous times. </p><p>[...]</p><p><b>Brown recalls Rodgers asking her if she thought it was off [sic] that there were men in black in the woods by the school</b>, falsely claiming those men were actually government operatives. Brown found the encounter disturbing.</p><p>Rodgers, through one of his agents, declined to comment to CNN.</p><p><b>CNN has spoken to another person with a similar story. </b>This person, to whom CNN has granted anonymity so as to avoid harassment, recalled that several years ago, Rodgers claimed, “Sandy Hook never happened…<b>All those children never existed. They were all actors.”</b></p><p>When asked about the grieving parents, <b>the source recalled Rodgers saying, “They’re all making it up. They’re all actors.”</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>For the record:</p><p>If the murdered children never existed, we don't know what it would mean to say that they were actors. </p><p>That part of the story is a bit hard to parse. That said, that anonymous source also claims that Rodgers said the <i>parents</i> of the murdered children were just "crisis actors" too.</p><p>(For the record, also this: We'll guess that the word "off" in that passage may be an unnoticed typo. If "off" should really be the word "odd," the passage would seem to make more sense.)</p><p>At any rate, can this claim about Rodgers possibly be true? In an instant rebuttal, he has seemed to say that he never believed those things about the murders at Sandy Hook.</p><p>On the other hand, the Washington Post's Azi Paybarah did some sniffing around yesterday. He came up with<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/13/aaron-rodgers-politics/" target="_blank"> this second alleged example of a somewhat peculiar belief</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>PAZBARAH (3/13/24): According to one former teammate, Rodgers appeared to show skepticism about the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.</p><p><b>“The first thing that comes out of Aaron Rodgers’s mouth was ‘Do you believe in 9/11?’” </b>former Green Bay Packers teammate DeShone Kizer said in a 2022 podcast interview, of meeting the quarterback. <b>After Kizer said he did, Rodgers replied, “You should read up on that.”</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>What does, or did, Rodgers believe about 9/11? We have no idea!</p><p>Meanwhile, did Rodgers ever believe the least plausible claim on the planet—the claim that Sandy Hook was a hoax? We can't answer that question, but we can reliably tell you this: </p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>A whole lot of people do!</i></blockquote><p></p><p>The idea that those killings were a hoax would seem to be the least plausible claim on the planet. That said, the so-called "democratization of media" has resulted in a giant anthropology lesson, a lesson which goes like this:</p><p>We humans believe the craziest things! Aaron Rodgers to the side, there's nothing so crazy—more precisely, so implausible—that a whole lot of us human beings won't rush into line to affirm it.</p><p>This is a<i> very</i> important discovery, one that runs all through our politics. It's a surprising tenet of newfound anthropology—anthropology all the way down. </p><p>It's hard to believe that Rodgers believed it! That said, how well do we understand the shape of our human world?</p><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com60tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-9364002654916347732024-03-14T11:22:00.002-04:002024-03-14T11:23:02.023-04:00WARS: President Biden agreed with Britt!<p><b>THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2024</b></p><p><b>Lives are at stake, he said: </b>Mercifully, President Biden devoted little time, last Thursday night, to the silly "shrinkflation" "issue."</p><p>Mercifully, he barely mentioned the topic at all! According to the AP transcript of his spoken remarks, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/state-of-union-transcript-biden-2024-e84f5134e5201987eb441629aef5240c" target="_blank">he did say this at one point</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>PRESIDENT BIDEN (3/7/24): Look, too many corporations raise prices to pad their profits, charging more and more for less and less.</p><p>That’s why we’re cracking down on corporations that engage in price gouging and deceptive pricing, from food to healthcare to housing.</p><p>In fact, <b>the snack companies think you won’t notice if they change the size of the bag</b> <b>and </b>put a hell of a lot fewer—same—same size bag—<b>put fewer chips in it. </b>No, I’m not joking. It’s called “shrinkflation.”</p><p><b>Pass [Senator] Bobby Casey’s bill and stop this.</b> I really mean it.</p><p>You probably all saw that commercial on Snickers bars. And you get—you get charged the same amount, and you got about, I don’t know, 10 percent fewer Snickers in it.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>According to the address as written, the apparent quip about "ten percent fewer Snickers" seems to have been an ad lib. </p><p>That said, has any proposal by a senator ever been sillier? If a snack company's costs have risen, they can't sell you a smaller bag of chips while keeping the price the same?</p><p>Instead, they have to sell the same number of chips while raising the price? If they choose the prior option, the federal government will make them stop? </p><p>In our view, the president's fondness for Casey's proposal is a tiny bit daft. Beyond that, the president may have made a few statements in his address which were perhaps false or misleading—though he also made some dead-on claims, according to the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler.</p><p>Kessler fact-checked the president's speech. It's the role he's long played at the Post. </p><p>Some of Kessler's analyses involve so much complexity that they could never play a serious role in any imaginable public discussion. Beyond that, we reach the true and the false.</p><p>Doggone it! Kessler said that Biden's claim about inflation—his claim that our rate is the lowest in the world—was no longer accurate. On the other hand, some of Kessler's fact-checks made Biden look quite good:</p><p></p><blockquote>KESSLER (3/8/24): Biden’s job record in his first three years certainly tops Trump’s performance. <b>In the first three years of Trump’s term, about 6.5 million jobs were created—less than half the number created under Biden </b>in the same time period.<b> </b>The number of jobs is now 5.4 million higher than the peak under Trump in February 2020, before the pandemic struck the economy.</blockquote><p></p><p>Most of Biden's statements were accurate; some may have been wrong. Then too, and rather strikingly, we come to the point in the president's address where he agreed with the highly ambitious young Republican solon, Senator Katie Britt.</p><p>As we've noted in the past few days, Senator Britt gave the official Republican response to Biden's address. She savaged the president for the way he has dealt with the southern border—but in the following part of the president's speech. he almost seemed to agree with one part of what Britt's red tribe has been saying all along.</p><p>Biden was heckled during this part of his address. For today, we'll quote <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/03/07/remarks-of-president-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-address-as-prepared-for-delivery-2/" target="_blank">from the official White House text of the speech as prepared for delivery</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>PRESIDENT BIDEN: <b>In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of Senators. The result was a bipartisan bill </b>with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen in this country. </p><p>That bipartisan deal would hire 1,500 more border security agents and officers. 100 more immigration judges to help tackle a backload of 2 million cases. 4,300 more asylum officers and new policies so they can resolve cases in 6 months instead of 6 years. 100 more high-tech drug detection machines to significantly increase the ability to screen and stop vehicles from smuggling fentanyl into America. </p><p><b>This bill would save lives and bring order to the border.</b> It would also give me as President new emergency authority to temporarily shut down the border when the number of migrants at the border is overwhelming. </p><p>The Border Patrol Union endorsed the bill. The Chamber of Commerce endorsed the bill. </p><p>I believe that given the opportunity a majority of the House and Senate would endorse it as well. But unfortunately, politics have derailed it so far. </p><p>I’m told my predecessor called Republicans in Congress and demanded they block the bill. He feels it would be a political win for me and a political loser for him. </p><p>It’s not about him or me. <b>It’d be a winner for America! </b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>At this point, the president was interrupted. Already, though, he had agreed with some of the things the highly ambitious young Senator Britt would say in her formal response.</p><p>He had agreed that lives were at stake, in some unspecified way, by the ongoing conditions at the border. He had agreed that fentanyl was being smuggled across the border in a way which could be reduced or stopped by that bipartisan bill.</p><p>He also made the statements shown below in his formal prepared remarks. This mirrored, in a funhouse mirror sort of way, some things Britt would soon allege:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>PRESIDENT BIDEN: Unlike my predecessor,<b> on my first day in office I introduced a comprehensive plan to fix our immigration system, secure the border</b>, and provide a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and so much more. </p><p>Because unlike my predecessor, I know who we are as Americans. </p><p>We are the only nation in the world with a heart and soul that draws from old and new. </p><p>Home to Native Americans whose ancestors have been here for thousands of years. Home to people from every place on Earth. </p><p>Some came freely. Some chained by force. Some when famine struck, like my ancestral family in Ireland. </p><p>Some to flee persecution. Some to chase dreams that are impossible anywhere but here in America. That’s America, where we all come from somewhere, but we are all Americans. </p><p><b>We can fight about the border, or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it.</b> Send me the border bill now! </p></blockquote><p></p><p>For the record, are we "the only nation in the world with a heart and soul that draws from old and new?" Well actually no, we aren't.</p><p>At any rate, President Biden now said that he had "introduced a comprehensive plan to fix our immigration system [and] secure the border." He said that he'd done that <i>on his very first day on office! </i></p><p>That same night, Britt gave voice to a sharply different view of the matter. <a href="http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2024/03/wars-murders-fentanyl-terrorist-watch.html" target="_blank">As we noted yesterday</a>, this what the young solon said concerning that very same topic:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>BRITT (3/7/24): <b>President Biden inherited the most secure border of all time. But minutes after taking office, he suspended all deportations, halted construction of the border wall</b>, and announced a plan to give amnesty to millions.</p><p>We know that <b>President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.</b></p><p>[...]</p><p>From fentanyl poisonings to horrific murders,<b> there are empty chairs tonight at kitchen tables just like this one because of President Biden’s senseless border policies. </b></p></blockquote><p><b></b></p><p>The young solon mentioned fentanyl too, though she also referred to "horrific murders." That said, she took a very different view of Biden's first day in office—of his first <i>hundred</i> days, in fact.</p><p>President Biden seemed to agree that lives are currently at stake at our southern border. This topic constitutes a major part of the political war in which our flailing nation is currently involved.</p><p>Long ago, the Achaeans went to war with the Trojans concerning the marital status of "Helen the radiance of women." A bit more sensibly—or possibly not!—our polarized nation, Red against Blue, has now gone to war about this. </p><p>Red tribe members are told one thing. We blue tribe members hear something quite different, on the rare occasions when we're re asked to consider this life-and-death topic at all.</p><p>Biden and Britt almost seemed to agree, at least on that one basic point. <i>Lives are at stake at our southern border</i>, the president and the senator said.</p><p><b>Tomorrow:</b> Hooray for interruptions!</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-2634063169650483792024-03-13T12:36:00.003-04:002024-03-13T12:39:25.974-04:00How many black voters will Donald Trump win?<p><b>WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2024</b></p><p><b>A peculiar report in the Times: </b>How many black votes could Donald Trump win in November? </p><p>It's a scary topic! This morning, a report on that question appears above the fold on the front page of the New York Times. In print editions, the dual headlines say this:</p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Trump Wooing A Voting Group He Stereotypes</span></b><br /><b>Modest Gains Among African Americans</b></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p>The headline speaks about<i> modest</i> gains—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/trump-black-voters.html" target="_blank">but paragraph 4 says this</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>HABERMAN ET AL. (3/13/24):<b> Mr. Trump currently receives nearly four times the support from Black voters in polling than the 6 percent who actually voted for him in 2016</b>, according to Pew Research Center data. He is vying for wins in states with major cities that have large Black populations, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia. The margins of victory are expected to be small in those four states, where Mr. Trump hopes to offset his potential weaknesses with independent voters and suburban women.</blockquote><p></p><p>Say what? Trump got six percent in 2016—but he's polling at <i>four times</i> that amount now? </p><p>Presumably, any such outcome would mean that Trump would win November's election. That said, here's why we thought this Times report was peculiar.</p><p>It's true! Trump did get six percent of the black vote in 2016—<i>"according to Pew Research Center data."</i> That said, note the source of the data the Times reports shortly thereafter, in paragraph 9:</p><p></p><blockquote>HABERMAN ET AL.: <b>Even as Mr. Trump lost Black voters overwhelmingly in 2020, he gained ground relative to 2016,</b> according to exit polls. He performed stronger among Black men, winning 19 percent; it was double his share among Black women.</blockquote><p></p><p>Now the data are sourced to "exit polls." Here why we found that peculiar:</p><p>It's true! <a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results" target="_blank">According to the one standard set of exit polls</a>, a strikingly large 19 percent of black men voted for Trump in 2020. According to those same exit polls, he won just nine percent of black women in 2020, and 12 percent of black voters overall.</p><p>That was the way the black vote went in 2020 <i>according to exit polls. </i>But after each of our recent national elections, Pew has conducted a detailed study of what it calls "validated voters."</p><p>Pew's numbers have tended to differ from those in the standard exit polls. For example:</p><p>In the case of the 2020 election, Pew found that black voters favored Biden over Trump, 92 percent to 8. Rightly or wrongly, Pew found that <i>eight</i> percent of blacks voted for Trump in 2020—not the<i> 12 </i>percent which had emerged in the exit polls.</p><p>(For Pew data from 2016 and 2020, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/" target="_blank">you can just click here</a>.)</p><p>Which numbers are more reliable—those which emerge from the exit polls, or those which result from the later, detailed studies by Pew? We can't tell you that!</p><p>We <i>can</i> say this—we don't know why the Times would report exit poll figures in paragraph 4, then switch over to Pew figures just a few paragraphs later.</p><p>In the case of black voters, the numbers have been substantially different:</p><p><a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls" target="_blank"></a></p><blockquote><a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls" target="_blank">According to the exit polls</a>, eight percent of black voters voted for Trump in 2016. According to Pew's later study, the number was six percent.</blockquote><p></p><p>Also this:</p><p><a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls" target="_blank"></a></p><blockquote><a href="https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls" target="_blank">According to the exit polls</a>, twelve percent of black voters voted for Trump in 2020. According to Pew's later study, the actual number was eight percent.</blockquote><p></p><p>The only numbers which matter today will be those from November's election. Presumably, if Trump gets something like 24 percent of the black vote, he'll be on his way back to the White House.</p><p>We have no idea how black voters are going to vote. We also have no idea why the Times structured its front-page report the way it did—jumping from Pew figures in 2016 to exit poll figures in 2020, just a few paragraphs later.</p><p>Why the heck would a paper do that? We have no idea!</p><p>Also this:</p><p>How many black voters <i>did</i> support Donald J. Trump in 2020? We think again of the old joke known as Goldberg's Law:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches is never quite sure.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>As with watches, so too here. Hat tip to Paul Reiser!</p><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-55924285228203999682024-03-13T10:51:00.000-04:002024-03-13T10:51:36.800-04:00 WARS: Murders, fentanyl, the terrorist watch list?<p><b>WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13, 2024</b></p><p><b>The main things the senator said: </b>Senator Britt got blown off the map by yesterday's Robert Hur hearings. Briefly, let us say this about that:</p><p>Did President Biden exhibit a memory problem when he was interviewed by Hur?</p><p>Almost surely, there's no real way to evaluate that claim based on the lengthy transcript. There will also be no final way to evaluate that claim if the audiotapes are released.</p><p>As with everything else, the red tribe would cherry-pick certain talking points. Our blue tribe would settle on certain others. </p><p>Under current arrangements, such conflicts are <i>never</i> resolved, or even addressed. We can only hope that the audiotapes will stay wherever they are.</p><p>Once Hur's report was made public, Candidate Biden was going to take a hit from what Hur had written. It would have been best for Democrats to accept that fact, then to counter with Hur's graphic account of the fact that Donald J. Trump's behavior with classified material was much worse than Biden's.</p><p>Instead, House Democrats at yesterday's hearing managed to generate another talking-point for the rival red tribe. They did that with their hapless claim that Hur had "exonerated" Biden. </p><p>For reasons any third grader could be made to understand, prosecutors rarely do any such thing. In this instance, Hur <i>didn't </i>"exonerate" Biden in his official report. </p><p>By grilling Hur on this point, Democrats induced him to make an explicit statement to that effect. In so doing, they created another videotaped talking point for red tribe warriors to herald.</p><p>On this morning's Fox & Friends, the friends were glorying in that videotaped statement by Hur. This is the way we human being create the divisions which lead on to wars, even in these demographically complex modern times.</p><p>Back to Senator Britt! As recently as Sunday, her refusal to relent on his prior misstatement was still on the public agenda. </p><p>In Thursday night's official GOP response to President Biden's State of the Union address, the apparently ambitious young solon had authored a grossly misleading claim. </p><p>By Sunday, everyone knew that Britt's presentation had been grossly misleading. That included Shannon Bream, host of Fox News Sunday.</p><p>But alas! <a href="https://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2024/03/wars-senator-britt-refused-to-relent.html" target="_blank">As we noted yesterday</a>, when Bream gave Britt a chance to clarify her misleading claim, Britt doubled down on the bogus claim instead. This is the way the game is now played as our the "thought leaders" of our flailing nation proceed ahead with a very dangerous political war.</p><p>Britt doubled down on her deception—and that's how the game is now played. Yesterday, the incident was blown off the public stage by the renewed dispute concerning Hur's report. </p><p>Every day, a new skirmish is invented as our two tribes wage their war. That said, the Hur report will go away—and Senator Britt's deliberate act of deception already has.</p><p>What <i>won't</i> go away are the main things Britt said last Thursday night, and then again in her appearance on Fox News Sunday.</p><p>Those statements won't be going away because they dealt with the southern border—and the southern border will almost surely be the main "issue" in this year's presidential campaign. </p><p>Britt's allegations will be advanced again and again, by everyone within the red tribe from Donald J. Trump on down. Other disputes will come and go, but those allegations about the border <i>won't</i> be going away.</p><p>The mains things Britt said <i>won't </i>be going away. So what in the world did she say?</p><p>Let's set aside the misleading anecdote Britt offered on Thursday night. What were the <i>main</i> allegations she made that night? As you can see in this transcript of her remarks, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/state-of-union-republican-katie-britt-b68be66d421f716fb74dce8cc61dac74" target="_blank">her<i> main</i> allegations were these</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>BRITT (3/7/24): The true, unvarnished state of our union begins and ends with this: <b>Our families are hurting. Our country can do better.</b></p><p><b>And you don’t have to look any further than the crisis at our southern border to see it</b>. President Biden inherited the most secure border of all time. But minutes after taking office, he suspended all deportations, halted construction of the border wall, and announced a plan to give amnesty to millions.</p><p>We know that <b>President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days.</b></p><p>[...]</p><p>President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.</p><p>[...]</p><p><b>From fentanyl poisonings to horrific murders, there are empty chairs tonight at kitchen tables just like this one </b>because of President Biden’s senseless border policies.<b> </b></p><p><b>Just think about Laken Riley. </b>In my neighboring state of Georgia, this beautiful, 22-year-old nursing student went out on a jog one morning. But she never got the opportunity to return home. <b>She was brutally murdered by one of the millions of illegal border crossers President Biden chose to release into our homeland.</b></p></blockquote><p><b></b></p><p>Fentanyl poisonings? Horrific murders? All "because of President Biden’s senseless border policies?"</p><p>These allegations won't be going away—and Britt didn't even include the red tribe's persistent allegations about individuals crossing the border who are on the terrorist watch list.</p><p>Those allegations will continue right through November's election. On Fox News Sunday, the ambitious young senator went into more detail.</p><p>If you want to see what she said <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240311_060000_FOX_News_Sunday/start/1620/end/1680" target="_blank">you can start by clicking here</a>. Headline included, here's a summary of her allegations, <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4522243-katie-britt-defends-human-trafficking-story-in-state-of-the-union-response-amid-backlash/" target="_blank">as offered in The Hill</a>: </p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Katie Britt defends human trafficking story in State of the Union response amid backlash</span></b></p><p>[...]</p><p><b>The senator brushed off the criticism [of her grossly misleading story],</b> claiming the story is emblematic of the president’s border policy.</p><p>“I’ve said, in [Biden’s] first 100 days he had 94 executive actions, and those executive actions didn’t just create the crisis. They invited it,” Britt said in a “Fox News Sunday” interview with Shannon Bream. </p><p><b>“The truth is, and the media knows that they’re not covering it, that human trafficking has gone up under President Biden,” </b>she continued. “If you look back under 2018, it was a $500 million industry, human trafficking by the drug cartels. It is now a $13 billion dollar industry. <b>Shannon, the drug cartels are winning under this. This is a story of what is happening now.”</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>"The media" aren't covering this, the ambitious young senator said. </p><p>"There are victims all throughout our country," Britt further said. She said the media are taking a dive, but "the drug cartels are winning" under Biden's policies.</p><p>Britt even included a very large dollar figure designed to show how bad things have become. Human trafficking is now a $13 billion industry, the ambitious young solon said.</p><p>Claims of that type about the border will continue right through November. The hubbub about Hur will subside, but those claims won't be going away.</p><p>Full disclosure! As we'll note tomorrow, Britt was still playing a bit fast and loose with the dollar figures she cited. </p><p>In fact, though, "the media"<i> have</i> largely avoided this topic in recent years. O at least, our own blue tribe's most beloved stars have relentlessly disappeared the border as they've pursued the one topic they truly love:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail!</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Full disclosure! Even after Britt appeared on Fox News Sunday, our stars continued to avoid her major claims about the border. Tomorrow, we'll return to Paul Krugman's column to see the way this works.</p><p>That said, every day it's another dispute—another point concerning which our nation's two warring populations will hear two vastly different accounts.</p><p>Our blue tribe has reacted to Britt by trashing her for the grossly misleading anecdote on which she doubled down. As for the<i> main </i>allegations she made, we're still largely running around with our blue heads struck in the sand.</p><p>No, Virginia! Hur didn't "exonerate" President Biden. (Prosecutors rarely do such things.)</p><p>That flap is going to fade away. We'll be left with GOP claims about the border, and with Hector's ancient warning:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>The day will come when sacred Troy must die.</i></blockquote><p></p><p><b>Tomorrow:</b> Biden agrees with Britt!</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com103tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-46772565763034008932024-03-12T15:50:00.002-04:002024-03-12T15:51:47.289-04:00Did President Biden have memory problems?<p><b>TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2024</b></p><p><b>It depends on who you ask:</b> Did President Biden have memory problems when he met with Robert Hur?</p><p>The transcript of their interviews has been released, but it runs 250 pages. As we perused a few initial reports, we were struck by differences between the Washington Post and the New York Times concerning one high-profile matter.</p><p>Let's start with Matt Viser's instant report for the Washington Post. Headline included, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/12/biden-hur-transcript-classified-documents/" target="_blank">this is the way it starts</a>:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Full transcript of Biden’s special counsel interview paints nuanced portrait</span></b></p><p><b>President Biden was in the early stages of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur when the topic of Beau Biden came up</b>—initially with Biden raising it and later as Biden was attempting to get his chronological bearings and wondered aloud when, exactly, it was that his son died.</p><p><b>“What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30,” he said, naming the correct day</b>, according to a transcript of the exchange reviewed by The Washington Post.</p><p><b>Two others in the room chimed in with the year,</b> and Biden questioned, “Was it 2015 when he died?”</p><p>Not long after the exchange, Hur suggested they consider taking a brief break.</p><p><b>“No,” Biden responded, before launching into a long explanation of Beau’s death and its impact on him deciding not to run for president in 2016. </b>“Let me just keep going to get it done.”</p></blockquote><p></p><p>As Viser continues, he correctly notes a basic fact. Ever since Hur's formal report was released, "the exchange between Biden and Hur [about Beau Biden's death] has become one of the focal points" of subsequent pundit discussion.</p><p>As Viser notes, President Biden's comments about his son's death "led the special counsel to conclude that Biden would not be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents—in part because Biden’s 'poor memory' would make it difficult to convince a jury.</p><p>In fact, Hur's account of this matter was so imprecise that it almost sounded, at least to some, like President Biden couldn't remember<i> the fact </i>that his son had died, or couldn't remember the actual incident. Among pundits capable of greater precision, Hur's claim was paraphrased with greater accuracy:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>The president wasn't able to remember the date—or perhaps the year—of his son's death.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>This jumbled allegation became a major part of pundit reaction to Hur's poisonous claims about Biden's alleged memory problems. In the account which Viser provides, it almost sounds like Biden was sharp as a tack—like he instantly gave the correct <i>date</i> on which his son had passed away, with two others in the room quickly "chiming in with the year."</p><p>Viser opens with that topic. To our ear, his account makes it seem a bit silly to think that Biden's acuity would have been called into question on this slender basis.</p><p>To our ear, that's the way it sounds in the Washington Post. In the New York Times, Charlie Savage drew the assignment of scanning the lengthy transcript—and his account of this specific matter makes it sound somewhat different.</p><p>Indeed, Savage actually includes a fairly lengthy chunk of the relevant transcript—though we're not real sure it helps.</p><p>According to Savage, President Biden was asked "about where he kept papers related to work he did after leaving the vice presidency in January 2017." At that point, in response to that specific question, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/us/politics/hur-biden-memory-transcript.html" target="_blank">this fandango occurred</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>BIDEN: Well, um … I, I, I, I, I don’t know. <b>This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?</b></p><p>HUR: Yes, sir.</p><p>BIDEN: <b>Remember, in this time frame, my son is—either been deployed or is dying</b>, and, and so it was—and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate [sic] that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president. I’m not—and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point—even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though—<b>what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30—</b></p><p>RACHEL COTTON, A WHITE HOUSE LAWYER:<b> 2015.</b></p><p>UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.</p><p>BIDEN: <b>Was it 2015 he had died?</b></p><p>UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: <b>It was May of 2015</b>.</p><p>BIDEN: <b>It was 2015.</b></p><p>ROBERT BAUER, BIDEN’S PERSONAL LAWYER: Or—I’m not sure of the month, sir, but I think that was the year.</p><p>MARC KRICKBAUM, HUR’S DEPUTY: That’s right, Mr. President. It—</p><p>BIDEN: And what’s happened in the meantime is that as—<b>and Trump gets elected in November of 2017?</b></p><p>UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: <b>2016.</b></p><p>UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: ’16.</p><p>BIDEN: ’16,<b> 2016. All right. So—why do I have 2017 here?</b></p><p>ED SISKEL, BIDEN’S WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL: That’s when you left office, January of 2017.</p><p>BIDEN: Yeah, OK. But that’s when Trump gets sworn in, January.</p><p>SISKEL: Right.</p><p>BAUER: Right, correct.</p><p>BIDEN: OK, yeah. And in 2017, Beau had passed and—this is personal …</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Savage includes that long chunk of transcript. On balance, we're not sure why. There's a bit of "Who's On First" to that passage, but we're not sure it tells us anything much worth knowing.</p><p>In this chunk of transcript, Biden starts by flatly miscasting the timeframe in which his son died. Quickly, things move onward from there. </p><p>Memory and acuity-wise, is there anything of interest there, in these initial bits of confusion? We're not real sure that there is. </p><p>That said, Viser's account in the Post makes this whole thing go down a whole lot easier. Maybe you had to be there, or maybe you have to hear the audiotapes.</p><p>Call no man happy until he's dead! The admonition is sometimes attributed the famous Greek statesman, Solon.</p><p>We also think of the joke we learned from Paul Reiser way back when. He referred to the joke as Goldberg's Law. To the extent that memory serves, it went a great deal like this:</p><p></p><blockquote style="font-style: italic;">The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches is never quite sure.</blockquote><p><i> </i>Hur's report included a widely-quoted political bomb. We can't quite tell you why.</p><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-81117590573413474402024-03-12T09:57:00.005-04:002024-03-12T09:58:31.773-04:00WARS: Senator Britt refused to relent!<p><b>TUESDAY, MARCH 12, 2024</b></p><p><b>But what were the<i> main</i> things she said?</b> Senator Britt misled the world. Three days later, she refused to relent!</p><p>With substantial regularity, this is the way our broken national discourse currently works. In the case of Senator Britt, here's the way the whole fandango started:</p><p>Last Thursday night, Britt delivered the official Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address. </p><p>At first, she was mocked, by red and blue observers alike, for the over-the-top delivery of her prepared remarks. Then, as Paul Krugman notes in today's column, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/opinion/katie-britt-trump-immigration.html" target="_blank">a second problem arose</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>KRUGMAN (3/12/24): <b>Her overwrought performance has been widely mocked</b>; that’s OK for late-night TV, but I’m not going to join in that chorus.</p><p><b>What I want to do instead is focus on the centerpiece of Britt’s remarks, a deeply misleading story about sex trafficking that she used to attack President Biden.</b> Her use of the story—which turns out to have involved events in Mexico way back when George W. Bush was president—wasn’t technically a lie, since she didn’t explicitly say that it happened in the United States on Biden’s watch. She did, however, say: “We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace.”</p><p><b>That’s a clear attempt to mislead—the moral equivalent of a lie</b>—and the careful wording actually suggests that she knew she was being misleading, and wanted an escape hatch if someone called her bluff.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>It's true! <a href="https://apnews.com/article/state-of-union-republican-katie-britt-b68be66d421f716fb74dce8cc61dac74" target="_blank">As you can see in the text of Britt's remarks</a>, her specific "story about sex trafficking" was very carefully composed. (Though quite possibly not by her, we might be inclined to guess.)</p><p>The story she told involved no statements which were explicitly false. But as Krugman correctly notes, it conveyed a grossly misleading impression. </p><p>In that sense, the story Britt told was "the moral equivalent of a lie." (Though only, we'd have to say, to the extent that she understood the impression her story would inevitably convey.)</p><p>As he continues, Krugman calls the story "a de facto lie." And again—despite the absence of statements which were explicitly false, Britt's story <i>did</i> in fact convey a grossly inaccurate impression.</p><p>A large amount of our nation's failing discourse is built on similar models. In this case, Britt was given a chance to relent when she appeared on Fox News Sunday this past weekend.</p><p>Shannon Bream gave the young solon a chance to relent. It would have been extremely easy for Britt to say that she hadn't intended to mislead the public. At that point, she could have restated her main allegations concerning Joe Biden's border policies.</p><p>It would have been easy for Britt to relent. Instead, she doubled down.</p><p>In her initial question about the story, Bream gave Britt a chance to relent. In a lengthy, Biden-bashing response, Britt declined to address the problem at hand. </p><p>(<a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240310_180000_FOX_News_Sunday/start/1620/end/1680" target="_blank">To watch that exchange, click here</a>.)</p><p>After that initial filibuster, Bream gave Britt a second chance to relent. When she did, Britt emitted an account of what she had said on Thursday night, <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240310_180000_FOX_News_Sunday/start/1740/end/1800" target="_blank">as you can see right here</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>BREAM (3/10/24): <b>OK, but to be clear: </b>The story that you related is<i> not</i> something that happened under the Biden administration. That particular person.</blockquote><p></p><p>It would have been easy for Britt to agree with that statement, and to express regret if anyone got a different impression. At that point, Britt could have returned to the principal thrust of her allegations about President Biden's border policies.</p><p>It would have been easy to do that! Instead, Britt doubled down with an account of what she had said Thursday night which was too slippery by well more than half.</p><p>Britt relied with this absurdly slippery presentation, apparently of her own making:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>BRITT (continuing directly): Well, I very— <b>I very clearly said I spoke to a <i>woman</i> who told me about when she trafficked when she was<i> twelve</i>. </b></p><p><b>So I didn't say a teenager. I didn't say a <i>young</i> woman. </b>A grown woman<b>.</b> A woman, when she was trafficked when she was twelve.</p><p>And so, listening to her story, she was a victims right advocate who was telling this is what drug cartels are doing. This is how they're profiting off of women, and it is <i>disgusting</i>. And so, I am hopeful that it brings some light to it, and we can actually do something about human trafficking, and that that's what the media actually decides to cover.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>At that point, Bream gave up. Even given this second chance, Britt had cast<i> herself </i>in a type of victim's role, suggesting that anyone who listened carefully on Thursday night would have understood what she had been saying.</p><p>The chronology would have been implied by the italicized words. The italics come from us, but they correspond to Britt's points of verbal emphasis.</p><p>For ourselves, we would have given Britt a break concerning her initial overwrought affect. Last Thursday night, she had been cast in a new type of role. In such novel circumstances, people often perform quite poorly.</p><p>We would even have given her <i>half</i> a break concerning the misleading nature of that original story. </p><p>All of a sudden, Britt found herself being put forward as a possible vice presidential pick. Human nature being what it is, people routinely submit to whatever they're being told to do when such opportunities come along.</p><p>We would have done even that! But on Sunday morning, speaking with Bream, Britt doubled down, and doubled down hard, on her initial deception. </p><p>In her initial statement to Bream, she criticized "the liberal media" for the way it had corrected the obvious misimpression her original story advanced. In her second statement to Bream, she even seemed to say that the chronology implied by her story had been clear all along:</p><p>This was a ridiculous claim—one that falls wholly on Britt. In fairness, much of our failing national discourse works in similar ways.</p><p>It would have been easy for Britt to express regret if anyone was misled. Pugnaciously, she refused to do that—and her overwrought delivery style was still present when she spoke with Bream.</p><p>That said, something else happened when Britt spoke to Bream. The solon went into a bit more detail concerning her overall criticism of President Biden's border policies over the past three years. </p><p>Those criticisms will receive large play in the media world of Red America. Over here in Blue America, those criticisms will be disappeared.</p><p>On Thursday night, Britt's initial story was grossly misleading. It <i>was,</i> in fact, the moral equivalent of a lie.</p><p>That said, the <i>main</i> things she said, on Thursday night and Sunday morning, do not appear in Krugman's column. Nor will you ever see them repeated by major blue tribe figures.</p><p>The Trojan War brought two distinct populations—Achaeans and Trojans—together for a ten-year siege. <a href="https://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2024/03/wars-some-people-died-on-battlefields.html" target="_blank">As we noted yesterday</a>, Hector, hero of Troy, said he knew what was coming:</p><i></i><blockquote><i>"For in my heart and soul I also know this well:</i><br /><i>the day will come when sacred Troy must die,</i><br /><i>Priam must die and all his people with him,</i><br /><i>Priam who hurls the strong ash spear..."</i></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"><i></i></p><div>In a way which went unexplained, Hector knew what the outcome would be.</div><div><br /></div><div>Two wholly separate populations had come together to engage in a ten-year war. Pundit reaction to Britt's remarks may help us see the way we moderns are perhaps still strongly inclined to create a similar conflict.</div><div><br /></div><div>Senator Britt refused to relent. So will our blue tribe's tribunes.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Tomorrow: </b>The main things the solon said</div><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com108tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-53316349458675485862024-03-11T10:33:00.009-04:002024-03-11T11:41:55.953-04:00As heard on C-Span's Washington Journal!<p><b>MONDAY, MARCH 11, 2024</b></p><p><b>Information Age warfare comes home: </b>Saturday morning, at 7 o'clock, C-Span's Washington Journal invited viewers to call in with their Top News Story of The Week.</p><p>A furious flurry of phone calls followed. At 7:26 a.m., <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?534103-2/open-forum-part-1" target="_blank">this exchange occurred</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>MODERATOR (3/9/24): <b>Next up, we'll hear from Richard in Newport, North Carolina </b>on our Independent line. Richard, what's your top news story?</p><p>RICHARD IN NORTH CAROLINA: Good morning. </p><p><b>First of all, it's not the "Democratic" Party. </b>That's a falsehood. It is the <i>Democrat</i> Party.</p><p><b>They've always been known as the <i>Democrat </i>Party. So that needs to be straightened out.</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>To our ear, it sounded like the caller was speaking literally—was completely sincere in his inaccurate claims. It sounded like he was annoyed to hear references to the "Democratic" Party, when its actual name is the <i>Democrat</i> Party, and it always has been.</p><p>After voicing this complaint, the caller went on to identify his Top News Story. He said that President Biden had been "pumped with drugs" during his State of the Union Address, and that he ought to be charged as an accessory to murder because of his border policies.\</p><p>(Also, he said that anyone who votes for Biden should be in "an insane asylum.")</p><p>So went this one phone call from this one Independent. (You can imagine what the <i>Republican</i> callers were saying on this particular day!) </p><p>To our ear, it sounded like the caller really believed that the official name of the party was the<i> Democrat</i> Party—that people who referred to the "Democratic" Party were putting a friendlier face on things.</p><p>That's the way it sounded to us. Let us say this about that:</p><p>It may be the most childish part of our nation's long-standing information war. Long ago, red tribe bombastics began referring exclusively to "the Democrat Party"—began refusing to refer to the party by its actual name.</p><p>Long ago, we saw Chris Matthews complain about this tribal idiocy or at least one occasion. But this practice has been widely maintained for decades—to the point where it sounded to us like this one caller had been completely misled by this braindead, childish behavior.</p><p>People who place their trust in princes may not know when they're being misled! For what it's worth, this caller's statement was instantly seconded. At 7:29, another caller on the Independent line ended his call like this:</p><p></p><blockquote>JAMES IN MERIDIAN, MISSISSIPPI: ...And the man is right! It is not the Democratic Party, <b>it's the <i>Democrat </i>Party. The last three letters are "rats!"</b></blockquote><p></p><p>That last, mathematically bungled jibe was popular years ago. We haven't heard it lately. At any rate:</p><p>To our ear, it sounded like this caller probably knew that he was simply engaged in an act of tribal war.</p><p>C-Span moderators occasionally (though rarely) challenge factual misstatements by callers. On this day, the moderator made no attempt to speak to the actual fact which lies at the heart of this endlessly childish bit of verbal war.</p><p><a href="https://democrats.org/" target="_blank">You can see the name of the party here</a>. People, we're just saying!</p><p><b>For extra credit only: </b>For a convoluted history of this matter, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)" target="_blank">you can just click here</a>.</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-32827942608878054902024-03-11T09:11:00.000-04:002024-03-11T09:11:33.793-04:00WARS: Some people died on the battlefields...<p><b>MONDAY, MARCH 11, 2024</b></p><p><b>...some in the prison camps:</b> "Now we're engaged in a great civil war," President Lincoln once said.</p><p>In one colloquial sense of the term, the war in question was something less than "civil." The leading authority on the matter offers <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War" target="_blank">this report on its immediate human costs</a>:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i><b>The war resulted in </b>at least 1,030,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including <b>about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease—and 50,000 civilians. </b>Binghamton University historian J. David Hacker believes the number of soldier deaths was approximately 750,000, 20 percent higher than traditionally estimated, and possibly as high as 850,000.</i></p><p>[...]</p><p><i>Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white men aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South. <b>About 56,000 soldiers died in prison camps</b> during the War. An estimated 60,000 soldiers lost limbs in the war.</i></p></blockquote><p><i></i></p><p>Some died on the battlefields, some in the prison camps. Wars which are necessary, even just, do come with vast human costs.</p><p>As we've noted in recent weeks, the first European "poem of war" is something like three thousand years old. It describes a largely mythical war which would have taken place centuries earlier, "at the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse, in the early 12th century BC."</p><p>It tells the story of a ten-year siege of a mighty walled city—a siege conducted by the Achaeans (most simply, by an assembly of Greeks) against the inhabitants of Ilium, more commonly known now as Troy.</p><p>That war was conducted in bloody but simpler times. For those who participated in the war, there seemed to be no real doubt concerning which side you were on.</p><p>Participants in this mythical war knew which side they were on! Inhabitants of Troy were under a state of siege, facing an existential threat from a powerful collection of Achaean armies. Fairly early in the poem, Hector, the son of Troy's King Priam, described the stakes to Andromache, his generous wife:</p><blockquote><i>And tall Hector nodded, his helmet flashing:<br />"All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman.<br />But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy<br />and the Trojan women trailing their long robes<br />if I would shrink from battle now, a coward...<br />For in my heart and soul I also know this well:<br />the day will come when sacred Troy must die,<br />Priam must die and all his people with him,<br />Priam who hurls the strong ash spear..."</i></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p>The day will come when sacred Troy must die! For inhabitants of the great walled city, the endless, ongoing ten-year siege was an existential threat. </p><p>The masses of Achaean warriors also knew they had to wage their endless war: You see, Late Bronze Age culture was built around the pursuit of war, and the Achaeans were acting on a point of honor! A point of honor concern (with apologies) the most beautiful woman in the world, Menelaus' former wife!</p><p>Given the warrior culture which prevailed at that time, Achaean warriors were eager to seek glory on the field of battle in the course of conducting their siege. Hector shared that cultural outlook:</p><p>Glory was earned on the field of battle, a point he explains in much greater (and astounding) detail as that conversation with his generous wife continues.</p><p>Given the offence to honor which had occurred; given the nature of Late Bronze Age culture; none of the Achaeans ever questions the reason for conducting this endless siege of Troy. Indeed, no one on either side in this Bronze Age war ever expresses any doubt concerning which side he (or she) is on.</p><p>From its opening pages, the poem turns on expressions of rage—expressions of rage brought on by perceived slights to honor. For the record, these slights all involve disputes about sexual and marital relations between men and women, a general point of concern which lingers today, in various forms, in our own political war.</p><p>Today, our struggling nation, such as it is, is involved in a growing <i>political </i>war. As with Lincoln's war, so too with our own—this is an <i>internal</i> war, not a war between two groups of geographically distinct populations. </p><p>In the development of our war, citizens of a pre-existing nation-state are forced to decide which side they're on, or it they want to be on a side at all. </p><p>Achaeans and Trojans had no such choice. In theory, we moderns do.</p><p>Theirs was a Late Bronze Age war; ours is a war of the Information Age. But certain impulses—perhaps including the impulse to wage war itself—may not have changed all that much over the thousands of years.</p><p>As we conduct our political war here within our struggling nation, can we possibly learn to see ourselves more clearly through a review of our earliest literature—through the way the impulse to war was carried out in a much less complexified time?</p><p>Our current political war involves two major populations—Red America and Blue. Because our war isn't being fought over a single offense to honor, our alignments in this ongoing war have to be built around a wide array of causes and slights.</p><p>With that in mind, we'll riddle you this:</p><p>Are points of difference sometimes created by those who <i>want</i> to drive us to war—by those who are still gripped, perhaps unknowingly, by that ancient, primal impulse? Can we trust the things we're told by the various people who are creating the points of honor which will recruit <i>us</i> into this war?</p><p>Hector told his generous wife that he knew sacred Troy must die. Civilizations <i>can</i> die in our human wars. It happens all the time!</p><p>Lincoln wasn't a Bronze Age man. "We must not be enemies," <a href="https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp" target="_blank">he fruitlessly said</a>. "We are not enemies, but friends."</p><p><b>Tomorrow:</b> Senator Britt declines to relent. How about President Biden?</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-10782280348317795192024-03-10T12:36:00.004-04:002024-03-10T17:55:33.797-04:00 SUNDAY: Our mainstream journalists seem to love snubs...<p><b>SUNDAY, MARCH 10, 2024</b></p><p><b>...more than they love life itself:</b> Our mainstream journalists love the "snub" more than they love life itself.</p><p>This thought came to mind as we scanned this trio of offerings in today's New York Times:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/08/movies/oscar-snubs-history.html#link-3dac24da" target="_blank">Snubbed!</a></span></b></p><p><b>By Brooks Barnes</b></p><p><b>Every year since the Academy Awards were invented, somebody has been overlooked</b>, ignored, passed over, disregarded or brushed off. You know what they say about beauty and beholders.</p><p>But<b> perceived Oscar omissions—snubs, as we have come to call them—have grown into a frenzied annual conversation,</b> with people left off the nomination list, or nominated but denied a statuette, sometimes receiving as much attention, or more, as those who win. “Barbie” was nominated for eight Academy Awards, but Greta Gerwig’s exclusion from the best director lineup has been the headline (never mind that she is in the running for adapted screenplay). The academy and ABC, which will broadcast the Oscars on March 10, have been promoting the show with a commercial that pointedly references the lapse.</p><p>[...]</p><p><i>A version of this article appears in print on March 10, 2024, Section AR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Club Too Good To Be Ignored. </i></p></blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/08/movies/oscar-snubs-history.html" target="_blank"></a></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/08/movies/oscar-snubs-history.html" target="_blank">Spurned, Slighted, Rejected: 25 Oscar Snubs We’ll Never Get Over</a></span></b><br /><b>Greta Gerwig, you’re not alone. These artists and films memorably—outrageously in our view—got the brush-off from the academy. We’re still in disbelief.</b></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"><b></b></p><p></p><blockquote><p><b>By The New York Times</b></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote>[...] </blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p><i>A version of this article appears in print on March 10, 2024, Section AR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Club Too Good To Be Ignored.</i></p></blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/movies/oscar-nominations-winners-awards.html" target="_blank"></a></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/movies/oscar-nominations-winners-awards.html" target="_blank">13 Things We’re Still Mad About: Oscars Edition</a></span></b><br /><b>We asked staffers in Culture and Books about the snubs from years past that still bother them, and they had some things to say.</b><br /><p style="text-align: left;"><b>By The New York Times</b></p></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><p>[...]</p><p><i>A version of this article appears in print on March 10, 2024, Section AR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Oscar Decisions That Still Bother Us.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>We offer the first two paragraphs of the Brooks Barnes piece. For the other two compilations, we simply present the double headlines which sit atop the lists of alleged snubs from the past. We also present the online accounts of where these three items appear in today's print editions.</p><p>At any rate, our journalists seem to like nothing more than working up lists of "snubs." </p><p>It isn't enough to <i>disagree </i>with a selection which was made in the past. Here, as in so many other areas, we've agreed to settle on the use of a term designed to inflame.</p><p>Much of our discourse is like this today, thereby constituting what we'd call "imitations of life." Our discourse routinely heads off in search of perceptions of insult which thereby permit expressions of rage. </p><p>This seems to be the mindset we've chosen as a nation. </p><p>Full disclosure:</p><p>Among our own three favorite films of all time, Casablanca won for Best Picture in 1943. In 1947, then again in 1980, Notorious and My Brilliant Career didn't even receive nominations!</p><p>Additional full disclosure:</p><p>Unlike the journalists who contributed to that one piece today, we've somehow "gotten over it." With emotional balance as our watchword and our way of life, we <i>aren't</i> "still in disbelief!"</p><p>We aren't even "still bothered" by these so-called "snubs." We've even found our way past that!</p><div>We're sorry we wasted our time with this. That said, we pretty much did. So it goes with Hollywood!</div><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-39032878932933493032024-03-09T11:59:00.005-05:002024-03-09T12:06:55.764-05:00SATURDAY: When The Five reviewed the president's speech...<p><b>SATURDAY, MARCH 9, 2024</b></p><p><b>...they said he should pee in a cup:</b> No serious person forms an opinion about a State of the Union address until The Five have had a chance to check in.</p><p>Yesterday, at 5 o'clock sharp, the Fox News panel began a lengthy of President Biden's address. </p><p>As usual, the panel was evenly split, with four (4) standard Fox News types arrayed against one (1) lone liberal. Serving as moderator, resident loudmouth Judge Jeanine offered <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240308_220000_The_Five/start/60/end/120" target="_blank">this initial overview of the president speech</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>PIRRO (3/8/24): It's five o'clock in New York City, and this is The Five.</p><p><b>It was must-scream TV! The president yelling at Americans for over an hour</b> during one of the most hyper-partisan State of the Unions. </p><p>President Biden's lack of leadership was on full display<b> in a speech designed to please his base of MSNBC flunkies</b> and not the American people.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>One of the chyrons said, OLD YELLER. The discussion continued from there.</p><p>The first segment ran until 5:13. At that point, the judge teased the program's second segment in the manner shown:</p><p></p><blockquote>PIRRO: Coming up, "a tour de force." <b>Joe Biden's clapping seals in the media give a slobbering review </b>of his State of the Union<b>.</b></blockquote><b></b><p></p><p>We'll say this for Judge Jeanine. Yes, she may be a world-class loudmouth. But when she's cast in the moderator role, she plays it right down the middle! </p><p>After a commercial break, that second segment unfolded. By its conclusion, an overall assessment had clicked into place: </p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>President Biden was hopped up on drugs during Thursday night's address.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>After several feints from several performers, it fell to TV's silliest child to articulate this assessment. Lone liberal Jessica Tarlov had finally addressed the insinuations, <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240308_220000_The_Five/start/1440/end/1500" target="_blank">leading to this declaration</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>WATTERS:<b> I'm not a doctor, but they are giving him something, Jessica!</b></p><p>If you see a horse, and the horse is old and injured and mopes around the barnyard, and then all of a sudden you race the horse and he fires out of the gate and laps everyone, <i>what did they give the horse?</i></p><p>Jessica, the man has walked around lethargically for the last three years. Barely picks his head up, can't hear, is out of breath, falls asleep, skips dinner internationally, dies out during funeral processions.</p><p><b>All of a sudden, this guy is like on speed or something</b>, Jessica. To dismiss it like, "Oh, he's definitely clean"— <b>He should pee in a cup.</b></p><p>PIRRO: [LAUGHTER]</p></blockquote><p></p><p>There was more to this gentleman's diagnosis. But you've now gotten the general drift of the program's initial half hour.</p><p>At 5:27 p.m., it fell to substitute panelist Shannon Bream to tease the program's third segment. For the record, it seems to us that a<i> </i>serious point of concern <i>did</i> arise during the upcoming segment:</p><p></p><blockquote>BREAM: Coming up,<b> Laken Riley's mom ripping into President Biden</b> for fumbling her daughter's name.</blockquote><p></p><p>In our view, this next segment did involve a teachable moment. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/08/us/politics/biden-state-of-the-union-rowdy.html" target="_blank">In this morning's New York Times</a>, Annie Karni reports on the general topic while omitting one event:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>KARNI (3/9/24): <b>As he made his way to the rostrum, Mr. Biden gasped and appeared taken aback by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene,</b> the hard-right Republican from Georgia, who had dressed herself as a one-woman political protest. She wore a red “Make America Great Again” cap and a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student allegedly killed by a Venezuelan migrant, a horror story Republicans have used as a cudgel against Mr. Biden.</p><p><b>“It’s about Laken Riley!” she cried out</b> later from her seat<b> during the segment of Mr. Biden’s speech devoted to the U.S. border with Mexico</b>, in which Mr. Biden blamed his “predecessor” (as he referred to Mr. Trump all night) for tanking a bipartisan border security bill.</p><p><b>Ms. Greene saw her moment, interrupting the president </b>to call the suspect in Ms. Riley’s killing an “illegal.” The authorities have charged a Venezuelan migrant who crossed into the United States illegally and was then released on parole.<b> “Say her name!” Ms. Greene shouted.</b></p><p><b>In response, Mr. Biden did, in fact, say her name, albeit botching the pronunciation</b> so it sounded more like “Lincoln Riley.” The president referred to her as “an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal—that’s right.”</p><p><b>“But how many of thousands of people are being killed by legals?” he said.</b></p><p>[...]</p><p>He added: “To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you. Having lost children myself, I understand.”</p><p><b>The president’s off-script use of the term “illegal” drew immediate pushback from progressives. </b>“No human being is illegal,” Representative Delia Ramirez, Democrat of Illinois, posted on social media shortly after he uttered the word.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>For what it's worth, we've seen no videotape in which Taylor Greene refers to the alleged murderer as "an illegal." It may be that she actually did, but Karni offers no source for the claim.</p><p>That said:</p><p>This was one of the most dramatic moments in which Biden ventured off-prompter during Thursday's address. When he did, he made a series of errors or apparent errors:</p><p>He mispronounced Laken Riley's name. He then used a term which generated instant pushback from a wide array of progressives. </p><p>Also, he authored that peculiar question about the "thousands of people being killed by legals." The utterance was interpreted in various ways on various sides of the aisle.</p><p>That said, this morning's Times report didn't include what happened next. Here's the way Jesse Watters introduced <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240308_220000_The_Five/start/1860/end/1920" target="_blank">the third segment on yesterday's The Five</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>WATTERS: <b>Joe Biden, botching the name of Laken Riley</b>, the Georgia nursing student brutally murdered at the hands of an illegal alien. Watch:</p><p>[Videotape of Biden and Taylor Greene]</p><p>WATTERS: <b>Laken Riley's mom slamming Joe Biden as "pathetic" for fumbling the name of her daughter,</b> and adding this: "If you are going to say her name (even when forced to do so) at least say the <i>right </i>name.</p><p><b>And Democrats are upset because the president called the killer "an illegal."</b></p><p>[Videotape of several Democrats criticizing Biden for his use of that term]</p></blockquote><p></p><p>As the segment unfolded, Biden was slammed for mispronouncing Riley's name and for failing to speak to her parents. Democrats were slammed for allegedly caring more about language issues than about the murder of Riley itself.</p><p>The report in this morning's New York Times omitted the statement by Riley's mother. Also, it included this passage—a passage which is perfectly accurate, but speaks to a claim we've seen no one make on Fox:</p><p></p><blockquote>KARNI: (For years, <b>studies have found that undocumented immigrants have much lower crime rates than citizens born in the United States and legal immigrants</b> across a variety of offenses, including violent crimes, drug crimes and property crimes.)</blockquote><p></p><p>That passage addresses a claim we've seen no one make. Here are the claims which <i>have been</i> widely made by red tribe observers, even on such clownish programs as The Five:</p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Familiar claims on red tribe TV shows:</span></b><br /><i>For the bulk of his first three years, President Biden made no serious effort to stop the rapidly increasing flow of unauthorized immigrants across the southern border. As a result, an untold number of violent people were presumably able to cross the border along with everyone else. </i></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"><i></i></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>It was one of those violent people who is alleged to have murdered Laken Riley. For three years, the Biden Admin made no serious effort to staunch the flow across the border, even as they kept insisting that the border was secure and closed.</i></blockquote><p></p><p>It seems to us that red tribe pundits are raising perfectly valid points when they make such arguments. Until big city mayor began to complain, it seems to us that the Biden administration <i>had</i> been weirdly silent about the vast increase in chaos at the southern border. </p><p>As part of this package, a very large number of unvetted people <i>have </i>been allowed to stay in the country over the past several years. One of those people was Jose Ibarra, who has been accused of the murder of Laken Riley. </p><p>In the wake of this highly publicized murder, remarkably clueless blue tribe pundits have laughed about the silly voters who see the border as a major issue. In one case, a major figure at MSNBC seemed to be unaware of the most elementary facts about the killing of Riley. </p><p>Completing the rule of three, the president then mispronounced Riley's name in the course of making a jumbled off-prompter presentation. So it goes in our unsustainable modern world—in a world whose major news orgs are often rigidly "segregated by viewpoint." </p><p>Thanks to this rigid segregation, we live in a modern Babel. Red tribe voters hear one set of facts. Blue tribe voters—even blue tribe media stars—may be completely clueless concerning topics which are going viral on the streets where they and their colleagues <i>don't</i> live.</p><p>Or then again, they may not care. We can't rule that out.</p><p>The clowns at The Five were in typical form during the bulk of yesterday's program. There were moments of typical clown-car stupidity which we haven't even mentioned.</p><p>The Five is an imitation of life, a gruesome parody of journalism. In the end, it seemed to us that yesterday's program also raised some reasonable points.</p><p>Red tribe voters mourn a killing; blue pundits crack jokes and laugh. So it goes in our rigidly segregated America—in America Red and Blue.</p><p>Can a large modern nation really function this way? Go ahead!<i> Take a good look around!</i></p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com60tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-744632264134198932024-03-08T16:59:00.003-05:002024-03-08T16:59:44.960-05:00How much confidence should you have...<p><b>FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2024</b></p><p><b>...in our blue tribe's corporate pundits?</b> How much confidence should you have in the judgment and / or in the performance of our blue tribe's corporate "cable news" stars?</p><p>We just watched the first segment of Deadline: White House. Our answer to your question would be this:</p><p><i>Not much!</i> </p><p>Be careful where you place your confidence! Consider what John Heilemann said. </p><p>Midway through the opening segment, Heilemann said something to this effect:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>President Biden's speech was so good last night, "he should be out there doing this all the time."</i></blockquote><p></p><p>(That's close to a word-for-word quote.)</p><p>As we noted this morning, we think the speech itself was <i>extremely </i>good. But the State of the Union address is a scripted teleprompter speech, delivered to a (largely) rapt audience in an august, jam-packed hallowed hall.</p><p>A candidate <i>can't</i> "do that all the time!" And there <i>were </i>some instant problems when President Biden went off-prompter last night.</p><p>One example: </p><p>The whole progressive world came down on Biden's head for using the term "illegal" as a noun. He did that when he briefly went off-prompter in response to heckling from Marjorie Taylor Greene concerning the murder of Laken Riley. </p><p>On the one hand, we ourselves <i>don't</i>, and we ourselves<i> wouldn't</i>, use the word that way. When President Biden spoke that way, we instantly noticed.</p><p>On the other hand, this pushback is <i>precisely</i> the sort of thing for which our blue tribe gets widely ridiculed. That said, it <i>was</i> a type of mistake on Biden's part, and he was instantly criticized for it. </p><p>He made several other mistakes when he went off-prompter last night. We thought his speech was beautifully composed, but how well will he do if he attempts to conduct a normal presidential campaign?</p><p>For ourselves, we still aren't sure. On Deadline: White House, the cheerleaders were all twirling their pom-poms in all the mandated ways.</p><p>We think that was an excellent speech, but there's still a long way to go. As for the gaggle of blue tribe pundits (and their predecessors), they've routinely been failing you for at least three decades now. </p><p>Be careful who you listen to! You shouldn't feel certain about the things the "cable news" oracles say.</p><p><br /></p><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-54904536970964479652024-03-08T11:50:00.004-05:002024-03-08T11:50:34.921-05:00CULTURES: An extremely well-constructed address!<p><b>FRIDAY, MARCH 8, 2024</b></p><p><b>A remarkable pundit moment: </b>After last evening's (delightfully) pugnacious address, is there any way President Biden could lose?</p><p>In our view, yes—there actually is. In our view, this year's challenge won't be over until it's actually over.</p><p>In our view, last night's address was extremely well-written—was extremely well composed.</p><p>The speech was pugnacious in a way we don't recall from past State of the Union addresses. We thought the tone was fully appropriate. In various ways, we thought the president was finally appearing on the field of battle after a very long delay.</p><p>At times, we didn't think the speech was pugnacious enough! When the president discussed the events of January 6, it seemed to us that he should have stressed the fact that the some o the events in question had happened right there in this very room, as members of the House from both parties correctly feared for their lives.</p><p>We felt he should have mentioned the fact that, quite literally, <i>a gallows had been constructed outside the Capitol building—</i>a gallows constructed by invaders who wanted to take Vice President Pence's life.</p><p>Why should the newly arrived candidate for re-election have been that specific? Here's why:</p><p>Voters who watch the Fox News Channel are never told about such events. They're never shown the actual footage of police officers being beaten that day. </p><p>They're never told about the gallows which was constructed outside the Capitol building. For them, such information, along with such video footage, has long since been disappeared.</p><p>(Red tribe viewers are never told or shown such things. By way of contrast, we blue tribe viewers are never told or shown much of anything else!)</p><p>We thought last evening's address speech was extremely well constructed. If President Biden was 61 years old, we'd consider him an overwhelming favorite for re-election. </p><p>That said:</p><p>In our view, the fact that he's <i>81</i> years old remains as an unresolved possible problem. When he went off prompter last night, it seemed to us that a sense of diminishment still exists. </p><p>Will he be able to campaign in unscripted settings? Will he be able to debate?</p><p>We think those questions are still unanswered. Then again, the crazy behavior continued last night from Candidate Donald J. Trump:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Disaster for Trump as Truth Social Crashes at Critical SOTU Moment</span></b></p><p><b>Donald Trump may have rage-posted his way through President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Truth Social, but his social media site crashed </b>for many<b> </b>before Biden even entered the House chamber, with technical issues lingering for at least an hour before and into his remarks.</p><p><b>Beginning shortly before 9 p.m. EST Thursday, outages numbered in the thousands,</b> according to Downdetector. The outages peaked an hour later and then began to slowly resume back to normal, according to the monitor.</p><p>Around the same time, users on X reported not being able to access Trump’s feed, with some—including former Trump White House Press Secretary Alyssa Farah Griffin—mocking him for it.</p><p>“Trump said he’d be live fact-checking Biden’s SOTU but Truth Social appears to be down. Sad!” she wrote on X.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Thus spake William Vaillancourt. at the start of <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/disaster-for-trump-as-truth-social-crashes-at-critical-sotu-moment" target="_blank">this report for the Daily Beast</a>. The former president had been "rage-posting" again, at least when his site wasn't down.</p><p>We were struck by that somewhat unusual term. In the Robert Fagles translation, Book One of The Iliad bears this title:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">The Rage of Achilles</span></b></blockquote><p></p><p>Roughly three thousand years later, the rage-posting of Donald J. Trump still helps define the political and journalistic culture within which the red tribe's siege of the Biden White House will be conducted this year.</p><p>It's hard to believe that this rage-posting challenger could possibly win in November. But in the western world's first war poem, Achilles' rage in fact prevails—and rage remains a powerful force in human affairs, all these millennia later.</p><p>We regard Candidate Trump as being badly disordered. That said, tens of millions of neighbors and friends simply don't see him that way.</p><p>We disagree with their assessment—but they disagree with ours! Meanwhile, it seems to us that Candidate Biden, when he wasn't reading from prompter last night, continued to signal a possible type of diminishment at his famously advanced age. </p><p>All in all, we don't know where this confrontation will end. On balance, we thought last night's address was superb—but will the candidate be able to keep it up when he campaigns off the cuff?</p><p>We thought the prepared address was superb. Then too, there was a remarkable pundit moment after last evening's address. </p><p>For those who are prepared to take The Blue Tribe Challenge, it struck us as highly instructive.</p><p>The moment occurred at 2:47 a.m. this morning, as live coverage of the address continued on MSNBC. Presumably, nothing will turn on what was said in this fleeting moment—but the moment strikes us as extremely instructive.</p><p>Even in the 2 a.m. hour, a panel of three MSNBC contributors were still discussing the speech. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) was on set as their guest.</p><p>It may seem hard to believe. But after Rep. Garcia praised Biden's focus on "kitchen table" issues, <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240308_070000_State_of_the_Union/start/2820/end/2880" target="_blank">MSNBC's Symone Sanders-Townsend said this</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>SANDERS-TOWNSEND (3/8/24): There were some other things in the speech that were not, I think, written down. You talked about—</p></blockquote><blockquote><p><b>We talked off-camera about Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the congresswoman from Georgia, and the buttons that she had</b> and the outfit that was a violation. </p><p>She—<b>when the president came down the aisle and was greeting folks, she greeted him, gave him a button. </b>There was a point in the speech where he pulls out the button. </p><p>Literally, this speech had everything. It had props.</p><p><b>He pulls out the button and says the name of the young man who was killed in Georgia.</b> I think Marjorie Taylor-Greene and other Republicans were going to use this as a foil.<b> He was killed by an undocumented woman. </b>And so—</p><p><b>But the president used the term "illegal" when he was responding in the heat of the moment.</b> I heard the term "illegal:" There were people in my text messages who heard the term "illegal."</p><p>I wonder what you thought about that moment.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Sanders-Townsend was concerned about Biden's use of the term "illegal"—more specifically, about his use of the term as a noun.</p><p>She didn't seem to be concerned about the actual killing itself. Beyond that, she didn't seem to know the basic facts about the killing in question, in which a 22-year-old (female) nursing student was allegedly killed by a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who had entered the country illegally, then had been allowed to stay under a type of "parole."</p><p>As he responded, Rep. Garcia called Taylor-Greene a disgrace. He talked about the slogan-festooned outfit she'd worn as if in tribute to NASCAR drivers. He then started to discuss the president's use of the term "illegal,"</p><p>Only then did Sanders-Townsen break in to correct her misstatement about the killing in Georgia. To our eye and ear, it appeared that she'd been prompted by someone speaking to her through the button in her ear.</p><p>At the age of 34, Sanders-Townsend is a very capable high achiever. Is it possible that she didn't know even the most elementary facts about the killing which took place in Georgia last week—about the killing which had set red tribe networks on fire?</p><p>Two nights earlier, a panel of five MSNBC hosts had laughed about the fact that Republican voters in Virginia considered the border to be the most important current issue. </p><p>Within the red tribe world, their laughter had gone viral. In part, the five were blasted for the way they'd laughed about the topic without even mentioning the recent murder in Georgia.</p><p>Their laughter in the face of the previous week's killing was widely cited. We aren't sure about this next point, but we think we saw some red tribe critics say that our blue tribe's pundits care about the use of appropriate language more than about life itself. </p><p>At any rate, is it possible that our corporate blue tribe tribunes pay so little attention to matters like this that one of them didn't know even the simplest facts about the murder of Laken Riley, age 22?</p><p>That's the way Sanders-Townsend's presentation read to us. It seems to us that this mere possibility teaches us something about our contemporary world, and about the corporate pundits in whom we tend to place our trust.</p><p> We thought last night's address was <i>extremely </i>well-composed. As we contemplate the red tribe's ongoing siege of the White House, we also thought that this morning's brief pundit exchange was a strong teachable moment.</p><p>Could Donald J. Trump still capture the White House? In our view, in spite or perhaps because of his rage, imaginably, he still could.</p><p>There's still a whole lot more to learn about our blue tribe's corporate pundits—about the role these people have played in getting us where we now are. </p><p>This story dates back more than thirty years. Thanks to decades of group silence, the story has rarely been told.</p><p>Red tribe voters never see the videotape from January 6. Blue tribe voters don't see the footage from the southern border—and our blue tribe pundits don't ask us to hear about the killing of Laken Riley, or about the policy breakdowns which apparently led to her death.</p><p>Trump was rage-posting again last night. Why are many red tribe <i>voters </i>also enraged? Also, is it possible that their rage, like the rage of mighty Achilles, could somehow win out in the end?</p><p><b>Yet to come:</b> The role of rage; the attraction to war; the subjugation of women. </p><p>Also, the constant absence of clarity—the never-ending inclination to avoid the pursuit of mere facts.</p><p><br /></p><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-7067178519494753202024-03-07T15:32:00.004-05:002024-03-07T15:38:33.744-05:00Tonight is the start of The Year That Was!<p><b>THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2024</b></p><p><b>Why not take The Scarborough Challenge?</b> Tonight is the start of The Year That Was. It's the start of a campaign year which will presumably send President Biden or Candidate Trump to the White House.</p><p>In large part, the outcome will likely turn on President Biden's ability to run a competent, vigorous campaign. Tonight involves a scripted speech, but it's the start of the chance to make a type of assessment.</p><p>Meanwhile, could Donald J. Trump get elected again? Presumably, he could! </p><p>For what it's worth, the only trial he will face may turn out to be the Stormy Daniels trial. There's no way of knowing how that somewhat unusual trial will turn out, or how it will seem to American voters.</p><p>(It could <i>defeat </i>Trump, of course. Or that again, possibly not.)</p><p>Can President Biden run a competent campaign? Can Candidate Trump steer clear of self-destruction?</p><p>Tonight, we get our first look at Candidate Biden. Concerning Candidate Trump, we wanted to make a suggestion about the way our blue tribe's major tribunes are currently performing their tasks.</p><p>Last Friday morning, March 1, we were asked and told these things as we watched Morning Joe:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Can you imagine voting for that guy? How stupid would you have to be?</i></p><p><i>He can't. complete. a sentence. He can't. complete. a thought.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>That was Joe Scarborough, at 7:07 last Friday morning, developing the "early onset dementia" hypothesis concerning Candidate Trump.</p><p>"He can't complete a sentence," the gentleman said, pausing for emphasis as he did. "He can't complete a thought." </p><p>We were surprised to hear that! The night before, we had seen Trump do the full hour on the Hannity cable news show. In the course of that hour, we'd seen him complete a very large number of sentences and a very large number of thoughts.</p><p>Quite a few of the thoughts were off the wall; some of the thoughts were not. But in the course of an entire hour, the candidate betrayed no trouble completing sentences. He had been surprisingly calm, and he had somehow managed to complete every sentence and thought.</p><p>Warning! <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240301_110000_Morning_Joe/start/4020/end/4080" target="_blank">If you watch the Morning Joe segment</a>, you'll see Joe and Mika taking advantage of a doctored "edit"—of a piece of videotape which has been clipped so abruptly as to give the impression that Trump's statement hadn't made sense.</p><p>You'll then see Joe and Mika histrionically acting out a bit of a scam. After that, you'll see Scarborough make the statements we've posted above.</p><p>We offer this suggestion:</p><p>Why not go ahead and take The Joe Scarborough Challenge? To see the start of Trump's appearance with Hannity, <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240301_020000_Hannity/start/360/end/420" target="_blank">you just have to click here</a>. </p><p>As you will see if you take the challenge, the first segment of the interview ran for sixteen minutes. If you choose to take the challenge, you'll see the candidate complete a very large number of sentences and a very large number of thoughts.</p><p>At this point, Scarborough rarely makes a statement about Trump which hasn't been embellished. For ourselves, we've long regarded Trump as severely disordered, but the behavior of our blue tribe's panicking tribunes offers a picture of a slightly different, but quite familiar, type of human disorder.</p><p>We regard Trump as severely disordered, but he <i>can</i> complete a sentence. Scarborough is very smart and highly experienced, with a very good sense of humor, but he's becoming a familiar type of figure from the annals of public distortion.</p><p>Who will win November's election? We don't have the slightest idea, but tonight is almost surely the night which starts us down that road.</p><p>Presumably, Nestor's speech to the troops would be premature: <i>Tonight's the night that rip our ranks to shreds or that pulls us through</i>.</p><p><b>Also this:</b> If you watch that Hannity tape, you'll see what's<i> actually</i> being said on red tribe cable about the problems at the border, as opposed to the characterizations we blues are currently sold.</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-79597472654605516112024-03-07T10:38:00.000-05:002024-03-07T10:38:03.863-05:00CULTURES: Reid and Psaki and Maddow oh my!<p><b>THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2024</b></p><p><b>But also, Watters and Gutfeld:</b> On one major cultural point, the two cable channels agree.</p><p>There must never be heard a discouraging word! Tribal viewers must <i>never</i> be exposed to any hint of nuance or complexity.</p><p>It's stunning to see the level of dumbness which results from this cultural practice. To cite one example, here's the way Jesse Watters began one segment <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240307_010000_Jesse_Watters_Primetime/start/2700/end/2760" target="_blank">on his prime-time Fox News Channel program last night</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>WATTERS (3/6/24): <b>The House passed a half a trillion-dollar spending bill today.</b> Thousands of pages. No one had time to read it.</p><p><b>We didn't even know about it and we just opened it up and here's what we found</b>: $850,000 for "bus stop equity" in California.</p><p><b>We don't know what that means.</b> We don't know if they're going to put a bus stop in a rich neighborhood or a poor neighborhood, but a bus stop is just a small thing that keeps you dry in the rain and a sign that says "Bus Stop." </p><p>Eight hundred fifty grand? What!? </p></blockquote><p></p><p>Please don't ask us to catalogue the various aspects of the dumbness displayed in that passage by this silliest primetime child. For a recent report about this general topic, <a href="https://laist.com/brief/news/climate-environment/la-secures-funding-for-bus-shelters-community-calls-it-long-overdue" target="_blank">you can just click here</a>.</p><p>At any rate, that's how dumb our "journalism" can get when practitioners know that nothing they say will ever be questioned, critiqued or challenged—when they know that their pronouncements, however dumb, will be swallowed as gospel. </p><p>In our view, the first eighteen minutes of last evening's <i>Gutfeld!</i> was pretty much equally dumb. Surrounded by the usual gaggle of flyweight pseudo-commentators, the program's host yakked right up to 10:18 p.m., <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240307_030000_Gutfeld/start/300/end/360" target="_blank">working from this premise</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>GUTFELD (3/8/24): All right, let's do a monologue. </p><p>So with Trump cruising to victory in the primaries and Biden's slow implosion, <b>we should once again get used to the media's curiously timed stories that will bash the Don.</b> This week's comes from Rolling Stone...</p></blockquote><p></p><p>As it turned out, Gutfeld said the curious timing in this matter dates back to "a report released in January by the Defense Department." According to Gutfeld, that report "detail[ed] how the White House Medical Unit managed drugs during the Trump administration."</p><p><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/white-house-clinic-improperly-distributed-controlled-substances-previo-rcna135787" target="_blank">Here's the January report by NBC News</a> about that study by the Defense Department's Inspector General. (Just so you'll know, the White House Medical Unit is staffed by military <i>and</i> civilian employees, but is overseen by the Defense Department.)</p><p>Gutfeld and his acolytes burned the first 18 minutes of last night's prime time program assuring viewers that the Defense Department report was the latest attempt by the Deep State to get President Biden re-elected. Most simply, we'd say this:</p><p>Within a journalistic culture defined by "segregation by viewpoint," there will be <i>nothing</i> so dumb or so improbable that it can't be pleasingly flogged. </p><p>Viewers will see no one raise an objection to whatever statement or claim has been advanced. Given that circumstance, it may not occur to the casual viewer that what he is being told is improbable, silly or wrong. Unyielding true belief may tend to emerge from such presentations.</p><p>At this site, we're trying to find a way to approach the misogyny-adjacent material which regularly flows from the Watters and Gutfeld programs. (Bronze Age Pervert, come on down!) For now, we're planning to go there tomorrow, building upon some recent soul-draining conduct by Watters. </p><p>For today, let's consider something offered to blue tribe viewers this past Tuesday night. The brief exchange in question occurred during the interminable, largely pointless coverage of that evening's Super Tuesday primary results. </p><p>Especially on MSNBC, analysts tend to fill the long, useless hours on such evenings with examples of their matchless comedy stylings. So it went when a panel of five MSNBC hosts laughed about a silly idea advanced by many Republican voters in the great state of Virginia.</p><p>Many Republican voters had reported, as part of the day's exit polling, that immigration and the situation at the southern border seemed like the current top issue to them. </p><p>This produced several minutes of eye-rolling and laughter from the MSNBC panel—several minutes of mockery which have now gone viral within the red tribe world. </p><p>Was anything "wrong" with what was said? <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240305_230000_Decision_2024_Primaries__Caucuses/start/11880/end/11940" target="_blank">As you can see by clicking here</a>, the exchange began with Joy-Ann Reid offering a sweeping assessment of the way red tribe voters vote:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>REID (3/5/24): <b>Republican voters don't vote that way.</b> They don't vote on economics or things they're getting economically from the president. They're <b>increasingly, from the Tea Party on, they're voting on race, on this idea of an invasion of brown people over the border,</b> the idea that they can’t get whatever job they want. </p><p>A black person got it? Therefore, drive all the blacks out of the colleges! Get rid of DEI! That is what they’re voting on. <b>They’re just voting specifically on racial animus at this stage. It isn’t about economics.</b></p></blockquote><p><b></b></p><p>That was a remarkably sweeping assessment of the basis on which such voters vote. Jen Psaki took it from there, and she turned to those exit polls:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>PSAKI (continuing directly): No, which is why Trump killed the immigration bill. That's why! And because otherwise, he can’t run against The Other, and brown people, and people who don’t look like him, like his supporters, his base of supporters, coming across the border and scaring people, and killing people, or whatever he’s threatening out there.</p><p>I mean, if you look at some of these exit polls— <b>I mean, I live in Virginia. Immigration was the number one issue.</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>By now, the chuckling had started. Inevitably, Rachel Maddow jumped in with a joke:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>MADDOW: <b>Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia. </b>It's a very congested area!</p><p>VOICE OFF-CAMERA: <b>Build a wall!</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>By now, the laughter was general. As she continued, Psaki seemed to marvel at the fact that she'd heard people in New Hampshire expressing concerns about the <i>northern</i> border. Mercifully, a commercial break now intruded.</p><p>This brief exchange between these thought leaders has gone viral across the red tribe universe. It doesn't seem to have been discussed by mainstream outlets, except for <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/tv/jen-psaki-rachel-maddow-and-msnbc-panel-openly-laugh-at-the-border-crisis-being-the-most-important-issue-among-voters/" target="_blank">this scolding presentation at Mediaite</a>.</p><p>(Operating more from the left, The Young Turks also scold the panelists <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILjxN9NzCHE" target="_blank">in this YouTube presentation</a>.)</p><p>Was something <i>wrong </i>with the MSNBC presentation? Can it, in any way, be compared to the steady-state dumbness emitted by Gutfeld and Watters?</p><p>That, of course, is a matter of judgment. We'd be inclined to say this:</p><p>First, to consider the problems, and the deaths, occurring at the northern border, you can see<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/11/nyregion/migrants-canada-northern-border.html" target="_blank"> this February 11 news report in the New York Times</a>. The dual headlines say this:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></b></p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Migrants Face Cold, Perilous Crossing From Canada to New York</span></b><br />Increasingly, migrants from Latin America are risking their lives to cross illegally into the United States along the northern border.</blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p></p><div>The northern border can be a scene of peril too. That said:</div><p>In our view, Reid's sweeping assessment of the motives of pro-Trump voters is extremely unwise as a matter of politics and is basically indefensible on anything resembling "the merits." Concerning the way the ensuing exchange seemed to mock the voters in question, we would only add this:</p><p>Tonight, President Biden will likely speak about the bipartisan border bill which was recently killed by Donald J. Trump and the House GOP. It has also been widely reported that President Biden hopes to issue executive orders to address the situation at the southern border.</p><p>It's hard to know why President Biden would be doing such things if there was no serious problem at the southern border. Mainly, though, it's the sheer enjoyment of these cable news thought leaders—the group laughter they enjoy, all through the night—which helps make election night programs like this unwatchable as a matter of basic journalism and basic public discourse.</p><p>That short exchange on Tuesday night strikes us as profoundly unwise. It may not strike you that way. In our view, this is all part of the ongoing task of taking The Blue Tribe Challenge!</p><p>In our view, it's pretty much Watters and Gutfeld <i>and Reid and Psaki</i> oh my! More generally, it's amazing to see the fruits that emerge from "segregation by viewpoint." </p><p>In our view, that's especially striking in the emerging case of Psaki, a person who is much more experienced and sophisticated than the fellows who are currently hosting primetime "cable news" programs as they toil in the vineyards at Fox.</p><p>Reasonably or otherwise, that mocking exchange from Tuesday night has gone <i>very</i> viral.<a href="http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2024/03/can-candidate-biden-turn-it-around.html" target="_blank"> Just yesterday</a>, we quoted Bret Stephens, who was still puzzled as to why red tribe voters are still supporting Trump.</p><p>At any rate:</p><p>As a matter of journalistic culture, two major "cable news" channels agree on one basic point:</p><p>Let a single set of flowers bloom! Viewers will only hear <i>one</i> point of view, and they'll hear it repeated all night!</p><p><b>Tomorrow:</b> Glorious Hector, hero of Troy, seized female captives too!</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-53901317465695573142024-03-06T15:00:00.006-05:002024-03-06T15:15:03.591-05:00Can Candidate Biden turn it around?<p><b>WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 2024</b></p><p><b>Also, what's up with Trump voters?</b> Presumably, it starts tomorrow night, with the State of the Union address.</p><p>Can Candidate Biden turn it around? <a href="https://jabberwocking.com/voters-dont-know-anything-yet/" target="_blank">In this recent post</a>, Kevin Drum outlines one reason to think that he can. </p><p>Kevin cites numbers from a recent YouGov survey—numbers which illustrate general voter ignorance. Here's where those numbers lead him:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>DRUM (3/5/24): Hell, <b>only 34% [said they] had heard [a lot] about the Hur report. Only 24% knew we were striking back against the Houthis.</b> And the fact that a star witness had lied about bribes paid to Hunter and Joe Biden? Only 22%.</p><p><b>Most people don't know anything about anything. In fact, I'll bet that even these numbers are inflated</b>, with lots of respondents saying they've heard a lot about these things because they watched a segment on the evening news or got pointed to a Facebook post.</p><p>This is why I think Biden has a fair amount of upside in the presidential race. <b>In September, when people start paying attention, what are they going to learn? Mostly bad stuff about Trump and good stuff about Biden's little-known positive accomplishments.</b> That's where the greatest ignorance is right now, so it's also where there's the greatest potential for change.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>At this site, we're amazed to see that 22% of respondents <i>said </i>they had heard that we were striking back against the Houthis!</p><p>That fact doesn't get mentioned on Fox—and it certainly doesn't get mentioned on MSNBC, where nothing interferes with round-the-clock speculations about Trump getting frog-marched to jail.</p><p>As a general matter, it's almost always true that "most [of us] people don't know anything about anything." As to what people will start to hear in September, that will depend on where they're getting their soundbites.</p><p>Remember, though, an intelligent campaign doesn't try to win <i>every</i> voter; an intelligent campaign tries to win<i> some </i>voters. More specifically, it will try to win the <i>most persuadable</i> voters—not the ones we tend to picture when we say that you simply can't reason with Those People Over There.</p><p>In our view, Candidate Trump is unelectable, but so is Candidate Biden. In our view, this will still turn on Biden's ability to campaign in a vigorous fashion. We strongly doubt that he'll be able to do that, but we're also prepared to be wrong.</p><p>From there, we move to the weekly colloquy between Bret Stephens and Gail Collins. We were intrigued <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/opinion/trump-mcconnell-biden.html" target="_blank">by this part of this week's exchange</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>STEPHENS (3/5/24): I’ve always thought that Trump’s obstruction of a subpoena in the documents case is the strongest of the indictments against him. Unfortunately, a Florida courtroom is not an ideal jurisdiction for getting a guilty verdict, and it doesn’t look like the case will be tried anytime soon.</p><p>COLLINS: <b>More than the idea of seeing Trump marched off to jail, I love the idea of a bankrupt Trump spending his 80s doing podcasts from a motel room in Tampa or Bridgeport</b>. But when it comes to punishment, no bad deed is more important than trying to subvert the democratic process in such a big-time manner.</p><p>STEPHENS: It’s horrible. But not quite as horrible as the idea that <b>tens of millions of Americans are willing to vote him right back into office. Serious question: Why?</b></p></blockquote><p><b></b></p><p>At this very late date, Stephens is still wondering why tens of millions of people are eager to vote for Trump.</p><p>First suggestion—a person might start by <i>asking </i>people why they plan to do that. That said, Stephens ended up offering one idea about why Trump voters are like that:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>COLLINS: But hey,<b> you’re in charge of understanding Republicans. What’s the bottom line?</b></p><p>STEPHENS: <b>He’s a raised middle finger at all the people whom his supporters see as a self-satisfied, self-dealing cultural elite.</b> The more that elite despises him, the more they love him.</p><p>That’s why any good analysis of the Trump phenomenon has to begin with an analysis of the Us phenomenon, if you will: <b>Where did those of us who were supposed to represent the sensible center of the country go so wrong that people were willing to turn to a charlatan like Trump in the first place?</b> </p><p>I have endless theories, but here’s another one: We tried to change the way people are instead of meeting them where they are. <b>Neocons (like me) tried to bend distant cultures in places like Afghanistan</b> to accept certain Western values. Didn’t work. <b>Progressives tried to push Americans to accept new values on issues like identity, equity, pronouns and so on.</b> That isn’t working, either.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Again, it seems to us that Stephens would be better off <i>asking</i> Trump voters to explain their preference. But when he does mindread a general answer, he partially blames his own behavior, and the behavior of other elites:</p><p>He says that red tribe elites—people like himself—engaged in deeply unwise behavior on the international front. And he says that progressives—blue tribe figures who <i>aren't</i> like himself—"tried to push Americans to accept new values on [a wide array of] issues."</p><p>Is it possible that some of us within the blue world have pushed a lot of new values very hard, perhaps before their time? Over here within our blue tribe, we tend to reject the very premise of that idea. There's no such things as "woke," we frequently say. <i>The term can't even be defined!</i></p><p>There actually <i>is</i> such a thing as "woke," and our tribe has routinely advanced new values and ideas which fly in the face of traditional "common sense" understandings. There's nothing<i> morally wrong </i>with doing that, but it also isn't a surefire way to win national elections.</p><p>Collins reacted as shown:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>COLLINS: It’s true that the Trump folk find progressives irritating, but <b>we’re going to have to discuss how you avoid making people feel like they’re being lectured to </b>while simultaneously standing up for critical principles like gay rights.</p><p>In the meantime, we march forward. Sigh.</p><p>STEPHENS: Gail, this is so depressing. Let’s switch gears. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>How do you "stand up for critical principles like gay rights" without "making people feel like they’re being lectured to?" </p><p>One possibility: <i>Stop lecturing to people!</i> Also, stop calling people names.</p><p>Sigh! Some extremely impressive public spokespersons did such things in (let's say) the 1990s as public acceptance of gay rights slowly began coming into its own.</p><p>They absorbed a lot of undisguised guff on cable programs like Hardball. In the process, they showed the way such things can (sometimes) be done. Some of our journalistic elites don't seem to know that this happened.</p><p>Eventually, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton came out in favor of marriage rights. Biden got there first, but the groundwork had been laid, by patient and persistent people, several decades earlier. </p><p>We admired their forbearance. Slowly, attitudes started to change.</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com131tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-19402862676246503872024-03-06T10:57:00.003-05:002024-03-06T10:58:04.560-05:00CULTURES: O'Donnell uncorks ridiculous howler!<p><b>WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6, 2024</b></p><p><b>Maddow pleases the tribe:</b> We're so old that we can remember when the Supreme Court's Colorado ballot decision was a very big thing.</p><p>Checking our calendar, we see that we're referring to this past Monday night, and also to yesterday morning. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/05/opinion/letters/supreme-court-trump-ballot.html" target="_blank">In this morning's New York Times</a>, one remnant of this era washes ashore in the form of this slightly odd letter:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Supreme Court: Trump Stays on the Ballot</span></b></p><p><b>To the Editor:</b></p><p>Re “States Must Keep Trump on Ballot, Justices Rule 9-0” (front page, March 5):</p><p>Despite the stunning clarity of the 14th Amendment and the well-documented historical record of its intent, the votes of the three Trump-appointed justices and that of Justice Clarence Thomas to allow an insurrectionist to remain on the ballot were a foregone conclusion.</p><p><b>The only surprise was the unanimous vote.</b></p><p>D— F— / Beverly Hills, Calif.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>For this well-intentioned letter writer, the Supreme Court's unanimous vote was the lone surprise. That said:</p><p><a href="http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2024/03/cultures-blue-tribe-stars-seemed-to-be.html" target="_blank">As we chronicled yesterday</a>, a unanimous vote had been widely predicted ever since the court heard oral arguments back on February 8. </p><p>It isn't odd when one letter writer finds that outcome surprising. That said, why would a newspaper start its letters section with a letter to that effect? </p><p>We can't answer that question! Nor can we explain the passage in the Washington Post's February 9 news report which we highlight below.</p><p>Even now, four weeks later, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/08/supreme-court-oral-arguments-trump-colorado-ballot/" target="_blank">we can't explain what that news report said</a>:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Supreme Court poised to allow Trump to remain on Colorado ballot</span></b></p><p>The Supreme Court on Thursday seemed poised to allow former president Donald Trump to remain on the Colorado ballot, expressing deep concerns about permitting a single state to disqualify the leading Republican candidate from seeking national office.</p><p>Justices from across the ideological spectrum warned of troubling political ramifications if they do not reverse a ruling from Colorado’s top court that ordered Trump off the ballot after finding that he engaged in insurrection around the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.</p><p>The court was considering the unprecedented and consequential question of whether a state court can enforce a rarely invoked, post-Civil War provision of the Constitution to disqualify Trump from returning to the White House.</p><p>During more than two hours of argument, the justices asked questions that suggested their often divided bench could reach a unanimous or near-unanimous decision to reject the challenge to Trump’s eligibility brought by six Colorado voters...</p><p>Liberal Justice Elena Kagan repeatedly questioned whether one state should be allowed to decide whether a presidential candidate is disqualified. <b>“Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?” she asked</b>, adding, “That seems quite extraordinary, doesn’t it?”</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Right there in paragraph 5, the Post's next-day news report featured Justice Kagan asking a peculiar question. Our puzzlement went like this:</p><p>Suppose Colorado<i> had </i>been allowed to bar Trump from its ballot. In what way would the state have been making this decision "not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?"</p><p>Four weeks later, we still don't have the slightest idea what Justice Kagan meant. That said, the New York Times also featured that puzzling question from Kagan in its February 9 news report, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-ballot.html" target="_blank">quoting her in a bit more detail</a>:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Supreme Court Seems Likely to Reject Challenge to Trump’s Eligibility</span></b></p><p>[...]</p><p>Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, also expressed concern about granting individual states too much power over national elections.</p><p><b>“I think that the question that you have to confront is why a single state should decide who gets to be president of the United States,” she told Jason C. Murray</b>, a lawyer for the Colorado voters challenging Mr. Trump’s eligibility. She added, “Why should a single state have the ability to make this determination not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?”</p></blockquote><p></p><p>In what way would Colorado have been "deciding who gets to be president of the United States?" In what way would Colorado have been making that determination "not only for their own citizens but for the rest of the nation?”</p><p>Even now, four weeks later, we have no real idea.</p><p>Kagan's puzzling question got a lot of play in the days after the February 8 hearing. We've never seen anyone explain what Kagan could have meant. But so it goes—so it repeatedly goes, generally with no one noticing—in this least coherent of all possible highly-educated worlds.</p><p>When we were 28, we once journeyed to Washington to visit a college roommate who had just been elected to Congress. At one point, we walked from his office to the House chamber itself so he could cast his vote on a bill creating a weight limit for trucks on interstate highways.</p><p>We asked him how he could possibly know what the correct vote would be. Chuckling, he said something to us which went a great deal like this:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>"You have to understand, the basic facts of every matter are always in doubt."</i></blockquote><p></p><p>The basic facts are never clear! And so it continues to be in this best of all possible tribal worlds.</p><p>This very morning, tribunes of our own blue tribe were pounding away on Morning Joe, examining the parameters of Candidate Donald J. Trump's "early onset dementia."</p><p>That quotation comes from Joe Scarborough at 6:26 a.m. It reflects the Full Tilt Tribal aspect of our nation's contemporary journalistic culture—a culture which obtains within our own blue tribe as well as among the red.</p><p>In the pages of The Iliad, a modern reader is exposed to the dueling cultures which obtained among the poem's two warring tribes. </p><p>The Achaeans (the Greeks) have been staging a nine- or ten-year siege of Troy as the poem starts. Within their camp, a Bronze Age male warrior culture obtains—a culture marked by rage and male aggression, in which the defining argument turns on the question of which of the warriors gets to maintain the services of which stolen woman.</p><p>Inside the towering walls of Troy, a domestic culture obtains. In the famous scene in question, Hector delights in his "darling son" before he goes off to battle, and he comforts Andromache, his "generous wife:"</p><blockquote><i>In the same breath, shining Hector reached down<br />for his son—but the boy recoiled,<br />cringing against his nurse's full breast,<br />screaming out at the sight of his own father,<br />terrified by the flashing bronze, the horsehair crest, <br />the great ridge of the helmet nodding, bristling terror—<br />so it struck his eyes. And his loving father laughed,<br />his mother laughed as well, and glorious Hector,<br />quickly lifting the helmet from his head,<br />set it down on the ground, fiery in the sunlight,<br />and raising his son he kissed him, tossed him in his arms,<br />lifting a prayer to Zeus and the other deathless gods...</i></blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p>Before Hector goes off, expecting to die, he shares a laugh with his generous wife and kisses his darling son.</p><p>We'll continue to suggest that members of our own blue tribe should take The Blue Tribe Challenge. We'll continue to suggest that we take a step back from the daily events of our own tribal war and, possibly scrunching our eyes just a bit, that we try to see ourselves a bit more clearly through the intervention of works of ancient literature.</p><p>Concerning our modern blue tribe culture, we can tell you this:</p><p>Our own Blue America has joined Red America in accepting one aspect of modern journalistic culture. Each tribe has adopted a deeply unintelligent culture shaped by the practice of "segregation by viewpoint."</p><p>We refer to a practice in which tribal tribunes are never asked to interact with people who disagree, in any way, with their own mandated tribal frameworks, viewpoints and claims. Thought leaders interact with people who will echo their views—and with no one else. </p><p>So it went at the start of today's Morning Joe as participants took turns echoing (and embellishing) each other's basic claims. So it was going on Fox & Friends as red tribe tribunes disappeared certain facts and claims and kept asserting others.</p><p>Our own blue tribe has come to accept the wages of this culture. On Monday evening, it gifted us with Lawrence O'Donnell's absurd claim, a claim he repeated several times, that the court's three liberal justices had "called [Donald Trump] an oath-breaking insurrectionist" in the separate concurrence they filed.</p><p>You've heard no one else make that claim because it's baldly inaccurate—but there's no such thing as correction within this devolving form of tribal culture. Nor is there any mechanism by which Rachel Maddow's 25-minute opening segment could be subject to challenge that night.</p><p>We refer to a 25-minute opening monologue whose absurdly selective, resentful ending <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240305_020000_The_Rachel_Maddow_Show/start/960/end/1020" target="_blank">started with Maddow saying this at 9:16 p.m.</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>MADDOW (3/4/24): The United States Supreme Court ruled today, as expected, that the part of the 14th amendment that says you can't hold federal office ever again if you took part in trying to overthrow the government of the United States, the court ruled today that Donald Trump's role in the January 6 insurrection isn't enough on its own to trigger that constitutional protection. Perhaps nothing is!</p><p>And so even though states can keep candidates off the ballot for lots of other constitutional reasons like being too young or not being a citizen or whatever, with this one, with the trying to overthrow the government and being banned for life from federal office because of it, like the constitution says in its plain language, on this one he's fine.</p><p><b>That's what the Supreme Court said today. Because of course they did.</b></p><p>If you're a Trump fan, if you're a Republican, if you are hoping for a return to power for Donald Trump in this Republican Party, today's Supreme Court ruling was of course great news. The bad news, on the other side of it, is that everyone can see what the Republican Party is like right now under Donald Trump. And <b>he doesn't just get the presidency thanks to the court trying to help him get it.</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>That's what the Supreme Court said today <i>because of course they did? </i></p><p>Trump doesn't just get the presidency <i>thanks to the court trying to help him get it?</i></p><p>That's the way Maddow's resentful conclusion began. Please don't ask us to tick off the various absurdities just in that opening part of her pseudo-analysis. </p><p>Maddow's resentful ending got dumber as it went. She never explained why the three liberal justices would have joined the other six in "trying to help him get it." </p><p>Indeed, she never did her viewers the favor of reminding them that the three liberal justices did in fact <i>agree with the other six</i> in the day's principal ruling—in finding that the state of Colorado didn't have the right to ban Trump from the ballot. </p><p>Did the three liberal justices say that <i>because of course they did? T</i><i>hanks to the fact that they were trying to help Trump get elected?</i></p><p>As Maddow's nine-minute ending rolled on, it just got dumber and dumber. By 9:18 p.m., her viewers were hearing this newly issued tribal bromide about Candidate Trump:</p><p></p><blockquote>MADDOW: He also slipped into admitting or thinking or positing once again that he is running against President Obama rather than President Biden. He does this all the time...</blockquote><p></p><p>If we want to be honest just once, Trump <i>doesn't</i> do that "all the time. " That said, he has explained, correctly or otherwise, why he sometimes does that. </p><p>Because we've watched a lot of red tribe cable, in which it's routinely said that the Obamas—Barack <i>and</i> Michelle—are still the ones who are calling the shots, we find Trump's explanation plausible. That said, being part of today's blue tribe means that you'll never be subjected to the complication of hearing what Trump has said. about something like that. </p><p>You'll never hear what he has said. Under new messaging protocols, you'll instead get to hear that Trump's "early onset dementia" is even worse than Biden's!</p><p>As a piece of analysis, the nine-minute conclusion to Maddow's monologue was an undisguised hot mess. If this is the best our tribe can expect from the person initially branded as Our Own Rhodes Scholar, you wonder why our society still bothers with higher education at all.</p><p>But so it goes when overpaid tribunes are allowed to voice their resentments without any possibility of critique, correction of challenge. Human nature leads us down the path to the gong-show pseudo-discussions now seen on both major channels. </p><p><i>American carnage</i>, the newly inaugurated President Trump once said. Had he referred to American <i>intellectual </i>carnage, we might have called him a seer. </p><p>These are the wages of the culture of segregation by viewpoint—a culture which, under current arrangements, is lustily practiced and enjoyed by red and blue tribals alike.</p><p><b>Tomorrow: </b>Red tribe "Bronze Age" culture</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com62tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-2597950075917243032024-03-05T15:52:00.003-05:002024-03-05T16:02:44.691-05:00Candidate Trump spoke for almost three hours! <p><b>TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2024</b></p><p><b>Morning Joe flogged four meaningless clips: </b>Citizens, can we talk?</p><p>Donald J. Trump has been making lunatic statements ever since he and Melania descended the escalator in June of 2015.</p><p>Strike that! At that time, he'd already been making crazy statements <i>for something like four years.</i> We refer to his years of unsupported, unsupportable claims concerning the place of President Obama's birth—the four years he spent on the Fox News Channel, establishing himself as king of the nation's birthers.</p><p>Trump has been making ludicrous statements for roughly a dozen years! For whatever reason, our own blue tribe has never been able to convince tens of millions of neighbors and friends that these ludicrous statements might be a reason keep him out of the White House.</p><p>In some ways, it's even worse than that! In the case of Trump's years of Fox-based birtherism, an amazingly large percentage of American voters <i>actually came to believe </i>his unsupported, unsupportable claims. Or at least so it seemed, based upon large numbers of nationwide surveys.</p><p>Here within our own blue tribe, we've never made much of an effort to determine why we can't persuade a larger number of voters to see Trump's lunatic statements as a reason to reject him. </p><p>Also this:</p><p>It has never seemed to cross our minds that some of this disconnect may lie, in some way and to some extent, with behaviors coming from us. As is always the case with our species' tribes, the problem can only lie with The Others. </p><p>Almost by definition, the problem <i>cannot</i> lie with us.</p><p>Now our tribe is involved in a great civil war—a great civil war in which our stars have decided to take a new tack. Instead of complaining about Trump's ludicrous, unsupportable statements, we've decided to pretend that his mental acuity is somehow coming undone right before our eyes.</p><p>For many voters, President Biden's mental acuity has now come into question. Increasingly, our blue tribe's reaction is to claim that Trump's mental acuity is on the way out too.</p><p>And so it happened that, yesterday morning, Joe Scarborough and the Morning Joe gang spent the first thirty-two minutes of their show pretending that a very short set of video clips shows that Trump is a giant hot mess, mental acuity-wise. </p><p>The four (4) extremely short clips were drawn from a pair of speeches Trump gave at a pair of weekend rallies. Just so you'll know, here are links to the videotape of those (lengthy) speeches:</p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Saturday, March 2</span></b><br />Greensboro, North Carolina<br /><a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?533855-1/president-donald-trump-holds-rally-greensboro-north-carolina#" target="_blank">Approximate length of speech</a>: One hour, 23 minutes</blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Saturday, March 2</span></b><br />Richmond, Virginia<br /><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGgpKBQQ_sw" target="_blank">Approximate length of speech</a>: One hour, 31 minutes</blockquote><p>In other words, Trump gave a pair of lengthy speeches, totaling almost three hours. Out of that sandstorm of crazy misstatements, the Morning Joe gang extracted four (4) extremely short video clips in which Trump is supposedly committing the "gaffes" which defined his allegedly "gaffe-filled weekend."</p><p>Two of the alleged "gaffes" seem to involve a slurring of, or a stumbling over, a pair of words. In the case of the other two "gaffes," it isn't entirely clear what the nature of the "gaffe" is even supposed to be.</p><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240304_110000_Morning_Joe/start/720/end/780" target="_blank">If you choose to click this link</a>, you can see Scarborough playing the video of these alleged "gaffes" at 6:12 yesterday morning. Believe it or not, you can then see him and the rest of the gang go on to spend the next twenty minutes pretending that these alleged "gaffes" show that Trump is losing his mental acuity in a way which goes beyond the public perception concerning President Biden.</p><p>From 6:12 through 6:32, with no commercial breaks, Joe and Mika and four useful helpmates flog the alleged meaning of these alleged "gaffes." For the record, we would guess that two of the alleged gaffes are actually teleprompter errors, with Trump suddenly forced to halt what he's saying until the prompter can catch up.</p><p>The alleged slips are wholly inconsequential. In the case of the fourth alleged gaffe, the video clip is "edited" so tightly that we automatically suspected what we later discovered to be the case—Trump instantly corrected the alleged verbal slip, presumably as soon as the teleprompter caught up.</p><p>Donald Trump has been making ludicrous misstatements for the past dozen years. The Morning Joe gang has now come close to going him one better, pretending to diagnose tiny slips which show that he is losing his marbles in a way designed to rival the public perception concerning President Biden.</p><p>Trump has been loco for a very long time. Does anyone think it's going to work on a political basis when Scarborough and his gang of acolytes play the fool in this way?</p><p>In fairness, we can't tell you that it <i>won't</i> work to some degree. But our tribe has spent a very long time failing to make a larger connection with tens of millions of red tribe voters, and we've never shown an inclination to wonder if our own behaviors could possibly be playing a role in this dangerous and destructive disconnect.</p><p>Is it possible that the problem lies in part with us? <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240304_110000_Morning_Joe/start/720/end/780" target="_blank">If you start watching here, at 6:12 a.m.</a>, and you're willing to let the good times roll, you'll soon see Scarborough wondering why the red tribe's voters are so "stupid."</p><p>Increasingly, he likes to affect a comical southern accent as he mocks the stupid Trump voters. He also enjoys name-calling Rep. Comer (R-Ky.) as the southern-accented sitcom figure, "Arnold the Pig."</p><p>Just a thought:</p><p>This may not be the best way to influence friends and neighbors. That said, our tribe has been inclined to behave this way for an extremely long time, and it never seems to enter our heads that we possibly ought to stop.</p><p>Donald Trump spoke for almost three hours this weekend. His speeches were filled with ludicrous misstatements. The Morning Joe gang somehow managed to come up with four utterly meaningless clips.</p><p>That was the best the gang could manage, but so what?<i> </i>They clucked about it all morning!</p><p>The Fox News Channel is losing its mind. Have you watched <i>our</i> channel lately?</p><p><i><br /></i></p><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com45tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-36527056841430120622024-03-05T12:09:00.000-05:002024-03-05T12:09:33.206-05:00CULTURES: Blue tribe stars seemed to be shocked...<p><b>TUESDAY, MARCH 5, 2024</b></p><p><b>...by the Court's (unsurprising) decision: </b>Yesterday morning, at 10 a.m., a new arrival on the front became the topic of general conversation.</p><p>That new arrival was the Supreme Court's decision in the Colorado ballot removal case. Dual headlines included, the leading news report in today's Washington Post (print edition) <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/04/supreme-court-trump-ballot-decision/" target="_blank">starts exactly as shown</a>:</p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Supreme Court keeps Trump on ballots nationwide</span></b><br />UNANIMOUSLY REVERSES COLORADO RULING</blockquote><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p><b></b></p><blockquote><p><b>The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously sided with former president Donald Trump, </b>allowing the 2024 Republican presidential front-runner to remain on the election ballot and reversing a Colorado ruling that disqualified him from returning to office because of his conduct around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.</p><p><b>The justices said the Constitution does not permit a single state to disqualify a presidential candidate from national office.</b> The court warned of disruption and a chaotic state-by-state patchwork if a candidate for nationwide office could be declared ineligible in some states, but not others, based on the same conduct.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>The decision was "unanimous," the front-page news report said. </p><p>A front-page report in the New York Times used that very same word. "Though the justices provided different reasons, the decision’s bottom line was unanimous," Adam Liptak wrote in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/us/politics/trump-supreme-court-colorado-ballot.html" target="_blank">the second paragraph of his own report</a>.</p><p>Rightly or wrong, wisely or not, all nine justices had decided that the state of Colorado <i>didn't</i> have the right to bar Donald J. Trump from the ballot. Not should this decision—a decision reached by all nine justices—have come as some sort of surprise.</p><p>Consider what happened on the evening of February 8, when Rachel Maddow joined her "beloved colleagues" in telling us, her "beloved viewers," about that day's Supreme Court hearing on this very matter.</p><p><a href="http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2024/03/cultures-on-fox-viewers-are-given.html" target="_blank">As we noted yesterday</a>, Maddow started, rather weirdly, by telling us that we were her "beloved viewers." She then offered her own reactions to the day's hearing, which had been broadcast live, though in audio only.</p><p>Eventually, Maddow turned to Ari Melber, the legal analyst among her collection of colleagues—and when Maddow threw to Melber, <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240209_010000_Trump_Ballot_Battle/start/3060/end/3120" target="_blank">he straight-up told her this</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>MELBER (2/8/24): It speaks to how bipartisan this was, based on the different Justices appointed by different parties. <b>Based on the questioning, which is all we have to go on, I would give you eight or nine votes likely against the Colorado Trump ballot ban</b>. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>And that's not because all eight or nine of those people are soft on insurrection. It's because of the things you raised and that we heard some in the questioning about.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Could Candidate Trump be banned from the ballot? As Melber finished a fairly lengthy initial statement, <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240209_010000_Trump_Ballot_Battle/start/3300/end/3360" target="_blank">he offered this assessment</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>MELBER: I think that <b>the justices, including the Democratic appointees</b>, basically said, "Yes, but not at the state level."</blockquote><p></p><p>So Melber said, all the way back on the evening of February 8. </p><p>The whole fandango had been quite bipartisan, Melber said. Even "the Democratic appointees" seemed to be down with the idea that the state of Colorado <i>didn't</i> have the right to remove Trump from the ballot.</p><p>That was Melber's assessment, based on that day's hearing. Nor was Melber's analysis some sort of outlier at this point in time. </p><p>The next morning, front-page reports in the Post and the Times offered the same assessment. In the self-same Washington Post, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/08/supreme-court-oral-arguments-trump-colorado-ballot/" target="_blank">a February 9 report said this</a>:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">Supreme Court poised to allow Trump to remain on Colorado ballot</span></b></p><p><b>The Supreme Court on Thursday seemed poised to allow former president Donald Trump to remain on the Colorado ballot,</b> expressing deep concerns about permitting a single state to disqualify the leading Republican candidate from seeking national office.</p><p><b>Justices from across the ideological spectrum warned of troubling political ramifications if they do not reverse a ruling from Colorado’s top court</b> that ordered Trump off the ballot after finding that he engaged in insurrection around the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.</p><p>The court was considering the unprecedented and consequential question of whether a state court can enforce a rarely invoked, post-Civil War provision of the Constitution to disqualify Trump from returning to the White House.</p><p>During more than two hours of argument,<b> the justices asked questions that suggested their often divided bench could reach a unanimous or near-unanimous decision</b> to reject the challenge to Trump’s eligibility brought by six Colorado voters...</p></blockquote><p></p><p>It was instant conventional wisdom—conventional wisdom which turned out to be thoroughly accurate! Yesterday morning, the court ruled in precisely the way Melber had predicted to his beloved colleague four weeks before:</p><p>As it turned out, all nine justices agreed. For better or worse, the state of Colorado did<i> not </i>have the right to bar Candidate Trump from the ballot. So said all nine justices, including the three from our own blue tribe.</p><p>Back on February 8, it had been conventional wisdom: </p><p>The ruling was likely to be unanimous. The ruling would go against Colorado, and it would favor Trump.</p><p>In that sense, there was zero reason for surprise when the court issued its ruling yesterday morning. And yet, starting at 4 p.m., the major stars on the blue tribe "cable news" channel expressed their outrage—and their apparent surprise—about the heinous ruling the court had shockingly issued.</p><p>At 4 p.m., Nicolle Wallace seemed to be shocked by what the court had done. At 9 p.m.,<i> we ourselves</i> were somewhat shocked by the way Maddow presented this widely anticipated ruling.</p><p>That said, we're not sure we can remember a time when our nation's two warring tribes disintegrated into so much bad faith—or perhaps, into so much furious true belief, furious<i> tribal </i>true belief which serves to overwhelm sound journalistic judgment.</p><p>(Or into so much baldly mercantile conduct? We can't tell you that.)</p><p>In some ways, the cultures of our two warring tribes are strikingly different. We know of no one in the world of blue tribe cable news who behaves in the way Greg Gutfeld behaved last night on his eponymous primetime program on the red tribe's channel.</p><p>In our view, Gutfeld—a 59-year-old man—is a little bit nutty and a whole lot more than a little bit smutty. We know of no one in the blue tribe orb who behaves in anything resembling the way he and his gang of flyweight guests routinely behave, on a nightly basis.</p><p>On the other hand, this:</p><p>In recent days, we've frequently thought of the poisonous culture outlined by Robert Graves in his acclaimed 1934 novel,<i> I, Claudius. </i></p><p>In that historical novel, the reader sees the way the Roman public was routinely deceived about the workings of their republican institutions. These repeated deceptions took place as central figures behind the throne engaged in ongoing behavior which was <i>literally</i> poisonous.</p><p>We've often thought of that acclaimed novel—and of the subsequent, highly acclaimed BBC/PBS series—as we've watched our own blue tribe match much of the more unfortunate conduct of its red tribe rival of late.</p><p>We were struck by Maddow's behavior as she railed against the court's unanimous assessment last night. One hour later, we were struck by a claim advanced by Lawrence O'Donnell—a tribally pleasing claim which strikes us as simply false.</p><p>The furious Maddow seemed to be shocked by the Court's (unanimous) assessment. As we thought back to the events of February 8, her reaction struck us as perhaps a bit strange—but also as an artifact of the deeply flawed human nature which was developed long ago, in our imperfect species' prehistoric past.</p><p>Can we blue tribe denizens learn to see ourselves as we secretly are? Might we be willing to take The Blue Tribe Challenge? </p><p>History suggests that the answer is no! That said, we'll continue to look at the cultures displayed in certain works of high-end literature as we fruitlessly continue to suggest that we blues might strive, like the famous physician of old, to learn how to heal ourselves at this time of peril. </p><p><b>Tomorrow: </b>What Maddow, O'Donnell said</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-3295315888682081642024-03-04T14:23:00.003-05:002024-03-04T14:24:57.903-05:00Suddenly aware of Bronze Age Pervert!<p><b>MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2024</b></p><p><b>We arrive on the scene a bit late:</b> Yesterday afternoon, as the Celtics pulled away from the Warriors, we <span style="font-size: medium;">switched over to the C-Span book event which appeared beneath this byline:</span></p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></b></p><blockquote><b><span style="font-size: large;">Anne Applebaum and Ezra Klein on the Future of Democracy</span></b></blockquote><p></p><p>The month-old discussion took place in Rancho Mirage. A name like Rancho Mirage makes us wonder if the gods are possibly having some fun, but at least it's better than watching an event from Rancho Cucamonga. </p><p>We arrived at the discussion midway through. At the 39-minute mark on the C-Span videotape, <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?533290-2/anne-applebaum-ezra-klein-future-democracy" target="_blank">Klein can be seen saying this</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>KLEIN (2/2/24): One thing I'm a litle, I'm more attentive to these days is what it looks like to be a young person coming up in Republican Party politics. I mean, what kinds of things are you reading? What kinds of—</p><p>The fact that you had all these young campaign staffers who had to get fired this year because of what turned out to Nazi imagery in the meme videos they were making for Ron DeSantis and people like that, that was worrying. Because I don't think they knew what that imagery was. But it was in the world they were inhabiting online. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p><b>The kinds of thinkers who have become more salient on the Republican side, people like this online writer Bronze Age Pervert? </b></p><p>Like that's a real thing. You can look it up. </p><p>[GESTURING TOWARD APPLEBAUM]</p><p><b>The Atlantic has done a great profile of Bronze Age Pervert.</b> Because we are all demeaned now, having to describe reality.</p><p>[LAUGHTER OFF-CAMERA]</p><p>I'm not sure—<b> For a long time, I thought Trump was an isolated kind of threat,</b> and as a politician, in a way, I think he is.<b> But what he is has kind of spread more broadly.</b></p><p>And so, I don't know. I don't know if this is kind of a temporary threat that America navigates its way past or not. I don't know what Gen Z's politics ends up looking like. </p></blockquote><p></p><p>Klein went on from there. But who in the world is "Bronze Age Pervert?" And how did we manage to miss that great profile of this "online writer" in The Atlantic?</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/bronze-age-pervert-costin-alamariu/674762/" target="_blank">The Atlantic profile is here.</a> It was written by Graeme Wood, who has apparently known the online figure in question for something like twenty years.</p><p>Politico Magazine offered a second profile, with no paywall. <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/07/16/bronze-age-pervert-masculinity-00105427" target="_blank">You can read that profile here</a>.</p><p>These profiles appeared last summer when we were locked away in a "skilled nursing facility," receiving ten minutes of bandaging per day for a brand-new surgical wound. We had little access to the Internet. That's when the profiles appeared, which would explain why we missed them. </p><p>The Atlantic profile strikes us as massively illuminating. For example, what's up with the peculiar impulses of a figure like Steve Bannon? Without mentioning Bannon by name, it seems to us that the profile by Wood may make that conundrum quite clear.</p><p>We expect to return to these profiles of Bronze Age Pervert at some point. For today, we'll offer this one passage from The Atlantic, print edition headline included:</p><p><b><span style="font-size: large;"></span></b></p><blockquote><p><b><span style="font-size: large;">The Rise of Bronze Age Pervert</span></b></p><p>[...]</p><p>Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. <b>Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history.</b> Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.</p><p><b>But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. H</b>e said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.”<b> The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. </b>Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. <b>These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, </b>and that the mistake should now be corrected.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Some of his best students had given up on classical liberalism, Professor Garsten said. Among the writers to whom they were drawn was the follow called Bronze Age Pervert.</p><p>In that passage, Wood describes classical liberalism as "the most successful idea in history," though only "by some measures." We'll flip the lens, focusing on the fact that this most successful idea "has existed for only a few centuries."</p><p>Translation:</p><p>For many members of our war-inclined humans, classical liberalism is a very recent layer of ideation laid down upon a much older set of impulses and reactions. For people like the online writer whose thinking Wood describes, that new layer of ideation doesn't seem to be establishing itself as a successful transplant.</p><p>Our own surgical wound still hasn't healed. For the online writer Bronze Age Pervert—Wood supplies his actual name—it looks late that recent set of new ideas hasn't really gained purchase.</p><p>Until yesterday, we'd never heard of Bronze Age Pervert. We <i>had</i> heard of Steve Bannon, and of quite a few others like him.</p><p>What in the world did Bannon have in mind when he said he wanted to deconstruct the administrative state? Wood's profile of this online writer may start to offer an answer, without necessarily reassuring us that the center will know how to hold.</p><p>Wood's profile of this online writer may start to help us see why our existing blue tribe elites have shown so little skill at the task of holding back the pro-Trump wave. As for Ezra, we think he ought to make an attempt to "demean himself" more thoroughly. It seems to us that Wood's profile may start to light the way down many dark corridors and paths.</p><p>What is driving a person like Bannon, and possibly a person like Trump? Thinking about the popular online writer BAP may be a good way to find out.</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com71tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8611810694571930415.post-17296024182136484362024-03-04T09:53:00.003-05:002024-03-04T09:53:57.363-05:00CULTURES: On Fox, viewers are given the status of friends!<p><b>MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2024</b></p><p><b>At MSNBC, we viewers are now "beloved:"</b> Last Friday, Ainsley Earhardt was helping tease the 7 o'clock hour of the long-running morning program, Fox & Friends.</p><p>Earhardt's co-hosts had started the tease. At 7:02, <a href="https://archive.org/details/FOXNEWSW_20240301_120000_FOX_and_Friends/start/120/end/180" target="_blank">she ended the tease with this</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>EARHARDT (3/1/24): The second hour of Fox & Friends starts right now, and remember:</p><p><b>Mornings are better with friends!</b></p></blockquote><p><b></b></p><p>"Mornings are better with friends?"</p><p>We've heard the slogan several times in the past few weeks. Is it a long-standing branding / marketing message? We have no idea.</p><p>As we've noted in the past, Fox & Friends is one of the longest-running programs on the red tribe's Fox News Channel. The program premiered on February 1, 1998. The two principal male co-hosts—Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade—have remained in place to this day.</p><p>The idea that you're starting the day with friends is presumably offered as part of the program's appeal. It's an especially friendly branding message in an era in which our American nation, such as it was, has split into two rival nations—Red America and Blue.</p><p>Mornings are better with friends? For many viewers, the message may be reassuring.</p><p>If you're starting the day with friends, you as a viewer know that you will never be confronted with material that challenges you—material you may dislike. You'll hear one set of facts, frameworks and viewpoints—full stop. </p><p>Every guest on the friendly program will reinforce your pre-existing point of view!</p><p>Presumably, your friends will always service your needs and your tribal desires. So it goes as red tribe viewers are told that they'll be happier if they start the day with friends.</p><p>This implicit reassurance is a long-standing part of red tribe culture. That said, let's recall a bit of advice we blue tribe viewers received as we watched The Rachel Maddow Show on Monday evening, February 5.</p><p>Midway through the hour, Maddow began calling her viewers' attention to an upcoming event. Directly out of a commercial break, she began her new segment <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240206_020000_The_Rachel_Maddow_Show/start/1920/end/1980" target="_blank">with a somewhat unusual suggestion</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote>MADDOW (2/5/28):<b> So if you can change your schedule around this week</b>—your school schedule, your work schedule or childcare, whatever you need to do—if you can make time for it on Thursday morning, this week,<b> you will have the opportunity to hear American history being made, live and in real time.</b></blockquote><p></p><p>That Thursday morning, at 10 a.m. Eastern, the Supreme Court was going to hear oral arguments in the Colorado ballot case. This was the case that would decide whether "states can keep Donald Trump off the ballot under the provisions of the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution," Maddow correctly said.</p><p>The case would be argued that Thursday morning. Maddow was suggesting that viewers might want to change their schedule around so they could listen to the oral arguments, which were going to be broadcast live—audio only—on MSNBC.</p><p>A ten-minute segment followed. As she continued, Maddow listed the three main questions the Court would likely be exploring, then she offered this:</p><p></p><blockquote>MADDOW: <b>Anything can happen. The whole country is going to be listening in Thursday morning. </b>Luckily for us, people who are experts at these things can help us understand what we should be listening for.</blockquote><p></p><p>"The whole country is going to be listening?" Excitement about the hearing was running high on this cable news channel.</p><p>To our ear, it seemed a bit odd when this major media figure suggested that viewers should rearrange their school, work or childcare arrangements so they could listen on Thursday morning as American history was being made. </p><p>By now, it wasn't entirely clear that any major history actually <i>would</i> be made. Also, Supreme Court hearings are famously hard to follow, especially so since videotape isn't allowed.</p><p>To our ear, Maddow's suggestions seemed a bit overheated—but, on balance, so what? Then, at the end of her hour, Maddow returned to the topic as she threw to Lawrence O'Donnell. </p><p><a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240206_030000_The_Last_Word_With_Lawrence_ODonnell/start/0/end/60" target="_blank">She started by saying this</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>MADDOW: Just a little note for your calendar before we go. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>This Thursday, 10 a.m. Eastern, the Supreme Court is going to livestream the oral arguments on whether Donald Trump is disqualified from holding federal office in the United States.<b> Here at MSNBC, we will have that audio live and in full</b>...</p><p><b>Then Thursday night, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, I'll be here with all my beloved colleagues</b>. We will have a primetime recap of those oral arguments. I'll see you then.</p><p>That does it for us tonight. <b>Now it's time for The Last Word with the great Lawrence O'Donnell.</b></p></blockquote><p></p><p>There followed a discussion with the great O'Donnell. During that throw, Maddow reported that she had just readjusted her own Thursday morning schedule—that she'd done so rather frantically.</p><p>She had done so "in a panic," she told O'Donnell—later, she called it "a moral panic"—so that she would be able to listen to the livestream that Thursday morning.</p><p>Had Maddow really been in "a moral panic" as she adjusted her schedule? We would assume that the answer is no—that Maddow was simply telling us, as she is inclined to do, that her all-around state of being is more dramatic than ours.</p><p>That said, we were most struck by the reference to the people with whom she would recap the events on Thursday night:</p><p>Those people are her "<i>beloved"</i> colleagues? We didn't think we'd ever heard that characterization before.</p><p>Let's be clear! Presumably as a branding and marketing mechanism, hosts of MSNBC programs have long since begun describing their colleagues and guests as "friends." Before too long, the inevitable embellishment began creeping into the messaging, with colleagues being described as "dear friends," even as "dear, dear friends."</p><p>So it has gone as "cable news" channels convince their viewers that they will be safe within a network of friends if they watch the channel in question. Now, those "dear, dear friends" had been bumped up <i>another</i> notch, attaining the peculiar status of being "beloved."</p><p>For us, the oddness of this presentation lingered when Maddow appeared with her colleagues on that Thursday evening broadcast. </p><p>In truth, the oral arguments hadn't seemed to proceed in the way our blue tribe had hoped. But as Maddow called the roll of the colleagues who would be part of the evening's two-hour broadcast, <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240209_010000_Trump_Ballot_Battle/start/2220/end/2280" target="_blank">she referred to them as her "beloved colleagues" again</a>.</p><p>We were struck by the hint of desperation involved in this marketing device. She then brought the analysts right out of their beanbag chairs <a href="https://archive.org/details/MSNBCW_20240209_010000_Trump_Ballot_Battle/start/2340/end/2400" target="_blank">when she offered this</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>MADDOW (2/8/24): In the 1970s, Watergate hearings were also broadcast live during the workday. Recognizing how consequential, how important those hearings were, news networks during that time started recapping each day's Watregate hearings at night, on TV, in prime time, so no one would miss out on that incredibly important history in the making.</p><p>We then did the same during the daytime hearings of the January 6 investigation in Congress in 2022. We know from what we heard from <b>you, our beloved viewers</b>, that that was valuable, that was a useful thing. </p><p>And so here we are, together again, tonight, with basically the same approach.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>The analysts came right out of their chairs! Quickly, let's summarize:</p><p>By now, it seemed likely that no incredibly important history in the manner of Watergate was going to emerge from Monday's oral arguments. (We may find out today.)</p><p>Still and all, Maddow showered MSNBC with praise, comparing its recaps of the January 6 hearings to what had happened during that famous era.</p><p>As Maddow offered this introduction, she referred to the people sitting around her as "beloved colleagues" once again. But she brought the analysts right off their futon mats with that reference to us out here in TV land:</p><p>We were now the "beloved viewers" of our blue tribe's channel! We were the beloved viewers she and her beloved colleagues were working so hard to serve!</p><p>Over on the Fox News Channel, red tribe viewers have merely been told that they've attained the status of friends. On our own blue tribe channel, we've been bumped up to "beloved!"</p><p>To our ear, this was very strange journalistic behavior by a very major media figure. Maddow's formulations struck us as very strange. As always, your assessments may differ.</p><p>Our assessment? As in The Iliad, so too here:</p><p>As we've split into two separate nations, the cultures of our red and blue nations have sometimes grown quite different. Sometimes, though, those failing cultures are startlingly the same.</p><p><b>Tomorrow:</b> The wages of "segregation"</p><div><br /></div><b>bob somerby</b>http://www.blogger.com/profile/02963464534685954436noreply@blogger.com82