Supplemental: The truth about our big media stars!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 2015

Christie, Cosby, Clinton: Frank Bruni is upset today with what Chris Christie said.

More specifically, he’s upset with the failure of Republican candidates to denounce Donald Trump’s recent remarks about Mexican immigrants.

According to Bruni, “Republicans can’t summon the courage to take on the dark heroes of the party’s lunatic fringe.” Eventually, he describes Christie’s failure to challenge what Trump said:

BRUNI (7/8/15): Trump’s rant about immigrants, which he has since amplified, was another squandered moment.

Chris Christie could have made good on his boasts about always telling it like it is and being unconstrained by politesse. Instead he made clear that he liked Trump and considered him a friend. That soft crunching sound you heard was the supposedly hard-charging New Jersey governor walking on eggshells.

That was Bruni’s full account of what Christie said.

Strange! As of this morning, we’d seen tape of Christie’s statements concerning Trump about a million times. For that reason, we were surprised, but not surprised, by Bruni’s peculiar account.

What sorts of things has Christie said about Candidate Trump’s remarks? He made the following statement last Thursday, in a New Hampshire town hall. The videotape was played that evening on the Sharpton program:

CHRISTIE (7/2/15): The comments were inappropriate and they have no place in the race. I think it has been well documented over time that there have been certain elements of our party that have been unfriendly to elements of our population, including the Latino community, and we need to change that. Because we need to broaden our party to create a coalition that’s going to be able to win national elections.

Since that time, Christie has been quoted, in other forums, saying the remarks by Trump were “wholly inappropriate” and “highly inappropriate.” For that reason, we were surprised, though not surprised, by what Bruni wrote.

In truth, our “journalists”—especially our high-ranking stars—are relentlessly banal. Defiantly, relentlessly, they hand you the stories they like.

Their slippery dishonesty is perhaps their defining characteristic. That and their genuine lack of intellectual skill.

Bruni’s account of what Christie said is very much par for the course. Our journalists aren’t especially honest. Beyond that, they simply aren’t very sharp.

Our journalists have a very hard time performing the most basic tasks of their profession. Consider the problems they have had discerning what Bill Cosby said.

As you may have noticed, our reporters have had a hard time in the past two days figuring out what Cosby did, and didn’t, testify to back in 2005. Even as of this morning, the New York Times had its thumb on the scale a fair bit in its front-page report in the Business Day section.

On page B1, the Times describes “Mr. Cosby’s admission in a newly released court document that he had obtained quaaludes to give young women with whom he wanted to have sex.” The Times links that statement to other statements, by alleged victims, that they feel vindicated by the new court documents.

(Headline: “Bill Cosby Admission About Quaaludes Offers Accusers Vindication.”)

For ourselves, we don’t doubt that Cosby’s accusers are making accurate claims. But the Times is a journalistic organization, and this report was a news report, not an opinion column.

You had to read much further in this morning’s report to reach this amplification on page B6: “In the records, Mr. Cosby did not admit drugging witting women” (our emphasis).

That’s a very basic distinction. But given their weak intellectual skills, it has taken our press corps the past two days to sort this matter out, to the extent that they have.

Let’s be frank and refreshing! For many members of our press corps, that distinction is simply too hard to follow. That’s especially true in a matter like this, where people have largely decided what the truth surely is.

(By the way: Is that distinction too hard for you to follow? Please ask yourself that basic question before you start offering comments.)

That said:

If it’s true banality you seek, we recommend today’s Morning Joe segment concerning Candidate Clinton’s interview with CNN. To watch the discussion, click here.

We’ll discuss the segment in all its haplessness tomorrow. But we think it shows the abiding banality of the press corps’ high-profile performers.

Bless their hearts! On the videotape, the pundits take turns explaining how Candidate Clinton “looked” and “seemed” during her session with Brianna Keilar.

This is the world’s most subjective possible construct. There is no sign that this simple-minded thought ever enters their simple heads.

For the record, it isn’t just Barnacle and Capehart who play the assignment that way. After a bit of a pause, Katty Kay takes her inevitable turn, “bringing the eternal note of sadness in.”

These are defiantly banal people. If it weren’t for skills involving career, would they have any skills at all?

THEY KNOW WHAT YOU WANT: Maddow doesn’t seem to care!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 2015

Part 3—It’s time for the clowning to stop: Friend, how well do you understand the disputes and disagreements about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Check that! How well do you understand the disputes about international trade deals in general? With how much knowledge could you discuss the effects of NAFTA, to cite one high-profile example?

For ourselves, we know very little about international trade. We have heard that the general topic is a major big deal.

On May 7, we heard that from Rachel Maddow. At the start of this passage, she’s discussing the way Nike conducts its business around the world:

MADDOW (5/7/15): That kind of business arrangement, where even iconically American products get made overseas because it’s more profitable to have the work done in places with terrible wages and terrible labor standards, that age-old dynamic which has killed off huge swaths of working-class and middle-class American jobs over the last few decades, that dynamic, many people worry, will get even worse than it is now if this big 12-country Asia trade deal goes through, which the president favors.

Maddow expressed no opinion herself. But she told us that “many people worry” that the proposed Asian trade deal, which Obama favors, could “kill off huge swaths of working-class and middle-class American jobs.”

That sounds like a bad thing! Watching Maddow that night, you learned who has those fears about the proposed trade deal. “Labor and Democrats and people on the left and people in the center are opposed to that trade deal in considerable numbers,” the joke-laden cable star said.

If you watched Maddow that night, you got to see “Our Own Cantinflas” get serious for just a moment.

According to Maddow, her comments about the proposed tradedeal had “nothing to do with owls attacking joggers in that park in the Oregon state capital.” She wasn’t discussing “the still inexplicable girlfriend scandal that drove [Oregon’s] once very popular governor out of office.”

She was discussing the TPP; she made it sound like the substance of this proposed trade deal was a very serious matter indeed. Six weeks later, Maddow conveyed the same sense as she discussed the very serious “trade thing” Obama has been supporting:

MADDOW (6/17/15): So, that’s one thing. Tomorrow 10 A.M., potentially huge Supreme Court news.

In the other branch of government that is usually boring but occasionally fantastically interesting, huge news tomorrow from Congress. This trade thing that President Obama has been trying to get passed, the thing Republicans support but most Democrats don’t, looks like that trade bill may be back up tomorrow.

You saw all those super-melodramatic headlines about the Democrats turning on the president on the issue and the president’s sway with his own party. But Republicans have been a mess on this one too. Yesterday, Boehner fired three of the House Republicans on his team, people in charge of counting votes for him.

People who couldn’t count the votes on the issue. They themselves voted the opposite of the way they were supposed to be whipping.

So the trade bill is a big deal in terms of policy. It would affect 40 percent of the world’s economy. But the politics around it are like a hurricane without an eye. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. That might be tomorrow too, which will be a huge deal in Washington.

From there, Maddow began discussing the Pope. But along the way, viewers had been told that the proposed trade deal “is a big deal in terms of policy.”

The TPP “would affect 40 percent of the world’s economy,” the Crazy Guggenheim of cable news said, as she discussed a branch of government “that is usually boring.” Passage of the next day’s bill would be “huge news.”

In terms of policy, it sounded like the Asian “trade thing” might be a very big deal. According to Maddow, who’s boredom-averse, the proposed deal would affect almost half the world’s economy, in a way she didn’t attempt to explain. Six weeks earlier, she had said that the proposed deal might “kill off huge swaths of working-class and middle-class American jobs.”

In terms of policy, it sounded like the proposed Asian pact is an extremely big deal. That’s why we’re asking you to notice the fact that Maddow virtually never discusses this topic, even though she seems to think it might devastate large numbers of regular people.

Maddow never seems to lack for time to tell her endless jokes or to engage in her endless mugging, which ought to serve as an open insult to her viewers’ intelligence.

Last night, he played her toy xylophone again while “Nick” paraded behind her with his cardboard NBC sign. We were amazed, as we always are, to think that liberal viewers accept this.

It gets even worse. Night after night, Maddow wastes time in prodigious amounts with her inane pseudo-discussions of the large number of Republican candidates in the White House race. Last night, she wasted time once again discussing “my guy, Jim Gilmore,” who apparently told the Richmond Times Dispatch that he will be running for president again.

No imaginable announcement could be less significant. But Maddow burned away her standard dollop of time:

MADDOW (7/7/15): Today, another candidate says he is jumping to that end of the candidate pool. And it’s my guy! It’s Jim Gilmore, the former governor—

He’s only my guy because his press office calls us back and nobody else does.

Jim Gilmore, former governor of Virginia. He was chairman of the National Republican Party in 2001. He ran for president for a hot minute in 2007. In 2008, he was in the debates and everything before dropped out of the presidential race.

Later that year, he ran for Senate in Virginia, whereupon he lost to Mark Warner by 31 freaking points in that Senate race.

But be not afraid, Jim Gilmore, former governor of Virginia. He’s in. He told The Richmond Times Dispatch today that he’s running. He will declare that he is running around the time of the first debate which he and lots of other Republican presidential contenders will not be allowed into because Fox News says they can’t.

He will be, I think, the 17th major candidate to announce. Fox News says they are only taking ten. And by that dictate from Fox News, that makes the next three weeks something of not just critical, but existential importance for these candidates [showing photos] and my man, Jim Gilmore.

These guys, plus Jim Gilmore, only three will make it to the stage. This is now a dog-eat-dog, zero-sum game. Only three of the people can make it.

Maddow repeats this general story might after night, week after week, in much the way that Lady Macbeth became famous for washing her hands.

Just to clarify the chronology, Gilmore’s “hot minute” in the 2008 presidential campaign actually ended in July 2007. From there, he went on to be decimated in that Senate race.

For reasons which are blindingly obvious from the history Maddow recited, Gilmore’s potential candidacy would be one of the most ridiculous vanity runs in modern history. Despite this fact, Maddow loves to waste her viewers’ time talking about his deliberations, most recently on her previous programs of June 11, June 16, June 25 and July 2.

She loves to waste her viewers’ time on this ridiculous pap. By way of contrast, she almost never discusses the substance of that Asian trade thing, which “would affect 40 percent of the world’s economy” and might “kill off huge swaths of working-class and middle-class American jobs.”

Friend, are you a serious person? Are you a serious liberal or progressive? A serious citizen of the world? Are you a decent human?

If so, we think it’s time for you to wonder why Maddow behaves this way. We think it’s time for you to ask why she clowns in the ways she does on almost every program.

We think it’s time for you to ask why she burns time on “my guy, Jim Gilmore,” but can’t bring herself to attempt to explain the substance of a major policy fight which, according to her own fleeting remarks, would affect all kinds of people who aren’t corporate-paid multimillionaires.

Over the past few months, Maddow’s “campaign coverage” has become about as dumb as anything we’ve ever seen on a cable news program. (That takes in a lot of territory.) But if you watch the Maddow Show, you know next to nothing about the proposed Asian trade deal, or about the substance of international trade deals in general.

Maddow doesn’t seem to care a whole lot about the jobs of working-class people. In our view, it’s long past time when you should be asking why that is.

How much do you really know about the substance of international trade? Tomorrow, we’ll show you what Paul Krugman has said about the substance of the proposed TPP. On Friday, we’ll return to Maddow’s absurd pretense, in the past few months, of discussing this major topic.

(Warning! Don’t let the children watch!)

Maddow and her corporate owners branded her as Our Own Rhodes Scholar. Her lunacy has reached the point where it must be made to stop.

Tomorrow: What has Krugman said?

Supplemental: Live and direct from the London salon, the dope about Candidate Sanders!

TUESDAY, JULY 7, 2015

Languid Times foppist churns snark: Over at The Atlantic, Peter Beinart is obeying the rules of mainstream press corps press criticism.

Beinart makes the statement shown below concerning the coverage of Candidate Sanders. To us, his claim seems slightly strange—and he provides no examples:

“Media coverage of Sanders has been fawning, partly because many journalists harbor sympathy for his anti-corporate message but mostly because they’re desperate for a contested primary.”

Has media coverage of Candidate Sanders been fawning? That wouldn’t have occurred to us, and Beinart provides no examples to show us what he means.

In this way, he obeys his guild’s relentless code of silence. Dearest darlings! No names are allowed! The word “fawning” isn't polite!

For ourselves, we wouldn’t say the coverage was fawning on the front page of Saturday’s New York Times. Live and direct from Philips Exeter, Yale and London, the wondrously self-involved Sarah Lyall was languorously rolling her eyes at the early and silly youthful young pre-candidate.

Lyall seems like a real piece of work. Headline included, her profile of Sanders started like this:

LYALL (7/4/15): Bernie Sanders’s Revolutionary Roots Were Nurtured in ’60s Vermont

When he came to Vermont in the late 1960s to help plan the upending of the old social order, the future presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought with him the belief that the United States was starkly divided into two groups: the establishment and the revolutionaries. He was a revolutionary.

Did Bernie Sanders “go to Vermont in the late 1960s to help plan the upending of the old social order?”

Lyall seems to make that claim in her opening sentence—and she already seems to be snarking. It’s a version of the “Creeping Dowdism” which was established, decades ago, as the standard way this terrible newspaper wends its highly privileged way through its strikingly low-IQ life.

Lyall, now maybe 52, seems like a real piece of work. She and her husband, Robert McCrum, seem to have spent an inordinate amount of their professional time talking about themselves in an array of forums.

Check Lyall’s strange Wikipedia page for a sense of the foolishness here. Or read this fawning spread by Susannah Butter, who tells us that the marginal Lyall and her husband “are one of the more recognisable social couples on the London literary scene, she with her blonde hair and American warmth and he with his literary gravitas.”

Let us guess that Lady Lyall never went to Vermont, or anywhere else, intent on upending, reforming, ameliorating or improving any established social order of any discernible kind. Perhaps for that reason, it seems to have jumped into her small head that Sanders went to Vermont, long ago, “intent” on the “upending” she seems to have garnished with snark.

Is that why Sanders went to Vermont? In her front-page profile of Sanders, Lyall makes no apparent attempt to establish the truth of that assertion. Indeed, it’s striking to list the various things you still don’t know about the Sanders of the era in question after reading her weak imitation of the journalist’s art:

When did Sanders move to Vermont?
How old was he at the time?
Why has he said he moved to Vermont?
What had he done in the years before that? Had he gone to college? If so, where?

On its front page, the Times included a photo of Sanders with a young child, a photo which carried this caption:

“Bernie Sanders held his son during a meeting in 1971 with colleagues from The Vermont Freeman in Burlington, Vt.”

Was Sanders married? To whom? How many kids did he have?

Despite the presence of the photo, you don’t learn those sorts of things in Lyall’s profile either. Basic info is basically AWOL in this eye-rolling piece.

Let’s fill in a few of those answers. According to the leading authority on his life, Sanders moved to Vermont in 1968, at age 26 or 27. (He was born in September 1941.)

In an earlier profile of Sanders, Times reporter Mark Leibovich was able to provide some basics concerning the way he got there. Somehow, he also managed to tell a human tale:

LEIBOVICH (1/21/07): Sanders’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father, Eli, a struggling paint salesman who saw his family wiped out in the Holocaust, worried constantly about supporting his wife and two sons. His mother, Dorothy, dreamed of living in a “private home,” but they never made it beyond their three-and-a-half-room apartment on East 26th and Kings Highway. She died at age 46, when Bernie was 19. “Sensitivity to class was imbedded in me then quite deeply,” Sanders told me.

Sanders spent a year at Brooklyn College before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he studied psychology and helped lead protests against racially segregated housing on campus. He spent time on a kibbutz in Israel after graduation and then moved to Vermont with his first wife. “I had always been captivated by rural life,” he says. As a child, Sanders attended Boy Scout camp upstate and used to cry on the bus as it returned him to New York at the end of the summer.

According to this profile from Chicago Magazine, “he and his college girlfriend, who became his first wife, bought 85 acres of woodlands in Middlesex, Vermont for $2,500” before moving to the state. Neither profile says that he was intent on upending the old social order, although he may have been.

In the main, Lyall’s profile is devoted to quoting silly-sounding things Sanders wrote in the early 1970s, while marveling at the fact that he didn’t have much money then. Did we note the fact that the writer is straight outta Exeter/Yale?

In fairness, quite a few people were saying somewhat silly things in the era in question. That said, we wouldn’t necessarily put our faith in Lyall’s paraphrasing and transcription of Sanders’ free-lance articles.

She says his pieces numbered like twelve, including the “diatribes.”

Lyall’s talent seems to be her ability to say silly-sounding things even now. For endless YouTube visits with the scribe, you can just click here.

We like Bernie Sanders’ politics a lot. We can also imagine him losing 49 states.

That said, we judge journalists here, not pols. Lyall’s front-page profile strikes us as snarky, unfinished, inept.

It doesn’t seem fawning to us. Think Maureen Dowd in a can, except Lyall isn’t that bright!

The Times is foppish all the way down. The paper brands itself as literary, upper-end, sophistiqué, insightful.

That branding is an endless charade. Concerning the Times, one imperative reigns:

Train yourself not to be fooled.

THEY KNOW WHAT YOU WANT: Maddow outlines the big giant Asia trade deal!

TUESDAY, JULY 7, 2015

Part 2—She doesn’t make it sound good: Friend, how much do you know and understand about the TPP—about the so-called Trans Pacific Partnership?

How much do you know and understand about trade legislation in general?

For ourselves, we’d say, “Not much.” But then, we have a ready excuse—we watch The One True Liberal Channel, whose hosts make very little attempt to explain such tedious topics.

In the case of the TPP, this insouciance produced an odd phenomenon in the past week or two. Famous hosts on The One True Channel were praising President Obama for his “best week ever”—and they were including the “important trade legislation” which had passed the Congress as part of that glorious week.

That trade legislation wasn’t the TPP itself, although at one point it wasn’t entirely clear that the talker Chris Matthews knew that. Still, the legislation in question was part of the process which may yet produce a TPP, and it was being hailed on The One True Channel despite its peculiar provenance, which went almost wholly unexplained.

How strange! In fashioning his best week ever, Obama had passed the trade legislation despite massive opposition from his own party. The bill in question had passed the House due to the joint efforts of Obama and John Boehner, a fellow who is normally ridiculed on The One True Channel.

As cable hosts presented the bill as part of that best week ever, they didn’t mention the peculiar vote counts which had occurred. In the congressional voting, the bill had been opposed by 158 of 186 Democrats in the House and by 31 of 44 Democrats in the Senate. These vote totals went unmentioned as cheerleaders served us our nightly porridge on the corporate cable channel designed for rubes like us.

Why would Obama support a bill which so many Dems opposed? What were the actual merits of this bill?

What are the potential merits and demerits of the actual TPP, which might emerge in the end? For ourselves, we can’t tell you much about questions like those. But then, we have that excuse.

Over the next two days, let’s consider the lazy way this topic has been covered on MSNBC’s flagship program, The Rachel Maddow Show. For today, let’s consider the way the program’s host described the potential “Trans Pacific Partnership” way back in early May, when we were all still young.

It was Thursday evening, May 7. President Obama had flown to Oregon. He was going to speak about the proposed trade bill the next day.

This produced Maddow’s strongest attempt, in the past several months, to discuss the proposed trade deal. Needless to say, she started her segment with some of her wonderfully whimsical humor about her own “fascinations:”

MADDOW (5/7/15): Here in the U.S. tonight, President Obama has just flown to the great state of Oregon.

Nothing to do with owls attacking joggers in that park in the Oregon state capital. Nothing to do with that state’s Republican Party chairman running a side business in which he asks members of the general public to mail him their urine.

Nothing about the still inexplicable girlfriend scandal that drove that state’s once very popular governor out of office. Nothing to do with any of those stories. Nothing to do even with Oregonians being obsessed with the carpet at the Portland airport.

The president’s visit has nothing to do with any of the truly strange news stories out of Oregon over the past few months that have made the state an object of national fascination, or at least an object of my fascination.

Now, President Obama’s visit to Oregon tonight is because he is going to Nike.

The president’s visit wasn’t about the owls, the urine or even the girlfriend scandal. Nor had those pointless events made Oregon an object of national fascination, though people like Maddow will often have a hard time drawing distinctions between themselves and the external world.

Instead, the president was going to Nike. Maddow now explained why, and shared a bit of her political insight:

MADDOW (continuing directly): Nike. Nike’s headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon. Nike’s a very large company. It has about 26,000 employees in the United States.

But the number of employees they have overseas just completely dwarfs their workforce at home. Yes, they’re headquartered in Oregon and they’ve got 26,000 American employees, but they’ve got a million people working for them overseas, in contract factories where the pay and the labor standards are generally terrible.

And that kind of business arrangement, where even iconically American products get made overseas because it’s more profitable to have the work done in places with terrible wages and terrible labor standards, that age-old dynamic which has killed off huge swaths of working-class and middle-class American jobs over the last few decades, that dynamic, many people worry, will get even worse than it is now if this big 12-country Asia trade deal goes through, which the president favors.

And so President Obama, mark my words, clearly has something up his sleeve here, because he has gone to Oregon tonight. He’s doing a DNC fund- raiser there tonight. But he is going to Nike headquarters tomorrow and it is at Nike where he’s going to give his speech tomorrow about why people should support his very controversial Asia trade deal.

Maddow wasn’t making this “very controversial trade deal” sound very good. She described an “age-old dynamic which has killed off huge swaths of working-class and middle-class American jobs over the last few decades.”

According to Maddow, “many people worry” that this dynamic will only get worse if this giant trade deal goes through. For that reason, she said Obama “clearly has something up his sleeve” in his trip to Oregon.

“Mark my words,” the cable savant said. Sure enough! The analysts did!

Why did Maddow feel so sure that Obama had something up his sleeve? As she continued, she explained. It had to do with Nike:

MADDOW (continuing directly): Nike is the poster child for why people are freaked out about that deal. Nike is the poster child for why labor and Democrats and people on the left and people in the center are opposed to that trade deal in considerable numbers.

So there must be something up his sleeves, right? This is, this is too obviously counterintuitive, right? It would be like him announcing the approval of the Keystone pipeline at the site of a pipeline spill, right? It doesn’t make sense for him to go to a company that’s sent all of its jobs to Vietnam to make a case for a trade deal that will make it easier for American companies to send all their jobs to Vietnam.

So it can’t be what it seems like. Something’s going on here.

According to Maddow, Nike’s international practices made it “the poster child” for liberal and Democratic opposition to the proposed trade deal. According to Maddow, endorsing the deal at Nike headquarters would be like endorsing Keystone at the site of an oil spill.

As she continued, Maddow gave herself a minor out. She also summarized the state of liberal opposition to the proposed trade deal:

MADDOW (continuing directly): The president is due to speak at Nike tomorrow, and we will see. Maybe it’s all as obvious as it seems. I think that we should expect some sort of surprise announcement tomorrow from the president, just given the place where he’s going to be making that speech. The president is due to speak at a DNC fund-raiser tonight in the meantime.

And you know, this trade issue is a divisive one in Democratic politics. Some Pacific Northwest Democrats like the powerful Senator Patty Murray of Washington, she supports the president on the trade deal, even though she’s willing to buck him from the left on other issues.

Other Pacific Northwest Democrats like Peter DeFazio of Oregon, he’s against the president on the trade deal. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supported the trade deal when she was in the Obama administration as secretary of state, but she’s now being much cagier about the issue now that she is running for president.

It was also an interesting consolidation of some of the loudest and most popular voices on the left side of the Democratic Party today, which is where that interesting dynamic is between the president and the left.

Today, President—excuse me, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for new populist economic policies from the Democratic Party.

Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio getting together. Hmmm.

So there’s interesting stuff going on, right? There’s a bit of a roiling going on in Democratic politics in general and specifically tonight.

President Obama is clearly going to drop something unexpected tomorrow on this big economic issue. Nobody quite knows where Hillary Clinton is going to land on that issue. Nobody quite knows where Hillary Clinton is going to land on a lot of issues as she keeps up her run for the Democratic nomination to succeed President Obama.

So there’s a little unexpected and sort of exciting drama in Democratic politics for once.

As she finished her discussion, Maddow sold us our nightly dose of “excitement” and “drama.” She didn’t tell us to “Watch this space”—although, as matters turned out, it was probably just as well.

Unless we’re missing something somewhere, this represents Maddow’s most thorough discussion of the proposed trade deal in the past several months. She presented the most basic possible outline of the trade debate of the past several decades, with liberals and Democrats generally saying that deals of this type have “killed off huge swaths of working-class and middle-class American jobs.”

It’s very, very, very rare to see Maddow address such mundane concerns. We suggest that you gaze on those words, enjoying them while you can.

That said, Maddow's discussion of international trade was extremely rudimentary this night. Let’s be candid:

If you get your news from this joke-laden show, you have very little real understanding of this proposed trade deal. We’ll flesh that point out tomorrow.

Maddow’s discussion was rudimentary—but she’d also made a prediction. Once the joking was done, she had said it was clear that Obama had something up his sleeve in his journey to Oregon.

There was no way you’d go to Nike to announce support for a giant trade deal! “So it can’t be what it seems like. Something’s going on here!”

Obama spoke at Nike the next day. For better or worse, it was exactly what it seemed like.

On Friday, May 8, Obama delivered his speech. In Saturday morning’s New York Times, Peter Baker reported what he said.

Front-page headline included:

BAKER (5/9/15): Obama Scolds Democrats on Trade Pact Stance

President Obama on Friday lashed out at critics within his own party as he accused fellow Democrats of deliberately distorting the potential impact of the sweeping new trade agreement he is negotiating with Asia and standing in the way of a modern competitive economy.

With the cutting tone he usually reserves for his Republican adversaries, Mr. Obama said liberals who are fighting the new trade accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, were ''just wrong'' and, in terms of some of their claims, ''making this stuff up.” If they oppose the deal, he said, they ''must be satisfied with the status quo'' and want to ''pull up the drawbridge and build a moat around ourselves.''

''There have been a bunch of critics about trade deals generally and the Trans-Pacific Partnership,'' he told an estimated 2,100 workers at the Nike headquarters here. “And what's interesting is typically they're my friends coming from my party.

“And they're my fellow travelers on minimum wage and on job training and on clean energy and on every progressive issue, they're right there with me. And then on this, they're like whupping on me.''

But Mr. Obama said that he had no political motive for supporting freer trade with Asia. ''I've run my last election,'' he said. ''And the only reason I do something is because I think it's good for American workers and the American people and the American economy.'' And so, ''on this issue, on trade, I actually think some of my dearest friends are wrong. They're just wrong.”

“The president's speech here on the sprawling campus of the sports apparel company represented his most expansive defense of his trade agenda since asking Congress to grant him negotiating power often called fast-track authority,” Baker further said.

Why was Obama saying these things? Why did he say that the giant trade deal would be good for American workers?

We don’t have the slightest idea—but then again, we have that excuse. Consider the chronology here:

On Thursday night, Maddow told us to mark her words. The president must have something up his sleeve, she all-knowingly said.

There was no way he’d gone to Nike to endorse a giant trade deal! De Blasio and Warren, she said!

On Friday, Obama spoke at Nike. Effusively, he endorsed the giant trade deal. He even said that some of his friends—presumably, people like de Blasio and Warren—were just “making this stuff up.”

The president had made big news that day—unless you get your news from the Maddow Show! That night, the program’s all-knowing savant and clown didn’t so much as mention what Obama had said. Nor did she mention his speech the next week, even after Obama specifically criticized Senator Warren, by name, over the ensuing weekend.

Tomorrow, we’ll see what Maddow did say the next week on her joke-laden corporate news program. But her viewers were never told about the speech Obama delivered at Nike. They weren’t told what he later said about Senator Warren. Her name wasn’t mentioned all week.

This is the way “the news” gets delivered on this joke-laden program. If we can say this without seeming snippy, it helps explain why we liberals are sometimes so clueless while Maddow’s so happy and rich.

Tomorrow: Maddow’s subsequent “coverage,” right up to the present

Supplemental: The New York Times defies belief!

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

Maureen Dowd goes there again: Finally, it has happened! A Yale professor, David Bromwich, has criticized the New York Times for its fatuous treatment of a Democratic White House contender.

To read his piece, click here.

We’ve been asking the professors to do this for years! Tomorrow, we’ll review the issues at hand. We’ll also profile Sarah Lyall, the Philips Exeter/Yale graduate who wrote Saturday’s front-page profile of the young Bernie Sanders.

For today, we’re going to stick with the basics. Yesterday, the Times placed the pitiful Maureen Dowd on the front page of its Sunday Review once again.

Seventeen years later, inevitably, she started with You Know Who. Needless to say, her dateline was Paris, a famous place we'll always have along with Dowd’s derangement

DOWD (7/5/15): The turquoise tranquillity of the Côte d’Azur was rocked a couple of times during the Cannes Lions Festival, the advertising world’s rosé-soaked answer to the Cannes Film Festival.

Al Gore snubbed Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky, who was giving a speech for Ogilvy & Mather about how she became “patient zero” in the cyberbullying epidemic, was slated to sit in a V.I.P. box with the former vice president, who got an award for being a good brand.

But her invite got yanked.

The contretemps was a reminder that Gore’s prissy attitude toward l’affaire Monica helped cost him the election, because he was so angry at Bill Clinton that he leashed the Big Dog, curtailing the president’s campaigning, even in the South. If Al had been less eager to put baby in a corner, there would have been no phony action on Iraq and plenty of action on melting glaciers.

Monica’s main bullies were not of the cyber variety. The Internet was just getting up and running. Her chief bullies were flesh and blood, a raffish president and feminist first lady who are now vying to be a feminist president and raffish first lad. They’re the ones who tried to paint her as a “narcissistic looney toon,” as Hillary put it to her friend Diane Blair.

Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary’s Doberman and email correspondent, led the sliming of Monica as a fantasist and stalker. Hillary’s friends do not regard Monica as a victim, but a predator. They think she let herself in for trouble when she took up with a married president who was a magnet for right-wing bullies.

Yet, as Hillary’s advisers said, being the victim of the Monica mess gave Hillary the impetus, and public good will, to start her own political rise.

In her speech at Cannes, Monica did say it hurt to be called “That Woman.” But other than that reference to Bill Clinton, she sticks to anonymous cyberbullies, which may be prudent, with Hillary out on the trail. And even if it’s a dodge, it’s nice to see the 41-year-old move out of her self-imposed exile, looking lovely, acting gracious and speaking out for a good cause.

There they were! Another 358 hiss-spitting words about “that woman,” You Know Who. Also, another complaint about the “prissy” Gore.

Simply put, Dowd’s can’t stop herself. Neither can the New York Times, who paired Dowd’s latest with this sad, disordered piece by Tim Kreider, an allegedly drunken man who doesn’t seem to like lower-class whites, who are less grand than he is.

If you want to understand the Times, we’d say that attitude is a key part of the profile. Returning to Dowd, let’s offer a few quick notes:

Dowd gives the clear impression that Gore had You Know Who’s invitation yanked last week. There is no evidence of that in the reporting of this pointless event.

Meanwhile, Miss Lewinsky has been taken by some to have said that she chose not to sit in the VIP box with Gore. Under the circumstances, that would be a sign of good judgment on her part, poisonous commentary-wise.

(It would also show good sense for Gore to avoid the pairing.)

Ignoring the lack of factual clarity, Dowd simply told you the version of the story she liked. From there, she continued her decades-old practice of gender-trashing Democratic men, who are all secretly women.

In Gore’s case, he was once “so feminized he was practically lactating.” On the Sunday before the 2000 election, Dowd pictured him singing “I Feel Pretty” as he admired himself in the mirror.

Yesterday, he was said to be “prissy” concerning Bill Clinton’s affair. Dowd will never stop writing such things, and the Times will never stop printing them.

(For the record: No, that actually isn’t the way George Bush ended up in the White House. The electoral situation confronting Gore was much more complex than that. In comments, it’s painful to see how easy it is to script the public to believe such things.)

It’s stunning to think that the New York Times keeps putting these cries for help in print. Even more amazing is the way they let their deranged star columnist complain about the people who “bullied” Lewinsky, “sliming her as a fantasist and a stalker.”

Dowd was very much one of those people! Among her three million real-time columns about That Woman was the demented late August piece directly comparing Miss Lewinsky to the famous Glenn Close character.

Below, we offer excerpts. Headline—“Monica Gets Her Man:”

DOWD (8/23/98): After the President's prime-time confession, the news media were abuzz about whether Mr. Clinton could repair his damaged relationships with his wife and daughter.

Suddenly, That Woman stamped her feet. Like the Glenn Close character in ''Fatal Attraction,'' Monica Lewinsky issued a chilling ultimatum to the man who jilted her: I will not be ignored.

She let it be known that she was wounded that the President had failed to apologize to her and had dismissed their grand, 18-month romance, their shared passion for books and laughs, as trivial—a mere mechanism for relieving Oval Office tension.

[...]

While she is not a stalker, since Mr. Clinton encouraged her interest for quite some time, she is certainly aggressive. Otherwise, as a mere intern, she could not have barged through all the protective layers around the President. And she was, according to the Tripp tapes, desperate to continue the relationship after the President had slithered away. I will not be ignored.

Monica has at least one special talent: she is relentless. It was the quality that got her noticed by Bill Clinton, and it is the quality that will prevent him from ever escaping her.

There is a sort of rough romantic justice here. It may be de trop to punish this President with impeachment or resignation. In his case, the punishment is the crime. Monica will never let him go. She will be center stage for the rest of his Presidency, doing a star turn at Congressional hearings, granting celebrity interviews, signing book and movie deals.

It will not be in the way she envisioned, but she will get to ride off into the sunset with her man after all. Monica Lewinsky is Bill Clinton's legacy. They are linked together forever and ever.

There’s more—there always was, and always will be—but you get the idea.

“They are linked together forever and ever?” As it turns out, that was a promise on Dowd’s part more than a prediction.

It’s easy to see that Dowd is some version of empty, lost, sad. It’s more important to notice the fact that the New York Times can’t see this.

Even seventeen years later, the Times insists on publishing this relentless dreck, which it rewarded in this case with its highest platform. In this case, the Times paired Dowd’s piece with that sad effort by Kreider.

The pieces are peas in a pod. Because we live in Baltimore, we know how silly and empty Kreider’s essay actually is. But even if you don’t live here, you should be able to see that.

The New York Times seems to be full of empty, lost, confused striving souls. Given the newspaper’s famous faux brand, it’s hard for people to see that.

Tomorrow: Kreider, Bromwich, Lyall and the soul of the New York Times

THEY KNOW WHAT YOU WANT: Barack Obama’s greatest week!

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

Part 1—As passed by Republican votes: Last Wednesday, Digby joined the liberal crowd, singing the week’s liberal song.

Her piece at Salon started like this. To us, this seemed a bit odd:

DIGBY (7/1/15): Last week was a productive one for President Obama. His approval ratings are up, he passed a major piece of legislation, he gave a historic eulogy at Charleston’s Emanuel AME church, and the Supreme Court handed down two rulings that will leave lasting positive marks on his legacy.

“Last week was a productive one for President Obama,” Digby said.

“He passed a major piece of legislation,” she said. To us, that sounded odd.

Why did that sound odd? Because the major legislation in question received support from very few Democrats in either the House or the Senate.

The legislation had been aggressively opposed by many liberals and progressives. In the actual congressional voting, the bill was opposed by 158 of 186 Democrats in the House and by 31 of 44 Democrats in the Senate.

Rightly or wrongly, Obama had passed the legislation with mainly Republican support. This wasn’t just Obama’s bill. For better or worse, it was also John Boehner’s.

Credit where due! As she continued, Digby acknowledged this state of affairs.

In our view, she performed a bit of a two-step in the process. The legislation which made Obama’s week “productive” was in fact “depressing” for her:

DIGBY (continuing directly): And it seems that liberals in general are feeling pretty good about things too. While the horrifying events of Charleston threw everyone for a loop, the long overdue realization that it was time to put the Confederate Flag into the history books was a welcome reaction. And while the passage of the fast-track legislation over the objections of the progressive base was depressing, the left put up a good fight that showed a path to winning future battles. Two big, highly anticipated Supreme Court decisions were met a huge sigh of relief, in the Obamacare case, and buoyant euphoria, in recognition of the right for gays and lesbians to marry. Sometimes it’s good to be a liberal.

As it turns out, “the passage of the fast-track legislation...was depressing,” Digby said. She said liberals were feeling good because of those other events.

It seemed to us that Digby was cheerleading just a bit. On a week when the president passed legislation she found depressing, she found a way to play along with the liberal meme of the week, in which this had been Obama’s greatest week.

She toned that language down a bit, changing the president’s week to “productive.” In the process, she gave him credit for two judicial decisions he hadn’t authored—and she smoothed her way past legislation he aggressively pursued, legislation which made her own head hurt.

To us, that was a bit of a two-step. In fairness, that put Digby miles ahead of the liberal cable hordes, who plowed ahead as if Obama’s success with that fast-track bill had been a triumph for socialist labor.

On the One True Liberal Channel, Obama’s week was being hailed—and that “depressing” piece of legislation was widely treated as one of the triumphs. On Tuesday night, Al Sharpton had started his program like this:

SHARPTON (6/30/15): Thanks to you for tuning in. We start with President Obama—loose, energized and with momentum coming off what many are calling the best week of his presidency. Today a reporter asked him about it.

OBAMA (videotape): In terms of my best week—now my best week, I will tell you, was marrying Michelle. That was a really good week. Malia and Sasha being born, excellent weeks. There was a game where I scored 27 points. It was a good week.

SHARPTON: It was a light-hearted moment, but the momentum is real. The president signed a major trade deal. His Charleston speech was stirring, maybe even healing. Two Supreme Court rulings cemented his legacy on Obamacare and gay rights. We saw the White House lit up in rainbow colors after the ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

In Sharpton’s recitation, that “major trade deal” was treated as a triumph—as part of that “best week.”

(He also credited Obama for the Court’s decision on same-sex marriage. He said it cemented Obama’s legacy on the subject, even though Obama opposed same-sex marriage until 2012.)

To us, that sounded a bit like cheerleading. But so what? One hour later, a loud cable talker was pushing the same line:

MATTHEWS (6/30/15): Well, after last week’s powerful sequence of triumphs for President Obama on trade, health care and same-sex marriage, his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is looking to capitalize on his momentum and that’s making some on the right nervous. President Obama reflected on his successful run last week earlier today. Here he is.

OBAMA (videotape): So in many ways, last week was simply a culmination of a lot of work that we have been doing since I came into office. How am I going to spend whatever political capital that I have built up? You know, the list is long. And my instructions to my team and my instructions to myself have always been that we are going to squeeze every last ounce of progress that we can make when I have the privilege—as long as I have the privilege of holding this office.

MATTHEWS: Isn’t that great, that the president of the United States, even he has to make lists of things he tells himself to do every day, like everybody else is trying to do?

Like Sharpton, Matthews treated the trade deal as one of the president’s “powerful sequence of triumphs.” The “depressing” nature of the triumph escaped his notice too.

The next night, on The Last Word, David Axelrod continued the theme:

O’DONNELL (7/2/15): Where do you place last week, David, in the Obama presidency?

AXELROD: Well, you know, obviously, it was a strong week, you know, for a variety of reasons. He had worked hard on this trade bill that was thought to be dead, it came back. You know, but the other—

He said today, and I think he was right, that really what it was, was a culmination of a number of things. The affirmation of the healthcare act was a culmination of, you know, a six-year effort on his part and it was—and so it was very satisfying...

“Yes, it was a really good week,” Axelrod said. To him, the trade bill was part of the package. Lawrence didn’t complain.

Without any question, Obama had some major victories during the week in question.

The Supreme Court refused to overturn the Affordable Care Act; this preserved the major legislative act of the president’s tenure. And he did prevail on that fast-track legislation—the legislation which Digby said left progressives depressed.

Can we talk? If you were watching MSNBC last week, you didn’t hear much extended discussion of that “fast-track” trade legislation.

You saw Matthews and Sharpton add it to the president’s triumphs without further comment. Other hosts ignored the matter altogether.

You heard little discussion of what the legislation accomplished. You heard very little discussion of the fact that the bill had been passed despite overwhelming Democratic Party opposition.

In many ways, this was fitting. If you watch MSNBC, you probably have little idea about this legislation.

Unless you watch Big Ed Schultz, you haven’t seen it discussed a whole lot. You haven’t seen its merits and its demerits discussed or debated.

Last week, you saw the legislation hailed as one of Obama’s triumphs, but you saw little discussion of its substance. You saw your favorite hosts rush past the fact that the bill was passed with Republican votes, in the face of overwhelming Democratic opposition.

All week long, we’ll be asking a question. Why have you heard so little discussion about this legislation? It can almost seem like the cable gods are keeping us barefoot and clueless!

How much do you think you know about this trade legislation? Why have you heard so little about it on The One True Channel?

Why have your favorite hosts ignored this major legislation? Is it too complicated to discuss? Could there be some other reason? Does the general avoidance of this topic fit some larger pattern?

We don’t know how to answer those questions. But we were struck by the discussions last week, in which this bill was treated as a triumph, with very few questions asked.

It almost seems like the cable gods may have stolen a line from the early Bob Dylan:

Progressives like Digby may (or may not) know what we the people need. But it almost seems like the cable gods think they know what we want.

For some reason, we don’t need to hear about that silly trade bill! To us, that avoidance seems to fit a pattern—a pattern which isn’t attractive.

Tomorrow: Rachel Maddow, early in May, describing a very bad bill

Supplemental: Joan Walsh and Chris and our discourse oh my!

FRIDAY, JULY 3, 2015

The fraudulence of Our Own Press Corps: For fraudulence and sheer inanity, it would be hard to top yesterday’s piece by Salon’s Joan Walsh.

According to Walsh, the mainstream press is promoting Candidate Sanders. Below, you see the way her piece began. Her claims are absurd, even ugly, in fairly obvious ways:

WALSH (7/2/15): If only the great Michael Harrington had lived to see this. So many brave Americans fought in vain to spread socialism in the United States, but it’s advancing in the summer of 2015 thanks to an unlikely vanguard: lazy and apolitical political reporters who love horse races and hate the Clintons.

Yes, the MSM is making sure that socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders is taken seriously in his uphill run against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. He’s surging in Iowa and New Hampshire, polls tell us, and attracting 10,000 people at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Wednesday night.

This lifelong lefty who attended Madison is thrilled to see it—and yet a little cynical, too.

I mean really, folks: If Sanders had a chance to become president, Mark Halperin would be the first in line to red-bait him, rather than shaming Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Clinton supporter, into doing it on Morning Joe.

Is the mainstream press “working hard” in some way to “make sure that Sanders is taken seriously?”

That strikes us as a ludicrous claim. Walsh presents exactly one example—the claim that Halperin “shamed” McCaskill into “red-baiting” Sanders on Morning Joe last week.

It’s an ugly claim; it’s also manifest nonsense. This was the first Q-and-A in McCaskill’s stumbling, incompetent appearance on Morning Joe:

BRZEZINSKI (6/25/15): Joining us now from Capitol Hill, Democratic senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri. Claire, great to have you back on the show...

Joe and Halperin here. I’ll start.

Bernie Sanders is doing quite well in the polls. And I guess we’re wondering. We know you’re “ready for Hillary.” Do you think there’s any concern there?

MCCASKILL: No, I think the media is giving Bernie a pass right now. I very rarely read in any coverage of Bernie that he’s a socialist.

I think everybody wants a fight, and I think they are not really giving the same scrutiny to Bernie Sanders that they’re giving to certainly Hillary Clinton and the other candidates...

To watch the whole segment, click here.

McCaskill noted that Sanders identifies as a socialist in the first words out of her mouth. She said the press rarely mentions this fact, a demonstrably ludicrous claim.

In her second question, Brzezinski asked McCaskill about the “massive crowds” Sanders has been getting. McCaskill said “it’s not unusual for someone who has an extreme message to have a following.”

Scarborough jumped in at that point, saying this: “So you think Bernie Sanders has an extreme message?” In her answer, McCaskill noted again that Sanders is “a socialist.”

If “red-baiting” occurred in this session, that’s where the baiting occurred. Plainly, McCaskill wasn’t “shamed into” any such conduct.

As for Halperin, he hadn’t even spoken yet. McCaskill had already dropped two S-bombs on Bernie’s head.

When Halperin did jump in, he asked McCaskill an obvious question, given what she had already said: “Name three specific positions he holds that you think are too far left, too socialist, to be elected.”

McCaskill stumbled and fumbled around trying to answer the question. For better or worse, she isn’t a skillful red-baiter.

There will be a lot of aggressive red-baiting if Sanders wins nomination. We’ll hear that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, that he wanted to hang with Fidel.

That said, Walsh’s piece was absurd, and even ugly, right from the start. It was also an obvious piece of propaganda—but then, that pretty much describes everything Walsh writes at this point.

In this case, Walsh was pimping for Candidate Clinton. Down through the years, Walsh has been willing to pimp for various sides.

So has her mentor and benefactor, cable talker Chris Matthews.

In line with current corporate arrangements, Matthews currently pimps for the Democrats and their wonderful national leaders. Under previous corporate owner Jack Welch, he savaged Clinton, Clinton and Candidate Gore in reprehensible ways.

No one distorted and dissembled any harder in the mainstream press corps’ two-year push to send George Bush to the White House. People are dead all over the world because of the things Matthews did.

(He was more influential back then.)

Currently, Walsh’s mentor is paid to pimp on Our Own Liberal Side. That doesn’t mean he has any idea what he’s talking about. Consider the astounding exchange he conducted on Hardball last night.

We’ve often noted the amazing way Paul Krugman’s work is ignored by the rest of the mainstream press. Last night, discussing Obama’s economic greatness, Matthews produced the perfect example.

Matthews said he was “defending this president as a major force in history.” Incredibly, he posed the question shown below to a youngish, three-pundit panel.

He spoke first with Time magazine’s Jay Newton-Small. His question was extremely basic—remedial, even. It concerned a topic Krugman has discussed a million times:

MATTHEWS (7/2/15): Do you know economics? Do you?

NEWTON-SMALL: Of course.

MATTHEWS: OK, let me ask you an economic question, because I don’t know the answer. That’s why I’m asking. It’s not a rhetorical question.

If you’d gone with an austerity policy like the Brits did—you know, like Cameron did over there, in the conservative party. Would this have gotten back the economy the way it has? If he had said, “I’m going to squeeze everything down, we’re going to stop spending, we’re going to tighten the belt.”

Would have worked, based on history right now?

Would an austerity program have worked after the economic collapse in 2008? How many thousand columns has Krugman devoted to this general topic?

We’ve often noted that Krugman’s work gains no purchase anywhere else—produces no wider discussion. Here was Matthews, saying he has no idea how to approach this topic—the topic Krugman has written about again and again and again.

Newton-Small was clueless too. So was Francesca Chambers, White House reporter for The Daily Mail:

NEWTON-SMALL (continuing directly): That’s a huge debate to have and clearly, Republicans would say no and Democrats would say absolutely. I’m sorry—Republicans would say yes, and Democrats would say—

MATTHEWS: But is there any anecdotal evidence of that, Francesca? That a tightened-belt, conservative policy, rather than his expansionary policy, would have worked? He had a policy. And it worked!

CHAMBERS: Well I will say, I agree. I think it’s difficult to get into counterfactuals here.

But it’s undeniable that the president had a really good week. He’s having a really good month. I mean, it is undeniable that the unemployment rate went down significantly since he took office, like he said today. It was nearing ten percent at the beginning of his presidency. Now, it’s down to five percent.

Michael Tomasky sat this one out, saying nothing about this super-basic question. At this point, Matthews rushed ahead to his next topic.

Would an austerity program have produced an economic rebound? Remarkably, Matthews stressed the fact that he didn’t know how to answer the question which has launched a thousand columns by Krugman.

Newton-Small and Chambers didn’t seem to have the slightest clue either. The two parties disagree, Newton-Small unhelpfully said. Chamber warned against exploring counterfactuals, then quickly changed the subject, turning to a discussion of Obama’s week.

Tomasky offered no thoughts. Matthews hurried away from the scene.

Krugman has written about this topic again and again and again and again. The faux nature of our “national discourse” is amazingly hard to compute or comprehend.

You’d never know it, but: We were unfamiliar with Chambers, a very personable young woman. So we ordered a team of analysts to run a background check.

Chambers graduated from Kansas in 2009. In 2008, she was editor of The Daily Kansan.

Here’s the part we found surprising—Chambers describes herself as a young conservative!

You’d never know it from the way she gushed about Obama’s week, month and career. But before she went to The Daily Mail, Chambers was “founder and editor and publisher of Red Alert Politics, a publication by young conservatives and for young conservatives, from the parent company of the Washington Examiner and The Weekly Standard.”

How faux is the discourse you’re handed each night? Chambers didn’t seem to know how to approach that question—but either did anyone else!

Supplemental: Robert E. Lee was a very fine man!

THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2015

Also, new thoughts from Frank Bruni: Yesterday, Elias Isquith got it right about Frank Bruni’s latest.

Or at least, he started an important discussion. But first, let’s consider last Friday’s column by David Brooks!

Personally, we’re not a fan of Brooks Derangement Syndrome. That said, Brooks is becoming extremely strange in his new career as a TED Talk character guru. This was never more apparent than when he decided to ponder the greatness of General Robert E. Lee.

We can think of few discussions which matter less at this point than an attempt to cipher Lee’s morality quotient. Last Friday, though, Brooks decided to give it a try.

His analysis started like this:

“The case for Lee begins with his personal character. It is almost impossible to imagine a finer and more considerate gentleman.”

As he continued, Brooks mentioned Lee’s “impeccable honesty, integrity and kindness,” both as a general and as a public figure. “As a family man, he was surprisingly relaxed and affectionate,” Brooks added, noting that Lee “loved having his kids jump into bed with him and tickle his feet.”

Lee could “write witty and even saucy letters to other women” Brooks saucily observed, though Lee only did this “with his wife’s cooperation.” Beyond that, he was “a gifted watercolorist, a lover of animals and a charming conversationalist.”

Did we note the fact that none of this actually matters at this point? That no one who loves community should get drawn into discussions of General Lee, fair or foul?

Except from someone deeply conversant with the morés of a distant time, it really doesn’t make much sense to measure the moral greatness of Lee. Having said that, let us also say this: It’s peculiar to read, of any person, that it’s “almost impossible to imagine a finer and more considerate gentleman,” only to reach a disclaimer like this rather late in the discussion:

BROOKS (6/25/15): The case against Lee begins with the fact that he betrayed his oath to serve the United States...

[…]

More germane, while Lee may have opposed slavery in theory he did nothing to eliminate or reduce it in practice. On the contrary, if he’d been successful in the central task of his life, he would have preserved and prolonged it.

Like Lincoln he did not believe African-Americans were yet capable of equality. Unlike Lincoln he accepted the bondage of other human beings with bland complaisance. His wife inherited 196 slaves from her father. Her father’s will (somewhat impractically) said they were to be freed, but Lee didn’t free them.

Lee didn’t enjoy owning slaves, but he was considered a hard taskmaster and he did sell some, breaking up families...

Brooks even decided to drag Lincoln in, partially making him play over there on the general’s side!

Even by our permissive standards, we thought that column was pretty strange. Every column by Brooks gets trashed. For that reason, we expected to see this column torn limb from limb.

We didn’t see anyone cite it at all!

Yesterday, in a bit of an echo, we got a rather peculiar column from Bruni. As Isquith correctly noted, the oddball column started like this, headline included:

BRUNI (7/1/15): The Sunny Side of Greed

In the dire prophecies of science-fiction writers and the fevered warnings of left-wing activists, big corporations will soon rule the earth—or already do.

Fine with me.

In fairness, Bruni was being a bit tongue-in-cheeky. But he went on to praise the corporations for their stands on several “social issues,” analyzing the reasons behind their obvious moral greatness:

BRUNI: [T]hose efforts, coupled with whatever genuine altruism and civic obligation some corporate leaders feel, have produced compelling recent examples of companies showing greater sensitivity to diversity, social justice and the changing tides of public sentiment than lawmakers often manage to.

Corporations aren’t paralyzed by partisan bickering. They’re not hostage to a few big donors, a few loud interest groups or some unyielding ideology.

“They’re ultimately more responsive to a broader group of voters—customers—than politicians are,” said Bradley Tusk, whose firm, Tusk Strategies, does consulting for both private corporations and public officials.

“If you’re a politician and all you care about is staying in office, you’re worried about a small group of voters in your district who vote in the primary,” he told me, referring to members of the House of Representatives. “If you’re a corporation, you need to be much more in sync with public opinion, because you’re appealing to people across the spectrum.”

Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Let corporations rule!

Even at the new Salon, Isquith correctly railed against the strangeness of the piece. We’re sorry he linked to a piece which has the unmistakable feel of journalistic borrowing, but we can’t say he necessarily could or should have known.

(For that linked piece, you can just click here. People are supposed to say where they got all their information.)

In our view, the Bruni piece has more to tell us that even Isquith said. In our view, it helps us see something we might not otherwise tend to notice—the way we get sold “social issues” by many corporate journalists, even perhaps by our fiery “liberal” corporate journalists, even as they hide the ways the entire country is getting looted by the pols and the corporations on the “budget issue” side.

Health care spending, we’re looking at you! Also, TPP!

Having just learned that tomorrow’s a holiday, we expect to discuss this topic next week. In the meantime, Elias Isquith got it right, while leaving more to be said.

LOW-COUNTRY CADENCES: Dr. King’s peculiar ideas!

THURSDAY, JULY 2, 2015

Part 4—Community rather than tribe: Dr. King was 28 when he wrote Stride Toward Freedom.

(Five years later, he published the embarrassingly titled book, Strength to Love.)

Stride Toward Freedom plainly wasn’t an eighth grade graduation address. Its author was a fully grown man who’d already had a wealth of experience. These experiences had helped him test his views.

Example:

At age 27, Dr. King’s home had been firebombed, in the night, with his wife and baby daughter inside. In response, Dr. King had made one of the most unusual public statements in American history.

That incident is described in chapter 8 of Stride Toward Freedom. In chapter 6 of that book, Dr. King described the “intellectual quest” which led him to the belief that “the love ethic of Jesus” was “a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.”

The views outlined by Dr. King are very much unlike our own. If you visit Our Own Cable Nerdland of a languorous weekend morning, you’ll hear a bit of humble-bragging and a fair amount of guff. But you’re likely to hear few reflections of Dr. King’s unusual views, which the Charleston families reflected when they spoke about love and forgiveness.

Within the modern context, Dr. King’s views aren’t cable-ready. Consider his peculiar ideas about concerning those who would do evil in the world.

Midway through his chapter 6, Dr. King continued to speak about Gandhi’s approach to the other. He described an outlook which seems familiar in modern-day Charleston, while being largely foreign, unknown, in the rest of our world.

“Gandhi resisted evil with as much vigor and power as the violent resister,” Dr. King wrote, “but he resisted with love instead of hate.” Dr. King then described a peculiar idea—“the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe.”

It should be remembered that Dr. King was describing a world in which actual violence was frequently visited on non-violent protesters. Writing from within that world, he voiced a peculiar set of concerns—his concern about the amount of bitterness in the universe; his concern that his own actions in the pursuit of justice might add to that amount.

What was this gentleman talking about?

In the following passage, Dr. King described the “social philosophy” he finally assembled during his years of graduate study. He said those ideas had been tested during the Montgomery bus boycott, during which time his own home was firebombed:

DR. KING (page 101): In 1954 I ended my formal training with all of these relatively divergent intellectual forces converging into a positive social philosophy. One of the main tenets of this philosophy was the conviction that nonviolent resistance was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their quest for social justice. At the time, however, I had merely an intellectual understanding and appreciation of the position, with no firm determination to organize it in a socially effective situation.

When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis in which nonviolent resistance would be applicable. I neither started the protest nor suggested it. I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman. When the protest began, my mind, consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime teachings on love, and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. As the days unfolded, I came to see the power of nonviolence more and more. Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life. Many of the things that I had not cleared up intellectually regarding nonviolence were now solved in the sphere of practical action.

Again—in their talk about love and forgiveness, the families in Charleston were speaking the language of Dr. King, who believed in the Sermon on the Mount “with its sublime teachings on love.”

Outside the Carolina low country, with its highly unusual cadences, is there any room at this time for Dr. King’s views on these matters? We ask that question because Dr. King went on to express some unusual views about the meaning of love and nonviolent resistance, views which are rarely reflected in our poisonous discourse.

Read the rest of Dr. King’s chapter only ye who dare! As he continues, he describes some very unusual views about the requirements brought on him by his belief in the power and goodness of love—of “the love ethic of Jesus” as expressed through Gandhian nonviolent resistance.

Weirdly, Dr. King says this: Nonviolence “does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent.”

“The end is redemption and reconciliation,” he weirdly says. “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”

Dr. King goes further in this discussion, insisting that the nonviolent resister must direct his attack “against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil.” The protester must even be willing to “accept blows from the opponent without striking back.”

(He quotes Gandhi at this point: “Rivers of blood may have to flow before we gain our freedom, but it must be our blood.”)

In the modern progressive context, of course, no one is suggesting violent action—at least, no one is doing so yet. For that reason, it may seem that Dr. King’s high-minded proscriptions don’t apply to us.

That thought would be mistaken. We regret to inform yo0u that Dr. King went on to say things like this:

DR. KING (page 103): A fifth point concerning nonviolent resistance is that it avoids not only external physical violence but also violence of spirit. The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns.

Say what? We can’t even indulge in hate campaigns? At this point, Dr. King’s peculiar views start coming a bit too close.

By now, we’ll assume that one point is clear. In the conduct which occasioned pushback form our intellectual leaders, the Charleston families were speaking directly from the moral and intellectual traditions of Dr. King.

No one is required to affirm these traditions. But in our view, it was appalling to see our useless journalists and professors rolling their eyes at the low-country folk who were, in fact, speaking from an intellectual tradition much deeper and richer than their own crabbed set of views and reactions.

Cable culture tends to be like that; so does the New York Times. No one has to agree with the views those families expressed, of course. But we thought it was rich to see our floundering, unhelpful “elites” condescend to the Charleston families in the way they did.

We’ll make one more point as we close:

Dr. King speaks directly to our world in the passage we’ve just quoted. It isn’t that we can’t shoot our opponents, he says. We also can’t revile them!

Continuing directly, he starts explaining why. Within the impoverished modern context, these are crazy ideas:

“To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.”

Dr. King would be out of step with modern times. The liberal world which has emerged in the years since the war in Iraq is heavily built around otherization. If you doubt that, just click here.

The ethic of love hasn’t been projected to the center of our lives, at least not in the sense Dr. King meant. Our world is built around the tribe; his concept of the world was centered on “the beloved community.”

We have to help the others, he said, even if they want to harm us. Eventually, he offered this, employing a Greek term for “disinterested love:”

DR. KING (page 105): Agape is not a weak, passive love. Agape is love seeking to preserve and extend community. It is insistence on community even when one seeks to break it...Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community.

To Dr. King, the love ethic requires “insistence on community even when one seeks to break it”—even when someone like Dylann Roof seeks to break it.

“He who works against community is working again the whole of creation,” Dr. King goes on to say. “...I can only close the gap in broken community by meeting hate with love.”

When Dr. King’s home was bombed, angry supporters, some with guns, assembled there. He told them to take their weapons home, then seems to have made an embarrassing statement.

Slightly different accounts exist of what he actually said. In Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, Taylor Branch records him saying this:

“If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the word will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.”

David Garrow quotes Dr. King adding a bit of advice: “I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them.”

In Stride toward Freedom, Dr. King recalls his own words slightly differently. In chapter 8, The Violence of Desperate Men, he recalls himself saying this:

“We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo through the centuries: ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.’ This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.”

Dr. King’s ideas and reactions are far removed from the modern context. He lived for community—for what he called the beloved community. We’re deeply in thrall to the tribe.

A lot of money is being made by teaching us that manner of thinking. For ourselves, we think Dr. King’s views about social progress were almost surely right.

What sorts of behavior produce good results? More on this problem tomorrow in yet another breaking report from the forgotten land we might even call the low country.

Tomorrow: Reactions from several observers

Supplemental: The children are beautifully trained!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 2015

The Clinton “scandals” through the eyes of Duke 2009: The children are beautifully programmed, what with their spotless minds.

The latest such player is David Graham, Duke 2009. At the Atlantic, he apparently was assigned to compile “The Clinton Scandal Primer,” which he chillingly says he’ll “update as new information arrives.”

To call this “more prejudicial than probative” is like saying it’s dark and cold inside young Graham’s head. At the Atlantic, this one candidate will be honored with a tabulation of her scandals or pseudo-scandals, including those of her husband.

No one else will have such a tab! She’ll be the only one!

Almost anyone could see the problem with this idea. Still, the children have been beautifully trained, so David plowed right ahead.

The children are eager to please, if not real sharp. This is the way the current child presents his overview:

GRAHAM (7/1/15): The Clinton family has been in politics for a long time. Bill Clinton’s first run for office came in 1974. And for almost as long as they’ve been a force, there have been controversies about what they were or weren’t doing, whether they were following laws, and whether they were disclosing what they ought to. Even today, the repercussions of a failed real-estate investment Bill and Hillary Clinton made in 1978 can still be felt. No other American politicians—even ones as corrupt as Richard Nixon, or as hated by partisans as George W. Bush—has fostered the creation of a permanent multimillion-dollar cottage industry devoted to attacking them.

Clinton defenders insist that it’s all just—to borrow a phrase—a vast right-wing conspiracy. The members of the alleged conspiracy insist that Hillary and her husband are shockingly corrupt. The truth is likely somewhere in between: Many of the hyped controversies have turned out to have little substance, but in several cases it has become clear that Bill or Hillary Clinton fell short of rules or laws. The Whitewater investigation, despite years of effort and millions of dollars spent, found almost nothing out of line, but that doesn’t mean Bill Clinton’s extramarital escapades weren’t real.

Now, with Hillary Clinton favored to win the Democratic nomination for president, every Clinton scandal—from Whitewater to Clinton’s State Department emails—will be under the microscope. Keeping track of each controversy, where it came from, and how serious it is, is no small task, so here’s a primer. We’ll update it as new information emerges.

“The truth is likely somewhere in between!” This is a good, well-trained boy.

Note the way this hopeless child treats the Whitewater matter, which gave its name to a decade of pseudo-scandals whose promulgation still goes largely unexamined.

In his second paragraph, he says the investigation of same “found almost nothing out of line, despite years of effort and millions of dollars spent.” Just for the record, let it further be noted that this all happened twenty years ago.

To a youngster with a critical mind, those facts might raise a few questions about the reasons why that investigation went on for so many years. They might even suggest that, twenty years later, the matter shouldn’t be found in a tabulation of some candidate’s “scandals.”

That said, this is the MSM, and Graham is nicely trained. In his third paragraph, he tells us that all the scandals, Whitewater included, “will be under the microscope” moving forward. He doesn’t say why that would happen with Whitewater, since it was exhaustively probed and next to nothing was found.

Nor does he explain his first paragraph, in which he tells us, right out of the gate, that “the repercussions of [Whitewater] can still be felt.”

Why are the repercussions still felt if almost nothing was out of line? Readers, please! Which part of “went to Duke” don’t you understand?

At the nation's top finishing schools, the children who plan to be “journalists” receive their laborious training in promulgation of script. On their diplomas, this motto is found:

“Narrative never dies”

Graham turned out to be a good boy. In recent decades, we’ve all paid the price for these, the folkways of his guild.

When youngsters begin to tire: At the end of his tabulation, Graham discussed all the “scandals” from the period which he called “THE BAD OLD DAYS.”

It may be that he was starting to tire. This is what he typed:

What is it? Since the Clintons have a long history of controversies, there are any number of past scandals that continue to float around, especially in conservative media: Whitewater. Troopergate. Paula Jones. Monica Lewinsky. Vince Foster.

When? 1975-2001

Who? Bill Clinton; Hillary Clinton; a brigade of supporting characters

How serious is it? Almost none. Some are wholly spurious (Foster). Others (Lewinsky, Whitewater) have been so exhaustively investigated that it’s hard to imagine them doing much further damage to Hillary Clinton’s standing. In fact, the Lewinsky scandal famously boosted her public approval ratings. But that doesn’t mean you won’t hear plenty about them.

“Almost none.” That’s how the youngster answered the question, “How serious is it?”

In this passage, David continues describing Whitewater as a “past scandal,” even though an exhaustive investigation “found almost nothing out of line.” He also seems to tell us that we’ll “hear plenty about it.”

Schoolboy, please! Thanks to you, we just did!

LOW-COUNTRY CADENCES: Dr. King spoke that language too!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 2015

Part 3—An electrifying event: In our view, the pushback came remarkably fast when the families in Charleston spoke about love and forgiveness.

The pushback came from the up-country gurus who have been leaving us barefoot and clueless over the past several decades. The condescension was fast and familiar concerning the low-country rubes.

Our “cable left” didn’t seem pleased with the things the families had said. In some ways, we thought Professor Butler’s statement to Chris Hayes was most notable of all:

“The problem is, love and forgiveness are not productive in American politics. That`s not how social change is achieved. You know, you could do it through organizing, you could do it through electoral politics, you could take it to the streets, but being nice in the face of white supremacy does not advance racial justice.”

We were surprised when we saw Professor Butler make that statement. For one thing, we’ve read Dr. King. Beyond that, we’re so old that we can remember the twentieth century—the century of Gandhi, King and Mandela.

It was plain that Professor Butler was very upset last week. There’s no obvious reason why he shouldn’t have been upset.

Still, as giants of cable and the web condescended to those families, we thought a basic point might be worth remembering:

Way back when, a famous person spoke precisely the way they spoke after the Charleston murders.

That famous person was one our greatest political achievers. It might be worth remembering this when we turn on cable each night.

We refer, of course, to Dr. King, who spoke at length about love and forgiveness throughout his ministry and his career. When the Charleston families spoke as they did, they were speaking from the tradition of Dr. King—one of the most brilliant moral and intellectual traditions the world has ever known.

Our cable savants rarely imagine the possibility that their low-country cousins may be speaking from a tradition more brilliant than their own. For that reason, it might be worth recalling Dr. King’s account of his own thinking about social change—for example, the account he gave in Stride Toward Freedom, his history of the Montgomery bus boycott.

Chapter 6 of that book is called Pilgrimage to Nonviolence. In that chapter, Dr. King described the “intellectual quest” he finally undertook in earnest when he entered Crozer Theological Seminary at age 19—“a serious intellectual quest for a method to eliminate social evil.”

No one is required to agree with the conclusions Dr. King reached. But before we condescend to those Charleston families, we might want to understand that they are speaking the language of Dr. King—one of the greatest social achievers in American and world history.

The full text of Dr. King’s chapter 6 is here. Warning! On various occasions, his purity of heart may seem embarrassing in the modern context.

That said, you’ll see this world historical figure speaking the language of love and forgiveness, just as those families did. Let’s start when his intellectual quest takes an important turn.

While at Crozer, Dr. King says, he “spent a great deal of time reading the works of the great social philosophers...from Plato and Aristotle down to Rousseau, Hobbes, Benthan, Mill and Locke.” He spends several pages describing his reactions to his reading of Marx.

“During this period I had about despaired of the power of love in solving social problems,” Dr. King writes, saying he had perhaps been influenced by Nietzsche. He then describes an electrifying event which would change his view of the world:

KING (page 96): Then one day I traveled to Philadelphia to hear a sermon by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University. He was there to preach for the Fellowship House of Philadelphia. Dr. Johnson had just returned from a trip to India, and to my great interest he spoke of the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. His message was so profound and electrifying that I left the meeting and bought a half-dozen books on Gandhi’s life and works.

Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously. As I read I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of non-violent resistance. I was particularly moved by his Salt March to the sea and by his numerous fasts. The whole concept of “Satyagraha” was profoundly significant to me. (Satya is truth which equals love, and agraha is force. “Satyagraha,” therefore, means truth-force or love force.) As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.

No one is required to agree with anything Dr. King thought or believed. That said, you’ll note that this world historical figure is speaking the language of the Charleston families.

For ourselves, we’re inclined to think their language was brilliant. As Dr. King continues, he continues to speak in those low-country cadences. He describes his own utter mistake:

DR. KING (continuing directly): Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships. The “turn the other cheek” philosophy and the “love your enemies” philosophy were only valid, I felt, when individuals were in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations were in conflict a more realistic approach seemed necessary. But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.

Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and non-violence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.

No one is required to agree with Dr. King’s reading of Gandhi. No one has to agree with the conclusions he drew.

We’re only suggesting that we might want to acknowledge a basic point—those Charleston families were speaking the language of this world historical giant. It’s a point you’re unlikely to see expressed on your favorite cable news channel, or in the profit-fueled piddle-poo they serve us each day at the new Salon.

We’re sorry to be the ones to say this, but Dr. King believed in what he called “the love ethic of Jesus.” He believed that Gandhi was perhaps the first person to transform that “love ethic” into “a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.”

According to Dr. King, it was in “this Gandhian emphasis on love and non-violence” that he “discovered the method for social reform” he had been seeking since his teen-age years. “I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom,” he said as he continued.

Who knows? Thanks to the wisdom of cable news and the web, we may have reached the point where we can see that Dr. King was well-intentioned but hopelessly misguided.

In The Grand Inquisitor, Dostoyevsky imagined Jesus returning to earth to learn that Christians don’t want to hear his views any more. Perhaps we’ve reached a similar state with respect to Dr. King, Gandhi and Mandela. The cable insights of Rachel and Sean may have obviated our need for these once-famous figures.

For ourselves, we think there’s still a lot to learn from the views Dr. King expressed in Stride Toward Freedom. As he continued discussing his intellectual quest, he discussed some very important ideas, including his refusal to create and denigrate The Other—his explicit refusal to hate.

(“The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent,” Dr. King wrote, “but he also refuses to hate him. At the center of nonviolent resist stands the principle of love.”)

For ourselves, we think the rest of Dr. King’s chapter 6 includes a collection of insights which are applicable to social movements today. We’ll scan that material tomorrow.

That said, Dr. King’s views and beliefs bear little relation to the current behavior and impulses of us on the cable news left. Let’s face it! If Dr. King appeared on cable today, puzzled producers would shake their heads and vow not to have him back.

No one has to agree with Dr. King’s rejection of otherization. That said, will someone please tell our fiery leaders that their low-country cousins were swaying last week to the cadences and the language of one of the world’s greatest historical figures? One of our greatest achievers?

Tomorrow: “The nonviolent resister not only refuses to shoot his opponent, but he also refuses to hate him.”

Warning! It gets even worse after that...