She’s a wolf. Forget that at your peril.
Spoilers within.
First Draft
Liberal Politics, Media Criticism & General Mayhem
Love at the Rodeo
On the second day of the Keystone State Gay Rodeo, about 60 contestants arrived at New Holland Arena — which sits inside the massive Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex — but they weren’t alone on the grounds. Next door, a gathering of Muslims celebrated Eid al-Fitr, the end of the holy month of Ramadan. On the other end of the building, whistles could be heard as hundreds of youth basketball players took part in a tournament.
The arena, though, belonged to the gay rodeo. It had been nearly a year in the making, the brainchild of Adam Romanik, 37, a cheerful cowboy from rural Pennsylvania who began participating in gay rodeos in 2009 and founded the Keystone State Gay Rodeo Association in 2015.
A.
The Uncertainty Principle
I’ve been thinking about this for a while:
There were like 40 people in that room. It was overwhelming. Did he run away and hide? No. He sat down and ate his dinner, like a man.
— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) July 12, 2017
Trump is an old racist dumbass. I know it’s fashionable to psychoanalyze him but he’s an old racist dumbass who rose to prominence through inherited wealth and a messy divorce. I know 20 of him and so do you. They don’t interact with anyone different from them not because they objectively hate non-white people or would even be rude in person to one, but because they don’t have to interact with them, and if they don’t have to, why should they?
They don’t travel, not even domestically. They don’t seek out information on their own. They’ll call a family member to ask something they could Google in ten seconds. They’ll ask who somebody is on Facebook, where a search box appears six millimeters from where they’re entering the question in their status update. They’re comfortable with media that reinforces what they already think, and they don’t ever put themselves in situations where they’re unsure of where they stand.
They’re terrified of not knowing things.
It’s why the idea of gender fluidity (the whole bathroom thing) makes them insane. They need to be able to put you in a box on sight and feel threatened when they can’t. It’s why all their stories about race relations start with “this one guy I KNOW” because evidence doesn’t exist. Everything is personal experience, because learning requires vulnerability.
It’s why they don’t have dinner with women who aren’t their wives, not because women are evil temptresses and they’re uncontrollable sex monsters, but because they’re not certain of what to do in that situation. They need to know The Rules. It’s the moral panics of the last 50 years, distilled down to one man.
Of course he deserves a medal for eating dinner in a strange place where he doesn’t speak the dominant language. If most of his voters did that, they’d feel unbearably exotic, and talk about it forever like they were Shackleton at the Pole. This is how most of them act about going to a new grocery store, come on.
This isn’t me saying you simply must go to Europe (or eat fancy lunch meat, Bobo). There are plenty of places I haven’t been and plenty more I would honestly be nervous about going. Every single day of my life I panic about learning an entirely new skill set and spend a good 20 minutes hiding in the bathroom trying not to hyperventilate.
To exist in the world right now requires a shitload of learning and catching up and a hell of a lot of straight white people who are now being confronted with other perspectives and slapped down a lot. Living in the world requires you, in a way it didn’t once upon a time, to be very very comfortable with being uncertain.
And along comes Trump, who says I’m gonna make America certain again.
It’s racist and it’s dumb, but mostly it’s just old. And I know, #NotAllOldPeople, but really, #LotsAndLotsOfOldPeople, right now. I hear people my own goddamn age (and I am tail end of Gen X, whippersnappers) complaining about smart mouths on young girls and pretending we can’t wrap our heads around a gender-neutral artist or two and basically acting like it’s the world’s problem that we’re tired.
It’s not the world’s problem that we’re tired and that some of us are old. It’s just the way things go. Plenty of old people (GODDAMN, JIMMY CARTER) are still finding ways to work and contribute and push and change and make things better. I would be a lot more understanding of this desire to lay down the burden of uncertainty if there weren’t so many examples of people saying fuck that, while I’ve got breath in me I’m gonna fight.
Even if I don’t know everything. Even if I’m tired. Even if I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit. Even if it’s mind-boggling to me that we have managed to find someone worse than George W. Bush, worse than Richard Nixon. Even if I’d rather be watching old TV shows from the early 2000s because that’s when shit made sense. So many people aren’t taking the opportunity of their own uncertainty to hate what they don’t know. So many people are standing up to their own fears and those of others.
Trump sat down in an unfamiliar situation. Go on with your bad self, Donald. We’ll be standing up in one until you’re gone.
A.
Sunday Morning Video: Chick Corea Meets Herbie Hancock
The two great jazz keyboard players had, of course, met before this joint appearance on Soundstage in 1974. The show features short sets by Return To Forever and the Headhunters followed by a Chick and Herbie piano duet.
Saturday Odds & Sods: Miles From Nowhere
Asakusa Hongan-ji Temple by Hokusai.
It was citywide election qualifying week here in New Orleans. I’m acquainted with three of the mayoral candidates but I’m undecided. It’s still early days in the race to replace Mitch Landrieu who is term limited and cannot run a fifth time to be Mayor. He’s a persistent bugger, y’all.
One person who talked about running was reality teevee star Sidney Torres aka the Trashanova. The Trashanova is a rich malaka who often wears a man bun, which is disqualifying as far as I’m concerned. Additionally, he’s too closely tied to former Mayor Nagin to have a chance to win. Torres declined to throw his man bun into the ring and the city heaved a collective sigh of relief. Ta-ta, Trashanova.
This week’s theme song is a three-headed beast, sort of like me before my first cup of coffee in the morning. We have two different songs titled Miles From Nowhere and one with a substantially similar title. I like to keep you on your toes.
After all the Tea for the Tillerson jokes, I thought it was high time to post a Cat Stevens song from the album with a substantially similar title. Substantially similar appears to be the two-word phrase of the day. Cat Stevens is followed (figuratively, not literally) by the Smithereens and Dwight Yoakam, which makes this a rather high mileage post.
Speaking of keeping you on your toes, we’re skipping the break and diving right in. Splash. Hopefully, it will be the deep, not shallow, end.
Your President* Speaks: It’s a long flight from DC to Paris so Trump had a chat with the press corps. He said some crazy shit about a transparent border wall. The “idea” is to see the “bags of drugs” flying over it or some such shit. That full quote is too long and rambling for this space but here are a couple of beauts annotated by yours truly:
So I was asked to go by the President [Macron], who I get along with very well, despite a lot of fake news. You know, I actually have a very good relationship with all of the people at the G20. And he called me, he said, would you come, it’s Bastille Day — 100 years since World War I. And I said, that’s big deal, 100 years since World War I. SO we’re going to go
The president* appears to think that Bastille Day is somehow connected to the Great War. It happened in 1789 and had something to with another famous event.
The other quote has the Insult Comedian sounding like his mentor Roy Cohn:
And I think what’s happening is, as usual, the Democrats have played their card too hard on the Russia thing, because people aren’t believing it. It’s a witch hunt and they understand that. When they say “treason” — you know what treason is? That’s Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving the atomic bomb, okay? But what about all the congressmen, where I see the woman sitting there surrounded by — in Congress.
Actually, Roy Cohn was a coherent motherfucker. That last sentence makes no sense whatsoever.
While we’re on the subject of the Darnold, there’s *another* excerpt from Joshua Green’s new Trump-Bannon book. It’s not as fun as the Bannon-Napoleon portrait one but it’s still swell. This excerpt is at Bloomberg News and discusses Trump’s time hosting The Apprentice. Fun fact: Trump was popular with minorities until the whole birther thing, which is when his ratings tanked. Sad.
Let’s move on to a segment about Trump’s longtime personal mouthpiece.
The Marc Kasowitz Blues: Pro Publica ran an eye-opening piece about Trump’s hard-drinking, foul-mouthed lawyer. One of the main points of the article by Justin Elliot and Jesse Eisinger is that Kasowitz will have a hard time obtaining a security clearance because of his drinking problem. I’m not sure how he can adequately defend the president* without one.
Kasowitz not only has a drinking problem, he has a nasty temper, which surfaced after a segment on the Rachel Maddow Show:
Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s personal attorney on the Russia case, threatened a stranger in a string of profanity-laden emails Wednesday night.
The man, a retired public relations professional in the western United States who asked not to be identified, read ProPublica’s story this week on Kasowitz and sent the lawyer an email with the subject line: “Resign Now.”
Kasowitz replied with series of angry messages sent between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern time. One read: “I’m on you now. You are fucking with me now Let’s see who you are Watch your back , bitch.”
In another email, Kasowitz wrote: “Call me. Don’t be afraid, you piece of shit. Stand up. If you don’t call, you’re just afraid.” And later: “I already know where you live, I’m on you. You might as well call me. You will see me. I promise. Bro.”Kasowitz’s spokesman, Michael Sitrick, said Thursday he couldn’t immediately reach Kasowitz for comment.
ProPublica confirmed the man’s phone number matched his stated identity. Technical details in the emails, such as IP addresses and names of intermediate mail servers, also show the emails came from Kasowitz’s firm. In one email, Kasowitz gave the man a cell phone number that is not widely available. We confirmed Kasowitz uses that number.
The exchange began after the man saw our story featured last night on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. We reported that Kasowitz is not seeking a security clearance even though the Russia case involves a significant amount of classified material.
Moral of the story: always think twice before hitting the send icon Also, isn’t Kasowitz a bit old to call someone bitch or bro? He’s 65. The AARP weeps.
It’s unclear if Trump congratulated or castigated Kasowitz for his mob lawyer outburst. It might be time to call in John Gotti’s lawyer Bruce Cutler seen below with his favorite client and a guy who looks like Paulie Walnuts’ unkempt cousin:
Bruce Cutler and John Gotti via the NY Daily News.
The Dapper Don in a turtleneck, not a tie? The fashion gods must have wept that day.
I’m sure Trump has met Cutler. I was disappointed not to find any pictures of them together when I asked first Siri and then Mr. Google. So it goes.
While we’re on the subject of the Trump-Russia scandal, next up is a “fake news” toon.
Cartoon Of The Week: I resisted the temptation to post Hokusai’s most famous painting, The Wave, as this week’s featured image. The Guardian’s Steve Bell, however, went for it in this cartoon about Trump Junior’s problems.
Holy shit storm, Batman.
It’s time to put New Yorkers and Muscovites in the rear view mirror and move on.
Warren Zevon’s Last Waltz: I’ve made a boatload of Zevon references recently so I reckoned I should share Jon Pareles’ classic 2003 profile of WZ as he faced death.
Since the story uses WZ’s last appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman as a backdrop, here’s that episode:
Enjoy every sandwich.
It’s time to sing the blues with a master of the form.
Saturday Classic: Albums featuring guest artists were the rage in the late Eighties and early Nineties. John Lee Hooker’s The Healer was one of the best of the bunch. It featured Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, Canned Heat, Los Lobos, George Thorogood, and Charlie Musselwhite. Enjoy.
That’s it for this week. I wrote more about politics than the average Saturday post, but I have Russia on my mind. I must be pining for cold weather. Our closing bat-meme features real life super villains Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Btw, Donny now claims that Vladdy was for Hillary in the late election. Oy, just oy.
Friday Catblogging: Floor Show
Della Street is plugged in and Oscar is leaning in. So it goes.
Joyeux Quatorze Juillet
Liberty Leading The People by Eugene Delacroix.
Joyeux Quatorze Juillet is the correct way to say Happy Bastille Day even though the latter makes me want to storm a prison and free some prisoners. The French merely refer to it as La Fête Nationale and dispense with the greetings.
French President Macron is trying a new tactic with the Insult Comedian: treating him like a crazy uncle to be indulged instead of disdained. I have my doubts that it will work but at least Trump isn’t throwing verbal stink bombs at the French any more. He did, however comment on the French First Lady’s appearance. I expect his aides will argue that it’s age appropriate: Brigitte Macron is 25 years older than her 39-year-old husband.
Here’s one of Trump’s big quotes from his day with the Macrons:
“France is one of our oldest allies. A lot of people don’t know that, but it’s true.”
There was much mirth about this on social media today. Unfortunately, Trump isn’t the only one ignorant of this basic fact. Surely, I’m not the only one who remembers “freedom fries” and “cheese eating surrender monkeys.” Those were, of course, epithets hurled at the French after then President Chirac’s wise decision to stay out of the Iraq War.
Joyeux Quatorze Juillet. Vive la France.
Malaka Of The Week: David Brooks
I am an anomaly among veteran liberal political bloggers. I have never written about David Brooks. The man known as Bobo has long been one of Athenae’s favorite targets. I almost called him her whipping boy but I have sworn off bondage jokes after an incident involving this Zappa song:
In any event, Brooks has written a column so silly that even I have taken notice. And that is why David Brooks is malaka of the week.
I’m late to the whole sammich column debate, but suffice it to say that one of the things Bobo thinks is wrong with America are foreign ingredients:
Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.
We are well and truly through the looking glass. Malaka Bobo thinks that Italian meats that have been eaten for years by his swarthier countrymen are an indicator of decline. Really, Bobo? Trump is president* Mitch McConnell is trying to destroy Medicaid and prosciutto is the problem?
If David Brooks weren’t such a white boy, he’d know that many Americans, including the working class types he’s suddenly so solicitous of, have been eating ethnic foods for years. Sure, yuppies are into it but so is the average Italian Giovanni in Jersey, not to mention Cajun oil rig roughnecks and their demon boudin. Somebody should bop Bobo in the bean with a baguette and knock some sense into him.
The best thing I’ve seen about the sammich mishigas was a meaty post by Charlie Pierce who has been mocking Bobo for years:
Moral Hazard, the Irish setter owned for photo op purposes by New York Times columnist David Brooks, stood dripping and shivering in my foyer. I half-filled his dog bowl with Jameson and he took it down in several big gulps.
“I had to get out,” he said. “It was starting to get crazy down there. Master’s off the rails and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. He walks around, day and night, mumbling to himself, saying weird stuff about community and prosciutto. People are starting to wonder. Douthat, the former houseboy, jumps into closets now when he sees him coming and Stephens, the new one, hides behind the sofa. Nobody wants to listen to 15 minutes on how Edmund Burke’s Reflections warned us against radicalism and balsamic vinegar. I mean, OK, hear it once and it’s interesting but around the third time, you want to talk about hockey.”
I’ll be doggone if I can top that but I’m glad to hear that Malaka Bobo has a commoner as a pal. It could explain why he’s so down to earth and in touch with white working class Trump voters. #sarcasm. I hope Breakfast for Bobo involves strictly American ingredients although I suspect we’d have to gritsplain a Southern breakfast to this pompous fool who thinks that croissants and cappuccino are ruining the country. And that is why David Brooks is malaka of the week.
The last word goes to the late Warren Zevon who knew a good thing when he tasted it unlike that silly billy Bobo.
UPDATE: It turns out that I wrote about David Brooks in 2014: Bobo’s Weed Screed. It was strictly a one off deal. Oh well, nobody’s perfect.
Twitter Twits
OK, I exaggerate a little — best as I can tell, neither Manafort nor Kushner use Twitter, while Eric — who I think of as Zombie Fredo, based on his pasty countenance and dead eyes…Junior’s been called Fredo, but in my mind he’s more of a mutant/monstrous hybrid of Sonny and Carlo…anyway, Eric’s been kind of lost in the glare lately…and sorry to digress on such a tangent.
So…thanks to screenshots, we’ve got a serious race for, if not this year, at least this week’s Top Twit (I’ll let Adrastos determine if he’s also a malaka). And on a level of sheer magnitude-8.0-or-greater stupid, it’s damn hard to argue: son Trumps father, pun not necessarily intentional but why not use it since it fits?
But just like Rick and Ilsa always had Paris, thanks to enough wingers in the right States plus quirks in the election rules/technicalities, we’re stuck with Orange Narcissus. I think Junior may have won the week, but dad still owns the lifetime achievement crown…and even offered some stiff competition for the smaller title until Little Donald blew him out of the water…
Pulp Fiction Thursday: The Big Steal
Don Siegel week continues here at First Draft. The Big Steal was Siegel’s first opportunity to direct a first rate cast and he made the most of it.
It’s trailer time:
The “Everybody Does It” Defense
I didn’t expect there to be a smoking gun in the Trump-Russia scandal. I certainly didn’t expect it to involve Trump Junior. I’ve always expected the Trumpers and their enablers in the Republican party to resort to the “everybody does it” defense. It’s what happens when past defenses are exposed as lies. Of course, nothing said by the Trump crime family and its lackeys is ever true. Nothing. No thing. Literally. Believe me.
The counterattacks are flying thick, fast, and unconvincing. They’re desperately trying to unearth past instances of a presidential campaign working with a HOSTILE foreign power. Good luck with that:
Moscow has, however, tried to meddle in previous American elections. The historian Michael R. Beschloss recounts in “The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963,” an account of the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Kennedy presidency, that the Soviet ambassador in Washington secretly reached out to both John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson, another Democratic presidential hopeful, during the 1960 campaign. The ambassador was rebuffed by both candidates.
Imagine that. Of course, Jack Kennedy had smart relatives involved in his campaign something the Insult Comedian is sorely lacking. Jared? Junior? Gimme a break.
Instead of listening to his lawyers and shutting his big bazoo, the idiot-in-chief has chimed in on the Tweeter Tube:
Hey, he’s not citing Fox News in support. This is some daring “thinking” on Donald’s part.
As the Trump’s tower of lies implodes, it’s time for Republican office holders to stop defending him or give up their frequent invocations of their secular saint, Ronald Reagan. Here’s the deal: I never supported or voted for Reagan but never doubted his patriotism. The current Russian kleptocracy is the successor state to the Soviet Union. Does anyone seriously think that the man who called the USSR “the evil empire” would accept oppo from a lawyer linked to the Kremlin?
Reagan may have been the leader who incubated what Charlie Pierce calls the GOP’s “prion disease,” but he was an old-fashioned patriot whose favorite president was Franklin Roosevelt. The Republicans have done a good job in the last 30+ years of making Reagan their FDR. Neither FDR nor Reagan would have colluded with a hostile power to gain political advantage. They didn’t need to do so to win elections. Defending Trump’s perfidy means that the GOP *should* lose the right to invoke Saint Ronnie. Will they stop? Hell no, but their invocations ring hollower by the day.
The world has truly turned upside down when I praise Ronald Reagan. Trump is so horrible that he makes Reagan look good in contrast. So it goes.
The “everybody does it” defense is a feeble one. Nixon and his minions trotted it out during Watergate. It did not work.
I originally planned to play Irving Berlin’s Everybody’s Doing It Now at the end of the post until I ran into the tune below. It was the label on the record that clinched it: Carnival Records with a clown logo. The Trump crime family brought the circus to the White House. It took six months for some people to realize that they’d taken a giant dump in the Rose Garden. Some people do not have a good sense of smell but the stench is growing day-by-day.
The Beguileds
I violated my film buff principles when I went to see Sofia Coppola’s remake of Don Siegel’s The Beguiled. I hate remakes, especially remakes of good movies. I was convinced by an article in the NYT that Coppola’s vision was so different from Siegel’s that I should give the remake a chance. Coppola *is* a very feminine director and Siegel was a manly man director of genre films. Their interpretations *are* different but it’s hard to think of any changes that Coppola made that improved the story. In short, I wish I’d stuck to my guns and stayed away.
Dr. A and I watched the 1971 version again a few days before going to the movies. It’s a terrific, suspenseful, and deeply weird movie with the Civil War as an important character. Eastwood plays a surprisingly chatty Union corporal named John McBurney. It seemed like a better fit for Paul Newman or Jim Garner BUT Clint rocked the part.
The Beguiled is fundamentally a Southern Gothic tale in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor. Coppola has removed some of the elements that made the story juicy, ripe, and entertaining. She’s also desexed the movie and reduced headmistress Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman) to prim and propertude. Is that a word? Coppola’s movie removes the Gothic from Southern Gothic, which makes it feel more like a southern fried episode of Downton Abbey set in Virginia. It was, however, filmed in Louisiana which is obvious by the landscape. Siegel too filmed in the Gret Stet but his movie was set in Mississippi. That made much more sense.
Then there are Coppola’s offenses against history. First, the Civil War is an after thought to the story. The war provides a menacing backdrop to Siegel’s 1971 film whereas it’s incidental to Coppola’s fixation on atmospherics. Then, there’s the dismissal of slavery in a line of dialogue: “The slaves left.” This is a movie set in the South that has no black characters whereas one of the best performances in Siegel’s film came from Mae Mercer as Hallie the enslaved housekeeper.
I was surprised when I looked up the running times of the two movies and learned that the 2017 version is 12 minutes shorter than the original. It seems much longer as the pacing is as slow as molasses and little happens until the last act. Sofia Coppola has always been much more interested in atmospherics than story-telling. It’s the fatal flaw in this movie: The Beguiled is not a subtle, nuanced story and Coppola’s attempt to make it one renders it dull and lifeless.
In the end, my issues with Coppola’s movie boil down to my taste in directors. Like the original French auteur theorists, I prefer the work of unpretentious genre directors such as Don Siegel to those filmmakers who are self-consciously arty like Ms. Coppola. It has nothing to do with gender but with style. It’s a pity because I *love* Lost In Translation but I cannot say the same about her latest effort.
I give Don Siegel’s 1971 version of The Beguiled 3 stars, an Adrastos Grade of B and an Ebertian thumbs up. As to the 2017 remake, I give it 2 stars, an Adrastos Grade of C and thumbs down. If anything, Dr. A disliked the remake more than I did because Coppola transformed Miss Martha, the head mistress played first by Geraldine Page and then Nicole Kidman, from a slightly crazy badass into a prim and proper Southern lady. Bad choice.
Next time, I’ll skip the remake.
Album Cover Art Wednesday: Romeo’s Escape
Romeo’s Escape was Dave Alvin’s attempt to make a hit album. Things didn’t go as planned but it’s a helluva record with a swell collagey cover.
The album is only available on YouTube in the playlist format. It’s worth dealing with:
Say It With Me … RACISM!
I just can’t wrap my mind around why the GOP won’t defend the fundamental conservatism of Obamacare:
Republicans are engaged in a brutal civil war between hard-liners and moderates as they struggle to craft legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. The episode invites an almost existential question for the GOP: Why, after seven years of nearly endless war against Obamacare, is the party unable to deliver a more conservative policy that provides access to health care to a similar number of Americans?
Give me a minute. It’ll come to me.
As a life-long Republican who has spent months contemplating this question, I’ve come to an answer that will be hard for many conservatives to swallow: Passing an Obamacare replacement is difficult because the existing system is fundamentally a collection of moderately conservative policies.
But it was championed by a black president! HOW can it be conservative? HOW can it be familiar to, say, a Mitt Romney or a John McCain? How, when it has the fingerprints of a man named Barack all over it?
To be sure, the suggestion that Obamacare is based on conservative principles is anathema to the modern incarnation of the GOP. Opposition to the legislation has become so central to the party’s agenda that simply writing these words will surely brand me as a Republican apostate.
I can’t imagine why that would be true.
If you force insurance companies to cover people who are already sick, you need market interventions such as the individual mandate and sufficiently generous tax subsidies to prevent a death spiral. And for people with few resources, these subsidies follow the wisdom of Reagan and provide Medicaid coverage.
Unfortunately, these marketplace realities run afoul of the Republican Party’s newly developed preternatural love for completely unfettered markets — a love that is simply incompatible with reality and our party’s history.
No, your party’s history is much more compatible with virulent racism and horror stories about black people mooching off the system. You suck Ronald Reagan’s legacy long and hard throughout this piece but fail to mention that his anti-government rhetoric relied entirely on a worldview driven by fear of nonwhites.
Where you said “love for completely unfettered markets?” You meant “love for gerrymandered votes that can only be won by promising to punish poor minorities and women.”
I have many problems with Obamacare, but they don’t stem from a belief that any government intervention in markets is a nonstarter. Such a belief cannot be, and frankly has never been, the litmus test for policy in the Republican Party.
You sweet summer child. Right now the litmus test for policy is “will it piss off my liberal sister-in-law?” A litmus test based on actual government intervention would be a step UP. I swear, we’re gonna spend the next 4 years (if we’re unlucky, the next 40) twisting ourselves into knots to pretend none of what’s happening is driven by racist spite when that’s all our politics are anymore.
A.
This Entire Story on Jim Acosta is Bullshit
Remember during the heyday of the Daily Show, when reporters would anonymously carp at the supposed freedom Jon Stewart had to call bullshit on bullshit? The stifled contemptuous jealousy with which they talked about him and his team? “Oh, he’s a comedian, not a journalist, and he’s on a cable network, not at an august publication run by someone with a numeral after his name, so he can question authority and we can’t, woe is helpless little us.”
Acosta’s remarks aren’t just blunt; they’re unusual. Reporters are supposed to report, not opine. Yet Acosta’s disdain has flowed openly, raising a question about how far a reporter — supposedly a neutral arbiter of facts, not a commenter on them — can and should go.
Really? It raises a question? All by itself? Nobody raised that question? Nobody who wants to be named, anyway? That’s okay, just put the question in the headline and pretend it came from God himself. No worries.
A curious sidelight to all this has been the relatively tepid support Acosta has received from his fellow White House journalists. Only a few have publicly spoken out in support of him. There have been no walkouts or calls for boycotting the briefings (although Acosta has suggested “collective action” to get the cameras back). The White House Correspondents’ Association has confined its agitation to behind-the-scenes negotiations with Spicer and several short, general statements.
So Acosta put himself out there, calling bullshit when he smelled it, and nobody else in the cowardly White House press corps jumped to his defense, so that automatically makes … Acosta questionable? HOW? What the hell kind of morally bankrupt construction is this? Is someone only right about stuff when everybody validates their point of view? Is he only correct if more than six other reporters back him up? Is that how you determine who’s on the side of the angels and who’s going to hell?
I’m really confused about this, Paul Farhi, because I’m old enough to have gone to journalism school and been taught about a trade that specialized in holding power to account. Nobody mentioned a popularity contest among our peers, and let’s be honest, most reporters fucking hate each other anyway. The good ones always have half a dozen enemies in the business.
Jim Acosta is not proven right or wrong by counting how many of his colleagues like his tone of voice. Even if he was, if you read the entire story, Farhi doesn’t even quote anyone who’s all that mad at Acosta. Farhi quotes Spicer, who of course is going to shit-talk Acosta, and he quotes Fox:
In fact, the pushback against Acosta from some quarters of the media has been more striking. On a recent Fox News segment, for example, former Fox News White House reporter Ed Henry said Acosta’s on-air commentary had “crossed the line” into opinion.
Henry then burst into flames, as is customary when irony flips the switch on the XM42.
How exactly is it striking, Farhi, that a Trump-friendly network thinks bullshit-opposing journalists are just de trop? Wouldn’t you expect Fox to say that anyone not actively licking the president’s boots must be some kind of communist traitor somehow? Isn’t that what they’ve spent the past two Republican administrations saying? Is this NEW for them somehow?
This is my favorite part of the story, though. It’s the SECOND TO LAST PARAGRAPH WHICH DISPROVES THE LEAD.
In fact, Acosta didn’t go easy on Trump and Spicer’s predecessors; his questioning of Obama press secretary Josh Earnest and Obama himself was often highlighted in conservative media accounts and in Republican National Committee emails. During the IRS scandal, for instance, he asked Earnest whether the White House’s claim that it had lost important emails was like saying “the dog ate my homework.” He also pressed Obama on his characterization of the Islamic State as “the J.V. team” and the president’s contention that he hadn’t underestimated the terror organization. “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” Acosta asked.
So … the entire premise of your story is bullshit, then? Acosta has said nothing provably false or even all that inflammatory, Acosta’s boss is really happy with his work, Acosta’s main critics are administration officials and one Fox jackass, so … why didn’t you spike this piece of shit? Why is it out there with a vague … this raises questions and shadows are swirling in the ether of nothingness in which disembodied observers might opine that we can’t ever know the truth?
What’s the good of keeping democracy from dying in darkness if you’re just going to drown it in stupidity?
A.
Life Imitates The Sopranos: Steve Bannon Edition
I hope y’all have read the excerpt from Joshua Green’s book about Bannon and Trump at NYMag.com. As far as I’m concerned, this is the money passage:
Like Trump, Bannon was a businessman and born deal-maker. With experience on Wall Street and in Hollywood, he was nothing if not high energy, a mile-a-minute talker with a volcanic temper who rarely slept and possessed a media metabolism to rival Trump’s own. And Bannon, too, had a healthy self-regard. On his office wall hung an oil painting of Bannon dressed as Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries, done in the style of Jacques-Louis David’s famous neoclassical painting — a gift from Nigel Farage.
A Napoleon portrait? That reminds me of the time on The Sopranos that Tony ordered Paulie Walnuts to dispose of a portrait of Tony with his deceased race horse, Pie-O-My. You may recall that Ralphie had the horse torched for the insurance money, which is why Tony couldn’t bear to have it around. Not only did Paulie keep the painting, he had it revised thusly:
The only problem with the Bannon-Tony Soprano analogy is that the latter had some redeeming characteristics. If Bannon has any, they’re not readily apparent.
Unsolicited Advice For Trump Junior From Earl Long
The shoes keep dropping. Our idiot president’s* idiot son is the subject of another NYT story. The lede of the story says it all:
Before arranging a meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer he believed would offer him compromising information about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Jr. was informed in an email that the material was part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy, according to three people with knowledge of the email.
I realize the Trump crime family loves headlines but sometimes it’s best to STFU and stop bragging. The late Earl Long was a smart politician who came from a political family. Trump Junior could do worse than to heed Uncle Earl’s savvy advice:
First Draft Potpourri: I’ll Be Doggone Edition
I used to think of July as the dog days of summer when not much happened. Those days appear to be gone, doggone it, We’ve had another news-heavy weekend so I’m going to run several flags up the pole and salute them; some with a one-fingered salute. I may, however, let one of my handy colleagues above do the dirty work. It’s an all hands on deck moment for the Republic, after all.
No Polish Joke: The other day, I threatened to title a post Polish Joke when the Insult Comedian was delivering his triumph of the will rant in Warsaw. I did not. I didn’t want to revive shit like this:
Ethnic joke books like the one above were popular when I was a kid. It’s one reason I was concerned that Trump would start riffing on Polish jokes. He *is* the first Insult Comedian ever elected president*. Given the tone and nature of his speech, even the nastiest Polish joke would have been better than the mish-mash of white ethno-nationalist nonsense he delivered. The fingerprints of Stephens Miller and Bannon were all over the speech. Oh, goody.
Since there were two outstanding pieces about the No Polish Joke speech at the Atlantic, I’ll send you there for some serious analysis:
How American Presidents Used To Speak Abroad by James Fallows.
The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech by Peter Beinart.
You Say Collusion, I Say Conspiracy: According to the NYT, the amoral nincompoops of Team Trump went fishing for derogatory material about Hillary Clinton in Russian waters. Trump Junior has told several different stories about this meeting. I, of course, do not believe any of them. Lying comes as naturally as breathing to this crowd.
I saw Junior referred to as the Fredo of the Trump crime family. I disagree, doggone it. They’re a family of Fredos. Only a Fredo would allow his daughter to sit in for him at a major international conference. Nepotism is in like Flynn as it were.
Vlad-n-Donny’s Love Fest: Team Trump spun the meeting as a win for their guy because he allegedly didn’t make any major gaffes. It appears to have been a triumph for the Russians. It was four liars in a room with two translators. I believe Russian liar Lavrov’s account of the meeting and not the weak tea poured by the Tillerson. The former’s statement comports more with Trump’s previous comments as well as these post-meeting tweets by Putin’s Pawn:
The whole “let by-gones be by-gones” theme struck by both Trump and Tillerson gave Putin the win, doggone it. The sound you hear is past Republican Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan rolling over in their graves. In fact, I believe Ike’s hardline Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was briefly reanimated then died of a heart attack upon learning of the Putin-Trump encounter…
The meeting also inspired one of Trump’s dizzier ideas:
Fox meet hen-house. The reaction was so negative that the president* kinda sorta walked it back during this morning’s tweet storm:
I believe the Watergate conspirators would have called this a “modified, limited” walk back. They should try the Ron Ziegler method and call the original tweet “inoperative.” If only we could declare the entire Trump administration* inoperative and rewind the past 170 days. It seems like 170 years, y’all.
I wish they’d give us back the dog days of summer but since they won’t, I’ll give Marvin Fucking Gaye the last word, doggone it:
Today on Tommy T’s Can’t Even – Runaway muse edition
Hi, folks – taking a break this week. Combination of nothing new in Freeperville (besides the inevitable crowing that The Darnold was all alone in that G20 pic because he’s better than everyone else there and they’re just jealous) and general fed-upness.
Speaking of fed up, here’s the surf and turf portion (broccoli was still steaming) of last night’s dinner.
Congratulations – my contribution to First Draft has now turned into a bad Facebook page.
There’s an APB out on my muse, and hopefully they’ll find her before she gets a new identity and a plane ticket to Fiji.
If only I’d gotten a comment on my last post……..
Want to #Resist, Rich Liberals? Buy Some Fucking Newspapers
This was rightly roasted all over the place this week:
Bigger government handouts won’t win working-class voters back. This is the fallacy of the left, believing that voters just need to be shown how much they are getting in government benefits. In reality, these voters see themselves as being penalized for maintaining the basic values of hard work, religion and family.
And I made the point myself that “Democrats” like Penn have no idea where the center is in this country and no financial incentive to find out. If they can cash in without providing any kind of data, why would they do the work necessary to prove their (bullshit) hypothesis?
Move to the center, Democrats! Because if you nominate a war hero, he certainly won’t be characterized as a traitor! If you nominate a woman so hawkish she makes Angela Merkel look like a pacifist, she certainly won’t be derided as weak! If you run a biracial constitutional lawyer whose ideas would be right at home in the Eisenhower administration, he’s certainly not going to be called a secret Muslim terrorist sympathizer!
This idea that the appeal of the GOP to the average voter is about substance is just adorable. We could go back in time, nominate Bernie Sanders, he could talk nonstop about manufacturing jobs and Real Americans in the Rust Belt, and by the time wingnut media were done with him he’d be That Socialist Jew and he’d have had to denounce every single black friend he’d ever made.
If the future of the Democratic Party is conversion of Republican voters, nobody is ever going to be good enough.
My biggest problem with that Penn piece and this WTF nonsense is that what Democrats need isn’t another retooling by somebody’s fucking cousin who’s a brand ambassador. They don’t need to call abortion icky or abandon whatever the fuck these rich white tools think is “identity politics” this week. They don’t need a white man with a Southern accent and a picturesque farmer/coal miner background (though if we wanna run Jimmy again, I’m game if he is).
They need their own fucking printing press and they should go buy one. Plus a few dozen TV stations and some local radio networks. Maybe save some media execs from themselves.
Without those things, it doesn’t matter if Democrats move left, right or center if there’s a 24-7 media machine screaming that all Dems including YOUR SENATOR INSERT NAME HERE is a pinko commie babykilling fairy peacefreak who wants to give secret welfare to black people by raising your taxes.
It doesn’t matter how many “Rust Belt correspondent” anthropologists big papers parachute in to gawk at the rubes and come up with euphemisms for racsim. They’ll never be able to convince people that “the media” aren’t the bad guys when the only media people consume is anti-Democratic, anti-dissent, anti-media media.
It’s not like there aren’t properties for sale. Good, profitable properties (I will NEVER fucking understand shuttering a profitable business, never in my life) that are doing important work in places where Americans desperately need a voice for public education, organized labor, a living wage, alleviation of poverty, universal health care and all the things we claim are so important to us every four years.
So maybe some of the people who will shovel cash at Penn and this WTF bullshit can wheel their barrels full of money just a little farther down the street and buy themselves the message they know isn’t getting out. It didn’t matter in the last half-dozen elections, presidential and otherwise, that Democrats across the board DID have policies and priorities to fix health care, to retrain American workers, to raise the minimum wage, to provide public education. Nobody heard a word they were saying.
You let Republicans do all the talking and people are going to vote for Republicans every time.
A.
