Category: Media

Fool me once… OK, now fool me again

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

The race is on. In one lane we have Donald Trump using false evidence from Benjamin Netanyahu as an excuse to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal, a first step in drumming up support for another Mideast war.

In the other, a diverse crew of investigators sifting through a trove of Trump lies, sorting them out, preparing a case that might topple our home-grown Mussolini.

So far Trump is winning, and each day brings more evidence that we’re right to worry — that Trump really might start a major war if that’s what it takes to keep Robert Mueller from overtaking him and making an airtight case.

This morning I visited my friend Swamp Rabbit, who is totally opposed to worrying. He thinks taking deep breaths and letting time pass is the best way to deal with situations you can’t control.

“But this is like the Iraq War in 2003, Rabbit. The chief and his minions let loose a stream of lies about a nonexistent threat, the media plays along with the lies, or do a halfhearted job of debunking them. Propaganda tamps down potential public outrage. The bombs start falling.”

“That’s just your ‘magination,” the Rabbit said. “Ain’t no way we gonna get fooled into fighting another of them disaster wars.”

“That’s what they said after Vietnam, you dumb rodent.”

My insult pissed him off. “You’re projecting, Odd Man. You got a shitty part-time job and can’t keep up with your bills or support your writing habit. Just because you in a downward spiral don’t mean the world is, too.”

I saw his point but resented his insistence that my bleak personal situation belied evidence that the world was in trouble.

“Trump is an existential threat,” I said. “He’s a monster con man with no redeeming qualities.”

“No shit,” the Rabbit replied. “But it took an army of morons to create the monster. It’s a little late to talk them into changing their minds, doncha think?”

“Maybe not. If public opinion can’t stop him, what will?”

The Rabbit broke the seal on a bottle of Wild Turkey and took a quick drink. “There’s Congress,” he said. “And then there’s the courts.”

I groaned and almost said something nasty, but in the end I just asked him to pass the bottle.

Footnote: As George W. Bush once said, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me you can’t get fooled again.”

Emotional weather report for April

~ odd man out ~ 3 Comments

…High tonight, low tomorrow, precipitation is expected.
– Tom Waits

Nature was at war with itself last month – solitary balmy days sandwiched by cold snaps with gusty winds, the sky still bright at 7:30 pm, but with temps in the thirties. I ran at dusk, watching the light shift as clouds rushed in, reshaping ordinary things into creatures I couldn’t trust, and vice versa.

The dinosaur up ahead turned out to be a mobile crane with steel jaws. The old woman scrubbing bed sheets was a chopper draped in a tarp that flapped in the wind.

The north wind hit me full force on Broad Street. I turned my head and saw THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS stenciled in gold on an impressive glass entryway and, on either side of the entryway, the words TAX TIME printed in big bold caps on tall cardboard signs. I guessed that Mormons had abandoned their South Philly mission to a platoon of accountants.

I turned west on Passyunk and saw the sky split in half, a big black cloud on the right, a pink sunset bleeding into clear blue on the left. Kanye West was on the corner, scolding black people for choosing to be slaves. Stormy Daniels stumbled out of Fatso’s Bar, followed by Donald Trump’s slack-jawed lawyer – Cohen, his name is.

My life passed before my eyes. Everything reminded me of past mistakes and false assumptions. The skinny old smoker outside 7-11 was at death’s door. Or would he outlive me by 20 years?

I stopped running and phoned my friend Swamp Rabbit. “It’s high anxiety,” I said. “You know any remedies?”

“Time,” the Rabbit said. “This time next week it might be 90 degrees. This time next year, or the year after, Trump might be making a deal to stay out of jail.”

“You can’t control what’s coming, so get a grip,” he added. “Get some new glasses, too.”

Rabid Rudy just won’t fade away

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

In 1951, Douglas MacArthur, grand poobah of the armies and supreme egomaniac, announced his retirement by telling Congress, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

That was then.

Nowadays, old soldiers and politicians and grifters and lawyers fight to their dying breath to not fade away. For example, Rudy Giuliani spent a decade and a half praising himself for having been mayor of New York in 2001 when those two planes took out the twin towers. As Joe Biden famously said, “…There’s only three things [Giuliani] mentions in a sentence — a noun and a verb and 9/11…”

But something new has come up. Giuliani, who more than ever looks and speaks like a rabid chipmunk, has elbowed his way back into the news by becoming the new legal rodent on Donald Trump’s sinking ship, where he’s quickly proven to be even dumber than long-time Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

On Wednesday night, Giuliani told Fox News talking head and Trump ass-wipe Sean Hannity that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 Cohen said he gave porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her from going public about having an affair with Trump. This, of course, directly contradicted Trump’s claim that he knew nothing about a payoff to Daniels.

Stormy’s hired gun Michael Avenatti reacted to Giuliani’s remarks by telling CNN “I said it weeks ago, I’m going to say it again: Mr. Trump will not serve out his term. No way. No how. He will be forced to ultimately resign. This is a bombshell.”

A bombshell Trump set off by scraping the bottom of the barrel to find a lawyer who will delay the inevitable. Giuliani is doing the opposite. We should thank him for not fading away.

Correspondents celebrate failure to do their jobs

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

I heard comedian Michelle Wolf interviewed on the radio today. She made news Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner by tweaking chronic liars Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, but one of her best lines was directed at the liar-in-chief and his symbiotic relationship with correspondents and their bosses:

What no one in this room wants to admit is that … [Trump has] helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.

It wasn’t even a joke, but that’s my point. Wolf isn’t a dazzling wit in the style of Stephen Colbert, who skewers Donald Trump on a nightly basis for fans who already know Trump is doing great harm to the notion that we live in a democracy.

In fact, Wolf is about as subtle as a flying mallet, maybe because she knows you can’t get the attention of the journalists who enabled Trump without hitting them over the head with the obvious — i.e., that they knew Trump was unqualified to be president and deliberately failed to communicate this truth to their audiences when it could have made a difference.

Remember, Trump lost the popular vote by a large margin, and there’s a good chance he would have lost the election if swing voters, and non-voters, had known more about his background. But the media rarely questioned Trump’s boastful lies while he was campaigning, choosing instead to present them as what Conway would call “alternative facts.”

By shining a brighter light on facets of Trump’s career — for example, his years as a casino mogul in Atlantic City — media outlets could have completely discredited him. But they chose instead to soft-pedal his personal history, lest they be accused of “liberal bias,” a charge that might adversely affect their ability to suck up to the insiders who provide them with so-called scoops.

Check out how Margaret Talev of the White House Correspondents’ Association responded to Wolf’s performance:

Last night’s program was meant to offer a unifying message about our common commitment to a vigorous and free press while honoring civility, great reporting, and scholarship winners, not to divide people. Unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit of that mission.

Talev is an idiot, or worse. A free press cares about truth, not civility. The truth will inevitably “divide people” because it alienates those who want to suppress it. Any journalist who doesn’t accept these common-sense facts should have her press credentials revoked.

Footnote: I don’t mean to imply Colbert doesn’t pack a punch. He used the flying-mallet approach on George W. Bush at the 2006 correspondents’ dinner. At least Bush, unlike Trump, had enough balls to show up for the event.

Another: Sure, a lot of mainstream journalists are doing good work now and might help topple Trump, but where were they early on, when the beast was slouching toward Washington, D.C.?

The worthless Washington media

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Washington, D.C.

Ryan Cooper:

But no. When Wolf launched a few mild zingers at Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway — saying that Sanders’ “smoky eye” makeup was made from “burnt facts,” speculating about how to get Conway trapped under a tree, and attacking CNN for profiting off the Trump presidency — most of the elite D.C. press leaped to their defense. CNN’s Chris Cillizza said Wolf was bullying Sanders. MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski tweeted that Wolf’s makeup joke was “deplorable.” The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman wrote that it was “impressive” that Sanders didn’t walk out. “Being mean isn’t funny,” whined Politico Playbook. “It’s mean.” Mike Allen, the dean of D.C.’s political journalists and (not coincidentally) an extraordinarily ethically compromised person himself, announced: “Media hands Trump big, embarrassing win.”

Margaret Talev, the president of the White House Correspondents Association, capped things off with a statement on Sunday night lamenting that “the entertainer’s monologue” wasn’t in the spirit of the dinner’s supposed “mission.”

Let’s be frank here: The basic job of Sanders and Conway is to lie and dissemble on behalf of a corrupt president who has taken vicious media-baiting far beyond the Spiro Agnew level. They do it nearly every time they open their mouths. That it is possible to react to these mild insults outside of this overtly and personally threatening context is final confirmation that the above journalists are not capable of perceiving the reality of the American state, much less how they are enabling it. As Alex Pareene once noted, “These people practice a form of corruption in which the corrupt individual literally cannot understand why anyone wouldn’t consider him or her a stalwart and productive member of society.”

It should come as no surprise that the White House Correspondents Association is itself all but an open fraud. The ostensible purpose of the group, and its annual fancy party, is to fund some journalism scholarships — but it spends less than a quarter of its revenues on that. (The fact that the dinner is making some important people piles of cash is surely the only reason it has not yet been canceled.)

People often say that Washington, D.C., as a whole is an awful, corrupt town, but that’s not really true. Much of it is quite pleasant, and most residents are not corrupt political hacks — indeed, even today a plurality of the population is still working- and middle-class black people. Instead, D.C. is home to some self-dealing creeps — the worst, most amoral social-climbing careerists in the country (and many of them actually live in Maryland or Virginia). The wretched correspondents’ dinner is only worthwhile as a sort of thermometer into the moral debauchery of that group. The diagnosis is not promising.

Starbucks helps widen the great divide

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Headline from a opinion piece by a lifelong black resident of Philadelphia:
“Starbucks wasn’t created for black folks, it was made to push us out.”

The piece appeared this week in response to the widely reported arrest of two young black men at a Starbucks in Philly’s affluent Rittenhouse Square section. The store manager called the cops on the men, who were sitting at a table but hadn’t yet bought anything. A customer recorded the arrest with her phone, the video went viral, and protests ensued.

The Starbucks story sounds like it’s about racism, and it is, but it’s also about classism. The fact that arrests were made, and made almost immediately, demonstrates how high a priority Philly cops place on protecting residents of affluent neighborhoods from real and imagined dangers.

Put another way, it’s likely that arrests wouldn’t have been made — that police wouldn’t even have been called — if the incident had occurred at a Starbucks in a poor neighborhood, where people are less likely to raise a fuss unless something truly criminal is taking place.

Wait, I forgot — there are no Starbucks in poor neighborhoods. The mere presence of a Starbucks in a neighborhood indicates that property values are booming to the point where poor people, black and white, have been pushed out, or soon will be pushed out, by people who can afford higher rental and mortgage payments.

(Check out the Zillow study, conducted in 2015, that documents the role Starbucks plays in the “gentrification” of city neighborhoods.)

Now Starbucks has announced it will close 8,000 stores for an afternoon next month in order to hold “racial-bias education” sessions for its employees. This may be a smart corporate strategy for avoiding lawsuits, but it will do nothing to allay the xenophobia and intolerance so prevalent in wealthy enclaves where residents have enough clout at City Hall to make cops jump through hoops at their command.

Racial bias sessions won’t keep wealthy residents from raising a stink when someone plays a flute in the square, or when the so-called Friends of Rittenhouse Square try to ban wall sitting there.

More broadly, the sessions will do nothing to relieve tensions in big cities like Philly, where the gulf between rich and poor residents continues to widen.

Trump has nothing to ‘lose’

~ odd man out

Reporters and White House insiders seemed to agree yesterday that Donald Trump was “losing it” I wondered what they were talking about. Did they mean his ability to put aside personal problems and focus on the welfare of others? Was it his sense of humor, his grip on reality, his human decency?

He never had any of those things, so how could he lose them? He is what he is – the ultimate ugly American, obsessed with the ownership and sale of things, content to believe that greed, fraudulence, ignorance and arrogance are virtues, not flaws.

Trump apparently threw a tantrum in the White House after learning the FBI had raided his personal attorney’s home and office. Later, in front of reporters, he called the raid “an attack on America,” as if nailing down evidence of his corrupt conduct, in and out of office, was akin to Pearl Harbor or 9-11.

But there’s no point ranting about Trump, he is what he is. What’s exasperating is his fan base, that malignant mass of white Americans who refuse to renounce him, to admit they were suckers for having voted for him. Many of them admire him, precisely because his persona reflects their own worst selves.

Trump tweeted this today:

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Nice and new and smart. Gas killing animal. In a little while, Trump fans might get to see the real-world consequences of having elected a fake macho man who thinks it’s a good idea to risk World War III by punching adolescent threats into his phone.

The awful truth: Our fearful leader is happy to risk World War III, if only to divert attention from the Mueller probe, which seems to have hit pay dirt. That’s the kind of guy Trump is.

Pravda TV

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

So you should all read this about the Sinclair Group. Be sure to watch the video: