Wow! If Roseanne Barr Can Be Booted Off Network TV... How About The Current Occupant Of The Oval Office? (Hint, Hint)

The tweet from the Oval Office in the aftermath of the cancellation of top-rated "Roseann" — the most prominent network TV defender of the current occupant — was telling. The current occupant took note of the ABC apology to the target of the offensive tweet — Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to POTUS 44. The current occupant of the Oval Office talked not about Roseanne Barr's firing, but rather locked on to the apology ABC made to Valerie Jarrett. In a piteous twitter, the current occupant proclaimed that he deserved apologies from ABC for not recognizing the current occupant's great achievements. If this is a (fair & balanced) demonstration of megalomania, so be it.

[x The Atlantic]
The "Roseanne" Fantasy Is Over
By Spencer Kornhaber


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

abc art barr became black character continue country critics culture directly dream dungey economic election family fantasy jarrett lot mostly national network obama outwardly point politics president pro-trump punchline question quickly rates rhetoric roseanne sense share sign sitcom sprang subject trump trump-voting tv tweet valerie values voters watch worldview written

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The Trump-voting Roseanne Conner of the rebooted "Roseanne" was not deplorable. She griped not about “shithole countries” or the “rapists” from Mexico, but about her mounting bills and healthcare costs. She sternly but lovingly helped out her gender-noncomforming grandkid. Her family members disliked undocumented immigrants only, it was emphasized, because they directly undercut their own job prospects. TV’s Roseanne did have some prejudices about the Muslim family that moved in across the street, but copped to being in the wrong when the new neighbors shared their wi-fi password in a moment of need.

The Trump-voting Roseanne Barr of real life, the actress who plays the character, doesn’t seem quite so concerned with economic stability or decency. Her Twitter feed has featured bursts of Islamophobia and conspiracy-mongering about George Soros. On Tuesday, the racist worldview in which such rhetoric is rooted—a worldview that sees America as under perpetual threat by brown and Jewish folks—was again affirmed when she sent a tweet comparing the Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett with an ape.

The tweet was quickly deleted, and within hours ABC announced it was canceling "Roseanne." Network president Channing Dungey called Barr’s tweet “abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values.” This was in many ways a shocking decision: It’s not often a profit-minded corporation axes a show that’s network TV’s biggest hit in years. But on some level, the outcome felt inevitable. All along, "Roseanne" offered a fantasy of who the average Trump voter was, and at some point, reality ruins fantasy.

After Donald Trump’s election, economic anxiety became a go-to explanation for what had happened—and almost as quickly, became a punchline for critics who thought that term distracted from the more urgent reasons for Trump’s rise. Most of those critics were on the left and pointed to the racism, sexism, and xenophobia plain in the statements of many pro-Trump voters. Others said that even outwardly tolerant Trump supporters had endorsed exclusionary policies. Yet some critics on the right, too, warned against overemphasizing the pocketbook in understanding the president’s appeal. “Trump’s populism sprang directly from culture wars, not from economic issues,” Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro wrote in a review of the new "Roseanne." “It sprang from anger at intersectional politics, coastal elitism, and disdain for traditional values.”

ABC’s sitcom, though, centered on a pro-Trumper who was basically neutral on culture. Roseanne and her husband, Dan, were mostly ever only confused, not antagonized, by signs of feminism or gay acceptance. If “culture clashes” did figure in, they were mostly in disagreements over how strictly to parent kids and grandkids. The reboot’s most controversial joke was a meta one about Dan dozing through “all the shows about black and Asian families,” a reference to sitcoms like "Black-ish" and "Fresh Off the Boat." The punchline, delivered by Roseanne: “They’re just like us. There, now you’re all caught up.” Dismissive? Absolutely. Outwardly racist? No. All in all, the show was such a benign portrayal of Trumpland that Trump himself applauded it.

Of course, were the partisan debates unfolding both on talk radio and around breakfast tables only about tax rates and the affordability of health care, politics wouldn’t be such a tricky subject for pop culture right now (nor would it command the share of attention it currently does). But what’s actually happening involves a lot of people who speak and tweet exactly like the real Roseanne does. Her conspiracy rhetoric has merely echoed the messages of the pro-Trump media ecosystem. Her crack about Valerie Jarrett was far from original, too. As journalists who’ve written about the Obama administration can well attest, someone, somewhere, tweets similar vileness every time a black Democrat is mentioned online. The difference is that Roseanne was famous.

As my colleague David Sims has written, the overtness of the Jarrett tweet has made it untenable for ABC to continue with the show. There’s plausibly even an aesthetic component to this threshold of cancellation: The distance between Roseanne’s "Roseanne" and the actual one has been made so blatant that the show would be hard to watch with a straight face. Now, one question moving forward is whether and how Hollywood will continue in its overtures to Trump voters. Because that’s what this sitcom was: an outreach effort (and ratings grab) conceived immediately after the election by TV executives who, as Dungey put it, “had not been thinking nearly enough about economic diversity and some of the other cultural divisions within our own country.”

It certainly makes sense that a broad network sitcom would want to keep things simple when tackling as fractious a subject as Trump’s appeal. It also makes sense that it would be relatively gentle in its portrayal of his voters—both to avoid offending and because, in the end, a lot of viewers want to watch likable characters. There’s a less cynical rationale for a certain amount of compassion and flaws-covering, too. The arts, after all, are supposedly an “empathy machine,” a means for building bridges between people who otherwise don’t relate.

But art is also a way to express truth. And while there are, surely, plenty of families like the one onscreen in "Roseanne," the fact that its own star—one of the few openly Trump-supporting mainstream entertainers of our day—couldn’t even maintain a façade of non-bigotry in the public spotlight raises the question of which strain of Trumpism is the more relevant one in the national conversation. "Roseanne" was created and written in part by progressives like Wanda Sykes and Whitney Cummings, and their team-up with the ideologically opposed Barr, like the show itself, could have been a sign that national unity is possible right now. It was a nice dream, and like a lot of American dreams lately, it’s up for questioning. # # #

[Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic covering pop culture and music. He received a BS (journalism) from Northwestern University (IL).]

Copyright © 2018 The Atlantic Monthly Group




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Edward N. (Ed) Simon Asks The Question O'The Day... Decade... Century

Yesterday, in this blog, Dahlia Lithwick offered a message of hope in these drear days. Today, Ed Simon argues that hope is not sufficient. We must resist the evil that resides in the Oval Office and the swamp the current occupant has created and filled with the worst sort of scum. If this is a (fair & balanced) question for our terrible time — Which Side Are You On? — so be it.

[x HNN]
Which Side Are You On?
By Edward N. (Ed) Simon


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

administration america american article asked become children civil concerning converse decades disagreements easy enough exhausting full government happens history hold human immigrant implications important irrelevant liberals lies live lucky month moving normal nothing opinion party people policies political pretending reality reece relatively reports times track trump tweets ultimately week wish

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In both its title and chorus, Florence Reece’s classic labor song of 1931 asked its audience the only pertinent political question in times of civil duress: “Which side are you on?” Repeated in covers by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg, and other folk singers conversant in the traditional music of the union movement, Reece’s lyrics present a simple yet steadfast choice – you can either be on the right side, or the wrong.

In more normal times such Manichaeism is looked at askance. We tend to valorize discourse and bipartisanship, the political order built on negotiating disagreement. But when the “other side” refuses to converse in good faith, when the stakes are nothing less than the continuation of the Republic in any recognizable manner, than Reece’s imploration takes on a new and pertinent import. Even if the days are getting warmer and baseball is being played again, the Memorial Day grills are being fired up and the beer is cold, this is very much a winter. This is very much not a moment when politics-as-usual is rational. This is very much not a normal time. German philosopher Hannah Arendt put it a bit more academically when she wrote “most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

Which side are you on?

Living in the midst of history, when it moves so rapidly, it’s hard to predict which single day, week, or month was when things took a turn. Full on despotism has been predicted so often that it’s easy to become flummoxed or disinterested, particularly in the daily lives of those of us lucky enough to live with our privileges largely unchanged. Middle class white liberals go grocery shopping in Trump’s America, while tweeting denunciations of the latest Trump obscenity. We watch television in Trump’s America, parsing Rachel Maddow’s analysis of the breaking news in Russia Gate. We enjoy our Netflix shows in Trump’s America, talking about "Wild Wild Country" on Facebook.

Life sometimes seems upside down in Trump’s America, but for many lucky in our stations, life as of now also seems fairly normal. Politics becomes a type of obscene spectator sport, an exercise in partisan masochism. When the worst one has had in their lived experience is the continual, dizzying, verbal defecations from the current administration, it’s relatively easy to immune ourselves to what that reality represents. As Dahlia Lithwick crucially and movingly asked recently in Slate, “How do we hold normal and crazy in our minds at the same time?” [See the blog post for May 29, 2018.] This, it should be said, is a relatively insignificant problem to have. Not everyone is so lucky.

If historians in the decades to come need to select a week when the spring air felt a little bit more constricting, the light a little dimmer, than it could be a few days in May. The media, in particular the liberal media, have been focused on the important issues concerning the Mueller investigation or the intricacies of Stormy Daniels’s civil lawsuit, but often to the detriment of the explaining the full scale of what’s at stake. Even those who oppose him have largely glossed over the sheer enormity of Trump’s ruptures. Trump’s attacks on the rule of law, his racist and sexist policies, his unadulterated performances of indecency, the exhausting magnitude of it all can ironically obscure the devastating human cost of his fascistic policies.

Following the Supreme Court’s March ruling in Jennings vs. Rodriquez where the majority opinion held that the government could detain immigrants indefinitely, the Trump administration took little time to enact that brief’s implications. Earlier this month Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions announced a new policy that would lead to the separation of immigrant children from their families, with Nick Miroff and Paul Sonne writing in a Washington Post article of May 15^th that the “Trump administration is making preparations to hold immigrant children on military bases... the latest sign the government is moving forward with plans to split up families.”

In her eloquent minority opinion in Jennings vs. Rodriquez, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that “Freedom from arbitrary detention is as ancient and important a right as any found within the Constitution’s boundaries.” Trump has directly lied about these policies, pretending that they’re the Democrat’s fault, which recalls Hannah Arendt’s observation that in a nation marked not by the occasional lie, but rather in a totalitarian state where lies are the very currency of governing, the people become “deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of it capacity to think and to judge. And with such people you can then do what you please,” even detain thousands of children while simultaneously denying that fact or pretending that it’s not your responsibility.

With its evocations of the Japanese internment camps of World War II the news would be heinous enough, but on Wednesday a 20 year old forensic accounting student from Guatemala named Claudia Patricia Gómez Gonzáles was shot in the head, murdered by immigration officials at the Mexican border. Nina Lakhani quotes the young girl’s mother in the Guardian, who said that her daughter “wanted to keep studying at university but we don’t have the money.... We’re poor and there are no jobs here, that’s why she travelled to the US — but they killed her. Immigration killed her.... She didn’t do anything wrong.”

And most disturbingly of all, Dakin Andone of CNN reported on May 26^th that the federal government had “lost track of nearly 1,500 immigrant children,” with reports that some of those children may have ended up being kidnapped by human traffickers. Ron Nixon, in an April 26^th New York Times article reports that there are concerns these children may now be “in the hands of human traffickers... used as laborers by people posing as relatives.” Whether through conscious malice or sick indifference, the policies of the Trump administration have enabled a new slave trade.

So easy to get lost in a morass of idiocy and gossip, reporting on ungrammatical tweets from the stubby thumbs of an illegitimate president while forgetting the full implications of what he’s enacted. Masha Gessen, the most astute writer about tyranny in the modern world, describes our predicament in a May 25^th essay in the New Yorker, explaining that the “overstimulation of the age of Trump... makes us lose track of time and whatever small sense humans normally have of themselves in history.”

Always participants at the carnival, it can be easy to cynically focus on just the bread and the circuses, or conversely to pretend that the bread and circuses are irrelevant. Neither perspective is correct, it’s in his rhetoric that Trump has been able to accomplish the travesties that he has, for nothing happens without the power of words first. When Trump uses the language of dehumanization in labeling Hispanic immigrants as “animals,” when he suggests that black athletes should be deported for voicing opinions he disagrees with, when he suggests that his political opponents should be investigated so as to silence them, he’s not obfuscating or diverting our attention — he’s laying out what he wishes to do. And so focusing on either the tweets or the policies to the exclusion of the other is to miss half of the narrative. For the one courtesy of the authoritarian is that despite his casual and wanton lies, when it comes to the implications of his dark vision he is always completely honest.

To whit [sic], when Trump delivered a commencement address on Friday at the Naval Academy where he claimed that ‘Together there is nothing Americans can’t do, absolutely nothing.... In recent years, and even decades, too many people have forgotten that truth. They’ve forgotten that our ancestors... tamed a continent,” he’s indulging the logic of Manifest Destiny and lebensraum, the rationale that justifies genocide and facilitates the possibility of it happening again.

Too often we fall into the false dichotomy of asking whether Trump is a buffoon or an aspiring tyrant while forgetting that one does not preclude the other, nor does the former make the later impossible. The track record of his comments and policies is so unequivocal that anyone arguing Trump is neither a racist nor a fascist implicitly enables him. By now we should move beyond such naivety.

Every legal means necessary must be engaged to minimize the impact of the Trump administration. There are disagreements between leftists, liberals, moderates, and anti-Trump conservatives as to if Trump represents a rupture with right-wing ideology or its ultimate culmination (both interpretations can be fundamentally true). In the moment, how we interpret Trump’s origins are less important than countering him. Concerning potential anti-Trump conservative allies — that there are disagreements with them is a given, that we can hold them responsible for what’s happened is fair, but ultimately those disagreements are irrelevant if they give us votes at the ballot box and bodies at the protest.

Concerning disagreements between liberals and leftists – perennially reenacting the traumas of the ’16 primary ensures Republican victories in ’18 and ’20. Asking what strategically and morally is the correct direction for the Democratic Party is crucial — left-wing wins in places like Georgia and Pennsylvania are encouraging signs that the party is moving in a more progressive direction — and it is imperative that the DNC listen. Hopefully winners of those primaries will push the party — which like it or not remains the only viable option of politically containing Trumpism — further to the left. But ultimately the most important ideological purity at this juncture in history is opposition to Trump.

Voting, however, is nowhere near enough. Not enough for the immigrant child pulled from their parents. Not enough for the refugee sent back to a war zone. Not enough for the Hispanic American assaulted by ICE. On Twitter, immigration lawyer Alida Garcia recommends that those wishing to get involved contact Informed Immigrant, which list resources for both those in need of help and those who wish to provide it, and of course the American Civil Liberties Union offers legal support, and has been instrumental in fighting the unconstitutional policies of this administration.

Our current age is exhausting, for the powers that be benefit from that exhaustion. No doubt the reality will change in a few weeks or months; the reality will possibly be far worse. Our great theorist of defiance, Rebecca Solnit, writes: “Hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them and addressing them...[for] hope is only a beginning; it’s not a substitute for action, only a basis for it.”

When the history of this period is written decades to come, when you look back and appraise the fortitude of your own character, the most important criteria for judgment will be “What did you do to oppose this injustice?”

So, which side are you on? # # #

[Edward N. (Ed) Simon is the Associate Editor of The Marginalia Review of Books channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. Simon received a BA (English) from Washington & Jefferson College (PA), an MA (literary and cultural studies) from Carnegie-Mellon University (PA), and a PhD (English) from Lehigh University (PA).]

Copyright © 2018 History News Network




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Dahlia's Hopeful Message For Our Time — The Parable Of The Wheat

Dahlia Lithwick makes a return to this blog after a long absence and today's essay is welcome message in these dreary days. And the bright side is that you will not have resort to a tequila shot to make it to her bracing conclusion. If this *fair & balanced) political commentary, so be it.

[x Slate]
How To Survive Trump’s Presidency Without Losing Your Mind
By Dahlia Lithwick


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

adults ago become broccoli change childhood children donald eat ends feel foreheads friend hold hope journalist kid king lies light live mad mark media minds news normal parable pay people perform perhaps record report sad started story tainted think track trump truth turn tweet used week wheat work world year

created at TagCrowd.com

[This article is adapted from a speech Lithwick gave last week when she accepted the 2018 Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis.]

This past week, journalists in America were struggling to comprehend two major stories: The first was that Donald Trump announced (via tweet) on Wednesday that any news that paints him in a negative light is, by definition, “fake news.” He went on to threaten the press credentials of any journalist who doesn’t portray him in a flattering light. This is, of course, the natural culmination of two years of attacks on the media, threats to reporters, promises to change the First Amendment press protections, and an unprecedented claim that the media itself is an “enemy of the people.” Perhaps relatedly, CBS reported Friday that every television at the Food and Drug Administration is tuned to Fox News and cannot be changed. This stuff is jarring because just two years ago, we believed such threats to the First Amendment died with Richard Nixon.

At the same time, we are all attempting to unravel a narrative in which Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s nonlawyer, created a shell corporation to pay hush money to a porn star with whom Donald Trump claims not to have had sex. That company became a funnel for ungodly sums of money from Fortune 500 companies and Russian oligarchs to perform services that it could have in no way performed.

In other words, if you work in media, you would be well within your rights to have had a tequila shot with your breakfast every day this week. It’s all just terribly sick and sad and the constant stream makes it hard not to be sick and sad all the time. We’ve long since stopped describing news consumption as drinking from a firehose. It went from firehose to tidal wave a year ago. Nevertheless, we’ve persisted.

Perhaps the most common refrain journalists hear from strangers is “I feel bad for you. I feel sad that following all this is your job.” The truth of the matter is that there is not enough hazard pay in the world. It’s hard not to want to shut it all off and just hope that some combination of Michael Avenatti, Bob Mueller, and the 2018 elections might restore normalcy. Normalcy would be nice, because weeks and months of being the head/desk emoji is hazardous to one’s mental health. Our brains, messed up from all that banging, still know something is amiss. It feels like the only way to exert any control at all over the insanity would be the capacity to turn it off.

And, of course, turning it off is exactly what a president who wants to kill the news is hoping for. Also, remember how reading and making the news are still all of our jobs?

This week a handful of tweets started trending that reminded me of how strong the impulse to normalize has become. It started with this tweet:

And spiraled into a series of these:

How do we hold normal and crazy in our minds at the same time? Sorting through this dilemma, and living as a journalist in the Age of Trump™, I have become thoroughly obsessed with a parable that mysteriously reached back from my childhood and grabbed me by the throat sometime after the election. It’s a story I used to have on a record and forgot about for 40 years. Truthfully, it’s an improbable tale for a kid’s album in the first place, but the ’70s were weird like that.

It took me months, but an old summer camp friend, Michelle, with an assist from a folklorist friend, finally tracked it down for me. The story is credited to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, a radically transformative thinker and mystic who lived in the late 18^th century. It’s a funny parable coming from a rabbi because God and religion appear nowhere in it. It’s also weirdly prescient for three centuries ago, but I guess that’s what makes a parable roll. Here it is:

HARVEST OF MADNESS

There once was a king who was also an astrologer. By studying the stars he learned that the harvest of wheat that year would be tainted, and anyone who ate of it would go mad. The king revealed this prophecy to his friend, the prime minister, and asked if there was anything they could do. The prime minister said, “Let us set aside some of last year’s wheat. That way we will not have to eat the tainted grain.” The king thought about this for a while, and then he said, “It’s not possible to set aside enough of last year’s wheat for everyone. But if we alone eat the good wheat, we will be the only sane people in a mad world. All the others will look at us as if we were the ones who are mad. So, we will have to eat the tainted wheat. But let us place a mark on our foreheads to remind each other that we are mad, like everyone else.”

The tale won’t let go of me in part because it so perfectly describes the world in which we now find ourselves, call it the Broccoli/World-on-Fire Paradox. We are trapped in a kind of national collective madness, where lies are truth, truth is derided as fake news, corruption is cleansing, and cruelty is good governance. Suddenly the adults are children and the Parkland, Florida, kids are adults, and every time you think it can’t get madder, it just does. It’s a world in which the mere act of declaiming, “This isn’t normal,” or “They’re not telling the truth” is dismissed as hysteria and overreaction. Jokes can hurt feelings, but ripping children from their parents leaves no lasting moral footprint.

Recently, I have begun to think of the wheat in this parable as the news itself; the news we must consume, because there is no ethical option to ignore it. That’s the compact we have made, and so we eat of it and eat of it until we are half-mad, but at least we are all going there together. We know what this is doing to our sanity, to our relationships, to the country, and indeed the entire world, but there’s no option but to follow it where it leads each day.

While I used to think of the parable of the wheat as tragic and nihilist (and in my childhood, I found it terrifying and still wonder who thought it suitable for a children’s record), in the year since Donald Trump took office, I have increasingly found that the story stays with me for a more hopeful reason. It stays with me because of the image of this mark, this stain on our foreheads, the one that’s meant to denote that we used to be sane, even if we can’t remember that fact. It’s a mark that signals that even though, as a nation, we must still inhabit these glittering cathedrals of lies and corruption, we can still see in one another the faint signs of what we were and what we hope to become again. It’s the story of a kind of ultimate triumph of all the people who live within madness and are forced to eat all the lies and still refuse to call them delicious. For me it’s a parable about truth telling (or the echoes of truth knowing) for truth’s own sake and of forming communities of people with secret markings who recall that we’ve all lost our minds but still refuse to just float up above it all and pray it goes away.

I told this story to a roomful of people the other night and someone asked me after how the story ends. I had to admit to him that as a formal matter, the story ends where I ended it: the madness and the markings. But the truth is that the story doesn’t end so much as invite us into it, to contend with it on its own terms. I’ve come to turn to this parable to recognize the markings and appreciate the people who suit up every day and use the tools of their trades to try to shovel the wheat around, to pile and sort it, and to hold fast to the old ideas about how the world should work. I see you there in the broccoli aisle, and you see me.

The people who organize and vote and march and run for office, the people who track down and report news, the folks who file lawsuits and who hear those lawsuits—they all do it in a world that makes no internal coherent sense anymore. But they see the other marks on other people’s foreheads, and they forge ahead. And I salute you, fellow broccoli people, and want to affirm that your marks are not as faint as they may seem. As long as we hang on to the marks and the memory and the promise, perhaps we can eat the wheat and not lose ourselves to it. The story holds fast so long as there are two people left to recognize each other. We eat the madness, as we may have to for a while longer, but we are not yet mad, and not yet alone. # # #

[Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor and legal correspondent for Slate, writes the column "Supreme Court Dispatches," and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Commentary, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Elle. She is a weekly legal commentator for the NPR show, "Day to Day." Lithwick is co-author (with Brandt Goldstein) of Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World (2003), a legal humor book, and I Will Sing Life: Voices from the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp (1992), a book about seven children from Paul Newman's camp who have life-threatening illnesses. She received a BA (English) from Yale University and a JD from Stanford Law School.]

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Today, Two Members Of The "Faithful Base" Come Out Of The Closet

At first, this blogger was nonplussed by the accompanying e-mail from Tom/Dan. It was brief without the usual salutation ("Hey all") and valedictory close ("Dan/Tom"). Upon reflection, it was mercifully brief because the message in the 'toon was brutally honest.

My response to the argument that’s been popping up a lot lately, that we shouldn’t criticize awful people because they then figure they have nothing to lose, and embrace full-on awfulness. People don’t become racists and Nazis because you call them out on their racist and Nazi behavior.

In today's 'toon, Sparky the Wonder Penguin (wearing Inuit-style googles to ward off bull$hit-blindness) encounters a pair of 2016 True Believers who ultimately display their true colors in the final panel. If this is display of true beliefs is a (fair & balanced) fulfillment of the old Foo-Bird Joke, so be it.

[x TMW]
Penguin Thinks We're Nazis
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2018 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)




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Today: How The Crime Story Of The 21st Century (So Far) Has Engulfed Us

Today, The Cobra (Maureen Dowd's nickname bestowed by POTUS 43) slithered in with today's post offering a take-down of confidence men (and women) who swindled vast numbers of gullible marks (victims). The accompanying photo of "Hollywood mogul" Harvey Weinstein being perp walked to a court room to face charges, surrender his passport, and arrange for bail prior to his trial. Then, this blogger imagined a perp walk at a later date as the current occupant of the Oval Office is handcuffed and walked to his eventual hearing in a DC courtroom. Thanks to Rudyard Kipling, we know that The Cobra is a sly creature. The current occupant of the Oval Office rehearsed his swindles with a fake university, inedible steaks, and bogus real estate development and, in 2016, pulled off his biggest con — stealing the government of the United States of America. If this is a (fair & balanced) crime exposé, so be it.

PS: Enhance today's post with the music from the soundtrack of the greatest confidence game film of all time — "The Sting."

[x NY Fishwrap]
Grifters Gone Wild
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

around art artists behavior believe billionaire blood book boy carreyrou change charm company con facebook fell finger flimflam harvey high-minded holmes ignored knew lanier lot love media money narrative nothing people princes prosecuting role scam silicon story suckers tech technology think trump turned valley voters wants ways weinstein wrote young

created at TagCrowd.com

Con artists have always been slithering around.

Huckleberry Finn tangled with flimflam men on Mississippi riverboats. There was a flirty snake oil salesman in “Oklahoma!” And Marian the Librarian fell in love with a charming charlatan, Professor Harold Hill, in “The Music Man.”

It was all part of an amusing American tradition of rapscallions doing their little side hustles.

But now narcissistic con artists are dominating the main stage, soaring to great heights and spectacularly exploding.

We have one running amok in the Oval.

And we have one who finally turned himself in at a TriBeCa police station on Friday. “Shakespeare in Love” was good. But Harvey in handcuffs was great. Harvey Weinstein spent many years prosecuting his nefarious schemes against women before women ensured his prosecution.

Elizabeth Holmes shot to fame as the youngest female self-made billionaire after she dropped out of Stanford at 19 and then founded the company that became Theranos. She claimed to have created an easier, cheaper way to do blood tests, just by pricking a finger, but then it turned out she was a literal bloodsucker, defrauding investors of $700 million on a nonexistent technology.

As Maria Konnikova wrote in her book, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It Every Time (2016), “The whirlwind advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift. Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change” when we are losing the old ways and open to the unexpected.

We are easy marks for faux Nigerian princes now, when chaos rules, the American identity wobbles, and technology is transforming our lives in awe-inspiring and awful ways.

Trump voters allowed themselves to believe they had a successful billionaire who knew the art of the deal when he only knew the art of the con. They bought his seductive campaign narrative, that the system was rigged and corrupt and only he could fix it. After winning by warning voters they were being suckered, he’s made them all suckers.

Those who ignored whispers about Weinstein’s grotesque behavior burned to believe that Hollywood was more than juvenile comic-book movies, that it could still make classy, sophisticated films with great roles for mature actresses like Meryl Streep and Judi Dench. And despite tales of misogyny and sickening transgressions, they wanted to buy Harvey’s grand narrative, that he was a liberal feminist who could raise enough money to help elect the first woman president.

With Holmes, people were longing for a young woman to break into the club of boy geniuses conjuring unicorns. She played to that, imitating Steve Jobs by wearing a black turtleneck and driving a car with no license plate. She pitched a Jobs-like mythic story about her company, that it was not merely about making money, it was designed to be “the most important thing humanity has ever built.”

High-minded elites like to scornfully say that Trump voters fell for his scam because they were ignorant and racist. But the high-minded elites fell for Holmes’s scam, even the fake deep authoritative voice she put on. Her board had George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis and David Boies; Rupert Murdoch and Robert Kraft were investors.

“It’s a controversial thing to say now, but Holmes wowed all these older men and wrapped them around her finger with her charm and youth and good looks and cool vision,” says John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal reporter who broke the scam story and who wrote a book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018) about it.

Carreyrou says that Silicon Valley has always had “a flimflam element” and a “fake it ’til you make it” ethos, from the early ’80s, when it was selling vaporware (hardware or software that was more of a concept or work in progress than a workable reality).

“We’ve been lionizing and revering these young tech entrepreneurs, treating them not just like princes and princesses but like heroes and icons,” Carreyrou says. “Now that there’s a backlash to Silicon Valley, it will be interesting to see if we reconsider this view that just because you made a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a role model for boys and girls.”

Jaron Lanier, the scientist and musician known as the father of virtual reality, has a new book out, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018). He says that the business plans of Facebook and Google have served to “elevate the role of the con artist to be central in society.”

“Anytime people want to contact each other or have an awareness of each other, it can only be when it’s financed by a third party who wants to manipulate us, to change us in some way or affect how we vote or what we buy,” he says. “In the old days, to be in that unusual situation, you had to be in a cult or a volunteer in an experiment [Skinner box] in a psychology building or be in an abusive relationship or at a bogus real estate seminar.

“But now you just need to sign onto Facebook to find yourself in a behavior modification loop, which is the con. And this may destroy our civilization and even our species.”

Lanier worries, now that tech has lost its halo, that there is nothing optimistic to replace it.

“We don’t believe in government,” he says. “A lot of people are pissed at media. They don’t like education. People who used to think the FBI was good now think it’s terrible. With all of these institutions the subject of ridicule, there’s nothing — except Skinner boxes and con artists.” # # #

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

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Today's Irony: The Current Occupant Of The Oval Office Doesn't Know The Difference Between HPV & HIV — The Current Occupant's Manhattan Lawyer, Roy Cohn, Denied His HIV-Infection To His Last Breath On His Death-Bed

An expert on Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), Professor Ellen Schrecker finds real parallels between the Wisconsin demagogue and the current occupant of the Oval Office. The link between McCarthy and the current occupant is the late Roy Cohn. When McCarthy crashed and burned in disgrace, Cohn left Washington, DC to return to his roots as sleazy lawyer in Manhattan. Cohn became, at the end of his career, the chief legal counsel of the current occupant. The lawyer instructed the current occupant in the dark arts of McCarthyism: bluster, falsehoods, and smearing his political enemies without hesitation. Further, the current occupant learned to attack the major institutions of government; McCarthy attacked the United States Army and the current occupant attacks the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And on and on, ad infinitum. If this is (fair & balanced historical analysis, so be it.

[x The Nation]
Trumpism Is The New McCarthyism
By Ellen Schrecker


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activities alleged allies american behavior campaign cold communism communists congressional current damage deal democratic establishment face fbi front given gop government liberals mccarthy mccarthyism members needed neither outrageous party political politicians president problems program provide public pushing republican right-wing senator similar simply society state truman trump turned war wisconsin years

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Nearly 70 years after Joseph McCarthy produced his first list of alleged government subversives at a West Virginia Republican banquet, the Wisconsin senator still haunts us. As historians and others ransack the American past searching for predecessors of our current president, McCarthy’s name often tops the list—but usually for the wrong reasons.

Even though the Donald doesn’t drink and “Tail-Gunner Joe” was a lush who died of liver failure, the two men are similar in many trivial and not-so-trivial ways. Like McCarthy, Trump is a sociopathic personality whose aberrant behavior facilitated a right-wing campaign against core democratic values.

Consistency is neither man’s hobgoblin. As blatant opportunists, neither was or is loyal to anything beyond themselves. After initially flirting with the social liberalism of their day, both switched parties and ideologies. During his early career as a judge in Appleton, Wisconsin, McCarthy was criticized for granting the quickest divorces around (at a moment when divorce was still considered scandalous, something reserved for abandoned women and film stars). While in his pre-Republican mode, Trump was a self-professed New York Democrat who was once, as he told "Meet the Press" in 1999, “very pro-choice.”

The two men have a remarkably similar relationship with the truth. McCarthy, like many politicians, exaggerated his wartime record while publicizing his ever-changing lists of—was it 81, 57, 205?—Communists in the State Department. No need here to detail Trump’s prevarications. The Washington Post says it’s an average of six or seven a day. Denial is his default mode.

In this, Trump may well have been following the advice of McCarthy’s former staffer, the notorious legal sleaze Roy Cohn, whose good connections and tainted ethics enabled him to service both McCarthy’s irresponsible allegations as well as the current president’s unprincipled business dealings.

Like Trump, McCarthy had, in the words of Boston lawyer Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, “no sense of decency.” The Wisconsin senator cared little about the human damage his reckless accusations caused. When he chaired his congressional investigations of supposed Communists in the government, he would bully witnesses, destroy their lives and livelihoods, and then, when the cameras were off, turn on the charm and hug their lawyers. Trump, as we know, has mocked a disabled reporter, compared immigrants to animals, and boasted about sexually assaulting women.

McCarthy, like the current president, played the media with panache. The press loved him. He fed its members juicy stories. They asked few questions. How could they? McCarthy tended to release his most sensational charges so late in the day no one could fact-check them before they made the front page.

Yet, to focus so heavily on the aberrant behavior of the two men is to distort the stakes.

McCarthy and Trump, though certainly worthy of condemnation, were and are but the public face of more serious problems within the American polity. The fixation of the media on their antics, as Eric Alterman’s recent column shows, not only diverts us from those problems, but also makes it harder to deal with them.

Just as McCarthy did, Trump now operates within a polarized political world in which partisan advantage frequently overwhelms the common good. Though presenting themselves as populists, the two men actually front for the Republican Party’s business-friendly establishments of their eras. Their outrageous conduct allowed and still allows the GOP to conceal its program of dismantling the New Deal and, in Trump’s case, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as well.

Ironically, given the damage they would cause, both men came late to the political agendas they pushed. The xenophobic and socially conservative campaign against the welfare state, the environment, and the most vulnerable members of society that Trump so blatantly abets had been decades in the making before his presidential run (as Nancy MacLean so brilliantly explains in her recent book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan [2017]).

Similarly, McCarthy signed on to the anti-Communist crusade a few years after it had begun. His tactics were only a more flamboyant version of the scenario that Republican politicians had been disseminating ever since President Harry Truman’s surprise reelection in 1948 revealed that the electorate still supported the New Deal. At that point, since the GOP needed a new program, its leaders took advantage of the public insecurity that accompanied the Cold War and turned to red-baiting. They blamed the Soviet Union’s supposed victories on subversives within the Democratic administration. Communists in government, so they said, had given the bomb to Moscow and “lost” China to Mao.

McCarthy amplified that message. Instead of following President Richard Nixon’s successful tactic of leaking FBI files, he simply lied—encouraged, it should be noted, by some the GOP’s most highly respected politicians. “If one case doesn’t work out,” the Senate’s leading Republican, Robert Taft, advised his colleague, “bring up another.” And so, he did. And another. And another.

McCarthy’s wild allegations flummoxed the White House. After all, Truman and his Cold War liberal allies had already enlisted in the anti-Communist cause. Because they needed to convince the American public to provide the resources for the foreign aid and beefed-up military deemed essential for waging the Cold War, they demonized the Soviet enemy and its American appendage, the small, isolated, but legal, Communist Party.

Thus, some three or four years before Joe McCarthy appeared on the scene to give his name to the crusade against domestic Communists, Truman and his allies were already pushing to eliminate from American life the party and all the ideas, individuals, and institutions associated with Communism and the left.

They were not alone. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and similar congressional investigating committees, state and local politicians, right-wing journalists, and, most importantly, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI all helped out, pushing the loyalty programs, blacklists, and criminal prosecutions that soon spread throughout American society.

The liberal establishment did not resist the purges. Instead, in response to pressure from the right, it turned against the left. It seemed more important to its members to avoid being labeled “soft on Communism” than to defend the Bill of Rights and the welfare state. Their timidity in the face of the Republicans’ red-baiting merely increased the power of the witch hunters.

But the liberals did oppose McCarthy. They just did so in a way that diverted attention from the real danger. They attacked the Wisconsin senator as an individual, rather than as the face of a broader wave of political repression. Their own anti-Communism had undermined the integrity and effectiveness of their alleged opposition to what they branded as “McCarthyism.” They focused their campaign on the unscrupulous charges against “innocent” liberals. As long as McCarthy et al. picked their targets correctly, many (though by no means all) moderates and liberals simply looked away. In fact, it was not until the Wisconsin senator turned on the conservative establishment that his outrageous activities brought him down.

But the damage that McCarthy—the “ism,” not the man—wreaked on the American polity remains. Its main legacy is a narrowed political spectrum in which egalitarianism is suspect and blinkered politicians and journalists focus on political minutiae while blaming “both sides” for the inequities that deform our society.

A similar process is at play today. While the pundits stew about Trump’s every scam and Twitter, they overlook the way the current regime and its judicial and legislative allies are incrementally hollowing out the democratic state.

Admittedly, Robert Mueller’s document drops cannot be ignored. They may, in fact, provide a tool for resolving the immediate crisis. Like McCarthy, Trump may become so unpalatable to the American public that the Republican establishment may finally abandon him. When that happens, we will no doubt be treated to the standard celebration of how “the system worked.” But unless we keep our eye on the structural issues involved—as we did not after Watergate or McCarthy’s demise—the current assault on the public sector will simply go underground temporarily to resurface when the present furor abates.

Trump’s erratic behavior endangers all living creatures. But, except for the encouragement that his crudity and flagrant racism have given to contemporary fascism, it is clear that the president did not write the script for his administration’s all-too-successful onslaught against the common good. That accomplishment is the product of decades of well-funded right-wing organizing and institution-building. The inevitable backlash against Trump may provide an opportunity to change our political discourse. But without a long-term commitment to intensive grassroots organizing, that chance to reclaim the United States from bigots and oligarchs may fade away. It has done so before. # # #

[Ellen W. Schrecker is is a professor emerita of history at Yeshiva University (NY)>. She is known primarily for her work in the history of McCarthyism. Historian Ronald Radosh has described her as "the dean of the anti-anti-Communist historians." Her most recent book is The Lost Soul of Higher Education (2010). See her other books here. Schrecker received a BA, magna cum laude (history) from Radcliffe College (MA) and a PhD (history) from Harvard University (M).]

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¡Basta Ya, Pendejo! (Translation: Enough Already, Current Occupant Of The Oval Office!)

Today, Eags (Timothy Egan) spares nothing in this takedown of the Hispanophobic current occupant of the Oval Office who lurches from one personal disaster to another. In fact, the header for this post contains a Spanish insult in a derisive insult aimed at the dumbest man in the USA. If this is a (fair & balanced) virtual middle finder extended toward the current occupant of the Oval Office, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
America Last: Trump’s Attack On The Amazon Job Machine
By Eags (Timothy Egan)

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amazon baron better bezos biggest business china citizen company country deal enemies freedom going ground hates help hurt investigate jobs korea liking machine major nation news newspaper north paul people post postal power president promise protect punish rates retailer reward sees service states think trump united war world zte

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President Trump has declared war on Amazon, the nation’s second most valuable company. Amazon is creating more jobs than all but a handful of entire states. And nearly every major city in the country is vying to land the second headquarters of this global retailer and the 50,000 high-paying positions it promises to bring.

It is perhaps the biggest job engine in the United States, and Trump is using the power of his office to hurt it. And he’s doing this while going out of his way to help Chinese jobs, those at the rogue telecom giant ZTE.

“Too many jobs in China lost,” Trump tweeted. He said that in the midst of a dubious round of deal-making that resulted in a promise from him to help the foreign phone company and coincided with a pledge from China of a $500 million loan to a Trump-linked property. That deal looks very much like a bribe, as my colleague Paul Krugman noted.

But let’s back up and take a look at the Amazon assaults. For added perspective, just substitute “Obama” for Trump and consider how it would look.

Amazon is no saint, certainly, with low wages at some warehouses and a business strategy that has hurt many small retailers while helping others. All the major tech companies could use a clamp of regulation to restrain their intrusions into daily life and commerce. But Trump isn’t the least bit concerned about any of that. Those issues are too complex for him.

He sees the world as a brute with power sees it. Everything goes through a love-me/hate-me prism. Sycophants are rewarded. Dissidents are crushed. Diplomacy, as he just showed with his laughable, incoherent dance with North Korea, is much harder.

Trump hates Jeff Bezos, the founder and chairman of Amazon. It’s possible he hates him for his success; Bezos transformed a mailbox bookseller into the world’s largest online retailer. There are far more Amazon Prime members in this country than people who voted for Trump. As a businessman, Trump stumbled through multiple bankruptcies, defrauded students at a phony “university” and even ran a casino into the ground.

But the more likely reason Trump hates Bezos is that he owns The Washington Post, which has a much different way of covering the president than Fox News, where Trump gets most of his misinformation.

The Post is protected by the First Amendment, as is the neighborhood blog, the fact-deficient world of talk radio and random opinions of every citizen. So, instead of going after the newspaper, Trump is going after its owner — who has nothing to do with the news operation, as Post editor Martin Baron has said.

Trump reportedly pushed Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rates that the Postal Service charges Amazon for shipping — even though those rates are bound by contract and are beneficial to the struggling agency. A case can even be made that if it weren’t for Amazon, the Postal Service might be out of business.

“He’s off the hook on this,” Vanity Fair quoted one insider as saying. “It’s war.”

This is what unrestrained strongmen do: use the state to punish — or silence — their enemies. It’s the same thing Trump is doing by demanding that the Justice Department investigate the people who are investigating him.

Trump couldn’t be more clear on this point. The free press, he says, is the “enemy of the people.” His aim, he told Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes,” is “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

A newspaper to Trump’s liking is The National Enquirer, whose publisher, David Pecker, is a Trump lackey, doing dirty work to protect the president from the embarrassment of his personal behavior.

Autocrats reward friends. In Trump’s promising to lift restrictions on ZTE — which was punished for doing business with North Korea and Iran — the United States got completely rolled by China. But in turn, China put money on the table that would help the Trump family business. Country last, Trump first.

When Trump was just a no-class developer who used his private fixers to go after his enemies, and lied five ways before breakfast, it was of no consequence to the rest of us. No more.

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a path to relinquishing our freedom.”

So said former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. It was too little, too late. But better than the complicity-by-silence of Republicans in Congress. Paul Ryan, your spine is calling you. Mitch McConnell, your past words are here for pickup and in need of some defense.

Anyone who thought autocracy would arrive with back-room deals or sleight-of-hand machinations at midnight should think again. Trump crosses a new line every week, in plain sight. Democracy dies in sunlight. # # #

[Timothy Egan writes now writes a semi-monthly column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]

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