When the lies become the truth

 Anyone who pays attention to politics and the antics of our betters on the Potomac has known the truth about the Leader of the Free World -- he is an officially undiagnosed dementia patient who happens to have access to the nuclear codes. Thursday's debate performance should not have astonished anyone, but apparently people in and around the Beltway are all Claude Rains right now - shocked, shocked at the condition of Joe Biden.

It's crap, of course - everyone knew the truth, but pretending not to know the truth has been the game for a very long time now. Even when he was in the greatest command of his faculties, Joe Biden was a blowhard dullard who would lie about anyone and anything. For years he claimed the truck driver who was involved in the accident that killed his first wife and his daughter was drunk when the crash occurred. This was a lie. He claimed academic credentials he did not possess. He claimed to be a coal miner, a political protestor who was arrested in Soweto, a truck driver, a denizen of black and Puerto Rican churches. He used the words and life story of the British politician Neil Kinnock in a stump speech. All of this is known and easily available in the public record. Yet his primary political campaign message in the last two cycles has been about his truth telling how he is a better and more honorable person than his opponent, Donald Trump. And Biden's supporters parrot every word and notion put forth.

It's incredible, really. And it can't go on.

The world would go on without the NBA playoffs. . .

 . . . which is why the players are going to call off their boycott and play.

After holding a meeting Thursday morning, NBA players have reportedly agreed to resuming the 2020 playoffs, per ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski. The three playoff games on Thursday are expected to be postponed, and discussions are underway on when games will be resumed. The meeting came after the postponement of three playoff games on Wednesday, including the Bucks-Magic game in which Milwaukee players staged a walk-out before the start of Game 5. The league's Board of Governors were also expected to have a call this morning to address Wednesday night's walkouts in addition to what needs to happen next. 

Several leaders on the Lakers roster, along with some players from other teams, reportedly stayed up into the early morning hours to hash out their issues inside the bubble. As a result of those talks, all players were able to agree to resume the season, per Wojnarowski.

During a meeting Wednesday evening that consisted of players and coaches, the Lakers and Clippers were among the minority of teams that pushed to end the season, according to Sham Charania of The Athletic. LeBron James said in the meeting he wants the team owners to be more involved and take action. 

LeBron James can call off his season; he's got his pile. His teammates? Maybe not so much. More importantly, the NBA is an multi-billion dollar business that could disappear tomorrow without a lasting impact on our social fabric.

I don't care about LeBron's thoughts on social justice any more than I care about Ted Cruz's basketball prowess. If they both disappeared tomorrow, it would be a tragedy for their families, but life without them wouldn't require much adjustment. 

It's tiring, frankly. I feel like this guy:

What's worse than an out-of-control police department?

Armed social workers, that's what.

I'm all for making changes to policing, especially using cops as agents of revenue collection. But given the predilections of the therapeutic state, you'd soon see tyranny far more cruel than whatever we have now.

Just a reminder

The MSM always has yer kabuki right here, pal:

The people who earn (so to speak) their living informing America are lying to you. But you know that.

If you hadn't been doing so already. . .

. . . you can, going forward, assume any political coverage in the New York Times is crap.

Before it goes down the ol' memory hole

When we look back at the Covington Catholic kids and their excellent adventure on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, let's not forget this archived piece, which National Review pulled down after the argument became, well, non-operative.  Your author is Nicholas Frankovich, who seems to have forgotten what the 8th Commandment says:

It appears that most of the teenagers in this video are from a Catholic high school near Covington, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. “Bullying” is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here.

For some of us, the gospel stories of Jesus’s passion and death are so familiar we no longer hear them. The evangelists are terse in their descriptions of the humiliations heaped on Jesus in the final hours before his crucifixion, the consummate humiliation. Read the accounts again or, if you’d rather not, watch the video. The human capacity for sadism is too great.

Evil. Sadism. Those are strong charges, even if they've been pulled down. But Frankovich had one more observation to make:

In any case, keeping in mind the parable of the proper priests and the Good Samaritan, whose religious practice Jesus’s listeners thought was wrong, listen to Phillips reflect on his experience on the Mall. Decide for yourself who is more pleasing to Christ, Phillips or his mockers. As for the putatively Catholic students from Covington, they might as well have just spit on the cross and got it over with.

National Review has a piece up on their site now excoriating people for jumping to conclusions. Kyle Smith describes what happened properly:

If you insult someone, and that person insults you back, you don’t get to cry, “Oh my gosh, for no reason whatsoever I’ve just been insulted!” The Christian thing to do is of course turn the other cheek, but if we’re being honest, people do tend to take the bait when they’re being baited, and teens are less likely than others to turn away from outright provocation. Nathan Phillips went out seeking to create an incident, and he fooled the New York Times and the Washington Post into accepting his false version of it.

All right and proper. But as of this writing, we've not heard a word from NR, or Frankovich, about the calumnies they heaped upon the Covington kids in believing the false version of events. If apologies are in order, it would seem that the apologies from that particular glass house are well overdue as well.

Update (Monday evening): Nicholas Frankovich of NR has issued an apology, but only to his readers:

Early Sunday morning, I posted a “strongly worded” (Rich Lowry’s description) condemnation of the conduct, seen far and wide on video, of a group of high-school students at the conclusion of the March for Life on Friday afternoon. I was preachy and rhetorically excessive, and I regret it. The overheated post I wrote has been taken down. Let this apology stand in its stead, both here on the Corner and in the memory of readers who justifiably objected to my high-handedness.

Does Frankovich still object to the "conduct" of the students? It's tough to say, but his avoidance of the topic suggests he still hasn't come to grips with the real meaning of what he said. I would argue his words were a little more than high-handed. I hope he gives it more thought.

Still, there is a larger apology that needs to happen. That would be from the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School, which still had a denunciation of the students on its website. Here is a screenshot:

Under the bus

As of this evening, the site is currently in maintenance mode, which suggests the Diocese is taking down the comment and replacing it with something else, perhaps something that's a little less, uh, high-handed. As an aside, I don't know how you condemn first and investigate second, unless the Inquisition is back in town. I sent a note to the Diocese asking them to consider retracting this statement. I'll let you know if they respond.

Get your hate on

Victor Davis Hanson, once again, explains the larger forces at play:

[Rick] Wilson was not original in his smear of the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump. He was likely resonating an earlier slander of Politico reporter Marco Caputo. The latter had tweeted of the crowd he saw at a Trump rally: “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”

Was the point of these stereotypes that poor white working-class people who supposedly voted for the controversial Trump understandably ate improperly, did not practice proper dental hygiene, or did not visit dentists—or all three combined?

When challenged, Caputo doubled down on his invective. He snarled, “Oh no! I made fun of garbage people jeering at another person as they falsely accused him of lying and flipped him off. Someone fetch a fainting couch.”

Peel him a grape, too. There's more:

Caputo’s “Garbage people” was also a synonym for the smears that two career FBI agents on separate occasions had called the archetypical Trump voters.

In the released trove of the Department of Justice text communications involving the Clinton email probe, an unidentified FBI employee had texted to another FBI attorney his abject contempt for the proverbial Trump voter and indeed middle America itself: “Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS [“pieces of sh*t”].” In fact, Trump in 2016 received about 90 percent of all Republican votes, about the same ratio as won by both recent presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.

In the now notorious text communications between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, fired FBI operatives on Robert Mueller’s special counsel team, Strzok right before the 2016 election had texted his paramour Page: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”

If you want to know why the government shutdown, and the plight of our noble public servants as they struggle with temporary cash flow issues, doesn't seem to be getting much traction, you might want to consider Page and Strzok, and their great love for those they serve.

So if you are a self-proclaimed paragon of tolerance, why the hate? Back to Hanson:

These outbursts were all voiced from highly educated elites (Caputo has a journalism degree from the University of Miami, [Donny] Deutsch graduated from the Wharton School, [Sarah] Jeong from Harvard Law School, Strzok received a master’s degree from Georgetown, Wilson attended George Washington University). And all engaged in vicious and cowardly stereotyping of a demographic in a manner that they assumed involved no downside. Rather, the smears were delivered on the expectation of winning approbation from their peers. And they did in twitter-fueled competitions to find the crudest pejoratives.

 Cue the Dobie Gray:

I'm in with the in crowd 
I go where the in crowd goes 
I'm in with the in crowd 
And I know what the in crowd knows

Hatred can wear academic regalia, or it can wear the cloak of professionalism. But at bottom, it's all the same. Hanson:

Those who slander the deplorables and irredeemables assume that they can say almost anything and expect no pushback, given the white working classes lack the romance of the poor and the supposed panache of the elite. A race to the bottom develops in which the more the hatred, the more the clicks and the media exposure. Minority critics expect their own identity politics affiliations to shield them from criticism. Wealthy white elites virtue-signal their disgust for those without privilege as a way of ensuring that those like themselves, who most certainly enjoy privilege, are rewarded with ideological exemptions for it.

Finally, we are learning that the entire idea of political correctness was never much about universal ideas of tolerance of the other, or insistence that language and protocols must not stigmatize individuals by lumping them into stereotyped and dehumanized collective groups.  What we are witnessing, instead, is that it is fine to demonize millions, from their appearance to their purported hygiene and smell to affinities with feces and apes—if it serves political or cultural agendas.

In sum, cultural progressivism is about raw power, not principle.

It's also the realization that, no matter how many degrees and credentials one obtains, we all will revert to junior high social norms when we can get by with it.

Yesterday

Too much to discuss, really. But for me, a few things stand out. First of all, Lindsey Graham's finest hour:

Second of all, RedState blogger Streiff notes the utter cynicism of the Senate Democrats, and Dianne Feinstein in particular, first by highlighting an exchange between Feinstein and Texas Senator John Cornyn:

Cornyn: Can you tell us your staff did not leak it?

Feinstein: Oh, I don’t believe my staff would leak it. I have not asked that question directly, but I do not believe they would.

Cornyn: Do you know that? I mean how in the world did that get in the hands of the press?

Feinstein: The answer is no. The staff would not.

Cornyn: Did you as your staff or any other member of the Judiciary Committee?

Feinstein: I just did. Well, Jennifer reminds me I’ve asked her before about it.

Cornyn: Well, somebody leaked it, if it wasn’t you.

Feinstein: Well, I’m telling you it was not…I did not…I mean I was asked to keep it confidential and I’m criticized for that, too.

And why would that be? Back to the link:

The problem here is that a) CNN got a copy of the letter she sent to Feinstein in confidence and b) Ford said, under oath, she didn’t send the letter to anyone else. 

Under oath, Christine Blasey Ford said she didn't send the letter to anyone else. So is Ford lying under oath? That would be the obvious implication of Feinstein's remarks. Lindsey Graham makes the point well:

Boy, you all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham. That you knew about it and you held it. You had no intention of protecting Dr. Ford; none.

She’s as much of a victim as you are. God, I hate to say it because these have been my friends. But let me tell you, when it comes to this, you’re looking for a fair process? You came to the wrong town at the wrong time, my friend. 

They have been Graham's friends, or so he thought, but it seems the scales have fallen from his eyes.

One other thing worth noting -- now, apparently doxxing your opponents is cool:

Several Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had their home addresses and phone numbers released to the public on their Wikipedia pages during Thursday’s hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination.

The victims included Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

According to Caleb Hull, editor of the Independent Journal Review, the wife of Mr. Hatch “has been receiving calls nonstop ON HER BIRTHDAY and their home address was made public.” 

CongressEdits, a bot account that for four years automatically retweets edits to Wikipedia made anonymously from IP addresses associated with the U.S. Congress, said the information was also posted on Mr. Lee and Mr. Graham “from US House of Representatives.”

From the House of Representatives. We'll just leave it there.

Home Truth

Sean Davis, writing for The Federalist, on the Kavanaugh War:

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) made clear on CNN on Sunday that Kavanaugh does not deserve to be presumed innocent, notwithstanding the lack of any corroborating evidence of any of the allegations made against him, entirely because his political ideology and judicial philosophy do not align with those of the Democratic Party.

When asked whether Kavanaugh is entitled to the presumption of innocence, Hirono said, “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.” Translation: he is guilty because of what he believes, not because of anything he’s actually done. Laverentiy Beria, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s most trusted police inquisitor, who famously declared, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime,” would surely applaud the totalitarian sentiment underlying Hirono’s statement.

If Kavanaugh is not safe from reputation- and career-destroying smears, no one is. Not you. Not your husband. Not your son, father, or brother. If they can destroy Kavanaugh, they can do it to anyone you love and trust, regardless of any mountains of facts or evidence to the contrary.

"Can" is the default position. "Will" is the next step. It won't get better unless the Left understands they can't get by with this behavior.

Interesting if true.

So the woman who is accusing Brett Kavanaugh of being a drunken teenager has come forward. No one can corroborate her story, of course, although Kavanaugh's buddy, who was supposedly in the room, denies it ever happened. But if this nugget is true, it's pretty amazing:

Christine Ford’s Parents Paula K Blasey and Ralph G Blasey were the Defendants in a foreclosure case in Maryland in 1996. Guess who the Judge was America? None other than Brett Kavanaugh’s mother, Martha G Kavanaugh. You literally cannot make this up.

Here's the information from online court records:



And who presided over the case?


There's more substantiation here than of anything Christine Blasey Ford says regarding Kavanaugh's teenaged comportment. It's not 1991, when Anita Hill could get by with making up a he said/she said story.

The question to ask a "Democratic Socialist"

If you come to power through an election, and then lose a subsequent election, do you step aside as the voters have requested? And, if your successor dismantles your handiwork, do you accept that?

Okay, that's two questions. I would be disinclined to believe anything a "Democratic Socialist" says. It's almost certainly a one-way ratchet. And if you doubt that view, consider the way the Loyal Opposition has been behaving in the past 18 months.

Lifetime sentence

At one point, Jennifer Rubin was proffered as a conservative blogger for the Washington Post. She's apparently grown in office:

Sarah Huckabee [Sanders] has no right to live a life of no fuss, no muss, after lying to the press—after lying to the press, after inciting against the press. These people should be made uncomfortable, and I think that's a life sentence, frankly.

That's Rubin, opining on MSNBC's "Morning Joy." Life is a long time. Sanders is, at the time I write this, 35 years old. It's reasonable to assume she will live another 50 years or even more. Should we assume that, in 2068, angry people ought to be harassing her? To what end?

As a wise old blogger has written more than once, this is how you get more Trump.

It's a gas, gas, gas

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane

And I howled at the morning driving rain
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas
But it's all right. I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash
It's a gas, gas, gas

It's starting to hit the fan. We now have a name for what was happening in 2016 -- Crossfire Hurricane:

The FBI investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia was originally known as "Crossfire Hurricane" before it was widely known to the public and even the bureau itself, officials told The New York Times.

The case, named after a Rolling Stones lyric, was used by only the small group of agents sent to interview the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom, who had evidence of possible collusion between Russia and a Trump adviser. 

What this means -- at the behest of someone within the Obama administration, the FBI was spying on the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. This isn't G. Gordon Liddy and his crew breaking into the Watergate -- this is the executive branch actively interfering in a presidential campaign. This is huge.

We can also assume the Inspector General's report is imminent and that the reportage we're seeing now is an attempt to get out ahead of the story. If the trail leads back to the White House, we're talking about a political scandal that makes all the others look like a game of checkers.

A guess on how this plays out:

• The IG report drops and it's damming
• Trump then, finally, declassifies all of the information -- the redactions and ass-covering included
• As the corruption oozes forward, it becomes quite easy for Trump to shut down Mueller, so he does

So you remember the notion that the Obama administration was "remarkably scandal-free?" Guess not.

It's a coup

Let's just call it what it is. There is no way in hell that Robert Mueller, or the Southern District of New York, or anyone else, should have any ability to raid the private attorney of the President of the United States, looking for something, anything.

If I were Donald Trump, I'd simply say the hell with it and do the following:

1. Fire Mueller
2. Fire Rosenstein
3. Fire Sessions
4. Fire the entire Justice Department, if that's what it takes to clean house
5. Declassify everything, and I mean everything
6. Release the IG report concerning what these shaved apes in bespoke have been doing to the country. All of it.
7. Dare Adam Schiff to do anything about any of it, since I suspect he's up to his eyeballs in a lot of this, too

They've come to kill the king*. Either the king fights back, or the king dies. There's no point in showing any deference to someone with a dagger in his hand.


*Yes, I know Trump isn't a king, nor would I want him to be king. But he was duly elected and what is happening now is outrageous beyond measure.

Charm Offensive

America's sweetheart, reminding us of our sins:

Hillary Clinton on Saturday partly blamed her 2016 presidential loss on white women and said that they voted for Donald Trump because their husbands told them to vote that way.

Clinton spoke at the India Today Conclave in Mumbai, India over the weekend, where a journalist introduced her as the "woman who should have been the president of the United States of America."

The event's host, India Today Editor Aroon Purie, asked Clinton how 52 percent of white women could vote for Trump after the "Access Hollywood" tape was released in the final weeks of the campaign, which featured Clinton making crude sexual remarks about women.

"Democrats, going back to my husband and even before, but just in recent times going back to Bill and our candidates and then President Obama, have been losing the vote, including white women. We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married white women," Clinton said.

She went on to say that white women face an "ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should."

That's sure to ingratiate her with potential voters. She wasn't done:

Clinton said that she was on the way to winning the white women vote until then-FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to leaders in Congress less than two weeks before the election stating that the FBI reopened its investigation into her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

"All of a sudden white women, who were going to vote for me and frankly standing up to the men in their lives and the men in their workplaces, were being told, ‘She's going to jail. You don't want to vote for her. It's terrible, you can't vote for that.' So, it just stopped my momentum and it decreased my vote enough because I was ahead. I was winning, and I thought I had fought my way back in the ten days from that letter until the election. I fell a little bit short," Clinton said.

Get your Stepford on, ladies.

This is nonsense. It's 2018. Men and women make up their own minds all the time. I know plenty of married couples whose votes essentially cancel each other's out. I also see a lot of married white women who post left-wing memes and diatribes on social media all day long. I also know conservative women who have left-wing husbands. Mrs. Clinton is a married white woman herself.

She had more to say:

If you want to know the truth, I think the main reason she lost is pretty simple: we all know people like Hillary -- nasty, hectoring, dismissive. You can't avoid all of them, especially if they are relatives, or neighbors, or co-workers. But you don't have to have them in your living room every day if you don't elect them to office. Trump may be a lot of things, but he's not a misanthrope. Hillary Clinton is the worst retail politician I have ever seen.

Light posting

We are having difficulty with our computer at home. That makes it difficult to do much blogging. I am actually using the voice to text function on my phone to create this post.

I will figure out what is going on with our computer and at that point we will be able to resume normal blogging activities. For now, I recommend this piece from Sarah Hoyt, in which she takes the

former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, to task for his grandstanding. Key graf:

Yes, I understand Mexico is a proud country. Do tell me what it has to be proud of! Is it the fact that you have to send your citizens like beggars abroad? Is it your inability to enforce the law? Is it your governance, which is the laughing stock of the world?

You don’t like to be called a sh*thole? Very well. Stop being one. Give less consideration to your “image” in the world and more to how your country functions. Stop the corruptocracy. Enforce honesty and the rule of law. Reform your schools. Stop the rampaging of the drug lords.

Good advice. More at the link.

For what it's worth

We now have a senator on record as saying that Donald Trump didn't use the term "shithole" in his discussion:

Georgia Republican Sen. David Perdue said Sunday that President Donald Trump did not use the phrase "shithole countries" during a meeting with lawmakers on immigration reform last week.

"I'm telling you he did not use that word, George, and I'm telling you it's a gross misrepresentation," Perdue told moderator George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week."

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, says he did, but not directly:

According to Durbin, Trump had told a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the White House that he'd rather have more immigrants from Norway and fewer from "shithole countries" in Africa and said the U.S. didn't need anymore people from Haiti.  to describe Haiti and African nations where some immigrants to the United States come from."I have seen the comments in the press, I have not read one of them that's inaccurate," Durbin, a Democrat, told reporters in Chicago.

"In the course of (Trump's) comments, he said things that were hate-filled, vile and racist," the Illinois senator said Friday. "l use those words advisingly, I understand how powerful they are. I cannot believe that in the history of the White House and that Oval Office any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday.

Durbin apparently gets to decide the intent of someone's remarks, and his decision is probative. Good to know. Durbin says a lot of things. In 2013, he said something else:

The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Dick Durbin, said in a Facebook post that a House Republican leader told off President Barack Obama during a negotiation meeting, and that GOP leaders are so disrespectful it’s practically impossible to have a conversation with them.

But Wednesday afternoon, both the White House and House speaker’s office denied his claims.

“In a ‘negotiation’ meeting with the president, one GOP House Leader told the president: ‘I cannot even stand to look at you,’” Durbin wrote in a post on his Facebook page over the weekend.

Durbin also said this, in 2005:

Durbin read from an FBI report that included descriptions of one case at Gitmo in which a detainee was held in such cold temperatures that he shivered, another in which a prisoner was held in heat passing 100 degrees, one in which prisoners were left in isolation so long they fouled themselves and one where a prisoner was chained to the floor and forced to listen to loud rap music.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings," Durbin said last week.

After the uproar that followed those remarks, Durbin said he was not comparing U.S. soldiers to Pol Pot (search), Nazis or Soviet guards, but was "attributing this form of interrogation to repressive regimes such as those that I note."

You can certainly believe Dick Durbin if you'd like. I wouldn't.

Contextualized

In our moment, facts are negotiable, but the Narrative is not. And therein lies a problem for those whose narrative depends on trashing Le Grand Orange. And the smarter observers know it. Behold Alex Shepard, writing for The New Republic:

There is value in publishing a larger, contextualized account of the Trump White House. There is nothing to be gained, however, from reporting information about Trump that can’t be locked down. Wolff’s recklessness fuels the Trump administration’s critique of journalists and the media. It suggests that journalists really are out to get the president—after all, in Fire and Fury, Wolff suggests that journalists will print anything, so long as it casts Trump in a bad light. The rewards are clear: His cavalier reporting has led to TV bookings, a #1 Amazon bestseller, and insane traffic for any of the outlets that agreed to publish his work.

So we're clear, "contextualized" means conforming with the larger Narrative. But in the marketplace of ideas, narratives compete, and Shepard understands that the Trumpian narrative of "fake news" works precisely because of the elements of truth to it. Trust that the MSM are honest brokers has been steadily eroded for nearly two generations. Even the sacred and heroic work of Woodward and Bernstein now is better understood as a couple of errand boys carrying the water of a disgruntled bureaucrat, Mark Felt, who wanted a job he didn't get.

It all works in Trump's favor. So will this book, despite the surface legal maneuverings and "cease and desist" letters flying around like bullets in the funhouse:

We have produced a generation or two of post-structuralists who now run our institutions. The game has always been the same -- take the meaning out of the existing structure, then claim its vacant imprimatur. What many of us who were earnestly NeverTrump didn't understand is something that should have been obvious, and now is in retrospect; it takes a bullshitter to call out the bullshitters. In a world where, to borrow a phrase from a cynical Reagan-era song, crap is king, it's increasingly clear the guy who's been in the business longest will prevail, especially when his adversaries consistently underestimate his intelligence.

Not a world I know

I watched the Today Show periodically when I was in high school and college, but it's not been part of my morning routine as an adult. As a result, I don't really know much about Matt Lauer, or Ann Curry, or Meredith Vieira, or any of the other players in the particular psychodrama going on right now. From what we've learned in recent days, Lauer is a scoundrel of the first order and maybe more than that.

What I do know is the world they inhabit has little to do with the world most of their viewers experience. The familiarity of television personalities is artificial and we really know nothing of their lives beyond the reach of the cameras. I also know this -- if you are a serious person, you should take the promises you make seriously, especially where Topic A is concerned. While I am hardwired to notice the physical attributes of all women, I'm a married man and therefore I shouldn't be trying to get into a physical relationship with any woman aside from my spouse. Cheating on one's spouse is a betrayal at the most basic level. Matt Lauer is a married man. If you are willing to betray someone you promise to share your life with, you aren't someone who can be trusted. We need to remember that.

Robespierre Goes to Lake Wobegon

I don't much care about Matt Lauer, but Garrison Keillor getting the pipe is a story:

Garrison Keillor, the force behind the popular “A Prairie Home Companion” show, was fired by Minnesota Public Radio over inappropriate behavior claims.

The radio station received a complaint about improper actions with an employee while he oversaw the popular Saturday afternoon radio show, the station said in a lengthy statement. He retired from it last year.

“MPR takes these allegations seriously and we are committed to maintaining a safe, respectful and supportive work environment for all employees and everyone associated with MPR,” the broadcaster said in a statement.

The station has cut ties with Keillor’s private companies, the statement continued.

Truth be told, I'm not surprised at all. Keillor has been a hateful crank for at least 25 years. The tell for me was the publication of The Book of Guys, which I always assumed was an admission of sins and/or cry for help rather than a work of satire. Misanthropes are the way they are for a reason, and the reason is usually self-loathing. I'm sure we'll learn more about the particulars in the coming days, but Keillor has only intermittently tried to disguise his bile for a long time now. Let's just say this moment has been coming, and in the current environment Keillor was a high-probability target for the tumbrels.