Month: May 2018

Never Apologize For Calling Someone A Cunt

HEY! Let’s see how many people are actually reading this site!

Every Wednesday, Samantha Bee has her TBS show, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee (‘like The Daily Show, only meaner’) and this week’s episode, she singled out “the second most oblivious tweet we’ve seen this week” where Ivanka Trump posed for a picture with her child. Bee complemented Ivanka on capturing a beautiful moment, but then said, “do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless c*nt. He listens to you! Put on something tight and low-cut, and tell your father to f***ing stop it.” This was setting up a broader segment investigating the Trump Administration’s recent decision to separate migrant children from their parents at the border, specifically targeting illegal and mostly non-white immigrants in order to discourage them from coming.

The thing is, TBS is basic cable, so the actual word would have been bleeped out. Of course, that doesn’t mean a whole lot these days, especially when people can get transcripts. It just goes to show that TV Standards & Practices is just a tiny fig leaf that fails to obscure what most of us can guess, all for the sake of protecting the delicate little flowers in this country from bad words.

But nevertheless, Sarah Sanders, the most delicate of all the flowers,  felt the need to make an issue of this, telling a White House press briefing on Thursday: “”The collective silence by the left and its media allies is appalling. (Bee’s) disgusting comments and show are not fit for broadcast, and executives at Time Warner and TBS must demonstrate that such explicit profanity about female members of this administration will not be condoned on its network.”

Shortly thereafter, Bee went on Twitter and said, “I would like to sincerely apologize to Ivanka Trump and to my viewers for using an expletive on my show to describe her last night. It was inappropriate and inexcusable. I crossed a line, and I deeply regret it.” In an official statement, TBS said, “Those words should not have been aired. It was our mistake, too, and we regret it.” Well, it was their mistake, insofar as Bee’s show isn’t a live broadcast.

The problem, in my opinion, is not the word. It’s the fact that Bee and her network (not necessarily in that order) backed down. But they sort of brought it on themselves.

For one thing, Samantha Bee is from Canada, and I don’t know how it works over there, but in America, that word is really vulgar. It’s not like in the UK or Australia where guys will just call each other “cunts” back and forth whilst watching football on the telly. Here, though, it’s a very low term, and it was so even before the whole #metoo moment started.

And on that score, the c-word is so grossly sexist that if Sarah Sanders, Donald Trump, and their “Why don’t we have a WHITE History Month” pity party hadn’t gotten their undies in a wad complaining about this, I’m sure the PC Left would have.

But given that you’re really putting yourself out on a limb with that insult, the very fact that you’re willing to go so far implies that you’re not that sorry, and you intended to say exactly that, since you could have used other language.

That’s why Trump NEVER APOLOGIZES.  EVER.

Learn from him, liberals. Maybe then you’ll get the White House back some time this century.

Because Trump is a bully, and that’s what bullies do. They game the social order by making everybody else obey the rules so that they don’t have to. This punk baits people with any sleazy insult he can think of, (like saying Nancy Pelosi ‘loves’ MS-13) and his pack of cultists brays and cheers. But you slap him back, and he screams like a prison bitch. A metaphor we may want to check back on in a few years.

As I said, when one party gets sucker punched and can only fight with one hand tied behind their back, who wins and who loses on that standard of “fairness”?

Now, I am not saying that the anti-Trump majority should have no standards. I am saying that standards have to be more robust than mere decorum. One should be able to stand by one’s rhetoric, which means one must be able to justify it. If Bee needed to retract, she could have told people: “I said something I shouldn’t have said. But I was genuinely outraged. The contrast between Ivanka sharing a loving moment with her child as her father’s administration enforced a deliberate policy to separate migrant children from their parents ought to be sickening to anybody. And I just couldn’t think of a better phrase to sum it up. Because whatever you may think of me or my language, that issue would still be more offensive, whether I said those things or not.”

See, here’s my take. In the ancient history of the United States, actually one year ago this week, comedian Kathy Griffin decided to do a publicity picture holding an obviously fake severed head of Donald Trump, in the manner of prisoners executed by Islamic terrorists. As she tells it now,  taking a Trump Halloween mask and layering ketchup all over it was supposed to be a commentary on Trump’s infamous insult of Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her wherever.” The resulting blowback almost destroyed her career. For one thing, it made Trump a sympathetic figure, which is the last thing you want to do. He said that his 11-year old son was not able to deal with it. The first reaction of a lot of people, including me, was that Griffin had gone too far. But not only did this stunt kill Griffin’s long established relationship with CNN (and Anderson Cooper), after Trump reacted, she started getting death threats. She had to cancel most of the dates on her planned tour because of bomb threats to the venues. As TMZ took up the cause by posting her show cancellations in real time, Griffin says it “led to the perception that there was a movement against me, not just of Trump supporters but that everyone was against me. People don’t take the time, and I don’t blame them, to learn and realize my show cancellations were because of organized/fake bomb threats.”

But another dimension of this was that it was easier to see Griffin as the aggressor because Trump had not completely exhausted the benefit of the doubt. Since then, it’s become that much more obvious that Trump obstructed justice in the Russia investigation, that whether he actually gained opposition research on the Clinton campaign from Russia, he has an ulterior motive to appease Russia to the utmost (evidenced by the fact that despite the Congress passing veto-proof sanctions resolutions, Trump refuses to enforce them), that both he and his satraps see the government as a means of living high off the hog at taxpayer expense, that he continues to degrade John McCain, who stayed in Vietnam while Trump dodged both the draft and syphilis, and that he seeks to pit the public against the country’s national security institutions, mainly the FBI, because they are investigating that alleged association with Russia, as is their job, and because they will not dissolve their purpose into his cult of personality as the Republican Party already has.

In the face of that, whatever I think of Kathy Griffin, or Samantha Bee, is not the point.

Serious question: Is there anything a private citizen could do with their free speech that is more offensive, or more of an actual threat to human beings, than what the Trump Administration is doing right now?

When I say, “never apologize for calling someone else a cunt,” I am not saying never apologize, period. Nor do I say it is always a good idea to call someone a cunt. I don’t think so. If I were Bee, I don’t think I’d call Ivanka Trump a “cunt” because that word just doesn’t seem to fit. I’d call her “collaborator.” Because that is a more precise complaint, and it is a dirtier c-word, in my opinion.

What I’m saying is, if you’re willing to go to that level of language, you’re going to own it, whether you apologize or not. So own it. If you do think that your target actually deserves that insult, then I say, hold out that cunt and wave it high and proud, for all the world to see.

 

The Trump Rationalization

On May 22nd, National Review Online posted an article by scholar Victor Davis Hanson, called “The Trump Rationale,” attempting to explain Donald Trump’s lasting appeal to his base. The article’s subheader is: “His voters knew what they were getting, and most support him still.”

The piece does indeed explain the psychology of the Trump supporter, though perhaps not in the way Hanson intended. To properly review it, I decided it needs a good old-fashioned fisking.

(A note: ‘fisking‘ refers to an incident where the left-wing journalist Robert Fisk had one of his columns demolished by a right-winger, point by point. The term should not be confused with ‘fisting,’ although the intention and result are often similar.)

“1) Was Trump disqualified by his occasional but demonstrable character flaws and often rank vulgarity? To believe that plaint, voters would have needed a standard by which both past media of coverage of the White House and the prior behavior of presidents offered some useful benchmarks. Unfortunately, the sorts of disturbing things we know about Trump we often did not know in the past about other presidents. By any fair measure, the sexual gymnastics in the White House and West Wing of JFK and Bill Clinton, both successful presidents, were likely well beyond President Trump’s randy habits. “ (et cetera…)

This sort of thing is why the average person is more and more cynical, because both houses of the duopoly are doing their utmost to promote the ideal that might makes right and “objective morality” is just a consolation prize for losers. Recall that in the days of Monicagate, the people on Hanson’s side – I was one of them – were railing about how tolerating Bill Clinton’s immorality was going to degrade the political culture. Now that the “conservatives” benefit from that degraded standard, they act like it was handed down from Saint Augustine. Meanwhile, Democrats offered the same defenses “conservatives” offer now, they benefited from Clinton’s popularity, and in more recent years they got a lot of their precious campaign money from the likes of Harvey Weinstein (and we’re alternately supposed to believe that either ‘everybody knew’ or ‘nobody knew’ about his violations). And now that enabling misogyny has bitten them in the ass last election, liberals have developed an acute case of scruples.

In any case, this particular subject is something I’ve already addressed on a semi-regular basis. We do not need to go over how many areas of complaint that Republicans have with Democrats, the Clintons in particular, to compare to what Trump and his cronies are actually doing. Comparison of rhetoric to fact just demonstrates that for all the erudition of Victor Davis Hanson – and I used to be a fan – he is providing a rationalization, not a rationale. During the campaign and certainly now, support for Trump was less a matter of rationality and more an appeal to tribal emotionalism. I wish these guys had just been honest enough to say: “Don’t vote for the liberal bitch who lies to you, ignores security procedures and exploits financial corruption. Vote for the conservative white guy who does all of that in spades!”

“2) Personal morality and public governance are related, but we are not always quite sure how. Jimmy Carter was both a more moral person and a worse president than Bill Clinton. Jerry Ford was a more ethical leader than Donald Trump — and had a far worse first 16 months. FDR was a superb wartime leader — and carried on an affair in the White House, tried to pack and hijack the Supreme Court, sent U.S. citizens into internment camps, and abused his presidential powers in ways that might get a president impeached today. In the 1944 election, the Republican nominee Tom Dewey was the more ethical — and stuffy — man. In matters of spiritual leadership and moral role models, we wish that profane, philandering (including an affair with his step-niece), and unsteady General George S. Patton had just conducted himself in private and public as did the upright General Omar Bradley. But then we would have wished even more that Bradley had just half the strategic and tactical skill of Patton. If he had, thousands of lives might have been spared in the advance to the Rhine. Trump is currently not carrying on an affair with his limousine driver, as Ike probably was with Kay Summersby while commanding all Allied forces in Europe following D-Day. Rarely are both qualities, brilliance and personal morality, found in a leader — even among our greatest, such as the alcoholic Grant or the foul-mouthed and occasionally crude Truman. “

All of which is setting up a false choice between personal morality and brilliance (or even competence). It is false not because this conflict cannot be observed in history, but because Trump is neither moral nor brilliant. Unless grifting counts as brilliance, in which case he’s fuckin’ Leonardo da Vinci.

“3) Trump did not run in a vacuum. A presidential vote is not a one-person race for sainthood but, like it or not, often a choice between a bad and worse option. Hillary Clinton would have likely ensured a 16-year progressive regnum. “

Everything is always “but Clinton would be worse.” No doubt this will continue to be the excuse no matter what depth Trump reaches: Clinton will always be worse, even when it is demonstrable that Trump is worse, if simply due to the fact that he’s the actual president now.

“As far as counterfactual “what ifs” go, by 2024, at the end of Clinton’s second term, a conservative might not have recognized the federal judiciary, given the nature of lifetime appointees. The lives of millions of Americans would have been radically changed in an Obama-Clinton economy that probably would not have seen GDP or unemployment levels that Americans are now enjoying. “

I’ll just leave this here: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/27/606078181/economy-probably-started-2018-off-slow-short-of-trumps-growth-target

“What John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Peter Strzok, Sally Yates, and others did in 2016 would never have been known — given that their likely obstruction, lying, and lawbreaking were predicated on being unspoken recommendations for praise and advancement in a sure-thing Clinton administration. Christopher Steele might have either been unknown — or lionized. “

But YOU would have been making it known, Victor. You and the other guys in the “conservative” grievance media, in the same way that you are making hay from these people now, and no one except the grievance media and their audience particularly cares. Because while certain elements – like Bill Clinton demanding an audience at the airport with Loretta Lynch over Hillary’s email investigation – deserved bipartisan attention, even the valid points of investigation don’t get it because the whole complaint is smothered in bad faith.

“4) Something had gone haywire with the Republican party at the national level. “

Finally, a point of agreement.

“The proverbial Republican elite had become convinced that globalization, open borders, and free but unfair trade were either unstoppable or the fated future or simply irrelevant. Someone or something — even if painfully and crudely delivered — was bound to arise to remind the conservative Washington–New York punditocracy, the party elite, and Republican opinion makers that a third of the country had all but tuned them out. It was no longer sustainable to expect the conservative base to vote for more versions of sober establishmentarians like McCain and Romney just because they were Republicans, well-connected, well-résuméd, well-known, well-behaved, and played by the gloves-on Marquess of Queensberry political rules. Instead, such men and much of orthodox Republican ideology were suspect.

“Amnestied illegal aliens would not in our lifetimes become conservative family-values voters. Vast trade deficits with China and ongoing chronic commercial cheating would not inevitably lead to the prosperity that would guarantee Chinese democracy. Asymmetrical trade deals were not sacrosanct under the canons of free trade. Unfettered globalization, outsourcing, and offshoring were not both inevitable and always positive. The losers of globalization did not bring their misery on themselves. The Iran deal was not better than nothing. North Korea would not inevitably remain nuclear. Middle East peace did not hinge of constant outreach to and subsidy of the corrupt and autocratic Palestinian Authority and Hamas cliques. “

The first part, that the Republican elite was irrelevant to the average voter, let alone the average Republican, is true. The second part is more rationalizing. Assuming that Trump’s policies are a constructive approach to illegal immigration, China’s unfair trade practices, North Korea or the Middle East is to deny the fact that Trump has no care about any of these things and knows that much less.

The hardcore critique of the Republican establishment, whether one is a populist or “economic conservative” is that Republican leadership doesn’t care about the average voter. But that’s because Republicans have always tried to split the difference between appealing to the people who fund their campaigns and the people who actually vote for them, even though these two priorities are often at odds. The punch line to the joke is that this is exactly what they’re doing now, because Trump is the only person who appeals to both camps, and as long as he’s throwing red meat to the culture warriors, they won’t care that the rich sponsors are soaking the poor.

“5) Lots of deep-state rust needed scraping. Yet it is hard to believe that either a Republican or Democratic traditionalist would have seen unemployment go below 4 percent, or the GDP rate exceed 3 percent, or would have ensured the current level of deregulation and energy production. A President Mitt Romney might not have rammed through a tax-reform policy like that of the 2017 reform bill. I cannot think of a single Republican 2016 candidate who either could or would have in succession withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, demanded China recalibrate its asymmetrical and often unfair mercantile trade policies, sought to secure the border, renounced the Iran deal, moved to denuclearize North Korea, and hectored front-line NATO allies that their budgets do not reflect their promises or the dangers on their borders. “

Something approaching substance here. The hardcore Republicans are indeed getting a lot of what they want from this president, and I think we can agree that President Romney would not have “rammed through” what he wanted, because as a career politician he was raised on procedure and not might-makes-right. So were Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell, but they at least as much as Trump set the stage for an environment where Republicans “ram through” everything they want with absolutely no regard for the other people on the floor. Not that Democrats deserve any special courtesy, but it’s rather telling that the less popular mandate Republican policies have, the more fanatic they are at enforcing them, not despite popular will, but actively against it. And even though one arm of that political machine is voter suppression, the more the ruling faction acts in defiance of outside reality, the more likely they are to come to error, which will only serve to compound their unpopularity. Creating such a radical “rammed through” regime was always a bad idea. It usually is when the midterm election after a new president’s election leads to a severe loss in seats to the ruling party, even when it isn’t deliberately TRYING to piss off the nonpartisan voter. Ask the Democrats. The last time they had both houses of Congress, they used it to pass Obamacare, and they lost their Senate majority just in time for the Census. Another hint: It’s easier to roll back tax cuts than expansions to the medical bureaucracy.

“6) Something or someone was needed to remind the country that there is no longer a Democratic party as we once knew it. It is now a progressive and identity-politics religious movement. “

I just find it odd that a conservative in National Review is using the term “religious movement” as a pejorative. Unless Hanson, like many of us, has reached the conclusion that most religious movements are not introspective attempts to find values in the transcendent, but shabby pretexts for justifying political prejudices on the grounds that some things cannot be explained by reason. If he believes this, I say: welcome to the club.

“Trump took on his left-wing critics as few had before, did not back down, and did not offer apologies. He traded blow for blow with them. “

And I’ve mentioned that one point of value in Trump is that his don’t-give-a-fuck attitude is instructive for anyone who wants to counter the crybully tactics of the Left. But that still begs the question of what you are going to replace the old liberal order with, and Hanson leaves himself empty-handed when he says, in so many words, “look, Eisenhower diddled his staff chauffeur, and things turned out great.”

The point is not that personal immorality is an automatic disqualifier for a statesman. But is it an automatic qualifier? Are we approving on the basis of vices instead of virtues? Of course even Hanson isn’t so dense as to explicitly assert this, even if that is what he is asserting implicitly. What you do is judge an individual on balance. That is why history judges Martin Luther King Jr. as positive on the whole (despite his adultery), why the historical judgment on Bill Clinton is far more ambiguous, and why the judgment on Donald Trump is already decidedly in the negative.

Of course, that could change. Trump could get a peace deal with North Korea, although maybe not.  Even if he did, that might not put him on the side of the angels. After all, in 1929, Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty, creating Vatican City in Rome and thus solving the diplomatic impasse between the secular Italian state and the “captive” Papacy. This is an achievement that stands to this day. Why then did Mussolini end his life executed, dragged through the street and hung up to be spat on and jeered at by his former subjects? Well, I guess after you kill political opponents, gas Ethiopians, turn the military into a joke and turn the government into a collaborator with the Holocaust, people judge you on balance.

“In the end, only the people will vote on Trumpism. His supporters knew full well after July 2016 that his possible victory would come with a price — one they deemed more than worth paying given the past and present alternatives. “

Quite. Even if Democrats get Congress back this year (and again, these guys could find a way to strike out in a whorehouse), you need two-thirds of the Senate to impeach. Republicans couldn’t do it to Clinton when the country was far less polarized. But then, Clinton was far more popular. And the reason why Democrats might get the House back is that America has paid the price for Trump, and now that we don’t have Hillary Clinton to kick around anymore (I fucking hope), Trump has lost his one surefire rallying point. That’s why he keeps relitigating an election that he WON, so that his dupes will have something to rile them up rather than think about how the country is scarcely better off than it was under Obama.

“To calibrate the national mood, they simply ask Trump voters whether they regret their 2016 votes (few do) “

https://www.facebook.com/IRegretVotingForTrump/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/us-small-farmers-regret-voting-trump-180330092417106.html

http://prospect.org/article/how-ambivalent-trump-voters-feel-about-him-now

“and whether any Never Trump voters might reconsider (some are), “

Again, that depends on whether Republicans can rally enough people around being the NotDemocrat party when that’s really all they have to offer. Based on the latest round of special elections and primaries, I’m not so sure.

“and then they’re usually reassured that what is happening is what they thought would happen: a 3 percent GDP economy, low unemployment, record energy production, pushbacks on illegal immigration, no Iran deal, no to North Korean missiles pointed at the U.S., renewed friendship with Israel and the Gulf states, a deterrent foreign policy, stellar judicial appointments — along with Robert Mueller, Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, and lots more, no doubt, to come. “

Drip, drip, drip, Trumpniks.

REVIEW: Deadpool 2

Deadpool 2 brings back most of the cast from the surprise hit movie: Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Morena Baccarin (his girlfriend, Vanessa), Leslie Uggams (Blind Al), Karan Soni (Dopinder the cab driver) and T.J. Miller, whose mutant power is the superhuman ability to sabotage his own career.

As the movie starts, Deadpool and Vanessa decide to start a family. Unfortunately, this goal hits a minor setback. Despondent, Deadpool ends up becoming an X-Men Trainee (TM) under Colossus and tries to rehabilitate an angry preteen named “Firefist” with the mutant power of flame generation (and possibly insulin resistance). However, once they’re stuck together in Mutant Penitentiary, Deadpool has to save the kid from a gun-toting cyborg named Cable, played by Josh Brolin. (Yes, Deadpool calls him Thanos at one point.) And once it’s revealed that Cable came from the future to change his own past, it raises the matter of how a decision to treat others can have effects on the whole universe. This is important, because it comes up at the end of the movie.

One thing I like about the Deadpool series is that it goes against the tendency in how most superheroes are adapted to the screen. Comicbook characters are literally cartoons. Their appearance, including a mask, is central to their identity, which is why Bruce Wayne doesn’t just fight crime in his civvies. But when studios are making a comicbook movie with a big star like Robert Downey Jr., they want to show Iron Man with his mask off as much as possible, because otherwise they think its a waste of star power to show a costume when pretty much anybody could be in it. But the producers of Deadpool movies (including Ryan Reynolds) get Deadpool. They put little facial expressions on his mask and show him in costume as much as possible because that’s how the comicbook looks. Besides which, Deadpool with his mask off looks kind of like a statue that someone sculpted out of dried cow shit and painted with a coat of vomit. Or like an abortion that crawled out of the biowaste bin, then escaped the facility, then grew up. Look, you get the idea.

In any case, Deadpool 2 not only has the violence and profanity we’ve come to expect, but it also holds together as a dramatic story (eventually) and it happens to have the most badass action-hero soundtrack EVER.

The Debate on Political Correctness

The Canadian debate series The Munk Debates had an event in Toronto Friday May 18, on the thesis “Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress.” The debate was speaker Michael Eric Dyson and New York Times journalist Michelle Goldberg on the side of political correctness with the opposition represented by British celebrity Stephen Fry and University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxYimeaoea0

Fry of course was awesome. Goldberg came off very well, and for the most part, so did Dyson, though calling Peterson a “mean white man” was a low blow that did not do him any favors. I also think he didn’t realize how badly that would play with Peterson’s hometown crowd.

Peterson nevertheless was the weakest part of the event. He first gained the attention of people like myself when he was interviewed by an opinionated person from Britain’s Channel 4,  and came off as the reasonable person against somebody trying to push an agenda. This time he was the one who was irritated that no one was stressing his agenda, which includes among other premises the idea that the root of political correctness is an attempt to foist Marxist concepts onto Western culture in order to undermine it. And when insulted by Dyson, he actually would have been more effective if he’d made a brief rebuttal and then let it go, but the situation clearly unbalanced him.

Problem is, the issue isn’t quite as simple as saying that political correctness is all bad. Neither is it all good. Fry describes himself as a liberal, but took the “anti” position. Goldberg is pro-political correctness on the whole, but in her opening statement said there were some aspects of the movement that she wasn’t on board with, though she didn’t specify what they were. Fry had mentioned in his opening statement, “I believe that one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right rather than to be effective.” I have mentioned that on balance, I think that a lot of the “politically correct” movements, like #metoo, are vehicles for progress and the people in charge are dealing with the current moment in a reasonable manner. But there are examples of excess.

The main example that comes to my mind was the takedown of Minnesota’s Democratic Senator, Al Franken. Last year, former model and USO supporter Leann Tweeden described a USO tour with Franken in 2006 (when he was still a comic coming off his career at Saturday Night Live) and alleged that he French-kissed her without consent during rehearsal of a skit, and was also photographed pretending to reach for her breasts while she slept. After this accusation was made public, several other women came forward with similar stories that they said took place during Franken’s political career in Minnesota. This sort of thing would normally have gone through the Senate Ethics Committee for internal review, a process that Franken agreed to submit to. But several Democratic politicians, namely Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D – New York) called for his immediate resignation. But we know what was really going on. Liberals could see that the real problem was Trump being a misogynist thug, but they can’t do anything about that, so in order to “do something” they decided to single out a problematic person who could be leveraged, and thus removed one of their own most popular and effective advocates from politics.

And this is why I don’t trust the Left to stop gun violence. Or to stop Trump. Or to do… well, anything. I mean, the Left are like a coyote that chewed off three paws but is still caught in the bear trap.

But on reflection, what strikes me is that the “pro-PC” side was represented by Americans with their Constitution and free speech tradition, while the anti-PC side were two citizens of the Commonwealth. It might be because, from their perspective, they can see where we’re headed. In particular, Stephen Fry, being a gay atheist and socialist whose positions were historically not always popular, is very much aware that one’s right to a position should not be dependent on its political popularity.

REVIEW: Avengers: Infinity War

The titles of Marvel movies are often misleading. For example, Civil War was promoted as Captain America: Civil War, when it could just as easily been promoted as an Iron Man sequel or an Avengers movie, since Iron Man was just as central to the story as Captain America, and it was his actions that ultimately led to the destruction of the Avengers team. And now that Thanos is making his long-awaited move, bringing in the Guardians of the Galaxy, Asgardians, Wakandans, Dr. Strange, Spider-Man and all of the (former) Avengers, what we are calling Avengers: Infinity War would be just as well called “Thanos Vs. The Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Guess who wins.

As fans know, the unifying arc of the Marvel movies since at least The Avengers is that Thanos is a demi-god level threat who has been collecting various “Infinity Stones”, some of which are possesssed by Marvel heroes. When all the stones are together, their owner has absolute control of space and time. Thanos seeks this power in order to restore balance by killing half the population of the universe. Apparently nobody told him about condoms.

Other good titles for this movie would be:
“The Search For A Thanos CGI That Doesn’t Suck”

“The Scriptwriters Don’t Seem To Like Star-Lord For Some Reason”

and “They Can’t Kill That Guy, He’s Still Under Contract”.

I waited until my friends were available to see the movie with me, so by now, most people are either aware of the ending or have been spoiled somewhat. The ultimate doom of the piece is greatly undermined because, A, we already know there is going to be a sequel, and B, anyone who knows about the original source material knows that a device that can control the universe and time can also reverse any changes made with it, which is how the comicbook story was resolved. But the major difference between a comicbook universe and its movie adaptation is that comic companies can use fictional characters and resurrect them without regard to age or death, whereas movie producers have to deal with real-world factors. For instance, Marvel Comics has had Steve Rogers quit being Captain America on several occasions (sometimes replaced by Bucky or Sam) but he usually comes back to the role. But even if Chris Evans wanted to play Captain America forever, Captain America is supposed to be at the peak of human athletic ability, and no one can be that buff past their early 30s. Whereas Robert Downey Jr. could conceivably play Iron Man (a normal human whose powers come from technology) well past the age of 50, but his star power has already made renewing his contract too expensive.  This is going to reset the universe, but not in the way that would happen in the comics.

So as both a comic reader and MCU fan, my approach to all this is a bit “meta.” Avengers: Infinity War was directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, who did my two favorite Marvel movies, Civil War and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. (The best MCU movie verges between those two, Black Panther and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, depending on my mood.) There’s a lot of great dialogue and good acting (especially from Chris Hemsworth, remarkably enough). But I can’t say it’s the greatest Marvel movie. Others have pointed out that (despite a strong performance by Josh Brolin) Thanos has a severe problem as a villain, which I will address when I have more time to think about it. The major problem with this movie is that it’s the least stand-alone of all Marvel movies, and necessarily incomplete. It’s basically 95 percent awesomeness, and 5 percent …….

About That White House Correspondents’ Dinner

“You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you use to date him?”
-Michelle Wolf, April 28, 2018

“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
-Les Moonves, February 29, 2016, regarding the Donald Trump presidential campaign

By now, a lot of people have offered their opinions on comedian Michelle Wolf’s speech at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  At the risk of coming off like Dennis Miller, I wanted to research some points before giving my opinion.

Wolf was not the first person to give a speech at the WHCD to be taken to task for being vulgar or tasteless, even before the Trump Administration. In fact if you look at the 2016 event and compare President Barack Obama’s speech to the speech given immediately afterward by comedian Larry Wilmore, it’s amazing that the president not only did not punch low, but had a better sense of the room and better comic timing than the professional comic. Since then, you’ve had Hasan Minhaj and Wolf (like Wilmore, both veterans of The Daily Show), and both were attacked for being too offensive. In Wolf’s case, she came off with a hesitant, giggly affect, which conveyed either too much confidence in the material, or conversely no confidence at all.

As Wolf herself said, “you should have done your research.” But nevertheless people felt the need to complain, including those who were not directly targeted by Wolf. So where the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Margaret Talev, had promoted Wolf before the dinner, saying “Our dinner honors the First Amendment and strong, independent journalism. [Wolf’s] embrace of these values and her truth-to-power style make her a great friend to the WHCA”, after the dinner, Talev said: “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.”

Which is a bit precious given that, again, this is the third year in a row that the Correspondents’ Dinner hired a Comedy Central comic as a featured speaker and they ended up giving an R-rated address. So it is a fair question as to who is more betrayed: the rubber-chicken crowd that expects the event to titillate rather than provoke, or the people who actually expect journalism to speak truth to power.

The real joke of the night is that that never has been the point of the event.

There is a certain code of professional respect in American politics, not just between the two major parties but between the press and the political class, and it is simultaneously the greatest virtue and greatest vice of the system. It has already been permanently undermined within the two-party system by Newt Gingrich, then the Tea Party, and most recently by the maneuvers of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan in the Congress to shut Democrats out of serious legislative action. But the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, like the Al Smith Dinner in New York, is one of the remnants of a tradition where all parties in the political-media complex are supposed to relax and reassure themselves that short-term disagreements aside, they’re all Americans on the same team.

The ultimate downside to this sense of courtesy is that if you have enough friendships or juice with the gatekeepers of information, you can be the most depraved character imaginable and still retain respect in the system. As some of Donald Trump’s mentors showed him by example.

I’ve often felt that this is one of the reasons that Trump ran for president in the first place. He was already the ultimate spoiled brat who was used to having the press and the legal system give him all the breaks he wanted, but the least little pushback was still too much for his fragile ego. So he decided to shoot for the ultimate position of power and prestige so that his disgusting conduct would finally be unimpeachable. So to speak.

What we have ended up with is worse than hypocrisy, it’s a double standard. Which is not entirely the same thing.

Hypocrisy is the Republican stock in trade. You expect these people to attack others on standards that they don’t feel the need to uphold themselves.

The problem is when the “respectable” mainstream media actually do believe they uphold standards of fairness and objectivity, but in doing so, enforce them unevenly. What happens when Donald Trump attacks judges and journalists for being Hispanic, or mocks another journalist for a disability? Do you call him out as a bigot? Well, you can’t do that, that would be bias! But if you don’t call a spade a spade, is that fairness to Trump, or bias against truth?

What happens where you have a standard where one party can bully, pick fights and do as they please while everyone else has to play by the rules? When one party gets sucker punched and can only fight with one hand tied behind their back, who wins and who loses on that standard of “fairness”?

This code of professional respect is one of the numerous traditions of American government that Donald Trump wishes to destroy, to the extent that he cares about those traditions at all.

So of course he isn’t going to attend the Correspondents’ Dinner and take (further) mockery. That’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ job.

Sanders, also known as Aunt Lydia, also known as Sister Mary Elephant, is one of the most disingenuous and unpleasant people in an Administration where being disingenuous and unpleasant are the two main resume items. But Wolf didn’t call her out for being overweight, though she could have. She didn’t say Sanders is ugly, though she could have. She did say that Sanders was the white woman’s equivalent of an Uncle Tom, and that she traded in lies to the extent that she had turned them into a facial accessory. Now, one doesn’t normally accuse the press secretary of outright lying, but when this Administration started by having Sean “Spicy” Spicer come up to the press corps and insist that Donald Trump had the best attended inauguration in history when all visual evidence confirmed the opposite, it undermined the “official” Administration’s credibility when attacking anyone else as false or biased. As a more recent example of White House lies, Dr. Harold Bornstein, Trump’s former doctor, just said that Trump’s bodyguard and a “large” assistant raided his office in February 2017 for Trump’s medical records. At her first press conference since the WHCD, Sanders admitted to the seizure on Tuesday but insisted that “as standard operating procedure, the White House Medical Unit took possession of the president’s medical records.” It is NOT standard medical procedure to have the president’s bodyguard take his medical records without authorization from the White House Medical Unit and in violation of HIPAA guidelines. (To the extent that we can trust Dr. Bornstein’s word, so long after the fact.) As it turned out, the raid occurred just two days after Bornstein told the press that he had given Trump a prescription of Propecia for hair loss. So that part wasn’t lying on the part of Sanders so much as omission. The pattern with the White House is to insist that “if Donald Trump says the sky is plaid and the moon is made of green cheese, then it is, because President Trump said so, because he’s the president, because he was elected, and who cares if Hillary got more votes, because he got the Electoral College, so that means the people have spoken, and anybody who disagrees is a Commie Muslim traitor or something.” Sanders is just that much more surly and brazen in that assertion than Spicer. Indeed, towards the end of his tenure, the press corps was starting to feel a bit of sympathy for Spicer because they could detect a core of shame within him, a trait that Sanders has obviously deduced is not conducive to survival in Trumpworld.

Getting roasted by Wolf is of a piece with Sanders’ day to day job. The White House press conference is increasingly recognized as a ritual where the White House spews public-relations propaganda in the guise of truth and the press corps pretends to take it seriously. But everybody puts up with being lied to, and did so long before Trump’s inauguration, because that’s how things are done. Journalism, especially in Washington, is a matter of contacts, and however much contempt the audience has for professional liars like Kellyanne Conway, and however much rage the president has for “leakers,” the government and the press are in a mutually parasitic relationship where most of the best leaks are from people like Conway and even Donald Trump himself. This was confirmed by no less a conservative than Ann Coulter. In her New York Times interview with Frank Bruni, Coulter confirmed that she was the source of a quote in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury expose and that she was not the one who leaked it. In her account to Bruni, she had tried to get Trump’s aides to dissuade him from letting Ivanka and Jared Kushner act in his White House without portfolio, since that sort of thing was bad optics in the Kennedy Administration, and Bobby Kennedy “knew a little more about politics.” She got blown off by people who said “that’s above my pay grade.” So she got an audience with Trump himself and said: “Apparently no one else will tell you this, but you can’t hire your kids.” She said he did listen at the time, but when she heard about Wolff’s book, she went to Wolff at the book party and said, “I didn’t tell you anything, how did you know I had told him this? It had to be the president or someone the president told.’ And he said: ‘Oh, yeah, it was the president. He was storming around the Oval Office, saying, ‘And then Ann Coulter told me ….’”

So both sides here are acting just a little bit in bad faith. And when it is clear that Trump and his team have no regard for How The Game Is Played, it doesn’t necessarily help the press to spread information through deception and unattributed rumor. Only one side needs to care about upholding its reputation.

In any case, it is hardly news for a private citizen to shout that Trump and his stooges are liars and crooks. The real punch of Michelle Wolf’s speech came very late, at the 18-minute mark. “You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks, or vodka, or water, or college, or ties, or Eric… but he has helped YOU. He 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. And if you’re going to profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money, because he doesn’t have any.”

It’s funny because it’s true.

The American press could have treated Trump on the same mutant-retard level that they usually reserve for third-party candidates. They could have shut him out of debates simply for going beyond the pale, which he did more and more often. But no. They wanted the 2016 election to be a contest. Everybody expected Hillary Clinton to roll to victory (certainly including Clinton), and the press corps that had prior experience of Clinton was already bored to death by the prospect. They could have promoted Rubio, Jeb or Ted Cruz, but they were all sad sacks, and the Annoying Orange was “great for ratings.” And of course, the New York press was at least as chummy with Trump as they were with the Clintons.

You don’t see journalists making a big issue of that bit, but that’s because Washington journalists are professional enough to not call attention to their weaknesses, whereas both Donald Trump and his cult are gaping wounds of emotional neediness that would cause a Jewish Holocaust survivor to go, “stop with the complaining, already.”

But make no mistake, Wolf knew what she was saying with those words, and her targets knew exactly what she was talking about.

And the fact that female professional journalists – some of whom are the prime beneficiaries of White House leaks –  are responding to Wolf on a tone-policing, gossip-girl level with regard to Sarah Sanders, rather than addressing the substance of her point, actually calls attention to it by omission.

One demands respect within an institution if that institution is worthy of respect. Thus when one party flagrantly violates the rules of respect they should not complain if they get attacked in kind, not should the respectable gatekeepers pretend that that party is innocent. Otherwise the institution becomes unworthy of the respect everyone is demanding.

And if the press will not challenge the White House, either because it fears a hostile administration, or wants to keep access to a friendly one, that’s part of the problem.

Also – Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have clean drinking water.