Jack Ohman (Tribune) offers a combination of the mundane and the insightful.
It seems 90% of the conversation about Trump’s rally was about the first tasteless joke by the first tasteless speaker.
Not only did everyone ignore the parade of white supremacists and assorted bigots who followed Tony Hinchcliffe, but few of them bothered to even note the rest of Hinchcliffe’s racist jokes, about Black people carving watermelons and brown people who flood the nation with their babies because they don’t use birth control.
So there’s nothing special in Ohman riffing on the “floating pile of garbage,” because everyone has. But he does well to add the banners proclaiming the rally a celebration of racism and fascism by a madman.
Those who focused on Hinchcliffe’s routine must have turned off the TV after that first joke, which isn’t how journalism works.
It was clever of Trump’s campaign to offer Hinchcliffe as a sacrificial distraction from things like Miller declaring that “America is for Americans only,” a line borrowed from the Third Reich and spouted not by a random warm-up act but from deep within the bowels of Trump’s steaming heap of advisors.
Adam Zyglis declares that the “October Surprise” in this election was the revelation that Trump’s campaign is a collection of bigots, liars and clowns, which surely falls under the category of “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for the better part of a decade and obviously I’m enjoying it.”
Pat Hudson illustrates the campaign as a case of Trump and Musk leading battalions of armed, militant MAGAts, in a recreation of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
Rod Emmerson did not provide such a flattering comparison, chalking it up rather to the Pied Piper summoning an alley full of rats.
We should note that the crowd not only laughed at Hinchcliffe’s routine but cheered and applauded calls to kill those who oppose Trump’s plans and vulgar, false attacks on minorities and misogynist insults directed at Kamala Harris.
It’s not as if they came into the rally unprepared for what was said, or that they were appalled at hearing the unfiltered hatred that Dear Leader later called “a lovefest.”
John Branch (KFS) seemingly understates the offense, first of all, of the insults aimed at Puerto Ricans, second, of the pattern of insults towards Puerto Rico that began with Trump’s dismissal of the serious damage in Hurricane Maria and, finally, with his pretense that the only flaw in the rally was one joke in the opening act. I would have preferred a more robust response to his pathetic justification.
But how many times have we seen Trump deliver what seemed the blow that would doom his political career, only to see it fade away as a flood of MAGA love continued to obscure his lack of empathy and his sociopathic narcissism?
Juxtaposition of the Day
One element that the Trump campaign has successfully implanted into media coverage is that we don’t know who Kamala Harris is or what she stands for.
Prickly City (AMS) might be forgiven for repeating the claim last week, given its lead time, but Harris has been out on the stump for weeks, while Trump has been canceling appearances, his team explaining first that he was exhausted and then that he wasn’t at all exhausted.
But last night Harris laid out who she is and what she stands for, and she managed to wrap up a speech before 75,000 cheering supporters just in time for the folks back home to switch over to the first pitch of the World Series.
Well before that, anyone who wanted to know her had many, many chances to find out who she is, not that her vice-presidency or time in the Senate had been a secret anyway.
I remain convinced that “We don’t know her” is as phony an excuse as “I’m undecided.”
Shoddy excuses for deliberate ignorance.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
There’s a fair amount of “Yes, but no” in each of these.
Mike Smith is making a reasonable point that people who don’t read newspapers shouldn’t be appalled over what a particular newspaper does or does not cover. But when 250,000 Washington Post subscribers cancel over Bezos’s decision, the idea that non-subscribers are upset seems flimsy.
The chatter on social media is not coming from non-readers and non-subscribers. Rather, it is among subscribers debating Eldridge Cleaver’s point of view that “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” and trying to decide on which side of that argument cancellations place you.
Meanwhile, Whamond brings up the idea that supporting Amazon undercuts the impact of canceling your WaPo subscription, which it does, though it would take one helluva lot more than 250,000 cancelations to slice 10 percent off Amazon’s totals.
But you don’t have to do comparative math to see an even more basic flaw in his concept. You just have to know that the Washington Post has a very solid paywall.
Though the weird thing is, as many are discovering, canceling the Post mostly means it won’t automatically renew when your subscription ends. You still have access until then.
You can cost them clicks by not going there, but you won’t cost them money until the end of your current term.
The question remains whether losing a tenth of his subscribers would lead Bezos to order staff reduction or would induce him to bail out and sell to a non-profit group? And that’s an interesting question.
As noted before, I quit eating grapes and the farmworkers got their union.
I don’t claim that the two are causally linked, but I seem to have survived not eating those grapes, just as I’ve survived small doses of fundraising and marching and organizing for various causes over the years.
I don’t know if any of it made any difference to history, but it made a difference to me.
I’ve also voted in every presidential election for the past 52 years. Four years ago, I was one tiny voice among 154,600,000, and I intend to be one tiny voice again next week.
Little drops of water, little grains of sand.
It’s still a pretty good question. Make sure you’re got a pretty good answer.
When I went to cancel my all-access digital subscription to WaPo, they offered me a $60 rebate to stay. I haven’t given them a click since. We’ll see if I actually get my money back.
It is distressing that so many are choosing to focus on Tony’s awful stand-up act and not the other 90% of bile that was spewed at MSG. But it’s reasonable to assume that people just “noped” after the opening act and changed the channel.
Of course, MSNBC showed a ton of the rest of the various idiocies, but only us overly committed watch that. It may be biased, but they don’t lie.
Mike – You suggested paying attention to the details in Ohman’s offering, and I did. There’s no one operating the tug?
Prickly City parroting untrue RW talking points? WOW. I did not see that one coming.
Right? Like, what is Sommers’ problem? The “both sides do it” business is just ludicrous at this point.
Someone tell Sommers to just admit they’re voting for Trump but still want to be invited to Thanksgiving and be done with it.
Ohman’s use of “Garten” is a nice touch.
One thing I’ll say about the non-endorsements by the Washington Post, LA Times, and now USA Today, was that the coverage has made it abundantly clear that these newspapers’ editorial boards were prepared to endorse Kamala Harris right up until ownership decided not to do any endorsement, apparently to remain “neutral”. All that was lost was the supporting rational, which in this short attention span age is much less valuable than the headline. So in effect, the endorsement was communicated to the public while the media owners got to play both sides by claiming to be neutral.
Still, the way it was handled was lousy.
The news people endorsed Harris, the billionaires didn’t. Must mean all of the billionaires will vote for Trump, while the rest of us will vote for Harris. Except all of the people that think they’ll be billionaires any second now…and amazingly high number.
If Bezos had a grain of social consciousness, he could run the Post as a nonprofit without being able to notice any real change in his wealth. After all, that “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto is concurrent with his ownership of the Post, but I’d guess he’s too busy figuring out how much government support his businesses would get if Trump and Musk are running the government.
Of course, Bezos could be spiteful and just sell off the Post to, say, an Alden Global Capital or Sinclair — either of which would be a fate worse than death for a newspaper.
I mean, Sinclair owner David Smith is slowly strangling what’s left of The Baltimore Sun and it’s only a matter of time before he turns it into an zombified husk to pour his garbage into:
https://x.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1851226900762411144?s=42