The misinterpretation the Masters and Tiger Woods counted on?

Here's Thomas Boswell in the Washington Post:

On Friday, Tiger Woods made a gigantic blunder in applying the rules of golf, a brain cramp unworthy of a veteran pro.... But his subsequent mistake, taking an improper drop, ultimately cost him two shots and will haunt and may doom his chances to win this Masters.

But that’s all he did wrong.

Woods was so unaware of his gaffe that he gave three TV interviews in which he described in detail what he thought was a smart piece of strategy but was in reality a clear violation of a rule so simple many hackers grasp it.

In fact, Woods’s candid comments were the sole cause of his penalty.

It’s hard to believe that Woods, a tour pro for 17 years and a high-level competitor for more than 25, could not know or could even become temporarily confused about where you drop a ball after you hit into water.

But it is far harder to believe that Woods would deliberately break a rule, benefit by it, get away with it, sign his card for it, stand in fourth place in the Masters after 36 holes and then voluntarily tell the world every pertinent fact that could get him penalized or disqualified from the Masters. In fact, with current data, it is impossible to believe. Tiger just screwed up.

That's what Woods and the Masters officials want you to think, that Woods's self-incriminating statement is evidence that he didn't realize he'd done something wrong. But there's another interpretation: Woods made that statement to manufacture the evidence that is being interpreted to mean that he wasn't aware of the rule. He was playing dumb to avoid disqualification. Why assume dumb? I assume smart, especially since he had a lot of time to think about it, he has advisers, and it's in the interest of the Masters to keep him in the tournament for the ratings.

Here are Bill Pennington and Karen Crouse in the NYT, explaining how the officials arrived at the decision to regard this signing of an incorrect scorecard as "exceptional," thus avoiding disqualification:

A friend of a rules official saw something on television that looked improper, an illegal drop by Woods after his ball plunked into a pond at the 15th hole.

Masters officials would not reveal the identity of the texter, but the claim was brought before the Masters rules committee, which decided there was no violation. Then, about an hour later, Woods inadvertently implicated himself, saying that before dropping the ball he had taken two steps back, which was not permitted under the circumstances.

It's this time lapse that made me suspicious. The officials considered the matter, and said there was no violation, except that there was. An entire hour passes, after which Woods comes out and says something that sounds like he's casually recounting the set of events and he drops in there the statement that makes it clear he violated the rule. The fact that people like Boswell leap to read Woods's statement to mean that he didn't know he was signing an incorrect scorecard is why it could have been a brilliant scheme to plan exactly that statement in the hour that Woods had to think about how to handle the problem.

But you may ask: What about the fact the Masters rules committee had told him they'd seen no violation? I don't know what they told him. I only know what we were told, and I understand the motive for them to collude with Woods and his advisers and I know what happened an hour later.

Back to the NYT:

The process for Saturday’s ruling might have been especially delicate; removing Woods from the Masters could have ruined TV ratings and deprived the world’s top-ranked player of his best chance in several years to win his 15th major championship.

"Delicate" is a word. "Corrupt" is another.

But Masters officials said neither Woods’s popularity nor his pursuit of history was a factor. They had absolved him of wrongdoing on Friday; a day later, they said they could not impose the harsh penalty that goes with signing an incorrect scorecard — disqualification — because their earlier decision mitigated his culpability.

In my conspiracy theory, the officials knew on Friday that they needed to disqualify him, but they didn't want to lose him, and they created a time window that allowed Woods to do his innocent dumb guy performance, after which they'd assess the 2-stroke penalty and the sportswriters like Boswell — who also benefit, getting to write about Tiger and not all those other golfers few readers care about — spin the story the way they need it: Somehow the well-seasoned Woods forgot a basic rule of golf because there's no way he'd describe doing exactly what we can see him do on the video unless he thought there was nothing wrong with it.

I don't know what went on behind the scenes. I'm just saying those who hear Woods's statement and think it can only mean one thing are plainly wrong. Think of the motives and think of that 1-hour time gap. There is a lot of money at stake here, and there's a concurrence of interests between the golf authorities and Woods.

ADDED: "Even if they told me I could play, I would slam my trunk and be on my way up the road."

Biden said "Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?”

... to the father of one of the former Navy SEALs killed in Benghazi.

"Why Don’t Women Get Comebacks Like Tiger Woods?"

Asks Lindsay Crouse in the NYT.

The extreme qualities and the obsessive pursuit of success that drive [the ascent of high achievers] can lead to their downfall. The discipline and pressure can lead to addictions, the opposite of control. Obviously we saw that in Woods; following his descent grew excruciating....

Entering rehab in 2010 after accusations of infidelity, sex addiction and substance abuse, [Woods] said: “I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled.”...

Consider how swiftly the Olympic runner and nine-time N.C.A.A. champion Suzy Favor Hamilton was vilified after she was caught working as an escort while coping with mental illness....

Tiger was criticized for his transgressions (at least as much as SFH, as I remember it). But SFH never attempted a comeback. Maybe one reason Tiger could do it is that his sport was golf. You have more time to go through a long narrative of rise, fall, and comeback.

[Serena] Williams has surpassed her male peers and demonstrated the flip side of the extreme, confident and righteous qualities necessary to achieve success — she dared to get angry, and show it, when she opposed what she considered an unfair call at the United States Open last September.... No women have the leeway to behave like Woods and get away with it; a black woman certainly does not.

Tiger Woods is black...  so the race theory here is weak. I think people — especially white people — love and root for Tiger Woods even more — a lot more — precisely because he is black.

Women literally cannot afford to make the messy mistakes we see in the long arc of a lot of a storied male athletes’ careers, and they rarely get the payoffs.

Back to the gender argument. It seems to me, there's no one to compare to Tiger Woods — the ascent, the crash, the long time in the wilderness, the perfection of the big comeback win. You can't generalize to: Men can do that, women can't. Now, there's also the fact that people are much more interested in men's sports. But they're not so interested in golf. There are a lot of people who only care about golf to the extent that it's about Tiger. Who else has done that with a sport — made millions of people care about it only because of him (or her)?

“I’m no Tiger Woods,” Hamilton told me...

Yeah, you and everybody else on the face of the earth except Tiger himself.

Society rarely allows women to nurture those bold qualities that drive standout success. Instead, to get ahead, women either learn to stifle those instincts, or get punished for them. This muffles the traits that might lead to failure and inevitably also the qualities that lead to success. To be sure, some men are being held accountable for their bad behavior these days....

Shouldn’t everyone be able to recover from a fall from grace? Or at the very least, shouldn’t we allow both men and women to get high enough to fall?

Getting that high means beating everybody else. There's no way for the rest of us to "allow" that. Women already enjoy the allowance of playing in separated women's sports. Getting a comeback like Tiger Woods is something that's theoretically available for everyone, but who else could ever do it and who would even want that to happen to him (or her)? The argument for equality doesn't fly. We're talking about individual achievement here. You can dislike that adulation of the individual, but it's incoherent to demand equal access to it.

But it is true that we, the spectators, experience different emotions when we watch males and females. Is the author of the NYT piece trying to tell us we need to change our emotions and make them less about femaleness and maleness? Why should we do that? We're making a practice of watching different human beings as they perform physical feats. Why shouldn't our emotions have to do with gender? Why are we watching sports in the first place? I'd like to see a deeper analysis of the significance of sports spectating!

IN THE COMMENTS: RK wrote:

You don't get a comeback. You make a comeback. Maybe women are more inclined to wait for someone to give them something.

Yes, this is what troubled me most about this NYT piece. It really does undercut women by insisting proactively that women be given something no man was given. That's what's incoherent. The idea of equality doesn't work, because what's demanded for women is not something any man ever had.

Buzz Bissinger tries to write about Tiger Woods.

The Vanity Fair article has a fascinating Annie Liebowitz cover photograph of Tiger Woods's without a shirt — fascinating because the great athlete looks so different from those Men's Health-type torso models who work their muscles solely for the purpose of getting their muscles to look the way people these days want to see muscles looking and who squeeze out the excess fat so we can get the best look at those muscles. By contrast, Tiger looks slightly porky and squishy. That's not a criticism. That's a suggestion that, knowing the functionality of the torso we're gazing at — and I'm including the sexual functionality — we ought to adjust our taste in male beauty.

But on to Bissenger's silly writing. Here's a sentence — one sentence:

Tiger’s story has been driven by sex, tons of it, in allegedly all different varieties: threesomes in which he greatly enjoyed girl-on-girl, and mild S&M (featuring hair-pulling and spanking); $60,000 pay-for-sex escort dates; a quickie against the side of a car in a church parking lot; a preference for porn stars and nightclub waitresses, virtually all of them with lips almost as thick as their very full breasts; drug-bolstered encounters designed to make him even more of a conquistador (Ambien, of all things); immature sex-text messages (“Send me something naughty ... Go to the bathroom and take [a picture],” “I will wear you out ... When was the last time you got [laid]?”); soulful confessions that he got married only for image and was bored with his wife; regular payments of between $5,000 and $10,000 each month to keep his harem quiet.

Diagram that. The subject and verb are: story and has been driven. Yes, that sets up a list, and you can go very long, quite grammatically, with a list. But it purports to be a list of all different varieties of sex, and not everything on the list is a variety of sex. A confession about why you got married isn't a variety of sex. A payment of money is not a variety of sex. A preference for a type of woman isn't a variety of sex. And "lips almost as thick as their very full breasts" — I'm sorry... that's a hell of an "almost." The picture that put in my mind is just absurd. Lips as big as really tiny breasts would be scarily huge.

Then there's this insight into emptiness:

In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, travels nearly 330 days a year to fire people with a sympathetic look on his face.

Presumably, it's Bingham that has the sympathetic look on his face, not the people getting fired, as the sentence construction would have it.

... It now seems that when [Woods] returned home after a tournament and vanished back inside his gated community, the persona he left behind, the one he so obsessively presented to the public, was as empty as Bingham’s Omaha apartment, pieces of furniture without any meaning, a life without meaning.

This is the first mention in the article of Bingham’s Omaha apartment. We've been told about Bingham's emptiness, but suddenly the comparison is to Bingham's apartment, where there are — ooh, tragic! — pieces of furniture without any meaning. This is as silly as women with lips as big as their breasts... almost.

At the end of Up in the Air, Clooney realizes....

I'll spare you the spoiler.

But Woods, to the bitter end and with a kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance, still felt he could beat the tidal wave back.

What bitter end? Woods isn't a movie, and he's still alive. A kind of hubris that revealed his fundamental arrogance... These qualifiers are as meaningless as the furniture in Bingham's Omaha apartment. There's some particular kind of hubris involved? He's not just arrogant; he has fundamental arrogance? Bissinger fleshes out his point with nonevidence. Woods used a fake name at the hospital, like any celebrity who needed privacy. That's not arrogant. Woods avoided talking to the police. That's not arrogant. That's what your lawyer would tell you to do.

It was only when his paramours started pouring out of every cupboard like tenement cockroaches that Tiger expressed some sort of awareness that he was in deep shit....

The most sensible thing for him to do was to keep quiet and request privacy. That wasn't arrogant. And about that trite cockroaches simile — were their mandibles almost as big as their mesothoraxes?

With the number of alleged paramours reaching 14 as of mid-December (a figure bound to multiply), it is safe to say that behind the non-accessible accessibility and seemingly perfect marriage to a beautiful woman was a sex addict who could not get enough. There is nothing wrong with that, given that the opportunities for Tiger were endless.

Bissinger gives no reason for his pat assertion that having endless opportunities makes it completely right to be a sex addict. He just goes on to make the obvious point — bolstered, despite its obviousness, with the dubious concurrence of Hugh Hefner — that Tiger was cheating on his wife.

Things are only continuing to cascade downward for Woods.

Cascade downward? Does anything ever cascade upward?

... The swirling question is if, and when, he will return to golf.

Swirling, eh?  Is it swirling upward or downward?

... In the end it was the age-old clash of image versus reality, the compartmentalization of two different lives that inevitably merge at some certain point, whoever you are.

Well, I don't know who you are, but life is not a movie, and satisfying narrative arcs are not inevitable. For example, Woods could have died when his SUV hit that tree. And then we wouldn't have witnessed the age-old clash you're pontificating about.

"On the way to the game camera, I hear a 'hey.' Of course, me being by myself in the woods not thinking anybody else is anywhere around, it startled me, shocked me."

"I hear, 'I’m naked,' and I looked down and he’s standing there in the middle of the creek. He’s not wearing anything at all."

Said Casey Sanders, quoted in "Video goes viral after hunter finds naked man in woods" (WGN9), a story from 2014 that I ran across today.

After a couple of minutes questioning the man, trying to determine if his mental state was stable enough to approach, the man told Sanders he had been drinking creek water and eating rotten crab apples. He then asked the hunter if he had anything to drink.... For the next hour, Sanders helped the man out of the woods....

Why am I reading that today? Well, I was looking for an image — hopefully something in the high art category — that would fit the phrase "naked man in the woods." Most of the hits were about this video, though I did find this relatively nice painting by Edvard "The Scream" Munch:

But, you may wonder, why is Althouse looking for a high-art representation of a naked man in the woods. It's a long story, and, surprisingly enough, it has nothing to do with Jeffrey Toobin. It's too complicated to explain though. It has something to do with the definition of the word "fuck" that I was given by my sister when I was very young and that I lived with for a few years. A simple tableau: a man and a woman naked in the woods. That became a reference point in a discussion when we needed to make fun of a man with a name that rhymes with "fuck." 

There. Don't you love incomplete explanations?!

AND: This post is for all you commenters who are saying Althouse needs to write about Hunter — Hunter Finds Naked Man in Woods.

"Comedian Chris Rock undoubtedly put it best when he said, 'A man is only as faithful as his options.'"

"And few men have the sexual options of the most famous athletes in the world.... Fact is, over the last century the greatest athletes of whatever day are virtually winless against sexual temptation.... Look, infidelity can take down elected officials (though not John Fitzgerald Kennedy and, in the final analysis, not William Jefferson Clinton). It can rub out a guy in the office, like Steve Phillips of ESPN. But it's not taking down the greatest athletes of our time."

That's from sportswriter Michael Wilbon. Ah, but wasn't Tiger Woods perceived as a special god-like man? And isn't that key to the most lucrative aspect of his career, endorsements?

Forbes estimated earlier this year that Woods was the first athlete to surpass $1 billion in career earnings, more than 80 percent of that coming from endorsements with companies such as Nike, Gillette, Gatorade and AT&T...

[C]ompanies that may have wanted to align themselves with Woods might rethink that -- particularly companies whose target audience is women or children. Part of Woods' appeal has been his pristine image, off the course as well as on, and events of the last week have tainted that, making him an easy target....

Time Magazine's Bill Saporito says:

I don't think he's going to lose very many endorsements. Sure, he has been revealed as a fraud, but Michael Jordan, another big sports fraud and the very role model for Tiger, is still selling.... [B]y some respects, he'll only become a bigger attraction. Tiger's on the cover of People. He's now moving up in the Jon and Kate–Brad and Angelina celebrity solar system. You know what happens next: an appearance on Oprah with his wife Elin, national contrition. And even bigger ratings at his next tournament. Unless, of course, Mrs. Woods throws the bum out.

Ah, yes. The Church of Oprah. But is Elin willing to be used that way? Who knows? I'm seeing that there is a prenuptial agreement, with frantic renegotiations going on. Elin is, it seems, needed in the shoring up of Woods's image, and there is a ton of money to be thrown around to overcome whatever preferences the woman might have. But talk about things that make women feel bad about a guy. Manipulating a wife with vast sums of money after abusing her with affairs....

"When you strike at a king, you must kill him," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, famously.

I think Emerson was talking to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Holmes was attacking Plato, hence the riposte. The physical attack was metaphorical. Holmes and Emerson were jousting in the world of words, and Emerson got off a bon mot for the ages.

I'm talking about that this morning because James Woods got kicked off Twitter:

James Woods, one of the few conservative stars in Hollywood, has been locked out of his Twitter account for over a week now for “abusive behavior,” once again demonstrating the double standard the tech giant holds when it comes to enforcing rules.

Twitter suspended Woods for a tweet that read, “‘If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll,” according to his girlfriend Sara Miller....

The tweet was apparently in reference to the Mueller report, which found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. The quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson and has been used in various forms in movies and TV shows like The Wire....

"You best not miss" is the form of words used on "The Wire" (video here), and on "The Wire" the physical attack is not metaphorical, but with a real gun with bullets. But Woods was using the physical attack metaphorically. The idea — which deserves to be expressed — is — I think — that there was a coup attempt on Trump and it didn't work, therefore those who attempted it are in desperate trouble.

This isn't a true threat, just rough political discourse. It's not much like Emerson, because Emerson was speaking in a context where it was clear that only ideas were at stake. Holmes couldn't physically threaten the long-dead Plato. I think it's also clear that Woods was talking about political power and legal troubles, though the legal troubles are bad enough that they could lead to a physical impact on a human being — that is, a prison term. But there is a problem with Twitter's clipped language and vast dissemination. Among the thousands or millions of readers of a post like "If you try to kill the King, you best not miss’ #HangThemAll" are confused, paranoid, angry people who might hear a message to go out and kill somebody.

I'm checking the #HangThemAll at Twitter, and I see this:

James woods was banned for saying #HangThemAll about treasonous leaders on the left and was banned from Twitter, but @kathygriffin isn't banned for this: pic.twitter.com/tT1x4eeVnJ

— The JP McGlone (@JPMcGlone) May 4, 2019

Yes, and that's the problem. Twitter needs to apply its standard from a neutral viewpoint.

"Conservative actor James Woods tweeted a hoax meme in July. Twitter just locked him out of his account."

WaPo reports.

An account belonging to a woman named Sara Miller, who identified herself as Woods’s girlfriend, first tweeted the news early Friday morning with images of the email Woods received from Twitter. The email stated the July tweet “includes text and imagery that has the potential to be misleading in a way that could impact an election,” and instructed Woods to delete the tweet before he can use his account again, according to Miller’s tweet....

The meme that Twitter appears to have taken issue with is a photo of three men with exaggerated smiles alongside the text, “We’re making a Woman’s Vote Worth more by staying home.” It also used the hashtags #LetWomenDecide and #NoMenMidterm. In his tweet, Woods wrote, “Pretty scary there is a distinct possibility this could be real,” referencing the meme. “Not likely, but in this day and age of absolute liberal insanity, it is at least possible…”

This gets the "Era of That's Not Funny" tag.

Twitter murders humor. But Twitter without humor is dead.

He "will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity. … He is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations."

Can you identify the "he"? It's not Barack Obama. The statement was made by the man's father, quoted in an article printed in Slate in July 2000. I ran across that article, which is written by Bob Wright (whom I talk to from time to time on Bloggingheads), because I'd just done that post about the problem of shame, and I knew shame was one of Wright's big topics. (He's pro-shaming.)

Tiger Woods refusing to talk to the police ≈ Desiree Rogers refusing to talk to Congress.

Maureen Dowd doesn't really have anything new to say about Tiger,

Tiger may have been the greatest pro golfer but he was an amateur adulterer. His puffed-up ego led him to leave an electronic trail with a string of buffed and puffed babes. Like so many politicians before him, Tiger ignored the obvious rule: Never get involved with women who have 8-by-10 glossies.

Amusing writing. But with nothing much to say about Tiger, Dowd makes a column of it by forcing a parallel with Desiree Rogers, the White House social secretary who purported to stand on constitutional principle as she refused to talk to Congress about the White House gate-crashers. Tiger, you see, refused to talk to the police.

But Tiger is a private citizen, and he faced potential criminal charges, either for himself or his wife. Dowd doesn't even mention the Constitution in connection with Woods — even as she's going for parallelism — but Woods had a constitutional right not to talk to the police, and I assume he was well advised by lawyers as he chose not to talk. He had a right to do what he thought was best for himself. The public may be interested in him, and he needs to worry about our loss of respect for him, which would hurt his lucrative career in product endorsement, but he doesn't owe us anything.

Rogers, on the other hand was working for the government, in a position of a public trust, and her refusal to account for herself was quite a different matter. The constitutional provision for executive privilege is not like the individual right against self-incrimination. It's a matter of separation of powers having to do with the ability of the executive branch to function independently. If it is invoked, it should not be Rogers protecting her own interests. It should be because it serves the public good for the executive branch to be free of interference from Congress. It may well be that there are legitimate reasons for maintaining secrecy about the details of planning and carrying out a big White House dinner party. There are some delicate, sensitive matters in party planning, no? One could imagine Congress picking apart such things for the devious purpose of distracting and weakening the President.

Dowd says:

Both Tiger and Desiree hid and stayed silent because they mistakenly thought they were protecting the Brand. But despite their marketing savvy, these two controlling players spiraled out of control.

That sounds clever and amusing, but only if you don't try to imagine what Woods and Rogers might be hiding and how, if they spoke, their words would be used to damage them further.  Dowd assumes that the truth has or will come out: "Don’t stonewall. Admit your mistake before others piece together the embarrassing facts." That is: It's the cover-up, not the crime. It will hurt more if you don't come clean. But I think there are things about what happened the night Woods ran into the tree that will never come to light. And who knows what more there is to the gate-crashers story? It sounds pretty frivolous, and we are expected to get over it. A slight glitch that represents nothing else of any concern. But is it?

Was Tiger Woods sleep-driving when he crashed?

An emailer writes:

I had a eureka! moment last night. Tiger was not awake when he crashed his car. This is why he was said to be snoring in the street by the neighbor in the police report. He probably is using ambien and "sleepwalked" the whole thing. His wife probably broke the window to attempt to wake him up, following him out of the house, but obviously being behind enough in time that he already had gotten in and started the car. This type of thing is a very common side effect of ambien. He can't sleep because his wife had already found out about the girlfriends.... I'm surprised I haven't seen this explanation offered by anyone.

Here's a news article saying he was sleeping and snoring in the street after the crash:

They found Woods apparently unconscious in the street, while his wife, Elin Nordegren, standing nearby. Woods was shoeless, in a T-shirt and shorts.

"He was actually snoring," [a witness] said.

Sleeping and snoring in the street after all that? You don't snore when you're knocked unconscious, do you? That sounds like a sleeping drug, which also explains how the highly skilled Woods could drive so badly.

Looking for that news article, I found this:

From Radar: "[Rachel] Uchitel told friends that she and Tiger liked to have sex while taking the drug Ambien. Uchitel told one pal, 'You know you have crazier sex on Ambien — you get into that Ambien haze. We have crazy Ambien sex.'" Readers: Is that a thing? We've witnessed people in an Ambien haze, certainly. But Ambien sex? This makes us feel old not knowing this.

Is it all fitting together now?

ADDED: The emailer was Elliott Althouse (no relation). And, in the comments, several people say that a person unconscious with a head injury might snore.

A graphic depiction of the inane gender politics of The Washington Post.

Here's a screen selection of the upper right corner of the WaPo front page right now:



It looks as though they're hot and desperate to show the importance of women, but they've got next to nothing. This, after a week of centralizing women. These are the crumbs of regard we get on Monday morning? Another story about Melania's hat, and a dopey attempt to disqualify her because of what the hat means. Checking in with the #MeToo movement, going back to the same minor actress for accusations that the supporters aren't supportive enough. And above all...

"Can Taylor Swift, revered by young Americans, help lead Democrats out of the woods?"

The photo Swift is from 2016, so WaPo went out of its way to choose the platinum blonde, black-red lipstick look. Does it inspire "reverence" or hope that this is the person to "lead Democrats out of the woods"? Are the Democrats lost in the woods? I guess we've gone from presuming it's a big blue wave election to finding ourselves far from the beach and up in the woods.

The news is just that Swift put up an Instagram post that told her fans they should vote and endorsed 2 Democrats — Tennesseans Phil Bredesen and Jim Cooper. Here's the post, with a photograph of Swift in much darker, longer hair. WaPo:

A black-and-white Polaroid was swapped in for a standard headshot.... By early Monday, more than a million Instagram users had registered their approval.

A million? That's not impressive when you consider that Swift has 112 million followers on Instagram.

By characterizing the midterms as “an overall struggle for protecting human rights and dignity” rather than a partisan grudge match, Swift is speaking effectively to young people who have less fealty to the party structure, said William Fotter, the vice president of the University of Arizona Democrats. “Young people are less party-oriented and more issue-oriented,” said the 21-year-old political science and international relations major. “If Taylor Swift is able to convince millennials that their votes matter, that could make a huge difference,” he said....

What if the young people are inspired by Swift to vote but not for Democrats? This danger is squirreled away deep in the article (which is so insanely padded that it would be weird if normal readers got this far, but it's the most interesting part):

Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union scolded her for threatening to sue a California blogger who accused the singer of being associated with white supremacy. And in an editorial, the Guardian called her an “envoy for Trump’s values.”...

Here's what the Guardian wrote last November:

[Swift and Trump both have] their adept use of social media to foster a diehard support base; their solipsism; their laser focus on the bottom line; their support among the “alt-right”.

Swift’s songs echo Mr Trump’s obsession with petty score-settling in their repeated references to her celebrity feuds, or report in painstaking detail on her failed romantic relationships.... The message is quintessentially Trumpian: everyone is out to get me – but I win anyway....

[N]otably her much-publicised “squad” of female models, actors and musicians is largely thin, white and wealthy. In a well-publicised Twitter exchange with rapper Nicki Minaj, she treated the discussion of structural racism as not only incomprehensible, but a way to disempower white people such as herself....

As for those other 2 WaPo articles, what Rose McGowan said about entertainment industry #MeToo supporters was:

“I just think they’re douchebags.... They’re not champions. I just think they’re losers. I don’t like them.... I know these people, I know they’re lily-livered, and as long as it looks good on the surface, to them, that’s enough.”

As for Melania and the pith helmet — despite the headline, the actual article has some depth and nuance. I'll highlight the details that really ruin the hat-based attack on Melania:

In 1994, The Washington Post’s Phil McCombs reported that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton “appeared in a pith helmet, looking vaguely like a North Vietnamese Army officer” on a visit to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park....

[P]ith helmets are worn by motorcycle taxi drivers in Hanoi, as well as police officers in Cameroon and Peru. In the U.S., postal workers wear pith helmets as part of their uniforms on exceptionally rainy or sunny days, and the U.S. Marine Corps’ marksmanship coaches wear them at shooting ranges....

In 1966, the civil rights activist James Meredith marched through Mississippi wearing a pith helmet while encouraging African Americans to vote. Charles W. “Hoppy” Adams, the legendary black DJ at WANN in Annapolis, Md., wore a pith helmet during live appearances in the 1950s and 1960s... And the rapper Andre 3000 of OutKast wore a straw pith helmet with a bow tie and overalls on MTV’s Total Request Live in 2006.

So are pith helmets properly called — as in the WaPo headline — "a symbol of colonialism"? If you want to say yes, you'll have to attack James Meredith!

Do you think Trump will be better off not having to run against a woman this time?

That's my first question, upon reading "BUCHANAN: Could be down to 3 white guys by end of month..." (at Drudge). The link goes to a column by Patrick Buchanan at WND.*

If Klobuchar runs fifth in Iowa and third, fourth or fifth in New Hampshire, in what state does she win her first primary? And as her fundraising has never matched that of the front-runners, where does she get the money to match Sanders or Bloomberg on Super Tuesday, now just three weeks off?...

As for Warren, in her battle with Sanders to emerge as the champion of the progressive wing of the party, her third-place finish in Iowa, and her expected third-place finish in New Hampshire, at best, would seem to settle that issue for this election.... I[n] what state does Elizabeth Warren beat her progressive rival?...

It's bad for the Democrats to lose their female candidates, but that does seem to be where things are going. They've already lost all their black candidates (at least the ones strong enough to have gotten on the debate stage (there's still Deval Patrick)). So it will, in all likelihood, be a white male against Trump. Is that better for him? I could argue both ways, so I give the question to you for now.
________________

* WND? Is that a disreputable website? I see it also has: "James Woods sprung from 'Twitter jail,' gets instantly political/Sarcastically asks: 'How's Jeffrey Epstein doing?'"

After being held captive in "Twitter jail" for nearly a year, essentially locked out of his own social-media account and precluded from posting any messages, actor James Woods triumphantly returned to the site Thursday night....

His first tweet:

I’ve tried so hard this past year to live without the wealth of knowledge available on Twitter, but this kind of blazing insight can be found nowhere else, so... I’m back! #AOCStillAMoron pic.twitter.com/kB0oDXmArB

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 7, 2020

If you were following Woods before his banishment, check to see if you still are. I was and am.

ADDED: From Wikipedia: "WorldNetDaily (WND) is an American news and opinion website and online news aggregator which has been described as 'fringe' and far right as well as politically conservative. The website is known for promoting falsehoods and conspiracy theories."

"What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial."

A good title. It's something I was trying to parse on my own yesterday.

The article is at The New Yorker, written by Ronan Farrow. Subheadline: "The legal issue behind Weinstein’s successful appeal is also at the heart of the former President’s hush-money case." The subheadline in my head was: Big man brought down by sex. Or should it be: Pile everything together and the monster will be visible?

Consider this: Farrow's book about Weinstein was called "Catch and Kill" (commission earned), and in Trump's trial, David Pecker has been testifying about the National Enquirer’s "catch and kill" scheme. 

From a CBS News story about Trump's lawyer's cross-examination of Pecker:

Pecker said he first gave Trump a heads up about a story in 1998.... [Trump's lawyer Emil] Bove had Pecker walk through negative stories that he had killed about other figures, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods.

"That's the old saying — right? — if you're going to shoot at the king you better not miss."

Said the NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker on yesterday's episode of "The Daily." Context:

[Biden is] saying, in essence, you can't have this debate anymore because this debate, it undermines my chances exactly, and therefore I want you to shut up. This question is over. Knock it off move on. And I think he's daring them. He's daring his doubters and naysayers to come after him or to shut up. You want to take me on? Take me on. Right? That's the old saying — right? — if you're going to shoot at the king you better not miss. So all eyes right now are on Congressional Democrats to see where they fall this week. Do the floodgates open and they end up abandoning him in large numbers or do they decide to give up on that notion?

First, the "old saying" is in fact a famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "When you strike at a king, you must kill him." I wrote about it back in 2019:

Eugene Robinson on Tiger's women: "What's with the whole Barbie thing?"

"No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who've been linked to Woods resemble one another. I'm talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement."

Really? Here's Barbie. Here's a montage of faces that have horizontally faced Tiger's. I'm sorry, Eugene, but these women are just not that pretty. Barbie is very pretty and glossy and made-up, but in a daytime, cheerleadery way. The Tiger women are all made-up for nighttime, indoor work, and they are not all that pretty. Tiger's wife is the Barbie. Tiger's women to cheat on Elin with are all getting away from Barbie/Elin. It strikes me as a touchingly ordinary search for sex that feels dirty.

A Woody Allen joke: "Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right."

Robinson rambles on:

If adultery is really about the power and satisfaction of conquest, Woods's self-esteem was apparently only boosted by bedding the kind of woman he thought other men lusted after -- the "Playmate of the Month" type that Hugh Hefner turned into the American gold standard.

Which Elin is, but — what is wrong with you, Eugene? — these other women are not!

But the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes -- some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an "official" standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

What is wrong with Eugene Robinson? He is seeing race, race, race. The Tiger women look white to him — are they? — and, beyond that, some big hair, big makeup, and big boobs makes them Barbie. Hardly.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious -- a control freak even when he's committing "transgressions."

I don't think so. I'd say he's a man who went for the Playmate ideal in choosing a wife and aimed low for cheating. He was the opposite of image conscious and controlling, and that's one of the reasons his fall from the god-like stature he had for us is so very long and hard.

***

If you clicked on the Barbie link and heard the voice of Barbie, don't you think she sounded an awful lot like Mira Sorvino in her Oscar-winning role — as a prostitute, naturally — in the Woody Allen movie "Mighty Aphrodite"? I say "naturally," because they are always handing out Oscars to actress who take on the amazing challenge of playing a whore.

Barbie, sluts, Woody, Woods...

Yamato Tanooka — the boy whose parents left him in the woods as a punishment — is found safe and alive after 7 days.

"Yamato's parents had briefly left him by a wooded road near Nanae in Hokkaido region to punish him for throwing rocks on a family day out. When they went back minutes later he had gone. He was dressed in only a T-shirt and jeans, in an area where temperatures can dip as low as 9C at night."

How did he survive?

He was discovered at a military base on Friday, about 5.5km (3.4 miles) from where he went missing last Saturday. The site had allegedly already been searched on Monday morning, but the boy was not found... The search team comprised of 180 people and search dogs. The soldier who found Tanooka had not been part of any previous rescue efforts, AP reports. Yamato told police he had walked to the military base by himself soon after his parents left him. "I drank water to get by," he reportedly said. "There wasn't anything to eat." He slept on mattresses spread on the hut floor.

There doesn't seem to be any talk about taking the child away from the parents, who have been effusively apologizing: 

"My excessive act forced my son to have a painful time... I deeply apologise to people at his school, people in the rescue operation, and everybody for causing them trouble. I have poured all my love into my son, but from now on, I would want to do more, together with him. I would like to protect him while he grows up. Thank you very much."

Initially, the parents had said that the boy had just got lost as they were walking in the woods, but later the father admitted that they'd made the boy get out of the car and they drove away. He'd withheld the true story because of sekentei— which means how one is seen in society. During the days of the search, there was a great deal of talk in Japan about what the parents had done:

Who was that woman sitting in front row center who would not look at Tiger Woods as he made his apology?

Oh! He hugged her. It was his mother!

I'm waiting for the full transcript, because I'm in the mood to pick it apart, especially the material about Buddhism, which, he said, is the religion he was raised in, which teaches not to pursue desire, and which he drifted away from. Indeed! So he wants to get back to Buddhism — he said, as his mother looked down into her folded hands in her lap and then off to the side. He wants to return to Buddhism, but he's going back to therapy. Why not to a Buddhist retreat, if Buddhism is the answer? Or was he just throwing things at us that he thought might work to make us love him again? Buddhism, therapy, leave my children alone...

Deep down, what does he really believe? If I were writing a fictionalized version of his story, I'd have him believe that he is the greatest golfer of all time and that this grand stature authorizes him to do what fits his fabulous mind and body. People get to see the manifestation of that mind and body on the golf course and in those idealized advertisements, but outside of that he must do what has worked, and that means having the anchor of a beautiful family and the whole range of intense sexuality that belongs to him — because he is what he is. Now, he's been called to account by conventional minds and all those people who make money through him — the PGA, the sports networks, advertisers — and they are dragging him down to their mundane morality with no concern for what it took to build the superior mind and body that is Tiger Woods. He is cornered and contemptuous, but he must abase himself for these little people and act as though he agrees. The outrage!

IN THE COMMENTS: dbp quotes the linked CNN article — "'I know I have bitterly disappointed all of you,' said the golfer, dressed in a blue button-down shirt and a blazer" — and says:

Can we take a closer look at his shirt? The resolution of the video was not high enough for me to detect button holes on Mr. Woods collar, but I could easily see that it wasn't buttoned down . What does this mean? He wears a button down shirt but leaves it flapping in the breeze — maybe his emotions are making him miss details. I think he should stay off the links for a while more.

Either that, or the reporter was mistaken about the type of shirt.

What does it mean? It means you can't trust CNN to report even the plain facts that are visible on screen to us here at home.

UPDATE: I go through the transcript here.

"Angelina’s wedding gown a gross display of parenting run amok."

It was covered with embroidery based on drawings her kids had made — "a random assortment of motorbikes, Eiffel Towers, mouse-like creatures and other 'charming' artwork" with "'buttock fattock' inexplicably embroidered on the rear."

Oh, what difference does it make? Why is a woman with children wearing a traditional white wedding dress in the first place? If you're going to stage a wedding long after the birth/adoption of 6 children and wear the white dress, why not goof on its inappropriateness and comment comically on how you've messed with the old convention that somehow you still want in on anyway?

By they way, "amok" comes from the Malay "amoq," which means "engaging furiously in battle, attacking with desperate resolution, rushing in a state of frenzy to the commission of indiscriminate murder... Applied to any animal in a state of vicious rage." (OED, no link available.)

To "to run amok" is "to run viciously, mad, frenzied for blood" or, figurative, "wild or wildly, headlong or heedlessly."

Talking about taxes and slavery, Henry David Thoreau used the expression in "Walden" (1854):

Are we "still supposed to believe that his wife, Elin Nordegren, somehow turned one of Tiger's Nike SQ drivers into the Jaws of Life"?

"Woods was driving a Cadillac Escalade out of his own driveway, which is the same as driving a tank. He wasn't going fast enough to deploy his air bags. But we're supposed to believe that in a rescue worthy of the new series, 'Trauma,' his wife had to bust a back window to pull her husband to safety after he ran over a fire hydrant and into a tree."

Mike Lupica tells Tiger Woods to get his story out — whatever it is.

AND, from the comments of Fridays's Tiger Woods post: a poem, by David (with "deep apologies" to William Blake):

Tiger, Tiger, that wasn't too bright.
Grabbin' the Caddy and takin' flight.
Perhaps the very lovely Ellin
Some Tiger hanky-pank was smellin'?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what pussy fried thee thy brain?
What the putter? What the wood?
What, her lawyer? Gonna whup you good.

AND: From Inwood follows David with his own "Tiger, Tiger":

TIGER, tiger, not so bright
In the caddy late at night,
What immortal hand or eye
Have framed thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or drain
Burnt the fire of thy brain
What babe you been A-W-O-L-in?
What you think that do to Ellin?

When Ellin threw your clubs like spears
Did’st water heaven with thy tears?
Did she smile her work to see?
Will she who made this ruin ruin thee?