October 6, 2019

"Phony as a horse"... is that an expression? Or is this just a stray inside joke for "Family Feud" fans?



Oh, dear! I'm so distractable, stopping in the middle of a sentence (in "The Hunter Biden story is a troubling tale of privilege" (WaPo)):
For all his barking and hucksterism, Rudy Giuliani is having limited success drawing the gullible into his sideshow tent. But the fact that Giuliani’s spectacle involving the Biden family is as phony as a horse...
I'm off chatting about it and laughing and googling "phony as a horse" — which is all about "Family Feud" to my immense delight —  but I finally come back...
For all his barking and hucksterism, Rudy Giuliani is having limited success drawing the gullible into his sideshow tent. But the fact that Giuliani’s spectacle involving the Biden family is as phony as a horse that does arithmetic does not mean there is no story worth examining. The real story of Joe Biden and his troubled son Hunter is full of pain and littered with questions and deeply relevant to our populist moment....
Oh! Phony as a horse that does arithmetic...  That's Clever Hans! I don't even have to look it up. I know all about the horse that supposedly did arithmetic. I read about that long ago in The New Yorker. Let me go get that for you. (I don't really care about the Giuliani-bashing in WaPo. That can go on just fine without me.) Ah! Yes! Here it is, "Questions About Language/I — Horses" by Vicki Hearne, August 10, 1986:





Ha ha, that was 33 years ago, and I still remember it so well. And isn't it refreshing to read a blog by someone who's 68 years old and talks like she's 68 years old?

68 comments:

David Begley said...

Ann: At least you don’t look and act like a 68 year old!

Narr said...

Full of pain and littered with questions. Wow. Populist moment. Wow.

People get paid for this?

Narr
My life has been full of comfort and answers

Fernandinande said...

No results found for ["phony as a horse" "family feud"]

Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the ... ...
https://books.google.com › books
United States. Congress - 1948 - ‎Law
On the strength of a slogan as phony as a horse-drawn rowboat on a desert—most of the Members of the Congress not realizing what they were doing—they ...

Michael K said...

Giuliani is getting close. You can tell by the invective

Mark said...

Or, we could say, "Phony as Elizabeth Warren's claims on the campaign trail that she had been fired from a teaching job because she was pregnant."

Video evidence has now surfaced from a few years ago where Warren says she left the job on her own -- "my first year post-graduation, I worked -- it was in a public school system but I worked with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an 'emergency certificate,' it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, 'I don’t think this is going to work out for me,' I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years."

rehajm said...

Doesn't The New Yorker totally blow the explanation of Clever Hans ? Clever Hans isn't a fallacy but a phenomenon or effect.

Ann Althouse said...

"No results found for ["phony as a horse" "family feud"]"

Of course, I didn't google "phony as a horse" "family feud." I had no idea Family Feud would be involved. I just googled "phony as a horse" (without quote marks).

Now the search is gummed up by my blog post. You can't get back to the state Google was in before I put up this post. I assure you my "phony as a horse" search turned up "Family Feud" all over the top of the results.

rhhardin said...

That turned up in Vicki Hearne's _Adam's Task_ as the preface I think. The essays on Washoe and How to Say Fetch in there are well worth reading.

If you like her style - female correctives to the scope of male philosophy - see also her later _Bandit_ and _Animal Happiness_. She takes no prisoners.

The cover blurbs on all of these are written by women who don't understand the first thing she's saying, as if they're cute animal youtube videos or something. So don't judge especially these books by their cover these days.

Chapter 8 of _Bandit_ is about why females don't wind up in chess and math.

rhhardin said...

Vicki Hearne thinks of herself as a leftist but actually writes on the right. Lefty magazines published her stuff a lot too, apparently not exactly getting the point.

gilbar said...

Professor Althouse;
As a 57 year Old, Both You and Meade give me hope for getting older
thanx!

cubanbob said...

For all his barking and hucksterism, Rudy Giuliani is having limited success drawing the gullible into his sideshow tent. But the fact that Giuliani’s spectacle involving the Biden family is as phony as a horse..."

They never get tired of whoring themselves.

Fernandinande said...

Little Hunter's wiki page has three entire sentences before they mention Trump.

You can't get back to the state Google was in before I put up this post.

There are ways to do that, but now your post is the first result w/o quotes!

Yancey Ward said...

All you have to do here is ask yourself this simple question- how would WaPo and the NYTimes treat Hunter Biden if Joe Biden was a Republican and Donald Trump a Democrat? Does anyone, Democrat or Republican, really believe that the exact same writers wouldn't be writing that Trump's actions were entirely appropropriate, and that Biden needed to be investigated by everyone with access to the necessary records?

The double standard being applied here is simply too open and obvious for it to work. The journalists here are taking their intellectual integrity and flushing it down the Cloaca Maxima for no real benefit- they are all preaching to the choir here. This is, incidentally, why the campaign against Kavanaugh also failed- Republican politicians in D.C. are starting to finally discard their willingness to live by the double standard- the voters for Trump have long since made that decision.

vanderleun said...

And you can't insult whores.

richlb said...

Like a mule with a spinning wheel....

Bob Boyd said...

Here's some arithmetic for you, Vicki:

A quick test of the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s salary is its comparability to other, similarly situated companies. It is estimated that Burisma’s earnings are about $400 million annually.
Burisma is not quite 1/4 the size of the smallest company on this list. The group of smallest companies pays between $285-$330,000 per year for a non-employee director. Hunter Biden was paid $600,000 (at least) for being a board member of a company whose language he did not speak, whose home country he’d never lived in, and which was in an industry about which Hunter Biden was pig-ignorant.


See chart here.
https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2019/10/03/absolutely-nothing-suspicious-criminal-like-hunter-bidens-ukrainian-directors-salary/

Bob Boyd said...

I apologize for confusing Vicki Hearne as the writer of the WAPO article.

Michael K said...

Slightly OT but A Romney REpublican could never win.

As Donald Trump strides toward his fourth year in the White House, his enemies have yet to answer the most basic questions of 2016. Why is Trump president? Why not a nice Republican like Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush?

Two maps tell the tale. The first is the obvious one, the map of states whose electoral votes Trump won, a map that includes states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that no other Republican presidential aspirant had won since the 1980s. But the second map is even more important — it shows not why Trump won but why the Republican party was doomed to lose without Trump and Trumpism. It’s the map of George W. Bush’s re-election victory in 2004, the narrowest re-election, in terms of presidential votes, in recent US history. Bush prevailed by just 16 electoral votes, which meant that had either Florida or Ohio gone to John Kerry, the Democrats would have won. And Bush won Virginia, a state with 13 electoral votes that has since moved firmly into the ‘blue’ column.


This is why the hysteria on the left. They have to kill this messenger from the people lest the message get out.

Gk1 said...

Liberals are spitting nails having to even acknowledge for a nanosecond that its shady and at the very least, terrible optics to have Hunter Biden receive millions of dollars from foreign governments while his dad was overseeing business with them. At a minimum, there is no way around the fact this creates a PERCEPTION of CORRUPTION. Even liberal cheerleader Bill Maher gets it. Articles like this are just a tap dance around the obvious. Giuliani is getting traction because the whole thing stinks, not because people are gullible. We really are believing our lying eyes, get over it.

Marc in Eugene said...

One of the protagonists of the UK television series Peep Show refers to the character Super Hans as 'clever Hans' on at least one occasion: may or may not have been an intentional allusion to the horse Clever Hans but certainly I understood it to be one.

Wince said...

That had to be the most bizarre ten paragraph white-wash column I've ever read.

Let's take in by paragraph, shall we.

1.) The Lede: Giuliani bad because... "phony horse".

2.) "I claim no intimate knowledge of this story beyond the soul-baring that Hunter performed with reporter..."

3.) Hunter's mother died and Joe Biden was an absent father.

4.) That led to Hunter leading a privileged but desolate existence.

I'll just quote the rest...

5.) "But there was always someone in Joe Biden’s life to help him out with Hunter."

6.) "Soon enough, directionless Hunter has a six-figure job at a bank run by Biden supporters. When Hunter grows bored, there’s another lucrative job under the tutelage of a former Biden staffer. When Hunter wants a house he can’t afford, he receives a loan for 110 percent of the purchase price. And when he goes bust, another friendly banker mops up the damage."

7.) "Then his brother Beau contracts fatal brain cancer, and the last wobbly wheels come off Hunter Biden’s fragile self. At this point, the New Yorker piece becomes a gonzo nightmare — much of it narrated by Hunter himself — of hallucinations, a car abandoned in the desert, maxed-out credit cards, a crack pipe, a strip club and a brandished gun."

8.) "If, as the magazine headline put it, Hunter Biden now jeopardizes his father’s campaign, the article makes clear Joe Biden feels a share of the blame. Yet, by the time the senator was vice president, the folks still willing to help Hunter were of a sketchier variety. There was a Chinese businessman who, Hunter said, left him a large diamond as a nice-to-meet-you gift. And a Ukrainian oligarch who hired Hunter at a princely sum to do nothing much. (Neither the firm nor Hunter Biden identified any specific contribution he made). Joe Biden’s response, according to his son, was: “I hope you know what you are doing.”

9.) "Hope! What family of an addict hasn’t fallen back to that last trench? Denial, they say, is not just a river in Egypt."

10.) "In sum, the story of the Bidens, father and son, is more pathetic than nefarious. Yet it might do damage anyway. Less privileged Americans can’t be faulted if they wonder why their addicted loved ones are on the streets or in the morgue while the vice president’s son is blessed with diamonds and sinecures. Multitudes locked up for years under Joe Biden’s crime bill might ask why the author’s son traveled the world scot-free. And sober working people making $50,000 a year may be skeptical of a system in which a vice president’s addicted son reportedly collected that sum every month."

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Chuck Todd is phony as a _______.

Mark Nielsen said...

I've no doubt the horse *could* do arithmetic. Why not? But when they tried to move past that, it didn't work. The horse fell over dead during the lesson on graphing parabolas -- turns out the old saying is true: don't put Descarte before the horse.

Sammy Finkelman said...

I think the Washington Post is telling only half truths but knows better.

The corrected one error about Joe Biden and Ukraine but I think there;s a much more serious problem there.

Nancy Pelosi and Adam Walsh want him to be the nominee and there's a land mine Biden has to avoid stepping on. Biden has to be very careful to avoid getting some questions about what he said in aJanuary 23, 2018 speech about his crucial role in firing a prosecutor.

Biden's entire speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on January 23, 2018 complete with a transcript is here:

https://www.cfr.org/event/foreign-affairs-issue-launch-former-vice-president-joe-biden

In it he said:

....I'm desperately concerned about the backsliding on the part of Kiev in terms of corruption. They made-I mean, I'll give you one concrete example. I was-not I, but it just happened to be that was the assignment I got. I got all the good ones. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember going over, convincing our team, our leaders to-convincing that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn't. So they said they had-they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I'm not going to-or, we're not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You're not the president. The president said-I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting the billion dollars. I said, you're not getting the billion. I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time

Biden has to avoid answering any questions about that, Just watch. They'll do everything to prevent that.

Sammy Finkelman said...

There's a twist worthy of Twin Peaks there, you see:

There's no other source other than that speech of Biden's for this tale of what is either a cancelled press conference or a cancelled announcement at a press conference!

One thing that makes this story unlikely is that even after the prosecutor was fired the loan guarantees were not released so that couldn't have been the only thing holding it up.

My understanding of the chronology is:

1. November 2015: Obama makes further loan guarantees to Ukraine conditional on reforms that are supposed to eliminate corruption.

2. December 2015: Biden's last trip to Kiev during this approximte time span.

3. March, 2016: Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin is replaced.

4) Beginning of June 2016: The Ukrainian Parliament passes a package of anti-corruption legislation and the next day the $1 billion loan guarantee is made available, with the United States Ambassador to Ukraine formally signing them in Kyiv.

The Washington Post had a partial correction of some of what has been assumed (and also the key quotes)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/02/correcting-media-error-bidens-ukraine-showdown-was-december/

But that doesn't consider the possibility that Biden made the whole story up about a cancelled announcement.

The Washington Post does link to another earlier different version from 2016 of Biden's story that doesn't include the press conference. But even that may not be true, at least the way he tells it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/biden-doctrine/496841/

In 1987, Biden had to end his campaign, not exxactly because of plagiarism, but because what he said about his biograohy wasn't true.

He may still be doing it

Biden maybe hasn't changed a bit in over 30 years.

Ann Althouse said...

"That turned up in Vicki Hearne's _Adam's Task_ as the preface I think."

I have that book in my Kindle and can search. Answer: Yes.

rcocean said...

That a horse could read body language like that is really amazing. I don't think i could do it. And did anyone *really* think the horse could do arithmetic or understand German?

And that cartoon is hilarious. 33 years ago, back when the New Yorker Cartoons were still somewhat funny. BTW, there's nothing wrong with trying to look younger. The problem is when you try - and fail. Then you just look pathetic. So, old people watch out. I'm looking at you - Nancy Pelosi.

rcocean said...

One trick phony. I like that.

Ann Althouse said...

"Doesn't The New Yorker totally blow the explanation of Clever Hans ? Clever Hans isn't a fallacy but a phenomenon or effect."

Here's the passage. You tell me how Hearne blows it. Seems to me she's discussing what others have termed the "Clever Hans fallacy" and is accurate about what the horse was doing that people were misunderstanding:

"And there has now come to be a technical term in academic studies of animal psychology, the "Clever Hans fallacy." This is the fallacy of supposing that an animal "really" understands words or symbols when what the animal is doing is "merely" reading body language. In the literature, this notion is used to discredit virtually anyone who disagrees with the writer in question as either a fraud and a charlatan or else as just plain credulous and stupid. There is an unhealthy air of triumph in the rhythms of the prose of the people who do this discrediting, and I have found myself moved to wonder why, if the trainers and thinkers who believe that Hans illustrates something more important are so discountable, they must be so often attacked."

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

Biden phony as a horse

Trump a stable genius.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Why do whistleblowers keep popping up, claiming to have knowledge about the Ukraine call, when the White House claims to have released the transcript of the call?

Something about putting the cart before the horse.

This impeachment business is driving up my phone use, threatening to hit my horse skin wallet.

rcocean said...

Mules are smarter than horses. You can ride a horse into combat and it will die with you. A mule will turn around and run safety no matter what. We call them "Stubborn" when they're simply smart.

Sebastian said...

"The real story of Joe Biden and his troubled son Hunter is full of pain and littered with questions and deeply relevant to our populist moment."

"full of pain": and full of dollars, which is the point of Giuliani's hucksterism. Pray tell, prog "journalists," what did the Ukrainians and Chinese expect to get in return for their investment in Hunter B., the inexperienced drug addict? And why did they think they could make good on their investment? Might there have been precedent for such profitable investments?

Yes, the issue is "deeply relevant to our populist moment," considering that we deplorables deplore the corruption of our prog and deep-state overlords, who presume to lecture us about our deplorability but cash in on their power and try to stage coups.

320Busdriver said...

Phony as a horse.....completely describes Mr Brennan’s vomitus all over Chuck Todd

CT: How would the CIA assess the stability of the American government right now?

JB: We would look at it as a very corrupt government that is under the sway of this powerful individual who has been able to just corrupt the institutions and the laws of that country.

CT: What would you say about the stability of the democracy?

JB: I would say that it is no longer a democracy if an autocrat has it in his hands. The democratic principles that the country was founded on are eroding right now.

CT: So The CIA would not assess the USA as a stable democracy?

JB: There’s a real question about the stability.

JB: I struggle with what my public posture should be. What I don’t want to do is put the CIA in a difficult position.(Think about that phony horse for just a millisecond)

CT: we have two sets of realities here. There is a 40% of the country that is only getting fed one reality, arguably 60% are getting, what I would argue, is reality. This is a huge problem. Are we capable of governing ourselves with a disinformation campaign that is happening like this.(@nother conversation with flyover man might be required

That’s not to speak of WI Sen Ron Johnson who was the opening guest and battled mightily with Chuck.....this was must see TV

rhhardin said...

Check out the first essay on Washoe, and then the chapter How to Say Fetch! since you've got the book.

Her next books were in order _Bandit_ and _Animal Happiness_.

About her novel The White German Shepherd, the less said the better.

She's an essayest, and has a couple of books of poetry. Nervous Horses and In the Absence of Horses, as I recall. A couple good poems in each.

rhhardin said...

Hearne shows how a woman's thinking habits can usefully correct stuff written by men.

You'll notice that, like Derrida, she likes the systems she's analyzing, at the same time as she revises them.

Disagreements that add dimensions rather than removing them.

rhhardin said...

Hearne is as critical as Althouse of men's thinking but less hot-button on penetration.

"For example, I was once involved in a panel discussion at which the idea was voiced and elaborated that riding horses was a good way for girls to prepare for marriage because it gave them practice controlling something powerful and dangerous between their legs. I thought, and at enormous risk of self- exposure said, that controlling something powerful and dangerous between my legs didn't characterize either marriage or horsemanship as I had experienced them. It is true that some activities that fall under the heading "sex" can be dangerous, but before AIDS it was the thing the man sometimes had in his hand, and not the thing between his legs, that was worrisome. And there are some differences between husbands and horses that I thought worthy of consideration, including the fact that in the case of husbands direct mutual genital contact is to the point, whereas it interferes with horsemanship. I don't doubt that it is possible, only that it is horsemanship."

Bandit p.205

She generally adds back context that women start from but that men abstract away, as her style. Not disparaging abstracting and men's tendencies but reminding them that maybe this that you left out maybe is important too. Sense of humor about sexual difference.

rehajm said...

Thank you. I think I got it...

rhhardin said...

In Animal Happiness, Hearne was quoting Harold Bloom on Job and started her correction of him by saying that it appears that Bloom is afraid of horses. Then went into it.

Add a detail and then follow the consequences.

rhhardin said...

In Animal Happiness refutes attribution of misogyny to Thurber to show he's the feminist.

tim in vermont said...

You know that rank and file blue collar Democrats all understand that the high and mighty are going to dip their beaks in the river of money that normals scarcely suspect exists! It’s Joe’s appeal! People love Joe and wouldn’t deny him all of that glorious lucre any more than a woman would deny him a sniff of her hair, or the hair of her girl child, or even the pleasure he takes in walking around naked in front of her. She likes it even if she does file complaints. She has to say no like that for appearances! Everybody loves Joe!

But Joe isn’t a narcissist. No sirree Bob!

gilbar said...

Isn't the Phrase you're all looking for, correctly worded as: Phony Pony?

tim in vermont said...

They are getting dispirited. They set the phasers to disintigrate, which is past 11, and it isn’t working. I was watching Byron York today and he made the point that if it was just about looking into the 2016 election, no Republican cares about it. Not that many care if he was using turnabout against Hillary.

I was talking to a guy today, remember I am in Vermont right now, who drives a little car with two big Warren stickers on it, and he said that the news now is like the news in the book 1984, when you hear something, you just assume it isn’t true. And this guy hates Trump with a passion, but for the issues, he said, not this clown show.

We don’t even see the trolls coming it to rub in their “huge victory.” I am thinking they might be spammng the comments as some kind of DOS to get the blog to shut up, but I am just guessing there, but no trolls even coming to rub it in, or even, like some of them, to rub one out.

rhhardin said...

another correction added:

Immanuel Kant proposed a distinction between human beings and animals at the opening of a longish essay on education. He said that baby animals, unlike baby humans, don't cry, because if they did, some wolf or wild animal would get them. But they do cry, of course, and quite often a wolf or even a wild animal does get them, and I do not bring this up to be disrespectful of the mighty dead, but to suggest that most of the time when a philosopher starts a discussion by distinguishing between people and animals, it is prudent to skip that part.

A philosopher's mistakes about animals are like anyone's mistakes about animals, of no real significance unless something follows from them, but when something does follow from them it is wise to watch carefully, because mistakes with things following from them can be tricky guides.

- Vivki Hearne _Animal Happiness_ "Wittgenstein's Lion" p.167

Michael K said...

Moderation taking a break again.

tim in vermont said...

"this notion is used to discredit virtually anyone who disagrees with the writer in question as either a fraud and a charlatan or else as just plain credulous and stupid.”

As Insty would say -- Heh

Fritz said...

Clever Hans went to public school.

Jupiter said...

How about "As phony as the services Hunter Biden supposedly provides to the people paying him in order to bribe hie father"? Does that work?

Jupiter said...

"This is the fallacy of supposing that an animal "really" understands words or symbols when what the animal is doing is "merely" reading body language."

If one is going to do biology, it is necessary to assure oneself that there is an unbridgeable gap between humans, who have moral claims upon other humnas, and animals, which do not. Those who refuse to respect this conceit are said to be "anthropomorphizing".

tim in vermont said...

If it’s all so innocent, Joe, why do you feel you have to lie?

tim in vermont said...

Watching the football game and the ad for Sixty Minutes has a liberal saying that “It’s about time” Trump was impeached for stuff that only became known last week.

It’s seereeous though, veerrrrry seeeeerious.

Louie Looper said...

“Phony as a horse” made me think it might refer to a pantomime horse - a horse costume operated by two actors; one playing the head and front legs and the other playing the back end. They are pretty phony.

narciso said...

it carries over into the other thread:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/mr_trump_goes_to_washington.html

Jupiter said...

"Seems to me she's discussing what others have termed the "Clever Hans fallacy" and is accurate about what the horse was doing that people were misunderstanding..."

Well, no. The claim was that Hans could do integer arithmetic, whereas in fact he merely stopped tapping his hoof when his trainer wanted him to do so. It is possible to suppose that animals have complex inner lives, and experience emotions, and even that they sometimes understand words or symbols, without supposing that they can perform integer arithmetic. It may be that "the literature" uses the term in a way that belies its origin.

Maillard Reactionary said...

Some have expressed concerns that a "Clever Hans" phenomenon may sometimes occur during traffic stops when police officers bring a K-9 around to sniff the vehicle for drugs.

I can't say, since the papers only report the cases where, sure enough, drugs were present.

I guess "Sorry sir, have a nice day" isn't considered newsworthy.

I imagine (hope) that the training of these dogs takes this possibility into account, but knowing how dogs work--body language cues notwithstanding--they want to please their masters. Are they less fallible than us?

Ann Althouse said...

“Well, no...”

You say no, but you identify nothing that Hearne got wrong.

Hagar said...

I don't think Joe Biden ever could distinguish between fantasy and reality.
It may break his little heart if he ever is made to face himself.

tim in vermont said...

Crows can perform integer arithmetic, or at least a small “murder” of them who ended up getting murdered when the number of guys with shotguns they had to keep track of reached five and exceeded their abilities, in a story about crows in a silo that I heard once. I felt bad that they all ended up being killed after showing themselves to be so smart. Maybe that was the real point of the story. Maybe it was made up to make the listener feel that way. IDK. I don’t even remember who told me the story.

tim in vermont said...

Nobody in the media wants to touch the billion plus dollars China gave to the coke head to manage after a visit there as a passenger on Air Force 2. That’s why I am not worried, if the story was really bad for Trump, they wouldn’t keep leaving stuff out that is relevant to the people they are trying to convince.

rhhardin said...

Horses are very sensitive to touch. You can guide one with the lightest pressure. Horse code.

See the film En Équilibre (2015), English subtitles, for a beautiful plot and rendition. Albert Dupontel and Cécile de France. Available with English title In Harmony.

Two people help each other out.

rehajm said...

The cartoon is there for reference to Ann’s comment AND for the rest of the passage. If you only read the first frame it doesn’t make sense...

Mark said...

Why do whistleblowers keep popping up

The DS "whistleblowers" -- and I wish that brain-dead "conservative" commentators* would STOP using that word since it gives legitimacy to what is clearly illegitimate -- are whistleblowers in the same way that the antifa-type protestors blow whistles when they come to infest the streets here in D.C.




*Commentators is not a word. One does not commentate. He comments or gives commentary, but commentating is another made-up nonsensical word.

Michael McNeil said...

Commentators is not a word. One does not commentate. He comments or gives commentary, but commentating is another made-up nonsensical word.

Au contraire:

dictionary.com:
commentator
—noun

1. a person who discusses news, sports events, weather, or the like, as on television or radio.
2. a person who makes commentaries.
Origin: 1350–1400; Middle English < Late Latin commentātor interpreter, equivalent to commentā(rī ) to interpret (Latin: to think about, prepare, discuss, write, perhaps frequentative of comminīscī to devise; see comment) + Latin -tor

[/unQuote]

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

"Why do whistleblowers keep popping up?"

WhistleLeakers?

why do recounts and trunkfuls of votes show up after a Dem failure?

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

And isn't it refreshing to read a blog by someone who's 68 years old and talks like she's 68 years old?

Felching jokes! Oh, you wild 'n crazy oldsters! Cut it out!!

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

You can lead a horse to culture, but you can’t make it math.

Bruce Hayden said...

“The DS "whistleblowers" -- and I wish that brain-dead "conservative" commentators* would STOP using that word since it gives legitimacy to what is clearly illegitimate -- are whistleblowers in the same way that the antifa-type protestors blow whistles when they come to infest the streets here in D.C”

I continue to use "whistleblowers" in quotes for that reason - that they aren’t really whistleblowers, but rather political operatives. The first had no personal knowledge of anything, just maybe rumors and second hand information of something they shouldn’t legally have known about. Since when is rumor mongering and wishful thinking whistleblowing? Esp after apparently meeting with HSCI Chair Pencil Neck Schiff and his staff to write their complaint, and then lying to the IC IG about it. Schiff both running the “investigation” and being a critical fact witness to those claims is a big part of why the minority has been cut out of the investigation, since the first thing that any Republican would ask the “whistleblower” is how much aid did Schiff and his staff give them when writing up their complaint? That would give away that the entire tempest about the “whistleblowing” was completely contrived by Schiff. The solution to confronting those embarrassing questions is to deprive the Republicans (and Trump) of any rights to subpoena witnesses or question the witnesses that the Democrats have subpoenaed.

Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...

did Graham used the pronoun "her" re: whistleleaker ?