"Some historians who follow the presidency say Biden has always shown flashes of anger when he feels underestimated."

"While they are far more fleeting than Trump’s brandishing of grievances, they have at times been unmistakable. 'There has always been this issue of resentment with Biden. He resented [former president Barack] Obama and crew for supplanting him in 2008 and for telling him not to run in [2016], and he has many other resentments,' said Tevi Troy, a presidential historian who recently published a book on the relationship between presidents and CEOs. 'But can you imagine how resentful he is of the shifting narratives and the way he’s been pushed aside and manipulated and not treated fairly. So yeah, I can see him being resentful.'"

From "Biden touts his legacy, but frustration seeps through/The president is observing the traditions of a peaceful transfer of power, but his regrets and misgivings are evident" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Lots to talk about there, but I want to focus on "brandishing" — Trump’s brandishing of grievances. This is an article about Biden, his resentfulness, but Trump must be inserted, and he must be worse. Biden has  fleeting flashes of well-founded anger, but Trump has grievances, and he brandishes them. So Biden briefly displays resentment but Trump waves his resentment around like a weapon. 

Just yesterday, I was talking about the journalistic deployment of the word "brandish." Discussing a NYT article — "In Display of Fealty, Tech Industry Curries Favor With Trump/It was a week of frenzied activity as Silicon Valley billionaires and their companies brandished checks and compliments for President-elect Trump"  — I wrote:

Goodbye to Norman Lear.

"Norman Lear, Whose Comedies Changed the Face of TV, Is Dead at 101/As the producer of 'All in the Family' and many other shows, Mr. Lear showed that it was possible to be topical, funny and immensely popular" (NYT).

 
“You looked around television in those years,” Mr. Lear said in a 2012 New York Times interview, referring to the middle and late 1960s, “and the biggest problem any family faced was ‘Mother dented the car, and how do you keep Dad from finding out’; ‘the boss is coming to dinner, and the roast’s ruined.’ The message that was sending out was that we didn’t have any problems.”

ADDED: I've written about Norman Lear on this blog a few times:

July 27, 2022: I blogged Norman Lear's NYT piece — "On My 100th Birthday, Reflections on Archie Bunker and Donald Trump" — and said: "Lear says Archie, if he were around today, would probably watch Fox News and vote for Trump. Probably?! He also imagines that Archie would have disapproved of the January 6th incursion on the Capitol. But why? Seems to me he'd approve, but Lear doesn't want him to, so okay. "

Bristol Palin would like to school Erick Erickson...

... for his faux outrage at Trump's supposed sexism.

Faux, because he employed sexism against Sarah Palin and because he cheerled Trump's attack on Rosie.

"Violence against women is never okay… Even if that violence occurs against conservative women."

"Imagine for a second the outrage that would happen if Chelsea Clinton had gotten pushed by some guy. Had she tried to defend herself, the liberal media would’ve held her up as some feminist hero."

Writes Bristol Palin in "The Truth about the 'Palin Brawl' – The Media Reveals Its Bias Against Conservative Women Once Again."

CNN's Carol Costello has now apologized for inviting viewers to "sit back and enjoy" the recording of Bristol describing what was a violent attack on her. And Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski also apologized for presenting the story in a “humorous tone.”

“The more we learned about what happened its clearer that it’s not that funny,” Brzezinski said. “We played into stereotypes from maybe our own outlook, quite frankly. So it’s definitely more of a story than that.”

Scarborough said everyone is guilty for presuming the Palins are to be used as a “punch line.” “There is the very real possibility that something terrible happened to them,” Scarborough said. “… I think we all shot first and asked questions later and a lot of people are guilty of that.”

And by "everyone" he means everyone he knows. 

ADDED: Josh Marshall stands his ground:

So now, liberals, the media, Democrats, apparently anyone who thinks Palin is a buffoon of almost world historic proportions (which gets you to something like 80% of the country) are all abominable hypocrites for 'laughing' at what is now fairly preposterously portrayed as a violent assault against a woman. If you listen to the police interviews, which occurred just as the brawl had barely ended, all the witnesses beside Bristol said she attacked the homeowner. Indeed, even Bristol's younger sister Willow backed up the these other witnesses' account. She just said Bristol missed with her punches.

I think it kind of goes without saying that if news emerged that Bristol had been assaulted by a boyfriend or spouse or really anyone else, no one would be laughing. Indeed, I'm not sure anyone now is laughing so much as standing back agape and marveling. But advocates who are trying to alter public perceptions about and stiffen penalties against violence against women are, I do not think, saying that female bodies are inviolable in every case if you barge into someone's party and start swinging punches at them.

"Does she think she’s Marilyn Monroe?"

Somebody said to somebody else about Bristol Palin that night in Anchorage when the police came.

Thompson, who is 56 years old... noticed two girls wearing sunglasses walking with an unusual amount of confidence around the yard. He only noticed them because of the sunglasses. That was odd, because it was at night.

This is just a test of your mind. Perhaps you thought:

The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.

Or:



Whatever... you are old. Marilyn Monroe is beyond old. The Palins-are-trash meme is old.

What hope is there? For the future... I mean.

"Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry."

The Onion actually apologizes.

There actually is a line that even humor can't cross, and this is evidence of where that line is:

 
We get how this is a joke, but it's aimed at a particular child. Quvenzhané Wallis is the 9-year-old who had a Best Actress nomination for "Beasts of the Southern Wild." Wallis will also star in the new film version of "Annie," taking the part that Willow Smith declined on the ground that she preferring just being a kid.

Speaking of sex jokes aimed at young girls — and speaking of girls named Willow — this reminds me of the way David Letterman had to apologize for making a joke about Willow Palin. (To his credit, Letterman was under the impression that he was making a joke about Bristol Palin who was 18 at the time.)

"While it’s great to listen to your kids’ ideas, there’s also a time when dads simply need to be dads."

"In this case, it would’ve been helpful for him to explain to Malia and Sasha that while her friends parents are no doubt lovely people, that’s not a reason to change thousands of years of thinking about marriage. Or that — as great as her friends may be — we know that in general kids do better growing up in a mother/father home. Ideally, fathers help shape their kids’ worldview."

Said Bristol Palin.

Bristol Palin's ex-paramour Levi Johnston is having a second child, by a girlfriend named Sunny, and he's naming the baby girl after a gun.

A gun and a light wind. The little girl will go forth into life with the name Breeze Beretta, and good luck to the girl who might blow us all away — gently.

The mother's name is Sunny. Sunny Oglesby. So Sunny and Breeze. It makes sense. The "Breeze" is for Sunny, and the gun, one imagines, is for Levi, who, it seems, can't keep his gun in his Levis.

[Oglesby] talked about the accidental nature of the pregnancy.

"We were out at the cabin for like, four days, and forgot the birth control," she said.

A cabin! Man, Bristol got impregnated in a tent. Sunny got a cabin. It's so unfair!

Johnston told Inside Edition that he plans on doing things differently with Oglesby than he did with Bristol Palin, the mother of their son, Tripp.

Well, he's starting out right. Cabin instead of tent.

"I'm actually in love...not doing it just because we had a kid together," he said.

Enough of this doing-something-for-the-child business. Moving on to love. Actual love.

Bristol Palin is waiting for Obama's phone call.

Given that he called Sandra Fluke, she says she's "a little surprised my phone hasn’t rung":

Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family.  He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.”...

What if you did something radical and wildly unpopular with your base and took a stand against the denigration of all women… even if they’re just single moms? Even if they’re Republicans?

Best move for Obama? Call her!

"Was Random House aware that [Joe McGinniss] was making a desperate overtime bid to save face?"

"And if so, why did it allow him to come forth with most of those tawdry accusations without proof or proper sourcing?"

McGinniss's sleaziness has been well understood. Let's focus on Random House, the venerable publishing house.

In the email [at the link], McGinniss reveals that his manuscript, then under legal review at Crown/Random House, could not prove its most headline-grabbing allegations. And yet, many of these “salacious stories” that lacked “proof” (in McGinniss’s own words) ended up in the book, and on televisions everywhere during the author’s current media tour … without proper sourcing, and without any apparent new evidence to support them.

It's hard for a public figure to sue for defamation in the United States, but this email may be the proof of reckless disregard for the truth that Sarah/Todd/Bristol Palin would need.

That doesn't mean they should sue. It would boost the profile of McGinniss and his book and shine a spotlight on his various allegations.

"I've never understood the assumption that if a woman was drunk and doesn't remember giving consent that it must be rape."

Says a commenter named Hamp at the blog JoeMyGod, at a post about Bristol Palin (and what she wrote in her memoir about losing her virginity):

It takes two to tango as it takes two to have sex. And if they're both drunk, if they both made the decision to drink to the point of blackout, then why is only the man at fault? Unless the woman was drugged or forced to drink then both parties are equally responsible. And how does one force another person to drink wine coolers to the point of no return? Did he tie her down and force the drinks down her throat? I doubt it. She's just another person refusing to take responsibility for her own actions. She wasn't raped she just got drunk and made what she now thinks was a bad decision.

JoeMyGod is a prominent blog that has won awards in the politics/LGBT category. I noticed this post because I was getting blog traffic from it after it linked to my post "Did Levi Johnston rape Bristol Palin?" I'm not sure the people over there discussing Bristol's book realize that she did not apply the word "rape" to what happened to her. I did. I looked at her facts, and I introduced the legal concept. Bristol (and her family) did not bring in the police. It seems to me that she took responsibility for her own actions and expressed her sadness over what happened. She did not call it rape. She may have described the facts with the intent that the reader would think what I thought. I only read a short excerpt from her book, so I don't know what her overall intent is. Perhaps she's trying to say: Girls, don't drink yourself into a stupor when you're out in a tent with a boy.

There are comments in that thread like "I just...well....I....Skankity-skank-skank" and "The apple didn't fall far from THAT twisted tree"/".... and the semen doesn't fall far from the oft offered ova." But after Hamp's disquisition on on the mutuality of sexual intercourse, FreudianNips says:

That's just lovely Hamp. Just lovely. I take it you are not a woman? I am, and while I did not consider it rape since I was in a relationship... I can tell you there are not much worse feelings than waking up knowing you've been pounded and not remembering it....

I think most of us are all familiar with the mechanics of both male and female genitalia. Is it a stretch to say that it is maybe more of the man's fault when "blackout sex" occurs, in certain situations (specifically this one if its true)? I mean, he's the one who has to get hard and stick it in her. And let's be real, all a woman ever really has to do is lie there, conscious or not, for sex or rape (BIG DIFFERENCE BTW) to occur....

I don't want to judge anybody or make assumptions, but in my opinion, a lot of men here seem to forget, or perhaps have never realized, the way men can control, manipulate, intimidate and yes, coerce women into doing things they do not want to do or wouldn't normally do. Maybe its because most of you are gay and mostly interact with each other, and maybe its because none of you are scumbags like that, but it is real. It may not be tangible or empircally provable, but many, many women know this. I mean, why do women stay in abusive marriages? ...

It doesn't have to be obvious, or threatening, or even dangerous, but men do this to women, whether they are aware of it or not. Do you know how prevalent, how pandemic, how swept under the rug abuse is, especially sexual abuse? Its fucking everywhere. And I am sick of these circular, apologetic, excuse filled articles and comments, when every damn day another high profile man is accused of, and USUALLY guilty of, crimes involving his fucking dick and putting it where it shouldn't be. And every damn time it happens, women are knocked 10 steps backward and have to try harder, prove harder and defend themselves harder just to stay on track of having a chance one day of being taken seriously. 

God damn I hate the Palins and the energy they have put into this world. 

After that, guess where the conversation goes? To banter about the mechanics of sexual intercourse given the length of Levi's penis and the girth of Bristol's torso.

Did Levi Johnston rape Bristol Palin?

The NY Post reports:

Bristol Palin was so drunk on wine coolers the night she first slept with boyfriend Levi Johnston that she couldn’t recall losing her virginity at the tender age of 15 — and he was nowhere to be found the hazy morning after to refresh her memory.

"Levi wasn’t even there to help me process — or even confirm my greatly feared suspicions," she writes in a new revenge tome disguised as a memoir. "Instead of waking up in his arms, I awakened in a cold tent alone."

I'm reading that as an accusation of rape. She was too drunk to consent or perhaps even passed out?

(The age of consent in Alaska, by the way, is 16, but I am not referring simply to statutory rape.)

Sarah Palin gets in Kathy Griffin's 50-year-old face.

I'm sure Palin fans are delighted at the feisty smackdown. But there's no way that Kathy Griffin doesn't love it. So... everybody wins. I mean, these 2 women could be in collusion, the mutual benefits are so great.

As for the leave-my-kids-alone routine: Bristol Palin is 21 years old. Not only is she an adult, she's an adult who chose to go on a big network TV show, wear sexy costumes, and dance all over the stage week after week in an effort to get millions of people to call in votes for her so she could win a big prize. That's completely inviting mockery.

As for Willow Palin — she's only 16, but she was prominently featured on "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Her teen-girl petulance was served up — by her mother — for our amusement. You can't do that and also claim a special insulation for the children. I mean you can, if you want to play to your fans who love that Mama Grizzly stuff.

Now, Sarah Palin was confronted by the question about Griffin, so she didn't go out of her way to bash the has-been 50-year-old  bully comedienne. What else could she have said? She didn't have to be so confrontational. She might have said comedy is comedy, and people love to have their fun or something bland like that. But then I wouldn't be writing about her, and you wouldn't be talking about her, and Kathy Griffin wouldn't be furiously working the statement into a new Palin-bashing....

"Bristol Palin was fixing a loose clip or an errant strand of hair for her mother...."

Oh! The injustice! Will the persecution of Sarah Palin never cease!

ADDED: "Over the past month, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has quietly altered her case for the presidency in a savvy shift of rhetoric."

Kathy Griffin joked that Bristol Palin is fat.

"She's the only contestant in the history of ['Dancing With The Stars'] to actually gain weight... She's like the white 'Precious.'"

Griffin, who just turned 50, was showing off her super-thin body in a bikini on stage. But check the rear view...



... always check the rear view, ladies.

Bristol Palin gets sarcastic on Facebook about Keith Olbermann.

After he called her "the worst person in the world."

"Now I am scared I am going to wake up with a decapitated moose head in my bed..."

Says Margaret Cho, possible evincing the guilt she really ought to feel.

What Sarah Palin is doing to her children.

The ratings are up for "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Oh, that's so sad for the people who exulted last week when the ratings were down. I skipped last week myself, but I watched this week's show. It was pretty cool seeing the Palins hauling in fish nets, slicing salmon into strips, tying the strips with string, and hanging them up in a smokehouse, with Todd's Eskimo grandmother demonstrating how to set up the fire to get the smoke just right.

I was touched by Sarah's interaction with Trig and with another boy with Down Syndrome (a member of her extended family). It made me cry and it made me think about this post by Andrew Sullivan criticizing Sarah Palin for combining motherhood and a career in national politics:

Anyone one who genuinely cared about the privacy of her kids would have either said no [to the vice presidential nomination] or been extremely careful to release the information as soberly as possible....

[S]he parades a special needs infant in front of the press, dangles him half-naked in front of book tour crowds, uses him constantly as a rhetorical campaign prop, and cites him at almost every speech to appeal to pro-life voters....

What Palin has done with her young children is unprecedented. Think of how Obama strictly protects his daughters, and how George W. Bush did the same. 

Think of how the press — including you — regards those daughters as off-limits but goes after Palin's daughters.

What Palin has done is use her children, having failed to actually rear them. She is still doing it on her reality show. That she has gone so far as to use and thereby abuse a child with Down Syndrome whose interests are clearly in seclusion, careful nurturing and care, and constant parental attention, tells you a huge amount. 

Seclusion? Is that right, tucking those kids away from the rest of the society? Why not be out and proud?

Bristol Palin: "Going out there and winning ... would be like a big middle finger to all the people out there that hate my mom and hate me."

Awaiting the results on "Dancing with the Stars."

UPDATE: And the winner is...

Sally Quinn — who says "Dancing is my religion" — denounces Bristol Palin's success on "Dancing with the Stars" as "unholy."

And this strangely sanctimonious journalist — she's writing in the always awful "On Faith" section of The Washington Post — condemns Palin voters for "cheating" 7 paragraphs after she confesses to doing something that is at least as much cheating as what the Palin fans are said to be doing.

My husband and I are "DWTS" fanatics.  We plan our social life around it, often regretting invitations that fall on the night of the show....

Ridiculous!

Not only that, but I vote.  Under the show's rules, you're allowed to vote five times on one line. I have six lines at home and my cell, so I vote as many times as I can for my favorite. 

So this lady, this longtime Washington powerbroker, has 6 phone lines, and she maxes each line out, each week, voting 30 times. But that's the show's rules. They can't tell how many individuals vote are voting. They can only see phone numbers. So if your family of 5 watches the show and you — you economic losers — only have one phone, you can make 5 calls. Sally Quinn happens to have 6 phone lines, so she gets 30 votes — under the rules.

This season, I'm voting for Jennifer Grey all the way. She is by far the best dancer on the show.

She's voting correctly. For the best dancer. You stupid people are voting for Bristol Palin. Lord knows why.

.... Brandy - a fabulous dancer -- was eliminated last week. She was definitely my runner up. (Jennifer has to win. She's head and shoulders above everyone else.) We were having a dinner party and I made my guests leave the table to watch the final half of DWTS. Norman Lear was with us. Norman is not a DWTS follower but got caught up in the moment too. As the music started and I waited breathlessly to see Bristol be told she was out. I was squeezing Norman's hand when Brandy, not Bristol, was sent home. I couldn't believe it. Neither could the judges and studio audience. Derek  and Jennifer's mouths dropped open. Boos could be heard.

Oh, the social life I'm missing! Norman Lear! Ah! And I'm stranded out here in the heartland where I can only imagine the sparkling, witty conversation. Perhaps: "The American voters are pretty damned stupid"... that sort of thing.

It seemed Bristol and her partner were just as surprised. Brandy cried. I have to confess I teared up. It just didn't seem right.

Bloggers, columnists and TV commentators jumped on the results.  There must be cheating going on, they said.  It was all a tea party plot. That could be the only explanation for this appalling miscarriage of justice.

Sarah Palin's detractors point to the Christian right as the culprits here. The say groups organized voting schemes to game the system and were telling each other how to cheat when voting at ABC.com.

Commenters on the conservative blog Hillbuzz.org said they had figured out how to enter more votes than the rules allow by creating fake e-mail addresses. One person posting on Hillbuzz said "Lord have mercy, I voted for three hours online! I got 300 in."

What is a "fake e-mail address"? The rules say you are allowed 5 votes from each email address, just as you are allowed 5 votes from each phone number. Some people have multiple phone numbers and some have multiple email addresses. What's the difference? All I can think of is that you have to spend money to have multiple phone numbers, and you can get multiple email accounts free. It feels so right for rich folk to get more. I love when liberals slip up like that.

I never remember all Ten Commandments off the top of my head, but there should be one that says, "Thou shalt not cheat while voting on 'Dancing with the Stars.'" Polls have shown that the majority of tea party members are conservative Christians. Are these Christians who are voting 300 times and not using valid email addresses? Doesn't it offend their sense of fairness, if not ethics and morals?

Well, that whole paragraph offends my sense of reason. You're just assuming that the votes are coming from Christians, imagining that these Christians pontificate about morality, and accuse them of cheating when they seem to be following the same rules that let you vote on 6 phone lines? You're blind to your own hypocrisy, even as you have a platform in the Washington Post where you can preen and try to look like you have something especially important to say about religion.