I'm sorry. I don't care enough to read the article.

"Do Trump’s alleged affairs even matter?" by Callum Borchers (at WaPo).

I did take a look at the top-rated comment: "If President Obama had had an affair, it would have mattered a lot to these same people. Hypocrites without honor, all of them."

If President Obama had an affair, it would matter because we have an opinion of him as a man who has been an excellent husband. It would have mattered to people who love him more than those who hate him.

Trump's affairs don't conflict with much of anything anybody thinks of him. You can't use them because those who want to use them are not those who are genuinely upset about the affairs but people who are looking for ways to attack the man they already hate. And anyone who likes Trump can easily see that about them and moves on. That's not hypocrisy, that's competence — resistance to trolling.

"Trump’s love of tabloid gossip complicates his denial of affair allegations with Stormy Daniels."

What? That's a headline at WaPo (for a column by Callum Borchers). Here's the concept:

The White House has dismissed the alleged encounter between Trump and adult-film actress Stormy Daniels as tabloid trash. But Trump’s denial is complicated by his history of associating with publications such as In Touch and lending credence to their work.

“I’ve always said, ‘Why didn't the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for Edwards?’” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016. He was referring to the Enquirer’s revelation that John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina and 2008 presidential candidate, had an affair and fathered a child with a campaign aide.

I'll leave it to you to make the In Touch/National Enquirer distinction if you want. I think it's funny to remind us of the monumental Edwards screwup (when a man who was collecting contributions and running in part on empathy for his dying-of-cancer wife was having an affair during his presidential campaign). And I thought we'd all already absorbed the assumption that private citizen Donald Trump had sex with a porn star 12 years ago. But here's WaPo, ever chiseling away at Trump's inexplicable popularity, bonking us over the head with his vouching for the National Enquirer that one time. Sad!

Here's a song to cheer you up:



You were the sunshine, baby, whenever you smiled/but I call you stormy today.... Oh, stormy, oh, stormy, bring back that sunny day....

But here's the headline I was looking for when I got waylaid into WaPo: "Stormy Daniels launches ‘Make America Horny Again Tour.'" Meade read that out loud to me and my reaction was: Great! I won't detail why just now, because it's time for my coffee break.

Why did Clay Travis say "I believe in the First Amendment and boobs," and what's the best thing Brooke Baldwin could have said in response?

I put the clip up yesterday, and said little other than that Travis clearly meant to say it and had no regret about saying it. I'm interested in figuring out what he was trying to make happen. He's a radio guy. Is he a shock jock? Was it just: Here's my opportunity, I'll get everyone talking about me? Or did he think he could trigger a substantive discussion about freedom of speech or the looks-based success of women in TV journalism?

Brooke Baldwin, the female CNN host, handled the comment by repeatedly asking Travis if he'd really said "boobs," emphasizing her own status "as a woman," giving the other guest (Keith Reed) a chance to speak (but cutting him off 3 times when he was speaking), and then announcing "I'm done, yanking mikes, bye."

Baldwin has a written piece at CNN now, "Speaking like this to women in 2017? No way." She reveals that her own response to was to "let it hang," but her executive producer (a man) started talking to her in her earpiece, and that's why "I just couldn't let this go."

I quickly felt myself turning red -- getting irritated and angry. My mind was racing. My face, I could tell, was incredulous. In the thick of it all, I could see my other guest, Keith Reed, was equally aghast. The newsroom around me fell silent. I was staring into the camera trying to make sense of what was unfolding on live television.... And then I did something I've done only a handful of times in my career. I told the control room to kill his mic and said "bye."

The stages: 1. Disbelief, 2. Anger, 3. End of discussion.

Rewatching the video, what bothers me most is that Baldwin cuts Reed off. He's saying lucid things, responding to Travis appropriately. Anyway, I understand the reaction that Travis wouldn't have gotten on the show in the first place if they'd known he would say that, but I wish that instead of Baldwin's theater of disbelief, anger, and silencing, she'd confronted him with intelligence and strength. Why — if she's good enough to be a CNN host — couldn't she get out a pithy question requiring Travis to connect up his thoughts? I'm thinking of something like: Did you come on my show to play the clown or do "boobs" — as you inelegantly put it — have something to do with your idea of why Curt Schilling got fired and Jamele Hill did not? 

Dominate him. Don't let him melt you!

Baldwin claims that Travis's remark was unexpected, but according to Callum Borchers at WaPo, "Clay Travis used his ‘First Amendment and boobs’ line long before he shocked CNN." Travis was invited on Baldwin's show after he'd written:

I don’t believe Jemele Hill should be fired for tweeting Donald Trump was a white supremacist and for recently saying police officers are modern-day slave catchers. I also don’t believe Curt Schilling should have been fired for what he said about the North Carolina transgender bathroom law or any of the other conservative political positions he’s adopted over the years. That’s because I’m a First Amendment absolutist — the only two things I 100 percent believe in are the First Amendment and boobs — who is also capable of doing something that most in modern media seem incapable of — distinguishing between a person’s public job and their private political beliefs. (Which are also public thanks to modern-day social media.)

Borchers writes:

And that wasn't the first time. Travis wrote in June 2015 that “absolutism on either the right or the left is scary to me — which is why I’m a radical moderate — who believes in only two things absolutely: the First Amendment and boobs."

When Baldwin appeared stunned and disgusted by Travis's quip on Friday, he replied, “I say it live on the radio all the time.”

This is who Travis is. CNN ought to have known what it was getting.

All right then. I assume CNN did know. In which case, the whole hoo-ha is fake news. CNN got its viral clip circulating, and however many people now view Clay Travis as toxic, I'm sure he getting lots of new listeners for his podcast. Let me look for that page. Oh! Here's Travis discussing the incident (warning: big boobs):

So I just went on CNN to discuss the collapse of MSESPN and said I didn’t believe Jemele Hill or Curt Schilling should be fired because I believe completely in only two things that have never let me down — the first amendment and boobs. And when I said that CNN got totally and completely triggered. Seriously, this thing plays out like an SNL skit. The other guy sputters and goes straight into offended pearl clutching mode.

That has an update:

CNN is so offended by my comments that they already asked me to come back on Monday. And, for the record, I will be on Fox News tomorrow night.

In the end, it's all about ratings. That's what they really believe in. Forget all the I-can't-believe-you-said-that-in-this-day-and-age, if it makes us watch, they'll be saying it more. In the end, they'll give the people what we want. Demand in the marketplace of ideas overcomes censorship. And that thought shines a different light on the remark "I believe in the First Amendment and boobs" and transforms it into a proposition I heartily endorse.

ADDED: For reference, here's how CNN — the woman with a man in her earpiece — presents Brooke Baldwin:



IN THE COMMENTS: Quoting me — "Did you come on my show to play the clown or do 'boobs' — as you inelegantly put it — have something to do with your idea of why Curt Schilling got fired and Jamele Hill did not?" — rhhardin says "Boobs are her job so that domination isn't going to work."

I'd never noticed Baldwin until this boobs thing erupted, but now that I've watched the clip embedded above, I see the problem very clearly. Baldwin is disempowered and silenced. She cannot address the issue head on. She's too implicated.

She's got a man talking into her ear. The producer is prodding her to react, but how can she say the interesting, probing thing I'd like to hear? What does she really think about boobs in media? She can't talk about it.

So we get women on TV, and they're pushed to talk about women's issues, but they can't really do it. Their value is appropriated and drained. And the sexist view of women is amplified: She's put in skimpy clothes, sculpted with contouring makeup, and left with nothing to say about sexism except to get flustered and mad, as prompted by a male ventriloquist.

Trump tweets that Mika Brzezinski "was bleeding badly from a face-lift."

Just this morning:

I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..

... to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!

Wow. That's harsh. He must know facelifts to be so confident he can diagnose the source of the bleeding. She had blood coming out of her wherever... face.

Why's he suddenly going back to New Year's Eve? And what's with all the "Crazy" and "Psycho"? It seems... crazy and psycho.

Here's the NYT story on the subject:

The graphic nature of the president’s suggestion that Ms. Brzezinski had undergone plastic surgery was met with immediate criticism on social media...

Mr. Trump’s comment on Thursday echoed a contentious remark that he made about another female television anchor, Megyn Kelly, during last year’s presidential campaign. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” Mr. Trump said, a remark that was widely seen as a reference to menstruation and drew rebukes from women’s groups.

Yes, widely seen as a reference to menstruation, but who knew he might have been talking about facelifts?

Over at The Washington Post, Callum Borchers is calling it a "blatantly sexist attack." Ridiculous. Men get facelifts too. In fact, it's Borchers who's supplying the sexism:

When Trump hits Brzezinski and Scarborough on Twitter, he hits Brzezinski harder, more personally and in a way that seems designed to portray her as insecure (“facelift”) and unintelligent (“low IQ”) — as a side piece who would not be on TV if not for her romantic relationship with Scarborough, to whom she was recently engaged.

Trump didn't say "sidepiece" or characterize plastic surgery as a marker of insecurity.  That's Borchers projecting. What I read in that tweet is that he found it ludicrous that the person trying to insinuate herself into his company was bleeding from the face. That doesn't sound at all like insecurity. Quite the opposite.

"Trump’s strike on Syria disrupts the narrative that he is Putin’s pal."

A good headline... for a column at WaPo by Callum Borchers.

What I like about it is that we don't really know the relationship between Trump and Putin. It's only a narrative. And we don't really know how far apart Putin and Trump really are about the strike or how close they were before. I like the carefulness in speaking only about what you know and the awareness that our sense of experiencing these events and relationships is fake.

My appreciation for Borchers' approach to talking about Putin and Trump is heightened by my irritation over what I had just read (over at Forbes): "Russia Responds To Syria Strike, As Putin-Trump 'Bromance' Gets Tomahawked" (by Kenneth Rapozo):

Anyone who worried that close ties between Trump and Putin was bad for the U.S. -- and maybe even the world -- slept much better on Thursday. Just days after a chemical weapons attack in Idlib, Syria, the U.S. government responded like actors to a script by launching tomahawk cruise missiles in defense of human rights. From Moscow and from Washington, no matter where you sit on this fence, the air strike is seen as damaging to yet another "Russia reset."

Ooh. Ouch. Writing this post, I hit the "Russia reset" link...



... and I hit the button to play but found it so embarrassing that after one second, I impulsively hit another video in the sidebar. I picked "I SHOULD'VE NEVER DONE THAT !! - CRUSH BATTERY WITH HYDRAULIC PRESS - THE SMASHER SHOW" and damned if I didn't find relaxing respite... in this: