"We do not have the luxury to fight amongst ourselves while that thing sits in the White House."

Said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee in Minneapolis last week, quoted in "Democrats let it all out at their party meeting" (Semafor)[SEE UPDATE BELOW].

But oddly enough, "that thing" is sitting in the White House after Republicans fought amongst themselves and Walz badly lost the election to him after Democrats went out of their way to avoid fighting amongst themselves. It would make more sense to use the epithet "that thing" to refer to the unwholesome agglomeration that is the Democratic Party.

The three-day meeting of the Democratic National Committee, held to welcome new members and start building the 2028 primary calendar, was the first under new chair Ken Martin.... The party, Martin vowed, was now bringing “a bazooka to a knife fight,” and would no longer “play by the rules” if Republicans broke them.

I'm guessing Martin deployed his "a bazooka to a knife fight" metaphor — in Minneapolis — before the the shooting of children that took place nearby. 

***

Bazooka (Wikipedia):

The name "bazooka" comes from an extension of the word bazoo, which is slang for "mouth" or "boastful talk"... 

That's fitting, for politicians.

During World War II, "bazooka" became the universally applied nickname of the new American anti-tank weapon, due to its vague resemblance to the musical instrument invented and popularized by 1930s American comedian Bob Burns.

Video of Burns playing the bazooka here.

UPDATE: In the comments below, Olson Johnson is right! observes that Semafor has taken Walz's words out of context:

"The search for a liberal Joe Rogan has led Democrats to an unlikely candidate: Jaime Harrison, their former party chair."

"Harrison will launch At Our Table on Thursday. It’s an interview show he’s been recording from his home in South Carolina and from the road, where he frequently spends time with the party’s once and future stars. 'Civic education in America is at an all-time low,' Harrison told Semafor this week, shortly before meeting up with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, the latest ambitious Democrat to visit Harrison’s home state ahead of its 2028 presidential primary...."

Semafor nonsense.

That's David Weigel, by the way.

If there's ever going to be a "liberal Joe Rogan," it's not going to happen that way.

In my opinion there is one — but only one — way to find a liberal Joe Rogan: He's right there. It's Joe Rogan. Let me help you in 3 steps: 1. See that Joe Rogan, as he already is, is pretty damned liberal, 2. Persuade Joe Rogan to lean further in the liberal direction on various issues where the liberal position is genuinely appealing, 3. Adjust your own vision of what it means to be liberal, so that it isn't gummed up with illiberal junk that has turned the public away from you, and maybe then you'll be able to see that Joe Rogan is more or less on your side, and, more important, maybe then you won't be so pathetically desperate to find "a Joe Rogan" to save you from the unpopularity that you deserve.

But, aside from all that, might Jaime Harrison do a good podcast? I'll cherry-pick from the little interview at the link to give you a sense of what he has to say:

"Senior aides to Ron DeSantis oversaw the campaign’s high-risk strategy of laundering incendiary videos produced by their staff through allied anonymous Twitter accounts..."

"... a set of internal campaign communications obtained by Semafor reveals.... The meme-filled videos emerged from a Signal channel called 'War Room Creative Ideas,' screenshots of which were shared with Semafor and whose authenticity was confirmed by a second source familiar with the campaign. The chat in Signal, an encrypted messaging app, offers the first clear look into the 'war room' that has defined the Florida governor’s candidacy, and is presided over by his high-profile and confrontational director of rapid response, Christina Pushaw. The correspondence obtained by Semafor also offers a glimpse of a strategy that mixes digital aggression and (unsuccessful) attempts to keep the campaign’s own activities secret. The messages were set to disappear after one week. Screenshots of the 'War Room' chat reviewed by Semafor included staffers praising a widely-derided and since-deleted video...."

Write David Weigel and Shelby Talcott at Semafor in "This belongs in the Smithsonian’: Inside the meme video operation that swallowed Ron DeSantis’ campaign."

You can still watch the "widely-derided and since-deleted video" at that link. 

Now that WaPo has fired Felicia Sonmez, it feels like a good time to start following her on Twitter.

To those bizarrely attacking me for speaking out, or snidely saying things like “Day 7” — of course I’m still speaking out.

This is about systemic issues that run far deeper than a single tweet by any employee. Pushing for change takes far longer than 7 days. 15/

— Felicia Sonmez (@feliciasonmez) June 9, 2022

And here's the Vanity Fair article from 2 days ago, containing a lot of background, "'CLUSTERF--K': INSIDE THE WASHINGTON POST’S SOCIAL MEDIA MELTDOWN/A flurry of Twitter flare-ups and Slack spats involving Post journalists, along with a controversial suspension, have upended the newsroom and are presenting a major test for executive editor Sally Buzbee, who urged staff Tuesday to “be constructive and collegial'":

"Sonmez on Friday used her Twitter account to call attention to a colleague, David Weigel, for retweeting a sexist joke."

"'Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!' Sonmez tweeted in response.... Weigel apologized for the retweet and deleted it from his account. The Post subsequently suspended him without pay for a month for violating its social media policies.... In the ensuing days, Sonmez continued to use her Twitter account to focus on the incident, retweeting criticism of Weigel.... Over the weekend, Jose A. Del Real, another Post reporter, asked Sonmez to cease her criticisms, tweeting, 'Felicia, we all mess up from time to time. Engaging in repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague is neither a good look nor is it particularly effective. It turns the language of inclusivity into clout chasing and bullying.' Del Real later tweeted that his back-and-forth with Sonmez prompted a 'barrage of online abuse directed by one person but carried out by an eager mob.' Sonmez then posted screenshots of Del Real’s tweets and wrote: 'It’s hard for me to understand why The Washington Post hasn’t done anything about these tweets.'"

From "Felicia Sonmez terminated by The Washington Post after Twitter dispute" (WaPo).

Glenn Greenwald compares how WaPo treated Taylor Lorenz with how it treated David Weigel.

Taylor Lorenz just got caught repeatedly lying in her article such that WP had to revise it 3 times as an "Editor's Note," and it still contains a lie: nothing happened.

Dave Weigel immediately apologized for RT'ing a joke and is suspended without pay:https://t.co/fmtFNy78XN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 6, 2022

ADDED: Greenwald goes on in a series of tweets that I won't link to individually: 

Borrowing edge and then retreating when criticized.

It's the fact that you didn't immediately see the harm that is concerning for someone with your platformhttps://t.co/xt0vzO8zmK

— Kincaid (@kincaid323) June 3, 2022

The pro-abortion side should forefront and elevate women's rights, not stir up violence and anti-Catholic bigotry.

A pro-abortion group is not only calling for the targeting of justices at their homes for protests but declaring “We’ll be burning the Eucharist" to protest the Catholic Church's view of abortion as a sin. https://t.co/1EzTIMUdW6 It is the liberating license of rage.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 8, 2022

ADDED: This is so detrimental to the cause of women's rights that I want to explore whether this is a "false flag" message. Here's the Ruth Sent Us web page. It's not very informative.

MORE: When I do a search of Google News for the group, the hits all seem to be at conservative news sites. I don't believe the group has ever been mentioned in the NYT, and I find only one mention in The Washington Post, 3 days ago, in "The Trailer: Four ways the leaked draft abortion opinion has altered the midterms," by David Weigel:

Since Monday, the liberal group Ruth Sent Us has published the public addresses of conservative Supreme Court justices, urging protesters to walk by them, and ShutDownDC has endorsed a walk-by “protest for reproductive freedom.

If this group "published the public addresses of conservative Supreme Court justices," that's a pretty good sign that they really are radically hostile to conservatives. I wouldn't use the word "liberal" to describe this behavior.

The top-center of WaPo's home page: A map of Wisconsin, divided into 7 "states."

I see that the southeast gets to be all or part of 6 of the 7 states.

Here's the article: "The seven political states of Wisconsin" by David Weigel, who seems to have gotten much of his info from Ben Wikler (I knew Ben when he was a teenager):

“The history of polling relative to election results in Wisconsin suggests that this election will be won or lost by a nose,” said Ben Wikler, who took over the state’s Democratic Party in 2019. “Democrats should run as though we’re three points behind and might be able to win at the very final moment if we do absolutely everything in our power.”

He's not taking Wisconsin for granted!

So how is Wisconsin still so close? To understand it, we broke it down into seven political “states.” Democrats win landslides in the two most populous counties, Milwaukee and Dane. Republicans in 2016 won nearly everywhere else — the suburban WOW Counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington), the rest of Southeast Wisconsin, the old swing counties of Northeast Wisconsin, and formerly Democratic areas in the Southwest and Northwest.

"What makes Buttigieg an easy and reassuring choice for these older, white, straight people, and a disturbing possibility for the queer people who seem to be criticizing him for not being gay enough?"

"It is that he is profoundly, essentially conservative. He is an old politician in a young man’s body, a straight politician in a gay man’s body."

Writes Masha Gessen in "The Queer Opposition to Pete Buttigieg, Explained" (in The New Yorker).

He chose to wait [to come out] until after he graduated from college, after he had served in the military, after he had been elected mayor.... until after attitudes toward homosexuality had changed...

One kind of queer politics is rooted in ideas of liberation, revolutionary change, and solidarity. The vision of this politics is a society that is radically changed by many kinds of people fighting many kinds of injustice, a society in which economic, social, political, and sexual relationships have been transformed....

The other, more mainstream, and often more visible kind of L.G.B.T. politics aims to erase difference. Its message to straight people is “We are just like you, and all we want is the right to have what you have: marriage, children, a house with a picket fence, and the right to serve in the military.”....

Buttigieg embodies the second kind of gay experience and the second kind of gay politics.... Buttigieg is the ultimate candidate of the country’s post-2016 trauma. He is not a woman. He is not a socialist. He is decidedly not a revolutionary. He does not make big, sweeping promises...

MEANWHILE: "Did anybody catch a screenshot or see what [Washington Post writer Dave] Weigel tweeted? Supposedly he tweeted something from a movie that was clearly homophobic (towards Pete?), sparked some Twitter fury and took it down. Does anyone know what he did?" (Reddit).

WaPo's Jennifer Rubin pushes for a primary challenge to Trump... with the end of getting — who else? — John Kasich elected.

In "Here’s what a primary challenge to Trump would accomplish," she writes:

While there might be downside to the person challenging Trump, a primary opponent isn’t likely to take Trump on if he’s concerned about playing it safe and husbanding his or her popularity. The primary challenger, if you will, acts like the horse who jumps out to the lead, wears down the favorite and allows his stablemate to come from behind for the victory. And sometimes, the lead horse might actually win. Who’d do this? Maybe someone who already has a job (e.g., Mitt Romney, the Utah senator-elect), or doesn’t need one (e.g., a retired government official), or just thinks it’s the right thing to do (outgoing Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake?). ...

[A] primary run doesn’t preclude a third-party run by a different candidate, most likely a moderate candidate in the event Trump wins the GOP nomination. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, visiting in New Hampshire, explained the ideal circumstances for such a run. My colleague David Weigel writes, “Kasich was speculating on what it would take to break the two-party system wide open. He imagined a 2020 matchup between Trump and a left-wing Democrat that would create ‘a vast ocean between the parties.’ ” The decision to mount a third-party run could wait until after both parties pick their nominee; but if Trump falters in the primary, nothing would stop Kasich (or anyone else) from entering the race. (For now, Kasich occupies an enviable position. A non-candidate with high name ID can continue to criticize Trump and urge his fellow Republicans to hold Trump accountable for his rhetoric and actions.)

I just love the phrase "husbanding his or her popularity."

Anyway... someone other than Kasich is supposed to go in there and wear himself out weakening Trump, and Kasich has identified himself as the one to come in after someone else does the groundwork. Kasich is the moderate in waiting — quite openly and with strong support from The Washington Post.

"Trump has been the great doctor, stitching up our scars and healing us organically."

Said Washington Governor Jay Inslee, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, quoted in "Democratic Party’s liberal insurgency hits a wall in Midwest primaries" by David Weigel in WaPo.

Such an absurd and colorful quote. Stitching up scars?! If your wounds are already scars, it would be freaky to stitch them up. Inslee's metaphor sent me looking for images in that genre of tattoo that includes things like this:

A post shared by Dr. Andrés Sosa (@hombroycodo) on Mar 18, 2017 at 4:52pm PDT

Also, "organically." He's not only crediting Trump as the "great doctor" but putting him in what sounds like some alternative medicine category of doctor.

By the way, when did David Weigel start looking like Edgar Allan Poe?



"You are young yet, my friend... but the time will arrive when you will learn to judge for yourself of what is going on in the world, without trusting to the gossip of others. Believe nothing you hear, and only one-half that you see" — a quote from my favorite Edgar Allan Poe story, "The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether."

Trump's "Fake News Awards."

The GOP site is swamped, but Fox News has the list:

1) The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claiming markets would ‘never’ recover from Trump presidency

2) ABC News' Brian Ross’ bungled report on former national security adviser Michael Flynn

3) CNN report that the Trump campaign had early access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks

4) TIME report that Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office

5) The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel tweeting that Trump’s December rally in Pensacola, Florida, wasn’t packed with supporters

6) CNN’s video suggesting Trump overfed fish during visit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe

7) CNN’s retracted report claiming Anthony Scaramucci-Russia ties

8) Newsweek report that Polish First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda did not shake Trump’s hand

9) CNN report that former FBI Director James Comey would dispute President Trump’s claim he was told he was not under investigation

10) The New York Times report that the Trump administration had hidden a climate-change report

11) In Trump’s words, "‘RUSSIA COLLUSION!’ Russian collusion is perhaps the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people. THERE IS NO COLLUSION!”

How does the NYT know what Trump does in his bedroom when he wakes up in the morning?

I'm reading "INSIDE TRUMP’S HOUR-BY-HOUR BATTLE FOR SELF-PRESERVATION/With Twitter as his Excalibur, the president takes on his doubters, powered by long spells of cable news and a dozen Diet Cokes. But if Mr. Trump has yet to bend the presidency to his will, he is at least wrestling it to a draw."

The article — by Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker — says it's based "on interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress." But that doesn't mean every stated fact has 60 sources. Who was in the bedroom? The most logical guess is that the report comes from Trump himself:

Around 5:30 each morning, President Trump wakes and tunes into the television in the White House’s master bedroom. He flips to CNN for news, moves to “Fox & Friends” for comfort and messaging ideas, and sometimes watches MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” because, friends suspect, it fires him up for the day.

Energized, infuriated — often a gumbo of both — Mr. Trump grabs his iPhone.

So first he turns on the TV, watches it until he gets excited, and then he grabs his iPhone? Personally, I begin by grabbing my iPhone — oh, sometimes I just pick it up — and I read the news, probably the NYT, until feel so inspired to blog that I jump out of bed. Just kidding. I don't jump out of bed. And, really, who "jumps" out of bed in real life? But it's what everyone does in writing, just like they "grab"* their iPhone.

Anyway, I believe that when Trump wakes up, he turns on the TV and uses it to orient himself to the morning. Is he looking for something precise, like "news" from CNN, "comfort" from Fox, and "fire" from MSNBC — and in that order? "Friends suspect"! Well, I suspect some poetic license is taken there, but the reporters have deniability: They're passing along the suspicions of "friends." How many friends — all 60? What could they know of the order Trump flips through the news channels, what he's seeking on each of the channels, the feelings that actually arise — a "gumbo" of energy and fury! — and whether those feelings impel his famous fingers to the small electronic device.

Sometimes he tweets while propped on his pillow, according to aides.

Does he really tweet from the iPhone? That takes dexterity... or willingness to use speech-to-text. I never do that. I have to leap out of bed — literally hurtle myself out — to get to a real computer with a good keyboard, not just to make typing easier, but to feel better grounded in the real world. But then, I am clinging to the edge of reality in my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, and President Trump, even propped on his pillow, is in the White House, and when he turns on the TV, on multiple channels, people are talking about the fact that he's in the White House. I'm sure he feels grounded. Or insane. One or the other.

But that gumbo, I want to talk about the gumbo. I know HabermanThrushBaker are using "gumbo" to mean "stew," but "stew" is well established to mean "A state of excitement, esp. of great alarm or anxiety." The OED has that meaning for "stew" going back to 1806, whereas "gumbo" only means okra, the "soup thickened with the mucilaginous pods of this plant," something mud-related, and "A patois spoken by black people and Creoles in the French West Indies, Louisiana, Bourbon, and Mauritius." Yes, metaphor can take you beyond those meanings, but why express contempt for Trump by using a word associated with black people?

Other times he tweets from the den next door, watching another television. Less frequently, he makes his way up the hall to the ornate Treaty Room, sometimes dressed for the day, sometimes still in night clothes, where he begins his official and unofficial calls.

So the man walks down the hall, possibly in his pajamas. Or what are we talking about here — "night clothes"? "Quite undress'd, with only Night-cloaths on my Head, and a loose Morning Gown wrapt about me." I'm back to reading the OED. That quote is from the 1722 novel "Moll Flanders," by Daniel DeFoe. I'm just going to picture Trump in pajamas and a bathrobe. Maybe they didn't want to say "bathrobe" because there are too many bathrobes in the news lately. (I see a Slate article from last month, "Ban Men's Bathrobes.")

Back to the NYT article:

As he ends his first year in office, Mr. Trump is redefining what it means to be president. He sees the highest office in the land much as he did the night of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton — as a prize he must fight to protect every waking moment, and Twitter is his Excalibur. Despite all his bluster, he views himself less as a titan dominating the world stage than a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously, according to interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress....

But that is the way they portray him in the news —  a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously. I don't need 60 insiders to explain that to me. It's an accurate picture of the media. Now, you may say, he just shouldn't watch the TV, shouldn't pay attention to media, should let media do its thing and stick to what's conventionally presidential — ignore what's being said about him.

Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back.

Don't fight back. Be above it all. Remember how well that worked for George W. Bush? But that's not Trump. I can see why he uses Twitter. He's a master at Twitter, keeping the media honest (or at least looking as dishonest as it is (or might be)). Maybe you think he shouldn't stoop to things like this:

.@DaveWeigel @WashingtonPost put out a phony photo of an empty arena hours before I arrived @ the venue, w/ thousands of people outside, on their way in. Real photos now shown as I spoke. Packed house, many people unable to get in. Demand apology & retraction from FAKE NEWS WaPo! pic.twitter.com/XAblFGh1ob

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2017

But I don't believe that sort of thing takes much time, just like I don't believe that having a muted TV running in the background for 8 hours means he's spending 8 hours watching TV.  I read Trump's Twitter feed. Some days there's nothing. Some days there is one thing. Occasionally, he spreads out and drops 4 or 5 tweets. How much time does that really take? It might save time, because instead of feeling irritated and distracted by some stupid news report (e.g., Weigel's "phony photo") and involving somebody else in doing something about it, Trump spends probably one minute typing out a tweet. Efficient, effective. The media would, I'm sure, prefer to filter his message through their own template, replete with naysayers and qualifications. But Trump leaps over the media. He springs. He vaults.

Yes, yes. Excalibur. I haven't talked about Excalibur....

__________________

* "Grab" is an evocative word in anti-Trumpiana, because of "Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."

"No question at all she lost because she was a woman."/"She didn't lose because she is a woman. She lost because of the woman she is."

Those are the first- and second-highest-rated comments on the Washington Post piece by David Weigel "Clinton’s account of how she was ‘shivved’ in the 2016 presidential election."

"This music, so self-consciously English, sounded different in America, where its rather nerdy creators were greeted as exotic rock stars."

"That summer [1971], Yes played its first U.S. concert, at an arena in Seattle. A fan who approached Jon Anderson before the show remembered that Anderson was nervous. 'I don’t know what is going to happen,' the singer told him. 'I’ve never been in a place like this.' When Anderson sang, 'I’ll be the roundabout,' most American listeners surely had no idea that he was referring to the kind of intersection known less euphoniously, in the U.S., as a traffic circle... Why, then, did this music seduce so many Americans? In 1997, a musician and scholar named Edward Macan published 'Rocking the Classics,' in which he offered a provocative explanation. Noting that this artsy music seemed to attract 'a greater proportion of blue-collar listeners' in the U.S. than it had in Britain, he proposed that the genre’s Britishness 'provided a kind of surrogate ethnic identity to its young white audience': white music for white people, at a time of growing white anxiety. Bill Martin, the quasi-Marxist, found Macan’s argument 'troubling.' In his view, the kids in the bleachers were revolutionaries, drawn to the music because its sensibility, based on 'radical spiritual traditions,' offered an alternative to 'Western politics, economics, religion, and culture.'"

From "THE PERSISTENCE OF PROG ROCK/Critics think that the genre was an embarrassing dead end. So why do fans and musicians still love it?" by Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker.

I've never liked prog rock, but I've never thought about it in relation to white anxiety. The author of the New Yorker article appears not to be white (and used to edit a journal of race and culture). He's bouncing off a new book, "The Show That Never Ends/The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock," which is by David Weigel, who appears to be white. Based on my fiddling with the "look inside" function at Amazon, I don't think Weigel gets into the whiteness of prog rock or even says anything about race at all, but obviously others have.

"This one Clinton quote shows why her supporters hate the media."

Headline on a David Weigel piece at WaPo. To me, it's just ludicrous to think that the media were anti-Clinton — at least in comparison to Trump.* But what Weigel has is this Clinton quote...

If you drive around in some of the places that beat the heck out of me, you cannot get cell coverage for miles. And so, even in towns — so, the president was in Harrisburg. I was in Harrisburg during the campaign, and I met with people afterward. One of the things they said to me is that there are places in central Pennsylvania where we don't have access to affordable high-speed Internet.

That got boiled down into a tweet (by Phil Elliot of Time Magazine):

"You cannot get cell coverage for mile," Clinton says of the places that voted against her.

Weigel says that reporters knew that Clinton had "a quarter-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan" to help people out in those places that beat the heck out of her, but they nevertheless went for the easy snark that fit the "firmly established narrative of Clinton and Trump is that she couldn't connect to rural voters, whereas he was a 'blue-collar billionaire' who made surprising emotional connection."

__________________

* They surely favored Clinton over Trump, but I think at the primary stage they favored Bernie Sanders. But Trump did figure out how to use the media that hated him just by making himself available and speaking in a way that was compulsively watchable. He got a ton of free media — interviews and rallies — and so did Bernie — who used a very similar approach of being available and chattily interesting. Clinton was so guarded, so withholding. Even when she made herself available she seemed unavailable. And there was that meme — did she believe it? — that she is most liked when people don't see her at all.

"President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period," said Donald Trump today.

"Now, we all want to get back to making America strong and great again," but before getting back to that he saw fit to add: "Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it.”

Did Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign start the "birther" controversy? The linked article, in the NYT, says:

During the 2008 Democratic contest, Mrs. Clinton’s senior strategist at one point pondered, in an internal memo that was later leaked, the ways in which Mr. Obama’s personal background differed from many Americans. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion, neither Mrs. Clinton nor her campaign ever publicly questioned Mr. Obama’s citizenship or birthplace, in Hawaii.

Is that bait the Clinton campaign should take?

The Clinton campaign signaled on Friday that it does not plan to let Mr. Trump slide on the subject, pointing out that he has falsely claimed that the Democratic nominee was initially responsible for raising the questions and noting that he continued to question Mr. Obama’s birthplace for years after the release of his birth certificate.

This is forcing me to go look it up, because I honestly don't know the answer and I would have left this old issue behind.  I'm going to read a Breitbart article from a year ago, and then a CNN article from last May. After I've done that, I'll form an opinion about whether Trump or Hillary should want to bring this up now.

"Attacks on Trump just make these voters like him more."

David Weigel describes efforts by Frank Luntz, the Republican media consultant, to shake a group of Trump supporters by showing them some very negative advertising.

"Thirteen Republican presidential campaigns had started the week in a kind of solidarity, brainstorming ideas to make the cable news debates more fair."

"They ended the week in pathos and disarray, after Fox Business announced that two candidates would be shunted from prime time to an 'undercard' debate, and two mainstays of the undercard debate would not make it to the Nov. 10 forum at all."

Writes WaPo's David Weigel, after the news that Christie and Huckabee got reseated at the kids table and Graham and Pataki are excluded altogether.