"She had falsely accused him of stealing her cellphone, and can be heard yelling, 'No, I’m not letting him walk away with my phone!' The video, which garnered widespread consternation on social media, was yet another example of Black people in America being confronted with baseless accusations while simply going about their lives. It drew comparisons to an incident in May, in which a white woman called 911 to falsely claim that a Black bird-watcher in Central Park had threatened her life. (Ms. Ponsetto, her lawyer said, is of Puerto Rican and Vietnamese descent.)"
This story would have "garnered" so much more attention — and, of course, "consternation" — if only Ms. Ponsetto had been white. The Times calls it "another example," but it's not really in the category for which examples are being... garnered. Ponsetto is, her lawyer says, of Puerto Rican and Vietnamese descent, and she's not even charged with a hate crime — because, according to the police, "she didn't say anything about that."
Why is the charge robbery and not assault? Is there evidence that she knew the phone was not hers?
As for that interview with Gayle King, Ponsetto's lawyer says, "She went off script,. She decided to disregard my advice and just go on her own... She was prepared and guided. She apologized, but not in the way she should have. But she said so many other things that it almost blurred her message. It was so disrespectful." The lawyer called her client disrespectful? Am I reading that right?
In the TV interview, Ponsetto wears a cap that reads "Daddy" and says "I consider myself super sweet." The high point of the interview comes at 4:46 when Ponsetto lifts her hand, palm out, toward Gayle King and says "All right, Gayle. Enough." Now, that's not a crime, but it does show a young woman with unusual instincts, instincts also on view in the hotel video (which you can also see in the embedded clip).
How does a 22-year-old woman acquire that orientation in the world? I'll hypothesize that it has something to do with the self-image "super sweet."
Best line of the night — here's the debate transcript — from Joe Biden, near the end of 2 hours of all the candidates talking over each other and the moderators failing horribly to maintain any sort of order.
The moderator Gayle King responds, "Vice President Biden, you're a gentleman. Good home training. Thank you, sir." But Joe Biden doesn't want to be Gayle King's good little boy. He says, "Yeah, gentlemen don't get very well treated up here."
Good home training. Ridiculous. Biden was making a criticism — "Why am I stopping? No one else stops. It's my Catholic school training" — a justified criticism, and Gayle King understood or pretended to understand that to be supportive of her and justifying her bonding with Biden, like the 2 of them are well bred and polite, but he cut her off.
"Gentlemen don't get very well treated up here" — that's superficially polite, not telling King she's not doing her job, but the treatment in question is from the moderators.
He's saying: I have been polite and gracious, but you've presided over an event where rudeness wins. Catholic school may have taught me good behavior, but you, Gayle King, are teaching bad behavior.
By the way, it's interesting that King changed "Catholic school training" to "home training." She cleaned the religion out of it for him. She erased his Catholic identity. And if it's home training, the implication is domestication by a woman.
Now, a lot of people seem to think that Donald Trump is rude, and the Democratic candidates sometimes appeal to our desire for more politeness and niceness and harmony. So maybe Joe Biden got somewhere by embodying the gentleman, and maybe he's savvy enough to have done that on purpose. But Gayle King patted him on the head for it, and that hurt. Who thinks you can beat Donald Trump being the boy with "good home training"?
ADDED: Back in 2012, when VP Biden debated VP candidate Paul Ryan, Biden behaved like a jackass. I wrote at the time:
Biden is being rude, laughing and mouthing words. And Ryan is talking about serious national security matters. Biden mutters an interruption. When Biden is given a turn, he calls what Ryan said "malarky."
Here's the transcript. Here's Woody Allen's response.
It's an old story made new by the "Time's Up" movement in Hollywood and Farrow's going on camera (asking us to see and believe).
KING: Are you angry with the people, with the celebrities that are starring in his movies, that hold him in high regard and continue to compliment him?
FARROW: I'm not angry with them. I hope that, you know, especially since so many of them have been vocal advocates of this Me Too and Time's Up movement that, um, they can acknowledge their complicity and maybe hold themselves accountable to how they have perpetuated this culture of – of silence in their industry.
It's been a running joke on John Oliver's show for years:
Charlie Rose's "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King just happened to be a guest on Stephen Colbert's show last night. We're told she was already scheduled and, when the Rose story broke, she considered canceling, but Colbert's show is on CBS, and I assume I'm looking at CBS trying to extricate itself from the Charlie Rose story. And Gayle King isn't just committed to CBS, she's got her own reputation to keep clean. Watch the mind-numbing performance of Gayle King who plays dumb and cloyingly emotional:
1. In Colbert's introduction of King, he says she "delivers the hard news as co-anchor of 'CBS This Morning' and delivers the good news as the editor-at-large of O, the Oprah Magazine." Was "hard news" an intentional reference to Charlie Rose, whose penis is in the news? If innuendo was not intended, I believe it would have been noticed after it was written and edited out, so I say it was intended. Deniable, of course. Everything's deniable, like King's I-knew-nothing! routine.
2. Less than half-way through this clip, I was pausing and researching signs of lying. King is looking down and to her right (as if she had notes down there she needed to read) and scratching her cheek (at 2:02 (I've seen myself on video many times touching my cheek when I know I'm saying something that's has an element of deceit)). And look at her fist at 2:55.
3. "This is very difficult for me" — King's tactic is to make this a story of her emotional journey. Colbert plays a supporting role, with softball questions like: "Are you angry?" To which King answers: "I am a variety of emotions. There's certain some anger. There's some sadness. There's compassion. There's concern." It's so complex! "You can hold a variety of emotions around one particular incident."
4. At 3:52, she repositions and goes back to "what these women are going through." But what I want to know is what she knew and might have done to help "these women" before the news story broke and had an impact on her career. We have to start listening to women. King has been a professional in woman-oriented media for a long time. She didn't just recently get a clue about these issues. But the Colbert audience gives her a massive cheer (as she interlaces her fingers and works her hands back and forth).
5. Women will continue to speak up, King tells us in an impassioned tone, because "they're now being believed." She has to say "they," though she's a woman, because if she said "we," it would seem as though she had a story to tell.
6. King says that men need to "join the conversation." How? Men have to condemn sexual harassment and not make fine distinctions. They have to say that "it's all bad." So... not really a conversation. "All of it is really unacceptable." There's nothing to debate. Oh, but then she says, "By the same token, I want to be able to joke and laugh with friends without thinking I'm going to be called into human resources. But we all know the difference. What that is. We do." We do? Is it that talking is different and you can joke? But look at the most famous joke on the subject: "And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything, grab them by the pussy, you can do anything." That has plainly been dumped into the all-of-it-is-really-unacceptable category. (No wonder Siri is telling me, "Ann, I don't really know any good jokes. None, in fact." It is the Era of That's Not Funny.") [AND: As Ignorance is Bliss asks in the comments: "So who put a pubic hair on my Coke?"]
And here's Gayle King talking about the Rose story with Norah O'Donnell on their show, "CBS This Morning" yesterday:
That's very stiff and stilted. The 2 women are scripted to say what's been decided as the correct way to save their show. It goes on and on, and I'm saying that after stopping the clip at 2:12. There's no way, no matter how much longer they talk — the clip goes on for another minute — they are not going to get to the topic I want to hear discussed: What did you know? If you didn't know, why didn't you know? What good are you in your women-helping-women role on morning TV if you didn't recognize the monster who sat next to you for 5 years?
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