"So I Went On Bill Maher And This Happened..."

And here's the insane "Morning Joe" appearance from 2013 that he talks about (in which Mika Brzezinski acts like a complete idiot):

I love the idea of rating the rooms in these stay-at-home media appearances, but there needs to be some competition in the room-rater genre.

It's can't just be Room Rater as the only room rater all the time.

In a failing gambet to enter the Fruit Bowl game, @DonnyDeutsch attempts to upgrade the dentist office setup. @jheil was not immediately available for comment. 6/10 pic.twitter.com/XMcD8edieZ

— Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom) May 20, 2020

Here's the Room Rater Twitter feed. I love it, and I have great respect for the creation of a genre on Twitter. But there need to be other participants. It's a matter of taste, and Room Rater has his standards and factors, and now media folk seem to be pandering specifically to Room Rater. Prime example: Donny Deutsch adds a fruit bowl to his otherwise dull background. Room Rater is right to push back, but he's sort of conceding that there's a limitation to the his game. I think there need to be more critics, complicating the standards and questioning the value of, say, books and potted plants and "art."

Here is Room Rater's ideal:

Room Rater Team Heilemann Update: Wu Tang has joined the Mid Century Modern splendor that is @jheil room. 10/10 pic.twitter.com/rue4QQDHN8

— Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom) May 20, 2020

Fine. But I'd like to read the Twitter feed that objects to this ideal. It's too clean, too prissy, too tryhard. It's bourgeois. It's Architectural Digest. It gives us no inroads into the interior of the man called John Heilemann. Who is he?

By the way, "gambet" is a misspelling by today's standards — but I'm seeing "gambit" spelled like that in 18th century quotes. A "gambit" is a series of moves in chess. Metaphorically, it has come to mean "A plan, stratagem, or ploy that is calculated to gain an advantage, esp. at the outset of a contest, negotiation, etc." (OED). So "gambit" was the perfect word to tweak Deutsch about his apparent effort to play Room Rater's game.

ADDED: Here's a good example of where I think Room Rater goes wrong:

Not even a plant would help. Send him a storage shed. Maybe a dumpster. 4/10 @donttrythis pic.twitter.com/QgCnKMiaNU

— Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom) May 19, 2020

The prospect of a woman at the town hall debate asking Donald Trump: "Do you think I'm fat?"

On "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" today, the panel got to talking about the next presidential debate, which will be in a "town hall" format:

JOHN HEILEMANN (of Bloomberg): It is a harder debate than the first debate in some respects, because you've got real voters asking questions...

ROLAND MARTIN (of TV One): What happens if a size 12 or 14 woman stands up and...

(LAUGHTER)

MARTIN: No, no, no. I'm serious... What if a size 12 or 14 woman who's the average size in America stands and says, Donald Trump, I have two daughters and look at me. Do you think I'm beautiful? Do you think I'm fat?

(CROSSTALK)

MARTIN: -- question comes, Donald Trump is going to stand there with a deer in the headlights look and....

(CROSSTALK)

MARTIN: -- but, no, no, but in this format, you have to answer that question. You have to answer to all that you've said in the past. That's going to be a problem for him.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And you can't dis -- you can't dis the questioners on this one.

I thought this was pretty obtuse — except as Sunday morning entertainment. It's easy to talk about getting fat and the sensitivities attached to that totally down-to-earth mundane worry. It has nothing to do with the presidency, but it's easy to understand. Martin himself is fat. Trump is fat. Most Americans are fat. But do Martin and Stephanopoulos seriously believe that Donald Trump — with all his experience with women — wouldn't know how to talk to a woman who asked him "Do you think I'm fat?"? Frankly, I think it would offer him an easy opportunity to show the warmth and social skill that we have every reason to know that he has in his private dealings with individuals.