To what extent can the House Democrats control what the Senate Republicans do about impeachment?

Or, to phrase it like Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post: "How far can the House go to stop a sham trial?"

The Senate doesn't control the House; Why should the House control the Senate? The Constitution gives the House "the sole Power of Impeachment" and the Senate "the sole Power to try all Impeachments." That's the text of the document the House Democrats have been making such a show of solemnly honoring. Are they going to switch now to creative hijinks? How far can they go?!

Go as far as you can!!! Rubin eggs them on. Forget how you deafened yourself to the accusations Republicans made about the "sham impeachment." Time steal their rhetoric and call it a "sham trial." Oh, you do have to be careful. This is politics and there are winners and losers. Who's worse off if the people get the idea "sham"? Will the Democrats' "sham trial" framing enhance the Republicans' "sham impeachment" framing? Republicans say a sham impeachment, like a frivolous lawsuit, needs to be met with anti-sham tools and dismissed summarily, or the shamsters will file one frivolous impeachment after another and clog up the Senate. Frivolous lawsuits don't go to trial in the courts. The courts, carrying out their duty to decide cases, have devised methods to save themselves from being ruined by excessive and inappropriate work that comes in the form of a case.

Rubin sets out 5 ideas:

Omarosa doesn't know what's in her own book... or she does and she's pretending not to.

I do not want to spend much time on Omarosa's book. I'm just going to link to this NPR piece, "Omarosa Tells NPR She Heard Trump 'N-Word Tape,' Contradicting Her Own Tell-All Book" and quote this:

In her interview with NPR's Rachel Martin, Manigault Newman claims to have heard the tape and heard Trump using that slur on the tape.

But that's not what it says in her tell-all book, Unhinged, due out on Tuesday.

When asked by Martin about the discrepancy during the interview, Manigault Newman insisted Martin must not have read the book (she had) and pointed to a section at the very end of it. But in that section, Manigault Newman doesn't actually describe hearing the tape. She writes of calling one of her "sources" who had a lead on the "N-word tape."

"Unhinged" is such a common insult these days, but I heard some comedian say something like: "They said I was 'unhinged,' but I don't even have hinges." I'm just going to guess it was Kathy Griffin, because I can't find the joke on the internet and I recently sat through her 3-hour show. I liked that joke, and I'm tired of the insult "unhinged" (and all the other insults that rest on the premise of mental illness, a condition that warrants empathy (including my own longstanding tag "Trump derangement syndrome")).

I can also see that when the comedian Michelle Wolf was called "unhinged," she reacted with the joke, "Now is not the time to be hinged," but I like "I don't even have hinges" much better, because it takes you immediately to the concrete image — a person with hinges. This is what I picture:



That man — his name is Jeff Warner — is really good at operating that toy and I like his voice too. It reminds me of Jim Kweskin. The toy is called a "limberjack" or a "jig doll." I was a little worried that the term "jig doll" in a post involving Omarosa might strike some people as racist, especially since the song Warner is singing is "Buffalo Gals." But a "jig" is a dance, and these dolls — also called "limberjacks" — have been around for hundreds of years and don't seem connected to the racial slur that begins with those 3 letters and that can be shortened to those 3 letters. But here are some Pinterest images of jig dolls, and you'll see that some of them depict black people in a way that is easily interpreted as racist (like this one).

As for "Buffalo Gals"... are they supposed to be black women? I've never thought about this before. From Wikipedia:

"Buffalo Gals" is a traditional American song, written and published as "Lubly Fan" in 1844 by the blackface minstrel John Hodges, who performed as "Cool White." The song was widely popular throughout the United States. Because of its popularity, minstrels altered the lyrics to suit the local audience, so it might be performed as "New York Gals" in New York City or "Boston Gals" in Boston or "Alabama Girls" in Alabama (as in the version recorded by Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins on a field recording trip in 1959). The best-known version is named after Buffalo, New York.

Hmm. So "Buffalo" is not a way to refer to black people. It's just Buffalo, New York. But it is an old blackface minstrel song! What a strange set of facts to encounter as I put some extra effort into steering away from anything arguably racist. And I don't want to be unfair to Jeff Warner, who just seems delightful to me. Here's the most famous version of the song:



"Buffalo Gals" is also what the slave character Jim is singing when we first encounter him in Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer":

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged. Jim came skipping out at the gate with a tin pail, and singing Buffalo Gals. Bringing water from the town pump had always been hateful work in Tom's eyes, before, but now it did not strike him so. He remembered that there was company at the pump. White, mulatto, and negro boys and girls were always there waiting their turns, resting, trading playthings, quarrelling, fighting, skylarking. And he remembered that although the pump was only a hundred and fifty yards off, Jim never got back with a bucket of water under an hour--and even then somebody generally had to go after him. Tom said:

"Say, Jim, I'll fetch the water if you'll whitewash some."

Jim shook his head and said: "Can't, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an' git dis water an' not stop foolin' roun' wid anybody. She say she spec' Mars Tom gwine to ax me to whitewash, an' so she tole me go 'long an' 'tend to my own business--she 'lowed SHE'D 'tend to de whitewashin'."

“Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That's the way she always talks. Gimme the bucket--I won't be gone only a a minute. SHE won't ever know."

“Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n me. 'Deed she would."

I didn't have to censor the "N-word" in that passage. It does appear elsewhere in "Tom Sawyer," but not (as in "Huckleberry Finn") as part of Jim's name. But Mark Twain's use of the African American Vernacular English is on vivid display. The white author completely failed to follow the Roxane Gay directive to "know your lane" and stay in it.

And now, if you need a book to read, you can't be thinking of reading "Unhinged." That would be nuts. Don't you feel like reading "Tom Sawyer"? "Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden." That's great stuff. And I love running into words that it seems we've been forgetting to use, like "skylarking."

"Skylark" is also a song. Here, this is nice:



I think the "skylark" there is the bird. Not the prankish horseplay. And not the Buick...



Bonus: The French word for the "skylark" (the bird) is "alouette" — as in...



Je te plumerai la tête = I'll pluck the feathers out of your head.

And that's where I'm going with all this: I'll pluck all thoughts of Omarosa out of your head.

I've called it The Era of That's Not Funny.

Here's my tag — "The Era of That's Not Funny" — which began on November 15, 2017 and, 8 months later collects 25 posts. The first post with that tag is a reaction to a NYT op-ed "Why Men Aren’t Funny," which I translated to Why Nothing Will Ever Be Funny Anymore.

Today, there's an article at Quartzy "'Nanette' and Why a New Wave of Comedians Don't Want to Be Funny":

In Hannah Gadsby’s highly acclaimed comedy special Nanette, she announces that she’s quitting comedy. Jokes are too simplistic, she says: they convert her trauma into humor and obscure the ugly truth of her story. Comedy, says Gadsby, has prevented her from evolving....

[T]he phenomenon of talk show hosts making earnest, quite un-funny political pleas is now so common that comedian Michelle Wolf recently did a skit parodying these monologues.

“I am gonna throw my pen down on the desk, and I’m gonna shake my head in crestfallen bewilderment. I’m gonna look you in the eye, and I’m gonna tell you that Trump is bad!,” she cried. “Children in cages, gun reform yesterday, nevertheless I persisted, this is comedy now. And finally, the meticulously crafted clippable GIFable takedown that will fix everything, change minds, and save the republic.”...

"Everything about Harry Potter sounds like a name for your vagina."

Goblet of Fire, The Chamber of Secrets, Hagrid, The Half-Blood Prince...

Says Michelle Wolf, momentarily digressing within a comic rant called "Salute to Abortions":



The digressions appear at the midpoint of that video. Shaking off the digressions, getting back on track, she says, "Now, men, I'm sorry. I'm sure this brings up a lot of feelings and thoughts and points you want to make and I just want you to know: That's all very irrelevant..."

I found that via "Michelle Wolf Gets Patriotic For a Red, White, and Blue Salute to Abortion" at Slate, which ends:

By the time Wolf brings out a marching band and strews the audience with glitter while exhorting them to have abortions if they want them, you may be wondering why more late-night talk show hosts don’t produce segments defending abortion as a positive good. To learn more about this topic, check out the YouTube comments on this video!

3 Daily Beast headlines.

1. "Michelle Wolf Compares Ivanka Trump to Herpes: ‘You Always Show Up When We’re About to Get F*cked.'"

2. "Anthony Kennedy, You Are a Total Disgrace to America." "And now we learn that on top of everything else, Kennedy may just be corrupt. So his son Justin, if last week’s New York Times account is correct, in essence kept Donald Trump in business for the better part of a decade, overseeing $1 billion worth of loans to the Trump Organization via Deutsche Bank, where he worked. Justin and the Trump kids are buddies, it seems. Justin and Trump himself are palsy-walsy."

3. "John Oliver Is Devastated Over SCOTUS: ‘Everything Is Terrible Now.'" (Oliver was a lot better than the Beast's headline makes him seem. He was mocking the Donald Trump Jr. tweet that said, "OMG! Just when you thought this week couldn't get more lit... I give you Anthony Kennedy's retirement from #SCOTUS," which clearly deserves the mockery Oliver deftly delivered: "I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with Mister Junior on this, because I don’t think this is ‘lit’ at all. I mean, it’s obvs crayAF, no one is denying that fam, but I would argue that this week’s news was neither lit nor on fleek nor was it three fire emojis. Now, granted, I’m still a little shook jsyk, but I personally believe Kennedy’s retirement is super werpt. And I’m happy to announce that in saying that, all of the slang words I just used are now officially dead forever—and that includes ‘werpt,’ a term that doesn’t even exist for which I preemptively ruined just in case.")

"I don’t know who those people are that she can’t say that to them... I gotta respect the artistry. I gotta respect the gangsta."

Dave Chappelle on Michelle Wolf:

I really respected what I saw. I don’t know who those people are that she—she can’t say that to them, ’cause they offend people all the time. And I think that for many people, not everybody who watched it, but for many people, it’s cathartic to watch that woman speak truth to power like that. And whether they understand it or not, there was an enormous amount of levity in what she did. But it was very flat-footed and it was grounded in her truth, and whether I agree with it or not, I gotta respect the artistry. I gotta respect the gangsta. I know how hard it is to do what she did in front of that lame-ass crowd. And she—I think she nailed it. I thought it was beautiful. And I—I didn’t see her pander once and I thought that was beautiful.

"You've talked about how people have assumed you're African American even though you're white—do you get that a lot?"

"I didn't until I moved to New York. I think it was actually a pickup line once. But even now on some of my Instagram posts, people will ask, 'Are you black or white?'... The more we're open to talking about race, the better. A lot of white people shy away from discussing it, but we need to. I think a lot of us are just ignorant, and sometimes there's no other way to learn than by putting your own foot in your mouth."

Said Michelle Wolf, talking to Oprah.com, last January.

And here's Wolf on "The Daily Show" discussing the subject in the context of Rachel Dolezal (the white woman who controversially presented herself as black):

Of course, we've been talking about Michelle Wolf for the last day, because she was the comedian at the White House Correspondents' Dinner — that corrupt, inappropriate event. Some people are making a fuss that she said "fuck," talked about sex, and was mean to Sarah Huckabee Sanders who was sitting right there.

Here's Chris Cillizza at CNN serving up "5 takeaways on Michelle Wolf's hugely controversial speech at the White House correspondents' dinner." I'm not going to read the whole thing because I presume he leads with his best material and the first "takeway" is very lame:

There are LOTS of way [sic] to go after Sanders. I personally think that she is overly antagonistic to the reporters who cover the White House and misleads on the regular [sic]. But to make fun of Sanders' makeup? ("I think she's very resourceful, like she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's lies," said Wolf.) Like, really?

First, the word is "smoky." "Smokey" is the correct spelling only for the name of the U.S. Forest Service mascot, Smokey the Bear. [ADDED: And other proper names, like "Smokey and the Bandit."]

Second, Wolf didn't make fun of the makeup. In the joke, the makeup is not only good. It's perfect. The joke is that ugly things are going on behind the scenes and there's a contrast between that and the perfect exterior.

I would compare that joke to Jesus's denouncement of the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23:25-28:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

ADDED: Bear/Wolf... I should have made something out of that. Also, I should made a show of connecting up the subject of the way Michelle Wolf  looks and the way Sarah Huckabee Sanders looks.

AND: Meade read this post and said, "I would have made a show of connecting Sarah Huckleberry Hound and Michelle Dancing With Wolves."

Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents' Dinner: "You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you use to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him but I think you love him."

"I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn't sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He's helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster and now you're profiting off him."



Yes, a lot of her jokes thudded in that crowd and she said "fuck" a few times and got more sexual than most comedians at that event, but the line I quoted — which was almost the last thing she said — was a good one.

Typical reaction shot:



ADDED: Consider the words "You helped create this monster." What is "this monster"? It can't be Trump the man, because the press didn't create (or "help create") the man. The "monster" must be something else — The Myth of Trump, The Power of Trump, The Outsize Public Persona of Trump... or perhaps simply: The President Trump. He couldn't have become President without them. Their love made him strong, and they are responsible for what they have done. It's not enough, then, for them to stand back and act horrified — look! a monster exists. It's their monster. They are Frankenstein.