I get email from Tom Cotton, addressing me as "Patriot."

It says:

On Wednesday, I published an article in the New York Times calling for an end to violence in our streets. Outnumbered police officers, encumbered by feckless politicians, bore the brunt of the violence.

Feckless!*

These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives. The overwhelming majority of Americans are sick and tired of this violence and want to see strong action taken to restore law and order.

I’ve caused a total meltdown from the media and radical liberals. Reporters are attacking me and going after the New York Times for having the audacity to publish a piece that doesn’t fit within their liberal ideology.

He is glorying in their attack on him and fundraising. Of course, that's how it's done.  There follows a request for a donation, with clickable links. He says "socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" are "are trying to silence," and "liberal media and their democrat cronies" — yeah, small "d" — are "trying to silence our conservative voices."

I never give money to politicians. I'm just showing you that Tom Cotton is fundraising over the NYT reaction to its publication of his op-ed, that I was addressed as "Patriot," and that "feckless" has returned.
___________________

* I've already done a post about "feckless" — back when Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a "feckless cunt." I said: "In case you're wondering what the fuck 'feck' even is that we should feel bad about the lack of it, it's just another way to say 'effect.' So to be 'feckless' is to be lame, without effect." That was in the beginning of June 2018. Later that same month, Kathy Griffin called Melania Trump a "feckless complicit piece of shit," and I blogged it here. So... "feckless" had a moment, 2 years ago.

"Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s looks are the best thing about her. She has shiny hair, pretty eyes, and a lovely complexion. On the inside: hideous as a pinworm on the anus. On the inside: That woman is 90 percent taint, and I mean that medically."

Said Samantha Bee from the stage at The Not the White House Correspondents Dinner, The Daily Beast reports.

Bee also took a few light-hearted shots at the media, criticizing the TV news media for its inability to call things outright racist. “Let’s talk about euphemisms. If you mean ‘racist’ say ‘racist,’ not this,” offered Bee, before airing a montage of news anchors using “racially charged” and “racially insensitive” to describe overtly racist acts—like the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. “Things can be electrically charged or solar-charged or sexually charged, but racially charged isn’t a thing!” she exclaimed.

The NYT — in its crossword puzzle — botches the understanding of transgenderism.

I was very surprised, as I did the new puzzle last night, that the answer for the clue "Taking on a new identity, in a way" was "transgender." It's the New York Times! Wouldn't it be expected to adhere to the strict understanding that prevails today among the educated elite that a transgender person has had a consistent gender identity that just never matched the body he or she was born with? In that view, transgender isn't a "new identity." Why would you deviate from that understanding for the sake of a crossword clue?

Here's how Rex Parker reacted:

I have a question about the clue on TRANSGENDER, though (31A: Taking on a new identity, in a way). First, the part of speech seems off, but let's just say that the clue is being used essentially adjectivally ... OK, fine. The bigger issue is ... is that what TRANSGENDER is? It's not a makeover. It's not "The New You." It's just ... you. You with a gender expression that is different from the one that conventionally corresponds with your sex at birth. I mean, you might come out as TRANSGENDER, and coming out is a kind of "taking on a new identity." But lots of people just *are* TRANSGENDER. It's not a new identity. It's ... their identity. Also, something about the cluing makes being TRANSGENDER seem like dyeing your hair or getting really into cycling or something. I dunno. It's not an offensive clue, and I recognize the trickiness of being accurate and concise and (ideally) clever while cluing a term about which people are understandably sensitive. Still, this one missed a little, for me.

Rex is more forgiving than I am, but my harshness is grounded in my understanding of what the NYT aims to be and my awareness of the extreme consequences that have lately befallen people who've said one thing the wrong way. (I'm thinking of Roseanne and Samantha Bee, but I acknowledge a big difference in that both of them fully intended to be really mean and insulting to a particular individual.)

Let's look at the front end of "feckless c*nt."

I'm only using the asterisk because I know it will literally cost me money (in Google ads) to put the written out "c" word in the post title. My preference would be to write it out, and the whole fuss over it...



... strikes me as stupidly retro, phony feminism. I don't even like "The Vagina Monologues," but, good lord, the "Reclaiming Cunt" scene is hellishly relevant today:

I call it cunt. I’ve reclaimed it, “cunt.” I really like it. “Cunt.” Listen to it. “Cunt.” C C. Ca Ca. Cavern, cackle, clit, cute, come-closed c-closed inside, inside ca-then u-then cu-then curvy, inviting sharkskin u- uniform, under, up, urge, ugh, ugh, u — then n then cun — snug letters fitting perfectly together — n — nest, now, nexus, nice, nice, always depth, always round in upper case, cun, cun-n a jagged wicked electrical pulse-n (high pitched noise) then soft n-warm n — cun, cun, then t — then sharp certain tangy t — texture, take, tent, tight, tantalizing, tensing, taste, tendrils, time, tactile, tell me, tell me “Cunt cunt,” say it, tell me “Cunt.” “Cunt.”

I thought that was a bit coyly old-fashioned when the play first came out in 1996, but apparently Americans still haven't gotten comfortable with "cunt." I've had it with the bullshit puritanism of present-day American politics. If you can call someone an "asshole," you should be able call them a "cunt," but it's just too easy in social media to latch onto a word, to snatch the "cunt," grab that pussy, and see if you can destroy somebody today.

Well, I wasn't going to say all that, but I did and I mean it. I just wanted to give some attention to the "feckless" part. Why "feckless"? It's not a common word. To ask the question is to have the answer pop immediately into your head. Perhaps Samantha Bee already revealed the reason for "feckless." I don't know. I didn't listen to her routine. I don't even like her. She annoys me. Too much loud sassy politics that assumes you're on a particular side. I'm so bored with that. But I did a google search to see if my understanding of the reason for "feckless" was right, and I can see that many others have arrived in the same place:



"Feckless" stands in for "fuckless." And that does deserve a feminist swat. To use "fuckless cunt" as an insult means that you think that a vagina that does not receive the male organ is a pathetic, lesser place that the one that gets the male organ inserted even in the least loving satisfying way. The cunt should get fucked or it's totally worthless. That's just horrible feminism, Samantha Bee. Just apologize for "feckless."

In case you're wondering what the fuck "feck" even is that we should feel bad about the lack of it, it's just another way to say "effect." So to be "feckless" is to be lame, without effect. Obviously, there's no reason to say that about Ivanka.

But wait! Ivanka is powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.

I like Samantha Bee a lot, but she is flat wrong to call Ivanka a cunt.

Cunts are powerful, beautiful, nurturing and honest.

— Sally Field (@sally_field) May 31, 2018

"In some ways, it’s never been easier to be a political comedian: the Trump jokes write themselves."

"In other ways, though, it’s never been harder: amid all the absurdity, the most consequential issues imaginable are at stake," writes New Yorker editor David Redneck...

Damn you, autocorrect.

That's New Yorker editor  David Remnick, writing in email pushing me to read various articles about "comedians who are helping us to understand and survive the chaos." They've got something about Samantha Bee, whose political satire is, we're told, “slash-and-burn” (which sounds like more chaos) and something about John Oliver, who, we're told, is "cable’s king of catharsis" (catharsis cures chaos?).

I'm interested in this idea that it's easy to do comedy now because "the Trump jokes write themselves," because I was just reading "SNL’s Toothless Trump Schtick Is Tired as Hell/After a record-breaking, Emmy-winning season, ‘Saturday Night Live’ is struggling to get laughs with its unimaginative Trump-bashing skits." 

That's by Matt Wilstein in The Daily Beast — published 2 days ago and thus not taking account of the Trump-bashing cold open on last night's show. Wilstein is particularly critical of comedy writing that is "barely an exaggeration of what the real Trump said during a speech a day earlier" (like when Alec Baldwin's comic Trump told the mayor of San Juan, "I don’t know if you know this, but you’re on an island in the water, the ocean water, big ocean, with fishies and bubbles and turtles that bite," after real Trump had said, "This is an island surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water").

Last summer, before Baldwin had started playing Trump, author Malcolm Gladwell used another iconic SNL impression—Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin—to denounce what he viewed as the show’s “toothless” satire problem. Like Baldwin, Fey would often just repeat what Palin had actually said for comic effect. “They want the laugh, so they make fun of the way she talks,” Gladwell said on his podcast. “But the way she talks is not the problem.” The same could be said for Baldwin’s Trump.

And that’s the same critique that John Oliver levied this week on Late Night with Seth Meyers, albeit without naming Baldwin or SNL. “It’s easy to do bad comedy, because you just need to repeat what he says,” Oliver said. “And that’s not a joke, that’s repetition. Whereas comedy, especially if you want to try to do something that’s not just happening online all the time, is an effort.”

If it's easy, you're doing it wrong. That seems to be the proposition.

What I'd say is: Those who want to do anti-Trump humor need to understand that Trump himself is a comedian. I'm not saying Trump is just a clown, and it's crazy that we made a clown President. I'm saying, whatever his worth as human being carrying out the duties of the presidency, he is also a comic talent, with many humorous insights, great timing, and — like the greatest comedians — he's challenging us to see what's funny and what's serious as he mixes it up and causes anxiety that we can relieve if we climb out of the ocean of confusion and onto the island of laughter.

You don't have to like any given comedian, and a comedian who wields tremendous political power is going to fail to amuse most people. In fact, whatever your politics, you're not going to be a very funny comedian if you just think of the President as a wonderful humorist and laugh at his jokes. But you should understand the way in which he means to be funny and project yourself into the minds of the many people who do respond to his humor. You should do this, not because he deserves respect, but because it's the foundation for writing better humor yourself.

If you've been finding it easy to make fun of Trump, you are not working hard enough. It's like trying to write a brief in a hard legal case and believing your adversary's arguments are just stupid. You'd better understand the way they make sense and the thinking of the people who might hear these arguments as cogent or you're not doing it right.

Samatha Bee, self-consolation, and the smug liberal problem.

CNN's "State of the Union" today began with a clip from Trump's Harrisburg rally (which took place last night, the same night as the White House Correspondents Dinner):

TRUMP: As you may know, there's another big gathering taking place tonight in Washington, D.C. Did you hear about it? A large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom in our nation's capital right now.

Consoling each other. Very funny.

And then the first guest on the show is Samantha Bee, who had an alternative event last night, called "Not the White House Correspondents Association Dinner," which was... what?

JAKE TAPPER: The not -- not the -- not -- your dinner, not the other on... Not the White House Correspondents Dinner. And, more largely, what do you see as the role of comedy in the Trump era?

SAMANTHA BEE: Well, you know, I mean, listen, we -- we mostly do the show for ourselves. We just need catharsis. We need catharsis. We need a place to kind of analyze things in a different way. We need to see -- we see things through a different filter. We just need to break it down for ourselves in a way that we can understand.

Ah! In other words, you were consoling each other. Trump got it right.

Then, Tapper brought up a Ross Douthat column from last September, "Hillary Clinton's Samantha Bee Problem":

What would it take for Samantha Bee to apologize for saying that the people at CPAC have "Nazi hair"?

It would take the sheer happenstance that one of the photographs shown as she said "Nazi hair, Nazi hair, Nazi hair" was of a woman man with stage 4 cancer.

Oh! The poor politico whose speech — written by The Daily Show's Lizz Winstead — gets called "The most painful speech ever" by Politico.

My heart — which, I must say, contains an element of palpable bitchery — goes out to Democratic Congresswoman Donna Edwards, who had a text, probably a fine text that would have killed if delivered with the intensity and commitment — the passion and intrigue — of a Daily Shower like Samantha Bee.



Now, Donna Edwards is to be mocked — on Politico! — because the nitwits in the audience couldn't get jokes like: "Come on, help me y’all: I want to give a really special shout out to Nancy Pelosi and all my sisters in the libido caucus — holla'!"

"I am a child of the 1970s. What that means, in short, is that my childhood summer vacations were spent..."

"... languishing in front of the TV watching Phil Donahue and eating Boo Berry until my skin turned purple. Nobody cared if I read. Nobody cared if I wore sunscreen, or pants. I was like a house cat; my parents barely even knew if I was still living with them or whether I had moved in with the old lady down the street who would put out a bowl of food for me. In the '70s, parenting was like a combination of intense crate-training and rumspringa, so I would typically spend June through September burnt to a crisp and wandering listlessly around the city, verging on scurvy."

Writes Samantha Bee, who's now got 3 little kids and is tired of today's overachieving "tiger mother" style of parenting.

I did my childhood summers in the 1950s and 60s, and I can tell you my parents did not get the slightest bit involved in my activities. There was a community pool that we had tags to get into if we felt like going. We had bikes. What we did with these things was entirely up to us, and there wasn't a word of criticism if we chose to watch TV all day or a hint of praise if we read books or went outside. My parents never made the slightest show of putting any effort into good parenting. Looking back, I can discern that they had some principles that they stuck to, but these principles were things like self-reliance and personal autonomy, so it was hard to notice, and they didn't pontificate about these principles, which I'm only inferring they had.