"Immediately following the story’s publication, John and Cindy McCain both lied to the American people."

Wrote Steve Schmidt, quoted in "Former Top McCain Aide Says He Lied to Discredit a Times Article/'John McCain’s lie became mine,' Steve Schmidt wrote about Senator John McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist" (NYT).

Defending his long silence on the matter, Mr. Schmidt said in his post that he “didn’t want to do anything to compromise John McCain’s honor.” His post then questioned Mr. McCain’s judgment in choosing the relatively unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate and accused Mr. McCain of cowering before her — “terrified of the creature that he created,” he wrote. 

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Schmidt said he was motivated to speak up now in part because he felt he had been unfairly associated for nearly 15 years with Mr. McCain’s choice of Ms. Palin, which he called “a burden.”

Speaking of honor, you should have unburdened yourself while the man you accuse of lying was still alive. Now, it looks like you just can't get enough of kicking Sarah Palin around. Go away.

Winking at Room Rater — with 4 pineapples.

We have 4 count ‘em 4 pineapples for #TeamSchmidt pic.twitter.com/Oit7IvCh3k

— Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom) May 22, 2020

Flowers in the sewer — the misogyny of the disgust for Bill Clinton's lover.

On "Meet the Press" today, Chuck Todd was interviewing Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta:

CHUCK TODD: Is your goal of this debate is to get under his skin? Is that why you gave Mark Cuban a ticket right in the front row?

JOHN PODESTA: No, I think Mark Cuban is one of the business leaders who was never involved in partisan politics who's endorsed Hillary because he thinks she'll do better for the-- for the economy. I think that, you know, you saw his reaction, which is to do his favorite sport, which is to dive in the sewer and go for a swim.

Trump's reaction, you remember, was "Perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!" Now, I have a feminist problem with Trump's remark, one that I haven't seen anyone else notice, and that is the idea that he can "put" the woman where he likes. Flowers is a person, not an object — like a vase of flowers — but Flowers has already responded positively to the notion of getting placed in front of Hillary.*

So let me move on to the feminist problem I have with what Podesta said. He says the name, Mark Cuban, and vaunts him as a business leader who is above politics, but he won't say the name of the woman and he speaks of her as a creature of the sewer.

Todd pushes him: "You said-- you referred to diving into the sewer, so you believe that inviting Gennifer Flowers is diving into the sewer?" And Podesta has the smarts to resist further disrespecting the woman. But later, there's a panel, and one of the participants is Stephanie Cutter (who was Obama's deputy campaign manager in 2012 and who helped John Kerry prepare for debates in 2004). Todd asks her about "the idea of gamesmanship, which is the Clinton Campaign deciding to put Mark Cuban in the front row," and the response had me shouting at the TV:

STEPHANIE CUTTER: ... What Clinton and Trump are doing are trying to throw each other off their game. The difference is Hillary Clinton is doing it with a legitimate businessman, also, a celebrity. And as John Podesta put it earlier on your show, Trump is just jumping right down in the sewer and swimming in it by inviting Gennifer Flowers.

The man is "legitimate," and the woman is a "sewer."

Chuck Todd turned to another panelist, Steve Schmidt (a senior adviser to John McCain in 2008).

STEVE SCHMIDT: [The tactic of inviting Cuban] was clearly designed to provoke Donald Trump and it provoked Donald Trump, it provoked Donald Trump into going down the Gennifer Flowers rabbit hole....

The Gennifer Flowers rabbit hole?! Don't call a woman a "hole." Don't speak of a human being as a lower animal, a rodent. Whatever these people want to say about Trump, they should say it about Trump, but they instinctively jumped to express disgust toward the woman — who's really just a bystander to the pre-debate mind-games. Is this misogyny? The argument that it is not depends on the idea that the disgust is with sexuality — what happens when the man and the woman — Bill and Gennifer — get together and not with the woman herself. But the instinct — in both Podesta and Cutter — was to take the man out of the picture. Bill, like Mark Cuban, is legitimate. That horrible woman over there should be treated as a nonentity — down in a hole, there in the excrement, a rodent, a filthy pest. Anyone who would name her or treat her with equal dignity has himself fallen down into the sewer with her — "swimming in it," swimming in shit.

Being on the side of the female candidate does not absolve you of misogyny. It blinds you to it. 
_____________________________

* The full tweet is: "If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to sit in the front row, perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!" You can see that Cuban's autonomy is respected in the word "wants." What does Cuban want to do? By contrast, Flowers can be put where Trump wants.

"Donald Trump is emasculating Jeb Bush."

An interesting thesis by GOP strategist Steve Schmidt.

And a convenient place for me to drop an observation of mine. Trump seems hyper-masculine in some ways, but quite feminine in others. For one thing, those hand gestures — fingers up, palms out, wave-y wave-y. The accompanying effusive speech — "a big, beautiful, powerful wall," etc. etc. etc.

ADDED: Go ahead. Try to imitate Trump. What do you find yourself doing? Not just the "jazz hands," but don't you push out your chest and jiggle along with your over emphatic words? Mixed in, there's the super-macho scowling, pushed out lower lip, and gruff voice — screaming overcompensation.

"So you dislike Democrats as much as you dislike the GOP?"

Details asks Woody Harrelson (who played Steve Schmidt in that movie about Sarah Palin, "Game Change")"

It's all synchronized swimming to me. They all kneel and kiss the ring. Who's going to take on the oil industry or the medical industry? People compare Obama to Lyndon Johnson, but I think a better comparison is between Obama and Nixon. Because Nixon came into office saying he was going to pull out of Vietnam, and then he escalated the war. A lot of us were led to believe that Obama was the peace president, but there are still, I think, 70,000 troops in Afghanistan. Corporations like Grumman are so powerful that—I don't know, is this the kind of shit we want to talk about? It's making me depressed.

"He can be a serious presidential candidate because he represents a segment of Republicanism that hasn’t had a voice."

"But he can’t just be a neater package of his dad — that won’t work. He needs to convey his own domestic and foreign vision, and continue to overcome the kook factor, which he inherited."

Tom Brokaw's bizarre idea of what fairness required.

Steve Schmidt and David Axelrod were on "Meet the Press" this morning, and they spewed talking points and evaded the questions asked by Tom Brokaw. Here's the best example of that:

MR. BROKAW: Let me just share with you what The Wall Street Journal had to say about the opening statements of your two candidates at the debate the other night.

"The debate took place amid the backdrop of the financial crisis, and perhaps most disappointing was how neither man seemed to have anything useful to say about it. ... What neither man showed was any real insight about our financial market issues, or any political courage in offering a solution."

Are you going to have to go back and replate [sic] your economic program, Mr. Axelrod, going forward, because of the changed conditions that result--as a result of this bailout program?

MR. AXELROD: Well, first of all, I don't accept the premise of the Journal piece. The fact is that Senator Obama's been warning for a year and a half about this crisis--about the possibility of such a crisis because of the lack of oversight and greed on Wall Street... But the decisions we make are to prioritize, and this is what Senator Obama said that night, are to prioritize the middle class. What was phenomenal about that debate was that in 40 minutes on the economy, Senator McCain never once mentioned the middle class, never talked about the struggles people are going through. We need to create an economic recovery plan that puts at its core the middle class in this country.

MR. SCHMIDT: Well, Tom, you know, this was a debate about national security, about foreign policy. You never heard the word victory from Senator Obama when it came to wars this country's fighting. But we did talk about the middle class.....

Translation: The Wall Street Journal is absolutely right! The candidates have no real insight about our financial market issues and no political courage in offering a solution.

I'm skipping all the other blah blah blah, which you can read at the link. It's about Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, al Qaeda, etc. Then Brokaw ends the interview like this:

MR. BROKAW: In fairness to everybody here, I'm just going to end on one note, and that is that we continue to poll on who's best equipped to be commander in chief, and John McCain continues to lead in that category despite the criticism from Barack Obama by a factor of 53 to 42 percent in our latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

Gentlemen, thank you very much. I wish we could spend the rest of the day talking about these issues. But you're invited back, and I hope you'll make your second appearance right here on MEET THE PRESS.

What? Why was it a matter of "fairness to everybody here" to end the debate with a thudding, unanswered poll result? At the end of a discussion in which both candidates were perfectly well represented by their mouthpieces, Brokaw thought fairness required him to say, essentially, "Well, the American people still think McCain is much better on these questions."

Brokaw began the discussion by saying "We're not going to get into this business about who won and lost the debate." He made a point of not presenting Schmidt and Axelrod with poll numbers on that subject. And none of his other questions were based on polls, nor did Schmidt and Axelrod bring up any polls. So why did Brokaw end like that?

My guess? Inside NBC, they are fretting about criticism that they show favoritism toward Obama, so Brokaw thought it might help to lob out a glaring hunk of McCain favoritism. Sorry! That just looked really weird. Consequently, it reinforced the perception that NBC favors Obama.

UPDATE: I was right!