I'm saying it's sexist because of the line: "All these tech nerds that want to build robots because they don’t know how to talk to hot women." This is the kind of sexism you used to hear all the time half a century ago. A negative personality trait — or even just an interest in science or a hobby — would be attributed to a failure to have sexual intercourse. People with very little comic talent would think they were witty to say things like "You need to get laid."
I heard Tim Dillon — who's kind of my favorite comedian — make a similar joke on his podcast that came out on March 13th: "Now I understand there's man children out there that wanna fly rockets to Mars because they can't fly their penis into a vagina."
Did Burr just steal Dillon's joke, sanitize it, and run over to talk about it with the "hot women" on "The View"?!
A funny subheadline at the NYT — funny because if she's just going on Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and "The View," Harris is still avoiding interviews. That those are the 3 interviews the NYT names makes it obvious.
Most of them? Who's the unfriendly interviewer she dares to face? I am really appalled by the timidity. She needs to prove she's strong and can stand up for us.
I noticed that article because I went looking for Kamala Harris articles on the front page of the New York Times. You'd think she'd make more news!
There's also this Susan Faludi thing at the top of the right hand column, sitting atop a musing about celibacy:
So let's stare slack-jawed and cross-eyed at a rose. Mmmm. America's protector, eh?
Yeah, that kind of was my question about Kamala Harris when I saw that she dared to speak to Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and the hosts of "The View."
So let's see if Susan Faludi makes the case for KH as a protector. Much of that column is generic: Women have not, traditionally, been regarded as the protector. Some of it is an attack on Trump. Let's skip to something specific about Harris:
If I understood correctly, this show consists of her and Chelsea getting together with some other celebrity mother and daughter — e.g., Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson — and all 4 of them getting "out of their comfort zone" by doing something they hadn't done before. How far out of your comfort zone is a particular dance when you have danced or a particular soup when you have made soup?
They do move on to the serious topic of the documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid. Hillary is sharp and substantive, avoiding the display of animus toward Trump. Asked if she thinks he will be indicted, she says: "I don't want to judge. I've been prejudged — wrongly — enough."
She wants to know how it was possible that these documents could have been moved to Mar-a-Lago, when they were in a category that, when she was Secretary of State, she would read in a secured room, supervised by a person who carried the document in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. I wrote "when they were" and not "if they were" only because that's how she spoke.
"What, exactly, was different about this one? Is warmed-over critical theory prohibited now? And why does anyone care?... The View is a talk show, and a particularly stupid one to boot.... I simply do not understand the mechanism by which viewers are supposed to be damaged in some way by watching an actress make mistakes on live TV....
In its statement, ABC insisted that 'the culture at ABC News is one that is driven, kind, inclusive, respectful, and transparent.' Okay... [but] Goldberg’s only crime was 'being wrong in public' — an eventuality that is all-but guaranteed to arise when we televise spontaneous political debate. Why have such productions if we intend to police them like this? Bit by bit, and mob by mob, we are destroying our open culture and the organizations that we have constructed to serve it."
The link on "critical theory" goes to an Andrew Sullivan tweet:
"Goldberg's basic point is classic CRT: if it's 'white people' vs 'white
people,' i.e. Jews, it cannot be racism."
The link on "particularly stupid one" goes to Cooke's own article,
"Whoopi Goldberg’s Nonsensical Abortion Rant." In response to Justice
Alito's statement that "the fetus has an interest in having a life and
that doesn’t change... from the point before viability to the point
after viability," Goldberg had said: "How dare you talk about
what a fetus wants? You have no idea." Sample comment from Cooke: "Is
she arguing that, as a rule, unborn children might be suicidal, and that
abortion is doing them a favor?"
At the same time, the anti-Trump conservative can’t be seen as too chummy with the other co-hosts, as the network’s market-research shows that the audience wants to see the women spar. Sources said that this has hurt the chances of ANA NAVARRO.... It doesn’t help that there’s a perception that whoever sits in the conservative host slot is on borrowed time, with prominent Republican former co-hosts like NICOLLE WALLACE, ELIZABETH HASSELBECK, ABBY HUNTSMAN and [Meghan] McCain leaving the show with claims of being bullied by their co-hosts and ABC executives on-set and off, while veterans like [Whoopi] Goldberg and [Joy] Behar have thrived.
Sources said that the show was eager to recruit young libertarian KAT TIMPF, but she turned them down because of the show’s reputation for treating conservatives poorly and her contract with Fox....
How is a libertarian right for the Republican Party position? I don't watch the show, but it seems to me that the problem is they've got a panel with 3 on one side and only 1 on the other. There should be 2 to oppose the 3 — at least. Or make it 2 to 2. Have a libertarian and a conservative Republican. Why wouldn't that make a better show (unless bullying the outsider really is the narrative)?
Says "Whoopi Goldberg"/Leslie Jones in an "SNL" spoof of "The View." The impersonations are pretty good, especially Jones and Kate McKinnon as Joy Behar. They're talking about the border crisis:
I also enjoyed Aidy Bryant as Meghan McCain: “Can I just say something? As the princess of Arizona, there is a crisis at the border, and the border is right up in my Arizona, which was founded on sunburned women selling turquoise jewelry, not rando Mexicans. And that’s not racist, because my makeup artist is gay."
Here's the actual "View" incident that "SNL" is spoofing (I'd skip you to 2:30 to get to the good part but then you'd miss how long McCain talked before Behar got her chance):
Side note: Ana Navarro isn't in the real view clip, but she's in the "SNL" skit, where her annoyingness is well depicted.
"And if I don’t enter a primary, my job is to make certain that the best Democrat becomes the nominee and whoever wins the primary that we make sure that person gets elected in 2020."
"... which is an apt characterization of Kim Jong Un’s domestic political situation. But I don’t expect denizens of The View to get this," writes Glenn Reynolds after a "View" co-host, Sarah Haines, characterizes "Rocket Man" as a "phallic reference to masculine dominance." Watch the video at the link to catch the comic inflections and to experience the byplay with the other Viewsters.
Haines is taking the position that Trump's calling Kim Jong Un "Rocket Man" was "a smart move," because "If you think of Putin and you think of Kim Jong Un and you think of Donald Trump they love these phallic references to masculine dominance." That is, these men don't just enjoy talking about their phallus, they experience power as a phallic, making them vulnerable to taunts that call their masculinity into play.
It's really a very obvious observation of a sort that I've heard all my life. In "The Number of the Beast" (1980), Robert A. Heinlein wrote:
"No, she's absolutely right," said Zeb, patting the enormous pistol at his hip. "This is a penis substitute. After all, if I could kill at a range of thirty meters with my penis, I wouldn't need to carry this thing around, now would I?"
Guns, cannons, swords, daggers... they're all penises.
After all, most of them are vaguely phallic (any object longer than it is wide = phallic), they penetrate human flesh, and killing people is a sign of virility. In the case of guns, they even "ejaculate" bullets, while swords tend to have a suggestive shape, guard positions where the hilt is held crotch height, and thrusting attacks. Even better if they are combined (bayonets on guns are the simplest applications of this, as well as any syringe-like weapon).
Glenn's taunt, aimed at the "View" women is "EVER SINCE TRUMP APPEARED, LATENT PHALLOPHOBIA HAS BECOME BLATANT PHALLOPHOBIA." If a nuclear weapon is the phallic symbol, the fear is justified and not a phobia. I don't think anyone has an exaggerated, unrealistic fear of a nuclear weapon because of its resemblance to a phallus. And it is realistic to think about how sexuality affects political and military decisionmaking. The women on "The View" handle the subject in a very fast-moving, light-hearted way, but it's a serious topic, and I think that Donald Trump has chosen to boldly display masculinity and to flaunt his superior masculine weaponry to intimidate Kim Jong Un. In this context, "Rocket Man" does translate — psychologically — into mocking Kim Jong Un for having a small penis. To point that out is not phobia, but straightforward analysis of Trump rhetoric and psychology in foreign relations.
Remember how we laughed at Kim Jong Un when his rockets failed:
Of course, it's phallic. It's phallophobia not to see the phallus aimed straight at your face.
Or does Glenn Reynolds expect us to believe that Trump wanted us to simply fill in the line with "burning out his fuse up there alone." Now, it's certainly true that — at least here in America — we associate Kim Jong Un with loneliness...
... and, sure, let's give Trump credit for needling Kim about his pathetic loneliness as well as his small penis — it's a taunt, and taunts can be multidimensional — but the line "burning out his fuse up there alone" has always been hard to hear. I listened to the song a hundred times without understanding the line, which eventually I read or... I don't know... heard William Shatner enunciate the hell out of...
Key phrase: I'm not the man they think I am at home....
That's self-doubt about masculinity. If we can imagine Kim Jong Un thinking through Bernie Taupin's lyrics, the "they" is the North Korean people, brainwashed to believe in Kim's greatness. But if he's Rocket Man, that's not enough. He knows he's not that man at all.
... Trump attended Fordham for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took economics courses at its famed Wharton School. (According to a book by Gwenda Blair, Trump was allowed to transfer into the Ivy League school because of family connections, and has exaggerated his performance at Penn.)
Let's see the transcripts! I won't say that all candidates should always show us the transcript, but there is special reason to make this demand of Trump:
1. Trump made a huge deal out of Obama's birth certificate. He's a show-me-the-documentation guy. Here he is in 2011:
2. Trump seems to enjoy saying that John McCain was last in his class at Annapolis, and he blithely equates class standing with intelligence: "Graduated last in his class at Annapolis--dummy!"
4. Trump wanted to see Obama's college transcripts: "I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?... I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get into Harvard... We don't know a thing about this guy. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president."
5. As you can see from the quote in #4, Trump relied on the argument that a degree from a fine school doesn't mean so much if you got in through race-based affirmative action, and Trump himself is accused — in that Gwenda Blair book cited above and discussed at the link in #4 — of getting into Penn through wealth-based affirmative action. Let him disprove that by showing the Fordham transcripts.
6. There's some criticism of Trump that he "allowed the media to report that he graduated first in his class from Wharton," but "the commencement program from 1968 does not list him as graduating with honors of any kind." I don't know how much the inaction of "allowing" the media to report flattering untruths should count against Trump. It's the media's job to get things right, but there's some relevance to the point made at #3.
"ABC has begun doing deep research on Jenny's work on the show and the initial findings are that viewers want to tune out the second she opens her mouth!" a production source told Radar.
Here's Bob Woodward, today on "Fox News Sunday," talking about the what the Obama administration has said about the Benghazi attacks:
WOODWARD: There are lots of unanswered questions. And I love documents, and they released some documents in this, and if you go and look at the original request for more security, they say our policy, our goal here is to shift from an emergency footing to normalize the security relationship.
Now, this is in March, six, seven months ago. Anyone looking at that what say, wait a minute, read the document in which they say, oh, the situation is incredibly unstable. Well, why are you trying to normalize your security in a situation that's visibly unstable? You even acknowledge that.
So you've got a bad policy. And anyone looking at that would say, wait a minute; we are screwed up; we can't normalize here.
Let's look at all the statements, in order. On the 12th, we were told that what happened in Libya was "clearly a complex attack." On the 13th, there was the muddying swirl about "protests taking place in different countries across the world that are responding to the movie that has circulated on the Internet." Note that doesn't specify the murder of the ambassador in Libya.
Then, on the 16th, we heard Susan E. Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, stolidly deliver the talking points on "Face the Nation":
“Based on the best information we have to date ... it began spontaneously...
What's the scope of "it"?
... in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.... We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”
So there first thing that happened was the video-related protests, and then others joined in, but we don't know whether they did that spur of the moment or if it was planned. "We do not have information" about those"extremist elements, individuals," but we do have "the best information" about things beginning spontaneously.
On the 20th, Jay Carney was saying "It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack," but claiming a lack of info on whether it was "a significantly preplanned attack" and asserting however much it might have been preplanned — what does "pre-" add to "planned"? — it was still "opportunism, taking advantage of and exploiting what was happening as a result of reaction to the video that was found to be offensive." Note the clever merger of the planned attack with the cover provided by the offense taken at the video.
Obama kept stressing the video and avoiding saying "terrorism," though Hillary Clinton called it terrorism on the 21st. Confronted with her statement on the 25th, Obama would only say we're "still doing an investigation, and "it wasn’t just a mob action." That was on "The View."
Yesterday, Carney was asked whether "there any reason why the President did not — he was asked point-blank in The View interview, is this a terrorist attack, yes or no? Is there any reason why he didn’t say yes?" Jeez, "The View" was too tough. Carney said:
“He answered the question that he was asked, and there's no reason that he chose the words he did beyond trying to provide a full explanation of his views and his assessment that we need to await further information that the investigation will uncover. But it is certainly the case that it is our view as an administration, the President’s view, that it was a terrorist attack.”
It's our view and his view, but he wouldn't say it on "The View."
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