20 minutes of movie trailers — yes, I went to the movies — left me feeling utterly creeped out by Hollywood.

This is what I was forced to look at before getting to see what I'd paid to see (and which ended up putting me in the worst mood for seeing what I'd come to see):







Notice how they all have strong female characters at the center but everything is paranoid, violent, and sexual. This is what Hollywood gives me? I felt like I was dragged into the mind of one of the sexually abusing Hollywood producers. Of course, the actresses do what they are told, and I, the little person in the dark, passively sit there watching this fantasy. I'm free to leave. Why don't I?

With trailers, you keep thinking this is almost over, and the actual movie will start next. But the trailers went on and on and I watched and judged. Hollywood is sick. Evil. Corrupting our soul.

Then the movie I came to see started (after the short film about how we're not supposed to talk and we ought to look out for our personal belongings (thieves slithering along the floor, presumably, or so I thought, paranoically)).

The movie was "I, Tonya," which brimmed with domestic violence. Not only did Nancy Kerrigan get slammed in the knee with a police baton in that one famous incident, but Tonya Harding got smacked around in dozens of unfamous incidents. From the screenplay:

He’d beat the living hell outta me. And I thought it was my fault. Look, Nancy gets hit one time — and the whole world shits. For me, it was an all the time occurrence.

Why am I sitting here watching a woman getting abused? I've heard that in crowded theaters, there's lots of laughter. That led one reviewer to say:

Give Harding a redemptory arc and humanize her character? I can get behind that. The thing that’s harder to champion is the way I, Tonya sets about doing it. For, you see, the path it takes is akin to watching an R-rated, live-action Looney Tunes cartoon. It is casual violence, domestic abuse, misogyny and psychological torment wrapped up in goofy frivolity. The perpetrators? Clownish buffoons with bruised fists. Wise-cracking Gorgons who will throw a kitchen knife at you if you step out of line. Portraits of the lowest socioeconomic class painted in broad, chaotic colors so that we’re programmed to laugh at their exploits, no matter how brutal and disgusting they end up being presented as actual humans.

The film wants to have its own cake and eat it, too. Midway through, Margot Robbie’s Tonya looks us directly in the eye (because the Brechtian breaking of the fourth wall is one of the film’s central conceits) and tells us outright that we’re complicit in the abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) because of our lurid fascination with the media coverage. But, wait. Weren’t we just doing the very thing that she calls us out on? Weren’t we just getting a kick out of the seamy details of Tonya’s domestic life, set to various needle drops of popular ‘70s and ‘80s radio hits?

Yeah, well, I didn't feel complicit. I felt distanced and sensitized to the insensitivity to violence, and, anyway, there was no crowd in my theater, so there was no laughing all around me to give the place a jaunty comic feeling that would then make me susceptible to getting called out as complicit.

"Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country."

"Never said 'take them out.' Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings - unfortunately, no trust!"

Tweets Donald Trump, just now.

Earlier this morning, there is this series of tweets:

The so-called bipartisan DACA deal presented yesterday to myself and a group of Republican Senators and Congressmen was a big step backwards. Wall was not properly funded, Chain & Lottery were made worse and USA would be forced to take large numbers of people from high crime.....

....countries which are doing badly. I want a merit based system of immigration and people who will help take our country to the next level. I want safety and security for our people. I want to stop the massive inflow of drugs. I want to fund our military, not do a Dem defund....

....Because of the Democrats not being interested in life and safety, DACA has now taken a big step backwards. The Dems will threaten “shutdown,” but what they are really doing is shutting down our military, at a time we need it most. Get smart, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made - a big setback for DACA!

Sadly, Democrats want to stop paying our troops and government workers in order to give a sweetheart deal, not a fair deal, for DACA. Take care of our Military, and our Country, FIRST!

So was the quote we were all hyperventilating about last night fake news?!

Why don't the news reports now include the fact that he has denied the quote? It's especially interesting that the NYT is printing the word "shithole," in full, repeatedly, when, as recently as 2 days ago, it was being coy about the line "suck my dick" in the movie "I, Tonya." It was writing things like "she gets frustrated and gives them an obscene directive involving male anatomy" and "'Monica Lewinsky?' she asked, incredulous, using a modified version of the same obscene phrase involving male anatomy that she had just said she would never use."

If it's that hard to write dirty words, why didn't the NYT exercise more care before assuming that this word was really said? You'd think the pressure to avoid fake news would also be weighing on decisions like this.

And has the NYT asked the other people who were in the room? Here are the names: Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the majority leader; Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia; Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas; and Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. [ANSWER: Yes. And none would comment.]

Has any of these men come forward to confirm that Trump said what the NYT is reporting he said? Has the NYT called them? I guess they'd all say they're in a situation where they owe it to each other to keep a confidential meeting secret. But the President himself is talking about what was said, and I'm at the point of presuming that if no one who was there steps up and contradicts him, it means they are agreeing with him. So if someone who was there would say, the President really said it (or something like it), then they need to say so now, or I'm going to believe the President.

UPDATE: Senator Durbin speaks:

“In the course of his comments, [Trump] said things that were hate-filled, vile and racist,” Durbin told reporters on Friday. “I cannot believe in this history of the White House, in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday.”...

“You’ve seen the comments in the press,” Durbin said. “I’ve not seen one of them that’s inaccurate. To no surprise, the president started tweeting this morning, denying that he used those words. It is not true. He said these hate-filled things, and he said them repeatedly.”

That's a little cagey, dependent on what he's actually "seen" and what it means to say it's "inaccurate."

Please, reporters, if you are not doing this already, confront Durbin with the quote that has been in the press, and ask him: Did Trump say those specific words, verbatim? Can you confirm that is a verbatim quote?

Durbin is forefronting his interpretation: "things that were hate-filled, vile and racist." That's what's in Durbin's mind. (I don't accept that calling a country a "shithole" means that you have hatred toward the people or that you are racist toward them.)

UPDATE 2: Cotton and Perdue say they don't "recall" hearing the "shithole" statement. Why wouldn't they be sure? You'd think the line would stick out and be totally memorable... unless —— political guys talk like that a lot in private.

"I hated the word 'feminine.' It reminded me of a tampon or a panty liner."

Said Tonya Harding, whose "sin" — as the NYT puts it — "was not being the Disney princess Barbie doll that the Figure Skating Association demanded of its skaters."

The NYT article is "Tonya Harding Would Like Her Apology Now/In the movie, 'I, Tonya,' the disgraced figure skater looks back on the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan scandal and her struggles to tell her side of the story" by — what a spectacular name! — Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

“You all disrespected me and it hurt. I’m a human being and it hurt my heart,” she said, her hand karate chopping the table lightly with every word for emphasis. “I was a liar to everybody but still, 23 years later, finally everybody can just eat crow. That’s what I have to say.”

Yes, but the world is different now, I tell her.... Look at Monica Lewinsky and how we treated her. Just yesterday I saw maybe the seventh essay comparing her with you, how rough the 90s were on women who needed support and ——

“Monica Lewinsky?” she asked, incredulous, using a modified version of the same obscene phrase involving male anatomy that she had just said she would never use.* “In the Oval Office! You don’t think that there’s something wrong with that? She disrespected the country.”

But you were both so young, I said. And the press was so hard on you before they’d heard the full ——

Stop it, she said. Don’t compare her to Monica Lewinsky. She is nothing like Monica Lewinsky, she said. Tonya wasn’t making mistakes like a privileged person who gets an internship at the White House....

I'm interested in Brodesser-Akner's use of the double em-dash. That would look crazy to me, but I recently read — in "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen " — that Charles Dickens had a penchant for the double em dash:

In Dickens I discovered something unexpected: an abundance of double dashes— two-em dashes, closed up. “Gaffer! If you think to get rid of me this way——” He uses the double dash in dialogue, to convey an interruption compounded by a threat. The double dash is strangely expressive, packing an extra dose of suspense, as if the speaker, rendered inarticulate by emotion, were resorting to his fists. And, when you think about it, suspense is what punctuation is all about: how is the author going to finish the sentence?

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* Earlier in the article, we're told that in the movie, there's a scene with Tonya confronting skating judges, showing that "she gets frustrated and gives them an obscene directive involving male anatomy. Never happened, she said. 'I would never say that.'" I guess I could look up the movie dialogue. The "obscene directive" must be "Blow me." Or is it "suck my dick"? Oh! I looked it up. It's "suck my dick." Here's Vulture, "A Fact-checked Guide to I, Tonya":

Did Tonya tell a judge to “suck my dick” after the judge criticized her outfit? No. [the actress playing Harding, Margot] Robbie said in a late-night interview that the line was made up, but that when Harding saw the movie, she apparently wished she had said it. Harding did, however, tell the judge who criticized her outfit that unless she could come up with $5,000 to buy Harding a new costume she could “stay out of my face.”