Wonkette laughs at the idea of "duct taped Messicans wandering around the desert."

Obviously, Wonkette assumes you know Wonkette is good and the assholes are on the other side:

Mick Mulvaney ran around the Sunday shows to threaten ANOTHER government shutdown if nobody gives Trump a goddamn wall to "defend the nation" from the duct taped Messicans wandering around the desert, and also to threaten an invasion of COMMUNIST Venezuela. Mulvaney boasted that Trump will get his goddamn wall money "with or without Congress," but declined to say who in flyover country would suffer when Trump starts looking for the cash.

I'm seeing a lot of stories questioning Trump's statement on Friday about duct-taped women — "Women are tied up, with duct tape on their faces, put in the backs of vans" — but I wanted something more soberly written. Here's Monica Hesse in WaPo, "Why does the president keep talking about women and duct tape on the border?"

But women are not tied up, experts have said. They do not have tape on their mouths. When Trump repeated this claim a few weeks ago, my colleague Katie Mettler contacted many authorities on trafficking who have spent time at the border, and none of them had seen or heard anything resembling the violence he described.

Nevertheless, there was Trump on Jan. 4, dramatizing the traffickers who “have three or four women with tape on their mouths and tied up, sitting in the back of a van or car.” There he was on Jan. 6: “They nab women, they grab them, they put tape over their mouths.” On Jan. 11: “Taping them up, wrapping tape around their mouths so they can’t shout or scream, tying their hands behind their back and even their legs.”

Sometimes the tape is explicitly duct tape, sometimes it’s electrical. Sometimes it has a specific color, as it did on Jan. 10: “Usually blue tape, as they call it. It’s powerful stuff. Not good.”...

[T]here’s... a purity to the duct-tape anecdotes, in the sense that it describes behavior that’s purely evil. Black and white. Human trafficking, however, is often complicated: women who believe they’re coming to America for a job, for example, that later turns out not to exist.

The women are initially deceived — that makes it complicated? Really, I find that idea more puzzling than the details about tape.

Allegations of sexual assault are also complicated, as the president should know: He’s been accused of assaulting or inappropriately touching 19 women — and while he’s engaged in “locker room talk” suggesting he’s grabbed women, he’s also said his accusers are all lying. He nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and later mocked Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh’s own accuser. He’s mocked the whole #MeToo movement, implying that victims have gone too far.

Sex trafficking is plainly much worse than even the most negative interpretation of what Trump and Kavanaugh are said to have done, and Hesse is not only equating these things, she is buying into the defense that when it comes to sex, you never really knows what goes on in private. I imagine that she might feel that she's only criticizing Trump, but look at the text. She asserted "Allegations of sexual assault are... complicated." Are. Then she shifted to talking about Trump and saying that he "should know." Know. You don't know things that are not true. To say he should know is to say it is true. Hesse sounds upset that Trump has "mocked the whole #MeToo movement," but to my ear, she too is diminishing the movement with this whole it's complicated business.

Now, I see what her point is. She's saying Trump created the especially evil picture so people would know to be angry at something that, portrayed accurately, might make them wonder whether the women are choosing to undergo suffering to get something they want. That is, Trump is lying because that's his motivation to lie. But is Trump lying? What is the true story?

I see this addition to Hesse's story: "Correction: An earlier version of this story cited a misleading statistic about assaults of migrant women. The reference has been removed." Shouldn't a "correction" be the right statistic? I'd like to know how wrong Hesse's original statement was. (Neither Google Cache nor Archive.org found it.)

This column would feel quite different if it nailed down the correct facts and then speculated about why Trump exaggerated. As it stands, I'm still wondering what the truth is, and how close Trump is to it. I see Hesse just giving up on what is true, and that's not the spirit of the #MeToo movement. Hesse engages in that who-really-ever-knows shrugging that rightly enrages those of us who care about rape.

"The defining feature of kitsch is that it preys on our desire to feel art succeed."

"It follows the formula of meaningful expression and exploits our willingness to manufacture the sensation of meaning. How wonderful, after all, to see a painting and be moved. As a species of contemporary kitsch, sarcasm takes advantage of our readiness to respond to actual wit. It, too, is mechanical and proceeds by formula. And online sarcasm is now industrially produced, thanks to the mass quantities of content that digital media must churn out each day. The style of Internet writing often called snark participates in sarcasm, typically by adopting the derisive tone of satire without the complex irony."

Writes Dan Brooks in a NYT article, "Banksy and the Problem With Sarcastic Art." You may not want any help deciding what to think about Banksy's "Dismaland," but, midway through, the discussion becomes "Sarcasm is our kitsch" and the problem with internet sarcasm — the derisive tone of satire without the complex irony.

Brooks gives an example from Wonkette: “George Kornec and Phil Nappo have a mining claim on federal land; they’ve put up a garage and a fence, and the dastardly government is pushing its weight around and being a big bully and being really terrible and stuff by telling Kornec and Nappo to take them down.” Writing like is completely lazy, leaning on the assumption that the reader will already agree that Kornec and Nappo are bad and the government's good.

There’s no insight here to raise this irony to the level of satire. There is only mockery, backed by certainty that the reader shares the author’s contempt. Sarcasm is a natural fit for partisan news aggregators, because it relies on a calculated appeal to shared attitudes.

Kitsch banks heavily on these shared attitudes. It substitutes them for artistic insights, and it relies on its audience’s agreement with them to produce a feeling similar to profundity. Sarcasm works best when people already know what you mean.

As I read Brooks's observations, I'm thinking that the problem is that people are now finding comfort in sarcasm. But sarcasm should feel bad. It should heighten your awareness of what's not right. Now, what can make you aware of what's wrong with low-quality sarcasm? You need to feel revulsion for the sarcasm, not short-cut into the contempt that the sarcasm nudges you to feel.

"Ann Althouse fretting over the phrase 'I’m In'..."/"Funny, she didn't complain last night....."

"But she did say, 'Are you sure?'"/"It won't hurt, did it?"

Comments at Wonkette, after a post by Jesse Taylor mocking me for criticizing the University of Wisconsin for closing down central campus yesterday for an Obama rally which students could attend only if they went to the Obama campaign website, provided email addresses and phone numbers and clicked a button marked "I'm In."

Sexual remarks to tear down a woman? Imagine if conservatives did that to a liberal woman.

SECOND THOUGHTS: I wish I'd reacted a different way and, instead of focusing on insults to me, found a funnier place. When you put the phrase "I'm In" into a sexual context, as those commenters did, the metaphor becomes Obama as the unsatisfied girlfriend who can't even feel the man's love. Within this metaphor, the students who wanted tickets were forced to give what is now perceived at the sexually humiliating affirmation "I'm In."

Film critic writes a book about snark — called (duh!) "Snark" — and there's nothing to do about it, except...

... snark.

First [David Denby] references one of [Wonkette's] male associate editor’s posts about Chelsea Clinton and suggests that the “young women” who wrote it must have some catty jealousy issues, with their vaginas. Then he writes that we made fun of Ted Kennedy on the day of his brain tumor surgery, citing a post about something else entirely that was written seven months before Kennedy even got cancer. Damn those bloggers, always trying to ruin other peoples’ reputations with false information!

Snort.

"Watch These Terrible People Yapping At Each Other."

A Wonkette headline that I tried to read out loud and said: "Watch These Terrible People Lapping At Each Other." Ah, remember the original Wonkette? Everything was sexy somehow. Now... I don't read it enough to know what the point is, other than to make everything sound funny, though in this case the headline has nothing to do with what is supposed to be so hilarious: Al Sharpton is really skinny now.

Rush Limbaugh is skinny now too. He looks like this:



Ironically, Al Franken is quite fat.

Isn't it sweet that Rush posed in front of a picture of his kitty cat's bowl? Does Al Franken have a cat? Google image search suggests no:

"Brian Lamb saying 'misogynist neck-beard'"...

= "nerd Christmas" at Wonkette.

Oh, dictionary! How could you?!

(Via Wonkette.)

"With an endless parade of sexist buffoons and kindly forest-giants to choose from, Barack Obama goes for some dude named Tim Geithner...."

Wonkette is bored.

Did Obama just give McCain the finger (while "congratulating" him)?

Drudge seems to think so. Wonkette thinks Drudge is evil.

"Cuter than Glenn Reynolds, less cute than Markos Moulitsas."

Alex Pareene (of Wonkette) answers the question: "Would you say you're cute? Pretty? Hot? Beautiful?"

Read the whole FishbowlDC interview. Photo of Pareene at the link, so you can decide for yourself what's the true order of cuteness for Glenn, Kos, and Alex. I'll just say that Alex's photo looks like it belongs on the back cover of "Bringing It All Back Home." That's completely distracting me.