Deploying the TR precedent to promote fighting at the White House.

UFC just dropped a killer AI promo for tomorrow’s White House event featuring Theodore Roosevelt boxing 🥊🔥pic.twitter.com/W8wu2yFP6b

— TaraBull (@TaraBull) June 14, 2026

The video, from UFC, quotes from Theodore Roosevelt's idea of "the man in the arena." I've put up the full text of it in the past — here — but it's worth having at your fingertips today, as Trump celebrates his 80th birthday. Does this describe Trump?

Am I the only one who remembers Willie the Worm?

That is a puppet show — on WCAU Philadelphia — that got started in 1950. I myself got started in 1950, in Texas, of all places, but I emerged in January 1951, in the Philadelphia television market, so I had the great good fortune to encounter this simple worm character when I was young enough to get the sense that he was important and well-loved.

It must have been more than a half century since Willie the Worm crossed my mind, but my memory was jogged yesterday as I was walking through the neighborhood with Meade, and we stopped to look at an elaborate yard display that had a sign with the lyric "Whisper words of wisdom" from the Beatles' song "Let It Be." The painted letters were a bit blobby and misshapen, and Meade read it as "Whisper worms of wisdom." My memory whispered the name of that worm of wisdom: "Willie."

I'm so touched to find video of my long-lost childhood friend, the puppet Willie the Worm. But let me acknowledge 2 other Willies the Worm:

"When two fighters fight and one loses, the first thing they do is ask for a debate. Or they ask for a fight. So in this case a debate."

"When a fighter loses, he says: "I want a rematch. I want a rematch." Always the losing person, the fighter, the debater, they always ask for a rematch."

Said Trump, quoted in "Will There Be Another Debate? Trump Isn’t Sure. The former president suggested immediately after the debate and in a call-in to Fox News on Wednesday morning that he was not inclined to agree to another" (NYT).

Immediately after the debate, Harris's campaign said, "Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?"

Being "ready" for a rematch isn't the exactly the same thing as demanding a rematch. I assume both sides are spinning the first debate by saying things about a possible second debate, and they are in the middle of negotiating the terms and generating new material to use to insult each other. 

Why I don't have any hobbies.

I'm reading "Six Underrated Hobbies to Try Out/Picking up a new pastime is no small feat" (The Atlantic). "What is an underrated hobby that you love?" it asks.

I don't think I've ever used the word "hobby" to refer to anything I do. I don't relate to the idea of a "hobby," even though I like to do what I want, what interests me, and I have almost nothing but free time. I don't think of this blog as a hobby and might be annoyed if someone I knew called it that. But maybe I would be better off if I did something that genuinely deserved the label "hobby." I don't consider walking in the woods a hobby. Or reading. Maybe photographing the sunrise every day is a hobby, but this is the first time I've connected it with that word, which, to my ear, sounds diminishing.

So let's check out these 6 things. 1. Collecting animal figurines, 2. Playing video games (why not count watching TV?!), 3. Paraclimbing (climbing for persons with disabilities (I don't think sports are "hobbies")), 4. Boxing (another sport), 5. Making pizza from scratch (cooking can be a hobby), 6. Walking the dog and paying attention to the plants and animals that interest the dog (I'm intrigued by the idea of paying attention as a hobby).

Well, it's Labor Day, and I like thinking of my own personal freedom from labor. I'm not decrepit enough to deserve the word "retired" — if you want to think about words. That has to do with withdrawing or receding, retreating, or falling back. I'm reading the OED. Maybe paying attention to words and looking them up in the OED is my hobby.

Did you know that the original meaning of "hobby" is "A small or middle-sized horse; an ambling or pacing horse; a pony"? That goes back to the 1400s. The meaning we know — which begins in the early 1800s — comes from the idea of riding a toy horse — a "hobby-horse." It's "A favourite occupation or topic, pursued merely for the amusement or interest that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse...; an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker's opinion) out of proportion to its real importance."

When do you look at your own activities and judge your interest in them to be out of proportion to their "real" importance? It seems that if you're going to call something your "hobby," you're embracing the idea that your love of it seems foolish when viewed from the outside. By the same token, if you decline to use the word "hobby" for what you do out of interest and love, you are deprioritizing what other people think.

"We’re Having the Wrong Argument Over the Olympic Boxers/Questions about unfair advantage won’t just go away."

By Helen Lewis, in The Atlantic.

Please read the whole thing before commenting and restrict comments to the issue framed in the article, which I am not going to attempt to summarize. If you don't know what 5ARD is, please don't comment.

ADDED: If you have trouble accessing that article, try "What does science tell us about boxing’s gender row?" (BBC).

"She yelled 'this is unjust' at her corner and slammed her headgear on the canvas as the match in the 66-kilogram division was called off."

From "Imane Khelif, boxer in middle of Olympics gender storm, forces tearful first opponent to quit 46 seconds into fight" (NY Post).

Kamala Harris supports this…

Vote accordingly.

pic.twitter.com/RHJzfrQlvv

— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) August 1, 2024

An absolute travesty at the Olympics.

Angela Carini is forced to box against a biological male. She quits after just 45 seconds, and cries hysterically as her opponent is declared the winner.

Don't look away. This is wokeness. pic.twitter.com/wOkVRs88t5

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 1, 2024

"Well, this article just crossed the line to bloggable for me. They sent out the Althouse signal."

I say, out loud, as I'm reading "Trump Talked as Holyfield Got Pummeled. Just Another Day in Boxing’s Absurd Summer. Of course it was a circus — the kind that makes sense in boxing these days" in the NYT:

Boxing is no stranger to farces, to fights that never should have been approved or to events built much more around absurdity and car crash-like allure than around actual fighting. The entrance of Triller and YouTube stars into boxing over the last year, and the way they have sometimes garnered much more attention than the biggest and best fights — as in articles like this one — could have been an occasion for garment-rending and teeth-gnashing, for fears that this is just what boxing is now.

That garnered my attention. Got my attention, as we say in normal speech. 

But in conversations over the last few months, key people around the sport have mostly focused on the positives. One promoter said he wished his fighters could promote themselves even partially as well as Jake Paul and Logan Paul do. In the grand scheme of things, boxing is just content that can be watched online....

This content — which cost $50 to watch on TV — involved watching a 58-year-old man (Holyfield) lose very quickly and a 75-year-old man — the ex-President of the United States, Donald Trump — do commentary. 

What I wanted from this article was quotes from Trump, but there's only one: "They say there is a lot of people watching. I can’t imagine why."

I can't believe Trump did this for the money. He must have thought he'd reach the right people for his power-seeking purposes. I assume he's got some weird instinctive political genius, so maybe there's some reason why this appearance made sense. At least he wasn't risking permanent brain damage, like that other old man, Evander Holyfield.

How do we know there won't be some dramatically effective 9/11 memorializing at the big fight?

Question: Where is Trump during the 9/11 anniversary ceremony?

Answer: Preparing to do commentary for a boxing match in Florida. pic.twitter.com/tS2Sw63Dxf

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) September 11, 2021

Also, is it racist to accuse Trump of bad taste?

"U.S. Olympic team boxer Virginia Fuchs will face no punishment for failing a doping test after the U.S. Anti-Doping Association determined the violation had been caused by..."

"... two substances transmitted by her boyfriend through sex.... 'While the World Anti-Doping Code requires that this no-fault finding be considered a violation and be publicly announced, we strongly believe this case and others like it, including meat contamination and prescription medication contamination cases, should be considered no violation,' [USADA CEO Travis] Tygart said. 'We will continue to advocate for changes to the World Anti-Doping Code so that where there is no intent to cheat and no performance benefit, an athlete should not face any violation or unnecessary public attention.'"

From "Sex gets Olympic boxer Virginia Fuchs out of doping ban" (NY Post).

Talk in the Raturday Night Café and the Google search it inspired.

Click to enlarge and clarify...



Here's a link to last night's café.

"Marriage is the death of hope" brings up webpages that purport to quote Woody Allen. I'm dubious.

"Marriage is the death of romance" gets me to some boring relationship advice plus the assertion that it's the translation of a Chinese proverb:

I'm dubious. It used to be very common to hear characters on TV (often in ads) say "Ancient Chinese wisdom" (in a fake Chinese accent) followed by something in the form of a proverb (almost always a manifestly fake proverb).

"Marriage is the death of love" gets me to boring relationship advice, some more groping after a Chinese proverb, and a review of a play about Maynard Jackson, "the first African-American mayor of a major U.S. city, elected in Atlanta in 1973":

[Playwright Pearl Cleage has a] sagacious way with words, and epigrammatic pearls like "There's no greater cynic than a failed romantic" (a variation on George Carlin’s "Scratch a cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist"). Later, when Evey recalls an epiphany of self-discovery in Paris, she tells J.P., "Marriage is the death of love."

Ha ha. Scratch me, I'm a failed cynic.

Have you thought about Maynard Jackson recently? Did you know he fought Muhammad Ali?

“The only thing that really worries me is what happens if I hit him, for his sake and for mine as well,” [Mayor] Jackson said.

“[He] will not land one punch in one round, and if he dreamed it, he better wake up and apologize!” Ali responded....

But Jackson won with a technical knockout:

“Those trunks he had saved him because he had them too high.,” Ali told reporters. “I couldn’t hit him low because you’re not supposed to hit below the belt. He came with the trunks up to his breast, therefore I couldn’t hit him in the effective spots ‘cause he’s so big, he’s like a balloon, and if you hit him he’ll bust.”

"I have seen representations of Roman boxing gloves depicted on bronze statues, paintings and sculptures, but to have the privilege of finding two real leather examples is exceptionally special."

"The hairs stand up on the back of your neck when you realise you have discovered something as astonishing as these boxing gloves" (BBC).

"The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs. Taken separately, they’re unacceptable and untenable."

Wrote Barack Obama to his girlfriend Alexandra McNear, in one of the excerpts from letters, dated 1982 to 1984, that were released from the collection at Emory University, reported at WaPo.

“I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups, my American friends consuming their life in the comfortable mainstream, the foreign friends in the international business world,” Obama writes McNear in one letter. “Caught without a class, a structure, or a tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me.”...

“I don’t distinguish between struggling with the world and struggling with myself... I enter a pact with other people, other forces in the world, that their problems are mine and mine are theirs... The minute others imprint my senses, they become me and I must deal with them or else close part of myself off and make myself and the world smaller, lukewarm.”

Speaking of lack of warmth, his attitude toward McNear was, as WaPo puts it, "cooling." As Obama put it:

“I am not so naive as to believe that a distinct line exists between romantic love and the more quotidian, but perhaps finer bonds of friendship... but I can feel the progression from one to the other (in my mind).”

Poor McNear! McFar.

I went looking for a picture of Alexandra McNear and found this Daily Mail piece from 2012: "First picture of Barack Obama's first serious girlfriend... and how she went on to marry a Serbian boxer who is now one of New York's most famous bartenders":

A friend of Miss McNear [said]: "Alex is so embarrassed about this coming out right now. She has a family and is a grown up, for her to be called somebody's 'girlfriend' is really making her cringe. It was all in the past but her family still tease her about it. I know her sisters say they would have liked to have been in the White House, but ce la vie [sic]. To think she could have been First Lady, and she married a boxer instead. You couldn't make it up."

IN THE COMMENTS: MathMom said:

"The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions, classes, make them mine, me theirs..."

I had to stop reading there. My heart began to pound, my hands began to sweat, I felt dizzy and disoriented...I was reading about intentional cultural appropriation, and that by a revered statesman! Our former president!

I'm getting the vapours...must take to my fainting couch. Words fail me.

And sykes.1 said:

What Obama was unconsciously pointing out is that multiculturalism is not a goal. It, like anarchy, is a tool to break down the existing society. The goal is a totalitarian socialist dictatorship. Socialism insists that all individuals are literally identical, and it adopts policies to make sure that they are identical. These policies are, of course, brutal. There can be no White or black persons, no Jews or Christians, no Hispanics, etc. Socialist man is a single, homogeneous thing.

"Who killed Davey Moore/Why an’ what’s the reason for?/'Not me,' says the man whose fists/Laid him low in a cloud of mist"

"Who came here from Cuba’s door/Where boxing ain’t allowed no more/'I hit him, yes, it’s true/ But that’s what I am paid to do/Don’t say "murder," don’t say "kill"/It was destiny, it was God’s will.'"



Bob Dylan put those words in the mouth of Ultiminio Ramos Zaqueira — Sugar Ramos — who came here from Cuba's door after Fidel Castro banned all professional sports. Ramos — who was only 5'4½" — won the featherweight crown from Davey Moore on March 21, 1963. Moore — who was only 5'2" — was favored to win, but after the 10th round Moore conceded, and shortly after that, Moore said to his manager, Willie Ketchum, “My head, Willie, it hurts something awful!” 3 days later, Moore died. Now, it's 54 years after that, and Sugar Ramos has died (NYT).

“It was my night, my glory,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1964. “I won fair and square. I beat him after he almost knocked me silly in the seventh round. I came back and beat him good. Then he dies, and nobody remembers that Ramos fought a good fight and won.”

Here's something Bob Dylan said when he performed the song in 1964:

This a song about a boxer.... It's got nothing to do with boxing, it's just a song about a boxer really. And, uh, it's not even having to do with a boxer, really. It's got nothing to do with nothing. But I fit all these words together... that's all... It's taken directly from the newspapers, Nothing's been changed... Except for the words.

How many Bob Dylan songs are about boxing? He sings Paul Simon's song "The Boxer." Of his own songs, besides "Davey Moore," there's the song about Hurricane Carter. ("Rubin could take a man out with just one punch/But he never did like to talk about it all that much/It’s my work, he’d say, and I do it for pay...") And there's "I Shall Be Free No. 10":

I was shadow-boxing earlier in the day
I figured I was ready for Cassius Clay
I said “Fee, fie, fo, fum, Cassius Clay, here I come
26, 27, 28, 29, I’m gonna make your face look just like mine
Five, four, three, two, one, Cassius Clay you’d better run
99, 100, 101, 102, your ma won’t even recognize you
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, gonna knock him clean right out of his spleen

I guess Dylan got over his censoriousness about boxing. "Who Killed Davey Moore?" — which I think was written about a year earlier — seems like a flat-out condemnation of the sport of boxing, blaming everybody. After Davey Moore died, there were demands that boxing should be outlawed. Dylan's protest song is part of that. "I Shall Be Free No. 10" goes with Dylan's turn away from protest, the 1964 album "Another Side of Bob Dylan." Who knows how serious Dylan ever was about condemning boxing? Maybe he was just carelessly ripping something out of the newspaper and it had "nothing to do with nothing" for him. "I Shall Be Free" — unlike the earlier "Davey Moore" — is about personal freedom. It's Rabelaisian:

I’m gonna grow my hair down to my feet so strange
So I look like a walking mountain range
And I’m gonna ride into Omaha on a horse
Out to the country club and the golf course
Carry The New York Times, shoot a few holes, blow their minds

ADDED: "Bob Dylans Boxing Addiction":

Bob Dylan owns the complex that includes The 18th Street Coffee House in Santa Monica. It has or had a gym in the back. Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini trained Bob Dylan there. In Ray’s word’s “Bob has his own private gym. Best gym I’ve ever been in. On the wall there are pictures of Joe Louis, Ali, Frazier, Muddy Waters, the Rolling Stones. The heavyweights of boxing and music. First time I was over there we were sparring and just to keep him honest I would tap him with a left or right....

"If it’s an antagonistic fight between two blacks, it’s one thing. But if it’s an antagonistic fight between a white and a black, then you can play the race card tremendously and get an overwhelming return."

Said Don King, quoted in "Mayweather Sees a Racial Double Standard in Megafight vs. McGregor" (NYT).

Both fighters have flung racially tinged barbs at each other — McGregor told Mayweather to “dance for me, boy” and said he himself was half black “from the bellybutton down”; Mayweather said he was fighting “for all the blacks around the world.”...

McGregor has been criticized for some of his racial remarks during the promotion of the fight. He gyrated on stage during a promotional event, calling it “a little present for my beautiful, black female fans.” In an interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” McGregor seemed to refer to black boxers in a scene from “Rocky III” as “dancing monkeys.”...

Well, that's all awfully crude. I guess people have a hankering to escape from the bonds of political correctness (which is what Trump perceived and exploited).

(I've been ignoring this thing all week and am just now seeing that it's a boxer boxing a mixed martial arts guy, and the mixed martial arts guy is boxing for the first time.)

The 3 top-rated comments at the NYT are:

1. Why is this even an article? As the article points out, "But one important difference between Mayweather and McGregor, Boyd noted, is that Mayweather has been in serious trouble with the law related to domestic violence and has served jail time." Mayweather says there is a racial double standard, but he has repeatedly beaten and battered women. It doesn't matter what race you are -- if you beat women, and especially when you are a champion boxer, you lose all respect of any decent person. End. Of. Story.

2. Mayweather is the greatest boxer of all time, with a 50-0 record when you include the time he beat the mother of his children in front of his children, leaving her bloody and screaming.

3. Mayweather, lets discuss a real issue. Your tendency to beat down women.

The day the comedy writers got tired.

It was July 29th, I'd say, doing a Google search — with no time restriction — for comedy writers trump:

Oh, I see what happened. A panel of comedy writers got together and admitted they had a problem. Here's Entertainment Weekly: "Late-night grapples with 'exhausting' Trump: 'I don't want this job'/Writers from ‘Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,’ ‘The President Show,’ ‘The Daily Show,’ and ‘The Jim Jefferies Show’ on the political climate in 2017."

One of the key challenges, the writers said, is finding the actual joke when so much of the news about the current administration that comes out these days seems almost unbelievable. “How do I heighten this?” Haglund said. “How do I not just show it, step back and be like, ‘Well, there’s nothing left to do with this that it’s so ridiculous?’ That’s always the challenge.”

Another challenge “is to try to avoid the low hanging fruit like this person talks funny or has funny hair,” Nangle added. “We try to look at what goes deeper than all that insanity? What made this man? We made him, we allowed this to happen, so as much as you can go deeper without being heavy handed, that’s what we aim for.”...

So the problem is Trump made it too easy for you, and you don't know what to do about that. He inoculated himself by being inherently ridiculous on the surface and you can't get past the surface.

That's called rope-a-dope:

In competitive situations other than boxing, rope-a-dope is used to describe strategies in which one contender lets opponent fatigue themself by drawing non-injuring offensive actions. This then gives the contender an advantage towards the end of the competition or before, as the opponent becomes tired, allowing the contender to execute devastating offensive maneuvers and thereby winning.

"Tennis is the sport in which you talk to yourself. No athletes talk to themselves like tennis players. Why? Because tennis is so damned lonely."

"Only boxers can understand the loneliness of tennis players—and yet boxers have their corner men and managers.”

Wrote Andre Agassi, quoted in "Nick Kyrgios, the Reluctant Rising Star of Tennis/He has been called the most talented player since Roger Federer. But does he even want to win?" by Louisa Thomas, who adds: "And, during a match, unlike boxers, tennis players can’t talk to or touch even their opponents, let alone a coach." (New Yorker)

I'd heard that article in podcast form on my walk today. Searching the website to get to the text, I used the terms tennis and boxers and happened upon this article from last year about David Foster Wallace, who wrote about tennis (which he'd played with some success at the junior level):

It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine Wallace’s noticing early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too. The perfect game for Wallace.

What books has Hillary Clinton been "losing [her]self in"?

"I finished Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, I devoured mysteries by Louise Penny, Donna Leon, Jacqueline Winspear, Charles Todd... I reread old favorites like Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, the poetry of Maya Angelou and Mary Oliver. I was riveted by The Jersey Brothers and a new book of essays called The View From Flyover Country, which turned out to be especially relevant in the midst of our current health-care debate."

New York Magazine reports.

Sorry, I can't seem to get beyond New York Magazine this morning. That's where I landed after starting out in the South China Morning Post. Somehow, I only told you about the beer cans in China. I could have told you about...

1. The "pro-democracy lawmaker 'Long Hair' Leung Kwok-hung" and his fight to keep from getting his hair cut while he's in prison.

2. The tourist who fainted when informed that the jade bracelet she just broke costs 300,000 yuan (US$44,110).

3. The 80-year-old lady who threw coins into a jet engine for good luck and got the flight delayed for hours.

4. The man who was fined for cutting the roof off his car to make it into a "convertible."

5. The thing that got me to that website in the first place (because it was linked at Drudge): "Police in Shanghai on Monday closed down an unlicensed fight between two teams – one led by a tai chi master and the other by a leading mixed martial artist – just weeks after footage of a similar, very bloody, contest went viral online."

In late April, Xu [fighter and promoter of mixed martial arts] scored a convincing victory over [tai chi master] Wei, after making controversial remarks about tai chi in which he said he wanted to “expose” its lack of merit.

“[I] crack down on fake things, because they are fake. Fake things must be eliminated. No question,” he was quoted as saying...

"In later life Ali became something of a secular saint, a legend in soft focus."

"He was respected for having sacrificed more than three years of his boxing prime and untold millions of dollars for his antiwar principles after being banished from the ring; he was extolled for his un-self-conscious gallantry in the face of incurable illness, and he was beloved for his accommodating sweetness in public. In 1996, he was trembling and nearly mute as he lit the Olympic caldron in Atlanta. That passive image was far removed from the exuberant, talkative, vainglorious 22-year-old who bounded out of Louisville, Ky., and onto the world stage in 1964 with an upset victory over Sonny Liston to become the world champion. The press called him the Louisville Lip. He called himself the Greatest."

From "Muhammad Ali, Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century, Dies at 74."

ALSO: "But Ali had his hypocrisies, or at least inconsistencies. How could he consider himself a 'race man' yet mock the skin color, hair and features of other African-Americans, most notably Joe Frazier, his rival and opponent in three classic matches? Ali called him 'the gorilla,' and long afterward Frazier continued to express hurt and bitterness."

AND: From my perspective, as someone who was 13 years old in 1964 when Cassius Clay emerged in the popular culture, he seemed to have invented self-promoting bragging. My parents' generation held values of modesty and sportsmanship. You shouldn't verbalize your self-esteem, especially in a way that vaunted yourself over others. You should achieve and be admirable and then, perhaps, other people will praise you.

As my parents and their coevals saw it, Clay was teaching the young people the wrong values, including the idea that you can push beyond your area of actual achievement — in Clay's case, boxing — and insult your opponents about something unrelated — such as the way they look. You could not only call yourself beautiful, but the other person ugly. To young people, like me, that seemed very funny and fun and liberating.

(I don't really want to mention Donald Trump in this post, but the connection is too obvious. Who are we? How did we get here?)

"Yes, that’s the (totally classy) cover to the book, which is one of a 2-part volume retailing for $1700.00..."

"Such dear, dear friends. That last shot doesn’t look so much like an airkiss as it does a very slow assault...."

Hey, yeah. It reminds me of this.

About tonight's debate, Chris Wallace likens his moderator role to that of a referee at a boxing match.

"I’m a fight fan, and when you watch a referee in a match, even if the fighters are tangled up, if they’ve each got a free arm and are still punching, the ref will let them keep fighting. It’s only when they get completely tangled up that he makes them break the clinch and start again. That’s my feeling about it."

And, referring to the last debate: "I thought that if you could see someone acting like a president on the stage, you have better eyesight than I do. Having said that, in the end, if the candidates want to act like damn fools, I’m not going to stop them."

That's quoted in the NYT article "Fox Moderators to Face Donald Trump in Thursday’s Debate." (Ha! Funny headline. The vector of who's facing whom is reversed. It's the moderators who have to face Trump, not Trump facing them.)

It should be noted that Megyn Kelly is back, and Trump seems ready to take questions from the woman he may have accused of menstruating.

I wanted to link to my old post discussing Trump's enigmatic old wisecrack "blood coming out of her wherever" — at the time, I just said "He went menstrual on her" — and my search of the archive, using the terms "megyn" and "blood," caused me to discover something that perhaps no one has yet noticed. Trump's mind went to "blood" the day after the debate, but during the debate itself, the word "blood" appeared in a very vivid context.

Megyn Kelly said she wanted to know if any of the candidates had "received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first." She asked Ted Cruz and then Kasich and finally turned to Scott Walker, who said:

I'm certainly an imperfect man. And it's only by the blood of Jesus Christ that I've been redeemed from my sins. So I know that God doesn't call me to do a specific thing, God hasn't given me a list, a Ten Commandments, if you will, of things to act on the first day. What God calls us to do is follow his will. And ultimately that's what I'm going to try to do.

At the time, I said:

Nicely done, I think. Sincerely religious, complete with "the blood of Jesus Christ," but manifested in public life in ways that are not noticeably different from being a kind, decent person in a way that works for people of any religion or no religion.

Words stick in your mind and recirculate into new contexts. It occurs to me now that Trump's striking use of "blood" the next day came not from thoughts of women on their period but the dramatic image of blood that was Scott Walker's go-to reaction when asked about religion. I wonder what Trump thought about the man who stood right next to him that night last August and spoke so directly and openly in the kind of stark religious words that Trump — for all his blunt speech — decorously eschews.

But Scott Walker is long gone and we're many debates down the road from that night last August...



... and there will be far fewer men on the stage tonight. We're not down to 2, so it's not quite the boxing match that the metaphorical mind of Chris Wallace envisioned, but there will be blood.

And by the way, what is the origin of the phrase "there will be blood"? Who said it first? Was it Daniel Day-Lewis?



Oh, no! It was GOD:

Then the LORD said to Moses, "Say to Aaron, 'Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, over their streams, and over their pools, and over all their reservoirs of water, that they may become blood; and there will be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.'"