With Matt Lauer ousted from "Today" over an allegation of sexual harassment, it's a good time to remember the furious political bias charges Hillary Clinton made against him...

... in her book "What Happened." It was so bad, she said "Trump should have reported [Lauer's] performance as an in-kind contribution":

It was disappointing but predictable that [Matt Lauer] had so quickly steered the supposedly high-minded “Commander in Chief Forum” to the subject of emails, months after the director of the FBI had announced there was no case and closed the investigation. I understood that every political reporter wanted his or her pound of flesh... If Lauer intended to ask Trump tough questions, he had to make a show of grilling me, too.

Of course, that isn’t balanced at all—because balanced doesn’t mean strictly equal. It means reasonable.... If Trump ripped the shirt off someone at a rally and a button fell off my jacket on the same day, the headline “Trump and Clinton Experience Wardrobe Malfunctions, Campaigns in Turmoil” might feel equal to some, but it wouldn’t be balanced, and it definitely wouldn’t be fair....

I launched into my standard answer on the emails... Instead of moving on to any of a hundred urgent national security issues... Lauer stayed on emails....

Reading Hillary's book, Part 2: "wax."

As you may remember from Part 1, I am not reading Hillary Clinton's  book ("What Happened"). I put it into our Kindle because Meade wanted to do some proto-blogging. That's my term for his reading and searching and talking to me and sending me links. That sometimes gets me to things I want to blog, and that's what we're doing with this book.

For Part 2 in the "Reading Hillary's book" series, my note for getting to the material I want to talk about is "wax." Beginning at page 5, Hillary writes about what I would call her friendship with Donald Trump. As you can see she denies that she was ever friends with him, even though she and her husband, former President of the United States Bill Clinton, attended Trump's wedding:

I had known Donald Trump for years, but never imagined he’d be standing on the steps of the Capitol taking the oath of office as President of the United States. He was a fixture of the New York scene when I was a Senator—like a lot of big-shot real estate guys in the city, only more flamboyant and self-promoting. 

I think she should mention that Trump was a big donor to Democrats. Wasn't that the relevant "scene"? 

In 2005, he invited us to his wedding to Melania in Palm Beach, Florida. We weren’t friends, so I assumed he wanted as much star power as he could get. Bill happened to be speaking in the area that weekend, so we decided to go. Why not? I thought it would be a fun, gaudy, over-the-top spectacle, and I was right. I attended the ceremony, then met Bill for the reception at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. We had our photo taken with the bride and groom and left.

She makes it sound as though she's all about having "fun," but then why get your photograph taken and then bug out? If you came to the big lavish party for fun, wouldn't you have wanted to eat the food and dance to the music and so forth? You just had your photo taken with the couple and left? That sounds kind of mean and rude. Why are you saying it like that? It seems as though you just want to elbow us into believing that you were never friends and assume we won't be thinking that this is a game of extracting money from a rich guy by making him think he was your friend.

The next year, Trump joined other prominent New Yorkers in a video spoof prepared for the Legislative Correspondents Association dinner in Albany, which is the state version of the more famous White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. The idea was that the wax figure of me at the Madame Tussauds museum in Times Square had been stolen, so I had to stand in and pretend to be a statue while various famous people walked by and said things to me. New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg said I was doing a great job as Senator—then joked about running for President in 2008 as a self-funder. When Trump appeared, he said, “You look really great. Unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. The hair is magnificent. The face is beautiful. You know, I really think you’d make a great President. Nobody could come close.” The camera pulled back to reveal he wasn’t talking to me after all but to his own wax statue. It was funny at the time.

It's actually pretty funny now. And Trump was gamely self-deprecating (while also, until the punchline is revealed, gushing compliments at her). Maybe he only did that to get attention, but I think it shows that they had a friendly relationship. She goes into no detail denying that they were friends. Trump's making a joke at the Legislative Correspondents Association dinner immediately becomes segue to: "When Trump declared his candidacy for real in 2015, I thought it was another joke, like a lot of people did." And the book is off into a discussion of Trump's political rise.

But I want to stop at the comic sketch that has Hillary playing the part of her own wax dummy. It's an old comedy idea, documented at TV Tropes. It's a subcategory of a trope called "Paper-Thin Disguise":

A character that the other characters should recognize (or at least recognize as out of place) dons a disguise and is treated as neither recognizable nor conspicuous. This disguise is so completely transparent that the audience wants to shout "For the love of God, it's him!"...

While not a Dead Horse Trope, these days Paper Thin Disguises are parodied as often as they are used seriously. The trope is still an important dramatic convention in live theater and opera productions — where a really good disguise would render the character unidentifiable from the cheap seats, and be beyond the scope of the prop budget to boot — but is usually employed along with some kind of nod to audience acknowledging the absurdity. This can sometimes be exaggerated for comedic effect, for example wearing bunny ears and becoming indistinguishable from a real rabbit, or pretending to be an ancient statue by simply standing still in a specific pose. Children's shows still employ this trope regularly without any parody element.

The link on "standing still in a specific pose" goes to "Nobody Here but Us Statues":

Alice tries to hide from Bob, so she pretends to be a statue (or, in more cartoonish settings, even a painting or a relief) in a museum, art gallery etc. Sometimes she has to Walk Like an Egyptian to fit in, or get in a suit of armour, or end up holding an empty picture frame in front of herself. Bob typically doesn't catch on, though he looks at Alice suspiciously (bonus points if he says "I'll never understand this modern art" or "What an ugly statue!").

In the Legislative Correspondents Association dinner sketch, Hillary didn't pretend to be a wax statue of herself to hide. Rather, the set-up had her enlisted to cover up the problem that the real wax figure had been stolen. It's a nice sketch and it was funny — I can tell even from reading the leaden waxen prose — because Trump was funny. He was funny in part because he made fun of himself, and Hillary didn't have to do anything except stand there. She didn't have to stand still for any jokes at her expense. Nobody said "What an ugly statue!" or anything like that but Trump allowed himself to seem like a ridiculous narcissist for saying "I really think you’d make a great President. Nobody could come close."

They all laughed...



ADDED: The first comment on this post, from sodal ye, is: "Hillary just broke a toe in the UK." I do a quick search and get to The Daily Mail and the headline begins: "I was running downstairs in heels with a cup of coffee and fell backwards!" I sincerely hope she's feeling better, but I've got to say that strikes me as really freaky — falling backwards in high heels — just after I've made a big leap from Hillary Clinton to Ginger Rogers, whose most famous quote is that she did everything that Fred Astaire did but "backwards and in high heels."

And I've already written about "backwards and in high heels" — and it was in a post that began by being about Hillary Clinton and then leaped into Ginger Rogers. It was September 4, 2016 and people were questioning whether Hillary was doing enough when her favorability rating had dropped as low as Donald Trump's. ABC News chief political analyst Matthew Dowd said:

[Hillary] is judged -- she is judged a little bit, I have to say, all of the controversy surrounding her and they're both -- Donald Trump and her, she's judged a little bit on a Ginger Rogers standard, which is, is that the bar is so low for him. I mean, Ginger Rogers, the famous like she did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels.

I said: "Suddenly, Trump is the Fred Astaire, judged by an easier standard when what his opponent/partner is doing is actually harder?"

There's more good stuff at that old post, including the debunking of the idea that Ginger Rogers is the source of the quote, the Ann Richards use of the quote, and Trump on "SNL" dancing like Fred Astaire Drake.

Reading Hillary's book, Part 1: "mustered."

I wasn't going to buy Hillary Clinton's new book — "What Happened" — because I did not want to read it. And if you're thinking Althouse is going to read it, so we don't have to you're wrong. I'm not going to read it. But I am going to blog it. I bought it because Meade asked me to put it in our Kindle  account, because — a propos of the Harvey Weinstein exposé — he had some search terms to apply to the text.

Now, Meade is doing something with the text that I'll call proto-blogging: He reads and speaks aloud the kinds of thoughts I might have if I were doing the reading. And that might get me to something I want to put in writing here on the blog. You'll just have to imagine the Meadhouse interplay that precedes the posts in this series. I'll just say he's the one who's kind-of/sort-of reading the book, we have conversations, and I dip into the text to get things to spin out for this new series.

So Meade is going to almost read it, so Althouse doesn't have to, so you don't have to. But it will be prime stuff. Nothing is blogged here unless I think it's blogworthy. Everything in this series is 100% guaranteed interesting. To me.

I've heard it said that the first maybe 100 pages of the book is a pretty good read, but after that it gets boring. I don't know if that's true, but I have found evidence that the first chunk of the book had a different author (or editor) than the rest of the book. The evidence is the word "muster," which I used to find a section of the text Meade and I were talking about, a section about Hillary's decision to show up for the swearing-in of Donald Trump. The passage in question ended with:

That’s how I ended up right inside the door of the Capitol on January 20, waiting to be announced. It had been such a long journey to get here. Now I just had to take a few more steps. I took Bill’s arm and squeezed it, grateful to have him by my side. I took a deep breath and walked out the door with as big a smile as could muster.

We were making various jokes — such as interjecting "I didn't inhale" after "I took a deep breath" — and got to talking about the word "muster" — which I said was like "garner." (I first blogged my objection to "garner" here.)

I wanted to blog various things about the Trump inauguration scene, and to get to the text, I searched for the word "muster." It was a good search term because I remembered it from our conversation, and it's unusual enough not to be likely to appear too many times in the text. Here are the results of the search:

The word appears 4 times in the book, and all 4 are in the first 100 pages. I don't have the kind of sophisticated software that can be used to detect whether various texts are written by the same author, but I think such software looks for many examples like this. I'm just entertaining the hypothesis that someone was involved in writing of the first 100 pages who did not work on the rest of the book.

Also, I'd like to say that "muster" is a rather silly word, though its true silliness only emerges when you use the past tense and create the homophone with "mustard." (If you did the Thursday NYT crossword this week, you might have enjoyed or groaned over the use of this homophone at 16 Across.) But "muster" is an okay word. I've used it 4 or 5 times in the 50,000+ posts on this blog, but I don't like to see it coming up 4 times in 100 pages. That's over reliance on a distracting word that could be replaced by words you would be more likely to use in conversational speech, like "pull up" or "bring together."

There's a phoniness to "muster" when someone uses it to convey how it feels to draw upon your inner resources to do something you need to do. In the above-quoted example, Hillary "walked out the door with as big a smile as could muster." Later, on page 41, she's talking about another loss, not to Donald Trump but to Barack Obama:

By the end, he led in the all-important delegate count, but our popular vote totals were less than one-tenth of a percent apart. That made it all the more painful to accept defeat and muster up the good cheer to campaign vigorously for him.

Again, the word is used in the context of holding back negativity and putting on a game face. The phony-sounding word aptly expresses her being genuinely phony on those 2 occasions.

On page 32, there's:

I prayed that my worst fears about Donald Trump wouldn’t be realized, and that people’s lives and America’s future would be made better, not worse, during his presidency. I’m still praying on that one, and I can use all the backup you can muster.

That seems to say: Yeah, I know this reference to prayer is bullshit. If she really believed in prayer as a defense against Trump at his worst or even just thought her readers took prayer seriously, I think she would have said something more like: and I hope you are praying too. Or: and I know many of you pray that God will give our president wisdom and good judgment. (And I don't like saying she "can use all the backup" as if she's the prayer leader and we're behind her.)

Finally, on page 92, we get the last "muster" in the book, and it's in one of these goofball girly passages:

Someone once asked what we talked about on long flights. “Food!” we chorused. It’s funny how much you look forward to the next meal when you’re living out of a suitcase. In 2008, we often relied on junk food to see us through; I remember a lot of pizza with sliced jalapeños delivered right to the plane. This time I was determined that we would all be healthier. I asked friends for good on-the-go snack recommendations. A few days later, shipments of canned salmon, as well as Quest and Kind protein bars, arrived at my house, which we lugged onto the plane in canvas totes. When the Quest bars got cold, they were too hard to eat, so we sat on them for a few minutes to warm them up, with as much dignity as one can muster at such a moment.

This is the best use of "muster" in the book, because she's describing something silly: sitting on her food to warm it up. And the thing being mustered — dignity — is supposed to be funny. There's no dignity in using your ass as a makeshift microwave.

By the way, "muster" comes from the Middle French word "monstrer" which means "to show," which is the same source for "demonstrate," which is a much better word, that is, a word you can use in casual conversation without seeming weird.