Anita Hill says she's "willing to evolve myself" and "work with" Joe Biden.

"One of the impacts of 1991 was my desire not to really work with the government in any way... I always said, I think I can be more effective as an outsider, as opposed to an insider. And now, I'm willing to evolve myself, to work for change inside."

That's from "Anita Hill vows to vote for Joe Biden and work with him on gender issues" at CNN. She did an interview with CNN. Anita Hill is the person who most prominently brought sexual harassment in the workplace to the forefront of American culture, and she did this in the Senate Judiciary Committee when it was chaired by Joe Biden.



I'm not going to fault her for offering to work on the inside, after 3 decades devoted to her "outsider" approach, but I will fault CNN if it did not, in the course of its interview, bring up the charges of sexual harassment that have been made against Biden. Is the name Tara Reade in the transcript?

"Notwithstanding all of his limitations in the past, and the mistakes that he made in the past, notwithstanding those -- at this point, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I think Joe Biden is the person who should be elected in November," Hill told CNN's Gloria Borger. But it's not just because he's running against Donald Trump, she adds. "Its more about the survivors of gender violence. That's really what it's about."

All his limitations and mistakes in his past? Is that including what Tara Reade says he did or does Anita Hill think Reade lacks credibility? Did Anita Hill hold back from supporting Bill Clinton, given all the allegations against him? It was disheartening, after Hill's Judiciary Committee testimony in 1991, to see so many purported feminists put Democratic Party power above the cause, and I hear echoes of that decision in Hill's "at this point, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I think Joe Biden is the person who should be elected."

Biden called her, seeking her support, all the way back in April 2019. Her support is strategically useful to him. She said at the time that he failed to apologize:

"An apology, to be real and sincere, has to take responsibility for harm," Hill told CNN. That's not what she heard when she spoke to him at the time. She wanted to hear him acknowledge the harm done to victims of sexual harassment. "He didn't take responsibility. He didn't hold himself accountable in any way, except that he was sorry that I felt I wasn't treated fairly. He didn't take ownership of his own role as chair of the committee." She called the conversation "unsatisfying." After that call, Biden told ABC's Good Morning America that he acknowledged his role as chairman in her treatment.

"As the committee chairman, I take responsibility that she did not get treated well. I take responsibility for that," Biden told ABC in April 2019. Hill was listening. She now says she believes he's evolved.

He's "evolved" and she's "willing to evolve" herself. Whatever that means. Ostensibly, it means I will rearrange myself into what is politically effective.

Anyway, I'm not surprised in the slightest to find nothing about Tara Reade and the harassment allegations against Biden in this CNN interview with Anita Hill. Once again, women are expected to support men, and the interests of women are deferred because a man must advance. Alternatively, Hill really wants a job for herself within the Biden administration, and it is a case of a woman doing what she needs to do to advance her career.

At the Golden Pink Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

How many comments do I need to read on this WaPo article about the professor who pretended to be black before the subject becomes Trump?

I'm reading "GWU plans to replace Jessica Krug, the professor who admitted to falsely claiming Black identity," and I've got the comments section sorted in order of up votes.

I bet the first comment makes it about Trump. What do you think? Want to do a bet with me? Well, if you had, I would have won, because the most up-voted comment is: "Weird. Be who you are people. If you're a failed businessman, grifter and reality-show host, don't try to be president. For example."

I remember when people said Trump was insane because he thought everything is about him, but these days, it's the anti-Trumpists who think everything is about him.

Journalism question: What does it mean to "confirm" a story?

She's a class act, but did she "confirm" the substance of the story, or did she simply hear the same allegation from the same sources for the Atlantic? If the latter, then it's not confirmation, it's repetition.

— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) September 5, 2020

"President Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia and Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti of Kosovo took an enormous step toward a long-term resolution of their historic conflict on Friday morning."

"At the White House, under the auspices of President Trump, President Vučić and Prime Minister Hoti signed a brokered commitment to achieve economic normalization between the peoples and governments of Serbia and Kosovo....  The parties have agreed to construct a roadway and railway link between their respective capitals, Belgrade and Pristina. They have committed to a joint feasibility study on options for linking the rail infrastructure to a deep-sea port in the Adriatic.... All these agreements will enable a more free and efficient flow of people and goods across the border between Serbia and Kosovo.... It soon will be easier than ever for Serbs and Kosovars to live, work, trade and study in each other’s’ neighborhoods, companies and universities.... Friday’s agreement reflects President Trump’s long-held vision for Kosovo and Serbia to focus on economic development, job creation and industrial development as prerequisites to the permanent resolution of political disputes. His belief from the start has been that trust is built first in the process of creating opportunities and futures for young people, rather than in the settlement of scores, symbolism or the righting of historical wrongs...."

Writes Richard Grenell, a senior fellow of Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Politics and Strategy and the Trump administration’s special envoy for Serbia and Kosovo, in "Serbia-Kosovo agreement results from Trump's different brand of diplomacy" (The Hill).

And here's Grenell taking on the reporters:

Richard Grenell: "I'm just going to talk about Kosovo-Serbia. I don't know if you can find it on a map...you might be too young...maybe it's too complicated an issue for you all."@jeffmason1: "I don't think any of us came here for a lecture about our questioning." pic.twitter.com/8nXKyCNv3J

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 4, 2020

He gets annoyed because the reporter wants to shunt Kosovo to the side and talk about homosexuality... because Grenell is a homosexual!

"I get this sense of dread, like I’m not going to wake up, like something is seriously wrong in the world."

Said Cheryl Ann Schmidt, describing "the heavy, knotlike feeling that hits her solar plexus every time she lies down at night, and even when she tries to nap," quoted in "The pandemic is ruining our sleep. Experts say ‘coronasomnia’ could imperil public health" (WaP).

[S]he lies awake fretting about finances and lost retirement plans, then chastising herself for self-pity when others are dying of covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Most nights, she waits in the darkness until she hears the thump of the newspaper hit her front door around 4:30 a.m. That’s when she gives herself permission to rise and read about the country’s latest crises at her dining table.

“Sometimes, the thought goes through my head that maybe getting this virus really is inevitable, that I should just get infected and get it over with. And if I die, I die,” Schmidt said. “It’s not that I really have a death wish, but in the middle of the night, I think to myself, I can’t continue living this way."

ADDED: I published this post, then thought: Look at the comments, look in order of up votes from readers, and see how far you need to read before somebody blames Trump. I predicted it would be the very first thing, and, indeed, this is the most up-voted comment: "it isn't the virus causing my insomnia, it's the orange idiot."

"President Trump is moving to revamp federal agencies’ racial sensitivity trainings, casting some of them as 'divisive' and 'un-American'..."

WaPo reports, citing a new memo from White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.

Vought says OMB will instruct federal agencies to come up with a list of all contracts related to training sessions involving “white privilege” or “critical race theory,” and do everything possible within the law to cancel those contracts, the memo states.... He... refers to press reports that say federal employees “have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism.’ ”...

“It’s absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government,” Chris Rufo, research fellow at the right-wing Discovery Institute, told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson earlier this week....

[M.E. Hart, an attorney who has given hundreds of diversity training sessions for businesses and the federal government for more than 20 years, said] “If we are going to live up to this nation’s promise — ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — we have to see each other as human beings, and we have to do whatever it takes, including taking whatever classes make that possible... These classes have been very powerful in allowing people to do that, and we need them more than ever. There’s danger here.”...

Here's the memo.

Here's a Fox News article about Rufo's interview with Carlson. That article has the same quote plus a little more: "It's absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government. What I have discovered is that critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people."

Why didn't The Washington Post find someone better than Hart to quote about the value of training federal employees in Critical Race Theory? It's Hart's business to sell this training. That's the ultimate bias. Instead WaPo pads its article with prods to think of Trump as some sort of racist:

Trump has put himself at the center of intense national debates about race, police tactics, the Civil War and the Confederate flag. Democrats have long taken aim at Trump’s comments about race, including his false assertion that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States. And this year, as numerous Black Lives Matter protests occurred around the country after police officers killed or shot Black Americans, Trump has sharply criticized social justice protesters and called for law enforcement to crack down.

Trump has sharply criticized social justice protesters? When did he criticize the protesters? Is WaPo using the word "protesters" to refer to the rioters, looters, and arsonists? Here's a higher level question for WaPo: Do you understand Critical Race Theory deeply enough to know whether it would include rioters, looters, and arsonists in the category "protesters"? Please show your work. I'm tired of the mushy insinuations. I'm reading WaPo this morning after taking a break from it and so far it's making me sick.

At the Deep Blue Café...

... you can write about anything you want.

If Trump had said he didn’t want to visit Aisne-Marne because the dead were "losers" and "suckers," John Bolton would have written an entire chapter about it in his book.

.@AmbJohnBolton told me today that if @realDonaldTrump had said he didn’t want to visit Aisne-Marne because the interred heroes were “losers” and “suckers”, he would have written an entire chapter about it in his book #TheRoomWhereItHappened

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) September 4, 2020

Biden did another press conference, but the pressfolk are helping him too much.

Many of the questions for Joe Biden after his remarks today consisted of reporters asking Biden to elaborate on how bad Trump is. A list (not exact quotes): pic.twitter.com/0ixZlVcItz

— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 4, 2020

Here's the transcript in case you'd like to check the accuracy of York's assessment. And here's video:

"She must have treated that beauty salon owner pretty badly. She uses the salon and the salon turned her in? The salon turned her in."

"I don’t think I would have turned her in. I would’ve said, 'Well, you know, she’s a customer. I got to take care of my customers, right?' But she made them open, and the salon turned her in and the salon did business with her. How much do they hate Nancy Pelosi? Then she made a terrible mistake because you want people that can’t be set up. She said, 'I was set up. I was set up by the salon owner. I was set up.' I said, 'Tell me she didn’t say that, please.' I just put out, that if she was set up, then she shouldn’t be leading the House of Representatives. I want the salon owner to lead the House of Representatives, because she set up … Think of it. She set up the Speaker of the House. That was a big mistake. As soon as I heard, she said, 'Well, she’s set me up,' Nancy, you’re not supposed to get set up. You’re representing our country. You know what she should have done honestly? She should have said, 'I made a mistake, sorry,' and nobody would be talking about, this is like the biggest story. This is the big, crazy Nancy, highly overrated person."

From "Donald Trump Latrobe, Pennsylvania Rally Speech Transcript September 3."

"As the mail-in ballots are tallied, the Trump leads erode. But the situation is genuinely unclear. Trump is on the warpath, raging about fraud."

"Within weeks there are lawsuits and challenges everywhere. It’s like Florida in 2000, but the chaos is happening in many states at once. Ballots are getting tossed because of problems with signatures, or not getting tossed, amid national frenzy. Trump says he won’t let Democrats steal the election and declares himself re-elected.... It turns out, amid the existential crisis, there really is a group of sober people who are militant about America, who can see reality unblinkered by the lens of partisanship, and who are finally compelled to organize.... The process of mobilizing for an accurate election outcome, before it is too late, would be a struggle to preserve the order of our civic structure against the myriad foes who talk blithely about tearing down systems, disorder and disruption."

From "What Will You Do if Trump Doesn’t Leave?/Playing out the nightmare scenario" by David Brooks (NYT).

There are way too many people who should know better who are stirring up the forces of chaos. The idea that these people are going to help if there's new chaos as the vote is tabulated and fought over seems overly optimistic. We are already having a national nervous breakdown and if there are "sober people" who "see reality unblinkered by the lens of partisanship," where the hell are they? Partisanship clouded the perception of reality quite a while ago, and it's going to continue and get worse in the next 2 months. Who has the credibility to "preserve the order of our civic structure" so we can get through some creditable tabulation of the vote? Nobody. Nobody even wants it. The fact that the discussion is focused on the idea of big bad Trump refusing to leave makes it all too obvious.

"If he said it, I'm thinking it was in the spirit of genuinely hating the losses in war, and he is keeping us out of military adventures."

"It makes me think of the famous quote from General Patton: 'The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.' It makes me think of this song lyric that I heard over and over when I was young: 'Come on fathers, and don't hesitate/To send your sons off before it's too late/You can be the first ones in your block/To have your boy come home in a box.'"

Things written by me, just now, in comments to a post on Facebook, put up by my son John, linking to and quoting "Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’/The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic."

Racial harmony, circa 1986: Everybody, especially Lou Reed, sings "Soul Man."

I ran across that this morning because the Jessica Krug story (see previous post) got me thinking about the old movie "Soul Man," which I've never seen, but remember very well, because it was about affirmative action in law school, in which a white guy misidentifies himself as black so he can qualify for a black-only scholarship at Harvard Law School. The movie is named after the old Sam and Dave song, and Sam participated in that remake with Lou Reed — known for, among other things, the song "I Wanna Be Black"* — of the already-old song.

The use of blackface in the movie was criticized at the time, most notably by Spike Lee. The actress Rae Dawn Chong, who played the main character's love interest, said: "It was only controversial because Spike Lee made a thing of it. He'd never seen the movie and he just jumped all over it... If you watch the movie, it's really making white people look stupid… I always tried to be an actor who was doing a part that was a character versus what I call 'blackting,' or playing my race, because I knew that I would fail because I was mixed. I was the black actor for sure, but I didn't lead with my epidermis, and that offended people like Spike Lee, I think."

Anyway, it has always been a terrible idea for a white person to adopt a black identity to get ahead within higher education. That was a subject of a Hollywood movie in 1986. It's amazing that real people so recently have attempted this sort of fraud. Jessica Krug has outed herself (perhaps because she would have been outed by others), but it makes you wonder how many other people are out there who've furthered their careers by pretending to be black.

I'm writing this post mostly because I was struck by the racial healing acted out in that music video — as if getting white people to sing "I'm a soul man" could bring us all together. To quote another Lou Reed song: You know, those were different times.
__________________
* Listen to the song "I Wanna Be Black" here. Read the lyrics, here. They're quite shockingly racist, but the key line, for comprehension purposes is, "Oh, I don't wanna be a fucked up/Middle class college student no more." The annotation at the lyrics link says:

"This song [is] described by Ann Powers as 'a proto-rap unspooling of racist stereotypes that makes fun of white hipsters by forcing a deep wallow in ignorance.' Though racist, this song attempts to be a satire of bored young white men in America and their attitudes and beliefs around black men. Whether it passes Poe’s Law or not, is up for debate."

What's Poe's Law? Wikipedia says:

"Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied." 

I guess you "pass" Poe's Law when you're clear enough that you are not the thing you are parodying. So, Lou Reed was singing all these racist things but then he let us know that he's really making fun of the "fucked-up, middle class [white] college student" who fantasizes about acquiring a black identity.

"I Wanna Be Black" is from the album "Street Hassle," released in 1978.

"I hope to live long enough to see future historians pose the very serious question: What *was* wokeness?"

The Jessica “Jess La Bombera” Krug story is waaaaay crazier than Rachel Dolezal’s.

I hope to live long enough to see future historians pose the very serious question: What *was* wokeness? pic.twitter.com/HEQ2g4fEEH

— Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) September 4, 2020

In case you haven't seen the underlying story: "Professor Jessica Krug admits she lied about being black: ‘I cancel myself’" (NY Post):

“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” Krug, 38, writes in a brief but life-shattering Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”... “There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy,” Krug writes. “I have no identity outside of this. I have never developed one.... I am a coward... You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.... I don’t know what to build from here. I don’t know that it is possible to repair a single relationship I have with another person, living or dead, and I don’t believe I deserve the grace or kindness to do so."

More here: "Professor who lied about being black ripped ‘white New Yorkers’ in profanity-laced tirade" (NY Post). With video, showing her using an accent/speech style that must have seemed empowering to her when she was pulling off her assumed identity but is now so embarrassing:

"Honestly, I hate to say it but I see a civil war right around the corner. That shot felt like the beginning of a war."

Said Michael Forest Reinoehl yesterday, quoted in "Suspect in fatal Portland protest shooting killed by feds during arrest attempt" (NY Post).

Reinoehl in the interview insisted he acted in self-defense and “had no choice” when he shot Aaron “Jay” Danielson, 39, after an evening of clashing protests in Portland on Aug. 29....

The ex-military man said he headed out into Portland that night to provide security for Black Lives Matter protesters, who had rallied against a pro-Trump caravan that was making its way through the city.

He did not state why he felt his life was in danger and strayed away from discussing specifics of the shooting. “Well honestly, those are…details that I probably don’t want to get into other than just simply saying I realized what happened,” Reinoehl said when asked about the immediate aftermath of the shooting. “I was confident that I did not hit anyone innocent and I made my exit.”...

Reinoehl..., had often posted about Black Lives Matter and related protests on his social media accounts, where he described himself as “100 % ANTIFA.”... “If you just look at the basic definition of it, it’s just antifascist – and I’m 100 percent antifascist,” he said. “I’m not a member of Antifa. I’m not a member of anything.... I used to really love this country and I respected the flag and everything that it represented,” he added. “But because of all this, every time I see a big truck, especially with the flag on it, I immediately think they’re out to get me.”

We don't yet have details on how Reinoehl died in his encounter with federal agents. The interview is evidence of his paranoia. He imagined a "civil war." There's no civil war, but there does seem to be some kind of national nervous breakdown.