Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

T R E 4 5 O N

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Republicans do not trust women.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

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Reader Interactions

142Comments

  1. 1.

    Mary G

    I like JustRuss’s comment on the last thread:

    What’s next, Michael Bay gets the Oscar for Best Director?

    I bet Fahrenthold is pissed.

  2. 2.

    Corner Stone

    Why not? Apparently you can also get one for making check marks on a list as well.

  3. 3.

    laura

    If only she’d been awarded a cordovan shoe . . .
    Barry Freidman, over at Charlie Pierce’s shabeen, channels Nooners and his “acceptance” is good for a chuckle.

  8. 8.

    LurkerNoLonger

    Unfortunately the Pulitzer is not shaped like a cup so Peggy will not be able to drink her morning, midday and evening gin out of it. I think she will kindly refuse the award.

  9. 9.

    Timurid

    Peggy Noonan. Seriously. What the fuck?
    At this rate a bag of broken glass is going to win next year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.

  12. 12.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    I don’t usually post stuff from older threads, but…any suggestions? (Swap out Kelly and Baier for Wallace and Williams for the Fox entries).

    Also: Are we sure Noonan’s piece wasn’t an Alexandra Petri original piss-take?

  13. 13.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Found this via some linking from Charles P. Pierce.

    “I think part of the answer is: Grandpa. He’d sit on the front stoop in Levittown in the 1950s. A sunny day, the kids are tripping by, there’s a tree in the yard and bikes on the street and a car in the front. He was born in Sicily or Donegal or Dubrovnik, he came here with one change of clothes tied in a cloth and slung on his back, he didn’t even speak English, and now look—his grandkids with the bikes.”

    The is really is a giant WTF?

  16. 16.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Farenthold won a Pulitzer too.

    I think Mary G’s point may have been that Noonan’s having been awarded a Pulitzer managed to diminished Fahrenthold’s prize.

    Hope he is celebrating with so much good champagne that he hardly knows who the other 2017 awardees are.

  18. 18.

    Patricia Kayden

    @LurkerNoLonger: She can find some nice immigrant to shape it like a cup for her. Somehow everyone in her orbit agrees with her regularly dispensed words of wisdom. Or do she says.

  20. 20.

    Patricia Kayden

    @SiubhanDuinne: LOL. It’s good to laugh once in awhile so thanks to Ms. Peggy for the hilarious comments in this thread. She’s good for something after all.

  21. 21.

    weaselone

    Commentary is apparently the Pulitzer equivalent of the ignoble prize. It seems to have a history of going to worthless hacks (OK, it’s actually a fairly mixed bag). Dowd and Krauthammer have also won them, as has Thomas Friedman and David Broder.

  22. 22.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Corner Stone:

    You know, I try to be selective about to whom I say “Fuck Right The Hell Off,” but I’m thisclose to making an exception in your case. What the everloving blue-eyed fuck has crawled up your ass today? Honestly, you can be feisty but you’re usually more reasonable than you’ve demonstrated today.

    Hope you get a good night’s sleep. I’m done here for the moment.

  28. 28.

    Timurid

    @JPL: What do I have to do to become rich and famous by dribbling out boozy, half coherent ransom notes for donor class extortionists? Good work if you can get it…

  29. 29.

    Yarrow

    Why is there an award for “Commentary” anyway? WTF is that? Everyone’s got a goddamn opinion. Why are there awards for that?

    Pulitzer committee needs to start awarding prizes for Best Rant. I’m nominating Betty Cracker and Cole.

  30. 30.

    Corner Stone

    @SiubhanDuinne: Give me a break. You disagree with my opinion on something and you act like you’re Jan Brewer wagging your finger in my face on a tarmac somewhere. This is like the third damn thread about this topic. Not like I’m dragging my disgust into a pet rescue thread or a health care thread.
    Personally, I think you’ve gone too far on this matter and owe me an apology.

  34. 34.

    Corner Stone

    @SiubhanDuinne: I accept your unalloyed apology, admittance of how wrong you were to behave in such a manner and otherwise complete capitulation to end this contretemps.

  36. 36.

    Ruckus

    @TenguPhule:
    What did the Bundys ever do to you? Just because they were the most completely dysfunctional family among dysfunctional families, they were far better than Peggers. She’s just a drunk monkey who won a consolation prize for having hit the keys long enough while never writing anything as good as one of those hairy short guys that hang out in trees would if we stuck him in front of a keyboard for a week.

  39. 39.

    Hal

    More than a dozen federal appeals court judges will hear arguments over President Trump’s travel ban executive order on May 8, the court announced on Monday.

    All active judges of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit — there are 15, if none are recused — will hear the appeal over the travel ban injunction issued by a federal judge in Maryland in Richmond, Virginia.

    The move to hear the case initially en banc — by the full court — rather than by a three-judge panel signifies the importance that the court places on the case and was not opposed either by the challengers to the ban or the Justice Department.

    The move also guarantees that the appeals court — which includes a majority of judges nominated by Democratic presidents — will not first hear the case by a three-judge panel that might happen to include two or three conservative judges.

    buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/full-federal-appeals-court-will-hear-travel-ban-arguments?utm_term=.ijYpqe…

  40. 40.

    Patricia Kayden

    @JPL: That’s a good point. Where are the awards for our esteemed BJ frontpagers? They all deserve awards. I’d attend the ceremony and applaud nonstop through their spoeches.

  42. 42.

    Chet Murthy

    @Corner Stone: heh. CS, I’ve been following Farenthold all thru the campaign, and the only sense in which your original comment

    Why not? Apparently you can also get one for making check marks on a list as well.

    makes sense, is as sarcasm. B/c as has been noted elsewhere (prior thread), he did a beautiful thing: showed us that even when it matter not *one iota*, Dampnut *still* lied. That he was incapable of truth-telling.

    I do hope you were being sarcastic.

    ETA: Oh, and he did it at a time when nearly all his peers were watching TV feeds of empty podiums (waiting for Dampnut to arrive for a rally) instead of doing *their jobs*. If for no other reason than *shaming* his peers by example, he earned that prize.

  43. 43.

    eemom

    I do believe I’ll repeat what I said on the last thread; because frankly, the fact that y’all dignify this circle-jerk with ANY thread, let alone two (and God knows how many more in the course of the evening) annoys the crap out of me.

    Why anybody gives a shit about Pulitzer prizes — or any prizes — is beyond me.

    Fucking MoDo won a pulitzer, y’all. Basically any emmessemmbot you’ve ever heard of has won one. So not surprising at all that waaaaay has-been Noonan got one now — they probably just looked at the list of over-60* hacks and realized, oh shit, we forgot about her.

    *Thanks to Steeplejack for pointing out that the twat is only 66. Who’d’a thunk.

  44. 44.

    Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)

    @Ruckus:

    In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.[10]

    Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages[11] largely consisting of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys “are not random generators. They’re more complex than that. … They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there.”[10][12]

    Wikipedia, “Infinite monkey theorem”

  46. 46.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Ruckus:

    A very good point about Cleek. Never before have I thought of Corner Stone as a troll, just as a highly opinionated commenter with whom I often agree and sometimes do not. But s/he has been on a roll today, offensive in his/her ripostes to reasoned arguments, and I can’t help thinking that something else is going on in his/her life to bring about such a torrent of recalcitrance and abuse.

  47. 47.

    No Drought No More

    The Pulitzers have now of gone the way of the Nobel awards in my eyes, on the day they awarded a peace prize to Henry Kissinger.

  49. 49.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Now give each other a hug.

    Yeah no, pretty sure CS never bothered to learn the words to “Kumbaya” or master the basic rhythms to participate in a drum circle.

    But if there were a Pulitzer for passive-aggressive blog commenting, it’d be unanimous.

  50. 50.

    eemom

    And while I’m at it, nothing against Farenthold in particular — but he got a prize for doing his fucking JOB. Because that is SO much more than any of the rest of them do.

  51. 51.

    hovercraft

    @Patricia Kayden:
    John Cole : Wins the Webby for Best Get Off My Lawn Post

    Betty Cracker : Wins the Webby for Best Illustrations and Wittiest Post

    Dave/ Richard : Wins the Webby for Best Healthcare Policy Analysis

    Adam Silverman : Wins for Best Foreign Policy and Security Analysis

    Take it away folks……

  56. 56.

    notoriousJRT

    @eemom:
    *Thanks to Steeplejack for pointing out that the twat is only 66. Who’d’a thunk.
    I’d have thunk she’s been 66 for the last 20 years, at least. Blech.

  61. 61.

    Mary G

    @SgrAstar: Yes, I was just going to type Steve Lopez too.

    And if Noonan is 66, I would be amazed. I’m 61 and she’s at least 15 years older than I am.

  62. 62.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @eemom:

    I was pretty sure, but once or twice I’ve either observed or stumbled into gender quicksands. But thanks.

  66. 66.

    Citizen_X

    @Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):

    Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages[11] largely consisting of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it.

    And then they founded Breitbart!

  67. 67.

    Gin & Tonic

    @JPL: I read that United CEO Munoz sent a letter to employees tonight praising the gate crew and calling the passenger belligerent. Does he really have no PR staff?

  69. 69.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Patricia Kayden:

    Helen Rettig for best vegetarian advocacy.

    Hillary Rettig, I suppose you mean. Yes, she is a powerful advocate for veganism/vegetarianism. I’m not fully converted by any means, but her writings have certainly prompted me to be at least a bit more conscious of my food choices.

  72. 72.

    Ruckus

    @Gin & Tonic:
    He’s a CEO. He’s smarter than any PR staff. You don’t believe me, just ask him. And as a little thought experiment, think what drumpf would be like without any PR staff. OK that’s a bad example, his PR staff seems to spend most of their time on their knees thinking with the small (very small I’d bet) brain rather than the one in the lump on their shoulders.

  73. 73.

    p.a.

    Does anyone else see a ‘Treat Depression, Anxiety, Insomnia’ ad just above the comments of this thread? Fitting, of course, but someone’s watching.

    also too, wonder if it works on paranoia?

  74. 74.

    Tilda Swintons Bald Cap

    You think Nooners winning a Pulitzer is bad, sheeeeit:

    Ron Howard has lined up a new directing project today as Deadline reports that the Inferno helmer is set to take on Hillbilly Elegy, based on the bestselling memoir by J.D. Vance. Imagine Entertainment secured the rights to the book, which was published by Harper Collins last June.

  75. 75.

    lollipopguild

    @Gin & Tonic: He is just being honest, He does not give a shit about the passenger or how it all looks to the public. I am reminded of a story I once heard about a British bus co. A woman goes to the bus stop to catch the bus into London. The bus is empty and does not stop for her. She tries the next day, same result. She writes a letter to the bus co. complaining about what happened. She gets a letter back from the bus co. explaining that the only way that the bus can stay on schedule is to never stop and pick up any passengers.

  79. 79.

    TenguPhule

    @Ruckus: Are you sure we’re talking about the same Bundys here?

    Married with Children. Dysfunctional is an understatement.

  81. 81.

    Aleta

    Touching

    Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump told the Telegraph he’s “sure” his sister, Ivanka Trump, played a role in the president of the United States deciding to attack a Syrian air base.

    “Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said: ‘Listen, this is horrible stuff,’” Eric said of the Bashar al-Assad regime’s attack on Syrian civilians last Tuesday.

  82. 82.

    TenguPhule

    @Baud: You are at the end of the list of politicians I will cannibalize during the long nuclear winter. Be proud!

  83. 83.

    TenguPhule

    @Aleta:

    Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump told the Telegraph he’s “sure” his sister, Ivanka Trump, played a role in the president of the United States deciding to attack a Syrian air base.

    Well in that case she can be hanged on the rope next to him at the Hague.

  84. 84.

    JPL

    @Gin & Tonic: Last week we had the Pepsi ad, today we were re-accomodated. It seems like the new normal for corporate america. It’s Trump’s world afterall.

  86. 86.

    Tilda Swintons Bald Cap

    @Baud: Synopsis given on the film website Coming Soon.

    “Hillbilly Elegy” is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

  88. 88.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Aleta: Yes, it’s horrible stuff. So is being burned alive by incendiaries, which don’t seem to induce the same outrage as chemical weapons.

  91. 91.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: The free market works. Except when it fucks over white working class Americans. Then something must be done, like create coal jobs for a commodity that no one wants to buy any more.

  98. 98.

    Jeffro

    @Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: Funny how no one seems to be falling all over themselves to write a book or film a movie about others in intergenerational poverty…others of a darker hue, let us say…

    …but hey, good for “Elegy” and its writer. I’m sure it will be a class-based take on what’s gone off the rails in America these past 3.5 decades or so…

  99. 99.

    jl

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    ” The free market works. Except when it fucks over white working class Americans. Then something must be done, like create coal jobs for a commodity that no one wants to buy any more. ”

    I wonder if Hillbilly Elegy talks about a certain bigot political party, that 50 to 60 percent of them slavishly vote for, that has played a big role in their sad decline.

  101. 101.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Corner Stone:

    Examples, please. Put up.

    Sure thing, dude, and these examples are hardly exhaustive.

    Corner Stone

    April 10, 2017 at 4:10 pm
    @SgrAstar:
    David Farenthold just won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Trump Foundation and Don’s shenanigans. Great stuff.
    I knew this was going to happen. Fuck this. Some lazy asshole picked up a phone and started calling charities. He should be on VDE’s list, and go fuck himself.

    93
    Corner Stone
    says:
    April 10, 2017 at 4:23 pm
    @randy khan: He wasn’t asking people to disclose their business secrets. It’s a bunch of charities. They kind of have to, for the most part.
    And yeah, a big chunk of what investigative journos do is phone leg work, and nowadays interwebs research.
    I’m not saying that knowing Trump is a lying, selfish, greedy asshole is not important. But, c’mon. You have all these resources at your disposal, and you are being fucking paid to ask about shit Trump does not want to come out. And what we get to celebrate is that Trump is a fucking lying tightwad? Well, boo fucking hoo.
    It seems mind boggling that it is only now, well after he is in office that independent voices are putting obvious pieces together to tell us all the ways Trump and his people are tied like barbed wire to Russia and Putin.
    Sorry, nobody gives a shit if Trump ever gave a penny to charity.

    1. 113
Corner Stone says:

April 10, 2017 at 4:35 pm
@randy khan: 
I guess I have a different view. He took what looked like a minor story, stuck with it, doggedly got the facts, and reported them clearly, carefully, and in great detail, and turned it into a major issue in the campaign, which it was.

He was reporting sports scores. Habitat? zero. St. Judes? zero. Fisher House? zero.
    2. It’s good work. It is solid reporting. But it should scare the fuck out of all of us that this is what is being celebrated as “primo investigative journalism” in the run up to the GE.
    3. In the end it was less than a minor story. It meant nothing to anyone.

    Corner Stone

    April 10, 2017 at 4:39 pm
    @SiubhanDuinne: Hey, I’ve got an idea for WaPo reporters. Trump can’t get a loan from any US Bank. He’s still in business. Where is he getting the loans and funding from?
Maybe tax returns?
Sexual assaults?
    No, no. Let’s find out if he’s a good Christian charitable type or not. Agreed! PULITZER!!

    Corner Stone

    April 10, 2017 at 4:44 pm
    @randy khan: We can agree to disagree, but you’re still wrong.

  102. 102.

    Tilda Swintons Bald Cap

    @TenguPhule:

    Howard will produce with Imagine Entertainment chairman Brian Grazer and the company’s president, Erica Huggins. Julie Oh will oversee the project for Imagine. A writer has not yet been set.

  103. 103.

    lollipopguild

    @GregB: Think of the horse drawn carriage makers and the buggy whip makers. Oh the humanity! Trump should Ex order all of the railroads to go back to steam engines that use coal!

  104. 104.

    efgoldman

    @Corner Stone:

    I think you’ve gone too far on this matter and owe me an apology.

    The only person that owes you an apology is whoever stuck a hot poker up your ass.

  108. 108.

    ThresherK

    @Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: I guess it’s time to watch Matewan again. I mean, it’s full of downtrodden and struggling WWCs, except there’s no imaginary “wimmenz, queers and negroes keeping us coal miners down” drumbeat in it.

  109. 109.

    Corner Stone

    @SiubhanDuinne: These all stand up fine on their own. Thanks! I think your argument is fail here, and maybe you should consider what is going on in your life that caused you to get so bent out of shape and play the Hall Monitor on some pretty tame opinions on DF’s Pulitzer.

  110. 110.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @efgoldman:

    I’m offended that you apologized. You owe him nothing.

    My error was in failing to use the ever-useful snark tag.

    Chag sameach, my friend.

  112. 112.

    Chet Murthy

    @Corner Stone: @SiubhanDuinne: CS, sure, it’d be great to get the victims of the sexual assaults to speak up. Only, at least one of those victims ended up going back into hiding, citing death threats. It’d be great to get those tax returns, only it’d require somebody to risk their jobs (maybe even imprisonment?) to get ’em.

    And yet, some of Dampnut’s misfeasance in the case of his charity, seems criminal. And more pertinent, Farenthold did his job, and @eemom: said it right:

    Because that is SO much more than any of the rest of them do.

    Look: I get it that you want some big reveal. So do I. Why do you think he’s got everybody who ever worked for him, under NDA? He’s mobbed-up, Russkied-up, and you expect reporters to *risk their lives* digging up stuff that isn’t in the public record? You’re askin’ a lot. And I’ll leave it at that.

  116. 116.

    hovercraft

    @Baud:
    From The Guardian

    he memoir ends shortly after Vance graduates from Yale, where he has learned how to exploit networks and connections that many students at Ivy League schools acquired at birth – but kids from Middletown don’t even know exist.

    The book finishes before it can tell the next chapter of Vance’s life: his relocation to Silicon Valley and his move, around April of last year, from the biotech firm to Mithril Capital, the venture capitalist firm founded by controversial billionaire Peter Thiel.

    I ask Vance how he got the job. He says he met Thiel during a talk the tech entrepreneur gave at Yale and emailed him years later asking for work. “It was that simple,” he says……………..

    Trump’s election was seen, at least in part, as a backlash from white, working-class voters frustrated at their relative decline in status in America – symbolized, of course, by its first black president. Vance plays down this explanation, but I bring up a line in his book that seems to hint at a racially toned resentment. “Obama,” he writes, “strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities.”

    “I think that Obama is everything that the American meritocracy values at a time when a lot of us feel like the American meritocracy doesn’t value very much about us at all,” he explains. “It is just sort of like everything about him. He’s like the American ideal at the very moment that we feel like we’re the opposite of the American ideal.”

    He adds: “The natural question that comes – especially in the modern political context as part of that – is the fact he has black skin. I think for some people that’s definitely part of it. But I continue to think the racial explanation of the reaction to Obama doesn’t quite capture how much everything about him is both enviable but also dislikable. Because we dislike the things that we envy.”

    There is an arrogance to Obama’s demeanour, he adds, that makes him especially difficult to relate to. “He talks in a way that a professor talks, he talks in a way that you sort of aspire to talk if you’re a young law student. Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.”

  118. 118.

    Ruckus

    @TenguPhule:
    Yes. That Bundy family.
    And I said most completely dysfunctional of all dysfunctional. And that’s not even true, I’ve known worse in real life.

  119. 119.

    Chet Murthy

    @hovercraft:

    He talks in a way that a professor talks, he talks in a way that you sort of aspire to talk if you’re a young law student.

    This guy. This guy. He can’t even *see* that the only black man who’d have a *chance* of getting to the Presidency, would have characteristics like these. As if a guy who talked and acted like Bill Clinton but was black, could have made it there. What a fool.

  120. 120.

    Baud

    @hovercraft:

    Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.”

    Kind of puts the lie to this.

    J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

  121. 121.

    ThresherK

    Hey, Frontline did a great show on Appalachian whites without having to resort to a Dem-hating hack inserting himself into it.

    Mark my words: We’re about five months away from Regnery Films announcing a movie of The Bell Curve, centered on poor little not-good-enough Abigail Fisher.

  122. 122.

    sharl

    @Tilda Swintons Bald Cap: J.D. Vance is slick, at least in the category of non-obvious self-promotion. Those of his critics I follow (who typically come from Appalachia) – e.g., Appalachian Studies specialist Elizabeth Catte and writer Sarah Jones – pretty much assume he’ll run for office at some point (probably in Ohio). Ron Howard’s movie will likely help boost his name recognition far beyond what his book and online writings have done.

    Here is one of a number of tweets in a live tweeting of a session at an Appalachian Studies conference; the session was devoted solely to Hillbilly Elegy. To say the least, the scholars there were not fans. A few of Catte’s tweets:

    Dwight Billings calls Hillbilly Elegy the Moynihan Report in whiteface. Yup. Getting good in here.
    ~ ~ ~
    Bob Hutton suggests Vance is feeding readers a simple Appalachia to satisfy the ‘well meaning’ American center craving tidy narratives.
    ~ ~ ~
    “No heart, no class, no warmth,” says Ivy Brashear. HE erases and erodes any Appalachian experience beyond Vance’s own, she says.
    ~ ~ ~
    Brashear says that Vance mines our stories like companies mine coal – this is exploitation, plain and simple.
    ~ ~ ~
    The panel IS NOT buying Vance’s ‘aw shucks, who me?’ response to his celebrity. He courts credibility off our backs to get the limelight.

    Here is something Sarah Jones wrote in New Republic back in November: J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America

    The bestselling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” has emerged as the liberal media’s favorite white trash–splainer. But he is offering all the wrong lessons.

  123. 123.

    Chet Murthy

    @Gin & Tonic: whups, sorry, clearly you don’t agree. I was merely noting that there’s a lotta chiming-in that Farenthold’s work is worthy, in this and the prior thread. Dude, not tryin’ to start a fight.

  124. 124.

    Ruckus

    @Aleta:
    I get to talk. I was in the navy on board ship and I was in the Shore Patrol for a while and met me some marines. Some shipmates and some of the marines had not evolved. Not in the least little bit.
    Haven’t you met a few dumpf supporters? Some of them have devolved below drunk monkeys.

  125. 125.

    Patricia Kayden

    @hovercraft: Yeah because a Black President could get away with talking like an illiterate idiot who repeats himself constantly and cusses and is crude. Sure.

    And why do we need a President who talks like he’s dumb to satisfy people like Vance? What’s wrong with intelligence in the Leader of the Free Works?

  126. 126.

    danielx

    Perhaps the Pulitzer selection committee was attempting some sort of balance, a half-assed “both sides” effort?

    Not that I really care. The award for Commentary is what frosts me. If they’d given her a prize as a lifetime achievement(?) award to Our Lady of Stolichnaya, perhaps I wouldn’t be so irritated. Perhaps.

    Naaahhh, I’d still be irate.

  128. 128.

    danielx

    @Ruckus:

    Had to laugh at a bumper sticker I saw today: Marine Corps insignia (eagle, globe, fouled anchor) and beside it:

    true
    American
    Idiots

    Had to be a marine’s truck, nobody else would have the nerve.

  130. 130.

    Ruckus

    @danielx:
    Sounds like my marine buddy. A self claimed racist, he votes democrat every time including both times for President Obama. In his younger days he had quite the temper, but old age has worked it’s magic and he’s a lot less bombastic. We go back to about a month after I got discharged, that’s 44 yrs.

  132. 132.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ruckus: I had soldiers who worked for me who were fantastic in the field but who could not stop themselves from mugging and assaulting people on weekends when in a garrison environment.

  133. 133.

    Ruckus

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    On board the ship I was stationed on for 2 yrs we had JC. Tall, thin, loved pain, loved boxing, as long as he was doing the hitting, which he most likely was. I came back one fine evening, having enjoyed several refreshments at the e club and JC called me out. Now I can box reasonably well but JC as I said liked pain, a lot, (btw I don’t) and had me on reach by about 2 inches and height by about 3. It was looking very ugly till his wingman showed up and convinced him of my identity. Did I mention that he liked to drink a bit as well and that he loved pain? He was not even close to the bottom of the barrel.

  134. 134.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ruckus: My bars kept me well away from that. When we did Courtesy Patrol, I, wearing my bus driver hat, could step into the middle of a fight and stop it, knowing that soldiers would pull a muscle pulling their punches rather than hit me. I would then suggest that the MPs were on the way and perhaps they shouldn’t be around when the MPs showed up. Different worlds.

  135. 135.

    Mnemosyne

    @sharl:

    It was kind of fascinating to me that Jones wrote a whole article about how Appalachia desperately needs help and is ignored by politicians and the only politicians she actually calls out by name in the article are … Bill and Hillary Clinton.

    Pair that with her dismissive review of the new Clinton book where she actually thinks that Sanders saying he, like, doesn’t like sexists, is actually a defense and I get a feeling she has some Clinton Derangement Syndrome issues she needs to work through.

  136. 136.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Mnemosyne: Yeah, I hold no brief for Vance, but the take down seemed aimed as much at the Clintons as Vance that it was laughable.

  137. 137.

    Ruckus

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    Very true. Although several officers that I’ve seen didn’t seem to understand what that difference was. When in the SP I ran for bit with an E6 marine who could smell drugs better than any trained dog I’ve ever seen. We’d work the main gate into Long Beach Navy Station and he’d just stand there and watch cars. Then boom, he pull one over and search it. Always found drugs, enlisted or officer. Have no idea what he saw, or why he pulled over certain cars, he told me he just knew. So either he was very, very good or most cars coming on to the base had drugs in them and it was just luck. The ratio of enlisted to officer stopped was pretty even every time I was with him.

  138. 138.

    sharl

    @Mnemosyne: Yep, Sarah Jones is definitely not a Hillary fan. I assume you are referring to Jones’ critique of Susan Bordo’s book. I haven’t read Jones’ critique, nor excerpts from Bordo’s book, and in general I’m burned out on Hillary-Bernie shit, so I may never get around to either.

    [I’m kinda plucking bits from here and there, but mostly for the purpose of deciding how I should think about campaigns in 2018; something maybe that can serve as a basis to determine my own priorities on contributions. Since those elections will be Congressional, state and local campaigns, I’m not yet certain how relevant the events of 2016 will be; issues to some extent of course, along with (IMO) necessary risk-taking and coherent messaging, will maybe matter more than personalities (though that always matters in politics, like it or not). At least for me it’s still too early to tell.]

  140. 140.

    J R in WV

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    @Ruckus:

    A very good point about Cleek. Never before have I thought of Corner Stone as a troll, just as a highly opinionated commenter with whom I often agree and sometimes do not. But s/he has been on a roll today, offensive in his/her ripostes to reasoned arguments, and I can’t help thinking that something else is going on in his/her life to bring about such a torrent of recalcitrance and abuse.

    Perhaps CS is suffering from Trump’s Syndrome?? I know I’m a little short lately, as in inclined to snap at people I shouldn’t.

  141. 141.

    J R in WV

    @Ruckus:

    I was standing midnight watch on our bridge late one night, and a PO came to the OOD and told him they were smoking that marijauna back on the fantail. Due back in home port the next day, we paused at anchor for a shipwide muster and search of everyone’s personal space – our lockers under our sleeping space.

    They busted many Chiefs and senior POs for having liquor in their locker, but nary a seaman for pot. I could only assume it was all smoked last night on the midnight watch. This would have been around 1971-72. I think everyone thought it was pretty funny except the lifers with their whiskey.

    Much funny stuff, since no one was usually hurt. Standing watch on a mooring line with an ax to cut it if the sub moored to my ship started to sink. Don’t want to capsize a tender with 900 guys by losing a sub moored alongside. Went through dozens of pumps which kept burning up engines, but kept the sub from sinking.

    Problem was Squids removing a high pressure valve without making sure there was no pressure on the valve, it actually blew through the pressure hull when it broke loose. Miracle no injuries on that one.

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