Rarely has a snapshot of Memeorandum so starkly depicted the current state of play in U.S. politics:
Trump couldn’t have more efficiently underscored the righteousness of Biden’s accusations if he had explicitly set out to do so. I assume that last item about Trump financially supporting the insurrectionists is a bald-faced lie since Trump doesn’t even support his blubbery orange self. But it’s unambiguous confirmation that he supports the violent overthrow of the democratically elected government.
The mister and I watched Biden’s speech last night and found ourselves cheering at several points, which is unusual for such a reticent pair of odd ducks. My inner theater critic is generally not a fan of Biden’s anger-bear mode; empathy is his métier, so sometimes anger can sound strained and cloud-shouty coming from Biden. But last night, it sounded genuine and righteous and timely.
The usual suspects sank into the usual fainting couches, but to quote a great man, “Fuck ’em!” And those meeping that Biden promised to be a uniter should understand that he is a uniter — he’s uniting people who support democracy against the fascists who are trying to destroy it.
Also, this headline makes me want to break shit:
Sweet weeping Jeebus. How about this instead:
Opinion: How clickbait media hacks can avoid burning Cassandra at the stake for telling the goddamn truth next time
As Biden said, “it is within our power to stop this assault on democracy.” Trump is certainly doing his part to demonstrate the urgency of the situation. The Beltway media is focused solely on theater criticism. All that remains is to see whether normie America will wake up to the peril and act accordingly.
Open thread.
eversor
Trumps raising money off the insurectionists getting locked up, but he won’t use it to help them.
Also breaking on MSNBC the list of what the FBI seized came out and it’s bad, including also some classified folders that were empty…
JPL
Opinion: How clickbait media hacks can avoid burning Cassandra at the stake for telling the goddamn truth next time perfect!
I heard that Brianna Keilar didn’t like the optics, of Biden’s speech.
waspuppet
It’s Balanced Journalism to point that out; it’s only Intolerable Liberal Bias if you hint that it might be bad.
By you admitting she was dead right.
matt
CNN is going to do this from now forward, thanks to their new ownership. Get used to it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
good to see at least this seems to be setting off alarm bells
trollhattan
@matt: Yeah, the rebranding to “Fox Lite” will not be pretty.
How long before a phalanx of blondes are reading news from a West Elm sofa?
Betty
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Those empty folders are stunning. How will anyone defend this without looking like a traitor?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@trollhattan: I’m trying to remember how many women they put up as a fair and balanced counterweight to that nut Rachel Maddow: Erin Burnett, Campbell Brown…. at least one more whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head.
eversor
@Betty:
Sadly with joy and great enthusiasm. They won’t look like a traitor to “real” Americans.
trollhattan
Dark Brandon meme has definitely traveled offshore.
twitter.com/ELINTNews/status/1565503063430922241?cxt=HHwWgoCw6byv5LkrAAAA
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I just hope they don’t try comedy again.
Greg
I guess that Trump has given up on the idea that the rioters were Antifa. And the next time someone tries to lay the blame for the violence of Jan. 6 on Antifa, the response is that then Trump is on their side, since he has said that he will financially support them and pardon them.
Raoul Paste
IIRC, the MSM aired a nationwide Trump speech which turned out to be mostly a promotion of his new hotel in Washington DC.
And yet Biden is important speech at a historic tipping point is not worth airtime. Well, there’s your problem right there
Betty Cracker
On Twitter, Perry Bacon says CNN personnel (as opposed to journalists) are both-sidesing everything to preserve their jobs, given the new management. Rings true. But if your job requires you to remain neutral on democracy vs. fascism, maybe find a new job? I can’t cast too many stones since I’ve done scuzzy things to make a living; I used to be an insurance company hack for hire! But damn!
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
That’s too bad. In late 2020, it seems for a while that CNN was doing a better job than MSNBC.
Cacti
Hillary’s mistake was backtracking on her comment.
They are deplorable.
MattF
@Greg: That brings the f-word into play, so, no. A more sophisticated RW criticism is that it’s inappropriate for Biden to bring politics into political debates. For this argument to work you have to be adept at statements in which the first part contradicts the second part… doublethink, I guess.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Rick Fucking Wilson
Newt Gingrich’s hatchet man is to the left of Peter Baker
CaseyL
@Betty Cracker: I don’t know how much the rank and file make, but the anchors are probably very well paid. Well paid enough that they’re also highly leveraged, with homes in the “right” neighborhoods, kids in the “right” schools, and so on.
Even if their annual salaries are in the high 6/low 7 figures, they can’t walk away without giving up all that. And giving up that nice status is a very hard ask.
Baud
Maybe CNN is aiming to be the news network of the three non-MAGA Republicans that Biden was talking about.
trollhattan
THIS is how to propaganda. Russia: “We have destroyed 44 of Ukraine’s 16 HIMARs.”
MattF
@CaseyL: And all that with no actual talent or expertise.
Sure Lurkalot
While MAGA clutches their pearls,
Let’s not forget where much of this started.
May the J6 folks have the goods on that pompous ass.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Anybody know what those sec/mil aid return to staff folders are?
Cacti
48 empty classified folders at Mar-a-Lago.
Were it Hillary or Obama, Republicans would be calling for their public lynching.
trollhattan
If you find yourself thinking this line can’t part of a happy story, gold star.
Ohio man who suffered 20,000 bee stings and ingested 30 bees wakes up from coma, family says
Scout211
Reposted from downstairs:
The full screen version of the documents list
wv blondie
Democracy is a muscle. You exercise it by standing up!
Baud
@Scout211:
The most surprising thing is there were books.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan:
I love this one:
Baud
@trollhattan:
Did someone actually count all the bee stings?
Scout211
@Baud:
2033 copies of “The Art of theStealDeal?”Ken
@Scout211: Lots of “US Government Documents/Photographs”. TFG still hasn’t caught on that each of those might as well read “Stolen property”. I wonder if his lawyers understood that?
Oh, and when I say lots, I mean lots. The largest number I spotted for one box was 1841, but there were several other boxes with over a thousand.
SiubhanDuinne
@matt:
And no Brian Stelter, who would have devoted his show this weekend to media coverage of Biden’s speech, including CNN’s.
I hope he lands someplace good. And soon.
Baud
@Ken:
Although not the worst crime he has committed, but I would love to see him indicted for Grand Theft Larceny.
FelonyGovt
I held a Secret clearance from 1981 to 1993. Reading about these empty classified folders, and classified documents mixed in with miscellaneous crap, raises my already-too-high blood pressure. I can’t even imagine how those of you who are former military, or high level intelligence folks, must feel about this.
Scout211
@Ken: Yes. And I am wondering (hoping?) that the fact that the DOJ listed so many documents as US Government property and the rest of the documents and items listed without that designation (Trump’s property) may give the judge a little more leeway to deny or at least restrict Trump’s request for a special master. All of the items have already been sorted and the ones belonging to the US Government are clearly marked as such.
Patricia Kayden
Good on President Biden for using his bully pulpit to denounce the violence coming out of the right. Trump isn’t the only problem. It’s the entire Republican Party.
Tony G
@Cacti: Absolutely. “Despicable” or “repulsive” would have been better words from Hillary. (“Deplorable” would be something like me spilling coffee on my shirt, or my dog making a mess on the floor.). I haven’t watched any TV news in almost two decades (the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the last time, I think). I know how to read. I don’t need corporate talking heads spoon-feeding talking points to me.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@trollhattan: Reminds me of the Chinese news story of how Mao swam a certain distance in a time that would’ve qualified him for a slot in the Olympics.
Propaganda at its finest.
Jeffro
@Cacti: fixed it for you
Llelldorin
@Baud: This paper says that 140-150µg of venom is delivered in a stinging event. With 20,000 stings, that’s around 2.8g of venom, which is around what that same paper lists as the median lethal dose. That’s like 0.5g/L, which has got to be measurable pretty easily.
Jeffro
What will the new line from the MAGAts be later today?
Roger Moore
@Greg:
Not at all. See the actual violent rioters were Antifa. The people who have been arrested are innocent pro-Trump people who are being railroaded to protect the real rioters and sell the story Trump was behind it all. /s
Jeffro
Btw if anyone’s interested, McMegs has finally, accurately, cut to the heart of the matter: with trumpov around, the GOP is going to continue to be fucked.
Sorry about your “red wave” there, Megs!
(Oh, and best wishes with this nonsense: we already tried!!)
different-church-lady
@Cacti:
Calling for it nothing, they’d be doing it.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@FelonyGovt: Being a former government employee, I had a random bureaucratic thought the other day about the “automatically declassified” nonsense.
For ordinary ex-peons like myself, the judgment on the classification level comes from a document called the Classification Guide that exists for every program. You need to be able to cite it as the basis.
I don’t remember ever being involved in something being declassified, but I imagine so long as the Classification Guide says it’s classified, it’s classified. So it can’t be considered unclass until somebody modifies the Guide, editing and re-publishing that document and disseminating it to everybody who holds a copy. Which must be a fairly tedious bureaucratic procedure itself requiring a dozen signatures.
Just confirming what everybody has already said about how even a President can’t just wave his hand and declare something unclassified. Being an ex-bureaucrat, my mind went to the bureaucracy.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jeffro:
It will be that empty folders are empty folders, and they never contained classified anything, which is an argument that I’m guessing will work in court. The inventory contains enough government documents of every level of secrecy, including thousands that aren’t classified but definitely are stolen, to convict Trump of every document handling crime in the book. I’m focused on that.
JPL
Today is John Harwood’s last day at CNN. whoa
He doesn’t say why, but we can infer that there was a disagreement, since he is job hunting.
Roger Moore
@Jeffro:
I would go with 4. All of the above, but I’m sure there are a few more you’re missing. We can definitely expect “but her emails” and “Obama has 12 zillion classified documents”, and probably a few more I can’t think of.
different-church-lady
@Baud:
“Look, nobody’s gonna believe there were exactly 20,000 bee stings. Add two.“
ian
@Jeffro: The FBI planted those folders to incriminate dear leader, and please give dear leader his folders back, he needs those to sheath the documents again.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JPL: wow
that new guy is chasing people out
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@different-church-lady: Reminds me of an old joke.
Museum guide: And this dinosaur skeleton is 30 million years and 9 months old!
Tourist: How can they know so precisely?
Guide: It was 30 million years old when I got here, and I’ve been here 9 months.
eversor
@Frankensteinbeck:
Unless they know where they went already. They just raided another Putin ally and came out there with boxes of documents.
brantl
@Jeffro: And they will list them, just as you did, one right after the last, with no sense of contradiction, or irony.
prostratedragon
@Baud: Bet that’s scaled from an average of a few areas. Poor man.
Josie
@eversor:
Please don’t use the term “raid” for a legal search by law enforcement. We don’t need to help the Maga’s in their misuse of language.
JPL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think he warned about the rise in fascism, and it scared the bosses. My guess is that Acosta is next.
eversor
@Josie: Fair enough!
Roger Moore
@Baud:
I think the “stung by a swarm of 20,000 bees” is a bad description. He was attacked by a swarm of about 20,000 bees and some of them stung him, but it’s very unlikely he was stung 20,000 times. For one thing, the surface area of a human body is only about 2 m^2, so 20,000 stings would mean an average of a sting on every square centimeter. That seems really unlikely. Also, a honeybee’s sting is so difficult to remove the bee itself will be torn in half by the effort of removing it, so honeybees are reluctant to sting more than they need to. The chances are only a small fraction of the 20,000 bees in the swarm stung the guy, but even a few hundred stings is likely to be really, really bad for you.
Jeffro
@brantl: 5. Dear Leader planted those empty folders himself in order to bait the Deep State into showing itself and sparking a glorious uprising! Q said so.
6. What folders? I don’t see any folders.
7. These were all part of a special “TRUMP: THE PRESIDENTIAL BOARD GAME” that trumpov is working on, for kids of all ages! Help the ahem real president find the classified material that will prove the 2020 election was rigged!!
Another Scott
I see a new submission coming to the US Court of Customs and Patent Appeals, or some similar US court:
“The Constitution says in Article 2, the bigly one, that the President is king of all America and can do what he wants. There’s nothing in the Constitution that restricts what the President can do with paperwork, therefore your unconstitutional puny laws and regulations cannot restrict him.
“Now, he demands that you reseat him in his rightly throne. Otherwise you’re a WOKE Demonrat.
“Submitted, respectfully, Lynn Wood, Esq., OBE, MAGA, MGM, ITT, Fnord.”
Maybe??
Cheers,
Scott.
Mimi
CNN is now reason #2 I won’t pay for cable.
Yes, I know some people would get no signal at all if they didn’t give money to a business that gives money to Fox and CNN. I get the very good local PBS channel and I can watch Jeopardy and that’s all I need over the air.
trollhattan
@Jeffro: This may be the first time I’ve read something by her and my BP did not budge.
Not expecting it to be a trend, however.
rikyrah
Andrew Weinstein (@Weinsteinlaw) tweeted at 9:38 AM on Fri, Sep 02, 2022:
Our democracy is at an inflection point and so many in the media seem completely unprepared to meet the moment.
(https://twitter.com/Weinsteinlaw/status/1565710657802084353?t=dFQFltqk56TDluO89y8CZw&s=03)
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
It would work in public, and it might work with this judge, but it won’t work at trial. Trump didn’t get those folders himself; someone else gave them to him. There’s a paper trail and people able to testify there was a document in that folder when it was given to Trump. I don’t know the procedure, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are receipts with Trump’s signature attesting to receiving the documents in question. Either he took the document out of the folder or he let someone else do it, in which case he was negligent in handling that classified document.
Tazj
I didn’t get to catch the entirety of Biden’s speech yesterday. However, I was confident that he would explicitly state in the speech that not all Republicans were MAGAS, because I know neither he, nor his speech writers are idiots.
This morning, I saw that he had pointed out his work with Republicans and said he respected conservative Republicans.This wasn’t enough of course for our media, who run with any criticisms of Republican politics as personal attacks against Republicans and their families.
Our media coverage is terrible and exhausting. They should be talking about how there is a threat of fascism and not about how Biden’s speech might hurt someone’s feelings.
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s beginning to take on the characteristics of a bloodbath.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Frankensteinbeck: The though had crossed my mind that Trump is the kind of asshole to have have a bunch of empty folders labeled classified so he could wave them around to impress the rubes. Like that whole thing were he had himself photographed signing blank pieces of paper when he was in the hospital with covid.
Like I said, Trump is the clown car of evil.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jeffro:
Then Trump will be on to;
8. Antifa broke into Trump’s office, to frame Trump. But Trump heroically secured the office until the NSA gets it’s act together.
The BS on this one is going to be something else.
rikyrah
No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) tweeted at 8:02 AM on Fri, Sep 02, 2022:
The party that put a massive banner over their stage that said “WE ARE ALL DOMESTIC TERRORISTS” less than a month ago is really upset today about being called a threat to America. t.co/Yp3xdiHZQs
(https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1565686503627403264?t=r4D3UocVHPDKzWtMeKZLOw&s=03)
RaflW
CNN reminds me of the last condo developer to throw up a Florida tower after it’s obvious to everyone but them that the boom is over and they’re gonna get screwed.
Five years after the Trump ‘phenomena’ launched, and at least two years after it peaked, now CNN has decided to chase Fox viewers. As if Fox fans would ever switch (or even double-dip), after marinating in “CNN is ultra left drool cup gibberish” rhetoric for decades.
But CNN will drive away their more liberal viewers with this new found focus. It’s gonna tank the already middling ratings, and management will have no clue why. SMH.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Harwood, Stelter and….? Anyone know who the third is? I agree with
@JPL: that Acosta is probably updating his CV.
MSNBC should give Mrs Greenspan her gold watch and give Harwood her chair.
Frankensteinbeck
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Trump is also the kind of idiot who would randomly give classified documents away to people he was trying to impress.
Eunicecycle
@Frankensteinbeck: But then they wouldn’t be HIS PRECIOUS anymore!
trollhattan
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Possum Queen used to use Acosta as her personal pinata so yes, I’d guess he’s on the chopping block (going with the hit-with-weapon theme).
Betty Cracker
@RaflW:
Great analogy!
JPL
Harwood was on CNN at ten and gone by noon
The core point he made in that political speech about a threat to democracy is true. Now, that’s something that’s not easy for us, as journalists, to say. We’re brought up to believe there’s two different political parties with different points of view and we don’t take sides in honest disagreements between them. But that’s not what we’re talking about. These are not honest disagreements. The Republican Party right now is led by a dishonest demagogue. Many, many Republicans are rallying behind his lies about the 2020 election and other things as well. And a significant portion — or a sufficient portion — of the constituency that they’re leading attacked the Capitol on January 6th. Violently. By offering pardons or suggesting pardons for those people who violently attacked the Capitol, which you’ve been pointing out numerous times this morning, Donald Trump made Joe Biden’s point for him. must thank presswatch.org
Paul in KY
@trollhattan: I was surprised he only ate 30 of them. He probably inhaled another 20. He’s a lucky guy with a strong constitution.
cain
We should post this on the front page and discuss – I think it’s quite relevant on observation on media culture:
politico.com/news/magazine/2022/08/28/fox-news-trump-journalism-00053991
Money quote:
cain
@trollhattan:
Does he have super powers now?
cain
@RaflW: Their decision makes no sense… there are so many right wing alternatives that these viewers aer going to – it won’t be CNN.
In the end, that guy is gonna get fired, but so should the people who hired him. If they lose a lot of ratings – it’s going to go badly for them all.
But perhaps, if there was a missing white girl on an island, they might be able to get their ratings back.
WaterGirl
@eversor:
?????