Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Everybody saw this coming.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

In my day, never was longer.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

“woke” is the new caravan.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Books are my comfort food!

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Bark louder, little dog.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Ignore Them and They’ll Go Away

Ignore Them and They’ll Go Away

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Ignore Them and They'll Go Away 1
This juxtaposition was incredibly easy to do – just pick the Times’ current headline on Trump and then find what he actually said. It would work pretty much every day that Trump is doing an event.

Scout211 mentioned this piece by Drew Magary at SFGate, and he’s about where I am with regard to the NYT:

[…] I work in an industry that’s been gutted from the inside out this century — you’ve heard about that part, too — leaving the Times as the dominant primordial beast in the serious newsgathering business. It has the biggest readership of any paper by far and, as such, critics like me have treated hate-reading the Times as an act of public service. My opinion was that the Times’ influence was so vast, especially among higher-ups in both the federal government and the private sector, that it had to be called out anytime it failed to call things as they clearly were (daily). To dump on the Times was to speak truth to power.

I no longer hold that opinion. Harris is winning this election right now in large part because she has avoided legacy outlets, the Times foremost among them, altogether. Her team understands that it behooves these outlets to have a close race, which means that they’ll seize on any gaffe Harris makes if it gives them a chance to falsely equivocate her remarks to those of Trump screaming, “THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS!” to kick up a racial holy war. Team Harris has no interest in helping the Times sanewash Trump more than it already has, so they’ve decided that the only way to win the game is not to play.

It was the right move, and it’s proven that the Times’ influence is exactly as large as you and I pretend it to be. It has a big-ass readership, but that readership is mostly there to play Wordle and, as ESPN’s Mina Kimes noted, the vast majority of them are already in the bag for Democrats anyway.

The extended tantrum thrown by the failson running that place over Biden’s refusal to sit down for an interview set them up for a faster ride to irrelevance.  The more pouty and bitchy they get, the less reason Harris has to interact with them, because their attitude almost guarantees that the outcome of an interview will be negative.

In addition to the Times’ readership being mostly Democrats, it’s also mostly engaged voters, and Harris has to reach the unengaged possible voters — still more reason for her to ignore the Times.

Also related to this was DougJ’s set of tweets over the weekend, on another platform that is not that relevant except that journalists keep using it.

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  2. 2.

    Old School

    The more Kamala Harris talks to other outlets, the sillier “But.. but… she hasn’t talked to us!” looks.

    She’s doing interviews, isn’t that what you wanted?

  3. 3.

    @mistermix.bsky.social

    @Old School: Yeah, and the most ridiculous, asinine thing is the repeated demand for more policy details. All Trump has is jibber-jabber.  Harris has told them more than enough.

  4. 4.

    rikyrah

    FrontPagers:

     

    Please please please

    Find this reply and post it.

    I spent some time this morning crying over it.

    MS Democratic Party

    @msdemocrats

    With permission from Catherine, we’re sharing this about the last vote of her lifetime. She knows her time is limited, but she showed up to vote on day one for
    @KamalaHarris
    and
    @Tim_Walz
    . What an amazing and heartfelt story. May God bless and comfort Catherine and her family. 

    https://x.com/msdemocrats/status/1838574928691343548/photo/1

    https://x.com/msdemocrats/status/1838574928691343548/photo/2

  5. 5.

    Gretchen

    I was just thinking how insane it is that the NYT and Washington Post didn’t mention once Trump’s insane ramblings about the giant faucet that takes a day to turn on that will bring water from Canada to solve California’s water problems. It was a completely delusional take, and it got zero attention.

    Meanwhile, they drove Biden out of the race because his occasional misspeak supposedly indicated failing cognition. Like the time he called the president of Egypt the president of Mexico. They didn’t mention that Egyptians call their president “the Mexican”, which Biden obviously knew. He knew not only who was president but his nickname, but that was evidence against him while Trump’s faucet delusion isn’t worth mentioning.

  6. 6.

    Gretchen

    @Old School: Every time legacy media gets to ask her something all they want to ask is “What do you think about what Trump said”? Dana Bash wasted her whole prime time interview asking them to respond to a litany of Republican talking points. They’re a waste of time and can’t see why.

  7. 7.

    BigJimSlade

    The title of the post reminds me of an old saying about dental care – teeth are like kids, ignore them and they’ll go away.

  9. 9.

    MobiusKlein

    Looking at the chyron on the foxnews, wtf
    Why would we want to stop sale of US steel to Japan? Or is that the company name US Steel, rather than generically selling steel made in US to Japan

  10. 10.

    Steve LaBonne

    Every Democratic politician should have “The only way to win is not to play the game” tattooed on their wrist for ready reference.

  12. 12.

    hitchhiker

    To be fair, Wordle is kind of addicting. There’s not much else in that paper that feels necessary, or even very interesting.

    Maybe the recipes?

  16. 16.

    Suzanne

    I still think the average age of the NYT/WaPo readership is approximately 800, and TikTok, podcasts, YouTube channels, Instagram, etc….. this is where the real influence is. For good and for ill.

  19. 19.

    Old School

    @Gretchen:

    Dana Bash wasted her whole prime time interview asking them to respond to a litany of Republican talking points.

    And now Trump is running an ad about how Dana Bash agrees that the economy was better under Trump.

  22. 22.

    Steve LaBonne

    @MobiusKlein: Everything is relative, devil you know, etc. Plus Japanese companies (cf. automakers) have tame unions at home and are generally union-hostile in the US.

  25. 25.

    Redshift

    @Old School:

    She’s doing interviews, isn’t that what you wanted?

    By definition, any interviews she’s doing aren’t “tough,” so they don’t count. Which fails both because (as already mentioned), “tough” has devolved into “respond to this insane thing TCFG said,” and it’s just dishonest to keep telling people she hasn’t done interviews instead of admitting she has but they don’t meet with your approval.

  26. 26.

    Luther Siler

    The bit about Wordle is exactly right.  At this point it’s more accurate to describe the Times as a casual gaming company that runs a shitty newspaper as a side gig.

  27. 27.

    rikyrah

    this is why I am so hoping that the NC Democratic Party is focusing on something other than the VP. That people need to know about the GOP nightmares, up and down the ticket.

     

    Justin Parmenter (@JustinParmenter) posted at 5:09 PM on Mon, Sep 23, 2024:
    Still can’t wrap my head around the fact that a homeschooling mom named @MicheleMorrowNC who has never worked in a school and who called for Obama to be executed on live pay per view television is the Republican candidate to be NC’s superintendent of k-12 schools.  #nced #ncpol https://t.co/YR3FWZZEvq
    (https://x.com/JustinParmenter/status/1838339845946491119?s=03)

  28. 28.

    rikyrah

    David Roberts (@drvolts) posted at 1:13 PM on Tue, Sep 24, 2024:
    Guy finally pulled the US out of a misbegotten war we should have gotten out of years ago, showing genuine political courage, and US political & media elites *savaged* him for it. That’s when coverage of his administration went full negative & never came back.
    (https://x.com/drvolts/status/1838642912760074379?t=lEgvEq0rFTmlrhDT7JR1OQ&s=03)

    Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) posted at 9:20 AM on Tue, Sep 24, 2024:
    Biden, speaking to the UN General Assembly, talks about pulling out of Afghanistan and says “it was a hard decision. But the right decision. Four American presidents had to face that decision. But I was determined not to leave it to a fifth.” https://t.co/QkNjERAVbC
    (https://x.com/atrupar/status/1838584401799557405?s=03)

  29. 29.

    rikyrah

     

    Renee 🪷 (@PettyLupone) posted at 1:56 PM on Mon, Sep 23, 2024:
    She suffered a pregnancy loss, got charged w/murder, held for 22 days, released to house arrest w/an ankle bracelet, and later cleared by a grand jury.

    She was never even pulled over for a traffic stop before.

    This is the legacy of trump’s Supreme Court.
    https://t.co/Y99ZO127Oj
    (https://x.com/PettyLupone/status/1838291394865311891?t=7INvg3fgGd7_iu86yHz70A&s=03)

    🪷💛🐝Samantha💛🐝🪷 (@ChiTownSam723) posted at 3:26 PM on Mon, Sep 23, 2024:
    You’ll notice that the women dying and being charged with murder are Black Women. This is outrageous.
    (https://x.com/ChiTownSam723/status/1838314096778973283?t=9YaAed4EI8PVe7e4B84yYQ&s=03)

  31. 31.

    Repatriated.

    @Steve LaBonne: Plus Japanese companies (cf. automakers) have tame unions at home and are generally union-hostile in the US.

    They see Americans as the exploitable foreign work force….

     

    Eta: extra punctuatiin  in nym threw it to moderation. Apologies for the inconvenience…

  34. 34.

    Scout211

    Hey, thanks for the hat tip.

    This is my favorite part of the entire amazing rant:

    More importantly, shrewd operators (that’s you and me) long ago grasped that the Times’ coverage of politics is all but worthless. It has cried “both sides” far too many times for you and me to take such obfuscation seriously anymore. We know better.

    So do most voters. That’s why they’ve chosen to get their news from TikTok (no paywall required there), from straight-up investigative reporting or just by looking out the goddamn window. They understand that the Times has so thoroughly isolated itself from the zeitgeist that it’s written itself right out of it. We don’t need these fartsniffers anymore, if we ever did. We certainly don’t need to give them oxygen whenever they let Bret Stephens write op-eds like, “If Kamala Wants To Win, She’s Gonna Have To Fix My Car First.”

  36. 36.

    mary s

    The media double standard for Repubs vs. Dems started a long time ago — but, of course, with Trump it has become ever more extreme. I am happy to see Harris (and Biden before her, for the most part) taking their interviews elsewhere. I agree that this has helped keep her campaign’s “vibe” on the positive side. But I actually see this as evidence that the major outlets can cause damage. And I think that there’s a “trickle-down” effect that can be bad for Dem candidates. Anecdotally speaking, I have many good friends who read NYT and listen to NPR but are not political junkies; these friends were very negative about Biden well before his debate performance — they didn’t really know about all the stuff the Biden administration had gotten done. These are people who always vote and would never vote for Trump, so you might say it doesn’t really matter what they think about Biden. But I think dampening people’s enthusiasm is always a bad thing, because — for one thing — there are a lot of people out there who *don’t* always vote.

  37. 37.

    rikyrah

    Nicky Frank (@NickyFrank30) posted at 11:42 AM on Tue, Sep 24, 2024:
    We need to start entertaining the reality that many Muslim men in the US are using Gaza as a veil to cover their real feelings, which is why they love Trump for the same reason white men do – he will put women, LGBTQ people and other “lesser” people in their places and make them feel superior again.
    (https://x.com/NickyFrank30/status/1838620126213443984?t=_cfyHj6mfRxTp2STVralLg&s=03)

  41. 41.

    Kay

    @rikyrah:

    OMG, I must investigate further. He’s as much of a scumbag as Rufo, but less will known.

    Thanks (as usual) for the tip. You’re amazing.

  42. 42.

    lowtechcyclist

    @hitchhiker:

    To be fair, Wordle is kind of addicting. There’s not much else in that paper that feels necessary, or even very interesting.

    I play Wordle on my phone every morning, but I don’t have a FTFNYT subscription, and I haven’t paid them a dime since briefly subscribing back in 2017-2018.

  44. 44.

    Matt McIrvin

    @rikyrah: Oh no, somebody’s speaking a different language!!

    Jesus, he thinks Haitian Creole is some kind of terrifying Martian talk? It’s on the signs in the subway here. These are our neighbors too. I suppose that’s Trump’s nightmare.

  46. 46.

    Jackie

    @rikyrah: This:

    “At least 210 women faced criminal charges related to pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth in the year after the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion,” Rolling Stone reports.

    “In most of the cases — 121 of the 210 — the information later used against the women was obtained or disclosed in a medical setting, researchers found.”
    😡😡😡

  49. 49.

    waspuppet

    @Redshift: “Harris will only have done a REAL interview when it’s with someone openly working against her being elected. You know—someone unbiased.”

    Maggie Haberman and the rest of the NYT are doing exactly what Fox News does. They don’t respond to criticism from the left; they invent a caricature of what liberals say about them, one that furthers their self-pitying victim narrative, and then they respond to that. They don’t let liberal critics speak for themselves, whereas on the other hand Trump calls her Maggot and she takes a deep breath and reminds herself that he’s worthy of having his say. We’re not.

  50. 50.

    different-church-lady

    The saying goes, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” But it doesn’t say anything about what you’re supposed to do when that person picks the fight with you.

  51. 51.

    Matt McIrvin

    @rikyrah: If I thought it was premeditated enough I’d speculate that this was a strategy to goad Harris into talking about her dad who can then be demagogued about as a crazy leftist radical.

    But it came from Laura Loomer! She’s a complete fool. Nothing she does is premeditated.

  54. 54.

    Jackie

    Literally Fake (and dangerous) News:

    A recently unsealed FBI affidavit revealed that Russian websites have been spreading disinformation about the 2024 election, aligning their propaganda with GOP’s false narratives about migrants voting, Talking Points Memo reported.

    In April, back when Joe Biden was still running for re-election, an article purportedly from “The Washington Post” claimed that the president “needs migrants” to win the 2024 election. It falsely claimed that the Democratic Party had “smuggled over 320,000 illegals by plane through several airports last year,” echoing charges made by former President Donald Trump and his allies. “The Democrats are determined to win elections at any cost so they can continue to fuel wars around the world. Therefore, they promote uncontrolled illegal migration in every possible way,” the article read.

    But the article was Russian propaganda, posted on a website that mimicked the appearance of The Washington Post, complete with a real Post journalist’s name in the byline. The article featured made-up quotes that could be found nowhere else online, according to Talking Points Memo, which reviewed an archived version of the fake site.

    The story was posted on “washingtonpost.pm,” a web domain that the Justice Department determined is linked to a “Russian government directed” influence campaign called “Doppleganger.” An FBIaffidavit, filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, flagged the spoof Post site as just one of 32 domains that the U.S. government identified as part of a Kremlin propaganda initiative. All the sites have been take down.

    In addition to the fake news story, the Russian propaganda campaign also spread claims by Stephen Miller, a former Trump aide who has spread false claims about immigrants and U.S. elections, Talking Points Memo reported.

    https://www.salon.com/2024/09/24/russian-propagandists-spread-and-the-gops-false-claims-about-migrant-voting/

    You have to wonder if TCFG was in cahoots with Putin… he DID repeat the fake WaPo’s accusations almost per verbatim.

  55. 55.

    Scout211

    The Pennsylvania Commonwealth  Court affirmed a lower court’s decision requiring Washington County to notify voters of errors on their mail-in ballots and afford them an opportunity to cast provisional ballots at the polls this November.

    In an 2-1 ruling issued today, the majority held that Washington County’s current policy “emasculates the Election Code’s guarantees by depriving voters – like Electors herein – the opportunity to contest their disqualification or to avail themselves of the statutory failsafe of casting a provisional ballot.”

  56. 56.

    HumboldtBlue

    Pressed the power button on the remote to turn on the TV and all I got was a fizzing, sparking sound and then… blackness.

  58. 58.

    geg6

    @MobiusKlein:

    It’s the company US Steel.  And no, we don’t want to sell it to the Japanese.  It would be terrible for the people who work there.  The only ones who would benefit would those who already benefit the most from the profits of US Steel (execs and shareholders), not anyone who works there or those in the community.

  59. 59.

    HumboldtBlue

    Gloria Allred is now representing a victim of Sean “Diddy” Combs and has filed a lawsuit. If Allred is representing a woman you harmed, you’re fucked.

    BREAKING: Diddy’s latest accuser speaks publicly for the first time in live press conference.
    Thalia Graves claims Diddy and his head of Security violently raped her in 2001 and filmed the attack.

    Thalia Graves says she was lured into a meeting, drugged, and passed out. She woke up bound and restrained, with Diddy and Joseph Sherman raping her.

    She later discovered in 2023 that the assault was recorded on video and shown to other men to humiliate her. Graves says the trauma left her with severe depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts, and she’s been in psychological treatment ever since.

    Now, she’s suing Diddy, Sherman, and Bad Boy Records, with attorney Gloria Allred representing her.

  61. 61.

    rikyrah

    @HumboldtBlue:

    Gloria Allred is now representing a victim of Sean “Diddy” Combs and has filed a lawsuit. If Allred is representing a woman you harmed, you’re fucked.

     

    The gates are about to open….

  67. 67.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Timill: I find Duotrigordle soothing. I think it’s actually one of the easier variants of Wordle because after you make, like, three seed guesses to cover most of the alphabet, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to guess a different word on every line. I suspect that above about Octordle it starts getting easier.

  68. 68.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Scout211: …Oh, mistakes made BY THE VOTER. I was thinking “what, they mailed out mistaken ballots? I’d hope they do more than that!”

  69. 69.

    lowtechcyclist

    @rikyrah:

    The gates are about to open….

    Yeppers – chances that he did this to just one woman are infinitesimally small.

    Meanwhile, DeSantis is telling Florida schools that they can’t use the word ‘consent’ in sex ed classes.

  70. 70.

    A Man for All Seasonings (formerly Geeno)

    @Steve in the ATL: When NYT announced that it bought wordle, I downloaded the old wordle site to my computer. So I have a local wordle that’s different from the NYT version, with no hint sites or anything tempting.

    I do the NYT wordle too, but as a non-subscriber, I don’t get streaks or records or anything like that.

  72. 72.

    prostratedragon

    @Gretchen:

    Sherrilyn Ifill:

    Last week Trump:
    -inisted that ppl from Africa, Asia and other places are “poisoning the blood of our nation”;
    -went on an antisemitic rant at an antisemitism event;
    -declared that every job created in the U.S. in the last 4 years has been taken by “an illegal”;
    -vowed to prosecute Biden and other “enemies” if elected;
    -called an MSNBC rptr a “bimbo” & went on an unhinged rant about women;
    -stood by a “Black Nazi” candidate in NC.
    STILL, no major news papers have called on him to withdraw.

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