Today’s theme is entertaining media meltdowns.
Exhibit A. The Covfefe Conundrum. (Not surprisingly, the poorest selling Bourne sequel to date.) Okay, Trump is up tweeting in the middle of the night (and yes, it’s not the end of the world, but please stop doing that!), and he makes an odd typo, “covfefe.” And the lefty media goes nuts, with 94,382 stories on it (my rough estimate) in the next 48 hours.
It’s the perfect storm: a nonsense word, with no significance of any kind, and no impact on any issue, foreign or domestic. So let’s bloviate about it for days on end.
My favorite part of the resulting wall-to-wall coverage? A bunch of empty heads — Did I mean “talking heads,” you ask? I did not. — were sitting on a panel discussing this on CNN. Because you can’t deal with a story of THIS magnitude with one presenter. You need a panel.
Anyway, one member of this brain trust was Gloria Borger, who passes for a Chief Political Analyst at CNN. Only the chyron that appeared on the bottom of the screen identified her as “CNN Cheif Political Analyst.”
That’s right. The best minds at CNN discussed the ominous, world-endangering implications of a typo, as they appeared… above a typo.
I like to fantasize that there is one closeted conservative saboteur running the chyrons at CNN. If so, I salute you. And I have a suggestion: the next time Gloria is on tv, try this one: “Gloreeah Bourgeois, CNN Cheef Political Anal-yst.” And the beers are on me.
Exhibit B: Kathy Griffin, Part Deux. After her bloody beheading stunt received (ahem) mixed reviews, Griffin actually apologized pretty convincingly. Rather than going with the usual pseudo mea culpa – “If anyone misunderstood and was offended…” – she gave what seemed like a heartfelt apology.
Then, when that didn’t immediately stop the blow back, she ruined it by calling a press conference, during which she embodied every obnoxious leftist trope of the last 20 years. She played the victim, invoked sexism and racism (“Old white men are persecuting me”), claimed that the Trumps were bullying her, that it’s not right to ruin her career, that she’s not afraid of Trump, that it’s not her fault that ISIS is running wild, and that the Russians cost her the election.
Wait. The second-to-last whine was from Obama, and the last one was from Hillary. It’s getting difficult to tell the delusional jeremiads apart.
Anyway, good news for the authors of abnormal psychology textbooks: you don’t have to write any more! Just transcribe Griffin’s press conference, and label the respective dysfunctions as they rear their ugly heads. They’re all there:
persecution complex — “He broke me.”
projection – “I’m not afraid of Donald Trump. He’s a mean bully.”
delusions of grandeur – “For the first time ever, a President of the United states is trying to ruin a private citizen’s life.” (What’s that? Juanita Broaddrick is on line one? And Paula Jones is on line two? And James Rosen is on line three? And – oops, the switchboard has been overwhelmed.)
delusions of comedic talent — “I’m a comedian, and I’m not going to stop making fun of anyone.”
Okay, that last one is not technically a recognized psychological malady. But c’mon.
Kathy, you enacted a simulated bloody beheading of the President. You broke yourself.
Exhibit C — Hillary Agonistes. Not to be outdone, the former future leader of the free world – and oh, the joy I get from knowing that she will never be president! – sat down with yet more sycophantic interviewers. Many commentators have noted that by now Hillary has blamed nearly every person or group on earth for her sweet, sweet loss. (Piggish men, insufficiently feminist women, Russians and Comey and Bernie, etc.) But this time she added a new culprit: Macedonians. Let’s savor her schadenfreude-tastic quote:
“So this was different because [the Russians] went public, and they were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it, and they were running, y’know there’s all these stories, about y’know, guys over in Macedonia who are running these fake news sites, and you know I’ve seen them now, and you sit there and it looks like you know sort of low level CNN operation, or a fake newspaper.”
First, there’s no such thing as a “low level CNN operation.” You cannot get lower than CNN without being subterranean. CNN is a low level CNN operation.
Second, “weaponized information?” You mean, facts and things that you and your creepy circle of co-conspirators wrote and said, right? They released things that you said and did, and you’re calling that “weaponized information?” Ohhh-kay.
Third, something goes horribly wrong, and you look around for scapegoats. I get it. Blaming others is always tempting, and often entertaining. For example, when my oldest daughter was toddling around at about age 2, I taught her a verbal trick. In the middle of any conversation, I could point to her and ask, “Who do we blame for that?” And she’d look at me with her enormous brown eyes and say, “The Democrats.” That’s the kind of Norman Rockwell moment that makes the diaper changing and future college expenses all worthwhile. And my lefty in-laws were mortified. So, win-win.
Anyway, enough about my fantastic parenting tips. We were discussing Hillary’s blame game.
There’s hilarious, well-adjusted Simpson-style blaming, and then there’s grim, sociopathic Hillary-style blaming. But she outdoes even herself when she uncovers the sinister Macedonian cabal.
Move over, Jews and Global Warming, because there’s a new scapegoat in town. And it’s the Macedonian Menace. (If this were an old timey radio show, I’d insert a scary organ sting here.) (That reminds me: Anthony Weiner. Boom!) (Admit it: you read “insert scary organ sting” and you beat me to the Weiner reference. You’ve officially sunk to my level, God help you.)
By now, it’s easier to identify groups whom Hillary HASN’T blamed for her loss. By my count, that list comes to: the ancient Etruscans, the Hapsburg Empire, the Hottentots, and Hillary Clinton.
One other note: Did you hear what kind of conference she was speaking to? A tech conference. Hillary Clinton, who set up a server in her back bedroom — using open-source software, with a hardline strung out her window and across country to the Russian embassy, installed by Boris and Natasha Badanov — was invited to speak at a tech conference.
Were there no Amish people available?
Exhibit D. Trump out of Paris. In his fourth-best action as president (after Gorsuch, Nikki Haley, and Maddog), the president pulled the US out of a meaningless non-treaty, and the world’s elite melted down. Big brains like Fareed Zakaria, Jerry Brown, John Kerry and Moe Howard (just seeing if you are paying attention) all agreed that the world is going to end now, and fell to arguing only about which of the Biblical plagues that Trump has rashly unleashed will provide the coup de grace. The early money was on rivers of blood, but the consensus now is evenly split among frogs, locusts and shadowy Macedonians.
The Paris accord might be the most blatant example of empty, leftist virtue signaling of this century. It’s an agreement that has no enforcement mechanism, based on goals that each country came up with on their own, and paid for just about solely by the United States.
What was the vote in the Senate to confirm this treaty, you ask? There wasn’t one. Obama knew that he wouldn’t be able to get enough votes to ratify this feel-good do-nothing boondoggle, so he didn’t even try. He just unilaterally said that we’re in.
So now, Trump can just unilaterally say that we’re out. And he did. So good on him.
Finally, Exhibit E. As in, “Egad, what a moron.” California Representative Barbara Lee – from guess which party? — in a heroic effort to take the heat off of the Macedonians, is blaming global warming for something. But that something isn’t one of the usual somethings, like droughts or melting ice caps or Al Gore’s increasing fortune.
It’s prostitution.
I am not making that up. She says that as the world gets increasingly hot, food will get scarce. And then – yada yada yada — women will naturally have to start with the hooking. Or something. I can’t really follow her “reasoning,” but Google the topic and see if you can make sense of it. (I was going to say “make heads or tails of it,” but considering the topic, I am way too mature for that.)
I guess the voters in her district find this kind of reasoning persuasive, but I can’t believe that the husbands of California are buying it. I picture a typical guy waiting up to catch his wife sneaking back into the house at 3 a.m., wearing heavy makeup and her old college cheerleading uniform.
He snaps the light on, and stands there with folded arms. And the wife says, “Honey, it was 90 degrees out for three days in a row! What else was I supposed to do?”
If he accepts that explanation, he deserves to be represented by Barbara Lee in Washington.
Martin Simpson 