Here we go again

It’s body count time!

The number of Islamic State fighters killed by the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat by the United States military, dubbed the “mother of all bombs,” has risen to at least 94, according to Afghan officials.

We need a metric for success, so hey, let’s count up the corpses. More corpses, more winning, right? Except that we’ve been through all this before.

My friend Sazz [stderr] fought around the Vietcong tunnels at Cu Chi. I don’t write “he fought in the tunnels” because only a very small number of Americans went down in them; the rest waited up top to see what happened. One of the things he said was that the tunnel complexes were large, but also pretty small and shabby. They weren’t the kind of things Americans would build, with a Burger King and a Starbucks’ 14 stories down, and air conditioning and power generators – they were little hidey holes and they weren’t worth a damn thing to anyone; conqueror or conquered. That’s what the MOAB blew up.

When the invasion of Afghanistan was still brewing, the US marketed the idea that Osama Bin Laden had built gigantic terror complexes under Tora Bora – multi level, hydroelectric powered, and huge. Of course, such complexes did not exist.

They have never existed, unless you’re thinking about the complexes politicians build to hide from their mistakes. The gigantic MOAB probably collapsed some simple dirt tunnels (because ISIS is sure as hell not tunnelling in stone) The Vietcong at Cu Chi didn’t defend the tunnels when the Americans found them: they left and went elsewhere. The ISIS survivors of the MOAB are already gone to elsewhere, and they’ve added a few recruits from the local population, because the Americans have demonstrated what ruthless assholes we can be.

WINNING!

Why aren’t we boycotting CNN?

I’ve been wondering that for a while, but the question has become more acute recently. CNN keeps bringing on that lying boob, Jeffrey Lord, or the Disney villainesque Kelly Ann Conway. Wolf Blitzer has been promoted above his level of competence, I suspect because of his name — he belongs in a Joseph Heller novel. Everyone’s eyes seem to light up with dollar signs every time Trump says something belligerently stupid, and the whole network’s reputation seems to rest on the orgiastic celebration of military violence. It’s just plain awful. CNN only survives on a tabloid-like fascination with evil and the fact that it’s not as much of a propaganda organ for the Republicans as is Fox News. “Not quite as bad as Fox News” is a hell of an endorsement.

If you’ve ever felt like cutting CNN some slack, though, you need to read this profile of Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, and the sick media culture he fosters.

We can blame our own home-grown media organizations, especially CNN, for the elevation of Trump. Forget the Russians — Jeff Zucker is the real traitor.

CNN was hardly the only news organization to provide saturation coverage of the Trump campaign. The media-measurement firm mediaQuant calculated that Trump received the equivalent of $5.8 billion in free media — known as “earned media,” as opposed to paid advertising — over the course of the election, $2.9 billion more than Hillary Clinton. Nor is CNN the only cable-news network that has benefited from Trump’s incarnation as a politician. MSNBC and Fox News each had a surge in ratings during the election that has shown no signs of slowing since then. Fox, the president’s preferred outlet, is coming off the best quarter in the history of 24-hour cable news. MSNBC, the network of the resistance, has been thriving, too, often even beating CNN during prime time.

But CNN was the first major news organization to give Trump’s campaign prolonged and sustained attention. He was a regular guest in the network’s studios from the earliest days of the Republican primaries, often at Zucker’s suggestion. (For a while, according to the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Trump referred to Zucker as his “personal booker.”) When Trump preferred not to appear in person, he frequently called in. Nor did CNN ever miss an opportunity to broadcast a Trump rally or speech, building the suspense with live footage of an empty lectern and breathless chyrons: “DONALD TRUMP EXPECTED TO SPEAK ANY MINUTE.” Kalev Leetaru, a data scientist, using information obtained from the TV News Archive, calculated that CNN mentioned Trump’s name nearly eight times more frequently than that of the second-place finisher, Ted Cruz, during the primaries.

He isn’t a news person at all. There’s nothing about journalistic standards in his approach. It’s not a news network, it’s a circus.

What Zucker is creating now is a new kind of must-see TV — produced almost entirely in CNN’s studios — an unending loop of dramatic moments, conflicts and confrontations. “I’ve always been interested in the news, but I’ve always been interested in what’s popular,” Zucker says. “I’ve always had a little bit of a populist take on things. Which I know is interesting when you talk about Donald Trump.”

Every circus needs its clowns, and Zucker has hired at least a dozen of them.

Lord made his CNN debut in July 2015. Two weeks later, CNN offered him a job as the network’s first pro-Trump contributor. (CNN said it was already considering Lord and that Trump’s suggestion had no effect on their decision to hire him.) Today, he is one of 12 Trump partisans on CNN’s payroll and perhaps the network’s most reliable, if mild-mannered, provocateur; he recently defended Trump’s tweet that Obama had orchestrated a “Nixon/Watergate” wiretapping plot against him, saying that the president was just speaking “Americanese.” The network sends a black town car four days a week to ferry him to Manhattan from Harrisburg and back, a three-hour drive each way.

Stop. Just stop. Turn off the entire media spectacle of 24 hour news. It’s a failure. It’s worse than a failure. It’s led us to think that entertainment (of the worst kind) is information, and has paved the road to complete corruption and ineptitude in our politics. I’d like to think that print journalism, at least, isn’t completely dead — note that I’m citing a NY Times article here — but even there the signs are on the wall. Just look at their op-ed pages, which consists largely of a parade of over-paid idiots, to see the same rot growing there.

At this point I’m more reliant on European news sources. It’s not that they’re necessarily better, but that at least they’re outside looking in at the chaos in America.

But tune out CNN. They’re tainted.

The CNN mindset:

But Trump has the spokesperson he deserves!

Charles Pierce thinks Sean Spicer deserves to be fired for this:

You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons, Spicer said in response to questions about the implications of Assad’s chemical attacks.

Then he made it worse.

Hitler was not using the gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing.

His own people. On Passover.

That is an epic gaffe. If it were a hook, it would only be used for landing whales, and would require the power of a Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C to hoist it. Decades from now, people will remember where they were on the day Sean Spicer made Melissa McCarthy utterly superfluous; McCarthy is weeping right now, defeated, knowing she could never invent something as ridiculous, oblivious, and insensitive as that comment. Spicer will go to his deathbed regretting dropping that turd from his mouth. It’s going to be in his obituary afterwards. The only person praising the Lord for that remark right now is the CEO of United Airlines.

Since the invention of the spokesperson, there have only been five spokespeople that were rated the most incompetent, the most dishonest. This one left them all behind.

So yes, if Trump were a rational man who valued competence, Spicer should be immediately fired.

But Trump is not that man.

Are all Republicans just hateful scoundrels who like to hurt people?

It sure seems that way. Minnesota has been thriving under Democratic leadership for the last several years, and we had a bit of moderate progressive legislation passed…but the Republicans got a majority in the last election, and are bound and determined to eradicate all the successes of the past. It’s as if they just don’t like people.

Progressive policies enacted in Minnesota’s largest cities in recent years are at risk from Republicans who control the state Legislature as they seek to block, undo or change local ordinances on everything from sick leave and the minimum wage to plastic bags and bike lanes.

Sick leave? Minimum wage? Bike lanes? They don’t like bike lanes?!?! They don’t have any kind of positive intent or agenda, so they’re just going to tear down what previous legislators accomplished. Their justification is also as racist as fuck.

“Clearly the cultural values of Minneapolis are drastically out of alignment with greater Minnesota, so there’s going to be conflicts,” said Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, author of a bill that would block cities from passing their own labor rules.

Key words there: “greater Minnesota” is a phrase that refers to all of the state except for Minneapolis/St Paul. To put it in words more familiar to out-of-staters, he wants to block any support for the cultural values of those urban people, hint hint, nudge nudge.

He’s wrong, of course. There are a lot of us out here in “greater Minnesota” who have progressive values, and find these damned dumb regressive yokels to be an embarrassment.

We’ve got to work to kick these slugs out of office in the next election.

Our ‘liberal’ media at work

Krugman nails it:

One thing is certain: The media reaction to the Syria strike showed that many pundits and news organizations have learned nothing from past failures.

Mr. Trump may like to claim that the media are biased against him, but the truth is that they’ve bent over backward in his favor. They want to seem balanced, even when there is no balance; they have been desperate for excuses to ignore the dubious circumstances of his election and his erratic behavior in office, and start treating him as a normal president.

You may recall how, a month and a half ago, pundits eagerly declared that Mr. Trump “became the president of the United States today” because he managed to read a speech off a teleprompter without going off script. Then he started tweeting again.

One might have expected that experience to serve as a lesson. But no: The U.S. fired off some missiles, and once again Mr. Trump “became president.” Aside from everything else, think about the incentives this creates. The Trump administration now knows that it can always crowd out reporting about its scandals and failures by bombing someone.

Every time I think maybe the media are growing a spine and showing some appreciation of their responsibilities: they see the prospect of a war that will boost their ratings, and suddenly they’re orgasming over missiles. I’m looking at you, Fareed Zakaria and Brian Williams. Fuck you all. Get off the air.

Hysterical

Those darned humanities professors, teaching about literature and words and history and all that fuzzy stuff.

The course is titled “The Wandering Uterus: Journeys through Gender, Race, and Medicine” and gets its name from one of the ancient “causes” of hysteria. The uterus was believed to wander around the body like an animal, hungry for semen. If it wandered the wrong direction and made its way to the throat there would be choking, coughing or loss of voice, if it got stuck in the the rib cage, there would be chest pain or shortness of breath, and so on. Most any symptom that belonged to a female body could be attributed to that wandering uterus. “Treatments,” including vaginal fumigations, bitter potions, balms, and pessaries made of wool, were used to bring that uterus back to its proper place. “Genital massage,” performed by a skilled physician or midwife, was often mentioned in medical writings. The triad of marriage, intercourse, and pregnancy was the ultimate treatment for the semen-hungry womb. The uterus was a troublemaker and was best sated when pregnant.

But that’s ancient history! No one could believe that after the Middle Ages!

It just got transmogrified in the 19th century.

It was believed that hysteria, also known as neurasthenia, could be set off by a plethora of bad habits including reading novels (which caused erotic fantasies), masturbation, and homosexual or bisexual tendencies resulting in any number of symptoms such as seductive behaviors, contractures, functional paralysis, irrationality, and general troublemaking of various kinds. There are pages and pages of medical writings outing hysterics as great liars who willingly deceive. The same old “treatments” were enlisted—genital massage by an approved provider, marriage and intercourse—but some new ones included ovariectomies and cauterization of the clitoris.

Oh, those Victorians! No one believes that kind of crap now.

This wasn’t just any fall semester. There couldn’t have been a more appropriate time to consider the history of hysteria than September 2016, the week following Hillary Clinton’s collapse from pneumonia at the 9/11 ceremonies, an event that tipped #HillarysHealth into a national obsession. Rudolph Giuliani said that she looked sick and encouraged people to google “Hillary Clinton illness.” Trump focused on her coughing or “hacking” as if the uterus were still making its perambulations up to the throat.

For many months, Hillary had been pathologized as the shrill shrew who was too loud and outspoken, on the one hand, and the weak sick one who didn’t have the strength or stamina to be president on the other. We discussed journalist Gail Collins’ assessment of the various levels of sexism afoot in the campaign. On the topic of Hillary’s health, Collins wrote, “this is nuts, but not necessarily sexist.” We, in the Wandering Uterus, wholeheartedly disagreed. But, back in September, we did not understand how deeply entrenched these sinister mythologies had already become.

But that was 2016! We know so much more now, in 2017!