Tag Archives: Maggie Haberman

You Gotta Let It Hang Out, Joe. At This Point Perception is Far Worse Than Reality.

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Joe Biden Is Old. Get Over It.

After the Special Counsel report gratuitously describing him as “an elderly man with a poor memory” the clear consensus is that Joe Biden has to come out of his protective shell, say “f*ck it”, (as he is wont to say) and let it all hang out. Just as with “crooked Hillary” and “her e-mails” back in 2016 the meme has settled in that he, Joe Biden, an honest operator with 50 years of government experience is a bigger risk than a 77 year-old failed casino operator campaigning as the fool he is proud to be.

Sunday’s Super Bowl may have been the single most-watched telecast … in history … and Biden passed on an interview with CBS. Not with a self-serving gasbag like Bill O’Reilly or a smirking frat boy like Jesse Watters or some other right-wing stooge, but with an intellectually honest network’s interviewer. Someone with a professional allegiance to facts and respectful decorum. That was a big mistake.

Especially … especially … when you factor in that the game’s enormous audience was likely fueled by an unprecedented inflow of women primarily interested in the whole Taylor Swift side show. With women voters showing a 22% preference for Biden over a guy a lot of them likely regard as the epitome of a shit boyfriend/worse husband; an undisciplined, vulgar blowhard facing 91 criminal counts and officially judged a “rapist” for his assault on a woman in a department store dressing room, Biden failing to immediately recall the name of the president of Egypt could hardly be deemed perilous to their view of who is the wiser choice.

Both of these guys, Biden and Trump, are what they are. Both are old. One has five decades of experience with national and international crises. He understands climate and infrastructure policy. The other played a real estate mogul on a TV show, bankrupted a casino, lost more money than any other person in the United States over nine years, has never said a cross word about the Joseph Stalin of our era and has been regularly described as, “a fucking moron” by people he hired to work in his first administration.

So given the fact that barring some deus ex machina event that removes him from the nomination, Biden (i.e. his team of strategists) has to push him out for unscripted interviews. Not with MAGA fools like Watters, etc. But with people like, say, Jonathan Swan, now with The New York Times. Or Maggie Haberman of the Times. Chris Wallace at CNN. Jonathan Lemire of Politico. Hell, I see value in an hour-long chat with a bona fide conservative like Bill Kristol.

Let the public decide if his (lifelong) stutter or his occasionally lengthy reaches for a specific name or date is disqualifying early onset dementia or just an older guy whose head is full of names and dates. (Among the facts conveniently ignored amid the frenzy over Biden’s “gaffes” are all the times George W. Bush, 30 years younger, mangled names, dates and spewed out bizarre salads of incongruence.)

Neither of these guys is Bill Clinton or Barack Obama when it comes to slickness on the impromptu stage. But one is sane, sincere and qualified. The other is … well, we all know … . I don’t have to repeat myself.

Trump Behind Closed Doors is So Far Beyond Anything “Veep” Could Imagine.

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While we all hold our breath and wait for the 126 Republican congress-critters and 17 state attorneys general — valiant defenders of the Constitution — to suffer any consequences for trying to overthrow a presidential election (*), I came across this item.

“Barack and Michelle are reportedly producing a comedy series for Netflix ‘based on the chaotic transition of power when Donald Trump became president in 2016’. The show, titled The G Word With Adam Conover, is a collaboration between the comedian and the former first couple’s Higher Ground Productions, based on Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, which was born out of a September 2017 Vanity Fair article. The book covers the historic chaos and mismanagement that occurred in the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy during the handoff between the administrations.”

I spotted that story the same day Julias-Louis Dreyfus showed up on Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast’s podcast, “The New Abnormal”, and where she was asked for million and first time if the Trump presidency had out-lunaticked, out-venaled and out-bungled anything they ever imagined when and her writers was shooting “Veep?” Short answer — yes. Team Trump, meaning Jared and Rudy and Ivanka, etc., has performed so far beyond (I mean, below) what “Veep’s” writers could dream up there’s talk of reviving the show based on a new lower bar for what audiences are prepared to believe about … the President of the United States.

Then there is Noel Casler, a professional “talent wrangler” who worked on “The Celebrity Apprentice” and is now flagrantly violated his Trump-mandated Non-Disclosure Agreement with tales of Trump’s chronic incontinence, his plastic girdle, Adderall addiction, halitosis, sexual predation, personal grooming, functional illiteracy and vain-glorious laziness. Stories that rival anything “Dumb and Dumber” imagined, much less ‘Veep”.

Being an admitted (former) coke-snorting rock ‘n roller, Casler’s stories don’t carry quite the credibility of say, Maggie Haberman at The New York Times. But as he points out in this interview, Trump is still president. For another month Trump can still sic The Justice Department on anyone who dares say he wears Depends. Casler also reminds us that the edges of all these stories have circulated for years and that at this point only the most delusional Trump cultist finds it hard to paint in the numbers and accept that as bad, as ludicrous and buffoonish as everything is that we can see right now, what is waiting to be told is even more clownish.

Or, as Lori Levine, one of Casler’s interviers says, “Wait a minute. Can we get back to the shitting his pants story?”

Understanding that journalism is a delicate balance of reporting-while-maintaining-access, I have no trouble — zero — believing that people like Haberman or any of the Washington Post’s White House team or CNN’s have terabytes of files of stories of Trump’s more personal dysfunctions. Stories they’ve chosen to withold until after he’s safely gone. I mean, from the Times’ perspective, is presidential incontinence a legitimate story? Heaven’s no! You can imagine the editor’s meeting on that one. The Times does not run “shitting your pants:” stories.

The accepted tradition of journalism is to ignore “private” behavior. LBJ took heat once for pulling his dog’s ears. But no one in real time — while he was in office — told the story about Johnson forcing staffers to watch him relieve his bowels or whipping out “Jumbo” to make a point about who was the biggest dog in the kennel. Likewise, JFK had to be long dead and buried before we were told he was obsessively nailing everything in skirts while supposedly guiding us to The New Frontier.

Times of course have changed, post Bill and Monica and The Blue Dress. But unlike Clinton, Trump has been so derelict in his duty, so sociopathic in his disregard for pandemic suffering and death and so complicit in protecting Vladimir Putin, his only reservoir of good will is with ‘Murica’s sad Lost Minority, the torch-and-pitchfork MAGA crowd. You knw, the bellowing mob forever pissed at the way big city elitists have played them for chumps all their lives.

Point being, even if the Biden administration decides to pass on a prosecution, or even a Truth Commission on the Trump years, popular culture is well positioned to take all the drugged-out, scatological, grifting gold that Donny and the gang have given them and make a fresh fortune out of it.

Among the 81 million in this bubble it requires no suspension of disbelief.

(*Will never happen. In fact they will proudly remind voters about it next election.)