Firehose #210: The Moynihan Shat

Also: Who is America’s most beloved living celebrity?

Look, the kid had a big week, so he can get top billing here *one* last time. We already embedded the whole Moynihan Report re-boot episode in the show notes of Episode #572, so let’s just grab one short from the TMR YouTube page:

Will Shat FTW!

* So does Kmele show up to his other jobs? Answer: The ones that record remotely! Here our getting-the-milk man confers with his Tangle bros about “decency in politics against the backdrop of the race for Iowa’s governorship, a New York Times poll on Sen. John Fetterman’s appeal, Sen. Darline Graham’s primary win, and Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s interview with Fox News’s Jesse Waters.”

* On Members Only #341 with Semafor honcho Ben Smith (veteran of #125, #227, #404, and #480), we asked commenters to name celebrities who could compete with the late, great Dolly Parton for universal American lovability. Your answers, ranked by my opinion of their plausibility:

Clint Eastwood

Stevie Wonder

Charles Barkley

Steve Martin

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Shaq

Snoop Dogg

Denzel Washington

Keanu Reeves

Tom Hanks

Mel Brooks

The Rock

Dick Van Dyke

Tom Selleck

Matthew McConaughey

Weird Al

Brenda Lee (did not know she was still alive, thank you!)

Mark Cuban

Luke Combs

Jeff Bridges

Emmylou Harris

Lauryn Hill

Mr. T

LeVar Burton

Corey Feldman

Not sure there’s much daylight between #3-10 on this list…. Still can’t believe I’m the only one who thinks Willie Nelson shoots near the top….

* On one of our recent episodes, Moynihan & I talked a bit about how a damning investigation of Democratic olds-spamming/scaring/soaking by the political scientist Adam Bonika was killed by The New York Times. Well, this week, Bonika dropped the other shoe, on The Bulwark. It’s … not great, Bob!

At The New York Times, publication was derailed by a cease-and-desist sent by the Democratic party committees. At The Bulwark, it was derailed by the publisher, a political consultant herself, whose comments on the locked draft rejected the premise that standard industry practices warranted scrutiny. […]

The Bulwark had been at the finish line, and I could not make sense of why it had gone cold. Then I opened the post-legal-review draft and saw a set of comments from Sarah Longwell, the paper’s publisher. […]

What arrived was an extensive rewrite, delivered as a condition of publication twelve days after the piece had cleared a third round of legal review. It took the subjects’ legal arguments and set them down in my voice, as my own conclusions. Several of those changes directly contradicted the fact-checking record, asking me to endorse claims we had already proven false while deleting, without explanation, the vetted evidence that disproved them. Elsewhere, the rewrite undermined the investigation, excusing high fundraising burn rates, recasting donor extraction as a strategic necessity, and deleting the disclosure paragraph informing readers that subjects had responded to requests for comment with legal letters and that no subject had identified a single factual error.

I emailed the editorial team to explain in detail how the rewrite introduced factual inaccuracies, removed vetted evidence, and placed vendor defenses under my byline. I offered a viable path forward: return to the legally cleared August 1 draft and work from there. The following day, I was informed the piece had been killed. […]

When I reached out to The Bulwark for comment, presenting them with a detailed outline of the timeline and factual account of the editorial process, they issued the following statement:

“After a great deal of good-faith effort, The Bulwark did not publish Adam Bonica’s article because his work did not meet professional journalistic standards. We presented him with a draft that could meet journalistic standards. He chose to publish elsewhere.”

* Time for the triumphant return of Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

A few months back, VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi sent me this Instagram reel made by someone in India suggesting that Dhurandar was based on The VICE Guide to Karachi (which he and I made together in Pakistan–much to my mom’s chagrin–back in 2012). But, I wondered, what the hell is Dhurandar? Well, clearly I don’t speak Hindi, because it turns out that Dhurandar is the highest grossing Hindi-language film in the history of India. The film is incredibly violent, fantastically melodramatic, action-packed, and very, very long. It is, essentially, an Indian revenge fantasy set against the backdrop of real-world events (like the 2001 Indian Parliament attacks and the Lyari gang wars in Karachi), and featuring a handsome, ripped Indian secret agent with glorious hair going undercover in the slums of Karachi to infiltrate and destroy Pakistan’s terror network. Though not based on the VGTK (alas!), it does feature wonderfully cartoonish versions of some of the same characters, namely Karachi gangster Uzair Baloch, and the police superintendent best known for extrajudicial killings, Chaudhaury Aslam. How do people in Pakistan feel about all this? They do not like it. Clocking in at three hours twenty-five minutes, Dhurandar is an epic with filled with espionage, intrigue, so much slo-motion you’ll be able to refresh your drink, and some truly over-the-top torture scenes. If, like me, you find that at the end you still want more … there’s a sequel. Stream (the “Raw and Undekha” version) on Netflix; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Sean:

RIP Tim Curry. Muppet Treasure Island is one of his best. Good reason to post the quote that makes the rounds whenever he or Michael Caine are mentioned for their roles in Muppet films:

“the reason Michael Caine and Tim Curry are so good in their respective Muppet movies is that Michael Caine treats the Muppets as fellow actors, and Tim Curry treats himself as a fellow Muppet”

John Doe (love your discography!) also adds value on the same topic:

Here is the full compilation of Curry hamming it up as the soviet general for those curious. Plus pierce brosnan

Sendoff: Keeping on the above theme. Obviously, Dolly Parton’s too big for words just yet; I’ve been mourning all week. But listening in the car to some tribute tracks on my (very good) alt-ish rock local WFUV, I was reminded that Tim Curry’s singing—not unlike William Shatner’s!—has a total commitment to the bit that’s breathtaking, inspirational. Am including his most famous song here, yes, but in my defense I heard the thing every damn week growing up on Dr. Demento, and it was almost certainly the source of me first encountering the words “transvestite” and “transsexual.” Still haven’t seen the movie, though, which I understand may qualify me for The Hague.