Workin’ for the Weekend #34: Trashing Taibbi, Whyte-ing Joker, Second Sunday
Also: Watch out for that Manganese!
Hey gang, a quick reminder: We do Second Sunday (of the month) versions of our Members Only podcasts, in which paying subscribers can watch along live, make fun of us in the chat, and sometimes contribute to the finished product. The next Second Sunday is … (checks calendar) … tomorrow! We’ll be down a man (guess who!), and sadly on remote instead of in-person due to some unhelpful Covidding, but there could be a guest star or two. Look for a Zoom link in your in-boxes … around 1 pm ET?
* Jeebus Jumping FROG-Christ, did you watch Matt Taibbi (#226, #348) and Michael Shellenberger get the bitch-slap treatment from House Democrats on Thursday over the #TwitterFiles? (Which we discussed on the previous episodes of #384, #385 & #386.) So many WTF clips to choose from; here’s three:
Taibbi has a good reaction piece up headlined, “The Democrats Have Lost the Plot.” Excerpt:
Most of the ideas I have about issues like speech, civil liberties, and due process are from Democrats. I come from a family of Democrats and my mother is both a Democrat and a lawyer. So I was shocked when Dan Goldman of New York started quizzing Mike and me about “the two indictments by Special Counsel Robert Mueller that definitively established that Russia interfered in our 2016 election through social media disinformation, and a hack and leak operation.” […]
[T]he most salient fact about Goldman is that he has a J.D. from Stanford Law and is a former Assistant U.S. Attorney from the Southern District. Even the former lead counsel of a Trump impeachment, which Goldman is, should know better than to assert that an indictment can “definitively establish” anything.
This is why we have trials. A prosecutor’s assertions aren’t fact. They can only be said to be proven if they hold up against evidence presented by a competent defense in a fair trial setting. This is civil liberties 101, which is why I was confused when Goldman turned to me and asked if I “agreed” with Mueller’s indictments[.]
* Re: the Fox/Dominion lawsuit (subject of much discussion on #396 & #397), always-on-the-ball listener L Brown points us to this acerbic and insightful Politico column from belovedly cranky ol’ media critic Jack Shafer: “The Tucker Carlson Schtick Melts Away.”
* Our smart sportswriter-for-people-who-don’t-even-like-sports pal Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. 151) has another bang-up piece out, under the yes-I’m-going-there headline “There Are Many Different Whites: Steve Nash, Nikola Jokic, and the oversimplified fight over MVP voting.” (The sport in question is basketball here.) I will cheat by reproducing the closing paragraph, but you should really read the whole thing:
The ultimate irony in insisting that Nikola Jokic’s awards are derived from White Unity is, of course, where he’s from. Jokic was born in a place called Yugoslavia, which no longer exists. Specifically, he was born in the nation of Serbia and Montenegro, which eventually split off into two separate countries. Generally, he’s from the Balkans, a region that spawned the term “balkanize,” to describe when groups break up into smaller hostile factions. Is he White? Yes, but he’s also, just by existing, a living testament to the idea that “White” isn’t an assurance of common cause.
* I wrote a grumpy piece for Reason this week: “Mask On, Mask Off: New York Trying Everything Except Not Telling People What To Do.”
* Comment of the week comes from Boston B:
Had to Google "Dick Gregory Manganese." Glad I did, because now I know what manganese will make me do to my momma.
Closing music, which has to be double-clicked on because of viewer discretion, comes via alert listener Jonathan:
My greatest dismay of the week was watching the Democrats beclown themselves repeatedly (and in self damaging ways) in the hearing with Shellenberger and Taibi and make Jim Jordan (JIM JORDAN!!?) seem like a reasonable human being. I don’t know how we can make Congress work better or hearings actually be about substance, but my God they have lost the thread. The message from nearly all politicians seems to be that ethics and principles matter when we can point out that the other side is bad because of their violations, but if we are wielding power to get what we want since “we” are “good” we can do whatever we want. It’s the theory exposed in “It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower” by Michela Wrong. Principles being a useful bludgeon to achieve power and then jettisoned once power is achieved.
We have in the past had many principled politicians, though never enough, but it really appears that we are in a deep deficit of them. The whole lot of them in that hearing whether they saw the truth as something that they could weaponize or something inconvenient that had to be delegitimized made me feel very depressed and angered about where our country is as far as political leadership (not that I wasn’t already there).
As the Fifth already observed with former Representative Meijer, there’s not much space made in politics for people of principle (I mean you’re a sucker to live that way seems to be the common wisdom). I disagree with Meijer on a lot of things, but I’d trade the whole lot of who was running that hearing and their cohorts for a Congress full of Meijers.
Is this the 1st workin' for the weekend that exclusively elevates a handful of "podcast bro's"?
FTC fall 2023 merch should include limited edition tee & hoodie:
“It’s not because you’re a woman, it’s because I’m a fucking asshole”