Today, we're not going to be about Trump directly.  It would have been easy, there's SO much to choose from -- indeed I came close to choosing how yesterday during a pandemic when another 1,000 Americans died, he praised himself about dishwasher regulations -- but instead thought it best to address all such things in a roundabout way.

Two days ago , I posted the following comment on Facebook --

It turns out, I wasn't alone in that thought.  Yesterday, Bill Sternberg took USA Today to task for the editorial.  And who is Bill Sternberg, I hear you ask?  He's the political editor of...USA Today!!

Among the many things he wrote were, "Several of Navarro’s criticisms of Fauci — on the China travel restrictions, the risk from the coronavirus and falling mortality rates — were misleading or lacked context. As such, Navarro’s op-ed did not meet USA Today’s fact-checking standards.”

My immediate reaction was, "Hey, ya think???!!"

My second reaction was that Mr. Sternberg was being polite, but didn't go nearly far enough.  I do understand that as USA Today's own political editor there are probably limits about how far he could go in his criticism, but the larger point to me isn't that Peter Navarro's op-ed did not meet  the paper's "fact-checking standards," but rather that Peter Navarro has a terrible record for honesty, so he shouldn't have been given a platform in the first place.

Yes, good for USA Today for following up later with such an acknowledgement.  It's rarely done, and it's deserving of some credit.  But "some credit" only covers a very small part of the whole.  Think of it somewhat like if a circus let a lion wander loose among the crowd and it goes on a rampage, and they post a notice the next day explaining all the reasons it was a bad idea.  It's not a perfect analogy, but it's close enough.  Sometimes, you should know better and not put yourself in a position where you'll likely have to apologize after.

Same too with the recent disaster at the New York Times with their op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton.  Yes, they did a mea culpa after, but these aren't one-person gaffes, but go through multi-level approvals, and they should all know better.  And they do know better.

I'm well-aware that it's important to get the views of the current administration.  But the credibility of this administration disappeared long ago, and I'm sure that USA Today is well-aware of that, so vigilance is critical, especially with an election just months away.

And that's the larger point here.  This administration has been in office for 3-1/2 years.  Their list of deceptions and lies during that time are well-documented.  The Washington Post has collected a list of now over 20,000 lies by Trump during his time in office alone.  Their spokespeople go out on TV shows and repeatedly lie to the point that real-time fact-checking has become a new journalism requirement.  We are in the middle of a pandemic in which 141,118 Americans have died, and the White House seems oblivious..  Just yesterday, the White House press secretary said, :Science should not stand in the way" of schools reopening.  (The comment denigrating science at any time, but especially during a pandemic and most-especially about the health of children is bad enough -- but when you realize her disparagement of science was in the very same sentence as talking about the importance of school makes it ethereally galling in a ghastly way -- and makes you wonder what on earth she thinks they should be teaching.  Perhaps alternative facts, like the airports Trumps said existed during the Revolutionary War.)  About 48 million Americans have applied for unemployment.  Russia has put bounties on the lives of American soldiers, and the White House has not acted.  National movements to change social justice have broken out across the country, and the White House.defends the Confederate Flag and the statues of Confederate generals.  Trump sends out the National Guard, helicopters and chemical spray against American citizens at peaceful rallies.

And the best USA Today can do is -- after-the-fact -- say that they should have fact-checked better.  Yes, they should have.  And good of them to realize that and say so.  But it doesn't let them off the hook for not realizing they shouldn't have given a national platform to the Peter Navarros of the world in the first place.

And that's the point.  This isn't about USA Today.  It's about all news media accepting that Trump is Trump and that he's not "finally becoming presidential" at this point.  And by "at this point," I define that as -- ever.  Ever.  We know who he is.  He tells us every time he opens his mouth or types a tweet.  This is about recognizing the realities of the world when your job is the news.  The job is to be fair and honest and objective and detailed.  It is not to be a red carpet for those spewing fascist, deceptive PR propaganda and think that makes you balanced and fair.  It makes you a dupe.  It makes you complicit, even if unintentionally.

And for those in journalism who haven't figured out the subtleties of all this yet, here's a hint that might help: Trump and his administration call the media "the enemy of the people."  They are not going for fair and honest and objective and detailed.  So, it's up to you.

No, really.  Honest.

Still, at least we did learn from the White House yesterday that the country has less-restrictive water regulations for dishwashers.  Which is a good thing! 

Unless you're in one of those many states with a drought.  Which Trump thinks is a hoax.  And which he made the United States the only country in the entire world that is literally not in the Paris Accord on Climate Change.

"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
-- Thomas Jefferson

And Jefferson hadn't even hear of Trump.

Oh, dear God – it wasn't just a lunatic "threat," but Trump actually, really, truly did have his re-election campaign lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter to CNN for having published their poll results.  And apparently they did have an outside firm, the not-especially well-regarded McLaughlin Associates, analyze the results.
 
What a whiny little petulant child Trump is.  It's almost a miracle he hasn't threatened to sue every pollster, since after all every one of them have him behind Joe Biden -- by a lot.  Maybe he thinks this was a good idea for his base, but it was a brain-dead idea.  What a shock Trump is lost with the pandemic & Black Lives Matter.
 
But best of all is the response from CNN.  At first I thought maybe it was from The Onion.  But it was tweeted on the CNN account, and I found it on the CNN website.
 
And you have to love the CNN lawyer’s name – David Vigilante.  And no, again, this is not The Onion.

I have almost nothing to add to this.  Some things are just right and say all that needs to be said.  I do feel compelled to note a couple of thoughts about why the Trump cease-and-decease letter is so idiotic, beyond the obvious.  First is that there are two other polls with almost the same results -- showing Trump behind by 10/11 points, which is within the margin of error -- and there was no cease-and-desist letter sent to them.  This not only shows the letter to be childish and empty, but if the threat ever wet to court is probably all the evidence CNN would need to get it thrown out.  And second, since CNN was never going to retract its poll, and since a lawsuit could never go anywhere for the reason stated and more, the only reasonable outcome from sending the letter is ridicule and humiliation, pretty much the exact opposite of looking tough to anybody.

I can only keep repeating -- no, this is not The Onion.  

​I've embedded the text at the end in case the graphic of the original letter isn't sharp enough, though I think it should be.

If you have a hard time reading the graphic of the original letter, here's the text below --

​Dear Ms. Ellis,
 
This responds to your letter dated lune 9, 2020.
 
To my knowledge, this is the first time in is 40 year history that CNN
had been threatened with legal action because an American politician or
campaign did not like CNN's polling results.
 
To the extent we have received legal threat from political leaders in
the past, they have typically come from countries like Venezuela or other
regimes where there is little or no respect for a free and independent
media.
 
CNN is well aware of the reputation John McLaughlin and McLaughlin
Associates. In 2014 his firm famously reported that Eric Cantor was
leading his primary challenger Dave Brat by 34 points only to lose by 11
points -- a 45 point swing. The firm currently has a rating from
FiveThirtyEight.
 
In any event, McLaughlin was able to evaluate and criticize CNN's most
recent poll because CNN is transparent and publishes its methodology
along with its polling results. Because of this, McLaughlin was free to
publish his own critique of CNN's analysis and share his criticisms
across the U.S. media landscape. That's how free speech works. It's the
American way.
 
Your letter is factually and legally baseless. It is yet another bad
faith attempt by the campaign to threaten litigation to muzzle speech it
does not want voters to read or hear. Your allegations and demands are
rejected in their entirety.
 
 
Very Truly Yours,
 
David C. Vigilante

There's a point to this, bear with me.

I've long been an admirer of the columnist ​Molly Ivins.  Though Texas was her foundation, her words cut across state lines and added perspective to America.  You may know her best from her famous comment -- often adapted by others to fit the situation -- about a creepy far-right "culture war" speech given by Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican Convention.  "It sounded better in the original German."

(Let it be noted for all those trying to claim that the far-right fascism of Trump in the Republican Party is just a Trump phenomenon.  To repeat -- Buchanan's speech was not at some small, out-of-the-way event but rather the Republican National Convention in 1992.)

She also was famous for having a deep insight into George W. Bush, having covered him for years as governor of Texas.  From this she wrote two bestsellers -- Shrub and Bushwacked.

Related to this, she once said (and this is a paraphrase but close), "The next time I tell you not to elect a Texan as president, pay attention."

This is a piece that I wrote for the Huffington Post on Molly Ivins after she passed away.  I'm tempted to repost it, but it would take us too far away from the point.  However, if you have any appreciation of Ivins, you can read it here.
 
I was watching a documentary last Sunday, Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins.  It was very enjoyable – but one utterly surreal moment leaped out.  I wanted to write about it then, but as you may have noticed, much too much other news got in the way -- even though this was related to it directly.  But again as a reminder and for perspective, it was a week ago last Sunday when I was watching the film.
 
As much as her life was centered in Texas, what I didn't realize until watching the documentary is that at the very beginning of her career, after a few years writing for a very small publication in Texas, she got an offer to work for a major city paper up north.  Now, keep in mind, this was around 1965, about 55 years ago.  The paper was the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, where was not only a police reporter, but the first female police reporter in Minneapolis.  And I’m doing a double-take given what’s going on in the country -- again, this was last Sunday when the protests were at their height, and riots had started to break out, and so much attention of the country was focused specifically on Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police, where George Floyd had been murdered. 

But then it got even more weird. 

The documentary brings up how the Minneapolis police had a pet mascot that was a pig (and yes, how strange was that, given what was to come in about three years in American society…), which the police named – “Molly,”  as a mark of their great dislike of her.  The film then had footage of her later in her career when she was much more prominent, a national figure at that point, looking back on that period, and she’s on a TV show being interviewed,  During the conversation, she’s asked about that police mascot pig having been named “Molly” years earlier.  And she just laughs and says (and this is a paraphrase, but close – and remember this is about something 55 years ago in Minneapolis), “Oh, I took it as a great badge of honor.  I thought it was pretty funny.  I know they didn’t look at it that way, but I did.  But they didn’t like me because I’d written a number of stories about police brutality there.”
 
Wow.  It wasn’t an out-of-body experience, but came close.  There I was last Sunday night, watching her talk years ago about something that is now 55 years after the fact.  And I was sort of looking around the room and out the window at the surrealness of the moment, with riots throughout the country over a murder in Minneapolis charged against the police, trying to place myself in time.

I have two videos here.  

First, this is a good clip from the documentary which then leads into her making her famous comment about Pat Buchanan.

And here is the trailer.
​

No, this editorial is not from the Washington Post.  Not the New York Times. Not the Los Angeles.Times.  This is from the Portland Press-Herald in Maine.
 
But just in case you don't click through to read the whole, blistering editorial, the first sentence is wonderful enough --

"President Trump: We’re sorry that you decided to come to Maine, but since you are here, could you do us a favor? Resign."

The whole thing is great.  Like --

​You can read the full editorial here.

By the way, a notable follow-up:

I sent this editorial to a friend earlier.  He said he had no idea that Trump was going to Maine -- neither did I.  Obviously it's to help Susan Collins, since the state only has four electoral votes and they can be split -- but given how it’s because of him that she’s losing support, I’d have thought she’d beg him to stay away.  So glad the editorial is getting attention. Anyway, that aside, not long after reading what I'd sent him, he saw a story on TV about Trump heading to Maine – and the report actually brought up this editorial.

The front page of today's New York ​Times.
​

The sub-headline is difficult to read here.  It says -- “They were not simply names on a list. They were us.”

Within the paper, the Times wrote --

“Numbers alone cannot possibly measure the impact of the coronavirus on America, whether it is the number of patients treated, jobs interrupted or lives cut short. As the country nears a grim milestone of 100,000 deaths attributed to the virus, The New York Times scoured obituaries and death notices of the victims. The 1,000 people here reflect just 1 percent of the toll. None were mere numbers.”

This is from Mike Luckovich.  He's the op-ed cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and has received two Pulitzer Prizes and won cartoonist of the year in 2005.  I suspect that when he thought of his, he slapped his head, thought "Oh, my God, I have to get this out by tomorrow before anyone else comes up with it," and immediately began drawing.

It's also a perfect response to almost any Trump tweet.

Just to fill in the gaps and put the proper perspective here, Jurgen Klopp is the manager of the Liverpool English football team that plays in the Premier League.

Over the years, I've written my share of articles criticizing Tucker Carlson, who I find the most white supremacist on "Fox News," even more so than Sean Hannity which is a high standard to top, though in fairness I consider Hannity racist and anti-Semitic more than "pure white supremacist."  It's a distinction with a difference. One hates minorities, the other wants them out of His Country.

I've written here about seeing a liberal guest on Carlson's show during the 2016 presidential election, and he (I wish I could recall who it was because he was so richly prescient) called Trump a fascist -- and Tucker Carlson turned apoplectic, it was like his head was about to explode.  He started fuming and spouting and fulminating and wouldn't let the guest explain why he felt it was an accurate description of Trump -- despite Carlson snapping, "Why would you say that???!!!" and adding how unfair it was.  All I could think was that the guest clearly hit a raw nerve with Carlson and that  in the midst of all his ranting meltdown, if anyone wanted a visual aid for explaining the Shakespearean admonition, "Methinks he doth protest too much," that video should be put in the Time Capsule vault.

But for all the things I've written about Tucker Carlson, none of it comes close to a virtuoso column on Wednesday in the Washington Post by Margaret Sullivan.  In fact, if you only read the title, you could stop there, and it would be the best -- "Tucker Carlson's claim that white supremacy is a hoax is easy to prove wrong.  Just watch his show."

You can't get much better than that.  

And the thing is, even with a title like that to live up to, Ms. Sullivan is able to ratchet it up with the very first sentence.  The article begins -- 

"In his ongoing and remarkably successful quest to be the worst of the Fox News nighttime hosts, Tucker Carlson hit a new low on his Tuesday show."

-- and then she goes off from there.  When quoting Carlson in full denial, "I’ve never met anybody, not one person who ascribes to white supremacy.  I don’t know a single person who thinks that’s a good idea” -- she follows that with a pithy, "Hmm.  Maybe his sample size is a bit flawed."

The article masterfully takes Carlson apart by quoting him, repeatedly.  And she doesn't limit her focus to him alone, but quotes others at "Fox News" showing how it's all of a part of "racist propaganda" and what the result of it is, though always returning the attention on Carlson as the worst of the worst.  It builds, is damning and is eloquent -- even bending over backwards to be fair to Carlson by saying that she doesn't know what drives his white supremacist diatribes, and for all she knows he's a lovely fellow, and she doesn't know how much he believes of the hate-filled and divisive things he says, or if it's just to drive ratings by pandering to a racist, raging audience.  But she adds that it doesn't make a difference, since the results of his "damaging rhetoric" matter because they have the same impact.

But as good as the whole article is, she tops it with her last line which sums up her thesis in 22 words.  You can read it all here.

UPDATE: Since Carlson's broadcast on Monday when he claimed that white supremacy was not a problem in the United States and is a "hoax," his show has lost three major sponsors -- Long John Silver’s, Nestlé and HelloFresh.  The program previously lost several sponsors in March after recordings surfaced of him make white supremacist statements on a radio show over the course of several years.

What has perhaps gotten the most headlines for this story is the "red flag" for former Nebraska Secretary of State Kris Kobach who was being vetted as the possible head of the Department of Homeland Security.  The concern here was that Mr. Kobach might have a "political vulnerability" of -- white supremacist.  To be clear, the Trump administration thought that white supremacy was a "political vulnerability"...not a human decency vulnerability.

The good news is that Kris Kobach was not named Secretary of DHS.  Left of of the article was the bad news -- the Trump administration did hire Kobach.  They made him vice-chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.  He served under Vice President Pence who was chairman, but is practice was the committee's "operational leader."

So, that means a man the Trump administration believed had a political vulnerability with white supremacy ran the presidential committee of election integrity.  Given the Mueller Report finding of multiple instances of Trump team contacts with Russia, turning a blind eye to Russian actions and happily accepting the efforts of Russia to cyberattack the U.S. on behalf of Trump (also known as...say it all together -- "collusion"), the bitter irony of this is not lost on sentient human beings.

If you're like to read Axios's own article on the story, including the posting of numerous of the document, you can read it here 

And this is a three-minute segment of the broadcast where they show a blunt Chris Christie the vetting material on himself before he was fired.
​