Campaign watch: Authoritarians to the right of me!

MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2016

So Professor Taub has now said: A terrible but important fact just keeps on emerging.

Here it is:

Along with our intellectual leaders, we the liberals just aren't especially sharp.

This flies in the face of our tribal self-image, which holds that we liberals are the smart honest people while the dimwits are all Over There.

That said, it's more clear all the time that we just aren't especially sharp. Consider something Amanda Taub wrote last week in a long, lengthy piece at Vox.

Taub is an adjunct professor in International Law and Human Rights at Fordham. She's also a lawyer who's nine years out of Georgetown Law.

Her most recent Vox piece, which is quite lengthy, appeared on March 1. The lengthy report bears this scary headline:

"The rise of American authoritarianism"

Taub's piece inspired Colbert King's bomb-dropping column in Saturday's Washington Post. King's column carries this headline on line:

"Trump: The authoritarian’s candidate of choice"

For our previous report on King's piece, you can just click here.

We expect to spend a few more days looking at different aspects of Taub's lengthy piece. For today, let's consider one particular thing she wrote.

In her piece, Taub excitedly claims that recent work in the social sciences has uncovered "an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group [in the United States]—authoritarians."

In her next paragraph, she expands on that claim in dramatic fashion. She says that, by 2009, "the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies."

Let's ask and answer two questions:

Does the American electorate contain a "surprisingly large" number of "authoritarians?"

Everything is possible! Needless to say, it all depends on what the meaning of "authoritarian" is! Also "surprisingly large!"

Does the electorate contain "a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies?"

Once again, it all depends on what the meaning of "authoritarian tendencies" is! Also, how big is "vast?"

How many "authoritarians" are found in the U.S. electorate? We can't answer that question. That said, sensible people should perhaps be a bit careful when they start employing that term—a term which is almost guaranteed to produce more heat than light.

Professor Taub isn't that person! Later in her lengthy report, she describes the result of some polling she and Vox undertook in connection with her piece. She wrote what follows without betraying the slightest sign that her findings may perhaps seem a bit odd:

TAUB (3/1/16): The first thing that jumped out from the data on authoritarians is just how many there are. Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high." That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare.

The key thing to understand is that authoritarianism is often latent; people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how, over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful political constituency without anyone realizing it.

For whatever reason, Taub doesn't say how many black or Hispanic respondents turned out to be authoritarians. That said, let's marvel at the outcome she was prepared to report:

At first glance, a reader might think that Taub said the following: A reader might think she said that 44 percent of white respondents turned out to be authoritarians.

To our mind, that would be a rather remarkable finding. But that isn't what Taub said. She said something much more striking.

Here's what Taub and Vox actually found in the course of their research. They actually found that 44 percent of white respondents are "high" or "very high" authoritarians!

Presumably, the total number of authoritarians would be substantially larger than that! That 44 percent just represents the number of folk who are highly authoritarian, perhaps very highly so.

At times when tribal juices are flowing, does any result make a person like Taub stop to rethink her procedures, her assumptions, her claims?

Apparently not.

Based upon what Taub has written, it seems that substantially more than half of all white Americans turned out to be "authoritarians" in the course of her research. A walloping 44 percent were determined to be "high" or "very high" authoritarians.

Depending on one's definitions, of course, everything is possible. Tomorrow, we'll look at the questions Taub seems to have used to determine Where The Authoritarians Are.

When we do, you may start to feel that her findings aren't quite as startling as they may seem at first glance. But we'll put that off till tomorrow.

That said, the term "authoritarian" carries a very large amount of historical baggage. In our view, people who work with such loaded terms ought to be careful if they venture outside the narrow, egg-headed environments found inside academe.

(Tomorrow, we'll note a peculiar passage from Taub's report concerning this very problem.)

Taub and Vox haven't been especially careful as they have toyed with this term. Last Saturday, they got their first major result—a name-calling column in which Colbert King said he didn't want to paint all Trump voters with the same brush, then proceeded to do something that looked very much like that.

Are 44 percent of us the people highly authoritarian? Taub reported that startling result without even batting an eye.

On the merits, that strikes us as a very unwise claim to make in a non-academic setting. On the politics, it strikes us as the latest horrible gift to Candidate Trump—but when people like Taub start getting scared, they start doing damn-foolish things.

For the past few months, we've been asking a basic question: Do we liberals know how to talk about politics at this point except by dropping our various bombs on the heads of The Others?

Professor Taub and her dean, Ezra Klein, have emerged with a lusty response to our question.

Tomorrow: The banality of (testing for) evil

GREETINGS FROM BABEL: Did Williams know whereof she spoke?

MONDAY, MARCH 7, 2016

Part 4—Charles Blow didn't ask: Did Ashley Williams, age 23, know what she was talking about?

We ask for an obvious reason. A few weeks back, Williams interrupted Candidate Clinton at a campaign event, making a statement which struck us as rather odd.

In last Monday's New York Times, Charles Blow wrote a column about this interruption. His column seemed to be straight outta Babelstan. It left us asking such questions as these:

Did Ashley Williams have any idea what she was talking about? We'll get more specific, based on the nature of Williams' remarks:

How much does Ashley Williams know about the 1994 crime bill? About that bill's effects on the nation's (very high) incarceration rate?

Does Williams know who voted for that bill? Against it? How much does she know about the specific contents of the bill? How much does she know about the social conditions surrounding its enactment—more specifically, about prevailing crime rates in the early 1990s?

Most specifically, these questions came to mind:

Why does Williams seem to think that Hillary Clinton has called her a super-predator? How much does she know about the context in which that term gained currency when she was two years old? How much does she know about the one speech in which Clinton used that term on one lone single occasion?

We ask these questions for a reason, and Williams' age is involved. In his silly subservient column, Blow referred to Williams as a "young graduate student."

At age 23, Williams isn't super-young. But we will say this:

We ourselves turned 23 in December 1970. At that time, we weren't gigantically well versed on the politics and sociology of 1948 and 1950, when we ourselves were one to three years old.

When she interrupted Candidate Clinton, Williams referred to a bill which was signed into law in 1994. She also referred to a speech Clinton made in 1996. We hope it doesn't seem condescending to make a fairly obvious point:

Most people who are 23 don't know a great deal about events which happened when they were one. How much does Williams, age 23, know about that crime bill? About that one lone speech, which took place when she was three?

How much does Williams actually know about the 1994 bill which fueled her interruption? This seems like a blindingly obvious question.

Charles Blow didn't ask! We'll suggest that his silence is a marker of a Babel-rich era.

Blow is paid by the New York Times to pretend to be a journalist. By tradition, a journalist would have wondered why Ashley Williams offered this peculiar remark when she took it upon herself to interrupt a campaign event:

“I’m not a super predator, Hillary Clinton.”

Why in the world did Williams say that? It didn't occur to Blow to ask! Instead, he took that statement by Williams and used it as the headline for his column.

At no point did Blow try to explain why Williams would have made that statement. At no point did he try to explain the way in which that statement even makes sense.

A journalist would have taken those steps, but journalism is dying fast in the ever-expanding empire of Creeping Babelstan. Instead of asking those obvious questions, Blow got busy apologizing to Williams for his own failures in the past twenty years.

Or something! Here's where the pundit went after quoting Williams:

BLOW (2/29/16): Williams: “I’m not a super predator, Hillary Clinton.”

Clinton, obviously caught off guard, struggles to find an appropriate response as Williams continues to pressure her and the crowd begins to grumble, “That’s inappropriate,” and the Secret Service closes in on Williams.

Then Clinton says something about answering for her statement and mass incarceration in general that left me flabbergasted:

“You know what, nobody’s ever asked me before. You’re the first person to ask me, and I’m happy to address it, but you are the first person to ask me, dear.”

Could this be true? How was this possible? How is it that of all the black audiences she has been before in the interceding two decades, and all the black relationships she has cultivated, no one person ever asked her what this young graduate student was asking?

In that moment, I knew that the people of my generation had failed the people of Williams’s. Her whole life has borne the bruises of what was done, largely by Democrats, when I was the age she is now.

[In an interview, Williams] said she has grown up knowing families and whole communities devastated by vanishing black people, swept away into a criminal justice system that pathologized their very personage. That night, Williams forced a reckoning.

Are the highlighted statements true? To state the obvious, those accusations are extremely significant. That said, to what extent are they true?

More specifically:

Is it true that Williams' whole life "has borne the bruises of what was done, largely by Democrats, when [Blow] was the age she is now?"

To state the obvious, that's an extremely significant claim—but to what extent is it true? More specifically, to what extent has Williams's whole life "borne the bruises of what was done" by the 1994 crime bill? To what extent has Williams "grown up knowing families and whole communities" who were "devastated by" that bill?

To what extent did that 1994 crime bill create the effects Blow describes? To what extent did that bill produce "families and whole communities devastated by vanishing black people, swept away into a criminal justice system that pathologized their very personage?"

To state the obvious, Blow was presenting an extremely serious set of charges. To what extent were his highly dramatic charges actually true?

Blow made no attempt to answer that obvious question! He merely accepted the statements in question as true, then began to flay himself, and his whole generation, for not having directed such accusations at Candidate Clinton sooner.

For today, we have one more question:

Does something about that presentation perhaps not quite make sense? This is why we ask that:

Twenty-two years have passed since that 1994 crime bill was passed by the House and the Senate and signed into law by Bill Clinton. (Twenty years have passed since Hillary Clinton used the term "super predator" one time, in one lone single speech.)

Twenty-two years have passed since that bill was passed. If that bill actually had the effects described in that passage, does it make really make sense to think that no one in Blow's whole generation would have mentioned this fact to Clinton by now?

Crackers, please! To state a blindingly obvious point, people in Blow's generation actually have mentioned "mass incarceration." In some cases, people have done so at great length.

To name one well-known name, Michelle Alexander wrote an entire book on the subject, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The book appeared in early 2010.

It's true! You haven't seen Alexander on our corporate pseudo-liberal channel, where Blow has often cavorted and played, dreaming up facts, with the likes of Lawrence O'Donnell. Presumably, the corporate suits don't want to depress the folks with such gruesome, depressing topics. Rachel and the other stars have happily played along with that and a million other decisions—with decisions which disappear the needs and the interests of this nation's black kids, except on the rare occasions when someone gets shot.

Alexander wrote an aggressive book. It has largely gone undiscussed by our corporate stars, who much prefer reading worthless polls while mugging, snarking and clowning. This leaves our basic question unanswered:

To what extent are Blow's extremely aggressive claims actually true? To what extent did that 1994 crime bill produce the effects he described?

That's a very important question; as a pseudo-journalist, Blow didn't attempt to address it. Nor did he make any attempt to introduce some obvious context, the type of context we listed in last Friday's report.

Blow didn't mention the gruesome crime rates which helped define the age in which that bill was passed. He didn't mention the many "families and whole communities" who were being "devastated," at that time, by the horrible crimes which created those horrific crime rates.

Many people were being killed. Blow didn't stoop to recall this.

Blow forgot to mention something else. He seemed to say that the "devastation" Williams has known was created "largely by Democrats."

He named exactly one such person; he named Hillary Clinton. If he's talking about the 1994 crime bill, he forgot to say that the Democrats in question included two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus!

Why would two-thirds of the CBC vote for a bill like that? Because Blow kept forgetting to mention key facts, his readers didn't have to worry their vapid little New York Times heads with such obvious questions.

Blow also didn't trouble his readers with another buzzkill fact—the 1994 crime bill seems to have had very little effect on the nation's incarceration rate! What does Williams say about that? Did Blow even bother to ask?

One week ago, that column by Blow came straight from a particular region in Creeping Babelstan. When we liberals pleasure ourselves in such ways, we are begging—begging; begging!—for the joys of a President Trump.

Journalistically speaking, Blow's readers were handed a big pile of crap in last Monday's column. Later that day, along came the latest embarrassment from The House of Josh, an enterprise found in a different province of Our Own Modern Babelstan.

Tomorrow: "A very good column," he said

Campaign watch: Colbert King doesn't want to generalize!

SATURDAY, MARCH 5, 2016

Proceeds to throw A-bomb around: It's important to understand one key point:

The Washington Post's Colbert King doesn't want to generalize! More specifically, he doesn't want to generalize about the nation's Trump voters.

We know King doesn't want to do that because he tells us so. He says so early in his weekly column in today's Washington Post:

KING (3/5/16): A stipulation: It would be unfair and dishonest to paint all Trump supporters with the same brush.

That heartfelt stipulation comes early in King's piece. But uh-oh! After presenting his stipulation, he proceeds to "paint all Trump supporters" with a rather unpleasant brush.

With which brush does our columnist paint? This is the headline which sits atop his column on line:

"Trump: The authoritarian’s candidate of choice"

(That's the current headline on-line. In our hard-copy Post, the headline employed a milder brush: "What Trump voters are afraid of.")

According to the current headline, Donald Trump is "the authoritarian’s candidate of choice." Presumably, King didn't compose that headline himself. But we'd have to say that it's a fair summary of the column he wrote.

Please note:

That headline doesn't say that all Trump voters are "authoritarian," whatever that unpleasant term will be taken to mean. The headline doesn't even say that most Trump voters fit that unpleasant description.

That said, we'd have to say that King's column does paint with a very broad brush. We'd also say it's terrible work, of a familiar, destructive and dangerous type.

Why are people supporting Candidate Trump? Given what is happening this year, that's an important question.

Not wishing to be "authoritarian" ourselves, we'd assume that the answer to that question would differ depending on which Trump supporter you spoke to. We also note this fact:

We see no sign that King spoke to any Trump supporters in the course of assembling his column. A certain type of semi-"authoritarian" mind will typically function that way.

King plays a familiar game. As he proceeds in his piece, he simply tells us what Trump supporters think—and what he tells us about their imagined thinking tends to be highly unflattering. Highly privileged folk at the top of the heap will frequently function that way.

Could there imaginably be valid reasons explaining some voter's support for Trump? Let's just say that King hasn't worked his imagination real hard in pursuit of that question.

In our view, King's column is horrifically bad, but it's also quite instructive. Overall, we wouldn't describe King as a liberal. But his column shows how we in our liberal tribe tends to function when we're at our intellectual worst, which is where we can be found a large amount of the time.

Because King's column is so instructive, we'll almost surely return to it next week. For today, though, let's only note where King ends up.

King ends his column by saying what follows. As he does, we'd have to say that columnist King is ignoring his own gruesome history:

KING: Trump’s willingness to flout all the conventions of civilized discourse when it comes to out-groups and others that his authoritarian supporters find so threatening is, as Vox observed, a benefit rather than a liability for him.

Even if Trump is out of the picture, Vox’s Taub points out, the authoritarians “will still look for candidates who will give them the strong punitive leadership they desire.”

Thus a seminal finding: There is a sickness in our body politic that Trump’s candidacy exposes.

We agree! Over and over, again and again, Candidate Trump has shown a "willingness to flout all the conventions of civilized discourse when it comes to out-groups and others."

Here's the problem. We're so old that we can remember when King and his horrible Washington in-group spent many years engaged in the same highly destructive practice.

In our view, Colbert King was Donald Trump long before Trump came to town. So were the many others who rode around, year after year, in the insider establishment Washington clown-car with him.

This in-group was assaulting our journalistic conventions long before Candidate Trump came along. Trump has come along in the past year and destroyed things a tiny bit better.

Colbert King and his gruesome in-group were destroying our discourse long ago. His newest column continues to do so, in a way which is pleasing to liberals. Let's close with a basic point:

In the past few months, we've frequently asked a basic question. Here it is:

Can we the liberals discuss modern politics without the use of our bombs?

King said he doesn't want to generalize. Then just like that, he started throwing his A-bomb around.

Again and again, this seems to be the only play our liberal tribe knows. As we've noted many times, we liberals love our various bombs.

We don't leave home without them! It's a vaguely authoritarian practice, and it makes you-know-who strong.

Campaign watch: Drum reviews the Trump "health plan!"

FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2016

As we wait for Godot: For weeks and months, Candidate Trump has given us in this weary world an overview of his health plan.

It would be terrific, the candidate said. Also, no one would die in the streets!

(The candidate said he got a standing ovation every time he mentioned that second point. Did he ever get any such ovation? We're just asking, friend!)

Trump has now released his "plan." Kevin Drum reviews it here.

We're leaving you with one question. Will the New York Times ever subject this "plan" to a serious front-page review?

We don't have the answer to that. Crackers, we're just asking!

BREAKING FROM BABEL: The New York Times finds Allentown!

FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2016

Will Maddow follow suit: This morning, right on the front page, the New York Times has finally found Allentown.

You might say the famous newspaper has located life outside Flint. Hard-copy headline included, this is the way Michael Wines began his news report, which carries a Cleveland dateline:

WINES (3/4/16): Beyond Flint, Lead Poisoning Persists Despite Decades-Old Fight

CLEVELAND—One hundred fifty miles northwest of here, the residents of Flint, Mich., are still reeling from the drinking water debacle that more than doubled the share of children with elevated levels of lead in their blood—to a peak, in mid-2014, of 7 percent of all children tested.

Clevelanders can only sympathize. The comparable number here is 14.2 percent.

The poisoning of Flint’s children outraged the nation. But too much lead in children’s blood has long been an everyday fact in Cleveland and scores of other cities...

Say what? According to Wines, Flint had a 7 percent excessive exposure rate at the worst point in its current ordeal. (We don't know where he got that number.)

In Cleveland, the rate of excessive exposure is twice as high! Eventually, Wines even said this:

WINES: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that four million of those most dangerous households have children. A half-million children—in Atlantic City, Philadelphia and Allentown, Pa., where a remarkable 23.1 percent of children tested had excessive lead—are believed to have enough lead in their blood to merit a doctor’s attention.

Say what? At its worst point, seven percent of children in Flint displayed excessive exposure to lead. The corresponding figure from Allentown is 23.1 percent—more than three times as high!

Thanks to other people's work, we've been noting such facts for the past two months. It took the Times a while to get off its ascot and do this reporting. But Wines goes into detail about the scope of the problem in today's front-page report.

Eventually, returning to Cleveland, Wines even tells us this:

WINES: In 2010, researchers estimated that 7.7 percent of the nation’s black children younger than 6 had blood lead levels above five micrograms per deciliter. But in Glenville, 26.5 percent of children tested in 2014—286 children in all—exceeded that standard. Two registered more than 45 micrograms, the threshold for hospitalization to remove lead from the body.

Cleveland tested less than half its under-6 population. How many other children are at risk is unknown, but an Ohio State University analysis suggests that in some census tracts, it could be more than four in 10.

In Flint, the alarm was triggered when Dr. Hanna-Attisha's study showed that the exposure rate had gone from 2.1 percent up to 4.0 percent after the switch to Flint River water. According to Wines, the exposure rate may be ten times that high in some census tracts in Cleveland! As recently as 2010, the exposure rate was twice that high for the nation's black kids as a whole.

Wines explains a key point. In most of these instances, the exposure to lead is caused by exposure to lead paint, not by ingestion of lead in drinking water. That said, the potential damage is the same, however a child is exposed.

We'd say Wines is guilty of one or two key omissions. He doesn't explain what exposure rates were like in earlier decades. We think those extremely high exposure rates help provide some basic context for people who want to understand this nationwide state of affairs.

We'd also say he does too little explaining about the types of damage one should expect at lower rates of excessive exposure. "Lead poisoning" is a scary term. For journalistic purposes, it may spread more heat than light.

That said, the fact that the Times has finally done this background reporting raises an important question. Will someone tell the Maddow Show to stop its disgraceful clowning around with this national state of affairs?

For viewers of the Maddow Show, overexposure to lead is a problem for children in Flint and for children nowhere else. In a highly typical manner, Maddow has played the state of affairs in Flint as a way to attack Rick Snyder, one of her favorite political demons. (For better or worse, she has several—and she's thrilled when they end up in jail.)

If you watch the Maddow Show, lead poisoning exists in Flint, and it exists nowhere else. Maddow has never so much as mentioned the fact that exposure rates are much higher elsewhere. On Maddow's highly novelized program, Flint represents "a humanitarian crisis of international proportions." The lead-exposed children in Cleveland and Allentown don't even seem to exist.

In many ways, Rachel Maddow has become our own tribe's Donald Trump. This is why we say that:

Over in the other tribe, many voters can't see through the silly scams they're constantly sold by Trump. Over here in our own brilliant tribe, we tend to have the same problem with the endless mugging and clowning and pimping of self which is constantly peddled by Maddow.

Exposure rates in Cleveland and Allentown are substantially worse than that in Flint. The same can be said of many other cities. At sites like Vox and Kevin Drum, this news has been spreading for months. As of today, even the Times has gotten around to reporting this basic fact.

Will the day ever come when Maddow, who isn't obsessively honest, tells her viewers the rest of the story? Or will she keep using the children of Flint as stars of a private morality tale in which Governor Snyder is the key villain and she herself is cast in the role of one of the genius heroes?

We'll guess that Maddow will never tell. Whether we tribals can see it or not, she tends to play it that way, something like Candidate Trump.

GREETING FROM BABEL: Basic facts you can't learn from Blow!

FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2016

Part 3—Contextually clueless in Babel: Today, we plan to have naming of parts. We'll have naming of parts in this morning's report, then again in an afternoon post.

This morning, we'll start with naming of parts concerning crime in Gotham. According to the leading authority, these were the numbers of murders in New York City in the early 1990s:

Number of murders in New York City, 1990-94
1990: 2245
1991: 2154
1992: 1995
1993: 1946
1994: 1561

Last year, the number of murders was 345. That's still a lot of murders, of course, especially for the people killed and for their families and friends.

Next, we'll have the naming of homicides in Chicago during that same era. According to the leading authority, those numbers look like this:

Number of homicides in Chicago, 1990-94
1990: 851
1991: 928
1992: 943
1993: 855
1994: 931

Last year, the number was 488. By standards of the developed world, that's still a very large number (and it makes Chicago our current "Murder City"). But it's roughly half as large as those figures from the early 1990s.

(According to the leading authority, New York City's numbers were dropping at that time. Chicago's numbers were not.)

Next we'll have the naming of parts concerning the vote in the House on the 1994 crime bill. By most counts, this is the way the voting broke down within the Congressional Black Caucus:

Final vote, 1994 crime bill, Congressional Black Caucus
Voting yes: 23 members
Voting no: 11 members

We're not saying those votes were right or wrong. We're just saying those votes were cast.

(Our own congressman, Kweisi Mfume, voted for the 1994 bill. Two years later, he was named president of the NAACP. Just for the record, Mfume is a very impressive person.)

As you may have heard, Bernie Sanders voted for the 1994 bill. In the Senate, so did Paul Wellstone. So did Carole Mosely-Braun. At the time, she was the nation's only black senator.

According to this mid-level authority, it's also true that "a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the 1986 law that created the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine." We name that part to offer even more context concerning a recent New York Times column.

We'd like to name one additional part, although this part is somewhat complex. It concerns the extent to which the 1994 crime bill created, or contributed to, our current rates of incarceration.

Breaking! By the norms of the developed world, our incarceration rates are extremely high—so high that our current practice is often described as "mass incarceration."

That said, to what extent did the 1994 crime bill contribute to those current rates? There's no simple statistic with which that question can be answered, unless it's this statistic, reprinted in a recent post by Kevin Drum:

"In the US, federal prisons house only about 13 percent of the overall prison population."

In that post, Drum added these further bits of context. They involve the naming of some very basic parts:

DRUM (2/11/16): [B]y 1995, when the crime bill took effect, state and federal policies had long since been committed to mass incarceration. Between 1978 and 1995 the prison population had already increased by more than 250 percent. Between 1995 and its peak in 2009, it increased only another 40 percent—and even that was due almost entirely to policies already in place.

Drum includes a striking graphic which illustrates these parts:

Incarceration had already displayed a steep rise before 1994. Federal incarceration rose after 1994, but that constituted a small part of the overall rise.

Were those 1986 votes a mistake? How about those votes on the 1994 crime bill?

In today's naming of parts, we aren't trying to answer those questions. We're trying to offer amazingly basic context concerning those bills and those votes.

As we do, we'll name one further part:

If you read Charles Blow's latest imitation of journalism, you weren't exposed to any of this extremely basic context. You weren't offered any of these extremely basic facts.

Instead, you saw an increasingly familiar sight, here in the Babel where we all live. You saw a grown man with a very high platform pandering to someone much younger.

You saw that grown man refusing to play the role of the serious journalist. You saw him refusing to play the traditional role of the elder. Instead, you saw the amazing reversal of roles which, by now, has come to define Our Own Ridiculous Babel.

According to Blow's ridiculous column, Ashley Williams, age 23, is a "young graduate student." Recently, she interrupted a presidential campaign event to make a somewhat peculiar statement, a peculiar statement the slacker Blow tied to the 1994 crime bill, and to the heinous first lady who spoke once on its behalf.

Blow didn't provide the most obvious context. Instead, he pandered and fawned and pimped script.

In the Babel we all inhabit, Blow is one of the ultimate slackers. In his highly dramatic column, he hurried past all the parts we have named today.

He didn't make the slightest attempt to determine if his young graduate student had the first freaking idea what the freak she was talking about. Instead, he played the role of the penitent hero, part of a nauseating morality play in which so many of our tribal leaders are now profitably engaged.

If she read Blow's column, the young graduate student wasn't challenged by the simple facts we've assembled. (We wouldn't prejudge her response.) Subscribers to the New York Times didn't encounter any of this basic context either.

Instead, they encountered the usual crap which now routinely gets shoveled at us here in Our Own Private Babel.

In comments, our liberal tribals swung into action, reciting our memorized tribal scripts. Moments later, up jumped Josh Marshall, newly refashioned as Gramps.

Tomorrow: Tugging his forelock, confessing his guilt, Josh plays an appalling sad game