Do forgive me if I appear to be a tad less patient than usual, which I acknowledge is a diminished bar in comparison to many. I’m in the middle of an extended work schedule at a more remote location where my commute time has been doubled and it results in about a 14-hour day with more than two hours in bumper to bumper traffic. I’ve done it before and I suspect some of you have done it more consistently and perhaps for even longer distances, but it’s been a while since I’ve had to. So I’m exhausted but hardly exasperated.
Which is unfortunately more than I can say about so many folks from so many parts of my past lives who have felt the need to take to social media and express in vivid detail their consternation, feigned shock and indignation at the antics that have been playing out in Washington during this week’s confirmation hearings for the Ship of Fools that appears to be what will consistute the cabinet of the free and fairly elected 47th dict–er, President–of the United States. And the early actions of those that have already squeaked into power are indeed alarming and arguably performative. Kristi Noem has apparently turned her badass addiction to guns toward migrants as opposed to dogs, which I suppose can be perceived as a step in the right direction. Pete Hegseth is focused on empowering colleagues with a penis who choose not to wear skirts and emasculating those that have those qualities that along the way may have actually attempted to offer a more informed opinion on tactical operations than his boss and he had developed while they made an emotional connection on Saturday morning TV in a manner not seen since the days of Schoolhouse Rock.
And yesterday it was Robert F. Kennedy JUNIAHHH’s turn to stand–er–sit–before the firing squad of the U.S. Senate to have his own tribunal, and if it were possible my timeline became even more cluttered with even more righteous indignation, literally thousands of words and bullet points pointing out his inconistencies and mistakes and ultimately connecting it to the dict–er, President who put him out there as a candidate in the first place. Rehashing exactly what far more qualified and amplified observers have already done.
Look, I had my own brief dalliance with RFKJ’s handlers when at one early point last year he was polling in some circles with as much as 20 per cent of a potential three-candidate race. I directly connected with his regional campaign managers (or at least that’s the title they claimed to have) in the hopes of providing support and direction for their upcoming primaries after they agreed with my assessment that a more fleshed out series of objectives and policies stands beyond merely his widely known views on vaccines and seed oils was necessary, and it would be beneficial for him to conduct some polling of potential voters to see which other issues they considered priorities and how they may have contrasted with those of his competitors. Three ghosted weeks later, one finally had the courtesy to get back to me and replied “Mr. Kennedy has informed us he is content with how his campaign is progressing and does not feel any urgency to modify it at this time”. Well, we all know how that ultimately worked out. So my views on him aren’t very positive, either. But I’m basing it on what I experienced, not what I read.
That’s why I directly link or italicizedly note what much more qualified and objective observers are reporting. The NEW YORK TIMES’ David Leonhardt provided all I needed to know in this morning’s subscriber newsletter. The entirety is here for those capable of reading it, but one particularly telling conflict of interest which Leonhardt referenced was especially instrucitve:
Kennedy has a personal stake in these anti-vaccine lawsuits, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board noted. He has received payments from a law firm that sued a large vaccine maker, and he plans to continue receiving them even if he becomes health secretary. Some of the cases involve a vaccine called Gardasil, which protects against a group of viruses that cause cervical cancer.
THAT was news to me. Not the snarky references to his sexting, infidelity and frog croak that were among the many character assassinations my “commentators” felt compelled to include. Nor their frustration at his evasive testimony where he consistently referenced what “the president believes” or what “the president wants”.
We’ve long since established that this will be a cabinet of goose-stepping loyalists determined to do the bidding of a petty, obsessive and bitter old fart who is obsessed with the court of public opinion and is fully incapable of processing criticism. But then again, many others have known that a LOT longer. One such person is Susan Mulcahy, who recently collaborated with Frank DiGiacomo on an oral history of the NEW YORK POST that they worked at for decades. THE MEDIA MIX’s Claire Atkinson, a longtime NEW YORK TIMES business reporter, dropped a detailed interview with Mulcahy yesterday that reminded us that those who actually read THE POST over the nearly half-century span that Rupert Murdoch has owned it have known far longer than many. And Mulcahy accepts full credit–well, blame–for helping to feed the perception that 49.8 percent of American voters somehow felt was enough to make him the leader of the free world for the second time in eight years in free and fair elections (and an awful lot would contend was actually the third):
Q: Where does Trump intersect with the New York Post?
Mulcahy: It was the road map to Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s the foundation of Rupert Murdoch’s American empire. It led to tabloid TV with [news show] “A Current Affair,” and then all the copycats that followed, which led to Fox News.
Between The Post and Fox News, those were the building blocks of Donald Trump’s media persona. NBC’s “The Apprentice,” solidified his media persona, which, as we know, is a false persona, because he’s a very bad businessman who has gone bankrupt, and he kept creating things that would go out of business. If he just had taken what his father had left him and put it in a savings account, he would have been a billionaire long before any of his recent triumphs financially.
Obviously he called in tips and he had that persona, his PR guy John Barron. Who could forget? [The Post] is not just a road map to how Trump operated, Rupert changed the media. Everybody changed the way they operated in the wake of what he started at the NY Post.
[Trump] became this larger than life character who sold papers. I mean, John Gotti sold papers, and Donald Trump sold papers. He knew this, and he would bombard all departments of the NY Post with stories about himself, to the point where, in the early nineties, when he was sort of on the wane, there were moratoriums – “Enough with the Donald Trump stories!”
When the myth about Donald Trump was being created he was very smart about who he hired for PR. He hired Rubenstein and Dan Klores. [Lawyer] Roy Cohn was his mentor. He hired people that had close relationships with a lot of reporters.
I wrote a book in the late eighties [My Lips are Sealed] about my experience editing Page Six and I devoted half a chapter to what a liar he is. I called out his pathological tendencies in the lying department a long time ago.
But the fact is, Mulcahy and others happily worked at providing him with a pulpit of consequence at a time when newspapers mattered more to far more subscribers and generations. Fealty to a handsome paycheck and an influential role in media–enough so that you can eventually publish an oral history–does have its benefits.
And I confess to my own small role in that process. I helped get A CURRENT AFFAIR sold into syndication and convinced Rupes that his initial idea of shoving it down the throats and schedules of his then nascent FOX broadcasting affiliates, the majority of whom hadn’t even launched local newscasts to compliment it, was a recipe for failure. By placing it adjacent to that and the likes of ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT–perhaps the closest thing on TV at the time that offered a journalistic lens to pop culture and populist topics–the chances for the show to make us all money was much greater. I was proven to be right and yes, my career was jumpstarted as a result. You want to hang me in the public square for that retroactively, you’re free to try. But I warn you–these days I fight harder than I used to, and a lot more surgically than ever.
Spitballing and lamenting and finding nuggets about yet another transactional political motivation for Trump or his lackeys is neither original nor meaningful. Using schoolyard-level derisions like Felon Dump, anything Jimmy Kimmel’s writers have coined and, indeed, Fat Orange Jesus are wholly inconsequential. They’re not listening and frankly, they don’t have to. Fealty is working for them even better than it did for me. And frankly, it’s working better than any fealty you may think is necessary to what you perceive to be democracy. And a HECK of a lot better than it did for the genuises who ran the Democratic campaigns last year.
Ya know what HAS worked? Unconvering someone we don’t yet know about who offers some unique viewpoints and comes from a different world than those already in place. Who besides his relatively small number of constituents knew who Barack Obama was at the start of this century?
We were reminded on Bill Maher’s show last week about the likes of Arizona senator Ruben Gallego, who fended off a determined challenge by a delusional and well-financed Keri Lake to become the first elected Latino senator and to the delight of his voters sent her sorry ass all the way to Washington to beg for an ambassadorship job she ultimately was passed over for. Not only was history made again, but it was a rare case where fealty wasn’t effective. Why are we not devoting at least some of our social media real estate to stories like his, as well as what he’s up to now?
Please, share something we don’t already know rather than vent and reinforce your own inabilities to do anything more than rant. That tends to be what Fat Orange Jesus does in the middle of the night when he’s pooping out Big Macs and Diet Coke. What’s your excuse?
Until news…