The Mayor from Jaws Explains Those Quotes He Gave to Bob Woodward

 

Everyone knows I want to be a cheerleader for Amity Island, right? You want to project confidence. So while I might have told some reporter from the mainland that we were facing “a  grotesque, Biblical monster of the deep,” “a bloody, churning nightmare of teeth,” or “a lean, mean tourist-eating machine,” there was no reason to tell the general public that. You don’t want to start a panic, fellas. Just think of the kids.

On the subject of kids, the media’s distorting my comment about the unfortunate Kitner boy being “a fit offering and sacrifice to our mighty fish-god Dagon” completely out of context. First of all, I was brought up never to criticize someone else’s religion. I don’t know how you were raised. Second, if I have the worshipers of Dagon right – and they’ve been fine, upstanding members of our Chamber of Commerce – then Dagon brings wealth and prosperity not just to his followers, but to the whole community. Who wouldn’t like a little more prosperity, am I right? Here on Amity Island we depend upon the ocean for our very lives. So you gotta keep those obscene, scaly, aquatic monster gods happy.

Look, if it wasn’t for me, this whole island would descend into real darkness and bloodshed. I’m talking about roaming mobs of young radical leftists – some of them nearly four foot ten – destroying our picket fences with their karate. If my opponent is elected Mayor, they’ll just run wild. Then the only white, pointed pickets you’ll see will be the row upon row of pitiless shark teeth closing down on you. I think I got off the subject somehow.

When I told that reporter, “We want to play this down, so the suckers don’t avoid the beaches,” I simply meant that it was time to reopen our beaches and our economy. It’s lost business that’s the real killer: not just people, but whole communities. Do you want to kill our community? Maybe I should quote you in a newspaper.

So it’s exactly what I was saying on twitter at the time, except a few minor details about the insatiable marine predator Carcharodon carcharias. Twitter has a character limit, as you’re well aware.

And when I said that “We should get everyone we can to go swimming and thrash wildly in the closest possible imitation of a distressed seal,” I was simply calling upon the spirit of loyalty and public service in our nearly 346-year-old community and its citizens. “Amity,” as you know, means friendship.

When I said “Have you seen some of those off-island girls’ bikinis? I wouldn’t mind eating them myself,” that was simply boat-locker talk, and a compliment to our beautiful young guests and the fashionable swimwear for sale here in our town. Life’s too short to get upset about stuff like this, particularly with a frenzied cartilaginous fish honed to homicidal perfection by millions of years of evolution around to shorten it.

 I don’t think the voters are going to hold a little banter against me any more than they did last election, when I was recorded talking about inviting Chief Brody’s wife for “a little midnight harpoon practice.” And speaking of the Chief, I don’t expect voters to mind me hoping “the shark eats that snotty New York bastard, so I can show his widow my blow hole.” People from New York can be prickly. 

 No one cares what I may or may not have said to a famous investigative journalist who explicitly asked permission to record me. Who are you going to believe? All that matters is, the sun is shining, the beaches are full, and we’re going to have the best Fourth of July we’ve ever had. You’re the one who says it’s September. I prefer to be an optimist.

Why Booing Trump Matters

Various elite media types clucked, scolded, and clutched their pearls after Donald Trump got booed at the World Series and some of the crowd spontaneously chanted "Lock him up!" Because when ordinary voters do it, it's "uncivil." When Trump does it, it's the Voice of the People. But the talking heads' discomfort was about something more important: cognitive dissonance. Trump being booed threatens their worldview. The American media cannot accept the fact that President Trump is unpopular.

Donald Trump is very unpopular. More than half the country dislikes him. The polls have always shown this. But the media and political establishments refuse to digest this. They always find a way to attach a but or a qualification.

Unpopular, but that's just the other party. (Forget what the polls say about independents.) Unpopular, but only in the big cities (where most of the people are). Unpopular, but not in "Real America" (where most of the people aren't). Unpopular, but that's just the elite.

There's no such thing as a small elite that makes up more than half the population. If you think about that for a second, it's obvious. So some people work very hard to avoid thinking about it for even a second.

Having a random World Series crowd lustily boo the President of the United States threatens the pundits' world view. It undermines what they "know" to be true. So they organize all the excuses they can to protect the conventional wisdom from the facts.

Here's the thing: Trump, as a reality TV type used to creating false appearances, has carefully managed every appearance of his Presidency, precisely because he was afraid of this. He knows he's deeply unpopular and is afraid other people will catch on. So this may be the first time in his presidency that he's been outside without hand-picking his audience.

And look: people hate him. 100% of Trump's genuine public appearances have resulted in him being booed and jeered. The last time I saw him enter a public place where he didn't control the guest list was election day, when he went to vote in his local precinct. He got heckled. The video clearly captures some guy shouting, "You're gonna lose!"

Donald Trump is an unpopular figure with a small, fiercely loyal cult following. That cult following is a real political fact, which needs to be confronted. But it is not at all the same as wider popularity, and it becomes impossible to think about him, or strategize against him, if you don't think about the actual situation. And yet, our media establishment refuses to take the depths of his unpopularity on board. They are not at all interested in what is really happening. They'd rather go out and interview one of his stalwart superfans again, as if that told us anything.

Because Donald Trump is right about one thing: if the false perception of his popularity went away, that would change things.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

Partial List of Hope Hicks's White House Duties

White lies

 

Little fibs

 

Harmless prevarications

 

Genteel fictions

 

Telling the truth mainly, but stretchin' it some

 

Artful misdirection

 

Poetic license

 

Flights of whimsy

 

Pursuing a less literal, more memoir-centered notion of "truth"

 

Yarns

 

Tall tales

 

Fish stories

 

Off-the-record briefings

 

Keeping our oral folklore traditions alive

 
Commiserating

Diplomatic balderdash

 

Stimulating the hearer's sense of wonder

 

Telling all the truth but telling it slant

 

Telling some of the truth, slantier

 

Slanting, baby, slanting

 

Strategic omissions

Misleading paraphrases

Verbal legerdemain 

Sympathetic nodding

 

Thrilling campfire tales

 

Press relations

 

Having the courage to describe the world as we wish it to be

 

Accessorizing properly for fall colors

Explaining how Santa can be in so many places at the same time

 

Seemingly accidental misrepresentations

 

Making soothing noises

 

Pulling Maggie Haberman's leg, just as a little joke

Sharing staff diet tips

Deliberately misunderstanding

 

Stone cold lying, bitch.

cross-posted from Dagblog: please comment there, not here

The New York Times Wants You to Know How Normal Everyone Is Here at the Applebee's

Here in bucolic Fairfield, California, amidst rolling vineyards and struggling big-box stores, unassuming souls like Norman Bates go largely unremarked. While most Americans would instinctively recoil from his habit of brutal murder and the uses to which he puts his victims’ bodies, here in Middle America he is Norman Next Door, a soft-spoken young man whose manners nearly any mother would applaud, working to keep open a family motel that serves both as symptom and as symbol of the economic anxieties roiling the heartland. Norman has heard murmurs advocating radical change, from Wal-Mart’s gun aisle to the local church’s pork-and-beans supper, and seems guardedly optimistic. Perhaps it will become easier for him to date. “Most girls don’t want to hear about being violently stabbed to death and having selected portions of their remains repurposed,” he says, browsing the knives at the dollar store. Now, he feels, things may be about to go his way.

    The Joker understands that mainstream Americans do not approve of him, or his plans to set most of Gotham City’s inhabitants on fire. He has come to see this disapproval as the fruit of consistent media bias. A slender man dressed with immaculate care, he possesses an infectious laugh that instantly announces his presence in any room. “Your big legacy media companies just aren’t equipped to think about crime on my scale,” he says, sweeping with his customary brio into a local Steak n’ Shake and nonchalantly commandeering a booth whose most recent occupants have succumbed to his poisonous gas. “They’re dinosaurs. They can only imagine mass extinction as a bad thing.”  He takes a sip from the Orange Freeze a newly departed customer has left untouched and gives his trademark roguish grin. “I think ordinary people, your average Americans, are tired of all the knee-jerk moralizing, the hypocrisy. The New York Times got so holier-than-thou about that thing with the orphanages, but they publish David Brooks twice a week. How do they justify that?” He feels the current political volatility, the disappearance of the Police Commissioner and Mayor, might at last permit his ideas to be heard. “The anarchy, the looting, the complete breakdown of civil order: it’s my moment.” He strolls along Maple Street, glittering with fireflies in the Midwestern dusk, toward the Volunteer Fire Department, another clever scheme in mind.
               
    Leatherface has no grand ambitions for himself. It has always been enough for him to live here, on the wind-scoured Texas plains, working with his brothers in the family’s humble assortment of businesses: a small gas station, adjoining restaurant, and a now-shuttered slaughterhouse. Often one of the brothers must resort to hitchhiking, hoping to steer passing motorists the family’s way. Leatherface does the homestead’s chores, his beloved chainsaw always at the ready. He even built the family’s furniture, using whatever traditional materials come nearest to hand. Years of thrift have become ingrained habit, and absolutely nothing goes to waste.
    "We’re just trying to put meat on the table,” he explains, slipping into an Applebee’s booth that other regulars, by unspoken agreement, leave reserved for him. He has brought his own dinner, wrapped in humble butcher’s paper, and tucks into his meal with a workingman’s eager gusto. He must occasionally readjust his homemade, lovingly hand-crafted mask, constructed entirely from recycled human flesh. “That’s what people outside the flyover states never understand. If they want to find out what this country is really about, tell them to come out here. Straight to my house.”

    Darth Vader, weary at the end of another long day, agrees to an interview at a Cracker Barrel off the Ohio Turnpike. He orders coffee for what can only be reasons of politeness; his complicated and burdensome respirator apparatus will not allow him to drink liquid in public.  His detractors in the press view him as aloof, out of touch, and motivated by implacable evil, but he still sees himself as a humble farm boy from a tiny desert village he declines to name, a place so poor that his family actually had to farm for water. He never knew his father, but he claims still to feel that Dickensian desert demi-orphan inside him at his most impetuous moments, as when he is strangling another senior staff officer, and during whatever subsequent moments of fleeting regret.       
    He was raised not to complain, but feels that the public has come to see him solely through the lens of a one unfortunate, notorious day. “The single worst news cycle of your life, repeated forever,” he intones, in his deep, reassuring church-organ basso. “That is CNN.” He offers no self-justification or excuse for the destruction of the planet Alderaan and its millions of human inhabitants. He speaks instead of his faith, at once old-fashioned and profound, a set of lifelong, deeply held beliefs that have come to feel out of place in modern, secular society.
    “Is the problem that I created a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced?” he asks. “Or is the problem that no one in the liberal coastal elite could feel that disturbance? I find their lack of faith disturbing.” He counts out his tip carefully, in exact change, before leaving it on our server’s lifeless body.

    The few New Yorkers who have ever heard of Cthulhu consider him a malevolent demon-god intent on the elimination of all human life. But here in the hardworking blue-collar neighborhoods of Providence, Rhode Island, he passes easily for that most beloved of homespun meals, a plate of fresh calamari. Cthulhu considers his poor reputation a temporary problem, soon to be rectified, in his view, by the terrified madness and utter annihilation of every living creature. It’s a goal he has long dreamed of; he knows that not everybody understands. We meet at a local Dunkin’ Donuts, where his entrance reduces customers and staff to shrieking horror and dismay.
    “This country has a serious problem,” he says in a blood-curdling and nigh-incomprehensible gargle. “Washington doesn’t understand it. Mainstream media doesn’t understand it. No mewling pathetic humanoid could possibly grasp it. I alone know what the problem is, because I am the problem. You will all bow down to me before you die.” He demonstrates his point by disemboweling the morning-rush customers and brutally eviscerating the staff. The interviewer, reduced to gibbering madness, crawls out of the Dunkin’ Donuts having lost of his ability to speak. He has been permanently institutionalized; portions of this article have been reconstructed from his notes. But before leaving, Cthulhu takes two honey-dipped donuts in a wax paper bag: for all the world, in that moment, just another ordinary customer on the streets of the Real America.

cross-posted from Dagblog: all comments welcome there, rather than here

Balanced Coverage and Baseball

So today, Paul Krugman told it like it is about the newspaper that employs him and its strange "balance via bias" coverage of the Clinton and Trump campaigns, in which the Grey Lady tries to give both candidates equivalent amounts of negative coverage. This requires (or allows) the Times to exhaustively cover "shadows over" and "questions about" the Clinton campaign while outright ignoring outrageous Trump behavior (such as funneling $25,000 to a state DA who was considering whether to sue one of Trump's businesses). The Times has written multiple stories on donors to the Clinton Foundation asking for favors and (wait for it) not getting them, while writing no (none, nada, zero) stories about the Trump Foundation giving the Florida DA twenty-five grand while a lawsuit was being considered. That's fair, right?

And the logic here, as in much of the media coverage, is that Trump has done so many terrible things that there isn't room to cover them all. So if he behaves badly enough, he gets some free bad behavior as an incentive. What journalism!

Then the Times, in a not at all biased piece of behavior, responded like this:

Looks like @nytimes isn't tweeting out Krugman's column, which was basically a subtweet of NYT's campaign coverage. https://t.co/h0l5DT6P3i

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 5, 2016

The Times did eventually tweet a link to Krugman's column, about nine hours after Silver's public shaming. So public shaming, plus nine hours, to get the routine social media promotion that all the paper's op-ed columns get. Nice.

Now, I know some of you will want to get into the weeds about details of Hillary Clinton's e-mails and the penumbras and emanations of the meetings she did not actually hold. So let me switch the topic entirely. Let's talk about baseball.

Sixteen years ago (on August 29, 2000, to be precise), two baseball teams played a game in which an eye-popping eight members of one team, including the manager, were ejected by the umpires, while exactly none of the other team's players or coaches got thrown out. Eight ejections to no ejections. How can that be fair? I have occasionally heard sportscasters ask exactly that question. If one team has eight people thrown out and the other side none, I have heard one Hall of Famer say, something has to be wrong. Obviously, this discrepancy is a sign of biased umpiring, right? Right?

No. Not at all.

On the home team's first at-bat, the visiting pitcher, Pedro Martinez, hit the leadoff batter with a pitch. (Full disclosure: I am an ardent Red Sox fan, and a pretty big Pedro fan. But I will fully admit that Pedro Martinez sometimes threw at guys intentionally. I might be biased in the Red Sox's favor, but in this case all of the facts are clear beyond question.) The umpires, rightly or wrongly, believed that Martinez had hit the home team player (Gerald Williams of the Tampa Devil Rays) by accident.

Williams, however, chose to run out to the mound to attack the pitcher. This is a clear baseball no-no. It also led to nearly all the players from both teams rushing onto the field, pushing and shoving each other. Have I mentioned that the game had just started? The umpires regained control, sent everyone back to their places, and resumed the game. They ejected one player, the player who had rushed the pitcher's  mound, and kept everyone else in the game. That was basically the last eviction that involved the umpires' judgement calls. One Devil Ray ejected, no Red Sox ejected. Still with me?

A couple of innings later, the Devil Rays pitcher hits a Red Sox batter. This, too, may be an accident. But there is a clear baseball tradition of pitchers retaliating for hit batsman by going out and hitting one of the other team's batters as payback. At this point, the home team pitcher is not ejected. But, in baseball parlance, the benches are warned. This means that any further hit batters, or clear throws at batters, will lead to the automatic ejection of that pitcher AND his manager. Automatic. No questions. Great. Each team has hit one batter, one player has been ejected for starting a fight, and now both teams face automatic ejections if someone else gets hit.

Two batters later, the Devil Rays pitcher hits another Red Sox batter, the Red Sox's best hitter, pretty clearly not by accident but that's no longer even the question. The pitcher and the team manager get run off the field. 3 Devil Rays ejections, 0 Red Sox ejections.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox are doing pretty well. They build up a three-run lead and -- this part will be important -- their pitcher Pedro Martinez is throwing a no-hitter. After hitting that first batter, he hasn't let anyone else on base. He has gotten every single Devil Ray batter out, inning after inning. They simply can't hit him. They can't even work a walk.

So, eventually, the Devil Rays pitchers hit, or try to hit, more Red Sox batters. When they do this the pitcher, and whichever coach is filling in as manager at that moment, get ejected. In one memorable sequence (and I still remember watching this), the Devil Rays pitcher throws at one Red Sox batter so that the pitch is literally behind the poor guy. That pitcher gets ejected, taking one of his coaches with him. The Devil Rays bring in a new relief pitcher, let him warm up, and he immediately hits the very same batter that the last pitcher was ejected for throwing at. Four ejections in one at-bat. This is how you get to eight.

Why did this happen? Because, after a certain point, the Rays kept hitting batters because they wanted to bait the opposing pitcher into hitting one of them. If he got upset and retaliated, he would be thrown out of the game. They desperately wanted him out of the game, because he was throwing a no-hitter. But he obviously was not going to do anything to get thrown out of the game for the very same reason: he was throwing a no-hitter, a record-book accomplishment that he had never achieved. He was not going to be ejected if he could help it, and since he could help it, he did.

The team that was getting repeatedly ejected were not being treated unfairly. They were breaking rules that the other team was following. They were doing it to bait the other side into a misstep, and also trying to work the umpires. Should one of the Red Sox been ejected for "balance" every time a Devil Rays player got ejected? If that were true, the Devil Rays could get the Red Sox punished for the Devil Rays' own bad behavior. Which brings us back to the 2016 election.

The Clinton-Trump election is like this. One side is way outside the established rules and falling behind. The other is playing carefully by the rules and winning. The rule-breakers are protesting loudly that things are not fair and many in the media (who now behave, in the worst possible way, like sportscasters) are coddling those complaints and seeking to punish the winning campaign for the losing campaign's misdeeds. This dynamic will only intensify when Trump next falls further behind in the polls. He will do his damnedest to get Hillary thrown out of the game.

To some, including some people who make their living as Serious Journalists, this seems only fair. Because they have lost their sense of what fairness actually entails.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Horserace? Or Hindenburg?

Donald Trump is clearly losing this election. What is the media going to do about it?

Even Trump understands that he's way behind in the polls and that those polls are on the level. That's why he shook up his campaign staff this morning to make it more Trump-y. (New campaign motto: "Let Trump be Trump. We're out of other options.") He's doing much worse than Mitt Romney was four years ago, and Romney lost by a solid margin.

Trump is actually doing so badly that he has defeated the national media's reflexive need to "balance" coverage and to present the Presidential election as a close contest. There are plenty of reporters out there happy, more than happy to write the "Trump Comeback" story or, if necessary, the "Trump: Down But Not Out" story. But Trump's campaign has been so, well, Trumpalicious that he hasn't given those reporters a chance. Trump is currently losing so badly that they can't spin the polls any other way. You can't write the comeback narrative if the comeback kid keeps falling further behind.

The great James Fallows tweeted last week that we were approaching a turning point, where the media would have to decide how to cover the election:

Next wk will see collision of 2 powerful media instincts:
1) Story must change ('doing better than you think')
2) Bandwagon ('losers lose')

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) August 13, 2016

Well, this is the week for that collision. Trump's campaign shakeup is, among other things, a clear attempt to get some journalists back to the Comeback narrative, by giving them a "turning point" as a hook for those stories. That, after all, is how Trump's last shakeup, the firing of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, worked. It provided a peg to hang the "Trump is about to pivot" stories from. It's the equivalent of hanging an "Under New Management" sign on a restaurant that's been closed down over health violations. Now the pivot hasn't worked, because Trump didn't actually pivot, and so he has new new management and Paul Manafort now reports to someone who is basically Corey Lewandowski with even less campaign experience. Whee! Keep your hands and feet inside the roller coaster at all times!

But since the clear point of this reshuffle is to double down on Trump's previous unworkable strategy, there's a chance that it reinforces the Loser in Disarray story instead and brings on the mother of all media pile-ons. The standard thinking is that Trump is failing and flailing because he's refusing to act like a normal candidate. Now he's essentially declared that normal is for losers, and he's going to be more -- God help us -- unrestrained. More rallies, uglier personal attacks, no bothering with stuff like campaign offices in, say, states. Who knows? Maybe he'll burn a cross on his own lawn. Trump is simply going to flail away with both arms. Since most journalists understand Trump's Trumpiness as the reason he's losing, they are going to assume that turbo-Trumping the campaign will only make him a bigger loser.

The press wants a good horse race, always. The horse race means ratings and sales and advertising dollars. They want a close election the way sportscasters want a close game, because it delivers eyeballs. It takes an a lot to pry the media away from their desire to present a national election as neck-and-neck. An election that seems over before Labor Day is basically their worst nightmare: boring, predictable, and bad for business. How do you generate story ideas when the story is already over?

But the national press can also reach a tipping point where they no longer treat the election as a contest at all. Once that point is reached, the press will start to cover Trump and his campaign for the sheer curiosity value of public-self destruction. Not horse-race coverage, but Hindenburg coverage, where you stop pretending the thing is getting off the ground and just invite the viewers to watch the beautiful colors as it burns. This is how local news covers car crashes. This is how reality TV, from which Trump comes, covers the personal meltdowns of the psychologically troubled people they keep putting on camera. They learned early that the audience doesn't watch reality TV to see other people succeed. They watch reality TV to see other people flame out. When Trump's political failure becomes spectacular enough, the press will treat the disaster as a spectacle.

We've basically reached that tipping point now. It's becoming impossible to pretend that Trump has a fighting chance or that he's capable of taking it, that he is anything but a loser. And so the media will be forced to cover him as the huge, dangerously volatile bag of gas that he actually is. You will be able to see the explosion across New Jersey. And the press will just roll the cameras and watch him burn.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

After Iowa: Republicans Still in Trouble

The day after the Iowa Caucus, the conventional pundit wisdom is that the Republican position improved and that the Democrats are somehow (and here things get a little cloudy and ill-defined) in trouble. This is because the conventional wisdom is 1) relative, 2) obsessed with direction, and 3) amnesiac. So the Republican result gets spun as positive, because things are relatively better for the GOP and moving in the right direction, so that's "good." We forget all about the fact that last week -- just last week! -- various Republican heavyweights were actively trying to prevent the very result that is now being hailed as Good News for the GOP. And we measure everything by expectations, rather than by objective standards.

But even if the Republicans have taken a step toward climbing out of their hole, they are still in a deep hole, with a lot of climbing yet to do. They don't have a front-runner. They don't have a clear primary field. The Republican presidential campaign has gone from Completely Doomed to merely Basically Doomed. It could be even worse for them, and sometimes has been, but don't be fooled. "Could be worse" does not mean "good."

The big success story is that Trump came in second, so the Republicans can start the parade. Maybe this is better than Trump coming in first, unless of course you remember that last week the Grand Old Party was trying to throw Ted Cruz under the bus and openly rooting for Trump to beat him in Iowa. So Cruz beating Trump is a victory condition, and Trump beating Cruz is a victory condition, which must be convenient. Unless, of course, we remember that both Trump and Cruz are horrible general-election candidates and more than half of the Iowa Republicans voted for one of them.

Part of today's thinking is that Trump, having had a setback and badly underperformed his polls, will now collapse like a cheap tent. To this I say, maybe. It's certainly true that Der Trump has not behaved like a traditional candidate, proving immune to things that would end most campaigns. On the other hand, this scenario counts on Trump behaving unlike a traditional candidate. The conventional wisdom has never been that someone who comes in second in Iowa by a few percentage points and holds a hefty in lead in New Hampshire is no longer anyone to worry about. The idea that Trump is done because he came in second in Iowa, where several polls were showing him in second place over the last month, strikes me as wishful thinking.

The Republicans can be pleased and relieved that Trump didn't roll up 35% of the vote. On the other hand, when you step way from the endlessly-adjusted expectations, you find yourself facing the fact that a psychologically troubled amateur with no ground game still got 24% of the vote. That is not good at all. And that psychologically troubled amateur, who is still leading in New Hampshire, has enough money to stay in the race all the way until the convention if he's feeling stubborn, especially because he doesn't have to pay for a ground game or even much advertising, and still take a significant slice of the vote. Trump can certainly keep someone else from building a majority. And if he actually starts paying for commercials, who knows.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio's 23% of the vote is allegedly cause for triumphant rejoicing, because he did better than expected and because one of the "electable" candidates got into the top three. So now the whole party can coalesce around Marco, right? Well, slow down. He managed to come in third. And he only got 23% of the vote. So his ability to expand to 50+% percent is still, ah, untested. So is Rubio's alleged ability to consolidate the "mainstream" or establishment vote, since most of his mainstream-y rivals basically abandoned Iowa and are waiting in New Hampshire, where three of them are polling at 10% or better. You can't say Rubio took the crown from Bush, Christie, or Kasich, since Bush, Christie, and Kasich conceded the round and are positioning themselves for the next one. Is Rubio the mainstream boy to beat? Maybe. But he still has to do it.

And then if Rubio emerged as the Sanest Remaining GOP Candidate, there's no evidence that he could beat Trump or Cruz. Rubio got 23% of the Iowa vote. Bush, Christie, and Kasich split less than 7% between them. That's barely 30% of the Iowa Republican electorate voting for sanity or electability. Meanwhile, if you add up the vote shares for Cruz, Trump, Carson, Rand Paul, Huckabee, and Santorum, you're seeing a very solid two-thirds preference, a supermajority, for a candidate who is bananapants crazy. Even if everybody gets behind Rubio, it's not clear that "everybody" is a majority of the party any more. The Bananapants Caucus is large and it's energized and it wants what it wants.

And while we're talking about the 30% threshold, how is it that none of the Republican candidates got to 30% of their own party's vote? Even the "winner," Cruz, did not get to 28%. You can say that this is because the vote is split so many ways. But actually, the vote is split so many ways because none of the candidates are very popular. None of them can even get one third of the vote. By contrast, in 2008 all three of the leading Democrats got a larger vote share than Cruz did this time. Part of that is because the Iowa Democrats shunt caucusers to second choices, but the third-place Democratic finisher in 2008, one Senator Hillary Clinton, got 29% of her party's vote, while 2016's glorious victor Ted Cruz doesn't quite have 28% of his party backing him.

(Oh, yes and because of expectations, Hillary's whisper-thin victory, or statistical tie, is supposed to be a huge comedown. On the other hand, she got nearly 50% of the vote in a state where last time she got 29%. Disaster!)

And while we're comparing Democratic and Republican vote tallies, we can ask ourselves how many people voted for the top two Democrats. We can't say in detail, because the Democratic Caucus only releases state-delegate counts, but we can use registration data, turnout history, and the published results to estimate a ballpark figure. If it were a close comparison we wouldn't have enough data, but in this case the ballpark estimate will do because Ted Cruz is not actually in Sanders's or Clinton's ballpark. Even using the most conservative estimates, both Sanders and Clinton each collected at least 10,000 more individual votes last night than Ted Cruz did.

Just under 187,000 Iowa Republicans caucused last night, out of 650,000 registered Republicans: better GOP turnout than the last two presidential cycles, where Iowa turnout was around 20%. (Here I'm using Dennis J. Goldford's turnout date from The Iowa Caucus Project, which is very much worth a look.) Of those 187,000, Cruz garnered just over 51,000 votes.

Now, there are 700,000 registered Democrats in Iowa (and 750,000 registered independents). Goldford's data shows that the last two contested Democratic caucuses, 2004 and 2008, had a turnout of more than 23% in 2004 and just under 40%, a whopping amount by caucus standards, during the Obama/Clinton/Edwards showdown of 2008. We don't know this year's turnout, except for meaningless media anecdotes, so lets err on the small-c conservative side and say that the minimum Democratic turnout is 20%, lower than in 2004. (We could get super-conservative and set it to 18% and it wouldn't matter much.) That would mean 140,000 Democratic caucusgoers, with much lower turnout than the Republicans this year, and that sounds very low, but let's stick with it.

If 140,000 people caucused for the Democrats and split nearly in half, that's just shy of 70,000 votes for the winner AND 70,000 for the runner-up. That means the second-place Democrat had to pull at least 18,000 or 19,000 votes more than the Republican winner.

(Don't like that number? Let's set Democratic turnout to a bottom-falling-out 18%, much worse than 2004. Now we have a mere 126,000 Dem voters, giving Clinton and Sanders a mere 62,000 votes and change. Still a five-figure advantage over Cruz.)

And of course, if the Democratic turnout was actually higher than that 20% (or 18%) minimum, the difference between Sanders's vote and Cruz's vote only expands. If we find that 25% of Democrats turned out, a fairly middling number by recent standards, that would mean that Sanders and Clinton each had around 35,000 more supporters than Cruz did last night. And if the Democratic turnout was even 30% (on the high side, but far below 2008's high water mark of 39-40%), then both Clinton and Sanders collected one hundred thousand votes apiece, basically doubling Ted Cruz's total.

These aren't exact figures, because we don't have the exact figures. They are only estimates of general scale. But the difference between Cruz's support (or Trump's or Rubio's) on one hand and Sanders's or Clinton's on the other, is not a matter of exact figures. You don't need most of the decimal places. It is a comparison of scale. Even if you low-ball Clinton and Sanders, they had to swamp Cruz in the raw vote count.

So obviously, as everyone on TV concludes, things are looking pretty tough for the Democrats.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

David Bowie Lived to 69 (Alan Rickman, Too)

My social media feed, like yours, is full of mourning this week: not simply for the great and beloved David Bowie, but also for the brilliant Shakespearean actor Alan Rickman (likewise beloved from many films), the poet C. D. Wright, and two more heroes of the Shakespeare world: the eminent actor Brian Bedford, a legend of the Stratford festival in Ontario, and the scholar and editor Sylvan Barnet. (You know those Signet paperback editions of Shakespeare? Those were Sylvan's.) And I see my friends asking in baffled grief, Why so many? Why so fast? Why now?

Because they refused to die in December. So let's celebrate that. They wanted to make it through the winter holidays, into the new year -- in Bowie's case, until his 69th birthday. So they hung on: for their family's sake, and for their own. Maybe not all of them. But likely most of them.

Can someone do that? Absolutely. You're going to have to trust me on this one.

You can't keep yourself alive through sheer willpower, not forever. You can't choose your day. But terminally ill patients can rally for a while, especially when they something to look forward to. I've seen it happen.

I feel sad that these famous strangers have gone out of the world. I liked living in the same world with them, and I will be sad they are gone. Some of them were heroes of mine. But celebrate that they got their New Year's Eve, their London Christmas. Be happy that their spouses did not have to spend Christmas in raw, newly-wounded mourning. Be glad that Bowie, who had already willed himself not just to stardom but to thoughtful, searching artistry, willed himself to his 69th birthday. (And no, I couldn't resist the off-color pun in my title. Bowie was full of appetites and life, as people who knew him in his touring days have amply testified. The bacchanal Bowie of the 1970s and the Bowie who willed himself past one last milestone were very much the same man.)

And if you think your Facebook feed is sad now, think of what it would have been like if Ziggy Stardust and Professor Snape had died on December 23. Think of how that would have made you feel, and be grateful for the deep generosity, by people with almost nothing left, that held off that sadness from you.

Celebrate their lives, and celebrate their final, persevering strength.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Profiles in Cowardice

My thoughts are with Paris today, and with Beirut. We were in the airport, waiting for a delayed flight, when the news broke Friday evening, and so the Paris new broke to us through cable TV and the Beirut news did not reach us at all. There is too much to say about these crimes. For now I can only say that the United States has, at this point, precisely the news media that terrorism wishes us to have.

CNN was on the TV above us. And we added a bunch of French new sources to our twitter feeds. Not so shockingly, the death toll reported in France (and by the other European news outlets on our feeds) was always significantly lower than the numbers being thrown around on CNN. I woke on Saturday in the weird position of being both sickened by how many lives were lost and queasily grateful that the number is lower than American media first said. No matter how bad things seem, Wolf Blitzer can always make them seem worse.

In fact, making things seem even worse is American TV's primary job. Profiting from fear is TV news's main business strategy, from your local station at 11 pm to the 24-hour networks. TV news will literally ask us, in its commercials "Should you be worried?" Listen, and you will hear that phrase coming back over and over again. They want their audience as frightened as possible. For a group dedicated to spreading terror, they are perfect.

Long before anything was clear in the reports from Paris. CNN was asking who else should be worried. Should Germany be worried about an attack, since they have so many refugees? Will there be attacks on the United States? Is New York tightening its security? These questions are not just idle and irresponsible. These questions amplify terrorists' signal. The terrorists spent their resources, probably a healthy share of their resources, trying to terrify the people of Paris, and then CNN deliberately terrifies people thousands of miles away for them, for free.

And, like all fear-mongers, cable news (and some right-wing political figures) turned swiftly to a weak, powerless scapegoat for their fears. Friday night, that meant scapegoating Syrian refugees, refugees from Daesh, for violence committed by Daesh. Before the identity of even one terrorist attacker was confirmed, even before the attacks themselves were over, cable news was proceeding as if it were a confirmed fact that the terrorists were refugees. Of course, the investigation so far is finding French and Belgian nationals. Closing the borders to refugees will not keep out Daesh; Daesh already recruits in Paris itself, and in London, and in Chicago. Instead of going after the funding that allows terrorism to flourish, our native fear-mongers demonize the tired, the hungry, and the poor, the tattered refugees struggling to be free. And that, too, is exactly what Daesh wants. Because Daesh does not want those people to escape them.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Dr. Cleveland's Rule for Evaluating Rumors of Affairs

So, the latest Republican self-immolation in the House apparently has now also spun off nasty little rumors of an affair between two Members of the House. Let me say, straight off, that I don't give a damn whether or not that's true. My issue with today's Republicans is not the conduct of their private lives, but the scandalous and shocking conduct of their public lives. They face important moral questions in the House every day and give immoral answers. When someone is for torture and against feeding the starving, adultery is really not the big moral issue.

But that said, I'm inclined to believe that the rumors are more likely to be untrue than true. I could be proved wrong: it's maybe a 60-40 or 70-30 proposition. But the stories could just be a smear, especially considering the very shaky sources of the accusation so far. In fact, news outlets promoting this story should be ashamed for circulating these rumors without even one good source that can testify to their truth. And I am also skeptical because of my Rumored Affair Rule of Thumb: always be more skeptical of a rumored affair when the people involved are attractive.

Rumors like this get started for many reasons (including, occasionally, because the rumor is true). But people repeat them for reasons of their own. Sometimes, a rumor like this has legs because circumstantial evidence keeps it going. Sometimes, the rumor sticks because people have an ulterior motive that the rumor furthers, as in many political situations. But also, in general, people tend to repeat a sexual rumor if they think it's hot. The sexier the people in the story are, the more people like that story. It's basic human nature. So a flimsy story featuring two attractive people (or just a conspicuously attractive woman) tends to flourish despite the lack if any good reason to believe it. The reason people believe those rumors is because believing them is titillating.

People love love love talking about the rumored JFK-Marilyn Monroe affair, for example, although the evidence seems to suggest that it was basically just a one-night stand. But people love love love talking about it because nearly everyone finds at least one of those two people sexually attractive. Telling that story, or thinking about it, is a way of titillating yourself. On the other hand, you've probably never heard that Bob Hope had a confirmed and quite torrid affair with Ethel Merman, and you will probably blot that information from your mind by the middle of my next paragraph, because you really may not want to picture that.

So my rule of thumb, especially but not exclusively with show business rumors, is to take a story where the protagonists are sexy (by the standards of their profession) as suspect until proven otherwise. When the sexiness of the couple is in doubt, I go with the question of how sexy the woman in the rumor is. Rumors about sexy people fly further on flimsier wings, so when someone tells you a hot rumor about Celebrity A and Celebrity B, what they are really saying is "I enjoy thinking about Celebrity A-and/or-B having sex." They're not necessarily telling you anything else.

The current scurrilous rumor about two Republicans in the House involves two perfectly nice-looking people for their age and profession. They could not star in a teen romance movie, and neither happens to be my personal cup of tea, but for forty- and fifty-something politicians they look pretty good. And, more importantly, the female politician in the story is conventionally very attractive. When that woman's fellow Republicans gossip about her committing adultery, what they are really saying is that they enjoy thinking about that Congresswoman having some illicit sex. And a lot of them are admitting that they would like to be committing adultery with her. Maybe she actually has a lover. But that's not really the point. The rumor flourishes because the men she works with enjoy thinking about her with a lover. It goes with the territory, still, in 2015.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at Dagblog