FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2017
Part 4—Actually, long before that: Is a river a person?
More specifically, could the Monongahela River sue someone in court?
In Wednesday morning's New York Times, Julie Turkewitz wrote a full-length news report about these intriguing questions. Her report appeared on the first page of the newspaper's National section.
Inevitably, Turkewitz quoted a Republican politician—Montana's Senator Daines—saying how crazy this idea was, and a Democratic politician—Colorado's Govewrnor Hickenlooper—who was refusing to comment.
She also quoted a Harvard professor saying the intriguing legal claim faces "an uphill battle." All in all, that's the sort of battle a river's unlikely to win, unless the river's allowed to sue gravity along with everyone else.
Go ahead! Treat yourself to Turkewitz's report! It exposes us to the sort of service we liberals often receive from our brightest assistant professors—silly claims which cause most people to shake their heads, for perfectly obvious reasons.
(Warning: Your lizard brain will tell you to search for a way to agree with this sh*t.)
As our assistant professors spout, the public comes to believe that we liberals are perhaps just a tiny bit kooky. Many of these issues today concern matters of gender or race, but in this one battle, the assistant professors are challenging the hidebound idea that rivers and lakes aren't persons.
Will this land turn out to be their land? Everything is possible! Along the way, we keep dividing our 330 million human persons into two disconnected tribes appalled by the views of The Others.
In the next few weeks, we hope to discuss some of the ways our assistant professors keep adding to this problem. For today, let's return to one of the ways our liberal journalists have doomed us, here on our dying liberal planet, to decades of puzzling defeat.
This past Tuesday, David Brooks wrote an excellent column about our society's two disconnected "planets." On that same page, Michelle Goldberg, in her debut column, wrote a somewhat similar piece, saying 1) that we have become two "countries" and 2) that the smaller of these countries tends to get the bulk of the political power under current arrangements.
We thought both columns were well worth reading. We also saw an ironic twist to Goldberg's new role at the Times. You see, we recall what she did last summer—rather, in the spring of the previous year.
It was April 24, 2015. The White House campaign had barely begun. The campaign of Donald J. Trump was still a gleam in The Big Crazy's eye.
(If only the Rockies had sued!)
On that morning, the New York Times published one of the longest and strangest "news reports" of the entire campaign. It was a 4400-word, slashing attack against Candidate Hillary Clinton, concerning her imagined role in an imagined Scary Uranium Deal.
The sprawling report was based on work by a right-wing nut—a right-wing nut who was being funded by Steve Bannon! The current president, Donald J. Trump, still refers to the stupid claims the New York Times published that day.
Why had the New York Times entered into an arrangement with that right-wing propagandist? We can't answer that. But the arrangement had now produced a blatantly bogus news report—and Goldberg joined with TV's Chris Hayes to call the report a "bombshell."
Hayes and Goldberg could have taken a different approach. They could have said, "There they go again," like President Reagan of old. They could have told viewers about decades of anti-Clinton jihad by the Times, dating to the invention of the Whitewater pseudo-scandal.
The fiery liberals didn't do that. Instead, they called the blatantly foolish report a "bombshell."
We can't tell you why the fiery liberals did that, but we've been discussing a larger pattern for many years. It's as we've always told you:
Liberal and mainstream journalistic careers run through the New York Times! For that reason, career liberals have never been willing to tell you about the long, strange jihad the paper has run against Clinton, Clinton and Gore.
The children have minded their p's and their q's every step of the way. Crazy news reports go unmentioned, or they even get praised. Decades of lunacy by Maureen Dowd couldn't be mentioned either.
Dearest darlings, use your heads! Such things simply aren't done!
(Careers also run through NBC News and its cable arms. That's why you've never seen a report about the years of crazy anti-Clinton, anti-Gore work by the baldly misogynistic Chris Matthews. Instead, he's sold to you as Rachel's dear friend and favorite political analyst! Rachel loved Greta's work too!)
.
The Times had published a crazy report—a report which started on page one and ran 4400 words.
All the others chose to ignore it; Hayes and Goldberg called it a bombshell. Trump still pimps its manifest bullshit today.
No one was willing to tell you the truth about that crazy, Bannon-fueled "news report." And much as we have long explained, Goldberg is now a columnist for that same New York Times!
Her first column was very strong. We hope she writes many more.
She doesn't hail from the 1950s-style "gender throwback" school of the silly, simpering Collins and the hiss-spitting Dowd. We hope she writes a lot of great columns. But one nagging thought will intrude:
We may know what she did that spring! We may know how she got there.
A final question: A final question goes to you:
Why did you hear from no one at all about that Bannon-funded report, the one to which Donald J. Trump still refers? No really—why did you see zero push-back from our big liberal stars as the Times helped Mr. Trump make his way to the White House?
Why did none of our heroes fight? At long last, defeated liberals, it's time we asked ourselves that.
Two planets diverged in a yellow wood. As has become appallingly clear, you can't run a country this way!
