ADULT ABUSE: Does Professor Gordon know squat from squadoosh?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Part 3—Standard memorized gloomy claims about our broken-down schools: Does Robert J. Gordon know squat from squadoosh about the public schools?

It’s our impression that he may not. Here’s why that’s a problem:

Professor Gordon, an economics professor, sounded off in Sunday’s New York Times about the state of the public schools. He wrote this long gloomy piece for the Sunday Review.

As editors saw the piece, it told a familiar story. Here’s the way they presented that tale to Times readers:

The visual which accompanied Gordon’s piece showed a broken-down yellow school bus. Smoke poured out from under the hood. The headline told a gloomy old tale:

“The Great Stagnation of American Education.”

In his lengthy, gloom-shrouded piece, Gordon discussed “American education” through the completion of college—but students don’t go to college in yellow school buses. As such, that visual conveyed a Tired Old Tale about K-12 schools, a tale the Times loves to recite.

Last month, Bill Keller recited this Tired Old Tale. In his weekly op-ed column, he announced that we have experienced “decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education.”

The visual of that broken-down school bus told the same gloomy story. But then, the professor seemed to tell a similar tale as he started his piece:

GORDON (9/8/13): For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true. This development has serious consequences for the economy.

The epochal achievements of American economic growth have gone hand in hand with rising educational attainment, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown. From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year—enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.

A careful reader might note this fact: if our improvement has slowed to a crawl, that means we’re still improving. “Great stagnation” would be a gloomy way to describe this state of affairs.

That careful reader might also note this: the professor hasn’t yet said what he means by “educational attainment.” As it turns out, he seems to mean the number of grades completed in school. He seems to refer to the percentage of people who are attaining high school or college diplomas.

The percentage obtaining a high school diploma may be slightly down from 1970, the professor says—although this is a very difficult topic, and it isn’t clear that the professor knows that to be the case. By the same token, the professor says the number attaining a college diploma is still going slightly up.

If those are the professor’s facts, why would the Times illustrate his report with a broken-down school bus? Our answer:

Because this is a treasured standardized tale, a tale the elites have all memorized. But also this:

Professor Gordon enables that tale in his gloomy, selective pronouncements. This brings us back to our basic question:

Does Robert J. Gordon know squat from squadoosh about the public schools? Or is he simply repeating memorized claims, the Familiar Gloomy Memorized Claims all pundits know how to recite?

For ourselves, we lean toward the latter idea, in which this professor may not know whereof he speaks. Let’s run through the familiar claims in which this non-specialist seems to put his thumb on the scale, tilting things heavily toward Major Gloom, as Keller did last month:

Forget about what happens in college. Let’s consider what Gordon says about K-12 schools, the ones with those yellow school buses. For starters, has “educational attainment” “slowed to a crawl” in those schools since 1990?

Almost surely, many Times readers took Gordon to be making that claim, right in his opening paragraphs. But uh-oh! The professor never mentioned the data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the widely-lauded “gold standard” of domestic educational testing.

Those data show large gains in reading and math since 1990. The score gains by black and Hispanic students have been especially large.

The New York Times constantly lauds the NAEP as our most reliable program. Has the paper ever reported those basic facts about NAEP data? We will guess that it never has done so! And sure enough: on Sunday, Professor Gordon blew right past those encouraging data as he brought in the gloom.

Before long, the professor sharpened his claim about K-12 schools. In this passage, his work was fuzzy, and fashionably selective, in new and different ways:

GORDON: Then there is the poor quality of our schools. The Program for International Student Assessment tests have consistently rated American high schoolers as middling at best in reading, math and science skills, compared with their peers in other advanced economies.

Before we note the professor’s selective data, let’s note his fuzzy logic. If American students perform roughly as well as their peers in other advanced economies, should that generate gloomy comments about “the poor quality of our schools?”

Logically, no, it should not! There is no obvious reason why American students should read better than students in Denmark, or Norway or France. Indeed, given various aspects of our brutal national history and our current social policies, it can perhaps be seen as amazing if our students, in the aggregate, perform equally well, even better.

But gloom about the public schools is A Standard Memorized Stance. In this instance, this standard stance is once again fueled by selective inclusion of data.

NAEP data say that our students are improving, but NAEP data don’t appear in this piece. Similarly, the most recent data from the TIMSS and the PIRLS, the other major international tests, show American students doing rather well in comparison to their peers in other developed nations.

Perhaps for that reason, results from the (more recent) 2011 TIMSS and PIRLS are routinely deep-sixed in favor of results from the (less recent) 2009 PISA. As with the NAEP, so too with the TIMSS and the PIRLS: Professor Gordon ignores their data, enabling the gloomy picture conveyed by that broken-down yellow school bus.

(For what it’s worth, Richard Rothstein and Martin Carnoy have argued that the 2009 PISA tested too many low-income American students, producing an unrepresentative national sample. Are they right? We don’t know. But the possibility of such errors helps explain why it makes sense to consider all major international tests, not simply the test which produces the gloomiest outcomes.)

Professor Gordon blew past the NAEP, the TIMSS and the PIRLS. In fairness, this is standard procedure in modern “journalism,” where the script demands that we generate gloomy claims about the “poor quality” of our broken-down public schools.

That said, Professor Gordon isn’t a specialist in education. Did he even know that he was omitting these data? We wouldn’t feel real sure about that; those encouraging data from the NAEP are almost never cited in elite polite company! And uh-oh:

As Gordon continued, he occasionally got the impression that he might not know squat from squadoodle concerning the public schools:

GORDON: Federal programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have gone too far in using test scores to evaluate teachers. Many children are culturally disadvantaged, even if one or both parents have jobs, have no books at home, do not read to them, and park them in front of a TV set or a video game in lieu of active in-home learning. Compared with other nations where students learn several languages and have math homework in elementary school, the American system expects too little. Parental expectations also matter: homework should be emphasized more, and sports less.

First, a relatively minor point: the second of those highlighted sentences doesn’t make sense. We assume this is some sort of typo. Presumably, that sentence should have said something like this:

“Many children are culturally disadvantaged. Even if one or both parents have jobs, these parents have no books at home, do not read to their children, and park them in front of a TV set or a video game in lieu of active in-home learning.”

That gloomy assessment would be accurate, here and in other countries. That said, it’s typical of modern script promulgation that some Times editor didn’t notice the fact that this passage, as published, didn’t make basic sense.

It sounded gloomy, upsetting, depressing! At the Times, that’s close enough for public education work!

The highlighted statement didn’t make sense. More strikingly, we asked ourselves this: was Gordon saying that public schools “have gone too far in using test scores to evaluate teachers” because many children are culturally disadvantaged?

He doesn’t explicitly say that here; here, as elsewhere, his writing is fuzzy, unclear. But in possibly seeming to make that suggestion, Gordon seemed a bit clueless.

Whatever one thinks of the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, so-called “value-added” assessments eliminated the problem he seems to suggest long ago. When test scores are used to evaluate teachers, Teacher A will typically be compared to other teachers with demographically similar students—a practice which makes obvious sense.

That said, Professor Gordon is often fuzzy when he writes about schools. As he continues to spread the gloom, do you understand what this means?

GORDON (continuing directly): Poor academic achievement has long been a problem for African-Americans and Hispanics, but now the achievement divide has extended further. Isabel V. Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, has argued that “family breakdown is now biracial.” Among lower-income whites, the proportion of children living with both parents has plummeted over the past half-century, as Charles Murray has noted.

Do you understand what that paragraph means? We’ll guess it means that biracial kids don’t score as well as white kids do, and that lower-income white kids score less well that their higher-income peers.

Assuming that these claims are true, what do they tell us about the progress, or lack of same, being displayed in our public schools? Those gloomy claims don’t tell us squat—though they do spread the feeling of gloom.

Finally, the professor offers the highly familiar statements we highlight below. As he continues, so do his fuzzy expression and logic. Whatever that highlighted passage is supposed to mean, does Gordon believe it is true?

GORDON (continuing directly): Are there solutions? The appeal of American education as a destination for the world’s best and brightest suggests the most obvious policy solution. Shortly before his death, Steve Jobs told President Obama that a green card conferring permanent residency status should be automatically granted to any foreign student with a degree in engineering, a field in which skills are in short supply..

Richard J. Murnane, an educational economist at Harvard, has found evidence that high school and college completion rates have begun to rise again, although part of this may be a result of weak labor markets that induce students to stay in school rather than face unemployment. Other research has shown that high-discipline, “no-excuses” charter schools, like those run by the Knowledge Is Power Program and the Harlem Children’s Zone, have erased racial achievement gaps. This model suggests that a complete departure from the traditional public school model, rather than pouring in more money per se, is needed.

It’s hard to know how conferring permanent residency status on foreign students with engineering degrees addresses the preceding claim about biracial and low-income white kids. But the professor’s logic tends to wander about in this piece, until he returns to Familiar Old Scripts—in this case, to the Familiar Uplifting Claim about KIPP and the Harlem Children’s Zone.

We’re strongly inclined to support the efforts of KIPP and the HCZ. But have they really “erased racial achievement gaps?” Depending on what the word “erased” means, it’s our impression that this claim simply isn’t true. That said, the claim was quite familiar in 2009. And it’s easily memorized!

On Sunday morning, the New York Times let Professor Gordon spout from a lofty perch. But does he know what he’s talking about when he talks about public schools?

It’s our impression that he may not. One thing is quite clear:

The professor’s sprawling, careless piece repeats a long list of Standard Claims about “the poor quality of our schools.” And sure enough:

At the hapless New York Times, some editor read that familiar phrase in this piece. When he did, a picture of a broken-down school bus flashed before his eyes.

Smoke was pouring from under the hood. A STOP sign on the bus’ door told us our schools are failing.

This editor didn't think about those NAEP scores, which have been shooting up. As a member of the pseudo-journalistic elite, there's every chance that he has never even heard about those data from our “gold standard” testing program!

On the gold standard of domestic educational testing, reading and math scores have shown large gains since 1990, a year Gordon mentioned. The score gains have been very large among black and Hispanic kids.

You’d almost think that would be major news. But you’re never told about those gains in this low-IQ, upper-class newspaper.

Tomorrow, a basic question:

When will the Times get off its aspic and do the work of a real newspaper? When will the paper abandon its current procedures, a form of adult abuse?

Tomorrow: Back to school, Dangerfield said

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We teach the professors how to talk!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

What you should say to your seatmate: Are women discriminated against in the world of academic philosophy?

If so, they shouldn’t be. Yesterday, we started reading the links Katy Waldman provided on the subject.

For Waldman’s piece at Slate, click here. For ourselves, we were stopped dead in our tracks by the way her first link began.

The piece was written by Sally Haslanger, a philosophy professor at MIT and, we’ll assume, a darn good one. Below, you see the way her piece began.

What follows has nothing to do with women’s issues. Times are hard all over:

HASLANGER (9/2/13): Many of us have had the experience of sitting on an airplane and being asked by the person in the next seat, “What do you do?”

It is a moment of uncertainty: what to say? There are risks if you reply, “I’m a philosopher,” for you may then have the neighbor expounding “their philosophy” at length, or recounting how awful their experience was when taking Philosophy 101. (“We read some crazy article about being kidnapped and hooked up to a famous violinist to keep him alive!”) One time, a male friend of mine got the enthusiastic response, “Oh, you’re a philosopher? Tell me some of your sayings!” However, when I’ve tried the “I’m a philosopher” reply, it has prompted laughter. Once when I queried why the laughter, the response was, “I think of philosophers as old men with beards, and you’re definitely not that! You’re too young and attractive to be a philosopher.” I’m sure he intended this as a compliment. But I stopped giving the answer “I’m a philosopher.”

Haslanger doesn’t know what to say when people ask her what she does. It seems she wants to answer their question by saying, “I’m a philosopher.”

Is Haslanger “a philosopher?” You can answer that question as you like. On balance, we’d be inclined to say the answer is almost certainly no.

(Do physics professors answer that question by saying, “I’m a physicist?” We don’t know!)

Out of the goodness of our hearts, we’re going to teach the professors how to talk! The next time someone asks Haslanger what she does, she could say something like this:

I’m a college professor.
I’m a college instructor.

She could even say, “I’m a teacher” or “I teach philosophy in college.” What would be awful in that?

Down through the years, we’ve often wondered where the philosophy professors are as our culture’s access to logical thought is blasted to smithereens. It turns out they’ve been writhing in pain on jets, not knowing how people talk.

Haslanger keeps talking: As she continues, Haslanger says this:

HASLANGER (continuing directly): Although most philosophers these days are not old men with beards, most professional philosophers are men; in fact, white men. It is a surprise to almost everyone that the percentage of women earning philosophy doctorates is less than in most of the physical sciences (see chart). As recently as 2010, philosophy had a lower percentage of women doctorates than math, chemistry and economics. Note, however, that of these fields, philosophy has made the most progress on this count in the past five years.

Most “professional philosophers” are men? Did you know that such people existed? Where are they? What do they do?

In closing, it's our turn to writhe in pain. According to the identity line at the Times blog where this piece appeared, Haslanger “was awarded the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the year in 2010.”

As it turns out, it looks like Haslanger is “a philosopher” after all! Where has she been down through the years as our access to logical thought has been stripped away, in large part by the “journalists” right there at the New York Times? Putting it another way:

When will the national's philosophers give their seatmates a little help?

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Politico is (said to be) upset with Joan Walsh!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

Joan Walsh runs the rubes: Yesterday morning, Salon’s Joan Walsh was back on her very high horse.

Few people have ever been quite so heroic. We were struck by what she said about the good folks at Politico.

This is the way Walsh began. We’ll include the pair of headlines, which she presumably didn’t write:

WALSH (9/10/13): You heard me: Rush Limbaugh is “a racist troll”
Mediaite and Politico think my saying that is news. Have they missed his 40 years of shameful racial stereotyping?

Politico and Mediaite are aghast that I called Rush Limbaugh a “racist troll” on “Politics Nation” with Al Sharpton on MSNBC Monday night. The immediate cause of my diagnosis was Limbaugh terming President Obama’s pitch for military intervention in Syria “Operation Shuck and Jive.” Or as Limbaugh said: “Bush had ‘Shock and Awe.’ We’re looking at ‘Shuck and Jive’ here. That’s what I’m going to name this. The Obama operation in Syria—‘Operation: Shuck and Jive’—because that’s what this is.”

Is Rush Limbaugh a racist troll? For various reasons, we wouldn’t be inclined to say that ourselves. We think it’s lazy politics—politics of the kind the plutocrats adore.

That said, we aren’t concerned with Joan’s heroic denunciation of Limbaugh. We were struck by her claim that Politico and Mediate were “aghast” at her saintly conduct.

We’re sorry, but that isn’t true. Surely, Joan of Salon must have known it.

Was Politico aghast? Walsh linked us to this short blog post. For the record, the piece was written by media reporter Dylan Byers, not by “Politico.”

We’re sorry, by Byers gave no sign of being aghast at Walsh’s heroics. The saintly one was making that up, sanctifying herself in the process and treating her readers like rubes.

Rather plainly, Salon is now inventing a culture in which liberal politics consists almost solely in dropping R-, B-, S-, M- and H-bombs. In these ways, We The Good People fluff ourselves as we take The Bad People down.

Who knows? This culture may work out well in the end. But can you build a truly progressive politics by making bogus statements?

In this case, Joan chose to stoke the sense of tribal warfare, pretending that “Politico” was very upset with her heroic conduct. This is the way we liberals get dumb.

This is the way saints get over.

In search of the aghast: For the record, Josh Feldman wasn’t hugely “aghast” at Walsh either, although his tone at Mediaite differed from Byers’ a bit. In all honesty, no one was aghast at Joan, who was simply running the rubes of a Tuesday morning.

Joan Walsh is an overpaid cable hack. Can you build a progressive politics this way, by having the overlord TV stars toy with the pitiful rubes?

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ADULT ABUSE: Two different worlds!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2013

Interlude—Times profiles Ravitch: Readers of Sunday’s New York Times were exposed to a Familiar Old Story—an easily memorized, often-told tale about “the poor quality of our schools.”

The messaging was conveyed by the headline on the piece—and by a gloomy visual.

In the visual, a bright yellow school bus has broken down. Smoke is pouring from under the hood. Gloomily, the headline says this:

“The Great Stagnation of American Education.”

The writer, Professor Robert J. Gordon, rattles a list of familiar complaints about our public schools, the kinds of complaints a typical pundit could recite in his or her sleep.

Some of Gordon’s complaints and claims make sense. Some of them pretty much don’t. But is the general situation as bad as Gordon seems to suggest? His gloomy piece starts like this:

GORDON (9/8/13): For most of American history, parents could expect that their children would, on average, be much better educated than they were. But that is no longer true. This development has serious consequences for the economy.

The epochal achievements of American economic growth have gone hand in hand with rising educational attainment, as the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have shown. From 1891 to 2007, real economic output per person grew at an average rate of 2 percent per year—enough to double every 35 years. The average American was twice as well off in 2007 as in 1972, four times as well off as in 1937, and eight times as well off as in 1902. It’s no coincidence that for eight decades, from 1890 to 1970, educational attainment grew swiftly. But since 1990, that improvement has slowed to a crawl.

There’s a lot of air in that opening paragraph, partly thanks to the helpful word “much.” At this point, it isn’t clear what Gordon means by “educational attainment.”

That said, Gordon’s claims sound very gloomy—especially perched beneath that bus. That said, is it true?

Has “improvement” slowed to a crawl since 1990? In part, it depends on what the professor means—and sometimes, that isn’t real clear.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at Professor Gordon’s various claims, which are rather selective and often unclear. For today, we thought we’d give you a look at a different world.

We start with today’s New York Times. On the first page of the National section, Motoko Rich profiles Diane Ravitch, who has a new book about public schools.

Kirkus has already penned its review. This is the way it starts:

KIRKUS: A noted education authority launches a stout defense of the public school system and a sharp attack on the so-called reformers out to wreck them.

We’ve been misinformed, writes Ravitch, about the state of our public schools. Test scores are higher than ever, the dropout rate is lower, and achievement gaps among races are narrowing. The only “crisis” is the one ginned up by government bureaucrats, major foundations, an odd coalition of elitists and commercial hustlers intent on privatizing education...When it comes to education, notoriously plagued by fads, it’s always difficult to determine truth. Ravitch, however, earns the benefit of the doubt by the supporting facts, figures, and graphs she brings to her argument...

Say what? If “test scores are higher than ever,” why did the New York Times show that school bus broken down?

Kirkus can be wrong, of course. David Kirp, a Berkeley professor, is smart and very experienced as an education specialist.

Last week, we cited his treatment of Ravitch’s book. Here’s part of what Kirp wrote:

KIRP (9/4/13): In her new book, Reign of Error, Ravitch documents how public education’s antagonists have manufactured a crisis in order to advance their agenda. They deploy doom-and-gloom language to characterize the threat...

Exhibit A in the sky-is-falling argument is the claim that test scores are plummeting. Ravitch shows that, quite the contrary, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, have never been higher. (The biggest gains in NAEP scores were recorded before the No Child Left Behind Act, with its fixation on teacher accountability and high-stakes testing, was implemented.) Nor do American students perform as badly as advertised on international exams—in 2011 tests of math and science, only a handful of countries did better.

Say what? Kirp makes the same observation as Kirkus, except with more detail. NAEP scores have never been higher!

Depending on what Professor Gordon is trying to say, it’s like we’re living in two different worlds! The gloom and the doom are very familiar—but Kirp says the gloom isn’t true.

Why the heck did the New York Times show us that broken-down school bus? That visual told a familiar old tale. But is that familiar tale true?

As usual, you won’t find out by reading Rich’s profile of Ravitch. In fairness, it isn’t the world’s longest profile. And it isn’t a formal review.

But Rich is an education reporter, and the profile is a featured news report in the National section. It just doesn’t make any real attempt to evaluate, or even state, the claims in Ravitch’s book.

Are test scores higher than ever? No such claim is mentioned. Instead, we get a type of soft profile, focused on Ravitch’s personality and life style. We get to learn about her pet Labrador-German shepherd mix, but not about what she has said.

Rich’s observations today aren’t wrong. But people, where’s the beef?

Tomorrow, we’ll return to the claims of Professor Gordon, who isn’t an education specialist. Does Gordon know what he’s talking about? Or did the Times let him blow a string of familiar old claims right straight out of his ascot?

Tomorrow: Professor Gordon’s various claims

Friday: What the Times should report

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Maureen Dowd’s Two Faces of Barry!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

The one face of Milbank and Dowd: In this morning’s Washington Post, Milbank plays the silly card with respect to Susan Rice.

But first, Maureen Dowd played the silly card with respect to President Barry. On Sunday, she started her column like this, pitiful headline included:

DOWD (9/8/13): Barry’s War Within

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize had been up late pleading for war.

The president looked exhausted as he met the press in St. Petersburg on Friday. The man elected because of his magical powers of persuasion had failed to persuade other world leaders at dinner the night before about a strike on Syria.

Return of belittling nickname? Check.

Silly pseudo-contradiction? Check. (Man of peace pleads for war!) Loaded account of the way he looked? Check.

Everyone knew what was coming next. Soon, the doctor was IN:

DOWD: It is uncomfortable to watch the president struggle to reconcile his two conflicting identities as he weighs what he calls the unappetizing choices on Syria, and as he is weighed down by the malignant choices on the Middle East made by his predecessor.

In his head, is Barry at war with the commander in chief?

One side of him is Barry, the smooth consensus builder and community organizer, the former constitutional professor and the drive-by senator who must stand by the argument he made when he ran for president excoriating W.’s and Dick Cheney’s highhandedness: checks and balances must be observed...

When it came time to act as commander in chief, he choked and reverted to Senator Barry...

In our view, it is beyond “uncomfortable” to watch the New York Times offer this pitiful dreck to the public. That said, Dowd has been playing these games for so long that the liberal world doesn’t seem willing or able to see it.

In Dowd’s childish Two Faces of Barack, the smooth “Barry” may be at war with the commander in chief! Soon, she offered her childish take on Nancy Pelosi:

“Now the president who saw no benefit in wooing Democrats on the Hill is desperate for their love. Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco peacenik, will have to win Barry the right to bomb.”

To Dowd, Pelosi is a “peacenik.” Dowd, a childish empty soul, is living in 1960.

This morning, Milbank follows. For him, as for Dowd, life-and-death issues get resolved to simple-minded pseudo-ironies. Headline included:

MILBANK (9/10/13): Susan Rice returns to CIA talking points

This is the price of insularity.

About a year ago, the White House put Susan Rice, then the ambassador to the United Nations, on TV to read CIA talking points that turned out to be false about the attack in Benghazi, Libya.

The backlash poisoned her relationship with Republicans in Congress and dashed her chances of becoming secretary of state. President Obama instead named her national security adviser, which didn’t require Senate confirmation.

Now there is another crisis. Obama needs congressional support for a military strike on Syria, because a “no” vote could cripple his presidency and damage American credibility. So what do the big brains in the White House do? They put Susan Rice in front of TV cameras to read CIA talking points.

Rice is back on the CIA points! It’s just like last year!

Milbank forgets to note a basic fact from last year’s batch of points: When Rice was “put on TV to read CIA talking points that turned out to be false about Benghazi,” she noted, again and again, that she was offering preliminary assessments—that the investigation was continuing, that the facts might change.

Beyond that, the points Rice read last year weren’t all that false if you review what she actually said. Milbank isn’t going to do that. The pundit clowns to forget.

In our main set of posts this week, we are reviewing the “adult abuse” readers get from the New York Times. For many people, it’s hard to grasp the depth of the inanity displayed by our press corps elites.

Is Nancy Pelosi a peacenik: In this morning’s New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer profiles Pelosi.

Is Nancy Pelosi a silly peacenik? In the mind of the broken child Dowd, she is! For a more adult portrait, click here.

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It’s pretty darn good being Wagner or Cupp!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Notes on two all-new programs: Two Sundays ago, Meredith Blake reviewed the all-new Newsroom in the Washington Post. The piece was a reprint from the Los Angeles Times.

We don’t get HBO on our sprawling campus. In part for that reason, we don’t know a great deal about Newsroom.

That said, we’re not sure that getting HBO would help. Last year, a few free episodes of Newsroom aired. We tried to watch but couldn’t do it, so awful was the program.

Last night, we found the all-new second season on our free cable, so we tried to watch again. Same result! Newsroom can’t be watched!

That said, it’s good being a “cable news” denizen! Blake included this throwaway note about Newsroom’s second season. She discussed the ways Aaron Sorkin keeps trying to get it right:

BLAKE (9/1/13): For the show's [second year], Sorkin enlisted 13 paid consultants, including former MSNBC and CNN president Rick Kaplan, political strategist Mark McKinnon, New Republic Literary Editor Leon Wieseltier, conservative pundit S.E. Cupp and MSNBC host Alex Wagner.

With their input, he made some storytelling tweaks.

It’s good being Alex Wagner and S. E. Cupp, with cable consultant payments rolling in!

Cupp is one of the conservative hosts of the all-new Crossfire, which debuted last night on CNN. This reminds us of the unpleasant post we did in April 2010.

By now, it’s perfectly clear that Cupp is perfectly bright. She’s also telegenic and youngish. In the past year, she served as the house conservative on MSNBC’s three-against-one afternoon discussion program, The Cycle. A few months ago, she departed for the all-new Crossfire, which was in preparation.

(Rather plainly, The Cycle was based on The Five, the Fox News Channel's four-against-one afternoon discussion program. The Cycle makes up for its lack of imbalance by booking liberal guests.)

Cupp is perfectly bright. But back in the fall of 2009, she was so dumb it hurt. Or so it seemed when she spoke with Brian Lamb, for the full hour, on C-Span’s Q&A.

For transcript or tape, just click here.

At the time, Cupp was working a ridiculous shtick which seemed to grab Lamb’s interest. Again and again and again and again, he asked her about her “I’m not a religious believer but I sure would like to be” heartfelt shtick.

Cupp struggled to answer Lamb’s questions about this stance, seeming rather dumb in the process. To us, Lamb seemed puzzled, bemused.

In the last few years, it became clear that Cupp just basically isn’t dumb. As a result, we generated a theory about that program with Lamb:

At the time, a lot of folk were creating slightly offbeat conservative personas to make themselves useful to Fox. Tammy Bruce had fashioned herself the “lesbian former head of Los Angeles NOW” type of offbeat conservative, to cite just one example.

We’ll take a guess! Back when Cupp did that hour with Lamb, she was working on such a persona. She just wasn’t especially good at playing the part. Lamb kept inquiring about her deeply felt existential stance concerning religious belief. She kept giving him answers that did in fact seem rather dumb.

As it turns out, Cupp isn’t dumb! This week, her all-new Crossfire debuts, even as she pockets the honoraria from helping Sorkin get it right on his all-Newsroom!

As for Wagner, she reads script on The One True Channel. Life is good if you’re Wagner or Cupp, hauling the cable cash.

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Lawrence interviews Anthony Weiner!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

The end of the human race: Last night, Lawrence made us think of Norman O. Brown again.

Brown, a well-regarded classicist, suddenly got very hot in the 1960s. He got very hot because of his books, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) and Love’s Body (1966).

We don’t recall what those books were about, or why Brown suddenly got so hot as a visionary of the revolution. If you’re interested, this remembrance of Brown from 2005 helps explain how it was.

That said, we have always remembered that one brief passage from Love’s Body, the one in which Brown described the way societies die:

BROWN (1966): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.

We don’t really know what that means; we don’t know why that has stuck in our head for maybe 45 years now. But the highlighted passage always pops into our head when we watch performances like the one Lawrence staged last night.

Lawrence interviewed Anthony Weiner—rather, pretended to do so. Instead of interviewing Weiner, he staged one of his trademark stupid-ass rants.

Granted, Lawrence gets crazier than he was last night. Still.

Lawrence said he doesn’t care about what Weiner did on-line. Instead, he kept haranguing Weiner about—well, his harangue didn’t really make sense. That’s why we thought of Brown again, of his thoughts about the way societies come to an end.

O’Donnell is one of the genuine nut-balls. He is a monster of self-regard and a genuine nut. Despite that, he holds an honored place in the corporate liberal firmament.

He stages crazy sessions like last night’s and nobody in our failing tribe seems able to notice or care.

This man has been crazy—dumb crazy— for years. He’s part of the guild within the guild which did the most to put Bush in office. And yet, we liberals just sit there and take it. We simply don’t have what it takes to see what Lawrence is.

As Norman O. Brown once said, “I sometimes think I see that societies...end in exhaustion.”

To watch Lawrence rant at Weiner, click this. (It will make you think better of Weiner.) For the record, Lawrence was crazily dumb this way back when he was hunting down Candidate Gore and the two Clintons, both of whom he still incoherently abhors.

For all these years, our liberal tribe has been unable to see the problem with this. This makes us think of Norman Brown, who said that societies die.

By the way: That low-polling candidate whose name Lawrence bungled is actually Randy Credico (CREDD-i-co), a progressive political comedian. Way back when, we brought Credico to Baltimore, where he staged his deathless act. (He had already been on the Tonight Show.)

Lawrence O’Donnell is visibly nuts. Credico probably isn’t.

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