Media faced with telling the truth ~ Kudos to Michelle Wolf

In this blog, I've posted several articles about speaking truth to power, like Michelle Wolf did at the April 28, 2018 White House Correspondent's Dinner.   In fact, Wolfe's comedy roast of Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (White House presser) and others was evidence of my opinion, being that putting truth in the face of Republicans is analogous to putting Holy relics in the face of vampires. In other words, truth causes Republicans great pain.

Unfortunately, Wolf's truth also raised criticism from some media elites who, in another one of my own opinions, were enablers of Donald Trump being elected by the Electoral College, in the first place ~ especially noted is Andrea Mitchell. 

King Henry VIII (1491-1547) ~ "What would Henry have done?" 

This essay below (this is an academic article, so there's some daunting perspective) was posted on the History News Network listserver under the title of "News at Home ~ First  Amendment"

Henry VIII is rightly remembered by posterity as a vain, intemperate, narcissistic, and mercurial man who had no compunctions about assaulting the rule of law and reforming the instrument of state into a device for his own familial gain while advancing personal vendettas. Even in an era whose politics were defined by monarchism, his reign was distinguished by assault on the traditional separation of powers coupled with increasing economic disparities and attacks against the publicly enjoyed commons. With a reputation for intemperate rage and violently condemning those who had been allies only shortly before, the Tudor king was equally dangerous to friend and foe alike. 

Will Sommers was the favorite court jester in the court of King Henry VIII

Consider his favored court jester, the celebrated Will Sommers, who though he was supposedly one of the few able to make the fickle monarch laugh could still incur the ruler’s wrath for the simple crime of telling the truth. In a letter dated July 25th 1535, Eustace Chapuys, King Charles V’s envoy to the Tudor court, wrote home to Spain that “the other day [Henry] nearly murdered his own fool… because he happened to speak well in his presence of the Queen and Princess, and called the concubine ‘ribaude’ and her daughter ‘bastard.’ ” Chapuys duly informs us that Somers was banished from the court, hiding in the household of an aristocratic ally until Henry’s rage subsided. Somers got off relatively easily; today one imagines that the intemperate ruler would simply tweet his rage at the jester.

This week we find ourselves in a similar yet distinctly twenty-first-century ritual of wringing our hands and clucking our tongues over perceived “vulgarity” and “obscenity” from one of our own truth-tellers who spoke a bit too bluntly for the pearl-clutching sensibilities of the occasionally polite class. 

This past Saturday (April 28) comedian Michelle Wolf, a correspondent and writer for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, was asked (for what I assume is the last time) to host the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and she presented close to half an hour of ribald, vulgar, hilarious prophetic truth-telling, which predictably proved to be too much to the hypocritical supporters of Trump and disappointingly proved impolitic to the supposedly liberal members of the press whom she equally castigated for their failure at holding the administration accountable for its lies and casual cruelty.

Referencing the president’s bragging about sexual assaults he has committed, she said that “Trump isn’t here, if you haven’t noticed. He’s not here. And I know, I know, I would drag him here myself. But it turns out the president of the United States is the one p—y you’re not allowed to grab.” Puncturing the naivety which presents Ivanka Trump as some sort of partisan for more humane policy in the administration, Wolf quipped: “She was supposed to be an advocate for women, but it turns out she’s about as helpful to women as an empty box of tampons. She’s done nothing to satisfy women. So, I guess, like father, like daughter.” And in what has been the cause du jour of right-wingers who constantly mock progressive “snowflakes,” Wolf “triggered” her audience in what was anything but a conservative “safe space” by saying of press secretary Sarah Huckabee-Sanders that “she burns facts, and then she uses the ash to create a perfect smoky eye. Like, maybe she’s born with it; maybe it’s lies.”

Wolf’s performance will be remembered as more consequential than Stephen Colbert’s similarly iconoclastic act at the 2006 press correspondent’s dinner where he excoriated President George W. Bush to his face, because in telling profound and obvious truths which the media has often been too milquetoast to state themselves she not only condemned the atrociousness of the Trump administration, but the timidity of the people in the press who are supposed to keep our government honest. 

Calling out both the Democrats for their political incompetence and the national press for their fecklessness, Wolf was the best type of comedian, skewering with equal opportunity. 

Right-wing Trump defenders acted predictably, chastising the performance as inappropriate, claiming that Wolf had mocked Huckabee-Sanders’s physical appearance (she hadn’t) while conveniently overlooking the daily barrage of obscenities, vulgarities, and cruelties which emanate seemingly hourly from the bully pulpit of the most powerful man on Earth.

To perseverate on Republican hypocrisy is at this point not just a losing proposition, it has become boring as well. Better just to ignore the faux outrage of Sean Spicer and Michael Huckabee. 

More disappointing, but similarly predictable, was the reaction of some in the press, who would perhaps benefit more by reflecting on the manner in which failing to investigate Trump’s possibly illegal financial deals and known mafia connections while disseminating Russian propaganda in the form of hacked emails were integral to the election of the man who now so mercilessly attacks them. Instead we get Jake Sherman at Politico piously telling us that “Being mean isn’t funny. It’s mean” (a false dichotomy if ever I read one), NBC’s Andrea Mitchell demanding that Wolf “apologize,” and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman celebrating Huckabee-Sanders’s supposed coolness under fire, as if the real issue hasn’t always been the press secretary’s relentless attacks on not just the press, but the very idea of truth (whether she can appear calm or not).

In what is the most worrying rebuke that Wolf received, and evidence for the continuing authoritarian creep in our politics, Margaret Talev, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association apologized for Wolf’s stand-up, saying that their goal was to “offer a unifying vision… not to divide people.” And here I thought the purpose of the press was to tell the truth? At least one can remember that as impolite as Will Somers may have been, he told the truth too.

NBC news correspondent Kelly O’Donnell tweeted that the “spirit of the event” is supposed to be “jokes that singe but don’t burn.” What is currently being debated are two radically different models of what comedy is supposed to do when confronted with injustice and power, and the brilliance of Wolf’s performance was that her comfortable audience was expecting to be lightly singed while she rather offered a flame-thrower.

Comparing Wolf in particular, and political comedians more generally, to Renaissance court jesters like Somers is inexact. I should emphasize that such a comparison is not done to disparage contemporary satirists. Rather it’s to acknowledge the central place that comedy has always had in the discourse of saying uncomfortable truths that others are prohibited from uttering.

Theorists have debated the social utility of such rhetoric, none more so than the great early twentieth-century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who in his Rabelais and His World (first translated into English in 1968) offered a theory of representations of the grotesque, and what he called the “carnivalesque.” 

Bakhtin analyzed instances of carnival in medieval and Renaissance literature, understanding the annual pre-Lenten festival as an instance in which humor, mockery, subversion, satire, and irony were used to critique existing social structures. 

Practices like crowning an “Abbot of Unreason” and “Lord of Misrule” who presided over the ceremonies allowed European peasantry the open, yet safe, mocking of their rulers. 

A democratic and collective version of the function of the jesters, for such events provided a biting means of resistance, which in its literary forms exhibited “exceptional radicalism, ruthlessness, and freedom” (no “unifying visions” to be found). 

Bakhtin explains that this genre of critique was a “boundless world of humorous forms and manifestation [which] opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture,” and our most biting contemporary political comedians like Wolf are in this stead.

Hovering over Bakhtin’s project was the question of whether the carnivalesque served as an actual means of radical resistance, or merely as a type of social pressure valve to release anxieties and anger? In other words, was the purpose of such comedy to “burn,” or to merely “singe?” Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in their indispensable The Politics and Poetics of Transgression analyze Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, asking whether the “ ‘licensed release’ of carnival is not simply a form of social control of the low by the high and therefore serves the interests of that very official culture which it apparently opposes.” 

Whatever the function of such spectacle was in early modern Europe, for the organizers of the WHCA dinner, humor clearly serves to gently needle those who oppress, which explains all the consternation over Wolf simply saying what a majority of Americans are thinking.

The advocates of toothless comedy (and thus toothless critique) castigate Wolf precisely because she told the truth, and because she rejected the “polite” and “civil” strictures demanded by the organization which invited her. In the process the reaction to her performance exemplifies precisely her point about the anemic cowardice of much of the mainstream press, as their angry reaction to her demonstrates, especially as they are comparatively gentle to those at fault in the fleecing of American democracy.

Stallybrass and White explain that the carnivalesque is a “potent, populist, critical inversion of all official words and hierarchies” and that such rhetoric must be understood “as a mode of understanding, a positivity, a cultural analytic.” That being the case, Wolf’s great contribution at this moment is in demonstrating how afraid of uncomfortable truths we’ve become, and how the right, for all of its bellyaching about “free speech” and “political correctness,” remains the entrenched, powerful, status quo it’s always been, pretensions on the “alt-right” to being “counter-cultural” aside.

Hopefully, one result of Wolf's act would be the welcome dissolution of the annual event itself, a scandalous and embarrassing embodiment of the chumminess between the fourth estate and those who they’re expected to hold accountable. 

Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi astutely described the event as being a “mutual admiration society, in which pols and pundits dressed in black tie stroke each other to the edge of ecstasy over champagne and fillet mignon,” arguing that while there are few positives in the horror that has been the Trump administration “the end of black tie lovefests and the charade of buddy-buddy press-pol relations might be one.” 

In an uncharacteristic act of accidentally saying something accurate, Trump tweeted that it was time to “Put Dinner to rest [sic],” and in that I agree with both him and Taibbi. 

Wolf’s comedic brilliance was embodying Bakhtin’s contention that “Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning… [one of the] essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole.” 

The truth that she demonstrated was, that in times of unparalleled crisis, what’s needed is not a gentle singe, but a roaring fire.

by Ed Simon

Ed Simon is the Editor-at-Large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books.

A frequent contributor at several sites, his collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post Religion will be released by Zero Books in November of 2018. He can be followed at his website or on Twitter @WithEdSimon

MaineWriter ~ My favorite Michelle Wolf joke, given at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, was her opener ~ "Like the porn star said to Donald Trump before having sex, 'so, let's get this over with'".  

Republicans and the fraudulent election

What bothers me most is wondering why the media didn't demand to see the email search warrant? USAToday reports.

Legal experts who have examined the FBI search warrant determined not enough evidence to warrant the Clinton laptop investigation.

Republicans must examine their wrong minded support for the Republican Donald Trump, in light of evidence about how the Russian government interfered with the pre-election information by hacking the Democratic National Committee (DNC) email and releasing damaging confidential data of no importance to the campaign. Moreover, there is more reason to declare the 2016 election as fraudulent, evident in that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Director James Comey had no reason to issue a search warrant for Hillary Clinton's personal laptop. Most important, now that we have been informed about how President Obama in fact used the highly sensitive "red phone" to warn the Russians not to interfere in the American elections, the fact is that Americans were not told about this high level communication. We should have been told. Ironically, President Obama goes into history as being the first US president to use the so called "red phone". It's a legacy he can now own; but Americans weren't told, at the time. Finally, it turns out, Hillary Clinton won the election's popular vote by a significant margin. In fact, the Electoral College numbers don't correlate positively with the math in the final vote tallies.

There's absolutely a lot of screwiness about the 2016 election.  

WASHINGTON — The FBI warrant that shook Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in its final two weeks has been unsealed, and the lawyer who requested it says it offers "nothing at all" to merit the agency's actions leading up to the Nov. 8, election.

The warrant was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Los Angeles lawyer Randy Schoenberg, who wants to determine what probable cause the agency provided to suspect material on disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer might be incriminating to Clinton. Weiner is the estranged husband of Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin. Under the Fourth Amendment, search and seizure can only be granted when proof of probable cause of criminal findings has been documented.

The letter confirms news reports in late October that the FBI had detected “non-content header information” suggesting correspondence with accounts involved in its already-completed investigation of Clinton's private email server. The FBI request concludes there is “probable cause to believe” that the laptop contained “evidence, contraband, fruits and/or items illegally possessed."

Yet the documents show the FBI request was based on the presence of classified information on previous emails chains between Clinton and Abedin and no new evidence on the laptop at issue.

"I see nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between" Clinton and Abedin, Schoenberg said in an email to USA TODAY. It remains unknown "why they thought they might find evidence of a crime, why they felt it necessary to inform Congress, and why they even sought this search warrant," he said. "I am appalled." The FBI's Manhattan office did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Clinton campaign officials echoed Schoenberg's complaints Tuesday. Campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said on Twitter that the "unsealed filings regarding Huma's emails reveals Comey's intrusion on the election was as utterly unjustified as we suspected at time."

Just two days before the November 8 election, Director James Comey "covered his ass" by releasing a statement to end the investigation into the Clinton email "Where's Waldo" search.

WASHINGTON — In a stunning last-minute announcement, FBI director James Comey said Sunday the agency is still not recommending charges against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton after reviewing newly discovered emails.

In a letter to lawmakers, Comey said the FBI is standing by its original findings, made in July, that Clinton should not be prosecuted for her handling of classified information over email as secretary of State.

"The FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation," Comey said in the letter. "During that process we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of State," Comey wrote. "Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton."

In other words, the Republican campaign to defeat Secretary Hillary Clinton in 2016, was based on lies, fake news, illegal interference in the Democratic National Committee communications and a bogus "witch hunt" led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a "non-issue" with Hillary Clinton's email server.  Nevertheless, Republicans wrongly continue to claim an election victory they never legitimately earned. This is a horrible time for America and proves, in my mind, that Republicans have no interest in protecting and defending our US Constitution.  Unfortunately, many in the news media, particularly the ratings hungry "Morning Joe", "Mitchell Reports" (aka "Andrea Mitchell") and "FoxNews", are more interested in creating news than in reporting about the facts. Otherwise, they would have demanded to see the FBI search warrant before the election.