the daily howler

MONDAY: Did the madness of that Senate hearing...

2026-08-10T14:24:11.770-04:00

MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2026

...elude the Times' Wallace-Wells? "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on?”

(Or while it's putting its pants on? Is that also true of a misstatement, even of a false impression?)

It's a famous apocryphal statement! Back in 2017, the New York Times shot the standard attribution down. The report by Nirai Chokshi started off like this:

That Wasn’t Mark Twain: How a Misquotation Is Born
How fitting that the man often credited with saying “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” most likely did not invent the phrase.
Commonly attributed to Mark Twain, that quotation instead appears to be a descendant of a line published centuries ago by the satirist Jonathan Swift. Variants emerged and mutated over time until a modern version of the saying was popularized by a Victorian-era preacher, according to Garson O’Toole, a researcher who, like Twain, prefers a pseudonym.

And so on from there. All in all, Twain didn't say so many things you wonder if he ever made any real statements at all!

Wherever that famous bromide started, it's only that much truer today, given the speedy transmission of bogus claims our modern media make possible.

With that in mind, we start with a peculiar hook, one which seemed to appear in many post mortems of the charges made aganst Fauci in thar recent rage-filled Senate herinbg.

David Wallace-Wells wroe the lengthy piece, and he's plenty sharp. . We'll offer two clips from his lengthy piece, again for the New York Times. Still, we were puzzled by his initial premise:

Fauci Has a Lot to Answer For. But We’re Asking the Wrong Questions.
Pleading the fifth was cowardly. It was also revelatory.
When Anthony Fauci categorically refused to answer any questions at a Senate committee hearing last week, he inadvertently showcased a throwback scene of irreconcilable pandemic partisanship. On one side were Republican ideologues boiling over with grievances familiar from 2020 and 2021. On the other side, Democrats nominally committed to the principle of defending science against partisan attacks but unsure exactly what that meant beyond lip service...
[...]
The United States was not the only country to wrestle with Covid, to improvise a policy response that upended the lives of its citizens or to watch as even burdensome restrictions failed to prevent a mass mortality event, only lightening it. But for years Fauci has been bullied and harassed and intimidated and, above all, vilified and scapegoated by bad-faith critics mounting contradictory attacks that allowed them to pin responsibility on one man for everything they might not have liked about the experience of living through a brutal pandemic. Yet that is exactly why Fauci should have talked last week: to answer those critics, defend his approach and those of his colleagues, and explain what lessons he’d learned and might like the rest of us to learn. Evidently, he felt too boxed in to try, even with Joe Biden’s blanket pardon in hand.

Say what? For years, Fauci had been vilified and scapegoated by critics mounting contradictory attacks? Indeed, they'd been doing so in bad faith?

But even in the madhouse environment in which the sitting president is trying to lock everyone up, he should have gone into that Senate hearing and taken his chances with the presumptive fairness of the Tr\ump/Blanche DOJ?

At age 85, in this madhouse environment, it was cowardly of him not to try? Are we all on the same planet?

Many opinion and editorial writers have adopted this peculiar stance in their reviews of that Senate hearing. A bit later, Wallace-Wells extended his portrait of the venomous bad faith Dr. Fauci should have ignored:

...If you believe that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak, it’s not crazy to suspect that American support for gain-of-function research around the world may have played some role in bringing it about. How much responsibility remains an open question, because the subject of pandemic origins itself remains open as well. This is another reason that Fauci should have come prepared to explain and defend himself last week, as he told me he would several years ago if presented with the chance to expound at length and with nuance about the value of this kind of research.
But it is also politically convenient to make Fauci the sole villain in the lab leak morality tale, because so many of his haters have already taken to blaming him for everything else about the pandemic, no matter how contradictory their complaints.
You can’t think we overreacted, for instance, and at the same time think that Fauci was indifferent to ongoing American deaths during the period when pandemic restrictions were strictest. You can’t charge him with a million murders while doubting the mortality statistics or insisting that Covid was actually a “scamdemic.” (“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine,” as “The Daily Show” joked.) You also can’t pin the whole thing on Democratic safetyism when Trump was president through the most restrictive phase and pointedly criticized governors who wanted to reopen too soon...

"If you believe that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak, it’s not crazy to suspect that American support for gain-of-function research may have played some role in bringing it about?" The only question would be how much responsibility to dump on Fauci's head?

That seems to make perfect sense! But what if, apparently like Dr. Fauci, you don't believe that the pandemic came from the lab? And as he continues, Wallace-Wells further describes the "bad faith" to which he has already referred:

"You can't charge Fauci with a million murders"—some senators charged him with nine million deaths—"if you're also saying that the whole thing was a scam?" By now, Wallace-Wells is saying the tribal rage was so phony that it could be summarized in the way The Daily Show engineered:

“It’s deadly and it didn’t matter and millions died, but it was fine.”

To our eye, one analysis after another blew right past the apparent madness of the current age. In our view, our journalistic elites are having a very hard time understanding this basic fact:

A blatantly obvious type of plague is present within our Oran.

Tomorrow, we'll visit another appraisal. Writing for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner starts right there, with a reference to Camus' The Plague, but after that the corrections and fact-checks start.

Are Wehner's defenses of Dr. Fauci accurate? How are we supposed to know? The "democratization of media" has created a type of modern Babel. Again and again, matters of technical complexity pretty much take over from there.

NEW ARRIVALS: A new arrival on the front...

2026-08-10T10:18:00.271-04:00

MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 2026

...was met with familiar old conduct: "The appearance on the front of a new arrival...became the topic of general conversation."

In the translation by David Magarshack for Penguin Classics, that's the first sentence of Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog. The famous story has its own Wikipedia page. Included there is this:

The Lady with the Dog
"The Lady with the Dog" is a short story by Anton Chekhov. First published in 1899, it...is one of Chekhov's most famous pieces of short fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov considered it to be one of the greatest short stories ever written.
[...]
Nabokov wrote about the unconventional ending:

"All the traditional rules of storytelling have been broken in this wonderful short story of twenty pages or so. There is no problem, no regular climax, no point at the end. And it is one of the greatest stories every written."

You could call it a story without an ending. So too with our ongoing, unresolved, unfolding national dilemma.

Variously named in various translations, The Lady with the Lapdog is a story about human growth. As such, it has no obvious political application under current arrangements.

Still, we've been thinking about that opening sentence because of several new arrivals who have appeared on the scene in the past few weeks.

First, we had the DSA's Megan Romer, a thoroughly good and decent person. She declared her support for that organization's party platform on the July 26 edition of Fox News Sunday.

(To watch the entire interview, you can just click here.)

Several parts of Romer's discussion with Shannon Bream "became the topic of general conversation," at least on the Fox News Channel's heavily watched "cable news" programs. Later, Romer's interview with The New Yorker's David Remnick also became widely discussed on Red American shows.

Not long after that arrival, Francesca Hong joined Romer as a topic of conversation on Fox News Channel programs.

Hong is the leading candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for governor of Wisconsin. A statement in 2021 about her desire to abolish Thanksgiving has received a lot of play on Fox, though also on CNN.

(Then too, there's the easy-to-mock "proximity to whiteness" hook.)

Finally, we turn to Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Party's nominee in the Michigan Senate race. News orgs have chosen to ignore the remarkable statements about this candidate made by the sitting president during last Wednesday's speech in Las Vegas.

Perhaps understandably, major news orgs have chosen to avoid that day's familiar old madness. With apologies, here are some of the things the sitting president said:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/5/26): In Congress, we're working every day to defend the American dream for you and your children. The radical left, the maniacs, they're trying to destroy it with the disaster known as, not socialism—Communism!
It's Communism. These are Communists. And the polls were wrong again last night when they thought it would be a landslide victory for a hater of Jews and a hater of Israel.
This guy hates Jews. Somebody said, "Oh, that's a little strong." No, he hates Jews, and he hates Israel.
"Abdul El-Sayed." Can you believe this? This could only happen to me.
Abdul El-Sayed, a lovely gentleman! He's a man of hate, and now he's going around saying, "No, I love everybody." He doesn't love everybody. Put him in office, you're going to find out what he loves.
He doesn't love Israel. He doesn't love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart, and there's not a fricking thing he can do about it. There's not a thing he can do about it because he hates them.

That's what the sitting president said. Big orgs have largely averted their gaze.

(Thanks to the invaluable Rev, you can read the transcript of the speech, and you can watch the tape.)

Dr. El-Sayed, a former Rhodes scholar, is a new arrival on the national front. Yesterday, Jake Tapper praised his performance on CNN's State of the Union.

We're sorry to say that we disagreed—that we thought Dr. El-Sayed's relative inexperience may perhaps have showed.

El-Sayed is a new arrival on the national front. By way of contrast, the president was demonstrating the oldest form of ugly political conduct—and just for the record, moments later, he went on to say this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: One of the things I see, and you see it here in the Blue states run by Democrats, everything's filthy dirty all the time. The cities stink. They smell. The sidewalks are loaded with horrible stuff.
I don't want to use the term because my wife will get—she hates it when I use the term. I use it, but she doesn't love it.

There's more to what he said that day, but we're trying to keep it short.

It may be understandable when major news orgs duck the difficulty of reporting this kind of familiar old conduct. It may be understandable, but these new arrivals will be the subject of general conversation as the midterm campaign unfolds.

Tomorrow, we plan to focus on a different type of new arrival—a new arrival which won't produce much discussion at all. We refer to Kurt Andersen's new guest essay for the New York Times.

The essay won't produce much conversation. But this is the way it starts:

Has America Already Undergone a Soft Breakup?
“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”

That's the way the essay starts—and we'd say that headline about a "soft breakup" is itself rather soft, given the essay's contents and suggestions.

Does our flailing nation already qualify as a type of "failed state?" In the past, we've suggested that the answer may be yes. As the president rants and rails in the oldest and most familiar ways, Andersen's gloomy essay seems to be saying much the same thing.

"We can’t keep going this way," Andersen eventually says. "[A]voiding real hostilities over the long term will require some kind of radical shift."

Tomorrow: From the New York Times identity line:

Kurt Andersen is the author of the forthcoming novel “The Breakup,” about the United States’ split into two nations.

SATURDAY: Why did Dr. Fauci take the Fifth?

2026-08-08T09:03:44.018-04:00

SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 2026

Why was Blanche confirmed? Was that an example of tribal group rage in that Senate hearing room last week?

Was that an example of the deadly rage no modern society can really expect to withstand? (Was that a gang of Achaeans coming over the walls?)

Presumably, stated opinions will differ.

No senators embarrassed themselves more than Hawley and Moreno did. But two questions remain to be answered concerning Dr. Fauci.

Question: Why did Dr. Fauci take the Fifth so many times?

Answer: Fellow citizens, please!

Dr. Fauci took the Fifth 111 times because he was asked 111 questions by the rampaging senators, quite a few of whom almost seemed to be showboating. (As usual, Senator Lankford, R-OK, was the glaring Republican exception.)

Presumably, every journalist knows the legal dangers involved in so-called selective pleading. So did the grown child known as Hawley, as he pimped himself to the voters back home.

Regarding the conduct of the rampaging Republican senators:

As usual, Senator Lankford, R-OK, was the glaring exception. The invaluable Rev provides a transcript of the hearing right here.

Question: Why did Dr. Fauci take the Fifth at all?

Answer: We can't necessarily answer that question. But the culture built around "Lock her up" (2016) has aggressively spread in the last two years, even reaching the point reported today by Fox Digital.

Yes, this has actually happened:

Trump urges Jeanine Pirro to revisit dropped Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism case
President Donald Trump on Friday urged U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro to take a second look at the recently dropped charges over vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
"Now that people are able to see it up close, they are reporting pure VANDALISM at The Reflecting Pool," Trump wrote on Truth Social, sharing photos from a freelance photographer that allegedly showed vandalism.
The president claimed that "People were on their knees with their hands in the water at the exact location of the ‘slashes.’ Additionally, there were witnesses to the VANDALISM, and the flexible areas of the material were cut with a knife.
"U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro should re-visit her hastily made decision, especially since it turned out that the ‘gentleman’ involved is a big player in ActBlue, a disgraceful fundraising SCAM, and is represented by a TRUMP DERANGED SLEAZEBAG, Political Hack Lawyer, Norm Eisen, and CREW, a group that uses ‘charity’ for political purposes which is, to the best of my knowledge, ILLEGAL!"

And so on from there. To see the furious president's new post, click this.

That's right! Given the madness of the time—the (tragic) condition the New York Times is never going to report or discuss—the president is back on Truth Social, urging the former Judge Jeannine to get David Hearn locked up.

Given the (unfortunate) madness of the time, this was the environment in which Dr. Fauci and his legal counsel decided that he would refuse to answer any questions.

He showed up and took a three-hour beating. But he was being asked to speak about 111 different topics at a time when an apparent form of (always unfortunate) mental disorder seems to be in control of the land.

The New York Times won't report discuss that apparent condition. Neither will MS NOW.

We move on to a question about a separate topic:

Question: Why was Todd Blanche confirmed?

Answer: We've seen an obvious part of the presumptive answer dodged by an array of cable news commentators right here in our own Blue America.

One after another after another, we've seen them go on CNN and MS NOW and agree to play dumb.

There's an obvious presumptive answer they all agreed to swallow. To see Lawence O'Donnell report that obvious presumptive answer, we'll suggest that you click right here.

The answer he gives is blindingly obvious, unless you watch other shows.

A self-evaluation: Sadly, no verses today from Homer!

As with the Harrison Ford character in Witness (1985), it was time to return from a brief sojourn in a simpler and purer land.

We saw Witness that summer on Block Island. Sadly (in retrospect), we were weekending there.

FRIDAY: We said we'd show you what comes next!

2026-08-07T14:06:54.131-04:00

FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2026

He was delighting his heart: We've beaten the famous resource to death, but we promised we'd do it.

We promised we'd show you what comes next, after these treasured lines from Professor Fagles' translation of the Iliad:

BOOK NINE
The Embassy to Achilles

[...]

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,
praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth
that they might bring the proud heart of Achilles
round with speed and ease.

The rage of Achilles now has that great warrior sulking in his tent. Nestor, the seasoned charioteer—he always gave the best advice—has directed Odysseus and two other men to go there and persuade him to return to the fight.

Understandably, they're praying to the god who moves the earth as they proceed down the shore. What do they find when the shelters in question, this is what they find:

[continuing directly]
Reaching the Myrmidon shelters and their ships,
they found him there, delighting his heart now,
plucking strong and clear on the fine lyre
beautifully carved, its silver bridge set firm,
he won from the spoils when he razed Eetion's city.
Achilles was lifting his spirits with it now,
singing the famous deeds of fighting heroes.

Across from him Patroclus sat alone, in silence,
waiting for Aeacus' son to finish with his song.

Achilles was lifting his spirits, delighting his heart, with thoughts of all the treasure, and perhaps of all the young persons, other heroes had stolen away.

That scene almost strikes us as comic relief. We've had a question in recent years:

Even now, is the Iliad taught this way?

RAGE: Senator Hawley plays the fool!

2026-08-07T11:39:24.788-04:00

FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2026

Group rage comes to the Senate: Just to be honest and fair, what happened last night supports the idea that news orgs should never involve "mental health" issues in their political coverage.

Caroline Sunshine (actual name) was appearing on the 10 p.m. shoutfest, CNN NewsNight. The program is designed to replace attempts at intelligent discussion with a raucous modern-day Babel.

Sunshine is a former Disney Channel child star. In 2018, at age 22, she became a Trump press assistant.

She's now out there as a political commentator on "cable news" programs. Judged by conventional norms, she does look good on TV.

(When she appeared on Gutfeld! last month, the host called attention to her very little "little black dress." "I ran out of turtlenecks," the surprise guest sagaciously said. She was way off message in that Gutfeld! appearance. In our view, and speaking quite frankly, she can say whatever she wants!)

Sunshine may be completely sincere. David Gilmour of Mediaite reports what she said last night:

CNN Panel Explodes as MAGA Pundit Claims ‘Sociopath’ Fauci Belongs in ‘Mental Institution’
A CNN panel descended into a shouting match Thursday after former Trump White House aide Caroline Sunshine declared Dr. Anthony Fauci “should be in a mental institution” and branded the longtime public health official a “textbook sociopath,” prompting immediate disbelief from host Abby Phillip and fellow panelists.
The clash unfolded on CNN NewsNight during a discussion about renewed Republican scrutiny of Fauci, who has been hauled before Congress and faces the prospect of further legal action following the release of diary entries from his time leading the nation’s Covid-19 response.

In our view, it's long past time for Phillip to drop her performance of shocked disbelief. This show is designed to produce blow-ups like this. Why else was "author Leigh McGowan" also a guest last night?

(McGowan recited Standard Blue Cant. You've heard it a thousand times by now. It doesn't exactly make sense.)

Gilmour's report includes videotape of Sunshine's declarations. Along the way, he quotes her in the manner shown:

“Forget about prosecuting him, the guy should be in a mental institution! He’s a textbook sociopath. I mean, DSM 5 level sociopath running our pandemic response, low empathy, ability to inflict pain on innocents, narcissism.”
[...]
“What are you talking about?” the host asked before pressing Sunshine further: “Are you suggesting that he should be in a mental institution for having an ego, which I think would characterize just about every single person in Washington?”

Sunshine attempted to cite Fauci’s diary entries, mocking passages about media attention he received during the pandemic.

And so on from there. In fairness to Sunshine, buzz like this is the fairly obvious goal of the way CNN NewsNight assembles its panels.

That said, should news orgs honor their version of the Goldwater Rule, according to which they never discuss possible mental health / mental illness issues within their political coverage? One part of the reasoning has always been clear, and it has always made sense:

As soon as you conduct some such discussion with medical specialists, people like Sunshine will show up on some cable news show offering their own diagnoses. Indeed, such guests may be actively sought, perhaps for reasons of propaganda, perhaps due to ratings concerns.

That said, what happened in the Senate last week was even worse than last night's debacle on CNN. Even before yesterday's "contempt of Congress" vote, the hearing to which we refer had generated these questions:

Did Dr. Fauci do something wrong during the course of the Covid pandemic? Indeed, did he possibly do something which might have been criminal?

For ourselves, we can't answer those questions. Regarding the question of criminality, we showed you yesterday what the Wall Street Journal has said:

Dr. Fauci Takes the Fifth, Alas
Anthony Fauci’s decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself before the Senate on Wednesday is a shame. The public could have benefited from his exchanges with Senators, even if they would have been contentious.
Sen. Rand Paul has been investigating the government’s response to Covid, and Dr. Fauci was at the center of the decisions to close schools and lock down the economy for months. President Biden granted Dr. Fauci a pre-emptive pardon, but Mr. Paul said that wouldn’t protect him if he lies to Congress.
Dr. Fauci blamed the Senator for an “unhinged obsession” with him and decided on silence as a strategy. Mr. Paul is too set on criminalizing policy differences in our view, and Dr. Fauci doesn’t belong in jail on any evidence we’ve seen.

And so on from there. That's the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, one part of the Murdoch empire.

Yesterday, the editorial board of the Washington Post offered a somewhat murky set of assessments. That said, they started with a clearcut denunciation of yesterday's "contempt of Congress" vote:

The contempt vote against Fauci was a stunt
Anthony S. Fauci should have been forthright during his Senate appearance last week, offering a full explanation of his past misstatements and reflecting on lessons learned during the pandemic. But he had legitimate reasons—and constitutional protections—for staying tight-lipped.
A Senate committee voted Thursday along party lines to approve a resolution holding Fauci in contempt of Congress for invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times. It would be an abuse of prosecutorial power if the Trump administration were to use this stunt to pursue criminal charges against the 85-year-old.
[...]
[T]his will do nothing to help the public understand the origins of the coronavirus or what went wrong in the government’s response. That’s a shame, because Fauci has a lot to answer for: He was slow to accept the airborne transmission of the coronavirus, and his guidance kept millions of kids out of school for far longer than was necessary. There are also questions about whether the agency he led at the National Institutes of Health supported research that altered coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began.
Covid was hugely disruptive for society, and it is fair game for Congress to exercise oversight. Indeed, lawmakers should have done so years ago in a bipartisan way. But this contempt vote was clearly less about illuminating what happened than about exacting revenge.

As is often the case with editorials at the new version of the Post, this editorial is somewhat unclear.

Plainly, the editors reject the contempt vote as a Republican stunt—as a way of punishing Fauci. They also say that Dr. Fauci should not be criminally charged for his refusal to answer questions last week.

That much is clear. But they (very murkily) suggest that Dr. Fauci may have played a major role in the fact that the pandemic ever occurred in the first place.

(Did the editors actually say that the Covid virus originated in the Wuhan lab? Surely, the murkiness of the relevant passage was executed that way by design, not through limited competence.)

Did Dr. Fauci engage in some form of criminal or unethical conduct during the Covid years? Was he somehow involved in the pandemic's very existence?

We don't know how to answer those questions, but we do know what we saw last week in that Senate hearing room. We saw the dangerous type of tribal rage which has been causing civilizations to fall dating back to the fictional death of Troy, as described by Professor Knox:

The death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city.
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history...

In that remarkably vicious way, so went the fall of Troy—and every Greek citizen knew it. Again, here's Mary Lefkowitz in the Washington Post, back in 1990:

"It was [Homer] who first portrayed [women] in their important role as survivors and the continuers of the culture that the men sought in their violence to destroy."

The men sought to do that through their violence, but also through their group rage.

At any rate, that's how rage was expressed in the Late Bronze Age. The means of assault are different today, but the ugly power of tribal rage is unchanged.

The ugliness of what happened last week was matched by its sheer stupidity. It's hard to be a bigger fraud that the pitiful Senator Hawley chose to be:

HAWLEY (7/29/26): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc? Let's try something:
What day of the week is it today?
[...]
What color tie are you wearing?
[...]
What color is the carpet in front of you?

Once it's clear that the witness is taking the Fifth, people like Hawley understand that they're free to tear the wings off the insect seated before them.

Incredibly, the showboat who posed those pseudo-questions is a graduate of Stanford, but also of Yale Law School. Later, he clerked for John Roberts.

He knows why a person in Fauci's position will have been told that he can't pick and choose which questions to answer. He knows the target has been told not to answer any question, not even a question from a creep like Hawley about the blue of the sky.

He also knows that most of his constituents don't know such things, and that members of the press will often be so dumb as to marvel at the fact that Dr. Fauci too the Fifth 111 times!

(Why did he take the Fifth 111 times? Duh! Because that's the number of questions he was asked! He had to plead every time!)

What has made Hawley as small as he is? Pathetically, once again, this is the way he started:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc?

Knowing the witness wouldn't respond, this small child chose to taunt him. And later, this childish child of the Yale Law School dimwittedly piped up with this:

[Hawley] Claims ‘No Honest Person Pleads the Fifth’ After Fauci Hearing—Gets Immediately Reminded of Trump’s Own History
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) claimed “no honest person pleads the Fifth” after Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hearing. He was promptly reminded that President Donald Trump has done the same.
Hawley was part of the committee that questioned Fauci on his Covid-19 guidance Wednesday. Throughout the hearing, Fauci repeatedly declined to answer questions by pleading the Fifth Amendment. Hawley began his line of questioning by answer Fauci a set of basic questions about what he was wearing and the room they were in. Still, Fauci refused to answer.
Later that day, Hawley posted a clip of his exchange with the former Chief Medical Advisor to the President on X/Twitter. He then declared that “no honest person pleads the Fifth.”
Critics of Hawley were quick to point out that Trump has used a similar strategy in the past.

How pathetic can this guy get? As Austin notes in his report, President Trump took the Fifth more than four hundred times in a 2022 deposition directed by the office of the New York State Attorney General. And of course, as a graduate of Yale Law School, Hawley knows that innocent people do plead the Fifth.

He also knows that many members of the public may not fully grasp that fact, and that they might be impressed by the courage with which he seemed to go after the demonized Dr. Fauci.

Should Dr. Fauci have refused to answer questions last week? He did so in the context of the latest astonishing criminal charge, the bogus charge lodged against The Olympic Oarsman Who Wrecked the Reflecting Pool.

The madness that was evident during the fall of Troy is all over our failing society now. But the madness and the rage exist in modern forms.

Where did Covid begin? Messengers like Gutfeld are all over Fox, saying "we know" the answer to that question.

The New York Times is too afraid to report what happens on Fox. But last week, in that Senate chamber, madmen were coming over the walls in the rage-filled world we increasingly live in.

Tomorrow: Tyrus and Kat explain?

THURSDAY: Recollections of probably taking Hum 3!

2026-08-06T16:18:36.836-04:00

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2026

The doldrums invade our camps: As a matter of fact, we did in fact take Hum 3 during the first semester of our junior year.

We know that because we believe our transcript. It says that we received an A-minus in the class. It also says that we failed Kant—that we were handed an F.

Or, perhaps, "did Kant fail us?" We're quoting our award-winning college years memoir, for which we served as Capitol Style cover boy at some point in (we'll guess) 1999

According to an expert we can no longer find, Capitol Style lost $3 million during its three-year run, the bulk of which had little or nothing to do with us, or with the grades we received that semester, in which the gift D we received from Professor Quine kept us out of Vietnam, where so many others served.

(We don't know why we were gifted with that D. At the time, the rule said this—if you were failed in two or more courses by people like this "Kant," you were out on the street for a year.)

As it went, we were in fact failed by Kant. (Who could possibly agree to pretend to have read such a book?) We dropped out of Nat Sci 5—an actual lab course!—after the lectures were over. We've always felt sorry for the puzzled Radcliffe freshman who got stuck with being our lab partner. At least she didn't have to pretend that she had read Kant!

After dropping out of Nat Sci 5, we transferred into Crane Brinton (History 134a), in his last year of teaching what he was said to call "the last of the roaring guts."

Given the fact that lectures were over, we never set eyes on the man! We brought down the house at the jam-packed optional make-up hour exam, struggled to a B-plus.

Did we really take Hum 3? Our transcript plainly claims we did, and we do have a lengthy term paper, whose closing text (from the Odyssey) we expect to reaffirm on Saturday.

We don't recall setting eyes on Professor Finley, although we probably did.

Why were we we flirting with disaster in the manner described? In retrospect, we have no clear idea. Looking back, we stand by our refusal to pretend to read a book like the Critique, whatever the price of refusal might turn out to be.

The high-humidity August doldrums are currently in effect. Normally, we console ourselves with Professor Horwich at such times. We'll post him saying such things as this:

Was Wittgenstein Right?
[...]
Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on—and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?
If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking.

Normally, that's where we go at these times.

Tomorrow, we'll show you what happens, in the translation by Professor Fagles, when Odysseus arrives at the tents where brilliant Achilles is sulking. It starts in the language shown below, but where does the passage end up?

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,
praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth
that they might bring the proud heart of Achilles
round with speed and ease.

Praying hard to the god who moves the earth where the breakers crash and drag! No, it doesn't exactly matter, but what are we told after that?

RAGE: Should Dr. Fauci be shipped off to jail?

2026-08-06T10:09:46.507-04:00

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2026

The Wall Street Journal says no: Despite the fact that he didn't exist, Homer has been in the air of late.

In our opinion, Keats may have overdone it a bit with respect to Chapman's translation:

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
[...]

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Or then again, maybe not. There's a lot to see in the pair of poems by the poet who didn't exist.

(According to experts, Keats may have meant Balboa, not Cortez—though yes, that's a reference to the Darien of today's Darien Gap. Also, the reference to a "new planet" would have resonated at the time because of the recent discovery of Uranus.)

For us, Homer's recitations, starting with Book One of the Iliad, show us the madness of the principal players in the siege of Troy in a wholly unvarnished way. By way of contrast, major news orgs like the New York Times and MS NOW are devoted to the idea that the apparent mental illness of our leaders must be normalized, ignored, disappeared.

Because neither he nor Agamemnon existed, Homer knew he couldn't be sued, or even arrested and charged with crimes, by a man like that leader of the Achaean (Greek) forces. He knew that he could portray Agamemnon's rage, in all its irrational fury, in the Iliad's opening lines.

We're still in Book One in the first of the poems! In his Introduction to the Robert Fagles translation, Professor Knox describes the situation as we've already portrayed it:

Bernard Knox, Introduction to the Robert Fagles translation
[...]
Chryses, a priest of Apollo, whose daughter has been carried off by the Achaeans in one of their raids, comes to the camp to ransom her. But she has been assigned, in the division of the booty, to the king who commands the Achaean army, Agamemnon, and he refuses to give her up....

We wish that one word hadn't been used, though we'll soon see it several more times. As Knox continues, he repeats it again and again, but he does explain the background to the first appearance of "the rage of Achilles:"

...he refuses to give her up. Her father prays for help to Apollo, who sends a plague that devastates the Achaean camp. Achilles, leader of the Myrmidons. one of the largest contingents of the Achaean army, summons the chieftains to an assembly. There they are told by the prophet Calchas that the girl must be returned to her father. Agamemnon has to give her up...

Calchas says the girl (or perhaps the young woman) must be returned to Chryses, her father.

That said, the prophet Calchas knows the room. Sacred Homer portrays his fear after Achilles orders him to speak:

"Achilles, dear to Zeus,
you order me to explain Apollo's anger,
the distant deadly Archer? I will tell it all.
But strike a pact with me, swear you will defend me
with all your heart, with words and strength of hand.
For there is a man I will enrage. I see it now,
a powerful man who lords it over all the Argives,
one the Achaeans must obey. A mighty king,
raging against an inferior, is too strong.
Even if he can swallow down his wrath today,
still he will nurse the burning in his chest
until, sooner or later, he sends it bursting forth.
Consider it closely, Achilles. Will you save me?"

And the matchless runner reassured him: "Courage!
Out with it now. Calchas. Reveal the will of god..."

Calchas fears Agamemnon's fury. He knows that Agamemnon will surely seek to punish him for the bad news he's about to deliver.

Here within our own failing world, that same story has played out a thousand times in the past ten years, with careful journalists saying less than they think or know about the principal player. As the overview by Professor Knox continues, it reaches a point on which we moderns might want to focus:

...Agamemnon has to give her up, but he demands compensation for his loss. Achilles objects: let Agamemnon wait until more booty is taken. A violent quarrel breaks out between the two men, and Agamemnon finally announces that he will take recompense for his loss from Achilles, in the form of the girl Briseis, Achilles' share of the booty.

Achilles represses an urge to kill Agamemnon and withdraws from the assembly, threatening to leave for home, with all his troops, the next day. The priest's daughter is restored to him. Apollo puts an end to the plague, and Briseis is taken away from Achilles' tent by Agamemnon's heralds.

The one girl (or young woman) is returned to her father—to Chryses, the priest to Apollo. ("And the priest embraced the child he loved, exultant.")

The other girl (or young woman) is led away by Agamemnon's heralds. Even now, five thousand years later, are young readers of this foundational text invited to understand the nature of the conduct chronicled here?

Patroclus obeyed his great friend's command.
He led Briseis in all her beauty from the lodge
and handed her over to the men to take away.
And the two walked back along the Argive ships
while she trailed on behind, reluctant, every step.

She trailed behind, reluctant, every step of the way. We'd be happier if Homer had dropped the reference to "her beauty" at that juncture.

At any rate, our European literature started right there, with that, with the focus belonging to the subsequent rage of Achilles.

(In the moment, we're told this: "But Achilles wept, and slipping away from his companions, far apart, sat down on the beach of the heaving gray sea and scanned the endless ocean..." To the modern reader, the inanity of this conduct should be clear—or then again, possibly not.)

We also wanted to slip away this week! We wanted to slip away to Homer's unvarnished presentation of Achilles' famous rage—the famous rage which almost sank a thousand ships. We keep finding it hard to do, given the way Homer may perhaps seem to skip past the circumstance of those young women.

At any rate, a similar type of rage—on this occasion, a type of group rage—was on display last week in a Senate hearing room, then again as Robert Kennedy Junior interrupted and insulted Dana Bash.

Should Anthony Fauci, age 85, be hauled off to prison for the rest of his life? A group of rage-filled tribal warriors directly said, or in some cases merely implied, that the answer is yes.

The editorial board at the Wall Street Journal seemed to suggest that these warriors, in their vast and rather performative rage, were perhaps a bit over their skis. Live and direct from the Murdoch realm, the editorial started like this:

Dr. Fauci Takes the Fifth, Alas
Anthony Fauci’s decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself before the Senate on Wednesday is a shame. The public could have benefited from his exchanges with Senators, even if they would have been contentious.
Sen. Rand Paul has been investigating the government’s response to Covid, and Dr. Fauci was at the center of the decisions to close schools and lock down the economy for months. President Biden granted Dr. Fauci a pre-emptive pardon, but Mr. Paul said that wouldn’t protect him if he lies to Congress.
Dr. Fauci blamed the Senator for an “unhinged obsession” with him and decided on silence as a strategy. Mr. Paul is too set on criminalizing policy differences in our view, and Dr. Fauci doesn’t belong in jail on any evidence we’ve seen...

Tomorrow, we'll try to return to the rage of the GOP solons. We also want to show you what was said on the Gutfeld! program—by Kat Timpf and by the blowhard Tyrus, but also by the nut-ball Gutfeld himself, and by Emily Compagno (again).

Homer described the rage of Agamemnon, and that of Achilles, with no attempt to hide the madness put on display by these powerful men.

It may have helped that they didn't exist! That said, he never directly seemed to suggest that there's a problem with the theft of the people who happen to be vibrant girls or young women for the obvious reason.

We still struggle with that topic today, and with the rage of disordered men who insist on having their way.

Tomorrow: Republican Solons Gone Wild

WEDNESDAY: Angry fellow makes accusations!

2026-08-05T14:51:28.026-04:00

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2026

The rage of Kennedy Junior: Dana Bash and Bobby Kennedy never got on the same track on Sunday morning's State of The Union. The first apparent misstatement arrived right away—and it came from Kennedy Junior:

BASH (8/2/26): You have been placing nearly all the blame on the Covid pandemic and the way that the U.S. responded to it squarely with Dr. Fauci. But, of course, he worked for President Trump. Does President Trump also deserve some of the blame?
KENNEDY: Well, President Trump, as you recall, wanted to end the lockdowns. I think the thing that did the most damage to our country was the lockdowns, lockdowns that shut down 3.5 million businesses in our country with no due process, no just compensation, all of our churches, closed our schools, and our children are still paying the price for that. And yet we had the worst outcome of any country in the world.

We had the worst outcome of any country? That seemed to be a misstatement. (To watch the whole session, click here.)

Bash asked him to explain his statement. But now, the first non sequitur arrived, and this time it came from Bash:

BASH (continuing directly): How so?

KENNEDY: We have the highest death rate from Covid of any nation on Earth.

BASH: Well, let me just say, because I have heard you say that before on the death rate from Covid. That's not accurate, because public health experts say that there is a combination of factors that went into that—higher rates of chronic illnesses, which I know you would agree with, gaps to our health care system, and misinformation about vaccines.

Experts say "a combination of factors went into" the American death rate? Assuming that's true, in what way would that mean that Kennedy's claim was inaccurate?

Kennedy noticed the problem. He proceeded to repeat his claim—a claim which seems to be bogus:

KENNEDY (continuing directly): You just said what I said was inaccurate. What I said was accurate. We had the highest death rate from COVID of any—
(CROSSTALK)
BASH: Well, there are other countries that had higher. But go ahead.

For the record, Worldometer lists thirteen countries with higher death rates from Covid, several with much higher rates. The U.S. is listed with the highest death rate among comparable developed nations, but that isn't what Kennedy said, and the U.K. wasn't real far behind.

Ninety seconds into the interview, the pair were off to a shaky start—and for what wouldn't be the last time, the transcript now said CROSSTALK.

Within moments, Kennedy Junior proceeded to this apparent howler:

KENNEDY: Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVID pandemic and was doing it under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns.
And, in fact, in Anthony Fauci's diaries, he talks about how President Trump is calling him every day, trying to get him to reopen the country.
BASH: Yes, well, the lockdowns were done by governors. I mean, certainly, Anthony Fauci and the president had opinions, but the lockdowns were done by governors, and largely because—and largely because they were hearing from hospitals saying that their ICUs were overrun and they needed some help while that was happening.
(CROSSTALK)
KENNEDY: Well, that's not true. Dana, that's just not true.
BASH: It is true.
KENNEDY: What you're saying is not true. No, they were doing it because Anthony Fauci was telling them from the top, you need to lock down. There were ICUs that were empty all over the country, including in New York at the height.

In fairness, he didn't say that ICUs were empty "all over New York City." But even as Bash may perhaps have seemed to be "telling not asking," he now issued a statement which has been widely assailed in the fact-checks of his session with Bash.

Did the rage of Achilles trigger events which eventually led to the fall of Troy? This interview was soon dominated by the accusations and insults Kennedy aimed at Bash. This is where it began:

BASH: Again, I really want to move on. But you were saying you were—
KENNEDY: Of course you want to move on—
BASH: Yes, I do.
KENNEDY: —because you were part of the problem.
BASH: No, I wasn't part of the problem.
KENNEDY: There was absolute press malpractice. You weren't allowing—your job—
(CROSSTALK)
BASH: Mr. Secretary, your job—
KENNEDY: Your job is a fierce skepticism toward authority.
BASH: OK. Yes, I am. I am.
KENNEDY: And you weren't doing that. You were beating up on people who were dissenting.

No example was given there. Soon, jabbing his finger and raising his voice, Kennedy heatedly moved to this:

KENNEDY: You're just— You're talking nonsense. You're making assertions you can't support, and then when I call you on them, you're telling me I'm arguing with you.
BASH: OK, do you want to talk about you want to talk about assertions that you can't support? I will get there in a second.
Let me just say, for the record, that I am not saying that the entire way that the Covid reaction was accurate. It was a scary time, and people made mistakes, absolutely. Let me finish.
KENNEDY: You were scaring people.
BASH: Why are you saying that?
KENNEDY: Because that was the job of CNN—
BASH: OK. OK, stop.
KENNEDY: .—was to put the chyrons up about many people are dying to get people to comply.

CNN had misbehaved when it reported death totals! Before long, it was on to fuzzy claims about a possible link between vaccines and autism, with this exchange taking place:

KENNEDY: Dana, you probably don't understand this because you're not a scientist.
BASH: Well, you're not either.

Each statement was accurate. Of course, news broadcasters aren't supposed to be scientists or economist or even "education experts." Ideally, they should know how to interview and question such specialists, but before long the exercised Kennedy seemed to be criticizing Bash even for doing that:

KENNEDY: All you know how to do is repeat things that people told you and say, trust the experts. That's what you did during Covid.
Now we know that Anthony Fauci, who was the expert, was lying about everything—about masks, about the social distancing, about natural immunity, about the transmission from the vaccine, about the source of Covid.
He was lying, and you were punishing people for not trusting the experts. And now you're rolling out the experts again—
BASH: Yes.
KENNEDY: —to talk about something that you have no personal knowledge of.
BASH: OK. Well, guess what? That is my job to talk to people.
KENNEDY: Your job is to tell the truth to the American public—
BASH: Am I allowed to talk? Yes, yes. And my job is to get as much information as I can.

Bash is still interviewing medical experts, the angry Kennedy said!

For the record, "we" don't know that Dr. Fauci "was lying about everything." In the course of Kennedy's manic behavior, he made no attempt to demonstrate the existence of any such act of misconduct. But so this useless interview proceeded, driven by the rage of Robert Kennedy Junior.

Kennedy made some plainly accurate statements during the session. In our view, Bash did seem to be a bit over-protective of official government procedures during the Covid years.

That said, the rage of Kennedy was active, early and often, during this useless session.

The rage of MAGA is visible all through the halls of the Fox News Channel. It was also visible as Kennedy raised his voice and wagged his finger, interrupted and made accusations all through this tribute to the dangers of our failing nation's destructive tribal procedures.

RAGE: Homer made it easy to see!

2026-08-05T09:29:58.127-04:00

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2026

The New York Times won't go there: As far as we know, there was no historical Homer. There wasn't even a Homer Price, he of the doughnut machine.

(That Homer lived in a different time: "It [was] America laughing at itself with a broad and genial humanity....")

There was a Homer Parrish in The Best Years of Our Lives (Best Picture, 1946), "the highest-grossing film in the United States since the release of Gone with the Wind." In one of that film's most memorable scenes, his next-door sweetheart since childhood convinces him that of course she will, and of course she does, still love him despite the wounds he has brought back from the war.

That portrait of classic (female) fidelity might perhaps recall the weaving and unweaving of Penelope in the poem which wasn't written by Homer, who apparently didn't exist:

Homer
Homer (possibly born c. 8th century BC) was an ancient Greek poet who is traditionally credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer was highly revered in ancient Greek society and is considered one of the most influential authors in history. Today, the question of Homer's identity and existence—dubbed the "Homeric Question"—continues to be debated, and scholars generally regard the two poems as the works of separate authors.
The Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War...

However it may have been composed, the Iliad does indeed "center on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles" during the last year of that fictional war. It's the rage of Achilles which triggers the action, leading on to the fall of Troy.

Leading on to the fall of Troy.! We refresh you about that famous event, produced by a vast group rage:

Bernard Knox, Introduction to Robert Fagles translation
[...]
The death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city.
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history...to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich. no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

Hector's sister unspeakably abused in the temple, with an old man butchered at the altar? Hector and Andromache's baby boy hurled to his death from the walls of the city?

So it went in the group rage which followed the slaying of the endlessly valiant Hector. In his continuing rage, Achilles drags Hector's body behind his chariot, through the dust, as Hector's parents watch from the walls. Or, as Mary Lefkowitz put it in the Washington Post:

It was [Homer] who first portrayed [women] in their important role as survivors and the continuers of the culture that the men sought in their violence to destroy.

Regarding the baby boy in question, here's one small part of the scene, high atop the city's walls, as Hector prepares to go off to battle earlier in the poem. Andromache is begging him not to go:

In the same breath, shining Hector reached down
for his son, but the boy recoiled,
cringing against his nurse's full breast,
screaming out at the sight of his own father,
terrified by the flashing bronze, the horsehair crest,
the great ridge of the helmet nodding, bristling terror
so it struck his eyes.

And his loving father laughed,
his mother laughed as well, and glorious Hector,
quickly lifting the helmet from his head,
set it down on the ground, fiery in the sunlight,
and raising his son he kissed him, tossed him in his arms,
lifting a prayer to Zeus and the other deathless gods.

[...]

So Hector prayed
and placed his son in the arms of his loving wife.
Andromache pressed the child to her scented breast,
smiling through her tears. Her husband noticed,
and filled with pity now, Hector stroked her gently
trying to reassure her, repeating her name...

We thought that memorable scene should be mentioned today.

The baby's loving parents laughed together at their baby boy's innocence. Loving parents and loving spouses were found inside the walls of Troy. Down by the shore it was different.

For the record, Hector returns from battle that day, succumbs to the rage of Achilles as the long poem nears its end. We emerge from these reveries with a curious type of question:

Is it possible? Is it possible that Homer, who largely didn't exist, tells the story of our nation's current circumstance with greater clarity than can be derived from the well-intentioned news reports found in the New York Times?

Just within the past week, we've seen the tribal rage of a group of Senate Republicans directed at the 85-year-old Anthony Fauci. As his colleagues prayed to the gods that Dr. Fauci might be imprisoned, the astonishing Senator Moreno was even inspired to say this:

Here I am sitting in front of you, six years later, saying "Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?"

Yes, he actually said it! And there was the grisly Senator Hawley, engaged in such undisguised clowning as this:

HAWLEY (7/29/26): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc? Let's try something:
What day of the week is it today?
[...]
What color tie are you wearing?
[...]
What color is the carpet in front of you?

TUESDAY: Translation is as translation does!

2026-08-04T14:59:57.938-04:00

TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 2026

Endless approaches to fury: The latest bizarre MAGA meltdown, this time involving the reflecting pool?

Reflections on the furious behavior of Secretary Kennedy on Sunday's State of The Union, complete with the kooky misstatements? Reflections on the pitiful way the kidz on The Five pretended he masterfully nailed it?

Please, dear God, no thanks! Instead, how about a passing bit of puzzlement concerning the nature of translation? How about something that doesn't involve mental illness and the refusal to talk about same?

Last Friday evening, we posted a tiny passage from Book IX of the Iliad, courtesy of Robert Fagles. Odysseus and two others have been dispatched by Agamemnon to try to reason with Achilles, who's sulking in his tents.

Achilles' capacity for fury takes us even beyond that of a certain sitting president. As the embassy approaches the warrior's tents, Fagles hands us this:

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,
praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth
that they might bring the proud heart of Achilles
round with speed and ease.

For us, "where the breakers crash and drag" is an inexhaustible treasure. As a child, before we'd created our own disasters, we happened to summer right there!

"Praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth?" That has us trudging with the challenged pair as they approach their challenge.

We recently looked at the 1951 translation of that same passage by Richmond Lattimore. That's the translation we started with. This is what we found:

So these two walked along the strand of the sea deep-thundering
with many prayers to the holder and shaker of the earth,
that they might readily persuade the great heart of Aiakides.

Wow! That wouldn't have grabbed us at all. And that was all he wrote!

True story! When we lazily looked for a way to copy and paste the Lattimore text, up popped a book review in the Washington Post from September 15, 1990. Discussing the new translation by Fagles, Mary Lefkowitz started like this:

THE WRATH OF ACHILLES
HOMER: THE ILIAD Translated by Robert Fagles Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox Viking. 683 pp. $35
FOR MORE than a thousand years the most popular book in the Greek-speaking world was Homer's Iliad. It was studied and quoted in 5th-century Athens. It was recited to crowds from Asia Minor at the great festival of Apollo at Delos. Centuries afterwards in remote outposts, it was read eagerly and even translated by people who knew Greek only as a second language.
No single work of literature has had such a pervasive influence on other writing, since it was from the story of Achilles's anger and its deadly consequences that the notion of the "tragic flaw" ultimately derives. It was from Homer that students learned the basic patterns of rhetoric (Achilles is a fine speaker) and came to know about the capricious and dangerous character of their gods. And it was Homer too that provided young people with their first cruelly realistic impressions of the nature of human life.
Perhaps surprisingly for those who now imagine that dead white males can write only about their own "values," over the years Homer's many audiences included women, since women (like men) of the propertied classes learned to read and write. It was he who first portrayed them in their important role as survivors and the continuers of the culture that the men sought in their violence to destroy. It is Homer also who portrays the Greeks and their Trojan enemies with equal sympathy, and who shows that, ultimately, victors can suffer losses as great as the defeated in a war. As such The Iliad deserves to keep its place on the list of the books that every educated person ought to read.

Achilles's anger and its deadly consequences! And then, so on from there.

Before long, Lefkowitz begins discussing the characteristics of several different translations. For her sample passage, this is the one she chose--and no, we aren't making this up:

Here, first in Lattimore's translation, are a few lines (182-84) from Iliad IX, the "book" (or papyrus book-roll) that was most people's favorite in antiquity. Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army, has decided to apologize for the quarrel he started with Achilles, and to make amends for it. He sends ambassadors to Achilles, who in his anger has withdrawn from the fighting; these are Achilles's old tutor, Phoenix, and two of Achilles's friends, the great heroes Ajax (or in Greek, Aias) and Odysseus.

So these two walked along the strand of the sea deep-thundering
with many prayers to the holder and shaker of the earth,
that they might readily persuade the great heart of Aiakides.

All in all, go figure! From there, she moves to the Robert Fitzgerald translation (1974), then on to Professor Fagles.

She describes the pros and cons of the three renditions. Regarding the Fagles translation of that passage, this is what she says:

Because I know what the original says, I am more comfortable with Lattimore. But Fagles' translation will be far more accessible to non-specialists because it can be understood straight off. And the Fagles version also offers Bernard Knox's concise and informative introduction, which even Lattimore loyalists ought to read.

So much for those Lattimore loyalists! Overall, her assessment of the Fagles effort was this:

Robert Fagles now offers a verse translation that explains what readers need to know, in clear, vigorous language that still retains a sense of the sweep and the sonority of the original.

For the record, $35 was a lot back then! All in all, you never know what you might find once you've decided to google.

(Not a word about mental illness! Indeed, "mental illness?" What's that?)

Since you asked: Fitzgerald speaks:

Following Phoenix,
Aias and Odysseus walked together
beside the tumbling clamorous whispering sea,
praying hard to the girdler of the islands
that they might easily sway their great friend's heart.

Aias is an alternate version of Ajax, as we all learn here.

RAGE: Dr. Fauci "killed millions of people?"

2026-08-04T10:14:54.282-04:00

TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 2026

Tommy Tuberville's rage: For better or worse—we'll guess for worse—the prevailing rage of the current era was directed at Dr. Fauci last week.

It was directed at him in a Senate hearing. That said, in certain essential ways, the story of this tribal fury had been told long before. We return to Book One of the Iliad, in which the disastrous rage of Achilles emerges.

As we noted yesterday, this is the way that story begins, as rendered by Robert Fagles in his 1990 translation:

BOOK ONE
The Rage of Achilles

Rage—Goddess. sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds.
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
What god drove them to fight with such a fury?

At this point, we're told about the first step toward the destructive rage which would eventually cost so many lives:

Agamemnon, lord of men, has stolen the daughter of a priest to Apollo to serve as his "slave." Now, the young woman's father has come to the Achaean camps to get his daughter back:

Yes. Chryses approached the Achaeans' fast ships
to win his daughter back, bringing a priceless ransom
and bearing high in hand, wound on a golden staff,
the wreaths of the god, the distant deadly Archer.
He begged the whole Achaean army but most of all
the two supreme commanders, Atreus' two sons,
"Agamemnon. Menelaus! All Argives geared for war!
May the gods who hold the halls of Olympus give you
Priam's city to plunder, then safe passage home.
Just set my daughter free, my dear one. Here,
accept these gifts, this ransom. Honor the god
who strikes from worlds away—the son of Zeus, Apollo!"

The priest was willing to let Troy be sacked if he could win his daughter back—his dear one.

The troops were inclined to respect the priest. But Agamemnon, lord of men, responded with one of his familiar rages:

And all ranks of Achaeans cried out their assent:
"Respect the priest, accept the shining ransom!"
But it brought no joy to the heart of Agamemnon.
The king dismissed the priest with a brutal order
ringing in his ears: "Never again, old man,
let me catch sight of you by the hollow ships!
Not loitering now, not slinking back tomorrow.
The staff and the wreaths of god will never save you then.
The girl--I won't give up the girl. Long before that,
old age will overtake her in my house, in Argas,
far from her fatherland. slaving back and forth
at the loom, forced to share my bed!
Now go,
don't tempt my wrath, and you may depart alive."

I won't give up the girl! Tragically, but familiarly, this is where European literature begins.

At any rate, Agamemnon has flown into one of his recurrent rages. As the famous poem continues, an old man walks away, terrified, though the story will hardly end there:

The old man was terrified. He obeyed the order,
turning, trailing away in silence down the shore
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag. .
And moving off to a safe distance, over and over
the old priest prayed to the son of sleek-haired Leto,
lord Apollo...

Terrified, the priest walks away. But as the story continues, he continues to pray to Apollo, and a plague will soon descend on the Achaean camps.

We're looking here at a first act of rage. In this case, it's the rage of Agamemnon, commander of the Achaean forces. The death-dealing rage of Achilles hasn't been triggered yet.

That's how the Iliad starts. A similar scene was perhaps on display last week as Dr. Fauci, 85 years of age and a long-honored public servant, sat before a furious Senate committee.

Rage! Even as the hearing was taking place, Senator Tuberville (R-Alabama) was being interviewed by Newsmax. Justified or otherwise, he voiced the rage to which his Republican colleagues were giving voice inside the hearing room.

From 1999 through 2008, he'd been head coach at Auburn. Last Wednesday, rightly or wrongly, he turned from the chalkboard with this:

SENATOR TUBERVILLE (7/29/26): He should be locked up before he leaves this building today and put in prison, and then put on trial in front of the American people.
We lost twenty to thirty thousand people in Alabama alone, and I hope every one of them sues this Dr. Fauci—puts him in court.
If we can’t put him in prison, let’s put him in court every day for the rest of his life, where he where he has to be punished and listened to the death that he caused.
[...]
I promise you one thing, we will find out if there’s a possibility that we can bring him to Alabama, to put him in front of a court and a jury, to see if we can put this guy in prison. He killed millions of people, folks. I mean, this was a catastrophe.

Tuberville wanted Fauci sent to prison, then later put on trial. Along the way, he claimed that Dr. Fauci "killed millions of people."

In fairness, one claim was clearly true! The Covid pandemic was indeed a catastrophe. But sometimes, catastrophe can also emerge from acts of fury, not excluding acts of tribal rage.

Tuberville was speaking with Newsmax from the building where the hearing was taking place. The hearing was chaired by Senator Paul. Back in May, he had tweeted this:

SENATOR PAUL (5/7/26): He lied to Congress about NIH funding dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan and engaged in the worst cover-up in modern medical history. The American people want Fauci behind bars.

Do we the people really want Dr. Fauci behind bars? Surveys say the answer is no, but the fury has been general over the Republican caucus.

As we've suggested before:

It seems to us that we can possibly see ourselves more clearly, at this point, through the auspices of literature. The world is perhaps a bit too much with us, given the relentless madness of the present age.

The rage was general over the Republican senators who took part in last week's hearing. Many claims emerged from their fury, but did their furious statements make sense?

Tomorrow: Furious voices prevail

MONDAY: Morning Joe presents those crazy Truth Social posts!

2026-08-03T14:40:54.542-04:00

MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2026

But also, those crazy claims: Yesterday, in a rare Sunday outing, we linked you to Mediaite's report about the sitting president's latest, rather unusual social media posts.

We refer to last weekend's rather peculiar Truth Social posts. Because the posts seemed rather strange, we used them as an occasion to ask a rather familiar question:

Is it possible that something is wrong with the sitting president?

That was the question we asked.

This morning, Morning Joe viewers were offered an unusual type of report by guest host Jonathan Lemire. At 7 o'clock Eastern, Lemire reported on those peculiar Truth Social posts.

This is what he said:

LEMIRE (8/3/26): For the second weekend in a row, President Trump posted a lot of AI-generated content on his social media site.
It was a bizarre range of slop posts, from him kissing a golden crucifix—there it is—to him in a white Elvis jumpsuit.
I mean, I think he looks great! And there's this one here, where he's walking next to a shackled [extraterrestrial] at a military base. I'm not sure what that one's about. Maybe it's a preview of an October surprise!
He also trolled Greenland in one post—there—then, minutes later, suggested that Venezuela would be the 51st state.
And, just like last weekend, the president posted a TRUMP 2028 image. So that was where the president's mindset was this weekend amid those terrible poll numbers.

For better or worse, insightfully or otherwise, Lemire took a lighthearted approach to this rather peculiar fare. As you can see by clicking that link, he treated it as a bit of a joke when the most powerful man on the planet spent time on the second consecutive weekend posting a "bizarre array" of social media content.

As for "those terrible poll numbers" mentioned by Lemire, that was a reference to a front-page "news analysis" piece in today's New York Times. As with the Truth Social images, so too here:

Peter Baker describes President Trump posting peculiar content:

NEWS ANALYSIS
Trump’s Polling Numbers Hit a New Low. Don’t Expect Him to Change Course.

After a spate of bad polls earlier this summer, President Trump simply declared that they were not true. “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN,” he wrote on social media, using capital letters as if they would shout away any contrary data.
In fact, his real poll numbers are at or near the lowest they have ever been in some nonpartisan surveys. A flurry of new samples in recent days found that Mr. Trump is at the nadir of his presidency, with support from just around a third of Americans as a stalemated war in Iran and high gas prices take a political toll.

[...]

These kinds of poll numbers would throw a normal White House into panic mode, especially coming just three months before a midterm election...But Mr. Trump has never been a normal president, and he does not react to political circumstances in the same way his predecessors have. Through force of will and command over his MAGA base, he has traditionally played a weak hand strong.

It is, of course, hard to have a course correction if it is not entirely clear what the course was to begin with. The most impulsive president of modern times, Mr. Trump follows his instincts and can completely reverse himself by the day, or sometimes the hour.

As with Lemire, so too here. To our ear, Baker's tone conveys this assessment:

There's nothing whatever to look at here! The normalization's complete!

There's nothing to look at here! There's nothing to look at when a sitting president makes crazily inaccurate claims about his polling numbers.

Meanwhile, is the sitting president the most "impulsive" president in modern times? Does he have a tendency to reverse himself by the hour?

There's also nothing to look at there! When he behaves in these abnormal, erratic ways, that's just Trump being Trump!

Could something be wrong with President Trump? Possibly on the other hand, is the normalization complete?

RAGE: The Iliad was a poem of rage!

2026-08-03T09:42:13.562-04:00

MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2026

But also, the rage of Senator Paul: Now that's we've all seen the film adaptation of the Odyssey, let's go all the way back to the start.

More specifically, let's return to the first few lines of the Iliad, the war poem which preceded the poem that's known as the Odyssey.

The Iliad was a war poem, but it was mainly a poem of rage. Or so said Professor Knox, in his Introduction to the 1990 translation by Robert Fagles:

THE ILIAD
'Iliad" is a word that means "a poem about Ilium" (i.e., Troy). and Homer's great epic poem has been known as "The Iliad" ever since the Greek historian Herodotus so referred to it in the fifth century B.C. But the title is not an adequate description of the contents of the poem, which are best summed up in its opening line: "the rage of Peleus' son Achilles."
The incident that provoked Achilles' rage took place in the tenth and final year of the Achaean attack on Troy, and though Homer does work into his narrative scenes that recall earlier stages of the war...the rage of Achilles—its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences—is the theme of the poem, the mainspring of the plot.

The rage of Achilles is the soul of the beast—and sure enough, the Iliad begins right there. These are the opening lines of the Fagles translation:

BOOK ONE
The Rage of Achilles

Rage—Goddess. sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds.
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

Achilles' rage produced many lost lives. Just for the record, Agamemnon, lord of men, is also in a state of rage as European literature begins:

[continuing directly]
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
What god drove them to fight with such a fury?

"Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto" drove the pair to fight with such fury, the poem now reveals. "Incensed at the king / he swept a fatal plague through the army—men were dying / and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo's priest."

In the short run, Agamemnon's rage subsides. For reasons which remain instructive today, the rage of Achilles did not—and, after a period of sulking in his tents, his rage was redirected at the very existence of Troy.

As the Iliad begins, the rage of the two Achaeans (Greeks) leads them to fight each other with a fury. And even though the fall of Troy has not yet occurred as the Iliad ends, Professor Knox describes the furious conduct of the Achaeans when the sacred city finally succumbs.

Brilliant Achilles has slaughtered Hector, the prince of Troy. Building on ten years of tribal rage, that slaughter leads to this:

Introduction, Professor Knox
[...]
The death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city.
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history...to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich. no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

The rage produced the unspeakable.

Hector's baby son, thrown from the battlements? His sister Cassandra, assaulted unspeakably in the temple? In fact, the murderous fury which follows from rage persists within this pair of ancient texts until the closing lines of the Odyssey, which we'll visit before the week is done.

European literature begins with the murderous conduct produced by fury, by rage. Last Wednesday, furious senators from Red America's MAGA world directed remarkable acts of fury at Dr. Anthony Fauci, who remains a highly respected figure within the world of Blue America.

Did Dr. Fauci do something wrong during the Covid years? Did he make such unwise policy assessments? Is it even possible that he engaged in dishonest behavior?

Everything is always possible, but nothing can ever be resolved when inane spear-chuckers from a furious tribe agree to perform their tribal rage for the benefit of tribal followers.

Last Wednesday, an astounding number of Republican senators behaved in murderous ways as they mocked and berated Dr. Fauci during a Senate hearing. It doesn't help when the leader of the pack continues to lead with a blindingly obvious groaner, as described by Jessica McDonald in this lengthy piece for FactCheck.org:

Paul Distorts Fauci’s Diary Entry About COVID-19 and Wet Market
[...]
In the hearing, and in multiple statements before and after, Paul has focused on a Jan. 26, 2020, diary entry in which Fauci stated that “the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”
Paul has zeroed in on these statements to falsely suggest that Fauci was saying then that the coronavirus didn’t have a natural origin and to argue that he wasn’t being transparent with the public.
[...]
This is not the “gotcha” that Paul makes it out to be. Citing this one passage...falsely implies that if the pandemic didn’t originate in the one market, that it couldn’t have had a natural origin...

Duh! As McDonald notes, Senator Paul just keeps pimping a classic 5-star groaner. In fairness to Paul, other Republican senators behaved in ways which were even more clownlike still.

(Who is Jessica McDonald? She's "a science journalist who joined FactCheck.org in 2018. She trained as a scientist, receiving her Ph.D. in immunology from Yale University in 2013.")

Let's return to the dawn of the West! The Achaeans were laying siege to Troy in a rage-filled clash of civilizations.

(Their motive remains instructive today. They were prepared to fight and die for ten years in response to a perceived sexual insult. They wanted Helen back.)

They wanted Helen back! In the meantime, Achilles and Agamemon fought with a fury over Briseis, a young woman who had been stolen from a neighboring village for sexual purposes. Early in the Iliad, we seem to learn that Odysseus has a kidnapped young woman of his own.

(Is the Iliad ever taught this way? Even now, we'll semi-guess that the answer is still no.)

Senator Paul bristled with rage. Three or four of his MAGA colleagues behaved like absolute fools.

Somewhat similarly, the Achaeans displayed a vicious tribal rage when sacred Troy finally fell. The headline of this lengthy report in the Washington Post describes the frequently-stated goal of their present-day successors:

The intense pressure facing Fauci, as GOP lawmakers push for his jailing

Dr. Fauci is 85. The modern Achaeans, filled with rage, would like to see him in jail.

Yesterday, it was the rage of Robert Kennedy Jr. which spilled out onto the nation's TV screens.

Is something wrong with this furious man? For many years, the answer has seemed to perhaps be yes—but at times of tribal rage, such people can be valuable.

The Iliad was a poem of rage. In the end, the rage of Achilles produced the fall of Troy.

Vicious, grisly behavior ensued. Absent some sort of new politics, will our civilization, imperfect as it always has been, perhaps go down the drain too?

Tomorrow: Ed Luce of the Financial Times, speaking on today's Morning Joe:

"I can describe this guy as a nutcase. He's a nutcase. Let's be frank."

SUNDAY: We've decided to ask that question again!

2026-08-02T08:45:36.771-04:00

SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 2026

Even today, on a Sunday: Is something wrong with the person serving as the sitting president?

We've decided to ask that question again. We base our question on Zachary Leeman's report for Mediaite.

We've omitted one word from the headline, but the start of Leeman's report seems to speak for itself:

Trump Kisses Jesus and Arrests Aliens in Truth Social Posting Spree
President Donald Trump went on a posting spree on Truth Social on Saturday, sharing AI-generated images of him doing everything from arresting extraterrestrials to kissing a statue of Jesus Christ.
[...]
He also posted a number of strange memes that ran all over the place.
One image was of him kissing a golden statue of Jesus.
[Image]
Another post was a recycled picture of Trump walking with officials next to an [extraterrestrial] alien in handcuffs.
[Image]
The president also doubled down on his long-standing wish for the United States to take control of Greenland.
[Image]

And so on from there.

To see the images, just click this. Also, you can look for the word we omitted.

(Furthermore, and just for the record: Yes, the images are actually there.)

Is something wrong with the sitting president? In all cases, we would regard any such situation as a obvious human tragedy. But given the gentleman's high position, it seems that this would also be a dangerous state of affairs.

Is something wrong with the sitting president? Also, will Blue America's major news orgs ever decide that the time has come to find a journalistically appropriate way to pursue that obvious question?

Leeman reports, you decide.

SATURDAY: "He has a story in his head!"

2026-08-01T10:20:37.483-04:00

SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 2026

Is he mentally ill? Is something wrong with President Trump? Once again, we started the current week with that same old question.

On Monday night, Lawrence O'Donnell repeatedly called the president a madman. At one point, he referred to the president's "insanity."

In our view, O'Donnell did excellent work all week. But at one point on Monday night, he made a deeply peculiar remark:

O'DONNELL (7/27/26): Everyone knows how crazy the president of the United States is. And no one is calling for the use of the 25th amendment to remove the madman in that image from the office of the presidency because the entire professional Republican Party in Washington has accepted fully the madness of Donald Trump.
The American news media has understandably run out of words to describe the horror of the madness of Donald Trump.

Our journalists have done all they could? They've "understandably run out of words?"

Lawrence O'Donnell is deeply experienced, but that was a strange assertion.

As we noted yesterday, for perhaps the ten millionth time, our major news orgs have agreed that they must never discuss an obvious possibility—the possibility that the president is (severely) mentally ill.

Over the course of the past ten years, many medical specialists have said that the president does seem to be mentally ill. In the old days, several ranking medical specialists discussed that possibility with O'Donnell himself, right there on The Last Word.

Below, we want to remind you, once again, about the basic conceptual frameworks surrounding the concept of "mental illness." First, though, consider what happened, yesterday afternoon and yesterday evening, on two major news broadcasts.

We start with last night's PBS NewsHour. Brooks and Capehart were on hand, as always, to be interviewed by Geoff Bennett.

Is something wrong with President Trump? Right at the start of their weekly segment, David Brooks said this:

BENNETT (7/31/26): David, what does it say that the president is apparently willing to sacrifice his attorney general's confirmation, rather than make concessions on this settlement fund?
BROOKS: All hail the king! The government is there to serve the president, not to serve the government. And so he wants that $1.8 million [sic] slush fund—
Billion! Sorry. I was only counting my share.
(Laughter)
But he also wants immunity from prosecution from the IRS, and that's the key. Because he's made boatloads of money...

So he wants that. And he's got this story in his head, which is like the core of his identity these days: He was robbed of the 2020 election, the January 6 people were perfectly nice people, and the prosecutions that he endured in his years out of power were the deep state going after him.
And that's central to his identity, and that's going to always be the priority.

The president "has a story in his head," and it's "like the core of his identity." As Brooks describes it, the story in the president's head seems to conflict with basic reality, but it sounds like that story's not going to change.

He's got a story in his head, It's central to his identity! We're inclined to agree with what Brooks said, although what he said is quite fuzzy. Earlier, on MS NOW's Deadline: White House, one-time Trump aide Sarah Matthews seemed to say something similar.

Matthews resigned as a Trump aide on January 6. She spoke with Nicolle Wallace:

WALLACE: (7/31/26): There are lots of public-facing proof points of his decline, performatively, perhaps cognitively—I don't know.
This feels like the inability to stop talking about an event where it was his supporters who were beating the cops...Why do you think he can't stop talking about it?
MATTHEWS: You know, I think that Donald Trump has always been a broken man. But I do think that losing the 2020 election fair and square to Joe Biden permanently broke his brain.
WALLACE: [Laughter]
MATTHEWS: I don't think he's ever been able to recover from that, because he looked at someone like Joe Biden and he thought, "How could I lose to this guy?" I mean he called him, you know, "Sleepy Joe." And then obviously it affected him because he's a narcissist. His ego won't allow him to see the facts for what they are—that there was no election fraud and that it was Joe Biden who was the winner of the 2020 election, and so he's been fixated on this topic and talking about the election...

Matthews continued from there—and she isn't a medical specialist. Like almost everyone else, she hasn't had professional experience with people who are (significantly) mentally ill.

She isn't a medical specialist! But she plainly seemed to be stating the view that something is wrong with the president:

According to Matthews, his ego won't allow him to see the facts for what they are.

As she continues, Matthews plainly says that, in her opinion, Trump really believes the apparently crazy claims he keeps making about the events of January 6.

According to Matthews, he isn't lying—he really believes it! That's not unlike what David Brooks said about the story the president carries around in his head, which is like the core to his identity.

Are Brooks and Matthews possibly describing a type of diagnosable "mental disorder/mental illness" For example, could this be a diagnosable version of "delusional disorder?"

("Delusional disorder?" That's a clinical "mental disorder/mental illness" you can read about simply by clicking here.)

Are Brooks and Matthews clumsily describing some diagnosable mental disorder (mental illness)? Putting it a bit more simply, or perhaps somewhat differently:

Is it possible that the sitting president really believes the unfounded claims he continues to make?

We don't know, and they don't know either—but there are medical specialists in this country who, at least in theory, could shed light on that possibility based on their medical experience.

That said, for better or worse, people like Wallace have agreed that they will never interview the medical specialists who could offer expert assessments about the possible state of the president's mental health and cognition. They simply aren't going to go there!

For better or worse, Wallace won't interview such medical specialists, and neither will Rachel Maddow or pretty much anyone else. They won't tell you that they're skipping such interviews. Presumably, they're just doing what management tells them they have to do.

On occasion, O'Donnell conducted such interviews in the past, but it looks like those days are gone. For better or worse, Wallace simply chooses to laugh when a lay person like Matthews launches an honest attempt at describing the president's mental state.

Does it matter if something is wrong in the way Matthews describes? Below, we'll highlight one key phrase in what Mary Trump recently said:

BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?
MARY TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.
But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.

Her uncle's ongoing psychiatric disorders "are only going to worsen!" Other medical specialists have said the same thing, dating back to 2017. Wallace laughs delightedly and refuses to consider the possibility that this disturbing prediction could be accurate.

Is there some such thing as "mental illness?" Does "mental illness" exist?

Our primitive discourse is highly unsophisticated when it comes to such basic questions. As a general matter, we Americans struggle along with an extremely unsophisticated public discourse, the results of which are now increasingly obvious.

We Americans! As a general matter, we accept "the germ theory of [physical] disease," but we have a profoundly undeveloped set of understandings about the basic features of mental illness. More generally:

Over here in Blue America, We Blues just aren't amazingly sharp, and our best-known journalists aren't a whole lot better.

Over there, in Red America, the Fox News Channel airs its clownlike dog-and-pony shows to audiences which dwarf our own, and our news orgs in Blue America don't say a word about the endless clowning.

There's nothing left for the press to say? Our major news orgs have "understandably run out of words to describe the horror of the madness of Donald Trump?"

We've run out of ways to describe the madness without ever having tried the one most obvious way?

Why in the world—why on earth—did O'Donnell make such a weird statement? In fairness, we'll close with this:

Is it possible that President Trump is "mentally ill" in some serious way? (For example, is it possible that he's "delusional" in some clinical way?") Beyond that, is it possible that he's "mentally ill" in a way "which is only going to worsen?"

You'd think our journos would want to know! But if they tried to examine such a possibility, would they know how to do it?

As with any serious illness, a serious mental illness should be a cause of sympathy, pity, concern. Our discourse doesn't run on such fuel. As Professor Brabender memorably said, midway through the last century:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.

FRIDAY: We went to see The Odyssey!

2026-07-31T18:41:12.327-04:00

FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2026

A TDH movie review: We went to see The Odyssey this very afternoon. We lasted until midway through the Cyclops.

We attended the 4 p.m. show at The Charles. We were airlifted back to our sprawling campus in time for the start of The Five!

What went wrong on our trip to The Charles? Let us riddle it out:

The following passage comes from Professor Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad. Yes, that's the Iliad, not its sequel, but you may get the idea:

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,
praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth...

Where the breakers crash and drag! But what was Odysseus praying for? Let us complete the offering:

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,
praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth
that they might bring the proud heart of Achilles
round with speed and ease.

Achilles was sulking in his tents, refusing to fight, assisted by sacred Patroclus. A wily tactician had been sent by Agamemnon, lord of men, to urge him to beat back his anger and return to the war against Troy.

So much takes place in the lines which follow—though yes, that isn't the Odyssey. But whatever made anyone think that some such experience could somehow be moved to a screen?

We expect to continue our review tomorrow. "Emily Wilson was way too kind," several young analysts said.

A Daily Howler point of concern: Warning! Every speck of the Iliad is built around the human impulse sometimes described in modern times as "toxic masculinity."

On The Five, the children scream about the use of that term. But all in all, at the dawn of the West, let's face it—there it was!

WE BLUES: Everyone knows it, O'Donnell says!

2026-07-31T10:39:26.671-04:00

FRIDAY, JULY 31, 2026

Why hasn't it ever been said? We Blues! Yesterday brought another worrying assessment concerning the race for the House. It comes from Larry Sabato, one of the last of the sane ones.

In its newest assessment of the race for the House, Sabato's Center for Politics reports an improved prospect for Democrats. But even so, this is where matters are now said to stand:

Sabato Shifts 14 Races Toward Democrats...
[...]
“Our overall topline assessment is basically unchanged, though: Democrats remain favored to flip the House majority in November, but Republicans have a path, too,” [a Sabato analyst] wrote.
Currently, Sabato’s ratings list 179 seats as Safe Republican; 208 rated Safe, Likely, or Leans R; 181 Safe Democratic; and 207 Safe, Likely, or Leans D. Twenty races are listed as Toss-Up, 15 currently held by Republicans and five by Democrats.

That report comes from Mediaite. In our view, those numbers are frightening, close.

We Blues! The president's numbers are in the tank, but he won't be running this year. As We Blues exult about his numbers, the House numbers seem scarily close.

I can't believe I 'm losing to this guy! Way back in 1988, SNL's version of Michael Dukakis memorably voiced that point of incomprehension as the election neared.

We Blues have never quite understood the ways we sometimes look to others. We've been planning to examine that matter next week, though the madness of Wednesday's Fauci hearing may push that topic back again.

How can we (even possibly) be losing to the party of President Trump? We'd call that a very good question!

For today, we want to return to the madness of last Friday night's address at the White House Correspondents Dinner. More specifically, we want to return to Lawrence O'Donnell's reaction to that endless, disordered address, and to the man who delivered it.

Returning from a weeklong vacation, O'Donnell discussed the address this past Monday night. Before he did, he discussed the state of the war with Iran—and in his program's first few minutes, he came right out with this:

O'DONNELL (7/27/26): The one story that you know every historian will write about when looking at the year 2026 is Donald Trump's war. And in that war, historians will find everything they need to know about Donald Trump's incompetence, Donald Trump's laziness, Donald Trump's ignorance and yes, Donald Trump's madness.
What happens when a madman starts a war?

As far as we know, "madness" isn't a clinical term. It's a word which is often used in a colloquial sense, and the same can be said about "madman."

That said, O'Donnell is one of the very few major journalists who have explored the blindingly obvious possibility that the current sitting president is afflicted by some version of "mental illness" (whatever that challenging term might be taken to mean).

"What happens when a madman starts a war?" The doctor did seem to be IN—and O'Donnell continued from there:

O'DONNELL: [The difficulties in Iran] have left him deeply frustrated, his aides say, and have made him more erratic, even by Trumpian standards.

He's been even more erratic than normal! Indeed, "erratic" is "the kindest possible description of Donald Trump's public utterances," O'Donnell (quite reasonably) said.

O'Donnell then displayed a few of the crazy AI-generated images the president had posted on Truth Social over the weekend. With the normalization long since completed, we've seen those crazy images—posted by the sitting president!—reported and discussed nowhere else.

In one of the images—"hallucinations," O'Donnell called them--President Trump pictured himself helping George Washington clamber onto the top of Mount Rushmore. Eventually, O'Donnell said this about the sitting president:

O'DONNELL: Insanity cannot be anticipated. And that's why you could never possibly have imagined that image of Donald Trump and George Washington being put out by a president of the United States until Donald Trump did it.
And then, when he did it, when he flashes his madness like that on social media...it is completely empty of surprise, because everyone knows how crazy the president of the United States is.
[...]
The entire world knows that the man who started that war in Iran, and on the 149th day of that war put out that image of himself with George Washington, is a madman. That is what has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt in five months of Donald Trump's war, and then and in the now over ten years of Donald Trump's political career.

Everyone knows how crazy he is. The entire world knows he's a madman.

The word "insanity" was also used. Astoundingly, though, in the part of that passage we've so far omitted, O'Donnell also made the highlighted statement:

O'DONNELL: ...everyone knows how crazy the president of the United States is.
And no one is calling for the use of the 25th amendment to remove the madman in that image from the office of the presidency because the entire professional Republican Party in Washington has accepted fully the madness of Donald Trump.
The American news media has understandably run out of words to describe the horror of the madness of Donald Trump...

"Insanity" and "madness" aren't clinical terms. That said, it seems clear that O'Donnell is saying that President Trump is (severely) mentally ill.

Why, then—why in the world—would he also say this?

The American news media has understandably run out of words to describe the horror of the madness of Donald Trump.

Why in the world would he say that?

In fact, for better or worse, America's major news orgs have made exactly zero attempt to explore the fairly obvious possibility that the president is in the grip of some significant mental illness, or is suffering a cognitive decline, or quite possibly both.

Or, quite possibly, both! That's what his niece, a doctorate-holding clinical therapist, said to Erin Burnett earlier this year:

BURNETT (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?
MARY TRUMP: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.
But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.

She described an "obvious" cognitive decline, layered atop decades of "serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen."

Obviously, the fact that she said it doesn't mean that it's true. But she wasn't invited back to explain what she meant, nor has anyone else asked her to elaborate on the assessment she offered. Nor would our journalists (or politicians) know how to discuss such matters, even if they wanted to try.

They wouldn't have any idea how to do it. Along with just about everyone else, We Blues just aren't that sharp.

O'Donnell has frequently criticized the work of the mainstream press. By law, he isn't allowed to discuss Gutfeld, Watters, Compagno, Timpf/Tyrus, or even Dana Perino.

We Blues! By rule of law in the upper-end press, they simply cannot be discussed.

That said, O'Donnell has frequently criticized the mainstream press. Why would he say that they have nothing left to say about the president, when it's clear that they have vowed that they will never discuss the possibilities we've just mentioned?

We don't know why O'Donnell said that. Meanwhile, We Blues! We simply aren't the people we imagine ourselves to be.

In particular, we simply aren't unusually sharp. We enable the other side in a wide array of ways, and we rarely seem to know what they are.

This doesn't mean that we're bad people—because, of course, we aren't. It simply means we're people people, a bit like everyone else.

It doesn't mean that we can't be loved. Yevtusheno said this about us, though in translation, of course:

People

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

[...]

Who we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, what did we know?

Everyone knows it—but no one has said it! Of whom, what did we know?

To watch O'Donnell's Monday night monologue: It's available from MS NOW under this headline:

Lawrence: Day 150 shows what happens when a madman starts a war

To watch the tape, click here.

THURSDAY: Did the GOP win the redistricting wars?

2026-07-30T13:11:43.997-04:00

THURSDAY, JULY 30, 2026

That's what the Cook Report says: We Blues! Our tribunes keep stressing the president's approval numbers. Pleasingly, those numbers just keep getting worse.

That said, the president isn't running for Congress this fall—and the Cook Political Report has just unveiled a discouraging assessment concerning the race for control of the House.

Did the GOP win this year's mid-census redistricting wars? Here's the start of Alex Griffing's report for Mediaite:

Cook Political Predicts GOP Took 12 House Seats From Dems With Trump’s Gerrymander Push
Dave Wasserman, the senior editor and elections analyst for The Cook Political Report, released a deep-dive assessment on Wednesday on the state of play for the House following the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering by several states ahead of the midterms.
[...]
Wasserman crunched the data and came up with the definitive number for how the gerrymandering wars, which spread to ten states in total from Florida to Utah to Ohio, impacted the House map overall...going into November.

At that point, Griffing's language gets a bit technical. You can examine his report for yourself, but it looks like the Cook Report says the redistricting wars most likely resulted in a significant improvement for Republican prospects.

In Wasserman's assessment, redistricting would seem to have cost the Democrats twelve seats. That leaves Democrats poised for a narrow win in the race for the House, as opposed to a larger projected win if redistricting in the various states hadn't occurred.

Obviously, that's a projection—an educated assessment. Also, it seems to us to be extremely bad news.

Whatever the facts of the matter might be, Dr. Fauci is now being demonized to produce a new talking point for the party which currently lacks them. The nuttier planks in the DSA platform are being put to use the same way.

(That and "the Commies," of course. Let's not forget about them!)

WE BLUES: Disordered Republican solons gone wild!

2026-07-30T10:58:39.444-04:00

THURSDAY, JULY 30, 2026

Then later, the "cable news" kidz: Last evening, on The Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell very much did get it right.

He opened with the Fauci hearing, not with some bit of relative ephemera. He even said this, in passing, as he discussed the astonishing conduct put on display in the Senate hearing room:

No Republican senator mentioned today that, on his last day if office—on January 19, 2021—Donald Trump gave Dr. Fauci the Presidential Commendation.

For the record, it was part of a set of Presidential Commendations given to several dozen members of the "Operation Warp Speed Team." General Milley was even commended by President Trump that day, just to refresh you on the way these things can change.

O'Donnell started with the astonishing hearing, exactly as he (and others) should have done. He was wise enough to name the madness on display in the hearing room. He played tape of Senator Blumenthal saying that yesterday's hearing was "one of the darkest days in Senate history," and he added such assessments as these:

Republican senators disgraced themselves today, attacking the man who saved lives, possibly millions of lives, during the Covid-19 outbreak.
[Dr. Fauci's opening statement] led Rand Paul to turn his hearing room into the most disgraceful Stalinist tribunal the United States Senate has ever seen.

Did Dr. Fauci save millions of lives? We can't answer that question.

Was this really the most disgraceful Stalinist tribunal the United States Senate has ever seen? We can't assess that either!

That said, given the madness put on display by Republican senators, it's hard to believe that this wasn't "one of the darkest days in the history of the Senate"—a day so gruesome that one of the mutts was even willing to showboat by saying this to the committee's lone witness:

Here I am sitting in front of you six years later saying, "Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?"

Yes, that was actually said.

We're dealing with anthropology here—with the level to which tribal groups may descend when they've convinced themselves that it's time to engage in a vast tribal war. Yesterday, how bad did the madness get?

In the case of Moreno, Johnson, Tuberville, Hawley we'd say it got astoundingly bad. We thought again of Professor Knox's description of the mayhem which occurred when the Achaeans finally overran Troy, but that (fictional) exhibition of human fury involved acts we won't return to today.

We may attempt to memorialize yesterday's madness in a set of reports next week. For today, we want to give you one example of the lunacy put on display by the Republican solons gone wild, and one example of the madness put on display by The Five.

Example one: The Wisconsin senator's tale

Yesterday afternoon, Wu and Engber produced an instant account of the mayhem for The Atlantic. Their overview reads like this:

What Anthony Fauci Didn’t Say
[...]
Senator Paul had said he called the hearing—billed simply as “Testimony of Anthony Fauci”—because “the American people deserve answers” about Fauci’s role in the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, the American people got something absurd: a three-hour spectacle of unchallenged allegations and distorted facts.

To the extent that we the people still exist, we were exposed to a boatload of "distorted facts," Wu and Engber wrote.

"Distorted facts" is a strange construction. Here's one example of what they meant. It comes from Senator Johnson:

[T]he most obvious distortions at the hearing came from the Senate panel. Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, proposed that the pulmonary infarction Fauci experienced in 2021—the details of which were revealed in the pages from Fauci’s private diary that Paul released last weekend—may have resulted from COVID vaccination and booster shots. More than 39,000 deaths had resulted from COVID-19 vaccination, he said, and although Facebook had censored his supporters when they tried to share that fact, “this wasn’t disinformation, this was the truth.”
Fauci only sat there with his fingers clasped. He did not point out that this was not the truth at all, and that Johnson’s data—derived from unvetted, user-submitted information in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System—are likely to overestimate the real total by about 1,000 times.

Senator Johnson has sometimes been described as the Senate's dumbest member. That was before Senator Tuberville came along and sought to wrestle that crown away.

However that contest might be judged, Wu and Engber estimate that Johnson's data were inaccurate by a factor of one thousand!

Are Wu and Engber right about that? Given Johnson's long track record, we know of no obvious reason to disbelieve what they've said.

Example two: Compagno, one of The Five

Wu and Engber posted at 5 p.m., just as The Five was starting to air on the Fox News Channel. It's our flailing nation's most-watched "cable news" show.

Yesterday's edition was a debacle. The program opened with a segment about the Fauci hearing. The mutt Greg Gutfeld, going first, quickly offered this dispatch from a distant tribal reserve:

GUTFELD (7/29/26): There's one question, it's such an easy question, and he [Dr. Fauci] should answer it:
How did he know the origins of the Covid virus when he said it was a wet market? It was one of those things where like, we knew that it was the lab leak. But how did he know?

This manifest nutcase—and we're sorry, but that's what he is—did stumble forward from there. But in that passage, Gutfeld was assuring Fox News viewers that they and their tribe have brilliantly known all along that Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan lab

Out here in the actual world, no such thing can be said to be "known" today. Nor do we have any idea what this disturbed, disordered man meant when he seemed to say that Dr. Fauci has declared that the virus originated in the Wuhan wet market.

That isn't the position that Dr. Fauci has routinely voiced—but so what? Fox News viewers were now bring handed their angry tribe's reassuring scripture.

Assessed by any rational standard, a nation in which a nut-ball like Gutfeld is a leading figure in broadcast news has already become a failed state. Accordingly, the miserable performances continued from there, with recitations by Watters and Ford which we'll expect to assess next week.

Straining for coherence as always, Emily Compagno spoke last. In its embarrassing entirety, here's what the Fox savant said. We invite you to give it a look:

COMPAGNO: For a party that flies planes and launches campaigns based on "no kings," it's shocking to me that they worshiped this one man, and based on his unilateral recommendations threw in the towel for everything, followed him blindly, and now that's the reason they can't bear to acknowledge that behind the curtain the whole time was a little tiny man pretending to be Oz.
If the science had been correct, if his diary said, "Yes, all of my research shows that everything I've been saying on air is true, I stand behind it," then it would just be a shame. But now it is a sham. Now it is downright fraud and negligence and corruption and concealment of government records and obstruction of justice and so much more, and by the way, the standard for negligence, as you knew or should have known, he doesn't even have to have malintent to be on the hook for that at the state level, so what I see here is not that Operation Warp Speed was the result of a concerted effort in wartime from a country. I see that it was simply at the behest of one small, egomaniacal, sullen, hubris-infected individual that made everyone fall in line after him and those that dared to question him in any way, shape or form were vilified and ostracized.

And in addition to those—we can never get them back—million deaths, what about the hundreds of thousands of livelihoods and businesses? The weaponization of the administrative state, the multiple felonies that were booked because people dared to keep serving others in restaurants, and this guy dares to say in his opening statement that it was about embarrassing him or intimidating him and that he somehow had a right to privacy of his private diaries on a government computer?
No, Idiot! For someone that was a public servant for decades, he should know a pen he held was never his own personal pen, everything was actually owned by the American people and that we do, therefore, have an interest in reading it.
Thank God, in fact, he did write it on a government computer like an idiot, because now we can see that he was downright lying,

And for a scientist that people held him above that standard, they said with impunity we believe him because he should be above all politics and above all ego, instead we learn that he was simply lying for his own monetary and fame gain, which is the most tragic thing of all because it is so ephemeral, it is so gross.
And to see him today at the hearing—just final quick thought on this:
He did not even have the integrity to look those lawmakers in the eyes when they were detailing the lies that he ruined while he contrasted the death toll of that day on the same page with his Vanity Fair cover story, for example. He makes me sick. and I know that despite this limited pardon, there will be accountability, legally, for him, and likely criminally, moving forward.

Yes, that's what she said. The name-calling was general over her high-speed, garbled remarks.

According to the perpetually furious Compagno, Dr. Fauci is an "idiot." He's "a little tiny man pretending to be Oz," she said. He's "a small, egomaniacal, sullen, hubris-infected individual" who makes Compagno sick.

As to what this idiot has done wrong—as to the offenses for which he faces criminal liability moving forward—the picture was much less clear.

Most strikingly, Compagno said Dr. Fauci was "downright lying" about something at some point in time. But she never got around to saying what the "downright lies" actually were, or how she feels so sure that Fauci's statements were wrong.

Most clearly, Compagno complains that Dr. Fauci thought he could assume future privacy when he recorded his daily experiences on a government computer. Also, he wouldn't look Republican statesmen in the eye when they were saying things like this:

Here I am sitting in front of you six years later saying, "Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?"

In the face of such obvious greatness, the small man with all the hubris refused to make eye contact!

It's madness to have people like Gutfeld and Compagno on the air at our nation's most watched news channel. But then again, We Blues!

We Blues! At our largest news orgs, our tribunes refuse to report and discuss the daily madness being created at the channel in question.

People like Gutfeld, Compagno and Watters offer manifest lunacy—remarkable imitations of life—every day of the week. But then again, We Blues!

When Compagno offers garbled fury—when Gutfeld slimes and cons the nation—our "journalists" all know what to do:

They agree to look away!

Tomorrow: Lawrence O'Donnell cops a plea on behalf of Blue America's press

WEDNESDAY: Inventing Fauci as a demon!

2026-07-29T14:52:46.235-04:00

WEDNESDAY, JULY 29, 2026

The Fox News Channel at work: Friend, do you know what Dr. Fauci is currently charged with—what he's charged with as he's transformed into a high-profile villain?

Do you understand the charges? Do you believe the various people lodging the charges have any idea what they're talking about?

It's always possible that some of them do! But how sure do you feel about that?

How many such people do you think are scientifically competent? As an example, we saw expert guest Tom Shillue ranting about Dr. Fauci in the first segment of today's Outnumbered program on the Fox News Channel.

Who the heck is Tom Shillue? He's one of the comedians most commonly featured on the Gutfeld! program—except today, that is, when he was presenting as a "hang him high" approximation of a scientific savant.

We'll provide transcript excerpts tomorrow.

Meanwhile, We Blues! Our tribunes refuse to report or discuss the way the Fox News Channel works. As a tribe, we're engaged in a slow, steady act of tribal retreat and surrender.

Much like humans everywhere, we aren't skilled at seeing ourselves as we are. Details on the morrow, with visits to some of the most patently phony Republican Party senators.

(More on Us Blues next week.)

By the way:

Where did Covid-19 originate? Do you think the question's been settled?

WE BLUES: "Hilarious," the chyrons said!

2026-07-29T10:46:05.594-04:00

WEDNESDAY, JULY 29, 2026

Correspondents "can't take a joke:" Judged by normal standards, the sitting president did have one good joke.

In fact, it was a very good joke, and it got a very good laugh at last Friday night's dinner. Eighteen minutes into his endless remarks, this is what he said:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/24/26): I hope that everyone finally got to enjoy their entire, very delicious beef tenderloins. It's very special beef. And I want you all to know that Bobby Kennedy, who's right here, personally ran over the cow in his car.
[Laughter, some applause]
Boom. And he cut it up, and he brought it here for you to eat tonight. So it's very fresh.

By traditional norms, that was a very good joke. It was aimed, in a good-natured way, at one of the president's own, as is the norm at such functions.

(The president quickly added this: "We love Bobby. I'll tell you, he's a piece of work. You think it's—it is fun, but he is a very different kind of a person, I will tell you. [Laughter] But he has what it takes and he's smart. And he loves the country, and he wants people to be made to feel good.")

He wants people to be made to feel good. It was the coda to a very good joke, and it came to the audience, live and direct, from an earlier cultural time.

The president had that one good joke. The rest of his 65-minute forced march was vastly different.

C-Span's cameras scanned the embarrassed, frozen faces on display throughout the hall. Crickets invaded the ballroom—and cabinet members were present as guests, often of the Red American news orgs whose correspondents shared the hall with colleagues from the Blue American press.

Crickets routinely swarmed the room—unless you were watching the Fox News Channel on Saturday morning, when the chyrons on Fox & Friends Weekend instantly reassured Red America in the manner shown:

TRUMP MAKES TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO WHCA STAGE

DINNER IS SERVED
TRUMP THROWS OUT JABS AT DEMS, MEDIA AND CABINET

CAN'T TAKE A JOKE
MEDIA CRITICIZES TRUMP'S HILARIOUS WHCA DINNER SPEECH

That's what the chyrons said. For the record, the hilarious speech, a triumphant return, had included such "jabs" as this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: She's a low IQ person, and she's also a very dishonest person. And she ought to get the hell out of our country. She shouldn't be here. She shouldn't be in our country.

Hilariously, the president said that Rep. Omar (D-MN) "ought to get the hell out of our country." As you can hear on the tape, it was crickets all the way down as he delivered that hilarious jab.

As a matter of basic decency, we're deleting the unfounded claims the president advanced about Rep. Omar in the course of a long, hilarious jab. He never stops making those unfounded claims, and he's never asked why he does.

Red and Blue scribes and cabinet members alike, no one managed to find a way to laugh at the endless array of personal insults the president dispensed all through his endless address. But on Fox & Friends Weekend the very next morning, the focus was on the way the correspondents couldn't "put down their swords and have a good time" with a president who was offering humor like that.

"They just couldn't do it," or so Rachel Campos-Duffy cheerfully said. And by the time The Big Weekend Show aired at 5 o'clock that afternoon, the president's performance had possibly become even funnier.

"The president stole the show," co-host Tomi Lahren instantly told Red American viewers.

"It's nice for a night to lighten the mood a bit." guest co-host Taylor Riggs eventually added.

In our view, Riggs rarely disappoints. "I love that we can take a step back and laugh a bit," she went on to say. "I love the moment for what it is and represents, and also the levity that I think this country desperately wants right now."

Yes, she was taking about the previous night's WHCA event! The chyrons were hailing the president's TRIUMPHANT RETURN, though two other chyrons said this:

LAUGHING IT OFF
PRESIDENT TRUMP JOKES WITH THE MEDIA AT WHCA DINNER

TAKING CENTER STAGE
PRESIDENT TRUMP POKES FUN AT 'DUMOCRATS' IN SPEECH

Hilariously, he even "poked fun" at the "Dumocrats!" When he did, he carefully explained, for the ten millionth time, that the word "dumb" really does ends in a B.

"It's very quiet," the president said, after he'd offered that "Dumocrats" jab.

It's very quiet, he said. At this point, a question arises:

Different people will of course react in different ways to a nearly endless, 65-minute address. It's also true that the landscape of American "cable news" is routinely peopled by messenger children pimping the corporate agitprop Xeroxed for them by their owners.

The channels may tend to be highly partisan at this point in time. As part of the "democratization of media," the medium known as "cable news" has now produced such situations as this, Joe DePaolo reporting:

Fox News Has Mentioned Fauci 343 Times Since Monday. CNN and MS NOW Combined? 11
Depending on which cable news network you’ve been watching, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s newly-released diaries are either the biggest story in America, or a total nothingburger.
An analysis of cable news transcripts conducted by Mediaite...shows that over the past 36 hours, Fox News has mentioned Dr. Fauci’s name 343 times on its air...roughly once every 6 minutes.
Some shows have gone deeper than others. Jesse Watters Primetime mentioned Fauci 36 times on Monday night...
It is a very, very different story over on CNN and MS NOW. CNN has mentioned Fauci 10 times on its air over the past 36 hours, per Mediate’s analysis.

On MS NOW, Fauci's name had been mentioned just once, DePaolo further said.

In presenting those numbers, DePaolo is describing the way the partisan organization of "cable news" is helping to create a pair of dueling Americas—a pair of rival American nations. Those nations are separate but far from equal when it comes to the delivery and receipt of real or alleged information and news.

On Fox, the focus on the Fauci diaries has come with a very aggressive set of claims about the former official's evil behavior—and yes, that word has been used.

Over here in Blue America, We Blues don't have the slightest idea that any of this is taking place on the "cable news" channel whose audiences dwarf the size of our own.

"The far right is really amazing in their distortion of reality,” Fauci wrote in his diary in May 2021. For many more such comments from Fauci's diary as the war on his person developed, we recommend this lengthy report from the Washington Post.

"The far right is really amazing in their distortion of reality? Is some such phenomenon currently taking place on programs like the aforementioned Jesse Watters Primetime? Of one thing you can feel fully certain:

Over here in Blue America, We Blues aren't going to ask! Our tribunes are going to take a dive as they spoonfeed us the president's latest approvals.

We Blues! We find it hard to see ourselves for the stumblebums we frequently are. Our tribunes refuse to discuss the Fox News Channel, and they refuse to discuss the apparent or possible state of the sitting president's mental health and cognition.

We find it hard to see ourselves as we actually are. Tomorrow, we'll turn to what Lawrence O'Donnell said about the president and the mainstream press in the wake of the hilarity POTUS brought forward at that major press event.

We Blues! After saying the president is insane, O'Donnell made a very strange statement about the ongoing work of the mainstream press.

There's nothing more for the press to say, the cable host weirdly said.

Tomorrow: We Blues! O'Donnell's assessment

TUESDAY: The ugly side of "democratization!"

2026-07-28T14:46:49.916-04:00

TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2026

Baying hounds seek justice: At the Fox News Channel, the knives are out for Dr. Fauci. The knives are out again.

The ghouls are running in the streets. On today's Outnumbered program, the increasingly arrogant Harris Faulkner can almost seem to be holding the rope in her hands, as recorded by Mediaite in this news report.

It's Dr. Fauci she wants to hunt down. He's scheduled to appear before a Senate committee tomorrow, and the hounds have been baying:

FAULKNER (7/28/26): I want to get to this point. I think we have been in our own sort of "republic evolution" long enough to figure out how to best punish officials when they hurt the public.
Do we all have to join a class-action lawsuit? Or is there a mechanism rather than a shamefest on Capitol Hill?
Because if nothing comes about, if we only elevate his status in the public even more, his ego is fed either way. He doesn’t care if you love him or hate him. He’s known. He’s "the most famous man in the world at one point."
He wasn’t saying people loved him. He said he was famous. I’m concerned that that’s what we’ll do.
We’ll cover it from stem to stern. Everybody wants to see the hearing. There’s going to be a lot of facts that are checked in that, and I love that.
But this man literally lied to us. Caused those of us who are responsible to the public to say what he was saying was true.
I take it professionally and personally that now we know more detail about that. It’s not enough to shame him on Capitol Hill for me. I want more. I want justice with this guy. I don’t know what that looks like.

That is astounding conduct on an increasingly dangerous "cable news" messaging entity. It's not enough for her!

Within the world of the Fox News Channel, the hunt for Fauci has become increasingly unhinged in the post-Covid years. For the record, the flyweight panel which accompanied Faulkner on today's program has little chance of being able to sift the science involved in this dangerous manhunt.

What they can do is read the clips in their producer's notes. Read, ingest, repeat!

Earlier today, Tom Durante posted a report about the manhunt chasing Fauci as it materialized on this morning's Fox & Friends. Durante's report started like this:

Fox Host Brian Kilmeade Tears into ‘Maniac’ Fauci: ‘We Knew He Was Lying’
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade ripped into Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, calling the former NIAID chief a “maniac” after the release of journal entries from the days of Covid-19 ravaging the world.
Kilmeade spoke out during Tuesday morning’s Fox & Friends, as the curvy couch reported on the 2020 journal entries revealed by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), in which Fauci called himself “the most famous and talked about person” in America.
As F&F co-host Steve Doocy noted that “a lot of the stuff he wrote down was different than what he was telling us,” Kilmeade was ticked off.
“This guy’s a maniac,” Kilmeade said. “We knew he was lying. We knew he was changing his opinions and the statements and his policies per interview.”

As the report continues, Ainsley Earnhardt makes a groaning logical error about the alleged "lie" this trio of bloodhounds was chasing. Adding to the difficulty, Durante makes an additional error in his description of some typically truncated Fox News Channel video clips.

Given the multiple errors, the issues involved are too complex for simple examination in this format. But the hounds are baying at the Fox News Channel, and many of the hounds in question have no business being on any kind of national news program.

The so-called "democratization of media" has created this sprawling tribal nightmare. ("Every flyweight a king!") We've separated into warring tribes, and it looks like certain members of one of the tribes wouldn't necessarily mind seeing a bit of blood.

Faulkner is an increasingly arrogant mess. She wants some justice with this guy! She isn't quite sure what that looks like!

The New York Times explains: In this separate news report, the New York Times explains the matter which Earnhardt rushed to misconstrue.

(Key word: "amplifier." Don't fail to click ahead from the Times report to Dr. Fauci's detailed interview with USA Today in February 2020.)

On balance, these matters are too complex to explain. The yahoos take over from there!

WE BLUES: "Everyone knows he's crazy?"

2026-07-28T10:13:40.717-04:00

TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2026

Why haven't We Blues ever said it? Is something wrong with President Trump? Something that might be dangerous?

As we noted yesterday, when we watched the hour-plus speech he delivered last Friday night, it seemed to us that no sane person could really dispute some such claim.

The endless tedium of his meandering self-involvement, mixed with his endless stream of ugly insults and his inane counterfactual claims? That, plus the way he seemed to struggle to keep his eyes open, even when he was delivering his endless soul-crushing remarks?

It seemed to us that something was plainly wrong, in a way no one could miss. But we also predicted that We Blues weren't going to come out and say so.

Yesterday, on MS NOW, two anchors opened their programs by discussing last Friday night's speech. We were struck by a false impression Nicolle Wallace may have given at 4 o'clock, at the start of Deadline: White House.

Wallace seemed to be stricken by what she had seen. She was angry at the president. She also seemed to be angry with the journalists who had attended the event.

At one point, she used a dangerous word—"they." Speaking of the journalists, she seemed to say that "they" applauded when the president made the inane declaration that he planned to seek a fourth [sic] term in 2028.

("And then they applauded," she said. "The White House Correspondents Association, embracing a man seeking to destroy everything they are supposed to stand for.")

Did any journalists applaud that display of potentially dangerous madness? We can't exactly say. A smattering of applause was briefly heard, but there were Trump officials in the room, present there as guests of various news organizations.

Also, journalists from Red American news orgs were in the room—news orgs like the Fox News Channel.

Who produced that smattering of applause? We have no way of knowing. But later, in an exchange with Jessica Yellin, it seemed to us that Wallace implied that the president received a favorable "response" from journalists to his gruesome, lengthy attempt at denigrating CNN's Kaitlan Collins.

When we went back and checked the tape, we were reassured by what we heard and saw. With apologies for reprinting the president's text, this is what actually happened in the room that night:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (7/24/26): But I want to personally congratulate CNN's Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award. It was all about me. It's a fake. She shouldn't get the award, it was a fake, But I didn't mind.
I said, "Kaitlan, congratulations." But it was fake, there's no question about it.
But she's a young, attractive woman. She never smiles.
I said, "Kaitlan, do you ever smile? Smile! You have a nice position. You are at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan, just smile."
But we attack, and I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn't her on the Bud Light can. It was Dylan Mulvaney. And Dylan Mulvaney cost Bud Light $35 billion in market cap. That was the worst commercial ever made, by the way.
AUDIENCE: [CRICKETS]

Wallace read that entire text before her exchange with Yellin. In his gruesome presentation, the president was trying to fold our most forthright cable news journalist back into the grip of his old-world gender politics.

The president's presentation was gruesome—but the audience responded with CRICKETS, exactly as they should have. Watching Deadline, it seemed to us that Wallace had conveyed an angry false impression.

Should journalists have attended this event at all? A person could teach it flat or round.

Surely, it would be madness to invite this president to any such future event. But it isn't helpful when a major figure like Wallace starts misstating or inaccurately suggesting what happened at the event.

Plainly, Wallace was appalled by what had happened, as she well might have been. But is something wrong with President Trump?

Five hours later, at the start of The Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell tried to answer that question. He also made a very strange favorable claim about the national press corps.

O'Donnell had been on vacation last week. Last night, he started with this:

O'DONNELL (7/27/26): ...We'll try to cover as many subjects, important subjects, as we can in this hour—important for this week's news and today's news. But we will begin with war...
The one story that you know every historian will write about when looking at the year 2026 is Donald Trump's war. And in that war, historians will find everything they need to know about Donald Trump's incompetence, Donald Trump's laziness, Donald Trump's ignorance and yes, Donald Trump's madness.
What happens when a madman starts a war?

And so on from there, with O'Donnell discussing last Friday's address and referring to the president's "madness" and his "insanity" Eventually, he even said this:

"Everyone knows how crazy the president of the United States is."

Plainly, O'Donnell seemed to be saying that something is seriously wrong with the president. But he proceeded to offer a strange excuse for a very strange state of affairs:

According to O'Donnell, everyone in the press corps knows how "crazy" the president is. But how strange! Right up to the present day, virtually no one has tried to report that dangerous state of affairs!

Everyone knows it; no one has said it! Tomorrow, we'll show you the very strange, favorable claim O'Donnell made about the press.

Also, needless to say, on Fox the story was different.

Tomorrow: Saturday morning chyrons on Fox:

TRUMP MAKES TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO WHCA STAGE

Also this:

CAN'T TAKE A JOKE
MEDIA CRITICIZES TRUMP'S HILARIOUS WHCA DINNER SPEECH

MONDAY: Wily Odysseus, now wracked with guilt!

2026-07-27T14:31:39.916-04:00

MONDAY, JULY 27, 2026

Megyn Kelly unchained: We haven't seen "The Odyssey" yet. We'll probably go next weekend.

Many commentators have said that, for better or worse, the Christopher Nolan modernizes the ancient culture out of which the Iliad and the Odyssey emerged. In a new critique for The Atlantic, Peter Wehner offers this:

An Odyssey for Our Own Time
[...]
Part of what makes The Odyssey so appealing to a modern audience is that it takes civilizing aspects of Greek culture—hospitality and magnanimity—and adds later concepts, some of them influenced by Jewish and Christian ethics that were, to varying degrees, alien to ancient Greek culture: deep introspection, even confession; humility and empathy; sorrow and guilt for the harm one has done, even in victory; the conviction that the conquered count and have worth; and vengeance tempered with mercy. In the film, Odysseus emerges as a figure haunted by his victory [at Troy] in a way that no ancient Greek would have been.

According to Wehner, the Odysseus of the ancient poem wasn't a man wracked with guilt. We'll return to that general characterization at some later point.

As he continues his critique, Wehner contemplates our own society's ongoing loss of some of "the more humane virtues" on display in the film:

Much of life in the ancient Greek world was harsh, even barbarous—mass executions in conquered cities, torture, the weak discarded at birth, chattel slavery—which is precisely why the Greek commitment to honor and hospitality was remarkable then and still resonates today. So, too, do the later, more humane virtues the film weaves in.
Those virtues are now under assault. Movements and voices in our own country hold them in open contempt, treat mercy as weakness, and feed on vengeance and grievance. Theirs is a Nietzschean ethic, a “master morality,” the code of the strong that Christianity overthrew when it took the side of the slave, the stranger, and the destitute.
[...]
The world that this ethic is creating is harsh and barren, raw and uninviting. It exists in the daily coarseness, in the anger and the ugliness, and in the isolation. There is a weariness in us, and a sadness, at what we have become...

Wehner may have written that shortly after watching the White House Correspondents Dinner last Friday evening. Or shortly after reading some of the copy Megyn Kelly is now bringing forth on the podcast beat.

All reports come from Mediaite. You'll have to assess them yourself:

Megyn Kelly Takes Aim At Ex-CNN Anchor For Writing About Her Sex Life—Falsely Claims the Ex-Anchor Said She Was ‘Banging Four Men in a Month’
(for full report, click here)

Megyn Kelly Melts Down in Bonkers Rant Against ‘Scripted and Artificial’ Michelle Obama
(for full report, click here)

Bill And Hillary Clinton’s ‘Weird Marriage’ Slammed By Megyn Kelly
(for full report, click here)

‘Go Back to F*cking Haiti!’ Megyn Kelly Goes on Wild Rant Over Supreme Court Ruling
(for full report, click here)

There's more where that came from. For the record, some bilious Blue American podcasters are basically like this too.

Regarding Kelly's false claims about former anchor Brooke Baldwin, her lack of concern about her false statements is simply astounding. As for Baldwin, she may perhaps be on the verge of a lawsuit:

Baldwin Fires Back at Megyn Kelly for False Claims on Her Sex Life: ‘Talk About a Reckless Disregard for the Truth’
(for full report, click here)

Kelly has become unchained in these (recent) latter days. The rise of the new technologies—the so-called "democratization of media"—has created this new world order:

Every venomous podcaster a king or a queen or a royal!

Every furious flyweight a monarch!

Can a modern society function this way? In our weariness and in our sadness, do we possibly have a need for a new (secular) Awakening, for a "politics of meaning" to which various tribes can subscribe?

WE BLUES: Can anyone deny that something is wrong?

2026-07-27T10:21:50.200-04:00

MONDAY, JULY 27, 2026

We Blues almost surely will: In fairness, his first remark, taken in context, was a bit self-deprecating. You could possibly call it good-natured.

The comment was actually funny. To our ear, it got an honest laugh.

The fellow had just been introduced by Weijia Jiang, the head of the White House Correspondents Association, at last Friday night's restaging of the association's annual dinner.

As part of her introduction, she made a reference to the cancellation of the first attempt. Below, you see what the sitting president said:

JIANG (7/24/26): ...President Trump, I've covered you for a long time and so have many reporters in this room.
When we ask questions, you push back. You give us answers, and we push back. You have always been a "deal" guy. Well, that's the deal—and the First Amendment is a done deal.
And that's what we toast tonight—the freedoms that brought us back together, even after they were threatened. So let's raise a glass to what makes ours a beautiful country.
[Jiang leads the toast]
And now, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming the 45th and 47th president of the United States, President Donald J. Trump.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Wow! That was very beautiful, but this has not been an easy evening—all these awards.
AUDIENCE: [Laughter]

PRESIDENT TRUMP: [Grimaces, shakes his head]

As you can hear on the videotape, he got a very good laugh. We've been in many rooms where joking comments were offered. To our ear, the laughter he got was both authentic and earned.

In the earlier part of the evening, he'd sat in his seat at the head table as awards were given to various journalists who had challenged his endlessly disordered behavior. The awards were deserved, but the comment was rueful—and his rueful comments was rewarded with laughter, as you can hear on the tape.

His first comment received a good laugh. His presentation went downhill from there, screaming as it did.

(For Roll Call's transcript, click here.)

He started with endless, tedious recollections built from his astonishing degree of self-involvement. From there, he proceeded to long strings of inane, inappropriate insults, driven along by his standard array of absurd, long-corrected misstatements.

Governor Pritzker was "a fat pig." Governor Newsom's name was "Newscum." Jake Tapper was really "Fake Tapper."

Senator Schiff was said to have a "big fat ugly head." ("I call him watermelon head, because he has the largest head I've ever seen with the smallest neck.")

Rosie O'Donnell is "a sick older woman, I guess now I have to say."

We're omitting reams of other insults, not wishing to drive certain images and certain bogus claims forward. Pathetically, though, he even went with this embarrassing mess at one point:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: And I know Dumocrats—and the word "Dumocrat" is something that's come into fashion. I changed the E with a U. And most people don't know that "dumb" has a B. So, we don't have to worry about that.
It's very quiet [in the hall]. I thought it was quite good, but I haven't gotten much credit for that.

We'll offer a guess—most people do know that "dumb" is spelled with a B. This seems to have been a recent revelation to the sitting president, though perhaps to no one else.

The insults and the self-involved tedium went on and on and on. At roughly the 50-minute mark, C-Span's cameras began to pan to frozen faces in the audience, as you can see on the official tape.

As you can see on the tape, it panned to frozen faces in a silent hall at 10:22 p.m., then again at 10:23.

Out in that audience, there seemed to be nothing except frozen faces, many looking down. At 10:28, as the droning continued, C-Span even panned, for the first time, to frozen faces at the head table.

At 10:29, it showed another frozen face at the head table, along with a second person who was now sitting with his back turned to the president.

He had now been droning for 56 minutes. At the one-hour mark, he finally said it:

"It was a rigged election."

Roughly five minutes later, he closed with an unhappily accurate statement:

"Our country's doing things that no one's ever seen before."

The accuracy was unintentional as the gentleman finally stopped. With that, we pose this morning's question:

At this point, can any serious person really doubt it? Can anyone doubt that something is severely wrong with the president?

He had seemed to be sleeping about half the time as he sat through the earlier speeches and the aforementioned awards. Later, he seemed to have trouble opening his eyes even when he himself was speaking.

Can anyone doubt or deny that something seems to be wrong? The answer we'll give you today is this:

We Blues are going to do just that! We Blues aren't going to speak!

David French and David Brooks aren't going to say it. Nicholas Kristof isn't going to say it. Neither is Michelle Goldberg or Peter Baker or anyone else from the New York Times news division.

Rachel Maddow isn't going to speak, and neither is Nicolle Wallace. Joe and Mika aren't going to say it. Neither is Lawrence O'Donnell.

No one at The Atlantic is going to speak. Jeffrey Greenberg isn't going to give anyone that assignment.

Anderson Cooper isn't going to speak, and neither is Jake Tapper. We're sorry to say that the same is almost surely true of Kaitlan Collins, whose character we've admired since the first Covid year, when she alone was willing to challenge the endless blather being performed at the president's televised bullroar and blather events.

Is something wrong with President Trump? At this point, what sane person could really deny it? Consider:

As you probably know, the president tried to insult Collins at Friday night's event. The insult he tried to aim at her got more attention than any of the million additional insults which froze the faces of an entire ballroom that night.

He tried to insult her, but neither she nor CNN was bowing to his pathetic attempt. And so, inevitably, what did he do?

Of course! Turning to Truth Social, he went ahead and did it again! Over at Mediaite, here's the start of Joe DePaolo's report:

Trump Doubles Down on His Attack Against CNN’s Kaitlan Collins By Posting a Shocking New Meme
President Donald Trump doubled down on his attack against CNN’s Kaitlan Collins by posting a shocking new meme to his Truth Social account.
In a Sunday morning Truth post, the president shared a doctored photo depicting Collins in place of trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a 2023 Bud Light promotional campaign.

Trump’s new meme comes on the heels of his attack on the CNN anchor Friday night at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in which he compared Collins to Mulvaney.

Joe DePaolo's report for Mediaite continues along from there. To see the president's Truth Social post, you can just click here.

Just to be clear:

The president's Truth Social post says nothing "shocking" about Collins. With great valor, she led the way in the first Covid year.

We've been grateful ever since. The president's post says nothing "shocking" about her.

To the extent that the post is "shocking," it's shocking because of what it makes clear about the president himself. Simply put, it's no longer possible for reasonable observers to doubt the fact that something seems to be badly "wrong" with the sitting American president.

Now for the rest of the story:

No one could doubt or deny the fact that something seems to be wrong. No sane person could doubt or deny it, but We Blues almost certainly will!

Other parts of his recent conduct make this problem even more obvious. That said, We Blues are going to look away from this dangerous state of affairs.

In fairness, this is all part of the human condition. It's part of the imperfect wiring of our imperfect human species.

The Fox New News Channel is a giant slag heap, but We Blues are a piece of work too. Faces were frozen all through the hall.

We Blues aren't going to say that.

Tomorrow: "Other parts of his recent conduct make this problem even more obvious."