Media shocks (Ava and C.I.)

Last week was a series of shock -- far too many to cover in full.

 

But let's start off with a good shock: IRONHEART.   Chinaka Hodge deserves a standing ovation for creating a MARVEL TV show that has a female hero and is not a joke. 

 Jac Schaeffer, Jessica Gao and Bisha K. Ali should not only hang their heads in shame, they should be issuing public apologies for the garbage that they foisted off on audiences.  We're talking WANDAVISION, SHE-HULK ATTORNEY AT LAW and MS. MARVEL.  These were not superhero shows that sported strong female characters.  Instead it was giggle and laugh at the women and, in MS. MARVEL's case, at the girl.  These garbage shows had characters praised by The Water Cooler Set.  But audiences avoided them.  Liars try to pretend otherwise and note the interest in the shows and some big streaming debut.  They move on quickly so that they don't have to talk about the drop off after seeing the first episodes.  Yes, the programs were anticipated and then people saw them.

 

That garbage created a backlash  

 

IRONHEART is a first rate superhero series.  That shouldn't be such a shock.  It's been done many times before.  Even with a female superhero.  Melissa Rosenberg, for example, created compelling television as the show runner of JESSICA JONES.  Prior to that, Maurissa Tancharoen, Joss Whedon and Jed Whedon created complex roles for men and women on MARVEL AGENTS OF S*H*I*E*L*D.  MARVEL really only faltered in this century once they became part of DISNEY+.   With Chinaka Hodge creating such a strong show and Dominique Thorne being so perfect in the lead role, maybe this is a sign that (once again) MARVEL can showcase strong women instead of making fun of them?  

That would be a good shock.  However, last week was mainly bad shocks. 

For example, the Chump administration rounded the corner last week, swaying and rolling due to the bad shock absorbers, as Convicted Felon Donald Chump made threats.  What had the senile so upset?  Possibly the fact that his lies about what a great job he'd done on Iran were being questioned.  CNN had reported the truth of the US intel assessment which made clear that, at best, Iran's efforts were set back a few months. That assessment came from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency and that really sent Chump on a rageathon.  It's a lie, it's wrong, it's criminal, CNN should fire correspondent Natasha Bertrand, it doesn't matter -- he was frothing at the mouth -- and it will be proven to be wrong when, he insisted, Israel releases its assessment.

You read that right.  

Here are his exact words, "Israel is doing a report on it now, I understand, and I was told that they said it was total obliteration. I believe it was total obliteration, and I believe they didn’t have a chance to get anything out because we acted fast."  Those were his exact words, the nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah  was apparently left implied.

The President of the United States actually insisted -- publicly -- that the US intel was no good but that the Israeli intel would back him up. 

Yeah, that's considered normal.

But that wasn't Chump's only strange remark on Wednesday.  

The dementia appeared to be 100% in charge when Chump declared -- of Iran's strike in response on a US base in Qatar,  "You saw that, where 14 missiles were shot at us the other day. And they were very nice. They gave us warning. They said, 'We’re going to shoot them.'  'Is one o’clock okay?' They said, 'It’s fine.'  And everybody was emptied off the base, so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners. They call them the gunners. And out of 14 high-end missiles that were shot at the base in Qatar, all 14, as you know, were shot down by our equipment. Amazing stuff, amazing what they can do."

Those remarks should have resulted in a lot of coverage.  Go to any search engine and you'll find out that MSNBC covered the remarks as did MILITARY.COM.  Did any other news outlet write up the remarks?  Or was everyone doing their best not to upset nutso?

Konstantin Toropin (MILITARY.COM) noted, the remarks were not only strange, they didn't fit with the official story the White House has promoted:

 

On Wednesday, as he was about to depart from a NATO summit, President Donald Trump seemed to make a stunning admission: He gave Iran the green light to attack a U.S. military base in retaliation for his own strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites.

The Iranians "were very nice. They gave us warning," Trump told reporters. "They said, 'We're going to shoot 'em. Is one o'clock OK?' I said, 'It's fine,'" he added.

The casual, nonchalant tone of Trump's acceptance that Iran would attack U.S. forces at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar -- an assault that involved more than a dozen Iranian missiles -- was a sharp contrast to the message of steely-eyed professionalism and heroism that his top military adviser, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, offered to reporters the next day for what he said was likely the largest single use of the Patriot air defense system in U.S. history.

The press may have been too scared to print what Crazy said but Chump knew he'd gone too far.  So the next day, at the Pentagon, it was time for an 8:00 am press briefing with Mama's Boy Pete Hegseth.  Hegseth was so rushed, they didn't get to smooth out his foundation the way they've been doing at his personal hair and make up salon he had installed at the Pentagon leading to his psoriasis splotches being visible yet again.  

The little mama's boy got loud but with that nasal and childish voice, it only made him come off spoiled, entitled and, frankly, unhinged.

He was screaming at the press -- the same press that he was a part of mere months ago before Chump stupidly decided to nominate a drunk who once had rape charges filed against him for Secretary of Defense and idiots like Senator Joni Ernst voted to confirm Hegseth (what does it matter -- right, Joni -- we're all going to die). 

He wanted to give the press a word -- Well, he gave them 1589 words before he took a breath.  

Then he let Gen Dan Caine speak.  We covered that two-some as they made the Congressional rounds this month.  Caine plays sane while Hegseth plays like he just pooped his own diaper -- is he playing, right?  And the press briefing was one lie after another from Hegseth and a ton of projection.

He screamed at the press -- or maybe shrieked, he does have a rather high and girlish voice,  "And again, before I pass it to the chairman, because you, and I mean specifically you, the press, specifically you the press corps, because you cheer against Trump so hard, it's like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes."

Mama's Boy said that.  After we sat through one hearing after another where he repeatedly lied about former President Joe Biden, attacked former President Joe Biden and stole credit for what Joe Biden had done (including turning around recruitment numbers which Hegseth lies happened under Chump -- and he told that lie again at the start of the Thursday press briefing.)

We loved it when Caine slipped an answer to the idiot Hegseth (Caine, "Sir, I think you could -- I'd say go out -- the IC should be able to help you answer that question." followed by Hegseth, "And so, again, I go back to the IC, whether it's Director Ratcliffe or ODNI Gabbard.") because it reminded us of the Congressional hearing this month where racist Hegseth couldn't call out the Nazis and Caine had to step in to reassure members of Congress that, yes, even this administration -- or at least some members of it -- grasped that Nazis were bad.

Mama's Boy Hegseth embarrassed himself non-stop and that included his nonsense about how three bomb drops constituted "the most complex and secretive military operations in history."

The country could not stop laughing.   Ahmad Austin Jr. (MEDIAITE) compiled some of the responses such as "Normandy? Hiroshima? Bin Laden Raid?" and "Move over D-Day!" and "So the turning point of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, with 175K soldiers fighting and 50K lives lost over 3 days, doesn't hold a candle to dropping a few dozen bombs from the air? Am I understanding this statement from the SoD?" among them. 

 

When you hear Hegseth lie and Chump lie, you wonder why?  They just keep repeating lies.  Why?

 

PBS viewers might have gotten an answer last week with the latest installment of AMERICAN MASTERS which featured a documentary entitled  HANNAH ARENDT: FACING TYRANNY.  It examined Arendt's work documenting that crimes of the Nazis and how they got support for their crimes.  Arendt noted that they lied and lied some more and knew they were lying but they were creating this lie that motivated and excused.  Did anyone really believe the lie or was just the excuse they needed, the 'noble lie' told to garner support for a genocide.

 

One part that especially stood out?  

 

This passage from Arendt:

 

Banality was a phenomenon that really couldn't be overlooked.  The more one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with his inability to think    Namely  to think from the standpoint of someone else.  There's nothing deep about it, nothing demonic.  That's simply the reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing.  That is the banality of evil. 

 

 She's referring to the fact that the Nazis conducted a genocide and got away with it because of people who lacked empathy.  

 

And that's why the right-wing's been attacking empathy (see our "MEDIA: YOUR FRIENDS & NEIGHBORS and your non-friends too!" from April) because MAGA can't get it's way if people have empathy.  So they portray it as a bad thing.  They pretend to be Christians while attacking the very idea of empathy that Jesus Christ taught.  At THE ATLANTIC, Elizabeth Bruenig explained today:

 

Five years ago, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan during a podcast taping that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit.” By that time, the idea that people in the West are too concerned with the pain of others to adequately advocate for their own best interests was already a well-established conservative idea. Instead of thinking and acting rationally, the theory goes, they’re moved to make emotional decisions that compromise their well-being and that of their home country. In this line of thought, empathetic approaches to politics favor liberal beliefs. An apparent opposition between thought and feeling has long vexed conservatives, leading the right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro to famously declare that “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

But the current ascendancy of this anti-empathy worldview, now a regular topic in right-wing social-media posts, articles, and books, might be less a reasonable point of argumentation and more a sort of coping mechanism for conservatives confronted with the outcomes of certain Trump-administration policies—such as the nightmarish tale of a 4-year-old American child battling cancer being deported to Honduras without any medication, or a woman in ICE custody losing her mid-term pregnancy after being denied medical treatment for days. That a conservative presented with these cases might feel betrayed by their own treacherous empathy makes sense; this degree of human suffering certainly ought to prompt an empathetic response, welcome or not. Even so, it also stands to reason that rather than shifting their opinions when confronted with the realities of their party’s positions, some conservatives might instead decide that distressing emotions provoked by such cases must be a kind of mirage or trick. This is both absurd—things that make us feel bad typically do so because they are bad—and spiritually hazardous.

This is certainly true for Christians, whose faith generally counsels taking others’ suffering seriously. That’s why the New York Times best seller published late last year by the conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, is so troubling. In her treatise packaging right-wing anti-empathy ideas for Christians, Stuckey, a Fox News veteran who recently spoke at a conference hosted by the right-wing nonprofit Turning Point USA, contends that left wingers often manipulate well-meaning believers into adopting sinful argumentative and political positions by exploiting their natural religious tendency to care for others. Charlie Kirk, the Republican activist who runs Turning Point USA, said that Stuckey has demolished “the No. 1 psychological trick of the left” with her observation that liberals wield empathy against conservatives “by employing our language, our Bible verses, our concepts” and then perverting them “to morally extort us into adopting their position.” Taken at face value, the idea that Christians are sometimes persuaded into un-Christian behavior by strong emotions is fair, and nothing new: Suspicion of human passions is ancient, and a great deal of Christian preaching deals with the subject of subduing them. But Toxic Empathy is not a sermon. It is a political pamphlet advising Christians on how to argue better in political debates—a primer on being better conservatives, not better Christians. 

It's very distressing but people are standing up and speaking out.  

 

And with that in mind, last week actually contained one more shock.  Chump was threatening to sue various outlets -- one of which was THE NEW YORK TIMES.  In response to his ranting and raving, the paper's deputy general counsel David McGraw stated, "No retraction is needed.  No apology will be forthcoming.  We told the truth to the best of our ability.  We will continue to do so."

Contrast that response with the caving on the part of ABC NEWS and the expected caving on the part of Sheri Redstone on behalf of CBS NEWS and McGraw's stance is a very happy shock.