TUESDAY: Matt Bai says he has found the villains!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2025 

Could the villain really be him? The fury had to go somewhere today. When the sitting president awoke, the fury and rage went here:

Trump Wakes Up to Trash ‘STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS’ for ‘KILLING’ New Jersey

That's the headline on the Mediaite report. To read the actual Truth Social post, you can just click here.

That's where the fury went first. Last night, on the Gutfeld! show, Greg Gutfeld started with one of his typical jokes about the way Taylor Swift is really just a 6. Soon, he was offering a sally about the alleged effect on crime of the president's takeover of the D.C. police. 

In our view, the comment came from within a peculiar, unexplained soul:

GUTFELD (8/18/25): It's gotten so quiet on the streets that you can hear Rashida Tlaib's mustache growing.

[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]

Pathetically, LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE! At any rate, President Trump is full of fury and anger, and so is this "cable news" star.

For the record, "Tayler Swift is just a 6" is a standard theme for this aging moral pervert. So too with the physical insults—fat as a cow; not sexually attractive; too many facelifts—he aims at every (liberal, progressive, Democratic) woman who swims into his ken.

Night after night after night after night, we remain amazed by his unrecognizable conduct. We're even more amazed by the fact that his nightly behavior has been thoroughly normalized—has been completely accepted—by our tribunes here in Blue America, by the people we now call "The Best."

It's a very depressing time to glance about the society. That disordered fellow's moral squalor has been thoroughly normalized. So is President Trump's constant massacre of anything known to be an actual fact.

Unfortunately, the normalization performed by us Blues is as bad as the peculiar conduct displayed by (so many of) them Reds. We offer that as a prelude to a recent column by Matt Bai.

The column appeared in the Washington Post. Headline included, it started off like this:

Our institutions aren’t failing. We are.

There’s a lot of talk now about failing institutions. Every time President Donald Trump pushes the boundaries of his power—this month alone, he commanded Texas to create more Republican congressional seats and staged a hostile takeover of D.C.—his critics ask: Will no one stand in his way? Where are the pillars of democracy when we need them?

I’ve raised these questions myself, yet lately I’m coming around to another way of thinking. Maybe the most culpable institution in our national breakdown isn’t any branch of government or industry—but rather the American people.

We’re the ones expressly charged with holding a rogue president accountable, and we’re failing spectacularly.

We the people are "failing spectacularly," Bai has decided to tell us. From there, he proceeds to slice the lunch meat remarkably thin, eventually serving this:

I’m not talking about the large segment of voters who disdain Trump, or the celebrity-loving Trumpists who would make him Pharaoh if they could. I’m talking mainly about the centrist and conservative voters who wince at what Trump does and wish he were a better person—but for whom tax cuts and anti-woke policies seem worth the trade-off. These are the voters who got Trump elected, and these are the voters who enable him still, more than any judge or congressman.

It isn't all Trump voters, just some—and it certainly isn't Us! So says the incoherent diagnostician of modern-day moral greatness.

There's no great gain likely to come from an attempt to say who is really at fault. To Bai, we'd be inclined to offer this:

Mother-frumper, heal thyself! 

Mofo, heal thyself—it's an ancient bromide! In this instance, we're aiming it at "the knights of the keyboard" (Ted Williams) who simply aren't willing to come to terms with the president's apparent mental disorder, or with the moral and intellectual squalor of astonishing people like Gutfeld and his pals at the Fox News Channel.

The homunculus keeps telling us that Swift is really a 6! The desire of men of his type to subjugate women goes all the way back to the dawn of the West—all the way back to the opening verses of the Iliad, to cite one famous example.

(Everyone in the Achaean camp is aversion of Jeffrey Epstein.)

The impulse is deeply bred in the bone. A first cousin to this impulse lies at the heart of a great deal of the religious zeal which helps propel the current revolution. Greg Gutfeld suffers from the misfortune of having this poison and this consummate dumbness within. 

He works his woman hatred night after night. As he does, the much finer people—the people like Bai—know they must look away.

Also this: Gutfeld's undisguised misogyny is never mentioned at Mediaite. 

The misogyny is wholly undisguised—but even then, it can't be mentioned! It's the ancient cable news "problem that has no name!"

REVOLUTION: Revolutionary madness is in the air!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2025 

Who is the sitting president? On this very morning, the madcap madness of revolution was possibly in the air.

To appearances, that madness maybe possibly seemed to be lurking in several major headlines. In this morning's New York Times, one news report starts like this:

Trump Wants to End Mail-In Voting Ahead of Next Year’s Midterms

President Trump vowed on Monday to lead a movement to eliminate the use of mail-in ballots, continuing his legally dubious crusade against the nation’s voting rules, which he has long attacked and falsely blamed for his 2020 election loss.

Mr. Trump, who has opposed mail-in voting for years, wrote on social media that he would sign an executive order to “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” though neither he nor White House officials provided any detail about what the order would entail. Later on Monday, while meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Trump said the executive order was being written “by the best lawyers in the country” to end all mail-in ballots.

As we noted yesterday afternoon, the president's vow was driven along by his usual wild misstatements. Adding to the air of madness, the news report includes this:

Last week, Mr. Trump said President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had discussed the issue of mail-in voting during their summit on Friday in Alaska. Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News that the Russian leader had agreed with him that the 2020 election had been rigged in favor of Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“You know, Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things,” Mr. Trump said. “He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’ He said, ‘Mail-in voting, every election.’ He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”

Having flown to Alaska to discuss a war, the pair were now talking about mail-in voting? At any rate, the upshot was this—after Dear Vladimir allegedly trashed the procedure, the sitting president jetted home and made a vow to ban it.

In fact, many countries have mail-in voting. The madness of the president's personal culture of endless misstatements is marbled all through this crusade. With respect to that personal culture of madness and crazy misstatement, this report is sitting on the front page of this morning's print editions:

An Ohio City Faces a Future Without Haitian Workers: ‘It’s Not Going to Be Good’
Springfield faced a crisis after Donald Trump falsely claimed Haitians were eating pets. Now his policies are driving out workers like Wilford Rinvil, who left for Canada.

Springfield, Ohio now seems be facing some problems. That's the story that was driven by the crazy misstatements, by the president and by the disordered beast at his side, about the way the Haitian residents were eating the city's pets.

Mail-in voting takes place all over the world; no one was eating the pets. That said, madness tends to accompany revolution. Skipping past this additional headline—"Trump Administration Scraps Research Into Health Disparities"—we'll note that a different type of revolution gripped China way back when. 

It was called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Just like that, and with great fury and great ardor, madness was in the air:

Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It was launched by CCP chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until his death in 1976. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese socialism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society.

In May 1966, with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao launched the Revolution and said that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. Mao called on young people to bombard the headquarters, and proclaimed that "to rebel is justified." Mass upheaval began in Beijing with Red August in 1966. Many young people, mainly students, responded by forming cadres of Red Guards throughout the country. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung became revered within his cult of personality. In 1967, emboldened radicals began seizing power from local governments and party branches, establishing new revolutionary committees in their place while smashing public security, procuratorate and judicial systems. These committees often split into rival factions, precipitating armed clashes among the radicals. After the fall of Lin Biao in 1971, the Gang of Four became influential in 1972, and the Revolution continued until Mao's death in 1976, soon followed by the arrest of the Gang of Four.

The Cultural Revolution was characterized by violence and chaos across Chinese society. Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted...

Estimates of the death toll range from 1–2 million? Nothing like that has happened here, even as our own revolutionary cadres struggle to smash our own society's alleged versions of "the four olds."

Nothing that sweeping has happened here! But madness comes at times like these, and questions like the one shown below can even be formulated, and then asked, right in the Oval Office:

President Zelensky, are you prepared to keep sending Ukrainian troops to their deaths for another couple years, or are you going to agree to redraw the maps?

In yesterday's Oval Office event, that was the first question directed at President Zelensky. 

Some have said that the question dropped a Kremlin-adjacent framework on the terrible dilemma facing the Ukrainian president, whose country has been under attack for well over three years.

The somewhat peculiar question came from the Fox News Channel. In fairness to its creator, President Trump had offered this somewhat peculiar Truth Social post on Sunday morning at 9:17 a.m., two days after his latest meeting with Vladimir:

Truth Details

Donald J. Trump 
@realDonaldTrump

President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight. Remember how it started. No getting back Obama given Crimea (12 years ago, without a shot being fired!), and NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE. Some things never change!!!

It could almost be said that yesterday's question to Zelensky simply followed the company line.

In fairness, it has always been true! In theory, the leader of any invaded nation can always "end the war" simply by choosing to surrender. Given two days to think about his meeting with Vladimir, that was the somewhat peculiar thought that seemed to be back again in the revolutionary president's mind.

President Trump is the person who has triggered the revolutionary zeal which is apparent all through the land. His performance is characterized by his familiar wild misstatements and by his frequently shifting set of frameworks and rationales.

Last night, Lawrence O'Donnell stated a view about the president's mental functioning with which we're inclined to disagree. (We're glad he said what he did.) In theory, carefully selected medical specialists would have a better shot at assessing the matter at hand, but the mainstream press corps has agreed that such discussions must never occur.

The Cultural Revolution was swept along by the ardor gripping "many young people." In the current revolutionary moment, the wild misstatements of the sitting president are persistently smoothed and disappeared by the array of stooge foot soldiers who got to war on the Fox News Channel every day.

In yesterday morning's report, we showed you the way three of those soldiers fought back last Friday evening after that channel's correspondent has said that the day's Subarctic Summit seemed to have gone rather poorly.

As we noted, that pushback occurred a mere nine minutes later. Four hours later, with midnight approaching, Trace Gallagher was still trying to lay down the law.

At the end of that evening's Fox News @ Night program, he offered feedback from six Fox News Channel viewers. Feedback from viewers had been sought under terms of this chyron:

TRUMP-PUTIN SUMMIT
DO YOU THINK THE MEETING OVERALL WAS A SUCCESS?

Had the Stumblebum Summit been a success? Instant appraisals are often misguided, but battling now to keep hope alive, Gallagher ended his program by reading six alleged responses from alleged viewers. 

At 11:58 p.m. Eastern, he ended his program like this:

GALLAGHER (8/15/25): Steve says, "I believe that, all in all, it was a success. Unfortunately Trump didn't get a ceasefire. We'll get it on the next meeting."

The text of the messages appeared on the screen as Gallagher continued to read them:

Leo says: "President Trump didn't walk out like he said he would from a failed meeting. So there must have been progress."

Jim: "A success in that Putin came TO America. But it's just the first step."

Tammy: "It all depends on your definition of success. Although there was no ceasefire, evidently, Putin agreed to some things."

Joseph: "It was successful. Trump has Putin in the palm of his hand. There will be a trilateral meeting and peace."

And Scott says, "I think the fact that there will be a second meeting proves that this first one was a success."

Gallagher read six texts. The assessment was unanimous. The president had Putin in the palm of his hand. The fact that he didn't walk out of the meeting showed that there had been progress.

That said, the president would soon say that he had changed his mind about a ceasefire, thereby following Vladimir's lead.  By Sunday morning, he was back to angrily saying that Zelensky can end the war any time he wants.

The employees at Fox will continue to drive the messaging forward. Out in the country, six out of six Fox News Channel viewers will agree on the current points.

Some of the fervor comes from religious belief; some of the fervor doesn't. But what's going on with the president? 

We tend to disagree with something O'Donnell said last night, but who is this person? Who is the person who misstates elementary facts so crazily, who lurches from one basic stance to the next?

Tomorrow, we'll return to that basic question. For today, remember this:

Vladimir said mail-in voting is no darn good! Just like that, the commander in chief returned to his crazy misstatements about that topic as he launched his latest crusade.

Tomorrow: His darling Clementine

MONDAY: The Great I-Am has struck again!

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 

Also, the cluelessness of NAME WITHHELD: By the time he was 12 years old, President Trump was already being mocked for his grandiosity by his older brother.

He'd been given the nickname "The Great I-Am." Or at least, so said the president's niece, Mary Trump, in Chapter 3 of her best-selling family memoir, Too Much and Never Enough:

CHAPTER THREE
The Great I-Am

[...]

Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype. By the time he was twelve, the right side of his mouth was curled up in an almost perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority, and [his brother] Freddy had dubbed him “the Great I-Am,” echoing a passage from Exodus he’d learned in Sunday school in which God first reveals himself to Moses.

He was soon shipped off to military school. As we discussed at length in late April, Chapter 3 of the book is built around the development of those personality traits. 

For the record, Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist. That doesn't mean that her assessments of her famous uncle simply have to be right.

With respect to her famous uncle, it isn't entirely clear that the grandiosity ever left. Today, the president is running the D.C. police. He's also reshaping traditions of congressional elections, and he's directing a sweeping program of "mass deportation" which may, or may not, match what he said he wanted to do when he ran for election last year.

As of today, he's also decided to stage a crusade to change the method by which many Americans vote. As usual, he's advancing his new ambition with the standard barrage of claims which are baldly inaccurate—claims he may even believe.

There he's gone again! Earlier today, CNN's Daniel Dale offered the ten millionth useless fact-check:

Fact check: Trump falsely claims US is only country that uses mail-in voting

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about elections in a Monday social media post in which he pledged to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and voting machines—including an inaccurate assertion that states have to run elections in the manner the president tells them to.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s comments.

“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”

False. Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, as CNN and others have pointed out when Trump has made such claims before. These countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.

And so on from there.

That's the start of Dale's report on this latest blizzard of misinformation. With respect to the ludicrous claim that no one uses mail-in balloting but us, the president repeated that ludicrous claim as part of a rambling side trip during this afternoon's Oval Office press event with President Zelensky.

He's off on his latest crusade, trailing absurd misstatements behind him. Once an idea gets into his head, almost nothing can get it out.

With that, we'll briefly revisit another of the topics cited above:

The logic of district construction:

In last year's presidential election, Candidate Trump received 38.3% of the vote in California. That worked out to roughly 40% of the two-party vote.

A similar two-party distribution prevailed during last year's congressional elections in California. In those elections, Republican candidates received 39.2% of the votes across the state. Democratic candidates received 60.5%.

Once again, this raises a basic question:

If forty percent of some state's population belongs to Political Party B, is that political party entitled to something approaching 40% of the seats in that state's congressional delegation? 

An outcome like that might seem to be fair, but the long-standing answer to that question is no. Indeed, if the political blend of that state's population is spread evenly across the breadth of the state, Political Party A may end up winning every House race by a 60-40 margin.

Political Party B may end up with no congressional seats at all! There's nothing in American law or tradition which entitles the less popular party in a state to any House seats at all.

We mention this because of NAME WITHHELD, one of our dumbest "cable news" savants. The gentleman keeps insisting that California must already be heavily "gerrymandered" because its current House delegation includes 43 Democrats and only 9 Republicans.

Was gerrymandering involved in that outcome? We have no idea. That said, the breakdown of the California delegation follows the basic demographic pattern of the state, in which less heavily populated eastern parts of the state are more heavily Republican.

As you can see in the map at this link, the nine (9) Republican seats mainly come from those Republican inner-state regions. The population of the rest of the state is heavily Democratic, as are almost all members of Congress from those districts.

Under normal rules and procedures, we know of no reason to assume that something was wrong with the way California's independent districting commission created the 52 districts which produced that lopsided delegation.

NAME ITHHELD lacks the first freaking clue about the logic of this situation. He does know what he's supposed to say as a major figure on the Fox News Channel. Within our pitiful public discourse, the cluelessness about this basic matter is never going to end.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war about mail-in balloting itself! No one votes that way but us, The Great I-Am is now saying again. 

This is who and what we actually are! So is the silence of the various lambs at the various major news orgs of our self-impressed but unimpressive Blue American nation.

Mary Trump wrote a dangerous book. As we've noted in the past, everyone agreed to avoid those parts of her best-selling book!

REVOLUTION: It didn't seem good, Fox viewers were told!

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 

Then, Kellyanne Conway stepped in: First impressions are frequently imperfect, incomplete or just basically wrong.

That said, first impressions last Friday weren't especially good, not even at the Fox News Channel.

Putin had spoken for almost nine minutes. After that, President Trump had then stumbled through a formless three minutes. In fairness, he did manage to cite the "Russia, Russia, Russia hoax" for perhaps the ten millionth time.  

That said:

To our own (imperfect) eye and ear, President Trump's brief remarks were characterized by the way he clung to an illusion—to the illusion of what we'd call his "desperation friendship" with the man he kept calling "Vladimir." He first-named Putin three separate times in the course of his three-minute statement. We were struck by the extent to which he seems to want to believe. 

(As a point of comparison, see the YouTube entry, "Dr. Strangelove: Hello, Dimitri" from the 1964 film. For a longer excerpt, complete with a bit of a MAHA vibe, you can just click this.)

So it had gone, up in Alaska, after The Subarctic Summit. On Fox, Brian Kilmeade was guest hosting for Laura Ingrahm, and when he threw to Jacqui Heinrich, a plainly dispirited Heinrich started with this:

KILMEADE (8/15/25): Jacqui, I was surprised no questions. I was surprised no details on what progress was made.

HEINRICH: I think you and me both, Brian. And everyone else in this room was also surprised.

You know, we were told that we were going to have an opportunity to put questions to both leaders after a joint press conference in the event that the meeting went well enough that they could set the stage for a second meeting. And President Trump said, if that didn’t happen, he was likely to call off the joint presser and just address the media solo and then send Putin home. 

Neither of those things happened. And what was really stunning to me, as someone who has been in a lot of these press conferences, was a few things that were very unusual. 

For videotape of this full exchange, you can just click here.

To her credit, Heinrich is part of the Fox News Channel's news division. As a general matter, she isn't one of the stooges the channel drags out, at all hours of the day and night, to rattle its messaging points in robotic succession.

At this point, Heinrich's response to Kilmeade was just getting started. Just for the record, President Trump was never going to "call off the joint presser and just address the media solo and then send Putin home." 

That was never going to happen. That was simply the bluster in which this challenged man tends to engage until he has "Vladimir" standing right there before him.

As Heinrich started, she wasn't making the day's events sound especially good. But as her response to Kilmeade continued, her portrait of the presser rapidly rolled downhill.

Remember—this is the way his event was being portrayed on the Fox News Channel. This was the very first picture of the event that channel's viewers received:

HEINRICH (continuing directly): You had Putin come out and address the press first, and we are on U.S. soil here. And that left the media scrambling to get their headsets in. Usually, it is the leader of the country—the host country of a summit—that speaks first and addresses the room in their language. 

But Putin started right off, in Russian, and we all had to get our headsets on and listen to him rattle off this diatribe about the history of the U.S.-Russia relationship...

But also, without knowing the full background of it, there was something he said that was a little alarming, I thought, that seems like some of the things that he has said in the past—setting up false flags and that kind of thing, saying that we hope that Ukraine doesn't do anything to sabotage the progress that we have made today, knowing full well that Ukraine has agreed to a ceasefire, unconditionally, for the last several months, and it has been Russia that has not agreed to a ceasefire. 

That was President Trump's main objective today, and when we did hear from the president, he said we didn't get there, but we think that we can.

President Trump didn't achieve his main objective, Fox News Channel viewers were told. That, of course, was simply one person's instant assessment, but Heinrich was painting a gloomy picture in which Putin had seized control of the press event and had perhaps shoved Trump to the side.

That was one correspondent's instant assessment. But as she continued, her portrait of the event just kept getting worse:

HEINRICH (continuing directly): So a lot of questions remaining for the president, Trump—not just about what was discussed in that room and what might be happening now, but also how that all happened back there [gesturing toward the stage].

It was just very unusual, atypical, and I think we're all awaiting the read-out, because the way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well, and it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled—got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left. 

Of course, that is only the piece of the picture that we have right now, and certainly President Trump, who is the host and who is the president, would not want to, I think, enable something that would make him look weak. But we are eagerly awaiting to hear the background on that.

"It did not seem like things went well," Heinrich said. "It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled." she said. Most horribly, she even said this:

In her estimation, President Trump "would not want to enable something that would make him look weak!"

As Heinrich finished, she strained for a slightly hopeful sign—she said she hadn't seen "any scowls on the faces of the likes of Steve Witkoff or Secretary Rubio or any of the other members of the U.S. delegation." 

She hadn't seen any scowls. But she painted a very gloomy portrait of what seemed to have happened in the presser:

"The way it felt in the room was not good," she said. She even suggested that "Vladimir" may have made President Trump seem weak.

That was one correspondent's instant assessment. First impressions of this type will often turn out to be incomplete, inaccurate, wrong.

That said, that was the assessment offered to viewers of the Fox News Channel! It fell to Kilmeade to make his way out of the hole into which he had now been thrown.

This being the Fox News Channel, help was on the way. After a less scathing but unenthusiastic assessment by Mike Pompeo, out came a trio of messaging agents who seemed to know what Fox News Channel pundits are expected to say.

Heinrich concluded her assessment at 7:13 p.m. Eastern. Nine minutes later, out came this trio of messengers:

Kilmeade's trio of guests:
Kellyanne Conway: Fox News contributor
Jason Chaffetz: Fox News contributor
Charlie Hurt: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend

Out the messaging agents came—and they quickly set things right. You can watch the tape of their segment by clicking here. You'll find that the videotape appears at the Fox website under this dual headline:

Kellyanne Conway: 'Everything came up Trump and the US today'
A panel featuring Kellyanne Conway, Jason Chaffetz, and Charlie Hurt reacts to the Trump-Putin summit as well as the press conference.

Everything had come up Trump! Inevitably, that's what the trio said.

Kilmeade threw to Conway first. In addition to the statement quoted above, the event had been "a huge win for our president," she said.

With that, it came time for Chaffetz to speak. According to Chaffetz, the event had been "a huge win for President Trump, for the United States."

Hurt was possibly not quite so sure, but he proceeded with valor. He said he was impressed by the way President Trump had delivered his three minutes of remarks "off the cuff. He had no notes."

"Trump was talking almost like the wheels were still churning," Hurt said—and Kilmeade jumped in to agree. So it went, on the Fox News Channel, in the immediate aftermath of Friday's semi-summit.

Last week, we focused on the idea that an undeclared revolution is underway here within the American nation. This week, we'll focus on some of the different cadres found within that revolutionary brigade.

Plainly, the revolution is driven from the top. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or otherwise, the Fox News Channel maintains a large brigade which helps maintain the revolution's self-assurance.

Today, Zelensky may appear in the Oval Office again. Once again, a snarling beast may sit by the side of the American president.

Will he attack Zelensky again? Just as it ever was, so too here in this flailing nation:

For better or worse, times of revolution have always called for revolutionary zeal.

Tomorrow:  Several different brigades

SATURDAY: Trump's summit had been a perfect 10!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16, 2025

Then K.T. McFarland showed up: K. T. McFarland doesn't vote the way we do—but also, she's no dope.

Nor is she a household name. The leading authority on the topic offers a bit of her background:

K. T. McFarland

Kathleen Troia McFarland (born July 22, 1951) is an American political commentator, civil servant, author, and former political candidate.

McFarland began her political career in the 1970s as a night-shift typist and assistant press liaison for National Security Council staff. In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, she worked in the Department of Defense as a speechwriter and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.

[...]

Kathleen Troia was born on July 22, 1951, in Madison, Wisconsin, where she grew up as the oldest of four siblings...She graduated from Madison West High School in 1969.

Troia studied at the Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In 1970, she worked part-time at the Nixon White House for Henry Kissinger's National Security Council staff...Intrigued by U.S. foreign policy and Nixon's 1972 China visit, Troia majored in Chinese studies, graduating from George Washington in 1973.

After working in the Ford administration, Troia studied on scholarship at Oxford University, where she earned a combined master's degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Troia attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While there, she studied nuclear weapons, China, and the Soviet Union for three years, but did not complete her Ph.D.

Time spent at GW, Oxford and M.I.T. help suggest the possibility that McFarland is no dope. According to the leading authority, things did come apart, to a substantial extent, when she ran for the Senate:

In 2006, McFarland ran in the Republican primary in the United States Senate election in New York for a seat held by Democrat Hillary Clinton. She was a late entrant who was recruited once the candidacy of the leading Republican, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, imploded.

...She ran into trouble with a March 2006 comment that appeared to allege that the Clinton campaign had been flying helicopters low over her Southampton, New York, house and spying on her, or that Clinton forces had rented an apartment across from her $18 million duplex on Park Avenue; she later said she had been joking, but the episodes upset her. The race between McFarland and her opponent, former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, was ugly.

McFarland's candidacy was plagued by allegations that she overstated her credentials. Specifically, The New York Times reported that McFarland's claim that she had written part of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" speech was false, that her contention that she had been the highest-ranking woman of her time at the Reagan Pentagon was false, and that her claim that she had been the first female professional staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee was false. Also, the Spencer campaign objected to her assertion that she had held a civilian rank equivalent to that of a three-star general.

McFarland's inconsistent record of voting in prior New York state elections also became an issue, with her having failed to vote in six of the past 14 elections. McFarland also unlawfully maintained voting addresses in two different places at the same time, sometimes voting in one municipality and sometimes voting in another. She emphasized that she had never voted twice in one election, promising to cancel one of her voter registrations. By late June, her campaign was nearly out of money, and she loaned $100,000 to the campaign. On August 22, McFarland suspended her campaign after her daughter was caught shoplifting in Southampton.

Yikes! That said, it has been a major part of American politics over the past thirty-three years:

The wheels have come off the Republican cart any time opposition to the endlessly demonized Hillary Clinton has been involved.

Back in December 2005, Judge Jeanine's campaign against Clinton had imploded. The candidacy of McFarland may have been even worse. 

She went on to lose the race for the GOP nomination, and with it the chance to run against Clinton. That said, the years at Oxford and M.I.T. remain—and so it was when she appeared, this very morning, on the Fox & Friends Weekend program.

Let's go ahead and say their names! The friends this morning were these:

Fox & Friends Weekend
Charlie Hurt: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend
Rachel Campos-Duffy: co-host, Fox & friends Weekend
Johnny Joey Jones: Fox News contributor

As required by Fox News Channel law, the friends had been gushing about President Trump's masterstrokes in Alaska.

The program started at 6 a.m.; as required by corporate law, the friends were soon gushing hard. At 6:12, they played tape of the aforementioned Hillary Clinton 

She loves this war, Campos-Duffy said. She said that Clinton had "set a trap" for President Trump with her recent statement about nominating him for a Nobel prize if he manages to end the war in the way she described.

In short, things were proceeding as planned as the morning started. After Campos-Duffy spent some time trashing Barack Obama ("He's so uncool"), extremely clueless remarks about the logic of congressional districting followed at 6:14.

The day was proceeding as planned. And then, dear God! At 6:25, McFarland, a foreign policy specialist, was brought on to discuss the miracles which had occurred in Alaska.

McFarland did time at Oxford and M.I.T.—and no, she isn't a dope. On this occasion, dear God

She quickly seemed to say that things hadn't gone all that well!

Plainly, she said that in her opening statement, in which she said that the summit of the midnight sun had turned out to be "not that great."

The summit was "not what I hoped for," the Oxford grad now said!

Eventually, McFarland scrambled to make things right in certain predictable ways. First, though, she provided the kind of respite which occurs, on extremely rare occasions, on group propaganda programs like the channel's Fox & Friends Weekend.

As we post, we can't yet link you to videotape of what McFarland said. We can't yet provide a transcript of her complete remarks.

That said, for one brief shining moment, an unplanned event occurred. A guest had come on this "cable news" show and had wandered away from pure script.

Let us quickly add this:

When a brutal war like this war in underway, there is no single unassailable way to seek its resolution. One person might think that Ukraine should fight on against the Russian bear. Someone else may think that the overall game has been lost—that Ukraine should start feeding the beast.

There's no scientific formula which lets us compute the perfect way to proceed from here. But on messaging programs like Fox & Friends Weekend—on messaging programs like Fox News @ Night—politely scripted corporate stooges come on the air and say the things their owners want them to say.

Question to self:

Have we ever seen anything stupider than the segment which ended last evening's Fox News @ Night? We expect to show you what was said at the start of the week.

The village Stoopnagles were out in force during that final segment. As if the official Stoopnagles weren't pathetic enough, Trace Gallagher then read a set of text messages from a set of scripted viewers.

The stupidification of the American nation is underway at such times. Also numbered among the offenders are the Blue American stars who have agreed that what happens on Fox must stay on Fox—that this corporate conduct must never be reported, critiqued or discussed.

Alaska was a perfect 10, President Trump had said. Campos-Duffy quoted his statement  several times—and then, up jumped McFarland! 

Making a aet of reasonable observations, she instantly wandered off course. 

Regarding what will flow from yesterday's event, we think today of Sandburg's Lincoln. We refer to Sandburg's description of what would happen, out in Coles County, Illinois, where Lincoln's beloved stepmother lived.

We refer to his account of what would happen as the months went by after her boy—"he was all of a son to her"—had stroked her face a last time, and had then gone away, off to the White House, from which he would never return:

The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength; between harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beating and blizzards howling; and then there would be silence after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences, barns, and trees.

What will happen in Ukraine after yesterday's perfect 10? You won't likely hear it said on Fox & Friends Weekend, but quite possibly this:

The drone attacks will still rain down on the hospitals and the kindergartens. We'll be two weeks away from being two weeks away from being told what might take place, or possibly not, during Vladimir's next phone call.

Or then again, maybe not.

Sandburg's fuller passage: Sandburg was a poet biographer. As Lincoln said that last goodbye, Sandburg's fuller picture was this:

The next day Lincoln drove eight miles out to the old farm along the road over which he had hauled wood with an ox team. He came to the old log house he had cut logs for and helped smooth the chinks; from its little square windows he had seen late winter and early birds.

Sally Bush and he put their arms around each other and listened to each other’s heartbeats. They held hands and talked; they talked without holding hands. Each looked into eyes thrust back in deep sockets. She was all of a mother to him.

He was her boy more than any born to her. He gave her a photograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing and wanting, wanting. He stroked her face a last time, kissed good-by, and went away.

She knew his heart would go roaming back often, that even when he rode in an open carriage in New York or Washington with soldiers, flags or cheering thousands along the streets, he might just as like be thinking of her in the old log farmhouse out in Coles County, Illinois.

The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength; between harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beating and blizzards howling; and then there would be silence after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences, barns, and trees.

Her astonishing stepson would never come back. With respect to that final meeting, that's the way the poet imagined and told it.

With that in mind at this terrible time, Professor Brown said it long ago:

Our civilization has to be "renewed by...the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new."

We have to feel our way out of this mess. We can't just rattle script.