Good afternoon!

[For some reason, Bing’s version of the song that begins the film “White Christmas”–accompanied by a music box–is completely off-key. This has bothered me for decades. How could this happen?]

1. Our trustworthy news media. How many news outlets reported this story? In 2016, Tribune Publishing Co. owner Michael Ferro met with corporate leaders from within his news empire, including chief news executives from the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun.  During the meeting, he engaged in old-fashioned Jew-bashing, railing about the “Jewish cabal” that ran Los Angeles. In 2018,  Tribune Publishing made the first in a series of secret extortion payments that totaled $2.5 million to avoid a threatened lawsuit filed by a fired newspaper executive who had been in that room, thus keeping Ferro’s anti-Semitic slur out of the news.

Yes, a news organization paid millions to suppress the news. The rest of the story is similarly disturbing.

2. KABOOM! This article made my head explode. Therein, CNN contributor Kate Anderson Bower attacks the First Lady, saying that “she doesn’t understand what it means to be first lady.” The article is perfect 10s all across the board: for arrogance, for bias, for Trump-bashing, for incompetence and historical revisionism. The accusation arose from statements Melania made in an interview with Sean Hannity, stating that the hardest part of her job was having to deal with her and her family being personally attacked by “comedians to journalists to performers[and]book writers.”  Bower writes that Melania was

“again making the job about herself and her family instead of taking the opportunity to talk about the challenges she sees other people facing…The entire moment was a lost opportunity to put attention on the families of struggling Americans she’s met in her role as first lady, especially since she spent time the very next day reading to children at Children’s National Hospital, some sitting in wheelchairs with IVs attached. And the Hannity interview took place on USS George H.W. Bush, a trip the first lady made to support members of the military and their families. Wouldn’t it have been heartening to hear her use that moment during the interview to talk about the women and babies she’s met struggling with opioid addiction, or the children who she has met as part of her “Be Best” campaign who have been bullied at school, or the people whose homes were destroyed in the California fires?”

I’ll tell you what, you presumptuous hack: when you’re First Lady, you show us how it’s done.

There is no job of First Lady for Melania to “understand.” Bower is imposing her values and priorities on the job, and claiming that she knows the job description, which has always fluctuated with the occupant and the times.  The job of the First Lady, to the extent there is one, is to do whatever is possible to help the President of the United States be successful and succeed, using whatever talents she has. There is no obligation for a First Lady to be Eleanor Roosevelt, nor is it written in ink or precedent that the President’s spouse has to concentrate on “the challenges she sees other people facing.”  Jackie Kennedy’s primary project was renovating the White House, where she lived. How did that help the poor and under-privileged?  Lady Bird beautified the shores of the Potomac. How was that a boon to the poor in Appalachia?  Nobody criticized their priorities. I wonder why?

The nation is facing an institutional and constitutional crisis because of the challenges her husband is facing. No President in history has been bombarded by a concerted and coordinated campaign of personal and political destruction like her husband has, and will continue be to as long as he holds office. No First Lady has ever been derided and insulted like Melania, and the previous one, whose great contribution to U.S.  society was to make school lunches healthy but inedible, was treated as a goddess. I’m sure Bower would like to see Melania routinely attacking her husband’s policies, and arguing for the migrant hordes and the presumed guilt of men accused of sexual assault. That’s just too damn bad. Melania Trump’s first job, as First Lady, is to have her husband’s back.

3.  From the “Politics Poisons Everything” files: Variety reports that the NFL is having trouble filling out its line-up to perform at the Super Bowl because “woke” musicians and performers don’t want to be associated with the mean, racist NFL, which doesn’t allow its players to hijack the National Anthem to make half-baked, incoherent protests about “racial injustice and police brutality” when they are supposed to be, you know, playing football.

Once upon a time, before the Left decided that there should be no such things, professional sports and national events like Presidential inaugurations, funerals of statesmen, arts awards presentations, sports team invitations to the White House and the Super Bowl were non-partisan, non-political, nationally unifying activities. Now, with athletes and artists having taken the bait and entered the partisan political arena, everything is an endorsement or a boycott.

Personally, I boycott the NFL because it makes billions paying young men to get brain injured for the amusement of the intellectual and moral descendants of the Romans who cheered gladiators fighting to the death in the Colosseum. As for the half-time show, two words: Marching bands.

Finally, this comment from the Variety article, via Gozie Boy:

“I’m surprised the NFL hasn’t got Kaepernick, BLM, Madonna, Babs, Antifa, and a hundred other America haters to do a special, heart-wrenching program of kneeling routines, flag stomping/burning, p*ssy hat formations, Trump profanities, and simulated cop murders, all to the dulcet tones of tattooed thugs belting out their greatest hits of violent pornographic rap.”

4. Signature Significance! On Reddit, a husband tells the sad story that his wife wants to be artificially inseminated so their child will be better looking than he is. I may use this as an explanation of signature significance: no woman who believes this, much less who says it, can possibly love and respect her husband sufficiently to justify a marriage. This is all the husband needs to know, and thus he should take the sage advice of the Amityville Horror house, and “GET OUT!” (No, he has no inheritable disease or physical abnormality.)

Sure enough, the husband eventually learned that his wife had the perfect donor already picked out—and was having an affair with him. The husband now says he’s going to begin divorce proceedings and “destroy her in court” after he calls the potential sperm donor’s wife—Mr. Wonderful Sperm is a doctor— and tells her about the affair.

Good.

5. Trump Tweets. The President felt that he had to send out a tweet gloating about the demise of The Weekly Standard, which rallied NeverTrump conservatives. It just doesn’t occur to him that nice people don’t gloat, and cheering the demise of any enterprise, when real people lose their jobs, income and their dreams, can’t possibly do anything but hurt him.

Hopeless. Hopeless.