No Andrea, you arrogant, incompetent, disrespectful partisan fool: it’s Shakespeare, from one of the Bard’s most famous and best known tragedies, “MacBeth,” and perhaps the best known speech from that play, by MacBeth, in Act 5 Scene 5.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
“The Sound AND the Fury'” was a 1921 William Faukner novel, taking its title from the famous Shakespeare line. How lazy, reckless and stupid for Mitchell to take to twitter to challenge the erudition of Senator Cruz, who is not only better educated than Mitchell, but clearly more articulate, intelligent and better read as well.
Her sniping shows the depth of her partisan bias—would she ever attempt to correct Barack Obama or President Biden’s use of a literary allusion even if she actually knew what she was talking about, which she did not in this case?What does it tell us about her care in checking sources and facts when she would rush to correct a Senator without making certain she was correct, a bit of professional practice that would have required about ten seconds? Her tweet shows her bias, her limited intelligence and her dubious trustworthiness, never mind her lack of basic knowledge of iconic Western literature. (Incredibly, Mitchell majored in English literature yet apparently missed “MacBeth.” How do you do that? Be proud of your graduate, University of Pennsylvania!)
Making this self-outing even richer, Mitchell’s tweet prompted NeverTrump Washington Post Deranged Person Jennifer Rubin to pile on, as she tweeted, “and it says volumes about his lack of soul. That’s Any Thinking Person.” Wow. How embarrassing! How wonderful! Cruz knows his classics, these two phonies don’t and they ganged up to mock him!
Embarrassing herself further, Mitchell’s sheepish explanation was hilarious: “I clearly studied too much American literature and not enough Macbeth. My apologies to Sen. Cruz.” Ah! The problem is that you studied too much!
No, the problem is that you’re an ignoramus suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Ethics Alarms 
One of the last straws that finally convinced once of our liberal friends to “unfriend” us on Facebook (or at least my wife, since I hadn’t touched Facebook in years) was contradicting him on a pronouncement he made very similar to this. My wife had shared on Facebook a speech a priest had made explaining how Joe Biden’s policies were diametrically opposed to Catholic teaching. In this speech, the priest had said, “As Jesus said, ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.'” He claimed with smug superiority that the priest had mis-attributed a quote by Abraham Lincoln to Jesus.
My wife very quickly, but very politely pointed out the exact text in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus said what the priest had indicated, and our friend doubled-down and said it was definitely a quote by Abraham Lincoln because of the exact words used. My liberal sister texted my wife and asked what was up with this friend, and another family member politely suggested to our friend that perhaps, just perhaps, Abraham Lincoln, erudite fellow that he was, might have been quoting Jesus? Still our friend insisted that not only was the priest deceptive in his wrong attribution, but if this had been an academic paper, the priest would have been guilty of plagiarism, of all things.
When my wife pointed out that didn’t make very much sense, he told us he’d had enough of us, that if he never encountered us again it would be too soon, and unfriended us.
University of Wyoming, be proud of your graduates…
Whoa.
Nicely said, Jack. I suggest that in the future, whenever it is necessary to refer to Mitchell or Rubin (ugh and ugh), that they be referred to as “Noted Shakespearian Scholar”.
Or better yet, “Noted Faulkner Scholar.”
The common curse of mankind, folly
and ignorance, be thine in great revenue!
—William Shakespeare, “
Cruz could have advised her that this is an example of a Faulkner quote: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”.
“O God, that women
should put TDS in their tweets to steal away
their brains!”
-Shakespeare’s Othello, I’m pretty sure.
This ranks right up there with Chuck Todd’s idiotic question in 2015 about how the Mensheviks were Bolsheviks that were mensches. I’m beginning to think that journalism should be a licensed profession where you can lose your privilege to practice for making idiotic gaffes like this.
Guess Mitchell’s and Rubin’s tweets are full of sound and fearing, indicating nothing.
https://nypost.com/…/hustler-founder-larry-flynt-dead…/
Larry Flynt goes down for the dirt nap. He of course was an atheist (most scumbags like this are, it’s easier to do what you damn well please if you believe there’s nothing higher than you) but if there is a hell, he is in it, frying well beyond extra crispy. I say good riddance to a slimy creep.
I’ve spent years writing about heroes and villains, and struggled to deal with the question of who is hero, who is a villain, and how if at all, you “balance the books” with regard to objectively high achievers who also did some objectively terrible things. However, I need perform no such balancing act here.
Larry Flynt was a special kind of ooze. He created nothing valuable, built nothing lasting, sold nothing useful. He spent his entire life catering to the basest of male urges. He claimed to be a First Amendment stalwart and a civil libertarian, but he debased both by his mere presence. The only things about him that make him slightly less of a villain than his Playboy compatriot Hugh Hefner is that he neither pretended to be something he wasn’t (by filling his magazines with faux intellectual junk) nor maintained a personal harem (he just took his sex slaves one at a time). That said, a liar who admits to lying, a thief who admits to stealing, and a murderer who admits to killing win no points for admitting to being evil. Neither does he.
Flynt’s attitude toward the serial killing despot that condemned him to a gilded wheelchair for more than half his life is remarkable and deserves to be observed.
The 8638 people who liked her tweet are either as ignorant as she is or she made them ignorant. I didn’t major in English literature at all and knew where Senator Cruz got his reference.
No Andrea, you arrogant, incompetent, disrespectful partisan fool: it’s Shakespeare, from one of the Bard’s most famous and best known tragedies, “MacBeth,” and perhaps the best known speech from that play, by MacBeth, in Act 5 Scene 5.
To paraphrase a formerly-funny show, “Andrea, you ignorant slut.” And Andrea? That is not Faulkner, just so you know.
Very little these days shocks me, but this one did. I always, and apparently in error, thought Mitchell was an intelligent, reasonably thoughtful woman regardless of her politics. This proves my beliefs wrong, misguided, and assumptive.
Mitchell is 11 years my senior. She was educated back at a time when a liberal arts education actually cared about currently-unimportant historical and cultural icons like William Shakespeare, who is widely considered the greatest playwright in history — something we all throw around as the “GOAT” today at comparative cultural blips on the radar (and mostly sports figures, which tells you something not too pleasant about our culture) like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and Muhammad Ali.
Mitchell’s education background includes one of the best high schools in New York (New Rochelle High) and a bachelor’s degree at UPenn where her degree program was — and I kid you not — English literature. Such a curriculum at that time would’ve practically required you to memorize the entire catalog of Shakespeare’s works.
I suppose a fair analysis could reasonably conclude that this is simply an age-related brain-fart, a “senior moment.” But even allowing that, as a journalist, Mitchell is ethically required, at minimum, to do constant fact checks. It is ethically and presumably professionally incumbent upon her, when fact-checking a person she interviewed (especially when that fact check takes the form of a derisive tweet) to at least subject her comment to a cursory Google or DuckDuckGo search.
But alas, some snarks are just to good to subject to fact-checking. Who knew that the Bush-era mantra of “fake but accurate” would become the standard by which modern journalism was actually judged, rather than a dismissive condemnation of it?
As to her apology? Well, I’ll give her credit for having made one, but her attempt at humor deserves a Shakespearean insult:
“Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage.”
Does everyone know of Philomena Cunk? She’s a UK character who does documentaries that explain important subjects to the common people. Her only failing is that she’s an idiot. Here, she questions an expert about words that the Bard gave to our language:
Real question: Is Jennifer Rubin the daughter of someone important or did she sleep with someone important? I’m about to Google it, and I just can’t imagine anything else… She’s too stupid to get to where she is on her own.
And yet… It seems like she did. I don’t know if it says something about me that I would assume that, or something about her employers for paying an idiot to write for them, but I’ve never seen anything other than a cripplingly stupid, blazing hot take from Jennifer Rubin.
Neither, she’s just a non-practicing lawyer (albeit someone who was #1 in her class) who retired from practicing labor law after 20 years to turn to opinion column writing. Apparently her writing became popular enough that it was a big deal when she joined the Washington Post, and a big deal when she, who had supported Romney in 2012, turned against Trump and said she no longer identified as a conservative. She WAS at one point on the Jewish Daily Forward’s list of 50 most influential American Jews. Then again, Sarah Silverman made that list too, and despite the profane, hate-filled comments of her vicious, hate-filled jerk of a dad, that says more about the people making the list than those on it.
Earlier in her career others said they never got the impression that she was anything other than a Democrat. I’ve read some of her recent stuff, and I find it to be by-the-numbers, phoned-in Trump hatred that’s really nothing better than you’d find in the comments sections of any article on Yahoo. However, reliable Trump hatred has been really all you needed to keep your job in the mainstream media for 4 years.
Faulkner’s contemporary critics savaged his work, calling them sentimental drivel. After reading them, I agree. His work may be full of sound and fury, but I don’t think it signified nothing. I just think it signified the elitism we see today in our ruling class. Democrats haven’t changed much.
Faulkner’s probably my favorite. “As I Lay Dying.” “The Old Man.” Faulkner was despised as a traitor and an embarrassment by most of his fellow Mississippians (he must have hit the mark). When I mentioned to my American Lit professor/friend that the University of Mississippi football stadium was called, amazingly enough, “Hemingway Stadium,” I wondered whether it was done for irony, to which he responded, “No. Revenge.”
Ooops. Typo. Change the first “Hemingway” to “Faulkner.” (I think Hemingway the most over rated writer of the 20th Century.
I did. But the second Hemingway is correct? There is a Hemingway stadium in Mississippi???? Now I’m completely confused.
So is Andrea Mitchell: she just tweeted that when she wrote Faulkner, she meant Hemingway. Or Sinclair Lewis.
Yes. I googled it before sending the comment, although I’d heard about it years ago. The stadium is named after a Judge Hemingway and (since the 1980s) a long-time “Ole Miss” football coach, Johnny Vaught. So it’s now “Hemingway-Vaught Stadium.”
We know Grace has a brick; we don’t know how far she’s willing to travel to employ it.
And by the way, “The Sound and the Fury” is a ridiculously difficult book to read. The “Cliffs Notes” are essential. It was Faulkner’s “touche” to the European modernists (Joyce, et al.) and stream of consciousness, much as Fallingwater was Frank Lloyd Wright’s “I’ll show you how to do International Style!” to the Bauhaus, et al.
I’ve never thought of “sentimental” and “William Faulkner” in the same sentence.
Oh, it is. Any love of that type of ‘great’ literature was killed when I was required to read 3 Faulkner novels in high school. I don’t remember which ones they are, but I can summarize each one of them. They were so miserable to read, I don’t think I have ever been that close to suicide in my life. I would rather have died than read any more of that miserable trash. It actually sent me into a suicidal depression.
(1) It is centered on Southerners whose family used to own large plantations run by slaves, but now they are poor.
(2) They bemoan the fact that they aren’t running everything anymore and these ‘new’ people without any breeding are the important people now.
(3) They drink a lot and horrible things happen to them.
I can also summarize Faulker’s life with a loop. If only the biographer who wrote his biography had been so kind to me and not written about each loop in detail. I had to read that, too.
For N = 1 to (Number of Books Faulkner Wrote)
-Writes book
-Publishes book
-Book is panned by critics and doesn’t sell well
-Faulkner runs out of money for booze
-Faulkner goes to Hollywood to write movie scripts for money
-Faulkner drinks and bemoans the fact that a great mind like his is being wasted writing movie scripts for people who are beneath him
-Faulkner makes enough money in Hollywood for a year’s worth of living expenses and booze
Next N