House of Eratosthenes

And this bit at the end, where Trump gets his little digs in on Ms. Kelly, has exploded. The primer detonation was after the whole exchange, by which time the watchers and those interested were firmly divided into a pro-Trump and pro-Kelly camp. It was the second half of this Trump formula, where you poke the critic, or asker of unwelcome question, in the nose in a playful way first to sort of let ’em know what’s coming. Then you go off somewhere else where they can’t defend themselves and say something like…

“@timjcam: @megynkelly @FrankLuntz @realDonaldTrump Fox viewers give low marks to bimbo @MegynKelly will consider other programs!”

And…

I knew it was going to be a big crowd because I get big crowds. I get ratings…So she gets out and starts asking me all types of ridiculous questions, and you know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes — blood coming out of her, wherever.

My opinion? Well, let’s review what is really going on here. It’s a “good” disagreement, in the sense that their boxcars are both on the same track. Megyn Kelly’s point, and it is certainly not a bad one by any means, is that we could very well end up with a Trump-vs.-Clinton contest here…

Memo to people who feel like they sort of nodded off a few years ago, and woke up suddenly in these times and are scrambling to adjust. That means, people like me. “Clinton,” in the here & now, refers to a chick. Her Hillary-ness. Cankles. The mean angry middle-age woman whose appeal is, inexplicably, that she’s a mean angry middle-age woman. Yeah, I know right?

The point behind Kelly’s question is that Trump’s well known penchant for coloring outside the lines, could make him a liability in such a contest. I don’t agree with The Donald that this was an unfair question. The problem with it, is that it — like Trump’s many responses — bases its worthiness on the anticipation of what total strangers think, and/or will be thinking.

And as distasteful as I find that to be, it too is not a problem. The problem is 1) Trump is doing the same thing, and 2) from all we can see, from the audience’s reactions, he’s right and Megyn Kelly is wrong. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you didn’t watch the clip. Her question was not a reflection on the public’s delicate sensibilities and/or offense, it was an attempt to manufacture these. I really like Megyn Kelly, but here, she wasted everybody’s time. It was not a good question. It wasn’t an unfair question, but it was a bad one. She ended up with egg on her face and that’s what should have happened.

Now things get crazy. With the open forum ended, Megyn Kelly’s sympathizers want a “rematch,” of sorts. They want to see how their own tweets play out, what their own Facebook posts can get launched. One of my blogger friends from way back, speaks for a great many when he says,

I’m not a woman… but I’m married to one, I have sisters, I have nieces, I have a mother and I know plenty of women who would rightly take umbrage with Trump over his treatment of women. As a man who cares deeply about these women, I stand with them.

To which I reply,

Why do you conflate your sisters/mother/nieces with this woman who asked an inappropriate question? …since she was bullying a bully on live television, let us agree it was a foolish question. A question undeserving of respect.

I know lots of women who wouldn’t do that. Why should I see an insult against one, as an insult against all of them, just because they’re women?

And here, we confront our mass delusions that stretch backward in time by a great many years, that have set us down this errant path. And they’ve paved the way for a Trump candidacy in the first place. These misguided notions about classifications of people; that some of them are so incredibly weak, that if ever there is a dispute in a public forum that involves an instance of those classes the rest of us are ALL honor-bound to come out of the woodwork and lower the beatdown on their opponent.

For our sisters! Or something.

I remember something about this. I recall making a disparaging remark on the social media, during a rather frustrating bout of Christmas shopping, about the un-wisdom of burying children entirely under big piles of video games, specifically children with highly questionable learning disabilities. My point was, when the electronic-game-playing habit slips way out of control and you just feed it during birthdays and holidays buying the varmint a bunch of electronic gadgets and games and won’t even consider anything else, you can’t turn around and say “He doesn’t listen to me and has trouble with schoolwork, it must be LD.”

Up comes the husband of one of my exes, with some comment — in writing, it came off as exactly the same demeanor as Megyn Kelly’s question, this “offended yard duty teacher” posturing — “We both know who you’re talking about.” I ignored this completely, because that’s one of the first things a manly man does. One of the last things a manly man does, and this is my point, is to wade into social media fighting his wife’s fights for her.

A couple of my female friends, with varying levels of knowledge about the prior personal events, made that point to him. Fighting your wife’s Facebook fights for her, doesn’t make you look manly. It makes you look the opposite. That’s a good point.

It applies here. Megyn Kelly went up against Donald Trump and tried to win a judgment in the court of public opinion. She lost, end of case. That should be the end of it, but we’ve been conditioned to think in these things we somehow owe it to women to dehumanize them, to make sure we don’t see them as individuals, that we’re supposed to see them as part of this big, tender, highly sensitized class. An offense against one is an offense against all!

That’s bullshit. The big problem with women in this situation, as is the case in most other situations, is 1) it turns out they’re human and 2) humans make mistakes. That is all this is. I don’t owe Megyn Kelly a single thing and neither do you. She asked a foolish question and ended up looking foolish…something that happens to males in her industry, hundreds of times a year.

And, to be “fair and balanced” about it, I don’t owe Donald Trump anything either. But this is not about politeness versus rudeness as opposed to political correctness. It still IS about political correctness. And this is not anybody else’s fight. Megyn Kelly tried to stir something up, she failed — end of story. Oh and as further icing on the cake, Ms. Kelly is fully aware of this. She is an established player in her industry. It has hazards. I’d love to live in a house as big as her swimming pool, and you would too.

If we’re truly concerned about it, the solution to the problem is, as always, to do a better job defining things that have been left undefined. Or to restore a definition that someone dismantled. In this case, it would be: The proper role of a moderator in a presidential debate. We need to spend some time repairing that particular fence on our ranch. Seriously. There’s some heap big wreckage there.

Sigh. Trump. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Yet he’s really having a positive effect, causing the candidates to swing to the right, except for the liberal Democrats Jeb and Christie, who stubbornly continue to toe the party line and insist socialism is required to win votes.
He’s still a liberal. And a conservative. He’s whatever he needs to be to get him the most power and the most money. I’ve gone from the very real fear that RINO’s in the RNC would install puppets Bush and Christie to Trump running as an independent and handing the election to whatever criminal petty dictator the Dems offer up.
- P_Ang | 08/09/2015 @ 04:04
“Megyn Kelly tried to stir something up, she failed…”
No she didn’t, she tried to disingenuously frame the meme of the entire proceedings.
And got spanked, right there in the supermarket check out line, for doing it.
IMHO of course.
- CaptDMO | 08/09/2015 @ 04:56
I’ve been beating this drum for a long time. The public is sick unto death of PC nonsense. Like the term or not, the folks who coined “cuckservative” hit the nail straight on the head — there is a group ostensibly on the “right” who are Thought Police, same as the SJWs. “Better dead than rude,” is I think how John Derbyshire put it — a few major terrorist attacks at American shopping malls is a small price to pay for not being called “racist.” Megyn Kelly is perceived as the spokesmodel for these people.

Problem is, you’re gonna get called “racist” anyway. That’s what the Left does. That’s all they do. They haven’t had an original idea since the early 1950s. They’re totally busted. Look at their campaign platforms — “vote for me because vagina” and “let’s give the New Deal another shot.” They only win if the other side agrees with all their positions, and can only mumble vaguely about it.

Trump has tapped into that. I predicted before that Trump telling Kelly to get stuffed would appear like a big middle finger to the entire Cuckstablishment. Seems like I was right. Trump’s a loon, he’s an awful person, but he’s telling us quite a bit about ourselves that we really, really need to hear if we have any chance of turning this country around.*

*n.b. not that he’s doing that intentionally. He’s just an asshole who says whatever is in his giant ego at the moment. But the way we respond to that tells us so very many things about where we are as a nation.
- Severian | 08/09/2015 @ 08:22
[…] Any discussion of the questions themselves. Megyn Kelly might have had a point (or she might not). Either way, point-and-shriek is designed to take the focus off the issue and onto the […]
- The LIV Take on Trump | Rotten Chestnuts | 08/09/2015 @ 09:05
Hmm…awaiting moderation again. What was the magic word Sev, Li ber al?
- P_Ang | 08/09/2015 @ 12:51
Feminists routinely come out with this position. Women are just as strong as men, just as tough as men, women can do anything that men can do, and if you say otherwise, we will cry and get hysterical and faint. I’m sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that a woman can run for president because she is not different from a man in any relevant way, and then in the next sentence say that her opponent in the race is not allowed to criticize her because she’s a frail, fragile little girl and it would be ungentlemanly to be mean to her. If a woman wants to become a professional boxer and she can compete with the men, okay fine. But don’t say you want to become a professional boxer and then cry because someone hit you and men aren’t supposed to hit girls.
- saneperson | 08/10/2015 @ 14:48
The real question is, Who paid Kelly for this hatchet job?
- Bob Sykes | 08/12/2015 @ 05:55
@Bob Sykes,

I doubt if anybody did. That’s why I always say it’s wrong to call the media “whores.” Whores get paid for their time. Our media does it for the low low price of thinking well of themselves.
- Severian | 08/12/2015 @ 07:41
[…] Surrounded by Sphincter Muscles I Don’t Owe Megyn Kelly a Single Thing I Like My Way of Grilling Better Our Newest Addition to the Family Memo For File CXCVIII “The […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/12/2015 @ 17:03
[…] Egg Chivalry Voids Surrounded by Sphincter Muscles I Don’t Owe Megyn Kelly a Single Thing I Like My Way of Grilling Better Our Newest Addition to the Family Memo For File CXCVIII “The […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 08/14/2015 @ 06:04

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I Don’t Owe Megyn Kelly a Single ThingSaturday, August 8th, 2015

I Don’t Owe Megyn Kelly a Single Thing
Saturday, August 8th, 2015