How David Letterman Failed the Dangerous Laughter Test

 The Hayride   

"And if Allen is right that the roots of Russiagate reach much further back than 2016, then that missing Letterman interview may be a small piece of a much larger story about who shaped the narratives Americans were given, who repeated them and what eventually disappeared from view."

"(Mark Anthony) — Seven days after the Benghazi attack, Barack Obama went on David Letterman’s show.

"The date was September 18, 2012. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were dead. The Obama administration was under mounting pressure to explain what had happened, the election was less than two months away, and the administration’s explanation that the attack had grown out of a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islam video was already under scrutiny.

"So Obama went to Letterman. Naturally. 

"That was one of the more striking moments in A.J. Rice’s Dangerous Laughter conversation with Drew Thomas Allen, author of Clinton Hoax, Obama Coup: The Declassified Story of the Trump-Russia Delusion. Allen’s book argues that the political and intelligence controversies that exploded around Donald Trump in 2016 did not begin with Trump. To understand Russiagate, he argues, you have to go backward through the Obama years, Benghazi, Hillary Clinton and the intelligence community.

"But the Letterman story is where the conversation gets genuinely strange.

"Allen says that while researching the book, he found references to Obama’s Letterman appearance in material associated with the Benghazi investigation. Finding the actual interview, however, proved to be another matter. According to the discussion, only a small portion of the September 18 appearance remains readily available, while the section dealing with Obama’s explanation of Benghazi is the part that cannot readily be found. Rice points out that plenty of Letterman interviews from that period remain online, making the absence of this particular material difficult to ignore.

"Let’s be careful about what that does and does not mean. The missing footage does not prove who removed it, why it disappeared or whether anyone deliberately removed it at all. Television archives are complicated, rights change hands and old material can disappear for mundane reasons. Rice and Allen themselves discussed trying to obtain a complete copy or transcript rather than treating the missing footage as proof of a conspiracy.

"But it does raise a pretty remarkable question: why is a presidential interview, important enough to be referenced in the Benghazi investigations, so difficult to watch today?

"Rice’s answer was almost tailor-made for Dangerous Laughter: it has been “memory holed.'”. . .    More...

The New WWE—Women’s Wrestling Entertainment

 Caitlin Clark made the WNBA rich, but its players seem determined to destroy the league by turning women’s basketball into a violent spectacle.

Victor Davis Hanson  

"Two ex-NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, took the WNBA at its word, nobly identifying as women and declaring themselves for the WNBA draft. Yet their declaration of their preferred gender identities—which are usually affirmed as brave and stunning by the WNBA and other forms of officialdom—only elicited furor from the league."

"The WWE is getting rich not so much by just playing basketball as by waging a veritable physical and cultural
 war on Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham."

"A better name for the current Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) might be Women’s Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), given the growing performance-art violence that is now endemic in the league.

"Prior to the 2024 arrival of then-22-year-old Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark, very few people watched the WNBA.

"Team franchises were worth less than $20 million. The league ran chronic deficits and was subsidized by the men’s professional basketball league, the National Basketball Association (NBA).

"An unspoken subtext of the WNBA was that the owners and coaches were left-wing and made little effort to hide their political biases.

"Despite talk of diversity, the league was—and remains—about 83 percent nonwhite and about 70 percent black.

"Some media outlets have suggested that about 50 percent of the players are gay.

"By Clark’s third year, her level of play had revolutionized the WNBA—or rather, saved it from financial collapse and cultural obscurity.

"Economists have concluded that she has already infused $1 billion into the league through increased attendance, new media contracts, endorsements and sponsorships, and sports tourism.

"Once-obscure players are now pampered and highly compensated.

"Team franchises are now more than 20 times as valuable. In Caitlin Clark’s mere three years, the average team market value has soared to nearly $500 million.

"Caitlin Clark did not revolutionize the WNBA by belonging to a white and heterosexual minority. Indeed, there are plenty of such players in the league.

"Rather, in less than three years, she has proven to be arguably the greatest and most exciting female basketball player in history—hence the strange envy and hatred of her competitors." . . .  More.

Liberal Women

 What Lindsey Clancy’s defenders have revealed about American women - Patricia McCarthy    

"There are thousands of depressed and maybe even psychotic people who do not murder." 

. . . "There are thousands of depressed and maybe even psychotic people who do not murder.  But for an astonishing number of women across America, the answer is a no-brainer:  Clancy is innocent because … her husband did it (no evidence whatsoever), the psychiatric drugs she had amassed from several if not numerous psychiatrists made her do it, and/or that she suffered so seriously from postpartum psychosis, a rare but extreme form of postpartum depression.

"We’ve all seen the bizarre cult of moonbats who believe Luigi Mangione should be allowed to walk free after shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back because he headed a health insurance company; Mangione hated health insurance companies.  

"Then there are the “activists” who think Karmelo Anthony is not guilty of stabbing Austin Metcalf to death when all the evidence proves that he did, without cause.  Recent evidence shows that Anthony was on the edge that day and looking to stab someone and wanted to “lick their blood off his knife.” 

"The theoretically same people believed O.J. Simpson was innocent, that George Floyd was not the drugged-up criminal with a violent past that he was.  

"These are the same people who believed Kamala Harris’ pal Jussie Smollett did not set up his absurd attack by two men wearing MAGA hats.  How many fake “racist” hoaxes are there?  Too many to count." . . .    

. . . "But with the invasion of 12 million to 20 million migrants from third world failed states our American culture has been polluted, the obvious consequence is the disruption of what was once a relatively ideologically cohesive country.  And now we have mothers defending a mother who murdered her own three babies."  

Why Are Liberal White Women So Angry? - American Thinker 

"Because the United States is living in the feminist future that these witless, self-indulgent, agnostic, supposedly well-educated, and miserable women promoted, there is an ongoing calamitous erosion of a unique American civilization."

We Happy Few, We Band Of Wokesters

Ann Coulter  

"Okay, fine. You have more beautiful buildings, accents, traditions, and castles, etc. We’re vulgar arrivistes who eat Texas chili out of a Frito bag. Then why, Britain, do you slavishly imitate the worst woke nonsense America has to offer?" 

"Assuming the ridiculous gushing over a Cambridge conman was not a national Monty Python sketch arranged for tourists, the Jason Arday affair reminded me of one of the most peculiar things about Britain: They’re more woke than the U.S. Which is weird, because the Mother Country still has a monarchy that rules over tens of millions of white subjects. The closest we have to that in America is the NAACP.

"According to the 2021 census, the U.K. is 2.5% black, but more than half of all its TV advertisements feature black people. (That’s even more lopsided than their representation in the country’s homicide statistics, where black Britons make up 24% of all convicted killers.)

"You’d never know Britain was the first nation in the world to abolish slavery, then proceeded to use the most powerful navy in the world to end the global slave trade. Black lives mattered to them way before Michael Brown got himself killed in Ferguson, Missouri.

"At a cost of thousands of sailors’ lives and billions of dollars ($170 billion relative to GDP at the time) British ships patrolled the African coast for 50 years, intercepting more than 1,000 slave ships, and freeing 150,000 humans. British taxpayers finally finished paying off that bill in 2015.

"So obviously, Britain has a lot to atone for.

"The study of TV ads, undertaken by the U.K.’s left-wing Channel 4 last year, also found that “[m]ulti-ethnic families with young multi-ethnic children continue to be the go-to for family representation,” constituting 47% of all ads with families. Interracial couples in the U.K. are like gay wedding planners in the U.S. Nobody has ever met one, but they seem to be everywhere.

"For extra “diversity,” Asians (mostly Indians and Pakistanis), who make up 9.3% of the population, are featured in 28% of ads. To be fair, Pakistanis are also wildly over-represented among leaders of white slavery rape gangs.

"The census numbers don’t quite add up, but 81.7% of Britons identified their ethnic group as “white.” At most, 12% of TV ads show white people. On the bright side, gay people in ads were 33% more likely to be white.

"London is gorgeous, has more shops than New York City, and a lot fewer muggers, homeless people and pot-smokers than in any American city." . . .More...

The Self-Cancellation of Jason Arday - by John Carter       "Jason Arday has been found dead at home, apparently by his own hand.  Arday has been written about extensively already, and I don’t want to waste time recapitulating the comical saga of his academic malfeasance here. If this is the first you’ve heard of him, you can do much worse than to start with the original piece by Nathan Cofnas exposing the Cambridge con artist’s record of plagiarism, semi-literate rambling, and outrageous tall tales:"

Hillbilly Elegance

  Don Surber; Barbara Walters did Dolly Parton a big favor that people in the 21st century just don’t understand

Greta Van Susteren was among those who denounced the questions. Why? You don’t elicit great answers by asking what’s your favorite color. Walters did Dolly a big favor by giving her a national audience to address the hillbilly stereotypes.

AfterMath - Home

"Dolly Parton’s death brought out the best in people. The Royal Family posted a video of a royal band of some sort playing 9 to 5 in tribute. The tweet said, “Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many—including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you.”

""President Trump ordered flags flown at half-staff in her honor.

"'Born in a one room cabin with a half dozen siblings, they were dirt poor in money but richer than Midas in family.

"Dolly rose. Porter Wagoner gave her a big boost that was controversial as the woman she replaced on his TV show was quite popular. It was not easy, but she Breeze’d her way through the situation.

"When she went off on her own, he sued her. Instead of being bitter, she wrote I Will Always Love You in his honor. When paying back taxes bankrupted him and he had to sell his music catalog, she bought it back for him.

"In the 1970s, she decided to go mainstream. She made some movies with Best Little Whorehouse In Texas being my favorite.

"Part of her marketing was a Barbara Walters interview in 1977. It went well for both women.

"But in the 21st century, everybody is a busybody who is easily offended. Remember Bewitched? The nation is now overrun by Gladys Kravitzes.

"Objections pile up over this exchange."

Walters: “Dolly, where I come from, would I have called you a hillbilly?”

Parton: “If you had have, it would have been something very natural, but I would have probably kicked your shins or something.” . . .      More...

 Dolly Parton truly was a ‘star’ - Andrea Widburg   "In a world in which too many entertainers are narcissistic ignoramuses, Parton epitomized grace, charm, and true generosity of spirit."

. . . "Our young people, God alone knows why, look up to the stars in the entertainment world, most of whom live sordid lives and espouse stupid politics. Can you imagine how different the world would be if these stars behaved like Dolly Parton, just being...good?"