I’m sure you have all heard by now

* NY Times staffers report that McCarthy wanted Trump to resign, and other details embarrassing to McCarthy
* McCarthy denies everything
* Reporters pull a Hedley LaMarr (“Oh, sorry, I just remembered. I AM armed.”). Specifically: Oh, sorry, we forgot to mention. It’s all on tape.

About four years ago I mentioned that the smartest person dealing with Donald Trump was Omarosa. She had dealt with him numerous times in the past as part of his reality show, so she knew that he would simply lie about everything. She therefore taped every single conversation with him. Best of all, she didn’t immediately reveal that she had the tapes. She wrote or told interviewers about all the evil shit Trump had said, like a cagey lioness, hiding in the tall grass, setting her trap for an unsuspecting antelope, just waiting for Trump to deny everything. He was easy prey, the antelope predictably heading to the watering hole at sundown, insulting her and lying about everything right on cue, whereupon Omarosa went full Hedley LaMarr and said, “Oh, sorry, I AM armed – with tapes.” After a couple of lame attempts to have his spin doctors handle the situation, Trump finally let it go, a rare thing to see. He obviously didn’t want any more of her tapes becoming public.

These two NY Times guys have just sprung the same trap on McCarthy. They let him lie his ass off, deny everything, and rant about the liberal media, before they revealed that they had it all recorded.

That was a great move, but the best news of all for us political junkies is that the reporters assert that this tape is just a drop in their immense bucket of recorded material! This means that politicians really can’t deny anything they have written in their new book. While they may not have tapes to support every single claim in their book, they may have just that. That means that any denial of their story is a major gamble because it could make things much worse if there is tape to back the story. The politicians will have two choices – either admit they are guilty as charged, or risk a denial that might be refuted on tape – thereby proving them both guilty and dishonest, while simultaneously prolonging the life of a negative story in the media cycle.

(Their trap is also a helluva marketing scheme. That book is already #1 on the best seller charts, and it hasn’t been released yet.)

All of this raises a fascinating question. Who made these tapes? Liz Cheney was on the one they have already released, but she swears that she is not the culprit. So where did these tapes come from?

Bill Murray behaved inappropriately? There’s a shocker! Don’t you hire Murray BECAUSE he will behave inappropriately?

(Kidding aside, I guess judgment should hinge on the nature of the inappropriate behavior. I am assuming he didn’t go full Polanski, but I don’t know that.)

I think you history buffs will find a lot to hate in this article.

Robert E Lee had some successes, but was not an especially effective general, and there are far greater ones left off the list. Two examples might be England’s Henry V and America’s Andrew Jackson. And I hear that Genghis Khan guy was pretty good, not to mention Hannibal, Frederic the Great and Jan Sobieski.

Napoleon? Well, he’s on the list and Kutuzov isn’t, but the last I heard, Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000 men and was lucky to return with his horse and a couple of stale baguettes. Kidding aside, he left about 500,000 of his men dead in the Russian snow. As I’ve noted several times, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was arguably the single stupidest thing any human being has ever done – in any field, not just restricted to the military. So he was bold and won many victories, but is maybe not the best general of all time.

(Yes, I know that Andrew Jackson was a despicable human being, but his military record was astounding. I suppose you could posit that his legendary victory at New Orleans was the result of incompetent opposition, but either way it was one of the most impressive triumphs in military history. He cobbled together a rag-tag army, and absolutely slaughtered a force of 8,000 British regulars, losing only 13 men in the process. For decades, January 8th and July 4th were celebrated with almost equal fervor.)

All comments and collages by Brainscan:

Students and faculty in the film department where I went to college talked of this movie with deep reverence and the sort of high falutin words otherwise reserved for the work of Eisenstein and Orson Welles. Beautifully written, wonderfully directed and photographed, edited and acted with consummate skill by everyone involved, and since one of the actresses was Marilyn Monroe at her most vulnerable – and she is in just about every scene – a healthy male cannot keep his eyes off the screen.

Clark Gable plays the part of an alpha male, a silver-backed primate with powers diminished and eyes grown cloudy. He was feeling his age, both actor and character. Within weeks of the movie’s completion, Gable was dead.

Monroe and her character were frightened and fragile, so clearly doomed that even someone who knows nothing of Monroe would have to feel the pain she shows in her face throughout the movie. Some scenes are terribly hard to bear, knowing as we do that Monroe would be dead from an overdose in a matter of months. And the last scene when Monroe and Gable ride away together is impossible to watch more than once. She looks as though she should be happy but she knows it is all temporary, this moment with him, and she knows what is to follow. Yikes, it hurts to think about. And Gable has the look of a man who knows he has won the prize again, one last time before the end comes so very soon.

Anyway, enough of this brouhaha. Marilyn gets very close to revealing her natural wonders a couple of times and now that The Misfits is on HD, I grabbed it and threw together a clip and a few collages.


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Scoop’s comments:

The film was released in February of 1961. Clark Gable had already died by then, leaving behind a pregnant, much younger wife. (His grandchild, Maria, was born two years before his son, John Clark!) Marilyn Monroe would follow him during the next summer, at the tender age of 36. In four more years, Monty Clift would complete the trifecta among the film’s stars when he was found dead in his apartment. He was 45.

They were three of the most troubled people in Hollywood.

  • Gable’s psyche never recovered from the grief he experienced after the death of his wife, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash.
  • Although Clift died of heart disease, his last 10 years, following his 1956 car accident, were called the “longest suicide in history” by his former acting teacher.
  • I’m sure you all know what happened to Marilyn.