"Do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?"/"It’s a great asset. More inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch."

The conversation everyone's talking about. A question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, and an answer from President of the United States Joe Biden.

Do you have a problem with any of it? It all makes sense to me. All I can see is that if anybody has a problem with it, but they also called out Donald Trump, in his presidential days, for his lack of "civility" when he made equivalently rough statements, then it's an occasion for my "civility bullshit" tag. Otherwise it's idle chitchat. Don't be distracted.

I need to give a link for the statement. I saw it yesterday multiple places, but I'm reviewing it at 4:45 in the morning at "Caught on a Hot Mic: Biden Uses a Vulgarity to Insult a Fox News ReporterThe president later called Peter Doocy and 'cleared the air,' Mr. Doocy said" (NYT).

Doocy didn't need an answer to that question. He was just publicizing an issue that obviously hurts Biden. Biden was presidential enough not to say "Fuck you," which would have been a completely justified and normal response. And if I am to believe the NYT, both men are engaged in a lengthy political dance:

Mr. Doocy is a reliable needler of Mr. Biden, although the president often appears more amused than angered by their jousts. Their sometimes spiky exchanges have become a regular feature of Mr. Biden’s public appearances.

Here's the video:

ADDED: As tim maguire says in the comments, since Donald Trump was criticized for lacking civility, it becomes necessary to criticize Biden too, in order to avoid using the kind of hypocrisy I call "civility bullshit." I still want the tag "civility bullshit," because it's a discussion of the problem of the double standard, and because I don't think Biden is roundly denounced for lacking civility, for degrading the public discourse. I think his roughness is largely tolerated, and it isn't characterized as a deplorable trend.

"Could we have had a more unsuitable man in charge? Sloppy, lusty, blind to details..."

"... just look at the piteous footage of Boris Johnson as he apologised to the Queen last week, nearly weeping, entirely out of self-pity. Nobody, he moaned, told him the massive party he had personally attended was 'against the rules.' If it wasn’t a 'work event,' he said, he couldn’t 'imagine why on earth it would have gone ahead.' I can tell him why: it went ahead because no one at Downing Street ever gave a toss about the rules. Not a single one of the scores of entitled, cashmere-hoodie-toting Tinder-swiping gin-in-a-tin-chugging junior staffers who flocked to the basement disco gimpfest the night before Prince Philip’s funeral gave a second thought about what was happening in the rest of the country. It says everything that even when Johnson came out of hospital, one of the earliest things he did wasn’t to tell Carrie to tone down the fire-pit heart-to-hearts; he went to what one MP described as a 'welcome back' party in his garden. He ignored Covid and nearly died from it but came back and still ignored it and licked everything. Who does that?"

From "Keeping up with the Johnsons is exhausting — life is lived at 10,000 miles a minute" by Camilla Long (London Times).

I do enjoy reading The London Times. The writing is different from what we get here in America. Apparently, in the U.K., a classy paper will print the word "gimpfest." And every other sentence makes me want to diagram.

"No. You can not base your life on frowning and glaring at others literally behind your shades and think you are making a positive impact on lives."

"Just like the met gala is a ridiculous, outdated event that does no good except for advancing privilege. I hope we begin to understand how many generous, kind people there are in the world and that those are the individuals we should be celebrating."

The second-highest-rated comment on "Can Anna Wintour Survive the Social Justice Movement?/A reckoning has come to Bon Appétit and the other magazines of Condé Nast. Can a culture built on elitism and exclusion possibly change?" by Ginia Bellafante (NYT).

The first-highest-rated comment: "It's kind of rich when a newspaper that oozes white privilege and credential worship, prints endless real-estate stories about zillion-dolllar properties, and covers celebrities endlessly in its style magazine and arts pages goes after Anna Wintour."

The NYT is going after Anna Wintour — not because she said anything arguably racist or got caught in blackface or anything like that, but simply because she is powerful and imperious and because, apparently, Vogue is a fashion magazine.

They also have this quote from André Leon Talley, "a black man and longtime former editor at Vogue": "I wanna say one thing, Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame. I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege."

A colonial broad, whatever "colonial" is supposed to mean. As for "broad"... it's a blatantly sexist word, but sexism was last year's concern. This year it's race, and for some perverted reason, we can't concern ourselves with both at the same time.

She is literally a "Dame" — I'm reading that at Wikipedia, where I also learn that she lives in Greenwich Village, rises before 6 a.m., "rarely stays at parties for more than 20 minutes at a time and goes to bed by 10:15 every night." For lunch she eats "a steak (or bunless hamburger)" but years ago it was "smoked salmon and scrambled eggs every single day." She wears sunglasses all the time because they are "actually corrective lenses" but also (as one acquaintance says) "you know, really, armour."

Politically, she's a big supporter of Democrats. They say if Hillary Clinton had won, Anna Wintour would have become the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. And now, look what she gets. The NYT coming after her for nothing. You can't devote your life to fashion for the sake of fashion in the Social Justice Regime.

ADDED: From "Anna Wintour Isn’t Going To Cancel Herself/Vogue’s editor is now promising to do better for Black employees and readers. Does she not realize that she, largely alone, had all the power all along?" (BuzzFeed News):

Wintour has built her entire career on the foundation of fetishizing white-woman meanness... Wintour’s persona isn’t just of a boss that’s tough to please, but of a woman boss who’s just as awful as a man could be. It’s an earlier, less PR-optimized incarnation of the Nasty Woman/Girl Boss modus operandi: the idea that being authoritarian or contemptuous at work is feminist, because if men get to do it, why can’t women?

Wintour embraces a version of femininity that says you have to be skinny, white, elegant, aloof, and rich..... Wintour found power in being icy, while third-wave “feminist” bosses learned to hide their harshness behind public displays of feminist solidarity.... 

Feminism is so last year. This year is all about race. Wintour is white, so she's out.

"Try to imagine Muhammad Ali without Little Richard’s winking persona, his swing and swagger ('I am the King!')."

"Try to imagine James Brown, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Prince without his electrical charge. Little Richard was an original, and he did not hesitate to remind his students of their debt. He once looked into a television camera and, with affection, told Prince, 'I was wearing purple before you was wearing it!'... Richard Penniman was born in 1932 into a large, poor Christian family, in Macon, Georgia. His father was a brick mason and a bootlegger. One of Richard’s legs was shorter than the other, making him a source of mockery among other children. 'They thought I was trying to twist and walk feminine... The kids would call me faggot, sissy, freak.'... Even as a child singer, Richard was known for his high range and incredible volume. But, in his father’s eyes, he was unbearably effeminate and not to be tolerated. When Richard was a teen-ager, he was thrown out of the house and went to live with Ann and Johnny Johnson, a white couple who ran a local venue, the Tick Tock Club.... Throughout his teens, he was in and out of outfits like Buster Brown’s Orchestra (where he got the name Little Richard) and the Tidy Jolly Steppers. He sang, sometimes wearing a red evening gown, under the name Princess Lavonne, in Sugarfoot Sam’s Minstrel Show."

From "Little Richard, the Great Innovator of Rock and Roll" by David Remnick (The New Yorker).

I wanted to find a photograph of Little Richard in the Princess Lavonne persona. I did find this description at Talkhouse, "Pour on the Steam: Little Richard at Age 19/Adam Weiner (Low Cut Connie) tells a tale of magical personhood in a Macon, Georgia bus station":

It was a medicine show spiritualist pseudo-psychic passing through town named Doctor Nobilio who was the first to tell Richard he would be massively famous—he just needed to get the hell out of Macon. He quit high school and joined up with a series of amazingly-titled rinky-dink traveling shows, initially billed as Little Richard, and then as the great Princess Lavonne. He performed with Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show, Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam, the Tidy Jolly Steppers, and the Broadway Follies. Princess Lavonne was an intense, hilarious Queen in Pancake 31 makeup. He worked on his schtick, but ultimately was an awkward drag performer. He had a natural gift to electrify and seduce, but with his mismatched legs, he couldn’t figure out how to walk or dance in heels so he would just stand still and wait for someone to open and close the curtain...

I'd also love to hear the story from the perspective of Ann and Johnny Johnson. Who were these white people who took in Little Richard when his father was so cruel to him? Or was his father cruel to him?

Bud Penniman. What voice did that man have?