Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 972

The secret to Jeff Daniels’ success: “Stars don’t last. They have a short shelf life”

“Remember, no matter what, it’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion.” This quote from Daniels’ character Charlie, from the 1986 cult classic "Something Wild," nicely suits the man himself. After four decades in the game, Daniels is a survivor. Whether playing a NASA chief, anchorman to the world, or his latest as ex-Apple CEO John Sculley in the Danny Boyle / Aaron Sorkin collaboration "Steve Jobs," Daniels imbues his characters with a playful spark, the radiation of a man truly enjoying his work. As an actors’ actor, he’s never chewed scenery, and captivates by playing off his fellow performers. That humble confidence may stem from his current home and Michigan upbringing, and his work as founder and head of the non-profit Purple Rose Theatre Company. He’s been married to his teenage love since 1979 and has subsequently eschewed Hollywood vice and pitfall. Along with Tom Hanks, Daniels has been graced with industry stability and longevity, and the key seems to be, no matter what, to always have fun. Where you aware of John Sculley, or the impact he had on Steve Jobs, before filming? No. Sculley’s mentioned in Walter’s [Isaacson] book which is what I initially read after getting the script. That’s the first exposure I had to what John was and what he did in Steve’s life. What were your initial impressions of the man? Did you view him as a tragic hero or even a martyr? I got to meet with him and hear his side of things, and also see and hear how much the relationship mattered to him. Aside from the business decision that he made, which short term was the one to make but long term was not, he really bought into working with Steve and being with a creative genius who truly was changing the world, much like a Henry Ford or Thomas Edison. That’s pretty heady stuff for a corporate guy who could have just run around doing startup companies not really knowing what product he was pushing. He did know on this, and did see the genius behind Steve’s next great idea. I think he was ready to buckle in and spend his life doing some great things together. When it ended badly, it took John a long time to come out from under that. His reputation had to be repaired, which took a lot of years. His personal interest in just being involved again in business took some time. He emotionally took some hits that were still with him when I met him, and that was something I was able to put in the movie. Did you get any sense of ego when you met with him? Ego is a big word. None of the guys got to read the script. Some had read the book and they were wary of what we were going to do. They were interested in making sure that we presented them in the light they wanted presented. Not necessarily a favorable light, but nobody wants to be the bad guy. This comes from a place of not knowing and wondering what the script is. You get their version of things and there are many sides to the story. Part of Aaron’s job was to sort it out. With your theater background, was your approach to Jobs’ three act structure instantly comfortable? Yeah, but Aaron was just more up front about it, certainly now in the interviews. Every story is three acts. It goes back to the Greeks. You can see it on "Law and Order" and "CSI." There’s a beginning, middle and an end. That’s all it is, and Aaron was just more out front about it. Unlike formula movies or TV shows, where you go, “Oh, ok. Here’s the problem. Now they gotta beat the obstacles, the hero makes a speech and everybody wins in the end.” The great writers don’t do that. Aaron hides all that. He hides the structure. What might be more obvious in some other shows that are more formula, aside from the three acts, Aaron hides the mechanics of storytelling, the way great writers do. Is falling into Sorkin dialogue easy for you at this point? It’s never easy but it’s familiar. You know the process. You know that you get the script and you need to start getting those words, word for word with no improv, into your head as soon as possible. I’ve learned to memorize it like a grocery list; kinda flat and monotone. Alan Arkin taught me that way back in the 80s when I got to do a project with Alan. You don’t act it. You just get it in your head so it can flow. Then you can find the rhythm and then you can pick up the speed and add the acting on top of it. You can’t add what you’re going to do or how you’re going to interpret it until you’ve got it in your head and you know you know it. That’s different than, “I think I know it,” or “I just memorized it two hours ago.” It’s gotta get in there, live and settle in there, almost like cement. Then when you do it, there’s no question that you know it. Now you can dance on it, as I like to call it. That’s when Sorkin gets fun. You get actors who know it cold, they can throw everything they’ve got at it, and there’s no fear that they’re going to forget their next line. Fassbender and I have a scene in the middle of "Steve Jobs" that’s like a heavyweight fight. We were both able to get to that place that made the scene all the more exciting to play. What’s your Sorkin rehearsal process? Do you run lines at home with your wife? Oh God, I wouldn’t bore her. I’ve spared her that. I’m the room with a script walking back and forth. It’s just repetition. It’s like professional athletes getting the muscle memory. It’s over and over and over again until it’s in there. As you’re saying one line you already know the next. That’s where you gotta get, and that just takes repetition and time. Do you consider Woody Allen, Ridley Scott or Aaron Sorkin geniuses? Genius is a big word. They’re singular. Only Ridley would shoot "The Martian" that way. Only Woody can write like that. Only Aaron would write that way. They’re one-of-a-kind originals in a world where everybody’s copying everybody and originality is harder and harder to find. I’ll give them that. I’ll leave it to others to call people geniuses. I’m not comfortable with that. All three of those guys have been doing what they do for decades. If that qualifies as genius then so be it. Is getting to know a director awkward, like a first date? Did you immediately click with Boyle? Not really like a first date, but you arrive and show him what you think it is and give them something to work with. It’s more than just you. You have to incorporate where the scene fits in the bigger picture of the whole movie. Those are the things that Danny [Boyle] has to worry about. I don’t have to worry about that. I just have to be Sculley in this scene and so you give him that. It’s just about giving him something to work with. Then he gets on his feet and says, “That’s great, but let’s try this.” Now you’re working together because you’ve given him something. I really don’t do, “Well, I need four dates with you before I can decide if I can trust you. I trust you right away. You’re Danny Boyle. Let’s get to work.” It saves everybody a lot of time when you come in like that. For the strong authoritarian figures in "The Martian," "Steve Jobs" and "The Newsroom," was there an archetype in your personal life that you drew from? These are three guys that had decision making power. They have to think through a problem and then everything moves based on their decision. There was that commonality, but there’s no one person I drew from. With McAvoy, I take pieces of people, whether they’re anchor people or not, that have elements of the personality that might fuel what McAvoy is going through. You also pour gas on the parts of you, in McAvoy’s case, that are egotistical or insecure. In real life I try to tamp those down, but with McAvoy you pour gas on them and light it. They call action and off I go. That’s the fun of it; pulling stuff out of me that McAvoy would consider normal behavior. That magic of make-believe is fun. It’s the same thing with the other guys. With Sculley I was able to talk to the real guy. Teddy Sanders is a guy in a position of power, a guy who has to say “no” or question whether saving one astronaut is worth risking the lives of five others. You get to see Teddy make those decisions right in front of the camera so it’s more about thinking your way through it. I run a theater company and sometimes decisions have to be made by me and only me. I’m literally able to take stuff like that, transfer it to Teddy and blow it up into science, math and the space program. When do you have the most fun on set? Is it when you’re allowed to play, like "Dumb and Dumber"’s Harry Dunne or Charlie in "Something Wild?" Those are fun. When you get to improv a little it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily always good or makes the movie better, but it’s enjoyable. I enjoyed "The Newsroom" always because of what I got to say. I enjoy the writing. I enjoy taking that writing, funneling it through me and throwing it at the camera. For me that’s fun. The scene in the middle of "Jobs" with Michael [Fassbender] when we go at each other like it’s a heavyweight fight. That’s fun. As an actor you live for scenes with days like that. When you get them, even though you may be tearing each other’s heads off verbally, that’s fun to us. There’s a lot of, “Hey, great work." Michael and I had gone through it together and we’ll always have that. It was a special day. How do you feel about the state of hyperactive American media? Are we desensitized, more than ever, to horror? Yeah. You know how we drive by a car wreck on the highway and slow down? There’s a lot of that going on now in social media. “Look at this! Look at this! Look at the pain this person’s going through!” The need to know everything about someone, whether it’s true or not, and take what’s not true and make it true, is everywhere. It didn’t used to be that way. I get that we all get information a lot quicker because it’s right there in our phone. We get updated on what this person did constantly and I get that, but I’m not sure it’s all great. Has living in Michigan and marrying your high school sweetheart kept you level? Were you ever drawn to the sex, drugs and rock and roll side of Hollywood? I just never bought it. I always knew it was fleeting and temporary. I was brought up as an actor in New York where they really champion that attitude. You’re an artist and an actor. Stars are something someone else does. You just go off and be the best actor you can be, and if you’re lucky you’ll have a long career. If you want to be a star, go be a star, but it’s probably pretty short term. Stars don’t last. They have a short shelf life. You get ten years older and you’re no longer that action hero anymore. The brand that you set up, as if you’re a product, has now outlived its usefulness. It’s a youth-oriented market. All of these are reasons to not buy into it, and I agreed. I said, “The only thing I can control is becoming a better actor by the end of each movie. I can come out of each movie better. If I do that, maybe I’ll have a career that will last decades.” It turned out that I’ve been able to stick around. As a musician, is there an album that has stuck with you throughout your entire life that you constantly return to? "11-17-70," Elton John. It’s just a threesome and they’re live in a New York studio. It’s not his most popular album but the energy, musicianship and rock and roll behind that is incredible. The bassline that Dee Murray does on “Burn Down the Mission,” man. For whatever reason, that’s the one. Is there a current band or someone new who’s been blowing your hair back recently? I like the writers with a guitar. I’m really attracted to people who are writing originally. Only Jason Isbell could write the two albums he just put out. Sturgill Simpson. The Milk Carton Kids. I’m interested in what those guys are doing. I love anything Lyle Lovett puts out. Only Lyle would write those songs. I look for guys like that. [image error]

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Trey Gowdy’s historic Benghazi implosion: A political witchhunt that would make Joe McCarthy squirm

In 1950, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy gave a speech to the Ohio County Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, WV, where he held up a piece of paper and declared,“I have here in my hand a list of 205 State Department employees that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” And so began the McCarthy witch hunt. The paranoid anti-communist mood in the country preceded his declaration by several years with the original hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Alger Hiss case and various Cold War shocks from Russia to China to Korea. But McCarthy's attack marked the beginning of what would become an article of faith in right-wing circles for decades to come: The State Department is a nest of traitors working together to sell out America. (If you doubt it, read the pungent prose in Ann Coulter's McCarthy apologia, "Treason.") McCarthy's accusations were ridiculous, of course. The numbers of spies he alleged had infiltrated the department ranged from a handful to hundreds and his evidence was non-existent. Even more damning, he could never produce any coherent theory as to why or how this happened and who was responsible for it, but for several years the fiery senator had many people in the country convinced that the State Department was riddled with communists. It was when he went after the Army that his crusade finally fell apart. The right is always willing to believe that a government bureaucrat would sell out his country, but the military is (usually) a bridge too far. The end of the McCarthy witch hunt did not end conservative hostility to the State Department.  Every Soviet incursion was met with howls of disapproval if there had been even the slightest U.S. diplomatic overture. These were seen as signs of weakness, echoing what they considered to be the greatest error of American statecraft -- the "sellout at Yalta" after WWII. In their view, diplomacy, the State Department's raison d'etre, is nothing more than a flaccid attempt to dilute American power. And even after the red scare petered out, the suspicion that the department was teeming with impotent liberal simps was prevalent among conservatives, always worried that any opportunity for America to exert its will through sheer dominant force might be obstructed by some sort of diplomatic interference. Daniel Bell, who wrote an influential book back in the early 1960s called "The Radical Right," even described their anti-communism as a "populist revolt against the State Department." This suspicion of the State Department has continued even in Republican administrations. During the Reagan administration Secretary of State George Schultz was famously at odds with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and there was little love lost between the Bush administration's Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. When the Democrats have the executive branch it's much, much worse. There is just something about the State Department that drives conservatives a little bit crazy. Of course nothing on earth drives them as crazy as Bill and Hillary Clinton, their most hated enemies. The Republicans wasted tens of millions of dollars back in the 1990s trying to destroy them. From Travelgate to Whitewater to Filegate to the Lincoln bedroom, to John Huang/Charlie Tree/Johnny Chung to Monica Lewinsky (none of which, with exception of some furtive extra-marital fellatio in a hallway, resulted in a finding of any wrongdoing) they just could not quit them. And they could not win. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that when the radical right's decades-long mistrust of the State Department combined with their decades-long crusade against Hillary Clinton, the result would be an incoherent howl of suspicion, confusion and inchoate rage. Throughout that marathon hearing yesterday, if there was a theme, a theory or even a rough guess about what Clinton was supposed to have done, it was extremely hard to see what it was. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, a man reputed to be a crack prosecutor, the Republicans were disorganized and unprepared, lurching from one topic to another without connecting any dots or explaining to the nation just what in the world this torturous exercise was supposed to achieve. But despite their embarrassing lack of focus,  the hours of questions about Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal did illuminate where their dark suspicions really lie. They are once again indulging in McCarthyite conspiracy theories, this time some sort of "sell-out at Benghazi" at the hands of Hillary Clinton and her diabolical Sith Lord. It's hard to truly know what the conspiracy theory is because they were so disjointed in their presentation, but there seems to be some notion that Blumenthal was trying to arrange some outside governmental activity in Libya at the behest of Clinton and that this somehow means she violated the Espionage Act. (Garance Franke-Ruta helpfully directed us to this post from the right-wing fever swamp to explain it.) So it's about spies in the State Department. As usual. Only this time it's Hillary Clinton, their most hated nemesis, the one who simply won't go down no matter how hard they hit her. The frustration was palpable. Joe McCarthy was eventually brought low by his own hubris. A man named Joseph Welch put the final point on it when he said, "at long last sir, have you no decency?" It was Congressman Elijah Cummings who made the similarly powerful moral statement in the hearing yesterday when he said:

"I don't know what we want from you. Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get tired, until we do get the gotcha moment he's talking about? "We're better than that. We are so much better. We are a better country. And we are better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign. That's not what America is all about."

Sadly, witch hunts are as American as apple pie. The good news is that if yesterday's hearing is any example, today's witch hunters are all ham-handed Kevin McCarthys instead of Tail-gunner Joes. Right wing conspiracy nuts aren't what they used to be. Maybe we're making progress after all. [image error] Highlights from the 11-hour hearing: [jwplayer file=" http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Bengha..." image=" http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Bengha...] In 1950, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy gave a speech to the Ohio County Women's Republican Club in Wheeling, WV, where he held up a piece of paper and declared,“I have here in my hand a list of 205 State Department employees that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” And so began the McCarthy witch hunt. The paranoid anti-communist mood in the country preceded his declaration by several years with the original hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Alger Hiss case and various Cold War shocks from Russia to China to Korea. But McCarthy's attack marked the beginning of what would become an article of faith in right-wing circles for decades to come: The State Department is a nest of traitors working together to sell out America. (If you doubt it, read the pungent prose in Ann Coulter's McCarthy apologia, "Treason.") McCarthy's accusations were ridiculous, of course. The numbers of spies he alleged had infiltrated the department ranged from a handful to hundreds and his evidence was non-existent. Even more damning, he could never produce any coherent theory as to why or how this happened and who was responsible for it, but for several years the fiery senator had many people in the country convinced that the State Department was riddled with communists. It was when he went after the Army that his crusade finally fell apart. The right is always willing to believe that a government bureaucrat would sell out his country, but the military is (usually) a bridge too far. The end of the McCarthy witch hunt did not end conservative hostility to the State Department.  Every Soviet incursion was met with howls of disapproval if there had been even the slightest U.S. diplomatic overture. These were seen as signs of weakness, echoing what they considered to be the greatest error of American statecraft -- the "sellout at Yalta" after WWII. In their view, diplomacy, the State Department's raison d'etre, is nothing more than a flaccid attempt to dilute American power. And even after the red scare petered out, the suspicion that the department was teeming with impotent liberal simps was prevalent among conservatives, always worried that any opportunity for America to exert its will through sheer dominant force might be obstructed by some sort of diplomatic interference. Daniel Bell, who wrote an influential book back in the early 1960s called "The Radical Right," even described their anti-communism as a "populist revolt against the State Department." This suspicion of the State Department has continued even in Republican administrations. During the Reagan administration Secretary of State George Schultz was famously at odds with Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and there was little love lost between the Bush administration's Dick Cheney and Colin Powell. When the Democrats have the executive branch it's much, much worse. There is just something about the State Department that drives conservatives a little bit crazy. Of course nothing on earth drives them as crazy as Bill and Hillary Clinton, their most hated enemies. The Republicans wasted tens of millions of dollars back in the 1990s trying to destroy them. From Travelgate to Whitewater to Filegate to the Lincoln bedroom, to John Huang/Charlie Tree/Johnny Chung to Monica Lewinsky (none of which, with exception of some furtive extra-marital fellatio in a hallway, resulted in a finding of any wrongdoing) they just could not quit them. And they could not win. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that when the radical right's decades-long mistrust of the State Department combined with their decades-long crusade against Hillary Clinton, the result would be an incoherent howl of suspicion, confusion and inchoate rage. Throughout that marathon hearing yesterday, if there was a theme, a theory or even a rough guess about what Clinton was supposed to have done, it was extremely hard to see what it was. Under the leadership of Trey Gowdy, a man reputed to be a crack prosecutor, the Republicans were disorganized and unprepared, lurching from one topic to another without connecting any dots or explaining to the nation just what in the world this torturous exercise was supposed to achieve. But despite their embarrassing lack of focus,  the hours of questions about Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal did illuminate where their dark suspicions really lie. They are once again indulging in McCarthyite conspiracy theories, this time some sort of "sell-out at Benghazi" at the hands of Hillary Clinton and her diabolical Sith Lord. It's hard to truly know what the conspiracy theory is because they were so disjointed in their presentation, but there seems to be some notion that Blumenthal was trying to arrange some outside governmental activity in Libya at the behest of Clinton and that this somehow means she violated the Espionage Act. (Garance Franke-Ruta helpfully directed us to this post from the right-wing fever swamp to explain it.) So it's about spies in the State Department. As usual. Only this time it's Hillary Clinton, their most hated nemesis, the one who simply won't go down no matter how hard they hit her. The frustration was palpable. Joe McCarthy was eventually brought low by his own hubris. A man named Joseph Welch put the final point on it when he said, "at long last sir, have you no decency?" It was Congressman Elijah Cummings who made the similarly powerful moral statement in the hearing yesterday when he said:

"I don't know what we want from you. Do we want to badger you over and over again until you get tired, until we do get the gotcha moment he's talking about? "We're better than that. We are so much better. We are a better country. And we are better than using taxpayer dollars to try to destroy a campaign. That's not what America is all about."

Sadly, witch hunts are as American as apple pie. The good news is that if yesterday's hearing is any example, today's witch hunters are all ham-handed Kevin McCarthys instead of Tail-gunner Joes. Right wing conspiracy nuts aren't what they used to be. Maybe we're making progress after all. [image error] Highlights from the 11-hour hearing: [jwplayer file=" http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Bengha..." image=" http://media.salon.com/2015/10/Bengha...]

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Fact-challenged Carly Fiorina learned nothing from yesterday’s Benghazi hearings, urges GOP to intensify attacks on Clinton

Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina watched the attempted interrogation of Hillary Clinton by the Benghazi Committee and learned precisely nothing from the experience, if her appearance on "Good Morning America" this morning was any indication. After host George Stephanopoulos quoted conservative critics, like Byron York, who claimed Clinton won the day, Fiorina countered by saying that "she did reasonably well," but that the hearings demonstrated "that she won't be held accountable until we have a nominee in a general election debate who will hold her accountable." Stephanopoulos chuckled a bit at the tautology, but allowed Fiorina to continue, asking her whether she thought that the Republicans on the committee "fell down on the job." "I think there were a lot of Democrats on that committee who were focused on salvaging the nominee on their part," she said. "If you just do a little thought exercise, if the shoe were on the other foot and she had been a Republican secretary of state, I'm quite sure the Democrats would be holding hearings." Of course, as Clinton herself noted multiple times on Thursday, Democrats held no such hearings after previous terrorist attacks on diplomatic outposts that occurred during Republican administrations. But facts are not Fiorina's strong suit, not when there are ignorant voters to be swayed by her inability to command them. Clinton, she argued, "never answered a fundamental question, and the fundamental question is this -- knowing that this was a purposeful terrorist attack on the night it occurred, why did you go the next morning and address the American people and talk about a videotape that didn't represent the values of America and why did you continue to do that over the bodies of the fallen and for many weeks thereafter?" The former Secretary of State did, of course, repeatedly answer this question, pointing to "conflicting information" from intelligence sources, not to mention statements by terrorist groups that claimed responsibility for the attack. Watch the entire interview via ABC News below. [image error]Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina watched the attempted interrogation of Hillary Clinton by the Benghazi Committee and learned precisely nothing from the experience, if her appearance on "Good Morning America" this morning was any indication. After host George Stephanopoulos quoted conservative critics, like Byron York, who claimed Clinton won the day, Fiorina countered by saying that "she did reasonably well," but that the hearings demonstrated "that she won't be held accountable until we have a nominee in a general election debate who will hold her accountable." Stephanopoulos chuckled a bit at the tautology, but allowed Fiorina to continue, asking her whether she thought that the Republicans on the committee "fell down on the job." "I think there were a lot of Democrats on that committee who were focused on salvaging the nominee on their part," she said. "If you just do a little thought exercise, if the shoe were on the other foot and she had been a Republican secretary of state, I'm quite sure the Democrats would be holding hearings." Of course, as Clinton herself noted multiple times on Thursday, Democrats held no such hearings after previous terrorist attacks on diplomatic outposts that occurred during Republican administrations. But facts are not Fiorina's strong suit, not when there are ignorant voters to be swayed by her inability to command them. Clinton, she argued, "never answered a fundamental question, and the fundamental question is this -- knowing that this was a purposeful terrorist attack on the night it occurred, why did you go the next morning and address the American people and talk about a videotape that didn't represent the values of America and why did you continue to do that over the bodies of the fallen and for many weeks thereafter?" The former Secretary of State did, of course, repeatedly answer this question, pointing to "conflicting information" from intelligence sources, not to mention statements by terrorist groups that claimed responsibility for the attack. Watch the entire interview via ABC News below. [image error]Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina watched the attempted interrogation of Hillary Clinton by the Benghazi Committee and learned precisely nothing from the experience, if her appearance on "Good Morning America" this morning was any indication. After host George Stephanopoulos quoted conservative critics, like Byron York, who claimed Clinton won the day, Fiorina countered by saying that "she did reasonably well," but that the hearings demonstrated "that she won't be held accountable until we have a nominee in a general election debate who will hold her accountable." Stephanopoulos chuckled a bit at the tautology, but allowed Fiorina to continue, asking her whether she thought that the Republicans on the committee "fell down on the job." "I think there were a lot of Democrats on that committee who were focused on salvaging the nominee on their part," she said. "If you just do a little thought exercise, if the shoe were on the other foot and she had been a Republican secretary of state, I'm quite sure the Democrats would be holding hearings." Of course, as Clinton herself noted multiple times on Thursday, Democrats held no such hearings after previous terrorist attacks on diplomatic outposts that occurred during Republican administrations. But facts are not Fiorina's strong suit, not when there are ignorant voters to be swayed by her inability to command them. Clinton, she argued, "never answered a fundamental question, and the fundamental question is this -- knowing that this was a purposeful terrorist attack on the night it occurred, why did you go the next morning and address the American people and talk about a videotape that didn't represent the values of America and why did you continue to do that over the bodies of the fallen and for many weeks thereafter?" The former Secretary of State did, of course, repeatedly answer this question, pointing to "conflicting information" from intelligence sources, not to mention statements by terrorist groups that claimed responsibility for the attack. Watch the entire interview via ABC News below. [image error]Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina watched the attempted interrogation of Hillary Clinton by the Benghazi Committee and learned precisely nothing from the experience, if her appearance on "Good Morning America" this morning was any indication. After host George Stephanopoulos quoted conservative critics, like Byron York, who claimed Clinton won the day, Fiorina countered by saying that "she did reasonably well," but that the hearings demonstrated "that she won't be held accountable until we have a nominee in a general election debate who will hold her accountable." Stephanopoulos chuckled a bit at the tautology, but allowed Fiorina to continue, asking her whether she thought that the Republicans on the committee "fell down on the job." "I think there were a lot of Democrats on that committee who were focused on salvaging the nominee on their part," she said. "If you just do a little thought exercise, if the shoe were on the other foot and she had been a Republican secretary of state, I'm quite sure the Democrats would be holding hearings." Of course, as Clinton herself noted multiple times on Thursday, Democrats held no such hearings after previous terrorist attacks on diplomatic outposts that occurred during Republican administrations. But facts are not Fiorina's strong suit, not when there are ignorant voters to be swayed by her inability to command them. Clinton, she argued, "never answered a fundamental question, and the fundamental question is this -- knowing that this was a purposeful terrorist attack on the night it occurred, why did you go the next morning and address the American people and talk about a videotape that didn't represent the values of America and why did you continue to do that over the bodies of the fallen and for many weeks thereafter?" The former Secretary of State did, of course, repeatedly answer this question, pointing to "conflicting information" from intelligence sources, not to mention statements by terrorist groups that claimed responsibility for the attack. Watch the entire interview via ABC News below. [image error]

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Hillary won the Benghazi show before saying a word: How TV hearings drum up support for the accused

It’s not an enviable place to be: Hillary Clinton spent the day dealing with the Benghazi hearing on Capitol Hill, grilled over her role in the 2012 Libyan attacks that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, dead. Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether Clinton deserves to be investigated over these attacks, which took place thousands of miles from Washington and in which she was not directly involved. A number of people, including some Republicans, have said that the inquiry was designed to score political points. Maybe they’re well-deserved. But it may be that this kind of videotaped spectacle — and with all the readings of emails and talk about Sydney Blumenthal, this one has hardly been great television, whether we watch on a set or online — tends to do the opposite of what’s often intended. That is, these investigations, more often than investigators think, play to the favor of the person being investigated. The fact that Hillary Clinton is often more effective when she’s cornered, and that she seems to have retained some of the poise and focus she demonstrated at the Democratic debates, pushes this even more into her column. The last few decades show a wide range of characters — Oliver North, who appeared on televised hearings in 1987 about his role in Iran-Contra; Clarence Thomas, who went through potentially brutalizing confirmation hearings in 1991 involving sexual harassment charges; and Bill Clinton, who was publicly embroiled in Monica-Gate in 1998 – actually received a boost of support for their appearances defending themselves. Three very different men, three very different transgressions, but North and Thomas became folk heroes, and Clinton’s party actually picked up seats in Congress while his popularity ticked up. And each man came up with something different to win the audience over: For North it was an earnest, military bearing and attacks on the Washington establishment. For Thomas it was his evocative description of a “high-tech lynching” that made his race explicit. For Bill Clinton it was his usual hangdog charisma. (Arrogant and obnoxious questioners, in some cases, don’t hurt.) Is there something hardwired into human beings to identify with individuals cornered by large groups of stern, formally dressed men? A memory of schoolyard bullying and defending supposed underdogs? Maybe so. In any case, this one seems to be going Hillary’s way. The New Republic sees the investigations as a win for her:

The first two and a half hours of Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi have presented a contrast between Clinton and her Republican interrogators that they quite clearly didn’t want taking hold in the public imagination. Clinton: Poised, knowledgable, contrite, humble, clear. Republicans: Small, petty, uninterested, disjointed, prepossessed. …At this point, I imagine Republicans must be hoping that over so many hours, and as fatigue sense in, she’ll slip and offer them a single damaging soundbite or decontextualized “gaffe,” and try to use that soundbite to overwhelm the otherwise extremely positive impression she’s making. If she avoids this, she might consider the whole thing an in-kind donation to her presidential campaign.

Additionally, liberal commentators are mocking the GOP attackers in a way that bolsters ideological unity on the left. (“If Hillary Clinton does not know the name of every single person who has ever worked in the State Department,” Wonkette writes, “and is not familiar with every single email ever sent by a State Department employee — especially the incriminating one under tab 31!!! — doesn’t this prove she personally murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens?”) For once, the left side is not divided between Clinton voters and Sanders voters. Should the GOP have avoided pursuing Hillary Clinton because of the way the hearings would play in public? That’s a separate question. But it looks like she may be the winner here, and it may have less to do with her than the way human empathy works. Anything could happen, but this could be her best day since her confident performance in the Democratic debate.It’s not an enviable place to be: Hillary Clinton spent the day dealing with the Benghazi hearing on Capitol Hill, grilled over her role in the 2012 Libyan attacks that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, dead. Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether Clinton deserves to be investigated over these attacks, which took place thousands of miles from Washington and in which she was not directly involved. A number of people, including some Republicans, have said that the inquiry was designed to score political points. Maybe they’re well-deserved. But it may be that this kind of videotaped spectacle — and with all the readings of emails and talk about Sydney Blumenthal, this one has hardly been great television, whether we watch on a set or online — tends to do the opposite of what’s often intended. That is, these investigations, more often than investigators think, play to the favor of the person being investigated. The fact that Hillary Clinton is often more effective when she’s cornered, and that she seems to have retained some of the poise and focus she demonstrated at the Democratic debates, pushes this even more into her column. The last few decades show a wide range of characters — Oliver North, who appeared on televised hearings in 1987 about his role in Iran-Contra; Clarence Thomas, who went through potentially brutalizing confirmation hearings in 1991 involving sexual harassment charges; and Bill Clinton, who was publicly embroiled in Monica-Gate in 1998 – actually received a boost of support for their appearances defending themselves. Three very different men, three very different transgressions, but North and Thomas became folk heroes, and Clinton’s party actually picked up seats in Congress while his popularity ticked up. And each man came up with something different to win the audience over: For North it was an earnest, military bearing and attacks on the Washington establishment. For Thomas it was his evocative description of a “high-tech lynching” that made his race explicit. For Bill Clinton it was his usual hangdog charisma. (Arrogant and obnoxious questioners, in some cases, don’t hurt.) Is there something hardwired into human beings to identify with individuals cornered by large groups of stern, formally dressed men? A memory of schoolyard bullying and defending supposed underdogs? Maybe so. In any case, this one seems to be going Hillary’s way. The New Republic sees the investigations as a win for her:

The first two and a half hours of Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi have presented a contrast between Clinton and her Republican interrogators that they quite clearly didn’t want taking hold in the public imagination. Clinton: Poised, knowledgable, contrite, humble, clear. Republicans: Small, petty, uninterested, disjointed, prepossessed. …At this point, I imagine Republicans must be hoping that over so many hours, and as fatigue sense in, she’ll slip and offer them a single damaging soundbite or decontextualized “gaffe,” and try to use that soundbite to overwhelm the otherwise extremely positive impression she’s making. If she avoids this, she might consider the whole thing an in-kind donation to her presidential campaign.

Additionally, liberal commentators are mocking the GOP attackers in a way that bolsters ideological unity on the left. (“If Hillary Clinton does not know the name of every single person who has ever worked in the State Department,” Wonkette writes, “and is not familiar with every single email ever sent by a State Department employee — especially the incriminating one under tab 31!!! — doesn’t this prove she personally murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens?”) For once, the left side is not divided between Clinton voters and Sanders voters. Should the GOP have avoided pursuing Hillary Clinton because of the way the hearings would play in public? That’s a separate question. But it looks like she may be the winner here, and it may have less to do with her than the way human empathy works. Anything could happen, but this could be her best day since her confident performance in the Democratic debate.It’s not an enviable place to be: Hillary Clinton spent the day dealing with the Benghazi hearing on Capitol Hill, grilled over her role in the 2012 Libyan attacks that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, dead. Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether Clinton deserves to be investigated over these attacks, which took place thousands of miles from Washington and in which she was not directly involved. A number of people, including some Republicans, have said that the inquiry was designed to score political points. Maybe they’re well-deserved. But it may be that this kind of videotaped spectacle — and with all the readings of emails and talk about Sydney Blumenthal, this one has hardly been great television, whether we watch on a set or online — tends to do the opposite of what’s often intended. That is, these investigations, more often than investigators think, play to the favor of the person being investigated. The fact that Hillary Clinton is often more effective when she’s cornered, and that she seems to have retained some of the poise and focus she demonstrated at the Democratic debates, pushes this even more into her column. The last few decades show a wide range of characters — Oliver North, who appeared on televised hearings in 1987 about his role in Iran-Contra; Clarence Thomas, who went through potentially brutalizing confirmation hearings in 1991 involving sexual harassment charges; and Bill Clinton, who was publicly embroiled in Monica-Gate in 1998 – actually received a boost of support for their appearances defending themselves. Three very different men, three very different transgressions, but North and Thomas became folk heroes, and Clinton’s party actually picked up seats in Congress while his popularity ticked up. And each man came up with something different to win the audience over: For North it was an earnest, military bearing and attacks on the Washington establishment. For Thomas it was his evocative description of a “high-tech lynching” that made his race explicit. For Bill Clinton it was his usual hangdog charisma. (Arrogant and obnoxious questioners, in some cases, don’t hurt.) Is there something hardwired into human beings to identify with individuals cornered by large groups of stern, formally dressed men? A memory of schoolyard bullying and defending supposed underdogs? Maybe so. In any case, this one seems to be going Hillary’s way. The New Republic sees the investigations as a win for her:

The first two and a half hours of Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi have presented a contrast between Clinton and her Republican interrogators that they quite clearly didn’t want taking hold in the public imagination. Clinton: Poised, knowledgable, contrite, humble, clear. Republicans: Small, petty, uninterested, disjointed, prepossessed. …At this point, I imagine Republicans must be hoping that over so many hours, and as fatigue sense in, she’ll slip and offer them a single damaging soundbite or decontextualized “gaffe,” and try to use that soundbite to overwhelm the otherwise extremely positive impression she’s making. If she avoids this, she might consider the whole thing an in-kind donation to her presidential campaign.

Additionally, liberal commentators are mocking the GOP attackers in a way that bolsters ideological unity on the left. (“If Hillary Clinton does not know the name of every single person who has ever worked in the State Department,” Wonkette writes, “and is not familiar with every single email ever sent by a State Department employee — especially the incriminating one under tab 31!!! — doesn’t this prove she personally murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens?”) For once, the left side is not divided between Clinton voters and Sanders voters. Should the GOP have avoided pursuing Hillary Clinton because of the way the hearings would play in public? That’s a separate question. But it looks like she may be the winner here, and it may have less to do with her than the way human empathy works. Anything could happen, but this could be her best day since her confident performance in the Democratic debate.It’s not an enviable place to be: Hillary Clinton spent the day dealing with the Benghazi hearing on Capitol Hill, grilled over her role in the 2012 Libyan attacks that left four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, dead. Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether Clinton deserves to be investigated over these attacks, which took place thousands of miles from Washington and in which she was not directly involved. A number of people, including some Republicans, have said that the inquiry was designed to score political points. Maybe they’re well-deserved. But it may be that this kind of videotaped spectacle — and with all the readings of emails and talk about Sydney Blumenthal, this one has hardly been great television, whether we watch on a set or online — tends to do the opposite of what’s often intended. That is, these investigations, more often than investigators think, play to the favor of the person being investigated. The fact that Hillary Clinton is often more effective when she’s cornered, and that she seems to have retained some of the poise and focus she demonstrated at the Democratic debates, pushes this even more into her column. The last few decades show a wide range of characters — Oliver North, who appeared on televised hearings in 1987 about his role in Iran-Contra; Clarence Thomas, who went through potentially brutalizing confirmation hearings in 1991 involving sexual harassment charges; and Bill Clinton, who was publicly embroiled in Monica-Gate in 1998 – actually received a boost of support for their appearances defending themselves. Three very different men, three very different transgressions, but North and Thomas became folk heroes, and Clinton’s party actually picked up seats in Congress while his popularity ticked up. And each man came up with something different to win the audience over: For North it was an earnest, military bearing and attacks on the Washington establishment. For Thomas it was his evocative description of a “high-tech lynching” that made his race explicit. For Bill Clinton it was his usual hangdog charisma. (Arrogant and obnoxious questioners, in some cases, don’t hurt.) Is there something hardwired into human beings to identify with individuals cornered by large groups of stern, formally dressed men? A memory of schoolyard bullying and defending supposed underdogs? Maybe so. In any case, this one seems to be going Hillary’s way. The New Republic sees the investigations as a win for her:

The first two and a half hours of Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi have presented a contrast between Clinton and her Republican interrogators that they quite clearly didn’t want taking hold in the public imagination. Clinton: Poised, knowledgable, contrite, humble, clear. Republicans: Small, petty, uninterested, disjointed, prepossessed. …At this point, I imagine Republicans must be hoping that over so many hours, and as fatigue sense in, she’ll slip and offer them a single damaging soundbite or decontextualized “gaffe,” and try to use that soundbite to overwhelm the otherwise extremely positive impression she’s making. If she avoids this, she might consider the whole thing an in-kind donation to her presidential campaign.

Additionally, liberal commentators are mocking the GOP attackers in a way that bolsters ideological unity on the left. (“If Hillary Clinton does not know the name of every single person who has ever worked in the State Department,” Wonkette writes, “and is not familiar with every single email ever sent by a State Department employee — especially the incriminating one under tab 31!!! — doesn’t this prove she personally murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens?”) For once, the left side is not divided between Clinton voters and Sanders voters. Should the GOP have avoided pursuing Hillary Clinton because of the way the hearings would play in public? That’s a separate question. But it looks like she may be the winner here, and it may have less to do with her than the way human empathy works. Anything could happen, but this could be her best day since her confident performance in the Democratic debate.

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The ladies who planted bombs: Inside the Oscar-bait drama of “Suffragette,” an urgent lesson in activist history struggles to escape

It’s ironic or telling or all too illustrative of the social dilemma depicted in director Sarah Gavron’s much-anticipated film “Suffragette” that the direct-action tactics of early 20th-century British feminism had such a far-ranging effect on other movements dominated by men. Perhaps the most startling aspect of “Suffragette,” which for better or worse is a standard-issue historical drama, well constructed but not especially capacious or original, is its depiction of how far female activists were willing to go in order to prove that they could stand alongside men. If nothing else, Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan have rescued suffragist reality from antique newsreel footage of proper ladies wearing prim little hats and carrying signboards. If the leading suffragettes of turn-of-the-century London – that word began as a term of ridicule, but many British feminists embraced it – were often upper-class radicals like the controversial Emmeline Pankhurst (played here by Meryl Streep, basically in a cameo role), Morgan’s screenplay seeks to shift the focus to the movement’s working-class base. That’s a worthy goal, but in dramatic terms the results are mixed: Too much of “Suffragette” is a vaguely Dickensian fable about the struggles of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a young laundry worker in the East End who joins the cause only to be ostracized by her neighbors and thrown into the street by her cowardly husband (Ben Whishaw). Mulligan is being talked up for an Oscar nomination here, and I always find her a watchable performer. But Maud is a Noble Example of Something more than a character, and what’s far more interesting in “Suffragette” is the vivid depiction of how vigorously these women fought against an openly hostile British establishment. Not only were women barred from voting, they had extremely limited property rights (always secondary to those of fathers, husbands or brothers) and essentially no parental rights in cases of divorce or marital discord. Yet between about 1905 and 1913, the suffragists moved from polite street demonstrations and public petitions to lockdown protests, prison hunger strikes (which provoked brutal force-feedings) and campaigns of property destruction. Some historians have described suffragette tactics as “violent” and counterproductive, but as usual with such things, it depends what you think violence is, and what counts as being productive. As Morgan’s script makes clear, the movement began to split apart when Pankhurst and her most militant activists turned to blowing up mailboxes by the hundreds, cutting telegraph and telephone lines and even firebombing uninhabited buildings. “Suffragette” depicts one of the most famous incidents, the destruction of an unfinished weekend cottage that belonged to David Lloyd George, a leading Liberal Party politician and future prime minister. (In some ways it was a curious choice: Lloyd George was somewhat sympathetic to the suffragist cause, but could not convince then-Prime Minister H.H. Asquith to sign on.) Honestly, if Gavron and Morgan were not slightly too concerned with making sure that Maud and her laundress comrade Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) and crusading pharmacist Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter) and the other suffragettes don’t alienate audience sympathies, the story could have gone much further. As a matter of historical record, suffragist protesters smashed shop windows by the thousands, often selecting symbolic targets: High-end dress shops that catered to wealthy women; offices and workshops where women were mistreated or sexually harassed (the term may not have existed, but the practice surely did) or paid half as much as men for the same work. Enclaves of male privilege were vandalized, like golf courses, cricket grounds and racetracks, and so were zones associated with upper-crust femininity, like the picturesque Tea House at Kew Gardens, which was burned to cinders. Activists damaged exhibits in the British Museum, and took an axe to a portrait of the Duke of Wellington in the National Gallery. In June of 1914, a presumed suffragette bomb went off next to the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, where every English king or queen had been crowned for more than 600 years. That explosive was too small to do much damage (I almost want to say regrettably so), but it represented a shocking if symbolic assault against the most revered British traditions. It’s one thing to show angry women fighting against conditions that look, to the contemporary viewer, like obvious injustice. But Gavron and Morgan were no doubt aware that you can’t make a movie pitched at American audience and the Oscar race that shows crazy feminist bombers attacking the Royal Family, who are probably more worshiped by the Yanks than the Brits at this point. But “Suffragette” does draw explicit connections between that seemingly remote age and more recent historical moments and movements. Not merely did the suffragists face police brutality and constantly shifting modes of legal persecution, they also galvanized an early version of the surveillance state. Their movement was infiltrated by spies, informants and provocateurs; Pankhurst and other leaders were tracked by police agents armed with some of the first portable cameras. Some of this gets delivered, perhaps a bit too obviously, through the conflicted personage of a fictional Special Branch officer (or police intelligence agent) called Inspector Steed, played by the wonderful Irish actor Brendan Gleeson. Steed has made his bones by spying on the Fenian movement (i.e., the radicals among his own people) and has now been brought in to put down the uprising of ladies. In dramatic terms, Steed serves as a quasi-fatherly foil or nemesis for Mulligan’s Maud in a way that never seems fully satisfactory; as throughout this film, Gavron splits the difference between didactic history lesson and “relatable” storytelling without quite reaching either goal. In fairness, there can be no doubt that the confrontational tactics of the suffragists served as an inspiration for the Irish republican movement and the Easter Rising of 1916, and that connection is too easily overlooked. It would be even more accurate to say that the early feminists borrowed their direct-action tactics from Russian and Eastern European anarchists (many of whom then lived in exile in London) and spread them all over the Western world – to Ireland, to India, to Latin America and colonial Africa, to the American labor movement in its glory years, to the Black Panthers and ACT UP and many others – without getting any of the credit. If you felt puzzled or unhappy or challenged or excited when you saw Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter protesters chaining themselves in place, or refusing to back down from a confrontation even at risk of being called “angry” or “violent,” you were feeling the problematic influence of the suffragettes. Was everything they did wise and prudent? That’s quite a different question from whether they changed the world, and whether they could have done that by staying home and making jam and writing letters to the editor.It’s ironic or telling or all too illustrative of the social dilemma depicted in director Sarah Gavron’s much-anticipated film “Suffragette” that the direct-action tactics of early 20th-century British feminism had such a far-ranging effect on other movements dominated by men. Perhaps the most startling aspect of “Suffragette,” which for better or worse is a standard-issue historical drama, well constructed but not especially capacious or original, is its depiction of how far female activists were willing to go in order to prove that they could stand alongside men. If nothing else, Gavron and screenwriter Abi Morgan have rescued suffragist reality from antique newsreel footage of proper ladies wearing prim little hats and carrying signboards. If the leading suffragettes of turn-of-the-century London – that word began as a term of ridicule, but many British feminists embraced it – were often upper-class radicals like the controversial Emmeline Pankhurst (played here by Meryl Streep, basically in a cameo role), Morgan’s screenplay seeks to shift the focus to the movement’s working-class base. That’s a worthy goal, but in dramatic terms the results are mixed: Too much of “Suffragette” is a vaguely Dickensian fable about the struggles of Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan), a young laundry worker in the East End who joins the cause only to be ostracized by her neighbors and thrown into the street by her cowardly husband (Ben Whishaw). Mulligan is being talked up for an Oscar nomination here, and I always find her a watchable performer. But Maud is a Noble Example of Something more than a character, and what’s far more interesting in “Suffragette” is the vivid depiction of how vigorously these women fought against an openly hostile British establishment. Not only were women barred from voting, they had extremely limited property rights (always secondary to those of fathers, husbands or brothers) and essentially no parental rights in cases of divorce or marital discord. Yet between about 1905 and 1913, the suffragists moved from polite street demonstrations and public petitions to lockdown protests, prison hunger strikes (which provoked brutal force-feedings) and campaigns of property destruction. Some historians have described suffragette tactics as “violent” and counterproductive, but as usual with such things, it depends what you think violence is, and what counts as being productive. As Morgan’s script makes clear, the movement began to split apart when Pankhurst and her most militant activists turned to blowing up mailboxes by the hundreds, cutting telegraph and telephone lines and even firebombing uninhabited buildings. “Suffragette” depicts one of the most famous incidents, the destruction of an unfinished weekend cottage that belonged to David Lloyd George, a leading Liberal Party politician and future prime minister. (In some ways it was a curious choice: Lloyd George was somewhat sympathetic to the suffragist cause, but could not convince then-Prime Minister H.H. Asquith to sign on.) Honestly, if Gavron and Morgan were not slightly too concerned with making sure that Maud and her laundress comrade Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) and crusading pharmacist Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter) and the other suffragettes don’t alienate audience sympathies, the story could have gone much further. As a matter of historical record, suffragist protesters smashed shop windows by the thousands, often selecting symbolic targets: High-end dress shops that catered to wealthy women; offices and workshops where women were mistreated or sexually harassed (the term may not have existed, but the practice surely did) or paid half as much as men for the same work. Enclaves of male privilege were vandalized, like golf courses, cricket grounds and racetracks, and so were zones associated with upper-crust femininity, like the picturesque Tea House at Kew Gardens, which was burned to cinders. Activists damaged exhibits in the British Museum, and took an axe to a portrait of the Duke of Wellington in the National Gallery. In June of 1914, a presumed suffragette bomb went off next to the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, where every English king or queen had been crowned for more than 600 years. That explosive was too small to do much damage (I almost want to say regrettably so), but it represented a shocking if symbolic assault against the most revered British traditions. It’s one thing to show angry women fighting against conditions that look, to the contemporary viewer, like obvious injustice. But Gavron and Morgan were no doubt aware that you can’t make a movie pitched at American audience and the Oscar race that shows crazy feminist bombers attacking the Royal Family, who are probably more worshiped by the Yanks than the Brits at this point. But “Suffragette” does draw explicit connections between that seemingly remote age and more recent historical moments and movements. Not merely did the suffragists face police brutality and constantly shifting modes of legal persecution, they also galvanized an early version of the surveillance state. Their movement was infiltrated by spies, informants and provocateurs; Pankhurst and other leaders were tracked by police agents armed with some of the first portable cameras. Some of this gets delivered, perhaps a bit too obviously, through the conflicted personage of a fictional Special Branch officer (or police intelligence agent) called Inspector Steed, played by the wonderful Irish actor Brendan Gleeson. Steed has made his bones by spying on the Fenian movement (i.e., the radicals among his own people) and has now been brought in to put down the uprising of ladies. In dramatic terms, Steed serves as a quasi-fatherly foil or nemesis for Mulligan’s Maud in a way that never seems fully satisfactory; as throughout this film, Gavron splits the difference between didactic history lesson and “relatable” storytelling without quite reaching either goal. In fairness, there can be no doubt that the confrontational tactics of the suffragists served as an inspiration for the Irish republican movement and the Easter Rising of 1916, and that connection is too easily overlooked. It would be even more accurate to say that the early feminists borrowed their direct-action tactics from Russian and Eastern European anarchists (many of whom then lived in exile in London) and spread them all over the Western world – to Ireland, to India, to Latin America and colonial Africa, to the American labor movement in its glory years, to the Black Panthers and ACT UP and many others – without getting any of the credit. If you felt puzzled or unhappy or challenged or excited when you saw Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter protesters chaining themselves in place, or refusing to back down from a confrontation even at risk of being called “angry” or “violent,” you were feeling the problematic influence of the suffragettes. Was everything they did wise and prudent? That’s quite a different question from whether they changed the world, and whether they could have done that by staying home and making jam and writing letters to the editor.

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Welcome to “Sesame Street,” Julia: The show’s first autistic character is a big deal — maybe not for the reasons you think

A Muppet with autism!  Her name is Julia, and she’s just now joining the cast of digital Sesame Street.  As described by the Sesame Workshop’s Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, in an interview with ABC News, Julia is a character with a “moderate” degree of autism – a choice that took some thinking through, since there are so many ways that autism manifests itself in those who have the diagnosis. But in what is known as the “autism community” – those on the “spectrum,” plus their families, their friends, and their support teams of teachers, therapists and doctors – the specifics of Julia’s personality are beside the point. Judging by the emails hitting our inboxes this morning, and the tweets coming in – from friends and contacts all over the community – Julia’s arrival is being received as a very big deal, and perhaps even a little overdue. A Muppet with autism! Of course! And why not before? Yes, Julia’s debut is a landmark moment, but not entirely for the reasons cited most often in today’s coverage, where the people behind "Sesame Street" are getting well-deserved praise for encouraging greater acceptance and understanding of people who exhibit autistic characteristics.  That’s important, but just as significant is how, compared to the not too distant past, the topic of autism has risen to the top levels of society’s awareness. Put simply: in 2015, everyone has heard of autism. Sesame Street did not have to do much explaining about why Julia is different (and the same), and why she was joining the cast. That was not the case 46 years ago last month, the first time an American TV show featured a character with autism, in a single episode of the medical drama "Marcus Welby, MD."  In that case, the portrayal of a boy with autism named Pauly could hardly have been called heart-warming. Wildly out of control, Pauly barely spoke, and had been rejected even by a school offering special education. His frazzled, exhausted parents were on the verge of breaking down. While his mother struggled to work with him at home, his father favored sending him away, out of fear that Pauly would hurt his newborn baby sister. The good doctor Welby fought the father on this, but he did so by dealing out some harsh educational discipline to the boy, which included slapping seven year old Pauly across the face when he failed to pay attention.  In a climactic scene, Welby scolds Pauley’s mother for going too soft on him. “You will see Pauly spanked!” he shouts. “You will learn to spank him yourself! Or you will see him in an institution for the rest of his life.” It was a bleak portrayal of autism, and yet, much like Julia’s debut this morning, it was roundly celebrated by what constituted the autism community of 1969: parents of severely autistic children, who were in the earliest days of organizing as advocates for their children. Back then, there was only one autism organization in the U.S., the four-year-old National Society for Autistic Children (today’s Autism Society of America). Hardly put off by "Welby"’s depiction of their children, NSAC brought the show’s producer to its annual meeting in 1970, along with his wife, and gave him with an award. That’s how hungry for recognition the cause of autism awareness used to be. A lot changed in the decades separating Pauly from Julia. "Rain Man" happened, presenting a more nuanced portrait of one man’s autism. Temple Grandin became the most famous autistic person on earth, while her ability to communicate and her success in life made autism look less alien to “outsiders.” Also, the thinking evolved on the question of where autism comes from. The once entrenched belief that unloving mothers were the source fell by the wayside. So did the false alarm of an autism “epidemic” caused by vaccines. Ironically, however, the vaccine scare probably did more to make the world think and care about autism than any prior amount of advocacy by autism organizations, which now exist by the carload. So do fictional characters with autism, who can be seen in sitcoms and cops shows and on Broadway. That said, Julia does occupy a special place. "Sesame Street" is where kids have always been shown that being different comes along with being human. More than that, it happens to be a show that has had strong appeal over the years for children with autism as viewers. A while back, we spent an afternoon with a man in his mid-thirties who recited for us, verbatim, an entire minutes-long "Sesame Street" explanation of the adverbs “on,” “over,” and “under.” The bit’s rhythms and repetitiveness had some struck some chord with him when he first saw it in the 1980s, and he literally never forgot. Regarding Julia, it will be pointed out – and should be – that she represents but one way of having autism, and that by virtue of being able to talk, she is not representative of the hundreds of thousands of individuals who are far too impaired to be out on their own playing with friends and getting along with Elmo. It is true of the news media, too, that when they present portrayals of autism, they almost invariably seek out individuals with whom there are high odds of give and take in an interview, because, of course, the news likes talkers. This has the unintended result of leaving out many of the children who will never be able to live independently as adults.  Julia’s autism does not seem to suggest that level of impairment. Still, the makers of "Sesame Street" made a bold and canny choice in making her female. Statistically, autism affects far more boys than girls, by a factor of four to five. It may be that girls with the condition are being undercounted, but it is certainly the case that most research and therapies build on studies where boys outnumber girls, which may have a negative impact on how autism is recognized and treated in girls. Temple Grandin aside, autism is presented to the public as a mostly male experience. Julia is no doubt going to help change that. Ideally, she will also help further the destigmitization of autism, a process which has been ongoing for decades. In school settings, however, bullying of people with autistic traits – especially those who were once given the label of Asperger’s syndrome – has been a continuing problem. This is where the "Sesame Street" effect can be so powerful. They’re going to make Julia part of the gang. Elmo’s going to be her buddy. With friends like that, she’s going to teach a lot to a lot of us, and have some fun along the way.

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Ichabod and Abbie still haven’t kissed: The best work marriage since Mulder and Scully is back on “Sleepy Hollow”

The closest Fox’s campy genre drama “Sleepy Hollow” got to the Emmys in 2015 was when Emmy winner Viola Davis mentioned its lead actress during her acceptance speech. Davis became the first African-American woman to win the dramatic lead actress Emmy, in a field that was stacked with incredible talent. And as she noted in her speech, her success was not just about her performance but also about a moment in history, where diversity in casting has become both an ideological and business imperative for studios and network execs. The Emmys exist to reward good shows, and “Sleepy Hollow,” especially in its second season, was not a good show. But Davis called out what is the best thing about it—what has been the best thing about it, from the very beginning—the casting of Nicole Beharie as Abbie Mills, a cop who finds a very tall time-traveler and decides to believe him. Beharie came to “Sleepy Hollow” by way of Juilliard and a role opposite Michael Fassbender in 2011’s “Shame”; she both has dramatic chops and a demonstrable interest in using them. “Sleepy Hollow” is not quite an art film, but it’s ambitious in its own way—specifically because it debuted on Fox, which in 2013 made diversity casting part of its profit strategy. Beharie’s casting fed directly into the show casting her sister, Jenny, with another black actress (Lyndie Greenwood); and because her time-traveler from the colonial era, Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), was until recently used to black people being slaves, the show introduced an engagement and a tension with historical narrative that both commented on and played with the differences between 1781 and 2013. But casting for diversity does not always mean being ready to write stories for diverse casts. Season one of “Sleepy Hollow” was a supernatural romp through history, treating the Founding Fathers and Biblical lore with about as much respect as a kid in a candy shop (appreciative, but run amok). Season two got very lost in the weeds, and ended up sidelining the elements that made the show so fun to begin with. And that is the relationship between Ichabod and Abbie, one that both Mison and Beharie show up to with warmth and humor. “Sleepy Hollow” is not-so-subtly built on “The X-Files” template, meaning a tall odd man and a petite no-nonsense woman run around investigating the supernatural while staving off the real mystery…. their relationship. Depending on who you ask, both in the show and outside of it, Ichabod and Abbie are either totally in love with each other, totally platonic, or totally somewhere in the middle and figuring it out. Their chemistry adds another dimension to the interplay between race and history in the show; again, in a kind of silly and fun way, but in a way that feels new and interesting, too. So naturally, things got a little frustrating when season two of “Sleepy Hollow” sidelined Abbie in order to engage in an 18-episode long plot with Ichabod’s past-and-then-purgatoried witch wife, Katrina (Katia Winter) and his now-evil long-lost son (John Noble). It also sidelined or wrote out every other character of color: Orlando Jones’ magnificent Irving, who played the role of audience surrogate in the first season, ended up lost in a dead-end asylum plot; John Cho was fridged; Jenny ended up having to play second fiddle to a newcomer who happened to be a white guy; Sakina Jaffrey almost never moved past hatchet-faced disapproval. In a sense it was the oldest second-season story in the TV book; an overambitious first season leading to a messy and confused second season. (See also: “Empire.”) In “Sleepy Hollow”’s case, what literally had made the show so good—its diverse cast and the foundational relationship between Ichabod and Abbie—were backgrounded for plot machinations that were never the reason anyone was watching the show. It lost a lot of viewers, including myself, and actually, I would have bet money on “Sleepy Hollow” being canceled after its second season; the show just seemed to have lost steam and vibrancy. Except for one little thing: Ichabod does kill his entire family in order to save Abbie’s life. Like, there are other things he’s saving, such as the world, but Katrina walks into Ichabod’s knife because she is magic-strangling Abbie to death, and Abbie only points a gun at Ichabod’s son because Ichabod’s already given up on saving him. It was not just a narrative mic-drop; “Sleepy Hollow” knows it made mistakes, and wants to atone for them by killing everyone else Ichabod has ever been close to, so then he’ll have to be with Abbie. The third season, which debuted early this month, has significantly spotlighted the emotional relationship between Ichabod and Abbie. It’s also introduced new romantic interests for both.

* * *

As someone who was very invested in the evolution of Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson)’s relationship in what I named above as “Sleepy Hollow”’s major influence, I read with interest Megan Garber’s piece from earlier this week, “‘Steve Jobs’ and the triumph of the work wife.” She writes:

A healthy portion of the sitcoms and series that have been on TV in the last decades have indulged in office-set sexual tension, and indeed treated that tension as a premise of many of their melodramas. Moonlighting. Cheers. Grey’s Anatomy. And on and on. Will they or won’t they? we asked, breathlessly. That the “they” in question were co-workers was not, at the time, considered​ problematic. The current crop of shows and movies—not exclusively, certainly, but noticeably—are rejecting that premise. They’re treating work, and the office it’s conducted in, instead as a kind of sacred space that offers refuge from the assorted dramas of family life.

Abbie and Ichabod are only coworkers insofar as they both work for the Anti-Apocalypse Shadowy Good Guys, or something, but Garber’s observations made me wonder if that’s the reason “Sleepy Hollow” had trouble in its second season, as Ichabod’s family life got in the way of the important work that the team needed to accomplish. But I think there might be a slightly more emotional element at play outside of the sanitized world of “Steve Jobs,” and I think that hearkens back to the reason why Viola Davis name-dropped Beharie at the Emmys. When Mulder and Scully spent years on end smoldering towards each other but not doing anything about it, it was both because “The X-Files” wanted to hook interested viewers with that dangling thread, and also because a romantic relationship engages with faith, trust, and intimacy. Scully and Mulder spent the entire show reckoning with their individual faith and their trust in each other, as well as larger questions about the corruption of government and the security of their world. A relationship was impossible, no matter how many long silences stretched between them, because that complex reckoning between the desire for faith and the fear of it were embedded in the show’s foundation. “Sleepy Hollow” is not as sophisticated, but it might be scratching at something similar. It’s visible in the final scene of last week’s episode, “Blood And Fear,” where Ichabod, hopped up on pain medication, is surprisingly expressive of his affection for Abbie, and her response is a complex emotion that seems to verge on fear. I don’t think it’s that Abbie isn’t interested in Ichabod; I think it’s that perhaps much more than he, she gleans that it would be pretty damn complicated. An interracial work relationship is fun and games; an interracial work/sex relationship is Olivia and Fitz on “Scandal.” In season two, “Sleepy Hollow” had a lot of trouble writing its characters of color. Maybe the show realizes, along with Abbie, that launching into this romance would require more narrative heavy lifting for the black experience than they’ve been able to express. Maybe the writers don’t feel fully capable of handling this quite revolutionary relationship at a different level. And maybe they’re preparing to do it twice over. Because along with Ichabod’s family now being totally dead, so that he lives with Abbie (platonically, even if he folds her underwear) (this show), her sister Jenny has started working closely with a childhood friend who seems to have no plot purpose aside from looking at her with undisguised longing. Jenny is black; Joe Corbin (Zach Appelman) is white. I’m more intrigued than ever to see what this show is going to do with its completely ridiculous story, because all of the smoke and mirrors of Thomas Jefferson and Betsy Ross (Nikki Reed) is a cover for the oddest set of interracial work marriages in history. And who knows, maybe they’re all just friends. (This show.)

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Your “middle child syndrome” is BS: Debunking one of the biggest myths about personality types

Are you the high-achieving eldest child in your family? The peacemaking yet insecure middle child? The spoiled-rotten yet outgoing youngest? It’s a trick question. A couple of somewhat convincing recent studies suggest that our entrenched ideas about the influence of birth order on personality might be greatly exaggerated, if not sheer stereotypical bunk. In a huge study of more than 20,000 adults, German researchers from the University of Leipzig and Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, concluded that the “development of personality is less determined by the role within the family of origin than previously thought.” Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, the study’s authors wrote, “All in all, we did not find any effect of birth order on extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination, a subdimension of openness." Even the researchers seemed taken aback by the clarity of their conclusions. The idea that birth order has a lasting impact on personality stems back to Freud’s time. It was his colleague Alfred Adler who in the 1920s codified the idea of birth order as determinative of personality. Eldest children were supposed to be, “serious, conscientious, directive, goal-oriented, aggressive, rule-conscious, exacting, conservative, organized, responsible, jealous, fearful, high achieving, competitive, high in self-esteem, and anxious.” Poor, neither-here-nor-there middle children were supposed to be “mediators” and people pleasers, “who go with the flow of things.” Pampered babies got to be the out-going entertainers of the bunch. The birth order schema is an appealing way to break things down, and many people feel an intuitive connection with the idea that their place in their family of origin has helped determine who they are. It makes for great cocktail party chatter, and many an entertainer’s autobiography contains insight into how they developed their hilarious sense of humor because they were the youngest of many and needed to get mom's attention somehow. Parenting magazines and books are filled with the pseudoscience of birth order. Even if birth order is not as prescriptive as once thought, family dynamics and how different children are parented clearly have a huge impact. Often, firstborn children get the most attention from their brand-new parents, with subsequent children being less and less fussed over. And plenty of more traditional families still treat male and female children differently. Parents also change over time. Sometimes, the primary caregiver parent doesn’t leave a full-time job until the second child is born, and that child gets more attention than the first. Then there are the cases of fathers who are not terribly involved with their first round of children, resolving to do better when they have a second family with a younger woman. Obviously, the constellation and types of families is ever-changing, making it increasingly difficult to make generalizations or predictions about how kids will come out based on one simple factor. There may be some basis for birth order personality differences in evolutionary biology, basically the notion that older children have an advantage in the competition for parental attention and scarce family resources. An older child who is assertive and take-charge may milk the natural size advantage she has for as long as possible. But if the eldest sibling isn’t assertive and take-charge by nature, being the firstborn probably won’t make her so. That’s because temperament, which is thought to be inborn, often trumps any difference birth order or parenting style might bring. It is also probably natural to assume that an older and bigger child might be more prone to bullying younger siblings, but only if the propensity to bully is there to begin with. (True confession: As the younger sibling by four years, I had the hotter temper and more of a propensity to bully despite my smaller stature. I once impulsively pushed my older sister out a window. She’s okay, mind you. It was low to the ground. But still.) Mention the topic of birth order and personality, and everyone has a take on it, drawn from their experience, their families, their parents’ families or whatever.  But the science has always been pretty wobbly, and a huge percentage of people have never found the stereotypes to be particularly true for them. According to the White-Campbell Psychological Birth Order Inventory (or PBOI), a test developed to measure whether people are a “fit” for their rank, only 23 percent of women and 15 percent of men are a true match. The birth order-is-bunk argument was still more bolstered in the summer by astudy published in the Journal of Research in Personality. This study was also huge, looking at 377,000 high school students, evaluating them for the Big Five personality traits—openness, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion. The working hypothesis was that firstborns would be higher in conscientiousness and neuroticism, and the dominant aspect of extroversion. Younger siblings would be higher in agreeableness and the sociability aspect of extraversion. Didn’t really pan out. The differences were statistically insignificant, with the exception of firstborns averaging higher IQs by one whole point. So there’s your bragging rights, eldest children: one whole IQ point, if you believe in that bunk. Are you the high-achieving eldest child in your family? The peacemaking yet insecure middle child? The spoiled-rotten yet outgoing youngest? It’s a trick question. A couple of somewhat convincing recent studies suggest that our entrenched ideas about the influence of birth order on personality might be greatly exaggerated, if not sheer stereotypical bunk. In a huge study of more than 20,000 adults, German researchers from the University of Leipzig and Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, concluded that the “development of personality is less determined by the role within the family of origin than previously thought.” Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, the study’s authors wrote, “All in all, we did not find any effect of birth order on extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination, a subdimension of openness." Even the researchers seemed taken aback by the clarity of their conclusions. The idea that birth order has a lasting impact on personality stems back to Freud’s time. It was his colleague Alfred Adler who in the 1920s codified the idea of birth order as determinative of personality. Eldest children were supposed to be, “serious, conscientious, directive, goal-oriented, aggressive, rule-conscious, exacting, conservative, organized, responsible, jealous, fearful, high achieving, competitive, high in self-esteem, and anxious.” Poor, neither-here-nor-there middle children were supposed to be “mediators” and people pleasers, “who go with the flow of things.” Pampered babies got to be the out-going entertainers of the bunch. The birth order schema is an appealing way to break things down, and many people feel an intuitive connection with the idea that their place in their family of origin has helped determine who they are. It makes for great cocktail party chatter, and many an entertainer’s autobiography contains insight into how they developed their hilarious sense of humor because they were the youngest of many and needed to get mom's attention somehow. Parenting magazines and books are filled with the pseudoscience of birth order. Even if birth order is not as prescriptive as once thought, family dynamics and how different children are parented clearly have a huge impact. Often, firstborn children get the most attention from their brand-new parents, with subsequent children being less and less fussed over. And plenty of more traditional families still treat male and female children differently. Parents also change over time. Sometimes, the primary caregiver parent doesn’t leave a full-time job until the second child is born, and that child gets more attention than the first. Then there are the cases of fathers who are not terribly involved with their first round of children, resolving to do better when they have a second family with a younger woman. Obviously, the constellation and types of families is ever-changing, making it increasingly difficult to make generalizations or predictions about how kids will come out based on one simple factor. There may be some basis for birth order personality differences in evolutionary biology, basically the notion that older children have an advantage in the competition for parental attention and scarce family resources. An older child who is assertive and take-charge may milk the natural size advantage she has for as long as possible. But if the eldest sibling isn’t assertive and take-charge by nature, being the firstborn probably won’t make her so. That’s because temperament, which is thought to be inborn, often trumps any difference birth order or parenting style might bring. It is also probably natural to assume that an older and bigger child might be more prone to bullying younger siblings, but only if the propensity to bully is there to begin with. (True confession: As the younger sibling by four years, I had the hotter temper and more of a propensity to bully despite my smaller stature. I once impulsively pushed my older sister out a window. She’s okay, mind you. It was low to the ground. But still.) Mention the topic of birth order and personality, and everyone has a take on it, drawn from their experience, their families, their parents’ families or whatever.  But the science has always been pretty wobbly, and a huge percentage of people have never found the stereotypes to be particularly true for them. According to the White-Campbell Psychological Birth Order Inventory (or PBOI), a test developed to measure whether people are a “fit” for their rank, only 23 percent of women and 15 percent of men are a true match. The birth order-is-bunk argument was still more bolstered in the summer by astudy published in the Journal of Research in Personality. This study was also huge, looking at 377,000 high school students, evaluating them for the Big Five personality traits—openness, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion. The working hypothesis was that firstborns would be higher in conscientiousness and neuroticism, and the dominant aspect of extroversion. Younger siblings would be higher in agreeableness and the sociability aspect of extraversion. Didn’t really pan out. The differences were statistically insignificant, with the exception of firstborns averaging higher IQs by one whole point. So there’s your bragging rights, eldest children: one whole IQ point, if you believe in that bunk.

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This is why you don’t mess with Hillary Clinton: How the GOP’s Benghazi crusade just crashed and burned

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Trey Gowdy destroys his own hearing: The Benghazi committee chairman goes completely off the rails

Heading into today’s Benghazi committee hearing, I was curious which Republican on the committee would be the one to go full derp and scuttle any remaining doubt as to the committee’s political motives and agenda. With Hillary Clinton in the witness chair, the 2016 election season in full swing, and Benghazi on the docket, it seemed inevitable that someone on the Republican side would let their passions and partisanship get the better of them and eagerly throw themselves down a rabbit hole. That did end up happening, and the culprit turned out to be the one Republican I was sure would not do it: Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy. Gowdy, more than anyone else, is sensitive to the allegations of partisanship surrounding his committee and claimed to be personally hurt by the attacks on its credibility. So it seemed like he would go to great lengths to keep the rest of the members in line, if for no other reason than to demonstrate in public that he is running, as he so often declares, a “serious investigation.” But, alas, Gowdy went completely off the rails when his turn to interrogate Clinton rolled around. He started off his questioning by angrily responding to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and loudly denying that the Benghazi committee was a “prosecution” of Clinton or the Obama administration. “I’ve reached no conclusions,” he declared. Watch the video here to get a sense of how very agitated Gowdy was. Here’s the thing: we know none of that is true. One of his first public statements as Benghazi committee chairman likened the investigation to a criminal trial. “If an administration is slow-walking document production,” he said, “I can’t end a trial simply because the defense won’t cooperate.” He tried to walk it back, but Gowdy made similar comparisons during House Oversight Committee hearings into Benghazi, promising the families of the victims that the “real jury … is the American people,” and they were “watching this trial unfold, and they will decide.” And then Gowdy got into his actual questioning, which was devoted entirely to Hillary Clinton’s email correspondence with longtime Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal, who had been sending Hillary unvetted “intelligence” reports from a source he knew in Libya. The questioning quickly devolved into a lengthy argument over the definition of “unsolicited” as Gowdy tried to pin Clinton on whether she asked Blumenthal to send him this information. It then spiraled further downward, as Gowdy began reading aloud some of the nasty things Blumenthal said in his private communications about President Obama and his national security staff. You’re probably wondering what, if anything, this has to do with the Benghazi attacks. And Hillary Clinton pointed out as much to Gowdy, saying “I don’t know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of the deaths of four Americans.” Gowdy offered his rationale, such as it was: “It’s relevant because our ambassador was asked to read and respond to Sidney Blumenthal’s drivel. It was sent to him to read and react to, in some instances on the very same day he was asking for security. So I think it is eminently fair to ask why Sidney Blumenthal had unfettered access to you, Madame Secretary… and there’s not a single solitary email to or from you to or from Ambassador [Chris] Stevens.” Okay… I’m not really sure what comparing Blumenthal and Clinton accomplishes, and we know that Stevens had non-email access to Clinton, so… what are we talking about here? It was at that point that everything went completely off the rails. Ranking committee member Elijah Cummings broke in and demanded that the transcript of Blumenthal’s private testimony before the committee be released and called for a vote. Gowdy pushed back, arguing that Cummings only wanted selected transcripts released. This went on for several minutes as Cummings and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) successfully goaded the Benghazi committee chairman into an angry, extended argument over Sidney Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Just before the hearing adjourned for a break, Gowdy promised that this would only continue. “If you think you’ve heard about Sidney Blumenthal so far,” he said, “wait till the next round.” This all happened as part of Gowdy’s “serious” investigation into the deaths of four Americans at Benghazi. [image error]Heading into today’s Benghazi committee hearing, I was curious which Republican on the committee would be the one to go full derp and scuttle any remaining doubt as to the committee’s political motives and agenda. With Hillary Clinton in the witness chair, the 2016 election season in full swing, and Benghazi on the docket, it seemed inevitable that someone on the Republican side would let their passions and partisanship get the better of them and eagerly throw themselves down a rabbit hole. That did end up happening, and the culprit turned out to be the one Republican I was sure would not do it: Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy. Gowdy, more than anyone else, is sensitive to the allegations of partisanship surrounding his committee and claimed to be personally hurt by the attacks on its credibility. So it seemed like he would go to great lengths to keep the rest of the members in line, if for no other reason than to demonstrate in public that he is running, as he so often declares, a “serious investigation.” But, alas, Gowdy went completely off the rails when his turn to interrogate Clinton rolled around. He started off his questioning by angrily responding to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and loudly denying that the Benghazi committee was a “prosecution” of Clinton or the Obama administration. “I’ve reached no conclusions,” he declared. Watch the video here to get a sense of how very agitated Gowdy was. Here’s the thing: we know none of that is true. One of his first public statements as Benghazi committee chairman likened the investigation to a criminal trial. “If an administration is slow-walking document production,” he said, “I can’t end a trial simply because the defense won’t cooperate.” He tried to walk it back, but Gowdy made similar comparisons during House Oversight Committee hearings into Benghazi, promising the families of the victims that the “real jury … is the American people,” and they were “watching this trial unfold, and they will decide.” And then Gowdy got into his actual questioning, which was devoted entirely to Hillary Clinton’s email correspondence with longtime Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal, who had been sending Hillary unvetted “intelligence” reports from a source he knew in Libya. The questioning quickly devolved into a lengthy argument over the definition of “unsolicited” as Gowdy tried to pin Clinton on whether she asked Blumenthal to send him this information. It then spiraled further downward, as Gowdy began reading aloud some of the nasty things Blumenthal said in his private communications about President Obama and his national security staff. You’re probably wondering what, if anything, this has to do with the Benghazi attacks. And Hillary Clinton pointed out as much to Gowdy, saying “I don’t know what this line of questioning does to help us get to the bottom of the deaths of four Americans.” Gowdy offered his rationale, such as it was: “It’s relevant because our ambassador was asked to read and respond to Sidney Blumenthal’s drivel. It was sent to him to read and react to, in some instances on the very same day he was asking for security. So I think it is eminently fair to ask why Sidney Blumenthal had unfettered access to you, Madame Secretary… and there’s not a single solitary email to or from you to or from Ambassador [Chris] Stevens.” Okay… I’m not really sure what comparing Blumenthal and Clinton accomplishes, and we know that Stevens had non-email access to Clinton, so… what are we talking about here? It was at that point that everything went completely off the rails. Ranking committee member Elijah Cummings broke in and demanded that the transcript of Blumenthal’s private testimony before the committee be released and called for a vote. Gowdy pushed back, arguing that Cummings only wanted selected transcripts released. This went on for several minutes as Cummings and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) successfully goaded the Benghazi committee chairman into an angry, extended argument over Sidney Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Just before the hearing adjourned for a break, Gowdy promised that this would only continue. “If you think you’ve heard about Sidney Blumenthal so far,” he said, “wait till the next round.” This all happened as part of Gowdy’s “serious” investigation into the deaths of four Americans at Benghazi. [image error]

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