Month: February 2018

When Abraham Lincoln passed away on 4.15.65, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Since that moment any allusion to “the ages” has had a special apartness, a ring of dignity and reverence. Until two months ago, that is, when Vanity Fair‘s Yohana Desta called Get Out “a film for the ages.” Universal marketers seized on that quote PDQ and put it on a big fat billboard near the corner of Highland and Franklin. There’s no disputing Desta’s observation that Jordan Peele‘s horror-thriller “captured the zeitgeist,” but if the ghost of Edwin Stanton was somehow listening, he’d most likely be thinking “hmmmm.”

Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff was beaten up badly during a Morning Joe segment this morning. It was over an inference, first mentioned on Real Time with Bill Maher, that President Trump may have had a sexual relationship with a woman in his administration. Wolff told Maher that the woman’s identity is indicated by “reading between the lines” in a section near the end of the book. Nobody knows anything, but as far as I can tell Wolff never hinted that the party in question might be U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, Haley has strongly denied the alleged inference, and Wolff got hammered this morning on Morning Joe (and was interrogated yesterday on TheSkimm) for vaguely or indirectly floating this notion. The bottom line, as one of the Skimm co-hosts said, is that this is the wrong thing to hint about during “a watershed moment for women, especially in the workplace.” Correct — Wolff should have let well enough alone.