lusinia

Vanity Fair has a brief write-up - https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/meghan-mccain-manhattan-protests-claim. The closing lines - Do you think she'll be able to resist bringing this up when the show returns on Monday? If she doesn't, will she be asked to explain herself? Will she even be there?

Page Six says Meghan's at a family home in Virginia.

If Meghan is in Arizona, or someplace else where she can go outside, take a walk, etc., this will give people even more reason to doubt anything and everything she says. I wonder if she left once they started using those green screens? Or maybe before, for that matter. How would we know? That flag and yellow wall backdrop could be anywhere. I know Kelly Ripa received a lot of backlash a couple of weeks ago for secretly being in quarantine, since the beginning, in the Caribbean, because her family happened to be there on vacation when it started and decided to stay.

Just saw the link to the story on the Primetimer homepage. So, because "a gossip organization is about to run a story of where me and my family are currently" Meghan's beating them to the punch (at least halfway) by coming clean about not being in the city. That line makes it sound like she's being oh so brave, and robbing them of the opportunity to break the scandalous story that she's.....shhh.....not living in NYC. This took such courage and humility, right? You know, similar to when David Letterman was being blackmailed about having an affair with a staffer, and he just went ahead and announced it on his late-night show. The second point in her tweet sounds nothing like her. It's something a publicist would write. There were a couple of people in the replies to Kristen Bartlett's tweet who said that there have been rumors for a while that Meghan hasn't been living in her apartment for months.

If you google "Kristen Bartlett Meghan McCain", listings for this story already show up in the first 5 pages, both known and lesser known websites (including a French one). I don't think too many people are feeling sorry for her.

This is why I'm glad they're off right now. Because of course Meghan was going to somehow insert herself in the story and make herself out to be a victim in this. If it doesn't impact her life it's not as important, but this way, her "outrage" is somehow more justified. But this has nothing to do with her. If the Full Frontal writer really does live in Meghan's building, shame on Meghan for choosing to be incendiary just for effect. (Reading responses to the neighbor's tweet, which are interesting, btw, it sounds like Kristen Bartlett does live in the building. One of the people who replied said they live there, too.)

I remember that Whoopie. Her seeming disinterest in the show now doesn't come close to the lackadaisical attitude she had in her earlier years. (I wonder when and why that changed. Was it during/after the Rosie season? Did she realize she was replaceable, and needed to be more engaging?) I didn't watch for about a year and a half after that second Rosie season ended, and when I started again I was struck with how noticeably different Whoopie was.

That was exactly my thought. I'm kind of relieved we won't have shows this coming week.

I like the longer interviews, too. I just wish they gave that kind of time to the more interesting guests, and not politicians, who tend to stick to their talking points.

I knew today's show would feel especially dated, and then I was thinking - if this is a news show, run by the news division, shouldn't it be live every day? What other program covering the news tapes their show a day ahead of time? Talk shows pre-tape their shows, and that's really what The View is, no matter what they call it. I wish they'd just admit it, and then we wouldn't be subjected to seemingly endless multi-segment interviews (which rarely even happens on the news channels) with politician after politician after politician. Even interviews with politicians I like I rarely find interesting. Meghan - "a huge point margin of senior citizens". I guess she couldn't find the number in her notes, so she just threw "huge" in there. And then she brings up opening up the economy and says, "which we all agree with". I don't think the other hosts are in agreement with her about when and how it should happen, though. In name only, though, right? If there were actual qualifications and testing before you could call yourself that, she wouldn't pass. So Meghan's being "authentic". Okay. Authentically inarticulate, authentically untalented, authentically rude. She obviously sees no room for improvement, because, to her, that likely equals inauthenticity. What you see is what you get, I guess, and is in line with her refusal to do a chemistry test before she joined the show. It's all a facade, though, people displaying this much bravado, and they're not fooling everybody.

Meghan doesn't want Twitter to fact check her. So Meghan thinks the tech companies have a "base" that they're "virtue signalling" to. She tries to fit everything into her politics, "both sides" narrative. Just because one side in a dispute has political motivations doesn't mean the other side does. What was Meghan criticizing Joy for? Her ",,,by the way, the point about ballot, balloting you just said, Joy, that's not accurate. Arizona has voted red every election since 1953...over 70% of Arizonans vote in by absentee ballot or by mail. So it's just, it's, all of this is just trafficking in complete and utter inaccuracies and falsehoods. And I for one, it's Thursday, it's been a long week, and I have no time for this". (This was her most animated comment of the show, and when she finished she had this smug self-satisfied smirk on her face.) I thought I must have missed something, so I rewound to listen again to what Joy said. It didn't appear to me that there was anything Joy was saying that she herself was inaccurate about. She did quote Trump, and specifically said she was quoting Trump, as saying,"if you ever agreed to mail-in voting, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again". So was Meghan not paying attention, and mistakenly thought this was Joy's opinion? Or did she realize it was Trump saying this, but didn't want to say his name and directly attack him, so she blamed Joy instead? Since Meghan singled out Joy for being "inaccurate", I wish Whoopie had let Joy respond. But I'm not even sure Joy took it the same way I did. Maybe I'm misreading the whole thing, but the way she was talking made it seem like Meghan was pissed off at what was happening right then, and not Trump's weeks long anti-vote-by-mail crusade.

It's interesting that Meghan would assume the woman in Central Park was "working herself up into fake hysteria". Just because she herself has a habit of working herself up into fake outrages doesn't mean everybody does. Who knows what this woman's mental state is, but if she was faking it she missed her calling. She seemed completely, irrationally, hysterical. Don Lemon played a longer clip of this on his show last night, before talking to Christian Cooper, and the way the woman was pulling on her poor dog's collar, causing it to choke and yelp, was not the way someone who's pretending during a 9-1-1 call would be behaving. I'm glad the rescue organization has the dog back.

Oh, yes. I noticed this, too, and I bet she was. I guess Meghan and her husband don't have a car. Otherwise, taking a drive to go to her father's grave in Maryland wouldn't be a problem. Meghan was rightly upset at the people who went out and crowded together, without masks, over the holiday weekend. She said on Twitter that she thought that re-opening society would be "slow and responsible". But she's seemed okay with all the re-open protests and rallies, which were, for the most part, also not done in a responsible manner. Even though you have the difference between having fun and wanting to get back to work, the possibility of causing a "super spreader" event exists for both.

You know who I've seen do this? Three year olds who are being interviewed on tv, who, when they catch a glimpse of themselves on the monitor, become transfixed, and can't resist watching themselves. Which is cute when someone's 3, but a 35 year old woman who's been appearing on tv for over a decade really should have grown out of it by now.

I think what Clyburn said to Sunny, which was perfect, btw - wise, tactful, all those things, was his way of saying that this is a difficult enough decision for Biden to make without everyone putting their two cents in and just adding to the pressure he's under.

"Opioid overdoses" is one of Meghan's newer favorite phrases. Does she think this is the only drug out there? Meghan's going to insist on buying a crib in a store, isn't she? And as far as I can tell, she's free to visit her father's grave. If there are other people around, I can't imagine there would be so many people that social distancing couldn't be maintained. Why was Meghan looking off to the side so much, sometimes even while she was talking? (And why in the last week or so has she reverted back to wearing business suits; it's probably just the jacket, but still?) Terry Crews didn't have to worry about putting food on the table once he joined the NFL, several years before he became an actor. At the close, Whoopie, all cheery, says, "If you're not sure how you feel, look at the front of the New York Times", obviously a reference to the Sunday cover, but to mention it with a smile on her face was off, somehow.

My post was also on Thursday.

I read yesterday that this will be the first time in 5 years that the Daytime Emmys will be on tv. Then I checked to see if the show received any nominations, and I couldn't find anything. No wonder, since they didn't announce them until today - lol. It's nice that Ana was included in the nominations.

"Existential" twice, and two friends mentioned, all in the same answer, one of those friends being simply "Vanessa". Thank goodness Yvette will be on tomorrow. I was afraid she wasn't going to be on at all. A federal judge just ruled Monday in my state, Texas, that fear of catching the virus qualifies as a disability, which is one of the three reasons you're normally able to request an absentee ballot (the other two are for being out of the area during voting, or being 65 or over). He had this wonderful line in his ruling, that voters should “have the option to choose voting by letter carrier versus voting with disease carriers.” Hopefully, the ruling will hold up. There was also something in the Washington Post this week that said Democrats aren't more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. I wonder if Republicans are just doing their usual contrarian thing since it's something Democrats support.

The Ronan Farrow discussion was a mess. Whoopie starts off by saying that the NYT accuses Ronan of "not checking facts and sources", and then she says that Matt Lauer reached out to "sources" that Ronan didn't reach out to, and that they "didn't back up Farrow's reporting". This is a broad, sweeping statement that implies a whole lot more than what the article seems to say. First off, it's ridiculous to present Matt Lauer as being more truthful about his scandal than Ronan. Besides, that story broke long before Ronan ever did any reporting on it. Since I don't subscribe to the NYT, and they no longer allow you to read a few free articles a month, I wasn't able to read it, but in reports from other publications about that article they mention this quote in the article from Ben Smith, the writer - But the way Whoopie framed it certainly gave that impression. Then, towards the end, Whoopie says that "the ball is in Ronan's court" and he needs to respond to these "interesting questions". Well, if she or someone else would do her research she would see that both Ronan, and, especially, his New Yorker editor issued a lengthy rebuttal Monday on twitter to the NYT article (the show only showed tweets rebutting Lauer). Here are a couple of Ronan's New Yorker editor's tweets (the next 13 tweets go into detail about a couple of the stories) - Then Joy takes the discussion in a completely different direction, and it gets into "believe women" vs "believe all women". They would have been better off leaving this entire discussion off their agenda. It was just all over the map. Yeah, right. It's perfectly okay if a man gains "hundreds of pounds", and not only that, no one will say a word about it, according to Meghan. Now I really need Joy to post her almond cake recipe. Is it an Italian recipe? Does she use Amaretto? I absolutely love Amaretto. And I love cake. I thought of that exact same thing. Wasn't it just a couple of weeks ago? Maybe the "chip" in the brain that she imagines makes weight "interesting" to people, that she so smugly and proudly claimed her brain doesn't have, really is there, but it's defective, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So today Meghan's tan again. She was tan on Monday, but not yesterday. Does self-tanner wear off that quickly, or is she using a bronzer? Someone needs to tell her that she needs to do her chest, too, if her neckline is low.

I found this - TooFab, which had this paragraph, referring to when Whoopie cut off Meghan on Monday by going to commercial- (Interestingly, if you click on the link to People that's in the article, they don't have that quote. This is the only quote they have - Maybe someone complained and they removed it.) Regardless, the "source" of the quote that Meghan was complaining about wasn't criticizing her; far from it. That person was simply speculating that Meghan may not have heard Whoopie and wasn't actually interrupting her. That person was coming to Meghan's defense. That person was trying to help her. But what does she do? Gets defensive and says 'I didn't mishear anything, we were having a political debate, like political commentators do, and it's physically impossible for you to see what's going in my kitchen, where I was alone, so grow up, you anonymous source from the show, you'. And incidentally, neither of the two quotes are attributed to someone from the show. A friend or family member could just as easily have contacted People and made those same statements.

Aw....boo hoo. If I was on twitter (it's a good thing I'm not) I'd ask her why her demeanor and tone was acceptable when she questioned certain Democrats (for instance, some of those who ran for president this past year) and why the way Seth Meyers questioned her was not acceptable. I watch Seth's show pretty frequently (I always catch his A Closer Look; otherwise it depends on the guest). I've never once seen him be rude or combative with anyone. How on earth do you take a job as a "political pundit", practically proclaim it as your birthright, but then not have the expectation that you'll be asked about anything political that you might say? You would think that if Meghan truly believes what she says, it wouldn't bother her. This was just another instance of Meghan wanting to be one of the "cool kids", and thinking that she and Seth had a connection because 'I used to work at SNL, and so did you; wasn't that the greatest? We'll just have a few laughs while we reminisce'.

Did Meghan totally misread that tweet? She sounds off the rails here. The original tweet quotes her from this morning about how she's so desperate to do anything outside. The guy tweets back to go outside while wearing a mask and keeping socially distant. Like for a damn walk! He wasn't talking about people not being able to work. That's the reason Meghan always cites for why there is a rise in suicides, drug use (for some reason she thinks opioids are the only problem drug), child abuse, and other problems. That's not what she was talking about this morning in relation to herself, because obviously she is working. Is she now saying that her problem of not being comfortable going outside also causes this level of distress? It's also pretty rich for her to accuse someone of having a "trite and ignorant" response, since she specializes in those.

Yeah, I was surprised at Joy, too. She probably missed or forgot that this happened way back in March.

I would agree, except that right now, that's not possible. Not unless they have a live-in nanny. Maybe that's one reason she doesn't seem to be looking forward to this baby. Childcare is going to be all on her and her husband.