White House Kayfabe

 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill in "siren suit" visiting the White House in January 1942; photo by the Royal Navy's official photographer, Lt. C.J. Ware, via Wikipedia.

Trump may have been genuinely upset by President Zelenskyy's showing up at the White House in fatigues and sweat shirt instead of a suit and tie (he once slapped his eldest boy to the floor in front of everybody in the dorm for thinking it would be OK to wear jeans on a father-and-son outing—to see a baseball game, no less), but he can't have been surprised, since it's known that that's what Zelenskyy does, and intends to do until the war is over, by way of showing solidarity with his country's troops, as Winston Churchill liked to do in one of his special rompers outfits during World War II. 

So it's pretty clear that the incident on Friday was wholly staged kayfabe, from Trump's greeting as the Ukrainian president stepped out of the car ("You're dressed up today") onwards. 

The reporter who fired the first shot at Zelenskyy's clothing choices, Brian Glenn, was obviously planted for the purpose—he's from one of the new media joints the White House has chosen to replace the venerable AP in small-size press availabilities, the cable channel Real America's Voice, previously best known as a venue for Stephen Bannon's show after Bannon was thrown off of YouTube and Spotify, and had been selected to lead the press pool alongside CNN for the occasion (on Thursday it was Newsmax). Glenn is also said to be "dating" Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), which sounds to me like an assertion that the two of them have regularly scheduled sexual relations, but you really don't want to get into that. (That's what she said, heh-heh.)

Decodification

 

Via Theories of Media and Communication/University of Westminster.

This is really interesting, from a Rectification standpoint, on North Carolina's ban of "critical race theory" in the schools, from State Senator Jeff Jackson (D-Mecklenburg County, and running to replace retiring US Senator Richard Burr, with a good chance of winning, and you might want to show him some love):

Here's a good self-own that explains the basic strategy: pic.twitter.com/f9wHodvNjN

— Sen. Jeff Jackson (@JeffJacksonNC) May 13, 2021

That's not just a self-own, it's a new word, or at least a new meaning for "decodify", which used to just be a four-syllable way of saying "decode", though it can also be for removing a provision from the law (as in being the secretary whose job is to pull some language out of the code after the legislature has repealed it, which isn't sinister), or doing it without the legislature (which is kind of sinister), as in this dire, but possibly accurate, prediction from Sarah Kendzior, October 2020:

For the Record: Christianity and Stuff

Residents of Tecun Uman, Guatemala, and migrants from Central America cross the Suchiate River June 10, 2019, to enter Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico. (Photo/Jose Cabezas, Reuters). As long as Father Martin exists, you'll never get me to say Christianity is evil, though I do understand the temptation.

Anyway this person informing me that ex-governor Huckabee seemed not to be a good Christian didn't realize that she was going to trigger me:

The "old testament" or Tanakh as some of us call it is the basis for a deeply compassionate religion known as Judaism. Huckabee knows nothing of it.

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 1, 2019

I guess you know fuck all about Judaism too. Go away before I report you.

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 1, 2019

After that, it occurred to me that it might not be obvious to her why anybody might have a negative reaction to being told their Holy Book is evil (and she's probably somebody who thinks of herself as being "of the left"), and I started trying to explain, in an absolutely not hostile or oversensitive way:

Swedish Phish

In February 2017, our friend the New York Crank told the readers of No More Mister Nice Blog a story about

an attack that in fact never happened — by “terrorist” immigrants who didn’t exist, in Sweden.

Said Trump recently, “You look what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden! They took in large numbers, they’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

This left the Swedes scratching their heads. Nothing had happened in Sweden on the night Trump referred to. How Donald Trump turned on his TV to Fox and Friends [which had in fact run a report claiming that the north Stockholm suburb of Rinkeby was an immigrant-dominated "no-go zone" where Christians were unsafe] and arrived at this conclusion is a job for the men with the white coats when he finally arrives in a straight jacket at the National Home for Daft and Bewildered Ex-Presidents.

Crank went on to talk about the international response to the incident as a good model for how we could start dealing with our then-new president, through merciless ridicule, as demonstrated by the group of Danish Facebook users who organized a "Pray for Sweden" vigil, or the German report of a new Ikea product:

Anyway, some unexpected follow-up to the story came up in today's Times,