Moderna Love

A new film fact-check, GOP side boobs, Mike Wallace as sex monster, plus tunes from David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Dar Williams and Cry Cry Cry.

Got to love this roundabout in Switzerland. Label should show it is a Cars album, or maybe Drive-By Truckers. Van Morrison or Van Halen? The usual hot takes for today below. Don’t be afraid to Comment or subscribe—it’s free!

Politics & Media

Trevor Noah last night: “Sorry O.J., you had a good run but Trump got acquitted twice and he’s responsible for more deaths.”

As I noted last week, Dems might have never had a real chance to convict Trump but at least two stars were born among the House prosecutors. So now, what’s next for Joe Neguse and Stacey Plaskett? Certainly Jamie Raskin also got a bump but he has been around awhile and is older.

The first serious civil action against Trump for sparking Capitol Hill riot, via CNN this morning: “Former President Donald Trump and attorney Rudy Giuliani are being accused of conspiring with the far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to incite the January 6 insurrection in a civil lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court by the Democratic chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee that cites a post-Civil War law designed to combat violence and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan.”

New book by former top 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen skewers Mike Wallace and others. He describes feeling trapped and “enduring years of misery thanks to Wallace, whose workday behavior — sexually harassing women in the office; subjecting colleagues to tirades and tantrums — belied the righteous enforcer he played on camera for some 50 years.”

He also writes that Wallace regularly peppered colleagues with questions about their sex lives; lashed out at them for no good reason; grabbed the bottoms and breasts of women who worked in the office; pulled them onto his lap; and snapped bra straps…. And even if Wallace and [Don] Hewitt were geniuses, it didn’t excuse their Neanderthal behavior toward women. If I had been a 26-year-old woman working for Wallace in 1980, I doubt I would have survived the experience.” In addition to his icon-busting description of Wallace, Rosen paints unflattering portraits of two other “60 Minutes” correspondents, Steve Kroft and Katie Couric.

Barry Blitt, usually of the New Yorker, here for Air Mail online:

Dave Weigel: “Conspiracy theories work better if they seem familiar. Pelosi giving some sort of ‘stand down’ order to let a riot happen — shades of the ‘did Clinton issue a stand-down order and let Benghazi happen.’ It’s a cozy conspiracy blanket.”

We were reminded in reports today that Sen. Raphael Warnock in GA only won a two-year term in 2020—and now David Perdue (who just lost to Jon Ossoff) last night filed to make a comeback against him next year. Time for The Rev to rev up the fundraising machine because the MAGA dead-enders are coming to get him.

Okay, we knew that Rep. Adam Kinzinger, like other GOPers who came out against Trump on impeachment, would be hit by his party’s leaders. But ostracized by his own family?

11 members of his family sent him a handwritten two-page letter, saying he was in cahoots with “the devil’s army” for making a public break with the president.“Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!” they wrote. “You have embarrassed the Kinzinger family name!”

The author of the letter was Karen Otto, Mr. Kinzinger’s cousin, who paid $7 to send it by certified mail to Mr. Kinzinger’s father — to make sure the congressman would see it, which he did. She also sent copies to Republicans across Illinois, including other members of the state’s congressional delegation. “I wanted Adam to be shunned,” she said in an interview.

Longtime media critic, Eric Boehlert, asks why it took so long for media to confront Trump’s lies (as outgoing Wash Post editor Marty Baron recently—too late—admitted).

As I noted last week, I endorse this sentiment: No reason for the “Star-Spangled Banner” before sporting events. That makes me pro-Cuban on this. Hell, play “Tipitina” instead.

Music

I posted about “A Case of You” recently (hailing the Diana Krall live-in-Paris take) but now here’s a new piece calling it the greatest love song ever. I disagree with writer’s claim about the self-indulgent Prince version, but agree with her that it’s likely that in saying “I could drink a case of you” she is not offering fulsome love but announcing that “that with the clarity generated by time and age, she can drink him in, savor him and still be sober enough to clearly see him.” Here’s maybe Joni’s best live performance:

I’m just catching up with this recent piece by the legendary Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, recalling his role in handing a Sam Cooke tour of the UK in 1962, before rough and tough all-white audiences (and the headliner was Little Richard, no less). A little-known group named The Beatles joined up for part of it but here Sam is the focus as he won over the crowds.

Johnny Pacheco, who co-founded Fania Records, known as the Motown of Salsa, has died at 85. I went to Japan with him in 1986 with the All-Stars (including young Ruben Blades), with Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice as the only other journalist, thanks to Fania publicist and former Young Lords spokesman Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman. Surely you will be reading something more about this here some day soon.

I know about Dar Williams (and her Cry Cry Cry group) but this song hailing Crawdaddy and other ‘70s fixtures was new to me until yesterday—and naturally brought to my attention by fellow former Crawdoodah man, Peter Knobler. “We got Crawdaddy—we know what’s going on.” Testify, sister!

Film

Spoilers (and fact-checks) ahead: The closing moments of Judas and the Black Messiah leave a rather confusing trail. The final scene shows informer O’Neal, days after the 1968 fatal raid, being giving by his FBI mindercthe keys to a gas station out of town which he will own and allow him to leave his dangerous Panther undercover work and hide. In the text which immediately follows this scene, however, it is stated that he remained within the Panther for four more years and pocketed $200,0000—and only then went in the Witness Protection Program.

This section also shows footage of the actual O’Neal in a 1990, unaired, interview for the PBS series Eyes on the Prize 2, in which he appears to boast about being a legit hardcore Panther who risked his life for their cause. In reality, in that interview he admitted for the first time that he had been working for the FBI—and spiked Hampton’s drink the night of the assassination. The next day, as the film notes, he really did commit suicide, first by trying to jump out a window and then by running into traffic.

Apparently Hampton’s mother really did baby sit Emmett Till, whose family were neighbors back in Argo, Ill., before they moved to Mississippi—where Emmett would be murdered.

New doc coming soon on the great Tim O’Brien (best known for his books related to his service in Vietnam). Tim wrote an important piece for me at Crawdaddy about 43 years ago on his visits to nuclear missile silos, the crews who manned them, and the dangers for all of us. I believe it helped inspire his novel The Nuclear Age. Now Tim on his struggle to finish one final book: “Things intervene between maybe and is. Words fail, energy flags, imagination runs dry, influenza rages, insanity intrudes, the second-hand jerks to a stop, and what had been a maybe-book sails off into the oblivion of a never-book.”

Fun descriptive I’ve never seen before in New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum’s tweet review of the new Barb and Star movie: “a real tit-flapper.” I think she means “silly/funny.”

Books

The Dar Williams episode above reminded me that Cry Cry Cry, the group she shared with Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky, recorded a fine song called “Cold Missouri Waters,” based on one of the greatest non-fiction books our time, Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, which I recommend to all.

I rarely re-read a book, but I picked up DeLillo’s White Noise the other day—wondering how it would hold up. Wonderfully so far, and I see it’s finally soon to be a major flick, adapted by Noah Baumbach for Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

Song Pick of the Day

Hate to be self-centered, but after yesterday I have been admitted to the “Moderna World,” and I’m not throwing away my shot. Here’s one of my three favorite Bowie songs now re-titled in my mind (and body) “Moderna Love.” Still, I do not “put my trust in God and man.”

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and now has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.