“Gentlemen, congratulations. You’re everything we’ve come to expect from years of J-school training.”

The coverage is everywhere. So are the hot takes. I have no coverage to offer and I don’t do hot takes. A New York grand jury indicted Donald Trump yesterday and the indictment is sealed. That means we don’t know what he’s been charged with. We’re told that Trump’s attorneys have been in communication with…

The Never Ending Story

(I’m back after a week off including a few glorious days in Tallinn, Estonia. There’ll be an article about that trip over on Nagan of Copenhagen soon, if it’s not already there.) We begin (as one must) with disclaimers, disclosures, confessions, and context. I’m grateful for a lot of the things Donald Trump was able…

Why do the Danish media protect Joe Biden?

The headlines aren’t splashy. DanmarksRadio (DR): Biden after find of secret papers: “I don’t know what’s in them.” Berlingske (using Ritzau): Find of secret papers at previous office surprises Biden TV2 News (using Ritzau): Find of secret papers at previous office surprises Biden Politiken (using Ritzau): Secret Papers from Biden’s time as vice-president found in…

Darkness Descends

Danish winters are surprisingly mild, weather-wise. I grew up in New York and New England, spent two college years in Pittsburgh, and lived five years in both Chicago and New York City. I know how cruel winter can be. Danish winters aren’t cruel. But they’re dark and they’re gloomy. On days like today, when the…

Big Problems

First things first: I’m not gonna lie to you—that’s what my journal’s for—the American midterms pissed me off.  Conditions could not have been much better for Republicans to take a huge majority in the House and a safe majority in the Senate, thereby putting a brake on the Democrats’ insane agenda.  They did neither.  As…

Not hyperbole: Berlingske hates American conservatives and wants Danes to hate them, too

This morning—not much more than 24 hours before polling places open in America—Berlingske published a signed editorial entitled “Berlingske believes: The USA is in a death-spiral of mistrust.” There’s plenty of empirical data to support that premise.  I touched on a lot of it yesterday and on Friday. Berlingske’s lede states things pretty plainly: The United…

DR: Here’s how to misinterpret America, Americans, and the midterms

AUDIO NOTE: It’s a long post, today, and therefore a long audio. To save myself some time I did most of it in one take. It’s therefore bubbling over with mispronunciations, self-corrections, improvised riffs, and random musings that aren’t found in the text below. So it’s messy but fun. All you lurkers who come around…

Burning down the house

I just want to lay down a marker: my advance transcript, posted hours before the transcript was even released yesterday, nailed it. Here’s the real transcript from the New York Times. Compare and contrast—and marvel at my powers of precognition. Which I had thought was just satire. I never would have imagined Biden’s handlers would…

Gossip

If you’re a Dane relying on Danish news, you probably don’t know that in October 2016 the FBI paid a visit to Facebook headquarters and told them that a big trove of documents was about to be released and it was all Russian propaganda designed to interfere with our election. We know this thanks to…

Semi-Fascist

Let’s start with a some textual analysis. Here’s the text: What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the—I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism. Those words were spoken by Joe Biden at a fundraiser in…

“Just look at the data”

Back on August 9th I wrote about the raid on Mar-A-Lago. The words “banana republic” don’t appear in the post, but I did make a cute banana republic flag for the featured image: When you have armed federal investigators swarm the private home of an ex-president who happens to be one of your loudest and…

A Danish journalist gets it all wrong for a change

A couple of weeks ago, in one of my posts from “the the west,” I briefly mentioned a profile piece that Berlingske had published on TV2 News’s US correspondent Jesper Steinmetz. (And neglected to include a link: here it is.) I wrote: It reveals a Steinmetz I wish we could all see more of on…

“Half the Country”

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton deleted confidential emails from the illegal server maintained at her private New York residence. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was caught smuggling stolen documents from the National Archives by stuffing them into his clothes. President Joe Biden has been heavily implicated in the emails discovered on the laptop of his…

The Mar-a-Lago Mazurka

I had to scroll down quite a bit to reach Berlingske’s story about the FBI’s ransacking of Mar-A-Lago—an event unprecedented in American history. Republicans are furious: “When we get power back, people are going to be held to account”Sara Hodzic, Berlingske.dk, August 9 On DR’s website, the story was just beneath the metaphorical fold: Ransacking…

Trumpism—and its opposite

I don’t write much about Danish politics because that’s not what this blog is about. (Also because Danish politics is of little or no interest outside of Denmark.) Yesterday Berlingske published a very “inside-baseball” article about the state of play in Danish politics as the parties position themselves for the next election (which must take…

Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead

Berlingske published their most superfluous and redundant editorial of the decade this morning: Berlingske believes: Everything and everyone is better than TrumpBirgitte Borup, Berlingske.dk Leader, August 1 There’s no need to parse through the whole thing because there’s very little in it that’s new or novel. The headline alone is just a condensation of the…

Notes from the Algarve: II

If you’re a full-throated left-wing extremist—if you still want George Bush and Dick Cheney hog-tied before a Hague war crimes tribunal, for example, and if you believe American news media are biased to the right, and if you simply cannot understand why Donald Trump still hasn’t been taken out and shot— then Poul Høi is…

Notes from the Algarve: I

(Remember: the name Algarve is derived from the old Arabic Al-Gharb, meaning “the west,” so to speak of “the Algarve” is to speak of “the the West.”) We’ve been here a couple of days now, Herself and Youngest and I, on a brief southern getaway while Eldest holds down the fort and tends Dog back…

Gullible, stupid, obsequious, or malevolent?

Straight to the money quote: The storming of Congress made an indelible impression on me. The mob and the rabble flowed towards and into one of the iconic altars of democracy, storming the hallways, ravaging, robbing, and killing. Armed with everything from handguns to clubs. “The mob and the rabble” is my own interpretive translation,…

Much Too Little, Much Too Late

Mikkel Danielsen is Berlingske Tidende’s USA correspondent. I don’t know how I missed it, but on April 4 he actually came across with the goods on Hunter Biden—and that’s a full six days before I wrote my post about the “ongoing silence.” I screwed up. There was at least one story in the Danish media…