Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Freaky Friday 1 — Here’s Looking at You, Cupcake…
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As a one-time member of Substack and Instagram, I keep getting these “For You” pop-up notifications in my iPad and iPhone. This one’s been a frequent interrupter of late. I call her “The ‘A’ Cup Brain.” This woke me early this morning with an audible alarm the most recent unwanted IOS update had reset from off to on. Thought I’d share…
Punditress Genius with Subtitles
Look at me. Are you looking at me? Don’t I look beautiful and smart and in charge? Watch me really get into it now. Don’t worry if it takes me a bit to get down to brass tacks, as it were, because you have to remember there are members of our audience who have to buy you first before they believe you. Why I am careful to demonstrate that I am a poised, articulate, and confident woman they can trust. You’ll see when I get even deeper into it.
You wouldn’t believe the kind of response I get from these podcasts… I get notifications that dozens,
even hundreds, of new commentators are now following me at Threads and Substack and TikTok. Some
of them are asking to meet me in person, if you can believe it, and want to know what I like doing best in my off hours. Many of them are not even women but other genders, and they send me charming photos of themselves or their most evocative avatars. How many pundits do you know of who can use the term ‘evocative avatars’ in a sentence? I certainly haven’t met many white men who could do that. Could Trump do it? Don’t make me laugh.
See how in-depth I’m getting on this exposè of Trump’s authoritarian schtick? How come nobody else
can see it this clearly? Do you like my hair and my outfit? I have to admit I just love looking at my own podcasts. I don’t think of it as vanity. More like art appreciation. But it’s also professionally important. I know George Stephanopoulos personally, and he has more than once glanced upward toward my eyes. And I saw that Scott Pelley from CBS at a party once and he told me I had the best complexion of any journalist there. People ask why an art history major knows enough about Constitutional law to be an expert on free speech, and I ask them if they ever had tea discussing the First Amendment with Ruth Baader-Ginsburg in her wheelchair. They never have a comeback for that one.
Just in case you were too distracted by the simple pleasure of looking at me to get all of the brilliant
points I made here, let me summarize… This Trump guy has to go. Everything he does is wrong, illegal, undemocratic, borderline fascist, anti-LGBTQ, and illegal. Come back next time I post for more incredibly intuitional commentary…
So who is this fascinating person who calls herself S.E. Cupp, really?
From her Wiki Page (not updated since she was reduced to doing a solo podcast):
<<SARAH ELIZABETH CUPP was born in Oceanside, California. While growing up, she lived in Andover, Massachusetts, and attended the Academy of Notre Dame. From age six until her late teens, she studied ballet. While attending ballet school, she suffered from eating disorders and experienced a relapse during her college years. In 2000, Cupp graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history. While attending Cornell, she worked for The Cornell Daily Sun. In 2010, she earned a Master of Arts degree from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University with a concentration in religious studies.
After graduating from Cornell, Cupp worked for an online magazine and a public relations company. She was also a contributor to Politico.com's The Arena and has been a frequent guest on all three major cable news channels – CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
Throughout her career, Cupp has described herself as a "mainstream conservative" and a supporter of "limited government, self-reliance, self-empowerment, lower taxes".
Although an atheist herself, on July 5, 2012, Cupp said on The Cycle that she "would never vote for an atheist president". When asked to explain, Cupp said she felt that a president must not represent only 10 to 15 percent of the American populace and that faith served as a "check" on presidential power.
In March 2013, Cupp pulled out of a CPAC appearance because of its stances on homosexuality and gay marriage, saying she "became increasingly uncomfortable [aligning] with an event, a great event in many ways, that had nonetheless attempted to marginalize a significant group of conservatives working on our behalf."
Cupp personally opposes abortion, but believes it should be legal and opposed the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Cupp was strongly critical of Donald Trump's presidency, saying "I don't know these Republicans [that support Trump]. This isn't what drew me to this party."[18] She voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election.>>
Like a lot of her sistren in the politic biz, she started out Republican, then snapped at some point and went crazy in print and on teevee. Ann Coulter (another Cornellian), Nicolle Wallace, Megyn Kelly, Ana Navarro, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, et al. After a while you don’t know what they really stand for because the only common denominator in their public personas is the need for attention, which could be why the GOP is the launching pad, a place where men still hold doors for women and spend more than the necessary amount of time looking at you in that new skirt. After achieving some celebrity, it gets easier to grab attention by jumping on every issue-of-the-day bandwagon and just make sure your skirts are short enough to keep all men looking. By these criteria, S. E, Cupp is pretty much on point in the stupid girl sweepstakes.
Invocation of Nemesis by the Summoners Click on Rosie. Thought I’d get this part out of the way right up front. I’m reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the upper class British sport of fox hunting: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” As it happens, I’m working on two different posts at the same time this morning. This one and another one about the sad PR plight afflicting the unfortunate middle child of the three worst First Ladies in American history. . What the posts have in common is that the dominating element of both stories is a function of female psychology and can only be understood in those terms. There’s also the irony that Wilde’s jibe can be applied with some justice to both predator and prey in the two posts. Because I’m going to admit at the outset what most of the MAGA faithful won’t. You are right that Donald Trump is responsible for much of the imminent danger we are facing as a nation. Without his arrival on the political scene 11 years ...
This is what I call an omnibus post. That is, it will contain many links to what I have published here and elsewhere previously. Not going to apologize for that. I don’t mind asking you to read a variety of approaches to the same gigantic topic. It’s a topic so big we’ve all become accustomed (or trained ourselves) to deal with it only in pieces. But the pieces are all part of a larger whole that has grave consequences for the culture as a whole. A great many people aren’t going to like what I have to say here, but it’s time it was said. I won’t be mincing words. If you feel like contending with specific points I am making, you’re well advised to read what’s at the links before you cut yourself the easy break of dismissing this post as irrational or wrongheaded or over-generalized. It isn’t. It just won’t be popular. A word about the word ‘general’ as it used in vernacular expressions like ”in general” or “generally speaking.” We all do generalize, mostly without acknowledging that whe...
Conflicted identity and media image woes By now we know if you’re a Democrat, getting elected isn’t about who you are, what you’ve done or haven’t done. It’s about how people see you. The factors that can do in a candidate are often more subtle than the pundits of the professional wrestling circuit called the mainstream media. Why we think it’s time to help the world’s most uninformed voters about who to elect as their next nominee for President. We’re not going to get all racist and sexist about it. The decision points we’ve discovered are all based on the individuals involved, not the immaterial fluff like experience or political philosophies. We’ll start right at the top and give you one simple thing to bear in mind before you try to pick a winner for 2028. Kamala Harris Not about the word salads or the escort thing. Too Desperate. Gavin Newsom Too Lyle Waggoner. Times change. Bernie Sanders Too ‘Little Big Man’ AOC Too prematurely passé Gretchen Whitmer Too Lily-White J...
Mad Max as you’re supposed to want her Having finished my Mad Max post yesterday, I realized I had confined my discussion of the ‘Instant Gratification’ problem to the MAGA fainthearts. Their inability to look far enough forward to envision consequences is far less than that of the whole half country full of Democrat apologists and Trump haters. Shouldn’t I address that fact in some comparable terms to what I just wrote? I guess so. The easy answer is referencing the two recent Mad Max sequels provided to us by Woke Hollywood. But I haven’t seen them. I had no interest in paying to see them in a theater. At one point I did put one of them, Furiosa I think, on my IMDB watch list. I received a notification that it would be briefly available on one of the streaming services and I did tune in to watch. Lost interest about 15 minutes in, by which time the old rules had it a good movie should have you hooked. I was not hooked. It was just the same cinematic backdrop as the Road W...
Happy Independence Day No. 250! I’m planning to do my part for the year-long celebration of the still remarkable birth of the United States of America. Just starting to realize that the number of us who remember the last big anniversary in 1976 is getting smaller every day. Why I have some special ideas about focusing on the moment of transition, that is the tick of the clock last night when the 249th year became the 250th. A kind of time capsule that may be buried now but dug up later to see who were way back when you were still as young as you think you are now. My credentials for the job. Quite a few actually, but the most important one today is that I was a working participant in the official Bicentennial celebrations back when I was still young. I wrote a post about it almost 10 years ago, ancient history in today’s 24/7 chronometer dial. In honor of the ones no longer with us from that time, I dug up the old post from the Wayback Machine and put it back together here a...
Yeah. Click on the blue headlines. There are two precursor posts to this, both still in-process. I’ll finish and link them later. One is about the death of the historical novel, which mirrors a lot of other deaths in our culture. The other is about divorce, an absolutely transformative and deadly factor in what has become of us as a nation. What does that leave us with? The end result of our progressive devolution, largely invisible to all, because it is a function of the variable we tend to think of as a constant, human consciousness. Which it isn’t. I’ve written quite a lot about the consciousness problem over the years, and Instapunk Returns, as well as a couple other of my blogs, contain 5+++ years worth of thoughts on the topic. I’ll be sending you to those posts here, providing you with an excerpt, usually the lede, a sample graphic or two, and a link. The order is roughly chronological. I’m not going to give you any particular setup from piece to piece. The relevance to the main...
Marc Antony: “ Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men– Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.” [Worth noting, Gaius Julius Caesar was not an emperor; the successors who fought for absolute power and took his name as a title were emperors and brought about the death of the several hundred years of Roman Republic.] The American Republic is now at an end. We had a good run. He will be forced to concede, because Trump will not declare martial law....
The last group photo I’m a part of that’s still in my possession. My sister’s wedding in the late1990’s, with me and my mother in attendance, here in Salem. I don’t get out much anymore. Haven’t for a long time. If I didn’t take pictures of myself, nobody would, or could, anymore. I don’t give them the chance. Why in recent years I’ve made a point of doing an official birthday selfie, to keep track of the wear and tear of the years and see if the falling apart process is gaining speed. This year was not a good year for hair. That much I’ll tell you. But here’s the Official 74th Birthday Selfie I took on Friday. Not as young as I used to be. I hadn’t really shown this pic to anyone, but imagine my surprise when I received a gift yesterday by parcel delivery from a young lady I helped raise who will always be close to my heart. She and I hadn’t spoken about the Rolling Stones in years, but somehow she must have divined I’d been thinking of them, because here’s what she ordered sent ...
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