It’s hard to know where to start. And it’s not my goal to write things that you see elsewhere without putting a new twist onto things, and now there are so many people concentrating on the news that it’s hard to come up with thoughts that others haven’t thought before.

Before the inauguration, I had really tired of watching TV news, and we didn’t really watch it as much as we did before the election. We weren’t alone, as the ratings for our two go-to channels, CNN and MSNBC had fallen quite a bit. Now that were are in the middle of the Trumpickle, things have changed and we (and others, apparently) are watching once again.

We seem to begin our news watching at about 7. We generally watched Wolf Blitzer on CNN because Ari Melber on MSNBC got carried away with rap musicians, something that seems to us (but not to him) totally inappropriate for a news show. Now, however, it appears that CNN is going to reprogram Blitzer for a morning show. Not sure what will happen at 7. Now, it is Jim Sciutto, but I don’t know that this is a long term assignment.

In any rate, at 8, I am now favoring Chris Hayes (MSNBC) over Anderson Cooper. At 9, we used to watch Kaitlin Collins on CNN, but now that Rachel Maddow is back for 100 days on MSNBC, that’s where we go. It’s too bad, in a sense, that Collins, who is quite good at what she does, has to face such strong competition. At 10, we wind down our watching. Lawrence O’Donnell has just become a little too predictable and sometimes a little to partisan just for partisan sake.

We don’t watch Fox or Newsmax, of course, because we don’t want to watch fake news, and certainly don’t need their slant. For those who say that CNN and MSNBC are too left-wing, I say: “Huh? You don’t know what left-wing is.” Both of those channels are middle of the road in virtually all modern nations but ours.

Just two more thoughts this morning.

First, having watched long and short excerpts of the Kennedy, Patel and Gabbard hearings, I must say that DJ’s concept of “merit” and mine are quite different. Kennedy has been a surprisingly bad presenter, while Patel and Gabbard have done a good job presenting themselves as unrelated to the Patel and Gabbard who existed before they were nominated for their high level positions. I had also watched part of the Vought hearing, and it reaffirmed what I had thought before – that along with Elon Musk, Russell Vought is the most dangerous man in America today, and his appointment to OMB would be (probably will be) disastrous. I saw that he was voted out of committee by an 11-0 vote yesterday. Unanimous, you say? No, not for a 21 member committee. The Democrats simply refused to vote at all for a candidate so bad. (Reminds me of Samuel Goldwyn’s comment that no one should care what the critics say, they aren’t even worth ignoring.)

Of course, DJ’s presser about the plane crash (is that really a word? if so, too bad) was a disaster, even though it was good to hear that the reason for the crash was an example of Pete Buttigieg’s incompetence and the fact that the FAA is filled with people of intellectual limitations and dwarfs, to name a few.

Secondly, a few words about antisemitism. I listened to (actually watched) a presentation by an esteemed professor emeritus at the Jewish Institute of Religion, who gave a very good talk on the present condition of American Jewry and future expectations. The only thing that bothered me in his presentation was the claim that antisemitism, while far from a mainline American problem, was equally a problem on the left and on the right. I beg to differ.

Nor do I think that Samuel Goldwyn’s many quotes should be forgotten. The question is: did he and Yogi Berra have the same writer? (Don’t give a knee jerk reaction to this one.)

Right wing antisemitism (the “they will not replace us” type) is good, old fashioned antisemitism that seems to be impossible to stamp out. Or at least no one has figured out how to stamp it out. Left wing antisemitism is, in my opinion, a very different animal, one connected solely with Israel and Israel’s doings with regard to its neighbors. I don’t view that as antisemitism per se, and the attempts to define antisemitism to include anti-Israel political positions is, I think, a mistake. This is another subject worthy of a book or two, but I think that equating these two positions creates a problem bigger than the sum of its two components.

The title of this post? An old play on words on the New York Times motto coined during the Vietnam War, when Madame Nhu and her family members fled Saigon. Totally irrelevant to anything I said today, but I just don’t think it should be forgotten.