Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick ... BOOM.

It's about speaking truth to power. I have a plan.

At a CBS staff meeting yesterday, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley lost his shit. He broke all the customary rules for decorous workplace behavior. He failed to act in a collegial manner. He raised his voice. He was rude and abusive and intemperate and thunderously insubordinate.

My point is, we need more of this. More insubordination. More thunder. Less collegiality. We need more public people like Scott Pelley beginning to act like this:

And fewer acting like this:

I have a plan. It starts with Congress. We’ll get there in a minute.

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The “60 Minutes” meeting was to introduce the staff of the venerable news program to its new boss, Nick Bilton, the documentary filmmaker and tech journalist who has no experience in running a news feature operation. The meeting came after the network’s new, abrasively anti-woke editor in chief, Bari Weiss, fired the previous head of the program and two respected correspondents in what was a seismic shakeup of the historically progressive-leaning “60 Minutes.” Staffers are calling it “Black Thursday.”

It all seemed harshly political, part of a right-wing corporate shift under CBS’s uber-boss David Ellison, a billionaire buddy of Donald Trump.

Pelley had had enough.

According to The New York Times, which had obtained an audiotape of the meeting, Pelley informed Bilton that his qualifications for the job were “slender,” and asked why he had taken a position “knowing that you will never be welcome here.” He said Weiss is a corporate hatchet wielder who “is murdering 60 Minutes.”

“She does not love this place,” he said. “She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Pelley said, mock generously, that in contrast to Bilton’s slender credentials, Weiss had no credentials at all, that she was utterly unqualified for, and inept at, the job: “The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

As Bilton left the room after just 15 minutes of absorbing this, he sullenly told the staff to “enjoy the bagels,” and they did, after giving Pelley a round of applause.

Isn’t it time for public people to have had enough? The president has put us in indecorous times. Isn’t it time to be indecorous in return?

Pelley’s rant was not impromptu, obviously; it was shrewdly rude. He was speaking truth to power in a way that made an inarguable point. It stated out loud the plainly obvious, with not even a soupçon of diplomacy. And it was startlingly effective. Just hours later, former “60 Minutes” executive editor Bill Owens supported his former correspondent at a New York Press Club event, saying Pelley “can smell fraud a mile away.”

Fraud. That’s a fighting word. I think this might be the beginning of something cleansing, at “60 Minutes.”

Democrats in Congress can start something cleansing, too. I think they need to take to the floor — or at least try to — and simply read compilations of Donald Trump’s more recent deeply unhinged, pathetic nighttime toilet tweets. His hapless, impotent, incoherent, incontinent rants against enemies perceived and imagined and invented. His ludicrous braggadocio. The tweets that show him to be a toddler in mid-tantrum. The blame-shifting tweets ascribing his own incompetencies to others. The playground saber-rattling that reveal a man with no remaining personal agency, and no way to vent the panic he feels about this except through empty threats and infantile taunts. The grotesque AI images of himself as a Roman conqueror and his enemies as garbage-swilling rodents. The sullen, sophomoric “I don’t care abouts” to explain away the fights he has waged and lost. The self-serving, obvious lies that even his most gullible followers must now see as threadbare.

And every once in a while, while reading these things, the senators and congresspeople should turn to their colleagues across the aisle and ask them how they plan to explain to their constituencies their continued enabling of this damaged, dangerous paranoiac. What is their strategy — political and moral — for dealing with the consequences of their own cowardice?

It would be a shot across the furrowed brows of the men and women of power who are trying to sit this presidential crisis out, out of timidity or misplaced loyalty or what they have convinced themselves is forgivable, prudent politics.

The rules of the Senate and House give the majority leadership extraordinary discretion to control speech on the floor of their chamber. These sorts of speeches can be prevented by fiat, but it would come at a political cost. The senators and congressmen who are so rebuffed would simply take their litanies into the corridors and give impromptu press conferences. The can use audio-visual devices. They can emote to maximum satiric effect.

And they can ask, reasonably, why they were silenced. When they are told their speeches cannot be delivered on the floor, the deadpan answer should be obvious: “You are telling us we cannot quote the president of the United States in Congress? That is all we propose to do — share the thoughts of the president of the United States, in his own words, with the people of the United States.”

Anyway, it’s just an idea. A rude idea.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

— And, from the Mailbag:

Q: I loved your story yesterday about Pittsburgh, the missing cat. How did you determine where and how he had hidden?

A: Two things, neither of which I had disclosed in the piece, for tactical reasons. The first is that Rachel had seen Pittsburgh emerge from behind the couch, even though she thought it was Toothpaste. This itself was not dispositive evidence. All the cats frequently prowl under and behind the couch, and Toothpaste had been roaming the house freely for hours.

The main reason is that about 15 minutes before Pittsburgh appeared I thought I had heard a sound from the direction of the couch. It was a scratching sound, repeated only once. I called Rachel down from upstairs, and together we lifted and shimmied the couch five feet away from the wall. No cat was there. Then we returned the couch. We remained in the room for the next 15 minutes. No other cat approached the couch.

Thanks for asking.

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