Quint, the establishment journalist, describes a Donald Trump White House press conference. link
Donald Trump comes cruising in. The reporters form themselves into tight groups. You know it’s kind of like ol’ squares in a battle or like being roped together at a Hillary press conference. And the idea is if the Donald goes after one reporter and then that reporter would start hollerin’ and screamin’ and sometimes the Donald would go away.
Sometimes he wouldn’t go away.
Sometimes the Donald, he looks right into you. Right into the reporter’s eyes.
You know the thing about the Donald, he’s got… lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be a real politician. Until he bites into ya with those scathing remarks and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch complaining and the airways and Internet explode despite all the pounding and hollerin’ that the Donald isn’t a serious candidate. And that’s when the Donald comes in and rips ya to pieces.
Chadwick Moore, in the Spectator, helps out the NYT by writing their apology to Times subscribers for them.
Dear Valued Subscriber,
For a mere $39.99 a month, about what you pay your Guatemalan nanny, you depend on us for thought-provoking personal reassurance, award-winning arrogance, hard-hitting sycophancy, and up-to-the-minute coverage of Orange Man – who is very, very bad.
The New York Times remains the world’s most prestigious Viewpoint Validation Service because we understand the crippling emptiness permeating the wealthy liberal soul – we are that emptiness – and you entrust us to make you feel good, smart and worthy every day.
While News and Opinion whisper watered-down postgrad nothings in your ear, Style and Dining guarantee you’ll be validated on the outside, as well as inside. Style and Dining remain committed to informing you on exactly what Brooklyn thought was cool three years ago. While the city that is our namesake – and the place you’ve built your entire identity around – might be a dead, stale cultural wasteland that no one cares about anymore, our Travel section reminds you that you’re a global citizen. Times subscribers don’t have homes, they have bases.
But even the pre-eminent VVS is vulnerable to mistakes.
As some of you are aware, we failed in our commitment to ferociously guard the sanctity of your echo chamber this week. A headline appeared on our front page suggesting Orange Man spoke against racism. While the headline was factual, it was a flagrant betrayal of the service you expect us to provide and we literally stopped the presses to fix it.
We listened to our readers on how to proceed from there. The headline writer was an elderly holdover from the days when we were a newspaper. But today’s lovepaper business is different. Inspired by the Texas revolutionary Joaquin Castro, our editorial board decided to take out a full page ad in our own paper to publish his home address and pictures of his family. Then we mobilized our 52,247 interns to brigade his employer, us, with phone calls to report that we have a racist in our ranks. The writer was immediately fired. Our interns, known as TimesHelpers, chucked milkshakes at him as he sadly strolled through the lobby with his little NPR tote bag full of desktop knick knacks. Just as he reached the door we unchained Sarah Jeong and watched gleefully as she dismembered and ate him alive.
Our customers’ pomposity and fragility are important to us. We don’t use words like ‘neurotic’ and ‘repellant’ to describe our readers the way shopkeepers, waiters, and dry-cleaners might. We think your quirkiness is the natural byproduct of the cosmopolitan, emotionally lavish life that you lead.
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Point of privilege, when tens of thousands of you threatened to cancel your subscription this week, we had a chuckle. You were never going to leave. Our authority is the only thing that gives you authority. And, besides, where else would you go, the Washington Post? That lovepaper is named after a slave owner. And it’s not like you’re going to subscribe to the Wall Street Nazi.
But we still listened to your grievances. Because of your diverse needs, on Monday we will launch the most intimate Viewpoint Validation Service on earth with TimesPersonal. Our new premium service will give platinum members the option to select how they’d like to see a story reported before they read it. Platinum members will be able to pick from options like, ‘Skip to the white nationalism,’ ‘What’s the real estate value,’ and ‘Trump’s fault.’ TimesPersonal comes with our new TimesTrauma feature that algorithmically eliminates potentially triggering content from your personal edition of the Times. Going forward, subscribers can log-in to our TimesRapeWhistle portal to flag content they feel may have been published without consent from the greater Times community.
We know that from the first day you picked up our product, you’ve seen us as not just a newspaper but a social status accelerant. We will never forget our commitment to selling our subscribers more than just words, but personal brand and identity. In these dark and divided times, where 63 million white supremacists use the internet to ridicule their moral superiors with things called ‘memes,’ we have an even more important calling: to protect your truth.
Sincerely,
Dean Baquet
Minister of Feels, The New York Times Viewpoint Validation Service
​President Trump said Wednesday that he would order the Navy to rescind medals given to military lawyers who prosecuted a ​former ​Navy SEAL the president supported during his court martial on murder charges.
“The Prosecutors who lost the case against SEAL Eddie Gallagher (who I released from solitary confinement so he could fight his case properly), were ridiculously given a Navy Achievement Medal,†Trump wrote on Twitter.
“I have directed the Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer & Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson to immediately withdraw and rescind the awards​,†Trump continued.
​â€I am very happy for Eddie Gallagher and his family!​â€
The four attorneys who prosecuted Gallagher were given Navy Achievement Medals last month, the Navy Times reported.
US President Donald Trump pumps his fists as he arrives for a “Make America Great Again” rally at Minges Coliseum in Greenville, North Carolina, on July 17, 2019. (Photo by Nicholas Kamm / AFP) (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)
She wrote, “I’m thinking of the old ambassadors, mostly men in their 60s, 70s and 80s. They’re woven into the town, solid citizens, friends of journalists, occasionally sources, and they know things. They’re mostly retired, and at lunch at clubs in town often begin sentences with ‘And so I told Zbig . . .’ There’s a bit of lost glory with them, but they care about America, are personally invested in it, love it with an old-school love, and respect systems, knowing that creativity — in art, science and diplomacy — can only be born within a certain immediate order.”
Zbig is Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski, who advised LBJ and was Carter’s national security adviser. On his watch, we doubled down on Vietnam (LBJ) and lost Iran and the Panama Canal under Carter.
But he made the cocktail circuit.
President Donald John Trump does not curry DC’s favor. He does not need them. He is a garish playboy billionaire who saved Manhattan only to be resented by Manhattan’s elitists who look down on his Outer Borough ways.
He is saving the country and the people who will in the long term benefit most — the elitists — are spitting angry.
She wrote, “Pretty quickly and to the entire edifice of Washington, it became clear Donald Trump was not a Jacksonian shock to the system, which is what his supporters think he was. He was a daily system overload, a one-man frying of the grid.”
If one man, even a president, can overload a grid, then you need a better grid.
But the fact is, they did this to themselves and refuse to accept responsibility. Anyone can cut you off in traffic; you decide whether to turn that into Road Rage.
“So a lot of good people didn’t come in or weren’t allowed in. And those who did work for the president came to seem strange — fierce, emotional, half mad themselves. There were good people there — the generals were solid — but one by one they left.”
The message from DC is clear: work for The Donald and you end your career.
So much for her illusion of this crowd being public servants. If you love your country, you serve when called.
Hers is a roundabout way to blame President Trump for the attempted coup by the Deep State and the Fourth Estate, which awarded her a Pulitzer for her contributions to this effort.
She wrote, “It was all this — the president’s disdain, his well-fed resentments — that not only left Washington thinking Mr. Trump was crazy. It made Washington itself a fertile field for crazy. It was in this atmosphere that the Steele dossier, with its whacked out third-rate spy fiction, became believable, that sober-minded officials reportedly wondered if they should wear wires when they met with the president.
“He destabilized the entire town.”
No. The town’s Road Rage against him comes from their refusal to accept the will of the people and the policies that serve America and not Washington.
She is rooting for Democrats to offer a safe choice who will calm the waters, this shaming the legacy of Ronald Reagan for whom she once worked. Oh well, she always said Dan Rather was her favorite boss.
Hers is a cry from Versailles for Sloppy Joe Biden to save them from this Orange Man who wants to Make America Great Again.
Biden’s slogan is “America’s Coming Back Like We Used To Be.”
By America, he means the people who chatted with Zbig at cocktail parties.
Peggy, Catholic, Irish, and of working-class origin, is still bedazzled by the charm, prestige, and life-style of the American Elite Establishment. She fails to recognize that they are too commonly just like Scott Fitzgerald’s Buchanans:
““They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.â€
The current democrat frontrunner, Joe Biden was born November 20, 1942. He is currently 76 years old. The month of the next presidential election, he’ll be 78. If he were elected and ran for a second term in 2024, he’d be 82. If he were re-elected and served out two terms he’d be leaving office at 86.
Another prominent contender, Bernie Sanders, was born September 8, 1941. Bernie was born before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor! He’s a year older than Biden. In 2020, Bernie will be 79, in 2024, 83. He’d leave office, after two terms, aged 87(!)
Now, bear in mind, that Donald Trump, born June 14, 1946, set a new record as the oldest man, at age 70, elected president in History.
Ronald Reagan was considered remarkably well-preserved and was constantly mocked for his age by his opponents and accused of being senile and of napping through meetings and so on. Reagan, born February 6, 1911, was 69 when elected in 1980. He left office at age 78, the same age Joe Biden would be when entering. Ronald Reagan was, indubitably, an extraordinarily vigorous and physically gifted man, but he was widely recognized as slowing down and showing his age in the last couple of years of his presidency. Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at age 83.
Obviously rich men and big cheese public officials live longer, but the average life expectancy of male Americans is only 76.9.
What are the odds that either of these two, if elected, would even live out two terms? Not great, I’d say.
And even assuming President Joe or Bernie lives through nearly an entire decade from now, think about it, what are the odds that he will remain healthy and lucid enough to cope with the stresses, responsibilities, and long hours of the Presidency?
Most people in their 80s, if not already “shaking hands with the groundhog,” as Leo Hobbs used to put it, are nodding away their days, napping in their rocking chairs, not in the White House, but in some assisted living facility.
All this shows, I’d argue, that people younger than 60 have no clear idea what old age is really like, and just how many things can go wrong for you. And, it shows, too, just how feckless and irresponsible democrats really are.
When Progressive Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone says the Mainstream Media screwed up royally and Trump was in the right, that is really something remarkable!
You know what was fake news? Most of the Russiagate story. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, that thing we just spent three years chasing. The Mueller Report is crystal clear on this.
He didn’t just “fail to establish†evidence of crime. His report is full of incredibly damning passages, like one about Russian officialdom’s efforts to reach the Trump campaign after the election: “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.â€
Not only was there no “collusion,†the two camps didn’t even have each others’ phone numbers!
In March of 2017, in one of the first of what would become a mountain of mafia-hierarchy-style “Trump-Russia contacts†graphics in major newspapers, the Washington Post described an email Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sent to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov. They called it “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.â€
The report shows the whole episode was a joke. In order to further the Trump Tower project-that-never-was, Cohen literally cold-emailed the Kremlin. More than that, he entered the email incorrectly, so the letter initially didn’t even arrive. When he finally fixed the mistake, Peskov didn’t answer back.
That was “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s governmentâ€!
As outlined in his initial mandate, Mueller explored “any links†between the Russian government and the campaign of Donald Trump. His conclusion spoke directly to the question of whether there was any kind of quid pro quo between the two sides:
“The investigation examined whether these contacts involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future.â€
In other words, all those fancy org charts were meaningless. Because there was no conspiracy, all those “walls are closing in†reports — and there were a ton of them — were wrong. We were told we’d hit “turning point†after “turning point†leading to the “the beginning of the end,†with Trump certain, soon, to either resign in shame, Nixon-style, or be impeached.
The “RNC platform†change story was a canard, according to Mueller. The exchanges Trump figures had with ambassador Sergei Kislyak were “brief, public, and non-substantive.†The conversations Jeff Sessions had with Kislyak at the convention didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.†Mueller added “investigators did not establish that [Carter] Page conspired with the Russian government.â€
There was no blackmail, no secret bribe from Rosneft, no five-year cultivation plan, no evidence of any kind of any relationship that ever existed between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Michael Cohen “never traveled to Prague.â€
The whole Steele dossier appears to have been bunk, with even Bob Woodward now saying the “highly questionable†document “needs to be investigated.†The Times similarly is reporting, two-plus years late, that “people familiar†with Steele’s work began to have “misgivings about [the report’s] reliability arose not long after the document became public.â€
Reporters are going to insist all they did was accurately report the developments of a real investigation. They didn’t imply vast criminality that wasn’t there, or hoodwink audiences into thinking a Watergate-style ending was just around the corner, or routinely blow meaningless episodes like the Sessions-Kislyak meeting out of proportion, or regularly smear people who not only weren’t part of a conspiracy but had no connection to anything (see here for an example).
They’ll also claim they didn’t spend years openly rooting for indictment and impeachment via wish-casted predictions disguised as reporting and commentary, or denouncing people who doubted the conspiracy as spies and Putin apologists, or clearing their broadcast panels and op-ed pages of skeptics while giving big stages to craven conspiracy-spinners like Malcolm Nance and Luke Harding.
That’s fine. In the short term, a significant portion of the country will probably agree coverage was appropriate, probably the same sizable plurality of poll respondents who say they disagree on some level with Mueller’s findings. A lot of people out there despise Trump, and at least right now will be inclined to sympathy for broadcasters and editorialists who gave full quarter to the most damning theories of conspiracy and criminality in the Russia case.
… [N]ews audiences over time lose trust in news organizations that tell them what they want to hear politically, but get the substance of things wrong.
The Mueller report makes clear reporters were sold wolf whistles over and over, led by reams of unnamed official sources who urged them to see meaning in meaningless things and assume connections that weren’t there.
Reporters should be furious about being fed these red herrings. They should be outraged at all those people who urged them to publish the Steele report, which might have led to career-imperiling mistakes in print. They should be mad as hell at CIA chief Gina Haspel and the other unnamed officials who told them disclosing the name of already long-ago exposed government informant Stefan Halper would “risk lives.â€
More than anything, reporters should be furious at the many sources close to the various investigations who (it now seems clear) must have known pretty early there were serious holes in many areas of this story, and that a lot of these “dots†were dead ends, but didn’t warn their press counterparts. For instance, the papers should be mad those who supposedly had misgivings about the Steele report didn’t warn them earlier.
But they’re not mad, which makes it look like a case of intentional blindness, in which eyes and ears were shut among other things because the Trump-Russia conspiracy tale made a ton of money. Media companies earned boffo ratings while the Mueller probe still carried the drama of a potential spectacular ending, with blue-state audiences eating up all those “walls are closing in†hot takes.
This fiasco will surely end up being a net plus for Trump. The obstruction parts of the report make him look like a brainless goon and thug, but the absence of what Mueller repeatedly calls “underlying crime†make his ravings about an elitist mob out to get him look justified. This is not an easy thing to achieve, but we’re there, and the press is a big part of that picture.
I cannot help comparing the way this one came out with the Anti-Bush Intelligence Operations, the PlameGame (in which the Bush Administration was blamed for supposedly leaking the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame, and Scooter Libby convicted of lying to prosecutors, when Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew all along that it was the disloyal-to-Bush Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who revealed Plame’s identity to Robert Novak), and the “Bush-Lied-People-Died” Missing Iraqi WMDs view of the war, which successfully discredited both the Iraq War and the Bush Administration with the presently concluding “Stolen Election/Russian Collusion” attempted coup against Trump.
The difference is that Trump fought back, while George W. Bush stood there like a punching bag, taking every hit, and treating the hostile media and his Deep State opponents as if they were the legitimate authorities.
Trump may not be the ideal President in every respect, but at least he is a fighter.
It’s a damn shame I have to wait another 20 months to vote for President Trump. I wish I could do it now. Twice. Or better yet, in as many jurisdictions as I can. Preferably in every swing district and every swing state.
Yeah, yeah, I know — sadly, I can’t. It’s been a hell of a ride these past couple of years, and I sure hope it doesn’t end next November.
I am a middle-of-the-road Republican who voted for Trump with the utmost reluctance in 2016. He sure wasn’t perfect. He was no Cicero, either––though he can give a decent speech when the chips are down. He had a few extra skeletons rattling in his closet, especially compared to colorless non-entities like Jeb. So yeah, I was queasy about voting for an ex-registered-Democrat-from-New-York-and-possible-liberal-now-turned-Republican.
Was I worried? Hell, yeah! Was I depressed? You bet. But, really, what options were there? Hillary? Jill Stein? Seriously? Trump wasn’t my first choice or my second choice or my third choice, but by the time November 2016 rolled around, Trump was the only choice on the menu. So I swallowed hard, took a leap of faith, and pulled the lever for the Donald.
And let me tell ya, every time one of these newly minted Democratic “stars†opens their mouth, the same thought goes through my mind: Thank God for Trump. Trump is my last line of defense. Trump is the only thing that stands between me and these hallucinogenic socialist nut jobs. Trump is what’s keeping chaos and left-wing insanity at bay. …
The Donkey Party has a new leader: someone called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Every time her bright red lips form a sentence, I hear a clarion call: Must Vote For Trump! Unlike AOC, I actually know firsthand what socialism is. I don’t need to imagine the future that AOC is trying to shove down my throat––I lived in that future and I pray I’ll never have to live in that future again.
Every time AOC proposes to build trains to Europe, or wants butt plugs for cows to control their flatulence, or wants to spend $93 trillion on fairyland, I really, really want to vote for Trump. So make Ocasio-Cortez more visible! Make Ocasio-Cortez speaker of the House! Make her the keynote speaker at the convention!
All the CNN talking heads agree that Trump is an idiot? Maybe, but at least he isn’t planning to ban my car. Trump lies? Maybe, but with Trump, we’ll still have airplanes (and my 401(k) plan has been doing great since his election).
This gets us to the next installment of “Friday the 13th,†a.k.a. the Democratic presidential candidates. Kamala Harris, you say? You seriously want me to vote for Kamala Harris? And you say that Cory “Spartacus†Booker is just like Kamala, only better and balder? Are you kidding me? Pete Buttigieg? Ask me again when I stop laughing.
Bernie? Really? This grumpy near-octogenarian “public service†millionaire with three mansions is running for the presidency of the wrong country. All his best ideas have already been put into practice––in Venezuela.
This is a guy who pseudo-honeymooned in the USSR (two years before it collapsed!), and didn’t notice that people were waiting in mile-long lines for literally everything. This is a guy who has never met a paleo-Stalinist dictator he couldn’t be best pals with. Bernie doesn’t need to pretend he is a complete crank; he is a complete crank.
I will personally call every one of my friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, and beg them to vote for Trump. I will even offer to come and wash their cars while in the nude, if only they’d vote for Trump.
Did someone say Warren? Warren, the first Cherokee candidate — that Warren? Doesn’t she now want reparations not just for African-Americans, but also for Native Americans? Where, oh where, is that lever to pull for Trump?
Biden? The creepy old guy who likes to massage women and 13-year-old girls in public? That guy? I have a 19-year-old daughter, and I sure hope he never goes anywhere near her. But I do hope he runs. It feels like he’s been running for president in every election since Eisenhower. Can he lurch far enough to the left this time, to satisfy the woke police? I doubt it, but it will be fun to watch him try.
Ilhan Omar? Maybe she should run for president too. Nancy suggests that Omar is a good person who is simply too ignorant to understand what her words mean. I disagree. Omar is only saying what all the other Democrats are thinking. Yes, she is an anti-Semite. Yes, she is totally mainstream within the Democratic Party.
Throw that toxic Tlaib person into the mix, and we’ve got the triumvirate that truly runs the Democratic Party now––Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib. I see this nutterfest, and let me tell you, dear Democrats: I am motivated as hell. If ever given a choice (in this election or in other ones) between Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, Pelosi, Warren, Harris, Booker, Biden, Sanders, or Trump, I will take Trump any day of the week.
I am a highly motivated Trump voter because the Democrats have motivated me up to my eyeballs. I have never been more motivated in my life, because the Democrats are terrifying me. I am locked, cocked, and ready to rock in that voting booth. I just wish I didn’t have to wait 20 months.
