"The man formerly known as 'Junior,' who later became 'Bush 43,' was amazingly helpful, dishing the sort of inside-baseball detail and real-time dialogue that reporters dream about."

"He was totally fearless in analyzing the campaign; after all, he answered to only one official, his father, who’d recently introduced us at a White House reception and encouraged him to cooperate. And none of the anonymous reporting would be public until after the polls had closed. After an unusually productive interview, I gratefully thanked him for his candor. 'Now, let me ask YOU a question,' he said with a smirk. 'When this thing comes out I’ll probably be asked about some of this stuff. I’ll have to say it’s total bullshit. Are you gonna have a problem with that?' I assured him that wouldn’t be bothersome. Sources often deny inconvenient truths on the record that they’ve leaked on background."

Writes Tom DeFrank in "'I’ll have to say it’s total bull***t': How political sources play the anonymity game/George W. Bush dished on his father's campaign, with the understanding that he'd later have to deny it. Such arrangements have long been part and parcel not just of journalism, but of politics" (National Journal).

The occasion for DeFrank's story is, of course, Jeffrey Goldberg's recent suckers-and-losers article in The Atlantic. DeFrank ends his article with: "The White House response to this story has been so turbocharged not because of anonymous sources, but because it rings true, and they know it could damage a key component of his base."

It could! I tend to think it "rings true" to the people who already hate Trump, and not to his base. Or to the extent that it rings true to anyone in his base, it doesn't damage him, because they feel they understand the way Trump talks, with an edgy sense of humor and they think that if he said it, it was within a context of truly caring about the people in the military — because look at how he allowed them to win the war against ISIS, how he's ended conflict, avoided new conflict, built up the military, and improved access to medical care.

By the way, I love the new admiration for George W. Bush. Remember when he was Hitler?