"Later today I will be meeting with, of all people, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor of The Atlantic, and the person responsible for many fictional stories about me..."

"... including the made-up HOAX on “Suckers and Losers” and, SignalGate, something he was somewhat more 'successful' with. Jeffrey is bringing with him Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker, not exactly pro-Trump writers, either, to put it mildly! The story they are writing, they have told my representatives, will be entitled, 'The Most Consequential President of this Century.' I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be 'truthful.' Are they capable of writing a fair story on 'TRUMP'? The way I look at it, what can be so bad – I WON!"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

I like this. Trump is reminding me of Bill Maher — as Maher approached his dinner with, of all people, Trump.

Except it is a bit different... and what is "a competition with myself"? Perhaps Trump is of 2 minds, one which believes Goldberg can't write a fair story and one that is allowing for the possibility. You have to go through with the meeting to find out which side of your own mind is right, and since both are you, you necessarily win. I get the sense Trump thinks his "I WON" logic is quite funny.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: Tell me about the phrase "I've got half a mind to...." and compare it to the phrase "I'm of 2 minds about...." (And here's the long answer.)

"Bob Woodward has spent an entire career trying to infiltrate groups like this. So how could you possibly have just been added to a group chat?"

The NYT "Daily" podcast interviewer prompts Jeffrey Goldberg, in this morning's new episode, "Inside the Group Chat Planning to Bomb Yemen" (Podscribe).

Goldberg responds: "Yeah. I mean, you know, and, and, and also it's weird that substantive government conversations we taking place over Signal, because Signal is not by the US government standards secure in part because obviously it's open — technically open — to anyone, including yours, truly. And I, I know that previous administrations have used different messaging services, but not for, not for substance. Right? I mean, I think in the Biden administration, it's a, it's a good example. They used Signal. But my impression is based on, on some reporting, my impression is that they use Signal to do things like setting up lunch appointments or, Hey, I've just left Saudi Arabia. I'll call you from a skiff when I get to whatever."

Only once the bombings in Yemen occurred did Goldberg — as he tells it — realize "this is almost certainly a real Signal group and not some sort of deceptive disinformation campaign." He's being careful, it seems, to protect himself. Did he do something wrong by failing immediately to drop out of the chat? He would like the timeline for judging his behavior to begin at the point when he knew "almost certainly" that the conversation was what it appeared to be:

And so then I had to begin to make a serious decision...

Key word: then. And: begin.

... consulting with colleagues that ultimately led me to remove myself from the Signal group later that day....

What was said in these conversations?

How did they analyze the legal problems and journalism ethics? What we know is that Goldberg signed out of the Signal group.

... knowing that the group administrator and Signal and the members, I believe, of a group as well, are notified that you have left the group.

That is, to withdraw he would have to expose himself as the eavesdropper he chose to be. Presumably, that problem was bandied about in those consultations with colleagues. During the time he was talking to colleagues, he was still in the group and he knew it wasn't a hoax. Now, to get out, he'd have to target himself. But, bottom line, he got out. 

I assumed at that point that Mike Waltz was gonna call and say, Hey, who, who is this? Or call and say, why'd you leave the group? And, and, and then I would say, you know, director Waltz or whatever, do you know, do you even know who this is? But nobody look the, I mean, here's the, the, the truth of it is nobody noticed when I was added and nobody noticed when I was left.

The truth is, you don't know what other people notice when they say nothing. 

The "Daily" interviewer invites Goldberg to reveal why he left the group. He says:

You know, I, I think people can make their own deductions here, but I can't get into for various reasons. The conversations I subsequently had with colleagues and others about my decision making, all I will say is that I, I removed myself from the group understanding the consequences of that....

He doesn't want to talk about it. And who knows the meaning of things not said?

ADDED, after listening to more of the podcast. The interviewer comes back to the material I've highlighted. She says:

I respect the fact that you can't go into the details, but I do want to ask you whether part of the reason why you left was that you were concerned you could get in trouble for it. Like were you worried at all that you had stayed in that chat too long? And, and not just you, but the people that you're talking to at the Atlantic that presumably you're getting advice from? 

Goldberg's answer shows that he needs to worry that he could be accused of a crime. He says:

I'm going to, your Honor, I'm gonna respectfully decline to answer that question on the grounds that I can't answer the question. I take the nation's laws very seriously, but I am not in a position to discuss decision making related to the type of material that I was seeing.

Then, Goldberg brings up something that shocks me into seeing why Trump hates Goldberg: "Four years ago, five years ago, I reported that Donald Trump referred to the World War I and World War II War dead as suckers and losers."

And then I had to wonder whether Goldberg was put on that Signal chat deliberately to entrap him into committing what would be characterized as a crime, and that's what I'm guessing he talked about with his colleagues that led him to withdraw from the chat. 

Of course, on the Trump side, they congealed very quickly around the story that it was a stupid mistake, but no harm, no foul. But isn't that what they would do if it were deliberate entrapment?

Another suspicion I developed listening to this podcast is that Goldberg is not the first journalist to be added to a chat like this and fed information, but other journalists have just written stories about the substance of what they heard. Look at that line: "Bob Woodward has spent an entire career trying to infiltrate groups like this." Well, maybe Bob Woodward is in groups like that. He just doesn't write articles about what happened to him. And maybe Goldberg knows that, but he chose to make the story about himself because he knows he's high on Trump's enemies list, and he and his colleagues/lawyers gamed it out and decided he needed to protect himself from criminal prosecution.

Why would Goldberg, of all journalists, be included in that chat?

Occam's razor says entrapment.

Am I free not to talk about Jeffrey Goldberg?

I remember the time — 16 years ago — he got annoyed at me for objecting to his characterization of Dahlia Lithwick as a "haiku genius."

Now, there's something about his bizarre inclusion in a group chat about crushing the Houthis.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: When did Shakespeare use the plot device of a character who thinks he's secretly eavesdropping who is being deliberately fed false information to get him to do something? (The answer involves "Othello," "Much Ado About Nothing," and "Twelfth Night.")

I'll just say...

Whispers cloak the stage
Hidden ears catch crafted tales
Truth bends in the dark

"Just as several readers predicted would happen, other corporate journalists responded to this article by engaging in a rank-closing defense of [Natasha] Bertrand...

"... principally by accusing me of misogyny for publishing this critique of her reporting. Unlike me, they evidently view adult professional woman in highly influential media roles (such as Bertrand) as too fragile to endure critiques of their journalism, unlike adult men, who they apparently believe are strong enough to handle criticisms: a regressive view of the sexes right out of the 1950s. They also apparently skipped over the entire first section of this article detailing how Jeffrey Goldberg and Ken Dilanian — both men — were the pioneers of the CIA-serving career trajectory Bertrand is now following. But the oddest aspect of this media reaction, the only one that makes it worth noting here, is that misogyny allegations against me for this article were led by GQ's own Russiagate fanatic Julia Ioffe, even though Ioffe herself, in 2019, publicly accused Bertrand of a rather serious ethical violation that probably should be added to the list...."

Writes Glenn Greenwald in an update to his piece "CNN's New 'Reporter,' Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist/In the U.S. corporate media, the surest way to advance is to loyally spread lies and deceit from the U.S. security state. Bertrand is just the latest example" (Substack).

"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?

"Steve Jobs would not be happy that his wife is wasting money he left her on a failing Radical Left Magazine that is run by a con man (Goldberg) and spews FAKE NEWS & HATE."

Tweeted Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump attacks the sixth-richest woman in the world for her ties to The Atlantic" (CNN).

I only read that because the headline was so odd — "the sixth-richest woman." Is that supposed to make him seem more sexist than calling her Steve Jobs's widow?

"But journalism is not supposed to be grounded in whether something is 'believable' or 'seems like it could be true.'"

"Its core purpose, the only thing that really makes it matter or have worth, is reporting what is true, or at least what evidence reveals. And that function is completely subverted when news outlets claim that they 'confirmed' a previous report when they did nothing more than just talked to the same people who anonymously whispered the same things to them as were whispered to the original outlet. Quite aside from this specific story about whether Trump loves The Troops, conflating the crucial journalistic concept of 'confirmation' with 'hearing the same idle gossip' or 'unproven assertions' is a huge disservice. It is an instrument of propaganda, not reporting. And its use has repeatedly deceived rather than informed the public. Anyone who doubts that should review how it is that MSNBC and CBS both claimed to have 'confirmed' a CNN report which turned out to be ludicrously and laughably false."

Writes Glenn Greenwald in "Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean its Opposite/Outlets claiming to have 'confirmed' Jeffrey Goldberg’s story about Trump’s troops comments are again abusing that vital term" (The Intercept). The  "ludicrously and laughably false" CNN report was that "during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. had received a September 4 email with a secret encryption key that gave him advanced access to WikiLeaks’ servers containing the DNC emails."

If Rumormonger tells a story to Newspaper1 and then Rumormonger tells the story to Newspaper2, Newspaper2 can't say that it is confirming the story! It can only confirm that Rumormonger is mongering that story. There's no more confirmation than if Newspaper1 and Newspaper2 were on a conference call with Rumormonger and heard the story simultaneously.

"If he said it, I'm thinking it was in the spirit of genuinely hating the losses in war, and he is keeping us out of military adventures."

"It makes me think of the famous quote from General Patton: 'The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.' It makes me think of this song lyric that I heard over and over when I was young: 'Come on fathers, and don't hesitate/To send your sons off before it's too late/You can be the first ones in your block/To have your boy come home in a box.'"

Things written by me, just now, in comments to a post on Facebook, put up by my son John, linking to and quoting "Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’/The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades, multiple sources tell The Atlantic."

On "Face the Nation" today, the panelists seemed to be playing a game called: Talk about Trump as much as you can without talking about Trump.

The moderator was John Dickerson, and his actual question was: "You are an assignment editor. And you have to assign coverage for the year 2017. How do you deploy your forces? What’s the story?" Obviously, the story you've got to cover is President Donald Trump. But they're not going to say Well, duh, John, we've got to cover the damned Trump presidency.

Our first contestant is Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic:

JEFFREY GOLDBERG:  Well, the story is-- there’s one overarchingly huge story. A very big league story, as Michele might say. The-- the-- the story is-- the-- the story is the upending of American politics. The story is of the outs coming in and the ins going out. --The story is trying to explain to the American people what’s happened to their two main parties. And-- and the deeper story, also, I don’t want to forget this -- the deeper story is globalization, and technological disruption, and anxiety born of-- of rapid change, rapid, destabilizing change, the fragility of institutions. All of that is-- is there undergirding the larger, more immediate story, which is how did Donald Trump become president of the United States....

Bzzz. Goldberg mentioned Donald Trump. He had a great run going — the outs coming in and the ins going out... anxiety born of-- of rapid change, rapid, destabilizing change, the fragility of institutions... Great stuff. There's overarching and undergirding — construction to go along with the destruction. It was mindbending. I was ready to give him the prize, but then he said the name. Wipe out.

Let's get the next contestant up here. Michele Norris, a journalist affiliated with something called the Race Card Project:

Jeffrey Goldberg is "Remembering a time when Islamist extremists wanted to persuade reporters, not kill them."

He begins: "In the spring of 2000, I lived for a month in a Taliban madrasa, a religious seminary, located on the Grand Trunk Road outside of Peshawar, in Pakistan." Excerpt:

The subject of my religion came up in conversation. The imam was fascinated. He was anti-Semitic, but impersonally so. His abstract detestation of Jews was trumped by a practical curiosity. He phoned a friend who, like him, had never met someone from my tribe. That friend brought another friend. Soon, we were having a colloquy on several subjects—the putative righteousness of Osama bin Laden’s cause, the alleged treachery of Bill Clinton—but our focus narrowed to matters of faith. I raised the subject of Muhammad’s often complicated, sometimes violent relationship with the Jews of Arabia. These men, like many Muslims, believed that the Jews had behaved perfidiously toward their Prophet, and they endorsed Muhammad’s decision to behead some 600 of his Jewish enemies, the males of the vanquished Banu Qurayza tribe.

Back then, it did not seem foolhardy to engage Muslim terrorists on the subject of beheading....

A question I have for Goldberg is whether it was really true that the "extremists wanted to persuade reporters" and something changed. Or was it always the case that reporters were exploited as a means to an end — they were used to communicate and the head-cutting videos are powerfully communicative? You were always being used. That would be my hypothesis.

"Over the years, Obama administration officials have described Netanyahu to me as recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and 'Aspergery.'"

"(These are verbatim descriptions; I keep a running list.) But I had not previously heard Netanyahu described as a 'chickenshit.'"

From a Jeffrey Goldberg article in The Atlantic titled "The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here." Subtitle: "The Obama administration's anger is 'red-hot' over Israel's settlement policies, and the Netanyahu government openly expresses contempt for Obama's understanding of the Middle East. Profound changes in the relationship may be coming."

Andrew Sullivan denies that there was any anti-Semitic meaning...

... when he wrote:

The usual would-be policeman of Washington's discourse on all things to do with Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, takes a break from the Jewish holidays to consign yet another member of the thinking classes to the ranks of "something much darker."

... which Goldberg called a "low blow" 8 days ago. Today, Sullivan is all "apologies if I was misunderstood." And he denies membership in "the thought-police" while maintaining the presumption that Goldberg belongs:

... I will occasionally note homophobia - but usually of the obvious, fanatical, religious kind, not parsing metaphors of fellow columnists for "dog-whistles" and "code". And I have a long record of exactly the same for anti-Semitism....

...I have long, relentlessly lambasted the main gay rights lobby, HRC, while Goldblog is always anti-anti-AIPAC, just as he is always anti-anti-settlements.

... Let me just say that when Goldblog treats John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Kenneth Waltz, Phil Weiss, or Daniel Larison in the same way I treat my opponents on the issue of marriage rights, I will agree that he is not a member of the thought-police....

By the way, Goldberg calls himself "Goldblog," so that's not a dog-whistle (or telling typo).

This dog whistle whistles both ways.

"New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd set the Jewish political community on fire [Sunday] with a column about the Republican ticket's foreign policy proposals that, according to her critics, peddled anti-Semitic imagery," reports Politico.

You know all the racist things Republicans are always saying, as seen by Democrats? It's like that.

"Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews," Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic columnist and leading journalist on Israeli issues, wrote.

Snake-like... because the title of the article is "Neocons Slither Back." Dowd may not write the headline, and though she does use the word "slither" in her text, she's quoting Paul Wolfowitz, and he was saying that Obama shouldn't be allowed to "slither through" without having to take — Dowd's words here — "a clear position on liberals."

Dowd proceeds to say "Republicans are bananas on this one." Of course, if a Republican said Obama was bananas, that Republican would probably be accused of racism, because bananas remind us of monkeys, and the monkey is an animal that is associated with some racist iconography, and it's assumed that anything you say about the President is said while thinking about his race — which makes it conveniently/absurdly dangerous to criticize the President.

"How are you?" "I'm... I'm dying."

Christopher Hitchens has, it seems, decided to perform the drama of dying of cancer on camera, being interviewed by whatever media people are willing to step up and ask him how does it feel...



... and when if ever will you start praying.

"If I read the press release correctly, the ADL is opposing the building of the mosque because bigots also oppose it."

Jeffrey Goldberg reads the Anti-Defamation League's press release and opines.

Jeffrey Goldberg says "I've been leaked postings from JournoList before — wonderfully charming things written about me..."

"... I haven't had the opportunity to use them, but would be happy to if the need arose. Why anyone would think that a listserv with 400 people is private is beyond me. It's McChrystal-level naivete."

Ha. And somebody must be scared. He's got your email and he knows how to use it.

John Cole paraphrases, scornfully: "I’m not against using my perch at the Atlantic to publish someone’s private emails to viciously destroy their character and career, but what really bothers me is if someone makes a joke privately!"

The Journolisters — including Cole? — must be desperately trying to discipline each other not to leak. And yet the evidence is — if Goldberg is to be believed — that the leaks have been going on all along. Whenever someone not on the list was talked about, somebody in that 400 may have seen fit to let that person know what was being said. Think of all the reasons you might decide to forward the email. You might know the person being talked about and think they needed to be be alerted about some scurrilous accusations or plans. You might object to what was being said or dislike the person saying it and want to do something about it without drawing attention to yourself.

It's really too late now to get the 400 listmembers into line. Stuff has gone out. People like Goldberg have it and will use it when they decide it's right. You can try, like Cole, to say that using it will be vicious and destructive, but presumably, the email was vicious and destructive, which is probably why it got forwarded! And, anyway, you can't beat that many people into line. In that huge group are some writers who take orders, but there have to be others who are vindictive or careless. Some may be unsuccessful and jealous. Some may believe staunchly that information wants to be free or that a list of 400 is pretty much a public list with no valid restrictions. You can't control them all.

And there is, it seems, a new, smaller list being formed without the dangerous riffraff. The true insiders are determining what the scope of the inner circle is. And the others, the left-behinds? Well, they're sitting on a pile of hot, nasty words written by the cool kids who just shut the clubhouse door on them.

ADDED: Cole responds to this post and I respond to that here.

Jeffrey Goldberg says "Dahlia Lithwick is a Haiku Genius."

"She's condensed a week of Senate blather about Sotomayor into exquisite little poems."

I'm no poetry expert — maybe you are — but I don't see why these should count as even marginally good haiku. I suppose the whole thing is that it was done at all — making Senators' statements about Sotomayor into haiku.

Here are some teaching materials on haiku, focusing specifically on haiku in English:

The haiku poet cultivates awareness so that s/he may experience some unusually forceful impact coming from ordinary life or from everyday surroundings....

In 'haiku spirit' the poet adopts a self-effacing and faithful attitude towards the object s/he perceives. S/he does not set out to be moralistic or didactic or judgemental. The haiku form has been used successfully to write adages and epigrams, but because the aim of adages and epigrams is to mould opinion they are not haiku in spirit....

[M]any successful haiku result from a long process of draughting and re-writing, during which the poet clings hard to the original perception.

The pain is to give readers the means to feel as the poet her/himself felt at the time, or maybe differently, without any explicit (and so directive) statements about actual feelings. Some typical attitudes are humility, serenity, compassion, acceptance of transience and man's lonely state, joy in resurgence and company, wonder, wistfulness, as well as humour of a whimsical and sometimes paradoxical kind.

Now, those "typical attitudes" are so obviously not what one finds among Senators that the idea of writing bad haiku in the voice of a Senator is a very good one, but if you're doing bad, be really bad — there's a blog, Bad Haiku — and I think — I think — that would have to exclude anything that Jeffrey Goldberg would proclaim as the work of a genius.

***

And I know, I know, I know: How can you take advice about taste from someone who writes "S/he" and "her/himself"?

UPDATE: And curses! What a missed opportunity to keep up what began as an accidental Theme of the Day. Permit me to compensate via this update:

1.
Dead Sea Shells Worship
Lobster Fangs In Hades Door
While I Sleep Dead

2.
Lobster and artichokes
Slather with spirits
Canine hurls protein yak

3.
Snip my buttons off,
With your shearing claw, my sweet
Lobster in my pants

4.
Though warm tasty and
delicious, urine should not
be served with lobster

5.
Such a tasty meat,
Drenched in succulent butter
Lobster dies for me

All right. Enough. I am satisfied.

UPDATE #2: Jeffrey Goldberg is not amused.

"Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die."

Why Jeffrey Goldberg doesn't want to talk about Gaza:

I have friends in Gaza about whom I worry a great deal; I've seen many people killed in Gaza; I've served in the Israeli Army in Gaza; I've been kidnapped in Gaza; I've reported for years from Gaza; I hope my former army doesn't kill the wrong people in Gaza; I hope Israeli soldiers all leave Gaza alive; I know they'll be back in Gaza; I think this operation will work; and I have no actual hope that it will work for very long, because nothing works for very long in the Middle East. Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die. Gaza is where the dream of Palestinian statehood goes to die; Gaza is where the Zionist dream might yet die. Or, more to the point, might be murdered. I'm not a J Street moral-equivalence sort of guy. Yes, Israel makes constant mistakes, which I note rather frequently, but this conflict reminds me once again that Israel is up against an implacable force, namely, an interpretation of Islam that disallows the idea of Jewish national equality.

.