"Until now, arguments for limiting consumption have tended to come from the left rather than the right."

"They date back at least to the economist Thorstein Veblen, who, at the start of the twentieth century, wrote acidly about the 'conspicuous consumption' engaged in by grandees of the Gilded Age. More recently, a 'degrowth' movement has emerged, which aims to decrease consumption and to de-prioritize G.D.P. growth on the grounds that they are harmful to the environment and that, in any case, accumulating more 'stuff' doesn’t really increase the well-being of people.This argument depends on two concepts familiar to economists: the diminishing marginal utility of consumption, which is, roughly speaking, the notion that if you already own nineteen dolls, buying a twentieth won’t give you much pleasure, and competitive consumption, or the idea that many people are trapped in an endless cycle of trying to outshine their friends and neighbors with their purchases.... 'Trump, degrowther,' the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week.... 'What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,' Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book 'Growth: A History and a Reckoning' told me...."

Writes John Cassidy, in "Donald Trump Versus Barbie/Can the Administration retain public support for a trade policy that could force Americans to buy less stuff?" (The New Yorker).

Why don't the anti-consumption lefties embrace Trump? 

My first reaction to Trump's "Maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30" was: "This reminds me of what those on the left used to say to us

"The thing that is more difficult to gauge... is how the American public will process Trump’s legal drama between now and November, 2024."

"Will the accumulation of charges and evidence, and maybe even actual trials, gradually turn opinion decisively against the former President...?... [In] the latest opinion survey from Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists that monitors threats to democracy... [f]ewer than one in six Republican voters said they believed that Trump had committed crimes in trying to overturn the 2020 election, in his actions before the January 6th riots, or in making hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. A few more Republicans said they believed that he committed a crime in the classified-documents case, but the total was still only one in four. By contrast, at least three in four Democrats believe that Trump committed crimes in each of these instances, the results indicated. Among self-identified independents who don’t lean toward either party... between thirty-seven per cent and forty-six per cent, depending on the specific cases—said they believed that Trump had committed a crime. And about half of these respondents said that the charges were politically motivated.... [T]here is now at least some evidence that the public at large is more open to reason and evidence...."

Writes John Cassidy in "Public Opinion About Trump’s Criminality Is Shifting—a Bit/As prosecutors release details of the charges and evidence against him, minds are slowly changing among less partisan voters—and maybe even among Republicans" (The New Yorker).

""[I]n whipping up his supporters, moving closer to QAnon, and claiming that the American people wouldn’t stand for an indictment, Trump is..."

"... reminding Attorney General Merrick Garland and his colleagues that the stakes are very high. And that, even if some of the candidates he has endorsed in the midterms are lagging in the polls, and even though there reportedly were many empty seats at his Youngstown rally, he still has a mass movement that is fanatically loyal to him, and which has already demonstrated, on January 6, 2021, that it contains elements willing to resort to violence on his behalf. He doesn’t have to say all this out loud. It is self-evident. Garland has repeatedly stated that no one is above the law.... In the coming months, Trump, his desperation growing, will likely seek to test the system to the point of breakage, just as he did after November, 2020. Defenders of democracy and the rule of law, regardless of their political affiliation, had better be prepared."

Writes John Cassidy, in "Why Is Trump Openly Embracing QAnon Now? The former President is likely signalling to prosecutors that he won’t go quietly, so they had better beware" (The New Yorker).

Cassidy is responding to a recent statement by Trump about what would happen if he were indicted: "I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before. I don’t think the people of the United States would stand for it.... I think they’d have big problems, big problems. I just don’t think they’d stand for it. They will not, they will not sit still and stand for this ultimate of hoaxes."

"Until we see how Trump’s condition progresses, it’s impossible to say where the election campaign will go from here."

"The possibilities range from Trump making a rapid recovery and resuming his campaign, perhaps virtually at the start, to him becoming incapacitated and having to transfer power, at least on a temporary basis, to Vice-President Mike Pence, who so far has tested negative for the virus. In a worst-case scenario, Trump could be forced to withdraw from the race. The Republican National Committee, which is made up of officials from across the country, would then have to select a new candidate—presumably Pence. Given the calendar, things could get complicated...."

From "Trump’s Hospitalization Is Another Challenge for Democratic Norms" by John Cassidy (The New Yorker). Go to the link or elsewhere for details on the complications of swapping in Pence for Trump at this late date. Assuming it can be done, are you hoping to see this swap?

All the attacks have been focused on Trump, the man, and we can see in the polls that Trump is way behind. Make the candidate Pence and suddenly nearly all the arguments that Biden has used disappear. Biden would have to refocus, this late in the game, on Mike Pence, about whom one might say: He's articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy — that's a storybook, man.

What do you think of swapping in Mike Pence for Trump? (You can pick multiple answers.)

It's too complicated procedurally.

It's not fair to the Democrats, who've focused their attack on Trump.

It's too disrespectful to Trump, who deserves special sympathy now.

Clever, but maybe too clever. It might feel wrong to people.

It would demonstrate wisdom and flexibility on the part of the GOP.

Mike Pence isn't that good. People want Trump.

It depends almost entirely on how much Trump declines.

If Pence does well enough in the VP debate, then it will become a good idea.

I'm offended by this poll. We should be concentrating on praying for Trump's speedy recovery.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"There appears to be an emerging consensus that the impeachment of Donald Trump won’t matter very much in November, 2020."

John Cassidy writes in "Impeaching Donald Trump Is Already a Win for Democrats" (The New Yorker), and I note the weasel words "appears" and "emerging" and the lack of specificity about the set of persons who are coagulating into this consensus.

Is he looking entirely at those who are hoping to steel the Democrats to get through this next phase?

“Impeachment will eclipse all for the next seven weeks. And then it will recede, and other events will supersede it as the election year moves on,” David Axelrod, the CNN commentator and former adviser to Barack Obama, commented in a Twitter thread on Thursday. 

That's already clearly untrue. Impeaching isn't eclipsing all. Just yesterday, the impeachment was eclipsed by good economic news, an act of violence, and Trump talking about toilets. If you can't even get the next day right, your assurances about the next year sound like made-up happy talk.

In a Times Op-Ed, Michael Tomasky, the editor of Democracy, wrote, “I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that when we pore over the exit polls next Nov. 4, impeachment itself will have been a minor factor in people’s voting, let alone the question of how many articles the House passed.”

Dollars to doughnuts? Is that anything like malarkey? I'm going to guess that Michael Tomasky is over 70, because I'm almost 70 and I've only ever heard "dollars to doughnuts" from people who seemed really old to me. I looked. He's 59. I'm going to assume he's adopting a cornball, folksy style because he's knows it's a con.

Axelrod and Tomasky are shrewd and experienced observers....

No, they're not shrewd and experienced observers. They're shrewd and experienced participants in political discourse, manipulators of opinion. They're not prognosticating because they're trying to get it right. They're trying to affect what happens and what people think.

"The first part of this statement was a Trump truth—that is, a blatant falsehood."

Writes John Cassidy in "Donald Trump Launches Operation Midterms Diversion" (The New Yorker), referring to Trump's statement: "We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for eighty-five years with all of those benefits. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end."

Because we are stronger together...

"9 Ways to Oppose Donald Trump," by John Cassidy in The New Yorker.

I'm giving this my Trump derangement syndrome tag, even though I don't think it's precisely deranged. I just don't want too much tag proliferation.

When Trump first made noise about running for President, I just used my tag for "The Apprentice" and resisted making a tag even for his name. Now, I've got a bunch of Trump tags, and I'm trying to keep them from getting as ridiculously numerous as my Obama tags. I think I need to do a good culling of my Obama tags — maybe get rid of anything that didn't collect at least 4 posts.

Anyway, speaking of Trump derangement syndrome, Cassidy starts out:

Over the past few weeks, a number of anguished friends and acquaintances, and even some strangers, have got in touch with me to ask what they might do to oppose Donald Trump. Being a fellow sufferer from OATS—Obsessing About Trump Syndrome—my first instinct has been to tell people to get off social media and take a long walk. It won’t do anybody much good, except possibly Trump, if large numbers of people who voted against him send themselves mad by constantly reading about him, cursing him, and recirculating his latest outrages.

Well, that's pretty sensible. OATS is a little silly, but it does allow one to say "I'm feeling my OATS."

To feel ones oats means "to be lively; to feel self-important" — according to the Oxford English Dictionary. P.T. Barnum used it in his 1869 memoir "Struggles & Triumphs":

As I grew older my settled aversion to manual labor, farm or other kind, was manifest in various ways.... In despair of doing better with me, my father concluded to make a merchant of me.....  Of course, I "felt my oats." It was condescension on my part to talk with boys who did out-door work. I stood behind the counter with a pen over my ear, was polite to the ladies, and was wonderfully active in waiting upon customers.  We ketp a cash, credit and barter store, and I drove sharp bargains with women who brought butter, eggs, beeswax and feathers to exchange for dry goods, and with men who wanted to trade oats, corn, buckwheat, axe-helves, hats, and other commodities for tenpenny nails, molasses, or New England rum.

The art of the deal.

Of course, Trump has been compared to P.T. Barnum and he has embraced the comparison. From back in January:

Yesterday, on "Meet the Press," Donald Trump was presented with a list of characters he'd been compared to: "some people are calling you the Music Man of this race. Kim Kardashian. Biff, from Back to the Future. George Costanza. P.T. Barnum. What's - any of those do you consider a compliment?" Trump immediately said "P.T. Barnum."

"Once you grasp the geographical spread of Trump’s interests, it is hard to see how the potential conflicts of interest could ever be resolved."

"Take the Middle East, a region of the world that every modern American President has had to focus on. According to the Post, in addition to the Trump-branded real-estate development in Turkey, Trump has business ties to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, two oil-rich countries that have funded radical Islamic movements. And, just last year, Trump registered eight companies named after Jeddah, the second-largest city in Saudi Arabia. It’s not just that Trump won’t be seen as an honest broker in the Middle East. He wouldn’t be seen as broker of any kind but as a principal and business partner of some of the region’s repressive governments and their cronies. Even if, for the duration of his Presidency, Trump were to put his businesses into a properly independent trust, run by business executives not connected to him, the Trump-owned and Trump-branded companies would still be generating income for the President and his family. He and his advisers would know that. The governments of the countries where the companies are located would know that. And so would the rest of us."

Writes John Cassidy.

"We can be assured that a TBN (Trump Breitbart News) Network wouldn’t shy away from the conservative, or even the 'alt-conservative,' label."

"It would be nationalistic, xenophobic, and conspiratorial. If it featured regular appearances by Trump, and if it managed to poach some of the Fox News stars who are friendly toward him, such as Sean Hannity, it might even make money."

Says John Cassidy, at The New Yorker, about — speaking of conspiratoriality — what is "only a conspiracy theory."

I've been thinking about the same subject, and I go in a different direction.

First, I don't think it would be called Trump Breitbart News. Trump isn't going to share billing with Breitbart. It will be Trump, just like Bloomberg is Bloomberg and just like the way Trump has put his name — which he obviously loves as a vivid, punchy brand — on all sorts of buildings and merchandise.

Second, I don't think Trump would want to just make some money and to do it looking backward at Fox.I think he'd want something forward-looking and surprising and highly profitable.

Now, it's feeling like a challenge on an episode of "The Apprentice" and Cassidy looks like a member of the losing team.

I don't know if I'd be on the winning team, but here are some things I said on the topic in a discussion thread on Facebook:

If this thing happens I don't think it will be "right wing media." I think these people -- including Trump's children, who are not right wing (I don't think) -- will figure out a way to be very successful by providing a new mix, and it will include some very progressive things -- pro-gay, pro-woman, and some serious class politics....

Who would you put on? I'd like to see Scott Adams have his own show.

"It's a nuisance, it's a distraction, because he can't win the nomination and every dollar that he spends and every time she has to defend against an attack or answer some accusation of his..."

"... is money and time not spent defining Donald Trump and the Republican nominee. That's all it is at this point. I think people gave him a wide berth when he had a numeric chance but there is no math that ends up with his being the nominee, so at this point I think even the wins don't do anything but continue the inevitable problem of he can't get there from here."

Said Joe Trippi, disrespecting Bernie Sanders and all he has done. And it's simply not true that "there is no math." If Sanders keeps winning, it's possible for him to get ahead of Clinton in the non-super delegates. If that happens, the super delegates could flip.

ADDED: With all the help she had, all the money, all the name-recognition, what Sanders has done is truly astounding. If he overtakes her in the democratic process, how can the supers not respond. He'll only need half of them to win. In a year of unlikely occurrences, that seems almost ordinary.

AND: From John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

In the weeks ahead, the calls for Sanders to wrap up his campaign are likely to become more explicit. He seems certain to ignore them, and he has at least four reasons to do so. First, most of his supporters want him to keep going. Second, he still has a (very) slim chance of obtaining the nomination. Third, there isn’t much evidence that his dropping out would affect the result in November. And fourth, back in 2008, Clinton herself did something very similar to what Sanders is doing now, extending her primary contest with Barack Obama well beyond the point at which most commentators had concluded that she had no chance of winning....

Since the primary season began, Sanders has won more than nine million votes and finished ahead of Clinton in eighteen states. (Clinton has won more than twelve million votes and won twenty-three states.) Sanders continues to attract large crowds—on Thursday he will be campaigning in West Virginia—and he seems likely to win more primaries in the coming weeks, including in West Virginia, on May 10th, and Oregon, on May 17th. If he were to end his campaign now, many of his supporters would be furious, and even some Democrats who aren’t necessarily backing him would be disappointed. According to new poll from NBC News/Survey Monkey, fifty-seven per cent of Democrats and Democratic-leaners want Sanders to campaign until the Convention, and just sixteen per cent think he should drop out now. Eighty-nine per cent of Sanders’s supporters said they wanted him to keep going until July. More surprisingly, perhaps, twenty-eight per cent of Clinton’s supporters agreed....

"Will the G.O.P. Response to Antonin Scalia’s Death Hand the Election to the Democrats?"

Asks John Cassidy at The New Yorker, and you might wonder why the question doesn't work the other way too: Why not ask Will the Democratic Response to Antonin Scalia’s Death Hand the Election to the GOP?

The way I asked the questions yesterday was:

Will liberals overreach and show too much of a raging desire to control the Court and make it solidly liberal at long last, touching off a reaction among conservatives? Or will conservatives flare up with hostility to women's rights and gay rights and affirmative action and all the many issues that make them look too mean and ugly?

I gave some balance to it, a question for both parties, but you can see by the difference between my questions that the GOP is tempted in a different way, lured to move the social issues forward and alienate people. Like what happened back in the War of 2012, the War on Women.

But let's see why Cassidy thinks the GOP is exposed in a way that the Democrats are not. He's saying that political maneuvering to hold the nomination for the next President is an "apparent contravention of precedent and the U.S. Constitution." Nice use of the word "apparent" to avoid responsibility for an actual constitutional law interpretation.

But, really, does it matter what the Constitution means? (Especially now that Scalia is dead. It can mean whatever we need it to mean now. The bulwark is gone. Let creativity run wild.)

Just as Donald Trump wrings political energy out of saying that Ted Cruz is not a "natural born citizen," Democrats can get something out of saying Obama has the right to fill the vacancy. The President has a power to nominate new Justices, subject to the check of the Senate, which must confirm. It's balanced power, to be played out politically.

So what if the GOP-dominated Senate plays hard? Cassidy says it will "prompt" "outrage" "among Democrats and independent-minded Americans who dislike partisan warfare." The GOP "appears to be intent on hurtling into a deep pit." Obviously, Cassidy wants to scare the Republican Senators away from pushing back, checking the President's power with their own power, but you've got to play chess games looking ahead several moves.

The GOP will also say it's partisan politics, and this argument will be boosted by the usual claim that liberal Supreme Court Justices infuse their opinions with political preference that does not belong in constitutional interpretation. They'll celebrate their dead icon Scalia, whose method of interpretation will be presented as politically neutral and legally solid. We need another Justice like him, they will say. How terrible to allow Obama to install the 5th vote that achieves a liberal majority on the Court, they will say. Not only is the delay crucial, but the next President must be a conservative, they will say.

Cassidy says:

If the Republicans block the nomination without properly considering it, which also seems likely, a huge political row will ensue, enveloping the Presidential race....

Small wonder, some senior Democrats already appear to be dancing a jig. 

"Dancing a jig"?! Dancing on a man's grave? Is it not obvious how the GOP will respond? That was the basis of my question yesterday: "Will liberals overreach and show too much of a raging desire to control the Court and make it solidly liberal at long last, touching off a reaction among conservatives?"

The jig of raging desire is revolting to those who do not share the Democratic orientation.

ADDED: The title of this post is the title of Cassidy's essay that appears with the essay, but in the sidebar "Most Popular" list the title is "Will Scalia’s Death Boost the Democrats?" That's a much uglier image, depicting the dead body as a step stool. The Democrats are just hopping up on it. In the more sober title, the bad behavior comes from the Republicans and the Democrats stand by decorously, merely accepting what is handed to them.

AND: Here's the membership of the Senate Judiciary Committee, through which any nomination must pass. One notable face: Ted Cruz. What an opportunity for him to perform in The Theater of Proper Constitutional Interpretation. The GOP hold the majority and can calmly control the vote. The trick will be maintaining scrupulous dignity and veneration of constitutional principle. Expect Antonin Scalia to be canonized as the Saint of Constitutional Principle. The Democrats will not have him as their scary monster anymore. Dead, he's an angel. It will be hard to say his seat should be filled by someone unlike him.

That game has been played successfully: I'm thinking of the vicious fight that flared up when George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to take the seat that Thurgood Marshall had vacated. That happened in 1991, with the presidential election a year away. Bush won that fight, even with a Democratic majority on the Judiciary Committee, but he proceeded to lose the election. Obama doesn't face reelection, so he can perhaps absorb the heat, and he has an opportunity to pick someone that will be very damaging for the other party to attack. I'm sure he's working on an exquisitely strategy.

ALSO: "Scalia's Grave-Dancers Deserve a Harsh Verdict," by Stephen Carter. 

If Donald Trump isn't a fascist, how about calling him a Know-Nothing?

John Cassidy, in The New Yorker, tries "Donald Trump Isn’t a Fascist; He’s a Media-Savvy Know-Nothing." Various people are trying to wreck Trump by calling him a fascist, and Cassidy doesn't exactly want to absolve Trump of the charge...

Originally used as a collective noun for the murderous, revolutionary hypernationalist movements that emerged in Europe from the embers of the First World War, the word is often employed today as a catch-all term of abuse for right-wing racists and rabble-rousers. Trump certainly qualifies as one of the latter, but calling him a Fascist serves to obscure rather than illuminate what he is really about.

... he just wants to find something that works.

Part of the problem is a definitional one. Even historians who have spent their lives studying Fascism can’t agree on what the word means.... 

Once something becomes an insult — like "asshole" — it loses its particular meaning and at some point it doesn't even hurt. But if you could get all historical about what "fascist" means, you'd have to admit Trump isn't a fascist:

The awkward pivot from gun control to terrorism.

In the immediate aftermath of the San Bernardino massacre, and even before the cops killed Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, many commentators and politicos plugged in their usual call for gun control. As the facts about Farook and Malik emerged, the gun control message seemed rote and obtuse (or worse). The awkwardness of the pivot to a more terrorism-appropriate message is on display in this New Yorker piece by John Cassidy called "Domestic Terrorism and America’s Gun Dilemma":

Clearly, it would be in everybody’s interest if there were far fewer guns out there, especially fewer of the military-style weapons that also lend themselves to the massacre of civilians—as we discovered yet again on Wednesday, when, according to officials, a twenty-eight-year-old man, Syed Farook, and a twenty-seven-year-old woman, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire at an office party in San Bernardino, California, killing at least fourteen people and injuring seventeen. But since there are already an estimated three hundred million guns in private hands (nobody knows the exact number), and U.S. gun laws are so lax that many Americans believe that they need a weapon, or many weapons, to defend themselves and their families.

With reports emerging that Farook and Malik may have had ties to radical Islamism, these concerns are going to be exacerbated. In a different country, a winning argument could be made that the threat of homegrown terrorism is another powerful reason for restricting the sale and circulation of deadly firearms. Here in the U.S., the mere mention of the “T” word, by making Americans even more fearful and providing more fodder for the gun lobby, is likely only to exacerbate the underlying problem....

Cassidy's so nervous that he nattered "exacerbate" twice in 3 sentences.

"But some of the criticisms that have been levelled at [Jeremy] Corbyn in the past couple of days are unfair."

"He is neither a Communist nor a 'threat to national security.' He is a self-described socialist. In his republicanism, his anti-colonialism, his borderline pacifism, and his suspicion of big business, he represents an old and honorable, if occasionally misguided, strand of British radicalism, which extends back to Bertrand Russell, Keir Hardie, and beyond. Whether he can translate his radical beliefs into effective (or coherent) leadership is a fair question to pose. I doubt he can, myself. But on some big issues, Corbyn has raised valid points. Here are five of them...."

From "5 Things Jeremy Corbyn Has Right" by John Cassidy in The New Yorker.

"In some ways, Hagel was the President’s Republican doppelgänger: skeptical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan..."

"... eager to bring home U.S. troops, and reluctant to get the United States embroiled militarily elsewhere in the Middle East," writes John Cassidy in The New Yorker.

If the primary goal was to complete Obama’s agenda of disengaging from Iraq and Afghanistan, then having Hagel at the Pentagon seemed to make sense. In the past year or so, though, the policy of disengagement has been superseded.... There is no suggestion that Hagel opposed either of these policy changes. Indeed, he was one of the first senior U.S. officials to warn that ISIS represented a serious danger to American interests, which was said to have irked Obama’s aides at the time...

... President Obama appears to have decided that, with the U.S. stepping up its military involvement in various parts of the world, he needed a more hands-on, and on-message, figure at the Pentagon. That’s understandable. But so is the widespread skepticism about the official version of Hagel’s departure, including Republicans’ eagerness to make hay of it. “Secretary Hagel did not believe that the foreign policy is working or is going to work,” Republican congressman Peter King, of New York, told CNN.

That statement reeks of overstatement, which is typical of King. But it underscores that Obama, having just enjoyed his best few weeks as President in a long time, has just refocussed attention on an area, foreign policy, where his enemies sense vulnerability.

"His enemies"? That confused me. I'm pretty sure what Cassidy means by "his enemies" is Republicans. But he was just talking about ISIS, an actual military enemy. That shift in focus was abrupt and telling, especially following the acknowledgment that Hagel had been useful because he was a Republican.

By the way, the picture at the link is just perfect.

"It’s safe to assume that few people in the White House or the defense agencies would be happy to see Time pick Snowden as Person of the Year."

"But that’s just another reason why he deserves the honor," writes John Cassidy in The New Yorker.

Often with the best of intentions—protecting us from terrorists and potential terrorists—governments of both parties have overseen an unprecedented expansion of the surveillance state that bent America’s laws and violated some of its most cherished values. (Ryan’s piece recounts some of the relevant history.) Even now, after all of this year’s revelations, there is no assurance that anything very meaningful will be done to roll back the incursions and to protect the zone of privacy in which all (or most) of us would like to interact, and live.

ADDED: Here's the Ryan Lizza article cited in that parenthetical: "State of Deception/Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community?"

"We have no relation to Mr. Snowden, his relations with the American justice or his travel around the world."

"He chooses his route himself, and we have learned about it from the media," said Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

"We consider the attempts to accuse Russia of violation of U.S. laws and even some sort of conspiracy, which on top of all that are accompanied by threats, as absolutely ungrounded and unacceptable," Lavrov said. "There are no legal grounds for such conduct of U.S. officials, and we proceed from that."

I think back to what Michael Haz wrote in the comments to yesterday's Edward Snowden post:

Mr. Snowden, his computers and everything stored in his brain are now in possession of the KGB. He will now fully understand the meaning of the word 'disappeared'.

The press, the Department of State and Barack Obama have all been played for the rubes they are by Vladimir Putin. And there is nothing any of them can do about it. The amateurs have met the pro, and the pro won, then erased all tracks.

Meanwhile, 20 or so reporters were thrown way off the track as they happily enclosed themselves in a Snowdenless, Cuba-bound metal tube for 12 hours. What newsless meditations did they hammer out for publication? The New Yorker's John Cassidy lambasted the on-the-tube, not-in-the-tube newsmediafolk like David Gregory who, he asserts, have demonized Edward Snowden:

Snowden took classified documents from his employer, which surely broke the law. But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public. The puzzle is why so many media commentators continue to toe the official line. About the best explanation I’ve seen came from Josh Marshall, the founder of T.P.M., who has been one of Snowden’s critics. In a post that followed the first wave of stories, Marshall wrote, “At the end of the day, for all its faults, the U.S. military is the armed force of a political community I identify with and a government I support. I’m not a bystander to it. I’m implicated in what it does and I feel I have a responsibility and a right to a say, albeit just a minuscule one, in what it does.”

In the end, for all its faults... Marshall's going all last-paragraph-of-"1984." ("O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.") Except... Marshall never resisted.

Back to Cassidy:

I suspect that many Washington journalists, especially the types who go on Sunday talk shows, feel the way Marshall does, but perhaps don’t have his level of self-awareness. It’s not just a matter of defending the Obama Administration, although there’s probably a bit of that. 

Oh, just a tad. Probably! But...

It’s something deeper, which has to do with attitudes toward authority. Proud of their craft and good at what they do, successful journalists like to think of themselves as fiercely independent. 

Like to... but trapped on Aeroflot flight to Cuba, you start noticing your lack of independence. And those journalists who didn't get bamboozled into your lamentable predicament look so enragingly smug.

It’s not surprising that some of them share Marshall’s view of Snowden as “some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with and is now seeking refuge abroad for breaking the law.”

A political philosophy I don’t agree with.... What is that? Resistance to big government? Cassidy — who says — he's "with Snowden" because he's "the underdog" — ends with "Which side are you on?" which is the title of an old union song. Here's Pete Seeger singing it. Bob Dylan repurposed it in "Desolation Row":

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”

Unlike the Titanic, the Aeroflot flight reached its destination uneventfully.

All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name