"Lobbyists are only 'respected' in Washington....elsewhere they are pimps."

That's the top-rated comment on the Washington Post article "The rise and fall of the Podestas, Washington’s powerful political brother act," which begins:

For more than 30 years, the Podesta name was gold in Washington.

Tony Podesta was a respected lobbyist and a fundraiser for Democratic candidates. His younger brother, John, served as Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff and as senior counselor to Barack Obama. Together, they were the most powerful brother act in liberal politics since the Kennedys....

I finished reading "Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign."

Here's the book. You might remember that I was pulling out interesting quotes — here and here — as I went along, and the last one I had was 30% of the way through. Maybe it's me, but the book seemed to get tedious after the first third, as though they'd edited it more intensively but then didn't bother and just left us with dumped notes from their interviews with Clinton insiders. There was a lot of semi-digested material about the mechanics of getting speeches written and where to expend funds and how nervous and uncomfortable various people felt at various times. I got pretty bored.

But there were 3 more things I highlighted as I read. I'll give you these:

1. 34% of the way into the book: "While they were in the car, thinking about how Nevada could really turn the race on its head, [Democratic campaign operatives Tad] Devine’s phone rang. It was Podesta. The Clinton campaign chairman was upset. The day before, Bernie’s brother, Larry, had wondered aloud to a reporter whether Bill [Clinton] was 'really such a terrible rapist' or 'a nice rapist.' President Clinton doesn’t like being called a sexual predator, Podesta told Devine, especially not by a Democratic candidate. What kind of bullshit strategy is that? Devine tried to calm Podesta.... 'Did you see what I said?' Devine said of a television appearance he’d made the previous day. 'Larry is eighty years old. He lives in England. He gave this interview, and he’s not going to talk to the press anymore. This is not a strategy.' Podesta was not assuaged."

2. 67% of the way in: "But [Hillary] accepted the conventional wisdom that she could win or lose the presidency based on her performances [in the debates] against Trump — a rival who thrived on getting under the skin of an opponent. And what [Phillippe] Reines found, [playing the role of Trump] as he practiced against her, round after round, is that Hillary’s heavily nuanced policy arguments were boring and easy to pick apart with a sharp retort. Her strength and her weakness were one and the same: she mastered so much material. 'As the guy who would kick her ass over and over again,' it was obvious to Reines that Trump’s messaging was better, said a source with singular knowledge of his thinking.... [H]er stiffness and her inability to reply to specific questions with thematic answers... were painfully obvious in the debate-prep sessions. Reines had been able to exploit them and outperform her. Heading into the first debate.... Hillary and her team were nervous that Trump might do the same thing. "

3. 68% of the way: "As she had done before facing Bernie Sanders in the primaries, Hillary huddled with Klain, Dunn, Sullivan, and Podesta before the debate. This time, she seemed on edge. There was so much riding on a curious, nationally televised piece of performance art. It was such a poor test, she thought, of which candidate would make a better president. Normally so stoic, she betrayed the butterflies in her stomach by nervously joking with her aides about the outsize significance the debates took on. They tried to reassure her. Have fun, they advised. The winner of the debate was usually the candidate who appeared to be enjoying the moment more." (That was bad advice, don't you think? Her laughing, I'm-having-fun routine seemed phony, smug, and not well matched to the subject matter.)

Did Putin view Obama as "too, maybe, 'soft''s not the right word, but he wasn't tough enough against Putin?"

"Do you think all of this, that Putin over time read this as weakness?" Asked Chuck Todd...

... reminding me of the old Mick Jagger questions: "Am I hard enough? Am I rough enough?... Ain't I tough enough?"

I don't know who Mick was talking to, but Chuck was talking to Robert Gates on "Meet the Press" yesterday. And Robert Gates said:

I think that Putin saw the United States withdrawing from around the world. I think actually the problem has been that President Obama's actions often have not matched his rhetoric. His rhetoric has often been pretty tough. But then there's been no follow up and no action. And if you combine that with red lines that have been crossed, demands that Assad step down with no plan to actually figure out how to make that happen, the withdrawal from the Middle East, from Iraq and Afghanistan and essentially the way it was done, I think it sent a signal that the US was in retreat. It was always going to be complicated to withdraw from those wars without victory without sending the signal we were withdrawing more broadly from a global leadership role. I think some of the things that have been done have accentuated that impression around the world. And I think Putin felt that he could take advantage of that.

Chuck Todd came back reminding Gates of the time President Obama got tough in his own special way by telling Putin to "cut it out." Obama himself claimed that it was effective to tell Putin to "cut it out," but Todd, for all his bolstering of Obama, said it was "obvious that lecture didn't do anything." Todd, wondering how we should retaliate, asked Gates to "characterize" exactly what it was that the Russians did. Gates said:

Well, I would characterize it as a thinly disguised, covert operation intended to discredit the American election and to basically allow the Russians to communicate to the rest of the world that our elections are corrupt, incompetent, rigged, whatever and therefore no more honest than anybody else's in the world including theirs. And, you know, the US oughta get off its high horse in telling other nations how to conduct their elections and criticizing those elections and so on. Whether it or not it was intended to help one another candidate, I don't know. But I think it clearly was aimed at discrediting our elections and I think it was aimed certainly at weakening Mrs. Clinton.

I still don't understand how our getting to read email that was intended to be kept private corrupts the election. There are always disclosures of secrets before an election. We always know some things and not others, and the information flow is not organized and orchestrated. What is the big deal? If, as Gates said, the Russians' idea was to get out the message that our elections are corrupt, incompetent, rigged, why are we helping him? Wouldn't the strongest defense against Putin be to act as if nothing of any significance happened, and he's a puny little man?

Podesta's dumb assistants got phished. That's all. And we got to read some real email that meant not very much. Why are our news media and the Democrats bending over backwards to pump up Putin? Why are they doing something that must delight the hell out of him?

The unbelievable "typo" story about how Podesta got phished.

Slate's Will Oremus examines the story, propounded by the NYT, that John Podesta relied on advice from an IT guy who wrote "This is a legitimate email" but says he'd made a "typo" and had meant "This is an illegitimate email." Oremus asks the obvious question: Did you also typo "a" for "an"?

The IT guy, Charles Delavan, told Podesta to change his password and to set up two-factor authentication, but he gave him a correct link to Google's website. Podesta reacted by clicking on the link in the original nonlegitimate email, which is a mistake that anyone using email should know about.

Asked about the a/an discrepancy, Delavan told me the Times had the wording wrong. Delavan had actually meant to type that it was “not a legitimate email,” but mistakenly omitted the word not. Are you sure, I asked? “Yes,” he said. I asked why, if Delavan knew the email was not legitimate, he still directed Podesta to change his password....  Delavan said he recommended the password change “out of an abundance of caution,” even though he knew the request was a scam.

There would have been no problem if Podesta hadn't gone to the bad link. Delavan's "abundance of caution" failed to take 2 steps of caution that could have helped save Podesta from his own personal witlessness. Delavan should have had that "not" and should have said don't click the link in that email.

Actually, I don't think Podesta was personally involved in any of this. Delavan interacted with Podesta's chief of staff, Sara Latham. Podesta looks like a fool, and there's this lame effort to shift the blame to Delavan. How about paying more attention to Latham? Are women just invisible?

Ah, I see this at Politico, from October 28th:

"John needs to change his password immediately, and ensure that two-factor authentication is turned on his account. He can go to this link: https://myaccount.google.com/security to do both,” the staffer said. "It is absolutely imperative that this is done ASAP."

His chief of staff, Sara Latham, wrote to another Podesta aide, Milia Fischer: "The gmail one is REAL Milia, can you change - does JDP have the 2 step verification or do we need to do with him on the phone? Don't want to lock him out of his in box!”...

So it was Milia Fischer who failed to use the correct Google link but went back into the original phishing email? How many layers of unsophistication did they have over there at the Clinton campaign?

Here's Milia Fischer's LinkedIn page. Photo:



And as long as we're shining a light on Milia Fischer, there's this Breitbart item from October 16th, "WikiLeaks Reveals Podesta’s Obsession with Aliens… Space Aliens!" in which we learn that Fischer once forwarded Podesta a message from Tom DeLonge (a pop singer, late of Blink-182).

“Please show Mr. Podesta this private teaser. Let him know that I am spending all afternoon interviewing a scientist that worked on a spacecraft at Area 51 tomorrow,” DeLonge wrote.

Fischer's forwarding message said that DeLonge seems to have met with Steven Spielberg about some project that he wanted to get Podesta in on. Here's Podesta enthusing about aliens:



Maybe aliens hacked the election. All that "Russians" business is code, you know.

ADDED: The underlying NYT article has mind-bending statements like:

While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace.

The story is about the idiocy of falling for phishing! How is that "hard to see coming"? And what's the point of tracing it? Just never fall for it and the problem is solved, wherever the hell it came from. The Russians don't deserve special credit for devious genius. The Clinton campaign deserves to be lambasted for its shocking stupidity. And these are people who wanted to be trusted with the nuclear codes and who relied on the argument that Donald Trump is a dangerous ignoramus.

The NYT headline says "C.I.A. Judgment on Russia Built on Swell of Evidence" and I'm instantly skeptical about whether what's in the article supports that headline.

Because there's so much fake news these days.

Ever notice how cries of "fake news!" slip out of the news when the news outlets have some fake news to slip over? Oh, first let me show you Trump's new tweet:

Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2016

Now, let's get down to the work of checking to see whether the NYT really presents evidence to justify that headline. I'm reading every word of the rather long article but will only give you the actual evidence offered for the proposition that the Russian government intervened in the U.S. election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win. There's a lot of material in the article that is not about that at all. I'm excluding that, which is padding if the headline is the correct headline. Go to the link if you want to see what it is.

The first relevant material comes in the 16th paragraph: The DNC's servers and John Podesta's email account were hacked and a lot of damaging and embarrassing material was released onto the internet.

Next:

American intelligence officials believe that Russia also penetrated databases housing Republican National Committee data, but chose to release documents only on the Democrats. The committee has denied that it was hacked.

So here's the crucial disputed question of fact: Were the GOP servers also hacked? We're not told what evidence supports the belief that the GOP servers were also hacked, but the GOP says they were not. Yet some "intelligence officials believe" it was. Why? Where's the "swell of evidence" you were going to tell me about?

Even if that fact were nailed down, there would still be more leaps needed to get to the conclusion. First: Was there any embarrassing material? What? If I knew what, I could begin to think about the next question: Why would embarrassing material be withheld? All I can see from the supposed "swell of evidence" here is an assumption that if the DNC was hacked, the GOP committee was also hacked, and that if bad material was found in the DNC server, bad material would also be found in the GOP server, and since we only saw the DNC material, there must have been a conscious decision — by whom?! — to leak only the DNC things and that decision must have been made to help Trump win. That's not evidence itself, only inference based on evidence.

Finally, there are a few paragraphs about why "Putin and the Russian government" might be thought to prefer a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency. Trump and Putin have given each other some compliments.

That's no swell of evidence! That's a lot of leaping guesswork. And this is nothing more than I already read in the article the NYT put out on December 9th, which I put effort into combing through and rejected for the same reasons I'm putting in this new post.

This might be the biggest fake news story I've ever seen!

Squirreled away at the end of the article is the admission that people at the FBI are skeptical about the conclusion. An unnamed "senior American law enforcement official" told the NYT that "the Russians probably had a combination of goals, including damaging Mrs. Clinton and undermining American democratic institutions" and that "any disagreement between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and suggested that the C.I.A.’s conclusions were probably more nuanced than they were being framed in the news media." The NYT observes that the FBI holds itself to "higher standards of proof," since its work is geared toward prosecuting criminal cases in court, but: "The C.I.A. has a broader mandate to develop intelligence assessments."

I'm staring at that headline again. You said there was a "swell of evidence." Shouldn't that satisfy the FBI's higher standard rather than the good-enough-for-the-CIA standard? I think I see the reason for the different standards. The CIA is concerned about what might happen in the future. But why are we trusting them in an FBI/CIA disagreement about what happened in the past?

The very end of the NYT article is about the FBI investigating "numerous possible connections between Russians and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle, including former Trump aides like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, as well as a mysterious and unexplained trail of computer activity between the Trump Organization and an email account at a large Russian bank, Alfa Bank." This investigation began in the summer and seems to have played out by September and October — for reasons that are "are not entirely clear" and that the FBI won't talk about.

Speaking of embarrassing material... that headline, with that content... in the NYT. So awful.

I'm distracted into reading about the word "swell" in my dictionary (the OED). One usually reads of a swell of the sea or of music or emotion.  "Fenc'd no where from the least Surge or Swell of the Water," wrote Daniel Dafoe. "And up the valley came a swell of music on the wind," wrote Tennyson.  "Of all the actors who flourished in my time... Bensley had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy," wrote Charles Lamb.

But swell of evidence...

Swell is the talk of upwelling emotion and romanticism.

Swell is a tell.

Can Bernie help Hillary?

Look at the body language in this photograph (at the NYT). The chairs are set on the stage with room between them, so that the candidates could sit squarely on the seats and be close enough without touching, but both candidates sit off center. Bernie is quite far over to the side, and he's also crossing his leg away from her and high up on the knee to create a barrier which is fortified by his arm stretched all the way out across the leg. His other hand is in his pocket. Hillary, for her part, is turned away from Bernie, and she has her ankles crossed and her hands clasped in her lap.

The accompanying article, published today, is titled "Presidential Election: Any Surprises Left?" The political preference of the NYT is hilariously highlighted by the 2 headings: "Will the stars align for Mrs. Clinton?" and "Will the K.K.K. return to front and center?" As to the "stars"* aligning, the "surprise" for Hillary is that Pharrell Williams, Jay Z, and Katy Perry are performing at rallies, "working hard to drum up interest among millennial voters." And the political stars, Obama, Biden, and Bernie are doing events.

Judging from the photograph, Bernie is withholding his full and open support. Perhaps he knows that the passion and heightened consciousness that he inspired cannot simply be handed to Hillary Clinton. Or perhaps Bernie had recently read that newly leaked email:

In February, longtime Clinton adviser and Democratic insider Joel Johnson had sent an email to Clinton campaign head John Podesta, emphasizing, “Bernie needs to be ground to a pulp. We can’t start believing our own primary bullshit. This is no time to run the general. Crush him as hard as you can.”

Just after Salon reported Johnson’s message on Thursday morning, however, the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks released another trove of emails to and from Podesta. In this new batch of messages appeared Podesta’s response to Johnson’s advice.

“I agree with that in principle,” Podesta wrote in reply to Johnson’s “no mercy” email.

“Where would you stick the knife in?” Podesta asked....

Johnson proposed portraying Sanders as an “Obama betrayer,” noting that the White House would help affirm the talking point. He also said Sanders should be depicted as a “hapless legislator,” which other members of Congress would help affirm; a “false promiser,” which “policy elites” would affirm; and as someone who is unable to win, which “black people will affirm.”

_______________________

* Did you know that when you're a star, they let you do anything?

"As the only person anyone knows who has spent time in a Zimbabwe jail, you should pen an oped calling for his killer’s extradition. What an asshole. Missed you at the mini-reunion."

Wikileaked email from John Podesta to Barry Bearak.

Bearak is a reporter who got thrown in prison in Zimbabwe as he was covering the elections there.

The "killer" in question was the man who killed Cecil the Lion.

I assume Podesta — writing for an audience of one — intended to be edgily hilarious. That's the trouble with eavesdropping. You don't get the relationship. You don't know the in-jokes. I mean, I was just giving some more thought to what I wrote about Chelsea Clinton's email to her parents that said "I hope this mini-behemoth is not rife with grammatical errors...." It could be that "mini-behemoth" is a joke among the 3 Clintons. Maybe one time they laughed over this obscure video. Or maybe they've fooled around with this toy.

Context is everything. Relationships are everything. In fact, the reason people cared about Cecil the Lion was because he wasn't just another lion — as the asshole/dentist killer thought — but a lion people had been relating to for many years.

You think with these leaks that you're getting into the private zone, hearing what really goes on, but that's exactly what you cannot do. You cannot be fair. I'm not saying don't read those leaked emails. Don't pretend you don't see what you do. But don't assume you know what they mean.

Here's Barry Bearak's report from 2008, "In Zimbabwe Jail: A Reporter’s Ordeal":

"If this is standard operating procedure, why call yourself 'a hack' when sending copy for the purposes of fact-checking?"

"Furthermore, why ask Podesta to not 'tell anyone I did this' if this is an innocent fact-check request"?

Asks Larry O'Connor, looking into what  Politico’s Glenn Thrush wrote to John Podesta (which was: "No worries Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I fucked up anything.")

The official Politico answer is: "Glenn has a self-deprecating sense of humor, one of the many blessings of being born and raised in Brooklyn."

I can buy that explanation, but it only goes so far. Self-deprecating humor works when it has at least some truth in it. But Thrush's statement makes sense as a way to extract more information from Podesta, reeling him in by making him think that Thrush will serve as his mouthpiece.

That's what journalists do, as Janet Malcolm brilliantly explained in her great book "The Journalist and the Murderer," which begins:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject.

"The Most Important WikiLeaks Revelation Isn’t About Hillary Clinton."

"What John Podesta’s emails from 2008 reveal about the way power works in the Democratic Party," by David Dayen in The New Republic. (Podesta was a co-chair of Obama’s transition team.)

Flowers in the sewer — the misogyny of the disgust for Bill Clinton's lover.

On "Meet the Press" today, Chuck Todd was interviewing Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta:

CHUCK TODD: Is your goal of this debate is to get under his skin? Is that why you gave Mark Cuban a ticket right in the front row?

JOHN PODESTA: No, I think Mark Cuban is one of the business leaders who was never involved in partisan politics who's endorsed Hillary because he thinks she'll do better for the-- for the economy. I think that, you know, you saw his reaction, which is to do his favorite sport, which is to dive in the sewer and go for a swim.

Trump's reaction, you remember, was "Perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!" Now, I have a feminist problem with Trump's remark, one that I haven't seen anyone else notice, and that is the idea that he can "put" the woman where he likes. Flowers is a person, not an object — like a vase of flowers — but Flowers has already responded positively to the notion of getting placed in front of Hillary.*

So let me move on to the feminist problem I have with what Podesta said. He says the name, Mark Cuban, and vaunts him as a business leader who is above politics, but he won't say the name of the woman and he speaks of her as a creature of the sewer.

Todd pushes him: "You said-- you referred to diving into the sewer, so you believe that inviting Gennifer Flowers is diving into the sewer?" And Podesta has the smarts to resist further disrespecting the woman. But later, there's a panel, and one of the participants is Stephanie Cutter (who was Obama's deputy campaign manager in 2012 and who helped John Kerry prepare for debates in 2004). Todd asks her about "the idea of gamesmanship, which is the Clinton Campaign deciding to put Mark Cuban in the front row," and the response had me shouting at the TV:

STEPHANIE CUTTER: ... What Clinton and Trump are doing are trying to throw each other off their game. The difference is Hillary Clinton is doing it with a legitimate businessman, also, a celebrity. And as John Podesta put it earlier on your show, Trump is just jumping right down in the sewer and swimming in it by inviting Gennifer Flowers.

The man is "legitimate," and the woman is a "sewer."

Chuck Todd turned to another panelist, Steve Schmidt (a senior adviser to John McCain in 2008).

STEVE SCHMIDT: [The tactic of inviting Cuban] was clearly designed to provoke Donald Trump and it provoked Donald Trump, it provoked Donald Trump into going down the Gennifer Flowers rabbit hole....

The Gennifer Flowers rabbit hole?! Don't call a woman a "hole." Don't speak of a human being as a lower animal, a rodent. Whatever these people want to say about Trump, they should say it about Trump, but they instinctively jumped to express disgust toward the woman — who's really just a bystander to the pre-debate mind-games. Is this misogyny? The argument that it is not depends on the idea that the disgust is with sexuality — what happens when the man and the woman — Bill and Gennifer — get together and not with the woman herself. But the instinct — in both Podesta and Cutter — was to take the man out of the picture. Bill, like Mark Cuban, is legitimate. That horrible woman over there should be treated as a nonentity — down in a hole, there in the excrement, a rodent, a filthy pest. Anyone who would name her or treat her with equal dignity has himself fallen down into the sewer with her — "swimming in it," swimming in shit.

Being on the side of the female candidate does not absolve you of misogyny. It blinds you to it. 
_____________________________

* The full tweet is: "If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to sit in the front row, perhaps I will put Gennifer Flowers right alongside of him!" You can see that Cuban's autonomy is respected in the word "wants." What does Cuban want to do? By contrast, Flowers can be put where Trump wants.