The audience for the theater of hurricane empathy is vast, observant, and ready to put its critique in writing.

This is the most VEEP-like photo ever -- pretending to be on a phone call but forgetting to plug in the antiquated earphones while pretending to write on a blank piece of paper instead of actually doing anything. https://t.co/tkzHPplKhe

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 30, 2024

The desperation is so intense, and it's only December. They can't go on like this.

1) These people seem certifiably insane. As in, needing serious psychological help. I'm not exaggerating here, they seem to have completely lost a relationship with reality.
2) I laughed multiple times in this Supercut. https://t.co/FY6eXuzqnb

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) December 15, 2023

My advice, and I've said it before, is to abandon the overblown demonization and treat Trump like the political candidate he is. About half of the electorate supports him. If it's democracy they're so concerned about, let them show respect for their fellow citizens and endeavor to understand the good reasons why they support Trump and not Biden and engage on the issues.

I don't expect them to take this advice, because: 1. They're so dug in, and 2. They don't trust themselves to argue on the substantive merits.

Of all the posts I've ever tagged "Trump derangement syndrome," this is the most deserving.

IN THE COMMENTS: michaele said:

The look on poor Jennifer Rubin's face at the end of her comments (.29) is half hilarious and half tragically concerning. Her anguish at the possibility of Trump being reelected truly seems to be affecting her mental and physical health.

Yes, I noticed that too. I'll make a screen shot. If I had more skills, I'd make that portrait in the background — a portrait of her, right? — change its expression too:

"Mitt Romney Admits He Didn’t Know Anything About Burisma During Trump’s Ukraine Impeachment."

Writes Mollie Hemingway (at The Federalist)(relying on the new book "Romney: A Reckoning")

[At the time of Trump's first impeachment,] “Sean Hannity accused Romney of ‘morphing’ into a ‘weak, sanctimonious Washington, swamp politician,’ and suggested the senator was simply ‘jealous’ of Trump’s myriad successes.”...

"Most people dislike believing they and their factions are the ones in power. They want power, while claiming the victim mantle."

With an open mind, I hope people will read this scathing indictment of Alvin Bragg's indictment against Trump by @AndrewCMcCarthy, a conservative who has often been contemptuous of Trump:https://t.co/N5gJ1ldjkr

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 5, 2023

From McCarthy's essay:

"Seriously, shout out to whoever the hero was within the Supreme Court who said 'f-ck it! Let’s burn this place down.'"

Wrote Ian Millhiser, of Vox, quoted in "Before Finally Overturning Roe, Supreme Court Must Block Yet Another Insurrection Attempt" by Mollie Hemingway (at The Federalist).

Hemingway continues: 

Brian Fallon, the former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman who became the leader of a dark money group behind the fight against the nomination of Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, issued a pretty clear call for intimidation of the court: “Is a brave clerk taking this unpredecented [sic] step of leaking a draft opinion to warn the country what’s coming in a last-ditch Hail Mary attempt to see if the public response might cause the Court to reconsider?” 

"When my husband listened to tapes of the interviews, he seemed almost shell-shocked at how much Trump hopped around from one topic to the next."

"While I like to think I’m an excellent listener, I’m not a fan of the interview style that requires badgering a source for a preferred outcome. As in the other interviews I had with him, I was just as curious about what he wanted to focus on as what I needed to find out from him. At one point, he noticed a large bandage on my forearm, which covered a burn I received while cooking dinner for my children. 'Did you have a tattoo put on?' he asked, in the midst of listing off detailed election irregularities in Pennsylvania and Michigan. 'Mollie’s going into the tattoo stuff? Whoa, that’s a big step.'"

From "I Interviewed Trump For 5 Hours. Here’s What He Told Me About ‘Stupid F—er’ McConnell, McCarthy’s Bromance With Luntz, And The Fake News That Bothered Him The Most" by Mollie Hemingway (adapted from her book "Rigged: How The Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections").

She's saying she accepted that he jumped around and did not try to foist her orderly approach on him, but I think that fails to credit him with deploying a technique. It's easy to assume he's got an attention deficit and insufficient appreciation for other people's preference for order, but I would presume that he is shifting around as a way to gain an advantage over his interlocutor. It's something lawyers do in cross-examination to trip up a witness. 

Hemingway's husband was "almost shell-shocked"? Maybe that was the idea. It would be hard — if he were lying or distorting or had a hidden agenda — to get the better of Trump. And notice how Trump did not merely hop around, he moved from professional to personal. It's disarming —  no pun intended! — to suddenly be talking about Mollie's arm. He sees the bandage — there's a whole story under that bandage, and why merely talk about it, make up a story about it — is that a tattoo? 

That opens up so much potential. He can learn a lot about her by how she reacts to that. Hemingway doesn't tell us what she said, but she could have overdone denial — of course she's not that kind of person — or she could have playfully thought up an answer that could amuse him — Oh, yes, it's a tattoo of you!

An obvious point.

Obvious point here but: media quickly calling states in Biden's favor, when they're actually close, and slow-walking the announcements of Trump's clear victories is not a good look for being trusted or fighting a narrative of an election being stolen from the voters.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) November 4, 2020

"A New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his role perpetrating the Russia collusion hoax was tasked with framing the news that a former top FBI lawyer was to plead guilty..."

"... to deliberately fabricating evidence against a Donald Trump campaign affiliate targeted in the Russia probe. The resulting article is a case study in how to write propaganda. Adam Goldman broke, and cushioned, the news that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was to plead guilty to fabricating evidence in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application to spy on Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page. His job was to present the news as something other than an indictment of the FBI’s handling of the Russia collusion hoax, to signal to other media that they should move on from the story as quickly as possible, and to hide his own newspaper’s multi-year participation in the Russia collusion hoax.... The 434-page Horowitz report identified major abuses by the FBI that violated Page’s civil liberties....  Here’s how Goldman puts it: 'Republicans have seized on a narrow aspect of the inquiry — the investigation into Mr. Page — in a long-running quest to undermine it.'... FISA abuse was never a 'narrow aspect' of the inquiry and everyone should have 'seized' on it because lying to a FISA court and violating an American’s civil liberties are evil."

Writes Mollie Ziegler Hemingway at The Federalist. Much more at the link.

Why can't John Bolton's publisher just release the book ahead of schedule so we're not subjected to second-hand reports of what's in it?

Here's the book (in Kindle form), on Amazon, scheduled for release on March 17th. Yes, there are commercial interests here, but there are overriding national interests... unless there are not.

So which is it? Like a lot of other people, I'm trying to extract the real meaning of the NYT article, "Trump Tied Ukraine Aid to Inquiries He Sought, Bolton Book Says/Drafts of the book outline the potential testimony of the former national security adviser if he were called as a witness in the president’s impeachment trial."

We're haggling and agonizing about whether Bolton can testify at the impeachment trial, as if he's a crucial repository of information that can only be delivered through live testimony, but that book exists. It's just being withheld — withheld and teased, through people who are very antagonistic to Trump.

It reminds me of the way Trump antagonists began this impeachment process with inflammatory reports of what Trump said in the Ukraine phone call. But there was a transcript of that phone call, and Trump changed the conversation about it by releasing the transcript.

Release the damned book!

Mr. Bolton’s explosive account of the matter at the center of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, the third in American history, was included in drafts of a manuscript he has circulated in recent weeks to close associates. He also sent a draft to the White House for a standard review process for some current and former administration officials who write books.... The White House could use the pre-publication review process, which has no set time frame, to delay or even kill the book’s publication or omit key passages.

So, the book is already circulating to outsiders as part of the review process, and the White House is being given an opening to assert executive privilege and suppress all or part of the book. Everything will still come out, one way or another. It's already dribbling out, in a distorted form.

The White House did not provide responses to questions about Mr. Bolton’s assertions, and representatives for Mr. Johnson, Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Mulvaney did not respond to emails and calls seeking comment on Sunday afternoon.

Mr. Bolton’s lawyer blamed the White House for the disclosure of the book’s contents. “It is clear, regrettably, from the New York Times article published today that the pre-publication review process has been corrupted and that information has been disclosed by persons other than those properly involved in reviewing the manuscript,” the lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, said Sunday night.

Trump had the power to release the transcript of the Ukraine phone call, but it's not so easy to release somebody else's book. There's a big commercial interest here, and it seems that Bolton's cashing in on his intimacy with the President is more important that serving the people as we are subjected to this impeachment ordeal. The manuscript is out there, and many people are reading it, but it's the pre-publication review process, and — big surprise — it's leaking. Well, that's to be expected, and now we're reading the leaks as the NYT chooses to present them, presumably in the hope of opening up the Senate trial. And from Bolton's camp, what we hear is crying over corruption of the process — not the Senate trial process, the pre-publication review process.

If the pre-publication review process is more important than giving us what's in the book while the Senate trial is going on, then I'm guessing what's in the book is nothing we haven't already heard about Trump and Ukraine. And if the White House is the source of the leak — which is the story from the Bolton camp — that's all the more reason to think the book is nothing special.

"Kavanaugh had been deluged with advice until the end. His Bush friends, by and large, told him ... not to show too much emotion. But he received calls from a few senators encouraging him to show his righteous indignation."

Fox News reports on what's in the forthcoming book "Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court" (by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino). Most of what's in that link is material I knew from following the hearings. There's a bit of behind-the-scenes about Kavanaugh's preparation for the hearing.

The Daily Caller has "New Book On Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Has Incendiary Allegations About Christine Blasey Ford," which seems to offer something more revealing, but I'm so dubious about Daily Caller headlines. I'll read this, though (and it can be a test of whether The Daily Caller is as bad as I think it is). Incendiary Allegations?

In “Justice on Trial” authors Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino say unnamed peers accused Ford of drinking to excess and accosting boys with some regularity as a student at the Holton-Arms School, a contrast with press accounts that cast her as innocent and naive during that period.

Press accounts cast her as innocent and naive during that period?

“Female classmates and friends at area schools recalled a heavy drinker who was much more aggressive with boys than they were,” Hemingway and Severino write of Ford. “‘If she only had one beer’ on the night of the alleged assault, a high school friend said, ‘then it must have been early in the evening.’ Her contemporaries all reported the same nickname for Ford, a riff on her maiden name and a sexual act.”

I'm supposed to think of sex words that rhyme with "Blasey"?!

"Counterintelligence investigations can take years, but if the Russian government had influence over the Trump campaign, the F.B.I. wanted to know quickly."

"One option was the most direct: interview the campaign officials about their Russian contacts. That was discussed but not acted on, two former officials said, because interviewing witnesses or subpoenaing documents might thrust the investigation into public view, exactly what F.B.I. officials were trying to avoid during the heat of the presidential race. 'You do not take actions that will unnecessarily impact an election,' Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy attorney general, said in an interview. She would not discuss details, but added, 'Folks were very careful to make sure that actions that were being taken in connection with that investigation did not become public.'"

From "Code Name Crossfire Hurricane: The Secret Origins of the Trump Investigation" (NYT). There's much more to this article, which I'm still trying to digest. My confidence in the NYT is undermined by this correction: "An earlier version of this article misstated that news organizations did not report on the findings of the retired British spy Christopher Steele about links between Trump campaign officials and Russia. While most news organizations whose reporters met with Mr. Steele did not publish such reports before the 2016 election, Mother Jones magazine did." You got an easily checkable, important fact plainly wrong. How can we trust your reporting?

ADDED: At WaPo, Erik Wemple has "New York Times acknowledges it buried the lead in pre-election Russia-Trump story":

In a massive article Wednesday on the FBI’s 2016 snooping into the possible nexus between Russians and the Trump presidential campaign, reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos include these two paragraphs:

In late October, in response to questions from The Times, law enforcement officials acknowledged the investigation but urged restraint. They said they had scrutinized some of Mr. Trump’s advisers but had found no proof of any involvement with Russian hacking. The resulting article, on Oct. 31, reflected that caution and said that agents had uncovered no “conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.”

The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph.

That’s one heck of a concession: We buried the lead! In their book “Russian Roulette,” authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn report that editors at the New York Times “cast the absence of a conclusion as the article’s central theme rather than the fact of the investigation itself,” contrary to the wishes of the reporters....

AND: "10 Key Takeaways From The New York Times’ Error-Ridden Defense Of FBI Spying On Trump Campaign" by Mollie Hemingway (The Federalist).
ALSO: From the Hemingway article:

[T]he admissions in this New York Times story are coming out now, years after selective leaks to compliant reporters, just before an inspector general report detailing some of these actions is slated to be released this month. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that people mentioned in the report are beginning to get previews of what it alleges. It’s reasonable to assume that much of the new information in the New York Times report relates to information that will be coming out in the inspector general report.

By working with friendly reporters, these leaking FBI officials can ensure the first story about their unprecedented spying on political opponents will downplay that spying and even attempt to justify it. Of note is the story’s claim that very few people even knew about the spying on the Trump campaign in 2016, which means the leakers for this story come from a relatively small pool of people.