LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A “PAYOFF” FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS. THE LEFT WING “RAG,” KNOWN AS “POLITICO,” SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY! THE DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE. TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!
On Tuesday, staffers at Politico were notified that a 'technical error' had prevented paychecks from going out. Many joked that this had something to do with the Trump administration putting a freeze on USAID funding....And while there's no evidence the two are linked, the suggestion prompted internet sleuths to look into Politico's sources of funding. What they found was absolutely shocking. According to government spending tracker website USASPENDING.gov, Politico — which laundered the Hunter Biden '51 intel officials' propaganda during the 2020 election — received up to $27 million (and by some counts $32 million) from various US agencies during the Biden years....
Let's see how the major news media are handling this story the morning of:
The New York Times: Media correspondent Michael M. Grynbaum asks, "Should a leading presidential contender be given the opportunity to speak to voters on live television?" Wow. That suggests it could be considered unethical to give air to the horrible man.
Joy Reid, an anchor on rival MSNBC, derided the event as “a pretty open attempt by CNN to push itself to the right and make itself attractive and show its belly to MAGA.” Her colleague Chris Hayes called the town hall “very hard to defend.” Critics asked why CNN would provide a live platform to someone who defended rioters at the United States Capitol and still insists the 2020 election was rigged. Those objections intensified on Tuesday after Mr. Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll. “Is @CNN still going to do a town hall with the sexual predator twice impeached insurrectionist?” Alexander S. Vindman, the Army colonel who was a witness in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, wrote on Twitter....
Politico: The headline is "Trump world booked CNN hoping for a big audience. Now, they’re in the thick of it/The former president will fundraise off the E. Jean Carroll verdict. But he also has to get through a televised town hall where it will come up."
Maybe there was an earlier draft of this article that made more sense, but the way it is now, what Clarence Thomas "suggests" happened is the same thing Politico tells us really happened.
What's not true is that the vaccines contain cells from aborted fetuses or cells derived from cells from aborted fetuses, but Thomas didn't say that. He said that some litigants opposed to a vaccine mandate "object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children."
"The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. They're politicizing it,” he said. “They don't have any clue. They can't even count their votes in Iowa. No, they can't. They can't count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That did not work out too well. They could not do it. They tried the impeachment hoax.”
Then Trump called the coronavirus “their new hoax.”
The fact that the quote doesn't continue and "Then Trump called the coronavirus" is inserted before "their new hoax" should make you suspicious, whether you've heard the original or not. But the purportedly verbatim text above it is not, in fact, verbatim.
Here's the original:
I'll have more to say about all that is left out. But let me give you this for now.
ADDED: Let me do a transcription, restoring the words that Politico elided (without using ellipses to show where they're dropping words and changing the flow of the meaning). The embedded video above has its own cuts, so I found uncut video. Here:
Trump is clearly not calling the virus a hoax. What he's calling a hoax is the political talking point that Trump has been failing to protect the country from the virus!
Now, Politico is pushing a hoax hoax — it's putting out a false story about what Trump called a hoax.
Trump is certainly not "rall[ying] his base to treat coronavirus as a ‘hoax.'" Trump is rallying his base to believe that he's doing an excellent job of handling the problem and to see the criticism of his work as a hoax. He's not saying they should "treat" the virus as a hoax!
AND: Here's my transcription, with boldface for what Politico left out:
"Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They're politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say: 'How's President Trump doing?' They're going: 'Oh, nothing, nothing.' They have no clue. They don't have any clue. They can't even count their votes in Iowa. They can't even count. No, they can't. They can't count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That didn't work out too well. They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They've been doing it since you got in. It's all turning. They lost. It's all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that's been pretty amazing. There's 15 people in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early. We could've had a lot more than that. We're doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never been more unified than it is now."
PLUS: Trump really is hard to transcribe. And when you see the transcription, you see the strangeness of his speech. It's impressionistic — short phrases with easy words and lots of repetition. I think it's mesmerizing if you're on his side and incredibly annoying if you are not. He jumps from one idea to the next and makes things feel as though they go together — if you're with him. If you are not, it's crazy talk. Word salad. And you may be grossed out by the people who love the salad. I'm writing from a position of cruel neutrality. I like observing how this salad is made, and I understand liking it and resenting people who don't get it, but I also understand the people who are horrified.
Let me tear into that paragraph. I object to the deceptions in the Politico presentation, but I also see that Trump doesn't make it easy for reporters who are trying to tell it straight. I would suspect that Trump is deliberately laying down traps for them so they'll screw up and he can hit them again for being "fake news." But I've listened to him so many times, talking for so long, and I tend to believe he just flows words and this is the form they take. It's working for him, and he keeps it up and gets energized and inflated by his own distinctive stylings.
But forget Politico for now. I know I've got an accurate transcription, so let me move forward and just criticize this text:
Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus.
This is the big thesis. The implication is that the other party is politicizing something that should not be part of politics, but he's criticizing his political rivals, and that's political too. There's an inherent contradiction.
You know that, right? Coronavirus. They're politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say: 'How's President Trump doing?' They're going: 'Oh, nothing, nothing.' They have no clue. They don't have any clue. They can't even count their votes in Iowa. The can't even count. No, they can't. They can't count their votes.
The can't-count-Iowa line is something he plugs in whenever he wants to note that the Democrats are incompetent. It's a little hard to follow: How did Iowa get mixed in with coronavirus? But I'm used to his rhetoric. Instead of saying the Democrats are incompetent, he leaps back to this notable instance of incompetence. He's using very simple language, but he still trusts listeners to keep track of what's being talked about. Suddenly, we're in Iowa and when you think he might quickly get back to the coronavirus, he's off to Russia:
One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That didn't work out too well. They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation.
"Russia" stands for the proposition that the Democrats are out to get him: They'll take whatever raw material appears and they'll beat it into an anti-Trump weapon. They tried Russia, and when that didn't work, they tried Ukraine (AKA the impeachment). His next line states the generality:
They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They've been doing it since you got in. It's all turning. They lost. It's all turning. Think of it. Think of it.
That repeated line, "It's all turning," is the most dreamily impressionistic line in the passage. It's like a line from a psychedelic tune by The Byrds. I sense that it's a view of the swirl of thoughts inside his head, but he's trying, I think, to create a picture of the dizzy disorientation in the mind of Democrats. They're losing everything! Think of it!
As they spin and tumble, they're grasping after anything, everything:
And this is their new hoax.
But all he means is that they're saying he did a bad job — and, of course, they will — when he really did a good job:
But you know, we did something that's been pretty amazing. There's 15 people in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early. We could've had a lot more than that.
That is, we've only found 15 people with coronavirus in the U.S., and without the things he did, we might have had a lot more. He doesn't specify what he did, other than that he did it "early." From there, he jumps to the most generic statement of his overarching idea of American greatness:
We're doing great. Our country is doing so great.
Then he says something that's completely out of line with the idea that the Democrats are out to get him for anything that happens:
We are so unified. We are so unified.
Thanks for the repetition, but how can that be true? Oh, I see:
The Republican Party has never been more unified than it is now.
Said the U.S. Senator who refers to himself as "the Republican nominee for President" because, I guess, there's some idea of forefronting your highest or most elite accomplishment, and Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for President. He's a Senator now, elected by the people of a state, but he was a nominee for a higher office, and that's apparently more important, even though he didn't win, and he's not even the party's "standard bearer" (not the most recent nominee). But Romney is apparently proud of his distinction, and there's only one other person on the face of the earth whose highest level was Republican nominee for President (and he's 95 years old). Maybe the idea is that Trump is illegitimate, so exclude him, and that leaves Romney as the leader of his party.
But he didn't beat Obama. He showed he could beat Obama if he wanted. He came on strong in the first debate. But he stood down in the second debate, and his party lost. Now, he's voted against one of Trump's judicial nominees, and he was the only Republican Senator who voted no, and he voted no because the person, Michael Truncale, once called Obama an "un-American impostor." Truncale testified that he was "merely expressing frustration by what I perceived as a lack of overt patriotism on behalf of President Obama" and did not mean to suggest that Obama was not a natural born citizen.
I'm reading about this in Politico, where the text is he "believed Obama was born in Hawaii and did not subscribe to 'birtherism,' a racist theory that the president was not an American citizen." The Politico text is shocking for 2 reasons. First, the question under the Constitution wasn't whether Obama was an American citizen. Citizenship isn't enough to qualify a person to be President. He must be born a citizen. Big difference. Second, a news organization shouldn't casually toss in the opinion that this suspicion about Obama is a "racist theory." That's not decent journalism. I accept the use of the term "birtherism" because I think Truncale used it in testifying. If Truncale himself called birtherism "a racist theory," it would be good journalism to quote him, but you can see that it's not in quotes.
I actually don't have a problem with Romney's voting against Truncale. But Romney's stated reason — if this is all he said — is inarticulate. He could have said that he lacked sufficient confidence in Truncale's judicial temperament. There were other things about Truncale that were disturbing, and not just the one thing Romney is quoted as citing — "disparaging comments about President Obama." I'm seeing in The Salt Lake Tribune that Truncale was quoted as saying "With regard to immigration, we must not continue to have the maggots coming in" and later that the word was not "maggots" but "magnets." I can see not bringing that up, because of confusion over whether Truncale said "maggots" (though I note that in immigration discussions, the word "magnet" is applied not to the immigrants but to the United States (for example, candidate Trump said he wanted to "turn off the jobs and benefits magnet")).
By citing only the "disparaging comments about President Obama" and stressing his own status as the one-time Republican Party nominee, Romney elevated himself. He's special.
ADDED: On rereading, I question my assertion that "Romney's stated reason... is inarticulate." I was assuming that Romney looked at everything about Truncale and formed the opinion that he didn't have what it takes to be a judge — that he was too political and intemperate. There are clearer ways to say that. But the statement Romney did make was, I think, rather revealing of his psychology and his plans for himself as a Senator. It's more revealing perhaps, than he intended to be. I wouldn't call that inarticulate, because "inarticulate" connotes that he meant to say something and couldn't come up with the right words, and I don't think Romney meant to reveal that much. What then is the right word? Maybe — ironically — it's "intemperate."
IN THE COMMENTS: Nobody points to a Slate article correcting the FALSE assertion that Truncale said "maggots." The video there — at 1:25 — shows him saying "we've got to stop the magnet that draws people over." Not only is it clear that he's saying "magnet" not "maggots," he's using the word "magnet" in the standard context, referring to government benefits. He's not calling the immigrants "magnets." He's saying they are drawn to the metaphorical magnet that is welfare benefits. The "maggots" slur is truly evil. Shame on The Salt Lake Tribune.
ALSO: I wrote this in the comments but I want to frontpage it:
Making up racial hatred is truly evil.
I was careful to write, in the original post, " I'm seeing in The Salt Lake Tribune that Truncale was quoted as saying..." Was quoted. I avoided saying that he said it, because how do I know? I only said what I knew, that the SL Tribute presented that statement as a quote.
But with the video there and available for weeks, there's no excuse for passing along the "maggots" quote.
It reminds me of the continued reporting that Trump said Nazis were "fine people." The corrective material is available and plain, and there are some horrible journalists and politicians who want to make people feel that there's some deep ugliness out there -- want people to feel hurt and diminished and afraid. It's disgusting to have a personal stake in doing that to people.
1. The "crassness" of making fun of people who are suffering.
2. The stark and negative stereotypes. (The "dismissive" attitude toward Christianity especially bothers Blake.)
3. The assumption that because it's Texas, people are conservative, when, in fact, Houston skews strongly Democratic.
4. The idea that "people who believe in smaller government and lower taxes believe everything should be privatized and that the government shouldn't be counted on to do anything."
Here's the second-highest-rated comment at WaPo:
I disagree completely. The cartoon epitomizes the essence of the rabid right-wingers ruling Texas, who insist that government IS the problem... until they need some government help. The hypocrisy of religious right fanatics like Cruz is so thick you could cut it with a spoon. Meanwhile, the PumpkinFührer in the White House hasn't drained the swamp, he's made it much, much worse. And remember, these are the same fanatics who insisted that President Obama was planning a forceful takeover of their State to remove all their guns. Personally, that would not have been a bad idea.
With kids heading back to school and the first hints of an autumnal nip in the morning air, there is something about Trump’s rich cinnamon-orange skin, with its artificial hues of nutmeg, an ample yet airy frosting of whipped sugary golden-white strands sitting on top of it all, that just feels comfortable to certain folks as fall’s shorter, crisper days approach. It’s like a warm cup of cider. Or a comfy sweater. Or, yes, like delicious, delicious pumpkin spice. That’s right—Voters must think Donald Trump is pumpkin spiced.
"These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class – an exalted and privileged class."
Consider Politico’s famous email tip-sheet, Playbook, which is read religiously every morning by countless members of the DC press corps, including myself. About two-thirds of the publication consists of useful summaries of the day’s news stories.
The rest, however, is a sort of People magazine for the Washington journalist community, in which the reader is invited to celebrate leading journalists’ (and politicians’) birthdays, congratulate leading journalists (and politicians) for their witty phrase-making, learn which leading journalist (and politician) was seen at which party and anticipate which leading journalist (and politician) is going to be on which Sunday program....
But there is an unwritten purpose to these daily honor rolls of journo/political friendship and that is to define the limits of what is acceptable.
Like the guestlist at Lally Weymouth’s party in the Hamptons, which was described so salaciously in Playbook a little while ago, a tiny handful of people and publications and ideas are in; everyone else is out....
They know what a politician is supposed to look like and act like and sound like; they know that Trump does not conform to those rules; and they react to him as a kind of foreign object jammed rudely into their creamy world, a Rodney Dangerfield defiling the fancy country club.
A foreign object jammed rudely into their creamy world...
Yes, he is a pricker forward.
I'm glad to get a perfect chance to use that term I learned yesterday — pricker forward, a synonym for instigator from the 16th century.
Frank is portraying Trump as a masculine stereotype (a rude jamming object) and the press as a feminine stereotype (swanning about in a "creamy world"). It's a rape metaphor.
Now stand back and let Donald Trump make a sandwich:
Five people, including a senior administration official and several sources close to the president, tell POLITICO that Bannon, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has clashed with the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who’s taken on an increasingly prominent portfolio in the West Wing. Bannon has complained that Kushner and his allies are trying to undermine his populist approach, the sources said.
Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, a longtime Bannon confidante who became a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, urged Bannon not to resign. “Rebekah Mercer prevailed upon him to stay,” said one person familiar with the situation....
It's good to have 5 sources, but I can't tell what happened that justifies the verb "clashed." That could mean a lot of things, and I'm suspicious that journalists antagonistic to Trump are eager to impose a chaos template. (It seems to alternate with the evil template.)
Politico observes that Kushner's power has "ballooned":
He has helped to expand the authority of two senior West Wing officials who, like him, are less ideological in nature: former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy. The national security directive removing Bannon from the NSC explicitly authorized Powell to attend the National Security Council's Principals' and Deputies' Committee meetings.
I'm familiar with the name Gary Cohn only because I just read — in a NYT interview transcript — Trump's reaction when Gary Cohn sneezed:
TRUMP: God bless you. You O.K., Gary? That was a pretty tough one. I’ve got to make sure my man is all right.
I don't know if Trump and Cohn have a sneeze-and-response routine to break the tension. It happened right when Maggie Haberman was bearing in, looking for specifics about which U.S. airports really deserve to be called — as Trump had put it — a "horror show." But I'll assume it was a random sneeze, and Trump loves to spontaneously switch topics. It's fun. It makes him look cute and smart (or so he may think). And it makes it hard for others to keep up even as he looks as if he's not racing ahead. He's manifesting distractability, and it makes them think he's less competent. But everyone laughed, and Trump got away with never saying exactly which airports are a horror show.
Oh, yes — do I seem distractable? — there's all that chaos around Trump. Bannon and Jared are clashing. Cohn is sneezing.
[Robert Mercer] poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News.... By 2016, Breitbart News claims, it had the most shared political content on Facebook, giving the Mercers a platform that no other conservative donors could match. Rebekah Mercer is highly engaged with Breitbart’s content. An insider there said, “She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos.” Though she doesn’t dictate a political line to the editors, she often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention. Her views about the Washington establishment, including the Republican leadership, are scathing. “She was at the avant-garde of shuttering both political parties,” the insider at Breitbart said. “She went a long way toward the redefinition of American politics.”
Much more about Robert and Rebekah Mercer at that New Yorker article. Back at the Politico piece, we see that Jared Kushner supposedly thinks that Rebekah and Robert Mercer "have taken too much credit" for Trump's victory and that he has "misgivings about their go-it-alone approach to outside spending boosting Trump’s agenda."
“If Bannon leaves the White House, Bekah’s access and influence shrinks dramatically,” said the GOP operative who talks to Mercer.
"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.
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 reported departures follow whispers among Washington media circles that [CEO Jim] VandeHei was clashing with Politico ownership... From his early days at Politico, VandeHei has driven Politico’s workaholic competitive edge... Whether Politico was “better” than the Washington Post or the New York Times, one thing is clear: It forced those newspapers, and many other outlets, to expedite their work to keep pace with Politico.....
VandeHei stumbled, however, when it came to replacing himself. After ascending to the CEO position, he and Harris hired Rick Berke, a former New York Times editor, to serve as executive editor..... Succeeding Berke was Susan Glasser.... A former colleague and friend of VandeHei’s, Glasser secured the sort of authority and control that Berke had craved... She promised to carry forward Politico’s fast-twitch heritage while at the same time producing in-depth journalism.... What she got was a period of turmoil. Valuable staffers headed to other pastures....
I'm seeing some mockery of what Rush Limbaugh said about Mars on yesterday's show. Of course, it's taken out of context, as Rush, of course, expects and invites. (I'm sure he'll talk about this on the show today.) Let's look at what was quoted and what's in the transcript and try to figure out if he's ridiculously stupid or comically apt.
Okay, so there's flowing water on Mars. Yip yip yip yip yahoo. You know me, I'm science 101 big time guy, tech advance it, you know it, I'm all-in. But NASA has been corrupted by the current Regime. I want to find out what they're gonna tell us. Okay, flowing water on Mars, if we’re even believe that, what are they gonna tell us that means? That's what I'm gonna wait for. Because I guarantee, let’s just wait and see. This is September 28th. Let's just wait and see, don't know how long it's gonna take, but this news that there is flowing water on Mars is somehow gonna find its way into a technique to advance the leftist agenda. I don't know what it is, I would assume it would be something to do with global warming and maybe there was once an advanced civilization. If they say they found flowing water, next they're gonna find a graveyard. And then they're gonna be able to say in the graveyard is a dead advanced civilization. What killed them? Well, who knows. This is a bit, of course, of an extreme exaggeration, but this is what happens.
Yes, older people tend to be conservative, and older people tend to die.
And yet, everybody's always getting older, tending more toward conservatism, and, yes, eventually, dying. So the more conservative party is always dying, but it's also always receiving new entrants, as the once-young become old.
Now's a good time to roll out the old Churchill/not-really-Churchill quote: "If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."
Headline at Politico. Not much going on in the article in my view. I find this bloggable because 1. Politico is choosing this theme for its coverage (and not, say, the new John Doe documents that just came out) and 2. the absence of material is significant.
Walker tends not to talk about the social conservative issues — probably because 1. such issues are divisive and 2. he appears to be a very solidly religious man — and the social conservatives are having a meeting with him — where he'll probably explain those 2 things.
IN THE COMMENTS: I repeat my point that "Walker doesn't talk the SC issues. He is a conservative man. He comes across as sincerely religious, based on his whole life story and his behavior." I add: "That's his approach, and it's different from the approach of those who use the issues. I think it's an excellent and winning combination." And MaBee says: "Which is exactly why Politico wants to push him out of using it." Yes. And... how do we feel about a candidate winning that way? I guess it depends on whether in the end he does anything about these privately held values.
This blog has 703 posts with the tag "Scott Walker" and is at risk of becoming absurdly Scott-Walker-focused as the country-at-large suddenly trains its eyes on the man who became the governor of my state 4 years ago and touched off massive protests, endless legal proceedings, passionate criticisms, and a bonus political campaign in the form of a recall election.
I've had 6 posts about Scott Walker since last Friday — mainly on 2 subjects: his declining to answer the question whether he feels "comfortable with the idea of evolution" and his lack of a college degree.
I'm experiencing active pushback from commenters who seem anxious to get me to stop monitoring the journalism and commentary that's so suddenly raining down on Scott Walker. I get accused of being a "spokesperson" for Walker or a "big fan." The truth is, I have an aversion to politics, but I read the news and I vote. And I blog. I blog about Walker because he's a long-entrenched topic here and has been ever since my city became Ground Zero for Walker-hating 4 years ago.
At this point, it's very hard to deal with every Walker topic that comes up as it comes up, especially since I don't want to be an all-Walker-all-the-time blog. But after 4+ years of following Scott Walker, it feels as though I'm doing something wrong if there's a significant Walker topic that non-Wisconsinites are blogging and I haven't even acknowledged its existence.
So here I am at 4:48 in the morning, driven by a weird sense of obligation to pay attention to that foolish Gail Collins column The New York Times published on Friday the 13th: "Scott Walker Needs an Eraser."
You'd think columnists who want to wield influence would be more careful about letting their murderous intentions glare. But Collins stupidly overreached, perhaps fed by the Wisconsin Walker-haters who've been chewing over a set of stock topics for years and now pass along the gooey pulp of their contempt.
Collins built her column on the story of a young teacher who won an award for excellence but then got fired due to budget cuts. Walker's name is associated with budget austerity, so Walker must be to blame for her job loss. This was a gross error, the teacher having lost her job the year before Walker became governor. It took 2 days for the Times to edit out the mistaken assertion (which left the column not making much sense). Walker's reforms were aimed at saving money at the school-district level and making it possible to keep excellent new teachers.
Conservative news sites had a field day with the error over the weekend, with The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack calling out the (since deleted and corrected, but archived) mistaken section in question.
The New York Times gets caught in a bad factual error and one of its main columnists — did you know Collins is a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board? — exposes herself as a Walker-hater, and Politico casts the incident as an occasion for conservatives to have "a field day." Like it's all just a big militarized operation, and one side got an occasion for a grand, showy triumphing.
Oh, how I loathe all the politicos out there — those who are labeled "Politico" and, worse, those who are labeled "New York Times." But I'm sticking with this little enterprise of mine. It's 5:44 a.m. now, and I'm as dedicated as ever to monitoring these politicos, even though in my heart, I'm an artist. My real inclination — as I've been toiling over this post in the pre-dawn — has been to go off on a tangent about the meaning of the term "field day" (originally, a day when military troops are assembled for some sort of review or exercise) or to go into a reverie about erasers I have known and loved, like the rubbery pink Pink Pet (not to be confused with the upstart Pink Pearl) and the mystifyingly fragrant Art Gum, which, when I was a schoolgirl, I used to like to rub into an inch-deep pile of dust which I'd invite my classmates to palpate.
Everyone who touched my little evanescent creation was delighted.
"House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) publicly considered boycotting the panel, an idea that Clinton supporters feared would leave the potential 2016 candidate exposed to the enemy fire of House Republicans. So Clinton emissaries launched a back channel campaign, contacting several House Democratic lawmakers and aides to say they’d prefer Democrats participate, according to sources familiar with the conversations. Pelosi’s staff said they have not heard from Clinton’s camp."
So begins the article in Politico. What's supposed to be surprising here? Obviously, the Democrats care about the effect on the investigation on upcoming elections, and they've been trying to figure out whether their attacks on what the Republicans are doing will be more effective from the outside or the inside. I suspect the wavering position on whether or not to participate — assuming it wasn't always only theater — has to do with the whether one focuses on the 2014 elections or looks further ahead to 2016. If the Clintons sent what Politico tellingly terms a "We need backup" message, they were trying to drag the House Democrats away from their immediate concern about winning their districts this fall and into the service of Hillary Clinton's 2016 interests. Think about why staying out of the hearings seems like a good position for fighting to win this October, but getting friendly faces on the inside is so important to the longer game of Hillary's winning the presidency in 2016. Is she not woman enough to face down that panel of Republicans on her own? She needs Elijah Cummings and company to back her up?
"... tales so compelling that they help drive up enrollment, marginalize Republican repeal efforts and erase memories of this fall’s HealthCare.gov debacle."
Shouldn't that just be the internal memo about the campaign? Saying that's what you're about to do is practically the opposite of doing it. And I think the story only came out in that form — over at Politico — because actually doing it is not possible, not with the raw material they have. Perhaps they expected the media to do it for them, in which case the question is, why isn't the media doing their work for them, as usual? And I'm guessing the media can't do it either, because even if you are inclined to sift through the raw material and find the good things, you can only cherry-pick where there are some cherries. Politico needs to write about something, and this was all they had, the desperate fantasy of launching a campaign that can't possibly happen.
“Go on,” said Lennie. “How’s it gonna be? We gonna get a little place.”
“We’ll have a cow,” said George. “An’ we’ll have maybe a pig an’ chickens . . . an’ down the flat we’ll have a . . . little piece alfalfa——”
“For the rabbits,” Lennie shouted.
“For the rabbits,” George repeated.
“And I get to tend the rabbits.”
“An’ you get to tend the rabbits.”
Lennie giggled with happiness. “An’ live on the fatta the lan’.”
... a healthy ego, but ... longstanding ability to coolly assess his circumstances and then adapt...
• His enemies
... Ted Cruz....
• His party
... Democrats...
• His luck
... As president, Obama overruled pragmatic advisers like his then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who urged him to hold off on a health care overhaul. “I feel lucky,” he said at the time. “I think we can get it done.”
Months later, with public poll ratings for his proposal in the cellar, Emanuel asked the president if he was still feeling lucky. “My name is Barack Hussein Obama and I’m sitting here,” he said. “So, yeah, I’m feeling pretty lucky.”
I wonder where Obama would be right now if he'd listened to Rahm Emanuel and not coasted on his luck, his normality, and his personality as he let his party play him into making his whole presidency about health insurance. But yeah, there's always how awful the GOP is. Talk about that. That fiend, Ted Cruz!
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