Possibly on topic: Darrell Issa isn't running for re-election.
This thread is interesting:
https://twitter.com/ECMcLaughlin/status/950884746082562048
In a more readable form: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/950884746082562048.html
Ok, people, that's it. It's a bombshell of a day in America. And if Trump isn't impeached after this, along with complicit members of the @GOP who have known this and tried to discredit Fusion and Steele and this dossier, there is no hope for our democracy. Period.
From link in 2,3.
Well, that's good. One less thing to worry about.
Yes. Hope for democracy was getting tiring.
52/ In those notes is a reference to a Cypriot holding company to engage in inward investment into Russia, the note "active sponsors of the RNC," Dick Cheney's press secretary, and finally, adoptions. (Tr. 261-264)
53/ But Cypriot holding companies, and "active sponsors of the RNC?" WTAF. There is something so deep and so corrupt here in the @GOP I'm nearly speechless. (Tr. 261-264)
yowza.
Yeah, the real headlines to me are:
1) Feinstein just doing it. Hopefully bodes well for a more aggressive Dem posture.
2. Exposing the desperation and sleaziness of the Grassley/Graham "referral" last week.
The race continues. Governing norms will be eroded to some extent no matter what.
1 is not on topic, but it means I can now ask: Why is there no talk at all about any of these Republicans in anti-Bush districts switching to become Democrats? When your constituents change their party affiliation, why not at least try? Hundreds of white southern Democrats did in the 80s and 90s. In the Bush administration at least 2 Senators switched to Democrat, and Bush hadn't made the Republican brand nearly as toxic as Trump has.
Barbara Comstock seems like a natural given that she is the most doomed incumbent of all, and about 80% of female politicians in this country are Democrats nowadays. If she was a normal politician who had moved up from obscurity into the congress this would happen -- but she is a Republican operative first who only started running for office at 50 after a long career of helping the likes of John Ashcroft, Tom DeLay and Scooter Libby behind the scenes, so probably not.
"anti-Bush districts" s/b "anti-Trump districts" of course.
I wonder if the talk of primary opponents has put a spine into DiFi. If so then I'd like to see her primaried. She might shift further or California might get a better senator.
Can't tell your players without a scorecard.
Lawyer Veselnitskaya, who met with DJT Jr, represented Prevezon principal who laundered money from Hermitage, the firm that Magnitsky investigated before he was killed.
13 to 3, with this link intended there:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-15/russia-laundering-probe-puts-trump-tower-meeting-in-new-light
One thing that I have seen disputed is whether the "insider" is in fact Poopadoozly and subsequently the Australian ambassador's actions poorly characterized by Simpson.
Natasha Bertrand:
Source close to Fusion tells me the Trump campaign source Simpson referenced in SJC testimony was Papadopoulos.
Separately, the FBI's walk-in source was a reference to Australian diplomat who reported Papadopoulos' comments about Russian dirt in mid-2016.
My understanding is that the testimony was from before the Papadopoulos stuff was out in public.
Re: 3/7, this , and as 13 says is about Hermitage and the Magnitsky Act.
Gah, sorry. +"isn't new" + tagging
From 3 link:
[35/] Steele went to Rome, gets debriefed by the FBI, and learns in the debriefing that the FBI, in September 2016, has a "voluntary" source inside the Trump campaign. (Tr. 175-176). READ THAT AGAIN.
36/ NOTE: that means this is not Papadopoulos. He was flipped when he lied to the FBI. This was also someone who was NOT also a source for Steele.
[45/]Steele and Simpson weren't sure that @Comey EVEN KNEW ABOUT THE ALLEGATIONS. Which would explain a lot. An awful lot.
a "voluntary" source inside the Trump campaign
Let me be the first to suggest the source be called "Deeper Throat."
The tinier the hands, the deeper the throat.
The voluntary source thing is totally compatible with it being the Australian ambassador situation.
If the FBI gave him the code name "Mark Felt", it would be really great.
The point of 18 isn't about the source or who it was, but that elements of the FBI might have been sitting on evidence of treason. That goes far beyond leaking bs about Clinton.
How would Comey not know about the investigation? Are they claiming that lower downs were actively trying to suppress it?
3 link implies 24.2, and in my mind would be consistent with Comey's behavior throughout.
25.2: Though admittedly I didn't pay very close attention.
Well, yeah, I got it from 3. I just am having trouble figuring out how that comes to pass.
The point of 18 isn't about the source or who it was, but that elements of the FBI might have been sitting on evidence of treason.
Sure, with caveats around "treason". But I've seen multiple people, including the tweetstorm linked here, jump on the voluntary/walk-in source thing as indicating it's not just Papadopoulos, when it does no such thing.
Not a headline*, but i was surprised to see the lame ass NYTimes' "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia" article come up. Apparently it led Steele to stop going to the FBI as he thought it indicated they were not taking it seriously
It is the rare story that gets increasing notice months and years later (and Baquet's "defenses" have been laughably bad). The story was *not* by Michael Schmidt who is generally their go-to guy for BS FBI-insider info from the New York office nor is he listed as having contributed reporting (maybe they were all consumed with their Comey letter coup).
*And maybe it is a headline given the number of news orgs briefed (Including the NYTimes) and only Mojo's Corn went with it (and his just seemed part of that weird week where all sorts of stuff was being thrown at the wall in the wake of the Comey letter). I should trigger alert this for the bad memories. Motherfuckers all.
28.last: Agree. Also this release should be viewed as part of the slow build , not some kind of gotcha revelation.
29: Last spring it seemed like the narrative was all Comey, Honorable Guy Who Stood Up to Trump, and so it's a relief to see a bit of Comey, Shithead Who Announced Phoney Clinton Scandal Had Been Resusitated Minutes Before Election. If not explicitly, at least recalling those crazy lead up days.
29.2: And also a story that otherwise useless NY Times public editor Liz Spayd took two cracks (right after it was published and then in January after the dossier was published).
29: I read that as indicating that Steele thought that elements in the FBI were, or could be, participants and that further cooperation might lead to more murders.
I'd love to come up with a comprehensive list of the NYTimes' crimes against journalism at some point. Off the top of my head, we have "Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia", Clinton's emails (shared blame, but they were notably bad), Judith Miller's WMD, Wen Ho Lee, Whitewater. Didn't they also sit on the Bush wiretapping story for a year?
33.last: Yes. They were atrocious on ACORN (part of a guest post I am working on...) . They were pretty bad on Gore 2000 as well.
And although per usual they have some real scoops they are being quite bad in this moment. And it is belied by the incredible thin-skinned defensive the NYT Politics folks are exhibiting on Twtter;. For instance Ken Vogel: Sort of ironic that the left is blasting TRUMP for making inaccurate claims, while simultaneously citing two texts to discredit him -- FIRE AND FURY, & the STEELE DOSSIER -- that contain, or at least allow for, inaccuracies, according to their authors.
Not his use of "the left." The Politioc-ization of the Times has made "not good" worse. (Haberman, Thrush, Vogel, others?)
I don't think the facts support Comey being totally in the dark on this at relevant moments unless I am remembering incorrectly.
I was intrigued by the Twitter examination linked in 2 and 3 but then I saw the author regularly retweets Abr/mson. Still, looks like she has more relevant background than he does.
33- Also they had the deal to pre-release details from Clinton cash which everyone with half a brain knew were bullshit.
I don't think it was in the thread in 3, but Steele also talked to a group of reporters in Oct 2016 including from WaPo and NYT.
That's not all: Fusion and Steele himself briefed news outlets on the findings. Among those outlets was the New York Times. As the transcript states, the New York Times took part in two briefings with Fusion/Steele -- one in late September and the other in mid-October. The upshot here is that the newspaper published its no-link story just a couple of weeks after the second briefing.
It wasn't a huge deal, but remember the Times on Sen Blumenthal's military service? He was in the military during Vietnam but not in Vietnam himself, everyone knew this, the Times caught him misspeaking I think literally twice over a period of decades and saying Vietnam service rather than Vietnam-era service, and did a couple of days on his disgustingly deceptive perfidy? That was weird.
39: Ah right. I actually sent one of the reporters an email on it. Looking it up just now I see that it was in fact Clyde "Maggie's Dad" Haberman. He repsonded per exchange below. (I actually don't think he was the original author but piled on in some Metro piece.)
JPS: Are you serious? This may be the worst piece of holier-than-thou dreck I've ever read in the Times, and that is saying something. This whole Blumenthal/Vietnam industry you guys have ginned up is right down there in Jeff Gerth territory. Nearly as bad as the Times coverage of the fraudulent ACORN tapes. Learn some context:
http://blogs.courant.com/colin_mcenroe_to_wit/2010/05/the-flaws-in-the-nyt-blumentha.html
CH: Thanks for this note, Mr. Spindler.
Best,
Clyde Haberman
Uh, maybe that's less anonymity that usual.
I sometimes use that pseud when dealing with the press...
Last decade I once really riled up a NYT reporter with an email. He had written elegiacally on French cafes closing; I asked for any non-anecdotal evidence for this being a trend, seeing as eating establishments have a natural life cycle. His reply leant on authority, something like "if it wasn't happening I wouldn't have written it".
38: Right, Forgot about the Clinton Cash* thingie. (and apparently their coverage--and continuing harping on Clinton Fdn. nothingburgers helped fuel the flames of hatred at the Trumpland (NY FBI office) because FBI HQ would not due a real investigation of the Foundation.)
As far as pouring gas on the dumpster fire- Everyone goes out of their way to point out that although Russia also had access to election systems at the state and local level, they did not do anything to mess with actual vote tabulation. As things continue to turn against the Republican party more and more, isn't that the next logical step? I haven't seen anyone with any sort of plan for either preventing it or dealing with it when it does happen. Although they're poised for a wipeout this year, I don't know if Russia would deploy such an attach on behalf of the wider party, or only if Trump decides to run again in 2020 and is facing a massive blowout. So what happens when polls are 10+ points off from the results? Does everyone shrug and say, "Well, that's the process, have to respect the outcome"?
Also, there's been plenty written about "Well, they wouldn't hack the voter tabulation - they'd purge the voter rolls" with zero effect.
So what happens when polls are 10+ points off from the results? Does everyone shrug and say, "Well, that's the process, have to respect the outcome"?
That's what happened in 2016.
"Retired man yells at newspaper"
I kid. Honestly, Stormcrow is the best NYT/other big political media takedown person I've encountered, and I wish he had a better forum to do it than here. Don't use Twitter, though.
The protestations that Russian hackers did not alter election counts have struck me as more hope than fact, generally made by people not in a position to authoritatively make those claims.
47: Cleland lost in 2002 with a 10 point discrepancy between the polls and the results. In Georgia, with DRE voting machines. Therefore, I'm going to boldly assert that we'll just continue to live our lives in a dying caricature of a democracy.
50: Did it ever become publicly known who was behind Media Whores Online?
This is totally the sort of thing a very stable genius would say at a cabinet meeting.
47: The Secure Elections Act seems like a good start, is liked by at least one election security researcher, and has broader support at the moment than I might cynically have guessed.
47. Pretty sure the Russian motivation is private and public destabilization of democratic norms over putting anyone specific in power. They supported LePen not because they particularly wanted a racist in power, but because an opponent weaker in fact helps them in the word, and an opponent who appears weaker allows domestic press coverage to the effect of "Are you sure you want democracy?"
I was bored, and then had trouble sleeping last night, so I read the whole testimony. It was fascinating how completely separate the R and D hours of questioning were, and I also found the descriptions of how Fusion does its work quite interesting.
56: This is what makes the whole thing so confusing. Trump having close ties with Russian mobsters is totally unrelated to the Russians trying to install Trump as president to weaken America. The latter group of Russians would have been equally happy to install any unstable ignoramus as US president, even if they had no ties to Russia. Paul LePage, Tom Tancredo, Chuck Woolery, Jill Stein, Roseanne Barr, whoever.
And then we have the THIRD factor that Trump happens to personally love Putin and dreams of emulating Putin in every way as a leader and man. Which again is basically unrelated in that the Russians would be trying to elect Trump even if they had nothing but boring technocrats as the face of the government.
58: It finally makes sense to me that Trump was elected President. Who else has all those qualifications?
This is what makes the whole thing so confusing. Trump having close ties with Russian mobsters is totally unrelated to the Russians trying to install Trump as president to weaken America. The latter group of Russians would have been equally happy to install any unstable ignoramus as US president, even if they had no ties to Russia.
I agree with the second sentence, but you don't think they planted the idea in Trump's head and/or groomed him as a candidate because of his pre-existing ties?
And you don't think #3 "Trump happens to personally love Putin and dreams of emulating Putin in every way as a leader and man" is entirely because Putin and his cronies gave Trump money and support? Trump is entirely transactional, if you praise him or give him money he'll love you.
Trump and Putin are ideologically compatible. You know who runs government like a business? Putin.
Trump doesn't run businesses likes a business, if you figure that not going bankrupt is part of the ideal.
I have no strong opinions about what goes on inside Trump's head. Maybe he regrets Russian involvement but is being blackmailed, maybe he genuinely loves Putin, maybe he says nice things about Putin to troll the left and Jared or whoever is responsible for the collusion and Trump has no knowledge of it. Trying to get inside his head wouldn't be comfortable.
Re: 60, I doubt they groomed Trump personally. Too many ways for that to go wrong. I wouldn't be too surprised either way about whether they picked him personally years ago, or whether he's the perfect American politician for their interests out of sheer luck.
Re: 61, either possibility is possible. Trump is transactional but based on everything we can tell about Trump, Putin really is everything he wishes he was himself: a manly auto- and plutocrat.
Trump and Russia remind me of this. If 5 years ago someone wrote a book about a president with all Trump's weaknesses as a politician and candidate, it would be implausible. Either he happened by accident or they made it happen deliberately and it worked; is either one more or less likely than the other?
Re: 60, I doubt they groomed Trump personally. Too many ways for that to go wrong.
I'm not saying they groomed him the way a child molester befriends a vulnerable child. I'm saying they saw how easily manipulatable he is and played him like a fiddle, and probably stroked his ego about what a good president he'd be. The best!
Per 3, Trump has connections with Russian organized crime going back years. Assuming Russian mafiosi are feudatories of the state, that made Trump available to Russia as an agent, and they likely would have picked him up as being potentially useful, if only for money laundering. Then, probably years later, when their agent decides to get involved in politics, they decide to back him as part their general destabilization strategy, and set up the Trump Tower meeting to buy some specific policy actions just in case he wins.
Josh Marshall had a good piece recently on the different strands of Trump-Russia and how we don't yet know whether or how they are connected.
Why is there no talk at all about any of these Republicans in anti-Bush districts switching to become Democrats? When your constituents change their party affiliation, why not at least try? Hundreds of white southern Democrats did in the 80s and 90s. In the Bush administration at least 2 Senators switched to Democrat, and Bush hadn't made the Republican brand nearly as toxic as Trump has.
Barbara Comstock seems like a natural given that she is the most doomed incumbent of all, and about 80% of female politicians in this country are Democrats nowadays. If she was a normal politician who had moved up from obscurity into the congress this would happen -- but she is a Republican operative first who only started running for office at 50 after a long career of helping the likes of John Ashcroft, Tom DeLay and Scooter Libby behind the scenes, so probably not.
I think the end of this answers the beginning. There just aren't many Republican officeholders left who aren't fundamentally creatures of the party, even compared to ten years ago.
Beth Fukumoto comes to mind. Ana Navarro at least voted for Clinton.
And Josh Barro, I guess. Not a great gain.
Almost all of the actual moderate Republicans either died or became Democrats years ago. The ones left are the hardcore loyalists, as evidenced by their response to Trump becoming their leader.
You're forgetting the newly embraced racists.
Right. I think by most measures the most "moderate" Republican in the entire current House is ... Pete King, a right-wing blowhard by any reasonable standard. Susan Collins, the most plausible current "moderate" would have been an absolutely standard party-line Republican even in, say, 1998, not in some long-gone distant past of Jacob Javits.
I think the most moderate Republican in the current house is Charlie Dent, but he's retiring. The one who votes against the Republicans most often is Walter Jones but that's more because he's been gradually transforming into Ron Paul.
If you put the Republican Party above the white race, you're a cuck.
he's been gradually transforming into Ron Paul.
Now there's the premise for a creepy horror movie.
52: "generally made by people not in a position to authoritatively make those claims."
Very possibly because the systems are set up in ways that nobody can make authoritative claims about their security.
I've finished the Woolf book and am delighted by how good it is. Will try to write more and more thoughtfully later, but it is very elegantly written, and by far the most damning quotes in it are those from Trump that are on the public record, such as his CIA speech. I think it approaches very responsibly the ethical and epistemological difficulties of reporting the statements of proven liars who have clear motives to lie to you. The portrait of Bannon is delightfully credible, and I'd be astonished if there were not recordings to back up anything verbatim.
Also, there are lots of delightful quotes that were missed by the people skim reading.,
Related: the idiot Pete Hoekstra encounters Dutch media for the first time as US ambassador in the Hague:
https://twitter.com/RGjournalist/status/951102206325002240/video/1
"C'mon, guys, this is not the way it works."
"This is the Netherlands! You have to answer questions!"
Wait until the new U.S. ambassador to Austria points out that Austrians aren't even allowed to turn around when the der Kommissar's in town. O-oh.
I am now seriously considering that it might be time for us to invite the Dutch to come over and set up a new government in Britain again, as our present lot seems (much as they did in 1688) to be ineffectual, demented, and in the pay of foreign autocrats.
That is why you need to put Meghan Markle in charge of everything.
80 Our central committee meeting this week had a featured speaker on tribal sovereignty. I was tempted to ask if it might be possible to recruit a delegation to take over, as we're seemingly incapable of self-government.
(I was hoping to find a suitable line from Cherokee Nation v. Georgia to support the contention, but, alas, nothing really fits. Always worth reading Marshall, though.)
It's not Marshall, but the plaintiffs that get off the best lines, though:
The bill set forth the complainants to be
"the Cherokee Nation of Indians, a foreign state, not owing allegiance to the United States, nor to any State of this union, nor to any prince, potentate or State, other than their own."
"That, from time immemorial, the Cherokee Nation have composed a sovereign and independent State, and in this character have been repeatedly recognized, and still stand recognized by the United States, in the various treaties subsisting between their nation and the United States."
That the Cherokees were the occupants and owners of the territory in which they now reside before the first approach of the white men of Europe to the western continent, "deriving their title from the Great Spirit, who is the common father of the human family, and to whom the whole earth belongs." Composing the Cherokee Nation, they and their ancestors have been and are the sole and exclusive masters of this territory, governed by their own laws, usages, and customs.
The bill states the grant, by a charter in 1732, of the country on this continent lying between the Savannah and Alatahama rivers, by George the Second, "monarch of several islands on the eastern coast of the Atlantic," the same country being then in the ownership of several distinct, sovereign, and independent nations of Indians, and amongst them the Cherokee Nation.
The foundation of this charter, the bill states, is asserted to be the right of discovery to the territory granted; a ship manned by the subjects of the king having,"about two centuries and a half before, sailed along the coast of the western hemisphere, from the fifty-sixth to the thirty-eighth degree of north latitude, and looked upon the face of that coast without even landing on any part of it."
This right, as affecting the right of the Indian nation, the bill denies, and asserts that the whole length to which the right of discovery is claimed to extend among European nations is to give to the first discoverer the prior and exclusive right to purchase these lands from the Indian proprietors, against all other European sovereigns, to which principle the Indians have never assented, and which they deny to be a principle of the natural law of nations or obligatory on them.
On moderate Republicans: there are a streak of Republicans here who are trying to be moderate and productive and find a new model. I don't think the national party has much to do with them, and in fact, one of them just got ousted as minority leader. But, after a decade of being exiled, there are Republicans in CA looking for new ways.
I now live in a traditionally Republican area of a very Democratic state. So in this unusual situation where there are Republicans who have no voice in the state legislature, it's interesting to see how they are divided into the ones who want to be moderate and try to accomplish something, and the assholes who spend all their time trying to embarrass Democrats with stunts. Presumably if they had a chance of taking power the nice guys would suddenly be crowded out by the assholes.
77. The Washington Villagers aren't happy with Wolff. He doesn't understand how things work there and doesn't care, is the charge.
The New Yorker has a very revealing piece by a Politico writer that does a good job channeling Sally Quinn of yore.
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I view recall elections as conceptually suspect in most cases. This is an exception.
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86 When the Revolution comes it's going to be difficult to decide whose heads to chop off first, the donor class's or the Villagers'
Who am I kidding? The Revolution will never come.
Fortunately, the Old Post Office hotel appears to be concentrating the worst of both so tightly the revolution won't have to choose.
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I'm drunk. So the shithead who is acting director is still intent on shopping stolen cultural property, this time not to our institution but to a soon to open national museum. I've been told angrily that it's not my business but of course it is, it's my exact curatorial expertise. I have pics and other documentation. Unbelievable. This would cause an international scandal if this museum were to buy this given the local political situation. What a fucking dumbass. I'm this close to walking this upstairs (where btw I've been recently told I walk on fucking water, not that matters one way or teh other.) The reaction from this shithead is so extreme that I'm beginning to think this he's getting kickbacks from this vendor. Why would he push back on me so vehemently otherwise? It's really fucked up.
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this s/b that.
Like I said, drunk.
I'm torn between walking this upstairs or walking in to an alphabet agency's art crime division next time I'm in the area. And I know that this is known about.
Is all this misconduct documented in a way you can securely rely on in the future?
It's always 2pm somewhere in the world so you can claim you're so mad that you're drunk during working hours.
At least in this country, where I know you are not, if you have knowledge that a crime is being committed (eg the federal crime of trafficking in stolen antiquities) or will be committed in your area of work and do nothing you may face your own personal legal liability. And of course the organization is put at risk as well. If you know it's a crime say something, and if the organization is criminal enough that reporting a crime to the top produces no results you probably need to quit. God forbid you should end up in the custody of some police force in wherever you are just because crimes are happening at your worksite. Obviously I have no on the ground knowledge whatsoever but the more general message would be very cautious about thinking this is something you can safely ignore because you're not the criminal or that the only consequence of ignoring the issue will be moral, as opposed to practical, negative consequences for you.
Either way, be careful abroad because our State Department is being aggressively shitheadized.
Also very true. Assuming that law exists at all in your jurisdiction, I also strongly recommend finding and talking to a local lawyer.
And not going into the issue on the public web.
88: Based on that article I'd say the Villagers'. The donor class includes some people I agree with. As for the rest of them, say what you will about the tenets of plutocracy, at least it's an ethos.
Post of mine got eaten.
Thanks RH.
I may well have to quit. Don't know what will be next for me if anything. This is making me sick to my stomach.
101 I'm good with that. Pour encourager les autres, if nothing else .
Sorry to hear you're in such a crappy situation, Barry.
OK. I was trying to ignore the Susan Glasser piece linked in 86 but the responses convinced me to go ahead and plow through. It truly is a work of staggering insipidity.
For those not wishing to click let me share a bit. The main "substance" of her article after she is trough clutching pearls at the "mistakes" in the book is a fleshing out of the events at this breakfast:
Take that Four Seasons breakfast that Wolff didn't quite get right. I happened to be there on the morning of Friday, February 3, 2017, when Ivanka Trump, swathed in a tight, sleeveless sheath dress, high heels, and cocktail-party-voltage makeup, sent the normally staid room of pant-suited Washington lawyers and lobbyists into what can only be described as a tizzy. She was having breakfast with Dina Powell, a former Bush Administration official with impeccable Washington-establishment credentials, who had just started work with her at the White House, and Indra Nooyi, the C.E.O. of PepsiCo, who had been persuaded to join a new White House advisory council of business executives.She points out--as many others have--that Wolff mixed up a "Mark" and a "Mike" Berman showing what a loser he is; (he may as well not even exist in that town). And then goes on to point out a lot of potential Beltway insights he missed by being such a loserhead.
Which she then admits would all have been wrong: But, of course, Wolff's book fills in the rest of the picture. There would be no normalizing this White House, unlike any that came before it
I actually thought that the Mark/Mike Berman mistake was credibility enhancing rather than the reverse. Someone who was making up fiction would be trying to make it plausible. Someone who was writing from notes of a real event might very well mix up two people with similar names. It makes Wolff sound like someone with a bad sense of who's likely to show up at the Four Seasons, but someone who probably was talking about real events that he had notes about.
And of course he immediately owned up to the mistake when it was pointed out.
But, yes, it is not knowing exactly what it would *mean* for Mark vs. Mike Berman to be there that is his fatal flaw in their eyes.
That Susan Glasser piece is so weird. It's totally upfront about how stupid and petty the whole Washington-insider mentality is, to the point that it almost seems like the point of the piece is to attack the insider mentality. I mean she explicitly admits that the mistakes are meaningless and that Wolff gets the broader issues right. Yet it's still framed as a defense of insider Washintgon-y knowledge which is important because ... totally unexplained reasons, even though it's not?
The piece isn't even really an attack on Wolff. I guess it's more like a cry for help for someone smart enough to realize that her illusions of a predictable orderly political world of which she has powerful "inside" knowledge (this is the common, perhaps the fatal, Washington DC illusion -- you, unlike the rubes, "really" know what's going on, even though of course you don't) were illusions, but dumb enough to want to cling to the illusion of knowledge and control anyway.
Or maybe it's just a deeply weird way of saying "yeah Wolff is basically right about the big stuff but the dude is still a total asshole with shit for journalistic practice ," which put that way is probably true.
Thanks for 110. Crystallizes the aspect of the piece that I could not find the words for. Almost a lament for a lost world.
Yet none of them will give a dime to my Kickstarter for reanimating David Broder.
The reaction to Wolff has been totally inexplicable. Is anything he reported in any way unbelievable? Some of the salacious details -- Trump's strategy to hit on wives, for example -- wouldn't make a top 20 list of embarrassing Trump revelations.
The Susan Glasser piece is the written equivalent of "Oh shit I need to present about something but I do not have a presentation put together. Let me do something in the next two hours with what I have handy."
Communicating that way happens pretty often, but it's unfortunate, a consequence of organizational failure. Communicating that way about larger contexts as SG does is appalling. The only times I've had to be that slipshod in a context where it mattered, I disclaimed left and right-- fast-moving topic, preliminary ideas, recent suggestion to explore this, yadda yadda.
I don't know if that framing made much of a difference to anything but my self-respect. If she doesn't know why she's writing but has to fill up space, saying so rather than pretending to competence not actually present in the piece would be a sign that she knows the difference between good analysis and bad.
It's a review of a book that was just released-- did she even have time to read the thing? If there are no pre-publication galleys, what's the point, just to talk to sound knowing?
I guess the organizational failure is some editors decision to publish the review before there's time, the written equiavelent of putting out Mr Right Now.
Contemptible, silence is better.
The Washington Post's open use of the word "shithole" in a headline is one of the clearer indications I've seen that even the DC establishment realizes that the old rules of deference, fake-comity and respect for the power-players are just vanishing if not gone. I was heartened by that.
The NYT's main headline is still euphemistically saying "disparaging words" indicating that they aren't quite ready to declare game over to the DC past as yet, but at least "shithole" shows up in a sub-headline.
Whatever emerges from this nightmare, if we do emerge from it, we won't have the same Washington, because even the institutionalists will finally have got it through their skulls that the institutions just can't contain the insane wreck if the Republican party, or the reaction from Democrats, and that the bipartisan 1865-1994 era is never ever ever ever coming back. At least I hope so.
It was the first time they used the word "shithole" that wasn't a restaurant review.
And he's awake and tweeting.
Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for "peanuts," only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!
I guess this means they didn't invite him to the royal wedding?
I just had the same conversation about CNN, about how we never expected to see the word "shithole" in a CNN headline.
Oh give me a home where the Trumpalo roam
And the coal and mine tailings play
Where often is heard a disparaging word
Because the president is a fucking racist shitbird but he's our fucking racist shitbird, and the skies are polluted all day.
America will have tremendous shitholes, very stable shitholes, shitholes filled with covfefe, you'll get tired of all the shitholes.
120. Yay! We won't have to trail down to London to throw eggs at him!
I, for one, welcome our new Norwegian immigrants.
I COME FROM THE LAND OF ICE AND SNOW/VIKING POTATO PARHUMP OSLO
Norwegians liked immigration before it was on radio.
Anders Breivik has already started filling out the immigration forms.
Sadly, State no longer has any employees to accept them.
The reaction to Wolff has been totally inexplicable. Is anything he reported in any way unbelievable?
The part about the Gorilla Channel sounded a little implausible to me.
Wait until the new U.S. ambassador to Austria points out that Austrians aren't even allowed to turn around when the der Kommissar's in town.
Nah, if there is any controversy, he'll just blame it on the kangaroos.
133: Oh, come on, now. I'm sure it's really a very nice thread.
People less dumb than Trump seem to be unaware that the United States doesn't own the old embassy building anyway and never has. It's part of the Grosvenor estate. What the Qataris are buying is the residue of a 999 year lease, on which the Duke of Westminster could presumably raise the rent to a punitive figure any time he wanted it back.