Tag Archives: Bob Woodward

Ok, He Paid Off a Porn Star. But Where’s Some Justice for Being a Sociopath About COVID?

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I swear to whatever god you send money to and the continued health of my dog Sam, the world’s scariest beast, that I wake up every day committed to not giving Donald Trump another square millimeter of space in my brain. Enough was enough six goddam years ago.

But still. If and when he actually is indicted — for paying off the porn babe, inciting a riot to overthrow the government or anything in between — we’ll soon all be back in The Psycho Cheeto’s unstable orbit. Even now, his (never very bright) team is spitballing ideas on how to maximize/monetize the spectacle of his arrest. To cuff or not to cuff? To march in the front door or enter via the Waste Management garbage dock? To make a grand “Braveheart” speech (i.e. plea for another riot and more “legal defense funds”) or simply hustle back into the SUV with a brave, “tormented-by-the-libs” wave?

Amid all the hysteria of the past few days, as Manhattan authorities hardened the defenses around the court house, and the usual MAGA invertebrates threatened … something … against the DA, and it was revealed that Trump pulled in another $1.5 million just for claiming he was going to be perp-walked, I couldn’t help but notice a small, back-pages item on the internets.

Maybe you too caught The [Failing] New York Times piece a couple days ago describing the scene inside the CDC as the virulence and scope of the COVID virus was becoming clear?

If you live inside the reality bubble none of it was surprising. Basically, the Trump administration threatened CDC administrators and scientists to playdown/ignore/outright dismiss trending data — woke science-y stuff, y’know — that this thing was going to be big. All while, as we know from Bob Woodward’s recordings of Trump, the sociopath knew how serious it was, but preferred to do … nothing.

Now, inciting a riot to overthrow the government is to my mind a fairly serious offense. But being deliberately, consciously indifferent to a coming plague that was already shown to be lethal is psychopathic incompetence on a far grander scale. (I love the part where CDC employees were sent to airports around the U.S. to screen passengers arriving from China … but not to wear masks in order not to “alarm” bystanders.)

Says the piece, ” … many of their reports — including ones on when the virus arrived in the United States, guidance for meatpacking plants and religious services and on the risks to children — were suppressed or altered beyond recognition by the Trump administration, several said. (The House select subcommittee on the pandemic concluded that the Trump administration had meddled in or blocked at least 19 reports.)

“Morale plunged after a May 2020 report estimated that imposing social distancing measures one week earlier in March 2020 would have saved 36,000 lives.”

36,000 for that week. Think about that. Or consider other estimates that Trump/Jared/Mike Pence’s incompetence — that is to say the astonishingly inadequate logistical preparation by the government of the most technologically advanced nation on earth —- could very well have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths over the longer run of COVD. (Some of the deceased obviously being MAGA cultists who gave serious thought to drinking bleach instead of listening to woke lib doctors.)

Yet this atrocity will likely never be adjudicated anywhere by anyone. Perhaps it would be different if a porn star had died somewhere … . I don’t know. But in that great mythical, sane world somewhere out there we would have had a full-scale 9/11 style commission, with public hearings and CDC witnesses and depositions of The Cheeto, Jared, Pence and all the other gross incompetents muzzling scientists … in their self-serving effort to avoid responsibility for a disaster that might impact their reelection campaign.

So yeah, I guess we’ll have to be satisfied with an indictment over a porn babe pay-off. A small beer arrest that will set off yet another freak show spectacle wherein Trump the Victim raises millions off MAGA shut ins, gun nuts and anti-wokers and likely gooses his poll numbers with that same crowd.

It ain’t much. It ceretainly isn’t justice for the 35,00-100,000+ dead from a combination of gross mendacity and incompetence. But it’s what we’ve got.

Repeat After Me, “It Will Never Be ‘Normal’ Again.”

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Forget raining, it’s pouring Trump scandal books. The past few days I’ve been toggling between Jeffrey Toobin’s, “True Crimes and Misdemeanors” and Brian Stelter’s, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”

There are separate discussions to be had about both, as there are over Bob Woodward’s “Rage”, the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt’s, “Donald Trump v. The United States” and top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman’s “Where the Law Ends.”

But one stark takeaway from Toobin and Stelter is how completely unprepared “the establishment” was for Donald Trump. More to the point both are argue, is how unprepared traditional legal bureaucracies and journalism organizations still are even today, nearly four years and 20,000 lies after Trump was elected … the first time.

Toobin (and Weissman, based on interviews he’s already given), both lament the overly-cautious, tradition-bound behavior of Robert Mueller as he confronted Trump’s total obstruction of his investigation. A creature from an era when people in high offices showed basic respect for legal “norms”, Mueller (and at least one key deputy) refused to push a direct face-to-face confrontation with Trump or any of his family over the source of their wealth, despite clear indications that its roots were in Russia and therefore they were all highly likely to be compromised by Vladimir Putin.

The spectre of litigating against … the President of the United States … over large scale money laundering for Russian oligarch/gangsters was simply a place Mueller didn’t want to go. Better to deliver a narrowly-investigated, bridled report that suggested as much but left all the ugly charging business to Congress.

Stelter’s book is a dizzying trip into Fox’s alternate universe. The naked careerism and mendacity. The all but total dereliction of journalistic duty in favor of locking down and pandering to an audience with a nearly-religious allegiance to a “norm-busting” celebrity figure. It’s all there, plus some.

Bad as all that is, the problem both Toobin and Stelter suggest is that “normal”, “traditional” politicians, courts and media are still off-balance and indecisive about how to respond to Trump. And this comes barely a month before the next election and with Trump plainly setting up to deny the results of the election should he lose.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the people in control of response to Trump’s (and Bill Barr’s, and Mitch McConnell’s) flagrant norm and tradition-breaking are almost all figures groomed and elevated to their positions from what appears to be a lost era. An era when editors and judges and sensible, civic-minded politicians always gave presidents the benefit of the doubt, always sought to present a “balance” between “both sides” and always avoided the word, “lying.”

But if you watch the Trump spectacle day after day and if you read what you can, the only conclusion is that we don’t live in that era or world anymore, and given social media and every other platform of disinformation, we never will again. The evolution of “normal” has passed our institutions by and is rocketing into a new time zone.

The Eisenhower-era of journalism, courts and politics is long gone. And we’re at a point, right now today where tradition-groomed and bound judges, politicians and journalists are have to ask themselves if they’re really going to play this moment as Robert Mueller did? Are they going to continue to respect the “norms” of their professions, all of which have been mocked, abused and degraded by Donald Trump, in the anachronistic hope that eventually, at some point, if not now, November or a decade from now, normal respect for tradition will prevail again?

Or, are they going to accept a harsh reality and adapt to change?

Frankly, if Trump is able to create enough chaos to declare and sustain victory I don’t see how old time tradition will hold sway in the US of A ever again.

It’s Time for the Press to Get Nefarious with Trump’s Taxes

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Last week the editor of The New York Times said he’s willing to risk jail to publish Donald Trump’s tax returns. Because he’s regarded as a serious guy in a serious job we should regard that as a serious promise. But it is also a call to hackers, IRS bureaucrats, former accountants and anyone else with access, legal or (more likely) nefarious, to do business with the grand Grey Lady on the single biggest untold story of this election.

the editor, Dean Baquet was at Harvard with Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, who was at first a bit tremulous about the idea of publishing a private citizen’s most comprehensive and revealing financial disclosure. I mean, people could get arrested! But as the conversation went on Baquet said, “[Trump’s] whole campaign is built on his success as a businessman and his wealth.” To which Woodward, perhaps steeping up his bravado said, “Some things you have to do. . . . This defines Donald Trump. . . . There’s a big hole here.”

Do you think? Trump’s appeal may be more rooted in his exploitation of age-old white grievance and resentments, but the “fact” he’s as rich as Croesus, or so he says, adds tremendously to the enthusiasm his various baskets have for him. Were he not living in a penthouse decorated in a style best described as “early Saddam Hussein” and not (currently) married to a former achitecture student-turned-bikini model and not fly around in his own 757, he’d be just another duck-tailed doofus gassing on at the 19th hole. But roll all that into one gaudy picture and you’ve got something that screams “Success!” to America’s perennially self-pitying white middle and lower classes.

Here, here, here and here are some good Trump tax-related stories based on what little can be discerned.

The ethical nut of this promise, this vow, from Baquet is that Trump has so blatantly and egregiously gamed the standard politician-journalism game that the only way to crack him is with what on the face of it is Edward Snowden-like criminality … and let the lawyers sort it out later, a la Daniel Ellsburg during the Vietnam war. And I believe he’s right.

Last Friday’s fiasco at Trump’s new hotel in D.C., where he played the national media for chumps by exploiting their live national coverage for an infomercial for the building goosed with a bunch of campaign-rally hosannahs from grizzled war vets before finally A: Conceding that Barack Obama was born in the USA, and then, B: Accusing Hillary Clinton of starting the whole racist birther BS, sent the press into a remarkable fury. Even CNN, directed by former “Today Show” exec Jeff Zucker, a guy who would stick viewers’ heads in a stopped-up cruise ship toilet knowing his target demo would watch it 24/7, expressed outrage over the incident.

Why, exactly, you ask? Certainly not because Friday was the first time Trump has “rick rolled” an audience. That’s SOP for the guy. The critical difference Friday was this: Trump made the assembled reporters and their colleagues and bosses back at the office look like fools. Or, chumps, as I say. Now, having juuuust a bit of experience with Le Grande Journalist Ego, reporters and editors are pretty thick-skinned about being called names — like “fool” and “chump” — but get really upset when someone shows a whole country how indisputably easy it is to make them look … well, foolish and chumpy.

So a guy the vast majority of the press regards as a fraud on one level or another plays them for a free commercial and makes them look ridiculous. What are they, can they do about it? The Times followed Friday’s fiasco with a “tough” analysis piece, saying, “He nurtured the conspiracy like a poisonous flower, watering and feeding it with an ardor that still baffles and embarrasses many around him. Mr. Trump called up like-minded sowers of the same corrosive rumor, asking them for advice on how to take a falsehood and make it mainstream in 2011, as he weighed his own run for the White House.”

But as most of the gamed-and-ridiculed press has come to understand, “tough” analyses, “strongly-worded” editorials and hour after hour of gob-smacked, incredulous talking heads are all gnat-bites on the hide of a creature long accustomed to nefarious behavior. None of it means anything, because none of it has any significant effect.

The only topic, the only single subject matter that carries any weight, that would pull down the (gold metallic micro-fibre) curtain and allow voters to see and assess Trump for what he really is are his tax returns. That is where The Story is, and pretty much everyone in the press, including FoxNews and Bretibart, knows it.

Which brings people like the editor of the New York Times and Bob Woodward — who’s colleague David Farenthold has fast-tracked himself to a Pulitzer for the most dogged and aggressive coverage of Trump’s finances — to say out loud 50 days before the election that the time is nigh for two wrongs to make a right. We are talking the Presidency of the United State here, not doping in pro sports or the machinations behind some gas pipeline.

If you’re going to break the rules you traditionally operate under — by soliciting, maybe even paying for Trump’s tax returns — you do it to properly, fully dissect a “non-traditional” (i.e. quite possibly criminal) candidate for the most influential office on the planet … and let the lawyers argue it out later.

And you do it now.