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

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Brian Lambert

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.

Resistance to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Futile. Because It Delivers Comfort, Status and Cash.

Posted on February 28, 2023 by Brian Lambert

On the same day that Elon Musk, an allegedly busy, future-oriented industrial magnate, found time to weigh in in support of a racist cartoonist, I came across a new piece by one of my favorite bona fide Smart People.

In The New York Times, columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein writes, “In 2021, I interviewed Ted Chiang, one of the great living sci-fi writers. Something he said to me then keeps coming to mind now.

” ‘I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism’, Chiang told me. ‘And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two’. …

“Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former. We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

“One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I. There is a wisdom to that, but wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation.”

“Regulation” of course is a hotter-than-usual topic because of the MAGA-hyped train wreck in Ohio. (By the way, is anyone else laughing at old school, Reagan-loving de-regulators like Joe Scarborough now fulminating about too much de-regulation?)

But Klein — and sci-fi writer Chiang’s — point about capitalism, i.e. profit-making and shareholder value being the true driving force behind the inevitable and (very) fast approaching world of Artificial Intelligence can’t be over-stated. His piece gets into the recent bungles by Microsoft and Google introducing their competing larval-stage AI-driven search/chatbot features.

You may have followed the simultaneously comical and eery conversation between a human reporter and Microsoft’s HAL-9000-style creation “Bing” in which … well, here’s how Klein describes it: “Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality, named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems, and tried to convince [reporter Kevin] Roose that his marriage had sunk into torpor and Sydney was his one, true love.”

“No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.“

Google and Microsoft will correct their embarrassing spring training mistakes and soldier on, injecting AI into every aspect of privacy-invading/personal data mining and monetizing any sci fi writer could ever imagine. Reaping, as they mature, even vaster fortunes with which to buy off regulatory legislation and invest in the next AI levels up. And who can argue it will play out otherwise? At this point in our evolution capitalism is the vastly predominant engine of human endeavour.

The truly unsettling concept within Klein and Chiang’s critic (one shared by others too numerous to mention) is that resistance to unimpeded AI is for all intents and purposes futile. Why? Because capitalism’s foundational design is to give us what we want, or at least — with the benefit of knowing everything about us on a deep individual level — give us what we believe we want.

Whatever intrusions or controls AI might inflict on us will be assuaged by some new mre sophisticated/cooler/status-lending level of AI-derived convenience, comfort, entertainment … or cost savings. It will be irresistible, in other words.

It’d be different if AI were presented to us as some kind of Bond villain. Were that the case we’d all press the delete key and rally ’round anyone who could nuke the psychopath’s lair. But what is far … far … more likely to happen given the sophistication of advertising and marketing on a user base capitalist systems know at a granular level, is that AI will make so many things so much easier. “Hey! Look! I just got a notification for a condo rental in Cabo! That’s wild. I was just telling to my sister how much I wanted to go there!”

I haven’t taken a survey but I have to think we’re down into single digits in terms of people who are going to rally against convenience … and cash in pocket.

What Would Trump Steal That is So Ultra Top Secret and Why?

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Brian Lambert

When I heard last night that the FBI had raided Trump’s garish Florida mansion, my first reaction was, “Jesus, what took them so long?”

There’s a line of thinking that the public explanation about searching for public documents Trump illegally airlifted out of the White House is merely a cover for executing a raid that very likely will sweep evidence of all sorts of other Trump malfeasance. And that would surprise exactly no one who doesn’t sleep with a Trump-as-Rambo poster over their bed.

Among all the things that have astonished me in the context of Trump’s appeal to “conservatives” is the blindered unwillingness to see the guy as the “fraud” and “con man” his fellow Republican candidates told us he was back in 2015. Why? Because Trump’s astonishing disregard for business ethics, tax laws, SEC statutes, immigration laws and, well, you name it, was abundantly well known to anyone who did business with him in New York and anyone with a passing interest in business reporting by credible national newsapers. There was never any excuse for the Rewpublican managerial class not knowing this long before he descended on the gilded elevator. It was a known fact shortly after he began stinking up the real estate/gossip column scene in the early Eighties.

And yet … to this day … the guy has never been indicted. Hell, we’re to believe his taxes from over a decade ago are still under audit!

And a bit further down the rap sheet, there doesn’t appear to be any on-going investigation of the extremely shady, Russia-assisted “banking” he did with Deutsche Bank, the only crowd of money changers willing to loan him money … even after he sued them … after he refused to re-pay the loan they gave him for Trump Tower Chicago. (I strongly encourage anyone interested to read “Dark Towers”, New York Times financial reporter David Enrich’s briskly-paced tale of the bank’s myriad nefarious executives and endeavors, including those buttressing Trump at his most desperate moments.)

Whether this raid is the first of many dominoes to fall in the clearly broadening, deepening investigation into Trump’s January 6 behavior we must wait … a while longer.

But after consuming 48 hours of reporting and pounditry on this FBI raid. my lizard mind has focused with acute fascinatioin on the nature of these Top, Top Secret documents/information the Feds clearly believe he still possessed. This the information so ultra top secret it can not even be described.

Really? Wow.

But we do know a few things abut this stuff.

A: The Feds absolutely believed Trump had the info, and convinced a Federal judge to let it raid the home of a former President to get it back.

B: Trump quite obviously lied about having whatever it is and did not include it in the 15 boxes of trinkets and souvenirs and whatever the Feds toted away last spring.

C: The Feds and the judge agreed that Trump was unlikely to ever hand it back in a polite, professional manner.

And D: They had good reason to believe Trump would destroy what they were looking for if they gave any notice that they were coming to get it.

Hence, a raid, much like kicking in the door on a meth dealer in Albuquerque.

So then I ask myself, “What would Donald Trump steal and cling to so desperately that he’d risk this scene?”

And I answer by reminding myself that we know two things about Trump with absolute certainty, namely everything is about him and money. This leads me to suspect that whatever Super Double Secret Probation information he stole has to have very high value in terms of either protecting him from some kind of prosecution and/or can be monetized in a negotiation with another party … most likely in a highly nefarious context.

(One of the facical aspects of this episode, as one national security expert pointed out yesterday, is that Trump was obviously too stupid to realize that as POTUS he had the authority to de-classify anything, including whatever the Feds are looking for now, and therefore could have avoided this whole mess.)

Finally, as fans of John LeCarre certainly understand, whatever the Feds are looking for is not one-of-a-kind. There would be copies somewhere. Which means that other than the illegality of iut, the peril her, the risk to national security is who has this information.

And in that case it is the as-yet-unindicted careeert fraud and con man Donald Trump, who long ago demonstrated he will do anything to get what he wants.

After 19 Dead Fourth-Graders It’s Time to Apply “Muscular Bravado.”

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Brian Lambert

Like everything else, reaction to Beto O’Rourke’s crashing of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s post Uvalde press conference immediately split into two separate camps. Tribe A was indignant that anyone, much less Abbott’s rival, would “exploit a tragedy” for “political gain”. Tapes of the incident include voices from the stage around Abbott calling O’Rourke a “son of a bitch” and ordering him thrown out of the building.

The other camp, of which I’m a part, applauded O’Rourke for having the chutzpah, the cojones, the level of proportionate moral indignation to get in the face of a cynically self-serving cast of gun-slaughter enablers, right then and there with all cameras rolling. And this was before we learned how much of what Abbott and other “leaders” of Texas’ law enforcement community was saying at that presser was pretty much utter bullshit.

The O’Rourke Incident instantly recalled an interview with Atlantic writer, Anne Applebaum, that I was listening to driving back from up north this past Tuesday, almost simultaneous with the murder of 19 kids and two adults at yet another America school. Applebaum was the guest on New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s podcast and the topic was her new introduction to the classic book by Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Klein is an interviewer with an exemplary talent for drilling down to the most salient issues of whatever topic he’s covering. And soon the discussion was moving into the “why” of people’s response to often crude, authoritarian leaders and their flagrantly obvious perfidies. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode for all that Klein and Applebaum get in to.

But at one point Applebaum used the phrase “muscular bravado” to explain the appeal of characters like Donald Trump.

Rogues like Trump present themselves as unfettered-by-common-rules-of-decorum warriors defending what large masses of people want defended. Or at least as “fighters” antagonizing the same people large masses want antagonized. The responses are not entirely rational. But it often translates to “heroic” in the eyes of people, as Applebaum and Arendt say, isolated by their ignorance and fearful of what they don’t understand.

A salient point here being that in 2022 USA this kind of bravado is entirely in the possession of Trumpist Republicans, and this explains much of the imbalance of energy and enthusiasm between Republicans and Democrats.

The takeaway is that politics/leadership is a profoundly emotional game. Barack Obama swung millions his way in 2008 through charisma and the belief that he had the strength and bravery/star-power to make change happen. More to the point, liberals, Democrats and the millions rightfully repulsed and horrified by the complicity of Republicans in America’s gun slaughter, erosion of Constitutional rights, degradation of our court system, indifference to climate change, wildly out of balance tax system, etc. have no real choice but to accept the power and importance of “muscular bravado” in rallying voters.

Liberals may accept this in theory, but are often embarrassed by it in reality. Bravado of a sort that appeals to largely non-ideological, non-partisan voters strikes the average policy-intense liberal as corny and suspicious, and beneath the dignity of a serious leader.

The dilemma for liberals, is that bravado works, on swing voters if not them. And in our current moment, as we reel from yet another grade school slaughter, genuinely indignant bravado could be a very effective emotional trigger for voters.

O’Rourke isn’t a newby to gun reform. He’s favored a flat-out ban on assault rifles for a while now. So I’m accepting his indignation as genuine. He’s demonstrated he’ll take the political risk that comes with his position on the issue. Just as with his “stunt” at Abbott’s press conference he’s demonstrated he’s prepared to take the blowback for getting right up in the grilles of the ghouls (Ted Cruz was standing behind Abbott) and accuse them for their complicity.

Liberals are notoriously not single-issue voters. Get a Democrat or a Democratic politician going on what needs to be done to set the country right and you invariably get a list longer than a Cheesecake Factory menu.

But 19 more dead fourth-graders presents as unequivocal a single-minded life-or-death issue as any imaginable, and O’Rourke is correctly calculating that no matter how short our attention spans, the outrage over gun-mutilated grade schoolers is something that carries deep, long-lasting moral outrage. Horror-struck outrage of a kind that can — and should — be resurrected repeatedly, with muscular bravado, for months until November and years beyond that until the cynics are driven back under their rocks.

The final point being, Republicans have no good faith response to their role in our gun insanity. With an unabashed siege on their corruption and reckless disregard for … children! … Democrats have an issue that like Joe Pesci in some Marty Scorsese mob movie they can hold Republicans’ faces to the burner with.

They need to do it.

I’m Feeling Another Sarah Palin Payday

Posted on February 14, 2022 by Brian Lambert

One-time vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is joined by "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson during a tea party rally against the international nuclear agreement with Iran in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 9.

Purely as a distraction you understand, I’ve taken an interest in Sarah Palin’s defamation trial against The New York Times. A decision may come down today, and betting money says she’ll lose. But losing could likely mean yet another in a series of pop culture paydays for the ex-mayor, ex-governor, ex-vice presidential candidate and ex-Masked Singer.

If you haven’t followed this at all, the very short story is this: Palin is accusing the Times, its editorial department and its editor at the time, James Bennet, of sullying her reputation in 2017 when he referenced an ad her “team” ran in 2011. The ad, fairly typical of other rabble-rousing pro-Second Amendment fund raising appeals, used gunsight imagery — a collection of crosshairs — over 20 Democrat-held congressional districts. You know, “They’re in our sights.”

Truly clever stuff. But invariably effective in ginning up small dollar contributions from the right-wing base.

The issue is that one of the “targeted” districts belonged to Gabby Giffords, who not long after was seriously wounded by a lunatic in a Tucson rampage that killed six people, including a nine year-old girl. (After being shown the ad prior to the attack, Giffords herself said, “We’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district, and when people do that, they’ve got to realize there are consequences to that action’.”

Sarah Palin vs. Ernie Chambers – Ricochet

Six years later Bennet added in a reference to the ad as he edited an opinion piece in the wake of the baseball field shooting — by a Bernie Sanders supporter — that seriously wounded Republican congressman Steve Scalise. His intended point, he says, being to draw attention to how violent rhetoric and imagery can lead to truly violent actions by the unstable.

Palin wasn’t having it. She had been sullied! And by god and mama grizzlies she was going to take the Times to court.

The truly ludicrous part of Palin’s claim is that the editorial — which Bennet and the Times corrected within hours — had “damaged” her in some way. Which way, she couldn’t say exactly, as Times’ lawyers pointed out that her standing in her political community and by extension her finances didn’t diminish much at all in the aftermath.

Put in another, less polite manner; being accused of anything by a citadel of godless, anti-freedom, elitist-liberal intolerance like The New York Times is — as everyone knows — like a monsoon of gold from the hillbilly firmament. In other words, mam, “Exactly what damage have you suffered?”

True to form, court room observers have noted that Palin hasn’t lost her touch when it comes to self-parody. At one point she declared that this editorial was just another example of how the Times had “lied” about her. The only problem with that being was that no one, not even her, could come up with that other, um, you know, example. Said Palin when pressed in court, “I don’t have the specific references in front of me.”

Right. Well, we understand you’ve only been preparing for this trial for five years. But you get back to us when you’ve done some more research.

Then you factor in Palin being a very high profile-to-notorious public figure and how difficult it is to make a case abut defaming any famous personality.

So how a jury possibly rules in her favor will be a fascinating thing to see.

But the behavior of Mr. Bennet does expose the Times to a standard criticism of bias, certainly in the eyes of the usual right-wing echo chamber suspects. I mean, he did reach back six years for an example of a conservative politician using violent imagery. That leaves him open to accusations of fixed bias.

However, as Bennet — who was later driven out of the Times by the Times itself after running an incendiary opinion piece by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton demanding troops be sent in to subdue George Floyd protestors — explained in court, he was unable to find even one example of a liberal politician using similar violent imagery. In other words, its kind of a PalinWorld thing, that “targeted”, “get ’em in our gun sights” money raising pitch.

If Palin loses today or tomorrow I do hope someone keeps tabs on the speaking circuit/cheesy singing show/reality TV/FoxNews appearance/fund-raising haul that comes her way in the wake of being treated so cruelly and predictably by … a jury of New Yorkers.

I tell you, there’s gold in being a perpetual victim of elitist liberals.

How Did Local Media — or the Times or the Post — Know Scott Quiner Was Anywhere?

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Brian Lambert

First … my condolences to the family of Scott Quiner. No matter the circumstances, someone’s death, especially an entirely preventable death, is a sad occasion. That said, the telling and reporting on Mr. Quiner’s last days leaves several questions unanswered and a lot to be desired.

Quiner is the now nationally famous man from exurban Minneapolis who, unvaccinated by choice, contracted COVID in late October. He was hospitalized and intubated since early November before his wife sued to prevent Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids from disconnecting him. Then just last week, we’re told she flew him to “a hospital in Texas”. At that point her lawyer … told the press (which promptly reported) that though badly malnourished Quiner was once again responsive … before then relaying on that he died two days ago.

My issue with this story from the get-go was how we knew much of anything about what was really happening here?

Like every other hospital, Mercy in Coon Rapids, has laws and rules about disclosing patient information. So it has said little to nothing about Quiner’s condition or it’s reasons for planning to disconnect him … after two and a half months on a ventilator amid a new crush of COVID patients and a dire lack of ICU capacity for “normal” emergencies. (The average ICU stay is three days.)

Everything after that is the word of Mrs. Quiner or her attorney, including where exactly he was being treated in Texas … if anywhere.

This from a Jan. 17 Strib story, “Scott is now in a hospital in Texas getting critical care’, said Marjorie Holsten, a local attorney hired by Quiner’s wife, Anne. ‘The doctor said Scott was the most undernourished patient he has ever seen. The last update I got was yesterday afternoon after some tests had been run; all organs are working except his lungs’. Holsten did not name the Texas hospital.”

How do we know any of that is true and accurate?

What is known, but has only been hinted at, is that Mrs. Quiner — to her credit, some might say — played every card in her hand to get her husband treated as she saw proper. A January 14 Star Tribune story says, “Anne Quiner repeatedly had asked the hospital to try various treatments, including some that are not widely used. But the hospital refused, she said. ‘They basically said they have the authority to do this no matter what I say’, Anne Quiner said Thursday on the Stew Peters Show, a podcast that broadcasts from the Twin Cities and has been critical of COVID vaccines.”

” … has been critical of COVID vaccines.” Hmmm. That’s applying a very light hand to (yet another) MAGA-fueled podcaster regularly pumping out COVID misinformation and inflaming the ill-informed. Nor does it even hint at the barrage of outraged anti-Vaxxers, ivermectin enthusiasts and the conspiracy-deluded who, I’m told by a first-hand source, bombarded newsrooms across the Twin Cities demanding, you know, truth and justice for Scott Quiner. (As is so often the case, the callers, outraged at the lame stream media cover-up sounded as though they were reading from the same script.)

A New York Times story at least said this, “On Jan. 12, Ms. Quiner pleaded for a lawyer’s help on the ‘Stew Peters Show’, a podcast whose host has falsely called Covid vaccines ‘poisonous shots’ and given a platform to pandemic conspiracy theories.”

Want to know a bit more about Minnesota’s own Mr. Peters? Try reading this, and drop me a line if you can find where any Minnesota news outlet wrote a similar piece, or hell, has “reported” on Mr. Peters at all.

What this looks and sounds like, but has not been acknowledged by any news organization — that I have yet found — is that local newsrooms were badgered by political partisans into covering a story where by every plausible assumption the victim(s) — all adults — made conscious choices that resulted in severe illness, hospitalization (at staggering cost) and death. Moreover, the news organizations then relented, likely justifying coverage on the grounds that a judge issued a rare restraining order against a hospital.

But, I’m sorry, that is a long ways from telling the whole story of what went on with Scott Quiner. Nor does it explain why any news room would accept the word of the family’s lawyer in lieu of any verification that what she was saying was true.

Perhaps, the Strib and other local news rooms can explain how they verified Quiner had been flown anywhere? (The family raised roughly $40,000 via GoFundMe-style appeals.) Or that he was actually in a hospital or “care facility” in Texas and that his condition was improving … until, he died. Or, now that we’re told he died, will any of them follow up and seek a copy of the death certificate?

The Washington Post says, “Quiner died at the Houston hospital where he was flown for care during the legal battle, according to Marjorie Holsten, an attorney for the family. He remained on a ventilator at the time, Holsten said, but she declined to identify the facility or provide additional details on the circumstances of his death.“

Fear of pitchfork mobs, even in the form of a tidal wave of spittle-flecked raging via telephone, is a sad reality in modern newsrooms … so assert I. Would any of the same newsrooms care to dispute that they weren’t goaded/badgered/threatened into giving the Quiner story the coverage it got? And whether — or why they didn’t ask — the basic journalistic question of, “Where exactly is he now? So, you know, we can confirm what you’re telling us.”

An attorney refusing to supply “news basics” like that would, to my mind, mean putting the story on hold until she did, or it could be confirmed in some other way.

After that, let me suggest that there may be a “feature profile” on Stew Peters, who is clearly a local character with enough potency and influence to whip up sufficient anger that he manufactured soft, fundamentally sympathetic coverage in major media for a family that made a series of extremely bad choices, against all science and logic, and lost.

Afghanistan’s Collapse Was Inevitable

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Brian Lambert

Everything about the situation in Afghanistan is bad, and the way these things work, “ownership” lands in the lap of whoever sits in the Oval Office at the time. So the collapse there will be in Joe Biden’s obituary.

But watching news reports the last few days I kept remembering first-person descriptions of the country and it’s people — especially its men — in New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins book, “The Forever War”. Assigned to the country shortly after the US’s post-9/11 invasion, Filkins was merciless in his assessment that the deeply conservative rural population being “recruited” to hunt down Al Qaeda was so impoverished, so illiterate and so feudal in their attachment to their local war lords that they were functionally useless. They had no loyalty whatsoever to far away Kabul, and given a couple hundred dollars they’d switch sides in a heartbeat and go off hunting men they had served with the day before.

The chances that that particular crowd — the essential core of the Taliban — would ever submit to America’s idea of “nation building” by, you know, embracing US-style democracy, by getting a dozen years of classroom education, by marrying a nice girl with a career of her own, by buying a big truck and by starting a family in the suburbs was significantly less than zero.

And that was before Filkins got to the gobsmacking corruption of the educated classes running the so-called government.

Put simply, civilizing Afghanistan, bringing it into the 21st century, was always mission impossible.

The stain on Biden right now is the abandonment of the thousands of Afghanis who served US interests over the past 20 years. That’s inexcusable.

But the the original idea of turning one of — if not the most backward and least educated countries in the world — into a version of Oman or some other “moderate” muslim theocracy was misguided from the get-go. And again, because in actual fact Afghanistan is more a name on a map than an actual, unified country.

Joe Biden will have ‘splainin’ to do when he makes his speech to the country sometime this week. But from what I’ve read, he accepted the CIA version of Afghanistan’s reality — profound ignorance, tribal loyalties, medieval religious zealotry — and not the military’s, who told everyone from George W* to Barack Obama to The Orange God King, (whose eye-roller of a “deal” with the Taliban last year set this collapse in motion), to Biden that progress was being made. That Afghani soldiers could be trained to fight off the Taliban, and protect their daughters, wives and mothers from the Taliban’s, um, “toxic masculinity.”

And maybe they would have if corruption wasn’t so bad they were rarely paid, fed adequately or the Taliban hadn’t offered them a better deal … which the CIA said was always a likely scenario.

The argument that the 3000 US troops left in Afghanistan as of this spring was so modest we should have just accepted leaving them there … forever … like we do in Korea and Germany, overlooks the fundamental fact that Afghanistan is barely even a country, and more a collection of mini-empires riddled with religious-inspired ignorance and overall, wildly more corrupt than First World colossi like Korea and Germany.

The scenes coming over the next weeks and months, particularly the degradation of Afghan women back into 13th century subjugation, will be very hard to digest. But if you’re inclined to believe societies get the leadership they deserve, it’s hard to argue that the Afghanis aren’t getting exactly what was always inevitable.

Every Hour of Every Day Irony Dies Again

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Brian Lambert

With apologies to Graydon Carter, 9/11 was no Donald Trump.

Back in the week after the attacks that killed (only) 3000 Americans, Carter, then editor of Vanity Fair, memorably intoned that the event was so grave and sobering that, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” There is dispute over whether Carter — who co-founded the regularly brilliant satire magazine, Spy, back in the late ’80s and gets some credit for the description of Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” — was the first to suggest we’d never again laugh at the ironies of outrageous hypocrisy and shameless buffoonery. But fair or not, the line has stuck to him.

The smart kids at the Oxford dictionary define irony as, “A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.”

Now, given four years of Trump we can debate whether the line about “contrary to what one expects” has standing any more. Still, let’s take a quick roll through just a few of the shiv stabs of irony we’ve endured in recent weeks and see if there’s still a way to laugh.

Trump Campaign Manager Melts Down and Is Tackled By Cops in His Front Yard. To TrumpNation the MAGA reelection machine is a bigly world-class hypercar, the McLaren F1 of political campaigns, and therefore worthy of every dollar they can peel off their disability checks and send over to it. So it is ironic, to us if not them, that the campaign has somehow blown close to a billion dollars of MAGA money and is being heavily outspent in key places like Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Irony grows when campaign manager Brad Parscale, after citing “a million” requests for tickets to Trump’s Tulsa rally, (which ends up pulling in slightly fewer than a bad arena football game), is demoted/fired. Worse, having um, “migrated” $38.9 million of MAGA dollars to side hustles he personally benefits from, Parscale has rather flagrantly bought himself a Ferrari, a $400,000 boat and a $2.4 million waterfront home … only then to learn he’s under federal investigation. At this point he allegedly slugs his wife, gets drunk, threatens to kill himself with one of the 10 guns he keeps around the house for protection, perhaps from antifa, and wanders shirtless out into his front yard (while drinking a beer) where he gets tackled by cops and carted off to mandatory psychiatric care.

To this, purly as a bonus, we have ex-GOP hack and now Lincoln Project driving force Rick Wilson saying he “believes” Trump,’s campaign funding problem is compounded by the candidate himself, i.e. “The World’s Greatest Business Man”, taking “a 20% skim” off the top of all those $10 MAGA collections and stuffing it straight into his pocket. .

Not Only Isn’t Trump “Really, Really Rich” but He’s Essentially Lost $400 Million THREE Times. Those two $750 annual tax bills got most of the attention after the big New York Times story. But people long amazed at Trump’s shell game finances took special interest in the fact that he first blew $400 million in money he inherited from his father, (and likely swindled away from other relatives), then made and blew the $400 million he made off “The Apprentice” (including acting as a pitch man for Double-Stuf Oreos). But then — and this is based on what his records show — he is now in debt to god knows who for at least another $400 million. For those keeping score at home that’s $1.2 billion he’s basically thrown in a hole and set on fire. So here we have the irony of the “world’s greatest businessman” revealed to be demonstrably incapable of balancing a check book.

(At Vanity Fair William Cohan throws this in, ” … that is only a fraction of the more than $1.1 billion or so in debt and obligations that Trump [currently] owes across his empire, my calculations show. There’s Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, which Trump owns and which has $100 million of debt on it, due in 2022. On 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, which Trump also owns outright, he owes another $139 million, due in five years. He also owns 30% stakes, alongside Vornado Realty Trust, in two office towers: one in Manhattan at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, and one in San Francisco at 555 California Street. His 30% of the debt on these two buildings, according to the Vornado filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is $448 million—$163 million of which is due next September, with the balance of $285 million due in two years. (If you are still with me, we’re up to $687 million in debt. … thanks to Dan Alexander, the Forbes Trumpologist and the author of new book White House, Inc., we can account for another $100 million or so, bringing the total debt that Trump owes to around $1.1 billion—well beyond the $421 million of debt the Times shared in its piece.)

So, for another deeper level of irony, we have the “Art of the Deal” tycoon who screams “hoax” and “no collusion” every time someone says “Russia” deeply in arrears to a collection mysterious lender/investors, all of whom I gotta assume are feeling nervous about ever seeing a return on their money.

Can you call yourself a billionaire if the only billion in sight is what you owe your creditors?

Trump’s White House is Itself a Super Spreader Cluster. Leaving aside for a second the grand(est) irony that Trump the Denier, Trump of “Like a Miracle” and “We’ve Got it Totally Under Control” fame himself becoming infected, as of Wednesday, 27 people connected with the White House have also tested positive. In D.C. that one famous building is a goddam viral hot zone.

By contrast, last week the entire country of Taiwan, all 23 million people, reported … nine cases. Want more? Over a dozen countries reported fewer than 10. The Denier-in-Chief’s personal physical situation is so bad it’s the only plausible reason why the White House is refusing to allow contact tracing to determine who in the building is “Patient Zero”, the infector of the infected.

Does any of this mean that the scales have fallen from the eyes of Trump Nation? I doubt that, profoundly. Sean Hannity is telling MAGA warriors that Trump is a 21st century version of Winston Churchill, leading us through a crisis, presumably by exacerbating the crisis with incompetence and then infecting himself to demonstrate his sheer damn manliness.

TrumpNation is keeping the faith, or maybe they’re keeping the fraud, I’m not sure which. But then there are studies exploring why conservatives don’t use or seem to understand irony and satire, as liberals do. It’s a cognitive thing.

So as you and I can agree, the problem isn’t that irony has died. It’s more a problem that we are awash in so much irony it’s too damn hard to decide what’s laughable and what’s tragic.

The Times Drops the Big One and a Modest Proposal for a Deal with Donny.

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Brian Lambert

Consider the crowd I travel with, but I was startled by how many people read Bart Gellman’s piece in The Atlantic — the one about all the manners of hell that could play out if/when Trump refuses to concede defeat in November. But I suspect many more will be reading The New York Times deep and epic dive into the fraud and incompetence revealed within the past 20 years of The Donald’s tax records.

If it doesn’t tell us everything we’ve wanted to know about Trump’s finances — and there’s no “specificity” about money that may have come in from Russians — it’s as good as we’re likely to get until the day Cy Vance in New York lays it out in a public trial. It’s a long read, as was the Times’ 2018 Pulitzer-winner detailing the fraud old man Fred Trump and family ran for decades while building up the fortune … that Donald quickly blew on casinos, bad steaks and cheap vodka.

While this latest Times piece confirms virtually everything any clear-headed adult suspected of a carnival act like Trump for the past 30 years, it will likely mean nothing to MAGA nation, assuming they even hear a word about it in their thickly-insulated echo chamber. But the moderator of next Tuesday’s first debate, Chris Wallace of FoxNews, will commit journalistic malpractice if he doesn’t push Trump on what is in the Times story.

That said, my alleged mind has jumped to something else. Something both James Carville and ex-Obama chief of staff and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have been saying over the past few days.

Namely, that all the noise Trump (and Bill Barr) have been making about the “rigged” election and “getting rid of the ballots” and the “continuation” is a tactical device to build leverage for a “deal” with Biden once Trump is defeated. (I’ve written about this before, because I think it is palpable likelihood. Like a layer of flop sweat forming under a bad con man’s comb over.)

As today’s Times story lays out, Trump is in (ridiculously) deep debt, with huge bills coming due in the next couple years, for which he is personally on the hook. And the tab gets bigger if he loses his much-referenced tax audit (over $100 million including penalties), and bigger still if New York and god knows how many stiffed contractors, harassed women, former employees go after him … hard … post the immunity of the White House.

Trump desperately … and I do mean desperately … needs a way out of this looming apocalypse. One way is if he wins the election. But barring that he needs something like blanket immunity from the state of New York. And that would mean striking … a deal.

As I’ve said before, only a hopeless idiot would enter into any deal with Trump that didn’t have airtight conditions and abusive-level penalties.

So this is my proposal:

Trump agrees to concede the election. In return, the Biden administration, in union with Andrew Cuomo and Vance in New York set the following conditions for Trump — and his family, (since Ivanka and the boys appear to have fat chunks of fraud splatter in their laps as well) — to avoid prosecution.

The deal requires Trump to submit to a public interrogation by tax and white collar fraud attorney/prosecutors into any and all of his business dealings, from the time he took over from his father through to today. This would include everything involving the Russians, the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, and any other thug-ocracy he’s been trolling for loose change.

It also stipulates “the deal” is voided the second Trump lies, “misstates” or “mischaracterizes” any pertinent fact.

Why “public”?

Because the story of Trump and the foundational lies of Trumpism has to be told. It has to be admitted to and confessed by Trump himself. History has to be written by the winners … from the mouth of the loser.

Gellman’s post-election hellscape is based on the premise that “we will never know”. That the fog and stench of Trumpism and Federalist Society Bill Barr-ism is desaigned to prevent anything from ever being truly knowable. (Such is Putin’s game in Russia.)

I believe Adam Schiff for one will eloquently argue that accepting anything less than a full peeling of the Trump myth simply enables a smarter, less louche and preposterous Trump from picking up the pieces and starting all over again. Even the most oblivious and deficient Trumper has to be presented with stark evidence that they’ve been conned … again.

Thirty nine percent will ignore the Times’ tax blockbuster and/or dismiss it as “fake news”, and Biden still needs a solid victory in Florida election night and a landslide overall to neuter any plausible claim Trump and Barr might present.

But the basis is now visibly forming to squeeze Trump into a corner from which his only escape is a Walk of Shame, to reference the entirely apt “Game of Thrones.”

Police Reform, if I Were King.

Posted on June 18, 2020 by Brian Lambert

Someone, back in the civil rights fight of the mid-Sixties said, “The American attention span is ten days.” After that, lacking any fresh excitement, we get bored and gravitate to new stimulation. Today, in our digital age, there are studies saying goldfish have a longer attention span than the average human.

The context is of course the remarkable clamor for radical police reform in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. As a wizened creature of the Sixties, who saw months/years of angry anti-war street protests elect Richard Nixon … twice, I am skeptical anything seriously “reformative” is going to come out of any level of government, certainly not the Republican-controlled federal end of things.

The one wild card in this Debbie Downer thinking is the absolute certainty that as this summer goes on and leads into what is certain to be an absurdly chaotic autumn campaign season, American cops will continue to kill black men and women with appalling regularity.

Watching the killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, I was flasbbergasted that the two cops involved clearly has no sense of the large cultural moment. They had no presence of mind or impulse cntrol to consider that everyone in that Wendy’s parking lot was aiming a video camera at them and that they were poised to be the next poster-boys for panicked, racist cops. (The guy’s drunk and he’s running away. You’ve got his car. Go pick him up later. FFS.)

This past weekend The New York Times hosted an unusually good roundtable discussion of what “police reform” should include. It ran the gamut of everything currently on the table. Dissolving or neutering police unions. Reallocating/restoring money for armed cops to basic social services like mental health. The tricky transition period between dissolving a police department and replacing it with something better trained in de-escalation. Reassuring white suburbanites that they’re not going to be collateral damage in “defunding” the police. It’s worth the read.

For me, as I’ve ranted before many times, the bottom line begins with a better class of person hired to be an armed cop. Time after time the curriculum vitae of cops involved in these killings plays along the lines of: high school drop out, GED diploma, junior college drop out, odd assortment of “security jobs”, maybe a hitch in the Army then on to four months at police academy where they get eight times as many hours of gun and “defensive” training as de-escalation education. After that they’re handed a badge, a loaded gun and assigned to a “senior officer”, think Derek Chauvin, who shows them how the game is really played.

That is nuts.

Add up the property damage, over-time for ensuing protests, impact on reputation and legal pay-outs (when rarely convicted) and you’re talking the most expensive employees any city puts out on the streets. Drop-outs and semi-deadenders with guns? Jesus.

Is it too much to ask and wonder how many of these characters ever took a humanities course? Ever read a novel, other than “The Turner Diaries” or some Vince Flynn pulp? Shouldn’t an education in human psychology, the roots of rage and depression and a broad depth of understanding of dissimilar cultures be primary criteria for graduation from police academy if not acceptance into cop school to begin with?

Were I allowed to play king, (feel free to bend the knee), I’d coordinate a temporary force of the State Patrol, county sheriff’s department and National Guard as needed, (deal with them later), simultaneous with the dissolution of the Minneapolis police department (and its “union” — not that the AFL-CIO wants anything to do with Bob Kroll et al). The dissolution would come with a promise that all current officers would be allowed to immediately re-apply for the new Minneapolis Peace Force (or whatever). This would be conditioned on them proving they have not been a repeat violent offender, have not participated in one of Betsy DeVos’ brother’s paranoid “Bulletproof Warrior” trainings (or the like) and pass a dramatically upgraded and aggressive psychological examination designed to thoroughly assess their worst authoritarian impulses.

The carrot to all this would haver to be — have to be — a substantial increase in pay and benefits. Day to day policing is miserable work, (made worse by the cast of alpha dog Derek Chauvins you have to kowtow to). If you want better people, you’re going to have to lure them away from jobs that don’t require them to get in between raging spouses, chase around gang-bangers, piss off average citizens with nuisance, revenue-enhancing traffic tickets and write up minor car accident reports.

The savings would come with — picking a number here — 35-40% fewer armed cops. And significantly more mental health counselors, accident investigation personnel and similar non-uniformed, unarmed civilian staff to respond to things like, well for example, suspicion a guy tried to pass a counterfeit $20.

“Over-policing” is a real thing. It’s expensive to sustain, and catastrophically expensive when it goes bad. How much better off would George Floyd and the city of Minneapolis be if two MPD plus a Park Police squad, totalling six officers didn’t show up to “investigate” that bogus $20?

But I’m not holding my breath for anything of the sort. The old Cold War mentality that any “cuts”, any changes, anything other than more firepower would leave us “nekkid before the Rooskies” applies in this case as well.

That Enlightenment Thing? It’s a Still a Work in Progrsss.

Posted on April 13, 2020 by Brian Lambert

I won’t say that perspective and proportion are the first casualties of a crisis. But those two virtues of rational thinking have a way of quickly becoming endangered species.

While we don’t yet know the origin of COVID-19, (U.S. intelligence says it picked up no alarmed chatter among Chinese officials indicating an accidental outbreak in one of their bio-chemical labs), we do have a vividly clear picture of how thoroughly, totally and unequivocally the Trump administration has bungled — through fundamental incompetence, self-interest and naked mendacity — the preparation for and response to the pandemic. It’s all there already in the official record. Facts have been established.

But we don’t live, and — perspective alert — no human has ever lived in a world where facts alone control how critical decisions are made. As many have noticed, this is a partisan pandemic. Just as climate change instantly became a partisan battleground. Just as Galileo announcing that Copernicus was right that the Earth revolves around the Sun got him branded a heretic by the Catholic church and thrown into house arrest for the rest of his life.

It doesn’t help much, nor will it do anything to prevent Team Trump from continuing to blunder, ignore science and miscalculate the best available data. But there is a perspective on this calamity — the worst exercise of executive authority in American history (and that, I’ll debate anyone, is fully proportionate) — that I find somewhat reassuring.

A disclaimer here is that I’ve come to see validity in the brain science research that says some if not most of our tribal/partisan divide is a factor of evolutionary biology. As creatures who only a dozen or more centuries ago first figured out how to grow crops, we smugly think we’ve come along way in terms of making quality decisions based on what can be proven with the science we have. But just as with bonobos, hyenas and snail darters some are quicker on the draw than others. As with all evolution in all species, there’s a range in cognitive abilities, usually for good societal reasons.

This sort of thing — quite possibly a textbook example of a little information being a dangerous thing — is always in my mind as I watch, usually aghast, as Trump or one of his media enablers prattles on in wave after unapolgetic wave of misinformation.

So I perked up the other day when author/historian Jon Meacham suggested almost in passing that what we see today with this partisan pandemic is really just the latest battle of The Enlightment. Six hundred years later, we are still locked in the unfinished business of bringing the entire human species out of the dark ages of religious superstition, witchcraft, intellectual serfdom and blind loyalty to whoever holds power over our physical well-being.

I suspect Meacham’s been thinking about this because of the many fascinating ways that The Black Death of the middle ages set the stage for the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But the key point is The Enlightment was merely a tipping point. By no means did every member of the race suddenly reject superstition and embrace rationality. Evolutionary steps are never uniform across a species. IThe Enlightenment was merely when enough people of reason were able to network among themselves to establish a formidable, rational, scientific rebuttal to the superstitions that had failed to protect the 75-200 million who died of the plague.

But “enough” is far different than “all.” Which helps to explain the so often astonishing number of 21st century Americans, (not some lost tribe of the Amazon), who still believe in the fantastical. Like the 55% who say they believe in angels. Or the 39% who don’t “accept” the theory of evolution. Or the disparity of Americans who believe Jesus was born of a virgin, (73%), compared to those who believe humans have something to do with climate change, (61%).

As I say, I don’t know that applying this perspective helps all that much when the 21st century equivalent of necromancers, alchemists, pharisees and court jesters are making a forseeable pandemic several factors of magnitude worse than it should have been. But it may serve to fortify you and those around you for the fight to come, post-pandemic. The fight to step up the next rung on ladder of Enlightenment and prevent this kind of catastrophic failure from ever happening again.

The fight where fools, philistines and misanthropes are quarantined from power.

Impeaching Trump Will Require Smart, Savvy Storytelling

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Brian Lambert

If the Democrats are going to impeach Donald Trump — and there’s zero doubt that’s what Trump wants them to do — they’re going to have to be a hell of lot better storytellers than they’ve been so far.

All the reasons not to impeach Trump remain as valid as they’ve ever been.

A: No amount of evidence will convince the Republican controlled-Senate to convict him. As headlines go, he will be found “innocent.”

B: The “verdict”/acquittal will be strung out by Trump’s legal team and Mitch McConnell to conclude dramatically in the heat of next year’s election season, allowing Trump to rant with true finality, “Total exoneration!”

C: As infuriated as every anti-Trump voter will become over the course of the process, there’s no reason to believe the critical fraction of voters who pay little to no attention to details will respond in any other way than by voting in Trump’s favor in 2020.

D: Impeachment will be the only topic every Democratic candidate will be asked about and judged on until election day 2020.

If you are “the chaos candidate” (tutored and guided by the international maestro of chaos, Vladimir Putin), the all-consuming, total partisan warfare of impeachment with certain acquittal is a dream campaign strategy.

That said, Elizabeth Warren and others are absolutely correct when they say Democrats have a constitutional obligation, based only on what is known about the Mueller report today, to bring charges against Trump, politics be damned.

The essential issue is storytelling, which in modern America does not come in the form of a legalistic, 448-page government document, or blockbuster reporting like the two New York Times stories on Trump’s freakishly fraudulent tax-filings. Big complicated stories — a bit like “Game of Thrones” — are best presented on television, serially, regularly, with heavy advance marketing, an eye and ear for sympathetic characters and shrewdly ascending drama.

Raise your hand if you think today’s Democrats have that skill set.

In addition to the enormous obstacles everyone can see in plain sight, (the GOP Senate looking at Trump’s 91% approval among their voters), Democrats have to be aware of what lurks hidden beneath the surface.

A lot of what explains Bill Barr’s behavior — a 68 year-old establishment Republican coming back to go all-in for a flagrant fool and scoundrel like Trump — has to do with his sympathy for the power game as played most recently by Dick Cheney. Barr’s “go [bleep] yourself” attitude toward both Congress and legal tradition is a step-for-step repeat of Cheney’s reign “under” George W. Bush. (I refer everyone interested to Bart Gellman’s “Angler” for a full dramatic narrative of The Cheney Process.)

More to the point — and this is absolutely critical — as Bill Barr plays lead pharisee for a fundamental restructuring of American governmental (and economic) power, he can draw confidence that McConnell, with the conservative and highly influential Federalist Society, have now thoroughly stocked most levels of the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court, with judges sympathetic to their belief system. This is key to support of the so-called Unitary Executive Theory.

As of 2019 the court stocking is so thorough — or at least adequate — that (Republican) presidents truly are immune to any kind of traditional criminal prosecution. The guess is Barr believes that there are now enough judges on “the team” that the wheels of investigation can be gummed up, delayed and conflicted so badly that the only likely result of anything as supposedly conclusive as impeachment is … confusion.

Mitch McConnell, accurately reading the changing demographics of America, where white Americans are rapidly diminishing toward minority status, has long understood that gaming and stocking the judicial system is the best (only?) way to sustain control over American culture well past the point Republicans are able to win presidential elections … by normal means.

However Democrats imagine impeachment playing out, are they truly prepared to deal with how far outside the bounds of good faith, normal politics and litigation McConnell will take Republicans to protect Trump?

I have no confidence that they do.

Democrats are still playing the game as though the rules matter, while McConnell, Barr and others are quite literally writing new rules on the fly.

But … good storytelling is as powerful an emotional device today as it was around the cave fires of the Neolithic age. The Trump-Russia saga has so many primary characters, so many sub-plots, supporting characters and red herrings, unless you’re a sad nerd consuming this episode daily like a tele-novela (guilty) it’s mostly a blur.

Democrats would be smart to seek out some crowd-sourced expertise from professionals with a demonstrated talent for strategic storytelling. When to play up or play down certain characters and information. Key emotional plot lines. Where personality matters. Likewise, they have to conceive of a way to advance their investigation beyond the realms that Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr can control.

The normal, traditional judicial system is not going to be their friend in this matter.

Klobuchar Games the Star Tribune

Posted on March 4, 2019 by Brian Lambert

Finally, this past Saturday (not Sunday if you’re paying attention) the Star Tribune published its own reporting on the controversy around Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s treatment of her staff. It included a long, comprehensive interview with Minnesota’s senior senator-turned-presidential candidate.

Oh wait. What? It didn’t? She only consented to a written statement? And they bought that?

You really should ask yourself, “How does that happen?” Arguably the most prominent elected official in the state, continuing to deal with (highly) unflattering accusations about her personal behavior, denies an interview on the topic to (without question) the state’s largest news organization … and that organization accepts that response?

It’s easy to understand Klobuchar’s goal. She wants to diminish this “bad boss” story to the point it evaporates. Later Saturday she was making jokes at the annual Gridiron Club charity dinner about eating salad with a comb. As crisis management goes, that’s good form. Get up and do some self-effacing humor about your screw-up. Every smart politician knows that strategy.

But what about the Star Tribune? Klobuchar seems to be selling the notion that, “Yeah, I’ve been tough. But that’s how I get things done.” What though is the Strib’s selling point? “Well, uh, we were shamed into devoting actual staff time to seeing if this stuff was true. But, dang it, when the Senator wouldn’t talk to us we, you know, just had to go with what we got. But by God we’re still tough, hard-nosed, call-’em-as-we-see-’em reporters and editors! Neither fear or favor, baby!”

Riiight.

To quickly review: The story of Klobuchar’s staff mistreatment broke days before her gala (snowy) presidential campaign kickoff. With startling few exceptions, no Twin Cities news organization so much as breathed a word about it, even though tales of “Amy the mean boss” have circulated in knowing circles around town for decades. When some kind of mention had to be made, the “play” was to wrap the accusations within the dismissive verbiage of “anonymous” sources and “on-line” publications, which was to say organizations with much lower standards than the Strib, or MPR.

But the story didn’t go away, and when The New York Times did its own legwork and ran the tale of the salad and the comb, the Strib seems to have found itself in a bit of a professional pickle. To the point that — two weeks after the story broke — it finally assigned a couple of reporters to, you know, see if any of this “anonymous on-line” business could possibly be true.

And what did they publish on Saturday (not on Sunday, with two to three times greater circulation)?

I quote:

“The Star Tribune interviewed four former Klobuchar staffers who all said her treatment of subordinates regularly went beyond what they considered acceptable even for a tough, demanding boss. They described similar kinds of behavior: Frequent angry outbursts over minor issues, regular criticisms and admonitions in front of others, office supplies or papers thrown in anger, cutting remarks and insults on a nearly constant basis, waking up to long strings of e-mails from Klobuchar sent late at night or in the early morning.

All shared those observations on the condition they not be named in this story, for fear of reprisal.”

Along with this admission:

“Klobuchar did not grant an interview for this story.”

Put bluntly, the problem of (presumably young) staffers fearing reprisal is not unusual for any news organization trying to report on powerful figures in politics or business. But not demanding a direct interview with Klobuchar on the festering matter is.

If the Star Tribune doesn’t have the clout — or is unwilling to exercise the clout it has — to get so prominent a public official to respond to accusations in a national story with serious consequences for her presidential aspirations, who does? And to be clear I don’t blame the reporters. This is one where either the editor-in-chief or the publisher makes a personal call and explains that funky “Who needs who more?” thing all over again.

The question then is what’s their leverage? Klobuchar knows the Star Tribune is in a position where they have to run something, given how far behind the story they are, and her bet is that again saying pretty much nothing is better than responding directly and spontaneously to specific incidents. Her strategy is all about tamping this story down and getting on with the bigger business of winning the Democratic nomination.

At the very (very) least, the Strib could devote some staff-generated column space to discussing a few of the more interesting and provocative questions that have risen up around this story. Such as whether this whole episode is purely sexist? And whether prominent women truly are being held to standards both qualitatively and quantitatively higher than their male counterparts?

The standards may be different for women, but in totality are they worse? I don’t know. But I think, given the #MeToo movement and all the women running for office, it’d be a brave and interesting discussion to engender among the public at this moment.

Sadly, I don’t foresee the Strib (or MPR) pushing this topic much further, unless again, it gets shamed into it by forces beyond our state borders.

Never Mind The New York Times, The Local Press is Still Giving Klobuchar a Pass

Posted on February 24, 2019 by Brian Lambert

How’s that old saying go? “Even a mental picture is worth 10,000 words”? In an image-conscious world there are pictures that stick in your head, pretty much obliterating, you know, balanced reasoning.

Here in Minnesota we’re very familiar with the picture of pre-Senatorial Al Franken pretending to accost the ample bosom of a sleeping colleague, a colleague who was on his USO trip largely for the thrills her ample bosom gave our fighting troops in the Middle East. Later accusations that Franken was also accosting buttocks (ample or otherwise) while taking photos with constituents of course went uninvestigated. But those charges didn’t have to be proven true. Franken’s judges and jury — here’s looking at you presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand — had the frat boy photo with the sleeping bosom.

That was all they really needed. Franken was guilty of, well, contempt for womanhood, to put it one way. We couldn’t think of anything more dehumanizing or revolting! What an ogre! He simply had to go!

And now we have … Amy Klobuchar eating a salad with a comb. No photographic evidence is needed. We all get the picture. A picture that invariably comes with the GIF-like image of a woman sticking a groaty comb with teetering salad in her mouth … just to spite a terrified staffer. (I still don’t buy that a U.S. airline didn’t have so much as a plastic fork on board for — for a US Senator — for a flight from South Carolina to DC.) But, whatever.

I’ve already said what I think about the not-dead-yet stories of Klobuchar mistreating her staff. (Short answer: I don’t care.) And I understand that most readers don’t give a damn about how Minnesota’s local media did — or in this case didn’t –– cover the first round of accusations against Our Favorite Senator. Likewise, I am well aware that for many women, these attacks on Klobuchar are pure sexism — women being held to different, higher standard than piggish males — period. Full stop.

But as someone who was once a member of “the media”, and who wrote about “the media” and is still intrigued by the editorial choices made by “the media”, I have to say, again, that the locals’ performance in this sideshow to the Klobuchar campaign roll-out was remarkably … weak. Or “lame”, if you prefer. And still is.

It’s one thing to play the PR homer for the local sports teams. And it’s one thing to fill half your news hole day in and day out with “Service Journalism” entertainment-irrelevancy. But when that policy is directed at an elected official strategizing for the White House, it’s just not excusable. Again … period. Full stop.

When the first accusations were thrown at Klobuchar by reporters at The Huffington Post, an attitude among the local press corps was something akin to sniffing dismissal. “The Huffington Post! Please! Since when is that real journalism! Why half their news hole every day is filled with entertainment and irrelevancy! Movie stars and cutsie-poo singers we’ve never heard of! We are Serious. We have standards! Everything on the record or we don’t run it! Anonymous sources? Not us in a billion years!”

As a result, there was practically no reference to The Huffington Post story in the days leading up to and immediately following Klobuchar’s kick-off. The “sourcing” standards at The Huffington Post simply didn’t meet the standards of The Star Tribune, or Minnesota Public Radio or the Pioneer Press or our local TV news rooms, (the primary news sources for most of us.)

There were exceptions, and good on them. But the prevailing editorial decision (likely based on the fact that literally dozens of other unimpeachably Serious news organizations, like the Boston Globe, Bloomberg News, etc. were comfortable enough with The Huffington Post’s sourcing to run the story) was to make a fleeting reference to “on-line” and “anonymous” accusations deep in the Strib’s mostly “hail and hallelujah” copy. Further, when Klobuchar finally responded to the “on-line” accusations by conceding that she can be a tough boss — because her “grit”, you understand — the matter was relegated down to nothing more than predictable reaction to a “demanding” boss.

Things changed just a wee bit this Friday when The New York Times picked up where The Huffington Post left off and did their own reporting, which churned up the story of the groaty comb and the salad. Apparently accepting that The New York Times’ sourcing standards are at least as lofty as theirs’, the Strib on Saturday ran the Times piece (not their own reporting to be sure) under the headline, “Klobuchar seen as tough boss.” (Worth noting is that the hed for on-line version was: “Former Amy Klobuchar staffers describe work environment of volatility, distrust.” I’d like to think someone in the Strib newsroom complained about that soft-core dead tree version.)

Let me repeat, I don’t care if Klobuchar rants and berates her staff or eats salads with groaty combs. That’s not why I vote for her.

But gross sexism withstanding, this was a campaign issue when The Huffington Post first reported it and is more so now that The New York Times has put its stamp on it. It matters. It looks very much like something that could prove problematic for Klobuchar, a lot like Howard Dean’s manic yell was for him in Iowa years ago, not to mention the underlying character issue with Klobuchar is a lot more potent.

Contrary to the way the Strib, MPR and others around town hoped to play this at the get-go, the issue isn’t merely whether Klobuchar is a “demanding”, or “tough” boss, which suggests someone who yells a lot when stuff goes wrong. It’s whether she’s chronically abusive and demeaning to her staff of mostly lowly-paid young people. There’s a very big difference there.

Frankly, I’m not convinced the accusations against Klobuchar are only rank sexism. And I do think there’s an interesting conversation to be had on that question.

My point here is that the local press is still failing a basic obligation to report out a clear obstacle in Klobuchar’s campaign.

So Apparently Amy “The Mean Boss” is Not a Story in Minnesota

Posted on February 8, 2019 by Brian Lambert

As I begin writing this it 10 :27 on Friday morning, and we’re getting an object lesson in what is and isn’t news … in hometown Minnesota.

At this moment none of the major news organizations in the Twin Cities have said anything about The Huffington Post story on Amy Klobuchar (i.e. Amy’s a bad boss) other than pieces by Esme Murphy at WCCO-TV and Bob Collins at MPR, the latter generally sympathetic to the dilemma of female candidates having to be more “likable” than the usual brow-beating, desk-pounding male tyrants.

Now there are several possible reasons why the “local media” (to lump them all together) sees no value in so much as a bottom-of-page 22 two-paragraph item. Let me list them:

1: No local reporter or editor is yet aware of this story/accusation. They are not regularly following The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Bloomberg, PoliticalWire, The Daily Beast, Slate, Talking Points Memo, New York magazine and … well, you get the idea. If this explanation is true and the local press corps lives in some kind of Minnesota-Only hibernaculum, well that does not speak well of them, does it?

2: No local reporter or editor sees any news value in this story. “It’s just crazy ranting on Twitter!” “The sourcing is anonymous.” “Huffington Post is bullshit.” All those arguments can be made, but how many times have the same reporters and editors — who require Twitter as much as oxygen — dropped in a story purely on the grounds that “it is out there”? Or, if The Huffington Post’s sourcing — which included several loyal Klobuchar staffers obviously concerned enough to rally to their boss’s defense and attach their names vouching for her management style — is good enough for Bloomberg, The Boston Globe, Esquire and New York magazine (and dozens of others) why isn’t it good enough for The Star Tribune, MPR or the Pioneer Press? All of them have/are running featherweight promotional stories touting her likely presidential announcement this Sunday.

3: Every local reporter, editor and publisher would be in deep do-do with not just Klobuchar, but her deep, wide and influential support base in Minnesota if they touch this story. So much as whisper that people “out there” are talking about Amy the Bad Boss, (which quite a few have described as “an open secret”), and good luck the next time you try to access the Senator’s office, or have a cozy drink with that influential kingmaker/benefactor who has always been such a valuable source of insider DFL gossip.

4: Speaking of “everyone already knows this” … . Any political reporter with two ears and a note pad has heard tales of Klobuchar’s “management style” going way back in her career … and is now dismissing it as … normal. As just the same sort of thing you hear about every political office. You know, near psychotic levels of second-guessing, in-fighting, mis-judgments, blame-placing and paranoia. Same old same old. She may be marginally worse than Al Franken or Norm Coleman or Rod Grams or Paul Wellstone (?!), but not enough to count for anything, not even a tiny item casually mentioning that a significant chunk of the national press has taken note of this and is undoubtably asking more questions, some of them possibly uncomfortable.

As I’ve said before, whether Klobuchar is the harridan anonymous sources claim is not something that concerns me much, on a wholly selfish level. As long she does most of want I want done, she can lock her staff up in public stocks, hang them in gibbets and/or demand they clip her toe-nails. I don’t care.

But as nasty as politics is on a good day, presidential politics are like the Russians overrunning Berlin in 1945.

Closer to the political dilemma for Klobuchar, “mean bosses”, like sex with interns, is something everyone believes they understand and has an opinion about. If this becomes an identifying characteristic of Klobuchar the candidate it’ll be very difficult to overcome.

As for our local press, I’m yet again reminded of a chat I had with old pal David Carr a couple years after he landed at the New York Times. I was ranting about some study showing how little the general public knew about the financial stress on newspapers and how the whole business was being eaten away by private equity vipers … and Carr interrupted.

“Brian,” he said in the avuncular, vaguely patronizing tone he adopted in his later years, “no one cares about newspapers. I can write a column about some paper and all I get is crickets. No one cares.”

This “Nothing to See Here, Folks” Klobuchar episode may have something to do with that.

Yeah, Kids. It’s “Binary”. Sessions Lied Under Oath

Posted on March 2, 2017 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2 This one is really simple. The top law enforcement official of the United States lied under oath. As all the cool kids are saying these days, “It’s binary.” Yes … or … no. Simple as it gets. No nuance required. And here, as regards Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions the III of the great state of Alabama, the answer is unambiguously, “yes.”

So less than one day after the D.C. punditocracy was wetting itself over Donald Trump “pivoting” to Presidential, we’re whiplashed back into the real reality of, you know, what is really going on. And there’s no plausible equivocating that can be done here.

Sessions, one of the first-in-for-the-Donald members of Congress, and a constant presence throughout the sordid campaign, not only lied in his reply to a question from our own Al Franken, he “volunteered” the lie … abut something that he didn’t have to lie about. (Although the more his standing with the Senate Armed Services Committee is tossed up as an explanation for chatting up the Russian ambassador the more people are stopping to say, “Wait a minute. Chatting up foreign ambassadors is a function of the Foreign Relations Committee, not the one Sessions was on.”

The significance of last night’s news — from both The Washington Post (on Sessions and the Rooskies) and The New York Times (on several foreign governments offering confirmation of Trump associates meetings with Russians in Europe during the campaign) — is that Congressional Republicans are … this close … to the tipping point. The point at which the accumulation of suspicion and evidence is large they have no practical choice other than to agree to an “independent special prosecutor” to investigate — a la Ken Starr — anything and everything related to Trump and the Russians.

Who that special prosecutor would be, who appoints him/her and what level of subpoena power (i.e. into Trump’s taxes) they have remains to be … politicized to hell.

But for now, things are proceeding quite nicely, thank you.

Trump worshippers and toadies will kick up a lot of dust parsing the possible innocence of Sessions’ coziness with the Russian ambassador. But the, uh, unimpeachable fact is that he flat out lied … under oath … to Congress. Just as Bad Old Bill Clinton lied about “not having sex with that woman.” Only this time, we’re not talking about heavy-petting, sort-of-sex in the Oval Office. We’re talking about colluding with the United States’ primary foreign adversary to screw with a Presidential election. Republicans are going to have go deep doo-doo double secret probation tribal to make sex a bigger deal than this, and I have no doubt they will. But as they like to say down in ‘Bama, “That dog don’t hunt.”

Six weeks into the Trump era we’ve already reached the point of needing an extra-Congressional investigation of possibly treasonous activity. (“Treason” being another word that has lost most of its meaning as a result of the constant braying of tri-corner hat-wearing imbeciles.)

Not that I’m surprised, you understand. In fact what surprises me most about the way Sessions, Gen. Flynn before him and the whole Trump team has responded to “the Russian thing” is that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of these deep thinkers that it is the business of the NSA, the CIA, the DIA and on and on as well the MI5 in Britain and every other allied intelligence agency to monitor meetings and calls and communications with people close to Vladimir Putin. In fact … wait for it … it’s precisely what we pay billions of dollars a year for them to do.

So, I don’t know if, “Dem boys ain’t too bright” is another ol’ ‘Bama sayin’. But it sure fits this crowd.

Gen. Flynn and the Dam About to Burst

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3 If you’ve been worrying about the big Oroville dam in California bursting open, this Gen. Flynn thing could bring a much bigger flood. After 24 days, three and half weeks, the regime of Our Orange Leader is already up to its spray tanned jowls in a scandal bigger than Watergate.

That’s hyperbole!, you say? Well, no one ever accused Richard Nixon of regularly communicating with the Russians while they were doing their nefarious best to screw with an American presidential election. And G. Gordon Liddy was not the President’s key and, according to reports, sole advisor on foreign affairs. Baby, oh baby. Even I thought it’d be mid-summer before Trump got himself into something so outrageously, cartoonishly foul that the usual “Let’s move on, nothing to see here, folks” Republican “leaders” would be on TV demanding to know what exactly there is … to see here.

But that’s where we are … three and a half weeks into this fiasco. Clearly, some Republicans have already decided Trump is too ludicrous an embarrassment to protect with sealed-off, behind closed doors committee investigations. Moreover, if reports are true that U.S. intelligence agencies are withholding intelligence from Trump and his team of Russian-compromised know-nothings, the sooner the swap-out of Mike Pence for Trump happens, the better.

The schadenfreude-rich beauty of the Flynn debacle is how it whips the spotlight back around, away from the sideshow of fools and scoundrels joining Trump’s cabinet, and zeros it back in on what kind of business Trump has been doing with the Russians for the past 30 years. We have a pretty good idea, but to date none of the circumstantial (and better) assertions have grabbed the full attention, simultaneously, of our brave Congressional leaders and the national media herd.

The cynical assumption is that this Flynn business, which as we now know has been going on for months, not just between Flynn and various Russian officials, but other members of Trump’s campaign/administration, will be stifled and prevaricated over by Republican-led committees. They’ll muddle it and obscure it until the “failing” The New York Times and Jake Tapper lose interest or are distracted by the next farcical scandal or, god forbid, bona fide international crisis.

But I don’t see that happening, and I lived through Watergate. Why? Because this Flynn episode is hair’s breadth from the rich, juicy essence of Donald Trump — namely, the high likelihood he was bailed out of chronic bankruptcy by Russian money and has engaged in colossal tax fraud for decades. Being first to expose what so many, in and out government and media believe to be a monumental con game comes with guarantee of heroic historical standing of the eternal, name-in-schoolbooks variety.

My pal, Joe Loveland, correctly assessed the Republicans’ predicament over disposing Trump for Mike Pence. Basically, they’re prepared to do it, preferably before the 2018 mid-term elections, as long as they don’t have to take any responsibility for it. Most Republicans, batshit craven and otherwise, live in fear of Trump’s low-to-no information base. But if Trump brings the… house of cards … down on himself with a ceaseless bombardment of revelations about scheming with … the f****ing Russians for chrissakes (every old school Republican’s ultimate boogeyman) … they can stand back like mere horrified observers, while doing everything they can to polish up the medieval dunce Mike Pence as the only acceptable replacement.

The wild and terrifying card in this drama is of course the “Reichstag fire” scenario, where Team Trump plots to distract public/Congressional/media attention by either inventing, grossly exaggerating or ineptly bungling some serious international crisis. In normal times you, dear reader, would be excused for rolling your eyes at the wild-eyed lunacy of such a scenario. I mean, stuff like that doesn’t happen in The United States.

Unfortunately, like the dossier with stories of the Rooskies storing video of Donald and hookers, um, “micturating” on Obama’s hotel bed in Moscow, there’s a level of plausibility to almost every obscene, outrageous thing you can imagine about Trump that we’ve never dealt with before. Not even with Dick Nixon.

Man, am I tired of winning so much.

The Resistance Is Being Televised, And A Lot Of It Is Pretty Funny

Posted on February 9, 2017 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3 So I’m down in Florida for my sister Lu’s birthday bash, strolling around the quaint/funky old neighborhood of Key West minding my own business, and I pass by a guy parked on his Vespa talking on the phone.

“Look,” he says to whoever, “we can’t do this every day. It was a half hour yesterday and”, looking at his watch, “it’s already 20 minutes this morning. We can’t spend all this time talking about that asshole. It’s draining.”

Now, he could have been talking his drunken brother-in-law’s latest faceplant. But I kinda doubt it. The conversation was way too familiar to stuff I’m hearing everywhere I go. Hell, my wife and I were recently at a wake … a wake, for chrissakes … and every conversation was about Trump, “that asshole”. To the point that it struck me the guy is such a menace to psychic health he’s a goddam buzzkill … at a wake.

Scrolling through social media and other blogs, every liberal I know is in a competition to outdo the last in the level of vilification, disgust and personal offense they’re taking to Trump (and all things Trump). I can hardly plead innocence. It’s like, “No, I’m more outraged and appalled than you are!”, and there’s going to be some kind of awards banquet for the most righteous, apoplectic takedown of our Our Mendacious, Incompetent Orange Comb Over-in-Chief. (See?)

So here’s a little sunlight and flower-sniffing to counter-balance all the stomach-churning rage. The resistance undermining Trump (and Steve Bannon, and Betsy DeVos and all the other cartoonish trolls who have moved into D.C.) is flourishing and, apologies to Gil Scott-Heron, is actually being televised.

There’s nothing monolithic about modern media. It’s a million different sources for 320 million different interest groups. But as badly as “the media” failed us during the campaign, it is now reacting predictably — and pretty well — to the clown car chaos and buffoonery of the Trump administration. (Thanks in large part to its own craven ratings-chasing) “the media” now has a singular target of unprecedented size and authority to dissect, delegitimize and de-pants … hourly … day after day, with no conceivable end in sight. I’m convinced this is true because Trump, a demonstrably ill-formed, unstable and isolated personality, is not capable of transforming himself, like Madonna or Lady Gaga, to meet changes in public tastes. As this resistance grows, as it has with each adolescent Tweet, white nationalist/mega banker appointment and bungled military operation, Trump can only double down … and down and down again … as the rage swells up.

So here are a few things I’ve recently taken encouragement from.

1: The Harley-Davidson people, fully understanding the certainty that a Presidential visit to their Milwaukee headquarters would fire up an enormous and angry demonstration outside their factory, kind of ruining their anniversary party, thought better of Trump in Wisconsin. So the motorcycle execs went to the White House instead. This is a fascinating precedent. How does Trump go … anywhere … without inciting angry, mocking protests? Presidential factory visits are about as routine as it gets. But not with Trump, and not ever is my bet. He may be able to pull off a completely cordoned-off, quarantined “victory lap rally” in, I don’t know, West Virginia opioid, I mean, coal country, but where else? And even then the perimeters of that scene would be pretty unruly. Put another way, can you imagine Trump wandering around Minneapolis for a couple days, having a come one-come all appearance at Minnehaha Falls and knocking back a Juicy Lucy at Matt’s a la Obama? The mind reels at the protest possibilities, not to mention Matt’s owners pleading with him to stay away. Hell, good luck to any member of Congress risking a town hall in their own district with this fool in office.

2: Earnest, hyper-cautious second-tier newspapers like the Star Tribune, which have long relied on The New York Times for their national and international news coverage, are routinely re-printing Times stories full of appalling-to-hilarious details of Trump’s corruption and incompetence. The Times recently added $5 million to its budget to excavate more of Trump’s astonishing malfeasance. I’m still waiting to hear how NPR and MPR adjust to this new reality, but every outlet relying on the Times is running (some of) its stuff and feeding the fires of the resistance, with real facts, not the alternative ones. There’s no reason to think that will stop or slow down since, as the song goes, we’ve only just begun.

3: Pop culture, which I’ve mentioned before, is rapidly and with near unanimity coalescing around the concept of Trump as Toxic, Racist Buffoon. From Melissa McCarthy’s spit-take inducing takedown of the hapless Sean Spicer, to Alec Baldwin (and Bannon the Grim Reaper), to a refocused and re-energized Stephen Colbert, to an explosion of wall art around the world ridiculing Trump, to a ceaseless flow of GIFs and social media memes Trump is gold, or is it orange? manna dropping from the skies like a bombardment of frozen turkeys. (Note multiple metaphors.) And if you argue that all those “smug, urban elites” are just flogging the choir, check out the sports stars, most of them black at the moment, declining the “honor” of shaking Trump’s hand. Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors today, and I have a real hard time seeing LeBron James grippin’ and grinnin’ with a shameless liar and unrepentant race-baiter if the Cavaliers repeat this spring. Not good optics, man. Much like the boycott of his red neck inaugural gala, being publicly-and-loudly opposed to Trump is a badge of honor for an overwhelming percentage of America’s cultural heroes.

So yeah, Bannon and DeVos and Jeff Sessions and KellyAnne and the rest of the preposterous mob are in office, screwing things up and doing what they can to recreate some kind of white, patriarchal fiefdom here in the US of A. But, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, there is a broad, clever, swelling, well-informed and deeply invigorated resistance undermining, mocking and vilifying them for being the walking frauds and catastrophes they are.

And it’s all on TV. It’s the American way.

The Roiling Freak Show of Trump v. Media

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3 Considering our woeful record in assessing the likely outcome of the November election, no one in American media should make predictions. But … I strongly suspect the tenor of President-elect Trump’s first press conference Wednesday will be amplified and aggravated … constantly … throughout his term in office. It’s the way he does business, and to date the way the press has done business.

Digesting the spectacle Thursday New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote, “There were two big lessons in the Wednesday morning melee.

Mr. Trump remains a master media manipulator who used his first news briefing since July to expertly delegitimize the news media and make it the story rather than the chaotic swirl of ethical questions that engulf his transition.
The news media remains an unwitting accomplice in its own diminishment as it fails to get a handle on how to cover this new and wholly unprecedented president.”

These are not novel insights. But it remains interesting how regularly we’re hearing this kind of thing from the country’s acknowledged journalistic leaders. Trump the manipulator, delegitimizing the press and the press failing to adjust to a new reality. Or, as one observer put it, the press continuing to “apply balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon” to the extent that it “distorts reality.”

Missing from Rutenberg’s column and so many like it was a specific prescription of what to do. While he goes on to trill with the traditional news chorus indicting BuzzFeed for publishing the “extended version” of the U.S. intelligence briefing on Mr. Trump and his Russian activities, what he does in sum, is argue for yet more of the “balanced treatment” approach.

Whether you believe BuzzFeed, once a silly listicle-spewing engine, now given grudging credibility among traditional reporters, was right or wrong in publishing the unverified report in its full salaciousness no doubt depends on what you think of Trump. (Rutenberg lauds BuzzFeed’s work on the genesis of some of the past year’s “fake news” epidemic.) But it’s hard to see how the press adjusts itself and re-gathers its bearings over the near term future if it chooses to deny the right of an informed citizenry to know what the chattering classes of D.C. and New York have known and been talking about for months.

For the record, BuzzFeed presented the 35-page document with the clear disclaimer that information within was unverified. But the more important fact is that it published the thing. (Here’s a fiery takedown of the decision from Quillete.com.) Such a thing simply isn’t done! Or at least hasn’t been until now, in this starkly unbalanced, distorting moment. Comparisons of BuzzFeed to the now-defunct Gawker are being tossed around in the context of unjournalistic recklessness and shameless “clickbaiting.”

Such horror!

While the bonafides of the so-called dossier got something of a boost yesterday from a BBC story suggesting there at least four sources describing blackmail-quality material in Russian hands for possible use against Trump, for journalists of the traditional mindset, the line in the sand is “unverified”. Beyond that nothing matters.

The counter argument, which deserves more serious consideration than it is getting, is that having plainly asserted the material’s unverified nature, the credibility placed in it by U.S. intelligence agencies who briefed both the President, the President-elect and Senate leaders means the general public has a right to know what “the elites” are talking about.

As I say, the DC/media figures had been aware of this for eight months. (Here’s a timeline from businessinsider.com). If, as you can see in that timeline, influential people were making making strategic calculations based on its existence, who is the press protecting from what and why?

Former acting CIA Director Mike Morrell had a set of interesting comments on the matter to Christiane Amanpour.

If the crossing of the line, where news publications print unverified opposition research on powerful public figures is discomfiting to you, well, it should be. This is new ethical territory. Territory most polite people would prefer not to go into. But territory everyone in the press is reacting to whether they like it or not. Moreover, it is territory the press is being forced into, given the distortion of reality resulting from the head-on collision of “balanced” journalism and the “unbalanced phenomenon”, which in this case is an incoming President of the United States. Mr. Trump is after all someone who has steadfastly refused to disclose anything remotely like the normal financial information that could offer reassurance he is immune to foreign blackmail.

We may all wish we still lived in an era of two more-or-less respectful warring parties, where the press could play the comfortable, familiar role of bemused arbiter. But those days are gone, or certainly aren’t the ones we’re living today.

Another storyline in the roiling freak show that is the press in the Age of Trump is the offer by Penthouse magazine of a $1 million reward/bounty for anyone who delivers video of the dossier’s shall we say, “golden moment”. What does “the press” do if such a video ever appears? Beyond that, and something I think far more plausible, what happens if some wealthy liberal tycoon, a George Soros or Tom Steyer lets word get out that there’s a $5 million (or $10 or $20 million) bounty on Trump’s taxes? Drop them in a stall in an airport bathroom, no questions asked. What are ethics of running with that?

Our incoming President is a kind of ultimate disrupter. The press can accept that and adapt in order to assert the kind of oversight the public appears to want, or it can continue to wring hands over its relevance.

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

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Brian Lambert

NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3 Last 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.

Wry Wing Politics

Politics on wry.

Tag Archives: New York Times

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

Resistance to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Futile. Because It Delivers Comfort, Status and Cash.

What Would Trump Steal That is So Ultra Top Secret and Why?

After 19 Dead Fourth-Graders It’s Time to Apply “Muscular Bravado.”

I’m Feeling Another Sarah Palin Payday

How Did Local Media — or the Times or the Post — Know Scott Quiner Was Anywhere?

Afghanistan’s Collapse Was Inevitable

Every Hour of Every Day Irony Dies Again

The Times Drops the Big One and a Modest Proposal for a Deal with Donny.

Police Reform, if I Were King.

That Enlightenment Thing? It’s a Still a Work in Progrsss.

Impeaching Trump Will Require Smart, Savvy Storytelling

Klobuchar Games the Star Tribune

Never Mind The New York Times, The Local Press is Still Giving Klobuchar a Pass

So Apparently Amy “The Mean Boss” is Not a Story in Minnesota

Yeah, Kids. It’s “Binary”. Sessions Lied Under Oath

Gen. Flynn and the Dam About to Burst

The Resistance Is Being Televised, And A Lot Of It Is Pretty Funny

The Roiling Freak Show of Trump v. Media

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

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: