The Commentariat -- Sept. 3, 2016
Presidential Race
Holt, Raddatz, Cooper & Wallace. Photos via the New York Times.John Koblin & Alexander Burns of the New York Times: "Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace have been selected to moderate this year's presidential debates, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced on Friday. Mr. Holt, the anchor of the 'NBC Nightly News,' will moderate the first debate on Sept. 26; Ms. Raddatz of ABC and Mr. Cooper of CNN will moderate the town hall debate on Oct. 9; and Mr. Wallace of Fox News will handle the final debate on Oct. 19." -- CW (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
** Paul Waldman: "Whenever some new piece of information emerges about Hillary Clinton or people close to her, we're told that it 'raises questions' of some kind, which means it's being shoehorned into a larger narrative that ... she's tainted by scandal, or corrupt, or just sinister.... Yet somehow, stories about Donald Trump that don't have to do with the latest appalling thing that came out of his mouth don't 'raise questions' in the same way." Waldman compares two reports: one a non-story by the New York Times about Clinton's e-mails, and the other a Washington Post story about Donald Trump's contributing to Florida AG Pam Bondi's campaign while she was supposedly investigating Trump University, an investigation she dropped after Trump paid her tribute money. "Some stories 'raise questions,' and others don't." -- CW
Standing Rule: If it's Friday before a holiday weekend, you know there has to be a major docudump. ...
... Eric Lichtblau & Adam Goldman of the New York Times: "F.B.I. officials questioned Hillary Clinton extensively about her judgment in using her private email system to discuss classified drone strikes and in allowing aides to destroy large numbers of emails, before ultimately deciding she should not face criminal charges, according to investigative documents released Friday. The documents provided a number of new details about Mrs. Clinton's private server, including what appeared to be a frantic effort by a computer specialist to delete an archive of her emails even after a congressional committee had requested that they be preserved." The page includes the FBI's summary of its investigation. -- CW ...
... Matt Zapotosky & Rosalind Helderman of the Washington Post: "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her staffers employed an informal and sometimes haphazard system for exchanging and storing sensitive information and were at times either unaware or unconcerned with State Department policy, documents from an FBI investigation into her private email server system show. The documents reveal a myriad of new details about the email set-up and show that investigators found multiple attempts by hackers to access Clinton's system -- a series of personal devices and servers that the Democratic presidential candidate told investigators she used as a matter of convenience while she was secretary of state. The materials, which include a summary of the FBI's entire investigation as well as Clinton's hours-long interview with agents in July, contain no major revelations." -- CW ...
... Adam Goldman & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times report on "highlights" from the documents. -- CW ...
... Adam Blake of the Washington Post: "In the three hours-plus that Hillary Clinton spoke with FBI investigators about her private email server on July 2, she cited more than three-dozen things that she could not recall. Among them were things such as specific emails that perhaps nobody could be expected to remember years later, but Clinton also said she had no recollection of several key moments when it came to her email server, including briefings on how to handle classified information and key conversations about her server." Blake lists some of the things Clinton said she couldn't remember. -- CW ...
Nick Gass of Politico:"Former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned Hillary Clinton about using a BlackBerry to conduct official business in her first days as President Barack Obama's secretary of state, according to the FBI investigation's report.... According to the report, Clinton emailed Powell on Jan. 23, 2009, to ask about his use of a BlackBerry during his time in office.... In his response, according to the FBI, Powell told Clinton that if it became 'public' that she was using a BlackBerry to 'do business,' the emails could become 'official records[s] and subject to the law.' 'Be very careful. I got around it all by not saying much and not using systems that captured the data,' Powell said in the same email." -- CW ...
... Paul Waldman: "Don't forget that when the State Department told Powell, along with other secretaries of state, to produce all their work-related emails, Powell said he couldn't because they were all deleted." -- CW
Nick Gass: "Hillary Clinton opened up in a recent interview about the personal crisis she faced as first lady to Bill Clinton as scandal over his affair with Monica Lewinsky enveloped the political world and impeachment proceedings unfolded. 'It was really hard. It was painful. And I was so supported by my friends...," the Democratic nominee told CNN's Pamela Brown in a clip from a forthcoming documentary set to air Monday night.... CNN will also air a documentary about Donald Trump on Monday night following the Clinton special." CW: Yeah, Trump will probably open up about how painful it was to have to tell is potential dates to get HIV & other STD testing. "It’s one of the worst times in the history of the world to be dating," he said in 1991." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post: Hillary Clinton created the "vast right wing conspiracy" because she wanted to hide something about the Whitewater deal. And she did it when she wasn't even in the room. CW: See, Republicans would have been normal people instead of turning into a pack of radical, hateful loons if not for Hillary Clinton. With Tumulty's story, we have officially turned down the volume on the "Everything is Obama's fault" meme and activated the well-tested "Everything is Hillary's fault" back-up. ...
... CW: Here's Scott Lemieux, in LG&$, "raising questions" about Clinton coverage just as I did in a remark below. Here's he's referring to a NYT non-story story that ran a couple of days ago: "Hmm, it strikes me that the 'questions' that were 'raised' have an 'answer.'... 1)a Hillary Clinton aide asked for a special favor, 2)didn't get it, and 3)this 'raises questions' because the Clintons once lost money in a minor Arkansas land deal or something. I have no idea what explains it, but this form of hackery has been endemic at the Times for decades. The clouds over the Clinton campaign can never be dissipated." Let's commend Karen Tumulty for her NYT-style "journalism."
** Michelle Conlin & Grant Smith of Reuters: "... Donald Trump has run an unusually cheap campaign in part by not paying at least 10 top staffers, consultants and advisers, some of whom are no longer with the campaign, according to a review of federal campaign finance filings. Those who have so far not been paid ... include recently departed campaign manager Paul Manafort, California state director Tim Clark, communications director Michael Caputo and a pair of senior aides who left the campaign in June to immediately go to work for a Trump Super PAC[, which appears to violate federal campaign law].... Caputo told a Buffalo radio station in June after he resigned from the campaign, that he was not volunteering. Rather, he said he just had not gotten paid. Caputo confirmed to Reuters on Thursday that the Trump campaign has still not paid his invoices.... The Trump campaign said the Reuters' reporting was 'sloppy at best' but declined to elaborate." -- Thanks to Akhilleus for the link. -- CW
** Michelle Goldberg of Slate: "In a new New York magazine story, the invaluable Gabriel Sherman gives us fresh details of the depravity of ex-Fox News head Roger Ailes. [Linked yesterday in the Commentariat.]... There is abundant evidence, then, that Ailes is a vicious misogynist and a workplace predator. So why isn't it a bigger deal that he's advising the Republican presidential nominee?... If the Clinton Foundation were accused of doing anything this outrageous, it would be front-page news. The difference in how the two candidates are covered stems, in part, from a long-standing mainstream media tendency to view everything about Bill and Hillary Clinton in the most invidious possible light. But it's also a result of the fact that Trump is consistently able to bury his old misdeeds with new misdeeds, until all the outrages start to blur together." -- CW ...
... Molly Ball of the Atlantic: "Polls show majorities of Americans worried about being victims of terrorism and crime, numbers that have surged over the past year to highs not seen for more than a decade." In a longish piece, she shows how effectively Trump has tapped into, heightened and used that fear to his advantage. ...
... CW: BTW, I suspect the fear factor is largely a reflection of an aging U.S. population. People who are older are more fearful, not because we're all nuts but because we understand the stupidity of youthful bravado & we recognize not only our waning physical power but also our power to shape the world to more closely conform to our own ideal. Clinton began her campaign portraying herself as the protective grandmother figure, someone who would both bring you milk & cookies AND keep you safe from the bogeyman. But the press portrays her as a shady, elusive character (see this piece about the NYT's use of "shadow" and "cloud" in its Clinton stories, plus Paul Waldman's post linked above) and Trump of course calls her a crook (which is true of him but not of her). Together, the press & Trump have turned beloved "Nana" into a mashup of Lady MacBeth & the female villains in "Throw Mama from the Train."
... Dana Milbank: "... in recent episodes, something has gone wrong with the Trump Show. Trump still dominates the airwaves, but ... it turns out the Trump Show, late in the season, has lost its plot progression. And voters, belatedly but finally, are less inclined to view Trump the same way they view reality TV: with a suspension of disbelief.... Trump [has] benefit[ed] from the expectation of phoniness.... Reality TV may favor scoundrels, but reality can be more judgmental.... The Trump Show has lost its coherent story lines, its narrative arc.... This is no longer reality TV; it's reality. And reality is not as kind to Trump." -- CW
Alexander Burns & Maggie Haberman of the New York Times: "... the collaboration between Mr. Trump's campaign and [The Republican National Committee] has grown strained over the last month.... There is no prospect of a full public breach between the Trump campaign and the R.N.C. because both sides rely on a joint fund-raising arrangement crucial to their election efforts. But tensions have grown to such a point that they threaten to diminish the party's ability to work smoothly with Mr. Trump.... Mr. Trump, who has struggled to raise money, is dependent on his party's national committee to perform many of the basic functions of a presidential campaign." The reporters characterize Trump's Phoenix speech as perhaps a last straw. Prince Rebus & a Trump spokesman deny it.
AND Gideon Resnick of the Daily Beast on Trump's other teevee show. (And what a shame he didn't get to produce that show which aimed to pit black & white contestants against each other. Yeah, that was really a plan.)
Hey, there's one campaign that's more screwed-up than Trump's. Jill Stein's Green party staff sent her to the wrong city. Randy Ludlow of the Columbus Dispatch: Stein was scheduled to give a speech in Columbus, Ohio; her campaign sent her to Cincinnati. CW: We'll have to assume that Stein is as clueless as her staff: after all, she got on the plane bound for Cincinnati. Her excuse: "'A little scheduling error,' Stein said. 'I wish we had the resources of the other candidates. We're the only candidate who operates like the American people.'" Really? Do the "American people" routinely take flights to places they never intended to go? Ah, well, fly-over country. One place is about the same as the next, isn't it, Jill?
Beyond the Beltway
Matt Zapotosky: "Less than three months after the Supreme Court vacated the convictions of former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell, the U.S. attorney’s office that prosecuted the Republican has recommended to Justice Department higher-ups that they endeavor to try him again, according to people familiar with the case.... The decision ultimately rests with senior officials at the Justice Department, including the deputy attorney general and possibly the attorney general. But it is a significant step that demonstrates ... the prosecutors who convinced jurors that he was guilty the first time believe they could do it once more." -- CW
Robert Salonga & Mark Gomez of the San Jose Mercury News: "As he regained his freedom, Brock Turner faced protesters and heavy media scrutiny as an enduring public face of the issue of sexual assault on American college campuses. That was just with his first few steps out of jail. Turner's early release just after 6 a.m. Friday after three months in jail was met by a throng of television and press cameras from far-reaching parts of the country, as well as critics who continue to lament the light sentence given to the former Stanford swimmer for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman last year outside a campus party." -- CW (Also linked yesterday.)
Way Beyond
Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times: "Islam Karimov, a ruthless autocrat who ruled Uzbekistan for almost three decades, died on Friday in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. He was 78. A joint statement by the cabinet of ministers and the Parliament announced the death, saying he had a stroke that led to multiple organ failure. The announcement came after a long, strange interlude during which Uzbek officials refrained from confirming the death even while the leaders of Turkey and Georgia expressed condolences, mosque leaders were barred from offering prayers for the president's health, and funeral arrangements were being made very publicly." -- CW
Share Article
Reader Comments (10)
Here is a Washington Monthly article supporting the Clinton Foundation and all the journalism that just won't take no (scandals) for an answer.
http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/09/02/how-the-press-is-making-the-clinton-foundation-into-the-new-benghazi/
I am having a problem: frustration leading to paranoia.
Paul Waldman's column explains the source. The Clinton email story appears every day, everywhere and has produced absolutely nothing.
Trump bribes a state AG and that is ignored. Trump creates a fraudulent 'university' and that is barely mentioned. Trump cheats contractors and workers out of millions and millions and no one notices. Trump hides his tax returns and that is no big deal.
Usually this would not bother me too much since it looks like a violation of Schwalb's first law (never assume malice when stupidity will suffice) but now I am beginning to think that the media is playing a malicious game.
Hey, Marvin, you know who can feel your pain? All of us females who have lived with double standards from the get go. Below is one of my favorite Jon Stewart bits called "The Broads Must be Crazy"––he ends with the memorable line: "It's ok to be a pussy as long as you got a dick."
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/09yfp5/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-the-broads-must-be-crazy---belittled-women
To continue in this vein: Many younger voters have no living memory of Hillary's tenure as First Lady, of the right-wing witch hunt against her (YES, VIRGINIA & KAREN T. THERE INDEED WAS SUCH A THING) or of the ways in which she was a mold-breaking first spouse. Secrecy? After enduring the kind of coverage that has been doled out it's understandable.
And apropos of discussions here about the media's coverage of Trump's game of throw ups here is something Les Moonves, CBS head, said:
"The Trump phenomenon may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. The money's rolling in and this is fun...I've never seen anything like this and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry, it's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on Donald. Keep going."
About two weeks later a CBS reporter got caught in the middle of the mayhem at the Trump Chicago event and was thrown to the ground and arrested.
Ratings equal $$–––as Porky Pig was wont to say–--"Thaaats all folks!"
In the Molly Ball piece on fear is this --
"In study after study, the characteristic most predictive of a person’s political leanings is his or her tolerance for ambiguity. “The more intolerant of ambiguity you are—the more you seek control over your surroundings, certainty, clear answers to things—the more you tend toward conservative preferences,”
Elsewhere in the article, conservatism tends to correlate with fearfulness.
If there is causation -- i.e. if ambiguity tends to create fearful conservatives ... we are going to become one quivering lump of bedwetters, since the explosion of access to information (and misinformation) creates more ambiguity in uncritical minds (medullas?), and fewer people seem to develop critical faculties.
Talk about a nasty feedback loop. If "dumb" is "unable to resolve ambiguity", then
Dumb=scared=dumber=more scared ...
@Patrick: "... fewer people seem to develop critical faculties."
I wonder why that is, or if it's even true, but I also wonder where I got my "critical faculties," such as they are. I do think we may have done some kind of "critical thinking" exercises in some class I took in high school -- maybe civics or English -- but it certainly wasn't a sustained lesson.
I think my first hint that not everything was as it seems occurred in 1952 re: something Akhilleus mentioned the other day: the hole in the sole of Adlai Stevenson's shoe. The photo came to my house in Time magazine, & my parents were incensed.
In the context of the Time article, or at least the way my parents interpreted the article, the hole in the shoe showed that Stevenson was sloppy and/or "an absent-minded professor." At any rate, my parents cancelled their subscription to Time (which was pretty right-wingy then & certainly now employs right-wingy writers).
Up till then (I would have been seven years old), I thought that if somebody wrote it in a book, newspaper or magazine it was true. In the hole-in-the-shoe episode, I learned that even if something is true -- like the hole in the shoe -- it can mean something that not everybody agrees on, and that some "authorities" -- in this case, writers -- might mislead you.
This is not a lesson I learned as well as I should have, because in high school, I thought my American history books "must be" right about the wonderfulness of all things American, & my history teacher must have been wrong to question the books' premise. You can't (or at least I can't) go to "critical thinking" class once & have it sink in properly; you have to get there the same way you get to Carnegie Hall.
Marie
A thought about my own and others' paranoia. I don't trust either.
Is there an anti-Clinton conspiracy, the "vast right wing conspiracy" the Clintons themselves referenced years ago? Sure there is, not paranoid raving at all, and all purely evil. Everything from Whitewater to Kerry Swift-boating to the they're gonna take your guns away birther nonsense. It's all of a piece. Patently crazy stuff financed by hundreds of millions of dollars over the years from people who don't give a hoot about anyone but themselves, who don't want to pay taxes, and from corporations equally lacking any social conscience whatsoever.
It's not paranoia to recognize all that.
But there's also the momentum of narrative, of a story line that takes on a life of its own and carries a story-telling species such as ourselves along with it, leaving whatever critical faculty we might have far behind. Stories rely on struggle against the odds, between the strong and the weak, between good and evil, between us vs. them. Without a storyline to knit events together, there is only a dull recitation of disparate and hence forgettable facts, nothing to attract or hold the reader or listener.
In the Clinton-Trump campaign the story lines are long-established. It's a race between two, unlikeable, untrustworthy candidates. We've heard it for months, so facts and events, both reported and consumed, are filtered by the same narrative structure, nudging each into established patterns which ultimately have little to do with accuracy or truth. To some degree that story line was produced by the VR-W Conspiracy, abetted by genuine Clinton faults to be sure, but by now the lazy reporting of false equivalency and an uncritical acceptance of the established narrative has to take much of the blame.
So, the meshing to two factors, the VR-W Conspiracy, which is genuine enough, and our penchant for simple story lines that often hide as much reality as they reveal. Both play a part.
What we're left with, then, is one candidate regularly criticized for her moral shortcomings and the other given a partial pass because his own failings. glaring as they are, are "just business," where most expectation of morality is left at the door, or givens of his outsized personality, both contributing to the normalization of outrageous behavior that many have written about. No other narrative would keep the race close, and without a close race, the story and reader and listener attention to it disappear...
This morning's position: Paranoia, yes, but cum grano salis.
(Now see others were mulling over the same subject while I typed; today's RC storyline, perhaps?)
And Haley, if you haven't seen it yet, you might like this one:
http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-89663083/
And to carry this discussion of the lack of critical thinking ala the wonderful "hole in the shoe" example from Marie ( loved that–-and loved the fact that this humane man HAD that hole in his shoe) let's take fervent religious believers. They don't have to do any critical thinking nor is their curiosity never ended; they have all the answers, they KNOW the truth. Case closed. Minds closed.
Early on, I, like Marie, discovered (now there's a nifty word) that people lied/misled (to protect me? or themselves?) and that if I was going to find out the truth I needed to search it out myself. Many stumbles along the way, of course, but THAT course leads you to prick up your ears and keep asking questions.
I have for many years speculated that a draw for some (many?) to religion, especially highly prescriptive variations such as evangelical Christianity (and, I suppose, conservative flavors of most organized religions), is a relief from having to think for oneself, for removing the onerous task of having to come up with internally consistent guiding principles (or as consistent as most humans can be) and developing an ability to solve problems in a way that maintains respect for all parties.
That last part, a staple of humanist thought, is neatly done away with by the interpretations of many mainstream religions. Despite that "do into others" stuff and the reminder about "whatsoever you do for the least among you...", in practice, as anyone can plainly see, such admonishments are routinely and conveniently ignored if it appears necessary to apply them to groups or individuals one does not particularly care for. The fact that such tenets were devised exactly to be called upon in such situations gives the lie to the self-satisfied piety with which many wrap themselves. Why? Because it's hard to do.
And it requires a strong dose of self-awareness and the strength of one's convictions. I'm reminded of that line line from the film "A League of Their Own" in which one of the players on the ball club decides to quit. Her reason? "It just got too hard". The coach responds "It's supposed to be hard. If it was easy everyone would do it." So I suppose the essential hypocrisy of so many religious should not be a surprise. Neither should the comfortable reliance on rules which dispense with the need for critical thought.
One of the more heinous examples of such hypocrisy and simplistic thinking was the Decider's War of a Choice. He labeled a certain group evil doers and had no compunction about killing them all, even those who had no culpability whatsoever, and then being considered a "good Christian man" when he was, in fact , none of the above.
The carryover of this lack of critical thought and the handing over of all hard decisions to an all powerful father figure is one reason for the rise of the dictator in waiting, Trump, who, ironically, worships no god but himself.
A little glitch in that last post. I had meant to address it to PD in response to her previous post but somehow got her initials in the author field. Posting on a phone is not the best.