Did *not* expect to see this in the NYT (from someone other than Krugman):
Mainstream news coverage has a hard time making subtle distinctions between the behavior of the two political parties. When Democratic and Republican tactics are blatantly different — on voter suppression, for instance — journalists are often comfortable saying so. And when the parties act similarly — both soliciting large donors, say — journalists are good at producing “both sides do it” stories.
But when reality falls somewhere in between, the media often fails to get the story right. Journalists know how to do 50-50 stories and all-or-nothing stories. More nuanced situations create problems.
The 2016 campaign was a classic example. Hillary Clinton deserved scrutiny for her buckraking speeches and inappropriate email use. Yet her sins paled compared with Donald Trump’s lies, secrecy, bigotry, conflicts of interest, Russian ties and sexual molestation. The collective media coverage failed to make this distinction and created a false impression.
Now the pattern is repeating itself, in the battle over the federal courts.
Goku
Serious question: would reducing the New York Times Building to a smoldering pile of slag with a bomb send a message?
patroclus
Hillary Clinton’s e-mail usage wasn’t “inappropriate.” Virtually every major party Presidential nominee in modern history that wasn’t in public office gave speeches that made money. In an article purportedly decrying both-siderism, the author manages to do it anyway.
Aardvark Cheeselog
Even when saying “Both sides don’t do it,” the writer cannot resist the urge to say “both sides do it.”
Aleta
All Republicans need to do to test their claim is to nominate or float a centrist candidate and count the Democratic response. (And responsible journalists could do the thought experiment right now.)
hueyplong
Vichy “regret” in Sept 1944.
A little late to the party.
LurkerNoLonger
@Aardvark Cheeselog: Also, didn’t a bunch of Republicans vote against Bork too? That detail seems to be left out a lot.
patroclus
Moreover, John McCain is currently moaning about how the nuclear option is going to ruin the Senate, but he’s gonna vote for it anyway.
Mike J
@Goku: Not really comfortable with murdering journalists. Perhaps you should rethink this.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Goku:
Anne Coulter seems to think so…
Goku
@Certified Mutant Enemy:Don’t worry, Reichfart would get one too, as well as the Original Fake News
Goku
@Mike J: I didn’t say during work hours…
rikyrah
Huh?
For real?
They cling to BOTH SIDES DO IT pretty much at all cost.
When the Dems stand up to GOP outrageous bullshyt…..they clutch the pearls.
Kay
What I objected to about the email coverage was not just the sheer volume of coverage, but the moralizing tone.
They loaded it up with this weird “she takes LIBERTIES” scolding that seemed so insanely over the top- like it was proof of poor character that they had suspected all along. Like it wasn’t really about the emails at all- it was about some larger idea that “everyone knows” and I didn’t “know”. I don’t think Clinton is particularly dishonest, in the general scheme of “political actors”. I don’t, in fact, “know” that she’s a bad, immoral person. I wasn’t going along with that.
Maybe she just cannot be covered fairly. The narrative is so set and there’s so much defensiveness it’s impossible for her to get an even break. The BLAMING, too! The almost knee jerk defensiveness that dictates we must find how she is as at fault. She apologized for the email. It wasn’t enough. It was like she hadn’t apologized at all.
I saw a Guardian writer is doing a book on how Clinton was treated in ’16 and I’ll read it because I know something happened but I can’t lay it out – cause and effect. I feel like it’s important to figure it out, just for myself.
Go back and look at that Comey press conference and ask yourself if Mr. Comey would have delivered that scolding lecture to anyone else. He was WAY out of line in terms of his role but it was just taken as a given that she deserved this public shaming. It’s fucked up.
patroclus
@Goku: So you’d just kill the custodial work staff and the low paid security guards? Not a good strategy – the message you’d send is that you belong in jail.
Matt McIrvin
@Aleta: Gorsuch is a centrist! He didn’t mention Pepe the Frog once!
Yutsano
@Goku: Unless you’re going to do it like the Zankyou no Terror guys did it…nah we good.
Goku
@Yutsano: Just to be clear I wasn’t remotely serious when I said that and regret typing it. Orgs like the New York Times piss me off because of the amount of power they have to shape opinions which can shape elections. When they’re not acting responsibly we all suffer, like now. I also deleted other messages for being inappropriate upon further reflection and feedback
encephalopath
Neither Hillary Clinton nor her staff introduced classified information into the ordinary email system.
They never passed classified information to anyone who didn’t have the clearance to see it.
There is no evidence Clinton’s email server was ever hacked.
What was the inappropriate action? It’s a phantom: an imaginary thing the press keeps wanting to reference and point to but can never actually produce.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@patroclus:
Quoted for truth.
Kay
I just wish someone would admit that the email coverage was over the top. It’s too late, what’s done is done, but for God’s sake ADMIT they all went bonkers on the emails. She’s never running again. We can all safely admit the obvious now. How did it happen that email coverage absolutely dominated the 2016 election for 16 months? WTF? Christ, if she had STOLEN the server it wouldn’t merit that kind of laser-like focus. It was really unforgivable and disqualifying? Compared to what? How did it become the crime of the century?
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
I think this is where the misogyny comes in. Only the worst of the worst would say that women belong in the kitchen, or something equally obvious. But a vast swathe of the population, including women, will see a woman seeking power and feel like there must be something wrong there. When someone starts blowing smoke, that will prove to them there’s fire.
amk
You love trolling, donthcha doug? Who is this bothsidesdoit idjit of a pundtwit? Never even heard of him.
Kay
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
“Inappropriate”, okay. How in the hell does “inappropriate” merit the kind of coverage it got?
It wasn’t the email. They decided that the email was proxy for some larger point they wanted to prove about how she’s deceptive and untrustworthy, because the email itself was a bullshit issue. The email stood for something.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
Ha ha, no. Fuck this guy and fuck the NYT, they’re garbage.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
The way I put it in the immediate aftermath was that the media didn’t want to elect Trump. They just wanted to humiliate Hillary. Whether they hate a strong woman, they’re essentially Republicans, it’s a decades-old personal grudge, or any combination of the above, the national media hates her guts more than I can recall them ever hating anyone.
Tilda Swintons Bald Cap
@Kay:
This !
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
I saw and heard a lot of it. They can tell me that wasn’t the driving force until they’re blue in the face but I’m a middle aged woman and I know what I saw and heard. I recognize it! I live in the world! I get by okay but I don’t kid myself that it doesn’t exist.
People weren’t even subtle. They’d tell me they hated the way she looks, how she’s old, how she’s “bossy” or “bitchy” or how she never smiles and when she does smile they think it’s fake. Again- I know what I heard and I recognize this.
Bernie Sanders is old and so is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is, in my opinion, sort of horrible-looking. Mysteriously no one went out of their way to tell me they couldn’t stand looking at their old faces. I heard that about Clinton. They could not BEAR to look at her. Really? I mean, Jesus Christ. She looks likes tens of thousands of women.
Jeffro
Right now, the Rs are listening to the loudest, furthest right voices in their party thanks to big-donor Dark Money and heavily gerrymandered districts. The GOP will only rediscover the virtues of bipartisanship once we Dems beat them up badly enough. Let’s knock them around hard for being anti-American and anti-worker in 2018 and 2020, THEN see if they’re interested in any truly ‘bipartisan’ initiatives.
LurkerNoLonger
@Jeffro: You always bring a very positive attitude to these comments. I like it.
ruckus
@Kay:
Just think of the MSM as a propaganda arm of conservatives and it begins to be understandable.
The Moar You Know
@Kay: Russian agitprop, which convinced journos and the American people that millions of Americans gave a shit when they didn’t, and New York Times agitprop, an organization that would rather see Hitler’s pulverized corpse sitting in the Oval Office than one of the foul Clintons. Who they have hated since day 1.
@Frankensteinbeck: Oh yes they did. Absolutely they did. Don’t let those fuckers off the hook. They knew as well as anyone else that we have a two-party system and binary Presidential elections. If you’re anti-Hillary, that’s fine, but don’t pretend that the end result of being anti-Hillary isn’t going to be Trump’s fat ass in Obama’s old seat. Because that is the only possible result.
Ridnik Chrome
@LurkerNoLonger: Bork’s role in the Saturday Night Massacre should have been enough to disqualify him from the SCOTUS. But he at least got a hearing and a vote, two things Merrick Garland never got.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: Meanwhile Sanders has a ridiculous voice and a ridiculous face and yells and droops and wags his finger and it’s considered all part of the charm.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Ridnik Chrome:
Bingo!
Turgidson
@Kay:
I think your previous comment gets to the nub of it. The press came into the campaign with their Clinton baggage. The notion that she was untrustworthy, corrupt, willing to lie…those preconceptions were so embedded in the media that they just became rote additions to every single story about Hillary or her campaign. They never examined or challenged their own premise, and they felt like they didn’t need to because EMAILS validated that belief. EMAILS were a bad thing because the story made Hillary look bad, and since Hillary is bad, axiomatically, EMAILS were a big story that had to be covered.
Even people who supported HRC enthusiastically and knew the EMAILS was a bullshit story felt the need to say, “Wellllll, of course Hillary isn’t perfect, she has her flaws….” before mounting a defense of her or her campaign. Myself included. It felt like a necessary disclaimer to get the other person/audience to believe that you were being fair and honest. I knew as I said it a handful of times that I was violating all of George Lakoff’s rules about framing, but it felt like I had to say it anyway. And like you said, Hillary was really no more corrupt or prone to fabrication than most politicians. Maybe more than Obama, but Obama was a frickin unicorn in those respects.
For all the shit we heard about the Clinton’s baggage, it was the fucking media that brought baggage into the campaign. Everything she did was presumably nefarious, and even exculpatory evidence couldn’t penetrate that presumption. EMAILS was what they had to work with, so they ran that story into the ground, dug it back up, and repeated. About 50 times. And it worked, partly because the State Department released the emails in intervals rather than all at once, which would have probably been better for Hillary in terms of how many news cycles were clogged up with coverage. And there were some rules and guidelines that Hillary did not follow, which gave the braindead zombie chorus on the right all the grist they needed for their LOCK HER UP fever dreams and the bothsiderist dipshits like Fournier and Dowd enough of a figleaf of “ZOMG Clinton broke a rule and lied about it!” to keep the bothsiderist dipshittery flowing for the whole campaign.
Meanwhile her opponent was an ignorant, narcissistic sociopath with the attention span of a gnat and about eleventy jillion conflicts of interest, who considers Vladimir Putin his leadership role model. But.her.emails.
Yarrow
@Kay: Kay, if you haven’t read about this play where they restaged one of the debates and changed the genders of Trump and Clinton, you might be interested in it. The audience was surprised by their reactions to it.
Goku
@The Moar You Know: Would be interesting to see the demographic breakdown of several news orgs. Probably out there somewhere. Someone should consult the Great Google for the answer
slag
I hate to re-litigate these issues, but I actually kind of agree with this. Though I would have reworded it as:
That, to me, is more accurately reflective of Hillary’s actions as they concern the public interest.
But yes, her sins did pale compared with Donald Trump’s in pretty much every way, so I’ll take at least some acknowledgement of that reality. Of course, when we have to get into a situation this egregious just to get that tiny whisper into the void, we’re pretty much screwed anyway. But at least David Leonhardt can cross, “Well, at least I tried,” off the to-do list. Go team!
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
@Kay: Actually, I was agreeing with Patroclus that it WASN’T inappropriate. And I say that as an admin that wouldn’t have recommended it but certainly understand now exactly why she did it. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
That will happen a month of Sundays after trump admits he’s unqualified.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
but, but…… DWS!
Aleta
Mostly OT. This WSJ article is readable right now from the link on Joy Reed’s twitter.
Trump Administration Considers Far-Reaching Steps for ‘Extreme Vetting’
The WSJ seems concerned ! (They do add a smidge of Obama admin. for “balance.”)
Anyway, horrifying stuff for everyone.
https://mobile.twitter.com/undefined/status/849221847862431744
gratuitous
@LurkerNoLonger: Bork was voted down 58-42, six Republicans joining 52 Democrats not to confirm Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Here’s the whole rundown:
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/24/us/senate-s-roll-call-on-the-bork-vote.html
FlipYrWhig
@Turgidson:
This. No one honestly gives two shits about what computer had what emails on it. At its heart it was a story about how Hillary Clinton demands special treatment, acts secretive, and tries to bend the rules — all of which was said _before_ there was an email story, such as when it was the Rose Law billing records story.
TenguPhule
@Goku: Yes. But what kind of message is the problem.
Also, violence fantasies.
FlipYrWhig
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Someone here was JUST SAYING that in a conversation with a rabid Berniebot, Gabbard was being mentioned as a great presidential candidate, unlike Al Franken, who had been a Hillary Clinton surrogate, which disqualified him from consideration. SMH.
TenguPhule
@Aardvark Cheeselog: We need a law. Every time Bork is brought up out of proper context or incorrectly, the writer/speaker needs to be kneed in the crotch. Repeatedly.
Goku
@TenguPhule: Look who’s talking. I was just blowing off steam and I apologized. Mass murder, as it turns out, is not the solution
TenguPhule
@FlipYrWhig: No, we hate her at home as a attention swilling GOP-lite in Democrat clothing.
SiubhanDuinne
@Kay:
It was just released today. The author, Susan Bordo, isn’t a Guardian writer per se, although the paper printed a small extract from her book, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton. Bordo is a professor of humanities (history, feminist studies) at the University of Kentucky
On the strength of the excerpt I ordered the book. It downloaded at midnight, and I’ve been reading it on and off all day. It is very good. Will probably have finished it before I go to bed tonight unless Balloon Juice tempts me away.
TenguPhule
@Goku: ETA: Seen and acknowledged.
Mass murder is a solution. Just not a very good one.
Don’t throw those stones unless your own house is very secure, because I throw back.
amk
Now, this is something to blogviate about instead of this dumb shit.
Goku
@TenguPhule: @Goku:
For the record, I was wrong to type comment #1, it was morally repugnant. If I could delete I would
Turgidson
@slag:
“Hillary deserved scrutiny for [fake scandals and/or issues that should have been handled in one or two non-sensationalist articles]….” is their lame cop-out – basically admitting that their coverage was total shit without actually apologizing for it. Their version of the “I’m sorry that anyone was offended” non-apology or the “mistakes were made” shit Jeb(!) was tossing around to avoid admitting that his brother was a colossal fuckup.
I don’t know if they were trying to help Trump win or just trying to make what should have been a laugher of a race more interesting to keep the subscriptions and clicks coming while assuming Hillary would win regardless, or what. But their coverage was fucked up on a level that historians will be puzzling over for decades. A totally mainstream candidate, so qualified that it was considered funny to mock her for being prepared, with no *real* scandals to speak of, was brought down to the level of the Short-Fingered Vulgarian in large part because EMAILS. Which was a fucking bullshit story that affected nobody, harmed nobody, and was something that numerous other high-ranking government officials had done in various ways plenty of times before her. She lost because emails. The whole goddamn world lost. Because emails.
I still get rage-headaches when I stop and think about it too long. I probably always will, unless it turns out that the Trumpocalypse was the last gasp of white grievance in this country and his sheer incomptence both hastens their demise and prevents him/them for doing too much damage before they are swept out. But that’s an awfully big “unless.”
efgoldman
@Kay:
You have to start in the mid-90s. Rupert launched Fucks Nooze in Octobeer of ’96.
Ian G.
@Kay:
“Sort of” horrible looking? The motherfucker looks like a melting wax sculpture that someone glued some Barbie hair onto. He looks revoltingly hideous. Whenever I see him sitting with normal-looking human beings, Republican or otherwise, I wonder what the fuck is wrong with him that he looks the way he does.
Roger Moore
@FlipYrWhig:
But there’s two opposite ways of interpreting that. People who see this as about bias will see people having treated Hillary with suspicion because they don’t like powerful women, with the same wrongheaded claims showing up again and again. People who buy into those claims will see it as confirming a troubling pattern.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@FlipYrWhig: she’s a disgusting homophobe but she’s pretty so that makes her presidential. So goes the brain damaged analysis of the people’s revolution.
LurkerNoLonger
@gratuitous: Thanks, I thought so.
Yarrow
@Aleta: The Wall St. Journal is an interesting paper to run this story. If this proposal goes forward it’s going to kill business travel to the US. It’s already bad enough but this sort of thing will really mean businesses won’t want to send anyone here. Why would they when it would be standard procedure to have their computers and phones searched? So much for keeping company information secret.
TenguPhule
@Turgidson:
Previously it was a War Veteran rebranded as a Coward and Traitor. The American public is stupid and short of memory.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@amk: without any sponsors, they’ll be forced to do the show LIVE!!!
TenguPhule
@Yarrow:
Tourism too.
The Trump recession is really going to suck.
Yarrow
@TenguPhule: Yes, all travel to the US will be down. I was focusing on the choice of the Wall St. Journal, our ostensible “business newspaper” in this country, choosing to run this story. It’s got to have an effect on businesses as business travelers will be wary of risking their business secrets being stolen by CBP.
jeffreyw
Weird, OT but BJ will not scroll for me in Chrome, win 10, Logitech MX mouse. Other tabs scroll fine, Firefox BJ scroll is fine. Scroll wheel, I can drag the scroll sidebar button OK.
notoriousJRT
@patroclus:
In an article purportedly decrying both-siderism, the author manages to do it anyway.
Self-awareness. How does it work?
amk
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: and the pos is alive to do his pos ‘show’. only in murkkka.
FlipYrWhig
@Roger Moore: I totally agree. But I still feel bad about the way “don’t like her”/”don’t trust her” spread since the 1990s, to the point where it affects lefties and righties, women and men, old and young, for many different reasons. And I think it all started as “she doesn’t seem like she’s comfortable being herself,” which is just about impossible to combat, especially if the self you actually are is a tenacious feminist who knows lots of people don’t like tenacity or feminism in women and tried to damp it down for decades. I think it’s tragic in a literary sense.
efgoldman
@TenguPhule:
You looked in a mirror lately Ms/Mr Civil War / armed insurrection / arm yourself?
Goku
@TenguPhule: Thank you
jeffreyw
…and it’s scrolling fine after closing tab and then reopening it. Weird, old friend.
TenguPhule
@Yarrow: Makes one wonder if Trump is planning to short airlines stocks.
bystander
@Goku: TenguPhule has been prescribing various age old methods of execution for specific Constitutional infractions of the Trumps and their quisling abettors. I’m hoping we get to a codified and annotated version prior to the Revolution II.
TenguPhule
@efgoldman: I don’t pretend to be someone better then I am.
If I’m wrong, we all get to laugh and mock me. If I’m right, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
I really hope I’m wrong.
Corner Stone
Chuck Todd is all in on Susan Rice being the fucking devil that knocked twice.
TenguPhule
@bystander: After a trial and conviction. Got to follow the rules of civilization.
prob50
@Kay:
Take out “sort of horrible” and insert ” is grotesque” and I think you’ve got it nailed.
notoriousJRT
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think this is where the misogyny comes in. Only the worst of the worst would say that women belong in the kitchen, or something equally obvious. But a vast swathe of the population, including women, will see a woman seeking power and feel like there must be something wrong there.
I agree and admit I do not know how this nut gets cracked (no pun intended).
TenguPhule
@Goku: When I’m wrong, I’m wrong.
? Martin
@Aardvark Cheeselog: Bork could be seen as highly qualified. He could also be seen as the guy who did Nixon’s bidding on the Saturday Night Massacre, an action that was ruled illegal by a federal judge. That deference to authority in the face of a likely illegal act would seem to be disqualifying to me.
Goku
@bystander: I’ve kind of noticed. Still it is Trump, can’t quite fault someone for feeling that miffed at President Infallible and his cast of Captain Planet villains he calls a WH staff/cabinet
The Moar You Know
@Kay: Unlike Dorian Gray, every sin he’s ever committed has been written on his body.
Roger Moore
@Turgidson:
I think an understated part of the whole matter is that the media was played. The people who created the email scandal were playing precisely into the media’s weakness.
TenguPhule
@bystander: And admit it, if we didn’t have that pesky 8th Amendment, it really would be interesting to see them performed on Trump and company.
Turgidson
@Corner Stone:
Of course he is. He was kinda mean to McConnell on Sunday, pointing out that soulless ghoul’s breathtaking hypocrisy. So he needs to make sure his BothSides ledger gets back in balance ASAP.
notoriousJRT
@Goku: I was not disturbed by your first comment. Perhaps I am cynical, but I took it for hyperbole. I’ve seen it used here before admit to using it myself when I am frustrated by the world.
ETA: I thought you owned it well. Thanks.
efgoldman
@TenguPhule:
Only after he’s croaked the FAA and taken away its oversight over aircraft maintenance and airworthiness, and air crew qualification.
Aleta
@The Moar You Know: His body is turning into fault lines. And now his sins are showing up in stress lines on our bodies.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The idea that Hillary Clinton is somehow corrupt always puzzled me. She really always comes across to me as overly sincere and a horribly inept liar. I mean look how mockable she was when she tried it with that Bosnia thing in the 2008 primary. Being a terrible liar in the sense one can’t even do a “It’s not you, it’s me that’s the problem” kind of lie is likely a vice with a politician, but how does that get to “She’s hiding something!” is beyond me.
I always though Hillary’s real failing was as a woman she never learned how to
bullshit someone into bed like a horny weaselcharm someone. But the “She’s crook” has to be from something else, like she makes these men feel threatened somehow (like say she makes them face their personal myths of being Alphas is merely the result of the women their lives indulging them like they would a small child)TenguPhule
@efgoldman: No, that would make me wonder if he’s planning on buying the airlines outright. And by buying, I mean he gets someone else to put the money down for it.
TenguPhule
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Projection. It was always projection with the Right. Name a sin she’s accused of, you’ll find it on one of the accusers.
Roger Moore
@TenguPhule:
The time to short them is before announcing the policy. If he’s doing something now, it would be buying them while they’re temporarily depressed so he can sell them after rejecting the policy.
SiubhanDuinne
@prob50:
@Kay:
Take out “in my opinion” as well. Kay stated objective actual-factual truth. DT is horrible and grotesque-looking, and anybody who says otherwise is just plain wrong.
Tokyokie
@Aardvark Cheeselog: Robert Bork was highly qualified to be a Supreme Court justice in the same way Ezra Pound was highly qualified to be poet laureate. Both had outstanding résumés, yet both were moral wretches. Fuck The New York Times for failing to recognize that.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Quinnipiac Poll — Trump Ratings — April 4, 2017
Approve……………35%
Disapprove………58%
Roger Moore
@notoriousJRT:
I don’t think it gets cracked like a nut. Instead, there’s a long, painful slog of women fighting through discrimination to gradually get into more and more positions of responsibility. Each one who does a good job in spite of the barriers will make it a bit easier for the next one. Each time a woman achieves something new, it will be treated as the great breakthrough that has finally defeated sexism, but it won’t be. It’s going to take generations before women in power don’t provoke a reflexive negative response from a big chunk of the population.
TenguPhule
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: The floggings will continue until the polls improve.
J R in WV
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
Well, anyone who knows that Bork is highly qualified to be a Supreme Court justice is obviously highly qualified to write news stories about the DemocRAT Party, right?
Sorry if you can’t read that. You’re probably better off not reading it, really!
FlipYrWhig
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Gore got hit with both sides of that same proposition too: somehow both an awkward Boy Scout and dishonest at the same time. And in both cases it started with the “comfortable/uncomfortable in their skin” claim, which sometimes morphs into that idea of “authenticity” I hate so much.
Quinerly
But, there’s a Swedish study that concludes that Trump won because he’s just so damn attractive. Warning….don’t read the link while eating.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
The thing that pisses me off the most about blaming the Democrats for Bork is that Reagan knew his history when he appointed him. His appointment wasn’t some innocent act; it was a deliberate provocation. The media’s willingness to ignore that shows how reflexively they take the Republican framing of issues.
Mike J
@Frankensteinbeck:
CNN Had a Problem. Donald Trump Solved It.
hovercraft
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
Om my, the “fake news” and the “deep state” have really done a number on America, the one thing that’s going well is being attributed to that weak, ineffectual blah guy who snuck his way into the White House. SAD !!!!
GregB
Secretary of State Tillerson is reluctant to criticize Syria because he is reflexively defensive pro gas.
Turgidson
@Tokyokie:
Seriously. The Democrats and handful of now-extinct Northeastern Republicans who Borked Bork were doing their fucking patriotic duty, no matter how prestigious that hate-filled pustule’s education was. Being qualified for SCOTUS is certainly better than the alternative (shout out to Harriet Miers!), no doubt, but being a semi-decent human being whose views of justice and right and wrong align with the century we are living in and not the one that the judge thinks the Founders lived in when they wrote a document that said women could not vote, some people were only 3/5 human, and has been amended two dozen times, is vastly more so.
Scalia showed just how much damage a SCOTUS Justice who thinks he talks to the Founders on a charmed ham radio can do to the country. And thanks to Mitch McConnell being the most insufferable prick on the planet, we’re about to get someone even more vile to fill that seat.
Corner Stone
This motherfucker Chuck Todd.
FlipYrWhig
@hovercraft: @David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: I’m assuming that number is getting pulled in funny directions, though, because Republicans are trying to say the economy sucks and it’s Obama’s fault, and Democrats are trying to say the economy is good and it’s Obama’s doing, which is bound to show up lopsidedly as “Obama is responsible” in, like, an absolute-value sort of sense.
Turgidson
@hovercraft:
Of course, that 45% is Republicans who learned in about Fall 2009 to read economic charts upside down and blame Obama for what they think is a dystopian hellscape.
gene108
@LurkerNoLonger:
Bork got an up and down vote before the full Senate. His testimony was heard before the Judiciary committee. Bork had some bugfuck crazy ideas about why the Civil Rights Act of 1964 needed to be abolished, among other things.
He therefore was found wanting.
The same way, in 1986, Jeff Sessions was found wanting because he’s a fucking racist.
hovercraft
@Quinerly:
Fortunately the link didn’t work for me so I was spared. FYI the link is in the reply button.
Whoever these people are who thought Twitler was/is attractive or more attractive than Hillary, need their head examined. It may be that they liked him better than her so they found him generally more attractive, just like when you don’t like someone you tend to find them less attractive?
Ksmiami
@patroclus: As my chef buddy would say, Fuck that guy
Peale
@encephalopath: “But I would have been fired for that”. We have a lot of people who would have been fired for that!
A Ghost to Most
@Ian G.:
He is what a 70 year old infant looks like.
J R in WV
@Kay:
Well, Kay, sweetie… You just can’t understand. It’s just that HILLARY IS A WOMAN and thus can’t be allowed to have her own server guarded by the Secret Service. I mean, really??? It’s so obvious to everyone else, the menfolk, I mean.
//
The whole election was framed in advance by marketing professionals, and the flood of phony propaganda was unending and infinite in volume and degree of falsehood.
The people who participated in it should all be removed from the media, and get to work in fast-food for the rest of their lives. All the pressure, no chance to fuck up the nation!
hovercraft
@FlipYrWhig: @Turgidson:
I know that they are distorting the number, but this was one of the media’s and the GOP’s pet peeves back in the first term of the Obama administration, they kept polling to see who the country blamed for the economy and people kept saying Bush well after the media felt Obama should have owned it. Even leading into 2012 the country was still split on who to blame for the slow recovery. So yes republicans blame Obama for the dystopian reality we are all living through right now, but it will be a while before the credit Twitler for it. That is so long as it continues to putter along, if there is a recession as many economists expect, Twitler will get the blame, even if it’s cyclical. SAD !!
MCA1
@Turgidson: I feel like you tunneled into my brain and wrote my experience and impressions for me, more cogently and succinctly than I could. I 100% agree with your theory of the election and the history of the treatment of Hillary Clinton as a political figure. The metanarrative on her was formed over a quarter century and had hardened to a point where it was, in retrospect, unshakeable within the time frame of a single national election. Every bit of smoke the media ever reported on regarding Clinton was blown in their faces by a GOP dry ice machine, but they never bothered to care about that, and eventually there was such a trail of smoke that otherwise rational people were convinced there must a blaze somewhere. Over time, that metanarrative became a convenient, accepted conventional wisdom prism through which haters and non-haters alike (skeptics of political types/apathetic/low info voters) could view literally everything she did or said as confirming their gut feeling that she was somehow untruthful, arrogant, shifty, cold, secretive, overly ambitious, not trustworthy, and whatever else.
As a thought experiment, imagine a moderate but increasingly liberal over time Democratic woman not married to Bill Clinton had been a Senator, then Obama’s Sec’y of State and then ran for President. This candidate, we’ll call her Valerie Clanton, had kept a private e-mail server while at State, never did classified communications with it, used it partly because the IT dweebs couldn’t make her job easier, and knew that her predecessors had used similar workarounds (including their own private laptops). The server was never successfully hacked. Republicans would have made a huge deal of it because that’s what they do, but do we think anyone else would have given a flying fuck for more than a couple news cycles? Of course not. Rubes and old GOP stalwarts who don’t use e-mail would have been the only people for whom it mattered at all. But Valerie Clanton did not carry a 25 year history of made up scandals and ridiculous claims that she was a murderer, so it didn’t fit into a pre-established narrative for her. It would have been dead news inside of a week.
To Kay’s point, I think it’s critical to note that while this certainly all started as misogyny, seeing as the national pastime of hating on Hillary Clinton had Rush Limbaugh as its Abner Doubleday, it branched out from there to affect a lot of other, not misogynistic people. Even fairly progressive women, like Mrs. MCA1. Longtime professional working woman, highly educated, she voted Clinton, but would have been very tempted by Generic Republican had he been the nominee instead of Tangerine Nightmare. There was just “something” intangible that she did not like about Hillary.
p.a.
You’re all being quite unfair. Turd polishing is not an easy art to master (I am told.) NO ONE polishes turds better than the NYT.
FlipYrWhig
@MCA1: MsYrWhig, with a similar profile, was no fan of HRC either, not in ’08 nor ’16.
rikyrah
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
I’ll say it again…
I can be Purity Polly…
She is in HAWAII.
WE.CAN.FIND.SOMEONE.TO.PRIMARY.HER.
rikyrah
@Aleta:
This will DESTROY the tourism industry in this country.
Quinerly
@hovercraft:
My Microsoft Windows phone refuses to accept links when I plug it in the comments. It was an obscure article from some Swedish study that showed up in my news feed yesterday. The site was oregonlive.com. Bizarre little piece on how Conservative politicians are more attractive. It’s been widely mocked on several other sites.
TenguPhule
@J R in WV:
What do you have against those of us who enjoy fast food every now and then?
Ksmiami
@notoriousJRT: Against the Constitution- unreasonable search and seizure. corporations will throw a fit. WSJ is getting out in front of their corp masters
prob50
@SiubhanDuinne:
OK, NOW you’ve got it nailed.
It took a group effort – proud to be a part.
TenguPhule
@rikyrah: Tell me about it.
Like I said. He’s setting the country up to fail like never before. This Recession is going to make Bush II’s look like a Little piker.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
Ding-ding-ding.
Without giving away too much of my secret identity, I just went to a lecture/discussion where we spent a lot of time talking about Trump’s victory as the victory of a superior narrative. It’s hard to win with a narrative of “everything is good, let’s stay the course” when both of your opponents are bashing you for dishonesty and insisting that they’re both defending the people who were left behind.
Though I did feel somewhat justified when this speaker (who is something of an expert on story structure) said it really hurt in the general election that Wilmer couldn’t be arsed to publicly make nice with Hillary. Him being a grumpy curmudgeon is his schtick, but it hurt the party because it gave people an excuse to believe that he was right and the Democrats are totally corrupt — look, they can’t even get the other candidate to go along with the nomination!
West of the Rockies (been a while)
I earnestly think I will dance a big when Turtle finally strokes out. He is 75 and doesn’t look especially fit. Same for hobgoblin Sessions, Bannon, and of course, Lump.
Damn, it’s hard to halt this fantasy! Limbaugh, Coulter, Savage, Hannity, O’Pinhead….
Coulter and Hannity could keep churning out the lies for a couple decades.
TenguPhule
@Ksmiami: And they’re still going to go ahead and do it anyway.
janeform
Brilliant post title, Doug!
bystander
@TenguPhule: Hey, I enjoy dreaming along…I like to add in my own soundtrack. A combination of Bernard Hermann and screaming.
LurkerNoLonger
@A Ghost to Most: He’s what a rotting pile of garbage in an ill-fitting suit looks like.
Patricia Kayden
@patroclus: And what is the Trump regime doing with its email servers? Using private servers just like Secretary Clinton but no one gives a damn.
Patricia Kayden
@patroclus: Because he is so dang mavericky.
prob50
@Patricia Kayden:
But it’s not “news” because everyone already knew what monstrous, lying, unethical and immoral pricks they were.
So with that lowered bar of expectations it’s OK.
Different set of rules for Hillary, though. If she smiles while shaking hands with someone she doesn’t know while campaigning, well, she’s obviously an insincere phony and therefore not to be trusted.
geg6
@Yarrow:
I read about it and the whole thing is bullshit. I also read several critiques that pretty much invalidated the conclusions in the original article. It wasn’t in any way a scientific recreation and the actors had physicality and mannerisms that didn’t track with what actually happened at the debate. So I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt.
MCA1
Off topic, perhaps a possible new thread topic to stomp this one:
Joaquin Castro put the concepts of “Trump associates” and “jail” together publicly. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/rep-people-will-end-up-in-jail
I like this development. Schiff and Warner can continue to be presidential and circumspect, and hog the gravitas, but some Democrats like Castro need to troll away, throw bombs, lay out the honey pots for the media to come lap up, whatever. May as well have just named Flynn, as far as I’m concerned. I think that dude’s in serious trouble, as is the fool who passed classified information to Drumpf through Nunes after he was told to stop digging by White House General Counsel.
Anyway, it’s been perplexing/infuriating to me that the primary public reaction to this whole Russia thing has been a collective shoulder shrug. Part of it is people’s confusion about what’s real and what’s not anymore, part of it is a lot of people apparently can no longer distinguish an actual scandal from the 24/7 news churn, or they just can’t absorb the unimaginable level of corruption and derp coming out of the White House, part of it is the Cult45 effect, I guess. But I suspect some of it also just stems from the fact that people don’t want to, or just cannot, believe that something this bad is this close to a President. Democrats need to start using the words “prison,” “treason,” “spy” and the like, and connecting the dots loudly and often. To wake people up, and to lay the mental and emotional groundwork for them to accept that the President is the willing or unwilling stooge of a hostile foreign power.
Roger Moore
@Patricia Kayden:
It’s almost as if the email stuff were just a ruse to fool gullible rubes and provide an acceptable anti-Hillary justification for closet misogynists rather than a serious criticism.
SiubhanDuinne
@MCA1:
I think this is all deliberate. “Feature-not-bug.”
J R in WV
@Corner Stone:
Fixed that for ya!!
laura
@Corner Stone: so’s Andrea Mitchell and a gaggle of NPR reporters. Vomit inducing and by design to shift focus off the Trump Administration and twist it so as to lay blame on the Obama Administration.
Also, regarding the curse of bothsiderism, see almost anything by Driftglass, he’s been covering the phenomenon for years and yet will never get the serious media column such writing deserves.
Chuck Todd -gaaah!
Barry
‘Both sides do it’ and defeating a manifestly unqualified and corrupt nominee is equivalent to every dirty trick.
At times, I’ve thought of renewing my subscription; this makes me vow to give them money when H-E-double-hockey-sticks freezes over.
Villago Delenda Est
Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT
Wipe them out. All of them.
J R in WV
@West of the Rockies (been a while):
I personally can not wait until I learn the Dick Cheney has kicked the 55-gallon barrel. No bucket would do for him!!
The fact that some family, somewhere, donated their loved one’s organs to help others live, and Dick Cheney got their loved one’s heart!!!
Big Picture Pathologist
@Jeffro:
Doug!
@janeform:
thanks
Chet Murthy
@Goku:
Well, here’s something we can all get behind: I wouldn’t shed a single tear if every sulzberger who ever had any role in managing any part of the NYT, got Herpes zoster in every sensory ganglion. Incredibly painful, not (very contagious) and incurable. Also, not at all deadly.
Raven Onthill
They just had to take a swipe at Clinton.
Campaign’s over, we’ve the proto-fascists dominate two branches of the government. Time to move on.