Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Second rate reporter says what?

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Let me file that under fuck it.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

You are here: Home / I laughed at all of your jokes

I laughed at all of your jokes

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I have to admit that when the Wolff book came out, I thought for a while that maybe establishment media would stop pretending Trump was a savvy, gut-level decision-maker who was ready to pivot or become president all over again. I was sadly mistaken:

Maggie Haberman is the worst offender of course. The resident Trump-fluffer at Axios is no better.

And Bobo’s all in on Trumpism (no link, h/t reader JK)

I certainly have talked to many people over the last several months who said, yes, I went into a meeting, he was surprisingly well-informed, surprisingly ran a good meeting.

I have certainly had that experience. And he’s running a White House that, whether you approve of the policies or not, has done this Pakistan deal, or the change in Pakistan policy, which is defensible — they did pass a tax bill. They are doing this regulatory stuff, this judicial stuff.

Bobo generally supports Trump, and probably voted for him, but with the others, it’s a strange DC kabuki, which we saw before under W, where it’s considered uncouth to say anything bad about a Republican president who is clearly way over his head.

Probably most of it is that Maggie needs continued access so she can write her book about Trump (just as Elisabeth Bumiller did with W). And the Axios guy needs continued access too.

But I think there’s something more to it as well, just some strange code whereby to be a cool kid in good standing you need to tell your readers fairy tales about Republicans.

Reader Interactions

183Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    I certainly have talked to many people at Applebee’s salad bar over the last several months who said, yes, I went into a meeting, he was surprisingly well-informed, surprisingly ran a good meeting.

    Fixed.

  4. 4.

    aimai

    Jesus, at this point the Times should fire anyone who is contracted to write a book on a major political figure. They can rehire them after the book comes out but they should not allow them anywhere near reporting on their subject.

  6. 6.

    Bobby Thomson

    Dude, this isn’t complicated. She’s a conservative who used to write for the NY Post. And the Times is s shitty paper and has been for years.

  7. 7.

    Nicole

    I think we forget how many of these media pundits are children of rich kids themselves. As I said in an earlier thread, because I can’t stand to watch televised news anymore, I keep documentaries about American history on in the background now while I work, and listening/watching the one about FDR is a good learning experience on how much the elites hated Roosevelt for being “a traitor to his class” as was said about him. These media types aren’t going to be traitors to their class.

    I think so much of the Clinton hate was that this trailer trash hick and his barely middle-class wife rose about their stations in life. Not just from these dumb rich kids who owe their teevee jobs to their rich parents, but also by average white Americans who are upset to be reminded that every so often, a fellow crab makes it out of the bucket.

    Trump’s nouveau riche, but he didn’t make his money himself, so he’s still one of the “appropriate” people. Dumb graduate of an Ivy League, thanks to his dad’s $$. Just like a lot of the people talking about him.

  8. 8.

    dmsilev

    Also an issue for the NYT people is that their Editor and at least their previous Publisher are both pretty pro-GOP, even if they probably think Trump himself is a bit déclassé.

  9. 9.

    Baud

    @Nicole:

    I think so much of the Clinton hate was that this trailer trash hick and his barely middle-class wife rose about their stations in life. Not just from these dumb rich kids who owe their teevee jobs to their rich parents, but also by average white Americans who are upset to be reminded that every so often, a fellow crab makes it out of the bucket.

    I was thinking about Clinton hate recently. It’s so intensely irrational that I think it’s because they are America’s most prominent race traitors. Sure, the elites might also hate them because they are hicks, but that doesn’t explain why ordinary white people hate them (while loving FDR).

  10. 10.

    Yarrow

    I really wish Michael Wolff would do a book on some of the media “stars.” He can start with Bobo. Or maybe a book with a chapter on each of them. I’d read that.

  12. 12.

    Starfish

    A lot of the reviewers of this book just sound jealous. Here is The New Yorker review. It looks like maybe they skimmed the book. The review is really shallow and mostly based on the first quotes that were given to the press.

  13. 13.

    Nicole

    @Baud:

    I was thinking about Clinton hate recently. It’s so intensely irrational that I think it’s because they are America’s most prominent race traitors. Sure, the elites might also hate them because they are hicks, but that doesn’t explain why ordinary white people hate them (while loving FDR).

    FDR didn’t have to contend with FOX News. It was also still a deeply segregated society back then, so most of the New Deal benefits went to Whites.

    ETA: Also, the US is a deeply classed society, and depends on the lower classes buying into the notion that being rich = inherently more worthy. FDR was hereditary wealthy. He didn’t serve as an indication to middle-class and working-class whites of how they clearly weren’t living up to their own potential. I think that’s why Bill Clinton gets under people’s skins. He really is the living embodiment of the American Dream- trailer trash kid who grows up to be President. But we don’t actually really believe the Dream, so he just makes Whites feel insecure (don’t even get them started on Barack).

    And Hillary, of course, has a vagina.

  14. 14.

    Ruckus

    cool kid in good standing you need to tell your readers fairy tales about Republicans

    They so desperately want to be the koool kids. They will do anything to be them. They will sell their souls to be koool. They want someone to like them. Preferably someone whose station is above them. The higher the better. But anyone really. In HS they were the kids who smoked or made out behind the gym. Or smoked and made out behind the gym. (Why yes I am old, why do you ask?)

  15. 15.

    Vheidi

    @Baud: we watched tapper, who had to bring up the inappropriateness of a relationship with an intern in the white house.
    There’s a reason I don’t watch this horsesh*t

  16. 16.

    Mnemosyne

    Like I keep saying, the NYT (and the rest of the MSM) is pissed because a lowly freelancer from a mere Hollywood trade paper scooped them all and made them look like fools. That’s why they’re so desperate to run down Wolff and his book — he’s not one of the Kool Kids, he doesn’t buy into the Cult of the Savvy, and he’s willing to make his subjects look like assholes if he thinks they’re assholes.

    He is, quite literally, the kid in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and Beltway journalists are trying to shut him up before he blows up the whole game.

  17. 17.

    tobie

    I think after the Alabama elections the Republicans in Congress and in the media made a pact to do everything in their power to normalize Trump to ensure a permanent Republican majority. We’ll find out in 2018 who is, and is not, taken off the voter rolls.

  18. 18.

    Lapassionara

    @Baud: It was irrational. I recall, in the days before the internet, someone circulating an 8 and 1/2 by 11 Shetland of paper, with two columns of allegedly nefarious Clinton deeds, including murdering Vince Foster and Ron Brown.

    I could not explain it.

    ETA I meant sheet of paper. Thanks, autocorrect

  19. 19.

    Brachiator

    @dmsilev:

    Also an issue for the NYT people is that their Editor and at least their previous Publisher are both pretty pro-GOP, even if they probably think Trump himself is a bit déclassé.

    I don’t know if Times editor Dean Baquet is pro-GOP. He was a good reporter and even won a Pulitzer going after corrupt politicians, but he was an ineffectual disaster as editor of the Los Angeles Times and it is wild to see how he has failed upwards to the NYT.

    All of New York media loved Trump. I think that Maureen Dowd said that she was first assigned to write about him for the social pages. He was brash, a playboy and sometimes married man who loved to talk about himself. It was more fun to cover him than decrepit rich people who had to be propped up to look lively at charitable events.

    But this also meant that too few in the New York media ever looked closely at Trump or took him seriously.

  20. 20.

    pat

    I’m actually reading the book, on my Nook because the hardcopy is back-ordered, and there are a lot of things where you just have to wonder, How did he know that?? And frankly places where it might seem to be made up. Maybe some day we will find out what’s on those many hours of tapes.

  21. 21.

    Mnemosyne

    @Starfish:

    They are deeply, deeply jealous. Wolff is not one of them, and he scooped them all. Remember the Stephen Colbert routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner that pissed them off? It pissed them off because they knew he was right — they are too lazy to do the work Wolff did to write this book, and they’re pissed because Wolff showed them up in front of the whole world.

    Wolff doesn’t care. He’s crying all the way to the bank. And that’s the other thing that makes him different from them: he cares more about the story than he does about maintaining his sources. He would rather tell a great story while burning every bridge than maintain his access to power.

  23. 23.

    Mandalay

    @Starfish:

    The review is really shallow…

    It’s actually far worse than that. From your link…

    Wolff’s book seems to occupy a middle ground: between the writing of White House newspaper reporters, who exercise preternatural restraint when writing about the Administration, and the late-night comedians, who offer a sense of release from that restraint because they are not held to journalistic standards of veracity. That middle ground, where there is neither restraint nor accuracy, shouldn’t exist.

    Other Villagers dismiss the book because it is sloppy and inaccurate. Gessen cranks it up a notch and claims the book “shouldn’t exist”. WTF?

  26. 26.

    Sherparick

    I think it is the advantage of having Fox News and the rest of the right-wing infotainment complex available. Starting with Newt and his congress, Republicans can always promise to cutoff access the MSM reporters and shows if they offend them by reporting negative stories (also known as the truth) and use their right wing media to get their messages out and reinforced. Democrats can be pissed on by MSM, but they pretty much have to continue to deal with them and give access since they don’t have an alternative media universe to turn to. As to why there is a right wing media complex and not a left wing one, corporate America finds the right wing message useful and the left wing voices a threat.

  28. 28.

    Mnemosyne

    @pat:

    It’s entirely possible that Wolff took down stories that people told him but didn’t have a way to independently verify. That’s actually acceptable for this kind of book as long as you document in your notes who told you the story and on what date.

    Or, given that he was apparently just hanging around all day with no supervision, most likely he would make notes of what he overheard and who the speakers were. If they didn’t want to be overheard, they should have kept better tabs on him.

  29. 29.

    Baud

    @Sherparick:

    but they pretty much have to continue to deal with them and give access since they don’t have an alternative media universe to turn to.

    In the early days of blogging, I had hoped that blogs would turn into a viable alternative. Alas, they mostly went in a different direction.

  31. 31.

    Brachiator

    @Mandalay:

    and the late-night comedians, who offer a sense of release from that restraint because they are not held to journalistic standards of veracity.

    Wow. Actually, the late night comedians score very well with respect to veracity. Some of them are doing better jobs that mainstream reporters. They also don’t have to kiss ass to make sure they can get access to sources for future stories.

  33. 33.

    Yarrow

    @Mandalay: Wow. That is a terrible piece by Gessen. I thought she was better than that. Sample:

    But, worst of all, Wolff’s reporting is not reporting. The book’s most resonant revelation so far concerns comments Wolff attributed to Steve Bannon, who supposedly called the June, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer “treasonous,” said it should have been reported to the F.B.I., and expressed certainty that the Russians had been taken up to meet Donald Trump himself. Of these three assertions, one is stating the obvious—the Russian overture should have been reported to the F.B.I.—and two are false.

    In this paragraph she claims that Wolff got it wrong by saying that Bannon called the meeting treasonous.
    And here’s Bannon today apologizing for calling the meeting treasonous.

    Mr. Bannon, who is quoted in a new book calling Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with Russians in 2016 “treasonous,” tried to reverse his statements completely, saying that the younger Mr. Trump was “both a patriot and a good man.” Mr. Bannon spoke out after five days of silence, a delay that he said he regretted.

    He said his reference to “treason” had not been aimed at the president’s son, but at another campaign official who attended the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Paul Manafort.

    So Bannon’s apologizing for something he said that Gessen says he didn’t say. Okay, then.

  35. 35.

    MJS

    @Mandalay: Why is “restraint” something reporters should engage in? Is something true or not should be the only test. By indicating reporters are censoring the news, he’s also indicating they’re not to be trusted.

  36. 36.

    Marcia

    @Mnemosyne:

    Or, given that he was apparently just hanging around all day with no supervision, most likely he would make notes of what he overheard and who the speakers were. If they didn’t want to be overheard, they should have kept better tabs on him.

    In other words — being a reporter. Whoda thunk it?!

  37. 37.

    Baud

    @MJS:

    Why is “restraint” something reporters should engage in?

    You have to balance out the lack of restraint they show during Democratic administrations.

  38. 38.

    Mnemosyne

    @Brachiator:

    The only thing that could make this even more hilarious would be if Wolff manages to win a Pulitzer. He won’t, because establishment journalism hates his guts, but man would I love to see that happen.

  40. 40.

    Brachiator

    @Mnemosyne:

    They are deeply, deeply jealous. Wolff is not one of them, and he scooped them all.

    Kind of reminds me of the reaction to Kitty Kelly, who would get slammed for writing trashy celebrity biographies, but never given credit for getting access to people or for getting the facts right (and yeah, she got some facts wrong, also).

    Conventional reporters and editors keep trying to treat Trump like a standard politician, and keep blowing an opportunity to do good, Interesting reporting.

    Wolff, on the other hand, saw his opportunity, and rightfully took advantage.

  41. 41.

    Yarrow

    @Mnemosyne:

    Or, given that he was apparently just hanging around all day with no supervision, most likely he would make notes of what he overheard and who the speakers were. If they didn’t want to be overheard, they should have kept better tabs on him.

    I know nothing about this horrible administration should shock me anymore, but there are so many people who work there and apparently they’re ALL so incompetent that they just let Wolff hang out on a sofa outside the oval office every day, went to dinners he hosted, and let them interview him ALL without any caveats of on or off the record or anything else. It’s so incompetent it still shocks me.

  43. 43.

    Mandalay

    @Nicole:

    I think we forget how many of these media pundits are children of rich kids themselves.

    I don’t know whether Haberman’s family is rich, but having Daddy on the NYT Editorial Board certainly isn’t hurting her career.

  45. 45.

    MattF

    There’s the possibility that the various media types really believe that Trump’s not all that bad. Or no better than the hoi polloi deserve. Admitting this would reflect on their own fitness to cover politics, so it’s a no-no.

  46. 46.

    Baud

    @Yarrow: Remember all the brouhaha over that couple that crashed one of Obama’s state dinners, and how it meant that Obama was careless about national security?

  47. 47.

    Yarrow

    @JaneSays: David Brooks. He wrote “Bobos in Paradise” and earned himself a nickname. In his book “bobos” are bourgeois bohemians.

  48. 48.

    Mnemosyne

    @Marcia:

    Janice Min, the co-publisher of the Hollywood Reporter who was helping Wolff the whole time has some EPIC tweets about Wolff and the book. The private dinner party he talks about was one that Wolff himself hosted, and they all spilled their guts right at the dinner table.

    The most illustrative tweet of hers IMO:

    Janice Min
    @janicemin
    Incredulous, I often asked Michael about his near-weekly visits to roam the White House unsupervised:

    Me: ‘So what do they THINK you are doing?’

    Him (typing, typing): ‘I have no idea. No one asks’
    7:03 AM · Jan 4, 2018

  51. 51.

    m.j.

    From Trump’s latest appearance before the press…

    It’s very,very bad for our country. It’s making our country look foolish. And this is a country I don’t want looking foolish. And it’s not gonna look foolish as long as I’m here.

  53. 53.

    oldster

    Hey, DougJ–

    If I wanted to talk with you offline about political issues here in Western NY, is there a way that we could get in touch?

  54. 54.

    Mnemosyne

    @Yarrow:

    It’s so incompetent it still shocks me.

    They’re not used to a free press. They’re used to having reporters from the New York Times defer to them and only report things that make them look good because it’s good for both of their careers.

    Wolff is a shock to their system. It’s no wonder that the Guardian has been championing him and was the first major newspaper to support him — the British tradition is still of tearing politicians down, not propping them up.

  55. 55.

    Mary G

    @Nicole: This right here:

    And Hillary, of course, has a vagina.

    I continue to be shocked at how much that still matters. Gillibrand could come up with no-cost single payer healthcare, a pony and actual unicorn for each voter, and compel world peace and a not insubstantial portion of the punditry would still tsk-tsk her and invent reasons why people shouldn’t vote for her.

  58. 58.

    Wizened_Guy

    Maggie H’s real problem with Wolff’s book is that she just saw her dreams of a big paycheck for her own Trump book go up in smoke. She knows there is no way she could bring the dish like he did, because NYT reporters can’t work that way, but no publisher is going to buy anything less at this point.

  65. 65.

    germy

    @Starfish:

    A lot of the reviewers of this book just sound jealous. Here is The New Yorker review. It looks like maybe they skimmed the book. The review is really shallow and mostly based on the first quotes that were given to the press.

    I’m at the point where I’ll admit the only thing I like about the New Yorker is Jane Mayer.
    She’s the only Tina Brown hire I like.

  66. 66.

    Mnemosyne

    @MattF:

    IANA copyright lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that the publisher’s lawyer could get a cease and desist order. A book is not public material like even classified information is, and American copyright law allows for lots of infringement lawsuits that carry large financial penalties. ?

  67. 67.

    Chip Daniels

    I don’t suppose I am the only person who feels gaslighted by the media regarding Trump.

    Its like they are conjuring up an imaginary Donald Trump, who is solemn, wise, grave and thoughtful, even if intemperate and blunt spoken, sort of a Harry S. Truman for our age.

    Oh, that guy you actually see on television and Twittter? Pay no attention to him. Here, let us tell you what he really meant to say.

    ETA: Its a good thing I don’t work as a Disney Imagineer; I would have made the animatronic one true to life, and had him jerk and spasm in an imitation of that disabled reporter, while laughing about grabbing pussies and describing his daughter as a piece of ass.

    Give those good Christian tourists a close up view of what MAGA means.

  69. 69.

    Gelfling 545

    @Vheidi: If all we had to worry about was “inappropriate “ behavior It would be not quite so terrible. It’s the outright dangerous stuff that’s the main issue now.

  71. 71.

    Ruckus

    Our political press is a mobius trap. It always ends up being about the press, not the story. They get the attention and the story gets run over. The press is bad, the press is good. The press should be invisible if they are doing their jobs. But they never are. Here is a guy being about as invisible as can be in plain sight and he get and writes about the story and the rest of the press is yelling and screaming, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT meeeee…………..As they always do. And we discuss it at length, how bad they are. They are attention whores. Just like drumpf is. That’s why they like him, he’s a racist attention whore and they can get a bit of that attention if they try ever so little. Democrats are usually boring, they talk about actual policy, not bullshit. Think about the shitty democratic politicians, Edwards, Wiener, who else? Think about the other democratic politicians, the Clintons, Obama, Conyers, Rangel, Brown, Waxman, Brown, Gillibrand (Yes I know), Harris…. None of them are the people they are portrayed to be. They are far better. None of the republicans are who they are portrayed to be. They are far worse.

  72. 72.

    Yarrow

    Good Lord. Penetration at all levels, like Adam likes to say.

    Professional stylist Katie Price, who previously worked as a hair and makeup artist for Russia Today, is now a full-time White House official. Her daily duties include getting press secretary Sarah Sanders coiffed and camera-ready. t.co/feqoqXHIDk pic.twitter.com/srN3ZJUW1f— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) January 7, 2018

    There were no other hair and makeup artists available? They had to get the one that worked for the Russian propaganda network? Also, she doesn’t seem that good at her job.

  73. 73.

    Lapassionara

    @Mnemosyne: I think they are keeping to some kind of journalistic “norm” re covering politics, meaning they clean up the bad language, don’t point out shallow and inconsistent thinking, and “for god’s sake, don’t tell the children (meaning citizens) the truth about what goes on. Then Wolff comes in and breaks those norms, which has driven them nuts!

    When we have a President like Trump, who himself disrupts norms, the norms are not going to help get out the truth. We need the press to DO its JOB.

    They have helped put us in this mess. They need to help expose the rot. Not cover it up.

  74. 74.

    matt

    Or it could be these press people aren’t smart enough to tell the difference between a prepared policy discussion and a bunch of boilerplate right wing bullshit.

  77. 77.

    Mnemosyne

    @Yarrow:

    Wikleaks hasn’t admitted to being hosted in Russia AFAIK. Discovery in a lawsuit could be very interesting.

    The laws surrounding copyright and the laws surrounding classified information are quite different, as I hope Wikileaks finds out very soon. I know a smidgen of copyright law thanks to a “copyright law for artists” class I took in grad school and it’s very much tilted towards the copyright holder, who in this case is Michael Wolff.

  78. 78.

    Gelfling 545

    @pat: Virtually everything that happens in the Trump regime seems like it should be made up, yet we see it with our own eyes. It would be difficult to make up something so outlandish that it couldn’t happen in that crowd.

  79. 79.

    James E. Powell

    I have to admit that when the Wolff book came out, I thought for a while that maybe establishment media would stop pretending Trump was a savvy, gut-level decision-maker who was ready to pivot or become president all over again. I was sadly mistaken

    The establishment press/media put Trump in the White House and they are determined to keep him there.

    Trump is the OJ Trial of presidencies. They love him and they love what he does to their incomes, fame, and sense of purpose.

  80. 80.

    matt

    @Nicole: Conservatives were batshit crazy about FDR, we just don’t have any institutions around that keep these memories alive so they vanish conveniently as needed.

  81. 81.

    trollhattan

    @Lapassionara:

    It was irrational. I recall, in the days before the internet, someone circulating an 8 and 1/2 by 11 Shetland of paper, with two columns of allegedly nefarious Clinton deeds, including murdering Vince Foster and Ron Brown.

    I could not explain it.

    You should have demanded they pony up the evidence.

  83. 83.

    donnah

    I’m reading the book on Kindle and I agree that some of it seems shaky, but to be honest, I can hardly believe the shit that the Trump people have done and will actually admit to! So I’m taking this book with a grain of salt, but willing to believe a lot of it. It’s a quick read and I think it raises a lot of questions, as I’m sure Wolff intended it to.

    If it ticks Trump off, better still!

  86. 86.

    JPL

    Trump’s award show has been postponed until January 17th, due to the interest level. Maybe he’ll be in hiding by then.
    I don’t think Trump has his physical, because he can’t have the results leaked.

  87. 87.

    Sherparick

    @Mnemosyne: Mike the Mad Biologist put together Heid Moore’s twits on the “NY Times Problem” which I think are excellent and which I paste below:

    mikethemadbiologist.com/2018/01/04/a-hypothesis-about-the-ny-times-political-reporters/

    twitter.com/moorehn/status/946778725491859456

    And remember, donate what you can to this blog and others like it (Driftglass, Atrios, Digby, etc.) the Guardian, Pro Publica, and Washington Monthly, etc. so there will be alternative to NYT reporters tending their “beat” for future access.

    “…There are journalists imprisoned or dying or dead in Mexico, Myanmar, Egypt, Iran, Turkey for asking questions. And these journos at NYT see “asking questions” as some task separate from their role in society. It is not. Democracy is losing as their ambition sells us all out.
    The game for these journalists is to get a book deal, preferably about Trump, so he is in fact their meal ticket. Journalism isn’t. Even the prestige of the NYT brand isn’t enough to convince them that this job is about democracy and not about getting off on power. This is how we got Judy Miller. Judy Miller is how we got the Iraq War…
    And they’re okay with that! They see it as entertainment. They’ve got theirs, after all.
    They are the classic Trump voter profile…
    The fact that journalists think they’re working for their sources, or their subjects, and NOT their readers is a sign of corruption. It’s a kind of decadence. And it really lets down journalism, and lets down democracy. Ask the president questions. It’s literally the job. Consider what a privilege it is that the worst Trump can do to a journalist is leave, or have them escorted out of the room. Like, journalists in Mexico must be like, “that’s what you’re worried about? That he’ll leave and tweet his thoughts instead?” …And here you have careerist [journalists] resist asking questions, it’s all over. worried that Trump will just…ramble to someone else. That’s the disincentive to ask for evidence?
    Trump can do literally nothing to you except ask you to leave the room. That leaving the room is the worst these journalists can imagine shows how much they define themselves by their courtly proximity to power, and not as an independent check on power… These journalists, of course, don’t see themselves as corrupt. They think they’re in the room, so they’re where they should be. But journalism is not having the job. It’s *doing* the job. It’s asking the questions. When [journalists] resist asking questions, it’s all over.
    …It’s journalism to find the things he will not tweet: why he loves Russia so much, to start. What evidence exists for anything he says… Remember that this job is not about your book deal or your Twitter followers or showing off for your flack friends in government.
    One of the press corps’ knocks against Hillary Clinton is that she was always on the make, always trying to get more power, more money. Yet most of them can’t even recognize these impulses in themselves, or else they foolishly believe they aren’t corrupted by such things. Maybe there isn’t an ideological bias at all, but simply a mundane, careerist explanation–with some potentially lucrative side effects (after all, selling books and joining the high-end speaking circuit can be very lucrative!).

  88. 88.

    Sebastian

    It’s worse than that. Maggie’s parents are Trump’s PR firm. Not sure why this conflict of interest is never disclosed (here too)

  89. 89.

    Nicole

    @Mary G:

    Gillibrand could come up with no-cost single payer healthcare, a pony and actual unicorn for each voter, and compel world peace and a not insubstantial portion of the punditry would still tsk-tsk her and invent reasons why people shouldn’t vote for her.

    All the while insisting that it’s not that she’s a woman; really, there are lots of other women they’d be THRILLED to vote for. Really! There are so!

  93. 93.

    germy

    @Sebastian:

    Maggie’s parents are Trump’s PR firm. Not sure why this conflict of interest is never disclosed (here too)

    I had no idea.

    She really should recuse herself. Write about Paul Ryan or someone instead.

  94. 94.

    Mandalay

    Perhaps it’s not just Haberman’s upcoming hagiography on Trump that’s causing her to be a mean queen about Wolff’s book….

    During a Newseum event, Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff asked Conway why Donald Trump gave interviews to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

    “I know the president’s views of Maggie Haberman,” Wolff said. “And yet — why does he speak to her?”

    “What do you mean his views of her?” Conway asked.

    “His view of her is he doesn’t like her,” Wolff responded.

    “Why would you say that?” Conway shot back.

    “Well, because he’s told me,” Wolff said.

    “Michael, I just have to push back. That’s just not true. I think it is inappropriate to say who the president does or does not like, respectfully.”

    “And you just made my entire point about how he is covered like he is a guy sitting next to you on the bus. He’s the president of the United States.”

  95. 95.

    Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho

    @Baud:

    Foolish is an aspirational already accomplished goal as long as he’s there.

    Fixed.

  97. 97.

    germy

    Megyn Kelly refuses to have Wolff on her show.

    But it seems as if Kelly is still upset over Wolff’s Newsweek piece about her NBC deal, which makes sense. Wolff did describe Kelly as “the era’s most hardcore Eve Harrington case — soulless, heartless, shameless, avaricious, etc.”

  99. 99.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @oldster:

    Try sending him an e-mail via the Menu | Quick Links | Contact a Front Pager gizmo at the top of the page.

  100. 100.

    Mandalay

    @germy: Sweet.

    If you have any bridges to be burned with no fucks being given then contact Michael Wolff. Nobody does it better than him.

  102. 102.

    marcopolo

    Hope everyone is having a great day.

    Just got home from GOTV postcard writing for a State House special election in February with my local Indivisible group. We had over 50 people show up to the coffee house! I am slow and only wrote 12 postcards (the guy across the table did 20), but multiply that by the number of folks there and we did between 600-1000 postcards. These are individual voter touches for a special election where the total number of voters will probably be less than 10K. A comparable special election last August had 7200 voters. Well run campaigns try to get 6-8 touches with voters prior to an election so we do make a difference. If you’d like to pitch in, please go sign up at Postcards to Voters, they are doing upcoming elections all over the country.

    They have very simple guidelines to follow, provide information on the candidates, and an address list. Then you are good to go for the cost of cards/postage. And if you are in or near St. Louis or know someone who fits that description, come join us at Indivisible St. Louis or join a group doing similar work in your backyard.

  103. 103.

    gene108

    @Ruckus:

    In HS they were the kids who smoked or made out behind the gym. Or smoked and made out behind the gym. (Why yes I am old, why do you ask?)

    The were the kids, who wished they smoked and made out behind the gym, but weren’t cool enough to pull it off.

    They were the hangers-ons of all the kids in the “in crowd”, hoping to be invited to the cool kids party.

  106. 106.

    Yarrow

    @Sebastian: Maggie Haberman’s dad is Clyde Haberman, a former NYT journalist. I haven’t heard that he’s gone into PR work. Her mom is the PR person. She a top exec for Rubenstein. Link. They have done some PR work for Trump re: his Miss Universe pageants, but he has several PR firms he uses.

    According to this article Howard Rubenstein is “the [Kushner] family’s publicist.”

  107. 107.

    Suzanne

    Is the Axios guy a villager? He has always struck me as on the side of the sane, but I don’t read Axios daily. I hate the design of that site.

  108. 108.

    Mnemosyne

    @scav:

    At least they call it “wearable art” and not haute couture! ?

    I’ve never had any success knitting with novel materials, so I would just get frustrated knitting with videotape.

  109. 109.

    randy khan

    @Mandalay:

    There’s an obvious other middle ground: No restraint, but accuracy.

    This looks like one of those examples of the author’s reputation (and Wolff definitely does have a reputation) being treated as fact.

  110. 110.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    I certainly have talked to many people over the last several months who said, yes, I went into a meeting, he was surprisingly well-informed, surprisingly ran a good meeting had The Gorilla Channel on and forced everyone to comment on who was the better gorilla.

  111. 111.

    Ruckus

    @Yarrow:
    I must be so far outside the circle that I couldn’t see it with the Hubble.
    I don’t understand why a family would need a PR firm, other than if you were sticking your dickskinners in places they really, really didn’t belong and you had to put the best spin on how big an asshole you really are.
    OK maybe I do understand it.
    Assholes with money can afford someone to clean up behind them, so to speak.

  117. 117.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    @germy: good for him. her ratings are atrocious. he probably would have more viewers doing a live reading at a subway stop.

  118. 118.

    Ruckus

    @scav:
    I once went to an art “presentation’/fund raiser for KPFK, and they had some macaroni art displayed. By adults. I’ve seen elementary school macaroni art that was dramatically better. And all of that was better than your link. There are way too many who have way too much, including time, which they waste remarkably badly.

  120. 120.

    Lapassionara

    @marcopolo: Thank you for these links. I would have been there today, if I had known about it. I am leaving town for work, so cannot come for next few Sundays, but I will keep looking at this site for other opportunities.

    Do you know who is organizing something to help defeat the odious Ann Wagner, or at least put a scare into her?

  121. 121.

    Timurid

    I’m not sure what’s more terrifying… Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior or the redoubled commitment to him by elites, both elected and un-elected.
    All of the scolding and brow furrowing of the past summer are now as much ancient history as Cicero’s speeches to the Senate…

  122. 122.

    Another Scott

    @Sebastian: Interesting. Made me look…

    Elle (yes, that Elle) (from May):

    Journalists have become part of the story in the Trump administration, enablers and heroes of a nonstop political and constitutional soap opera, and last year Haberman was the most widely read journalist at the Times, according to its analytics. Many of the juiciest Trump pieces have been broken by her: That story about him spending his evenings alone in a bathrobe, watching cable news? Haberman reported and wrote it with her frequent collaborator, Glenn Thrush. The time Trump called the Times to blame the collapse of the Obamacare repeal on the Democrats? It was Haberman he dialed. When he accused former national security adviser Susan Rice of committing crimes, and defended Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly against the sexual harassment claims that would soon end his career at the network? Haberman and Thrush again, with their colleague Matthew Rosenberg. And since President Trump fired FBI director James Comey, Haberman has been on the frontlines of the nonstop news bombshells that have been lobbed, bylining or credited with a reporting assist on around two dozen stories in two weeks. They range from an extraordinarily intimate account of a “sour and dark” Trump berating his staff as “incompetent” to the revelation that Trump called Comey a “nutjob” in an Oval Office meeting with the Russians the day after his dismissal, telling them that Comey’s ouster had relieved the pressure of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and his campaign.

    Trump frequently complains about Haberman’s coverage. He’s tweeted, at various points, that she’s “third-rate,” “sad,” and “totally in the Hillary circle of bias,” and he almost exclusively refers to the Times as “failing” and “fake news.” But no matter what Haberman writes about Trump, he has never frozen her out. Slate called her Trump’s “snake charmer”; New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick recently likened Trump to her “ardent, twisted suitor.” “I didn’t care for that metaphor,” Haberman says. She finds the framing of her relationship with the president in romantic terms “facile.” No one suggests her male colleagues are “wooing” Trump.

    While the president and the reporter couldn’t seem more different—Trump, the flamboyant tycoon and Manhattan establishment aspirant known for his devil- may-care mendacity; and Haberman, a political insider known for her straight-shooting truth telling—the points at which their histories and personalities converge are revealing about both the media and the president himself. Trump wants what she can give him access to—a kind of status he’s always craved in a newspaper that, she says, “holds an enormously large place in his imagination.” Haberman, for her part, has become a front-page fixture and a Fourth Estate folk hero. “This is a symbiotic relationship,” says an administration official. “Part of the reason” Haberman is so read in the Times “is because she is writing about Donald Trump.”

    The 1980s and ’90s New York in which Haberman was raised is the same milieu in which Trump began his crusade to sand down his Queens edges and gild the Manhattan skyline. Haberman’s father, Clyde, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter, and her mother, Nancy, is a publicity powerhouse at Rubenstein—a communications firm founded by Howard Rubenstein, whose famous spinning prowess Trump availed himself of during various of his divorce and business contretemps. (Nancy worked on projects for Trump’s business but says she never met him.)

    Clyde and Nancy met at the tabloid New York Post—Clyde was a metro reporter there, and Nancy was a “copy boy” (what the Post called its entry-level cub reporters back then).

    […]

    Emphasis added. Kinda funny how the fashion press seems to be covering this stuff better than the MSM. :-/

    The world is small, but I wouldn’t conclude that Maggie’s slanting her coverage because of her parents. She seems to have come by her slant all on her own. But it is something to keep in mind, if one reads her stuff…

    My $0.02.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  123. 123.

    scav

    @Ruckus: Then again, it’s easy to mock. Everybody’s pleasures can look odd to other people. The amount of time, money and emotion some choose to invest in pets when there are so many people in needs strikes some as monumentally selfish and wasteful.

  125. 125.

    efgoldman

    @Sherparick:

    As to why there is a right wing media complex and not a left wing one, corporate America finds the right wing message useful and the left wing voices a threat.

    Occam’s broadcast says follow the money. If Fox dodn’t make money, Rupert and his minions would drop it.

  126. 126.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Programming note: Golden Globes are on tonight. Hopefully Meryl Streep has another stem winder.

    I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey, Viola was born in a sharecroppers cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Amy Adams was born in Vicenzia, Italy, and Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and was raised . . . in Ireland, I do believe, and she’s here nominated—for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is ? Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania.

    So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing else to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

    An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like, and there were many, many, many powerful performances that did exactly that: breathtaking, compassionate work. But there was one performances this year that stunned me; it sank its hooks in my heart, not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job—it made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth.

    It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter—someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie; it was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.

    Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

    O.K., this brings me to the press: We need the principled press, to hold power to account, to call them them on the carpet for every outrage; that’s why our founders enshrine the press and its freedoms in our constitution. So I only asked the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

  130. 130.

    kindness

    I think most Columnists and DC reporters are Republicans and they go out of their way to cover their team’s villainous scummy asses. I didn’t like that when they simply excused villainous scum but now they are covering up treason and at that point you are complicit in the end results.

  131. 131.

    Kathleen

    @Baud: @Nicole: From what I’ve read Eleanor Roosevelt was pilloried by the press and I think one of the main reasons was due to her outreach to African Americans (she resigned from the DAR because they would not allow Marion Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall.

    fdrlibrary.org/anderson

    Regarding Hillary Hate, while most of the discussion has centered on misogyny, I feel she suffered backlash because she embraced and included the mothers of the African American men slain by police. So the haters got a three-fer. “Not One of Ours” Clinton running for President. She-Bot Shillary running for President. Race Traitor Shillary actively engaging African Americans in her campaign.

    ETA Hillary admired Eleanor tremendously.

  132. 132.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    This topic also reminds me of Josh Marshall’s seminal article on the media’s right wing bias, written 3 weeks after Obama’s inauguration, when the press wasn’t coddling Obama and Harry Reid’s Democratic super majority Senate for access, but rather attacking them on behalf of a party thoroughly rejected and disgraced at the ballot box, in midst of the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

    By Josh Marshall Published February 19, 2009

    Several times over the last few weeks I’ve said that notwithstanding the last two elections DC remains wired for Republicans. And each time I say that people write in to ask, what does that mean exactly? So here’s what I mean. In Washington there’s a formal government and a para-government. The formal government itself has all sorts of different layers to it — the current crop of political appointees, the career employees, etc. But for the moment, let’s put everyone who draws a paycheck from the United States government to one side and focus on everyone else.

    Who are we talking about? The journalists. The lobbyists. The people who work in the think tanks and quasi-think tanks where purported policy experts work. The employees of the majority activist groups on both sides of the political spectrum. The list could go on and on. But this gives a basic flavor of who we’re talking about.

    We’re coming off of, or at least we’ve had a period of (because who knows about the future) thirty plus years of conservative dominance of Washington. By some measures you could say forty years. But at least thirty, notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s eight years in office. That conditions a generation of people with mindsets based around Republicans being the party of power, the party whose ideas get vindicated at the polls. Most of all Washington is a city that coddles up to and worships power. But a generation of one party holding the reins selects for certain kinds of journalists in key positions of power, the policy experts at the think tanks who get the journalists calls, the lobbyists who move the most money and so forth. You build up a set of assumptions about what kinds of people and ideas are respectable and which aren’t. Which are old-fashioned, which are ‘cutting edge’ and so forth. Who defines conventional wisdom?

    In all of these respects, DC remains overwhelmingly wired for the GOP.

    Over time, the formal government shapes the para-government. But there’s no immediate transition. In fact, in the short-run there’s usually an intensified conflict between the two. And you see evidence of the disconnect in repeated failures of people in the capital to predict the reactions of the country to key political developments — which is something you’ve seen repeatedly in 2006 and 2008. And even into 2009.

    The role of organized money obviously plays a big role too, though money’s partisan attachments are highly, highly malleable. The most important factor is the para-government and its entrenched attitudes.

  133. 133.

    Mnemosyne

    @Kathleen:

    That’s why they used the “superpredators” attack against her: it angered some people in the Black community and discouraged them from voting, it gave white “leftists” a handy nail to hang their existing Hillary hate on, and her apology for it reminded white voters that Hillary was vocally on the side of Those People. Win/win, as far as the Republican propagandists were concerned.

  134. 134.

    marcopolo

    @Lapassionara: Hey! I have linked this before, but there is this group:

    MISSOURI 2ND DISTRICT FOR CHANGE

    Our organization began in early 2017 with 13 people in a St. Louis County living room. We are not professional organizers or politicians. We are concerned citizens, who are worried about the direction our country is taking and the loss of accountability, transparency, and open discourse.

    They hosted a candidate’s forum a couple months ago with 4 candidates attending. One dropped out the night of the forum but 2 others are serious. Here is a link to the entire forum. I am staying out of the primary but come August after that election I will be doing GOTV & other work for whomever wins.

    As for writing GOTV postcards–you CAN do that from your home :). But I also think that Indivisible StL will be doing weekly gatherings for this as long as the enthusiasm level remains high. Definitely every Sunday in Jan.

  135. 135.

    Citizen Alan

    @Nicole:

    FDR didn’t have to contend with FOX News.

    This. If Fox News had existed in 1938, 45 minutes out of every hour would have been spent attacking FDR and his administration for being a bunch of America-hating communists, and the last 15 would have been spent praising Hitler and Mussolini as great men with a lot of good ideas we should be using in America.

  139. 139.

    chris

    @Mnemosyne: And everyone else. The book is up on Google Drive and appears to be clean. I do not know if google can be forced to take it down.

    As to Wolff losing sales, there are a number of writers who put their work out for free under Creative Commons and think it actually increases sales. Cory Doctorow comes to mind.

    Also this is a .pdf which is a pain if you don’t know how to convert it to something more reader friendly. So we’ll see.

  142. 142.

    Quinerly

    Just caught up on reading some articles in the British Guardian. It’s fascinating that so many of the commenters at the end believe that Trump has an untreated veneral disease. Hardly any speculation that it’s Alzheimer’s.

  143. 143.

    marcopolo

    @Lapassionara: No problem and welcome to the area. I had my first conversation with a McCaskill campaign volunteer this past Friday. I shared my availability to volunteer with them but they apparently are not yet ready to accommodate random Missourians who want to help. I am hoping that changes before the end of January–will definitely announce those opportunities once I know about them. Have a good business trip, perhaps we’ll run into each other at some future grass roots/campaign event.

  145. 145.

    Chitown Kev

    @Brachiator: Truman Capote with the unfinished Answered Prayers as well…esp. Capote’s thinly veiled reporting on CBS boss William Paley.

  146. 146.

    Mnemosyne

    @chris:

    Google will take down copyrighted material — it will probably be down by Monday. The techbros can whine all they like, but they do not own the book. Michael Wolff does.

    As an aspiring author myself, I would be pissed to find out that someone stole my work and put it on the internet. The fact that other authors make different choices doesn’t change the fact that taking a book that you did not write and posting it for download is THEFT.

  148. 148.

    marcopolo

    @Lapassionara: @Quinerly: Speaking of timely articles, this just dropped in the Post-Dispatch:

    With hopes of ‘wave election,’ Democrats lining up to take on Rep. Ann Wagner

    By most standard political metrics, U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Ballwin, should be able to safely count on re-election to a fourth term in November.

    But at least four Democrats are banking on this not being a standard political year, with a historically unpopular Republican president, an even less popular Republican Congress — and Wagner tied to both.

    “If this is a wave election, any Republican in a suburban district is going to be wary of the possibility of losing their job,” says political science professor Dave Robertson of the University of Missouri at St. Louis. “We’ve seen more wave elections than not since the first decade of the century. There is reason for incumbents to worry.”

    And with that I am off to think about starting dinner.

  149. 149.

    Gozer

    This may have been said already in a previous reply, but fuck it. I’m checking in whilst on vacay in Baja: They’re all white supremacists at this point. Fuck the lot of ‘em.
    Haberman, Bobo, all of ‘em. If the white nationalism doesn’t give ‘rm pause or cause them to recalibrate then they’re worse than useless. They’re collaborators. Motherfuckers.

    Gozer +Fuckit I’m on vacation.

  154. 154.

    Quinerly

    @marcopolo: Thanks for posting this. I’ll be more active here in St. Louis once back from New Mexico. Glad the Stone Spiral was a success.

  163. 163.

    Bob Bancroft

    @JaneSays: bobo is David Brooks {PBS, NYT), who has been a fascist/Republican enabler forever. Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, and Brooks would swear “Hillary’s emails” were as bad, or worse.

  164. 164.

    Comrade Scrutinizer

    @Citizen Alan: But there was Hearst, Father Coughlin, and a right wing media that wan’t that much different from Fox. The Mighty Wurlitzer has been blowing in this country for years, and predates Murdoch,

  166. 166.

    Brachiator

    @Quinerly:

    Is Trump our Henry VIII?

    No. Henry was learned and relatively restrained as a young king. He understood statecraft.

    Trump has always been an ignorant blowhard.

  168. 168.

    Mnemosyne

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Charles (Carlos) II of Spain died insane — too much Hapsburg inbreeding. Charles I was a stubborn Stuart and got his head chopped off trying to defend his divine right to be king. I think Adam did one of his thesis projects on the English Civil War, but I can’t remember. It may have been on the Glorious Revolution, which was when they booted out Charles I’s son James after Charles II died and invited James’s Protestant daughter Mary (as in William and Mary) to take over the throne.

  169. 169.

    cain

    @Baud:

    You have to balance out the lack of restraint they show during Democratic administrations.

    Or anything Clinton.

  172. 172.

    cain

    @Yarrow:

    There were no other hair and makeup artists available? They had to get the one that worked for the Russian propaganda network? Also, she doesn’t seem that good at her job.

    да

  173. 173.

    cain

    Apparently writing russian characters puts me in moderation. I think this is the first time the entire time I’ve been on htis site that I’ve had a post go into moderation.

  175. 175.

    TriassicSands

    @Yarrow:

    In this paragraph she claims that Wolff got it wrong by saying that Bannon called the meeting treasonous.

    I think you may have missed her point. She isn’t saying that Bannon never said that. She’s saying that it isn’t “treason” if we aren’t at war with the country in question. It’s a technical distinction, but she is probably right.

    Gessen:

    It is not treason to meet with representatives of a country with which the United States is not in a state of war.

  176. 176.

    burnspbesq

    @Baud:

    Totally with you on that, but I wonder where Holt could get jurisdiction, and how they would collect if they won damages.

  177. 177.

    George

    Brooks, Haberman, and all the other Trumpfluffers in the media are just as much traitors to American democracy as Trump and his minions.

    At what point do they suffer the consequences of abetting Trump? If Obama or Clinton or any other Democrat who served as President or who was a candidate for the job had tweeted one-tenth the garbage that Trump tweets, that Democrat would be roasted by the same people who now look the other way for Trump.

    I wonder about the psychology of those people. What makes them so unwilling or unable to see the truth of what Trump has done and is doing? Yeah, I understand that being a wealthy elite does figure into it, but there are enough conservatives in the media who don’t shy away from criticizing Trump that the True Believers like Bobo must be getting something extra out of the deal, if not monetary, then getting some perverse psychological needs met.

  178. 178.

    Mandalay

    @George:

    I wonder about the psychology of those people. What makes them so unwilling or unable to see the truth of what Trump has done and is doing?

    Moral disengagement is a term used to describe the process by which an individual convinces himself that ethical standards do not apply to him within a particular situation or context.

    For example, see NYT’s Michael Schmidt justify his lapdog interview with Trump last month which was just a Trump tweet without the 280 character limit:

    Some readers criticized my approach, saying I should have asked more follow-up questions. I believed it was more important to continue to allow the president to speak and let people make their own judgments about his statements. It was the best way to learn as much as possible about the president’s mind-set and his views on issues like North Korea.

    Of course one can argue that Schmidt is just bullshitting to defend the indefensible, but given the sense of self-importance that Villagers bestow on themselves, the poor sap probably truly believes his own nonsense.

  179. 179.

    mozzerb

    @Brachiator:

    No. Henry was learned and relatively restrained as a young king. He understood statecraft.

    IIRC, Henry VIII had a jousting accident and hit his head and was quite badly injured. It’s speculated that this resulted in a personality change?

  180. 180.

    J R in WV

    @JaneSays:

    “Who is bobo?”

    I’m pretty sure someone has answered this but I’m always happy to add one more comment to a dead thread. Bobo is Davie Brooks, idiot commenter and Op Ed writer for the FTFNYTimes.

  182. 182.

    Ksmiami

    @Mnemosyne: and now they e been revealed as the hapless and pathetic courtiers we knew they were all along. basically they traded journalism for access and those are very different entities

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