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Shot: No one is too old to be president.
—Headline, the Washington Post, yesterday.
Chaser: McCain’s Brain — How might the senator’s mind deteriorate over the next eight years? John McCain is old and, as several news outlets have reported, he’s only getting older.
—Headline, subhead and lede, Slate, then-owned by the Washington Post, June 11, 2008.
Hangover: “The big question he bumps into wherever he goes is his age. Reagan will be 69 in 1980 a year older than William Henry Harrison the country’s oldest president who died a month after his inauguration in 1841.”
—The Washington Post, September 24, 1978.
Typing “John McCain is too old to be president” into Google and setting the date range to cut off at January 1, 2009 brings up just about every major DNC-MSM news site grousing about McCain’s age when the 2008 DNC candidate was the much younger Barack Obama. Now that their leading candidates include Biden, Bernie, and Warren, the media aren’t interested in exploring that topic. Unexpectedly.
Ed Driscoll strung this together
Conrad Black:
“…It is illustrative of how completely invested they were in the hare-brained fraud of Russian collusion, that they are having such a crisis of separation from the subject. They are not the only losers in this fiasco, though they are the biggest losers.
They are left trying to pretend that they have an invitation to impeach from special counsel Robert Mueller, but that is not correct. In his and his Trump-hating investigative staff’s desperation to attack the president, Mueller engaged in the wholly unprofessional practice of acknowledging that he could not claim there was adequate evidence to prosecute or impeach the president, but could not exonerate him, either. It was up to the House of Representatives to determine if there were grounds to impeach.
Ahead of last week’s release of the redacted Mueller report, Attorney General William Barr in his summary explained the criteria for a charge of obstruction. Those criteria include evidence of a corrupt act with corrupt intent in contemplation of a legal proceeding. The attorney general, the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, a favorite of congressional Democrats who was supposedly considering recording Trump two years ago to canvass the cabinet to see if he was mentally unfit to be president, and the special counsel all agreed that none of the necessary ingredients for the president to be guilty of obstruction was present.
The extravagant, knife-edge judgment call the House of Representatives Democrats have been pretending to be considering about whether to impeach or not is bunk—self-improvised therapy to cushion their psychological plunge from confidence they could take down the president, to the grim awakening to the legal vulnerabilities of the Obama Administration and the Clinton campaign in confecting this monstrous fraud of Trump-Russian collusion. It is like a retreating army, led by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) insisting that impeachment won’t succeed, then a less defeatist Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saying of the president that “he’s not worth it,” (as if there were a chance of impeaching him), followed by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D.-Calif.) intoning that impeachment can’t be done without some Republican support…”
Nancy Thorner:
“…Ever since Al Gore and his gang of climate scammers came on the scene in the 1990s, we have been fed a steady diet of lies and false predictions. We were told that the oceans would rise as the polar caps melted and that cities and states bordering the Pacific and Atlantic would be underwater. We were told that the corpses of polar bears who had drowned would be washing up by the thousands on the coast of Alaska. We were told that the human race was doomed by rising temperatures.
What’s most remarkable about the hoax is that there was a deadline announced. The apocalypse was to take place within a decade. Now, two decades later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is giving us until 2030 to shape up or we’re all goners.
Even someone as cynical as I am would never have imagined that the con men and women would still be able to pass off this nonsense as gospel after all this time. The old line about whether you’re going to believe me or your lying eyes seems to sum up the situation pretty well…”
Related:
Stephen Green:
“People want to believe it, because ‘saving the world’ can make anyone feel important. And politicians love it because of ample opportunities for graft, corruption, cronyism, and vote-buying.”
Conrad Black:
“…In the circumstances, it need hardly be emphasized that the entire Trump–Russia collusion gambit, based on the infamous Steele dossier’s pastiche of lies and defamations, was the dirtiest political trick in American history and is in the process of transmogrification into one of the greatest fiascos in the history of American political skullduggery. (One of the most rabid Trump-hating Democratic congressmen, Eric Swalwell, still professes to believe all of the Steele dossier, as if it were a catechism.) Though there is an elaborate psychopolitical effort underway to pretend otherwise, investigations already taking place by the inspector general of the Justice Department, a special counsel, and the attorney general of the United States, about to be joined by the Senate Judiciary Committee, will call upon the chief intelligence and law officers of the Obama administration, along with Hillary Clinton and members of her campaign staff, to account for their conduct. These include lies under oath to congressional committees, lies to federal officials, and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. This is a series of dishonest statements and illegal acts that can only, at least provisionally, be seen as a coordinated campaign to influence the results of the presidential election and then to compromise the unwished-for outcome of that election. It will not be long before we hear the still familiar words, in reference to President Obama: “What did the president know and when did he know it?”…”
Naomi Lim:
“…Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, however, was referring to her time as a staff attorney serving on the impeachment inquiry for former President Richard Nixon two decades earlier in 1974.
“I was one of the young lawyers who actually drafted the memo about what is a high crime and misdemeanor, and it was truly meant by our founders to describe actions that undermine the integrity of our government that placed the personal or political interest in a president over the interest of the nation,” she said. “So, I know what it looks like, and I know what is required to do it in a way that wins the trust and confidence, not only of the Congress but of the American people. But I certainly think that the roadmap, as some call it, of the Mueller report raises so many serious questions in part one about what the Russians did, which is beyond debate, and in part two about all of the evidence about obstruction.”…”
Related
Stephen Green comments:
Clinton somehow neglected to mention the part Democrat Jerry Zeifman (counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee back then) wrote that she “engaged in a variety of self-serving unethical practices in violation of House rules.”
Democrats increase gas prices, waist the revenue on nonsense, demand investigations into the businesses they extort money from.
Democrats.
Disney seems determined to kill another high dollar franchise so executives can virtue signal to their peers at cocktail parties. Children in charge.
Glenn T. Stanton:
“…Weak Christianity is getting weaker and robust, and orthodox Christianity is getting stronger in terms of adherents, if not by theological maturity.
The stats are given as often and with as much confidence as they are wrong. The story goes that our nation is growing more secular with every passing day. Christianity is tanking, and atheists and generic non-believers mushrooming. The Daily Wireproclaimed that last week, with the headline, “God Help Us; Atheism Becomes Largest Religion In U.S.” CNN just reported something similar: “There Are Now as Many Americans Who Claim No Religion as There Are Evangelicals and Catholics.”
It’s not true. Not even close…”
ANDREW KLAVAN:
“…According to Bill D’Agostino at the indispensable Newsbusters site, in the 24 hours after the Mueller Report’s release CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC hosts, analysts, and contributors mentioned “impeachment” 309 times.
How many times did they look at it from the other side, I’d like to know. How many times did they ask: Say, if Trump was innocent, was the investigation even necessary? If the salacious Steele Dossier played virtually no role in Mueller’s magnum opus, why was it used to get warrants to wiretap a Trump associate’s phone? And by the way, what did Barack Obama know about all this, and when did he know it?…”
MATT TAIBBI:
“…On February 15, 2016, the National Review took unprecedented action. In an all-out plea to Republican voters to stop Donald Trump before it was too late, the magazine enlisted 22 of the right’s most prominent voices to band together and throw support elsewhere, to save the party.
The “Conservatives Against Trump” issue didn’t move the needle. Despite a lineup of pleas against Trump that included Glenn Beck, Cal Thomas, Mona Charen, Michael Medved and Dana Loesch, Trump surged in the polls that month, expanding his lead over primary opponents at a critical juncture of the race. Trump voters considered these and other pundits part of the Republican establishment and therefore not to be trusted.
Conservative media throughout 2015-2016 learned a painful lesson. If your approach is based on telling people what they want to hear, audiences might like it at first. They might gobble it up for decades. But you’ll have quietly lost their respect during that time, and in a key moment, they’ll tune you out.
For this reason, it’s shocking to see national media voices after the release of Robert Mueller’s report patting each other on the back, congratulating themselves for a three-year faceplant they must know will haunt the whole business for a long time.
“Fake news? Mueller isn’t buying it,” writes David Bauder of the Associated Press. He noted that with a “few exceptions,” Mueller’s investigation “repeatedly supports news reporting that was done on the Russia probe over the last two years.”
Bauder added the report showed “several instances where the president and his team sought to mislead the public.” He congratulated the New York Times and Washington Post for correctly reporting that White House counsel Don McGahn had been ordered to find a way to fire Mueller.
Trump, Bauder noted, had called this “fake news, folks, fake news.” It wasn’t. And neither were some other stories.
So, yay journalism! You were more truthful than Donald Trump, at times. This is like being proud of beating a fish at Boggle.
We’re not trying to be right more often than Trump — we’re trying to not be wrong, ever. It’s a standard, not a competition.
You know what was fake news? Most of the Russiagate story. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, that thing we just spent three years chasing. The Mueller Report is crystal clear on this.
He didn’t just “fail to establish” evidence of crime. His report is full of incredibly damning passages, like one about Russian officialdom’s efforts to reach the Trump campaign after the election: “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”
Not only was there no “collusion,” the two camps didn’t even have each others’ phone numbers!
In March of 2017, in one of the first of what would become a mountain of mafia-hierarchy-style “Trump-Russia contacts” graphics in major newspapers, the Washington Post described an email Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sent to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov. They called it “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.”
The report shows the whole episode was a joke. In order to further the Trump Tower project-that-never-was, Cohen literally cold-emailed the Kremlin. More than that, he entered the email incorrectly, so the letter initially didn’t even arrive. When he finally fixed the mistake, Peskov didn’t answer back.
That was “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government”!
As outlined in his initial mandate, Mueller explored “any links” between the Russian government and the campaign of Donald Trump. His conclusion spoke directly to the question of whether there was any kind of quid pro quo between the two sides:
“The investigation examined whether these contacts involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future.”
In other words, all those fancy org charts were meaningless. Because there was no conspiracy, all those “walls are closing in” reports — and there were a ton of them — were wrong. We were told we’d hit “turning point” after “turning point” leading to the “the beginning of the end,” with Trump certain, soon, to either resign in shame, Nixon-style, or be impeached.
The “RNC platform” change story was a canard, according to Mueller. The exchanges Trump figures had with ambassador Sergei Kislyak were “brief, public, and non-substantive.” The conversations Jeff Sessions had with Kislyak at the convention didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.” Mueller added “investigators did not establish that [Carter] Page conspired with the Russian government.”
There was no blackmail, no secret bribe from Rosneft, no five-year cultivation plan, no evidence of any kind of any relationship that ever existed between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Michael Cohen “never traveled to Prague.”
The whole Steele dossier appears to have been bunk, with even Bob Woodward now saying the “highly questionable” document “needs to be investigated.” The Times similarly is reporting, two-plus years late, that “people familiar” with Steele’s work began to have “misgivings about [the report’s] reliability arose not long after the document became public.”
Reporters are going to insist all they did was accurately report the developments of a real investigation. They didn’t imply vast criminality that wasn’t there, or hoodwink audiences into thinking a Watergate-style ending was just around the corner, or routinely blow meaningless episodes like the Sessions-Kislyak meeting out of proportion, or regularly smear people who not only weren’t part of a conspiracy but had no connection to anything (see here for an example).
They’ll also claim they didn’t spend years openly rooting for indictment and impeachment via wish-casted predictions disguised as reporting and commentary, or denouncing people who doubted the conspiracy as spies and Putin apologists, or clearing their broadcast panels and op-ed pages of skeptics while giving big stages to craven conspiracy-spinners like Malcolm Nance and Luke Harding.
That’s fine. In the short term, a significant portion of the country will probably agree coverage was appropriate, probably the same sizable plurality of poll respondents who say they disagree on some level with Mueller’s findings. A lot of people out there despise Trump, and at least right now will be inclined to sympathy for broadcasters and editorialists who gave full quarter to the most damning theories of conspiracy and criminality in the Russia case.
But as conservatives found out in 2016, news audiences over time lose trust in news organizations that tell them what they want to hear politically, but get the substance of things wrong.
The Mueller report makes clear reporters were sold wolf whistles over and over, led by reams of unnamed official sources who urged them to see meaning in meaningless things and assume connections that weren’t there.
Reporters should be furious about being fed these red herrings. They should be outraged at all those people who urged them to publish the Steele report, which might have led to career-imperiling mistakes in print. They should be mad as hell at CIA chief Gina Haspel and the other unnamed officials who told them disclosing the name of already long-ago exposed government informant Stefan Halper would “risk lives.”
More than anything, reporters should be furious at the many sources close to the various investigations who (it now seems clear) must have known pretty early there were serious holes in many areas of this story, and that a lot of these “dots” were dead ends, but didn’t warn their press counterparts. For instance, the papers should be mad those who supposedly had misgivings about the Steele report didn’t warn them earlier.
But they’re not mad, which makes it look like a case of intentional blindness, in which eyes and ears were shut among other things because the Trump-Russia conspiracy tale made a ton of money. Media companies earned boffo ratings while the Mueller probe still carried the drama of a potential spectacular ending, with blue-state audiences eating up all those “walls are closing in” hot takes.
This fiasco will surely end up being a net plus for Trump. The obstruction parts of the report make him look like a brainless goon and thug, but the absence of what Mueller repeatedly calls “underlying crime” make his ravings about an elitist mob out to get him look justified. This is not an easy thing to achieve, but we’re there, and the press is a big part of that picture.
News audiences were betrayed, and sooner or later, even the most virulently Trump-despising demographics will realize it and tune us out. The only way to reverse the damage is to own how big of a screw-up this was, but after the last three years, who would hold their breath waiting for that?…”
NICOLE JACOBS AND DAN ALFARO:
“….This infusion of capital will result in roughly 3,500 miles of new, repurposed or replaced pipelines across Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia and generate more than 124,000 jobs.
The Appalachian Basin is projected to produce roughly 31.6 billion cubic feet per day (bcf/d) of natural gas in March, according to the Energy Information Administration. The bulk of this extensive and much-needed regional infrastructure build-out is focused on expanding take-away capacity, enabling the Marcellus and Utica shale gas produced here to be used not only within the tri-state but across the country and even globally.
EID’s new infographic shows construction of all proposed pipelines will add nearly 23 bcf/d of natural gas pipeline take-away capacity. That’s enough room to move nearly 72 percent of the natural gas produced in the region…”
“…India said Tuesday it will buy crude oil from other major oil producing countries in view of the United States’ decision this week to end waivers that allowed it to buy Iranian oil without facing U.S. sanctions.
External Affairs Ministry spokesman Raveesh Kumar said the Indian government would continue to work with partner nations, including the United States, to find ways to protect India’s energy and economic security interests….The sanctions would choke off more than $50 billion a year in Iranian income…”
DEBRA HEINE:
“…A former top FBI official has admitted under oath that a repository of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email records was obtained by the Obama White House and housed in the Executive Office of the President. Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch recently coaxed the admission out of the former assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, Bill Priestap, as part of a court-ordered discovery regarding Clinton’s unauthorized email server. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled earlier this year that discovery could commence examining Clinton’s use of the server and ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides to be deposed or answer written questions under oath. The court said that the Clinton email system was ‘one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.’…”