The Washington Post is very upset!

MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 2019

They weren't real upset in real time: Once more, we're forced to delay for a week the start of the new year at this awatd-winning site.

"Aristotle's error" begins next week. For today, we turn to the deep concern expressed by the Washington Post in yesterday's top editorial.

The editor are very upset with the past conduct of one Roger Stone. His behavior took place in 2016, an election year.

According to the editors, Stone's gross moral corruption concerned the well-known nature of WikiLeaks. Hard-copy headlines included, the editorial started like this:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (1/27/19): Mr. Stone's indictment/The charges against the president's ally reveal gross moral corruption

Roger Stone was indicted Friday for lying to Congress and witness tampering, not for conspiring with Russian intelligence or WikiLeaks, Moscow’s partner in disseminating materials stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Yet if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III did not disclose evidence of criminal collusion, the indictment makes clear that senior officials of the Trump campaign—including, possibly, Donald Trump himself—reacted to the criminal intelligence operation of a prime U.S. adversary by secretly trying to take advantage of it.

By mid-June 2016, it was publicly known that the DNC’s computer systems had been hacked by Russian government agents. The following month, when WikiLeaks released a trove of DNC emails, it was clear the material had come from the Russians. Yet, according to Mr. Stone’s indictment, the response of the Trump campaign was to contact Mr. Stone and ask him to find out what other damaging material WikiLeaks might have and when it would be released.

By June 2016, "it was publicly known" that WikiLeaks was "Moscow's partner," the irate editors wrote. Despite this fact, Stone, and the Trump campaign, wanted to know what kind of material WikiLeaks might have.

Everyone knew that WikiLeaks was Moscow's partner! The editors stressed this point again as their editorial ended:

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL: Perhaps there was nothing illegal in the campaign’s actions, though we won’t know that until Mr. Mueller completes his work. But, as in the case of Mr. Trump’s secret pursuit of a real estate deal in Russia while running for president, his campaign’s dealings with Mr. Stone evince gross moral corruption. If it had nothing to do with the hack of the DNC, the Trump campaign should have done its best to steer clear of an attack on the U.S. political system by a hostile foreign power. Instead, at the least, it secretly sought to learn more about it so as to make the best use of it.

[...]

Earlier this week we pointed out that, if Mr. Trump did not secretly cut a business deal with the regime of Vladi­mir Putin while praising him on the campaign trail, it was not for lack of trying. Mr. Mueller’s latest indictment shows that if the president’s campaign did not conspire with WikiLeaks, an organization designated as a hostile intelligence service by the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was not out of scruple.

WikiLeaks had been "designated as a hostile intelligence service by the Senate Intelligence Committee!" As they ended their editorial, the editors stressed this general point again!

How righteous, how pure the editors were as they railed again this gross moral corruption! For ourselves, we thought of all the gross moral corruption which has emanated from the Washington Post from the Whitewater pseudo-scandal on, including the reign of terror of Ceci Connolly as the Post punished Candidate Gore for the alleged sins of President Clinton.

In that way, the Washington Post put George W. Bush in the White House. Children are dead all over Iraq because of what the paper's designated Gore-destroyer relentlessly did in twenty months of remarkably gruesome campaign coverage—gruesome coverage all "career liberals" knew they mustn't condemn or discuss.

The Post started in on Candidate Hillary Clinton in mid-2014. They thus continued their long campaign against both Clintons and Candidate Gore. As a result of decades of such behavior, we are all able to see who's American president now.

Yesterday, though, the Post was upset about the way the Trump campaign cavorted with "Moscow's partner"—with "an organization designated as a hostile intelligence service by the Senate Intelligence Committee." The editors were very, very upset about what the bad people had done.

We thought you might want to see the way the Post cavorted with WikiLeaks during the time in question. We thought you might want to see the way the Post described this org until the 2016 race was done.

On October 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began releasing John Podesta's stolen emails. The Post mugged, clowned, cavorted and played with the pointless contents of those stolen documents, as only such children will do.

For our money, Dan Zak's clowning essay on the front page of Style took the entertaining nonsense to its ultimate low point. Along the way, though, consider the way WikiLeaks was described on the front page of the famous paper which is so irate now.

On October 12, WikiLeaks released yet another batch of pointless catnip of the type our "mainstream press corps" loves. Under a triple headline, the Post reported the dump on the front page.

Note the way "Moscow's partner" was described by the Post:

PHILLIPS AND WAGNER (10/13/16): Hacked emails show anxiety over Clinton candidacy/
Wikileaks releases likely to continue/
Trump seizes chance to attack opponent's integrity

WikiLeaks released yet another batch of hacked emails from inside Hillary Clinton's campaign Wednesday, and with them came another round of embarrassing headlines and new glimpses of internal anxiety over the candidate's weaknesses.

Republican Donald Trump and his allies seized on the emails, which reveal comments by an aide about Catholics, a line from a paid speech in which Clinton might be seen as playing down the threat of terrorism and an internal dispute over potential conflicts of interest posed by the Clinton Foundation.

The drip-drip-drip of damaging attention is likely to continue. WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization, began releasing new messages last Friday from the personal email account of Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and has promised to issue tens of thousands more.

The correspondence reveals a campaign that has struggled all year to improve a flawed candidate. As far back as March, aides were keenly aware that she was resistant to the media, perhaps out of touch with regular Americans and unable to convey a clear message to voters.

Back when the morally glorious Post was playing its campaign reindeer games, WikiLeaks wasn't "Moscow's partner" or a Russian front. WikiLeaks was an "anti-secrecy organization!" Or so it said on the front page of the Washington Post!

So the great newspaper described this org on the road to Hillary's Defeat. That said, WikiLeaks kept releasing its piles of bullshit, and the Post kept pimping their contents along.

On October 26, Rosalind Helderman's report appeared on the Post's front page. Sure enough—it happened again!

HELDERMAN (10/26/16): Leak shows turmoil on Clinton team over emails

On the day the news broke that Hillary Clinton had used a private email account as secretary of state, the man who would soon be named to chair her presidential campaign fired off a note of distress, venting frustration about some of Clinton's closest aides.

"Speaking of transparency, our friends Kendall, Cheryl and Phillipe sure weren't forthcoming on the facts here," John Podesta complained in the March 2015 note, referring to Clinton's personal lawyer, David Kendall, as well as former State Department staffers Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines.

"Why didn't they get this stuff out like 18 months ago? So crazy," replied Neera Tanden, a longtime Podesta friend who also has worked for Clinton. Then, answering her own question, Tanden wrote again: "I guess I know the answer. They wanted to get away with it."

The exchange, found in hacked emails from Podesta's account and released Tuesday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, provides a striking window into how the revelation of Clinton's email setup roiled her nascent campaign team in the weeks before its official April 2015 kickoff.

This time, WikiLeaks was identified as "an anti-secrecy group." One day later, again on page A1, the Post fluffed Moscow's partner again:

HELDERMAN AND HAMBURGER (10/27/16): Top aide's leaked memo details 'Bill Clinton Inc.'

When top Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band wrote the memo, he was a central player at the Clinton Foundation and president of his own corporate consulting firm. Over the course of 13 pages, he made a case that his multiple roles had served the interests of the Clinton family and its charity.

In doing so, Band also detailed a circle of enrichment in which he raised money for the Clinton Foundation from top-tier corporations such as Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola that were clients of his firm, Teneo, while pressing many of those same donors to provide personal income to the former president.

The system has drawn scrutiny from Republicans, who say it allowed corporations and other wealthy supporters to pay for entree to a popular former president and a onetime secretary of state who is now the Democratic presidential nominee.

Band wrote the memo in 2011 to foundation lawyers conducting a review of the organization amid a brewing feud with the Clintons' daughter, Chelsea Clinton, who was taking a stronger role in leading the foundation and had expressed concerns about Teneo's operations.

The memo, made public Wednesday by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, lays out the aggressive strategy behind lining up the consulting contracts and paid speaking engagements for Bill Clinton that added tens of millions of dollars to the family's fortune, including during the years that Hillary Clinton led the State Department.

The bullshit just kept rolling out. The Post kept putting it on page A1, complete with its suggestion that WikiLeaks should perhaps win a Nobel Prize for its "anti-secrecy" work.

When it actually counted, the Post was happily pushing Moscow's line along with Trump and Stone. If someone steals a person's mail and shows it to the world at large, they're doing "anti-secrecy" work, or so the Post kept saying.

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is routinely said to have said. As part of this overall gestalt, we liberals tend to think that major orgs like the Washington Post behave with basic intellectual skill and in morally defensible ways.

We love it when they hand us pleasing fluff like that found in yesterday's editorial. Their conduct has been gruesome for decades, but boys and girls who seek press corps careers agree not to tell you that.

Ceci kept it up for twenty months. Our very favorite liberal stars knew they mustn't say so.

Later this week: Things "career liberals" may possibly do to get hired by the New York Times