MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2019
Three cheers for Barbara McQuade: In the past few years of impeachment and The Chase, Barbara McQuade has become one of MSNBC's go-to legal experts.
In our view, she has occasionally seemed to be sliding into the propagandistic bubble which has come close to swallowing the cable channel whole. This very day, at New York magazine, she offers a clear assessment of the problems within the FBI which Inspector General Horowitz detailed last week.
The dumbnification of MSNBC has been underway for years. It's reassuring to see a mainstay of the channel maintaining her contact with sound procedure.
Dumbnification won't serve liberal/progressive interests. Dumbnification is deeply appealing, but dumbnification is bad.
Also this: Yesterday, Chris Wallace batted Jim Comey around. Three cheers for Chris Wallace!
"The dumbnification of MSNBC has been underway for years."
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, but it would be more accurate to say that MSNBS is a tool for zombification, dear Bob.
We should always be seeking to make all parts of our government better.
ReplyDeleteVoting for Republicans, who are actively working to make it worse, is counter-productive.
Lesserevilism.
DeleteYou're in trouble if that's all you got.
"You're in trouble if that's all you got."
DeleteTrue that. It didn't work out for Osama bin Laden, and he loved America way more than the GOP does..
Calling things you disagree with "dumbnification" strikes me as pretty childish.
ReplyDeleteAs Kevin Drum says, the problems noted in the IG's report have nothing to do with Trump's impeachment. Somerby ignores the attempts at obfuscation occurring on the right. Spending any time at all on Carter Page is a distraction from Trump's malfeasance. Of course the FBI should make sure it does things properly and in its most professional manner. The IG's investigation was aimed at that, not exonerating Trump, but Republicans have seized on it as a spurious issue with which to confuse the electorate.
And Somerby is right in there helping the conservatives by pretending this merits any of his time. Because of the right's efforts to confuse matters, the cable news pundits must clarify that this isn't important and is just a way of shifting attention from Trump to a situation that has no practical implications for anyone who isn't in the FBI.
Naturally Somerby helps conservatives because he is a Trumptard, heart, body and soul.
DeleteIf you have read Somerby for 20+ years like I have, you know his main concern is holding the liberal press to account for using the same BS tactics like FOX. Thus when he spends time on Page it is in that vein. He is not here to point out Trump's malfeasance as a general rule.
DeleteFurther, I think he would argue that him doing what he does has at least as many practical implications. You are criticizing the column you want him to write instead of the one he DOES write.
DeleteNo, I believe the columns he IS writing are more helpful to Trump and do not further critical thinking at all.
Delete“holding the liberal press to account”
DeleteWhat is this “liberal press” you speak of?
Scott Mabry,
DeleteFor a guy who has read Somerby for 20+ years, I'm surprised you missed his post a week and a half ago, where he chided the "liberal press" for not joining Right-wingers on the fainting couch over a joke about Trump's kid. I.e. holding the liberal press to account for NOT using the same BS as Fox.
Bob's job is to repeat bad-faith Right-wing arguments, which---if we had a liberal (or functioning) press---would be dismissed from the discourse because for their disingenuousness.
Horowitz said the bar for the FBi to imitate such an investigation is a low one.
ReplyDeleteHe and AG Barr have differences in interpretation there. Horowitz says he didn’t find anything documented or expressly stated that denoted bias against Trump in starting Crossfire Hurricane.
The investigation started after George Papadopoulos told Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer that he had been told that WikiLeaks was going to release dirt on Clinton.
Papadopoulos had been told this by Joseph Mifsud, who had arranged two meetings with him.
Papadopoulos says he was set-up.
In an Oct 6, 2019 report, the NYT expresses the news orgs immense doubt about Papadopoulos’s “conspiracy theories” based on the redoubtable authority of feds.
There’s a certain irony in these paragraphs from the article:
“Why are these theories improbable?
Mr. Mifsud worked for neither the F.B.I. nor the C.I.A., former American officials said. If he had been an F.B.I. informant, prosecutors could have easily found and questioned him. If Mr. Mifsud were working for the C.I.A., the agency would have had an obligation to tell the F.B.I. as it investigated Mr. Papadopoulos.
So to believe the conspiracy that Mr. Mifsud was secretly working for the C.I.A. is to believe that either the intelligence community withheld from prosecutors that he was one of their agents or that prosecutors conspired to deceive federal courts.
To believe that another Western government secretly employed Mr. Mifsud as part of a plot against the president is to believe that an elaborate conspiracy entirely eluded the special counsel’s office in its exhaustive investigation, which included more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, 13 requests to foreign governments for evidence and interviews of about 500 witnesses.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/10/06/us/politics/italy-russia-mifsud-trump.amp.html
Didn't Mr. Mifsud (who is a professor and thus should be called Professor Mifsud) introduce Papadopoulos to a woman who he claimed was a niece of Putin? That woman was believed to be a Russian agent. Mifsud himself may not have been in Russia's employ in order to be played by a Russian agent and he could have introduced Papadopoulos without having any clandestine intent.
DeleteOlga Vinogradova. Another woman, Azra Turk. who is also described as being very attractive, was introduced to Papadopoulos by Prof. Stefan Halper.
DeleteProfessors get around.
“It's reassuring to see a mainstay of the channel maintaining her contact with sound procedure.”
ReplyDeleteMcQuade is always level-headed and careful, her reasoning sound. Somerby has praised her before.
Did she push back against the reporting of the Page FISA in real time? I can’t recall.
However, Somerby labels her judgment sound in today’s article, but he has ridiculed her when she made a case that Trump was guilty of crimes, as she did after the Mueller report. Because she found evidence of crimes in the Mueller Report, that made her tribal and ridiculous in Somerby’s eyes.
(http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2019/03/southern-frontiers-of-rational-impulse.html)
But since her approach is level-headed and careful and informed by her knowledge of the law as a former US Attorney, perhaps it is Somerby and not McQuade who exhibits a blind spot when it comes to the Mueller Report.
The so called errors do not bother me, being extremely minor as they are, and it seems like petty partisanship to make them seem of any significance as a way to distract from Trump's corruption. Yeah, Page was not a source for the CIA, they caught him interacting with known Russian agents and made him name the people he was interacting with.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nbc-2.com/story/41470590/justice-department-watchdog-says-fbi-could-have-ended-carter-page-surveillance-months-earlier
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