Maddow loses count of the Russians!

MONDAY, JULY 17, 2017

Her actual count came to one: Last Friday night, she made it official:

Rachel Maddow is one of least disguised major dissemblers in the history of "cable news."

Her opening segment on that night included a rich assortment of cons. To watch the full segment, click here.

At one point, Maddow was astonished to think that a Russian lawyer who doesn't speak English might have had a translator present. This is the bullshit she served:

MADDOW (7/14/17): And then we learned that it wasn't just Donald Trump Jr.

Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were at that meeting too, and they too had been notified this was a Russian government attorney coming to meet with them, bringing derogatory information that came from the Russian government.

And then we learned it was not just all of them and the Russian government attorney.

Today, we learned the group also included this guy [Rinat Akhmetshin], who NBC News first identified as a former Soviet counterintelligence officer suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence. He was there too.

Despite all of these days of reporting and statements and admissions about this meeting, the presence of this guy, this former Russian military intelligence guy, the presence of this guy at the meeting was somehow left out of all of the earlier disclosures and we only found out about that today, thanks to NBC.

In addition to him, there was also reportedly a translator there, who is a relatively well-known person himself. I expect you'll see a bunch of reporting about him and his potential role in this in the days ahead, over the course of the weekend.

That passage starts shortly after the eight-minute mark of the Maddow videotape.

Imagine having a translator there! We have no idea what made Maddow meant by her insinuations about the translator, Anatoli Samochornov. But four hours earlier, this profile had already appeared at the Daily Beast, along with this profile at the Huffington Post.

Long story short: the scary translator, an American citizen, had been vouched for, by Masha Gessen, as "the best intrepreter in New York, hands down." He has worked in all sorts of major international settings, typically for the good guys. Also this, at HuffPo:

SCHULBERG AND BLUMENTHAL (7/14/17): A registered Democrat, Samochornov works with clients on all sides of American and international politics. But his own views appear to be progressive. On Facebook, he has shared clips from MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s show, labeled former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Bush-era adviser Karl Rove as losers, and posted in favor of expanded health care coverage and more restricted access to guns. When PEN, the literary and human rights organization, invited a gaggle of Russian writers critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin to New York, he became “great friends” with them, Gessen said.

Who would allow such a man in the room? Four hours later, Maddow was using this scary Maddow viewer as a way to extend and enhance her brainless, dissembling red scare.

How bad did Maddow's dissembling get? As is often the case, if it weren't for the phony facts she provided, she offered few facts at all.

Go ahead! On your own, note the overt dissembling as she pretended to establish the claim that the Russian lawyer actually was a Russian government lawyer. In the passage below, she served you a flat misstatement:

MADDOW: So that meeting with the upper echelons of the Trump campaign in June of last year, today we learned that it also included a former Russian counterintelligence officer who nobody thought to mention before. He also tells the Associated Press that he and Natalia Veselnitskaya left documents about Hillary Clinton behind at that meeting for the Trump campaign to continue to review. We didn't know that before.

In that passage, Maddow was still playing Akhmetshin as "a former Russian counterintelligence officer." (By the next day, her beloved NBC News would move way back from that claim.)

But whatever you may think about that characterization, Akhmetshin didn't say that "he and Natalia Veselnitskaya" left documents about Hillary Clinton behind. He said that Veselnitskaya did. Full and complete total stop, unless you're getting yourself conned by a con man like Maddow.

That said, the most comical part of Maddow's con occurred when she started counting Russians. You really need to watch the tape to see Maddow clown and emote as she cons you at this point. But in this fuller chunk of text, she is rolling her eyes about all the Russians in the room at the now-famous meeting:

MADDOW: Today, we learned the group also included this guy [Akhmetshin], who NBC News first identified as a former Soviet counterintelligence officer suspected by some U.S. officials of having ongoing ties to Russian intelligence. He was there too.

[...]

In addition to him, there was also reportedly a translator there, who is a relatively well-known person himself. I expect you'll see a bunch of reporting about him and his potential role in this in the days ahead, over the course of the weekend.

That would bring the total number of people in the meeting to, let's see:

Junior, Manafort, Kushner, the lawyer, the ex-counterintelligence guy, the translator.

Oh, also on the lower right hand side there, that's the British guy who wrote the e-mails to Don Jr. in the first place.

That brings the total number of people we now know in the meeting to seven. But CNN is also reporting that actually maybe it was eight, and maybe it was more than eight.

CNN is reporting that there was somebody else in the meeting in addition who was there as a representative of the family of this Putin-linked Russian oligarch who initially took the meeting with Yuri Chaika, with the federal prosecutor in the first place that led to this whole thing.

So, we're now basically waiting to find out if there were any Russians who were in New York that day who were not in that meeting. And if so, is that just because they wouldn"t fit in the elevator? Honestly, like anything else to declare on this?

Maddow's outraged muggng was superb during that performance. Consider:

She said there may have been as many as eight people in the room. Histrionically, she asked if there were any Russkies in New York who weren't at the now-famous meeting.

She failed to note that her own sacred NBC News was saying that the alleged eighth person may have been Akhmetshin himself. She also failed to note this:

Of all the people she identified, only one—the now-famous Russian lawyer herself—wasn't an American or British citizen. The lawyer was the only one! Let's run down the list:

People known to be in the room at the now-famous meeting
"Junior," Manafort and Kushner: American citizens
Akhmetshin: naturalized American citizen
Translator: naturalized American citizen
Music publicist: British citizen
The Russian lawyer: flat-out Russian citizen

Maddow had identified exactly one straight-up Russkie. But uh-oh! Amazingly, she never told her misled viewers that Akhmetshin is an American citizen. She also forgot to mention the fact that the translator is an American citizen too.

She made it sound like all Mother Russia was there. In reality, she had managed to count exactly one person in the room who wasn't a British or American citizen.

We the pitiful liberal viewers weren't permitted to know that.

We don't know what makes Maddow behave in this highly unstable way. But this is very much the way she does behave, at least when she gets on the air.

We've warned you, for quite a few years, about her lack of obsessive honesty. That performance Friday night was an ugly con all the way down.

This ugly con was played on us, her gullible liberal viewers. We are the people who get fooled when this puzzling corporate tool plays these deeply disordered, Trump-like TV games.

There was one Russkie in the room. Maddow shrieked and completely lost count, the number had gone so high.

This actually is what Maddow does. She's been like this for years.

Don't misunderstand this remarkable fact: Maddow never told her viewers that Akhmetshin is an American citizen.

She never told viewers that the very scary translator is an American citizen too. This is what Rachel Maddow does. She's played the game this way for years, as has Donald J. Trump.

Scarborough spots former KGB agent!

MONDAY, JULY 17, 2017

Maddow was even worse: Friday night, she made it official:

Rachel Maddow is one of least disguised major dissemblers in the history of "cable news."

Assuming even minimal competence, Maddow's opening segment was a masterwork of dissembling, misstatement and scary-time propaganda, all aimed at the brains of us unsuspecting liberal viewers.

Liberal viewers were misled in an array of ways. But first, let's talk about Morning Joe's self-promoting rock star, Morning Joe's own Morning Joe.

Despite the fact that he's 54 years old, his rock songs are still about "bad girls." If you believe the Washington Post, "the Harvard types" adore him.

This morning, ten minutes into his program, he was complaining about the lying of the Trump administration. There's a bit of an irony there.

Scarborough sold his soul to pimp King Trump after Trump had spent four years spreading his bogus tales about Obama's Kenyan birth. Now, today, with everything changed, the upright fellow was deeply concerned about Donald J. Trump's alleged lying.

Ten minutes into his program, here's what the gentleman said:

SCARBOROUGH (7/17/17): David Ignatius, I want to talk about—you know, Elise was talking about "more of the same."

There is one thing that Donald Trump is saying that is more of the same, and that his lawyers are saying, and that the administration is now saying, now that they've just been busted lying time and time and time again about meeting with Russians, about this specific meeting.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, saying. "Hey! There's nothing new about opposition research, us meeting with a former KGB agent, us meeting with a series of Russians, us lying about the people who were in attendance there...

"Us meeting with a former KBG agent!"

Scarborough simply hates Donald Trump's lying. But he was quick to spew that!

Scarborough was referring to Rinat Akhmetshin, the lobbyist who attended the now-famous meeting at Trump Tower with the now-famous Russian lawyer.

Unless you're watching the Maddow Show, Akhmetshin is a lobbyist who is also an American citizen. He came to this country from his native land, the former Soviet Union, in 1993 ot 1994, when he was 25-27 years old.

By now, even NBC News seems to have agreed that Akhmetshin spent two years in the Soviet army as a teen-age draftee, full stop. Except in the land of high excitement and throwback red scares, there's zero evidence that he was ever "a KBG agent" or anything like it.

Unless you're watch criminal pundits like Morning Joe, or undisguised con men like Maddow. Unless you read the New York Times, which continued its Cold War throwback performance art on Sunday morning's front page.

People, can we talk?

The children are currently on a chase, a stampede, a scare. They are, in fact, behaving like a lynch mob.

Concerning lynch mobs, we'll tell you again what we've told you before:

Lynch mobs have operated all over the world, all through so-called human history. Many times, such mobs have hunted people who were in fact guilty of crimes.

That doesn't mean thay they weren't lynch mobs. That doesn't mean that they weren't behaving in the way of such mobs.

In the current episode, a journalistic lynch mob is chasing a generally guilty party by the name of Donald J. Trump. For decades, their target has engaged in a range of offenses against the public interest.

During much of that time, mobsters like Scarborough were blowing smoke op his astral region and kissing his hind parts to boot. Mika was doing it too, just extremely bigly.

Today, Scarborough is part of a mob. He's behaving like he's part of a mob. He's too lazy to get clear on facts. He's too busy writing and recording his rock songs.

"Meeting with a former KGB agent!" On the front page of the New York Times, it's 1954 all over again. This morning, Scarborough played the same game.

In our next post, we'll review Maddow's astonishing Friday night opening segment. Have liberal viewers ever been so baldly deceived, in so many different ways?

THE RELIABLE ABSENCE OF BASIC SKILLS: Dead German scientists and the AP!

MONDAY, JULY 17, 2017

Part 1—The AP's basic skills: Last Thursday morning, the New York Times dropped a dime on those misfiring German scientists of the late 18th century.

The topic even made page A3, home of Noteworthy Facts:

Of Interest
NOTEWORTHY FACTS FROM TODAY'S PAPER

[...]

In the late 1700s, German scientists blamed the occurrence of arson on the traumas of menstruation, a theory that had to be discarded when it was determined that most arsonists were men.

Oof. That fact was drawn from a book review by Jennifer Senior, whose work for the Times has been superb. The noteworthy fact on page A3 made us recall our ruminations on Wittgenstein and Kant.

Last Monday, at the start of our "basic skills" series, we briefly considered Professor Horwich's theory—his theory that the academy turned away from Wittgenstein because Wittgenstein said that previous philosophy should pretty much land on the junk heap of history.

It might be hard to keep teaching your standard Kant course if you accept the idea that traditional philosophy was built upon a foundation of conceptual confusion. And so, alas:

Though Wittgenstein's later work provides an array of highly useful analytical skills, it had to be thrown away! Better him than the familiar, traditional courses in the course catalog!

Is that why Wittgenstein lost favor within the academy? We can't answer that question, though we'd long considered that possibility by the time we read Horwich's essay.

That said, we couldn't help chuckling at the failed attempt of those German scientists to explain the cause of arson. Their embarrassing error made us think of immortal Kant.

In this, our modern misfiring world, we're supposed to roll our eyes at the embarrassing dumbness of European scientists, physicians and such from that embarrassing era. But we're also asked to continue thinking that figures like the immortal Kant (17424-1804) were firing brilliantly on all cylinders—that their immortal analyses and critiques were pretty much right on course!

The planet is losing its biological diversity with each passing year. With the refusal of our logicians to perform their classic guardian role, the planet is also losing its storehouse of analytical skills, or at least is failing to develop the new, advanced skills we need.

We'll return to these musings another day, and to Horwich's essay. For today, let's think about the skill level recently put on display by the Associated Press, the Kant of American news orgs.

Late in April, the AP released this transcript of Julie Pace's interview with President Donald J. Trump. The interview had been granted to mark the president's masterful first hundred days.

As such, the transcript qualifies as a significant journalistic document. But how odd:

The body of the historically significant transcript starts as shown below. Presumably, the "AP" designation marks the questions and statements made by Pace, to whom the interview is attributed:

AP: I do want to talk to you about the 100 days.

TRUMP: Good.

AP: I want to ask a few questions on some topics that are happening toward the end of the interview.

TRUMP: Did you see Aya (Hijazi, an Egyptian-American charity worker who had been detained in the country for nearly three years) ...

AP: Can you tell me a little bit about how that came about?

TRUMP: No, just—you know, I asked the government to let her out. ...

TRUMP: You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.

AP: How did you hear about this story?

TRUMP: Many people, human rights people, are talking about it. It’s an incredible thing, especially when you meet her. You realize—I mean, she was in a rough place.

AP: Did you have to strike a deal with (Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah) el-Sissi over this?

TRUMP: No. No deal. He was here. He—I said, “I really would appreciate it if you would look into this and let her out.” And as you know, she went through a trial. And anyway, she was let go. And not only she, it was a total of eight people. ...

After that, a break in the transcript occurs. That text seems to represent the first, self-contained chunk of the interview—and it makes little apparent sense.

"I do want to talk to you about the 100 days," Pace says at the start of this exchange. "I want to ask a few questions on some topics that are happening toward the end of the interview," she quickly adds.

That said, how strange! At no point does the transcript explain what "interview" Pace was citing.

To what "interview" does she refer? We have no idea.

In his response, Trump seems to think that Pace is referring to an event, or set of events, involving an Egyptian-American charity worker whose name seems to be Aya Hijazi. Within the transcript, the reader is given no idea why Trump would have thought that.

What explains this first chunk of this significant transcript? To what "interview" is Pace referring in her initial statement?

She doesn't seem to be referring to some other part of her own interview with Trunp. We find no other place in the AP's transcript where Hizari's name or situation was ever discussed.

Peculiarly, this unexplained chunk of dialogue appears at the very start of this lengthy, significant transcript. Presumably, anyone who peruses the transcript will be instantly puzzled by this initial chunk. But three months after the interview transcript was posted by the AP, there the reference sits, still unexplained. Our big news orgs ted to be like this.

Unless you've worked with the careless transcripts our major news orgs routinely produce, it might be hard to imagine why the AP would publish such a peculiar document. That said, further puzzlement might arise from the punctuation displayed in that brief first interview segment.

We refer to the ellipses which occur at three different places, and to the parentheses which appear in this comment by Trump:

TRUMP: Did you see Aya (Hijazi, an Egyptian-American charity worker who had been detained in the country for nearly three years) ...

As you can see from what we've posted, parentheses also appear in a later comment by Pace.

This may seem like a minor point, but this is a major interview. Did Trump speak the words which appear inside those parentheses? Or were those words inserted as a point of explanation by the AP itself?

We ask because, in standard practice, an inserted statement would probably appear inside brackets. In that case, Trump's statement would look like this:

TRUMP: Did you see Aya [Hijazi, an Egyptian-American charity worker who had been detained in the country for nearly three years] ...

We'll guess that the AP added the parenthetical material. But the transcript has barely started, and already we're guessing about who spoke or wrote a major phrase in a discussion of a topic whose very existence is puzzling.

Meanwhile, alas again! By normal standards, another point of confusion seems to lurk in that interview chunk. We refer to the use of ellipses (dot dot dots} at three separate points.

In standard notation, ellipses are typically inserted to indicate that a deletion of some kind has occurred. If a writer transcribes a statement but omits some part of the statement, those three little dots let the reader know that a deletion occurred.

Typically, that would be standard practice, but our major news orgs tend to be amazingly careless, in various ways, when they prepare their transcripts. In this instance, the AP has offered a brief explainer about its use of those ellipses.

Here's what the AP's explainer says. This text appears at the very start of the AP document, before the body of the transcript appears:

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (4/23/17): A transcript of an Oval Office interview Friday with President Donald Trump by AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace. Where the audio recording of the interview is unclear, ellipses or a notation that the recording was unintelligible are used.

Apparently, the transcript was prepared from an audio recording. According to that brief explainer, ellipses were (sometimes) used when parts of the recording were unclear.

Somewhat remarkably, this seems to mean that, at three separate points in that one short exchange, the audio recording was so unclear that verbiage spoken by Trump couldn't be included. One starts to wonder about the way this interview was recorded.

Beyond that, an additional point is left unexplained. At some points, ellipses will be used to indicate that verbiage was omitted because the audio was unclear. At other points, we're told that the term "unintelligible" will be inserted into the transcript, to indicate the same thing.

Why did the AP mark this problem in two different ways? No explanation appears. Our news orgs tend to be like this.

We run through these points for a reason. Two weeks after this transcript appeared, Masha Gessen, an important journalist, delivered an important lecture at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City.

In a substantial chunk of her lecture, Gessen worked directly from this AP transcript. She did so very poorly.

In theory, this AP transcript is an important journalistic document. In its execution, it was a bit of a puzzling mess.

And then, the inevitable occurred, bringing in the eternal note of sadness:

When Gessen delivered her lecture, she completely misinterpreted one significant element of the AP transcript. For this reason, it seems fairly clear that Gessen hadn't performed basic due diligence before making use of this document.

It also seems clear that Gessen has little experience working with the amateurish, unreliable transcripts our biggest news orgs routinely produce. It seems to us that Gessen has probably never wrestled with these problematic documents before, trying to determine what was actually said.

Can we talk? Gessen drew a great deal of laughter and applause as she read from the AP transcript during her lecture. As she did, our analysts cringed and wailed.

They were watching a somewhat embarrassing liberal audience laughing and cheering as a badly unprepared major journalist made extremely basic, embarrassing errors as she worked from a somewhat bungled transcript.

The analysts moaned and tore at their hair. "Buck up! What else is new?" we thoughtfully declared.

Long ago, our guardians within the academy walked off their posts. In his essay, Professor Horwich pokes and prods at one possible part of that group's refusal to serve.

This happened within our philosophy departments. But it has also happened at an array of major news orgs, not excluding the Associated Press.

Julie Pace is a thoroughly competent, thoroughly sensible journalist. The transcript purporting to record her interview with Trump is a bit of a puzzling mess.

Gessen is one of our most highly regarded journalists. When she worked from the AP transcript, she made inexcusable errors. And good God, holy smokes, dear lord!

Good God! That liberal crowd!

Tomorrow: Pretending to quote what was said

One other point from that short first chunk: The short first chunk of that AP transcript is riddled with points of confusion.

We don't know what "interview" Pace is referring to in that chunk. Just for the record, we also can't explain this:

TRUMP: No, just—you know, I asked the government to let her out. ...

TRUMP: You know Obama worked on it for three years, got zippo, zero.

Why does Trump seem to speak two consecutive times, without an interjection from Pace?

We can't exactly answer that question. We can tell you this:

When our big news orgs create transcripts, basic transcription skills are commonly missing in action. Our big news orgs are slipshod, careless, deeply unskilled. Again and again and again and again, they don't much seem to care.

The New York Times exhumes Tailgunner Joe!

SATURDAY, JULY 15, 2017

Misfiring all the way down: The New York Times does some horrible work at the top of this morning's front page.

The Times has dug up the bones of Tailgunner Joe. Covering the same news event, the Washington Post performs a hundred times more capably.

To what news event do we refer? Yesterday, the world learned that a previously unmentioned person was present at Donald Trump Junior's now-famous meeting in June 2016.

That person's name is Rinat Akhmetshin. As the Times begins its front-page report, try to catch the general gist of Eileen Sullivan's portrait:

SULLIVAN (7/15/17): Soviet Veteran Says He, Too, Met Trump, Jr.

He is a veteran of the Red Army, photographed in the 1980s with fellow soldiers in a Russian birch forest. He collects fine art, likes opera and owns a nearly $2 million townhouse in trendy Logan Circle, in the center of Washington. He often zips around the city on a bright orange bicycle.

On Friday, Rinat Akhmetshin, the Soviet army veteran, revealed another detail of an exotic life: He was one of the people at the meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.

The presence of Mr. Akhmetshin adds another development to the evolving narrative about the gathering, which Donald Trump Jr. arranged after learning that a Russian lawyer claimed to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. The news of Mr. Akhmetshin’s attendance shows how the story of the meeting keeps changing and has increased pressure on the White House to offer a more comprehensive account of what happened.

Mr. Akhmetshin, a naturalized American citizen who talks openly of his past in a K.G.B. counterintelligence unit focused on hunting spies in the Russian military, is well known in diplomatic and media circles in Washington, where he has worked for years on behalf of business and political interests in Russia and other former Soviet states.

Did you catch the general gist of this portrait? Let's simplify it for our lizards:

Akhmetshin, a veteran of the Red Army, speaks openly about his work for the KGB!

Sullivan is telling a scary story, evoking the scary work once perfected by Tailgunner Joe.

As it turns out, Sullivan actually knows very little about Akhmetshin's service in that scary "Red Army." According to Akhmetshin, he spent two years in the Soviet army as a teenager, after having been drafted. There is no sign in this Times report that Sullivan knows anything different.

But so what? At these highly exciting times, the androids are doing a lot of misfiring. At the Washington Post, by way of contrast, the journalists manage to keep themselves under control today as they handle this same topic.

Sullivan wasn't finished with her colorful evocations of Akhmetshin's scary behavior in those Russian birch forests. First, though, she entertained us a bit:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): It was in that capacity, Mr. Akhmetshin said in an interview on Friday, that he accompanied a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, to the meeting as part of an effort to amend an American law known as the Magnitsky Act that sanctioned Russians for human rights abuses. The 2012 law infuriated President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose government retaliated by restricting adoptions of Russian children by Americans.

Mr. Akhmetshin, who wears his curly hair high in a manner that associates compare to the protagonist in the 1977 cult-classic horror film “Eraserhead,” said in the interview that he took part in the meeting at the request of Ms. Veselnitskaya. He said he had no ties to the Kremlin.

“I am a target of well-coordinated and financed smear campaign,’’ he said in a text message.

Sullivan writes for a major newspaper whose biggest stars have focused, in the past, on Mayor Giuliani's comb-over, on Candidate Gore's bald spot, and on Candidate Edwards' $400 haircuts.

Its stars have even profiled Candidate Romney's hair stylist, on page one no less! In a related bit of clowning, Sullivan thus moved from Akhmetshin's pogrom-laced past to his amusing hair style.

That said, she wasn't through with the scary stuff about Akhmetshin's work in those forests for the KGB. As she continued, she finally let him have his say, then gave her readers another good scare with another colorful passage:

SULLIVAN (continuing directly): He described his time in the military as routine, serving from 1986 to 1988, like “millions of other Soviet boys.” He said he left the military with the rank of sergeant.

NBC News first reported Mr. Akhmetshin’s role in the Donald Trump Jr. meeting, but did not identify him. He first confirmed to The Associated Press that he attended the meeting.

Mr. Akhmetshin has boasted to associates that he had served in the military with a group known as the Osoby Otdel, or Special Section, which in the Soviet period was a division of the K.G.B. The group was distinct from the G.R.U., or Main Intelligence Directorate of the defense ministry, an organization with which he has denied any affiliation.

In 1986, Akhmetshin was 18 years old. There is no sign in Sullivan's report that his claim—his claim that he served two years as a teen-aged draftee—is anything other than accurate.

(On-line, the Times eventually shows us that photograph of their man, with his comrades, in that scary forest. The gentlemen do indeed look like teens. Decent people can perhaps feel sorry for very young men forced to perform such service.)

There is no sign that Akhmetshin's claim is anything other than accurate.That said, Sullivan wanted to give us one more thrill ride in this general area.

And so we're told that Akhmetshin "has boasted" about the service he gave the KGB. It actually wasn't the GRU, we're also skillfully told.

(As readers, you should always be wary when reporters turn to the insinuative verbs "boasted" and "bragged." Absent very careful reporting, the use of these insinuative terms tends to be a weapon aimed at a disfavored figure.)

As he ponders Sullivan's work, Tailgunner Joe is smiling in his grave. Sensible people will simply say, "There they go again"—a weary reference to the fact that the androids tend to misfire, sometimes badly, at thrilling times like these.

Over at the Washington Post, Helderman and Hamburger wrote a lengthy front-page report about this same new figure. To their credit, they managed to keep themselves under control, starting out like this:

HELDERMAN AND HAMBURGER (7/15/17): A Russian American lobbyist and veteran of the Soviet military said Friday that he attended a June 2016 meeting between President Trump’s oldest son and a Kremlin-connected lawyer.

In truth, we're not sure that Akhmetshin's military service belongs in paragraph one at all. But after that, you have to read all the way to paragraph 25 to find another reference to that military service.

That scary service in the Red Army is played for scares in today's Times. By way of contrast, the Post engages in behavior which resembles actual journalism:

HELDERMAN AND HAMBURGER: Akhmetshin [is] a controversial figure. In a letter this spring to U.S. government officials, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) described Akhmetshin as a person who “apparently has ties to Russian intelligence.”

Akhmetshin said he never worked as an intelligence agent, but he did say he was drafted as a teenager and served for two years in a unit of the Soviet military that had responsibility for law enforcement issues as well as some counterintelligence matters. He immigrated to the United States in 1993 and gained citizenship in 2009.

“I was not an intelligence officer. Never,” he said.

To its credit, the Post managed to report what is known in this area without throwing the scary terms KGB and GRU all around. For what it's worth, Akhmetshin would have been 25 or 26 when he came to the U.S.

That said, we'll offer one small word of warning concerning Grassley's scary statement.

The scary letter Helderman cites can be seen here. In that scary letter, Grassly quickly voices scary claims about Akhmetshin's "apparent ties to Russian intelligence."

We don't know what sorts of ties may, or may not, exist. We do know this:

Grassley's scary claims are sourced, in footnotes 3 and 4, to a Politico report. The claims he sources to that report are, simply put, not present in that report.

In reality, the scary claims are made in a report by the Daily Caller, an org which may perhaps be less trustworthy. But even there, the Grassley letter quotes the claims in a very slippery manner, heightening the sense of what the Caller actually said.

The androids were apparently misfiring in this tired old hack's office too. Remember this as your favorite liberal stars excitedly sell you this claim from this Republican hack.

Have Donald Trump Junior, or his associates, engaged in illegal or unethical conduct? There are several areas in which the Trump camp could turn out to have broken the law (or not).

They may have helped the Russkies direct "fake news" at voters deemed susceptible (or not). In that instance, they would have been playing an active role in a full-blown election operation which was plainly illegal.

Beyond that, they may helped the Russkies with the dissemination of stolen emails (or not). Presumably, that too would be baldly illegal. (We'll note that some news orgs now screaming about this had a field day pimping those stolen emails all around. They often did so in the most ludicrous and irrelevant manner.)

It isn't clear that anything illegal occurred at that now-famous meeting. (It's also true that no one actually knows, at this point, what did occur at that meeting.)

Based on what is currently known, the conduct at that meeting doesn't rise to the level of the possible scenarios sketched above. But having said that, we'll also say this:

We find it instructive to see major journalists squealing and complaining about the apparent attempt, by Trump Junior, to access information from that Russian lawyer, who may or may not have been a Russian government lawyer. Here's why we find that instructive:

We have said, for many years, that information and facts play almost no role in our discourse. Our "journalists" work from novelized scripts. Again and again and again and again, our "journalism" is novelization all the way down.

Trump Junior says he wanted information about Candidate Clinton. Our journalists are currently avoiding that term, recasting it as "dirt."

We aren't fans of scandal campaigning. But we find it amusing, in a dark way, to see our journalists shrieking, squealing and complaining about an apparent attempt to attain information. As we've told you for many years, it's something they themselves would almost never do!

That front-page report in this morning's Times is pure perfect novelized crap. The androids are misfiring badly today. At our most famous least competent paper, they're misfiring all the way down.

Tailgunner Joe loved the Times report. Citizens, how about you?

Also these: Two additional points:

Here's the headline at TPM: "Former Soviet Counterintel Officer Says He Was In The Room With Don, Jr. Too"

We'll grant you, that's scary/exciting. We should also mention this:

In a 37-paragraph, front-page report, the Washington Post never got around to describing Akhmetshin's wonderfully comical hair. At the Times, a possible android went there in paragraph 6!

Don Lemon works five nights per week!

FRIDAY, JULY 14, 2017

The New York Times takes it from there: We kid you not. Yesterday morning, the "Here to Help" feature on the New York Times' page A3 took a gloomy turn.

Someone at the Times was scared. Here's how the feature started:

Here to Help
HOW TO PACK AN EMERGENCY KIT FOR DISASTERS

No matter where you live, your emergency kit for disasters, man-made or otherwise, should always include a go-bag. Here's what to put in yours.

The feature helped us know what to include in eight categories, including Mylar Blankets and Dust Masks. Was this "Here to Help" feature really a comment on President Donald J. Trump?

We don't know, but we kid you not. The day before, the "Here to Help" feature started like this:

Here to Help
A RECIPE FOR SALADE LYONNAISE

We get an eyeroll every morning as we scan A3. This morning, in the "Of Interest" feature, this "noteworthy fact" appeared:

Of Interest
NOTEWORTHY FACTS FROM TODAY'S PAPER

[...]

As the host of "CNN Tonight," Don Lemon is on the air about 260 days a year.

Instantly, we handed it off to our computational mathematics division, asking them to conduct a thorough review of the numbers. After several seconds of work, we were handed these facts:

There are 52 weeks in the year. Multiply by five nights per week. Your answer will be 260.

That noteworthy fact was pulled from this timely, sprawling portrait of Lemon's "grooming routine." Lemon's first quoted statement was this:

"I live by coconut oil and argan oil."

We've sometimes suspected as much!

The piece was written by Bee Shapiro. Aside from her position at the Times, Shapiro is founder of Ellis Brooklyn, "a luxury, eco and sustainable fragrance and bodycare company based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn."

Is any of this a conflict of interest? We aren't sure we can tell.

At any rate, Shapiro reported that Lemon "is on the air around 260 days a year" right in her opening sentence. At page A3, someone else apparently felt that this was a noteworthy fact.

Are we best seen as "the rational animal" or as malfunctioning androids? About 365 days a year, the question crosses our mind.

"Harvard types" [HEART] Mika and Joe!

FRIDAY, JULY 14, 2017

An unfortunate cultural portrait: Tomorrow, we plan to review the way the cable corps has limned that now-famous meeting in which, as David Brooks has complained, Don Junior sought "information."

We plan to list a few ways Trump types may turn out to have broken the law (or not). At the same time, we plan to list a few absurdities about the pundit corps' reaction to what is known about that now-famous meeting, at which "information" was sought.

For today, we'll direct you to an unfortunate report from atop the first page of today's Washington Post Style section.

Granted, the piece was written by Monica Hesse, latest regent of upper-end press corps snark and snide, female leadership only need apply. Even allowing for the throwback attitude long adored at Style, we can all cringe a bit as Hesse begins, hard-copy headline included:

HESSE (7/14/17): Lovebirds Joe and Mika all atwitter about Trump

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, high atop the foamed crest of fame that traditionally appears when one half of a couple is accused by the President of the United States on Twitter of having a bloody facelift and the other half of the couple responds by loudly quitting the president’s political party, continued riding their wave on Tuesday night by appearing at the National Archives in Washington.

The affianced co-hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” it turns out, have also been named visiting fellows to Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Wednesday’s talk—an interview conducted by billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein and attended by an auditorium full of Harvard types—was their first public event as part of this endeavor.

“Tomorrow I’m interviewing George Bush and Bill Clinton together,” Rubenstein shared, “and more people have asked me about this interview than that!”

Scarborough preened. Brzezinski shook her head in apparent disbelief.

Joe and Mika have been named visiting fellows to the Kennedy Institute! According to Hesse, the "Harvard types" at yesterday's event pretty much loved what they heard from the erudite "lovebird" duo.

We're not sure what a visiting fellow does at the Kennedy Institute. Whatever it is, we're fairly sure that Joe and Mika probably shouldn't be doing it.

In fairness, Joe is a perfectly decent political analyst. In fact, he's often a good political analyst, at least when he isn't telling his endless Mittyesque stories about his own flawless campaigns.

As for Mika, she may have many other virtues and skills, but she's easily one of the worst major pundits in all of "cable news."

By way of temperament, she seems completely unsuited to the pundit/analyst role. That may make her a very good person, but it makes her a terrible analyst. She just isn't good in that role, a fact which would be true of a wide range of good, decent capable people.

That said, why are these people being interviewed by a billionaire for a Kennedy Institute event? Their claim to fame is this:

When Donald J. Trump threw his hat in the ring, they pandered, fawned and kissed his ascot right into the early months of 2016. Around the time of Trump's David Duke play, they withdrew their support for the great man who, they say, has changed.

Has J-Trump changed in some fundamental way? By early 2016, Trump had served as Birther King for almost five years. This didn't seem to bother these two as they pandered and fawned and devoted endless air time, and people like this billionaire won't be asking them about that.

Dearest darlings, use your heads! It simply isn't done!

Hesse goes on and on, then on and on, about the "uproarious audience laughter" which kept emerging from the "Harvard types" as Joe and Mika piddled out their various self-involved tales. Hesse is part of the snark machine which has always ruled at Style—including in June 1999, when the section signaled the rest of the corps that the time had come for open war against the vile Candidate Gore.

Hesse's report is built around mandated Style section snark. It also describes the state of upper-end culture surrounding our political journalism.

Donald J. Trump is a disordered man, but rank Trumpism was culturally dominant long before he came among. It's purveyors have long been accepted and praised by one and all, including by our own journalistic leaders over here on the corporate left.

THE PERILS OF SKILL-FREE LIVING: Nomenclature meets nomenklatura!

FRIDAY, JULY 14, 2017

Part 4—The AP composes a transcript: In Jim Sheridan's autobiographical film, In America, a young Irish immigrant father is losing his soul in the wake of the death of his son.

The father can't escape or regulate his grief. At one point, he describes the sweep of his losses.

A neighbor chastises him for the way he's failing himself and his two darling daughters. "You don't believe," the neighbor says.

The father responds as follows:

In what? God?

You know, I asked him a favor. I asked him to take me instead of him—and he took the both of us!

And look what he put in my place.

I'm a fucking ghost. I don't exist.

I can't think. I can't laugh. I can't cry.

I can't—feel!

We often think of that speech when we observe the hollowed-out skill set of our celebrity press corps.

They're the gang that can't paraphrase straight. They're the gang that likes to talk about candidates' haircuts and clothes.

They're the gang that invents irrelevant facts and disappears the world's most significant data sets. They're the gang that entertains us each night on our favorite "cable news" shows.

Most of all, they're the gang that works from novelized scripts. They've performed that way at least since early 2000, when E. R. Shipp, then the Washington Post's ombudsman, described the way the Post had cast the four major candidates in that year's White House campaign.

(Shipp described the "roles that The Post seems to have assigned to the actors in this unfolding political drama." Her headline: "Typecasting Candidates." To this day, her short column is the clearest description we've ever seen of the press corps' standard functioning. To read that short column, click here.)

Those journalists! We'd be inclined to call them the gang that can't report or analyze straight. Like the suffering father in Sheridan's film, are they "f*cking ghosts?"

Like that suffering father, they can't seem to think real well at this point. On the other hand, they do seem able to feel. They seem able to feel much too much.

They clearly can't restrict themselves to reporting the things they actually know. In the case of the Associated Press, they can't seem to compose a transcript.

We refer to the transcript of Julie Pace's interview with Donald J. Trump. The venerable news org posted the transcript of the session on April 23 of this year.

You can peruse it here.

The interview was a major "get" for the Associated Press. In effect, it was Trump's official interview about his triumphant and glorious first hundred days in office.

That hundred-day milestone is silly, but standard. Because Trump had provided few interviews, the AP's long session with Trump was a major journalistic event.

Two weeks later, Masha Gessen quoted extensively from the transcript during her May 7 lecture at the PEN World Voices Festival. She did so to laughter and applause from a liberal audience. To watch the lecture, click here.

The AP transcript was flawed. Gesen's use of the transcript was deeply flawed. In a journalistic world which wasn't principally peopled by skill-free ghosts, her performance that day would seem deeply puzzling.

Gessen's lecture dealt with a deeply important subject. She spoke about the destruction of the public discourse which had occurred in her native Russia by the late Soviet period.

Six days later, the New York Review of Books published an adapted version of Gessen's lecture. In the passage shown below, Gessen describes the destruction of language and public discourse under Soviet culture and rule, and the problem journalists faced in the early post-Soviet period.

This passage constitutes an important record of the way tyrants, thugs and possibly f*cking ghosts can destroy the public sphere:

GESSEN (5/13/17): A Russian poet named Sergei Gandlevsky once said that in the late Soviet period he became obsessed with hardware-store nomenclature. He loved the word secateurs, for example. Garden shears, that is. Secateurs is a great word. It has a shape. It has weight. It has a function. It is not ambiguous. It is also not a hammer, a rake, or a plow. It is not even scissors. In a world where words were constantly used to mean their opposite, being able to call secateurs “secateurs”—and nothing else—was freedom.

“Freedom,” on the other hand, was, as you know, slavery. That’s Orwell’s 1984. And it is also the USSR, a country that had “laws,” a “constitution,” and even “elections,” also known as the “free expression of citizen will.” The elections, which were mandatory, involved showing up at the so-called polling place, receiving a pre-filled ballot—each office had one name matched to it—and depositing it in the ballot box, out in the open. Again, this was called the “free expression of citizen will.” There was nothing free about it, it did not constitute expression, it had no relationship to citizenship or will because it granted the subject no agency. Calling this ritual either an “election” or the “free expression of citizen will” had a dual effect: it eviscerated the words “election,” “free,” “expression,” “citizen,” and “will,” and it also left the thing itself undescribed. When something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality. Hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens had an experience of the thing that could not be described, but I would argue that they did not share that experience, because they had no language for doing so. At the same time, an experience that could be accurately described as, say, an “election,” or “free,” had been preemptively discredited because those words had been used to denote something entirely different.

When I was a young journalist, I went back to my country of birth to work in my native language. In the early 1990s, Russian journalists were engaged in the project of reinventing journalism—which itself had been used to perform the opposite of conveying reliable information. Language was a problem. The language of politics had been pillaged, as had the language of values and even the language of feelings...

Gessen, who has walked the walk, is describing an important part of world history and human experience.

In fairness, her metaphysics is a bit fuzzy here. She never explains why this "free expression of citizen will," which was in fact an "overt governmental sham," couldn't be described in such a way, thereby "becoming a fact of shared reality." (We'll recall this objection next week.)

We mention this because it's important to avoid getting slippery about such an important topic. Gessen's lecture becomes even more important as she proceeds to compare this Soviet-era journalistic dilemma to the way our own American discourse is crumbling in this, the early Trump era.

Have we mentioned the fact that Masha Gessen has actually walked the walk? We'll recommend major respect for such an admirable person, but we'll warn against the common human instinct to confer the status of god on Gessen, or on anyone else.

Gessen covered those same points in her May 7 lecture. As she continued, she drew laughter and applause, working from the AP transcript of the interview with Donald J. Trump.

The transcript is remarkably puzzling in certain ways, especially given the importance of the interview the AP was recording. We're forced to say that Gessen's use of the transcript was substantially worse.

In her lecture, Gessen seemed to think that the corruption of our own public discourse could only be coming from Trump. It didn't seem to occur to her that the corruption of our own discourse might also be coming from the laughing, applauding liberal audience which was cheering her on, or from the journalists who did the typecasting Shipp described almost twenty years ago.

That AP transcript is a study in the banality of the press corps' lack of basic skills. We'll tell you why we'd say such a thing when we resume on Monday.

Gessen took a shaky route from there. As she worked from the AP transcript, her lack of due diligence was apparent. The audience laughed and applauded.

Gessen spoke of the loss of clear nomenclature during the Soviet period. Our warning concerning Gessen, whose soul is very much worth saving:

That suffering father was becoming a ghost. Is she in danger of becoming a part of our own nomenklatura?

Coming Monday: The banality of incompetence

Laundering money and selling your clothes!

THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2017

Donald J. Trump v. Thoreau: Has it really been two hundred years since sacred Thoreau was born?

We grew up two towns away. has it been two hundred years?

That's what Ron Charles tells us in today's Washington Post. Charles is the long-time editor of the paper's Book World. He starts his piece by naming Walden as his favorite book:

CHARLES (7/13/17): This week marks Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday, a bicentennial that emphasizes just how briefly the writer lived. He died before he was 45, but “Walden” is immortal.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Thoreau writes, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Except for a couple of more explicitly religious works, “Walden” is my favorite book, one I’d want with me on a desert island surrounded by pond water. I also might haul along my cherished copy of Thoreau’s journal...

Before he's done, Charles recounts his history teaching Walden, and he cites his favorites passages.

His favorite passages are a bit didactic for our tastes. For ourselves, we'd start with these epigrams:

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself.

[...]

Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.

To our ear and eye, that first passage captures Thoreau as at least an occasional ecstatic—as a person with the experience of being deeply happy, full complete stop, no particular reason required.

"Sell your clothes but keep your thoughts?" Truthfully, it can't always be done. But it's decent advice.

As opposed to sacred Thoreau, we have our current ruling family of grifters. We also have our terribly self-impressed liberal selves.

In this morning's New York Times, Nichaolas Kristof writes a headline which says this:

"All Roads Now Lead to Kirchner"

Effortlessly, we jotted an annotation:

We should possibly leave one road which leads, in the end, back to us. Back to the attributes which allowed our ultimate grifters to ascend to ultimate power.

Across from Kristof, Gail Collins has written her latest tongue-in-cheek pseudo-column. If President Donald J. Trump starts World War III today, Collins will have a tongue-in-cheek, quiz-themed column ready for Sunday's editions.

She may include a Seamus reference. This too is how our grifter clan ascended.

Thoreau recommended selling your clothes. The New Republic has now published this lengthy report about laundered money and Trump.

The money may have been hard to trace. The basic gong-show was not.

This president made himself the King of the Birthers in 2011. He kept this gong-show going for the next five years. This is how out treasured liberal institutions reacted:

On July 2, 2016, the New York Times finally did a full-length, front-page report about Trump's history as a birther. Even then, the paper was too timid to ask the obvious question:

Hadn't it always been a lie when Trump said he'd sent agents to Hawaii, and that they were shocked, just shocked, by the things they'd discovered?

In the midst of last year's campaign, the Times still refused to ask. Our career liberal heroes, knowing the rules, agreed to avert their gaze.

Anderson Cooper ran and hid from this entire topic. When he interviewed Candidate Trump, he played a cross between Trump's pool boy and his caddie. He never questioned the birther scam. Donald J. Trump got a pass.

When Trump announced in June 2015, Rachel Maddow made a point of saying she had nothing against him. The gentleman had been Birther King for four years at that point.

Earlier this year, MSNBC hired Greta Van Susteren away from Fox, where she had served, for years, as official hostess/enabler to Trump's birther musings.

Maddow devoted a segment to telling us liberals how great Greta was, and that they were great drinking pals.

What kind of person does that?

We liberals! We're slow, undisciplined, self-deluded and spectacularly dumb. We sell our suspicions, and buy entertainment on our cable TV.

There's nothing we like more than being conned. If we might borrow from sacred Thoreau:

This will be a demagogic evening, with Our Own Rhodes Scholar weirdly grinning and displayed her practiced hand jive.

Also this grifter pair: Early in 2016, Joe and Mika finally flipped on their long-time buddy, Trump. He wasn't the Trump they'd always known, they have sometimes said.

By that time, the Trump to whom they'd pandered and fawned had been Birther King for four years. What kinds of con men behave this way, while getting a total free pass?

Christopher Wray hammers Comey the God!

THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2017

We wonder why nobody else did: Yesterday, FBI nominee Christopher Wray appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It was his confirmation hearing. At one point, Lindsey Graham asked him about last summer's performance by Comey the God.

We think Wray's comments are worth recording. Here's how the colloquy started:

GRAHAM (7/12/17): Comey. Did you see the press conference he gave about the Hillary Clinton investigation in July of last year?

WRAY: Not live, but yes.

GRAHAM: Would you have done that?

Please note. Graham was talking about Comey the God-in-July. He wasn't discussing Comey's subsequent pair of interjections, very late in the fall campaign.

Last July 5, Comey delivered a scathing lecture in which he assailed the conduct of Candidate Clinton. Graham asked Wray if he would have done that.

At first, it almost seemed that Wray was trying to escape the question. But Graham pushed him back on topic, and got the following answer:

WRAY (continuing directly): Well, Senator, there is an inspector general investigation into Director Comey's conduct, so—

GRAHAM: I'm not talking about the investigation. I'm asking about you. Would you have done that?

WRAY: I can tell you that, in my experience as a prosecutor and as head of the Criminal Division, I understand there to be department policies that govern public comments about uncharged individuals. And I think those policies are there for a reason. And I would follow those policies.

GRAHAM: OK. He talked about somebody that was never charged in a disparaging fashion. Do you agree with that?

WRAY: That's the way I understood his comments.

GRAHAM: Do you also agree that he took over the prosecutor's job by saying, "There's no case here?"

WRAY: Well, Senator, again, there's an inspector general investigation into his conduct—

GRAHAM: Look, you would not have done either one of those is what you're telling this committee. At least I hope that's what you're telling this committee.

WRAY: I can't imagine a situation where, as FBI director, I would be giving a press conference on an uncharged individual, much less talk in detail about it.

GRAHAM: Fair enough. Thank you.

You can watch that exchange on this tape, at the 1:50 mark.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow! Prodded several times by Graham, Wray criticized last July's behavior by Comey the God.

According to Graham, Comey had "talked about somebody that was never charged in a disparaging fashion." Wray said there are Justice Department policies forbidding such conduct, and he said they exist for a reason.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow! "I can't imagine a situation where as FBI director I would be giving a press conference on an uncharged individual, much less talk in detail about it," Wray said.

As he did, he threw an official establishment god directly under the bus.

It took some prodding, but Wray directly challenged last July's conduct by Comey. Today, you should ask yourself this question:

How come no one else did?

Last July, in real time, why did you see Steve Kornacki aggressively adopting Comey's anti-Clinton line on two successive nights while serving as guest host on the Maddow Show?

Even more significantly:

Maddow returned from her richly-deserved vacation on Monday, July 12 of last year. She never mentioned Comey's name until very late in October! Why didn't our own favorite fiery liberal god challenge this other god's conduct?

We think you should ask those questions for a reason. Again and again and again and again, you've been abandoned, left for dead, by the self-serving boys and girls who pose as the progressive stars of corporate "cable news."

All too often, these people seem to be playing the game in service to themselves. Again and again and again and again, they desert you at moments of truth.

It can be hard to notice the various things our TV stars don't do. All last summer, deep into the fall, Maddow didn't challenge what Comey had done, just as she didn't challenge the Benghazi-related attacks on Susan Rice four years before.

Back in 2012, the invention of Benghazi got a total pass from Maddow. Four years later, Comey got the same pass.

In truth, Maddow completely avoided the email topic all through last year's campaign. She made zero attempt to clarify, challenge, debunk, explain. She ducked Benghazi and "emailgate." In fairness, she did entertain us.

Were you being played by Maddow the God? How many times will this major star run off and hide in the woods before liberals start to catch on?

One more point: In press corps novelizations, Comey now stands in opposition to Trump. For this reason, he is being re-established as an establishment god of unassailable moral authority.

In reality, James B. Comey isn't an unassailable moral god. The story here just isn't that simple, except when the group novels start.

Much of our "news" involves novelization. The public interest is poorly served by these childish games.

THE PERILS OF SKILL-FREE LIVING: Masha Gessen lectures on Trump!

THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2017

Part 3—But first, the AP's transcript: Who the heck is Masha Gessen?

You're asking a very good question! Last weekend, C-Span aired the videotape of Gessen's May 7 appearance at the 2017 PEN World Voices Festival.

The annual festival is produced by PEN America, a venerable organization which "works to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship."

The festival was founded in 2005 under the leadership of Salman Rushdie, a leading figure in world literature, who was then PEN's president.

We seem to be dealing from the very top of the deck. As it posts its tape of the May 7 session, C-Span describes Gessen's appearance as follows:

C-SPAN: 2017 Arthur Miller Lecture Author Masha Gessen delivered the Arthur Miller Lecture followed by an interview with Samantha Bee as part of the 2017 PEN World Voices Festival. Ms. Gessen books include The Future is History and The Man Without a Face.

That's right. After Gessen delivered her lecture, she was interviewed by comedian Samantha Bee.

The lecture and the interview were both aired by C-Span. The entire session can be viewed at the C-Span site linked above, or at this PEN America site

Concerning the interview, we'll only say this:

Bee is a very capable comedian. But she had as much business interviewing Gessen as we would have dancing a lead in the Bolshoi Ballet's next mounting of Swan Lake.

It's fairly clear, during that interview, that Bee understood this fact about herself and about her own performance. Here again, you see the preference within modern liberal culture for the joys of skill-free living:

In scheduling that interview session, PEN went with publicity value and imagined entertainment and fun at the expense of basic competence. Again and again and again and again, this is the way our liberal and progressive elites contribute to the dumbnification of the American discourse.

This dumbnification hasn't served liberal interests especially well.

That said, who is Masha Gessen? We'll offer a brief subjective capsule: she's smarter than the average journalistic bear, and she's much more sincere. Her sincerity would seem to flow from her personal history, which the leading authority has summarized in this way:

Maria Alexandrovna "Masha" Gessen (born 13 January 1967), is a Russian and American journalist, author, translator and activist who has been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Gessen helped found the Pink Triangle Campaign and has written extensively on LGBT rights. Described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist," she has said that for many years she was "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country."

Gessen writes primarily in English but also in her native Russian, and in addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, she has been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and U.S. News & World Report.

[...]

Gessen was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Moscow to Alexander and Yelena Gessen. In 1981, when Gessen was a teenager, she and her family moved to the United States. As an adult in 1991, she moved to Moscow, where she worked as a journalist. Gessen holds both Russian and US citizenship.

Gessen hasn't simply talked the talk; she has also walked the walk. She's sharper than the average bear. We'd be inclined to assume complete sincerity in every word she utters.

For those reasons, we were struck by the lecture she gave, to an appreciate liberal audience, at the May 7 PEN event.

Gessen's lecture was repeatedly interrupted by laughter and applause. Repeatedly, these interruptions occurred at points where Gessen was offering absurd analyses or working from an AP transcript whose basic structure she rather plainly didn't seem to understand.

We were struck by Gessen's overstatements—and by her lack of preparation.

Bee's attempt at conducting an interview was horrible, but predictably so. Simply put, she was playing out of position as she interviewed Gessen.

That said, Gessen's actual lecture was striking and disappointing. The reactions by that liberal audience only made matters worse.

Then too, we must confront that AP transcript, from which Gessen attempted to work at one point to the delight of her audience.

The Associated Press is one of this country's oldest and most influential news organizations. The interview to which we refer was conducted by Julie Pace, the AP's newly-named Washington bureau chief.

In the past year or two, Pace has become a familiar face on "cable news" programs. In our view, she is routinely competent, sane and well-informed, and professional in her demeanor.

She doesn't get way out over her skies. These traits tend to make a person stand out in the realm of "cable news."

On Friday, April 21, Pace conducted a lengthy interview with President Donald J. Trump. The interview was intended to mark the end of Trump's first hundred days in office.

The AP released no videotape or audiotape of the interview. The AP's official transcript of the session is here.

Some of Trump's statements in that interview provoked a lot of discussion. In our view, Pace's performance was completely appropriate throughout.

Pace performed as a journalist should. In a puzzling array of ways, the AP's transcript is a bit of a mess.

Our view? In a slightly different world, it would be hard to imagine a major news org publishing such a transcript. Beyond that, a second problem lurks:

It's completely clear, from Gessen's lecture, that she hadn't fully perused the transcript from which she chose to work. In her lecture, she used certain parts of the transcript to generate laughter and applause. But it seems depressingly clear that she hadn't performed basic due diligence before composing her text.

In our first few reports in this series, we've posed an implicit question. We've discussed the way our philosophy professors—in theory, an important set of guardians—have basically walked off their posts.

We then discussed the puzzling fact that a major journalist at the New York Times seems to display the intellectual skill of someone who's nine years old.

The implicit question we're raising is this:

As a general matter, how should we regard ourselves and our fellow humans? As a general matter, which heuristic best holds?

Are we humans "the rational animal," as Aristotle is said to have said? Or are we humans more reliably viewed as a set of misfiring machines?

Our logicians refuse to offer us help. Our nation's brainiest newspaper is written on third-grade level.

Tomorrow, we'll look at a puzzling transcript composed by our leading wire service. Next week, we'll review the lecture given by Gessen—and we'll consider the reactions of that liberal crowd.

Gessen's smarter than the average bear. Transparently, we'd say she's completely sincere.

For those reasons, we were struck by the lecture she gave. And also, good God—

By that audience!

Tomorrow: Our nation's most important wire service attempts to compose a transcript

Toobin and Turley apply the brakes!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 12, 2017

Legal eagles co-headline CNN's late show: You had to stay up late to see them. But we thought Toobin and Turley provided some needed perspective on CNN's late show last night.

Jake Tapper hosted an 11 PM special on the embattled network. That put him on the air opposite Brian Williams, who no longer mentions Al Gore's disturbing polo shirts or all the dead bodies which floated through his hotel room in New Orleans, but still manages to play the peacock concerning everything else.

Tapper provided a welcome alternative to Williams. When he threw to Toobin and Turley, his discussion with the legal eagles started off like this:

TAPPER (7/12/17): Let's dig deeper on these questions, legal and political. Jeffrey Toobin let me start with you.

Has anything that has been revealed so far that show that anyone—Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, any of them—violated any law?

TOOBIN: Not clear, and this is an unfolding investigation. It is not a crime under federal law to collude. "Collusion" is a big word, but that is not a crime.

TAPPER: More of a political term than a legal term.

TOOBIN: Right, but it is important—a lot of people talk about collusion as if it's a crime and it's not.

Toobin and others have said this before. Still, it was a welcome corrective to a night of fevered claims.

Toobin is thoroughly anti-Trump on matters of politics and policy. On questions of legality, he continued with his cool calm talk, expertly saying this:

TOOBIN (continuing directly): The only possible crime I see coming out of this particular event involving Donald Jr. is possibly a campaign finance violation where it's unlawful to solicit anything of value from a foreign government and perhaps, depending on what happened in this meeting—and frankly, I don't necessarily credit Don Jr.'s description of this meeting since he is lies about so much already—whether he solicited some sort of aid from the government.

That is a long shot. But to answer your question simply, no, I don't think there is any crime that has been uncovered specifically regarding this meeting.

We don't know if that is right. But he'd partially stopped the stampeding.

At this point, Tapper turned to Turley. Disdain for the mob only grew:

TAPPER (continuing directly): Jonathan Turley, you think that the media and some Democrats on Capitol Hill are a little breathless compared to the facts.

TURLEY: I think, instead of analysis, we're seeing rage. People are willing to take criminal codes and twist them to bag a Trump, and that is a dangerous game to play. People suggesting this might be treason, which is facially ridiculous.

Oof. Turley said the claim of treason, which had been bruited around all night, is "facially ridiculous," presumably at this point in time.

Politically, Turley isn't a Trumpist. As a legal analyst, he said he thought pundits were twisting criminal codes so they could play "bag-a-Trump."

It looks that way to us too. Below, you see the way the CNN transcript continues, though we think there may be errors here:

TAPPER: I agree with that. And to be clear, Senator Tim Kane said possibly this could be treason.

TURLEY: And that destroys his credibility and the credibility of his party.

TAPPER: Well, I think that is ridiculous.

We think it was Toobin, not Tapper, who made those two remarks. But we can't find videotape of the segment, and so we can't check to be sure.

(From watching the program last night, we think it was Toobin who made that last remark, and we think he meant that Turley's remark about the Democratic Party was ridiculous. Absent tape, though, we can't be sure. Key point: you can't assume that TV transcripts are accurate!)

Whatever! Turley finished up like this, according to the transcript:

TURLEY (continuing directly): To keep the definition of treason narrow because they don't want it to be used as a political tool, they don't want it to be used in this willy-nilly way.

I disagree with Jeff. I don't see a viable federal election claim here, and Jeff is right about that. But no court has taken information and said that is effectively a substitute for contributions and if they did, it would present a huge threat to the First Amendment. It would encompass an enormous amount of political speech. It would allow the federal government to investigate a campaign just because they're receiving information from foreign sources like NGOs individuals. I don't think a court would sign off on that, but that would be a particularly dangerous interpretation.

In that passage, Turley said there was no way the courts would treat the receipt of information as "something of value" under criminal codes. We're inclined to hope that he's right.

In the cool of the evening, the boys were throwing a damper on a lot of overheated excitement. We thought they offered a welcome corrective to a lot of cable posturing, given the point at which the known facts currently stand.

"Cable news" has really gone wild in the wake of this latest event. That said, what else is new?

The perils of the partisan chase!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 12, 2017

Jo Becker meets Toobin and Turley: What actually happened at that now-famous Trump Tower meeting?

At this point, there's no way to know. Did anything happen at that meeting? At this point, we're slightly flummoxed by one of the people who was in the room.

Donald Trump Jr. was there in the room. So were Manafort and Kushner, rounding out the heavy-hitters three.

That said, the music publicist was also apparently present, listening to every word which was said. On that basis, this doesn't strike us as a case of top-flight international spy-craft.

What is the nature of Donald J. Trump's fealty to the Russkies? We'd like to see a careful probe of that question.

Unfortunately, a major chase is now on, with journalistic procedures perhaps breaking down. Actually, we told you that a chase was on several months back. With the events of the past few days, that chase has turned into a land rush.

In our view, Anderson Cooper has especially gone off the rails. We haven't yet dared to watch Maddow's program from last night, aside from a few glimmers of her instant overstatements.

Then too, there's the New York Times' Jo Becker. You may remember her as the lead author of the paper's 4400-word report about the scary uranium deal.

It may have been the most horrendous news report of the Trump-Clinton campaign. It was filled with journalistic abominations, it banged the drum, loud and strong, against the vile Candidate Clinton.

Becker's "scary uranium deal" report drove a claim about Candidate Clinton which was still getting mentioned on cable last night. Our liberal children gave it a complete pass when it appeared, except for Chris Hayes, who called the report a "bombshell."

Becker's report was an abomination. Now, she seems to be the Times' lead reporter in the Trump Junior chase.

Atop this morning's page one, Becker's report started as shown below. By paragraph 3, we were thinking of her hideous work on the scary uranium deal:

BECKER (7/12/17): The June 3, 2016, email sent to Donald Trump Jr. could hardly have been more explicit: One of his father’s former Russian business partners had been contacted by a senior Russian government official and was offering to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The documents “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” read the email, written by a trusted intermediary, who added, “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

If the future president’s eldest son was surprised or disturbed by the provenance of the promised material—or the notion that it was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign—he gave no indication.

He replied within minutes: “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

We'll be honest. We're among the few people who who aren't "shocked shocked" by the fact that Junior was willing, possibly eager, to hear negative news about Candidate Clinton.

That said, we thought of Becker's slimy attack on Candidate Clinton when we read that highlighted passage, right there in paragraph 3. Junior "wasn't surprised or disturbed by the notion that [the approach] was part of a continuing effort by the Russian government to aid his father’s campaign?"

She stuck that in there right away. Here's our question:

Should Trump Junior have perceived the approach that way at that time?

We have no idea what Junior actually thought or actually knew at the time those emails arrived. But Becker was suggesting that he should have viewed the approach in the context of that "continuing effort" by the Russkies.

Is there any reason to think such a thing? Should that insinuation have been right there in paragraph 3, at the top of the Times' front page?

All in all, your journalists are frequently less than sharp and less than obsessively disciplined. As for Becker, she may have written the slimiest, sleaziest "news report" of the entire Trump-Clinton campaign.

Now, the Times has the "scary uranium" peddler shaping this new thrilling story. That strikes us as a bad deal.

We'd like to see an intelligent investigation of these matters. All over cable last night, we saw and heard excited partisans at work.

We woke to the scary uranium person. Are we the humans really capable of managing our affairs?

Next post: Toobin and Turley

THE PERILS OF SKILL-FREE LIVING: Jim Palmer wasn't 6-foot-6!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 12, 2017

Interlude—Applause for third-grade work: Long ago, though not far away, we uncorked a fiery statement which was demonstrably false.

We were sitting in the upper deck at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium. We told our friend, Name Withheld, that Jim Palmer was 6-foot-6.

Our friend was Baltimore's version of Mark Rudd—and a life-long Orioles fan. He quickly said that we were all wet, that Palmer was not 6-foot-6.

For whatever strange reason, we were sure we were right. We'd long believed that Palmer, a future Hall-of-Famer, weighed in at 6-foot-6.

As our friend quickly proved, our statement was demonstrably false. He bought a scorecard, and there it was, listed as part of the Orioles' roster:

Jim Palmer was 6-foot-3. He had been all along!

We offer this pointlessness for a reason. We're weren't telling a lie that day. We were sure of our (inaccurate) claim, but we were, in fact, misinformed.

Almost everyone would know that our statement wouldn't rate as a lie, even though it was demonstrably false. Everyone but major journalists, that is, in this land of skill-free living.

Yesterday, we posted the first five paragraphs of a widely-lauded report by the New York Times' David Leonhardt. It appeared in the Sunday Review on Sunday, June 25.

At best, it resembled third grade work. Once again, for the record, here it is:

LEONHARDT (6/25/17): All the President’s Lies

President Trump’s political rise was built on a lie (about Barack Obama's birthplace). His lack of truthfulness has also become central to the Russia investigation, with James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., testifying under oath about Trump's “lies, plain and simple.”

There is simply no precedent for an American president to spend so much time telling untruths. Every president has shaded the truth or told occasional whoppers. No other president—of either party—has behaved as Trump is behaving. He is trying to create an atmosphere in which reality is irrelevant.

We have set a conservative standard here, leaving out many dubious statements (like the claim that his travel ban is “similar” to Obama administration policy). Some people may still take issue with this standard, arguing that the president wasn't speaking literally. But we believe his long pattern of using untruths to serve his purposes, as a businessman and politician, means that his statements are not simply careless errors.

We are using the word “lie” deliberately. Not every falsehood is deliberate on Trump's part. But it would be the height of naïveté to imagine he is merely making honest mistakes. He is lying.

The list above uses the conservative standard of demonstrably false statements. By that standard, Trump told a public lie on at least 20 of his first 40 days as president.

Leonhardt is a graduate of Yale and a Pulitzer winner. He works at the very top of alleged American journalism.

Does he know what a "lie" is? Does he understand that familiar concept? Based on that remarkable work, it's amazingly hard to tell.

In various ways, that short presentation reads like the work of someone who's barely literate. Who knows? Perhaps it was subjected to an editing process which took it past five or six different pens.

That said, it isn't clear, in any way, that Leonhardt understands the basic concepts surrounding the notion of a "lie." Amazingly, it isn't clear that he understands the simple term "lie," even though it's a familiar word, one you will hear every day.

At one point, Leonhardt seems to say, with substantial accuracy, that a lie is a deliberate falsehood. Elsewhere, his conception seems less clear.

By that fifth paragraph, he almost seems to be saying that a lie is a "demonstrably false statement." Why on earth would a major journalist produce such strange, muddy work?

We can't answer that question. If we had to offer a guess, we would start with this:

For many major American journalists, it has been a very long time since they actually tried to figure anything out.

They tend to work from script, full stop. They advance the mandated narratives of their guild. Their intellectual effort stops there.

Leonhardt's essay reads like the work of someone whose brain has withered from disuse. Above his essay, he listed the statements he or someone had headlined this way:

"All the president's lies"

That headline fulfilled a guild mandate, a mandate requiring Watergate comparisons when discussing our current disordered president. But speaking of intellectual disorder, this was Leonhardt's second example of our president's "lies:"

JAN. 21 “A reporter for Time magazine—and I have been on their cover 14 or 15 times. I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine.” (Trump was on the cover 11 times and Nixon appeared 55 times.)

Why should we think that was a lie? How do we know that Donald J. Trump didn't believe those statements?

Donald J. Trump has always had terrible values and instincts. By now, it isn't clear that he isn't "mentally ill" in some way. It also seems possible that he suffers from some version of early onset dementia, a terrible disease.

Out of that stew has emerged a vast intellectual and moral disorder. That said, our upper-end press corps has also displayed vast intellectual and moral disorder over the past thirty years.

That jumbled piece by Leonhardt seems to have emerged from the brain of a child. That said, it was met with vast approbation within our liberal world.

We liberals! We're silly and childish and we aren't super-smart. Not do we show much discipline.

Beyond that, we're in the hands of an upper-end, often corporate press corps whose performance and conduct have been appalling over the past thirty years. We seem to have only the vaguest awareness of this.

Leonhardt's piece seemed to be the work of a none-too-impressive child. In our liberal tents, we thought it was great.

In May, Masha Gessen delivered a lecture which was frequently interrupted by liberal applause. Gessen is sincere in ways our upper-end press corps, on balance, is not.

Gessen is an admirable figure. We thought her work was revealing and poor.

Tomorrow—Part 3: Gessen, a fully admirable figure, seems to quote Donald J. Trump

Assorted brushes with greatness: At one point, we'd lightly jeered Palmer as he left a game at Fenway Park.

Standing behind the Orioles dugout in the final inning of another lost cause, we may have gotten the false impression that he was 6-foot-6. Almost surely, this box score records that occasion.

From Fenway, we proceeded to Logan Airport that day. "Greatest man of his generation" Name Withheld was flying in from the coast!

By the time we hooked up, the master ironist had had his own brush with greatness. He said he'd passed the whole Orioles team in the long walkway leading to the terminal from his plane.

He said they were all laughing, as they left Boston, about the way they'd blasted Fireball Freddy Wenz during the four-game series which had just concluded.

Wenz was supposed to be the Red Sox' next star closer. The historical record seems to show that that the Birds didn't exactly blast him that week. But he didn't make it as a major-league closer, and those Orioles proceeded to win the next three American League pennants.

Name Withheld lurked about the dorm for the rest of the year. For whatever reason, he decided to rent a cap and gown and march in Harvard's graduation that June. Our values being a bit more pure, we decided to sit that one out. As we used to tell Patton and Blaine, we were busy stopping a war.

Years later, we briefly met the personable Palmer over at Name Withheld's house. To this day, he's a superb analyst on Orioles' broadcasts. But we can assure you of one thing:

Jim Palmer is no 6-foot-6. Frankly, he never was.

Lousy conduct by not-so-great people!

TUESDAY, JULY 11, 2017

How to talk pork to the people: Long ago and far away, we walked around Baltimore with a friend who was on his way to Vietnam.

Because he later became well-known, we won't mention his name. But his wife, Tipper, was also there that day. Along with our mutual friend, Name Withheld, we walked around Baltimore on a cold, oncoming winter day in late 1970, chating about this and that.

(They'd all driven up from D.C.)

Our friend's father had just been defeated in a campaign for his fourth term in the Senate. It was a famously scurrilous campaign, with this senator's opposition to the war playing a prominent role in his defeat.

By the campaign's final week, our friend told us that day, his father knew he was going to lose. He told our friend that he wanted him to come out with him for a few final days of campaigning.

"I want you to see me talk po'k to the people one more time," our friend quoted his father saying.

(That was "po'k," pronounced as "poke," the written word being "pork.")

Talking pork to the people! The father had grown up hardscrabble, rural and poor; he knew about regular people. When you watch the stars of cable TV, you're looking at people who don't.

Don't know, and manifestly don't care.

If you watch CNN or MSNBC today, you'll be watching the "lock them up" crowd on the two "lock them up" channels. Pundits on these cable channels are eager to see Trump and them thrown in jail.

In truth, this is the only play still available to our terrible horrible team. It's our only play because we and our big cable stars don't know, and manifestly don't care, about the lives of most regular people.

Last fall, we managed to lose a White House election to the most disordered person who ever sought the office. We arranged for our defeat in a hundred thousand ways.

(One of our professors kept telling us there was zero way Trump could win. Rachel kept making Kornacki go through his carnival barker routine, propped up nightly before "the big board," gesticulating in the stupidified ways the channel's consultants required. On a nightly basis, this promise of victory made us feel good. And so we kept watching that space!)

Today, we refuse to think about who and what we actually are. Instead, we're trying to get The Others locked up. It's the last way we can avoid ourselves, can avoid who and what we are.

On CNN and MSNBC, our demagogues were hard at work last night. As of now, this is the story we're selling:

It was OK when the Clinton campaign got campaign help from Ukraine. It was treason when the Trump campaign got campaign help from someone from Russia.

Everyone can memorize the talking-points used to support that position. For now, we'll only say this:

Absent further revelations, good luck selling that particular po'k to a wide swath of the people.

Watching cable last night, we pretty much hit the wall. Internally, we could feel it. We finally gave up the ghost.

At long last, we finally saw Cooper as an insipid shill, full stop. We finally saw Maddow as the weird demagogue she actually is. Full stop, plain and simple.

(We'd base that on her opening segments from Thursday, Friday and Monday nights. Demagoguery all the way down, and so many varieties!)

Today, Brian Williams, who tilted so hard against Clinton/Gore, just can't stop his silly peacocking in the other direction.
That said, none of these people seem to have the slightest interest in the lives of regular people.

We hope you understand that fact. It seems to us we're in for a very long, very rough, deeply stupidified ride.

We're being deeply divided and conquered. Entities who support that division are these:

1) Vladimir Putin
2) The very hardest of the very, very hard hard right.

Remaining unaddressed in all the excitement: Five thousand dollars per person per year! If we might quote Elisabeth Rosenthal:

"Where is all that money going?"

Your big cable stars won't ask!