November 21, 2018--IvankaGate

According to a story in yesterday's Washington Post, presidential First Daughter and official senior advisor to the president (her daddy), using a personal account, Ivanka Trump, sent hundreds of emails last year to White House staff and Cabinet officials. 

According to sources, "hundreds" violated federal rules about the dissemination and retention of official papers and correspondence. 

Sound familiar? Do you hear "Lock her up. Lock her up" being chanted in the background? This from rabid Trump supporters who packed themselves into mass rallies during the primary and general election campaigns of 2016-17, the same time Ivanka was using personal email for official business  

If you were paying attention, so must have been Ivanka. And she as well as we knew the "her" bing chanted was Hillary Clinton and the reason Trump claimed that Hillary should be locked up was because, while secretary of state, she used a private email system rather than one provided by the government.

Also like Hillary, Ivanka is now asserting she did not know that by doing so she violated well established rules.

Clearly she wasn't paying attention. Or, more likely, felt that federal rules about official papers did not apply to her or, for that matter, her princely husband, Jared Kushner, also a senior presidential advisor, with whom she shared a personal network or domain.

As might be imagined, the mainstream media are having a field day with this example of blatant hypocrisy. How delicious it must seem to Democrats (very much including Hillary Clinton) who have had to endure Trump's mocking while blaming the former First Lady for all our troubles. He did so as recently as Sunday while trying to deflect probing questions from Chris Wallace on Fox News.

By Tuesday morning, on CNN and MSNBC, chat was all about Ivanka's let-them-eat-cake hauteur. But, on both networks, while gleefulness was universal, Jeffery Toobin, CNN's chief legal analyst, and John Harwood, Washington correspondent for CNBC, on Morning Joe expressed second thoughts. Both claimed that this was not that big a deal. Nor for that matter, retrospectively, was what Hillary did, though both confessed to having spent too much time on the Hillary flap. They cautioned that we should not to make the same mistake again. 

Mika, Joe, and Alisyn Camerota went ballistic. It would be irresponsible to give the story short shrift since is was such an open-and-shut opportunity to get back at the Trumps.

I agree with Joe, Mika, and Alisyn, but perhaps for somewhat different reasons.

Progressives need to take this on aggressively. Not only to get even with the Trump crime family but to demonstrate that like Republicans we are capable of fighting aggressively. 

There is a tendency within the educated, professional class to reason rather than fight. In many instances this is the appropriate option but in most political situations it needs to be more about winning than reasoning.

One reason Republicans have done as well as they have (including electing Trump) is because they have the capacity to battle relentless for things they want to achieve. Like getting nominees confirmed for federal judgeships. Change the rules if necessary. Keep an eye on the goal--winning.

Progressives often lose because they are too quick to be understanding and reasonable.

This is not an argument to emulate Mitch McConnell but to stop being such wusses when it comes to confrontations and political battles. A cold political war is underway and we demur at our peril.

January 10, 2018--Factotum

Late in the day on Sunday I heard from a number of progressive friends who called all excited about what they saw to be a takedown by Jake Tapper of CNN of Stephen Miller, White House senior advisor.

"I missed that," I said.

"It was on Jake's Sunday show, State of the Nation. Watch it on YouTube. You'll love it.

I did watch it and did sort of love it. At least until I gave it more thought.

In case you, like I, missed it, it was an interview largely about Michael Wolff's Trump tell-all, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Miller was clearly offered around to the Sunday talkshows as a counterweight to the Wolff tome. He was the perfect choice to send out on a retaliatory mission since he had been Steve Bannon's protégé; and Bannon, the main source of the most damaging reporting about Trump--how he is like a nine-year-old child and that Donald Jr. committed "treason" when he agreed to talk with the Russians about the "dirt" they claimed to have about Hillary Clinton--needed to be put down.

As my friend surmised, I did love it. To me Trump and everyone he touches are compromised. Very much including Miller. But what I didn't love was how Tapper, in his pose as a journalist, treated Miller who was his guest.  

Here are some selections from what turned out to be a brief interview--

Miller: "The president is a political genius . . . who took down the Bush dynasty, who took down the Clinton dynasty, who took down the entire media complex."

He went on to reup Trump's claim that he is "like, really smart," a veritable "very stable genius." He called Wolff the "garbage author of a garbage book" but Miller's real transgression, was accusing Tapper of being "condescending," and claiming that CNN promulgates "very fake news."

Tapper: Miller's calling him "condescending" clearly got under Tapper's skin--"I get it. There's one viewer that you care about right now, and you're being obsequious [servile, ingratiating], and you're being a factotum [lackey] in order to please him."

With that, he cut Miller off, saying he had nothing worthwhile to say and while Miller continued to rant, Tapper looked into the camera and introduced the next guest. It appears that Miller (off camera now) refused to leave and had to be physically removed by CNN security.

Miller's audience of one tweeted--

Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!

Tapper feigned surprise. But what was he expecting? Rational discourse about the strengths and weaknesses of the Wolff book? He knew in advance what Miller was sent out to do and rather than booking him, saying I don't allow shills and factotums on my show, he signed him up as he knew it would turn out to be a dogfight and go viral in less than a couple of hours. All turned out to be true.

This is not journalism to me but rather talkshow mud wrestling designed to increase ratings, which the struggling Tapper and State of the Union could use.

Monday morning, again on CNN's New Day, cohosts Alisyn Camerota and Chris Cuomo had New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman as a guest. Camerotta pressed her about an interesting subject--

Unlike Michael Wolff who does not have to maintain good relations with the Trump administration--his book is out and he is already making millions in royalties--because she has "to go back to the White House" every day after writing articles that frequently are critical of Trump and his people, does this place her in a compromised position as she needs to remain in the White House's good graces to do her job? Does she have to pull her punches, so to speak, in order to retain access?

Not at all, she in effect said, I report it as I see it. Let the chips fall where they may.

Do you believe that? I'm skeptical.

And then there are my Morning Joe friends, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski who a year and a half ago were cozied up to candidate Donald Trump. When he appeared on their show--it seemed almost daily--their ratings went off the charts. They were even eager to have a close social relationship to their friend "Donald." Wolff reports about their visits, as a closeted couple, to Mar-a-Lago. Apparently during one visit last January, a week after Trump was inaugurated, Jared Kushner and The Donald playfully spatted about who would marry them once they fessed up publicly to their on-going romance.

But things have gone south in their off-camera relationship. Cut off from access, they have been merciless in their attacks on Trump and his inner circle. So much so that Monday morning when Michael Wolff was on their show hustling Fire and Fury, they brought up some of the inaccuracies in his reporting, including those about them! 

But then, rather, than pressing to hold Wolff responsible for his inaccuracies and carelessness, they made excuses for him, saying, the book is less about the accuracy of incidents but about the overall impression that it offers of Trump and his presidency.

In these three examples it is clear why so many Americans are fed up with the media. They see the leading opinion writers and reporters to lack integrity and objectivity. Those who have personal agendas (Joe and Mika) or ideological interests (Tapper and Cuomo) or who are just trying to promote a book (Wolff) or publicize their reporting (Haberman) are most prone to professional self-righteousness and loss of objectivity.  

We progressives, especially, need to clean up our acts since we should not want to give media-bashers additional reasons and evidence with which to attack our credibility. 

November 30, 2016--You Be the Judge

They broke into Morning Joe yesterday to announce that their parent network, NBC, had just summarily fired longtime Today Show host Matt Lauer for "inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace."

Joe Scarborough, Mike Barnicle, and frequent Today host Willie Geist were visibly shaken. I suspect in Joe's case in part because he feared he could easily be the next to fall. There's a lot of sexual static in his past.

We watched for awhile and then switched to NBC where co-host Savannah Guthrie and last-minute substitute host Hoda Kotb were sharing their feelings of upset.

After ten minutes we surfed around to see how the other networks were was dealing with the news. 

First to CNN, where morning co-host Alisyn Camerota had been sexually harassed by her past employer, Fox News head Roger Ailes who had been summarily fired six months ago; then to Fox itself where the hosts, conveniently forgetting their own network's history with sexual harassment, were a version of gleeful; next to CBS where senior-host Charlie Rose had been summarily fired a week and a half ago for sexual malfeasance. Then finally to Today's main rival, ABC's Good Morning America.

We lingered there because mega-businessman Daymond John of Shark Tank fame was being interviewed about his latest book, The Power of Broke. We stopped to watch as Shark Tank is one of the two or three shows we enjoy watching. OK, one of two. 

At the end of the interview, the person interviewing him thanked him profusely (Shark Tank is also an ABC show) and reached over to touch him. On the upper thigh!

In the context of all the inappropriate touching this was shocking and the only thing of interest in this otherwise innocuous program.

"Can they get away with that?" Rona asked.

"I guess we'll find out later today or tomorrow when ABC human resources and/or executives of the network may have to deal with it."

"Did it make any difference that Daymond, the touchee," Rona wondered, "is a man?"

"Good question."

"Or that the interviewer, Robin Roberts is a woman?"

"And," I said, "an openly gay woman at that."

"This is all so complicated," Rona said. "In addition, I wonder if NBC rushed to fire Lauer, one of the networks Trump claims deals mainly in fake news, before he could get his hands on the story and gleefully scoop and excoriate them."

"He's on quite a roll with that," I said, "Shortly after the Matt Lauer story broke he was tweeting about 'low-ratings' Joe Scarborough and alluding to the scandal that befell him back when he was a congressman--when a female intern died of unclear causes in his Florida office."

"No wonder I don't want to watch TV," Rona sighed.

"But don't forget Shark Tank."