August 26, 2019
Summers winding down and the school year is commencing, what is their left to learn for us the 'adults'?
Have we learned the enormity of the peril to future generations of our 'success' as a civilization?
Do we understand that the plastic that is choking us..... ?
(Let's start this again)
How was your summer vacation?
What did you observe?
Did you notice the ongoing environmental damage across America the beautiful?
Did you notice how much warmth and heart there is as you meet people everywhere you roam?
Are you old enough to remember 50 years ago when the news was beginning to spread that this planet would double it's population in our lifetime, by about 2020?
Were you one of the few (somewhere around 400,000) in 1969 who spread a picnic blanket on a green hill in upstate New York in high expectation and watched as more and more lovely people
sought just a little more space, continually squeezing in and on to your blanket, joined you, until you had your 2x 2 space with your knees up? It was worth it. We made it. A disaster area it was... and I remember.
Are people a commodity? Do more and more people buy us economic wealth?
Are 'more and more' a requirement of Compassion?
Are homes a commodity? Is a home just a transient economic unit to buy and sell on the path towards wealth and success?
Is every acre surveyed on the Earth to be owned and 'developed'?
Friday, August 30, 2019
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Sharing some Taibbi https://taibbi.substack.com/
The New York Times is no longer the paper of recordEditor Dean Baquet admits his newspaper has become a political organ
Americans have always loved to hate the New York Times, but the rancor always came tinged with admiration.
A timeless piece of reactionary Americana, the paper’s stubborn resistance to change, stodginess, and our-farts-don’t-smell superiority were somehow always elements of its charm. The “Gray Lady” is where history’s worst mass-murderer would forever remain “Mr. Hitler,” where the robber-baron look is always welcome back in style (“The monocle returns as fashion accessory” is a Times classic), and the porn film Deep Throat could become a pop culture sensation in part because Times critic Vincent Canby panned it (''The film,” seethed Canby, “has less to do with the manifold pleasures of sex than with physical engineering”).
The paper’s style and grammar Nazis were monuments to Freud’s anal stage of development. They stayed frozen there for 150 years. Its upper-class airs have never not been funny, e.g.:
The paper’s worship of honorifics and leaden third-person prose came packaged in an ethical code that, love it or hate it, was a beacon for reporters. The Times was the white line in the middle of the road, an industry measuring stick.
When the Times pushed odious politics, it at least made a pretense to neutrality. Its reportorial style was timid to the point of morbidity. Writers were afraid to offer the smallest opinions. If a Times reporter wanted a point of view in a byline story, it had to be told through an “expert” or an “analyst.”
Nonetheless, there was a standard. Former Deputy Editor Phillip Corbett in the early 2000s said objectivity was “not only a worthy goal, but probably our most important one: the goal that underpins most of our other ideals, like fairness and accuracy.”
The Times braintrust refused across decades to budge an inch off its hoary stance. Editors were like druids guarding a thousand-year religion.
Not only was the Times the biggest paper in America, with the awesome mandate to document the news of the whole world, but every line on every page fit into a ponderously self-referential system of ethical standards. When there were breakdowns, as in the case of cocaine-snarfing fabulist Jayson Blair, it shook the whole business. (The characteristically understated Timesadmission in that case was that the “accident” of Blair opened “credibility cracks” for journalism).
After decades of intransigence, the paper in the Bush years began to change. In 2004 Public Editor Daniel Okrent took on the issue of being too deferential to both sides of political issues in a piece called “It’s Good to Be Objective. It’s Better to Be Right.” Okrent’s humorous example of over-balance was an obituary of Ronald Reagan that via a “balancing” quote by pious Republican Gary Bauer pointed out that AIDS research had gone up in his presidency. It had to. AIDS didn’t exist before Reagan.
Even the Times began to see the absurdity in this. The relentless emphasis on “X says a, but Y says b” as rule began to slacken.
The Times put ads on the front page in 2009. It abandoned euphemistic language describing the War of Terror in 2014. In 2016, it recognized the existence of the word “fuck.” Some of these changes may have been inspired by a loss of authority: in the digital age, the hard-fought distribution advantage of our biggest city’s biggest daily paper evaporated, and the “paper of record” suddenly had to compete with hundreds, if not thousands of other news organizations around the world for online eyeballs.
Between 2006 and the mid-2010s, New York Times overall revenue numbers saw sharp declines. It was forced to reduce the size of its news hole by about 5%, slash jobs, and close a printing operation in 2008, beginning a long slog back to commercial viability that would be based on digital readership. There would be no more telling readers to suck it up if they didn’t like the Timesianattitude. Like the rest of us mortals, the Times had to beg for clicks.
In 2016, when Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, the paper made a dramatic change in approach. The new concept was elucidated in an August 7, 2016 story by Jim Rutenberg, “Trump is testing the norms of objectivity.”
The column redefined objectivity as meaning not just true, but true to “history’s judgment.” Rutenberg added:
The column was difficult to not understand it as a corporate mission statement, especially when editor Dean Baquet told NPR that Rutenberg “nailed it.” When the paper dismissed public editor Liz Spayd, who’d acidly warned abandoning objectivity norms could mean turning the Times into “The New Republic gone daily,” the transformation to an “oppositional” Times was official.
How would the Times, which once treasured objectivity as its “most important” value, alter its approach? What would such changes look like?
We’re finding out.
In recent weeks, the Times and Baquet have given a public burial to the paper’s objectivity standard. In keeping with the paper’s tradition of slapstick self-importance, the announcement was accidental and pretentious, coming via a leaked transcript of a would-be private employee meeting. Still, it was revelatory, or would have been, in any other era. In the age of Trump, reporters barely noticed.
They should have.
Baquet, who seems to be a vacillating, nervous sort of personality, called for an urgent staff town hall meeting on Monday, August 11. From reports, it had the flavor of an ace pitcher leading a players-only confab after his team loses ten in a row.
The Times had had a tough week. In a small unforced error of the sort that passes for a towering intellectual controversy in journalism, editors used a page 1 headline, TRUMP URGES UNITY VS. RACISM, that readers and pundits alike said was too Trump-credulous. The paper was accused of giving our race-baiting tweeter-in-chief undeserved political points.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the “cowardice” of Times “aided” white supremacy. Cory Booker said lives “literally” depended on the Times working harder to unfuck its headlines. An online movement to cancel Timessubscriptions rushed over Twitter.
When the paper changed the online version of the header to something more anodyne (“ASSAILING HATE BUT NOT GUNS”), Pro-Trumpers seethed. The Times, they said, had removed a factually accurate headline just to assuage pro-Democratic audiences. Kellyanne Conway barked the Times was apologizing for being “insufficiently rabid.” Trump campaign manager Matt Wolking said “Democrats prefer their false narrative over reality.”
Both criticisms were right. No matter what your feelings about Trump, a page 1 head after a racially-motivated mass shooting is probably not the place to imply on any level that Captain “Go Back” is a racial healer. It made the paper look like it was doing White House P.R.
On the other hand, removing a factually accurate headline in response to Twitter complaints told every conservative or independent reader the Timeswill swiftly red-pencil itself in response to a hashtag (#CancelNYT). This was not an option that had even been open to editors in the old days (you can’t have paper kids snatch back print headlines) even if they had been so inclined.
In the wake of the headline scandal, plus another in which Washington editor Jonathan Weisman made an ass of himself with a series of racially-insensitive tweets, Baquet felt a need to calm the troops.
This probably wasn’t a terrible idea, but a naughty person recorded the “town hall,” which featured 75 minutes of Times staffers puking on each other in what they thought was an atmosphere of confidence (how a group of journalists expects any meeting of this size to remain quiet is also odd, but whatever). The transcript of the grim therapy session was leaked it to Slate,fueling more embarrassing headlines.
Baquet in the meeting spent most of his time talking about a headline controversy, and when and how much to use the word “racist” (a sequel to the controversy of 2016-2017 over the paper’s use of the word “lie”). He also made a series of stunning admissions. In a non-Trump era, these other comments would be fodder for a Judith Miller-sized journalistic scandal – a real one, not an overblown chin-scratching exercise like the headline flap.
Baquet described how the paper became laser-focused on Trump’s history of racial rhetoric:
Baquet placing the mission of a daily newspaper in terms of just one or two stories seemed odd. Still, only Baquet and a few other humans know what it’s like to captain a journalistic supertanker like the Times. Maybe that’s how it’s done? He went on:
By now, we know something is off. Even if you wanted to marshal your editorial resources to attack one subject – I could see it for something like an election, a world war, 9/11 – investing in this way in Russiagate represented an extraordinary up-front judgment about that story’s importance. He continued:
In the middle of telling staff the Times kicked ass on the Russia story, Baquet shifted to say:
WTF!!!!
In classic Timesian manner, speaking in pretzel-sentences and referring to one’s own first-person mistakes as a distant second or third person concern that just sort of happened, Baquet said the paper was staggered by the realization that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was not going to “do it,” i.e. remove Trump from office. The paper, he said, was caught “a tiny bit flat-footed” by the disappointing ending.
“A tiny bit flat-footed” is a Times euphemism on par with calling waterboarding “harsh questioning.” The only way a newspaper can get caught “flat-footed” by factual developments is if it’s been playing an expectations game with coverage, which should never happen, if you’re practicing safe sex and not overselling information.
Baquet admitted the Times did just that, crafting coverage to fit hopes of readers who “want Trump to go away.” Moreover the paper “built” its newsroom around “one story.” This enormous emphasis had the effect of further suckering readers into believing a) the story was massive in scope and importance, and that b) significant fallout had to be coming.
When “the story changed,” the paper was forced to shift gears and throw its weight into a new story. Here is where Baquet’s comments got really bizarre:
Baquet is explicitly saying the Times moved to cover race “in a thoughtful way, something we haven’t done in a large way in a long time,” because the paper needed to “shift resources onto a different story.” The paper is now planning on focusing on race “for the next two years,” obviously meaning to the end of Trump’s first term (is the assumption that this all-consuming attention to racial issues will only be necessary until then?).
The Times could have elected to dig into race more at any time in its history and it would have been appropriate. In areas like criminal justice, housing, education, income disparity, political representation, and racial violence, there is more than enough territory for good reporters (of which there are many at the Times) to cover. They could even have started doing this in conjunction with an examination of Trump’s racial attitudes at the beginning of Trump’s term, or before his election, and it would have made sense.
But in this particular context, with the bizarre reference to a plan for focusing in this direction for the next “two years,” the editor of America’s paper of record is saying he’s building his newsroom around race because the paper’s first-choice topic, Russiagate, failed to “do it,” i.e. end Trump’s presidency. “Russiagate ran out of gas, so we’ll focus on race,” seems somehow to be the message. This is Jim Rutenberg’s “oppositional” approach reimagined to scale.
The Times was once squeamish about the appearance of political bias to the point where reporter Jodi Wilgoren, years ago, became the locus of controversy for saying John Kerry was a “social loner” without quoting a source. Now the paper is openly building coverage for readers who “want Trump to go away.”
Forget for a moment the question of whether this is good or bad and just focus on what this means: it’s a radical change for a once-rigid American institution, stomping on an objectivity standard the paper spent 150-plus pretentious years building.
On one level, “objectivity” has always been an absurdity. Ex-public editor Okrent was right in 2004 when he wrote that bias and opinion are baked in to editorial decisions at every level, from the wording of headlines to where to place photos and how much space to give one topic over another. Bias in journalism can’t be escaped. I don’t know a reporter who really believes in it.
But there is such a thing as striving for objectivity, as a goal. This was a quality control method for newspapers as much as anything else. When the Times foundered on a WMD or Jayson Blair fiasco in the in the past, readers forgave, because the mistakes at least happened in the context of trying to hit true factual north. But what’s left when you stop bothering with objectivity and you get things wrong? That’s where you’re at when you’ve poured two years of resources into a story that “changed” and left you “a tiny bit flat-footed.”
There are other approaches to reporting beyond the old Timesian objectivity standard. It would be perfectly legitimate, for instance, for the Times to re-brand itself as a firebrand blue-state political organ whose purpose is campaigning against Donald Trump.
But the new, post-Trump Times is not selling itself as a political rally-sheet like Iskra or an opinion bugle like The New Republic. It continues to be written in the style of the old, stodgy, pole-up-its rear Times, whose main selling point was exactly its careful measuring of import and its phobic avoidance of visible slant.
The new Times, in other words, markets itself in the style of objectivity, while delivering a product that contentwise runs in the exact other direction. It’s selling authority and subjectivity at the same time.
This formula could work, in the hands of people with the self-awareness and intellectual audacity to make it work, but that’s not this New York Times. The inevitable consequence of this group of people trying to retain a reputation for stuffy editorial rectitude while seeking a bold lead role in the campaign to break the Trumpian wheel is that the paper will fail at both.
It is headed for a reputation for being politicized and unreliable while simultaneously somehow still being an absurdly windy, pompous, self-important drag editorially. This food is terrible – and such large portions, too!
It’s hard to overstate what the trajectory of the Times means for American journalism. When the paper’s revenues began declining in the mid-2000s, it was symbolic of the irreversible overall decline of print news.
However the Times, like cable news channels and some other large commercial news outlets, has begun a rebound in the last few years, with ascending revenues and a rapidly-expanding digital subscriber base. This rise, too, is symbolic of dramatic trends. It’s not an accident that this is coinciding with the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene.
News companies that have to compete with millions of tweeters and thousands of bloggers have figured out the formula is playing aggressively to a demographic half rather than trying to hold the entire fractured audience. Fox was the first big corporation to run in that direction. In the Trump era, even the Times has surrendered the hill, meaning the last connection to the objectivity era is gone.
Image by Joi Ito |
Friday, August 2, 2019
Matt Taibbi's Take on Mueller
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The change came in the space of a single news cycle. Beginning before and ending after the congressional testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the depth of America’s faith-based mania was laid bare. The Russiagate press managed to turn reality all the way around.
In the moment, while the event was being broadcast live, the assessment of the ex-FBI director’s performance as a congressional witness was nearly unanimous. Mueller was a confused, vulnerable human being, not an indefatigable force.
“Very, very painful,” said longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod.
“I don’t know what the #Dems were expecting from #RobertMueller, but this probably isn’t it,” tweeted Howard Fineman.
“Mueller is struggling,” former prosecutor and Mueller subordinate Glenn Kirchner commented during the event. “It strikes me as a health issue.”
This was a monstrous indictment of media. The Special Counsel’s inability to follow questions or remember key details (he was “not familiar” with oppo firm Fusion-GPS!) exploded two years of hype.
Mueller was sold in hundreds of articles and TV features as earth’s most competent human, a real-life superhero. His close-lipped manner and razor intellect supposedly presented a living antidote to our blabbermouth numbskull president, Donald Trump. He was as a character straight out of Team America, an ex-Marine FBI chief by way of St. Paul’s, Princeton, and a grad program at the University of Awesome. “Batman is back to save America,” his former FBI second Timothy Murphy said in a typical story from two years ago, describing Mueller as “the hero America needs.”
This myth died on television.
It happened by mistake, the kind that’s always a risk when you’re dealing with live broadcasts, as even censorious societies like the Soviet Union have found. Congressional Democrats like House Judiciary chief Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff of the Intelligence committee thought a TV show would bring the Mueller report “to life.”
How these two goofs didn’t know, or bother to find out, that Mueller was not up for the task of following difficult questions is hard to understand. Nadler and Schiff are both lawyers. A first-year law student wouldn’t put a witness on stand blind like that for a minute, let alone seven nationally-televised hours.
But they pressed on, convinced the Special Counsel could breathe new life into a case they believed had waned only because Mueller’s long report was a “dry, prosecutorial work product” that the public couldn’t or wouldn’t digest.
This in itself was crazy. Hopeful blue-staters across the country for months have indulged in readings of Mueller’s report like it was the word of God – with celebrity jackasses like Annette Bening, John Lithgow and Kevin Kline donning Rick Perry-style smart glasses to conduct televised deliverance of the gospel.
The report has been hyped plenty. It’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has now been on the New York Times bestseller list for thirteen weeks. In #Resistance America it’s as ubiquitous as Gideon’s Bible. What Nadler and Schiff seem to have wanted was something beyond familiarity with the work, like video of Mueller calling Trump a crook that could be used in commercials.
Instead, they revealed something no one expected. Now we understood why the Special Counsel avoided live exchanges across two years of being one of the most famous people on earth.
When Mueller’s morning session in Nadler’s committee ended, NBC’s studio seemed like a funeral parlor.
“If, uh, Democrats were looking for a pristine ten to fifteen second sound bite that made the point they wanted to make, uh, it probably didn’t happen,” said Lester Holt.
Chuck Todd, who along with colleague Rachel Maddow has been one of the most energetic Russigate torchbearers, offered that on the bringing-Mueller-to-life front, the testimony was “a complete failure.” He added it “didn’t do anything to help” impeachment arguments.
Within 48 hours, national consensus was completely reversed. It was breathtaking.
“Mueller didn’t fail. The country did,” wrote Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post. Her key passage, which would become a point stressed by many, complained about the over-focus on “optics”:
The “failure” is not of a prosecutor who found the facts but might be ill equipped to make the political case, but instead, of a country that won’t read his report and a media obsessed with scoring contests rather than focusing on the damning facts at issue.
In a heartbeat this idea spread everywhere. “Robert Mueller and the tyranny of ‘optics’” blared The Atlantic. “Forget the theater criticism – Mueller’s conclusions are the real news,” wrote colleague David Graham. “Jeffries dismisses optics: We wanted testimony from Mueller, not Robert de Niro,” chimed in The Hill.
It became a de rigeur media and social media observation to say the hearing wasn’t a disaster, that Mueller in fact moved the ball forward, his mighty reputation intact. He’d been in a difficult position, you see, and fighting evil, not movie acting, is his thing. The Daily Beast said so with this headline and lede:
Robert Mueller, Trump HunterReally, there were Democrats angry with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for being Robert Mueller Wednesday morning before the House Judiciary Committee? Are we so unaccustomed to a modest public servant speaking honestly in a measured voice that it enrages us…?
Writer Margaret Carlson insisted Mueller had been asked to deliver the impossible, tasked with “saving the big game with Hail Mary passes in the fourth quarter.” However, she said, he “was never going to throw the long ball” (metaphor production has soared in the Mueller period). The problem wasn’t with Mueller, but with us, for failing to “manage expectations.”
As such, Mueller was not merely Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, but also “Moses on the Mount, delivering the Ten Commandments but not dramatizing them.” Moreover, in a predictable development, pundits insisted the rumors of Mueller’s disappointing testimony were vicious lies perpetrated by Republicans in league with (or “on their knees” for) Trump.
Mueller was back to being both a sacred figure and superhero (in America, the prophet is always also an ass-kicking leading man). This took two days. Three days after his testimony, Kathleen Parker was arguing in the Washington Post that Mueller’s “forbearance” on the stand made him deserving of the Medal of Honor. The following passage was actually published by someone self-identifying as a journalist:
The close-up of Mueller’s face was a portrait of rare depth, the sort one is more likely to find on a Leonardo da Vinci canvas with all its shadows, hollows and his soulful, nearly weeping eyes. I found myself thinking of paintings of the Agony in the Garden, showing Jesus’ upturned face as he prayed.
Mueller on the stand was a potted plant. Reporters saw Moses and Jesus. If you need evidence we’re in a religious mania, look no further. This was a pure exercise in restoring an idol for worship.
It was also a metaphor for the Russiagate narrative. Mueller’s legend was built without any of his hagiographers demanding to speak to the man. Virtually the whole of it was constructed on the word of confederates or anonymous sources. In the manner of priests everywhere since the beginning of time, these sources interpreted for us the secret beliefs, conclusions, and desires of the unavailable man above.
“It is instructive to hear friends and former colleagues talk about Robert Swan Mueller III,” wrote Time when giving the Mueller third place in its Person of the Year issue. Mueller was a figure of such great gravity, we were told, he does not deign to speech:
Mueller, they say, is the kind of man who flicks the lights off and on at his home to inform guests that it’s time to leave a social gathering…
Citizens were urged to find truth, justice, and integrity not in Mueller’s words, but in his hair. “Mueller’s hair is one little shining piece of sanity in a sea of madness,” a portrait artist told the AP. “So precise and sober and straightforward and without deceit…”
The same article interviewed a woman named Alicia Barrett whose son bought a Labrador puppy for Christmas:
“The strong, silent type,” Barnett observed. And then she named him Mueller, an homage to the stoic special prosecutor appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election…
Mueller’s silence turned out to be more genuinely Labrador-like than Barnett and everyone else was led to believe. A media legend of immense dimensions was built without anyone first making sure there was a there there. Sound familiar?
Fellow journalists who think they’re aiding an anti-Trump resistance by keeping the empty piñata of Russiagate raised to the rafters couldn’t be more wrong. This story is Trump’s best friend. As opposed to the Mueller probe, which was an immediate legal threat to the president and his family, Trump on some level must be dying for impeachment.
Heading into an election year, nothing would suit him more than the protracted media spectacle of Democrats trying to break down the walls of the White House with a noodle.
Instead of spending next year campaigning against a policy wonk like Elizabeth Warren or a populist like Bernie Sanders (it’s safe to say Trump would look forward to a run against verbal mistake-factory Joe Biden), he’ll be running against a parade of fourth-raters in and around the party who spent Trump’s presidency rejecting real-world concerns of voters and throwing political capital into a dead-end conspiracy theory.
Less than 1% of voters now consider “the Russia situation” the most serious issue facing the country. This isn’t a new development. Polls consistently showed this to be the case across the last few years, including earlier this winter, before Mueller’s probe ended without further indictments.
In other words, even when voters in both parties knew charges could be filed at any moment, this issue rated below the economy, immigration, civil rights, health care, and other concerns. In mid-March, just before Mueller’s probe wrapped up, CNN found a whopping zero percent of Americans identified “Russian investigation” as their primary concern heading into 2020. The network wrote (emphasis mine):
The CNN poll… asked respondents to describe one issue that would be the most important to them when deciding whom to support in next year’s presidential election. The Russia investigation didn’t register in the results.
The above was the fifteenth paragraph in CNN’s story. Talk about burying the lede! Instead of Poll: Americans Don’t Give a Shit About Russiagate, the headline read, “Americans want Mueller’s report release and approve of his work. But their minds are made up about Trump.”
The only people who really care about this story are DC politicians, Twitter, people who don’t have bills to worry about (like Hollywood actors), and the news media, which continues to put this story front and center. Ratings are one reason, but people like Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo have probably also seen Red Sparrow too many times.*
The conspiracy tale has validated every Trump criticism about both crooked media and the deep state. The whole narrative is the brainchild of Clinton hacks, a handful of overzealous intelligence nuts, and a subset of the Democratic Party’s weakest elected minds, in particular murine ex-prosecutor Schiff, a man who should be selling Buicks back in his hometown Burbank.
Take a good look at Schiff, at our paranoid outpatient of an ex-CIA chief John Brennan, and at excuse-making Clinton campaign chief Robby Mook (a.k.a. the captain of the Democratic Titanic), and ask if you really want to be re-writing history for those people.
They’re making the press accomplices in the most imbecilic effort at political opposition in recent American history. Hence the desperate public comments and the string of wacked-out stunts, like putting Mueller under oath. Impeachment will be the next adventure in doubling down blind.
A significant portion of the original conspiracy theory vanished via a series of under-circulated news reports just in the months since the end of the Mueller probe. Remember the Southern District of New York campaign finance probe that arose in connection with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the one described as a “major danger” to Trump? Remember all that talk about how “Trump can’t run the Mueller playbook on the New York feds?” Experts told us that the Cohen probe posed a “significant threat” of new indictments for Trump and his family.
When that investigation closed with no new charges the same week Mueller testified, the commentariat barely noticed. Same with the Democrats v. Earth lawsuit/publicity stunt, in which the Democratic National Committee sued Trump, the Russian government, and Wikileaks under a RICO claim.
Plaintiffs charged the Trump campaign conspired to steal and release DNC emails. But a federal judge tossed the suit on the grounds that the Trump campaign “did not participate in the theft.” Moreover, the Clinton-appointed judge said published documents were “of public concern” and therefore protected like any other journalistic work product. The judge also ruled that allegations about all the non-Russian defendants (including Wikileaks) were “insufficient to hold them liable” for any illegality involved in obtaining DNC emails.
The end of this years-long gambit only drew a few brief stories in response. The same happened when Mueller in testimony dismissed a zany story about “human activity” detected between a secret server between Trump and Alfa-Bank. Over a dozen news stories covered this tale in length on the way up the news cycle, but dispositive information on the way down drew a shrug.
Russiagate should be dead. Instead, it’s gaining new life, with impeachment looking like the New Testament phase of the religion.
Until Russiagate, Robert Mueller was mainly known to the DC press corps as one of many imperious stiffs who made up George W. Bush’s War on Terror bureaucracy. At the outset of our glorious WMD hunt and in defense of the sweeping surveillance programs we likely still wouldn’t know about if not for Edward Snowden, Mueller effortlessly pushed official lies, conveying the impression of a man who wouldn’t wipe his ass with a congressional oversight committee.
Pious would have been a good word for him even pre-2017. Not many people could take two years of being portrayed as a Godhead on magazine covers and in comedy shows, but the role fit Mueller’s starchy Northeast celibate image like a glove.
The undisguised nature of the religiosity is amazing to look at now. GQ, describing Mueller as someone who embodied the “boy scout ideal” of “the absolute fairness of the lawful good,” wrote the following:
We may decide, in the end, that we do not want to know Robert Mueller; we may even take comfort in the fact that there may not be much of Robert Mueller to know.
This was the old “We’re not worthy!” routine from Wayne’s World. People did not want to find out Mueller was human in any way.
Newspapers and cable framed coverage of the investigation as a fable of coming deliverance. “Mueller knows” was one cliché. Reading “bread crumbs” or “puzzle pieces” dropped from above also became a regular fixation, as reporters sought to “read between the lines” of court filings.
By early this year, “waiting for Mueller” assumed enormous significance. The coming report was hyped as a judgment day. It was an article of faith with pundits and reporters that the verdict would contain all the expected evidence, as a fulfillment of prophecy.
The New York Times ran a multi-part audio series titled, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting (The Mueller Report).” The Atlantic meanwhile worried what the Trump opposition would do once Mueller finished his investigation. Would they be able to “grapple with a new world”?
Like the original Great Disappointment (Christ failing to come down to earth to dispense justice according to the Millerite prediction on October 22nd, 1844), the Mueller watch came to an abrupt cat-fart of an end.
Late on a March evening (coincidentally on the 22nd) the collusion narrative died, with news of the Mueller probe concluding without new indictments. This colossal bummer for Russiagate hopefuls forced poor Rachel Maddow to cut short her trout fishing vacation, and do a somber broadcast reassuring viewers that a concluded Mueller probe was “the start of something, not the end of something.”
There is a false narrative even about this sequence of events, as I have the misfortune to know personally. A common trope is that the death of the collusion narrative was a Trumpian falsehood, issued via hated Attorney General William Barr’s letter summarizing the Mueller report on March 24th.
As one of a handful of reporters who spoke about loony Russiagate coverage from the start, I began receiving emails or tweets on a daily or hourly basis from people accusing me of “believing Barr’s lies.” But like others who spoke out that day, I published my jeremiad about Russiagate being the next WMD on March 23rd, a day before Barr released his letter.
The end of the collusion/conspiracy narrative had nothing to do with Barr. It was officially over in the days before, as saddened media write-ups here, here, here, and here (“Russian collusion is a dead end,” conceded USA Today) attest.
The lack of charges was immediately spun by some as meaning nothing (Mueller found conspiracy but didn’t charge it because Manafort already had a prison sentence! Mueller found conspiracy but didn’t charge it because the evidence was classified! And so on). It all became a new story, about Barr lying about what those non-indictments meant.
On a more meta level, editorialists began plotting a rhetorical course that abandoned the search for conspiracy between Trump and Russia, and focused instead on obstruction of justice as the big reveal.
Legal analysts like Jeffrey Toobin were put back to work building the public case. We were reminded frequently that a charge of obstruction does not legally require an underlying offense. These arguments by themselves essentially admitted the previous two years of speculation about criminal Trump-Russia conspiracies involving blackmail, bribery, election fixing, espionage, even treason - all the theories about pee tapes and secret servers and five year cultivation plans and meetings with hackers in Prague and bribes from Rosneft — had been dead ends.
The precedent now would be impeachment of a sitting president for his response to a politically-charged investigation into crimes he didn’t commit, the same logic that rightly enraged Democrats in the Ken Starr days (articles of impeachment were filed against Bill Clinton, too, for obstruction, for coaching Monica Lewinsky and assistant Betty Currie). It wasn’t as good as a collusion case, but why not? Proponents pressed on, as if this had been their goal all along.
By the time Schiff and Nadler came up with their harebrained religious revival scheme, Russiagate had come full circle. Adherents were now back to making the same arguments editorialists were making in July and August of 2016: Donald Trump was simply too willing to be a partner to Putin. The crime was no longer any overt act of conspiracy, but in the mental state of being amenable to cooperation with the evil one.
This is how Vox reimagined “collusion” after the release of Mueller’s report:
What the report finds is not clear-cut evidence of a quid-pro-quo. Instead, what we see is a series of bungled and abortive attempts to create ties between the two sides…Does that rise to the level of “collusion?” It’s a slippery term. But if “collusion” refers to a willingness to cooperate with Russian interference in the 2016 US election and actively taking steps to abet it, it seems to me that the Mueller report does in fact establish that it took place…
Schiff in his opening statement before Mueller’s testimony took this all a step further. He said Trump “knew a foreign power was intervening in our election and welcomed it,” a crime he described as “Disloyalty to our country.”
Noting that this offense “may not be criminal” (a fact Schiff hastened to blame on destruction of evidence and “the use of encrypted communications”), he went on to insist that, “disloyalty to country violates the very oath of citizenship,” and is therefore unconstitutional, and a “violation of law.” That this concept was originally dreamed up in the Red Scare era (McCarthy also accused members of Truman’s administration of disloyalty) seemed not to bother anyone.
Russiagate isn’t just about bad reporting. It was and is a dangerous political story about rallying the public behind authoritarian maneuvers in an effort to achieve a political outcome. Republicans who battered Mueller with questions weren’t wrong. Investigators in the Russia probe made extravagant use of informants abroad (in the less-regulated counterintelligence context), lied to the FISA court, leaked classified information for political purposes, opened the cookie jar of captured electronic communications on dubious pretexts, and generally blurred the lines between counterintelligence, criminal law enforcement, and private political research in ways that should and will frighten defense lawyers everywhere.
Proponents cheered the seizure of records from Trump’s lawyer Cohen, sending a message that attorney-client privilege is a voluntary worry if the defendant is obnoxious enough. The public likewise shrugged when prosecutors trashed Maria Butina as a prostitute, because Butina a) is Russian, and b) palled around with the NRA. This case has seen would-be liberals embracing guilt by association, guilt by nationality, guilt by accusation, entrapment, secret evidence, and other concepts that were considered an anathema to progressives as recently as the War on Terror period. In the name of preventing the “sowing of discord,” they’ve even embraced censorship.
Finally, in an effort to milk the Mueller report for maximum effect, Democrats – ostensibly the party of card-carrying ACLU members – are trying to uphold a vicious new legal concept, “not exonerated.” In a moment that provided a window into the authoritarian tendencies Mueller once expressed with more fluency, the Special Counsel declined under questioning by Ohio Republican Michael Turner to reject the idea that in our legal system, “there is not power or authority to exonerate.”
This was equivalent to no-commenting a question about whether people are innocent until proven guilty. In America, prosecutors don’t declare you exonerated, you are exonerated, until someone proves otherwise. Efforts to reverse this understanding are dangerous, Trump or no Trump. It’s appalling that Democrats are backing this idea.
All these excesses have been excused on the grounds that Trump must be stopped at all costs. But you don’t challenge someone for being racist and an enemy of immigrants, the poor, and the environment by turning the federal security apparatus into a Franz Kafka theme park. It’s fighting bad with worse.
* I’m obviously on the list too, but only because this awful story has been a paradigm-wrecking event in my professional life.
Image by DonkeyHotey
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