Category: Media

The Times’s Trump story is a few years too late

~ odd man out

“I built what I built myself,” Mr. Trump has said, a narrative that was long amplified by often-credulous coverage from news organizations, including The Times. Certainly a handful of journalists and biographers, notably Wayne Barrett, Gwenda Blair, David Cay Johnston and Timothy L. O’Brien, have challenged this story, especially the claim of being worth $10 billion… But The Times’s investigation of the Trump family’s finances is unprecedented in scope and precision, offering the first comprehensive look at the inherited fortune and tax dodges that guaranteed Donald J. Trump a gilded life. The reporting makes clear that in every era of Mr. Trump’s life, his finances were deeply intertwined with, and dependent on, his father’s wealth…

It’s good that The New York Times has owned up to being “often credulous” in it’s decades-long coverage of Trump, and that it gave credit to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Johnston, former reporter for The Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, who was on to Trump’s humongous lies way back when he was a failing casino owner in Atlantic City.

But still … Why was the newspaper of record’s masterful, 14,000-word investigative piece not written a few years ago, when it might have helped deny the presidency to a lifelong fraud who has destroyed the last shred of confidence people had in the federal government?

I asked my sagely friend Swamp Rabbit as we chatted on the porch of my shack in the Tinicum swamp. “That’s easy,” he said. “The Times and the rest of the media had been propping up Trump’s public image since the 1970s, on account of they know people like reading about a cocky guy on the make, a bragger who makes big promises.”

“But his promises were empty,” I replied, “He cheated the people he did business with. A lot of them went broke waiting to get paid by him. He was never anything but a con man.”

The rabbit rolled his eyes and spit in the swamp. “His fans liked that he was a con man. They liked the idea that he charmed all them bankers and was a self-made man. They didn’t want to know he started on third base and got dragged across home plate by his father Fred.”

“Trump’s not charming,” I countered. “He’s vulgar, ignorant and delusional.”

The rabbit laughed. “To most people, them things are the same as charming. This is America, Odd Man. Give the people what they want.”

Footnote: Trump is an ogre and U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kanavaugh is a weasel, but they have two things in common: Both are liars and both think their inherited wealth entitles them to behave badly.

Judicial temper tantrum

~ odd man out

Everybody got a good look at Brett Kavanaugh’s judicial temperament on Thursday, and at his fear that he might get caught lying if the FBI investigates Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that he tried to rape her.

Under questioning, Kavanaugh sniped and ranted. He said he was the victim of a left-wing conspiracy to keep him off the Supreme Court. “My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed,” he wailed, as if the Republican majority in the Senate had somehow turned against him. As if the sky was falling.

“I ain’t never seen the like,” Swamp Rabbit said, watching Kavanaugh on TV as he threw an afternoon-long hissy fit instead of refuting the rape allegations. “He thinks he should be in the Supremes, but he keeps losing his shit. You sure he went to law school?”

Kavanaugh was a ball of weepy, petulant anger — the sort of anger a preppy might show when his dad says he can’t borrow the Lexus to party with his preppy friends.

With one big difference: There was panic in his anger, especially when questioners on the Senate Judiciary Committee mentioned the FBI. He looked like the thought of FBI agents interviewing his old sidekick Mark Judge was his worst nightmare. “I’m innocent of this charge!” he whined.

He was cruising toward confirmation despite his pathetic tantrum until Friday, when Republican Sen. Jeff Flake called for a floor-vote delay.

Now the Yale Law School grad who can’t seem to make a coherent argument will have a whole week to think about what Judge and other ghosts from his school days might say to the feds. And about the world of trouble he’ll be in if they say too much.

Kavanaugh’s dirty secrets still surfacing

~ odd man out


The past is never dead. It’s not even past. — William Faulkner

(I wrote the following before a third accuser came forward today.)

I’d just got back from a sales job upstate at a ski resort that doubles as a venue for dog shows. A pit bull had tried to bite me. My glasses fell into the little lake near the slopes and it took me a half-hour to fish them out. I was mad when I got home.

Swamp Rabbit was on the porch at my shack, watching breaking news on TV. Senate Republicans were hurrying to confirm U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a proud graduate of the spoiled rich boy’s club, before Democrats could push to investigate the allegation that he tried to rape a girl back in prep school.

“Did you see him on Fox News pretending he never ran with a gang of preppies, that he was never a drunk?” I said. “Did you see him sniveling? You were right, he’s a weasel.”

“He’s a weasel, but that don’t mean the attempted rape story is true,” Swamp Rabbit replied.”The Dems can’t go around presuming he’s guilty if they don’t have the dirt on him.”

No one’s calling Kavanaugh guilty, I told the rabbit. They’re just asking for a background check now that two women (so far) have accused him of sexual assault. They want to hear from his old buddy Mark Judge, the recovering alcoholic who wrote a book about the boozing and harassment of girls that went on when Judge and Kavanaugh were preppies together. And from his roomy at Yale who says Kavanaugh was a drunk and a braggart. And from the other women who say he was a dirtball back in the day.

“How many dudes you know were goody-goodies when they was young?” the rabbit countered. “I wasn’t into sex assault, but I was a drunk and I wasn’t nice to all the girls. I bet you were just as bad, Odd Man.”

“You’re still a drunk,” I reminded him. “The difference is you and I don’t pretend we were choir boys.”

I tried to explain. Kavanaugh could have admitted he was rowdy in his school days, that he drank too much and did stuff he now regrets. Instead, he told Fox News he never did the sort of things he’s been accused of, and treated women with “dignity and respect.” He’s stuck with the squeaky-clean persona constructed for him by Republicans. If he gets caught in a lie, the structure will collapse.

“By that time he’ll have a gig with the Supremes,” the rabbit said. “He won’t need no structure.”

The rabbit was right, of course. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, he gets a life-long appointment to the Court, which means he’ll have decades to take part in rulings that could screw up the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans.

“What a system,” I said. “What a world.”

“What a weasel,” the rabbit replied. “You got any whiskey around here?”

A weasel auditions for the Supremes

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

Brett Kavanaugh knows why Donald Trump chose him to replace Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court, and so do all the Republican senators who are so eager to finish the confirmation charade. Even my friend Swamp Rabbit knows, and he’s drunk most of the time. He showed me this last week, from one of the mainstream news magazines:

Judge Brett Kavanaugh declined to answer two questions from Democratic senators related to presidential investigations during his confirmation hearing — if a president should comply with a subpoena and if he has the ability to self-pardon — saying both were hypothetical.

“This Kavanaugh dude is Trump’s ace in the hole,” Swamp Rabbit explained. “He ain’t gonna mess with a sitting president, no matter what the president’s accused of.”

The rabbit mentioned a 2009 law review article in which Kavanaugh wrote that “we should not burden a sitting President with civil suits, criminal investigations, or criminal prosecutions.”

Kavanaugh felt differently when Democrat Bill Clinton was in trouble, but that was way back when. He could be the swing vote if the court is asked to rule on whether our overtly corrupt president should be permitted to continue breaking the law. He isn’t about to screw up his career by promising to recuse himself from cases involving the president, or by saying anything honest about his views on abortion, the environment, gun control and other volatile issues.

“Remind me again why Kavanaugh is allowed to withhold the truth, or to tell outright lies,” I said.

The rabbit said it was because Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, during her confirmation hearing, said she shouldn’t have to answer questions about possible future cases.

“But she did answer questions about Roe v. Wade and other cases, “I replied. “And she didn’t try to hide anything about her record, like Kavanaugh did. She’s been called a liberal lion.”

“The stakes are too high this time,” the rabbit said. “The survival of the worst U.S. president ever may be on the line. Trump don’t need no lion, he needs a weasel. Kavanaugh is his answered prayer.”

Chuck Todd is an incompetent twit

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Mama whale’s message to the media

~ odd man out

From NPR:

After carrying her deceased baby for at least 17 days and 1,000 miles, an orca mother has shown signs of returning to normal. She was seen Saturday with fellow members of her pod, chasing a school of salmon. She is no longer carrying her baby, and she looks healthy. “Her tour of grief is now over and her behavior is remarkably frisky,” according to a statement on the Center for Whale Research’s website… Not a single orca born in the past three years has been known to survive, according to the Center for Whale Research. That’s why the fact that [the mother whale] recently gave birth was so exciting, if only for a brief moment. Her calf died just 30 minutes after it was first spotted by a whale watch operator on July 24.

I’m not sentimental, but the whale story moved me. It spooked me. What if she was grieving not just for her baby, but for her entire species, and for all endangered species? What if her “tour of grief” was to remind humans that the huge amounts of toxins we generate are killing the oceans?

And don’t tell me it’s silly to attribute thoughts and feelings to non-human creatures. Whales feel deeply and are highly intelligent. Humans, on the other hand, are too dumb or selfish to care that their behavior might be dooming not just whales but their own future generations.

Footnote: Save the whales! Save the humans! Something’s wrong, as Spirit noted almost a half-century ago: https://youtu.be/YsTK2LHZKPQ

Laura Ingraham’s lily-white American dream

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Laura Ingraham, speaking entirely in code, makes it clear how she feels about immigrants:

“The America we know and love doesn’t exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like … this is related to both illegal and legal immigration.”

Twitter responded to Ingraham’s White supremacy rant:

https://twitter.com/Brooke_Cale/status/1027559303933128705

https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1027538631685222401

https://twitter.com/Goss30Goss/status/1027555561057992704

https://twitter.com/JRehling/status/1027552570774966272

Der Lugenpresse

~ susie

Trump is whipping his followers into a dangerous anti-media frenzy. Maybe they should stop all the live coverage?