Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Form No More

A Twitter friend sent me the following by DM yesterday evening, and I didn't notice it until later:

Does @maggieNYT’s latest change your opinion any?

My opinion of what? I assume she must have posted another obnoxious, defensive tweet, and it's so bad I'll really stop coming to her defense myself, like she's my girlfriend and the scales will fall from my eyes and I'll ask for my ring back.

Look, she's not my girlfriend. I've never met her and it's unlikely I ever will. If I saw her at the smoked fish counter at Barney Greengrass I would pretend, as I always do with celebrities, that I didn't recognize her. I don't want to know her. More important, I really need for people to start distinguishing between the profoundly stupid question, "Is X a Good Person or a Bad Person?" and the important question, "Is a thing that X is doing having a good or useful or pleasing impact or a bad or unhelpful or ugly impact? and what do we need to do about it?

It is not only ungenerous to spend time categorizing everybody into the Good Ones and the Bad Ones, as if we weren't all a mix of OK and not OK bits inextricably tied to each other, it is also dumb: it pulls you away from thinking about what is to be done, and toward a conclusion that nothing can ever be done about anything and all human endeavor is in vain. It's a conservative habit, which goes along with the view that you should never try to do anything about anything, because you'll probably make it worse. There's something pretty foolish about the corresponding liberal habit of insisting that there's at least a little bit of good in everybody, but at least it offers a basis for action.

Maggie Haberman has become a symbol of this problem for me, because some of you guys are so eager to get me to label her as a Bad Person, and her paper as a Bad Paper, and you just can't make me do it. Not because it's Bad in its own right but because it doesn't accomplish anything. But my conclusion from yesterday is something more important: that it's time to stop talking about Maggie Haberman.

So, at the risk of repeating myself somewhat, what I told my Twitter correspondent:

I haven't seen anything. and I'm not bothering to look. I'm honestly not that interested in the person, I was interested in the writer. My opinion remains where it was at the outset of the convo, as elaborated in the blog http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2022/02/for-record-we-had-all-information-we.html: we shouldn't be wasting time getting all hot and bothered about an imperial-court gossip reporter. Even though I think she's a good one and liked reading her. She isn't important. She should not be the story. Trump, running a criminal enterprise out of the White House undisturbed for four years, should be the story, and the reporters we should be interested in are the investigative reporters who did the real work of unveiling the criminality by studying the documents, from David Corn and Michael Isikoff to David Fahrenthold or Suzanne Craig.

I don't give a fuck about Haberman or Woodward saving anecdotes for their books because they're NOT IMPORTANT. They're anecdotes. And they're an idiotic distraction from the big issue.

The big issue is that serious reporters told us everything we needed to know--everything the legal authorities and the politicians needed to know--about what the Trump organization was doing (including breaking the Presidential Records Act, which I was writing about two years ago, Haberman's cute toilet story doesn't add anything material).

And yet nothing happened. We had a Mafia government for four years, everybody who was paying any attention knew it, and we, the American people, were unable to do anything about it. We had all the information we needed regardless of what Haberman or Woodward decided to put in their stories, and it didn't make any fucking difference.

We had the obstruction unveiled in the Mueller report, the Russia conspiracy laid out in the SSCI report, the gangsterism of the Ukraine shakedown, Barr's Nixon-scale efforts to shut down investigation and punish the investigators. the incredible and completely lawless mismanagement of the immigration system which now seems FUBAR, and so many more things, and I'm supposed to give more time than I've already given to a tale about a toilet? I'm sorry, give me a break.

In a way you're really playing Trump's game that he's pursued for 50 years, of changing the subject from his crimes to his celebrity status, as reported on Page Six of the New York Post. Haberman came to the Times from the Post, that's what they hired her for, and she (and the excellent Glenn Thrush, now me-too'd out of the picture) did it very cleverly. But it's such a tiny part of the picture. You're giving her so much more attention than she deserves. Stop it ffs

A corollary problem is the way the big media is now working to demonstrate that Trump didn't do anything wrong in flushing the Presidential Records Act down the proverbial toilet by clarifying that he isn't going to get busted, as in this appalling piece from NPR this morning, an interview with Mueller prosecutor Brandon van Grack (who knows a thing or two about failing to indict Trump and his confederates), explaining how it's perfectly OK, among other things, for Trump to be stealing top secret documents and taking them to his home because "the president has absolute authority to declassify anything he wants". Really? Wouldn't that be in the exercise of his duties as president? And in what sense would he have been doing that? And if he's right, couldn't he say one single word about how handing a Trump that kind of authority is a dangerous thing to do? But no, let's get back to giggling about toilets.