The Sanger, not the song

Image from The Inspiration Room.

As I was about to say, I haven't been shy about expressing admiration for the New York Times's David Sanger for the quality of his reporting and synthesis; nor, hooligan that I am, have I refrained from mocking him for the curious idea that it is unsporting of the White House to tell staff not to talk to him after he published a detailed account of the secret cooperation between Israel and the US in disabling Iran's uranium purification efforts.

Not because he shouldn't have published it, but because he shouldn't have been so surprised. It's like if I'm worried, as a friend, about your binge drinking, and decide to empty the contents of your wine cellar and distribute it to the poor, I may feel myself to be

Sanger Confesses: Tipped Scales for Ignoramus Candidate

Drawing by Jim Morin, May 16, for the Miami Herald, via.

I wish I was kidding: The Times's David Sanger, writing today about that bizarre interview he and Haberman conducted with Trump in March:

To Mr. Trump, the Iran deal was not only misguided, but also badly negotiated. “They should’ve walked,” he said of Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating team. Mr. Trump said he would have left the negotiating room, doubled down on sanctions, and never agreed to give back billions of dollars, money that belonged to Iran and was frozen in American financial institutions.

But when pressed, he struggled to name any part of the deal he would have walked out of the negotiations to alter. With some prompting, he finally settled on a common critique: that after 15 years, Iran will be free to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium again, in any quantity.

Make that "with a lot of prompting". And a great deal more prompting afterwards that didn't yield anything they could use for their article.

I didn't really notice it at the time, because in the first place it was obvious to me that he didn't know anything whatsoever about what was in the JCPOA with Iran or how it worked but simply kept denouncing it as bad because that sounded right to him and his audiences, but Sanger was working in the interview to make Trump sound not like an idiot. Now he tells us, after the election, it was fixed so the average reader wouldn't notice how ignorant Trump actually is. I don't think Sanger realizes that himself.

For the record: The last of Sanger

Still from Margaret Sanger's lost 1917 film Birth Control. dramatizing her arrest and jailing for violation of the Comstock Act by providing contraception to patients at her Brownsville Clinic in Brooklyn, 1916. Via Margaret Sanger Papers.

A kind of last word on the subject of Margaret Sanger and her support for sterilization of the "feeble-minded" popped into my head, right out of real life.

Her highest priority was for CHOICE (except for the intellectually disabled she believed were unable to choose, which I agree was wrong)

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

That cliché demurrer at the end won me a like from my interlocutor, but I didn't really feel good about it.

Still, when you think about it long-term birth control was unavailable then. I have a somewhat severely retarded nephew in his 30s...

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

they've been together a long time, it's good for them. Having a kid really wouldn't be.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 23, 2017

We say girls—young women beneath the age of statutory consent—can't "make a choice" to have sex. This is why we prosecute their seducers for rape. Similarly lots of states have statutory rape laws dealing with sexual abuse of women with intellectual disabilities. The legal standard focuses on when such women have the "capacity of consent". We can have a discussion of whether they can consent to sex but we can't discuss whether they can consent to having a child?

They didn't have hormonal birth control in Margaret Sanger's time, or IUDs, just condoms and cervical caps, and using those was against federal law after the 1873 Comstock Act, which was being rigorously enforced by the beginning of the 20th century. Sanger's great cause was to change that, and give women of all classes the ability to make their own choice as to whether to have a child or not, positive and negative.

The "feeble-minded, the insane and syphilitic" were a pretty peripheral part of her quest, and I don't know whether she thought it was a good thing for them to have sex, as I do, but she knew that they would, and she didn't contemplate trying to stop them. At the same time she didn't believe they should have to "make that choice", so she thought it was a good idea to give them tubal ligations or vasectomies and didn't think it was necessary to ask their consent (keep in mind that the concept of informed medical consent didn't exist, either—it only dates back to 1957). Even if she did use the language of "racial betterment", she absolutely rejected the concept of racial or religious identity as grounds for sterilization, unlike Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill and Calvin Coolidge and the rest of the eugenics movement. I really can't see any more how her thinking has anything to do with Nazis and their plans for Jewish and Roma genocide. It has to do more with my nephew.

The curious case of the busted bunker busters (concluded)

Cornell Schrödinger Cat. From Amit Goswami.

A week after the 4 January inauguration of the new president, David Sanger offered Times readers one of those magisterial (I want to say deanly? diaconal?) big articles for which he is famed, collations of a wide range of anonymous leaks and a firm grounding in Received Opinion, this one on the subject of US-Israel relations over the past couple of years; focusing, as a matter of fact, on the case of the bunker busters: on a request Prime Minister Olmert [jump]

For the Record: Psychopathy

Via obviously psychopathic expert guy.

I felt we got somewhere interesting in the following:

It's the psychopathy. He's not cognitively incapacitated but can only think about something to the extent it immediately pains or gratifies him. What he learns about "issues" is what it takes to get the rubes to applaud or get a rise out of us.

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

That's easier. The expert's doing all the work, he just has to make a serious face and the expert feels understood.

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

Well, sure, but I don't think he's doing it to please the person, he's doing it to display to the next person that he has an interesting opinion. "A lot of people don't know this, but..."

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

You bet. One thing I still don't get is, people (and T himself) say he wants people to "like" him. And yet he is easily the most despised person on the planet. Maybe that desire to be liked is rooted in psychopathy, with appropriate results.

— Ellis Weiner (@EllisWeiner) April 28, 2018

As it happens, I ran across something relevant in an old thing, from The New York Times's David Sanger, from November 2016, on Trump's campaign interview with Haberman and Sanger the previous March:

To Mr. Trump, the Iran deal was not only misguided, but also badly negotiated. “They should’ve walked,” he said of Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating team. Mr. Trump said he would have left the negotiating room, doubled down on sanctions, and never agreed to give back billions of dollars, money that belonged to Iran and was frozen in American financial institutions.

But when pressed, he struggled to name any part of the deal he would have walked out of the negotiations to alter. With some prompting, he finally settled on a common critique: that after 15 years, Iran will be free to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium again, in any quantity.

(My bold.) That's so Trumpy. He's got the crowd-pleasing condemnation of the JCPOA, which he's going to stick to, but no knowledge of what the JCPOA is or what it's supposed to accomplish to explain what it is he objects to, and he gets Sanger and Haberman to feed him a reasonable-sounding answer, giving Sanger a quote he's still working six or seven months later.  Not cunning enough that Sanger doesn't notice it, but enough that Sanger will just hint at it, with Church-of-the-Savvy obliqueness, not risking his access.

Specific Chemical Materials

Is David Sanger of the New York Times playing a Michael Gordon/Judith Miller role in building up a case for hostility to Iran? Massive story in which Sanger shares a byline with the Yedioth Ahronoth analyst Ronen Bergman, reporting Israel's raid last January of an Iranian storage facility stealing documents from 2003, which Prime Minister Netanyahu himself reported last April as part of his personal effort to push Emperor Trump into abandoning the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran's nuclear activities, which paid off a few days later when Trump indeed left. The documents reveal that the Iran nuclear weapons program was more advanced in 2003 than somebody or other thought it was, though it's also clear that Iran totally dismantled it that year, as they claimed.

Why is The Times reporting it now, six months after the raid and three months after the news? Because the Israeli government invited them over for a junket, pumped up with thrilling detail about the bravura of Mossad in the break-in:

TEL AVIV — The Mossad agents moving in on a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran knew exactly how much time they had to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of giant safes and get out of the city with a half-ton of secret materials: six hours and 29 minutes.

The morning shift of Iranian guards would arrive around 7 a.m., a year of surveillance of the warehouse by the Israeli spy agency had revealed, and the agents were under orders to leave before 5 a.m. to have enough time to escape. Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country’s clandestine nuclear archive, documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans.

The agents arrived that night, Jan. 31, with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees, hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected during the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. But they left many untouched, going first for the ones containing the black binders, which contained the most critical designs.

I guess it does have missiles in it, and it's sure slow...

Sergey Nikitich Khrushschev and his father around 1962, not sleeping. Via BBC. No special meaning.

Stupid Analogies department, from David Sanger:

What is playing out, said Robert Litwak of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, who tracks this potentially deadly interplay, is “the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.” But the slow-motion part appears to be speeding up, as President Trump and his aides have made it clear that the United States will no longer tolerate the incremental advances that have moved Mr. Kim so close to his goals.

Our Soviet antagonist in 1962, in response to US deployment of more than 100 nuclear-armed Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey and the possibility of a renewed US effort to overthrow the Cuban government, secretly deployed a like number of nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, creating a terrifying standoff when U-2 spyplanes discovered their existence.

Annals of Derp: The Paul Popenoe Story

The early ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ columns have an unpleasant chiding tone. Popenoe, along with his organisation’s marriage counsellors, thought of female clients as unrealistic babies: immature, and expecting too much glitz from their marriages. There was a strong element of intergenerational critique in their counsel – a sense that young women were seduced by popular culture, and hopelessly unable to ‘keep house’ and make sacrifices. ‘Don’t expect too much romance,’ Popenoe’s counsellors said over and over again. In treating ‘Ralph’ and ‘Alice’ (February 1953), a young couple who had four children in the space of five years, the counsellor wrote that Alice needed to be convinced to stop ‘nagging’ her husband for affection: ‘Ralph’s way of pronouncing his love was not in extravagant speech but in coming home to her and the children, and displaying his willingness – indeed, his determination – to support them.’ The happy ending was for her to provide: ‘When Alice recognised this fact and acknowledged that the language of courtship and juvenile dreams is seldom the language of marriage, she started keeping household accounts and padlocking her tongue.’ (via Aeon, illustration from Redbook.)

I was kind of thinking I'd take a bye on Dinesh D'Souza's newly emitted project, The Big Lie (from Regnery, already getting remaindered at $4.95 five days after publication!), aimed at persuading us that Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism was too mild, because Jonah left out the important bit about how liberals are also Nazis, which isn't how I remembered it, but this tweet kind of called out to me to find out what it was about.

Progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe--associate of Margaret Sanger--gave Nazis the idea for "lethal chambers" to kill the disabled & unwanted pic.twitter.com/iAjfVrOFvH

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 12, 2017

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that the progressive eugenicist Paul Popenoe, an associate of the birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, gave the German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei the idea of "lethal chambers" for killing the disabled and unwanted?

Answer: It's incredible how much wrong D'Souza can pack into 21 words.

For the Record: More D'Souza Lies

Tivadar Soros, 1894-1968, bon vivant and combatant against fascism. One of the reasons I can't leave Dinesh D'Souza alone.

Bogus. A journal Sanger quit in 1929 published questionable articles in 1933. No connection to her. https://t.co/y8KpDylWpK pic.twitter.com/XE66N3Ipq9

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 22, 2017

Sanger joined anti-Nazi movement in 1933. In Germany Nazis (anti-birth control) burned her books. pic.twitter.com/27glaikSv4

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 22, 2017

And some George Soros below the fold:

Is the United States Necessary?

With all respect, don't see why they expect me to think this picture represents something real.

I don't know why I let it happen, but I keep getting enraged by the emerging consensus that Emperor Trump did something positive to bring about whatever is going on on the Korean peninsula, from the wingnuts calling for him to be given the Nobel Peace Prize right away (don't wait for the Norwegians to do it, just steal Obama's and give him that one) to Mr. Magisterial David Sanger offering his balanced appraisal to readers of The New York Times:

President Trump insists that his own actions are responsible, that his threats of “fire and fury” and, more important, his intensified sanctions, forced Mr. Kim to this moment. He is partly right: Mr. Trump has shown an energy in confronting North Korea that President Barack Obama never did.

But disarmament experts who watched the Korean leaders meet in the DMZ agreed that Mr. Kim had been driving the events.

"Shown" being the operative word there: Obama certainly didn't tweet threats of nuclear war or offensive nicknames to the wider public. He did what he did quietly, without checking with David Sanger first, and Sanger still can't forgive him for that. He prefers a White House like that of George W. Bush or the current occupant flooding the press with 50 or 60 lies a day to one that puts him on a low-calorie diet of truth, in modest quantities.

But it isn't even the implied insult to Obama that bothers me: it is, once again, the continuing inability to recognize that South Korea has anything to do with it, or even exists.

If You're a Star They Let You Do It

 

Poster for The Frogs, Trinity College Dramatic Society, Toronto, 1902, via Wikipedia.

My theory of what makes Biden the best candidate to beat Trump is pretty simple, and ought to be cynical enough for anybody: it's that he's the only possible candidate at the same level of celebrity as Trump, with the same degree of star quality and a similar ability to work an audience, his reducibility to a three-stroke line drawing or a meme image (as the smiler in the aviators), or a comic book hero (Sunny Joe as the secret identity of Dark Brandon). Elections are reality shows now, and while that's deplorable in many ways it's where we are at the moment, and the only way out is through.

Kamala Harris comes closest to Biden in reality-show capacity, as she has become in the last months, with the fiery oratory and that warm relaxed laugh, and I'm very glad she's there, but she hasn't been exposed enough, and there are the other issues to consider (is she entirely ready for the racism and misogyny she'd have to cope with at the top of the ticket? Is it even fair to her?). The nice governors seem nice, if you're enough of a news junkie to know, but they don't have any established character as performers; we haven't seen them campaign, and still less have the people who count, the members of the electorate. And there's so little time to do it in! (A season of American Idol takes about eight months to put together, from auditions to finals.) And so little evidence that any of those supposed candidates are even willing to jump in—people, that's not because Newsom or Whitmer or Pritzker is too shy, or afraid of looking disloyal, they're politicians; it's because they've calculated they'd be most likely to lose, they're young enough to save themselves for a more auspicious year, and I think they're almost certainly right.

If Biden were really seriously diminished in capacity to the point where he couldn't do the job, it would be different; it would be his duty to resign (and President Harris, I would add, would be a much more compelling candidate than Vice President Harris), but everybody knows that's not the case—that's why there've been no calls for him to resign. All the more since his meeting with the press after the NATO conference on Thursday, which took a remarkable turn; it seemed to be going the way you'd expect, a debate between Biden and a Greek-comedy chorus—

FROGS

Do you really believe you're up to the job? You think you can convince us?
Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx! Brekekekéx-koáx-koáx!

BIDEN

Look, I'm doing the job right now! I'm not being facetious!

—when rescue appeared from an unexpected deus ex machina, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, David E. Sanger, who came up with an idea I'd had myself

My fantasy for tomorrow's presser Biden: OK why don't you test me? Ask me a substantive question and see if I'm capable of answering. Press corps: Biden: OK, person, man, woman, TV, camera, that good?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) Jul 10, 2024 at 1:22 PM

and asked Biden a question about the policy environment of the NATO summit, as a way (as he later explained it to CNN) of testing his cognitive capacity:  

West of Eden: Throwing up Hurdles

In a medieval Persian Megillat Esther, the queen negotiates with the king over the status of the Jews, while Haman, back left, tries to torpedo the deal.

Ex-Advisers Warn Obama That Iran Nuclear Deal ‘May Fall Short’ of Standards

So runs the headline of a story by David Sanger in yesterday's Times, and the first paragraph goes on to tell us,

President Obama’s inner circle of Iran advisers have written an open letter expressing concern that a pending accord to stem&nbspIran’s nuclear program “may fall short of meeting the administration’s own standard of a ‘good’ agreement” and laying out a series of minimum requirements that Iran must agree to in coming days for them to support a final deal.

The bad faith of this opening is just astounding. The letter, as you can see by looking at it, was not written by "five former members of Obama's circle of Iran advisers" but by a "Bipartisan Group of American Diplomats, Legislators, Policymakers, and Experts", 19 in all, of whom

Not so Quiet on the Rose-Garden Front

Via.

Mr. President, I think that war on journalists may not be going so well...

Or maybe "war" isn't quite the right term. Oval-Office Contingency Operations?

A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Something

Portrait of Don DeLillo learning that he has fans in the corridors of power. Just kidding. But it's a nice picture. Via Alchetron.

This deeply annoying David Samuels profile of Obama's youthful deputy national security advisor for strategic communications in the Times Magazine—

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru

How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age.

—has been arousing a lot of comment in my Twitter timeline, though very little to none here in our quarter of Left Blogistan, and I feel as if I ought to be reporting on it, even though I'm not quite sure why it's worth noting. Fact is, I'm not quite sure what it's attempting to accomplish, because it seems to be doing two different stories, somewhat overlapping, one about what a gigantic crush Samuels has on Rhodes (they both love the novelist Don DeLillo! It's Kismet!) and the other about how he thinks Rhodes has led some kind of Benghazi-like conspiracy to hide the Truth About the Iran Deal, which is that Obama started negotiating it with Ayatollah Khamenei before the election of President Rouhani, as evidenced by

the letters that Obama covertly sent to Khamenei, in 2009 and in 2012, which were only reported on by the press weeks later.

OK, a conspiracy, if there was one, to delay the truth about the Iran deal for several weeks on two separate occasions in the years before it was negotiated, because I don't know but it looks to Samuels like proof that Rouhani and Republican Guard factions in Iran aren't really at war with each other and thus the Iran deal is really a huge trick being played on somebody by somebody else. Perhaps. Or I may be reading it wrong, because frankly the prose is so simultaneously purple and clichéd, from its first DeLillo name-check—

Annals of Derp: Jonah's MacGuffin Theory

Via Amy Sterling, who's a little worried about Jonah's diet: "heart attack waiting to happen". Seriously, you need to ease up on the brandy and beef suet—and Froot Loops too— and pay some attention to the vegetables.

The derpetology practice here at Rectification Central too often focuses on rebarbative matters like statistics or money or earth science with which your correspondent himself is, to tell the truth, not all that in love or even very familiar. If it's just David Brooks misreading a chart, that's one thing, but frequently we are obliged to deal with the work of real scientists—or economists, which is even worse, imaginary scientists or scientists of the imaginary—and I really have to wonder why I'm working so hard. Can't some qualified person take over?

So it's pretty refreshing when we get Jonah Goldberg turning to film theory, riffing off a 2013 piece by the so-called Ace of Spades, "The MacGuffinization of American Politics".

The Ace's original complaint was the not very original thought that American politics has been turned into entertainment, which he believed had suddenly happened with the election of Barack Obama as president:

Act of Contrition

Courtesan Confessional by Aurora Maryte/Deviant Art.

Amy Chozick of The New York Times promoting her about-to-appear memoir of life on the Hillary Clinton beat since 2008 (WSJ, and the Times from 2013), Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling, with a book excerpt that includes an unexpected confession:

The Bernie Bros and Mr. Trump’s Twitter trolls had called me a donkey-faced whore and a Hillary shill, but nothing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was, they were right.

Note the trivial inaccuracy (it was "donkey-faced cunt") and slipped-in bothsiderism (suggesting her reporting must have been fair, since Hillary had some opponents who hated it as much as her supporters did). Still and all, she seems to be the first reporter from the big show to acknowledge playing a role in electing Donald Trump to the presidency through a series of journalistic failures, and that's pretty brave, right?

Nah. The only thing she pleads guilty to is spending too much time writing stories about pirated emails in the Trump-Clinton campaign, in which, as she carefully points out, she was not alone: "Every publication," she says, quoting Eric Lipton, David Sanger, and Scott Shane in the December postmortem, "including The Times, published multiple stories citing the D.N.C. and Podesta emails posted by WikiLeaks, becoming a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence." Though her own contribution (six stories and a blog post) to the stampede was not exactly small.

Eugenics, I genics

Shorter Ross Douthat:

Is the reproductive selection by some parents today entirely different from the eugenics of an earlier era?

This is another one of those cases where the Times copy department has strangely written their own Shorter. But you can't find it online, it's only on the page 3 teaser section in the paper paper.

The answer to the question, needless to say, is probably no for the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, but yes for the rest of us.

It is entirely different. The eugenics of the early 20th century was fascist in character, even if many persons of an otherwise progressive bent (Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger) favored it.  That "otherwise progressive", by the way, doesn't mean they weren't racists, because they were. It was concerned with what the state ought to do about other people's children—not ours!

Blastocysts, closed and open. From Stem Cell Bioethics.

The folks now planning to bless their heirs with longer legs and a tighter brain than they have themselves as soon as the science permits are working out a private-enterprise program to do something about their own children—not anybody else's. Except to the extent that one of the benefits they hope to score from it is the admiration of everybody else of their blonde, straight-nosed, Yale-alumnus scions, alongside that of an amusement for their early adult years and a staff of support for their old age.

You could say it is boboist in character, since it is the behavior of people imagined by Ross's partner-in-pandritry David Brooks. Supposing there are any such folks, at any rate.

In the real world as we currently know it, there are basically two legitimate reasons for choosing or rejecting to have a baby based on its genes: parents-to-be practicing in vitro fertilization may use genetic information to decide which of their blastocysts they should toss out, assuming they don't want sextuplets; and some women may choose to have an abortion rather than keep a fetus doomed to intense suffering and an early death.

Oh! Did you say "abortion"? Alternative shorter Ross Douthat:

Nazis practiced forced abortion, so anybody who gets an abortion is a Nazi.

 It's just the same old column after all.

N.B. I was able to write the foregoing virtually without looking at the column itself, on the basis of the teaser alone. Having read it, I need to make only a couple of further remarks.

First, the opening paragraph is an appeal to an article from the Yale Alumni Magazine. I initially assumed it was there to remind us that Ross went to Yale—to let us know, as it were, that when he finally mates with that chunky Reese Witherspoon, nobody needs to worry about how smart the baby will be. But Wikipedia tells us he went to Harvard, raising an irrelevant but fascinating question: What kind of person not a Yale alumnus could possibly find time to read the Yale Alumni Magazine? (I know: he only looks at it for the nude pictures.)

Second, in the sentence on which the teaser was based, he gets part of the point about the difference between the fascist state and the hopeful mother:

Is this sort of “liberal eugenics,” in which the agents of reproductive selection are parents rather than the state, entirely different from the eugenics of Fisher’s era, which forced sterilization on unwilling men and women?

But he misses the rest of it: the all-important difference between their kids and our kids, allowing him to move straight into his false equivalency through an idiotic strawman—

From a rigorously pro-choice perspective, the in utero phase is a space in human development where disease and disability can be eradicated, and our impulse toward perfection given ever-freer rein, without necessarily doing any violence to human dignity and human rights

—to the metaphysical peroration on what makes us just like Nazis:

First, a relentless desire for mastery and control, not only over our own lives but over the very marrow and sinew of generations yet unborn. And second, a belief in our own fundamental goodness, no matter to what ends our mastery is turned.

(Failing to distinguish the liberal belief that people are fundamentally good from the conservative belief that I'm fundamentally good and frack you...)

Don't make me

Personally I don't think Edward Snowden should be charged with espionage under a ridiculous misuse of the statute, and apparently charging him with theft of government property is a violation of sensible Justice Department rules, so if that's the best they can come up with maybe they really should just drop the case altogether. Especially if it gives Michael Hayden a sad.

That said, I just cannot get over what a crappy case it is as a poster child against the abuses of the US intelligence agencies foreign and domestic or for the improved protection of federal whistleblowers. This is shown more clearly than ever by the way the New York Times has jumped on it as part of their campaign to show that the Obama administration is more totalitarian in tendency than that of Cheney because even Stalin wouldn't have been mean to David Sanger. I refer to Friday's editorial in which the Times claims, with some reason, that

Why is there Politico?

So the New Yorker Festival is on, and if you were a reasonably educated person of the Upper East Side with nothing better to spend $35 on this morning you could go over to Florence Gould Hall before Bloomingdales opened and hear Ken Auletta interview Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times. So Politico sent their Media correspondent Hadas Gold there—don't know whether she had to get a ticket or not—to apparently think she was reporting a story about Abramson by writing down excerpts from the interview and posting them to Politico in the afternoon, as if she had done the interview herself. [jump]

Horse and jockey by Willard Mullin (1902-78), via CartoonSnap.

Nostalgie de la Boue Journalistique

Book cover by Lau Rivers, 2021.

A fascinating-appalling journalistic inside-baseball piece from Julia Ioffe, who seems to be engaged in the development of some as yet unnamed United Artists–like project where the journalists run the show, and in the meantime has started a sort of blog under the appropriately Russian-sounding title Tomorrow Will Be Worse, on a not very well-designed platform. The post ("The Agony and Ecstasy of the Trump Reporters, After the Fall of Trump") deals with the post-Trump crash in reportage futures:  

True to everyone’s predictions, cable news ratings have gone off a cliff. In the second quarter of 2021, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC each lost at least 30 percent of their audiences. Viewership at CNN, Trump’s favorite punching bag, was down a whopping 45 percent. “There’s a reason that TV networks cover plane crashes and condo crashes, and Trump was the plane crash of democracy,” said Susan.

That's Susan Glasser of The New Yorker, of course, spouse and occasional collaborator of Peter Baker of The New York Times, a couple of Ioffe's informants for this piece. I'm very fond of Ioffe in particular, of course, on account of the Russia connection, which leads her to do work that I think is often really valuable, unlike most White House political coverage, which she doesn't herself do, as she carefully points out, unlike so many of her friends and cable talking-head colleagues.