The 40th anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is being celebrated:

Iran on Monday held an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy and also announced fresh violations of the 2015 nuclear deal it arranged with former U.S. President Barack Obama, including plans to deploy a new uranium centrifuge that would work 50 times faster than the equipment it was permitted to use under the deal.

For the occasion, I’m going to recycle a (slightly edited) post I wrote in 2006 about the Iranian spokesman during the crisis, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a figure who fascinated me at the time of the crisis and who met a sorry end. (There are a number of dead links in the post; I noted some but probably didn’t catch them all.)
______________________

In this Atlantic article [link now dead], a name on the first page caught my eye: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister at the time of the hostage crisis.

Suddenly, although I hadn’t thought of him in decades, the memory came back. Ghotbzadeh! I recall his sardonic, jaded, man-of-the-world expression—a strange combination of arrogance and weariness. As the spokesperson for the regime, he was featured often on TV (I think on the nascent “Nightline,” “America Held Hostage”). As a visible and familiar figure, he became somewhat of a focus for my frustration and annoyance with the entire situation. Something about him seemed hollow, although he was clearly intelligent and articulate.

As events unfolded, it turned out that Ghotbzadeh was one of those cautionary figures, a man who was instrumental in planning a revolution that then got away from him and proceeded to devour him in the process. Like Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins; like Trotsky and so many other engineers of the Russian revolution who were slaughtered in the great purges; authors of violent revolutions often come to violent ends at the hands of their violent former comrades.

Thus it was with Ghotbzadeh. Here he is:

Ghotbzadeh was close to the Ayatollah Khomeini while both were in exile in Paris, and became one of his right-hand men back home in the early days of the revolution. He seems to have been motivated most strongly by hatred of the Shah’s regime. But, paradoxically, his role in the hostage crisis was as a relative moderate (accent on the “relative;” moderate in comparison to what?). He seemed to be working for a diplomatic solution, and lost favor with the Iranian powers that be in the process.

Former hostage and Ambassador at the time, Bruce Laingen, has this to say [another dead link] about Ghotbzadeh:

I didn’t like him at the outset for the role he played as Foreign Minister, but I sensed as time went on over those months, that he came to the conclusion, himself, fairly early, that this hostage business was counterproductive to the revolution and that it needed to be ended. I think he genuinely wanted to end it and was prepared to make some concessions to do that. And he stuck his neck out to do that. He showed some guts.

It all unraveled rather quickly:

Ghotbzadeh finally resigned in 1980 over the deadlock in negotiations. That year, after he was arrested and briefly detained after criticizing the ruling Islamic Republican Party, he retired from public life. In 1982 he was arrested on charges of plotting against the regime. Although he denied any conspiracy to take Khomeini’s life, he apparently admitted complicity with Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariat-Madari in a plot to overthrow the government. Ghotbzadeh was convicted in August 1982 and executed the following month.

Did he really plan to end the Khomeini reign, and, if so, with what was he planning to replace it? Or were the charges trumped up, and was he forced to confess to crimes he didn’t commit? At the time, I remember being astounded at the news of his startling reversal of fortune and allegiance; it was quite a switch from disliking him to feeling some sympathy for the man.

Guillotining having gone out of style, Ghotbzadeh was shot by a firing squad shortly after his trial. The revolution had eaten another of its own.

But not everyone connected with the early days of the revolution has met such a fate. Others connected with the hostage crisis have prospered. It’s unclear whether or not the current Iranian President, our good friend Ahmadinejad, was one of those “student” hostage-takers, although several former hostages have identified him as such. But there’s very little doubt about the identity of another former hostage-taker who’s riding high at present: Hussein Sheikholeslam, recently an Iranian diplomat and legislator.

Why do I mention Sheikholeslam? Only because I came across an interesting fact about him, an indication of the sort of cross-fertilization process that seems to have been at work in the revolutions of the 60s/70s. Sheikholeslam may not have been an actual student at the time of the hostage-taking in Iran. But whether or not Sheikholeslam was a student at that point, he certainly had been a student earlier—at UC Berkeley, where he learned a thing or two:

UC Berkeley gained a reputation as a center of student anti-war protest during the 1960s and 1970s. During that tempestuous period, an Iranian student named Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam attended Cal. He became fluent in English. He also absorbed the demonstrations criticizing American imperialism in Vietnam and other nations.

After Hussein returned to Iran, writes Mark Bowden in his new book, “Guests of the Ayatollah,” his anti-Americanism planted deep roots in his Islamic religion. In late 1979, the tree connected to those roots bore ugly fruit.

The student protests of the 60s didn’t actually revolutionize much in the directly political and traditionally revolutionary (i.e. a sudden overthrow of the existing government) sense in the US. The “revolution” they began here took a cultural form, with resultant political results (and intent). But in Iran, students who had learned the anti-American and propaganda lessons of the 60s used them later to great (and more instant) effect. Some forget that the 60s didn’t just happen in this country; the protests occurred in Europe as well.

Khomeini spent some of his exile in France, but I was surprised to learn (from Wikipedia) that the French were not necessarily simpatico to him during his rather short sojourn there:

In 1963, [Khomeini] publicly denounced the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was thereby imprisoned for 8 months, and upon his release in 1964, he made a similar denunciation of the United States. This led to his forced exile out of Iran. He initially went to Turkey but was later allowed to move to Iraq, where he stayed until being forced to leave in 1978, after then-Vice President Saddam Hussein forced him out…after which he went to Neauphle-le-Ché¢teau in France. According to Alexandre de Marenches (then head of the French secret services), France suggested to the Shah that they could “arrange for Khomeini to have a fatal accident”; the Shah declined the assassination offer, arguing that this would make him a martyr.

[NOTE: My post about Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, is relevant here. Nafisi, an Iranian national, likewise fell in with other radical Iranian students while studying in this country. Then, when she returned to Iran, she saw quite a few of those former associates imprisoned—and in some cases executed—by their former comrades-in-arms.]

[ADDENDUM: Also please see this about the Carter administration’s failed hostage rescue attempt.]

Burisma and the Obama administration

The New Neo Posted on by

The plot thickens:

Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company for corruption, newly released memos show.

During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)…

A person who assisted Blue Star and Buretta in settling the Burisma matters in Ukraine told me in an interview that the late February 2016 overture to State was prompted by a dramatic series of events in Ukraine that included when that country’s top prosecutor escalated a two-year probe into Burisma and its founder, the oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky…

By early 2016 the Ukrainian investigation had advanced enough that then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin authorized a court-ordered seizure of Zlochevsky’s home and other valuables, including a luxury car. That seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to published reports in Ukraine.

Not too long after that, Joe Biden pressed for prosecutor Shokin’s removal – ostensibly for not being hard enough on corruption – and he was indeed removed. But Shokin says he was removed because he was investigating Hunter Biden’s firm.

About those NeverTrump Republicans

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve already talked an awful lot here about the phenomenon of the NeverTrumpers on the right. Even so, this piece on the subject is well worth reading:

Before President Trump’s explosive entrance onto the political scene, mainstream conservatism was somewhat tolerated by gatekeepers in the media, academia, and the arts. My heroes were nuisances to America’s increasingly liberal institutions, sure, but no real threat to the progressively progressive status quo. Establishment conservatives were tokens, allowing liberal elites to pretend they were objective when they were fully intent on transforming American society.

But Donald J. Trump was a different animal altogether, one who refused to kowtow to the cultural norms of American political theater. His frank and straightforward style was intolerable to liberal puppet masters who had spent decades corralling Republicans and forcing them to play nice.

Establishment Republicans have built entire careers out of playing nice. And it shows.

The threat of banishment from cocktail parties and university lectures—over Donald Trump of all people—has been enough to force much of the right’s pundit class to toss aside their ideals to preserve mainstream acceptance.

Three years later, it’s this cadre of tamed conservatives who are lending their efforts to the left’s never-ending coup against the President.

In some ways, author Greg Jones’ trajectory is like mine in that he wasn’t particularly political prior to 9/11 and yet found himself surprisingly attracted to conservative thought after that event. In addition, during the 2016 campaign, Jones was initially quite anti-Trump, but during Trump’s presidency he has come to appreciate what Trump’s been doing.

But Jones and I are also quite different. Jones is much younger than I am, for starters. He also describes some of the supposed conservatives who later became NeverTrumpers as having once been his “heroes.”

I would never, never ever, have described them that way.

If I have any “hero” at all in the camp of conservative thinkers, then or now – and I’m not sure that I do – it would be limited to Thomas Sowell, a uniquely clear and fearless thinker whose writings were especially resonant to me when I was undergoing my political change.

I think the word “hero” should be used very sparingly, and time has proven me correct as so many feet of clay are revealed.

The revival of the Juanita Broaddrick rape charges against Bill Clinton: coming soon?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ronan Farrow seems to be revving up for some investigative research on the rape allegations Juanita Broaddrick has made for years against Bill Clinton:

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow said on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, that “credible” accusations of rape had been made against former President Bill Clinton by Juanita Broaddrick, adding that an investigation into the allegations is now “overdue.”

My opinion? Sure, look into it.

The following is the content of a post I wrote on the subject in May of 2016. Interestingly enough, the reason I took the topic up back then was that Trump had discussed it during his campaign for the presidency.
_____________________________________________

The topic of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape accusation against Bill Clinton has come up again this campaign season, a result of Donald Trump bringing it up in an interview with Sean Hannity.

Although anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I have no hesitation to criticize Trump vigorously, this is not an instance where I’m going to do it. Trump’s point is a valid one, and not only because Broaddrick’s accusations are serious enough to be at least potentially credible (particularly since there are people who swear she told them the story close to the time it allegedly occurred, back in 1978). It also is particularly relevant for Trump, who was recently the target of an article in the NY Times alleging various rather mild offenses on his part towards women, which even if true were deemed unoffensive by a lot of readers.

That does not mean, however, that Broaddrick’s allegations are true. We don’t know if they are or aren’t, and a good case could be made for either position. The full story is a complicated one, but you can read the pros and cons of it here if you’re interested. That Slate piece was published in 1999, when Broaddrick’s accusations surfaced, and it points out various inconsistencies in her story (including her saying under oath that Bill Clinton did not assault her, and then one year later saying he did). Also, several of the witnesses who said she told them the story long ago had beefs with Bill Clinton and might have a motive to lie. Lastly, although there is no question that Bill Clinton has been a major philanderer who came on to women at the drop of a—whatever, no one else but Broaddrick has ever alleged that he raped her.

That does not mean that Broaddrick is lying, however. She might indeed be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The problem is that there are good arguments for either side. What does my gut tell me on this one? My gut says it just doesn’t know.

[NOTE: More details here.]

[ADDENDUM: That’s all I wrote in 2016. Later there was another discussion of her charges in a different thread, and I offered this comment there.]

Elizabeth Warren tries some math on Medicare for All…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the results are not good:

Elizabeth Warren has come up with a plan to pay for her “Medicare For All” proposal, which has a price tag in the tens of trillions of dollars. Part of the plan is a “wealth tax,” which means taxing unrealized capital gains at ordinary income rates. Combined with other elements of her plan, this implies that unrealized capital gains will be taxed at more than 50%. …

I’ll tell you this, though: lawyers are a core constituency of the Democratic Party, and nearly every lawyer in the U.S. (along with many others, of course) tolerates paying 50% marginal tax rates on his or her income only because a chunk of that income is sheltered in 401(k)s. The 401(k) and the house are where the vast majority of high income earners accumulate wealth. Warren’s proposal essentially destroys the ability to build wealth via retirement savings. This may be OK with those who are already rich, like Elizabeth Warren, but it will be anathema to younger people who are trying to become wealthy.

That applies to a lot of people, but let’s stay with lawyers for now, the group I know best. Assessing a “wealth tax” that invades previously tax-free 401(k)s at a 50%+ rate will destroy Warren’s support in what has been, in recent years, a core Democratic Party constituency. “Wall Street,” i.e. the financial industry, has already warned that if Warren is the Democrats’ nominee, it will not support her. That in itself is seismic; no industry has ever supported a politician to the extent that Wall Street supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But the loss of support from America’s lawyers might be even more deadly to the Democratic Party.

More here:

Economist Jonathan Gruber famously attributed the passage of Obamacare to “the stupidity of the American voter.” The MIT professor’s assessment of the electorate’s collective intelligence is clearly shared by Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren if she expects us to take her “Medicare for All” funding plan seriously. She wants us to believe that she can expand a program already verging on bankruptcy — Medicare for the elderly will go broke in 2026 according to the most recent Trustees report — to cover every American without raising middle-class taxes…

You are by now anxious to know where the extra $20.5 trillion is going to come from. Warren’s answer to that question may cause your BS detector to go off. Her plan repeatedly claims that this stupendous amount of money includes “not one penny in middle-class tax increases.” There will, of course, be taxes on the Left’s designated villains, including “the financial sector, large corporations and the top 1 percent of individuals.” There will be additional taxes paid by “ultra-millionaires and billionaires,” as well as an additional employer tax the plan styles a “new Employer Medicare Contribution.” It goes without saying, of course, that there will be a substantial cut in what she calls the “military slush fund.”

Part of the $20.5 trillion will allegedly come from “savings.” The savings scheme that will get your attention involves the loss of your employer health insurance. It’s going away whether you like it or not. How will that save money? “As the experts I asked to evaluate my plan noted, private insurers had administrative costs of 12% of premiums collected in 2017, while Medicare kept its administrative costs down to 2.3%.” This is fiction. Medicare’s overhead costs aren’t lower. They are just hidden in the budgets of other agencies such as the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and HHS. The Warren plan also double-counts certain savings, as Charles Blahous of the Manhattan Institute writes:

These proposals are always complex, and evaluating them takes a level of tax and financial knowledge most people lack (I certainly lack it). Warren relies on this, and on the fact that she can easily locate some experts to parrot the pro-Warren line. But some things are clear and reflect what used to be known as “common sense” because it used to be quite common: health care is expensive, there is no free lunch, and there is a finite amount of money you can squeeze from the very wealthy.

[ADDENDUM: I have previously discussed the problem of valuing unrealized gains here.]

Chronicle of a porch thief

The New Neo Posted on by

This Atlantic article describes how home surveillance cameras have helped catch thieves who steal packages – predominantly Amazon packages – from porches. The attitude of the author is somewhat ambiguous, but as best I can determine she seems to lean slightly more towards sympathy with the thieves (in particular one thief who is described at great length) than with the victims of the crimes.

For example:

While porch cams have been used to investigate cases as serious as homicides, the surveillance and neighborhood social networking typically make a particular type of crime especially visible: those lower-level ones happening out in public, committed by the poorest. Despite the much higher cost of white-collar crime, it seems to cause less societal hand-wringing than what might be caught on a Ring camera, said W. David Ball, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “Did people really feel that crime was ‘out of control’ after Theranos?” he said. “People lost hundreds of millions of dollars. You would have to break into every single car in San Francisco for the next ten years to amount to the amount stolen under Theranos.”

That perspective was little comfort to San Franciscans in late 2017, when the city was the nation’s leader in property crime. In Potrero, Fairley had been captured on camera enough times, snatching packages or walking down the street with bundles of mail, that many in the neighborhood had a face and a name to attach to their generalized anger about ongoing nuisances. Fairley was correct in thinking that, in many cases, Amazon will replace pilfered packages. Her major miscalculation was in thinking that her neighbors would, therefore, just shrug and move on.

It’s hard to convey the flavor of the article without quoting at great length from it, but the general feeling I got was that stealing Amazon stuff from rich people’s (or middle class people’s) porches is upsetting but no biggee, but poor drug addicts (particularly if from minority groups) can be forgiven because it’s poverty that drives them.

The other sense the article conveys is how well Fairley (the porch thief featured in the article) plays the game of self-justification. She minimizes her offenses and plays the race card with great frequency. Here’s a little sample:

Arnold began combining the neighbors’ Fairley-related posts in a single document. They started with the first dispatch, from May 2017, with Margett photographing Fairley and her daughter. In October of that year, a friend of Arnold’s, then a VP at Flipboard, followed Fairley in his Prius, watching her go door to door collecting packages—a mail carrier in reverse. In November, a cam caught a lithe woman who looked like Fairley crawling up a home’s steps to seize a fat Amazon pouch of lug nuts, a rosary dangling from her neck. Two weeks later, neighbors were gardening on a shared strip of land when Fairley passed by balancing a long lamp box on her shoulder. (Fairley claimed that the box contained her own headboard and lampshade.) Seeing an address written in big letters for a home in the opposite direction, one of them grabbed the box and demanded to see an ID to prove Fairley lived there. A second man called 911 as a woman videoed Fairley’s ensuing tirade: “That’s why people get shot. You don’t pull somebody’s package off their fucking arm,” Fairley snapped, then stalked off.

And then there’s the failure of the legal system as well as the system to treat addiction:

Two incidents—the Googler and the bus; the Prius calling in Fairley—resulted in charges (petty theft, mail theft, receiving stolen property, and possession of heroin—all misdemeanors), and tickets for court dates. But Fairley regularly skipped her hearings—she’d lose track of the dates, she later told me, and just had “a lot going on”—which slowed the process of resolving the cases. Again and again, in her absence, the judge would issue bench warrants, and Fairley would eventually be arrested and booked into jail, from which the judge would release her to await her next hearing, with demands that she report to diversion programs or Narcotics Anonymous meetings—all while neighbors continued to report on Nextdoor that they were watching her steal mail.

Fairley is given many chances in many rehab programs, all of which she manages to flunk. Then, as her life spirals down from an already-low point, she loses more and more: her possessions, her public housing, her daughter. At no point does she show any inclination to take responsibility for her situation.

It’s hard to imagine any good ending to Fairley’s story; her problems seem deep-seated and intractable, her way of life ingrained and habitual. And what percentage of petty criminals resembles Fairley? How many are capable of change and how many strongly resistant to it?

Would more prison time have made a difference in Fairley’s trajectory? At the very least, it would have sent her a different message, and would have given the residents of the Portrero neighborhood a break from her thievery.

Or would it have? As this depressing article also makes clear, even when Fairley was unable to make her rounds because she was in rehab programs, other thieves took up the slack and kept stealing the low-hanging fruit – the Amazon packages – from the porches of Portrero.

Back spasms

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve had a bad back for over 30 years.

Bad backs run in my family, and despite general athleticism (or maybe because of it?) three out of the four members of my family had serious and chronic disc problems and nerve problems starting in early adulthood and lasting for the rest of our entire lives (so far, anyway).

I’ve grown accustomed to mine, and have a bunch of ways to deal with it and to protect my back. I sit a certain way, I stand to work at my computer, and I’m mega-careful in the ways I move and try to always use good ergonomics and posture. So although the first ten to fifteen years of my back issues were horrendous and involved major pain just about every day of my life, the past fifteen years haven’t been so bad.

In the last few months there’s been a little bit of exacerbation, although nothing all that terrible. But three days ago, I used my usual method (a kind of modified deep knee bend) to pick something up off the floor, and when I stood up straight I felt as though someone had shot me in the butt. The right butt, to be exact.

I couldn’t walk without involuntarily shrieking. I could barely manage to get to my bed, arrange some pillows to support my legs, and lie down and not move. That short journey had taken extraordinary effort and been extremely stressful, so much so that I shook almost uncontrollably for about ten minutes afterwards. My entire body felt under siege in fighting the pain.

I thought I was in major trouble and would be for a long time. I took some Tylenol and NSAIDs, which was all I had with me, and waited with trepidation.

The next day I felt about 80% better. This was a tremendous relief. But the question remains: why did it happen, and why was it so very bad, and will it happen again? I had developed a false sense of security and thought I knew how to prevent such a thing. But obviously, I was wrong.

I decided ex post facto that it had been a back spasm, a violent muscle contraction that can be excruciating while it lasts but doesn’t tend to last so very long. My previous back pain had been much more of the chronic nerve variety; I don’t think I’ve ever had anything happen like this before.

I bet some of you have, though. Am I right?

The nature of the present-day Congress

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “Snow on Pine” a few weeks ago:

It seems to me that Congress has gone so far off the rails that it no longer really represents the people–no more traditional “regular order” budgets, no major bi-partisan legislation of benefit to the people; it represents itself and its member’s interests, it represents major business interests, it represents a whole variety of ideological interests of the Left, it even represents the interests of various foreign countries which have bought influence and, perhaps, even “reality” TV.

At this point it’s going through the motions, giving the appearance of life to an empty shell that has, in recent decades, been increasingly drained of substance or meaning.

But, represent the real interests of the American people? That, it no longer does, nor–despite what it’s members might tell us–does it actually care.

I think there’s some truth to this. What’s the reason? Some probabilities: the influence of big money. The growth of gerrymandering to ensure safe districts, which in turn fosters more extreme positions, which leads to less ability to compromise. Members who are elected again and again and again and are basically career politicians.

However – take a look at the plot of the film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” It was made about eighty years ago in 1939, and although the subject is the Senate and not the House, it features a political system loaded with graft and corruption, and a stalwart guy fighting against that and for the old American ideals.

I am particularly struck by this part [emphasis mine]:

The constituents try to rally around [Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith], but the entrenched opposition is too powerful, and all attempts are crushed. Owing to the influence of Taylor’s machine, newspapers and radio stations in Smith’s home state, on Taylor’s orders, refuse to report what Smith has to say and even distort the facts against the senator. An effort by the Boy Rangers to spread the news in support of Smith results in vicious attacks on the children by Taylor’s minions.

The movie has a happy ending. But it paints a picture of Washington DC and politics in general that’s already highly tainted by corruption and rarely serving the will of the people.

But I agree with Snow on Pine that Congress has gotten worse in recent years.

What Kamala and Beto have in common

The New Neo Posted on by

Neither is going to be the Democratic nominee.

But they each had their day in the sun as the darling of the MSM and the person who was going to rise to the top. The media is so eager to locate the great Trump-slayer that anyone will do until the public rejects that person and it’s time to move on to the next.

Beto had two big problems. The first was that he seemed profoundly bizarre as a person, and the second was that the policies he advocated were to the left of even the current Democratic electorate. Kamala’s problem has been twofold as well: she is not the least bit likeable and she was flailing in terms of policy and never figured out what she stood for or even if she stood for anything other than Kamala Harris.

But for one brief shining moment they were the press’s favorites, and at that point they must have believed that they might truly win the whole shebang. That’s a hard notion to give up.

“Thank God for the Deep State!” says a denizen of the deep

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of people have opined about this comment by former acting director of the CIA John McLaughlin:

McLaughlin embraced the term when asked during an event with other former intelligence officials whether a CIA whistleblower complaint that sparked an impeachment inquiry feeds into Trump’s complaints that the “deep state” is out to get him.

“There is something unique you have to agree that now the impeachment inquiry is underway, sparked by a complaint from someone within the intelligence community, it feeds the president’s concern, an often used term about a ‘deep state’ being there to take him out,” Margaret Brennan, the moderator for the event, asked McLaughlin.

“Thank God for the ‘deep state,’” replied the former spook, who served as acting director at the CIA in 2004.

You can find some commentary on this here as well as here.

My own opinion is that it demonstrates what we already know about the self-satisfied arrogance and the assumption of entitlement to great power by individuals who have risen to the highest positions in government entities such as the CIA. They have become unused to answering to anyone who might disagree with them and don’t feel they should have to. If Louis XIV of France famously said “L’etat c’est moi,” then these un-elected and preening Pooh-Bahs (without the humor of the original Pooh Bah) say “L’etat profond, c’est moi.”

And they are not the least bit ashamed of it; they are proud.

Do they believe that Trump is guilty and that they, the keepers of the flame, are saving us from him and from ourselves? Some probably do, but many have a more cynical cast of mind. For that first group, who sincerely feel that they are heroes and that Trump is some sort of danger not just to Deep State power but to America and the world, they have never learned (or don’t care) that they are following in the path of tyranny by ignoring the proper process to follow, because they believe that they know best.

And they don’t have to prove it. They just know, because their judgment is infallible. So, since they know that Trump is guilty of terrible crimes and awful intent, all they have to do is find one of those crimes – or manufacture one if they can’t locate the ones they know must be there if only they could find them.

It’s a pernicious way of thinking and acting, but even worse are those Deep Staters who don’t believe Trump to be guilty of anything but undermining their power and disagreeing with policies they would advocate if they were president, and that this justifies their attempt to take him down using all the considerable power at their disposal. Their entire lives have been an exercise in growing career success (climbing up the job ladder) and increasing power, and they believe that rules are for the little people.

In addition, there is no lack of people to cheer them on. So their arrogance has been rewarded, and so far there have been no significant negative consequences for them. Will there ever be?

Beto…

The New Neo Posted on by

…we hardly knew ya [typos corrected in the following quote]:

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke is dropping out of the 2020 presidential race, according to a report by the New York Times.

The Times is reporting that O’Rourke had planned to withdraw “from the race in Iowa on Friday evening and follow up with an email message to his supporters.” According to the times, Beto stated in a draft of the message to his supporters that “he was proud of championing issues like guns and climate change but conceded that his campaign lacked ‘the means to move forward successfully.'”

And what we knew we didn’t like.

Trolls and the Times

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the most popular devices used by propagandists is the selected misleading quote. I’ve seen the method used so often that it can be called standard operating procedure. It’s not limited to the left – you can find it on the right, too – but it’s only on the left that it’s commonplace and becomes nearly constant.

In fact, that discovery was one of the reasons for my political change.

Yesterday we had a good example of the use of the technique in this post, in which I compared the treatment of Tim Morrison’s testimony and opening statement (it is only the latter for which we were allowed to see the text) by The Federalist and the NY Times. Needless to say, quite different things were emphasized by each publication.

Right on cue, our resident troll “Manju” chimed in with this, as a reply to my characterization “The [Times’] headline states ‘White House Aide Confirms He Saw Signs of a Quid Pro Quo on Ukraine.’ …directly contradicts what the Federalist reports.” Manju writes:

From Morrison’s opening statement:

“I had no reason to believe that the release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador Sondland.”

The NYTimes characterization is correct. The Federalist’s is propaganda.

But even looking just at the short excerpt Manju offers as proof that the Times headline was correct and the Federalist incorrect, it doesn’t indicate that at all. Morrison isn’t saying that he himself saw any such thing. He has no direct knowledge of anything of the sort. Nor was he asserting that because Sondland said it, it must be the case.

The part of Morrison’s statement that Manju left out provides the context [emphasis and bracketed remarks mine]:

I was not aware that the White House was holding up the security sector assistance passed by Congress until my superior, Dr. Charles Kupperman, told me soon after I succeeded Dr. Hill. I was aware that the President thought Ukraine had a corruption problem, as did many others familiar with Ukraine. I was also aware that the President believed that Europe did not contribute enough assistance to Ukraine. I was directed by Dr. Kupperman to coordinate with the interagency stakeholders to put together a policy process to demonstrate that the interagency supported security sector assistance to Ukraine. I was confident that our national security principals—the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the head of the National Security Council—could convince President Trump to release the aid because President Zelensky and the reform-oriented Rada were genuinely invested in their anti-corruption agenda.

Ambassador Taylor and I were concerned that the longer the money was withheld, the more questions the Zelensky administration would ask about the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Our initial hope was that the money would be released before the hold became public because we did not want the newly constituted Ukrainian government to question U.S. support.

I have no reason to believe the Ukrainians had any knowledge of the review until August 28, 2019. [that’s long after the Trump phone call in question] Ambassador Taylor and I had no reason to believe that the release of the security sector assistance might be conditioned on a public statement reopening the Burisma investigation until my September 1, 2019 conversation with Ambassador Sondland. Even then I hoped that Ambassador Sondland’s strategy was exclusively his own and would not be considered by leaders in the Administration and Congress, who understood the strategic importance of Ukraine to our national security.

I am pleased our process gave the President the confidence he needed to approve the release of the security sector assistance. My regret is that Ukraine ever learned of the review and that, with this impeachment inquiry, Ukraine has become subsumed in the U.S. political process.

The characterization by the Times and Manju lacks the context in which it can properly be understood. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

What’s more – although this is somewhat tangential to the subject matter of this post, how quotes can work as propaganda – even if Trump was doing exactly what he is accused of doing, so what? Didn’t Biden explicitly do something similar?

Plus, here’s a point made by Trey Gowdy:

Well, you know, that means something for something,” he said of the supposed “quid pro quo” at the center of the impeachment probe. “I need to know what both of those somethings is.”

“If the something is, ‘We’re not going to give you aid until you help us figure out who tried to interfere with the levers of democracy in 2016’ — Margaret, I can tell you if a Democrat did that we’d be adding something to Mt. Rushmore,” he said.

If it was the case that Mr. Trump and his allies inside and outside the administration pressured the government of Ukraine to help the U.S. determine who else, other than Russians, might have attempted to meddle in the 2016 election, Gowdy said the actions would not amount to “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the constitutional standard for impeachment.

“I mean, we spent two years as a country trying to figure out who tried to interfere with our elections. So clearly, it can’t be an impeachable offense,” he added.

But it’s moot, because there are no indications that’s what happened. And in particular, if Ukraine wasn’t even aware of any stoppage of aid, then there could not have been a quid pro quo for anything, and that includes the re-opening of the Burisma investigation.

There are several possible quid pro quo subjects, by the way, and they are often confused: an end to Ukrainian corruption in general, information about Ukrainian interference in the US election of 2016, and re-opening (note the “re”) the Ukrainian investigation into Burisma. IMHO they would all be valid subjects for Trump to insist upon, but I see no evidence that any of these subjects was made a requirement by Trump in terms of foreign aid to Ukraine, for the simple reason that Ukraine didn’t even know there was any disruption in aid.

The thing about this propaganda technique is that it’s generally very effective. That’s true for several reasons, but the main one is that most people will not go back to the original to find the context in order to check. Often it’s because they view the source of the quote as a trusted one. Often it’s because they don’t have the time or the inclination. Sometimes they even lack the knowledge that they can find the original if they try (and of course sometimes the text of the original is unavailable). Often they want to believe the version they read anyway, and aren’t especially interested in challenging it.

And so it continues.