The NY Post headline reads: “Even New York’s millionaires are fleeing to less expensive cities.”
“Millionaire” sounds like a rich person—at least, it used to. But it occurs to me that in New York City these days a million doesn’t go very far. So why not take the money and run? In particular, if you own any real estate in New York, you can cash out and live like a king elsewhere.
…on Russiagate, and what the MSM doesn’t get about the Trump phenomenon even now.
The movie “Unplanned” is about many things, but one thing it’s about is a person changing her mind on an important issue. In this case, the issue is abortion, and the change was from being head of a Planned Parenthood clinic to being an anti-abortion activist.
The movie wasn’t heavily promoted or predicted to do all that well, but in addition to that, many efforts at publicizing it were blocked, ostensibly because the subject matter was controversial. That hasn’t seemed to stop a lot of other promotional campaigns, so it’s hard to conclude anything other than that it was the movie’s un-PC pro-life stance that was the problem.
And this despite the fact that apparently the movie takes a “nuanced” view of things in terms of sympathy for women having to make the decision (Planned Parenthood, on the other hand, is the villain), although reviewers panning it disagree and think it’s simply a one-sided anti-abortion polemic.
I haven’t seen the movie, but many of the reviews that criticize the movie also state that the movie preaches to the choir, and that its intended audience is those who are already firmly in the anti-abortion camp.
I disagree. I haven’t seen the movie, but all the descriptions (including those of those who are giving it negative reviews) indicate to me that the movie actually would appeal—and intends to appeal—to those who aren’t sure about abortion or at least have some doubts where they stand.
I have read, for example, that in the younger generation, support for abortion has been declining somewhat rather than increasing. Polls over the last three decades indicate a periodic wobble but no clear trends, as far as I can see. I also think that there are two main issues involved: whether people think abortion should be legal or not and under what circumstances, and a second question as to whether this particular woman would ever have one. I believe (yet cannot prove) that there are a significant number of women who think abortion should be legal but who would not personally have an abortion if faced with an unwanted pregnancy.
It seems to me that the film probably is working on that last group more than on anyone else, trying to get an increase in the number of women who see abortion as something that is not a personal option for themselves.
These are filmed interviews with the elderly. Not the present-day elderly, but the elderly from almost a century ago.
Most of these clips were made around 1930, which means that a lot of the interviewees were born in the 1840s. Some earlier. I’ve located a number of these videos on YouTube, and rather than post them all at once (some are long) I’m planning to post excerpts now and then as a regular feature.
I find them astounding. Not only do these interviews drive home how long we’ve had the capacity to make movies and record people’s speech, but they make it apparent that, by interviewing the elderly, one can see back farther in time to make the even more distant past come alive in a way that’s startling.
I’ve also been struck over and over by how vigorous these elderly people are. But that makes perfect sense, because they had to be much hardier than people of the same age today. These old folks didn’t have the benefit of antibiotics and all sorts of modern medical interventions to help them along. They had to have remarkable resistance for all sorts of diseases, and they also ordinarily were very physically active by necessity. The number of old people was fewer as a percentage of the population, but the ones that survived were a very special group.
As you will see here.
Note also the old-fashioned accents (some of their lines seem scripted, though), Love this first guy in particular, who has an almost Frostian eloquence at times:
In the very olden days of the monarchy, kings often used to kill their opponents before they got killed by those opponents. It was a pretty brutal world.
Wretchard (Richard Fermandez) uses that as a metaphor to talk about the present:
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, one can make the equivalent argument that a probe against Obama officials would be just as much “a good faith attempt to investigate a credible charge” as the Mueller investigation. But one should not deceive oneself into not realizing that the ultimate targets of such a course would be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Such a turnabout would not end the crisis which began in the waning days of the Obama administration, it would only change its direction. And then some other king would lie on the political floor and the whole point of a peaceful transition of power which “is to prevent a clash between kings” would still be in ruins. Perhaps this is why Karl Rove is urging Trump, having won the round, to move on; for by considering the affair closed, Trump could restore the tradition of comity, which has been damaged.
Or could he? In the current political culture, magnanimity is unlikely to be met with gratitude, unless the words are spat out with irony. Passions are high and neither side appears willing to give an inch. It may take time before an extended hand is not met by a punch. The fever must still run its course. One can only hope the fever breaks before the patient does.
Good points and interesting points as well. But the problem is that this situation is not really some sort of tit-for-tat, any more than the police trying to find a cop-killer is tit-for-tat.
Of course, if in fact Trump had been an agent of Russia, that couldn’t be left to stand. The problem was that it was not only an absurd notion but there was no evidence for it that could pass the smell test, and so those wanting the investigation to go forward had to fake evidence, leak it, and lie about it to make the allegations seem at all credible.
So this really was an effort first to discredit Trump the candidate and then, when that didn’t work well enough, an attempted coup on Trump the president. If it was that—and I think it’s clear that it was—Trump can’t just let bygones be bygones. The precedent would be awful. The perpetrators of what amounts to a several years long attempt at a frameup have to be made to think they will be caught and cannot get away with it.
And yet, as Richard Fernandez says in his post that I quoted at the outset, an investigation of the investigators could help to destroy the peaceful transition process that America has seemingly enjoyed till 2016. But it was the previous administration that actually destroyed it, and we can’t pretend that didn’t happen.
I wrote all of the above before reading this article by Roger Kimball. An excerpt from it:
I think my friend Karl Rove is a very smart man. But I dissent categorically from his judgment a couple of days ago that the president ought not to “obsess” over the “origins” of the investigation because that was not an effective strategy to win over swing voters. Rove said Trump should let bygones be bygones and “move on.”
On the contrary, the president, to the unalloyed delighted of the crowd, made it clear last night that “moving on” was not part of his agenda. Or, to put it more accurately, move on he would, but not without making sure that those who weaponized the intelligence resources of the United States against him (and, more to the point, against them) were called to account. This is not a matter of vengeance. It is a matter of preserving the central core of our democratic republic, which turns on the integrity of our elections.
As I have said on many occasions, the whole Russia-collusion narrative represents the biggest political scandal in our history. Why? Because a cabal of officials in the Obama Administration, aided at every turn by a hysterical media, decided that the candidacy and then the election of Donald Trump was not to their taste. They used every expedient to challenge his campaign and then to attack his presidency. Senior officials in the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Department of State decided that they had a “higher loyalty” than their loyalty to the Constitution. The people may have spoken on November 8, 2016. But they made the wrong choice. Therefore it was incumbent upon people like James Comey to correct the mistake. They would lie under oath and leak classified material to the press to damage President and people close to him. Perhaps most stunning, they would employ a legal instrument designed to be used against suspected foreign terrorists and repurpose it to open a conduit into Donald Trump’s campaign and then into his administration.
The whole Russia-collusion fantasy, of which the Mueller investigation was only the desperate centerpiece, has cost the taxpayers untold millions ($30-$40 million for the Mueller investigation alone), it has destroyed the lives and careers of several people whose only “crime” was to have been in the orbit of Donald Trump, and it has gravely damaged public faith in the impartiality of our intelligence and security institutions to say nothing of what public faith remained about the media. It is imperative that people like John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey are made to understand—and that the public can see that they have been made to understand—that the heads of the FBI or the CIA or the Office of National Intelligence do not have a veto over who gets to be the president of the United States.
The Resistance tried to kill the king. They may not like the king—you may not like the king, either—but that’s not the point. The effort cannot be allowed to stand, and it must be driven home to the American people what actually happened and what the dangers are. And we certainly can’t count on the MSM to do that, since they were in on the conspiracy.
That’s not tinfoil hat territory. That’s just the way it was and the way it is.
[NOTE: I’m starting to experiment with using tags for post content as well as the usual categories.]
These car police will be inside your car:
…[P]oliticians…want to limit your car’s engine power to make sure you don’t break the speed limit while robots determine whether you’re fit to drive in the first place. At least that’s the proposed plan in Europe starting in May, 2022.
Backed by Members of the European Parliament, the European Transport and Safety Council says its new mandatory systems “will reduce collisions by 30 percent and save 25,000 lives within 15 years of being introduced.” And so just days after Volvo announced it will introduce driver-facing cameras and limit all its cars to 112 mph, the EU followed up with its own Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) system. Which includes:
—GPS and/or traffic sign recognition to determine the speed limit of the road, with your car adjusting its engine power accordingly. Granted, the ETSC says that initially, the system will switch off once you floor the gas, mostly “to aid public acceptance at introduction.”
—Data loggers. When, where, how fast. And the data available to whom?
—Advanced autonomous emergency braking and lane keep assist.
—Reversing cameras.
—Camera-based driver fatigue detection.
—Alcohol interlock installation facilitation. A breathalyzer?
—Emergency stop signal.As EVO points out, pressing the pedal to floor won’t get rid of your new nannies. The ETSC says that “if the driver continues to drive above the speed limit for several seconds, the system should sound a warning for a few seconds and display a visual warning until the vehicle is operating at or below the speed limit again.” Beep-beep. Beep-beep-beep-beep!
Some of these features I have no problem with, such as camera-based driver fatigue detection (I believe that’s a beep that goes off if your car drifts unduly or if your head drops an unusual amount). Others seem more like the step-by-step injection of more and more control by an ever-escalating nanny state bent on curbing your freedom in order to protect you.
Now, I’ve never felt the need to drive at a speed beyond 112 mph or anywhere even remotely near that figure. But I am made very uneasy by a car that won’t let me because of legislation that degrees cars have systems such as the one described. And there is no reason to believe it will remain at the 112 level, or that more and more of these government-imposed won’t curbs be placed upon anything that smacks of liberty.
The bottom line for all of this is the question of how much risk we want to assume and who we want to be in control of that. I’ve learned over the years that people differ very much in the degree of their desire for liberty and the value they place on it. In general, Americans have long placed a higher value on liberty than Europeans do, but I fear that is changing.
There are many reasons prosecutors might drop a case (or decline to go to trial), but as the Illinois prosecutors’ statement made clear, the Smollett case does not partake of the usual reasons and it was not handled in the usual way.
The case was not weak. The perp was not even forced to accept or admit any kind of guilt whatsoever. There was no probation. The community service was a joke. None of the ordinary procedures for settling rather than prosecuting were followed.
We can speculate on the reasons for this, but the leading one is that due to pressure the fix (not the Foxx) was in. One thing that seems crystal clear is that there was nothing weak about the case. Even Kim Foxx admitted as much [emphasis added]:
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx on Wednesday defended her office’s decision to drop all charges against “Empire” star Jussie Smollett but said prosecutors had enough evidence to convict the actor of faking a hate-crime attack on himself.
Foxx began a string of interviews with local media, as Smollett’s lawyers took to the airwaves to declare Smollett’s innocence following an unusual, hastily called hearing Tuesday at which prosecutors dropped 16 felony counts tied to the alleged hoax attack.
Foxx said that the deal, which essentially wipes Smollett’s record clear, was not a sign that the prosecution case was weak or that Smollett was innocent, and said similar low-level felony defendants are cut the same breaks.
“The notion that this somehow exonerates him or that the prosecutors somehow believed he was innocent is very frustrating to [my] idea of alternative prosecution,” a hoarse-voiced Foxx said late Wednesday in an interview with The Chicago Sun-Times. “But I understand that [Smollett’s lawyers] have a client, and they have a spin.”
Foxx, who recused herself from the case just over a week before Smollett was charged because of conversations she’d had with a relative of the actor, pointed to the $10,000 bond that Smollett turned over to the city of Chicago, a sum equivalent to the maximum fine for the disorderly conduct charges he faced. The prosecutor, who took office in 2016 after campaigning on a reform platform, said she believed the evidence against Smollett would have convinced a judge or jury to find him guilty.
“I believe based on the information that was presented before the grand jury, based on what I’ve seen, the office had a strong case … that would have convinced a trier of fact,” she said.
But the way it was handled allows the shameless self-promotor Jussie Smollett to proclaim his innocence and to make further accusations against the Chicago police.
Then there’s the question—and it’s a more general one that isn’t just about the Smollett case—of using the testimony of one (or more) of the alleged perpetrators against another of the alleged perpetrators, and/or the use of jailhouse snitches. Those practices are commonplace and always somewhat suspect, but that’s what a trial is about. In general, my rule of thumb is that if the snitch’s statement are unsupported by any other evidence they are far more suspect than if they are. Criminal law would be paralyzed if such statements were not allowed, but a judge or jury looks at the entire picture, including the corroborating evidence.
In the Smollett case, there was plenty of it. There was also the absurdity of Smollet’s original fact situation as he described it, as well as his shifting story.
I haven’t seen any polls on what percentage of the public believes Smollett and what percentage thinks he’s guilty, but my sense is that very few people believe he’s innocent at this point.
The Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association has some words for Kim Foxx, her office, and you:
The Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association serves as the voice for nearly 1,000 front line prosecutors across the State who work tirelessly towards the pursuit of justice. The events of the past few days regarding the Cook County State’s Attorney’s handling of the Jussie Smollett case is not condoned by the IPBA, nor is it representative of the honest ethical work prosecutors provide to the citizens of the State of Illinois on a daily basis.
The manner in which this case was dismissed was abnormal and unfamiliar to those who practice law in criminal courthouses across the State. Prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges alike do not recognize the arrangement Mr. Smollett received. Even more problematic, the State’s Attorney and her representatives have fundamentally misled the public on the law and circumstances surrounding the dismissal.
When an elected State’s Attorney recuses herself from a prosecution, Illinois law provides that the court shall appoint a special prosecutor. See 55 ILCS 5/3-9008(a-15). Typically, the special prosecutor is a neighboring State’s Attorney, the Attorney General, or the State Appellate Prosecutor. Here, the State’s Attorney kept the case within her office and thus never actually recused herself as a matter of law.
Additionally, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office falsely informed the public that the uncontested sealing of the criminal court case was “mandatory” under Illinois law. This statement is not accurate…
The appearance of impropriety here is compounded by the fact that this case was not on the regularly scheduled court call, the public had no reasonable notice or opportunity to view these proceedings, and the dismissal was done abruptly at what has been called an “emergency” hearing…
Lastly, the State’s Attorney has claimed this arrangement is “available to all defendants” and “not a new or unusual practice.” There has even been an implication it was done in accordance with a statutory diversion program. These statements are plainly misleading and inaccurate. This action was highly unusual, not a statutory diversion program, and not in accordance with well accepted practices of State’s Attorney initiated diversionary programs….
They must think that the prosecution’s actions regarding Smollet make them all look crooked. It seems that the Smollett case has made everyone mad except Smollet himself, his family, and the spokespeople at “Empire.”
[Hat tip: commenter Bryan Lovely.]
Some interesting background on the history of Brexit:
It was at 6:22 a.m. on June 24, 2016 — 59 minutes before the official tally was unveiled — that the European Council sent its first “lines to take” to the national governments that make up the EU.
The United Kingdom was leaving the European Union and Brussels was determined to seize control of the process.
In the short five-paragraph document written by Council President Donald Tusk’s chief of staff, Piotr Serafin, and circulated among EU ambassadors, the bloc’s remaining 27 national governments were urged to speak with one voice and to insist that the U.K. leave through the Article 50 process set down in EU law.
This meant settling the divorce first and the future relationship second, once the U.K. had left. “In the future we hope to have the U.K. as a close partner of the EU,” the document read. “First we need to agree the arrangements for the withdrawal.”
This was crucial. It ran counter to declarations by the U.K.’s victorious Vote Leave campaign not to be bound by the formal exit procedure. If the U.K. agreed to the terms of its departure before its future relationship was settled, the Brexit campaigners had argued, it would deprive itself of much of its leverage.
Joining the EU is a dangerous proposition. Brussels and the member states as a whole take control to a certain extent, and each individual country (and its people) loses autonomy. Divorce becomes very very difficult, and that is by design.
It reminds me of the lyrics to “Hotel California,” in particular the last verse:
Mirrors on the ceiling
The pink champagne on ice
And she said: “We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device”
And in the master’s chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave!”
I ordinarily get my news by reading. That’s not just a result of the internet or of my political change; it’s something that’s always been true of me. I’ve always found TV news to be too shallow, and I prefer reading in general anyway.
What’s even more curious was that I have always had a certain dyslexia for news personalities. Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley were practically the only TV newspeople I could have identified in my youth, and I couldn’t have told you what network any of them were on. And that was back in the days when it was quite a simple thing to do, because there were really only three choices: ABC, NBC, and CBS. But that tells you how little I cared about network news.
These days, with the proliferation of stations as well as the swelling of coverage hours to fit an all-news-all-the-time cycle, it’s even more complicated and difficult to know all the personalities, but I don’t make much of an effort.
All that of that is a lead-in to the fact that, during the Trump administration and the years of Russiagate coverage, I haven’t watched much TV news at all. Therefore I saw only a smidgen of the constant barrage of over-the-top accusations on stations such as MSNBC (Rachel Maddow in particular) or CNN.
Oh, I read quite a bit about the sensationalist TV news coverage itself, and sometimes I watched a small video clip. But I certainly had no desire to follow the TV news in real time because the little I did see made me cringe. I left it to others for the most part to cover the TV coverage.
It turns out that it was even worse—even more vicious and unremitting and mendacious—than I’d thought, and I’d already thought it contained plenty of all those ingredients.
And it also turns out that the coverage by some of these stations is one of the main reasons that viewers have been so completely gobsmacked by the findings of the Mueller report. Again, that’s something I expected to happen, but the extent and depth of it has somewhat surprised me.
It was fun for the MSM while it lasted. And it swelled their ratings to a phenomenal extent. They are now trying pivot to other related aspects of Trump’s supposed perfidy, and are refusing (as far as I can tell) to acknowledge any wrongdoing or error on their part that isn’t somehow Trump’s and/or the Republicans’ fault. I wonder if the newspeople even can admit error to themselves. I doubt it.
If you’ve read my change story you’re aware that a great deal of it was fueled by my late-in-the-game perception that the MSM had been lying to me for a long long time. Once a person realizes that, there’s usually no turning back. The trust is broken and that’s that, and the person is open to reading (or viewing) other things and other news sources with a critical and skeptical eye and evaluating each story on its own merits.
I wonder whether the MSM ever thought their coverage ultimately ran the risk of losing them viewers. I also wonder whether they believed their own tales that the Mueller report was bound to find that Trump had colluded with Russia. Ordinarily I think they’re well aware of when they are lying, but in this particular instance my guess is that a lot of them actually believed these particular lies. Wishful thinking played some part in it, and of course the collusion story drove ratings. But I think the press, or at least some significant percentage of people in the press, believed their informants who, after all, were supposedly privy to inside information on this matter.
Adam Schiff, for example, was lying through his teeth, brazenly and with a straight face and with full knowledge of the falsehood of what he was saying because there was nothing in the briefings that backs up his stories. I am sure there were other people like Schiff feeding the press scoops; he was just the most visible and vocal one of them dishing the dirt. And no doubt there were “authorities” in the FBI or the DOJ or people with close connections to those institutions who were also blabbing to the press and feeding them outright lies in order to sway the public.
If so, then many people in the press might be feeling somewhat duped and betrayed as well. Of course, they won’t let it stop them from going on and on and on this way. But over time it may make it harder for them to trust their sources and report with conviction on what they’re being told.
[ADDENDUM: Ace points out that, even now, no one in the MSM seems to be calling Schiff a liar. That does indicate that most of them probably knew he was lying all along, which certainly would not surprise me although I’m not totally sure it’s the case. It’s possible, for example, that they can’t accuse Schiff of lying now, even though they didn’t know it at the time, because (a) it would make them look like fools and dupes, and (b) it would help the right too much.
This is the old “knaves vs. fools” question, and as usual, you can’t go wrong if you answer “both.”]
Many many decades ago I read about the rare people who don’t feel pain, and learned that it’s a dangerous condition. They tend to hurt themselves and not be aware of it, so they can be in a lot of trouble and not know it. It seems that pain has a very clear function, although sometimes it can keep giving us the signal long after the danger is passed, and lead to the horror of chronic pain.
Here’s an article about a woman who at 71 has never felt pain in her entire life. The genetic mutation she has that causes this is a newly-discovered one, and doctors are studying it to learn if there’s anything about it they can apply to the rest of us who feel pain. One of the most curious aspects of her particular situation is that, although she does injure herself quite a bit (I first wrote “hurt herself” rather than “injure herself,” but then I changed it because the word “hurt” didn’t seem quite right), she heals pretty quickly and ordinarily without scars. Another is that she has literally never felt anxious, and doctors believe this might be physiologically caused.
It would seem to be a wonderful thing to not be able to feel pain. But many years ago, when I was quite young, I read that lepers used to sometimes lose digits in their extremities not because the disease made their fingers or toes fall off, but because they lost sensation there and didn’t know they were injuring themselves. Just now I wondered whether this was some myth I’d heard, or whether it was actually the case, and I found this:
Leprosy attacks the nerves in the cooler parts of the body, particularly those that relate to the hands, feet and face. The result is a loss of sensation in these areas meaning a person is at much greater risk of injury as they cannot feel pain. A stone in a shoe may go unnoticed or a burn while cooking with the resulting injury and infection sometimes severe enough to cause the bone to ‘shorten’. The feet of a leprosy-affected person are prone to ulcers and, if not treated properly, can lead to amputation.
Pain may not seem like a friend, not by a longshot. But to a certain degree it is necessary and protective.
I imagine something similar is true for anxiety, which tells us to be wary of potential danger and to try to avoid it—although, like pain, anxiety can sometimes get out of hand.
The left has been in near-total control of the MSM for quite some time now. No doubt they thought that was a victory, and it certainly has given them some victories that I don’t think would have otherwise occurred if there had been an equal number of voices on the right in the MSM.
But the media can get control of the entire shebang, and if it isn’t competent at its propaganda—if it doesn’t pick and choose but is too flagrant in its willingness to lie for the good of the Party, if its lies are too easy to see as lies—then the entire enterprise can actually sabotage the Cause and result in the public’s distrusting it.
And then the public’s perception of the media can turn into something resembling the general perception of Pravda, widely considered by the Soviet public during the days of the USSR as being a ludicrous and mendacious government mouthpiece:
The miserable former citizens of the old Soviet Union had an expression – “There is no Pravda in Izvestiya and there is no Izvestiya in Pravda” – which, roughly translated, reads “There is no Truth in News and there is no News in Truth.” Pravda was the news organization of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and Izvestiya was the news organization of the Soviet government. Pravda is “Truth” in Russian and Izvestiya is “News.”
Of course, during the days when the Soviets had an especially ruthless and iron grip, it almost didn’t matter what the people thought. In a way, the more ludicrous Pravda was, the more it showed the people how little power they had to change anything, and represented their leaders’ laughing in their faces.
But—at least so far—Americans still retain relative amount of liberty. That may not last, but at present it could make a big big difference.
Years ago we thought that maybe the blogosphere would make a big enough difference, too. I think it has helped, but not nearly enough. And Twitter and Facebook have been dominated by the left, which has the goal of censoring the right, and they have also facilitated the leftist desire to organize mobs of SJWs to attack those people simpatico to them who are just not extreme enough to suit their fancy.
What’s happened to social media in the political sense is an example of Robert Conquest’s second law in action:
Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
And what’s happening to the press right now can be seen as an example of his third law:
The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
[ADDENDUM: I just saw this piece by Lee Smith in Tablet, entitled “System Fail: The Mueller Report is an unmitigated disaster for the American press and the ‘expert’ class that it promotes.” Here’s an excerpt:
The media criticism of the media’s performance covering Russiagate is misleadingly anodyne—OK, sure the press did a bad job, but to be fair there really was a lot of suspicious stuff going on and now let’s all get back to doing our important work. But two years of false and misleading Russiagate coverage was not a mistake, or a symptom of lax fact-checking.
Russiagate was an information operation from the beginning, in which dozens of individual reporters and institutions actively partnered with paid political operatives like Glenn Simpson and corrupt law enforcement and intelligence officials like former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and senior DOJ official Bruce Ohr to smear Trump and his circle, and then to topple him. None of what went on the last two years would have been possible without the press, an indispensable partner in the biggest political scandal in a generation.
The campaign was waged not in hidden corners of the internet, but rather by the country’s most prestigious news organizations—including, but not only, The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC. The farce that has passed for public discourse the last two years was fueled by a concerted effort of the media and the pundit class to obscure gaping holes in logic as well as law. And yet, they all appeared to be credible because the institutions sustaining them are credible.
My impulse is to say “you mean were credible.” And yet that would be a cheap shot by me. I personally know many many many intelligent people who still (at least until this moment) read one or both of those papers and/or watch one or both of those networks every day or close to it, and believe what they say (and will not under any circumstances watch or read sources on the right, ever). You might say that those people have closed minds. But they would say that they don’t want to waste time filling their heads with lies. Which of course is ironic, but the dilemma is that if a person doesn’t read the other side, the leftist mouthpieces can retain quite a bit of their luster.
Which probably is one of many reasons why the MSM cannot admit the magnitude of what it did with Russiagate. Its only hope is to spin, spin, spin and to hope its readers buy its spin on what happened, rather than blame the press.
But I’m wondering if the MSM’s Russiagate hype represents a bridge too far, even for loyal readers of the MSM. Smith certainly seems to think so, because he also writes that for the MSM, “Russiagate is an extinction level event.” Time will tell, I suppose.]
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