Poor little tyke, never be on The SCOTUS.
P
:Why Women Make Better Assassins
The CIA had an opening for an assassin. After all the background checks, interviews and testing were done, there were three finalists: two men and a woman.
For the final test, the CIA agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun.
"We must know that you will follow your instructions no matter what the circumstances. Inside the room you will find your wife sitting in a chair. Kill her."
The man said "You can't be serious. I could never shoot my wife".
The agent said, "Then you are not the right man for this job. Take your wife and go home".
The second man was given the same instructions. He took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about five minutes. The man came out with tears in his eyes, "I tried, but I can't kill my wife."
The agent said, "You don't have what it takes, so take your wife and go home "
Finally, it was the woman's turn. She was given the same instructions to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard one after another. They heard screaming, crashing, and banging on the walls. After a few minutes, all was quiet. The door opened slowly and there stood the woman, wiping sweat from her brow.
"The gun was loaded with blanks" she said. "I had to kill him with the chair."
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I understand why people embrace the Democrat Party.
It is human nature to embrace the familiar and to make excuses why it is an act of compassion,even when doing so is illogical. Furthermore, even though it is often an act of hypocrisy one can dismiss this inconsistency as well through the process of denial. The mind is capable of being manipulated and manipulating. Intending good is always acceptable regardless of the results.
A few simple examples:
Being able to ignore Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton ywhile attacking Trump.
Embracing socialism over capitalism and offering no evidence when historical facts are preponderant in proving socialism fails and causes untold misery.
Supporting illegal immigration yet professing adherence to the rule of law.
Believing there are free lunches and deficits do not matter because they are created on behalf of doing what is kind and makes one feel good.
Arguing that leading from weakness rather than strength is more successful when dealing with bullies.
More money is the solution to all problems, government knows best and creates solutions not problems.
A broken family makes for a stronger society.
Blacks are incapable of standing on their own two feet and need an affirmative hand out and welfare.
No one is responsible for their behaviour and all are entitled to be first because there should be no bottom.
It is wrong to demand identification when voting. Stuffing ballots is acceptable and should be engaged in when the opposition is untrustworthy and holds bad ideas.
If ideas offend, you have every right to thwart free speech. Intolerance is acceptable .
Attacking the media for false reporting is unpatriotic and treasonable like behaviour.
Justice should not be blind to what you believe.
In politics anything goes as long as you ultimately win.
Police are racists and men are sexists.
The Constitution is only a guide and should not be the basis for legal outcomes.
Equal outcomes is the goal and it is acceptable to ignore human capabilities.
Free entitlements extend to basically anything the majority wants and begins with education, health care and extends to abortions and birth control pills..
By now you should have a good idea what Democrats favor and you as well if you continue to vote for them. Naturally I would expect you would deny this is what Democrats stand for and you certainly do not believe your vote supports these ideas because you consider yourself rational and not hypocritical.
You probably believe I have overstated the case and have made Democrats appear extreme and Sanders and his ilk represent the future and the path to Nirvana.
Once again, all I can say is "bless your soul" and keep sticking pins in your hate Trump doll while continuing to drool over Obama's pearls of wisdom.
I understand why those who vote for Democrats do so. It makes them feel self-righteous because they are so caring, they want nothing but good for people, even if it means destroying and enslaving them. After all, as been said: "Hell is paved with good intentions." (See 1 below.)
CNN Threw Ocasio-Cortez an Easy Question. She Butchered It on National TV
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Two Rants! (See 2 below)
And:
More from Hanson. (See 2a below.)
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The genesis of any prospective loss Republicans endure in the mid-year election are not of recent vintage. It has to do with their failure on health care - thank you McCain and Ryan, and an entire list of failed legislative executions and dumb things they have been doing all along including their inability to come up with a concerted, cohesive message the entire party should be delivering.
They are unwilling to speak as one because they obviously prefer their independence and thus, losing. Apparently Republicans believe in unity there is weakness.
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Dick
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1) What Democrats Have Become
By Daniel Henninger
Brett Kavanaugh is a casualty of an anything-goes political resistance.
It is still true: What begins as tragedy can end as farce. So it is with the case of Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when she was 15 and he was 17.
As of the most recent available moment in this episode, Ms. Ford’s lawyer said her client would not appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee until there is a “full investigation by law-enforcement officials.” Like the Mueller excavations, that could run to the horizon, unable to find anything but unwilling to stop until it finds something.
Let us posit that the one thing not at issue here is the truth. As a matter of law and fact, Ms. Ford’s accusation can be neither proved nor disproved. This is as obvious now as it must have been when Dianne Feinstein and the other Democrats came into possession of this incident.
Surely someone pointed out that based on what was disclosed, this accusation could not be substantiated. To which the Democrats responded: So what? Its political value is that it cannot be disproved. They saw that six weeks before a crucial midterm election, the unresolvable case of Christine Blasey Ford would sit like a stalled hurricane over the entire Republican Party, drowning its candidates in a force they could not stop.
In #MeToo, which began in the predations of Harvey Weinstein, Democrats and progressives finally have found a weapon against which there seems to be no defense. It can be used to exterminate political enemies. If one unprovable accusation doesn’t suffice, why not produce a second, or third? It’s a limitless standard.
The Democrats’ broader strategy is: Delay the vote past the election; win the Senate by convincing suburban women that Republicans are implacably hostile to them; seize power; and—the point of it all—take down the Trump government.
This is the “resistance.” This is what Democrats have become. Resistance is a word and strategy normally found in a revolutionary context, which is precisely the argument made by the left to justify its actions against this presidency since the evening of Nov. 8, 2016. Anything goes. Whatever it takes. Brett Kavanaugh is not much more than a casualty of war.
Rather than try to argue or win public issues on substance, the Democrats have become a party that seems to think it can win with muscle alone. Environmentalism emerged in the 1970s as a worthwhile idea that attracted the interest and support of both parties. From Al Gore onward, it became a bludgeon to beat up the other party. Now sexual abuse, an issue originating in utmost seriousness, has been quickly captured and fashioned into a political weapon by the Democratic left.
Politics as trench warfare has relieved the Democrats of the burden of thought. Extending the Pelosi Rule—we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it—we now have the Gillibrand Standard.
Commenting this week on Ford v. Kavanaugh, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, another 2020 presidential aspirant, said, “I believe it is disqualifying, given what we know.” In other words, what she believes is based on next to nothing.
Put on defense by these accusations, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley unsurprisingly agreed to a hearing in which Ms. Ford would tell her story and Judge Kavanaugh would speak. Then the senators would vote.
Consider the spectacle: Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court, the embodiment of a modern rule of law, is being decided in the Senate by the medieval practice of trial by ordeal, such as surviving immersion in fire or ice. Trial by ordeal was outlawed by the Lateran Council in 1215.
Or worse, the standards of the mob in the Roman Colosseum, turning thumbs up or down on the combatants. Though unlike the Senate Democrats, the Roman mob at least had an open mind.
Incidentally, the standard trope that Donald Trump has degraded our politics? We don’t need to hear that anymore. Or about the moral certitudes of the religious right.
Is there a sadder figure in the modern Democratic Party than Sen. Dianne Feinstein? Elected to the Senate in 1992, Mrs. Feinstein has produced a creditable career. Her above-it-all reputation was never quite deserved, but she has at least performed with dignity.
Now, seeking re-election at 85, she is getting heat from the progressive-dominated Democratic Party in California, the world capital of identity-only politics. By withholding from the committee the accusatory Ford letter that came into her possession nearly two months ago, Sen. Feinstein ensured the nomination’s descent into such a hapless, cynical moment. This will be the most remembered event in Sen. Feinstein’s career.
The Kavanaugh nomination, “given what we know,” has come down to an undiscoverable accusation. The defeat of a Supreme Court nominee on this basis would be a victory for a level of conscious political nullification not seen in the U.S. for a long time. Republicans in the Senate shouldn’t allow it, and voters in November should not affirm it.
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Corporate earnings continue to grow at record rates, and cash flow to companies bottom line is increasing rapidly. All of this is very good because now they can spend it on new technology which increases productivity, which is the key to keeping inflation in reasonable bounds. It also means there is cash to expand to meet new consumer demand, and that means expansion and upgrading of factories, warehouses, and other distribution and sales facilities. It allows hotel companies to do renovations, and other service providers to also do upgrades. All of this is capital expenditure, which is good for keeping GDP growth moving ahead. Increased capex, combined with increased productivity and increased compensation, are what translate into increased spending, which means GDP growth without inflation getting out of control and causing interest rates to increase too fast. The issue will be, can the federal and state budgets be cut, and will there be entitlement reform and infrastructure spending to support this GDP growth. There are already several states experiencing surpluses due to increased tax collections due to the tax reform and increased corporate profits. We need all of this to happen to sustain the economic growth. This is why the election in November is critical. If the Dems get control of the House, then getting deficit reduction will be impossible, and that will potentially disrupt the entire economic track we are on. That is not a political statement, it is fact. The Dems are publicly stating as policy to increase entitlement spending and raise taxes. There would be zero chance of entitlement reform, and spending reduction, which is the key to resolving the deficit.
For investors in stocks, we are on a roll. Indexes are up 335% since the election, and that is an average of 14.3% annualized growth in value. Over the past 3 years, the S&P is up 16.3% annualized. There is nothing imminent, nor forecast, that will knock this off track, at least for the next year, and maybe much longer. While the stimulus impact of tax cuts will wane, the huge growth in corporate profits has already covered tax reductions on corporations and will contribute to covering a portion of the individual tax cuts. The continued growth in profits and productivity gains should continue to generate more wage increases and more capex spending, once tariffs are mostly resolved. The issue will be the election and its impact on being able to continue to pass laws that are beneficial to economic growth.
For real estate, values have leveled, and in some cases like hotels, they are likely to decline. The issue is not that real estate is not a very good investment, but that occupancies are already very low in most markets, and rents are at levels where there is not much upside until existing long term leases roll over. Inflation is relatively low, so rent increases are going to remain low from here on in most cases. Financing is still relatively reasonable, so the old game of refinancing at excessive leverage levels is harder, but not impossible to achieve in the non-bank lender market. This is not to say real estate is not a good investment, but it does say that if you believe the GDP growth with limited inflation will continue for another year or more, then you will get better, higher risk returns in the US stock market than in real estate. If you want balance, and will accept lower, but materially lower risk returns, then good real estate is worth an allocation of investable assets. Construction loans remain hard to get, so supply will remain in check for several more years in most types of real estate, other than possibly multifamily, where excess supply has begun to have an impact in a few markets like Manhattan.
With the 10 year at 3.0%, or there about, loan pricing is still low on a historical basis. The ten year swaps are the index for a large portion of loans, and that rate is well below the more traditional 5%-6% level we experienced over many periods. Spreads remain very reasonable, so the effective cost of capital for real estate and other loans remains relatively low. If the deal does not work well at today’s effective borrowing rates, don’t do the deal.
The Dems demand for an FBI investigation is nothing but false innuendo delay tactics. What is it the FBI is supposed to investigate? The facts: she does not recall where the incident occurred, whose house it was at, nor when, nor who was in the house, nor how she got there, or how or when she departed. There is no place or time to investigate. She said nothing to anyone for 30 years, so there are no corroborating witnesses. She told the counselor there were 4 people, and now she says the counselor’s contemporaneous notes are inaccurate, that there were only 2, so he is not a credible witness by her own statement. The only two other supposed witnesses, Kavanaugh and Judge, say it never happened, and they have no information to provide since they say it never happened. There is no surveillance footage, no sign in records to the house, no record of any sort that that anyone was present at whatever unidentified house at some unknown date. Kavanaugh has been thoroughly vetted 6 times by the FBI already, and found nothing of this nature. 65 women, some of whom dated him in high school, say it is inconceivable he did this. So what is the FBI supposed to investigate on a 36 year old claim that is uncorroborated and uninvestigable in any fashion, where 65 women have provided written confirmation this is not him. She has said the only possible corroboration- the conversation with the counselor, is inaccurate. Her words. In any event, the statute of limitations ran out years ago. Feinstein should have referred this to the FBI in July when she received it, but she said nothing for 2.5 months, and now she says she cannot be sure of its accuracy. She has still not given Grassley the original letter. If this were not the politically charged situation, and the Me Too movement, it would all be dismissed out of hand as not credible, involving teenagers, and too old to matter. It would be laughed at. Instead, the Dems and the media are trying to create a false crisis to stop the confirmation. It may be the lowest point in DC disgusting behavior.
And:
2a) The New Refuge of Scoundrels By Victor Davis Hanson
Anonymity has never become more disreputable—and legitimized. An unidentified source is the new American means that is to be justified by noble progressive ends, often in the context of somehow delegitimizing Donald J. Trump and anyone or anything remotely connected to him.
The op-ed appeared conveniently as a would-be force multiplier of advance copy excerpts of Bob Woodward’s new tell-all Fear, circulating among journalists and reviewers. Fear is yet another Woodward exposé that reviewers say makes the identical argument as does Anonymous: so chaotic and disruptive is the landscape within the Trump Administration that the ensuing climate of fear naturally begs for some sort of deep-state intervention (as in the removal of an elected president).
Anonymity has also become the impediment to ending the entire Russia-Trump collusion mythology. Almost every document that is so painstakingly obtained from a Justice Department or FBI archive appears so heavily redacted as to be worthless. Miscreants are not identified by name, but instead by letters or numbers. The point of redaction is to disconnect the deep-state messenger from the incriminating message.
And:
It is impossible to predict where the China situation goes from here. As someone who has had business dealings with, and been in meetings in China, I can tell you, never trust them. They lie and cheat on everything. It is their culture. Even the Chinese do not trust each other. They have broken many of the rules of the WTO, and every western nation has admitted that letting China into the WTO to get them to comply with business norms has failed badly. It is now very likely Japan and the EU will back the Trump play to push China, and the WTO revisions. That will take many months. It goes to the core of the policies of Xi to build 10 industries by 2025 where China is the world leader, and his way to get there, unspoken, is to steal the technology to leap ahead. Reality is, China continues to slide economically. China continues to cheat a lot on the N Korea sanctions making them virtually ineffective. China continues to burden other Asian nations with crushing debt for the Silk Road infrastructure to make them beholden to China, and to let China be able to pressure them because they cannot repay the loans. Whether Trump should have waited until the meeting set for next week, or if he did the right thing putting on tariffs now, is an open question, but the Chinese were unlikely to be ready to fold next week, so maybe the added tariffs and pressure was the right move. Their stock market is down badly and going lower. Their economy will slow further now. The next few weeks and months are going to be ugly, so volatility in the markets is highly likely.
Emerging economies will be slammed by this. China will slow further, so purchases of commodities will slow, making a very bad situation worse with these currencies down and the countries unable to repay US dollar denominated debts. It is all going to get worse before it gets better so hang on to your safety belt. US stocks and bonds are the one safe place left. Anything else is a risk not worth taking.
One of the realities of storms like Florence is they do not really negatively impact GDP outside of the affected area. I have reviewed the Moodys Analytics data on mass storms for the past decades, and the negative impact is simply not nearly what you might expect. Keep in mind there is tens of billions of fiscal stimulus from insurance coverage, FEMA funds and added funds from Congress which will be forthcoming. This offsets the losses, and stimulates massive new spending in the affected markets. Think Home Depot, Lowes, companies who supply electric cable or road paving companies, hotels, Serve Pro, and many more. Big storms in a limited geographic area like this do not materially dent GDP. Q3 will still be excellent. The risk is the Dems winning the House in November and tying up budgets, and judgeships, and other key reforms. Get out and vote if you like making money in your business and the market.
The actions of the Dems in the Senate on Kavanaugh have now reached a level that is beneath disgraceful. It is a set up. Keep in mind the following: Women who have been his friends since high school, who were there when the accuser was in school, and who dated him, say this is a lie, the accuser admitted she did not recall where the house was nor who was in the house, she cannot be certain it was Kavanaugh, she took a lie detector test in August when she was saying she never wanted this to be made public???, lie detector tests are not permitted in court because courts ruled they are invalid. 65 women who have known him since childhood or professionally for years, (on Monday several of these women were threatened with retaliation if they went public about his innocence), plus numerous men of high stature, who worked with him, have stated publicly this is not possible to be true, not a single other person has come forward to corroborate her story, nor any suggestion he is a creep, and the guy she says was there, claims it is a total lie, every person who has known him for years says he is as upstanding and supportive of women as anyone they have known, Feinstein sat on this for 6 weeks and never mentioned it until the last second, but she is in a tight race against a far left candidate in CA and needs to look leftwing, the accuser is a professor in CA, the Dems have publicly stated they have been trying since the start to derail and delay the nomination any way they could. This is a set up to delay the nomination in the hope that the Dems win in November and can stop it altogether. The Dems lied and were grandstanding (Booker) at the hearings, and falsely edited videos (Harris) of his testimony. They will do anything to stop Kavanaugh, and lying and misstating by the Dems has already happened. The media are only too happy to pile on with absurd stories and innuendo. How do you prove a negative. What sort of government process do we have where any snake can crawl out from under a rock, make an unsubstantiated accusation at the last second, and disrupt what should be a solemn process. The far left is claiming he is lying about this incident, and that points to his supposed lies about when he was working in the White House. They have proven nothing. It is all innuendo and twisting of facts into conspiracy theories. It is clear the Dems intentionally sat on this until the bitter end when they realized he was going to be easily confirmed despite their best attempts and lies to stop him.
If anyone looked into what I did at that age, cruising the main in Hackensack with my best friend, to find girls who would go to the drive in with us, then I would be in jail by these standards. Kavanaugh is only guilty of being a dweeb and wienie so far as everyone who knows him can tell. Apparently he never did many of the things I, and most all of my friends, and probably you did at that age with girls. That is what 17 year old boys did back then. If we are to judge everyone by what they did as teenagers, then we should just pack in the government and businesses, and all go home. Nobody in their right mind will ever want to serve unless they are Dems like Bill Clinton and the deputy chair of the DNC who apparently did really commit improper acts, but the Dems are ignoring that, and they idolize Bill Clinton who was plainly guilty. Anita Hill is being revisited. They pulled out the exact same playbook and same script. I find this whole thing appalling to a degree that is hard to describe. I am certain the Dems will demand an FBI investigation after Monday just to try to waste more time, and claim he did not prove his innocence, so they will demand months more delay hoping they win control of the senate. Grassley and McConnell better say no, and there needs to be a confirmation vote late next week on the floor. This is the Supreme Court they are playing outrageous and false political games with. The one rock solid thing left in DC, besides the military, we thought. It is sickening. I have almost always been very calm and unemotional about the Rant, despite what some might think, but this one has upset me more than anything. It shows the depth of slime the whole process has sunk to in DC.
2a) The New Refuge of Scoundrels By Victor Davis Hanson
Just when observers had concluded the desperate progressive opposition to Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court could not stoop much lower, it most certainly did.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), in the news recently for somehow unknowingly employing a Chinese spy as her gofer and chauffeur for 20 years, passed on information to federal investigators that weeks ago had come to her attention from an unnamed, unidentified, and anonymous female who claimed she was a high school acquaintance of Kavanaugh’s. Apparently, we were to believe that the once-anonymous informant had harbored a long-simmering, but heretofore never-voiced complaint of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, which coincidentally reached a peak of unsustainable resentment at the time of his nomination to the highest court in the land.
After days of gossip and innuendo to the effect that the likely next Supreme Court Justice might just be some sort of pervert, Anonymous finally came forward and identified herself as a victim of a then 17-year-old inebriated Brett Kavanaugh who (she says) sexually manhandled her in 1982 when she was 15. More specifically, the woman now alleges that Kavanaugh and another student at a high-school party entered a room inebriated, pinned her to a bed, and then groped her while she was clothed. Young Kavanaugh then allegedly attempted to take her clothes off her while he and his classmate, Mark Judge, both laughed “maniacally.” She adds that she had sought “medical treatment” for her unspecified injuries.
Anonymous identified herself in the Washington Post on Sunday as Christine Blasey Ford, a registered Democrat, Bernie Sanders supporter, and psychology professor at Palo Alto University, who otherwise had no recollection exactly where or when the supposed assault occurred some 36 years ago. Nor did she offer any clear reason why she had never then, or in the more than three decades since, contacted authorities to report the purported assault, other than claiming in 2012 that the incident then 30 years earlier still troubled her and contributed to her own sense of unease.
Or as Ford explained her sudden self-unmasking over the weekend: “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.” A cynic might suggest that anonymity was useful in the 11th-hour smearing of Kavanaugh, but had proved not quite enough to derail his nomination, and so the fallback and default position of identification followed.
Ford was wise finally to come forward, given that the ability of the defendant now to face his accuser is a fundamental tenet of Western jurisprudence, as are canons such as statutes of limitations and hearsay. And just as Kavanaugh has labored for days under terrifying smears of Anonymous’s charges, so, too, will Ford have to prove to the court of public opinion that her narrative is believable, and neither timed nor crafted for the higher progressive objective of destroying a conservative Republican Supreme Court nominee.
Feinstein, in raising these initially anonymous allegations, was trafficking in the world of the English Star Chamber Court, the Inquisition, and the whispers and initial innuendos that prompted the hysteria of the Salem witch trials. Or rather she had a finger in the wind: if the 36-year-old charges created an Anita Hill-like hysteria, Feinstein was to be seen as heroic and on the barricades of the #NeverKavanaugh resistance. But even if her charge proved absurd, then she could have retreated into something like “Just Sayin’.”
So Feinstein saw no downside in releasing the initially anonymous sourced charge just after the formal hearings on Kavanaugh had concluded, in hopes that the smear could not be answered by cross-examining senators, but might gin up pressure on senators nonetheless to change their votes.
When the gambit backfired, Anonymous then—and only then—stepped forward to press her charges. What is left unsaid is that we will no longer have a free country or enjoy civil liberties and the safety of a Bill of Rights, if any American, at any time, can be ruined by an allegation of unproven sexual assault of some 36 years past, when the accused was a 17-year-old teenager, by an accuser who initially trafficked anonymously in such allegations, came forward only as part of a wider, more intensified and collective last-ditch effort to destroy the reputation of the accused, and yet has no clear memory of exactly where she was at 15, or the approximate date, when she claims that she was assaulted, or why she made no such accusation for 30 years—or when she raised the issue some six years ago privately during counseling, why her therapist’s notes of such revelations do not now match her current version of the incident.
Most would assume that when Blasey Ford wrote in her allegation, “I have received medical treatment regarding the assault,” she would produce proof of a confirmable visit to an emergency room or doctor fairly soon after the alleged attack—not subsequently refer to a couples therapy session 30 years later, during which the therapist took notes that now do not, six additional years later, synchronize with the current allegations.
Bad Faith Publishing at the New York Times
Anonymity has never become more disreputable—and legitimized. An unidentified source is the new American means that is to be justified by noble progressive ends, often in the context of somehow delegitimizing Donald J. Trump and anyone or anything remotely connected to him.
Newspapers rarely print anonymous op-eds. And when they do, the themes are matters of policy or ideology, not self-righteous confessions of stealth and supposedly justified conspiracies against the president in the final weeks before a midterm election. Yet on September 5, the New York Times published an unsigned confessional from one of many supposed “senior officials” who all are said to be members of #TheResistance. These disloyal insiders, we are told, are doing all they can to subvert the operations of the Trump Administration and, in their warped view, see these actions as the embodiment of some kind of patriotism.
Both the Times and the unknown author of the accusations believe that anonymity is justified because of the extraordinary danger that Trump is said to pose to the American commonwealth.
In reality, both parties more cynically assume that anonymity precludes all discussions of verification. What Ben Rhodes once cynically called the “echo chamber” and what President Trump refers to as “fake news” are supposed to have earned our automatic trust. They have not.
We have no idea whether the Times is acting in good faith and publishing verbatim the insider’s account, or whether it solicited the op-ed, or whether the op-ed was edited or massaged by theTimes—given that we have no ability to question the author, much less to see any supporting documents or corroborating testimonials. Moreover, the Times just published a fake news accountthat United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley was ordering extravagant drapes for her office (actually ordered during the Obama Administration). Its veracity continues to erode.
Far more important, the anonymous op-ed makes sweeping, even subversive, assertions that many like the author in the administration may well be breaking federal law by deliberately not carrying out, or indeed actively obstructing, administrative or legal orders. But ascertaining the truth of such charges is not the objective of the Times’s gambit. Instead, speculation, gossip, rumor, and “fear” are—as pundits grow feverish in their claims that the ogre Trump forced professionals of such rare virtue bravely to come forward.
Bob Woodward’s Games of Anonymity
The op-ed appeared conveniently as a would-be force multiplier of advance copy excerpts of Bob Woodward’s new tell-all Fear, circulating among journalists and reviewers. Fear is yet another Woodward exposé that reviewers say makes the identical argument as does Anonymous: so chaotic and disruptive is the landscape within the Trump Administration that the ensuing climate of fear naturally begs for some sort of deep-state intervention (as in the removal of an elected president).
There is no need to rehash four decades of commentary on Woodward’s journalistic methodology of using unnamed sources to “reconstruct” dialogues and conversations, replete with quotation marks. Generations of critics have warned that his muckraking cannot be verified and often cannot be fully accurate or even true.
When both observers and participants question the veracity of Woodward’s scenarios, sometimes the implication follows that, if called to account, he just may release (promises, promises) “tapes” of his sources to validate his dramatic reconstructions of these anonymous interlocutors.
Those quasi-threats are then usually followed by backpedaling: he has promised anonymity to his sources, and so, unfortunately, he cannot follow through on his warnings to substantiate his narrative. It is almost as if the threat to resort to citations, footnotes, or any type of confirmation of his speakers with background information of time and place would be seen as subversive.
We have forgotten how in the last four decades since the appearance of All the President’s Men just how the Woodward method has become institutionalized by the national press. We know the familiar modus operandi: the journalist is contacted by a leaker or indeed trolls for the leak. The “source” demands to remain anonymous. Negotiations follow about the terms of cloaking the informant. The motive of the unnamed source—whether it be patriotic, careerist, self-interested, or venomous—is immaterial.
The journalist is the ventriloquist, his sources puppets. Any observer who reads Woodward sees how the psychodrama further unfolds: should an anonymous source balk, then he must soon realize that some other anonymous sources might offer an alternate—and by definition competing and even more unflattering—narrative.
Sources, then, vie for primacy and likely exaggerate and fabricate, worried that if one does not leak or provide “background” he may become a target rather than the targeted: that is, someone else will first go full-blown Woodward.
At times, more substantial deep-state sources may use Woodward as much as he uses them, feeding him their own narratives and their own sources to substantiate their yarns, albeit of course, anonymously.
All of the above is the best-case scenario. Just as often journalists can invent dialogue and psychodramas, and attribute them to “informed sources,” “a high senior official,” or “sources tell us.” After Journolist, the WikiLeaks /John Podesta trove, the epidemic of fake news, and the “echo chamber,” why should anyone take the new journalists at their word?
Even at best Woodward is a postmodern Thucydides, whose 141 speeches in his magisterial history have sparked 2,400 years of controversy over their veracity. The historian himself, presaging Woodward, confesses that he wrote down what he heard. Fine. But when that effort proved not entirely feasible, Thucydides confesses that he put those words into the mouths of speakers that they should have said:
. . . it was in all cases difficult to carry them [the speeches in the history] word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course, adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.
Woodward says he relies on tapes rather than memory, but his method is as ambiguous as that of the ancient historians who routinely put their own words into the mouths of speakers. The speakers in Woodward’s “histories” usually say what is demanded on them by “the various occasions”—and in accordance with Woodward’s own thematic purposes.
Redaction, Anonymity, and Leaking
Anonymity has also become the impediment to ending the entire Russia-Trump collusion mythology. Almost every document that is so painstakingly obtained from a Justice Department or FBI archive appears so heavily redacted as to be worthless. Miscreants are not identified by name, but instead by letters or numbers. The point of redaction is to disconnect the deep-state messenger from the incriminating message.
How strange, then, that some government leaks to the press are replete with names, and so damn the innocent like Carter Page. Yet at other times official government documents use redaction to protect the identity of the culpable. So the final irony of the new cult of anonymity is that not all anonymity is equal.
The Obama National Security Council and others did their best to unmask and, quite illegally, leak the names of those caught up in surveillance. Either officials in the Justice Department or the FBI or both fed the toady press the names of a number of surveilled Trump campaign personnel.
If an official is willing to offer dirt on the current president, then journalists peddle the gossip and innuendo through the use of anonymity to “protect” a valuable source.
Yet if a name is legally protected from disclosure, but its release might fuel an anti-Trump narrative, then it is usually leaked.
Noble progressive ends justify any means necessary to obtain them—and increasingly anonymity is the preferred method.
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