New York Times

  • Censoring those statues: When YOU do it, you are an uncultured redneck. When I do it, I am respecting diversity

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    Thursday, August 17, 2017 0 Bad News in Higher Education, Free Speech, New York Times, PC Language Police, Safe Spaces, Yale , , Permalink 0

    If you have a long memory, you might recall George W. Bush’s Attorney General John Ashcroft deciding to change the backdrop at the Department of Justice.

    Initially, when he held press conferences, he stood in front of the Department’s half-nude, art deco statue, “Spirit of Justice.”

    He preferred a more modest, less distracting backdrop, so he had blue curtains installed.

    It seemed a little silly, but harmless enough.

    The national media had a field day mocking him as a cultural cretin.

    “What kind of backwoods idiot is he?” was the view in Manhattan, Cambridge, and the swankier sections of Washington. They deigned to look down their collective noses at him and his kind of people, much as they laughed at Victorians who covered up piano “legs.”

    Typical were the views of always-grating Maureen Dowd (link here):

    A Blue Burka for Justice

    By Maureen Dowd

    New York Times, January 30, 2002

    I had to call Attorney General John Ashcroft recently to ask if he had instructed his advance team to remove naked lady statues and calico cats from his vicinity because they were wicked.

    I know it sounds loopy. But with these guys, you never know. –NYT

    Yuck, yuck, yuck!! Those rubes.

    (Btw, Dowd’s column is not an example of newspaper bias, IMO. You can agree or disagree with her, but she is writing an opinion column, and it is clearly labeled as such. The Times’ problem with bias is not that its opinion columns tilt one way but that its editorial opinions suffuse its hard-news coverage.)

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    Now, the tables have turned, and I await the mockery from the NYT, the Post, and others.

    I suspect I’ll have a long wait.

    Here’s the story:

    Yale University censors ‘hostile’ historic artwork (Link here)

    Officials at Yale University recently censored a stone work of art on campus depicting an armed Native American and Puritan side by side, which has been described as a “hostile” image by the Ivy League institution’s alumni magazine.

    The stone carving was edited to cover up the Puritan’s musket, while the Native American’s bow was left as is, reports Yale Alumni Magazine (link here).

    The decision to censor the carving was made by both head librarian Susan Gibbons and Yale’s Committee on Art in Public Spaces, the latter of which advises President Peter Salovey “on ways to better represent the diversity of the Yale community through the art and other symbolic representations found around campus,” according to the university’s website. –The College Fix, referencing Yale Alumni Magazine

    Did anybody complain or even notice the shocking musket? Nope, no record of any complaints.

    Is Yale unique in such censorship? Alas, no.

    A number of universities in recent years have censored or concealed art on campus. Earlier this year, Pepperdine University removed a Christopher Columbus statue from its grounds while late last summer the University of Wisconsin-Stout moved a painting of Native Americans and French frontier trappers from a public area to a private conference room. The art in these two cases was deemed “painful” and “harmful,” respectively. –College Fix

    I just hope the New York Times doesn’t find out. Surely they will be outraged at this artistic censorship.

    Yeah, sure.

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    Comments:

    1. It is not unexpected that Yale would censor anything it considers politically incorrect. That’s its standard practice today.
      • It encourages the same kind of robust diversity of political opinion you find on the back of a cereal box.
      • Yale sets standards for free and open discourse Google can only aspire to.
    2. Judging from Yale’s abject behavior, and the lack of public criticism, John Ashcroft should have tried a different spin. He should have said the magic words, “This statue is offensive to the vital cause of female equality in the workplace.”
    3. I look forward to Maureen Dowd, New York Times, WaPo, and others attacking Yale’s censorship. So far, crickets.
    4. My own comment, as an alum is simple
      • Free Speech at universities is the most important issue in higher education today.
      • Yale doesn’t just fail on this issue. Under Pres. Peter Salovey and his administration, it sets the gold standard for politically-correct suppression of speech, all in the name of social justice. It is, I’m afraid, a standard made of fools’ gold.

  • When the news breaks, take a break from TV

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    Saturday, August 12, 2017 0 AP Associated Press, CNN, Crime, Donald Trump, Fox News, Media and Reporting, NBC MSNBC, New York Times, Television, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post , , , , Permalink 0
    Rule #1 during events like those in Charlottesville: do NOT watch TV for more than a few minutes at a time.

    To keep up, occasionally click on your favorite “breaking news” website.

    Depending on your tastes, that could be Drudge, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Associated Press.

    Of course, once they start interpreting the story, they’ll spin it in their familiar ways.

    ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

    The current news from Charlottesville can be summarized in less than two minutes, tops, and the networks have 24 hours to fill. They will fill them with high drama, idiotic confrontations, and conjectures, mixed with hard reporting and intelligent commentary. How wild can the conjectures get? When CNN was covering the missing Malaysia airliner, they asked experts if extraterrestrials were to blame.

    Intentionally or not, the cable channels heighten viewers’ anxiety with flashing alerts and breathless reporting, following by a sincere look, a bite of the lip, and a calm, “Our thoughts and prayers go out…” So do the thoughts and prayers of the extraterrestrials, I’m guessing. For more on that, tune to CNN.

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    To show you how briefly the real news can be summarized, here is what we know now (as of 6:15 pm, August 12):
    1. White supremacy and neo-Nazi marchers descended on Charlottesville to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a public park.
    2. Counter-marchers also showed up to protest the white-supremacy types. We don’t know what kinds of groups were involved in the counter-protest.
    3. The two groups clashed violently, despite a large presence of local and state police.
    4. A car deliberately accelerated into the counter-marchers, killing one immediately and leaving about two dozen more injured.
      • The car sped away, but the driver was soon captured. His name, motivation, and organizational connections have not been disclosed.
    5. A helicopter crashed nearby but details on that are still sketchy. Two people were killed
    6. That makes three people dead (so far), according to Virginia police.
    7. Donald Trump strongly condemned the violence, urging all sides to respect each other and avoid further violence.
      • Virginia’s state officials and those from Charlottesville issued similar statements, adding that the white nationalists should “go home.”
    8. Significantly, Pres. Trump failed to single out the White nationalists in his condemnation of the violence.
      • Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) immediately tweet a criticism of the President, urging Trump to condemn the white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

    That’s what we know so far. A newscaster could read it, with appropriate video playing in the background, in under two minutes.

    But they have hours to fill. Instead of filling it with serious and illuminating talk, they will fill it with repetition and, within a few hours, snarling political adversaries.

    Skip it and keep your blood pressure down.

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  • New York Times Art Critic Attacks Israel-Sponsored Exhibit on Eichmann Trial

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    Saturday, August 5, 2017 1 Anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Israel, Media Bias, New York Times Bias No tags Permalink 1

    The problems: apparently it is just too clear morally, too focused on Eichmann’s capture

    Such obvious failings. It’s hard to believe the Israelis missed these subtle points.

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    Ira Stoll, writing for Algemeiner, excoriates the moral vacuousness of the New York Times (link here to Stoll article);

    Just when you may have thought that the New York Times couldn’t possibly sink any lower when it comes to Israel or Jewish issues, along comes one Jason Farago, an art critic for the newspaper, who manages to review an exhibit about the murderous Nazi Adolf Eichmann and fault it for being, of all things, insufficiently sympathetic to Eichmann.

    Farago complains: “The trial was transformative, but whether it was entirely just is not a question raised by this exhibition, which prefers the relics of James Bond-like spycraft to moral and legal dilemmas.”

    Perhaps the reason the exhibit doesn’t dwell on these so-called “moral and legal dilemmas” is because they weren’t truly dilemmas at all. –Ira Stoll, in Algemeiner

    The Times article is here. The key quote:

    The show goes longer on spy thrills than on moral and legal perplexities, though that may have been inevitable given its co-organizer: none other than the Mossad, the intelligence service that is Israel’s equivalent of the C.I.A. –Jason Farago, in the New York Times

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    Robert Lieber comments on “the NYT’s intellectual bankruptcy”:

    The Holocaust and the deliberate, ruthlessly organized and meticulous extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II constitutes a uniquely appalling crime in the history of the modern world.

    One of its foremost architects, Adolph Eichmann was captured, tried and executed by Israel in an event that held the attention of the world.

    Now, more than a half-century later, the New York Times, ever ready to break new frontiers in its moral transgressiveness reviews an Israeli-government-sponsored exhibit in New York that documents the case.

    Leave it to the NYT to focus not on the unique evil, the indifference, fecklessness or complicity of so much of the world while the helpless Jews of Europe were being oppressed and slaughtered, but instead on the alleged absence of moral ambiguity in the exhibition.

    The NYT was once a great newspaper and the journal of record. This has long-since ceased to be the case in a newspaper where the editorializing begins on the front page.

    This current story is but the latest illustration of the New York Times‘ intellectual bankruptcy.

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    Robert Lieber, a professor at Georgetown, is one of the country’s leading analysts of US foreign policy, with special interests in the Middle East, Europe, and energy.

    His most recent book is Retreat and Its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order (Cambridge University Press).

  • ZipDialog Roundup for Saturday, June 10

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    Saturday, June 10, 2017 0 Britain, Drug Abuse, Election 2016, Fair Media, FBI, Healthcare, James Comey, Media and Reporting, Media Bias, New York Times Bias, Obamacare and Repeal-Replace, Republican Party, Robert Mueller, Senate, Theresa May, ZipDialog Roundup of News Beyond the Front Page , Permalink 0

    Articles chosen with care. Comments welcomed. Linked articles in bold purple

    ◆ The aftermath of Comey remains “He said. He said.” One he is Comey, the other is Trump.

    Other than Trump’s foolhardy bravado in offering to testify under oath to Mueller, nothing really happened.

    The newspapers generally covered the testimony honestly. The outlier was the New York Times. Here’s my blog post on that:

    How Five Newspapers Headline Comey’s Testimony: Four are Fair, One is Not

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    Comment on Conspiracy Theories: The Comey testimony and its aftermath underscore and reinforce a larger shift in public discourse that is very troubling: the rise of conspiracy theories.

    America’s media in tandem with the Democratic party and progressives are now playing a constant drumbeat of conspiracy theories, mostly about secret collaboration between the Kremlin and Trump to throw the 2016 election.

    We haven’t seen anything like that since Joe McCarthy.

    Trump does not come to this with clean hands. His claims about Barack Obama’s birth certificate were a major conspiracy theory for years.

    ◆ Britain’s Tories face a trainwreck. Their call for a snap election has produced a hung Parliament and likely a shaky coalition government

    The headline in The Independent: Theresa May tries to move on after humiliating result as critics begin to circle

    A chastened Theresa May is attempting to move on from her botched election gamble, under intense pressure from members of her own cabinet and Tory backbenchers to dramatically improve her game. . . .

    Ahead of what is promising to be a bruising meeting with Tory backbenchers next week, MPs publicly questioned Ms May’s position and her campaign, with one even branding it “madness”, while others demanded changes to her Brexit strategy and raised concerns about a deal with the Northern Irish DUP [Democratic Unionist Party] . –The Independent

    May met with the Queen and said she intends to form a government. But there is considerable question about her future.

    The Tories could toss her out before the next election, which is likely to come fairly soon.

    Meanwhile, here are the main effects of the British election. It

    • Requires Conservatives to partner with a small party (DUP) from Northern Ireland to form a government
    • Shows the failure of Theresa May’s campaign; she was a bad candidate who ran on her personality, not future policy
    • Rejects the Conservatives positioning themselves as mushy, big-state centrists, far away from Thatcher’s free-market policies.
    • Gives Labour its biggest gains since late 1940s, even though (or perhaps because) the party is headed by a very, very far leftist.
      • Labour’s huge gains under Jeremy Corbyn, an unabashed socialist who supports a number of terrorist regimes, mark a major political shift in the electorate.

    ◆ Spain’s Catalonia region (Barcelona and surrounding area) will hold a referendum on leaving Spain (NPR)

    The Spanish central government sees the vote as illegal, so this sets up a confrontation.

    The Washington Post story is here.

    “There is not going to be any illegal referendum that goes against the Constitution,” the government’s spokesman . . . said after a weekly cabinet meeting. “We are facing an increasingly radical strategy that has less and less support.”

    [But Catalonia’s regional president] Carles Puigdemont said the decision to call for the vote was reached after more than 18 months of efforts failed to establish a dialogue with Madrid.

    He also said the vote was nonnegotiable because Catalans backed his plan for secession by voting for his coalition of pro-independence parties at the end of 2015. –Washington Post

    Comment: The region has a long history and its own language, Catalan, that is related to Spanish but different.

    ◆ Repealing Obamacare puts the Senate’s centrist Republicans in a bind. An example from Ohio, in his USA Today story:

    Rob Portman’s dilemma: How to repeal Obamacare without undermining opioid fight

    The key problem: any cutbacks in Medicaid, which Ohio expanded as part of the ACA, would harm addicts’ ability to get care.

    Comment: Repealing and Replacing Obamacare depends on solving very hard problems like this. 

    ◆ Meanwhile, Politico reports that “Conservatives near revolt on Senate health care negotiations”

    Comment: Staunchest opponents appear to be Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT).

    Skepticism about the bill voiced by Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Tom Cotton (R-AK) 

    Republicans have 52 votes. They would need 50 votes plus the Vice President to pass a bill and send it to a reconciliation committee with the House.

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  • How Five Newspapers Headline Comey’s Testimony: Four are Fair, One is Not

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    Friday, June 9, 2017 1 Chicago Tribune, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Fair Media, FBI, Hillary Clinton email scandal, James Comey, Media Bias, New York Times Bias, Senate, Trump-Russia Investigation, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post Permalink 0

    I have written a separate post summarizing Comey’s testimony: what he said, what he didn’t, what he implied, and what I think is significant about it.

    Comey’s testimony lacerated the president and laid the basis for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate obstruction of justice. That and self-justification were his main goals, and he succeeded.

    But Comey’s testimony was careful.

    Here are some fair representations of it.

    The best, I think, is the Wall Street Journal’s because it

    • Puts Comey’s accusation against Trump in the headline
    • Gives it the most prominent place on the front page without stretching it to World War III headline size
    • Makes clear that Comey is saying how he “felt.” The WSJ is not taking a hard-news stance that he is correct or incorrect in that interpretation

    The Chicago Tribune is fair, too. It gives the story more prominence (a perfectly reasonable decision) and puts the hard news in the subheader.

    The headline merely says what we all know: he testified.

    ♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

    Here are two more, equally fair and tough.

     

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    Now, the New York Times.

    The Times’ headline represents everything that is wrong with mainstream media.

    It is an editorial without saying so.

    Why? Because Comey did not testify that Trump tried to “sink” the inquiry.  He was more careful, more lawyers, more “touchy-feely” about what he “felt” (which, of course, is entirely subjective and so cannot be refuted).

    Comey did not say Trump tried to stop the inquiry.

    He didn’t say Trump ordered him to do anything.

    He didn’t report anything like obstruction of justice at the time, as he would have been required to do.

    What he testified was that he felt pressured.

    Comey may be exactly right–or not. We can make our own judgments, but we don’t know for sure.

    His testimony was a lawyerly self-defense, designed to help himself and get revenge on Trump.

    But he did not testify, under oath, that Trump “tried to sink” the investigation. That’s the NYT’s editorial spin.

    Their interpretation may be exactly right, but it belongs on the editorial pages.

    All the other stories above the fold are designed–and headlined–to reinforce the NYT’s editorial viewpoint.

    Their headline should be hard news, and it should be accurate.

    That would be a refreshing change. 

  • London attacks: Media buries the religious motivations. It’s just “terrorism” of some sort

    By
    Sunday, June 4, 2017 0 Fair Media, Media and Reporting, Media Bias, New York Times, Political Correctness, Washington Post No tags Permalink 0

    First, some background.

    News organizations can bury entire stories or part of them.

    That’s not always bad. It may represent solid news judgment that the story or some part of it does not deserve much coverage.

    Too often, though, it represents news bias, in effect editorializing by downplaying what is really significant.

    The reverse also happens. The media can overplay or hype stories, as when CNN played the “lost Malaysian airliner” story for weeks on end.

    To consume news intelligently, it helps to look for these biases, which nudge you in one direction or another.

     

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    I had a hunch that would happen with the London Bridge attack. The story itself is huge news.

    What I wanted to know was whether the major news organizations would downplay the religious fury behind the attacks, which was known almost immediately.

    Here’s the answer.

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    New York Times lead story is here. At the bottom of paragraph 8, the Times slips this in:

    The police treated that attack, in which 50 were injured, as “Islamist-related terrorism.” –NYT

    That is the first mention of any motivation.

    The Times mentions a related point in the 10th paragraph.

    Then, way, way down in the story, it quotes an eyewitness telling the BBC the terrorists were shouting: “This is for Allah.” (I understand eyewitness testimony may not be accurate so you might be cautious about that in the early going. Turns out there were several witnesses and the motivations were not in doubt–except to the NYT and its readers.)

    And that’s it. Two mentions of Islamic radicalism in the entire story, both in lower paragraphs. That’s the only context the give for this story, other than saying it is “terrorism.”

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    NBC News, predictably, skips all mention of the Islamist motivations until it includes the quote, “This is for Allah,” in paragraph 9.  The story makes no other mention of the apparent religious motivation of the attackers. None.

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    SHAMEFUL: The Washington Post tops ’em, an impressive feat. Their lead story has no mention of Islamic terrorism at all, and only one glancing mention of that “This is for Allah” quotation somewhere around paragraph 30! (I confess I gave up counting somewhere after paragraph 20.)

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    Fox News also mentioned the ubiquitous quotation in para. 9, but it did something the others did not. It added further information immediately.

    Witnesses told Sky News and the BBC that the attackers shouted “This is for Allah.”

    The attacks came just over two months after the car-and-knife attack at British Parliament and less than two weeks after the suicide bombing at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester that killed 22 people. Britain just recently lowered its official terror threat from “critical.”

    The threats targeting Europe have been among the worst that American intelligence officials have seen in a decade, a U.S. government official told Fox News. Both London Mayor Sadiq Khan and U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert described the attacks as “cowardly.” –Fox News

    Notice that the Allah quote is now attributed to several witnesses, not one. That’s important confirmation.  Second, it notes that this attack comes after two other recent terrorist attacks, though it refrains from calling them “Islamic terrorism.”

    Finally, Fox features another major story on its front web page, devoted to their larger meaning of this string of attacks, calling them a “bellweather of assaults on Western civilization.”

    ♦♦♦♦♦

    My conclusion is straightforward.

    The MSM, like European politicians, does not want to report awkward facts than undermine their political preferences.

    If they can’t bury the whole story, they at least bury those inconvenient truths.

    My view: Put your political preferences on your editorial pages. Report the news and the crucial context, and cut the PC BS.

  • The Caddyshack Presidency. That’s the undertone of the Times’ sneering coverage of Melania’s fashion

    By
    Wednesday, May 31, 2017 0 Donald Trump, Media Bias, New York Times, Uncategorized Permalink 0

    Commentary: The Times even uses its style pages to snark at the Trumps.

    Their headline: “Melania Trump on Display, Dressed in Ambivalence and Armor” (New York Times)

    Let’s decode:

    “On Display” likens her to a non-human mannequin.

    “Ambivalence” is less clear. But they quickly add she is ” a cipher cloistered in a gilded New York penthouse.” 

    And, of course, she is armored, as opposed to open and authentic.

    The Times continues, plunging in the knife and twisting it:

    And her embrace of the high-end, and refusal to go through the motions of adopting the occasional accessible item, was fully in line with her husband’s gold-toned dollar-sign spiel. –Vanessa Friedman in the New York Times

    The phrase “gold-toned dollar-sign spiel” is particularly revealing. First, they use “gold-toned” instead of “gold” to indicate it is fake class, not the real thing you find in old-money living rooms on Central Park and Park Avenue.

    This line of criticism highlights one of the things that most irritates the NYT and intellectuals.

    The Trumps, they sneer, are so brash, so brassy, so . . . nouveau riche. They are not sophisticates like us.

    They are, of course, right that Donald Trump himself is a poster child for brash, brassy, and nouveau riche. He made his name hyping that lifestyle to people who wanted to buy in.

    And, as everyone knowns, Pres. Trump can be blunt, rude and crude.

    But Melania is none of those.. Neither are Jared and Ivanka. (I don’t know enough about the others to say.)

    So why smear Melania except to throw mud on her husband?

    For that noble purpose, they overlook no opportunity.

    The media, intellectuals, and the left basically think Trump and his ilk are Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.

    If Melania is his spouse, she must be Mrs. Dangerfield.

    ♦♦♦♦♦♦

    Trump’s supporters have their own cartoon image of the left, the media, and their ilk. They are Ted Knight’s pretentious Judge Elihu Smails. (The “Elihu” is a nice touch, says this Yalie.)

    Only the NYT would look at Caddyshack and root for the Judge.

    As Carl Spackler would say, “So Trump’s got that going for him.”

    And Trump would reply, “The Times. Oh, they must have been something before electricity.”

    ♦♦♦♦♦♦

    Post script: After I wrote this, I looked through the NYT files and found that, lo and behold, they had run an op-ed piece calling Trump “The Caddyshack President.” They were not laughing.

    Since the NYT op-ed pages run the gamut of opinions, from A to B, we can assume they agreed with the opinion.

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  • ZipDialog Roundup for Saturday, May 27

    By
    Saturday, May 27, 2017 0 Cybersecurity, Donald Trump, Europe, Hillary Clinton, In a Nutshell, Intelligence agencies, International relations, Israel, Media and Reporting, Media Bias, NATO, New York Times, North Korea, Palestinians, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Technology, Trump-Russia Investigation, US foreign policy, War, ZipDialog Roundup of News Beyond the Front Page No tags Permalink 0

    Articles chosen with care. Comments welcomed. Linked articles in bold purple

    ◆ Comment: Trump’s Trip in a Nutshell 

    • Saudi: Completely reverses Obama’s disastrous tilt toward Iran, reorients US policy to fight Iran and terrorism, makes a promising effort to incorporate a large coalition of Muslim states in the fight; good speech, too
    • Israel: Hard to say whether the Palestinian-Israel talks will go anywhere; what Trump did in Saudi does set a positive context, but it is still a stretch; the negatives are that Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas will do everything they can to stop it, and the Palestinians have no effective government to make peace with, nor has their population come to grips with the far-reaching and permanent concessions they will have to make; the Israelis have no confidence that a peace deal would be adhered to or give them more security
    • NATO: Telling the Europeans the hard truth that they need to pay up is good. What’s bad is Trump’s failure to restate the core principle of NATO, that an attack on one is an attack on all (Article 5). That omission could send a catastrophic signal to Russia about the vulnerable Baltic states, which are NATO members. The only reasonable explanation is that Trump is signaling the Europeans that, if you don’t pay up, you cannot expect us to treat you as full alliance partners. Very risky business.

    ◆ Jared Kushner’s talk with Russians during transition included possibility of establishing back channel to discuss issues such as Syria  (Washington Post)

    Jared Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring, according to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports. . . .

    The meeting also was attended by Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.

    The White House disclosed the meeting only in March, playing down its significance. But people familiar with the matter say the FBI now considers the encounter, as well as another meeting Kushner had with a Russian banker, to be of investigative interest.

    Kislyak reportedly was taken aback by the suggestion of allowing an American to use Russian communications gear at its embassy or consulate — a proposal that would have carried security risks for Moscow as well as the Trump team. –Washington Post

    Comment: Initial public interest has focused on the idea of a “back channel.” That’s not what’s important here; back channel communications are common. What’s important here is two things. First, the idea of using the Russians’ equipment to communicate this is amazingly amateurish and reckless (or at least at seems that way to me, as a non-professional in secret communications with adversaries). This scheme was probably Flynn’s misjudgment and Kushner’s inexperience. Second, it says the Trump team was extremely concerned the Obama administration was monitoring everything they had to figure out a different way to communicate securely.

    A third issue is bound to come up. What did they want to talk about? If they were talking about Syria, you could criticize them for undermining the sitting president. If they were doing anything that affected the business interests of private parties–and there is no indication they were–then that would be corruption.

    ◆ Hillary reappears at Wellesley Commencement, bitter, and attacking Trump (Washington Post)

    Comment: This has to be a Republican plot. It has to be.

    Only the Republicans could possibly gain from having Hillary out there hectoring the crowds, her shrill voice and tone-deaf delivery proving she still cannot give a decent speech, despite her having received tens of millions for giving them. (That’s a cruel joke, of course. She was paid because she and Bill provided access to power. It was a corrupt, rent-extraction game on a vast scale.)

    For Democrats, the real problem is that she reminds people of the none-too-glorious past and makes it harder for the party to develop new faces for the future. To recharge things, the Democrats need some new voices. It would help if they were not yet living in a retirement community on Social Security and a Reverse Mortgage.  

    ◆ US, worried about North Korea, plans a test shoot-down of ICBM  (ABC)

    Comment: The dangers from North Korean nukes are real and present. Their last test was a solid-fuel rocket (which means it can be launched quickly) and went to a very high altitude (which means it can already hit targets as far away as Guam).

    To kill these intercontinental missiles, which leave the atmosphere, is different from killing shorter-range missiles.

    The US has been working on this incredibly complex technical task since Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars). The latest iteration is what they will be testing.

    There is a partisan-political dimension here, too, aside from the need to fund the program. Now that America needs a serious anti-missile defense to protect against a North Korean attack on the continental US, people might want to look back and ask who has opposed, undermined, and underfunded that research at every stage over the past three decades. These political opponents, unlike North Korean missiles, won’t be especially hard to identify.

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  • NYT leaks on Manchester terror bombing pale beside their Scoop on the D-Day Invasion

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    Friday, May 26, 2017 0 Humor, Media and Reporting, New York Times No tags Permalink 0

    Sure, there’s a lot of furor about the New York Times needlessly publishing secret police information about the Manchester terror bombing, hampering the on-going investigation. (Washington Post)

    Pres. Trump wants the leaks investigated, and rightly so. The US leaks caused the Brits to immediately suspend sharing information about terrorists, something vital to US homeland security. Beyond that, they damage the trust essential between US and British intelligence.

    Critics charge (rightly, I think) that the Times published the terrorist’s name and crime scene photos out of badly misguided editorial judgment. Some Times’ readers may enjoy it, but the editors surely knew it would damage the frantic race to track down the members of the bomber’s cell.

    All true. So is the loathsome conduct of US spies who illegally shared this secret information, serving no public purpose.

    ♦♦♦♦♦♦

    Still, it all pales beside these two amazing NYT scoops from June 1944.