Tag Archives: NY Times

IMPEACHMENT WEEK: It’s OK To Be Bored; Not OK To Be White, by Ann Coulter

Musings on the impeachment farce and race from Ann Coulter at anncoulter.com:

It’s weeks like this that make me wish I had a job and didn’t have to stay home watching TV. With the impeachment nonsense dragging into its 56th month, I have some random observations, only a few of which have anything to do with impeachment.

1) As tempting as it must be for Republican senators to make a headlong rush to the TV cameras at the conclusion of the day’s festivities, they would be well advised to say this, and only this, each night:

Here are the vital issues the United States Congress did NOT address today:

— Repairing our highways, bridges and border with a major infrastructure bill.

— Ensuring that all Americans can get jobs by cutting off the deluge of cheap foreign labor.

— Providing the public with quality services by not inviting the rest of the world to come partake of government benefits meant for Americans.

— Fixing the disaster of Obamacare, so that all Americans have access to quality health care (by activating the same mechanisms that give them quality food, housing and iPhones: the free market, contract law and occasional government subsidies).

— Passing a bill to defund all the pointless, expensive military deployments around the globe, so we can FINALLY address the hellfires in our own hemisphere.

— Ending the opioid crisis by declaring war on Mexican drug cartels and building a wall.

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The Turnaround, by James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler has an awful lot of faith in people like William Barr, Michael Horowitz, and John Durham. We’ll soon know if such faith is warranted. SLL remains skeptical. From Kunstler at kunstler.com:

At yesterday’s Thanksgiving table, fifteen adults present, there was not one word uttered about impeachment, Russia, Ukraine, and, most notably, a certain Golden Golem of Greatness, whose arrival at the center of American life three years ago kicked off a political hysteria not witnessed across this land since southern “fire eaters” lay siege to Fort Sumter.

I wonder if some great fatigue of the mind has set in among the class of people who follow the news and especially the tortured antics of Rep. Adam Schiff’s goat rodeo in the House intel Committee the past month. I wonder what the rest of congress is detecting among its constituents back home during this holiday hiatus. I suspect it is that same eerie absence of chatter I noticed, and what it may portend about the nation’s disposition toward reality.

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Wait For It, by James Howard Kunstler

Is there really a whistleblower, or is the personage just another concoction? From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

An eerie silence cloaked the political landscape this lovely fall weekend as the soldiers in this (so far) administrative civil war scrambled for position in the next round of skirmishes. Rep. Adam Schiff fell back on the preposterous idea that he might not produce his “whistleblower” witness at all in the (so far) hypothetical impeachment proceeding. He put that one out after running a similarly absurd idea up the flagpole: that his “whistleblower” might just testify by answering written questions. I was waiting for him to offer up testimony by Morse code, carrier pigeon, or smoke signals.

Of course, the effort to “protect” the “whistleblower” has been a juke all along. For one thing, he-she-it is not a “whistleblower” at all; was only labeled that via legalistic legerdemain to avoid revealing the origin of this affair as a CIA cover-your-ass operation. Did Mr. Schiff actually think he could conceal this figure’s identity in a senate impeachment trial, when it came to that — for what else is impeachment aimed at? Anonymous sources are not admissible under American due process of law. Mr. Schiff must have missed that class in law school.

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Liberals haunted by social media tactics they use against the right, by Madison Gesiotto

Turnabout is fair play. From Madison Gesiotto at thehill.com:

The people who have made an industry out of destroying ordinary people’s lives over old social media posts and out-of-context comments are very upset that it’s happening to them. The New York Times, clearly worried by the recent exposure of blatantly anti-Semitic tweets posted by one of its reporters, and clearly worried that even more embarrassing material is in reserve, tried to stop the hemorrhaging with a rambling article demonizing the independent journalists who uncovered the tweets.

In fact, much of the liberal media sphere went into panic mode, vehemently declaring that this particular exercise of the First Amendment is actually an attack on the First Amendment. The reason why liberal editors are so distraught that independent conservative journalists are publishing evidence of the racist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise vile sentiments expressed by their supposedly “objective” employees comes down — as it usually does — to power.

Many journalists are in the profession not to inform the public, but to gain the power to destroy people who question them — and they don’t like those tactics being turned against them. “[U]sing journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations … is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” the Times wrote in its article — which was of course labeled “news,” not “opinion.”

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The Yin and the Yang of It, by James Howard Kunstler

Hysteria has become a goal in and of itself. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

The New York Times staffers wanted to change the paper’s longstanding motto, All the News That’s Fit to Print, to something more cutting edge, more of-the-moment, more congenial with the crypto-gnostic social justice impetus to change human nature in order to make the world a better place.

My personal suggestion was All the News That’s Fit to Print for Angry, Hysterical Women and Their Intersectional Allies, since The New York Times is now an advocacy rag, but the staff choice apparently is The Truth is Worth It — or perhaps The Times paid some Madison Avenue logo engineers for that.

And one is prompted to ask: worth what, exactly? If “truth” actually amounts to “lived experience,” as The Times insists, then truth can be whatever you say it is — the bedrock ethos of all tyrannical political movements. To me, The Truth is Worth It sounds suspiciously like The Ends Justify the Means, and anyone following the so-called Resistance the past three years may have noticed that’s exactly how it operates.

For instance, Resistance team captain Elizabeth Warren referred the other day to the 2014 “murder” of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri “by a white policeman.” Of course, Ms. Warren was speaking her “truth.” Now, it happens that the US Department of Justice under Eric Holder (this was the Obama administration) determined that it was not murder, as did an inquiry by the State of Missouri — rather that Mr. Brown was shot after attacking officer Darren Wilson in his police car and attempting to grab his gun.

Did Senator Warren not believe former attorney general Holder? Was there some other authoritative opinion she was referencing? Or was she just making shit up on-the-fly to juice an audience? Could she have had any other purpose than to provoke racial animus? Is that what this country needs? More tension between blacks and whites? More reason for suspicion and hatred? Is that where you want leadership to lead you?

Senator Warren’s remark pretty obviously demonstrates the Resistance’s tenuous relationship with reality. Her rival, Sen. Kamala Harris tweeted out substantially the same thing last Friday. Do they actually believe what they are saying, or is it simply a tactical move because it’s worth it to stir up racial animosity if you want to become president? The media gave both of them a pass on that ploy.

A few weeks ago, podcaster Dave Rubin had “spiritual teacher” Eckhart Tolle on for a chat, and Mr. Tolle made the surprising remark that the current sorrows of the world were due to an excess of yin and not enough yang, meaning, he went on to explain, too much of the female principle in operation and not enough of the male principle. This crack made Dave Rubin blink a few times, especially coming from the most serene celebrity on the planet, a fellow far less excitable than the Dalai Lama, and a demigod to the yoga pants and Chai tea crowd. Too much yin! He said that? Really?

Mr. Tolle is onto something. Just take, for instance, a recent column by The New York Times’s op-ed writer Gail Collins: How to Torture Trump. Could she have put it more plainly? Does she not sound like a woman who has gotten advice from an unscrupulous divorce lawyer (excuse the redundancy)? In fact, the USA is looking like a really bad marriage. The yin of America is stuck in an hysterical rage at the yang. Cis-men whose lived experience includes marriage may be familiar with this stratagem. The prudent men often opt to not engage with the hysteria, which almost invariably amps up the hysteria.

The aim of the national matrimonial hysteria is to make sure that whatever conflict is at issue remains unresolved. The melodrama goes on for its own sake. It’s fun living on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That is exactly why the US political scene is so disordered and distressed. That is why the Democratic Party can’t find any credible male candidates. And that is how come the country happened to elect an imperturbable Golden Golem of Greatness.

 

Silicon Valley Is Destroying American Democracy by Playing Political Favorites, by Robert Bridge

The New York Times is wringing its hands about the alt-right on social media, but it sounds an awful lot like sour grapes. From Robert Bridge at strategic-culture.com:

Perhaps it was expecting too much that the tech giants would check their political allegiances at the door to ensure fairness. Instead, they have let their political affinities disrupt the process every step of the way and this is leading the country down a blind alley.

June 2019 may go down in the history books as the defining moment when the American IT giants – in cahoots with the limping ‘legacy’ media – removed their masks, as well as their gloves, revealing the real threat they have become to the institution of US democracy, fragile as it already is.

The New York Times got the ball rolling when it ran a front-page story (‘The Making of a YouTube Radical’) detailing the trials and tribulations of one tortured Caleb Cain, a college dropout who was “looking for direction” in life but instead tumbled headlong into a rabbit hole of “far-right politics on YouTube” where he eventually found himself “brainwashed” and “radicalized.”

The article, quoting “critics and independent researchers,” which I suppose could mean just about anyone, says the Google-owned platform has created “a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining … a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens.”

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DOJ Bloodhounds on the Scent of John Brennan, by Ray McGovern

We’ll believe it when Brennan’s indicted. From Ray McGovern at consortiumnews.com:

With Justice Department investigators’ noses to the ground, it should be just a matter of time before they identify Brennan as fabricator-in-chief of the Russiagate story, says Ray McGovern.

The New York Times Thursday morning has bad news for one of its favorite anonymous sources, former CIA Director John Brennan.

The Times reports that the Justice Department plans to interview senior CIA officers to focus on the allegation that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian intelligence to intervene in the 2016 election to help Donald J. Trump. DOJ investigators will be looking for evidence to support that remarkable claim that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report failed to establish.

Despite the collusion conspiracy theory having been put to rest, many Americans, including members of Congress, right and left, continue to accept the evidence-impoverished, media-cum-“former-intelligence-officer” meme that the Kremlin interfered massively in the 2016 presidential election.

One cannot escape the analogy with the fraudulent evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As in 2002 and 2003, when the mania for the invasion of Iraq mounted, Establishment media have simply regurgitated what intelligence sources like Brennan told them about Russia-gate.

No one batted an eye when Brennan told a House committee in May 2017, “I don’t do evidence.”

The lead story in Thursday’s New York Times.

Leak Not Hack

As we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity have warned numerous times over the past two plus years, there is no reliable forensic evidence to support the story that Russia hacked into the DNC. Moreover, in a piece I wrote in May, “Orwellian Cloud Hovers Over Russia-gate,” I again noted that accumulating forensic evidence from metadata clearly points to an inside DNC job — a leak, not a hack, by Russia or anyone else.

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The FBI’s police state operation against Trump, by Patrick Martin

The FBI’s Trump investigation has been politically motivated and has little to do with whether or not Trump actually did anything wrong. From Patrick Martin at offguardian.org:

A front-page article published Saturday in the New York Times revealing that the FBI secretly opened a counter-intelligence investigation into President Donald Trump after he fired FBI Director James Comey has laid bare a massive police state conspiracy by the US intelligence agencies.

The Times published the article in an effort to revive the anti-Russia campaign against Trump, promoting the unsubstantiated and highly dubious claim that Trump is a Russian agent. The facts presented in the Times report are, in reality, far more damning of the FBI than of Trump.

Despite the newspaper’s intentions, the picture painted by the Times of the FBI is alarming. The Times depicts a highly politicized intelligence agency whose officials carefully monitor the activities of the two main capitalist parties, keeping a vigilant eye out for any deviations from the national security consensus in Washington.

The Times claims that Trump “had caught the attention of FBI counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.” Given that this was a sarcastic campaign remark directed against Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, and delivered at a public news conference, Trump’s sally can hardly be construed as evidence of a conspiracy.

The Times article goes on to describe how FBI officials monitored the platform adopted at the Republican National Convention, reporting that the spy agency “watched with alarm as the Republican Party softened its convention platform on the Ukraine crisis in a way that seemed to benefit Russia.” That is, the nation’s top police agency was concerned that the positions adopted contravened certain basic tenets of dominant sections of the foreign policy establishment.

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Former NY Times Boss Slams Newspaper Over Anti-Trump Coverage, by Tyler Durden

William M. Arkin resigns from CBS and a NY Times editor criticizes the paper for its one-sided Trump coverage. Is there change in the air? Probably not. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A former New York Times executive editor has slammed her former employer for being “unmistakably anti-Trump,” while invoking Steve Bannon’s claim that the mainstream media has become the “opposition party” united against the president, according to Fox News.

Jill Abramson, who led the Times from 2011 to 2014, knocked the newspaper for exploiting financial incentives to bash Trump and says that the bias has eroded the paper’s credibility.

In her upcoming book, “Merchants of Truth,” Abramson puts the news industry under a microscope – at times defending her former employer, while levying harsh criticism for her successor, Dean Baquet.

“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” writes Abramson – who says the Washington Post is no different. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.

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Deception in North Korea? Nope, But a New Flavor of Neocon, by Peter Van Buren

To the consternation of much of the US government and mainstream media, the two Koreas continue to make progress towards reconciliation and peace. From Peter Van Buren at medium.com:

What is the state of diplomacy on the Korean peninsula? Are we again heading toward the lip of war, or is progress being made at an expected pace? Are there Asian Neocons fanning the flames for conflict in Pyongyang much as others did with Baghdad?

A year ago, in November 2017, John Brennan estimated the chance of a war with North Korea at 20 to 25 percent. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the odds were 50/50. The New York Times claimed we were “slouching toward war” with the North, on a “collision course.” National security adviser HR McMaster said North Korea represented “the greatest immediate threat to the United States” and that the potential for war with the communist nation grew each day. The U.S. lacked an ambassador in Seoul; Victor Cha was rejected by Trump because, according to “sources and reports,” he didn’t support a preemptive strike on Pyongyang. It was reported the U.S. was “imminently preparing for an attack on North Korea,” driven in part by hawks like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.

All that was wrong.

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