Category Archives: Grey Lady

Judge Luttig vs. NY Times editorial board

There is reality, sometimes quite grim, and there is spin, sometimes comforting for the squeamish and overwhelmed, regardless of how ridiculous it is. Here is a highly respected conservative judge’s take on a lawless Trump administration for comparison to the New York Times’s account of the same crime spree.

From Heather Cox Richardson:

In a piece in The Atlantic today, respected conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted that for all of Trump’s insistence that he is the victim of the “weaponization” of the federal government against him, “[i]t is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.”

Luttig warned that Trump is trying to end the rule of law in the United States, recreating the sort of monarchy against which the nation’s founders rebelled. He lists Trump’s pardoning of the convicted January 6 rioters (which he did with the collusion of Ed Martin), the arrest of Judge Dugan, which Luttig calls “appalling,” the deportation of a U.S. citizen with the child’s mother, and the “investigation” of private citizen Christopher Krebs.

“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.

The courts are holding, Judge Luttig writes, and will continue to hold, but Trump “will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”

And rising up they are.

source

The New York Times takes a more nuanced view of Trump’s second term:

The building of this coalition [to oppose a Trump dictatorship, which the Times apparently calls for] should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.

[From a New York Times May Day editorial, entitled — There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab.]

“and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. “

Many are legal (which means some, or as many, or more, are not). Legal and as popular as racism, xenophobia, misogyny or homophobia. Hmm. Well done, Grey Lady!

As for the legitimate victory Mr. Trump achieved fairly, he got 77,284,118 votes while in every state controlled by MAGA voting for presumed non-Trump voters was systematically suppressed. As a threshold matter, we do well to recall George Carlin’s brilliant observation about the limitations of normal intelligence, and what that means for 50% of us.

There was also a nationally successful 2024 effort, in every MAGA controlled state — as the USPS delivered 20,000,000 less mail-in ballots than in 2020– to suppress the vote in a dozen different ways to make sure a maximum number of votes for the Orange Turd were recorded while all others were not cast.  Houston County, Texas, for example, a gigantic county with a population of 4.2 million, had one drop box, a plan to limit drop off voting that Republican governors feverishly hatched in a dozen secretive meetings with Koch’s private Heritage Foundation and failed at implementing in 2020. Hence, the need for fake electors and a riot at the Capitol.  

Say it again with Michael Luttig, Grey Lady:

“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.

Grey Lady, pitch perfect

From a New York Times May Day editorial, entitled — There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab. Here they describe a few of his despicable acts of vengeance against a nation that rejected him by a large margin in 2020.

He has fired federal workers without the 30-day notice that the law requires.

Doesn’t this also mean he fired federal workers illegally? Can’t say it, can you?

He has tried to cut university funding by citing antisemitism without following the established procedures for such civil rights cases.

“Such civil rights cases?” More accurately: he has threatened universities, and unilaterally withheld their federally funding, on transparently baseless grounds.

He has issued executive orders punishing law firms for invented wrongdoing.

Well, no problem with that one.

I did have a real problem with this earlier paragraph:

The building of this coalition [to oppose a Trump dictatorship, which the Times apparently calls for] should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense. Among these policies are many that we strongly oppose — such as pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, cozying up to Vladimir Putin of Russia and undermining Ukraine — but that a president has the authority to enact. Elections have consequences.

The Grey Lady’s normalizing characterization of Trump’s ridiculous performance as president with a massive mandate is, to say the least, cherry-picked. His many destructive acts, his administration’s rampant lawlessness and contempt for truth, his unqualified, lie-spouting loyalist appointees in crucial positions leaving America open to ridicule and worse, the president’s unprecedented and well-earned unpopularity, all left out of the Grey Lady’s delicate balancing act, their attempt to treat a psychopath as a perfectly normal president just doing the job like any other duly elected president.

To take one example — did he win the election fairly? We all seem to accept it, in the name of affirming democracy as expressed at the ballot box, but to me the jury is out after every MAGA state suppressed voting with new laws making it harder to vote, Trump being the sole Republican to win in several swing states, and Russia literally calling in bomb threats to Democratic districts on election day. Also, I saw no reporting whatsoever (except for mine) on the 20,000,000 less mail-in ballots delivered by the Trump megadonor postmaster in the first election since 2008 when mail-in voting didn’t increase.

Then I read a line like this and just say “fuck you” and turn away:

We understand that Mr. Trump’s defenders believe that Democrats started this cycle by prosecuting him, and there are reasonable arguments against some of those cases.

We understand that the New York Times represents a certain well-invested segment of the status quo, so what else are they going to say? Still, the words “fuck you” ring in my head when I read this kind of pandering nonsense in the journal of record. “His defenders defend him against what they call political persecution and they make some reasonable arguments.” Can you give us one?

Heh, of course you can’t.

In other news that’s fit to print:

The Face of MAGA

The conspiracy theorist/far-right influencer, Laura Loomer, is able to get Trump to fire experienced, nonpartisan national security officials she deems disloyal to MAGA. The perfect face of MAGA, this portrait was published by the New York Times the other day, as part of an editorial about the damage Trump and his myrmidons have done in the first hundred days.

Also in the New York Times, among a full spectrum of legal experts weighing in on Trump’s enactment of Project 2025:

The impression of a constitutional crisis is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch — limits the courts respected during the Biden administration.
— Adrian Vermeule, professor, Harvard Law School [1]

[1] Wikipedia: A convert to Catholicism, Vermeule has become an advocate of integralism, a form of modern legal and political thought originating in historically Catholic-dominant societies and opposed to the Founding Fathers’ ideal of division between church and state. Integralism in practice gives rise to state order (identifiable as theocratic) in which the Common Good has precedence over individual autonomy, the value prioritized by American democracy. Rather than electoral politics, the path to confessional political order in integralist theory is “strategic ralliement“, or transformation within institutions and bureaucracies, that lays the groundwork for a realized integralist regime to succeed a liberal democratic order it assumes to be dying. The new state would “exercise coercion over baptized citizens in a manner different from non-baptized citizens”.[11][12][13]

Grey Lady boldly headlines Trump’s lies…

Alternate reality, based in a faith-based world of alternative facts, admittedly, is also, applying basic common sense and language usage, a lie, and a deliberate “distortion” of reality (more accurately, disinformation), but what are you going to do, especially when that alternate reality TV show shit seems to be working (he won the popular vote, everyone seems to agree) and is backed by virtually all of our greatest and most principled billionaires?

When news reporters feel they have to take sides, where do you draw the line? You can see the distinguished Grey Lady’s editorial dilemma.

The Grey Lady politely opines

There are many things you can say about the US president riffing out an insane and illegal plan, pulled out of Bibi Netanyahu’s hateful ass and not run by any of Trump’s “advisors”, to forcibly evict millions of residents from Gaza and convert their former land into beachside condos for the wealthy. One thing, of course, is that it is an obvious distraction from what his illegally “empowered” financial benefactor, active neo-Nazi supporter and partner in crime, Elon “Stable Genius/Visionary” Musk has been doing with illegal data hacks, blanket agency lockouts, illegal agency closures and so on.

The Grey Lady notes that Trump is “unbound”, presumably because the party he took over, now serving the John Birch Society’s core values, controls all three branches of government, with a newly created, illegal fourth branch, pulled directly out of Charles Koch’s ass, led by an immature, vindictive, transgressive billionaire psychopath government contractor, running roughshod over law and democracy. OK, “unbound” sounds better than “unhinged” or “insane”, shows a bit of editorial restraint when describing the leader of the free world. I can take unbound, though, “untethered”, which means the same thing, carries a much more accurate connotation.

The “improbable idea” is another matter entirely. Unless it is perfectly fine to forcibly remove two million besieged Gazans from their densely populated, largely destroyed, longtime home. Improbable that Trump would be able to simply round them up and, as the Turks did to the Armenians a century ago, send horseback killers to bullwhip them into rivers and the sea to drown. Improbable unless Trump gets to build the beautiful concentration camps of his dreams, and equip them with machinery to make undesirable people simply disappear. Perhaps Elon Musk is working on this logistical challenge right now, in moments stolen from his main goal — colonizing Mars.

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. Here’s Trump’s White House chief of staff’s reaction to hearing unbound Trump’s improbable idea being broadcast live to the world, off the cuff, as the attention-starved rogue ratings hog so enjoys doing.

I didn’t find this telling photo of Susie Wiles, Trump’s soon to be former White House chief of staff, listening to his insane, er, improbable, plan to turn Gaza into a real estate development paradise, in the Times. It speaks volumes about how insane the improbable, unbound guy she works for is.

The New York Times, I have no words for how despicable the influential news source is, and how instrumental it is in preserving the ugly, unsustainable status quo we are living in right now. For every important investigative piece they publish, you can see dozens of daily examples of their bias for leaving things exactly the way they are. Why rock the boat when rich people are already getting so much bad press? It’s as though the 99% are making some kind of moral case that it is wrong for one greedy psychopath to have 400,000 million dollars while millions of his neighbors live in poverty and precarity.

Certain stories have only one reasonable response

We like to think that there are two sides to every story. Many times there are way more than two sides. The truth can be very slippery to get a grasp on, particularly when compelling stories that contradict each other are told. There are some stories, however, that almost anyone, weighing the events fairly, will relate to as true.

Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.

I think of the daughter who accused her father of wanting to fuck his son’s girlfriend, after he defended the girl as a good match for his son who made his son happy, in spite of what the daughter thought of the girl. The father was pissed off, felt disrespected, gave his twenty four year-old daughter a piece of his mind. Afterwards his wife told him he was out of line, that their daughter was just trying to be funny. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has agreed with the wife’s assessment that the girl was joking and believed the father had no reason to feel hurt by the remark.

There are some stories that simply don’t have two equally compelling sides or a lot of nuance. Sometimes a story has one demonstrable truth — for example, a three hour violent riot filmed and broadcast in real time, with more than a hundred injured police officers taken to the hospital. There is of course a counter story, in this case that the riot we all watched was, actually, “legitimate political discourse.”

The second story, to be remotely true, must discount the violence that injured outnumbered law enforcement, the breaking and entering, mass criminal trespass, vandalism, the necessity of heroic actions by a few policemen to allow lawmakers to flee the threats to their lives, the gas masks, the gallows and all the rest. One can’t believe the second story without dismissing a huge trove of evidence we all witnessed.

We can, of course, discuss which of these stories is closer to true, and millions will be compelled by one side or the other, but what actually happened is the deciding factor in which story is closer to true.  You can spin a story, as the studiously both-sides New York Times has become so adept at doing, but that is not the same as presenting an intelligible story that doesn’t make both sides, no matter how ridiculous one side is, seem equally plausible.  During legitimate political discourse, for example, people are rarely, if ever, injured en masse or taken to the hospital with grievous injuries. 

Here are two nice headlines for illustrative purposes, from our beloved journal of record

MAGA judge appointed by Trump, nothing political here
One person’s complaint was based on lies, the other’s was based on facts on the ground right now

Some stories are not complicated in the least, if you look at them clearly. If you ask one or two people, or ten, likely they will all have exactly the same response that you did.

A surgeon described to me a ten to twenty minute procedure that involves no cutting, merely the stretching of a constricted structure by a method called dilation.   A little shaving of the place the structure inserts into may be required, he said, but he could only tell that once he was looking through a scope during the procedure.   The procedure he described was much less invasive than the one I was expecting to have and without a side effect I was dreading.  I was relieved. 

A few weeks later when I got the presurgical papers, dilation was not included among the procedures I was scheduled to have.  There was a surgical resection described (likely the shaving he’d referred to) and the possibility of something called a cold knife urethrotomy.  As I’d never heard of this procedure, I looked it up.  Here’s what the device looks like:

I was concerned about this unannounced change of plans.   The risks associated with slicing with a urethrotome are not inconsiderable. The odds of success appear to be depressingly low.  I needed to talk to my doctor.  The corporation the doctor works for, a subsidiary of the the nation’s largest, and presumably most lucrative, corporate provider of such medical services, does not allow patients to directly speak to their doctor.  My need for this procedure is close to an emergency level, but I had to finally cancel the fucking surgery today, as there is no way to give  informed consent without knowing the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure I was never told about.

This outcome is what I mean by certain stories have only one response.  Any patient, or friend of a patient, hearing surgery A proposed, getting notification of surgery B, would have questions of the surgeon.  It is not the result of PTSD, trauma, the experience of abuse or being bullied that would make someone need an answer to this question.  It is the nature of the questionable behavior that makes the question necessary.

It is like having to inform a loved one that they had no right to punch you in the face when they were drunk.   There aren’t multiple sides to this story.  If the loved one tells you to shut up, they were drunk, it only happened three times in fifty years, it doesn’t change the essential nature of the story.  You are not wrong to either need this talked through to ensure it never happens again, to not see this person again, or whatever the solution you need is.  It’s not like there are two equally compelling sides to the story, outside of the question of how you let it happen a second and third time.

Corporations were ruled to be people by a corporatist United States Supreme Court. The kind of person a corporation is has all of the characteristics of a psychopath. Here’s a checklist from the excellent 2003 documentary The Corporation, which lays out the case in a manner so irrefutable it will make your spine tingle.

You can see the entire movie here, on YouTube, for only the cost of having to skip the infernal corporate ads inserted every ten minutes.

Your spine will tingle at the recognition that we are all prey and the corporate person, an eating machine without any other consideration, has virtually no constraints on its appetite.

Pete Hegseth

The New York Times reports the details of the incident that caused Fox News host and defender of Navy SEAL war criminal Edward Gallagher [1], Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Defense, to pay an undisclosed amount of money to a woman in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.

Trump himself couldn’t have done it better. Perfect agreement! 

The salacious details don’t matter (read the NY Times account anyway), the agreement is ironclad and absolutely nothing wrong happened, per the agreement and the undisclosed sum of money paid to settle the matter and keep it private forever (see NY Times account).

In other news, Matt Gaetz, also totally innocent and viciously persecuted by angry, name-calling libtard cucks armed with disgusting leaked private details of Mr. Gaetz’s personal life, cleared the way for Aileen Cannon’s appointment as Attorney General of the United States of America.

[1] Gallagher was turned in by his fellow Navy SEALs after, among other things, witness accounts that he stabbed a wounded teenaged Iraqi prisoner to death, and posed with the corpse, holding the cadaver’s head by the hair (as one does). A military tribunal convicted Gallagher of posing for a photograph with a corpse and texting the photo to friends. Gallagher was outraged. So was Hegseth, who became his powerful advocate. Trump gave Gallagher a full pardon. A perfect pardon! As all presidential pardons now are, according to the Federalist Society Six. Here are some of the now irrelevant details about the accusations against Gallagher:

Gallagher was accused of multiple offenses during his final deployment to Iraq and during the Battle for Mosul. The most prominent accusation and the best-attested to was the murder of a prisoner of war, a war crime.[9] Khaled Jamal Abdullah, a captured 17-year-old fighter of the Islamic State, was being treated by a medic.[12] According to two SEAL witnesses, Gallagher said “he’s mine” over the radio, then walked up to Abdullah and allegedly proceeded to stab him with his hunting knife without explanation. Gallagher and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, then posed for photographs of them standing over the body with some other nearby SEALs. Gallagher then text messaged a friend in California a picture of himself holding the dead captive’s (ISIS) head by the hair with the explanation “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”[9][13]

Prosecutors alleged that Gallagher’s sniper work during his 2017 deployment became “reckless” and “bloodthirsty”.[5] He allegedly fired his rifle far more frequently than other snipers;[5] according to testimony, the other snipers in the platoon did not consider him a good sniper, and he took “random shots” into buildings.[1] Other snipers said they witnessed Gallagher taking at least two militarily pointless shots, shooting and killing an unarmed elderly man in a white robe as well as a young girl walking with other girls.[5] Gallagher allegedly boasted about the large number of people he had killed, claiming he averaged three kills a day over 80 days, including four women.[1] Gallagher also was reportedly known for indiscriminately spraying neighborhoods with rockets and machine gun fire with no known enemy force in the region.[9]

A charge of obstruction of justice was brought against Gallagher for alleged witness intimidation. According to the claim, Gallagher allegedly threatened to kill fellow SEALs if they reported his actions.[5] The Navy cited his text messages as attempting to undermine the investigation, with messages sent to “pass the word on those traitors”, meaning cooperating witnesses, and to get them blacklisted within the special warfare community.[9][1] This resulted in him being confined in the brig for a time with heavy restrictions on his ability to communicate, although this confinement was later lessened.[5]

Gallagher was also charged with nearly a dozen lesser offenses.[5] Some of these charges, such as flying a drone over a corpse, were dismissed during preliminary hearings.[14]

According to the original Navy prosecutor Chris Czaplak, “Chief Gallagher decided to act like the monster the terrorists accuse us of being. He handed ISIS propaganda manna from heaven. His actions are everything ISIS says we are.”[6][5] Gallagher’s lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse, alleged the accusations were without foundation and came from a small number of disgruntled SEALs who could not meet Gallagher’s leadership demands. The accusations against Gallagher were recorded to be fabricated by teammates that started a mutiny in the SEAL platoon.[5]

source

Look at everything Trumpie accomplished in just his first year in office

The New York Times editorial board features a hard-hitting interactive timeline, apparently published in July 2024, of everything the Orange Menace accomplished in just his first year as wannabe dictator from day one.  The report goes through all four action packed years of fighting and lying like hell. A hard-hitting recitation of facts from the newspaper whose spokespeople over and over claim the Grey Lady refuses to get involved in “politics”… The first year by itself is very impressive. Click the image below for the show.

“Fun” fact:  More Americans died in Trump’s beautiful lovefest/January 6th Capitol riot, at the hands of their fellow Americans, than died in Benghazi, at the hands of enraged Libyans, an event weaponized against then Secretary of State H. Clinton to the eternal fury of the American right.  

Here’s an angry patriot, in Bayside, New York, standing under his Trump’s God, America, Freedom flag, with a t-shirt reminding Americans of those killed in Benghazi.

Don’t tread on me, bro

Attack, deny, lie, declare victory when you lose

The corporate media, a machine to normalize the psychopathy of the powerful, it seems lately, is routinely nonchalant about things that should have the citizens in an uproar. At the time, during the Mueller investigation, there was almost nothing in the news about this game changing “fuck you” from a sitting president. I had to read Trump’s interrogatory answers myself to learn that he had flatly refused to answer Robert Mueller’s final, most incriminating, question.

A Republican Assistant Attorney General appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller (witch hunter number one) after Trump fired FBI director James Comey for insufficient loyalty when he would not drop an investigation into crimes committed by former Trump national security advisor General Michael “Q-Anon” Flynn. As part of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s many ties with Putin, Mueller wanted to ask Trump questions in person. Trump publicly bragged that he would sit down with that witch hunting traitor fuck any time, that he had no fear and nothing to hide.

It turns out he had plenty to hide and feared a “perjury trap” and so his lawyers negotiated an alternative, he’d answer written questions under oath. His lawyers wrote evasive answers throughout (which he bragged about writing himself) and then, for the final question, a compound question involving Flynn and others at the heart of the 140 documented acts of collusion (not indictable criminal conspiracy, since much evidence had been destroyed and witnesses dummied up) with Putin, Trump wrote . . .

. . . Nothing. . .

The thought that we are twenty odd days out from an election in which these unaccountable criminals, grifters and violent extremists may well be able to pull off the crime they attempted in 2020, stealing a “rigged” election by chicanery, brazen lies and violence, sickens me to my heart. If this fascist coup comes about, on my way to prison, or worse, I will be cursing the fucking New York Times. How hard is it not to be a well-respected equivocating mouthpiece for Nazis?

The Grey Lady, late to the party and weak

It was big news across the nonauthoritarian-leaning side of the internet the other day when the NY Times finally published an article about the many signs of Trump’s seeming mental decline (not to mention his blooming psychopathy) and his apparent unfitness for office, headlined:

Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age

With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.

Fair enough, as far as they go in their detailed chronicle of his more and more demented statements as he campaigns to become president again, presumably by a combination of voter suppression, a surgically precise, razor-thin Electoral College win, strategic support from a corrupt and incompetent postmaster general, various MAGA election officials, MAGA state legislatures and MAGA state courts, his friends in Congress, The Heritage Foundation, The Federalist Society, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer, Ginni Thomas, General Flynn, Q, X, a corrupt 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court and, in a pinch, an army of angry low flying monkeys desperate to avenge the Confederacy’s inglorious military loss in 1865. 

The Grey Lady steers gracefully clear of violating anything like the sacred Goldwater Rule (no public comment on elected official’s dangerousness by mental health experts unless the elected psychopath in question agrees to be publicly psychoanalyzed) [1]. It quotes several who know the Republican candidate well and appear to think he’s just fine.

The Grey Lady also does not comment directly about how increasingly insane his rantings are. They simply provide many examples so an intelligent reader can draw the inference, if they so choose, that the man who says these things is dangerously insane, rather than a serious world leader for this perilous moment in human history. The Grey Lady seems to tastefully avoid (she’s nothing if not tasteful) the most hateful and violence-inspiring things trump constantly spews. Then she muses:

The former president has not been hobbled politically by his age as much as Mr. Biden was, in part because the incumbent comes across as physically frail while Mr. Trump still exudes energy. But his campaign has refused to release medical records, instead simply pointing to a one-page letter released in July by his former White House doctor reporting that Mr. Trump was “doing well” after being grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt.

Yo, Grey Lady, you leave out an obvious and immense part of why Biden was hobbled by fears about his age and you sell your influence short. Former president trump’s mental capacity was never written about negatively in the news section of the paper, as Joe Biden’s was, hundreds of times on the front page of the NY Times. Joe Biden’s every stutter and misstatement was amplified and questioned, his fitness for office constantly questioned, in news reports and editorials. Trump’s clear cognitive decline has been tastefully not spoken of (on the rationale that him being an inanely riffing, opinionated, fact-free asshole is not news) while the Grey Lady’s scrutiny of every Biden gaffe, stutter and misstatement was a major factor in Biden being forced to abandon his candidacy after a highly accomplished presidency.

One more, then you can go read the catalogue of trump’s idiocy yourself, at this gift link.

A 2022 study by a pair of University of Montana scholars found that Mr. Trump’s speech complexity was significantly lower than that of the average president over American history. (So was Mr. Biden’s.) The Times analysis found that Mr. Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who speaks at an eighth-grade level, which is roughly average for modern presidents.

It’s a tic, I suppose, to miss no opportunity to prove their unflinching fairness by once again pointing out that Biden too is, vocabulary and speech-complexity-wise, unfit for the presidency.

Are you smarter than a fourth grader? If so, read the NY Times with a critical eye for these fucking tics. The Grey Lady is all atwitch in these twitch-worthy times.

[1] OK, can’t resist one more. Note the Grey Lady’s lack of specificity, or an embedded link, in its reference to the recent conference of an anonymous group of mental health, national security and political experts whose 2017 New York Times bestseller the New York Times (in conjunction with the American Psychiatric Association,) successfully removed from public discussion during the trump presidency (and since):

Polls show that a majority of Americans believe he is too old to be president, and his critics have been trying to focus attention on that. A group of mental health, national security and political experts held a conference at the National Press Club in Washington last month on Mr. Trump’s fitness. The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group of former Republicans, regularly taunts him with ads like one calling his debate with Ms. Harris “a cognitive test” that he failed.