Category Archives: Grey Lady

Gray Lady offering “context” to Hur’s report declining to prosecute Biden but emphasizing Biden’s supposedly feeble mental state

The Grey Lady, with one of her more mealy mouthed pieces of spotty reporting:

Mr. Hur, who has been under fire for including what some have described as disparaging comments about Mr. Biden’s memory, had an incentive to focus on how Mr. Biden’s mental state might come across to a jury as relevant and proper to discuss. . .

. . . Still, at several points, Democrats like Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Representative Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania induced Mr. Hur to agree that his report also included lines like, “In addition to this shortage of evidence, there are other innocent explanations for the documents that we cannot refute.”. . .

. . . The discussion offered an echo of an ambiguous and much-scrutinized line in the 2019 report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Unlike Mr. Hur, Mr. Mueller made no decision on whether Mr. Trump should be charged with a crime, only writing, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him” of obstruction of justice. . .

. . . Mr. Biden, who at 81 is already the oldest person elected president, has been dogged for months by concerns about his age among voters from both parties. He and his allies have rejected those concerns, but Mr. Hur’s report described memory problems during a five-hour interview.

No mention in the New York Times report of lines in the recently released transcript, spoken by Robert Hur, that directly contradict false assertions he made in the report. For example, at one point Hur noted Biden’s “photographic” recall of the layout of a house. Hur also claimed Biden didn’t even know the month or year of his son’s death. The transcript shows that Biden said “oh, God, May 30th…” and agreed when a staffer added it was 2015.  No mention in the New York Times of this rather glaring bit of partisan Bill Barr/John Durham-style lying. Making inaccurate or false statements is New York Times-speak for lying, but there is no note of even false or inaccurate statements by Hur in their article.

The Times also doesn’t report that one of these recorded sessions took place during the international negotiations immediately after the Hamas attack on Israel October 7th.

Nor does the Times include this fairly important fact for assessing Hur’s candor and his agenda, (or allude to anything like an immolation of former Trump DOJ partisan Robert Hur):

House Republicans asked Hur to testify before the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Trump loyalist Jim Jordan (R-OH). Hur prepared for his testimony with the help of Trumpworld figures, and he resigned from the Department of Justice effective yesterday, so he appeared before the committee today not as a DOJ employee bound by certain ethical guidelines, but as a private citizen. . .

. . . Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote on social media: “I think Biden’s State of the Union address last week and Hur’s immolation today will go down in political history as Reagan’s ‘I am not going to exploit…my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment…only on steroids.” Conway was referring to Reagan’s response in a 1984 presidential debate to a question about his own age; Reagan’s opponent, Walter Mondale, later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.

Heather

This is another more intelligent assessment of what happened at the hearing, immolation or no.

No hint about any of this is given to readers of the New York Times report on the latest backfired attempt by MAGA diehards to magnify their wild claims that, unlike very stable genius Donald Trump, Biden is a feeble, stuttering old dotard who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground, even when he is handing MAGA hecklers their asses on a platter in front of a live national audience.

Chuck Chuck BoBuck Grassley and the Grey Lady

It’s shocking to me that a newspaper like the New York Times can print a sentence like this with a straight face (see below). Either their editorial standards have slipped, they truly don’t give a shit about the facts, they are trying to please people on the extreme right, as well as their more distracted liberal readers, or they truly have a Nazi bent somehow.

Read this bit from a recent article about MAGA reliance on a now debunked informant statement in their rush to find a crime or misdemeanor to impeach Biden for and let me know what you think about the word choice “payback for Democrats’ treatment of … Trump” rather than something about partisan retribution for the impeachments brought to try to hold a rogue president, now doing his damnedest to dodge criminal trials for 91 felony counts in four jurisdictions, accountable.

By the way, former DOJ States Attorney Scott Brady, the Trump loyalist who brought the form 1023 to the attention of the public, a guy who resigned one month into the Biden administration, (as he had previously refused to serve under Obama), appears to have knowingly lied to Congress not long ago about the reliability of what turned out to be Putin’s propaganda fed through an informant now in prison and under indictment for lying to the FBI about millions in bribes supposedly paid to Hunter and Joe Biden by a Ukrainian oil company.

Wake up Merrick Garland, a six-year investigation into Hunter Biden’s dick, in the interest of appearing scrupulously fair, means that you have to at least investigate the complicity of fucking MAGA asshole Scott Brady. You already have the letter from Jerry Nadler of the House Judiciary Committee asking for the investigation. Just fucking do it.

”Liberal media” hedging its bets

As long as the only value in your culture is corporate profit-driven wealth, you are going to get this kind of dog shit front page “reporting” from even the most reliable of profit-driven corporate media.  

1) Only Biden “superfans”, presumably isolated intellectuals and dreamers, think that tens of millions of under-educated voters supporting an insane, vindictive, racist, misogynistic fraudulent populist autocrat is crazy.

2) Polls, which are so frequently wrong as to be dismissible just by virtue of being political polls, show that many non-Biden Superfans believe Trump policies (ban Muslims, separate migrant children from families, no Covid restrictions, overturning women’s right to bodily autonomy, huge tax breaks for top 1%, etc.) are better than Biden’s (none of which they can identify).

Other breaking New York Times stories:

Biden old; Trump beating him in polls; Biden stutters; Trump makes hilarious joke of own dramatic cognitive decline, polls find; Biden appears feeble, hypochondriacal; Trump’s inexhaustible rage and love for fast food is contagious; Biden trails Trump, another poll finds, Superfans mystified.

Comer’s star “witness” in Biden impeachment indicted for giving false testimony to FBI

The New York Times continues:

The special counsel investigating Hunter Biden has charged a former F.B.I. informant with fabricating claims that President Biden and his son sought two $5 million bribes from a Ukrainian energy company, according to an indictment in a California federal court.

The former informant, Alexander Smirnov, 43, was accused of falsely telling the F.B.I. that Hunter Biden, then serving as a paid member on the board of Burisma, demanded the money to protect the company from an investigation by the country’s prosecutor general at the time.

The story Mr. Smirnov told investigators was part of a series of explosive and unsubstantiated claims by Republicans that the Bidens engaged in potentially criminal activity — allegations central to the party’s efforts to impeach the president.

The Special Counsel, another traitorous RINO appointed by the radical Merrick Garland to investigate a Biden, is a Donald Trump appointee, (like Robert Hur, who gratuitously, but effectively, slimed Joe Biden just the other day). Proof that even the infallible former/present/future party leader makes mistakes. Who among us has a crystal ball that can always accurately see the future?

One vote GOP majority impeaches Biden cabinet official

Today the House voted 214-213, on party lines, to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, vindicating their humiliating recent failure to impeach him. It is the first time in history that a sitting American cabinet member has been impeached. The tiny GOP House majority was in an admittedly tight spot on the issue of immigration, the party having demanded legislation on border control by tying it to Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Taiwan aid, getting it from the Senate after months of negotiation, and refusing to bring it to the floor for a vote, on orders of their boss, an impulsive man with a very busy court schedule.

Prior to the vote the NY Times ran a related article, using uncharacteristically direct language to describe the political party that is a big tent for every kind of American hater and bigot (along with the millions of very fine people who are neither haters nor bigots). The very un-Times like headline and lede reads: On Capitol Hill, Republicans Use Bigoted Attacks Against Political Foes; House and Senate Republicans have denigrated fellow lawmakers, Biden administration officials and witnesses in racist ways, both in casual comments and in official settings. The article offered a sampling of bigoted spoutings by the GOP, all in the course of a week. Here’s the bit about Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas: 

Around the same time, House Republicans released their report on impeachment charges against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Cuban-born homeland security secretary who is the first Latino to lead his department. Using unusually loaded language for a committee report, the panel described its action as “deporting Secretary Mayorkas from his position.”

In private, the language was uglier. During a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and the panel’s chairman, referred to Mr. Mayorkas as a “reptile with no balls” because of his refusal to resign from his post, according to Politico. A White House official condemned the statement, noting that Mr. Mayorkas is Jewish and that the comment echoed an antisemitic trope.

source

A reptile with no balls. What are you going to do with a creature like that?

Gray Lady, pouring it on!

Top three stories in today’s online New York Times:

Why would Biden’s protective White House aides worry that even his small mistakes would be exploited and endlessly repeated in a right wing and corporate media echo chamber?  Do you read your own headlines, Grey Lady?

I guess the partisan Robert Hur did his job as well as NY Times star reporter Judith Miller did her job back in 2001 for Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and all the other administration talking heads who cited the NY Times for the quote they fed to her “don’t let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud”  to insinuate that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of having nuclear weapons, to justify the illegal invasion of iraq after 9/11.

As for Judith Miller, her Wikipedia entry begins:

Judith Miller (born January 2, 1948)[1] is an American journalist and commentator who covered Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion, which was later discovered to have been based on inaccurate information from the intelligence community.[2][3] She worked in The New York Times‘ Washington bureau before joining Fox News in 2008.

It makes perfect sense that she wound up at Fox, but the larger question is — what the fuck New York Times?

Jen Rubin says it better than I do:

Goddamn it, Grey Lady!

Can you spot the New York Timesisms here? 

The New York Times continues:

“The Biden campaign has built its strategy around telling voters that the November election is a choice between the president, whatever doubts the public has about his age, and an opponent in Mr. Trump, 77, whom they paint as a threat to democracy and personal freedoms.“

Fair is fair, it is the centerpiece of Biden campaign strategy to paint Trump as a threat to democracy and personal freedoms. It is a two billion dollar  campaign strategy to portray Trump, an ordinary political candidate for president with an unremarkable history, mounting a typical reelection campaign, as some kind of existential threat. Calling him a threat as part of an attack ad campaign, like they all do.

Fair is fair, the Trump appointee who Merrick Garland appointed special counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, made comments well beyond the scope of his brief — which was to determine if Biden had or had not committed a crime related to taking government documents. Hur (no relation to Ben) determined that Biden could not be prosecuted and then opined, gratuitously as this blahg you are reading now, that Biden is perhaps in too feeble a mental state to have even been able to form any kind of plan to commit the crimes. No jury would convict such a feeble, doddering, sad, amiable but pitiable old man who barely knew what was going on, added Hur in his final report.  You know how the DOJ always like to include a little gossipy stuff in their official reports, spill a  little tea, like cattily opining about people’s fitness for their elected position and the political reasons to doubt their abilities. 

NY Times, taking the ball and running with it, along with the rest of corporate media.

Or as Biden ad libbed the other day at that news conference where he was angry at special counsel Trump appointee Hur being out of line and working in the interests of a political opponent:

FOX reporter: Are you having problems with your memory?

Biden: I must be, I’m taking a question from you.

Isn’t that right, Grey Lady?

Grey Lady — nuanced, super-polite and complicit in maintaining the status quo

This passes for sober analysis by the New York Times, in our current Age of Narcissism:

Donald J. Trump’s decisive victory in Iowa revealed a new depth to the reservoir of devotion inside his party. For eight years, he has nurtured a relationship with his supporters with little precedent in politics. He validates them, he entertains them, he speaks for them and he uses them for his political and legal advantage.

This connection — a hard-earned bond for some, a cult of personality to others — has unleashed one of the most durable forces in American politics.

source [1]

You won’t read in the New York Times that millions of Americans have been mercilessly screwed for decades by a system, designed to protect the interests of the super-wealthy, that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them. It’s not a hard-earned bond between Trump and the people who support him. He constantly validates their rage, which comes from his own rage at being the world’s greatest winner, yet still not having everything. Trump’s enraged inner child snarls resonantly at the enflamed inner children of his supporters. They love the thought of being him, able to grab women by the pussy (and brag about it), orchestrate a scheme to overturn an election, steal secret documents, lie about having returned them, incite a violent riot to keep himself in power, etc.

Super-wealthy and poor alike get the transgressive thrill of loving a powerful cartoon character who has never been wrong about anything, ever, gets a pass for fraud (his shuttered university, the shut down of his “charity”) and is applauded for doing what they’d all love to be able to do: constantly launch vicious attacks against those you hate and lie in your fucking face you goddamned fucking fuck.

As for a deep bond with little precedent in politics — what the devil are you talking about, Grey Lady? There’s plenty of precedent, all of it ended very badly for those who didn’t like being annihilated by an insane demagogue/cornered rat with a deeply devoted following willing to kill and die for their leader.

[1] The Grey Lady’s headline and lede:

The Most Durable Force in American Politics: Trump’s Ties to His Voters

If Donald Trump’s rivals want to stop his rise, they’ll need to break his bond with his supporters. They didn’t come close in Iowa.

Neat paragraph on Elon Musk bio

from Jennifer Szalai, in a recent NYT book review

By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.” There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?

Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People. https://nyti.ms/3sTPLUX