Unseemly Smears By Marilyn Penn
http://politicalmavens.com/
The snarky article profiling Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s association with the Trump transition team appears on the front page of the NYTimes Style section on Jan 19th It skewers Ms Wolkoff’s very expensive clothing, her upbringing in the Catskills when she had a more Jewish name than Winston and forebears who were chicken farmers, her un-classy education at Fordham and Loyola and most obviously, her chutzpah in her choice of friend and political bedfellow. This comes to you from the poisoned-pen of Jacob Bernstein, son of journalistic and movie royalty – Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron – grandson of noted screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron, young man of privilege whose divorced parents respectively lived at a townhouse on East 74th street between Madison and Fifth and the legendary Apthorp on the fashionable west side. Despite this affluent lifestyle and gifted genetic endowment, young Jacob attend Vassar College, a no-more prestigious school for boys than the choices of young Stephanie who traced her endowments to hardworking farmers instead of Hollywood glitterati with serious alcohol afflictions. Though the Times pretends to care about such issues as immigrants and nepotism – those don’t apply to Jewish snobs like Bernstein or the Sulzberger family. Jacob’s outstanding contribution to the Times so far is his launching of the “What I Love” column for the Real Estate section, in which celebrities discuss their most essential possessions and how they like to spend Sundays. Apparently it’s not offensive to advertise exorbitantly priced clothing and accessories (as the Times does), nor to wear an expensive handbag as long as you’re not on the Trump team. (See Anna Wintour of the Hillary team along with all the other super-rich sore losers who are immune from such ad-hominem attacks).
In line with the Times determination to malign as many Trump-ettes as possible, there is the trashing of Rebekah Mercer, another transition team member, on the front page of the Arts Section (NYT 1/19), questioning her suitability to be a trustee of the Museum of Natural History. Why has this woman who has a scientific background with two degrees earned at Stanford University and has donated 3 million dollars to the museum been deemed a target by the Times? It seems that her family foundation has also generously donated to “right-wing” institutes which are automatically guilty of anti-science by virtue of not subscribing to the party line on climate change. And to add to Mercer’s culpability, she hosted a fund-raiser for Ted Cruz at her triplex apartment in a Trump building!!! Robin Pogrebin, the reporter who wrote this scurrilous piece, failed to mention the price of the apartment or the cost of the designer glasses Ms. Mercer is pictured wearing but she did include other irrelevant information such as where her husband works and how many children they have. Ms. Pogrebin and her twin sister Abigail who is also a writer, have two children apiece and they themselves are the daughters of the feminist writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Bertrand Pogrebin, senior partner of a law firm in Mineola – not at Wachtel Lipton or Skadden Arps. Robin’s husband, Edward Klaris was another boy who went to Vassar and got his law degree from Yeshiva U. – not from Harvard or Yale. Both twins graduated from Yale but Abigail managed that summa cum laude and has also written several books, something that must sting her less accomplished sister. Speaking of twins at Yale – that’s a very expensive proposition, particularly for someone who is now busy casting aspersions at a wealthy Republican whose position on global warming is only circumstantially insinuated but nowhere stated by the subject herself.
Both of the preceding articles – filled with venom and inuendo – would never have been published in the NYTimes years ago. They are part of the reason for the newspaper’s diminishing subscription list and a pathetic response to the Times’ loss of credibility since the Trump election Rather than take a lesson from how out of touch their columnists are with most of America, they are frantically trying to tar and feather Trump and everyone associated with him. It’s a good bet that the closed-minded staff, marching in lockstep to yesterday’s news while nursing a bitter grudge against all those deplorables who voted for the wrong candidate may not be around as long as this president will.
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