RUTHFULLY YOURS

With reference to the much ballyhooed early September op-ed piece in the New York Times authored by “Anonymous,” which set off iterative bomblets throughout the kingdom of Donald and his closest and supposedly most trusted aides, several points to keep in mind:

With technology available to all, not least to tech-savvy Millennials trolling the current presidency, feigning (perhaps) respect for their CEO, President Donald Trump, it is a simple thing to suss out writers’ frequent usage of standout terms and phrases, such as, of course, the so-called telltale “lodestar.”  Even specific grammatical constructs can be programmed and revealed by the same modality.

It’s called forensic linguistics.

A few days ago, TheWeek.com wrote about this in a piece called “The delicate art of using linguistics to identify an anonymous author.”  It noted: “There’s the anonymously-authored book Primary Colors, closely paralleling Bill Clinton’s campaign…”

Mike Pence took a lot of the initial suspicion of being the author of the Times piece, but he denied it, and there is no other evidence besides a single word – his common use of “lodestar” – to argue he was involved.  That White House chief economics man, Larry Kudlow, has used such words, too, is no guarantee of anything dispositive, either, as it would be highly uncharacteristic of Kudlow to pen such a combative piece against a man he has professed as worthy of our attention and respect.  Thus, the frequency of such idiosyncratic terms as “lodestar” is debunked: any high-schooler could have divined that Pence, say, hit that word X number of times.  It would be, furthermore, a usage that would deflect adults into a slotted canyon of blame; a Millennial would savor that.  An adult over the age of normalcy and thought would not have done that word usage search and then planted that telltale, so-called.

Forensic linguistics can tell us a lot more.  Example: Obama’s “biography,” inked by his longtime conspirator and domestic terrorist pal Bill Ayers, was figured out from this technique.  Sailor and naval imagery appeared in that book repeatedly.  Obama has never been near the Navy or anything deeper than his own exorbitant inch-deep talents as magnificent orator and ne plus ultra wunderkind of magical etiology and education.  So Ayers was pinpointed, correctly, as the ghost for at least one Obama auto-bio.

Recall too that columnist Joe Klein was outed by his known stylistic “tics” – sentence length, verb:noun ratio, and sentence construction and complexity.  Though his “fictional” roman-à-clef on Bill Clinton, Primary Colors: A Book of Politics, was also tagged on its cover as by “Anonymous,” it was the work of not many people or hours to disambiguate who was its author.  Forensic linguistic technology made it possible.

Joe Klein later acknowledged his authorship of his chewy, disclosure-filled page-turner on naughty William Jefferson Clinton.  A movie was made of the book, and any attempted media-sanctioned and extended fig leaves were liberated for all discerning, breathing audiences.

Would that book and theme, shedding light on a favorite son of the Dem persuasion, be made today?  Doubtful, even if Chappaquiddick (2017) was surprisingly revealing about the late Senator Ted Kennedy.  In defense of the director, staunch Democrat John Curran, Kennedy is dead now nine years, so the sting of shocking unclaimed responsibility for his appalling lèse-majesté – and extracurricular activities, shall we say – in letting campaign strategist Mary Jo Kopechne die to salvage his own political neck is much bruited.  Out of 103 reviews, 94 were negative.  Hmm.  Nine to one, approximately – about the same ratio of lib and ultra-liberal to conservative journalists afield in the country.

Besides, the film grossed a pittance, despite the scandalous if belated nature of its disclosures we all basically knew before it hit the silver screen.

Another aspect of the Times’ “Anonymous” op-ed is its absence of details.  It was not crafted to reveal anything much that 95% of the electorate and citizenry above room-temperature I.Q. doesn’t already know, from the invocation of those anti-Trump memes over and over in the pulpy New York Times, running tabloidized pieces so regularly that it might as well change its masthead kicker line to “All the anti-Trump news, all the time, that’s maybe unfit to print, but we’ll do all the heavy lifting and print it anyway.”

The insightful Rush Limbaugh has observed that the hit piece recognizes and reifies the accuracy of the Deep State conspiracy that Trump has been alleging all along is indeed a “quiet coup.”

I would assert, instead, that the coup is as noisy as can possibly be.  With endless reams of faux fact “McBooks” spooling out of the mouths of top Obamaesque steno shops, top-tier though they are touted, they are just marketing.

The noise includes the aforementioned op-ed and its sibling obloquies in the WaPo and elsewhere in the seeded poisoned forest of print, but also the harangues from the paltry but peek-a-boo-worthy MSNBC, the once respected CNN, the hurrying harlots of harangue across the fruited plain that can be heard in miraculous chorus, all chiming the trending memes of the day on program after program.  The dispiriting orchestration continued with the nearly-sci-fi craziness of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation circus a few days past – all in service to the hatreds festering in every Democrat weedbox, for the president and anything he touches, like an enrubbling King Midas in reverse.

Silent coup?  Not unless Krakatoa’s two-day rolling eruption in 1883 was silent.

And like the claxonic coup in the innards of the White House, the reverberations and aftereffects of such eruptions go on and on.  None of the sequelae are ever anything but destructive.

Author, documentarian, and analyst Dinesh D’Souza, right out of the gate the day Anonymous was published, tweeted that he suspected the author of the op-ed was a writer at the New York Times, mascaraed over by a light coating of persiflage about the N.Y. Times “knowing the author” well, and that author being “a senior official of the Trump White House.”  Since there is no checking that assertion, and there are no biographical facts attending the Times’ little notation of self- justification, we cannot know.

Yet.

There are approximately 2,000 persons, according to many estimates, across the tier of what might be called “senior officials” “at” the White House, many actually serving outside the venue proper but still deemed to be top W.H. official level.  It would not be the first time the Times has fabricated authors purporting to be top W.H. aides or officials.  Those reporters once promoted an intern into not one, but three high-up W.H. persons.  That little journalistic ethics gem has been unearthed and extensively reported.

Many serious analysts assume that it is a Millennial crayoner, which explains why the piece ends with such a hosanna and bouquet to the deceased too well bruited RINO Sen. John McCain.  Senior officials, adults, would likely not have included such an encomium, because McCain was mercurial, quixotic, given to bluster, impetuous, changeable, hair-on-fire about Trump, and many of the adjectival monuments erected to him in contrast with President Trump are as valid for him as for this president.  Perhaps more so.

In any case, persons of my acquaintance have confided that even absent the useful research offices of the tainted CIA and FBI, following their fatal compromised neutrality during and after Obama, President Trump will be able to unearth the identity of Deep State Anonymous using his own signal prowess and private sourcings.

Luckily, nothing in the op-ed managed to shake any real trees, except among the already committed anti-Trumpers and dyed- in-the-Woodward furies still gnashing and wailing in the void of Hillary’s unambiguous defeat.  Defeats.

Winning, as Obama once sententiously intoned, has its privileges.

One of them ought not to be bilge-spewing treasonous so-called top officials in a White House accomplishing major triumphs despite relentless fusillades from the crocodile moat.