RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-washington-post-declines-to-endorse-for-president-and-civilization-melts/?utm_source=recirc-

The Washington Post — newspaper of the federal clerisy, official organ of the Resistance, the place where “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — announced this afternoon that not only will it not be endorsing either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump for president in 2024, but that it will never make an endorsement again. (This is truly a shame; as a colleague lamented to me, now I guess we’ll just never know how these people really felt about 2024.)

The reactions across media have ranged from disgust to outright garment-rending peals of agony — resignations have already been filed — and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be laughing until tears roll down your cheeks at every last one of them. I’d be remiss if I didn’t share a few, if only to illustrate the absurdity of it all.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first, however: This was a business decision by Jeff Bezos. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis wrote the piece announcing the Post’s decision not to endorse (erm . . . “change its policy going forward,” that is), but all other reporting (including, hilariously, the Post’s own employees’ union) clearly indicates that this is a directive from on high, one that Lewis was willing to go along with. I think I know why — and it’s not the dull and obvious answer of “Bezos just worries about Trump regulators hurting Amazon” — but hold that thought for now.

Because before that we should note that Bezos wasn’t actually the first to act on this. Only yesterday, the media world flew into a similar outrage over the owner of the Los Angeles Times blocking his editorial board from issuing a presidential endorsement. The editorial page editor resigned after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong asked the board to — this is not a joke, dear readers — write a sober “pros and cons” analysis of each candidate instead. (I am deeply disappointed myself, because nobody should have been denied the comedy of reading the Times rate Donald Trump’s good qualities.)

The reactions to the Times kerfuffle were muted, because to be perfectly honest, nobody reads or cares about the Los Angeles Times. But the news from the Post was greeted with a collective gran mal seizure from online media lefties. There are simply too many denunciations from the cheap seats to mention here, but internally it was ugly: Editorial board member Robert Kagan announced his immediate resignation, while former editor Marty Baron tweeted “this is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty” (leading one to assume he wrote the Post’s current masthead slogan, among other things). Meanwhile, notoriously surly race-harridan Karen Attiah first fell into stunned silence on Twitter, tweeting only “Jesus Christ” and “Today has been an absolute stab in the back.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/prophets-of-doom

A quiz: Who said the following, and which speaker did the New York Times deem dark and demagogic?

“We’re not going to have a country” if my opponent wins.

My opponent is “a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.”

“There is one existential threat:” my opponent.

“The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and [my opponent] didn’t do a damn thing about it.”

The 2024 presidential election “might carry near-existential stakes.”

Blacks and Hispanics “have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. . . . [they] have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.”

“America must heed this warning”: my opponent is a “fascist.”

“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country” as my opponent.

“Folks don’t care if tanks roll by on the way to the store as long as the milk doesn’t cost more than 4 years ago.”

Answer key: The first quote is from Donald Trump. The rest are from: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Joe Biden, the New York Times, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris, and a New York Times reader.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/60-minutes-officially-announces-yes-we-edited-the-harris-interview-and-were-proud-of-it/?utm_

I’d like to add a brief note tonight on a kerfuffle of less matter and moment than the other debates of greater importance currently raging throughout American political media. (To name but one example: How many times will Kamala Harris and her media surrogates try to sell “Donald Trump is old and tired” as a campaign talking point before giving up at the transparent futility of it all?)

Earlier this month Kamala Harris sat down for an interview with 60 Minutes, and it went just about as well her other various media encounters have: rather poorly. She served up her usual word salad, and I don’t recall there being much for me to say about it that wasn’t already covered well enough by my colleagues.

One little detail that nagged at me, however, was the way in which 60 Minutes edited their interview with Harris after first airing a preview of it on Face the Nation. When interviewer Bill Whitaker queried Harris about the Biden-Harris administration’s diplomatic relationship with Israel, Harris began with a rambling, lost prelude that amounted to her typical rhetorical churn. Then she collected herself and remembered her canned answer.

Later on, when the interview aired on 60 Minutes, that opening word jumble — which made Harris look remarkably weak — was edited away from Harris’s response. Instead of looking like a deer in the headlights unable to quickly answer, she was presented to viewers as a crisper speaker and thinker than she was.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/10/14/media-rushes-to-downplay-explosive-evidence-of-kamala-harris-plagiarism-n4933333

Did Kamala Harris plagiarize sections of her 2009 book? It sure looks like it. Christopher Rufo has uncovered significant evidence of Harris taking the work of others word for word and passing it off as her own, and it’s damning. Nowadays, when many Americans take for granted that politicians lie, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The plagiarism calls into question Harris’ honesty, her integrity, her trustworthiness, and even her most celebrated area of alleged expertise, as the plagiarism took place in a book that was designed to establish her credibility as a prosecutor.

JD Vance knows it’s a big deal. “I saw today, actually,” Vance said Monday, “a story that Kamala Harris apparently copied some significant chunks of her book from Wikipedia. So if you want a president with their own ideas, vote for Donald Trump. If you want a president who copies her own ideas from Wikipedia, vote for Kamala Harris.”

The New York Times knows it’s a big deal as well, which is why it published an 1100-word piece on Monday trying to explain away Harris’ plagiarism and portray the whole matter as an unfortunate example of just how low the foes of the sainted Harris will go. In the Times’ version, “conservative [a four-alarm word for the Times and its hapless readers] activist Christopher Rufo” is making a mountain out of a molehill. He “had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to ‘make a big deal of it.’” 

That was the assessment of one Jonathan Bailey, whom the Times identifies as “a plagiarism consultant,” without explaining what exactly a “plagiarism consultant” is or how one attains such a lofty position. Bailey, the Times informs us magisterially, “said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.”

See, if you’re a Democrat, you can get away with ripping off entire paragraphs of other works and claiming them as your own, as long as you fit the thefts into a document of sufficient size.