RUTHFULLY YOURS

When a director of the FBI admits he deliberately leaked to the press the contents of his own private notes, written on government time, of a confidential conversation with the President of the United States—a possible criminal offense—for the sole purpose of eliciting the appointment of a special counsel (a gambit which resulted in the selection of his friend Robert Mueller), then most Americans have no compunction about seeing FBI leadership as ethically compromised and something gone terribly wrong at the highest echelons of the once hallowed agency.

That is not “bashing the FBI,” but admitting that the current generation of leaders at the FBI and the Justice Department by their very behavior have bashed their own agencies and loyal and professional subordinates.

All the brilliantly degreed economists of the past decade could not craft policies to achieve even 3 percent growth. All the wittiest and “in the know” advisors had little clue about how to radically reduce illegal immigration. All the supposedly empathetic and moral crusaders more or less wrote off a broad swath of America as clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables—losers in a preordained global world—whose lack of the right stuff earned them deserved oblivion.

The result is that the deities of Washington and New York still do not quite know how and why Trump was elected, or why he well might be reelected—the result of half the country’s profound lack of confidence in the morality and competence of the coastal and gentry managerial classes. And to the degree our elite think they know why many Americans believe that their reputations are undeserved, it is a revelation so disturbing that they are not by background, education, and experience capable of understanding, appreciating, or responding to it.

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As widespread anti-regime protests in Iran continue on into their third day, American news audiences are starting to wonder why the US media has devoted so little coverage to such dramatic—and possibly history-making—events. Ordinary people are taking their lives in their hands to voice their outrage at the crimes of an obscurantist regime that has repressed them since 1979, and which attacks and shoots dead them in the streets. So why aren’t the protests in Iran making headlines?

The short answer is that the American media is incapable of covering the story, because its resources and available story-lines for Iran reporting and expertise were shaped by two powerful official forces—the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Obama White House. Without government minders providing them with story-lines and experts, American reporters are simply lost—and it shows.

It nearly goes without saying that only regime-friendly Western journalists are allowed to report from Iran, which is an authoritarian police state that routinely tortures and murders its political foes. The arrest and nearly two-year detention of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian drove this point home to American newsrooms and editors who might not have been paying attention. The fact that Rezaian was not an entirely hostile voice who showed “the human side” of the country only made the regime’s message more terrifying and effective: We can find you guilty of anything at any time, so watch your step.

The Post has understandably been reluctant to send someone back to Iran. But that’s hardly an excuse for virtually ignoring a story that threatens to turn the past eight years of conventional wisdom about Iran on its head. If the people who donned pink pussy hats to resist Donald Trump are one of the year’s big stories, surely people who are shot dead in the streets in Iran for resisting an actual murderous theocracy might also be deserving of a shout-out for their bravery.

Yet the Post’s virtual news blackout on Iran was still more honorable than The New York Times, whose man in Tehran Thomas Erdbrink is a veteran regime mouthpiece whose official government tour guide-style dispatches recall the shameful low-point of Western media truckling to dictators: The systematic white-washing of Joseph Stalin’s monstrous crimes by Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty.

Here’s the opening of Erdbrink’s latest dispatch regarding the protests:

Protests over the Iranian government’s handling of the economy spread to several cities on Friday, including Tehran, in what appeared to be a sign of unrest.

“Appeared”? Protests are by definition signs of unrest. The fact that Erdbrink appears to have ripped off the Iran’s government news agency Fars official coverage of the protests is depressing enough—but the function that these dispatches serve is even worse. What Iranians are really upset about, the messaging goes, isn’t the daily grind of living in a repressive theocratic police state run by a criminal elite that robs them blind, but a normal human desire for better living standards. Hey, let’s encourage European industry to invest more money in Iran! Didn’t the US overthrow the elected leader of Iran 70 years ago? Hands off—and let’s put more money in the regime’s pocket, so they can send the protesters home in time for a hearty dinner, and build more ballistic missiles, of course. Erdbrink is pimping for the regime, and requesting the West to wire more money, fast.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/28/a-tale-of-two-presidents-and-one-newspaper/

The stench of failure hangs over Mr. X’s White House. The people know it, judging by the opinion polls. Corporate titans know it and whisper disenchantment with a fellow conservative. Washington knows it when an Administration official calls the budgeting process ”an unmitigated outrage” and when Mr. X’s closest friend in the Senate pronounces the President ”as very close to set in concrete.”

Mr. X’s loss of authority only halfway through his term should alarm all Americans. The economic nostrums he brought to office have not had the predicted effect. Only by recognizing his errors will he find better ideas. To rationalize the failure so far, or to blame his predecessors, the media and Congress, is to condemn the nation to two more years of destructive confusion.

By his own reckoning, Mr. X became President for one basic reason: to restore the morale and power of America. By his own analysis, that meant above all ”the rejuvenation of our economy” so that America could regain industrial strength, put all its people to work and defend its interests around the world.

Sound familiar? It should—it’s the opening three paragraphs of a New York Times editorial about Ronald Reagan’s first administration, published on January 9, 1983. So if you think the Times is repeating itself, you’re right. For the past half-century, the Times and other Democratic Party house organs have adopted a single unwavering posture toward Republican and conservative presidents: they’re against them, no matter what.

Hence their reliance on boilerplate editorials such as the one quoted above; presidents may come and go, editorial writers may pass through the pages of the Good Gray Lady, and times may change, but the rhetoric remains the same. If you think this is accidental, however, you must have been born yesterday.

The point of the cultural Marxist project, for which the Times is, and long has been, the chief spokesman, is to keep hammering home the same points about its enemies, until they are simply accepted as fact and no longer even contended or questioned. Do you honestly think, at this point, that there is a single soul on the staff of the New York Times who would today disagree with the sentiments expressed in 1983—or not endorse them if the editorial board substituted the name of Trump for Reagan?

A well-established trajectory of witch hunts is that eventually, the purge will turn in on itself. Regarding the left’s efforts to upend perceived power structures through the redefining of men (as a group) as sexual predators, the left is finding that the sights on the identity politics cannon have been trained back on them. After the New York Times announced that embattled White House reporter Glenn Thrush would be keeping his job after his suspension in the wake of sexual harassment allegations, reports began to emerge that the women employed by the newspaper are expressing their concern for how the Gray Lady treats members of the fairer sex.

On November 20, Vox published an article by the website’s editorial director Laura McGann reporting claims that Thrush preyed on women working in political journalism. The bombshell of the article was McGann relating her own uncomfortable encounter with Thrush. McGann wrote that he “slid into my side of the booth, blocking me in. I was wearing a skirt, and he put his hand on my thigh. He started kissing me. I pulled myself together and got out of there, shoving him on my way out.”

Almost immediately after McGann’s story broke, the New York Times suspended Thrush and began conducting an investigation. A month later, the Times reported that Thrush would be returning to work, but with a different assignment. In a statement, the Times’ lawyer Charlotte Behrendt said, “While we believe that Glenn has acted offensively, we have decided that he does not deserve to be fired.”

Reporting on the NYT’s in-house fallout, HuffPost says,”The announcement set off a wave of indignation among Times observers, who thought it sent a message that the paper condones sexual misconduct and isn’t concerned about the safety of its female employees. But among the female Times employees who spoke to HuffPost, the takeaway was less about the dangers of sexual misbehavior and more about who actually matters at the paper.”

“We’re not really sure what the message is here,” one woman told HuffPost. “I feel really conflicted.”

According to HuffPost, another woman lamented that “while the Times took careful steps to nurture and protect its star male reporter, there were loads of women struggling to get help with flat-lining careers inside the newsroom. For her, the Thrush decision was another painful reminder of how the Times is failing its female reporters.”

In an internal survey, the Times has discovered that many of its female employees feel undervalued and unsure of how to advance their careers.

Contempt for Trump serves as a warrant for abandoning all disinterested judgment

The antipathy to Donald Trump, which in its keenest manifestations is fierce and relentless, is a disabling set of mind, nowhere more so than in the reporting on or about him.

Contempt for Trump—the conviction that he is some sort of dangerous historical “accident” in the presidential office—serves as a warrant for abandoning all disinterested judgment and analytic neutrality. To those who oppose him, particularly those in the news media, Trump is regarded as just SO bad that standards can be virtuously abandoned, and neutrality and dispassion set aside, so long as it helps (such is the hope) to hurt Trump, and, maybe, get rid of him.

The new rule is: anything that can weaken Trump’s standing, sever his connection with the populist base, and help to bring him down is fair game. Hence the sloppiness and one-directional nature of most Trump news. In just the last few weeks, Brian Ross at ABC, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN each had to correct or deny major stories that had all been wrong in the same direction. They hurt Trump.

Stories, however, that might hint at some aspects of competency or adroitness in Trump’s handling of affairs are either passed over or given the most desultory treatment. How many tins of Pepsi Trump drinks gets more coverage than the defeat of ISIS in Iraq, which has occurred under his watch. Under Obama that would have generated skyscraper headlines; under Trump you can search for it in the back pages and fine print.

When the majority of the American media failed in their coverage of the presidential election, they had to find some excuse for their massive incompetence. The New York Times, with all their resources, and after two full years of daily coverage of the campaign, was nonetheless projecting Hillary Clinton’s chances of victory at a full 92 per cent on election night itself. That was at least better than the pathologically anti-Trump HuffPost, which had Hillary’s chances set at a modest 98 per cent! Such was the state of American journalism, these companies barely allowed for the mere possibility that Trump could win. Under their professional eye, he was just a sideshow, even in the very hours before he actually won.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3652/Im-Still-Strzok-by-the-Espionage-Machine-Party.aspx Out of a reported 10,000 texts between senior, adulterous Justice Department/FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, Strzok’s “insurance policy” text is naturally attracting considerable attention — although noticeably not in the New York Times and assorted media followers who set course by it. Predictably, neither is Peter Strzok’s mention of the “Espionage Machine Party.” Then again, the “Espionage […]