At the beginning of the week, as this blogger began his slog through various cources, when he got to the NY Fishwrap, he exclaimed (like a NY-NJ mobster) "Bada Bing!" The result was the blogatorial decision to run a triple-post — essays by The Krait (Gail Collins), The Cobra (Maureen Dowd), and The Viper (Michelle Goldberg). If this is a (fair & balanced) suggestion that the reader consider a triple anti-venom inoculation before reading today's post, so be it.
PS: Look at the Directory below and click on the [bracketed number] to go to that essay; click on "Back To Directory" to return to the top of the page.
Vannevar Bush hypertext — Bracketed numerics — Directory]
[1] Published January 25, 2019 — The Krait (Gail Collins) Imagines tRump As Tony Soprano
[2] Published January 26, 2019 — The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) Exposes One Of The tRump Mob's Made Guys
[3] Published January 26, 2019 — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg) Shares Her Views Of Today's Craziness
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If Trump Were Tony Soprano…
By The Krait (Gail Collins)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Reading about the indictment of Donald Trump’s longtime pal Roger Stone, you can’t help thinking that we’ve got a president whose circle of associates closely resembles the guys Tony Soprano used to hang around with outside the pork shop [Satriale's Pork Store] in New Jersey.
Stone is a proud, self-proclaimed political dirty trickster. According to the Mueller indictment, he is also a witness tamperer who once threatened to kidnap the therapy dog of an associate who had been subpoenaed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee.
That’s not necessarily the most important part of the charges, but I knew you’d want to hear about it first. The witness is Randy Credico, a former radio personality who Stone said served as an intermediary between him and the WikiLeaks folk who released all those stolen Clinton campaign emails.
The indictment says Stone accused Credico of being “a rat. A stoolie” and warned that he would “rip you to shreds” and “take that dog away from you.”
Credico has a little white emotional support dog named Bianca. Doesn’t this sound like something Paulie Walnuts [Peter Paul Gualtieri] would have done around “Sopranos” Season 4?
Moving on. The biggest news in the Mueller indictment was its charge that somebody told “a senior Trump campaign official” to contact Stone about any “damaging information” that WikiLeaks might have about the Clinton campaign. And that Stone reported back about stuff that just might be coming out in the near future.
Who do you think that Somebody [emphasis supplied] could be? A person with receding hair and a taste for ultralong ties who recently kept the government shut for more than a month for no good reason whatsoever? Your guess is as good as mine.
And which senior campaign official do you think Somebody [emphasis supplied] told to contact Stone? The former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, since convicted of financial fraud? Former campaign adviser Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI? Former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, formerly in prison for lying to the FBI?
How about lawyer Michael Cohen, now sentenced to three years in prison for lying to Congress? If Trump and the gang were a Sopranos remake, Cohen would be “Big Pussy” [Salvatore Bonpensiero], who turned on Tony after being busted himself.
Really, there’s so much talent there, it could have been anybody.
Stone and Trump go way back. They were introduced about 40 years ago by their good mutual friend Roy Cohn, the guy who gave us the McCarthy witch hunts. Trump still burbles about how great Cohn was. And he enthused to a documentary interviewer that Stone is “a quality guy” who “always wanted me to run for president.”
Can’t get a better recommendation than that. Stone has a talent for identifying presidential talent — he’s got a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back. He was partners with Paul Manafort in a Washington lobbying firm that specialized in representing the most terrible dictators on the planet. If you had a million dollars, a need for support from the United States government and a small problem with torture, rape and terrorism, these were the guys to see.
(A third partner, Charlie Black, said that when reporters called him to ask if Stone was the connection between the Trump campaign and Russia, he replied, “With all due respect, Roger couldn’t find Russia on a map.” As always, when we’re considering possible crimes committed during the 2016 campaign, the best defense of Trump and his associates is that they were too dumb to be capable of plotting.)
“I’m proud of the job I did at Black Manafort and Stone because I made a lot of money,” Stone told those documentarians, getting right to the point.
Stone’s political career almost came to a crashing end in 1996 when he ran into a scandal that forced him to resign from the Bob Dole campaign. (The candidate was touchy about headlines like “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group Sex Ring.”) Stone blamed the story on a lying, disgruntled former employee. Later, he admitted that it was true, and explained that he needed to deny it because “my grandparents were still alive.”
But no matter, he would go on triumphantly to organize a wild protest that stopped the recount of votes after the Gore-Bush election in Florida. Or maybe not. Stone bragged that he was the guy who staged one of the most spectacular assaults on the democratic process in recent history, but there was competition for the title.
And then on to Donald Trump. He and Stone had worked on his political career for ages. (Although Stone doesn’t take credit for Trump’s Obama birther campaign, he’s said that he didn’t discourage the idea.) The two men parted company in 2015 — Stone claimed he’d quit because he was dismayed by Trump’s “provocative media fights.”
But then next thing you know we’re in 2016, and they’re pals again. Those Clinton campaign emails are stolen and released. According to Stone’s indictment: A “high-ranking Trump campaign official sent a text message to Stone that read ‘well done.’”
That would be a memorable moment. Not often when “well done” comes up in connection with the Trump crew. ###
[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she took a leave in order to complete America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. She received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Gail Collins’s newest book is As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda (2012).]
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Stone-Cold Loser
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Roger Stone has always lived in a dog-eat-dog world.
So it was apt that he was charged with skulduggery in part for threatening to kidnap a therapy dog, a fluffy, sweet-faced Coton de Tuléar, belonging to Randy Credico, a New York radio host.
Robert Mueller believes that Credico, a pal of Julian Assange, served as an intermediary with WikiLeaks for Stone. Mueller’s indictment charges that Stone called Credico “a rat” and “a stoolie” because he believed that the radio host was not going to back up what the special counsel says is Stone’s false story about contacts with WikiLeaks, which disseminated Russia’s hacked emails from the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
Stone emailed Credico that he would “take that dog away from you,” the indictment says, later adding: “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die (expletive).”
As the owner of two Yorkies, Stone clearly knows how scary it is when a beloved dog is in harm’s way. When he emerged from court on Friday, he immediately complained that FBI agents had “terrorized” his dogs when they came to arrest him at dawn at his home in Fort Lauderdale.
The last thing Stone posted on Instagram before his arrest was a video of a terrier, with a high-pitched voice-over, protesting, “Roger Stone did nothing wrong.”
Always bespoke and natty, living by the mantra that it’s better to be infamous than never famous, Stone looked strangely unadorned as he came out of court to meet the press in a navy polo shirt and bluejeans.
As the master of darkness who had been captured in darkness stepped into the bright light of Fort Lauderdale, he was his usual flamboyant, unapologetically meretricious self. He proclaimed his innocence, flashed the Nixon victory sign and reiterated the old saw from his mentor, Roy Cohn, that any attention is good attention.
But it fell flat. Being Roger Stone had finally caught up with him.
He has always said Florida suited him because “it was a sunny place for shady people,” borrowing a Somerset Maugham line. But now the cat’s cradle of lies and dirty tricks had tripped up the putative dognapper. And it went down on the very same day that Paul Manafort — his former associate in a seamy lobbying firm with rancid dictators as clients, and then later his pal in the seamy campaign of Donald Trump — was also in federal court on charges related to the Mueller probe. Manafort’s hair is now almost completely white.
One of Stone’s rules — along with soaking his martini olives in vermouth and never wearing a double-breasted suit with a button-down collar — is “Deny, deny, deny.” But his arrest for lying, obstructing and witness tampering raised the inevitable question about his on-and-off friend in the White House, the man who is the last jigsaw-puzzle piece in the investigation of Trumpworld’s alleged coordination with Russia: Is being Donald Trump finally about to catch up with Donald Trump?
Stone, who famously has Nixon’s face tattooed on his back, is the agent provocateur who is the through line from the Nixon impeachment articles to the articles about Trump’s possible impeachment.
As Manafort said in the 2017 documentary “Get Me Roger Stone,” Trump and Stone “see the world in a very similar way.” And that way is theatrical and cynical. Do whatever you have to do to get what you want; playing by the rules is for suckers.
In 1999, when I went on a trip to Miami to watch Trump test the presidential waters, Stone orchestrated Trump’s Castro-bashing speech to Cuban-Americans. The bodybuilding, swinging strategist, christened “the state-of-the-art sleazeball” by The New Republic in the 80s, said he was “a jockey looking for a horse.”
Stone, who was mixed up in Watergate at the tender age of 19, “made the transition from the Stone Age of dirty tricks to today,” as David Axelrod puts it.
He watched Nixon rally the silent majority with a law-and-order message and racial dog whistling. He helped Ronald Reagan create Reagan Democrats.
For decades, believing “past is prologue,” Stone urged Trump to be the successor to those pols, revving up angry, white working-class voters who felt belittled or scared of “the other.” It would be so easy to divide and stoke resentment, as Stone and Trump proved when they inflamed the birther controversy against Barack Obama.
“Hate is a stronger motivator than love,” Stone told the documentarians. “Human nature has never changed.”
The tribal tensions in America made Stone’s favorite tricks easier than ever; he didn’t have to operate in the shadows. He wore a T-shirt with Bill Clinton and the word “Rape” at 2016 campaign rallies. As Stone boasted in the documentary, his “slash-and-burn” tactics “are now in vogue.”
Trump has had periods of estrangement with Stone. In 2008, in an interview with The New Yorker, he called the strategist “a stone-cold loser,” a state Trump himself has been relegated to this past week, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi.
Stone will not go gently. When he is asked about the tattoo of Nixon, he says he got it to remind himself, “A man is not finished when he is defeated; he is only finished when he quits.”
At the moment, though, dogged by Mueller, Stone and Manafort are the dog’s breakfast. The pair has given practicing the dark arts a bad name. ###
[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]
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Politics, Writing, And The Journalism Professor From Hell — Answers To Readers' Questions
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
With women voters electing more women to both gubernatorial and congressional roles, do you feel we may actually break the glass ceiling in 2020 and elect a woman president and who do you believe could fulfill that role? — Carrie Lin Jones in Dubuque, Iowa
I think about this all the time, and to be honest, I’m torn. Because I really do believe that sexism hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016, there is part of me that wonders if there is too much at stake to risk running a woman in 2020. I was really dispirited by last year's backlash against Elizabeth Warren — who, full disclosure, my husband has consulted for — because it reminded me of how people turned Clinton into a caricature of herself.
At the same time, Clinton did win the popular vote, and it wouldn’t take much for a Democrat to flip Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Some of the most exciting potential candidates happen to be women, including Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris. The grass roots of the Democratic Party is hugely mobilized and has shown itself excited about electing women. And it would be profoundly sweet and redemptive if it were a woman who rid us of President Grab-Em-By-The-Pussy.
As a person who hates guns, thank you for helping me understand the argument and perspective of the Socialist Rifle Association. There have been moments where I have wondered if I, too, should consider a gun. Here is my question: I read an article yesterday about the gun restrictions put forth in California and yet they have had three mass shootings, I believe, since 2014? Do we have any proof that legislation, on state or national levels, will do anything to prevent the shootings like we have experienced? — Molly Reynolds Maher in Nashville, Tennessee
According to data compiled by Mother Jones, since 1982 California has had more deaths from mass shootings than any other state — 128 fatalities. But that’s because California simply has the highest population. Its rate of firearms deaths is one of the lowest in the country, about half that of Florida’s. State-level gun control can never entirely solve the problem of mass shootings — guns are still legal in the state and are easily available across state lines. But California actually offers pretty good evidence that gun control can curb gun violence.
As a woman, a liberal, a supporter of minority voices, I feel such a sense of sheer panic about the direction I see our culture heading such that I have lost my ability to appraise differing views calmly and objectively. How do you maintain your clear head and not function entirely from a defensive place? — Natasha Brown in Los Angeles, California
I’m not sure I always do! I find it much easier to engage with arguments that I disagree with when they’re made in good faith. I enjoy arguing with Ross Douthat on “The Argument,” the podcast we co-host, because he’s sincere and intellectually honest. I can read a writer like Noah Rothman at Commentary or David French at National Review for the same reason. They don’t write in ways that are deliberately misleading, and it’s useful to think through why I disagree with them.
The people I find maddening are those who don’t really care whether what they say is true or false. I usually can’t bring myself to watch more than a few minutes of Fox News, because it’s just such transparent, intellectually insulting propaganda.
Have or do you ever find that your thinking on a subject significantly changes as you explore the topic? If so, would you share an example? — Lisa Smith in San Diego, California
I’ve written about how multiple visits to the West Bank have really shaken the default liberal Zionism I was brought up with. More recently, as Israel has become increasingly illiberal and has acted to foreclose the possibility of a two-state solution, I’ve become more sympathetic to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] movement. It’s not that I’m totally sold on it — I understand the awful historical echoes of singling the Jewish state out for economic punishment, and I hate the way it’s used to shun Israeli writers and academics in international forums. But I feel like I can no longer dismiss BDS or its adherents outright, for reasons I recently wrote about in my column.
I also recently read Alex Berenson’s book about marijuana, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence (2019), and interviewed him for our podcast. He didn’t convince me that marijuana should be illegal, but he did persuade me that the drug has more ill effects than the pot lobby would like us to believe.
Michelle, could a third national party ever take hold in the USA? — Barry G. Larocque in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
I’m generally skeptical of third parties for reasons I recently discussed on “The Argument.” As long as we have a winner-take-all system, third parties are destined to play a spoiler role, helping the party that is furthest from them ideologically. The history of the last few decades, I think, shows that working within the parties is far more effective than trying to start a new one. Consider how much more the Democratic Socialists of America have accomplished, in terms of building real political power, than the Green Party has. I’m all for electoral reforms, like the ranked-choice voting system in Maine, that would make third parties more viable and practical. But absent those reforms, I think we’re stuck with a two-party system.
That said, those two parties don’t have to be the ones we have currently. It would certainly be fantastic if a rational, decent conservative party emerged to replace the GOP!
What did you learn from your least favorite teacher? — Nancy Barlow [location omitted]
I love this question! When I went to graduate school for journalism at UC-Berkeley, I was assigned to an introductory class with a notorious hard-ass who ran his seminar like a boot camp. He made us show up at an ungodly hour of the morning, professionally dressed, having read the entire New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. (He’d give us quizzes that included questions about the sports and style sections, so you had to read everything.) Sometimes he would make us file two articles a day, six days a week. He’d assign us to spend the night in an emergency room and come back with a story, or send us out to cover something he’d heard on the police scanner. If I remember correctly, he had us cover a BDSM fetish ball, which he probably couldn’t have gotten away with today. If you missed a class, you lost a letter grade. If you were late, you lost half of one. If you hadn’t placed a story in a legitimate outlet by the end of the semester, you couldn’t get higher than a C. Sometimes he would say to us something like, “Death is better than failure because at least you don’t have to look at yourself in the mirror.”
It was a brutal experience, and at the time, I hated him. But I learned more in that class than I did in any other that I’ve ever taken. I was only 20 when I started grad school — I’d gone to college early — and had very little real-world experience, and that class forced me to quickly get over whatever hesitation I had about hitting up sources for quotes or pitching editors. Many years later I taught journalism students and found myself wishing someone had put them through at least a light version of that initiation. ###
[Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and an MS (journalism) from the University of California at Berkeley.]
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