To clarify the reptilian sobriquets assigned to the New York Fishwrap's Op-Ed writers, the original poisonous hisser was Maureen Dowd and she explains "The Cobra" appellation here. When Dowd was joined in the Op-Ed work by Gail Collins, this blog saluted her as "The Krait." It was only consistent that when Michelle Goldberg more recently joined Dowd and Collins, this blog deemed her "The Viper." And that, boys and girls, is how three poisonous reptiles came to the Op-Ed department of the NY Fishwrap. Today, this blog offers a double-strike from The Cobra and The Viper while The Krait lies in wait.If this is (fair & balanced) herpetological punditry, 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 March 2, 2019 — The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) Dissects The tRump-Cohen Relationship
[2] Published February 28, 2019 — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg) Performs A Post-Mortem On Dumbo Hypocrisy
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The Sycophant And The Sociopath
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
Donald Trump specializes in spectacular breakups.
First there was Ivana. Then there was Marla. Now comes trouble in paradise with Kim [Jong-un].
Last fall, Trump cooed that the North Korean dictator wrote him “beautiful letters” and “we fell in love,” but then the president canceled their lunch date following their disappointing rendezvous in Hanoi.
Yet all the crazy tabloid splits and international spats seem pallid in comparison to the pathetic spectacle in Congress on Wednesday: a heartbroken ex publicly and bitterly processing his relationship with Trump.
This time, it wasn’t just lust, betrayal and secrets splayed across Page Six [NY Post]. This time, it was in Congress, part of an investigation that could lead to legal jeopardy for the Trumps or impeachment for the president.
In his testimony, Michael Cohen called himself a “fool” when it came to Trump. “I ignored my conscience and acted loyal to a man when I should not have,” Cohen said. A fool for love, held in thrall by Trump. How could anyone be held in thrall by such a sleazy goofball, much less offer to take a bullet for him or make 500 threats on his behalf?
“It seems unbelievable that I was so mesmerized by Donald Trump that I was willing to do things for him that I knew were absolutely wrong,” said Cohen in his “Goodfellas” accent, adding that being around the “icon” was “intoxicating.”
“Mr. Trump is an enigma,” Cohen said. “He is complicated, as am I.”
Actually, Trump is simple, grasping for money, attention and fame. The enigma about Trump is why he cut off his lap dog so brutally that Cohen fell into the embrace of Robert Mueller and New York federal prosecutors. Trump is often compared to a mob boss, but Michael Corleone would never turn on a loyal capo, only on one who had crossed him.
The portrait Cohen drew of Trump was not surprising. It has been apparent for some time that the president is a con man, racist, cheat and liar. (See: Jared Kushner security clearance.)
What was most compelling about the congressional hearing was the portrait of the sadistic relationship between the sycophant and the sociopath.Cohen told the House Oversight Committee that working for Trump had made him feel that he was “involved in something greater than yourself — that you were somehow changing the world.”
Threatening to sue people and take away their livelihoods or ruin their reputations isn’t exactly Greenpeace or Doctors Without Borders. But Cohen was chugging Trump Kool-Aid. He saw himself as Trump’s protector, the thug’s thug.
In late 2017, he appeared to get misty while talking to Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox about Trump: “One man who wants to do so much good with so many detractors against him needs support.” He vowed he would never walk away from Trump, no matter what. A year ago, he even shopped around a book that was meant to be a rebuttal to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, pitched as the “family fix-it guy” and titled Trump Revolution: From the Tower to the White House, Understanding Donald J. Trump.
He understands Trump now.
A stung Trump went on a tweet storm Friday morning, bringing up that book proposal, calling it a “‘love letter to Trump’ manuscript,” and noting: “Written and submitted long after Charlottesville and Helsinki, his phony reasons for going rogue. Book is exact opposite of his fake testimony, which now is a lie!”
Unlike many Republican TV commentators who can wash away past sins about Sarah Palin and the Iraq war — and get a big payday and liberal love — by trashing Trump, Cohen is not destined for reputation rehab.
The problem in a nutshell, as Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien once told The Times, was that Michael Cohen wasn’t Roy Cohn. The latter Trump lawyer was the one who helped shape Trump’s character or lack thereof, drumming in the win-at-all-costs mentality Donald had learned at his father’s knee.
Trump, who once bleated “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” in his anger about Jeff Sessions recusing himself, wanted a lawyer who was whip-smart, amoral, ruthless and predatory. Cohen was merely Renfield to Trump’s Dracula, gratefully eating insects and doing the fiend’s bidding.
Trump used Cohen for dirty deeds done dirt cheap, as AC/DC sang.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump showed up late to Cohen’s son’s bar mitzvah and then made a belittling speech about how he had come only because Cohen had begged him and everyone around him. The Times revealed last April that Trump had regularly threatened to fire Cohen and quoted Roger Stone saying that Trump mocked Cohen for overpaying for Trump real estate.
With a few exceptions in his inner circle and with family, Trump doesn’t give loyalty or deserve it. That’s why Republicans on the Hill who so obsequiously stand by him will eventually learn it wasn’t worth it, just as Cohen warned them.
Loyalty is a rare commodity in Washington. And Cohen is not the most wretched sycophant in political history. That honor goes to Andrew Young, a slavishly devoted aide to John Edwards during the 2008 campaign who served as a driver, personal shopper, handyman and butler to the North Carolina senator.
When Edwards had an affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter and a pregnancy ensued, he persuaded Young to say that he [Young] was the father. Edwards also got Young to go on the lam with his wife, who was a nurse, and Hunter and the baby, hiding out in fancy hotels and a posh home near Santa Barbara — an odyssey financed by Young and Bunny Mellon. As Young wrote in The Politician, inside the campaign there was “a cult-like atmosphere” that encouraged extreme sycophancy.
When Trump gave me a tour of his campaign headquarters in Trump Tower in the summer of 2016, he introduced Cohen as “my lawyer.” Cohen looked furtive, standing around with Trump favorites Corey Lewandowski and Hope Hicks and a few young guys at a desk and a whole bunch of Trump portraits and cutouts and a wall with pictures of Trump’s vanquished primary rivals.
It was the least presidential campaign headquarters ever, with the drywall still unfinished in some places. As The Times reported, Cohen, who had been pushing for years for Trump to be president, was jealous of the attention Trump gave Lewandowski.
When Trump somehow stumbled into the presidency, he and his family did not think Cohen was up to snuff to come to Washington, much less get some high-level job like chief of staff that he dreamed of. The Journal reported that Cohen and his guests did not even get priority access to the inaugural fetes.
“He was central casting for Trump Tower but not for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio told me. “The problem is, of course, that much of what burdens Cohen is exactly what Trump liked about him in the past. He was willing to be awful on command and had done so countless times making countless enemies. As someone who was the target of this behavior, I can tell you it was so cartoonish as to be ridiculous.”
Everyone is disposable in Trumpworld. They sidelined the fixer. By the time federal prosecutors were investigating Cohen’s hush payments to Trump inamoratas, an adult-film actress and a former Playboy model, Trump was barely speaking to Cohen.
“Boss, I miss you so much,” he said in a rare phone call with Trump, The Journal reported. “I wish I was down there with you. It’s really hard for me to be here.”
The yearning was even more palpable than texts from Jeff Bezos to Lauren Sanchez.
The self-styled protector was in purdah and he resented it.
“If Trump was more sophisticated and had the ability to think long term, he would have anticipated that Cohen might have become a problem if he didn’t hold him close,” O’Brien told me. But Trump isn’t a long-term thinker.
“He’s never had to deal with the people he has face-planted coming back to haunt him — ever. He’s been doing this to people for decades,” O’Brien said. The difference now? “He never had law enforcement turning people on him and essentially weaponizing them against him.”
D’Antonio agreed that “the president made the mistake of disrespecting Cohen because he believed he had purchased Michael and that he would stay bought. When the underdog turns and bites hard, the overdog is always surprised.” ###
[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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Republicans’ Race To The Bottom
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
It’s hard to say what’s a bigger taboo in American politics: being a racist, or calling someone one.
Sure, the Republican Party will occasionally try to distance itself from one of its more egregiously hateful members, like Representative Steve King of Iowa, who lost committee assignments after seeming to defend white nationalism. But mostly, right-wing politicians and their media allies pretend, to the point of farce, that the primary racial injustice in America involves white people unfairly accused of racism. This makes talking openly about the evident racism of our president harder than it should be.
To see how this works in microcosm, consider the House Oversight Committee hearing at which Donald Trump’s former consigliere Michael Cohen testified on Wednesday. Cohen said, in his opening statement, that, in addition to being a con man and a cheat, Trump is a racist. This should be clear to all people of good faith, given that Trump was a leading figure in the birther movement, defended white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, and claimed he couldn’t get a fair hearing from a judge of Mexican heritage, to mention just a few examples.
But Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina, strenuously objected to Cohen’s description, and came up with what he seemed to think was an airtight rejoinder. Meadows, who is white, had Lynne Patton, an African American woman and longtime Trump employee now at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, stand behind him, and quoted her saying that she would not work for a racist. Checkmate!
In the past, one person who would often publicly vouch for Trump’s non-racism was Omarosa Manigault Newman, the “Apprentice”-star-turned-White House aide. Then Manigault Newman came out with a book calling Trump “a racist, a bigot and a misogynist.” As part of her promotional tour for that book, she released an audio recording of a conversation she had with Patton and another African-American Trump supporter, Katrina Pierson, strategizing about how to handle the fallout should a tape surface of Trump using a racist slur. On the recording Patton, the person Meadows called upon as a character witness for the president, didn’t seem doubtful that Trump could have said such a thing.
Many liberals were agog at this stunt by Meadows; on the left it's largely accepted that responding to charges of racism by pointing to black friends — never mind black employees — is clueless at best. Some white conservatives, however, seem convinced that you can’t be racist if you have an affectionate relationship with a person of color. And so when Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, called out Meadows toward the end of the hearing, he was so aggrieved he nearly melted down.
The “fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself,” said Tlaib, who is Palestinian-American. Red-faced, indignant and seemingly on the verge of tears, Meadows demanded that Tlaib’s words be stricken from the record, turned the charge of racism back on her, and said that he has nieces and nephews who are people of color. In a stunning dramatization of how racial dynamics determine whose emotions are honored, the hearing momentarily came to a halt so that Tlaib could assure Meadows that she didn’t mean to call him a racist, and the committee chairman, Elijah Cummings, who is African-American, could comfort him. “I could see and feel your pain,” Cummings told him.
So Meadows emerged as the victim. There was, however, another twist. It turns out that in 2012, Meadows said some very racist things about Barack Obama, promising, on at least two occasions, to send the American president “home to Kenya or wherever it is.” As recordings of these comments ricocheted through the news, Meadows didn’t quite apologize, but he did tell reporters that his words were “not the way that I should’ve answered the questions.” (In only one instance did he appear to be responding to a question.) “I can tell you that anyone who knows me knows that there is not a racial [sic] bone in my body,” he added.
I don’t know Meadows, or what a “racial bone” is, but I suspect he may not be the best arbiter of what constitutes bigotry. Then again, when it comes to Trump, no arbiter is really needed. Why, after all, was Meadows’s rediscovered birtherism so newsworthy, automatically understood as pertinent to a debate about his racism, or lack thereof? Because there’s a mainstream assumption that it is racist to say that Obama secretly hails from Africa. This should, but somehow doesn’t, translate into a mainstream assumption that Trump, who rode birther conspiracies to political prominence, is an unrepentant racist. He should be shunned as Steve King is shunned, but he can’t be shunned because he is the president.
This contradiction is behind some of the madness of our public life right now. Normalizing Trump, which has become a central mission of the Republican Party, depends on denial about what racism is. Not for the first time, Tlaib got in trouble for pointing out the obvious — the president is a bigot, and that in bringing out Patton to exonerate him, Meadows only demonstrated his own gross insensitivity.
On Thursday, Tlaib and Meadows reportedly had a warm conversation on the House floor; according to a CNN reporter, they hugged. I’m glad; given how much she’s been demonized in her short time in Congress, it’s probably in her interest to make Meadows feel better about their earlier exchange. Who knows, if she’s friendly enough, maybe he’ll be able to cite their relationship next time he’s caught saying something awful. ###
[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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