Daily Digest
The FBI Has “Grave Concerns”? So Do I
The NFL kneeling protests: On MPR Tet (2)
Hillary Doubles Down on Stupid
“The Right to Say Goodbye”??
(John Hinderaker) Most of us are eagerly awaiting the release of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo on abuse of the FBI by the Obama administration. It should happen in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, the Bureau is worried, as always, about its public image. The Associated Press headlines: “FBI clashes with Trump, has ‘grave concerns’ on Russia memo.” I’m so old, I can remember when liberals were in favor of revealing corruption in institutions like the FBI. Those days, of course, are long gone.
In a remarkably public clash of wills with the White House, the FBI declared Wednesday it has “grave concerns” about the accuracy of a classified memo on the Russia election investigation that President Donald Trump wants released.
Yeah, well, you know what? I have grave concerns about the politicization of the Department of Justice and the FBI under the Obama administration, which I have been writing about since 2010.
“As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,” the FBI said.
If there are “material omissions of fact,” the Democrats’ responsive memo no doubt will reveal them. Good: let’s lay the cards on the table. The relevant fact here is that the FBI is no longer claiming that there is a national security problem with releasing the memo, only that it will put the FBI in a bad light.
Trey Gowdy, soon to depart the House, gets the last word:
The Justice Department had said in a letter last week that it would be “extraordinarily reckless” to release the memo without first giving the FBI and the department the chance to review it.After those complaints, Wray reviewed the memo over the weekend. Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., who was with him when he reviewed the memo, said the FBI director did not raise any national security concerns. Gowdy said the memo doesn’t reveal any intelligence methods but does reveal “one source.”
Heh. Christopher Steele, I presume. It’s time for some transparency. Let’s get to the bottom of the FBI’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The Bureau needs, at a minimum, to be reformed via a thorough housecleaning of senior bureaucrats.
The NFL kneeling protests: On MPR
Posted: 31 Jan 2018 02:13 PM PST
(Scott Johnson) Minnesota Public Radio (91.1 FM in the Twin Cities) will broadcast the University of Minnesota Humphrey School symposium on the NFL kneeling protests tomorrow at noon and 9:00 p.m. Moderated on campus yesterday by Professor Larry Jacobs, director of the Humphrey School’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, the symposium panel included Professor Douglass Hartmann, chairman of the University of Minnesota Sociology Department, Frank White, coordinator of the Minnesota Twins youth baseball program, and me, blogger. MPR streams its programming live online here and has a panoply of listening options here.
I previewed the symposium here. John reviewed the symposium here. I’m still in the woulda, coulda, shoulda self-assessment phase of my part in the program. If you have any interest in the subject, I nevertheless hope you will be able to check out the program tomorrow.
Minnesota Public Radio is an outlet with incredible reach. Given the presence in town of NFL management and the league’s top two teams for the Super Bowl on Sunday, the program may even be heard by responsible parties. Professor Jacobs is, in any event, to be congratulated for putting together a program that attracted the MPR’s interest in such short order.
Tet (2)
Posted: 31 Jan 2018 12:45 PM PST
(Steven Hayward) Continuing with yesterday’s excerpt about the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, a little bit more from The Age of Reagan, vol. 1:
On the morning of January 31, the first full day of the Tet attack, Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams and a Vietnamese TV cameraman employed by NBC were wandering around Saigon getting photos and footage of the battle damage when they noticed a small contingent of South Vietnamese troops with a captive dressed in a checked shirt. From the other direction came Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of South Vietnam’s national police. As Adams and the NBC cameraman aimed their cameras, Loan calmly raised his sidearm and shot the prisoner—a Viet Cong officer—in the head. Loan walked over to Adams and said in English: “They killed many Americans and many of my men.” (It was not reported at the time that the prisoner had also taunted his captors, saying “Now you must treat me as a prisoner of war,” and had been identified as the assassin of a South Vietnamese army officer’s entire family.)
Adams’ stunning photo of the prisoner’s grimace as the bullet struck his head ran on the front pages of newspaper all across America two days later. Only the Associated Press reported Loan’s remark to Adams that “They killed many Americans and many of my men.” Most news accounts of the photo ignored this context; the drama of the picture was just too irresistible for most news organizations to try to put it in any kind of balanced context. NBC, which had only a silent film clip because no sound man had accompanied its cameraman, went so far as to embellish its TV broadcast of the episode by adding the sound of a gunshot. Tom Buckley, a writer for Harper’s magazine, said Adams’ photo was “the moment when the American public turned against the war.”
The visual shock of the Adams’ photograph (for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize) was soon matched by the journalistic interpretation of events. On February 7, Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett filed a story from the Mekong Delta town of Ben Tre, where hard fighting had inflicted severe damage and high civilian casualties. The third paragraph of Arnett’s report quoted an unnamed U.S Major: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” The phrase proved an immediate sensation and was picked up and amplified by the media echo chamber. The phrase came to be repeated countless times by other media outlets and was adapted into an all-purpose slogan to describe the hard action in other cities such as Hue. For many Americans and not just those in the anti-war movement, it became an epigram that captured the disproportion between America’s seemingly excessive use of firepower and our limited war aims. (Arnett refused to identify the source of the quote, but later revealingly referred to his source as “the perpetrator.” The New Republic identified the source at the time as Major Chester L. Brown.)
Arnett’s sensational quotation was only the beginning of the bad press the Tet offensive unleashed. “Rarely,” wrote Peter Braestrup in his two-volume analysis of the press coverage of Tet (Big Story), “has contemporary crisis journalism turned out, in retrospect, to have veered so widely from reality. . . To have portrayed such a setback for one side as a defeat for the other—in a major crisis abroad—cannot be counted as a triumph for American journalism.” Braestrup later went even further, describing media coverage of Tet as “press malpractice.” Media critics, especially conservatives, have long charged that antiwar bias emerged openly in the wake of Tet. Former Los Angeles Times and Newsweek correspondent Robert Elegant, who covered Vietnam for ten years, wrote that “For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen.” The coverage of Tet can be charitably attributed as much to press incompetence and a journalistic herd instinct as it did to outright bias. . .
Several months later an NBC producer proposed to correct the record with a three-part series showing that Tet had in fact been an enemy defeat. The idea was rejected by higher-ups at the network because, a senior producer said, Tet was seen “in the public’s mind as a defeat, and therefore it was an American defeat.”
Hillary Doubles Down on Stupid
Posted: 31 Jan 2018 10:52 AM PST
(Steven Hayward)The British politician Denis Healey is credited with the First Law of Holes, which holds: “If you’re in one, stop digging.” Hillary Clinton apparently never heard of the First Law of Holes, because she’s shoveling away over the story that ten years ago she declined to fire a campaign staffer for sexual harassment. Now Hillary wants us to know that she’s oh so sorry, writing a long apologia on Facebook. You have to read it, not to believe it:
The most important work of my life has been to support and empower women. I’ve tried to do so here at home, around the world, and in the organizations, I’ve run. I started in my twenties, and four decades later I’m nowhere near being done. I’m proud that it’s the work I’m most associated with, and it remains what I’m most dedicated to.So I very much understand the question I’m being asked as to why I let an employee on my 2008 campaign keep his job despite his inappropriate workplace behavior.The short answer is this: If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t. . .
Now you tell us. After this, she reviews the incident from her point of view, and then piles on even more turgid self-serving pap:
It was reassuring to hear that she [the victim from 2008] felt supported back then – and that all these years later, those feelings haven’t changed. That again left me glad that my campaign had in place a comprehensive process for dealing with complaints. The fact that the woman involved felt heard and supported reinforced my belief that the process worked – at least to a degree. . .Over the past year, a seismic shift has occurred in the way we approach and respond to sexual harassment, both as a society and as individuals. This shift was long overdue.
Um, one reason it was “long overdue” was your covering for your Predator-in-Chief husband 20 years ago, blaming the whole fuss on the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Funny that’s she silent about all this now.
We can’t go back, but we can certainly look back, informed by the present. We can acknowledge that even those of us who have spent much of our lives thinking about gender issues and who have firsthand experiences of navigating a male-dominated industry or career may not always get it right.You may question why it’s taken me time to speak on this at length. The answer is simple: I’ve been grappling with this and thinking about how best to share my thoughts. I hope that by doing so will push others to keep having this conversation – to ask and try to answer the hard questions, not just in the abstract but in the real-life contexts of our roles as men, women, bosses, employees, advocates, and public officials. I hope that women will continue to talk and write about their own experiences and that they will continue leading this critical debate, which, done right, will lead to a better, fairer, safer country for us all.
Now she’s just trolling us. Here’s a question I’d like to see her asked: If you had it to do all over again, would you still marry Bill?
A lot of people keep saying, Can’t this woman just go away? To the contrary, I hope she hangs around forever.
“The Right to Say Goodbye”??
Posted: 31 Jan 2018 09:25 AM PST
(Steven Hayward) Did you know that you have a fundamental constitutional right to say goodbye? You do according to Federal District Court Judge Katherine B. Forrest (an Obama appointee). I guess that right was another one of those rights hiding in the emanations and penumbras of the 14th Amendment, or something.
On Monday Judge Forrest ordered the release from custody Ravidath Ragbir, an alien who ICE had detained and was preparing to deport. Judge Forrest twice notes that the government was in complete conformity with the statutory law: “The Court, in fact, agrees with the Government that the statutory scheme—when one picks the path through the thicket in the corn maze—allows them to do what was done here.” And: “The Court agrees that the statutory scheme governing petitioner’s status is properly read to allow for his removal without further right of contest.”
This should be the end of the matter then, shouldn’t it?
Not to Judge Forrest, who offers us this flourish of “legal reasoning”:
There is, and ought to be in this great country, the freedom to say goodbye. That is, the freedom to hug one’s spouse and children, the freedom to organize the myriad of human affairs that collect over time. It ought to be—and it has never before been—that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subject to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust [you mean like the Obama Administration arresting and jailing an obscure video producer after Benghazi??], regimes where those who have lived long in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home and work. And sent away.
Methinks Judge Forrest is angling for this year’s Anthony Kennedy Award for Most Emotive Judicial Writing. Prof. David Bernstein of Scalia Law School calls Judge Forrest’s opinion “the most lawless judicial decision I think I’ve ever read.”
By the way, who is Ragbir? The Washington Post yesterday filled in some of the blanks:
Ragbir is the director of the immigrant advocacy group New Sanctuary Coalition in New York, a collection of 150 faith-based organizations. He became a lawful U.S. resident in 1994. In 2000, he was convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy for accepting fraudulent loan applications while working at a mortgage lender. [Yet Judge Forrest says Ragbir has lived in the country “without incident.”]After serving a prison sentence, he was ordered deported based on his conviction. He spent about two years in detention but was released under supervision in 2008 while his case moved through immigration courts. Over the following decade, he became a prominent voice in New York’s immigrant community, testifying before the city council and once meeting with President Barack Obama’s transition team to discuss immigration policy, according to his attorneys.
In other words, Ragbir has been slated for deportation for nearly 10 years. Seems like that was plenty of time to arrange to say goodbye and get his affairs in order.
