Matt Taibbi

Taibbi is talking about the clinton foundation story, which should be much bigger than it is, not the dncleaks stuff. But you wouldn't know it from this thread. and that's probably because the people in this thread haven't paid attention to the clinton foundation stuff, because of people not making a big deal of it in the media, which is precisely taibbi's point.

I kind of feel like the Clinton foundation story is suffering death by slow leak, combined with the fact that no one (that I know of anyway) has done a really good job of tying everything together.

yeah there was a bit of talk about that Daily Caller story in the election thread, but there's a limit to how seriously we can take a story that doesn't cross over from batshit mediaworld

the problem with the clinton foundation story is that there's no story yet. there is speculation - enough that i listened to a 45 minute NPR panel on the topic on Monday (they did a v poor job burying the story) and read numerous NYT stories on the topic (including back when the story first broke and it was about whether state approved arms deals in exchange for donations to the foundation). even the arms story was mostly speculation. it's an unsexy story (maybe some ppl got access to state bc of donations to a charitable foundation) and there isn't a smoking gun. despite that the media has, in their quixotic quest for parity, reported on every new detail.

like "should be much bigger than it is" - does anyone really think the media is not reporting sufficiently bc they're afraid of giving trump the election? the media cares about one thing - getting hits. anti clinton stories are great for driving traffic. they have reported and will continue to report as much as they can. but they can't make something from nothing.

There may or may not be something there, but I feel like I haven't seen anyone do a thorough, rigorous analysis of donations/patterns wrt favors and access. There are just people lined up on one side to say that any appearance of impropriety is obviously corruption of the worst kind and people lined up on the other to say there's clearly nothing there whatsoever.

Honestly the Clinton Foundation story is exactly what I meant re: DBM.

The incredibly boring and quotidian nature of the story ("career politician continues to be involved in personal non-profit activities while employed in high ranking government position" plus or minus "huge non profit foundation run by family of career politicians is probably corrupt in at least a couple ways") makes it very difficult to write any kind of compelling headlines about it. There also remains no smoking gun, even after all the dumps and leaks. Lastly, in order to be convinced by stories that allege that the highest foreign policy official in the Obama administration, other than POTUS himself, was in fact a wheelin' dealin' pay-for-play loose cannon, you'd have to already be convinced that Obama's foreign policy has been a giant shitshow. So of course Morbs is all over it, as is the (T)rump wing of the GOP.

it's definitely worth delving into but ppl pretending no one is investigating the clinton foundation is pretty disingenuous

yeah i just googled clinton foundation and found large articles on the topic from NYT, WaPost, WSJ, a recent op-ed from the Boston Globe, etc. it's not their fault that there aren't new developments every day. blame assange.

a 45 minute block of NPR programming!

I feel like "no one is covering important issue" is a codephrase for "no one is concentrating on the particular pieces of this thing that I feel we could spin into a controversy"

Obama's foreign war policy is just a standard imperial placeholder; i expect Clinton's to be more Col Kilgore

actually i expect nothing

only the fearless investigative journalists at Fox and Breitbart are willing to tackle it!

xxp

if trump wasn't a completely tone-deaf white nationalist psychopath and could avoid saying something insane any day that Hillary is in the news over some controversy then there would be a lot more scrutiny on her, but he is and he can't

There is scrutiny of her but like many posters have remarked there's no direct evidence of anything

interview

Obviously, some people want to ascribe the entire rise of Donald Trump 100 percent to racism, 100 percent to discontent within an aging white demographic that feels frustrated about changes in the world that they have no control over, but that’s really not entirely the story. That may be most of the story, but it’s not 100 percent of the story. As much as I can’t stand David Frum, he had a piece in the Atlantic that got into a lot of different issues that explain why Trump happened, from the failure of the Republican Party to really listen to their own base, to the abandonment of unions and working-class people by both parties, to the general disconnect between people who are out there really living their lives and the media and Washington and the donor class.

All of these things are major, major problems, and I don’t think they have been sufficiently investigated. The Trump story has really been laid out as, “He’s the bad guy, his supporters are evil, and let’s all look down on him,” and that’s that. Look, I agree that he’s awful and horrible and needs to be stopped, but we still need to understand why he’s happening, and I don’t think we’re doing a great job of that.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/science/2016/08/matt_taibbi_says_donald_trump_has_ruined_journalism.html

that's def true. but i'm not sure the MSM ever did a great job with the sort of deep explanation he desires. and he seems to think that the media not holding hillary clinton's feet to the fire is a consequence of their focus on pillorying (sp?) trump. but the MSM hasn't exactly held obama's feet to the fire in re. extralegal assassinations etc. so nothing they're doing (or not doing) seems notably out of character. sadly.

sorry, i meant, "sad!"

the abandonment of unions and working-class people by both parties

when Reagan proved the working class, including union members, would sell their birthright in exchange for a mess of reactionary-rhetoric pottage, the working class set themselves up for economic marginalization and voted themselves into wage stagnation hell.

look - taibbi types want to believe that trump is about economic anxiety bc it feeds into a narrative he already wants to believe is true. but gallup has studied the voters and they've found that not only do trump voters not correlate to economic anxiety, but they are actually voters who are doing above average economically. what trump voters correlate heavily to is racial anxiety. on some level these voters may be identifying culturally with economically struggling working class ppl, but they are not actually those people. it's a fantasy (shocking that right-wingers are engaging in fantasy). you can't just make up what something is about bc it fits with your pre-existing narrative. aka this is more of taibbi totally dropping the ball this election.

the working class have not been voting in their best economic interests for several decades now, so it would be amazing if they suddenly decided to this time.

i feel like for some ppl 'the white working class'/southern strategy narrative can explain any phenomenon in us politics... for sure it's super impt and maybe i just have fatigue from hearing it trotted out to explain x, y, z too many times but i don't really buy it in this case

prob should be distinguishing between (large chunk of) white working class and the rest (majority?) of the working class.

post

er, x-post

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/curt-schilling-is-the-next-donald-trump-w435754

Schilling should wake up every morning and compose a five-page letter to God thanking him for the American white-guy lifestyle jackpot. Instead, he's consumed with bitterness over the raw deal he thinks people like him have gotten.
In this, he's very much like Donald Trump, who spent much of his adult life partying with models and celebrities and somehow emerged in late middle age as the most obdurate complainer in American history.
This brain type sees outrages everywhere. Colleges offer degrees in Black Studies, but unless it's the Martin Mull version, you can't proudly lug around a History of White People without being put on an FBI watch list. Unfair! As someone actually asked me on Twitter once, "How come only minorities get to have identity politics?"
If you really have to ask questions like this – if you can't, for instance, see that the whole curriculum of most colleges is "white studies" – then there are probably a lot of other things you're not ever going to grasp. So no offense, but when it comes to stuff like this, it's no use arguing, and, well, shut up, is what the rest of humanity is mostly saying to us white guys.
They're probably not saying shut up forever, or about everything, but just for once and about some things, after thousands of years of unrestrained yammering.
This shouldn't be too big an ask, since (as the likes of Trump and Schilling regularly prove) American white men still mostly run the world and live highly failure-resistant existences. Just take yes for an answer, enjoy the ride, and try to have the decency to not act like a victim; that's all anyone asks.
But they can't do it. The Schilling/Trump principle is never shutting up, particularly on topics about which they are ignorant, which is pretty much all of them. This is a movement, not limited to Trump, and it's not going to end anytime soon. God help us.

taibbi sells out the revolution

The "secret" speeches in some ways showed Hillary Clinton in a more sympathetic light than her public persona usually allows. Speaking to bankers and masters of the corporate universe, she came off as relaxed, self-doubting, reflective, honest, philosophical rather than political, and unafraid to admit she lacked all the answers.

The transcripts read like freewheeling discussions with friends about how to navigate an uncertain future. In one speech, she conceded a sense of disconnect between the wealthy and the middle class to which she used to belong. This, she said, was a feeling she never had growing up, when the country seemed to be more united.

"And now, obviously," she told executives from Goldman, "I'm kind of far removed because of the life I've lived and the economic ... fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy."
This frank, almost regretful admission rendered her more real in a few sentences than those cliché-ridden speeches about her hardscrabble background as the granddaughter of a Scranton lace-factory worker.

In a speech before the Brazilian Banco Itaú, Clinton talked about her vision for the future. "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders," she reportedly said. She wanted this economy "as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere."

Does this mean we have to revert back to Jimmy Carter as history's greatest monster?

if only Morbz were around to remind us

you have to admit the podesta group email about deliberately putting in some anti-wall-street stuff to then "leak" in order to throw people off the trail was, at a minimum, hilarious.

i didn't see that one. after the 5th or 6th totally misrepresented excerpt i stopped paying attention to the new leaks

One thing that strikes me about Wikileaks is how amateurish they've been revealed and not like the sophisticated I think Assange considered himself. Their whole strategy of slowly releasing emails that have nothing explosive in them just numbed the public to paying attention. They probably thought the slow leak would bleed the Clinton campaign but they should've picked 2-3 really strong hits and focused on them.

luckily Assange is a deluded moron

my favorite is still the panicked leak in the immediate wake of the access hollywood tape

That was supposed to say "sophisticated kingmaker" having zing problems :(

i didn't see that one. after the 5th or 6th totally misrepresented excerpt i stopped paying attention to the new leaks

― Mordy, Friday, October 14, 2016 5:04 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol ya, same. half ppl i follow on twitter were & still are acting like there's some heinous shit in there, though. even smart people, which kept making me doubt myself and read another

Reminds me of something I remember reading about Bill Clinton many years ago; that he truly and sincerely wanted to help people, and for whatever reason believed free markets policy were the way to do it

People are complicated and weird.

robert rubin

Don't forget Obama put Cass Sunstein in charge of OIRA as one of his first draft picks.

robert rubin

― coffee table, "serious" noodling (brimstead)

he sincerely wanted to help people?

booming interview (i'd forgotten Tom Friedman was in the NYT audience with the Don)

This idea that somehow Trump was the fault of the media because we didn't call him out enough, or we didn't do enough negative reporting about him, or we didn't do enough to try to reach his voters and dissuade them from making this choice? They were lost to us before this campaign even started. They were never going to listen to anything we said....

The Democrats are making some of the mistakes the Republicans made. The blame is: "the press didn't do enough," or "Russia was interfering with the election," or "we made a few minor strategic mistakes and that if we clear those up everything will be fine."

While the reality is that they should be looking themselves in the mirror and saying, "My God, how is it possible that we lost a popularity contest to this person?" It should say something incredibly profound about how despised and unpopular they are. But they're not in that kind of panic mode right now, and they should be....

Look at Friedman's first question to Trump when they had an interview—he was like, "Mr. President-elect, can I ask a question?" And by the end of the interview you could see that he'd very much softened his tone toward Trump. When he wrote about that interview, he talked about how Trump gave critics "hope" and went on about how he could be influenced in the right direction etc. One of the reasons that people like Friedman survive as long as they do is because they have a magical ability to contort themselves into whatever shape is necessary to be pleasing to whoever is in power.

I can't sit here and tell you for sure that Thomas Friedman and David Brooks specifically are going to end up being Trump fanatics, but I do think it's a characteristic of that type of pundit—they tend to convince themselves over time that whoever is in power is making the right decisions....

http://gothamist.com/2017/01/11/matt_taibbi_trump_clowns.php

The headline, not the article, says hope

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/opinion/at-lunch-donald-trump-gives-critics-hope.html

inteview, with addendum on Russiamania

I remain very skeptical of these news stories whose sources are almost entirely unnamed and from intelligence services. The meaning of them is absolutely unclear still. The bombshell New York Times piece on this subject reports that “current and former American officials” say conversations were intercepted as part of investigations whose aim was to determine if cooperation or collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia had occurred. The third paragraph of that very story says they found no evidence of that collusion. So what are we talking about? What does contact with Russian intelligence officials mean? I’ve had contact with Russian intelligence officials, many times, as part of my normal reporting work (I’ve even called some of those agencies for comment!) and I’m surely not a traitor. Virtually everyone who has done any kind of high-level business or reporting in Russia has had contact with intelligence agencies, whether they knew it or not. In the extant case, was it knowing or unknowing contact? What are we talking about? Here’s the thing: If this conduct really was treasonous — and I don’t rule out that it was — why didn’t the agencies act in real time? Why aren’t they acting now? Why is this being litigated in the media? I think this is a very dangerous story for reporters. Please understand that I am not saying I don’t find it possible that collusion or compromise of Trump occurred. But the Flynn episode aside, it still feels long on insinuation and short on detail. It could equally be treason on Trump’s part, or meddling in domestic politics by our intelligence agencies. I’m scared of both possibilities.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-revolutionary-force-of-stupidity-a-conversation-with-matt-taibbi/

But the Flynn episode aside,

^ LOL

if everyone had listened to Greenwald and Taibbi Mike Flynn would still have a job in the White House

"everyone," you mean those inveterate RS/Intercept readers in the WH?

Similar content: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-russia-story-is-a-minefield-for-democrats-and-the-media-w471074

I agree that maybe the means justify the ends with all of this Russia stuff, but if it all turns out to amount to little, that seems dangerous for media credibility. But I guess at this point it doesn't matter, and anything is fair game to throw sand in the gears of the administration?

The mainstream media already has very poor credibility among those who voted for Trump. When you've been herded into pens at Trump rallies, where you've been tagged as "the worst liars" and the crowd has been incited to boo you loudly and vigorously, then you haven't got much credibility to lose in that quarter. Since you're already the enemy regardless of what you do or say, it must be tempting to abandon some of your scruples and embrace the role.

Yeah, it seems like even if there's fire to this smoking story, Trump supporters are already on-board with buddying up to Russia at this point anyway. I guess there's no point (politically) in trying to have any kind of rhetorical high ground anymore (or maybe there never was, and I'm just figuring that out?), but that seems like such a dangerous thing to let go of. The both-sides-do-it argument always seems to benefit the status quo. Ugh. So goddamn frustrating. Is this all postmodernism's fault?

russia interfered in the 2016 US election in favor of donald trump

so vote republican