MORE THOUGHTS ON History Without Tears.
Archive for 2022
June 16, 2022
LIVE AT 4PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Jen van Laar.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Abbott closes infant formula plant in Michigan again after flooding.
READER FAVORITE: LED Floor Lamp. #CommissionEarned
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● Shot: What does a Biden presidency mean for the world?
—Headline, the Financial Times, January 19th, 2021.
● Chaser: An age of real wealth destruction.
—Headline, the Financial Times, yesterday.
TBH, IT WAS NEVER THAT GREAT: RIP Internet Explorer, and thanks for all the memes: Microsoft bids a long-coming farewell to a legacy browser.
THE HARDEST WORKING WOMAN IN POLITICS! Biden gives Kamala Harris another job: VP will now head an online harassment task force to add to her portfolio that includes the border and voting rights.
Flashback: “On the latest Editors podcast, I floated the somewhat-tongue-in-cheek theory that Joe Biden has set Kamala Harris up to fail, a passive-aggressive form of revenge for her shivving him in that first Democratic presidential-primary debate.”
To be fair, there’s enough failure to go around for everybody in this administration.
EARTHQUAKE: Biden Is ‘Too Old’ and Should ‘Step Aside,’ Says NYT Insider. “Leibovich’s column isn’t quite Henry II asking, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ But politically, it’s close.”
FOURTH TIME’S THE CHARM: NASA says it’s ready for a fourth attempt to fuel the massive SLS rocket.
THAT’S RICH: World’s first trillionaires could be from Texas. “A new report published by the software company Tipalti Approve estimates that newly relocated Texas resident, Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk, could become the world’s first trillionaire by 2024. Houston native and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell could become a trillionaire by 2033.”
WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: How one-third of “The Watergate Three” got written out of journalism history.
In the spring of 1976, the Post’s Watergate team gathered for a private screening of a nearly finished cut. The men in the room saw themselves reshaped on screen into big-name stars. Robert Redford played Woodward; Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein. Three Post editors were portrayed by award-winning character actors: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Martin Balsam as Howard Simons, and Jack Warden as Harry Rosenfeld.
Most of them were happy with their portrayals. (Robards won an Oscar playing Bradlee, despite barely 10 minutes of screen time.) But Simons was hurt deeply by the way the film made him seem like a mere functionary under Bradlee; in reality, Bradlee was only lightly involved in the story until months after the break-in. One critic noted that Simons “is made to sound like a fool who wanted them taken off the story” when in reality he was “the reporters’ strongest defender.” (Simons was later curator of the Nieman Foundation until his death from pancreatic cancer in 1989. At his memorial service, Woodward apologized for how Simons was portrayed in the movie.)
But [Barry] Sussman, the leader of the Watergate Three, wasn’t portrayed inaccurately — he just wasn’t portrayed at all. He’d been written out of the movie entirely.1 Filmmakers said they were worried that having three middle-aged white-guy editors on screen was already confusing for the audience, and four would’ve been too much.
But that it was Sussman they chose to cut — the editor most involved in the story from Day 1 — was galling to many, both in and out of the Post. When director Alan Pakula was doing his initial research for the film, both Simons and Rosenfeld had told him that, “if any one individual at the Post was deserving of a Pulitzer for the newspaper’s Watergate coverage…it was Barry Sussman.”
“Of all the filmmakers’ real and imagined derelictions, the elimination of Sussman as a character was the one that bothered Post staffers most,” Post film critic Gary Arnold wrote in his review. “Indeed, it has proved a more serious drawback than one might have guessed, because the picture needs a rumpled, avuncular, dogged editorial type to contrast with Robards’ flamboyant Bradlee and to supply some lucid updating and recapping of information as we go along.”
“As history, this is inexcusable,” wrote Jim Mann of The Baltimore Sun, “because it expunges from the record the editor who worked most intimately and directly with the reporters in the early days of Watergate.”
Post reporter Timothy Robinson told the Chicago Daily News he’d almost boycotted the movie because of Sussman’s omission. “The real hero isn’t even in it,” he said. “He was the guy who kept pushing and pushing that story.”
“When the celebrification of Watergate hit, Barry Sussman got cut out,” Mann, a former Post reporter, would say later. “If you take the hurt that Howard Simons felt, and you multiply that hurt by a thousand, you get to Barry Sussman.” In 1992, the Post itself would call Sussman’s omission “the most grievous example” of the movie’s “factual deficiencies.”2
After the film, the break between Sussman and Woodstein was total. Shepard describes the movie as having done “permanent psychic damage” to Sussman. Thirty years later, when she called Sussman to interview him about Woodward and Bernstein, his reply was: “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.”
* * * * * * * *
It’s more than a little ironic that Barry died less than two weeks before the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, a moment that will be endlessly mined for content. The scandal will likely be remembered at least as much through myth — Robert Redford questioning Hal Holbrook in a parking garage — as through reality. Hollywood wrote Barry out of Watergate; mortality wrote him out of its anniversary. There’s plenty for journalists to celebrate about that particular Story of the Century; let’s just remember the cast of characters wasn’t a short one.
As Max Holland wrote in the Weekly Standard right around this time in 2017 in “The Woodstein Tapes:”
The truth was that All the President’s Men was a fabulistic account of a newspaper procedural, part and parcel of what was then called the New Journalism. It presented a sanitized and often trivialized account of what had gone on inside and outside the Post—or what Barry Sussman described to Pakula as a “modified, limited hang out,” intentionally parroting John Ehrlichman’s infamous phrase about the tactic of presenting misleading information in order to divert attention from the real facts. In particular, Deep Throat was a fiction—not in the sense of a completely invented character—but in the motives attributed to him.
What Woodward and Bernstein conveniently left out of their explanation to Pakula—either because they were all-too-acutely aware of it or were inexcusably ignorant of it—was that this last rendezvous had coincided with [Mark] Felt’s abrupt departure from the FBI because he was suspected of leaking to the press. He had never talked to Woodward out of a concern for the office of the presidency or the bureau, much less the law or morality. He had leaked to damage the reputations of his rivals for the FBI directorship, which he coveted above all things. In May 1973, years of scheming had finally come to naught, and if he wasn’t experiencing a nervous breakdown that night he was close to one.
Woodward and Bernstein, of course, could hardly fess up: It would have been impossible to do so without providing Pakula with a serious clue to Deep Throat’s identity, and they were intent on keeping his name secret. More importantly, the mythology of Deep Throat-as-whistleblower had become central to their book and their reputations—and soon it would be central to the movie. So the duo kept up the pretense that Felt was a truth-teller and they had been in danger. Pakula faithfully recreated the paranoia in the film’s penultimate scene, careful, as Redford counseled, not to deliver the message “with hysterics.”
And “Woodstein” apparently didn’t mind a 138 minute gap in the film for Sussman, as well.
Related: From Glenn: Nixon’s Revenge. “But ultimately, that tolerance—and even the ruling class self-policing—was the product of deep-seated security in power. The liberal establishment of that era, which had crushed Sen. Barry Goldwater’s campaign like a bug, saw no one who might challenge it. This is why Nixon’s election was so traumatic for them. Like Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, the election of a Republican seemed somehow fundamentally wrong. Republicans in Congress could do things, and could even occasionally snatch a short-lived majority. But after four Roosevelt inaugurations, and a string of Democratic presidents interrupted only by Dwight Eisenhower, who could have had the nomination of either party and who showed no inclination to interfere with the post-New Deal federal gravy train, the presumption was that the Executive and the bureaucracy would stay essentially Democratic forever. Then, Nixon. Not the Camelot-redux hoped for with Bobby Kennedy, or even the party-establishment regime promised by Hubert Humphrey, but Nixon. A man from a small college instead of the Ivy League, a sometimes-awkward introvert, a fervent anti-communist when anti-communism was seen as declassé, Nixon was very much not our kind, dear.”
(Bumped.)
BEER: IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Men’s gut health improves by drinking lager beer, study suggests. “The small study, published Wednesday in the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, found that healthy men who drank one alcoholic or non-alcoholic lager daily developed a more diverse set of gut microbes, which is associated with a lower risk of chronic illnesses such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.”
CRISIS BY DESIGN: Another Month, Another Record Number of Border Apprehensions by CBP.
BORDER PATROL AGENTS ‘FURIOUS’ BIDEN ADMIN TO PUNISH THEM OVER FAKE MIGRANT-WHIPPING INCIDENT:
You’ll recall the incident that occurred last September at the US-Mexico border when photographers caught agents on horseback using their long reins to control their horses as they tried to slow the onslaught of migrants illegally crossing the Rio Grande river into our country.
The Biden administration immediately drew conclusions, saying the agents were “whipping” the migrants as if they were slaves. “To see people treated like they did, horses barely running over, people being strapped – it’s outrageous,” Joe Biden told reporters after the photographs surfaced. “I promise you, those people will pay.”
The controversy was quickly debunked, and the agents were cleared of wrongdoing. So, what’s the poor Biden Administration to do? Punish them for “administrative violations,” of course.
Fox News reported Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security will discipline multiple horseback Border Patrol agents in the debunked “whipping” of Haitian migrants story. Already suffering from low morale due to record migrant surges at the US-Mexico border, agents are reportedly “furious” over the decision.
Why? Because they know they’re being made into scapegoats for the failed border policy of the Biden administration.
Why, it’s as if: We are governed by Twitter. “[Fox reporter Bill Miselugin] went on to state that despite the investigation clearing them, the agents will be charged with ‘administrative violations.’ Could there be a more crystalline example of the Biden administration setting federal policy according to the whims of Twitter? Perhaps this might partially explain why the person in charge currently sits at a 38.7 approval rating — given that a good majority of the population are not equipped with Twitter accounts.”
“TATER IS TOAST:” ‘Down To Weeks If Not Days:’ Brian Stelter To Get Pink Slip: Report. “Management is confident Stelter is the one sharing the internal pushback to fellow media reporters while simultaneously stirring discontent within the ranks.”
HE SAYS WHAT HE’S TOLD TO SAY: Does Joe Biden Even Understand What LGBTQ Is?
POLITICO: Latino Dems furious at DCCC, party leadership over Texas loss. (Link safe; goes to Ed Morrissey):
Democrats are also talking about “drag queens in every school,” too. Now that’s an issue that preoccupies voters in the RGV and in American households everywhere.
Democrats are turning themselves into the Weird Party, and even in good times that would be a strange choice. But with Joe Biden busily creating crises that he can’t handle and Democrats doing nothing but carrying his water, voters have some damned good reasons to toss Weird Party incumbents out on their ear, or another figurative body part. Republicans are far from perfect, but at least Republicans are talking about issues that matter outside the solons of Academia and progressive drum circles.
And speaking of “the Weird Party:”
IT’S NOT SO MUCH FOOLISHNESS AS CORRUPTION: Biden’s Bottomless Energy Foolishness.
A MAJOR REASON HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP MUST BE INVESTIGATED AND THE CROOKS TRIED AND CONVICTED: Political Corruption and Injustice Threaten U.S. National Security.
Bottom line: The sellout of fundamental American values by U.S. political and scientific elites for Chinese cash does strategic damage to America just as Pearl Harbor and 9/11 did psychological and operational damage. Professors; political creeps; the universities that debase and ignore American constitutional, political and cultural values — these craven actors betray the values that underpin the free and productive system that spurred and supported their individual and corporate successes.
They also undermine the sources of America’s domestic defense and international security.
Check it out.
KRUISER: Welcome to Secular Relativist Hell. “The consequences of fragile progressive idiots believing that the world should bend itself to fit subjective kumbaya criteria are far-ranging and absolutely poisonous.”