SECOND LOOK AT VIETNAM: DID WE HAVE IT WON?

In the fifty years since the Paris Peace Accords ended our military involvement in Vietnam, a consensus has long been locked in place about America’s war in southeast Asia. The effort to defend democratic(-ish) South Vietnam was an imperialist folly and an immoral war of choice using the Vietnamese as proxies. We never had a chance to win the war, and efforts to do so only strengthened our enemies.

But is that what actually happened? I sat down for a lengthy conversation with Mark Moyar, the William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College and author of Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968. In the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast, we discuss how the narrative of futility formed during the war and dominated the discussion for decades afterward.

“Almost none of it is right,” Moyar declares, “and that’s why I’ve spent so much time writing Vietnam books.” The American veterans of the war as well as the people of former South Vietnam deserve an honest accounting of what actually happened, not the all-too-easy gloss that we walked away from a war we couldn’t win. In fact, Moyar argues based on new access to Vietnamese records, we largely had the war won by the time Richard Nixon got elected — and slowly let it slip away from us.

Well, slowly, and then suddenly, to paraphrase Hemingway on bankruptcy. The so-called “Watergate Congress” of Democrats elected in 1974 pulled the plug on funding for our defense of South Vietnam the following year. But prior to their election, as Lewis Sorley quoted counter-insurgency expert Sir. Robert Thompson in his 1999 book, A Better War: 

Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks.  They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam.  When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi.  For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North.  For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table.  Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that:

In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area, you had won the war.  It was over.

At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War.  Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way.  Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.

Or lost, depending upon who was in charge in DC:

Related: Joe Biden Comes Full Circle:

During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.

According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.

But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.

Found via Fred Bauer, who notes, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us to 2021:

HOW THE DEEP STATE TOOK DOWN NIXON:

Since the publication of Secret Agenda, books such as Len Colodny’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup (1991), James Rosen’s The Strong Man (2008), and Geoff Shepard’s The Real Watergate Scandal (2015) and The Nixon Conspiracy (2021) have drawn on declassified documents and unsealed judicial and congressional hearings to help us better understand what really happened. Although these authors disagree about many details, they agree that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him. And while scholars shy away from endorsing some of the more dramatic claims that have been made over the years, the best of them understand Watergate not in terms of the conventional narrative, but as an institutional “conflict” in which Nixon was the most important casualty. Nixon had to go—not because of a bungled break-in, but because he challenged the national-security state.

Thanks to the revelations concerning Felt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in Nixon’s downfall is better understood. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, however, remains mysterious. It was only one of several US intelligence agencies spying on Nixon and his officials, but Langley’s role in Watergate set it apart. As Hougan shows, it infiltrated and sabotaged “The Plumbers,” the covert unit responsible for the Watergate burglaries, run by several figures in Nixon’s re-election campaign committee with connections to the White House. It was the CIA that set in motion the events that forced Nixon from the presidency.

The CIA, the military, and other agencies spied on the White House because Nixon the president acted differently than Nixon the politician. As congressman, senator, and vice president, Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior. While this position earned him the ire of media and academic elites, especially when he exposed the treason of their darling Alger Hiss, anti-Communism was at the time a fairly conventional position within military and intelligence circles. In backing Nixon in 1968, his supporters in the military and intelligence communities thought they were getting a hawk who would stop trying to micromanage the Vietnam War and national security from the White House.

Nixon had other ideas.

Read the whole thing.

MARK JUDGE: Want to cure American amnesia? Teach history backward.

There is a simple step America’s educators can take to improve civic awareness dramatically. Teach history backward.

That’s how I learned it. One of the best teachers I ever had was a man who taught me high school history. On the first day of class, he announced that we would be learning U.S. history starting with recent events. We began with Watergate and the Vietnam War, then moved back through the 1950s, the Red Scare, and the Korean War. From there, we covered World War II, the Great Depression, then the 1920s. Eventually, near the end of the school year, we found ourselves in the American Revolution.

It was a curriculum that worked brilliantly. It was the early 1980s, and Vietnam was something very real to those of us in high school and college. Many of us had friends, neighbors, and family members who had served in the war. It was exciting to study the conflict.

It also made liberal bias very difficult to weaponize. When the topic being taught involves living people who can challenge the accuracy of the curriculum, it makes it hard to bowdlerize the truth the way something like the “1619 Project” does.

It sounds like a reverse-action version of Whig History, which is much more enjoyable for most students than its successor, Black Armband History.

VDH: Refighting the Vietnam War.

 We talk of a “Vietnam War.” In fact, it was a Cold War communist proxy effort that saw over 100,000 Chinese auxiliaries engaged in supply and repairing Vietnamese infrastructure, while thousands of Soviet “advisors” manned tanks, flew planes, and organized and operated anti-aircraft systems. Vladimir Putin’s current objection to U.S. military aid to Ukraine is again ironic, given Russia was historically an active participant on the ground in Vietnam and both directly and indirectly killed Americans in efforts to defeat the United States.

Moyer ends volume two on a mixed note. An exhausted and beaten North was negotiating in fear that its massive losses of 1967-1968, if continued, would have threatened the Hanoi regime itself. An elected Republican hawk Richard Nixon, inheriting a war that already had cost 35,000 dead, was now opposed by the same Democrats who started it. A growing number of frustrated Americans wanted either to win the war or to get out. Nixon would soon take the gloves off, ensuring that a nearly defeated North would be subject to greater bombing pressures—even as the anti-war Left enjoyed complete control of a Congress that was suddenly liable to cut off aid to Saigon, could more easily mobilize against a now oppositional and conservative White House—and the ingredients of the Watergate debacle were on the distant horizon.

The so-called “Watergate Congress” of Democrats elected in 1974 pulled the plug on funding for our defense of South Vietnam the following year. But prior to their election, as Lewis Sorley quoted counter-insurgency expert Sir. Robert Thompson in his 1999 book, A Better War: 

Having failed to achieve their aims militarily, the North Vietnamese turned their attention to the Paris Peace Talks.  They were extraordinarily fortunate to be dealing with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, two opportunists of the worst sort, who were willing to negotiate a deal which left the North with troops in South Vietnam.  When President Thieu balked at this and threatened to scuttle the talks, the North backed off of the whole deal and Nixon ordered the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi.  For eleven days, waves of B-52’s, each carrying 108 500-pound and 750-pound bombs, pummeled the North.  For perhaps the only time during the entire War, the North was subjected to total war, and they were forced to return to the negotiating table.  Sorley cites Sir Robert Thompson’s assessment that:

In my view, on December 30, 1972, after eleven days of those B-52 attacks on the Hanoi area,
    you had won the war.  It was over.

At that point, the Viet Cong had been destroyed, we had definitely won the insurgency phase of the War.  Additionally, the North had been defeated in the initial phase of conventional warfare, and had finally had the War brought home to them in a significant way.  Though the overall War was certainly not over, it was sitting there, just waiting to be won.

Or lost, depending upon who was in charge in DC:

Related: Joe Biden Comes Full Circle:

During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.

According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.

But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.

Found via Fred Bauer, who notes, “Biden has never made any secret of his tremendous admiration for McGovern, whom he views as a transformational and inspirational figure.” Which brings us to 2021:

MARK JUDGE: All About the Narrative.

Of course, [former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie] spends a lot of time on Watergate, which turned the Post staff into movie stars and the Post from a small local paper to a rich international one. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein drove Richard Nixon from office, an event that made journalism seem like a sexy and dangerous profession and that filled newsrooms with generations of elite liberals and hard-core leftists.

However, the person who comes off the worst in All About the Story is not Nixon, but Hillary Clinton. Downie’s dislike for Clinton is palpable. When in 1994 the paper began “pursuing significant questions about the relationship the Clintons had with the failed Madison Guarantee Savings and Loan Association in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Bill was governor,” Downie and the first lady had a tense meeting at the White House. Clinton was irritated that the Post was reporting on the federal investigation into the Clintons and their deals in Little Rock, yet she refused to turn over any documents related to the case. Downie would not back down. Clinton then switched the subject to the various women who were claiming to have had affairs with her husband—a kind of preemptive strike against their credibility. (She would also dispatch George Stephanopoulos to have lunch with Downie and try to kill the stories.) After the meeting, Clinton began to spread rumors that Downie was out to get them and that he was jealous of Ben Bradlee. Despite being criticized by other journalists and liberal activists, Downie defends his coverage: “I strongly believe that we did what we should have done in holding the Clintons accountable for their behavior. Even as I write this, I believe that there remain significant unresolved questions about the veracity of both Clintons.”

Well, not everything; its sister magazine Newsweek, then owned by the Post, couldn’t be bothered to break the story on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Or as Mark Steyn wrote in 2018: “It was twenty years ago today/Slick Willie taught the intern to play!”

The drama of January 1998 put certain words and phrases in the public discourse for the next two years, including “impeachment”, “vast right-wing conspiracy”, “the meaning of ‘is’”, and “completion”, which President Clinton was said by Monica in the Starr Report not to reach.

Yes, it was twenty years ago today/Slick Willie taught the intern to play! In a sense, the Clintons have never reached completion — which is why, two decades on, the news is full of Uranium One, Hillary-commissioned dirty dossiers and Huma’s emails — not to mention the exposure of Harvey Weinstein and other Clinton buddies for availing themselves of the same interns-with-benefits approach to the workplace. We may run some old pieces from the Dawning of the Age of Incompletion in the weeks ahead. But, if you’re wondering what we were talking about before Monica, the answer is Paula – who became near totally eclipsed by Miss Lewinsky.

The Age of Incompletion also kicked off the age of new media, beginning with a young man with a DIY Website named Matt Drudge, who published the Lewinsky story that then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek had spiked, because – say it with me:

The bill came due eventually, though — the Post sold Newsweek for a dollar in 2010, only for the Graham family to see its newspaper acquired three years later by Jeff Bezos, reportedly for about the same amount of money he paid for the first three seasons of his Grand Tour car TV series on Amazon Prime.

(As to what’s happened in the last few years to Matt Drudge, that’s an entirely different story, one that appears not to have a satisfactory answer. A year ago, Steve linked to an article headlined, “Matt Drudge confirms he still runs Drudge Report.” As he wrote in response, “Could Have Fooled Me.”

THE WASHPOST WAY: ‘Badass’ Journalists ‘Afflicting the Comfortable’ for ‘Radical Change.’

Margaret Sullivan recently stepped away from her soapbox as a media columnist for The Washington Post, but she has a new book out titled Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life. Mark Judge at the Washington Examiner provocatively asserted journalism is a like a drug, and they became addicted to the power of “doing good,” like forcing Richard Nixon to resign over Watergate.

Judge quoted Sullivan on liberal heroes Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: “They were badass, the essence of swashbuckling cool, especially when confused in my teenage mind with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman … I wanted to be them, or at least immerse myself in that newsroom culture. Righteousness could be achieved, according to the self-important journalism adage, by ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.'”

Fair enough. When will the Post start?

MARK JUDGE: News junkies: Margaret Sullivan’s new memoir and the media’s addiction problem.

For an entire generation of young journalists, the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s was like a powerful drug. The toppling of Richard Nixon provided a high. Called by Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “the longest shot in the history of American journalism,” Watergate altered the political and media landscape the way heroin rewires the brain. The point of journalism went from covering the news to destroying the president — especially if such a figure were a Republican or a conservative. The language of addiction, a “rush,” came to define the media’s behavior whenever there was a political scandal. They even created fake scandals to feed their habits.

Sullivan was in high school in her native town of Lackawanna, New York, when Watergate hit. A kid who loved language, by the time Nixon resigned, she was the editor of her school newspaper. Here she is on Woodward and Bernstein: “They were badass, the essence of swashbuckling cool, especially when confused in my teenage mind with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman … I wanted to be them, or at least immerse myself in that newsroom culture. Righteousness could be achieved, according to the self-important journalism adage, by ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.'” (Why the comfortable should be afflicted is never explained.)

That’s easy – they had an (R) after their names:

Among the funniest parts of Newsroom Confidential are Sullivan’s reports of the freakout in the Washington Post newsroom when Donald Trump was elected president. Editor Marty Baron had to keep reminding the staff that they just had to “keep doing their jobs.”

This was not possible. Trump was fentanyl, an insanely powerful drug that was equally dangerous. The media went crazy. They simply could not let the man do his job. The press suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story , defended the security agencies they had ferociously distrusted after Watergate, and speed-balled the idea that there was a seven-hour “gap” in President Trump’s White House phone logs. Bob Woodward, the original scandal dealer, was rolled out to huff and puff and proclaim that this was, yes, worse than Watergate. The story turned out to be false.

Read the whole thing.

TENSIONS RISE BETWEEN THE LA TIMES AND ITS BILLIONAIRE OWNER:

As Nika Soon-Shiong’s political activism grew, it became harder for the paper to chart out coverage that converged with her interests. Staffers grew alarmed when she clashed with an editor on the Metro desk earlier this year over the Times’ reporting on the LAPD. It was not lost on staff that they did not initially report on the public safety commission’s decision to reduce funding for the LA County Sheriff’s Department — a move she pushed for aggressively and one that was covered widely by other Los Angeles outlets.

There were internal grumbles after the paper endorsed Democratic West Hollywood Council member Lindsey Horvath for the powerful LA County Board of Supervisors. Horvath had a close relationship with Nika Soon-Shiong — she defended her publicly and said attacks on her were “rooted in racism” — and helped appoint her to the public safety commission.

More recently, the Times endorsed Kenneth Mejia, a self-described radical and Nika Soon-Shiong favorite, for the job of city controller. Two days after the endorsement, City Hall reporters David Zahniser and Julia Wick wrote a story detailing how Mejia, as a Green Party member, said he considered both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to be “sexual predators.”

The ownership of a paper retains the right to endorse whichever candidates they want. Often, they exercise that liberty. Merida said that Nika Soon-Shiong has no “say in endorsements.”

But the Mejia editorial sparked immediate backlash over the perception that she had a hand in it. City Council member Paul Koretz, a Democrat and Mejia’s opponent in the race, accused the paper of acting “as if it were run by the Mejia campaign itself.”

“People are just scratching their heads about their editorial board and how they can come to these decisions,” Koretz told POLITICO. “I have never seen an election where the newspaper is the story.”

Really? Keep Rockin’!

As Mickey Kaus notes, Carl Bernstein, then with the Washington Post, used the 1970s equivalent of phone hacking to dig up information about the 1972 Watergate burglary. Kaus quotes from “All the President’s Men,” Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s account of their reporting on the scandal that sank President Nixon:

Bernstein had several sources in the Bell system [the landline telephone monopoly]. He was always reluctant to use them to get information about calls because of the ethical questions involved in breaching the confidentiality of a person’s telephone records. It was a problem he had never resolved in his mind. Why, as a reporter, was he entitled to have access to personal and financial records when such disclosure would outrage him if he were subjected to a similar inquiry by investigators?

Without dwelling on his problem, Bernstein called a telephone company source and asked for a list of [Watergate burglar Bernard] Barker’s calls. That afternoon, his contact called back and confirmed that the calls listed in the [New York] Times had been made. But, he added, he could not get a fuller listing because Barker’s phone records had been subpoenaed by the Miami district attorney.

As far as we know, Bernstein was never investigated, much less prosecuted, for this. To be sure, there’s a strong argument that the ends justified the means in the Post case but not the Globe case. Certainly a political scandal that ended up implicating the president is a matter of much greater public importance than a sensational murder case. But it does not follow that the “mainstream press” is entitled to greater constitutional liberty than tabloids are.

What’s more, supermarket tabloids have been known to break important political stories that the mainstream press shied away from–and in this regard, the Los Angeles Times has an especially embarrassing record. In 2008 Kaus published an email from Tony Pierce, an editor at the L.A. Times, to the paper’s online contributors (quoting verbatim):

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

As Kaus quipped: “That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal.” Two weeks later, Edwards partially confessed, and Times columnist Tim Rutten weighed in:

When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.

Rutten acknowledged that “too many newsrooms, including that of The Times,” were derelict in ignoring the Edwards story. But his column reflected a telling defeatism. By proclaiming the “end to the era” of traditional media, he seemed to be suggesting that those media, including his own paper, were incapable of applying any lessons from the experience of being shown up by the Enquirer–that they were too hidebound to do anything other than keep rockin.

And then there was the moment last year when the L.A. Times smeared the first black candidate for governor of California as “the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned,” compared him to David Duke and the Klan— and downplayed the physical attack that he received.

Evergreen:

MICHAEL ANTON: The Immorality of The Godfather.

In the second scene, a wistful Don Vito laments to Michael that his son was, in effect, forced into the mafia.

VITO: I knew Santino was gonna have to go through all this. And Fredo … Fredo was … uhh. But I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life—I don’t apologize—to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those … bigshots. I don’t apologize—that’s my life—but I thought that, that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the string. Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone. Something.Note, first, that the don presents his own, and Michael’s, dilemma as a choice between starving his family or a life of crime. This is hokum. And it is immediately belied by the don’s sorrow that his youngest son couldn’t become a governor or a senator. What about a middle-class life practicing an honest trade? The idea isn’t even contemplated, for himself or his sons.

Note, too, that Sonny, the eldest brother, “had to” become a Mafioso. Why? This isn’t explained, beyond the hoary cliché to “take care” of the family. But the Corleones are richer than the dreams of avarice. “Need” stopped being a motivating principle for them well before 1920, with the first shipments of Corleone-financed Canadian booze to Corleone-controlled speakeasies all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. And why, in the end, did Michael have to follow his father’s and brothers’ footsteps? He didn’t. The central tragedy of the film is that he chooses to, ostensibly to save his father—this is what he tells himself—but really because he enjoys power.

There are three ways to interpret all this. The first is that Michael, and the don, really believe what they say. It may be genuine belief, or it may be rationalization, but it is not said to deceive.

The second is that Michael is just shining Kay on, telling her what she needs to hear so that she can justify to herself her otherwise shameful desire to marry a gangster.

The third interpretation hinges on Puzo’s and Coppola’s intent. Are Michael and the don speaking for author and auteur, channeling, especially, Coppola’s Watergate-era cynicism? (Though the break-in itself would not happen until three months after the film’s release, the movie is commonly lumped with other jaded products of the early 1970s.) Coppola justified to himself taking on what he considered a low-grade project unworthy of his genius by his ambition to transform the tale into an indictment of capitalism, greed, and the American Dream.

Leave the gun, take the cannoli, and read the whole thing.

BRIAN STELTER’S FINAL DELUSIONAL RANT SHOWS WHY HE GOT THE BOOT:

Curtis Houck of NewsBusters took the bullet for all of us and waded into the dreck.

“We’re barely five minutes into the final Reliable Sources and the arrogance and hatred for conservatives that “the truth is not neutral” with Stelter and Carl Bernstein is flowing. They’ve already shown why it’s being canceled.”

“Second segment for Brian Stelter’s final show — the risk to the lives of journalists and how dangerous it is to be one in America because of the far-right. Ah, yes. Being a journalist in America is JUST like reporting in China, Myanmar, North Korea, and Russia!” Houck said.

Criticizing and mocking bad CNN hosts isn’t threatening or putting their lives at risk.

But Stelter would like to present the illusion that he’s some kind of mystical knight fight for “democracy” against the evil Donald Trump. That’s not just false, it’s delusional–and it surely isn’t journalism.

“CNN’s Brian Stelter decries outside criticism of journalism as a “poisonous cloud” that’s spread throughout the country and around the world. He adds he’s “proud” to have worked at a network when they knew they had to fight and attack Trump,” Houck explained.

So, it’s wrong to criticize journalism? Wasn’t that what Stelter’s show was supposed to be about? Of course, that’s why he’s gone because his show wasn’t that; it devolved into a constant attack on Fox News and Trump. But it was sort of hilarious as he talked about why the media didn’t cover the important stories that should be covered. Then he and Carl Bernstein immediately went back to the narrative about “democracy” being in danger from authoritarianism (translation: to them, that means Trump).

Some authoritarianism is better than others, of course:

Bernstein was born in February 1944, the son of a radical labor union lawyer and activist mother. Both his parents were secret members of the Communist Party USA.

* * * * * * * *

“A case can be made that [Bernstein] should have disclosed the conflict of interest he brought to his Watergate exposes,” wrote New York media consultant Sidney Goldberg in 2003. “After all, he was brought up as a Nixon hater and readers might have been told that his family regarded Nixon as vile, as an enemy.”

Bernstein’s animus for Nixon is beyond dispute. He has written that anti-Communists such as Nixon and Joseph McCarthy unleashed a “reign of terror” in America. Yet he has always maintained that his motivation in pursuing Nixon was purely journalistic.

Bernstein also has said that growing up under the influence of his parents’ Communist values “has informed my beliefs about what is important.” Apart from his parents, one of Bernstein’s most admired role models is the radical journalist I.F. Stone.

Bernstein left the Washington Post at the end of 1976 to pursue other career opportunities. He worked for a time as ABC Bureau Chief in Washington, D.C. and later as its correspondent. In 1992, Bernstein was quoted as saying: “The lowest form of popular culture — lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives — has overrun real journalism,” he has said. “Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”

Physician, heal thyself.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME: Jan. 6 Followed Years of Political Violence. The Committee Should Investigate Leftist Violence, Too.

There is an enduring infamy to Jan. 6, and rightfully so. Yet, the madness of the mob is not unique to Trump and his “Stop the Steal” adherents.

Trump’s “coup in search of a legal theory,” as Chairman Bennie Thompson called it on Thursday night’s session of the January 6 Committee hearings, is unique in its scope, but not in its assault on American democracy.

There has been a trajectory of modern mob formation over the course of the Trump years that the January 6th Select Committee would do well to explore in further hearings.

Civil unrest may have culminated on Jan. 6, but it started much earlier. And the potential for its continued activation has been with us ever since. If those on the January 6 Select Committee fail to take a deep dive into mob events leading up to Jan. 6, they will be missing half the story.

Fortunately, it can be found on Twitter. And what you learn when you cover these protests is that neither the Right nor the Left has a monopoly on political violence.

Why would Democrats want to investigate how much violence and destruction their supporters have caused at their own show trials? It’s simply a 21^st century extension of the Watergate hearings, where no word of the previous presidents’ crimes were allowed:

The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities was created on February 7, 1973, following the convictions of the Watergate burglars. The vote was 77-0, since twenty-three GOP senators abstained rather than join in the political witch hunt. Their abstentions followed party-line votes, giving Democrats a voting majority and limiting the committee’s investigation to the 1972 presidential election instead of chancing any second look at those from ’60, ’64, and ’68, in which Nixon and Barry Goldwater were on the receiving end of campaign improprieties. The 1976 Church Committee hearings included testimony indicating that Nixon’s campaign was bugged in 1960 and again in 1968 and that the FBI had forwarded derogatory information on Goldwater’s staff to the Lyndon B. Johnson White House.

Related: Report: There Have Been 76 Attacks on Churches and Pregnancy Centers, Not One Attacker Has Been Sent to Prison.

UPDATE: Summer rerun ratings are down: J6 witch hunt ratings dropped 21%.

BILL MAHER: WaPo Reporters ‘Blubber-Tweeting’ over a Joke ‘Captures What’s Wrong with Today’s Journalism.’

Maher stated, “If someone knows of a story that more effectively captures what’s wrong with today’s journalism than the sad saga of what happened last week at The Washington Post, they need to keep it to themselves. Because it would be too depressing.”

After recapping the story, Maher said, “The fact that The Post’s initial response was to punish, not Felicia, but one of their best reporters for a silly joke shows that the kindergarten is already in charge. Today, June 17, is the 50th anniversary of a very seminal event in American history. On this day in 1972, the Watergate break-in happened, and over the next two years, The Washington Post gave the world a masterclass in investigative journalism. I have to wonder how The Post’s newsroom of today would handle that story or how they’re currently handling any story. All this time blubber-tweeting over a retweet begs the question, don’t you have anything better to do? Aren’t you supposed to be reporters digging up stuff? Are there no more vital issues going on in America right now? This is why you’re not in charge. Because if someone named ‘Deep Throat’ called the paper today and wanted to meet in a parking garage, this crew of emotional hemophiliacs would have an anxiety attack and report it to HR that they didn’t feel safe.”

Heh, indeed.

If only there were some other way of handling uber-woke young staffers. If only.

FAST TIMES AT BEN BRADLEE HIGH: The Washington Post’s week from Hell.

The paper known for its slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” should perhaps be more concerned about its own well-being after the disastrous week it had.

The Washington Post, the once-revered news organization that famously exposed the Watergate scandal leading to a president’s resignation, is still highly respected in the Beltway but has lost its way in recent years among most Americans. From declaring the coronavirus lab-leak theory was a “debunked” “conspiracy” to quickly rejecting the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election, the Post of today is simply not the same as the Post of the Nixon era.

But the events that occurred over the past week may be some of the worst that have plagued the Washington Post in its 144-year history.

Speaking of which: Things at the Washington Post are great.Thanks for asking!

It certainly looks apparent that despite the suspension of Weigel over a simple retweet, Sonmez is trying to provoke a disciplinary action from her superiors at the Post, which she can then use as evidence of retaliation for her lawsuit in her appeal.

The public appearance is that the inmates are running the Jeffrey Preston Bezos Asylum and that the Post has a completely upside-down idea of what constitutes an ethical lapse. A single retweet, swiftly retracted, is worth a month-long suspension. However calling out colleges on a public timeline, siccing online mobs on them, leaking internal emails and refusing to comply with workplace directives are allowed to continue. Something stinks at the Washington Post and for once it’s not Dave Weigel.

And the hits just keep on coming! WaPo’s Felicia Sonmez torches ‘White’ colleagues for ‘downplaying’ workplace drama with ‘synchronized tweets.’

Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez continued her scorched-earth tweeting about her colleagues on Thursday, this time taking aim at ‘White,” “star” reporters who expressed solidarity with the paper as the viral infighting has dominated conversation in the media industry.

On Thursday, Sonmez took a flamethrower to fellow staffers in another lengthy series of tweets, attacking those who had posted recent, strikingly similar messages of support for their paper.

“I don’t know who the colleagues anonymously disparaging me in media reports are. But I do know that the reporters who issued synchronized tweets this week downplaying the Post’s workplace issues have a few things in common with each other,” Sonmez wrote during a lengthy Twitter thread.

“They are all white – They are among the highest-paid employees in the newsroom, making double and even triple what some other National desk reporters are making, particularly journalists of color – They are among the ‘stars’ who ‘get away with murder’ on social media,” Sonmez tweeted. “Of course the Washington Post is a great workplace. It is a great workplace *for them.* The system is working *for them.* What about for everyone else? The General Assignment team? The Morning Mix team? The newsletter researchers?”

Sonmez insisted there have been “long-standing issues” within the Post that have not been addressed and that will only continue, even if the media will move on from “trivializing” them as a “Twitter spat.”

Nothing like calling your employer crypto-racists. So how is all of the drama of the gifted children being received outside the writers’ bullpen?

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Are There Any Adults at the Washington Post?

You may have noticed a bizarre trend at organizations whose staffs are full of younger liberals: Internal disputes aren’t kept internal anymore but are aired in public, on social media or in the press, with rampantly subordinate staff attacking their colleagues or decrying managerial decisions in full public view — and those actions apparently tolerated from the top.

In the most extreme cases, you get meltdowns like the one at the Dianne Morales campaign for mayor of New York, where staff went on strike to demand, among other things, that the campaign divert part of its budget away from campaigning into “community grocery giveaways.” But it’s especially a problem in the media, where so many employees have large social media followings they can use to put their employers on blast — and where those employers have (unwisely) cultivated a freewheeling social media culture where it’s common for reporters to comment on all sorts of matters unrelated to their coverage.

* * * * * * * * *

I hate that I’ve written so many paragraphs about this. I hate that I know so much about this dispute. It’s so high school, and it ought not to be any of our business. These are all internal HR matters. But Sonmez is explicit: She wages these fights in public because management is more responsive to that than when employees complain privately. By giving her “good friend” Weigel such a long suspension and doing nothing to her, management is only encouraging her and other Post employees to put their colleagues on blast more, which she has indeed been doing.

Airing internal workplace disputes in public like this is not okay, even when you are right on the merits. My statement isn’t just obvious, it’s how almost all organizations work. If you think your coworker sucks, you don’t tweet about it. That’s unprofessional. If you disagree with management’s personnel decisions, you don’t decry them to the public. That’s insubordinate. Organizations full of people who are publicly at each other’s throats can’t be effective. Your workplace is not Fleetwood Mac.

Even before the Times’ collective meltdown over Tom Cotton’s column in 2020, there were similar comparisons made about its own high school-like nature, such as Matthew Continetti’s 2014 Washington Free Beacon column:

Gossipy, catty, insular, cliquey, stressful, immature, cowardly, moody, underhanded, spiteful—the New York Times gives new meaning to the term “hostile workplace.” What has been said of the press—that it wields power without any sense of responsibility—is also a fair enough description of the young adult. And it is to high school, I think, that the New York Times is most aptly compared. The coverage of the Abramson firing reads at times like the plot of an episode of Saved By the Bell minus the sex: Someone always has a crazy idea, everyone’s feelings are always hurt, apologies and reconciliations are made and quickly sundered, confrontations are the subject of intense planning and preparation, and authority figures are youth-oriented, well-intentioned, bumbling, and inept.

Unexpectedly!

And as Glenn Greenwald noted over the weekend about the Post’s twitter spat:

Finally, note that the Fast Times at Ben Bradlee High drama at the Post this week is a distraction from what should be the real story emanating from the offices that once led to Watergate: Twitter saga obscures the Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz scandal. “But the key point is this: Either Lorenz or her editors engaged in direct fabrication or a willful disregard for journalistic standards. The broader challenge is that those who run the Post have decided that Lorenz, and her continued shoddy reporting and broad generalizations, are worth the headache. Why they have decided as much is anyone’s guess. But as Lorenz continues to stretch the boundaries of ethical journalism, her Post colleagues will be the ones who share in the reputational damage.”

DEMOCRATS ADMIT THE TRUE PURPOSE OF J6 HEARINGS:

“FOX won’t televise the hearings of the greatest Crime in Presidential history,” tweeted Rob Reiner. “Our Democracy is hanging by a thread.” Cry me a river, Meathead.

The fact is, there’s only one reason why any network will air the hearings of these pointless, blatantly partisan hearings—and it has nothing to do with the so-called insurrection. It has to do with helping the Democrats in the upcoming midterms.

This isn’t a guess. They’ve already admitted to this. “Jan. 6 Hearings Give Democrats a Chance to Recast Midterm Message,” reads the headline at the New York Times about the hearings—showing absolutely no shame that government resources are being used for blatantly partisan purposes.

“With their control of Congress hanging in the balance, Democrats plan to use made-for-television moments and a carefully choreographed rollout of revelations over the course of six hearings…to persuade voters that the coming midterm elections are a chance to hold Republicans accountable for it,” the report explained.

The article goes on to quote Democrat lawmakers and operatives all but admitting the purpose of the hearings is to distract voters from astronomical gas prices and historic inflation.

We’ve been here before, of course: Warnings From Watergate for the January 6 Committee. “As midterm elections approach, Democrats face challenges eerily similar to those following President Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide reelection. Their response was a select committee to stage a legislative show trial where they controlled the agenda and disgraced witnesses could be called to account without the inconvenience of due process rights guaranteed by our Constitution. They appear to be following the same playbook today, half a century later. Times have changed, but Democrats’ willingness to abuse government power to punish political enemies hasn’t. Let’s jump inside their heads for a few moments (if you can bear it) to follow the logic of their plots.”

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: Matt Taibbi: Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now? Trial testimony reveals Hillary Clinton personally approved serious election misinformation. Is there an anti-Trump exception to content moderation?

Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”

In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen.

There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.

Read the whole thing. As David Frum puts it in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse: 

Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.

President DeSantis is going to be doing a lot of housecleaning when he takes office.

Flashback: Deep State, Deep Trouble — America’s woke generals and the Military-Industrial Complex must be purged to save the nation.

LEE SMITH: Ukraine Is the Ruling Class’s Latest Propaganda Ploy.

It would be useful to have insight into Putin’s thinking, especially now with a massive land war in the middle of Europe giving rise to a powerful anti-American bloc led by Russia and China. But don’t count on America’s national-security establishment to provide that insight. For they squandered their credibility with Russiagate. From former officials like ex-Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and retired spy chiefs like James Clapper and John Brennan to Biden deputies like National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and the Pentagon’s top strategist, Colin Kahl, and the entire Democratic Party and its media apparatus, the lies of America’s political class left the republic vulnerable to destructive forces.

Why did they lie? Policymakers, spy chiefs, and military officials rightly deceive foreign powers to protect and advance the US national interest. But these men and women lied to the American people about the president they elected. Then they lied about everything. Public US institutions and private industries have spent the last six years mustering their formidable powers to break the US working and middle classes. Why? Because lying is part of the logic of war, and America’s oligarchy is at war with the American people.

Earlier: Here Comes the Limited Hangout. America’s Nixonian press corps takes a page from the Watergate playbook to try and cover up its active role in the criminal Russiagate hoax.

Related: 2022 has become the preventing World War 3 election.

ROGER KIMBALL: Biden’s Handlers Are Preparing to Eject Him (and Kamala).

The news is full not only of stories about the New York Times fessing up, sort of, about the contents of Hunter’s laptop, but also of stories about how Hunter is likely to be indicted for tax fraud. In one sense, that is not news. I wrote about it at the end of 2020 when Hunter announced, sotto voce, that he had been informed that he was being investigated by the tax authorities. But in another sense, I suspect, that news, like the revelation from the New York Times that, what do you know, all that stuff about Hunter’s laptop was on the level, like Joe Biden’s bizarre suggestion a couple of days ago that “everybody knows somebody” who has taken nude pictures of some lover and then used them to “blackmail” the person—all that has a different valence now that the Biden Administration is seriously underwater and there are no lifelines in evidence.

The issue is never the issue. I suspect that Joe Biden is being prepped for ejection. Exactly how it will happen I do not yet know. But he is on the threshold, or possibly has even passed the threshold, where he could appear to govern. His minders understand this. They must be the ones to replace him, otherwise they themselves risk being replaced, which would be intolerable. As I say, it’s not entirely clear yet how the defenestration will take place. Obviously, Kamala will have to be dealt with first, and she will be. Look for some ground softening stories such as the Times just served up about the laptop. They won’t be long in coming.

Stay tuned.

Related: America’s Newspaper of Record reports: New York Times Announces They Have Finally Confirmed The Watergate Tapes Are Authentic.

ICYMI, FROM REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: The Curious Case of Stefan Halper, Longtime ‘Zelig’ of American Scandals Who ‘Crossfired’ Trump.

Halper’s undercover operation, which was documented in a report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, would prove largely a bust. Transcripts between Halper and Trump campaign officials would show that none of them took the bait, or appeared to otherwise be soliciting Russia’s help in the 2016 presidential campaign

Even now, it might seem odd that the FBI made Halper, then a septuagenarian Cambridge University professor, a linchpin of its top-secret counterintelligence probe codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.” But a closer look at Halper’s life and work makes that decision seem inevitable. Stefan Halper is the Zelig of modern American political scandal – a chameleon-like, unusually ubiquitous figure who keeps appearing when mischief is afoot.

The former son-in-law of a top CIA official, Halper cut his teeth in the Nixon White House during Watergate. The New York Times identified him as the Reagan campaign’s point man in an alleged effort to spy on President Jimmy Carter, and he was later chairman of a bank that helped provide money to surreptitiously fund Nicaragua’s pro-American contra rebels during the 1980s. In the run-up to his subterfuge in the Trump-Russia caper, Halper was paid more than $1 million by a Pentagon office that produced work deemed of such little value that Sen. Charles Grassley recently identified it as a prime example of the government’s “systemic failure to manage and oversee” spending.

Given the secret nature of his work, it is not surprising that Halper’s exact role in these scandals is still debated by insiders and historians. An examination of long-ignored records by RealClearInvestigations, however, shows that Halper has added to the mystery by appearing to consistently misrepresent his background and experience on resumes. There is, for example, no public evidence for his claim, on a resume he submitted to the Ford White House, that he was class president at Stanford University in 1967, or a Fulbright scholar. Nor is there any for the claim on another resume that he held the prestigious position in the Ford administration listed.

Halper declined to speak with RCI when asked for an interview in person at his Virginia home. He also declined to respond to a letter from this reporter subsequently sent to his attorney, inquiring about discrepancies documented in this article.

Read the whole thing.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: The Curious Case of Stefan Halper, Longtime ‘Zelig’ of American Scandals Who ‘Crossfired’ Trump.

Halper’s undercover operation, which was documented in a report by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, would prove largely a bust. Transcripts between Halper and Trump campaign officials would show that none of them took the bait, or appeared to otherwise be soliciting Russia’s help in the 2016 presidential campaign

Even now, it might seem odd that the FBI made Halper, then a septuagenarian Cambridge University professor, a linchpin of its top-secret counterintelligence probe codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.” But a closer look at Halper’s life and work makes that decision seem inevitable. Stefan Halper is the Zelig of modern American political scandal – a chameleon-like, unusually ubiquitous figure who keeps appearing when mischief is afoot.

The former son-in-law of a top CIA official, Halper cut his teeth in the Nixon White House during Watergate. The New York Times identified him as the Reagan campaign’s point man in an alleged effort to spy on President Jimmy Carter, and he was later chairman of a bank that helped provide money to surreptitiously fund Nicaragua’s pro-American contra rebels during the 1980s. In the run-up to his subterfuge in the Trump-Russia caper, Halper was paid more than $1 million by a Pentagon office that produced work deemed of such little value that Sen. Charles Grassley recently identified it as a prime example of the government’s “systemic failure to manage and oversee” spending.

Given the secret nature of his work, it is not surprising that Halper’s exact role in these scandals is still debated by insiders and historians. An examination of long-ignored records by RealClearInvestigations, however, shows that Halper has added to the mystery by appearing to consistently misrepresent his background and experience on resumes. There is, for example, no public evidence for his claim, on a resume he submitted to the Ford White House, that he was class president at Stanford University in 1967, or a Fulbright scholar. Nor is there any for the claim on another resume that he held the prestigious position in the Ford administration listed.

Halper declined to speak with RCI when asked for an interview in person at his Virginia home. He also declined to respond to a letter from this reporter subsequently sent to his attorney, inquiring about discrepancies documented in this article.

Read the whole thing.

ROGER SIMON: Durham Reveals Democrats Behaving Like the KGB; Is More Coming?

Electronic spying on the White House at the behest of the Democratic Party? It’s what you would expect from Chinese or Russian intelligence. And we thought the Mueller investigation was bad!

And talk about strange cases of projection. The Democrats were always accusing Trump of colluding with Russia while they were behaving like the KGB.

Trump himself responded that this is worse than Watergate, and he surely is correct. Watergate, it will be recalled, was about a small-time break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters during an election that Republicans won by a historic landslide. Although not to be excused in the slightest, politically, it couldn’t have been more irrelevant.

All this recent eavesdropping occurred during the tightest of elections (2016) and afterward during an actual presidency. It was clearly aimed at destroying that presidency, sabotaging from within—a genuine insurrection, instead of the phony one we know about. Nothing remotely like that has happened in our history.

And it was all instigated by people close to Hillary Clinton or, quite possibly, by Hillary herself. We don’t know yet. One of those involved we do know was Jake Sullivan, currently our national security adviser, charged with overseeing the conflict on the Ukraine–Russia border. Think about that. What a disgrace to our country that is. If you and I know about it, every nation in the world knows it.

This evolving scandal—atrocity might be a better word—has most probably eliminated Clinton from the Democratic presidential sweepstakes. It may even sweep up President Joe Biden.

Or not, thanks to a media near-blackout: Nets Ignore Explosive Report Showing Clinton Spied on Trump.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their silence makes perfect sense.

Evergreen:

CROOKED HILLARY: Clinton Campaign Lawyer Gave ‘Sensitive’ Trump Data to CIA, Special Counsel Claims.

The court filing shows the extent to which Clinton operatives went to portray Trump as an agent of Russia. Sussmann’s fellow Clinton campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, commissioned the Steele dossier, which falsely accused Trump of colluding with Russia in order to win the 2016 election. Elias Briefed Clinton campaign officials, including current national security adviser Jake Sullivan, about the investigation of Trump. Sussmann and Elias also provided their findings to media outlets in order to prompt investigations into Trump.

“This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution,” Trump said in a statement about the Sussmann revelation.

Sussmann’s meeting with the CIA has been previously reported, but it was not known that he provided the agency with information taken from White House web servers. According to Durham, Sussmann gave the CIA data purportedly showing a series of suspicious Internet lookups between Russian mobile phones and Trump associates at the White House. But according to Durham, the lookups were common and had also occurred during President Barack Obama’s tenure. Sussmann failed to provide the additional context about the Internet lookups to the CIA, Durham alleges.

It is unclear whether Sussmann knew that Joffe obtained the data from his company’s federal contract. Joffe served as chief technology officer at Neustar until he retired last year. He had long worked with the FBI and other federal agencies on cybersecurity issues. He Received the prestigious FBI Director’s Award in 2013.

Well, isn’t that rich.

MARK JUDGE: Breaking Up With Carl Bernstein and the Communist Media.

Like a lot of people from the Watergate era — Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Jesse Jackson — Bernstein has lived long enough to see himself go from hero to villain.

As with Hillary, the irony surrounding Bernstein’s hypocrisy is particularly acute. He helped expose a president who was orchestrating opposition research on opponents, including digging into their psychiatric files. Now Bernstein, like the rest of the media, celebrates the very same kind of tactics, and even kicks it up a notch. . . .

The problem with Bernstein is not just evident in his obviously deranged leftism. It’s that this totem of journalistic integrity is a founding father of fake news and has been for years. It’s not just his recent madness that calls into question his integrity. It’s his evasiveness going back decades.

The roots of it can be found in his 1989 memoir, Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir. Bernstein’s parents were members of the Communist Party. But, in his memoir, the famed Watergate sleuth plays dodge with the extent of their involvement with the Party. He was called out for this not by conservatives, but by radical lefty Martin Duberman in “Bernstein’s Left-Wing Legacy,” a 1989 review in The Washington Post. Duberman chided Bernstein for not defending his parents’ Communism, and thus revealing that Bernstein may have been hiding something about his family’s true links to that murderous and evil false religion.

Commies always lie. It’s essential to their creed.

MATT TAIBBI: What Happened to the “Question Authority” Era? Discussion with Author Walter Kirn.

Taibbi: I remember the reaction I had when they hired [former CIA head] John Brennan and [former Director of National Intelligence] James Clapper as TV analysts. Former CIA chief Michael Hayden was another one. I thought, theoretically, I guess you could have them comment on so certain general topics, but they would have to recuse themselves from all the ones that they were directly involved in, at least.

It turned out to be the opposite. In other words, they would have Brennan and Clapper and all those guys, and they would bring them on to talk about the stories that they themselves were most directly involved with. This new thing with Fauci — the new emails that have come out, they’re kind of shocking, just on the level of proving that Fauci and others were being deceitful about their assessment of the lab-leak story at the beginning. The fact that people aren’t jumping all over those stories is amazing to me.

Walter Kirn: To point out the conflict of interest, you are now accused of being a conspiracy theorist. Well, journalists aren’t supposed to be conspiracy theorists. They’re supposed to be conspiracy finders.

The thing that infuriated me and almost radicalized me against this corporate regime, and journalism, was the Russiagate story. I’ll tell you why, and it’s not because it was adversarial for Donald Trump. It’s because the Russiagate story, which was, I’m just here to tell you — it was bullshit. It had bullshit sources. It stemmed from high influence peddlers and campaign officials and places like the Brookings Institute and so on. It posed as Watergate. It posed as an outsider exposure of the ways of power, when in fact it was just the opposite. It posed as muckraking when in fact it was icing the cake of power. Pulitzer Prizes were awarded, and star reporters were crowned in this supposedly anti-authoritarian mega-story, which was being reported despite the anger and fury of power.

In fact, it was just the opposite. It was a completely phony caricature of a Watergate-style investigation. When I saw the press willing to pose as crusaders and outsiders on behalf of the most established political, intelligence, and even corporate entities in America, I was just like, this is the biggest travesty.

Taibbi: Obviously you’re not going to have to work too hard to get me to agree about Russiagate being bunk, but one of the first clues for me that the story probably wasn’t real was that there was so much pressure to go along with it, and also so much pressure in the other direction, not to say anything against it.

As a journalist, you know when you’re saying something risky. This is a business where they let you know right away when you’ve said something that crosses a line somewhere. There was none of that with this story. It was completely in the other direction.

Walter Kirn: All those newspaper movies, those romantic movies, like All The President’s Men and Spotlight, in which the crusty editor says, “I’m not gonna put the reputation of this paper on the line for your half baked reporting! You get me a witness in the next 36 hours, or we’re killing this story forever! And I’m firing you!” That’s the supposed newsroom. When you’re going up against power in Russiagate, it was: “Get me more people from the DNC to be outraged about this by tomorrow, or, we’re going to pay somebody else hundreds of thousands of dollars to write this story!”

* * * * * * * *

I have to say I had, I want to focus on what appeared to be the most trivial part of the question — the preface that we’re both from Ohio. That was I think the most important part of it. We have a national myth, and a great musical called the Wizard of Oz, which I think warms the heart of every child at least initially. Remember, Dorothy’s a Midwesterner, but Holden Caulfield felt the same way, and he was an Easterner. Its message was, “Look behind the curtain. Don’t be Buffaloed by power, money, glamor, smoke, and mirrors. Make sure that you take a peek at the hidden aspects of reality.” Now, the opposite of that is Chris Cuomo telling us on CNN that it’s illegal to look at WikiLeaks. We can do that as journalists.

He actually said this on TV. He literally said, I know you’ve seen behind the curtain, and seen that the Wizard of Oz is actually this little con man from Kansas. But pretend you never saw that. In fact, it’s illegal for you to have seen that. So if you can wipe your memory banks, we’ll tell you what to think.

When I saw that moment on CNN, a journalist actually demanding incuriosity of the audience, I went, okay, the country I know is dead. The Midwestern ethos of, I’m gonna look behind the side show, or the Emperor’s New Clothes myth, of being that little kid who stands up and says, “Hey, you know, he’s naked, he’s a fat naked man.”

That was being systematically and affirmatively repressed. We now have a professional priesthood because, because throughout Trump, what we heard about journalists was that they were the most persecuted they’d ever been. They were one minute from being thrown into camps by Trump, and how dare we insult their profession. They exalted themselves into something resembling medieval priests. We read Latin, please. You don’t want to look at the Bible — we’ll tell you what’s in it.

So I’m standing up for a cultural tradition of seeing for yourself. You know — Missouri, the Show-Me State. Ohio, the state that produced James Thurber, who laughs at the fancy people, and so on. Look behind the curtain. I don’t wanna let that go.

Read the whole thing. As Glenn wrote in the aftermath of Dan Rather’s implosion in 2004, “The world of Big Media used to be a high-trust environment. You read something in the paper, or heard something from Dan Rather, and you figured it was probably true. You didn’t ask to hear all the background, because it wouldn’t fit in a newspaper story, much less in the highly truncated TV-news format anyway, and because you assumed that they had done the necessary legwork. (Had they? I’m not sure. It’s not clear whether standards have fallen since, or whether the curtain has simply been pulled open on the Mighty Oz. But they had names, and familiar faces, so you usually believed them even when you had your doubts.) The Internet, on the other hand, is a low-trust environment. Ironically, that probably makes it more trustworthy. That’s because, while arguments from authority are hard on the Internet, substantiating arguments is easy, thanks to the miracle of hyperlinks. And, where things aren’t linkable, you can post actual images. You can spell out your thinking, and you can back it up with lots of facts, which people then (thanks to Google, et al.) find it easy to check. And the links mean that you can do that without cluttering up your narrative too much, usually, something that’s impossible on TV and nearly so in a newspaper.”

LEE SMITH: Here Comes the Limited Hangout. America’s Nixonian press corps takes a page from the Watergate playbook to try and cover up its active role in the criminal Russiagate hoax:

In other words, all of Russiagate—the initial crime and the criminal cover-up—is based on the dossier. No matter how much reporters now try to sever themselves from it while maintaining Trump really did collude with Russia, there was only ever the dossier.

So should the Pulitzer committee strip the Post and the Times of their 2018 prize, as Trump and many of his supporters are saying? By no means. That would only further obscure the damage the media have done to American citizens, U.S. national security, and government institutions during the past several years. The press sponsored an intelligence operation that, among many other outrages, violated the privacy rights of an American citizen (Page); forced another to flee his adopted home for fear of false imprisonment (Millian); dragged a decorated combat veteran through the mud and cost him his home and millions of dollars in legal fees (Flynn); interfered in an election, and helped spies target the president through leaks of classified information. Demanding they simply return the awards they use to credential themselves obscures the larger truth. Instead, it would be more fitting for the Post and Times to have the prize’s citation emblazoned on their mastheads for posterity to commemorate how they injected poison into the national bloodstream and burned down our free press.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Before Russiagate, There Was Watergate.