Tag Archives: The Atlantic

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The Hegseth Follies: Lies, Insults and Obfuscations

In early March, the Pentagon sent an advisory to all military personnel warning that a “vulnerability” had been identified in the commercial messaging app Signal and warned against using it for classified information., according to the New York Times.

Ignoring that caution, when senior members of President Trump’s administration discussed upcoming military strikes in Yemen on Signal, they unknowingly included the editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, who disclosed the error and the contents of the communications.

“Rather than admit their mistake, apologize, and make sure not to do it again, administration officials are spinning hard and smearing Goldberg,” the Free Press observed today. “The White House has chosen to deflect attention from the substance of the leak and, instead, viciously attack Goldberg and the Atlantic.”

The most noticeable aspect of the comments by President Trump and his administration is the unusual coarsening of political debate. Heated political rhetoric is at every turn. American politics has never been a like pot luck dinner of neighbors, but neither has it always been today’s dumpster fire of venomous insults , caustic personal attacks, and threatening behavior (online and offline).

To say we are seeing an appalling decline of political eloquence is likely not an original thought and perhaps civility in today’s fractured country is a forlorn hope, but surely we can do better than the remarks below in our political discourse. 

Comments by President Trump

The Atlantic is “a failing Radical Left Magazine”.

“I happen to know the guy  (Goldberg) is a total sleazebag” and “a slimeball reporter”. 

“The Atlantic is a failed magazine, does very, very poorly. Nobody gives a damn about it.”

 “I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business.”

 “He’s (Goldberg) made up a lot of stories and I think he’s basically bad for the country.”

Comments by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt

“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans. This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

“This administration is working hard on behalf of the American public every day, but the mainstream media continues to be focused on a sensationalized story from the failing Atlantic magazine.”

“If this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate, and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well. And there’s arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg.”

“We are not going to be lectured about national security and American troops by Democrats and the mainstream media.” 

Comments by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth

“So you are talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist (Goldberg) who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes. Time and time again. This is a guy that peddles in garbage.” 

“As I type this, my team and I are traveling the INDOPACOM (the Asia Pacific) region, meeting w/ Commanders (the guys who make REAL ‘war plans’) and talking to troops. We will continue to do our job, while the media does what it does best: peddle hoaxes.” 

Comments by Steven Cheung, White House communications director

“The Atlantic story is nothing more than a section of the NatSec establishment community running the same, tired gameplay from years past.” 

“At every turn anti-Trump forces have tried to weaponize innocuous actions and turn them into faux outrage that Fake News outlets can use to peddle misinformation. Don’t let enemies of America get away with these lies.”

Comment by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz 

Mr. Goldberg is “scum”.

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Messages of Doom Aren’t Reaching Trumpers

A friend recently praised the The Atlantic’s January/February 2024 edition for turning over an entire issue to 24 writers offering dystopian warnings about a second Trump presidency. 

“In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness, “ wrote David Frum. “In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself.”

“Trump’s bullying of military leaders, journalists, and judges was never merely the ranting of an attention seeker, and that behavior—backed by the credible threat of violence from radicalized supporters—will likely become even more central to his governing style,” wrote Juliette Kayyem.

That should have a real impact on public discourse about Trump, my friend said.

Not likely.

The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Washington Monthly and multiple other elite liberal/progressive/left-leaning publications are preaching to the choir in covering politics and so much more of the cultural landscape. Far too often, their attention is on things the vast majority of Americans are simply not focusing on. 

As former New York Times editor James Bennet wrote in The Economist, “The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.”

The New York Times illusions are reflected in its coverage of the HBO show “Succession”, described by one critic as “an amoral look at the stupidity of capitalism”. The paper droned on about the show interminably after its debut in June 2018. 

“…time has hardly dulled the beige sheen of “Succession”, New York Times reporter Alexis Soloski effused in the paper’s Dec. 3, 2024 edition. “In January it will likely dominate the Emmy Awards — all of the main cast received nominations and Armstrong earned two, for writing and as an executive producer — and no other show has come to replace it in the cultural consciousness.”

But the fact is Succession was a niche show, not even on the radar of most Americans. Succession’s May 2023 finale drew 2.9 million viewers, a series high. Even counting delayed viewing, “Succession” averaged just 8.7 million viewers per episode in its fourth and final season.

That’s with a total U.S. population of 341 million, with just about every household having a television or computer screen for streaming.

That’s how it is with the New York Times. Even though it now has about 10 million subscribers, and still claims it runs “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, it’s not really talking to America. 

According to the paper’s readership demographics, 91% of its readers identify as Democrats, only 7% of the readership doesn’t have a higher education degree and most of its readers are white and well-off. 

In other words, most people who read the New York Times and other liberal-leaning publications do so because they already share the political sensibilities of these publications.

And frankly, there’s not much incentive for pundits to go off the beaten track. As Osita Nwaney put it in a Columbia Journalism Review article about political writing, “…What’s worth writing about and how? The morsels of rage and misery we offer might not have much political effect, but they do feed an online writing economy that rewards speed, quantity, and deference to algorithms designed for the profit of three or four tech companies—an economy that offers few incentives to generate writing that lingers in the mind longer than half a day or half an hour…The whole system is one of the bleakest forms of entertainment imaginable.”

Similar limiting factors are present with most “elite” news outlets in the United States. 

Even television news and opinion shows reach a narrow audience. The days when Walter Cronkite dominated the scene,  reaching an estimated 27-29 million viewers per night, when the nation’s population was just over 200 million, are long gone. 

ABC World News Tonight with David Muir finished the week of November 27 at No. 1 in the evening news ratings race with an average of just 8.45 million viewers. That same week, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt averaged 7.075 million viewers and The CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell averaged 5.05 million total viewers. In other words, the combined viewership of all three top evening network news shows totaled 20.56 million, about one third fewer viewers than Cronkite alone reeled in more than 40 years ago when America’s population was much smaller.

The proliferation of liberal political comment on social media  and in reams of political punditry also likely has less of an impact on the broad public than is often assumed. 

This is likely one big reason why all the hand-wringing about Trump in progressive publications and network news shows, isn’t denting Trump’s support. He’s still crushing his GOP presidential primary opponents and surpassing President Biden in the polls, even in a poll pitting Trump against Biden, Kennedy, West and Stein. 

Put simply, Trump’s supporters just aren’t listening. 

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Hillary and The Donald: Self-inflicted wounds

With Super Tuesday voting and other primaries and caucuses behind us, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the clear leaders in the Republican and Democratic races for their party’s presidential nominations.

But they are both damaged candidates and the parties have only themselves to blame for their success.

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Democrats have known for years that Hillary would be a seriously flawed candidate.

 “She has always been awkward and uninspiring on the stump,” a senior Democratic consultant once told the Washington Post. “Hillary has Bill’s baggage and now her own as secretary of state — without Bill’s personality, eloquence or warmth.”

 While her damaging e-mail scandal may be relatively new, Hillary has been associated with decades of personal and political contretemps, leading to a clear case of Clinton fatigue among the populace.

Equally troubling to the Democratic Party should be Hillary’s trust gap.

In a July 2015 Quinnipiac University national poll, 57 percent of respondents said Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, one of the worst scores among all the top candidates at the time. And her scores have gotten worse. In a subsequent Quinnipiac poll, 61 percent of respondents said Clinton is not honest and trustworthy.

In an August 2015 Quinnipiac University poll, “liar” was the first word that came to mind more than others in an open-ended question when voters were asked what they think of Clinton, followed by “dishonest” and “untrustworthy”. (“Arrogant” was the first word that came to mind for Trump, but that doesn’t seem quite as toxic)

In January 2016, a poll produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates put Hillary 12 points behind Bernie Sanders, 48-36 percent, in being seen as more honest and trustworthy, a deterioration from 6 points behind in Dec. 2015 and equal to Sanders in October 2015.

But Hillary’s problems as a candidate go even deeper.

“Voters see her as an extraordinarily cynical, power-hungry insider,” James Poulos said in The Week on Feb. 2. “She is out for herself, not out for Americans. Voters know it.”

This ties in with a long-held and widespread perception that Hillary and her family are just plain greedy, what with them hauling off $190,000 worth of china, flatware, rugs, televisions, sofas and other gifts when they moved out of the White House, taking money from all sorts of unsavory people and foreign countries for their Foundation, and charging exorbitant amounts for speeches.

David Axelrod, a political consultant who helped steer Obama to the presidency, noted in his book, “Believer”, that Hillary has two other main weaknesses: she’s a polarizing rather than a “healing figure,” and she has a hard time selling herself as the “candidate of the future” given her checkered past and long political resume.

And then, as Josh Kraushaar wrote in The Atlantic before Jeb Bush dropped out, “…pundits and donors alike are vastly overrating the prospects of two brand-name candidates for 2016 — Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush — and undervaluing the reality that the current political environment is as toxic as it’s ever been for lifelong politicians.”

Then there’s Trump

That, of course, takes us to Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s “Nightmare on Park Avenue.”

Isolated in their cocoons, party officials (and the political press) assumed an establishment candidate would emerge the victor. They denied to themselves and others for months that Trump would be a viable candidate for the Republican nomination.

Nobody was more smug in this assumption then Jeb!

He started early, rebuilding political connections, building a professional staff and laying the groundwork for a “shock and awe” fundraising blitz. But he faltered early and never regained his balance. He watched helplessly as his fund-raising advantage become a disadvantage, defining him as the establishment favorite when the Republican base was looking for a change agent.

Political leaders also overestimated voters’ desire for solid, traditional, steady candidates and too quickly dismissed Trump as a long-term threat. “Reality TV will gather a lot of interest and a lot of people enjoyed the celebrity of that, but for the last 14 years, I’ve had to live in the real world and deal with real world issues and come up with real world solutions,” former Texas Gov. Rick Perry said in mid-2015. “And that’s what the people I think of this country want out of the next president of the United States.”

Meanwhile, confident that Trump’s bombast, misstatements and insults would doom him, Republican Party leaders watched incredulously as he rolled over establishment candidates.

“Until recently, the narrative of stories like this has been predictable,” Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone. “If a candidate said something nuts, or seemingly not true, an army of humorless journalists quickly dug up all the facts, and the candidate ultimately was either vindicated, apologized, or suffered terrible agonies… That dynamic has broken down this election season. Politicians are quickly learning that they can say just about anything and get away with it.”

As Karen Tumulty wrote in the Washington Post, “Will Trump eventually cross a line — or do the lines no longer exist?”

The make-up and size of the Republican candidate field also has worked to Trump’s advantage.

There’s no love lost, for example, between most members of Congress and Ted Cruz. And with so many Republican candidates (17 at one point), voter preferences were atomized for too long and even now none of the remaining candidates are willing to drop out, preventing the emergence of a single challenger to Trump.

So here we are, facing the possibility of a Clinton-Trump election.

Just goes to show that Clarence Darrow was right. “When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The American dream – present and accounted for

With the 4th of July imminent, the crowd gathered in Brooklyn on June 30 to take the oath of United States citizenship was excited about their chance to live the American dream.

Reflecting the thoughts of the assembled group, Felix A. Okema, 38, formerly of the Ivory Coast, now a resident of Elm Park, Staten Island, spoke with pride and enthusiasm of the naturalization experience.

“You have a system that opens its doors to opportunity, to others,” Okema said. “You hear people talking about it. It’s real. The vibe, the intelligence, the special blast of the people here — it’s going to make the country better.”

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Okema and the rest of the new citizens obviously didn’t get the message from University of California President Janet Napolitano.

She thinks saying the United States is a land of opportunity is insulting, a microaggression.

Earlier this year Napolitano sent letters to UC deans and department chairs inviting them to seminars “to foster informed conversation about the best way to build and nurture a productive academic climate.”

A principal goal of the seminars was to help faculty “gain a better understanding of implicit bias and microaggressions” in their vocabularies and to urge the faculty to purge potentially offensive words and phrases from their speech.

Examples of such offensive speech included the following:

  1. Statements that indicate that a white person does not want to or need to acknowledge race, such as, “There is only one race, the human race.” “America is a melting pot.” Why is this a microaggression? It delivers the message that you must assimilate to the dominant culture.
  2. Statements denying bias, such as saying to a person of color, “Are you sure you were being followed in the store? I can’t believe it.” Why is this a microaggression? It denies the personal experience of individuals who experience bias.
  3. Statements that don’t recognize meritocracy is a myth, such as: “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” ;“America is the land of opportunity.”; “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough.” Why are statements such as this a microaggression? They deliver the message that the playing field is even or that people of color are lazy and/or incompetent and need to work harder.
  4. Statements implying that the values and communication styles of the dominant/White culture are ideal/”normal”, such as saying to an Asian, Latino or Native American: “Why are you so quiet? We want to know what you think.” Why is this a microaggression?: It delivers the message that Asian, Latino and Native Americans must assimilate to the dominant culture, that there’s no room for differences in America.

Where does this stuff come from? Not from Americans.

A just-released Penn Schoen Berland poll of about 2,000 Americans from June 8 to 19, 2015, commissioned for The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute, revealed that 72 percent of those polled said they are living the American Dream or expect to, 85 percent of are satisfied with their lives and 86 percent are optimistic about the future.

Young people are on board, too. According to the poll, 77 percent of Millennials say they’re living the dream or believe they can. Among African Americans and Asian Americans, that rises to 82 percent and among Latinos to 83 percent.

Napolitano and her ilk are clearly way off base. As the Atlantic concluded, the American Dream is alive and well. It’s the misguided people subscribing to Napolitano’s thinking who are undermining it.