Displaying posts published in

August 2018

The Weekly Standard’s Ties to Fusion GPS By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/15/the-weekly-standards-t

In his online appeal for money after being fired this week, disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok credited an unlikely source to vouch for his victim status: The Weekly Standard.

At one time a leading conservative magazine, the Standard declared last month that Strzok’s plight was merely an “overwrought tale of bias” and the case against him is “just sound and fury.” The article brushed off Strzok’s actions as “several bad judgment calls” and blasted Congressional Republicans for continuing a criminal investigation into the now-unemployed G-man.

Strzok is following only 32 people on his newly-verified Twitter account. Bill Kristol, the editor-at-large of the Standard, is one of them.

So, what’s with the fanboying between the Standard—an allegedly serious publication dedicated to advancing conservative principles—and a corrupt government bureaucrat who embodies everything the conservative movement fought against for decades?

I found an article in the Standard archives this week that might explain why. On July 24, 2016, just days before Strzok helped launch a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign, Kristol gave Strzok and the Obama Justice Department a big assist from the anti-Trump Right by posting a flawed and questionably-sourced article. “Putin’s Party” is compelling evidence that Kristol and the Standard were far from mere sideline observers as the Trump-Russia collusion scam took shape in the summer of 2016.

At the very least, the timing of the article suggests there was careful coordination between the central players—including the Hillary Clinton campaign—and Bill Kristol to derail Trump’s candidacy just weeks before the election. But the article’s content also serves to raise alarming questions about the claims by many Republicans that “conservatives” had no knowledge of or involvement with the Christopher Steele dossier.

The Double Standards of Postmodern Justice By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/16/the-double-standards-of-

The New York Times recently hired as a writer and board member Sarah Jeong. The Times knew that in recent years Jeong had posted a series of unapologetically racist anti-white tweets. She had offered wisdom such as “#CancelWhitePeople” and expressed hatred for males.

Yet when the Times discovered less graphic versions of such tweets from newly hired technology writer Quinn Norton earlier this year, the newspaper immediately fired Norton.

The message of disparate treatment was that what bothers the Times is not racism per se, but who is the racist and who are her targets.

Over at The Atlantic, there are also no ostensible rules concerning who is and is not fired, and for what reason. Essayist Kevin Williamson was allegedly dropped by The Atlantic for his prior incendiary suggestion that abortion might warrant the death penalty.

Fine, it is a free country, and private companies can fire whomever they chose. But The Atlantic had no problem hiring writer Julia Ioffe. She been let go at Politico for tweeting that President Trump might have engaged in incest with his daughter Ivanka.

Again, the impression conveyed is that The Atlantic is not so concerned with inflammatory speech as with calibrating at whom the venom is directed. If Ioffe had tweeted the same perversities about Barack Obama and his daughters, The Atlantic surely would have fired her immediately.

The American people are losing confidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation not just because after 15 months, he has not charged anyone with Russian collusion—the original reason he was appointed. Instead, the pushback is due to the growing sense that rules are made up ad hoc.

300+ newspapers publish the same anti-Trump editorial today By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/300_newspapers_publish_the_same_antitrump_editorial_today.html

Today marks another milepost on the funeral march of the American newspaper industry. Has there ever before been such a mass demonstration of self-unawareness as the collective expression of outrage this morning by the editorial boards of these ailing enterprises? Here is the editorial as it appears today in the Boston Globe, which no doubt will receive one or more journalism awards (journalists love to give each other awards for agreeing with each other) for its “courage” – as if howling mobs were outside their doors, and military vans on their way to seize the printing presses.

The editorial, indeed, raises the fear of being shut down right up front, relying on a poll supposedly indicating a public ready to send storm troopers into the nation’s newsrooms. Ginning up polls is a standard operating procedure for the media, who are well aware that by careful wording and sequencing on questions, you can shape the public response into the direction you are hoping for. In this case, Trump-haters are anxious to manufacture a purported threat to shut them down, which is something that nobody in a position of authority has ever even hinted at.