Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
By Amy Chozick @ NYTimes. com for "Sunday Review", April 20
Covering Hillary Clinton’s campaign from before it started to the very last moment.The 3 most recent comments @ the article provide the best summary:
Lisa Cabbage, Portland, OR 5 minutes ago
Thank you for writing this, Ms Chozick, it means a lot to me. I started getting worried in September; watching the debates made me ill....
Michael A. Santoro, Santa Clara, CA 6 minutes ago
Thank you for this honest, raw piece. Like Shakespeare's "problem plays" it is not easy to sort out the meaning, lessons, and significance of the election, the meddling, and the myriad of factors that went into the election....
PeteH, Upstate NY 6 minutes ago
"They were never going to let me" is illuminating: its subject is indistinct, unknowable, inviting speculation....
Oh maybe I should add this paragraph excerpt:
The Bernie Bros and Mr. Trump’s Twitter trolls had called me a donkey-faced whore and a Hillary shill, but nothing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence. The worst part was, they were right.
Comments
I appreciated this zeigeist point from the piece, as I had missed it when it was happening:
by artappraiser on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 2:28pm
And they became the "working class".
by barefooted on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 2:58pm
Hardly - now they're the "day jobbers" or "piece-mealers". "Working..." had some continuity to it. Now it's "always on" but "seldom compensated". But hey, those emails...
by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 3:00pm
As noted, it was a "linguistic" change that became the norm - aided in no small part by the Sanders piece of the equation. You're likely correct that just as there is no middle class to speak of anymore, there is a severely dwindling working class, but the language used hasn't quite caught up to the reality.
by barefooted on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 3:07pm
Well, "opioid addicts" is trending - not sure what else they got going for them, but reality will not be denied.
by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 3:14pm
Maybe it's time to take "class" out of the equation completely.
by barefooted on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 3:23pm
I think Trump & Cohen have done exactly that
by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 4:27pm
Interestingly, Chozick's 2015 piece on topic which she links to in the piece, reports in the first paragraph that the Sanders campaign had obviously decided to use "ordinary Americans" in light of learning this information:
Perhaps the working class thing partly came from the labeling of pollsters together with Sandersnistas like Dagblog's Hal? I would think the Sanders campaign would be smarter than that, as they know Bernie already had a "socialist" label problem and was trying to capture some swings by avoiding the whole "workers of the world unite" meme that might remind of that.
by artappraiser on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 4:55pm
I'm still struck by a repeated meme...
Oft repeated "it should never have been that close to begin with" (Dan Froomkin used this on Facebook like 2 days ago, and it's frequent). I mean, what planet does this come from? Obama won in 2012 by 4.9% (51.1%), 7.2% in 2008 (52.9%), and he was a superstar, considered by many to be the finest speaker of their generation. Kerry lost by 2.4%, Gore pulled 48.4% of the vote, Bill got 49.2% and 43.0%, while Dukakis got 45.6%, Mondale 40.6% & Carter 41% against Reagan and eked out 50.1% against Ford (the unpopular Republican who pardoned the just impeached Nixon and lost by only 2.1%). McGovern? 37.5%. Humphrey? 42.7%. JFK? 49.7%. Only LBJ in 1964 got 61%, and that took an assassinated president and a divisive fringe conservative.
And these are men. Hillary got 48.2% of the vote. She didn't cheat on her spouse, much less bring dozens of lovers to a beachside bungalow and presidential yacht, or sleep with a mobster's girlfriend or marry a multimillionaire trophy spouse to replace the dowdy one. She didn't get caught faking her military record to leave early, or leave a major American city sinking while holding a birthday party. She didn't get caught writing in graveyards to back her earlier campaigns, or have a major Kansas City mobster as her patron and major campaign funder. She didn't make a ridiculous pose in a tank with a funny helmet or claim that East Europe wasn't part of Soviet influence. She didn't choose a psych patient receiving electroshock as a running mate. For all the complaints, she wasn't near as wooden as Kerry or Gore or Dukakis or Mondale. She didn't call out the Guard to shoot up a campus & kill 4 students, or spray defoliants across a whole country. She didn't lie to get the nation into a war claiming the enemy was building up weapons when it wasn't and then leave us there cause she hadn't thought of an exit. She didn't get caught calling ethnic groups "rapists" and incite her crowds to physically attack or even shoot their opponents, and get caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women. She didn't crash the economy while refusing to enforce laws on the books in the name of "deregulation". She didn't erase millions of emails across all presidential staff, or . She didn't have the backing of a bootlegger father or a oil rich CIA-spook father who'd obstructed a federal investigation into arms-for-hostages. She didn't buy a ranch 2 years before she ran for President to be "authentic". She didn't suffer from dementia with onset of Alzheimers. She didn't funnel money from her charitable foundation into illegal campaign donations and for-profit activities. She didn't go bankrupt a dozen times and have a record of suing partners with vindictive lawsuits.
She did have a home mail server that may have had up to 30 classified emails out of tens of thousands of documents. She did champion universal health care, but not single payer. She did call some violent, racist followers of her opponent "deplorables". She did sit through 9 fruitless investigations of Benghazi when a small consulate was overrun by Muslim protesters and some terrorist affiliates. She did laugh a bit cacklish and wear pants suits, rather than the Brooks Brother suits that most candidates wear.
Kennedy claimed "victory has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan" - except that orphan looks like Little Orphan Annie with Daddy Warbucks as a sponsor, too cute & cuddly to fail. Except that wouldn't happen for a grown woman - only for a grown man or a young girl. Men fail up, women fail down, girls get pulled up (if attractive). Some political version of the law of gravity, with Einstein's relativity built in.
Shouldn't have been that close to begin with? Damn straight, but where I disagree is the reasons why it was close to begin with. Even now, with revelations about all the damage Facebook & Cambridge Analytica and illegal Russian hackers/bot teams, illegal money laundered through the NRA and elsewhere, illegal pressure on the FBI to break its own longstanding rules - *TWICE*, major malfeasance by the nation's paper of record in publishing a political hatchet job book "Clinton Cash" as supposedly a serious researched book, along with an overtly 180 degrees wrong front page claim about her opponent days before the election, a major news announcer caught sharing lawyer and background info with her opponent, hacked emails from her campaign and the Democratic committee leaked within minutes of damaging news, repeat meetings with Russians from dozens of her opponent's campaign staff and administration.... And yet still we get "but Hillary ran a flawed campaign". I mean, wow.
by PeraclesPlease on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 4:10pm
Nothing to add, except ^^^ Like ^^^
by CVille Dem on Sat, 04/21/2018 - 8:35am
More news on the history of "they" and MSM:
Responding to James Comey, New York Times’s Baquet says key Russia-Trump story was ‘NOT inaccurate’
by Erik Wemple @ WashingtonPost.com, April 20
by artappraiser on Fri, 04/20/2018 - 4:34pm
The Hillary Book That’s ‘Going to Piss Off’ Both Sides
Article from at length Interview of Amy Chozick by Rachael Combe @ NYMag.com, April 29
by artappraiser on Sat, 04/21/2018 - 8:32pm
Didn't piss me off at all, not that I ever became unpissed. But Amy takes it too hard - Times management published Clinton Cash in its pages, and threw a big sloppy zipless fuck to Trump as aa headline in the waning days. They were never going to give any serious intelligent coverage to Hillary no matter how many press folks she travelled with.
Except that "who wouldn't want to be Maureen Dowd" bit - I came seconds from gouging my eyes out with a spoon. Like every female journalist's dream is to be some rich shallow catty vindictive cunt who's been an icon for unserious chick-lit-psychological-rambling-dissimulating for decades? Just think of her trashing Al Gore and his supposed Naomi Wolf-inspired earth tone suits, and then think of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis brutally murdered thanks to her "guy I'd like to 'ave a beer with" paean - who wants that bloody guilt at whatever the profit? I'd rather be Kellyanne Conway or Ivanka Trump, and that's going low, but at least they likely know they're slime.
by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 04/22/2018 - 5:31am