Well, no - you respect foremost to keep critical info out of the hands of enemies. Trump sharing Israeli info with the Russian ambassador was near treason. Trump making a mistake and having a few docs would draw scorn, but not such condemnation. Trump grabbing scads of docs intentionally while ignoring both classified info laws and the Presidential Records Act is men's Rea, once again believing himself above the law and acting on it, including refusing to cooperate. Both-sides-doitism may win the media cycle, but it's not a valid intellectual position here. (Potentially we learn something in Biden's case that changes things - so far not by a long shot)

Is George Santos's multilayered never-stop-lying persinality disorder the same as Elizabeth Warren's lies about being native American? Only from an extremely coarse & forgiving analysis of facts.

Here's Mike Pence showing how it's done - largely the way Bidens done it. Trump is the outlier. Sandy Berger was an outlier. Oetraeus was an outlier. Most sane honest people don't fight the classifying agency or hide stuff. Classification's goal isn't to put people in jail - it's to try to guarantee safe but efficient use. We *want* the right people to be using the sensitive documents to handle whatever security-minded important tasks need doing. We don't want ex-pols to take home to blackmail people for revenge and leverage, which is a side of Trump that exists all too well. Do Dems not explain it well enough for the MAGAhats? Sorry, it's difficult to counter intentional distortion. But Pence's guys will get it. Where are the Romney Republicans? Or do her have to concede all to the fringe lunatics who sadly have a Republican majority simply cuz it's tuff for them to understand?

The fucking media isn't the "court of public opinion" - it's assholes with a job to do, to try *explaining* nuances to the tiki-torch masses. I don't say they have to succeed - it's a tough job, i worked in media - but at least they should give it a fucking try before tossing in the towel. And these are people who largely write sitting on their asses pondering - not investigative or war journalism, such as Russian reporters getting a slug in their back or Ukrainians getting hit by gunfire. Explain how 2 violations of the same law can differ by degree and intent - is that so fucking much to ask when writing words, vs "i dunno, Vern, it all looks pretty messy and complicated to me..." This is the grist of half of Tom Tomorrow's amusing but sad cartoons, the clueless talking head.

Marcy's self-appointed job includes explaining why *some* Jan 6 rioters are charged with insurrection and why some aren't, and how the 5 or 6 intertwining groups that day differ, and how the DoJ is documenting how the organized groups deliberately used the teeming rube masses as an attack weapon in order to show intent & execution from the President's circle on down. This is complex and murky overall, si requires patience and digging and sifting/collating - tens of thousands of hours of videos, photos, tweets, Signal calls, texts, etc. to pull together in a cohesive, persuasive fashion - something the Jan 6 committee largely did without too much help from that mainstream bothsideism press (tho a lot of info from citizen reporters on the internet tracking down participants and social media comments.) And if it wasn't obvious, why this all takes so much time, why Rudy & Trump & Bannon aren't in jail yet. Even a Tweeter with 400k followers can't get that "Proud Bit trial was delayed 4 weeks, so the prediction for end of year has also been delayed". Basic logic lije that.

Sure, if it's Tucker Carlson or Aaron Maté I know which way they spin, no surprises. I'm talking about the rest.

Part of how Trump stays "relevant" is the kneejerk reaction to out his every brainfart in the front page in bold, and then afterwards futiley trying to explain why it's not right. Promote, then try to tear down. Of course the Republicans it right is taking the opportunity to parade the 3 confidential docs cases as identical, whether they are or aren't. At the moment, 2 look similar - we don't have full details - and 1 is wacky obstinate criminally insane. How fucking tough is it to say "Biden & Pence cases seem tame; Trump's is a gross violation"?

Trump doesn't even fucking read - he used David Pecker and Michael Cohen to seek revenge with every piece of documentation he ever retained - the guy has filed about 3000 lawsuits in his life. He walked out of the White House taking as much useful dirt for revenge as he could manage - we knew it at the time, because there was some timely reporting that he was ignoring pertinent laws.

So yes, maybe our 4th Estate is now a lost cause, but that's the issue - not whether the public is confused. And where I live, the press is largely still working *despite* media ownership that favors the liar-in-chief. And some of the worst headline brainfarts sadly come from NYT and WaPo even tho there's (unrealistic?) hope that they would lead the sane & sober news evaluation while CNN is again wooing the conservative eyeballs by "cleaning up" (aka sanitizing) their reporting. Much of small town reporting is dead, but this is straight & simple DC + public records stuff (except the docs themselves can't be evaluated in context because they're confidential to varying degree, so we're stuck with a # of docs metric, whether enemy's nuclear missiles or Sec'y of State travel agenda.)