Im-Politic: The January 6th Card Isn’t Working for the Democrats

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Biden, Capitol assault, Capitol riots, CNN, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2022, election 2024, Im-Politic, January 6, January 6 committee, midterm elections, midterms 2022, Pew Research Center, RealClearPolitics.com, Republicans

Some compelling evidence emerged this past week that if the Democratic Party thinks it’s going to prevent major losses in this year’s Congressional elections mainly by beating the Capitol riot and the Donald Trump-as-deadly-danger-to-American-democracy drums, it needs a major reality check. For new polls are showing that the public is increasingly moving on from January 6^th, and is less and less critical of the former President’s role.

The most eye-opening survey results came out on Tuesday from the Pew Research Center. They showed that, since the immediate aftermath of the attack, 52 percent of the country’s adults assigned Trump “a lot of responsibility” for the riot, 23 percent said he deserved “some” responsibility, and 24 percent saw him as blameless. But of those responding to the same question in the middle of last month, only 43 percent agreed with “a lot,” 24 percent agreed with “some,” and 32 percent agreed with “none at all.”

Predictably, a big partisan split emerged. But changes in Trump’s favor were evident even among adults calling themselves Democrats and those avowedly leaning Democratic. Last year, 81 percent told Pew that Trump bore “a lot” of blame for the riot, 14 percent answered “some” blame, and just five percent let him off the hook. This year, the results were 70 percent, 17 percent, and 12 percent, respectively.

A CNN-co-sponsored poll also taken last month and released Thursday found somewhat similar results in response to a somewhat different question. Last January, 75 percent of the adult respondents surveyed called the Capitol attack a “crisis” or “major problem” for American democracy, with 36 percent choosing “crisis.” Last month, the comparable overall figure was 65 percent, with 28 percent calling the riot a “crisis.”

These two surveys also warn Democrats not to expect the House of Representative’s January 6^th committee to be a political game changer. The Pew poll reports that, since last September, the share of U.S. adults who have heard a lot about the committee has more than doubled. But it’s still just 26 percent. And only 29 percent of Democrats say they’ve been tuned in to this extent.

Meanwhile, according to Pew, only 44 percent of American adults overall are “very” or “somewhat” confident that the committee’s investigation of the riot is “fair and reasonable.” Fifty-four percent are “not too” or “not at all” confident.

CNN’s results were more favorable to the committee: Forty-four percent of its respondents viewed it as “a fair attempt to determine what happened” and just 36 percent dismissed it as a “one-sided effort to blame Donald Trump.” (Twenty percent “hadn’t heard enough to say.”) But no earlier figures were presented to enable judging any trend over time.

But maybe the most revealing poll results pointing to a big fading of January 6th’s political effects (totally contrary to what yours truly predicted) come from RealClearPolitics.com. Since August, the site has tracked polls that have asked the public whether they would back Trump or President Biden if they ran against each other in the 2024 presidential election. Of the 12 surveys monitored, Trump has won in ten and one produced a tie.

At least as revealing: In five of these polls (including two of the last three), the “Trump vote” topped his official 46.86 percent share of the 2020 vote.

As I’ve written previously, this could all change if the House committee or the press produce some genuinely blockbuster findings, or if Trump is perceived to be going unprecedentedly far off the rails or if most of the myriad challenges and opportunities sure to face America over the next few months break the Democrats’ way. And I certainly don’t rule out Republicans screwing up in some disastrous way between now and November.   

But so far, it looks very much like their “All January 6th” approach has been a bad bet for Democrats. At the same time, given Mr. Biden’s record and deep unpopularity, maybe it’s still the best bet they’ve got.

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Im-Politic: So You Think Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Reflect “The Science”?

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden, CCP Virus, CNN, coronavirus, COVID 19, Im-Politic, immunity, Mainstream Media, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, public health, RealClearPolitics.com, vaccination, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, vaccines, Wuhan virus

Can we just finally stop pretending that the Biden administration’s approach to mitigating the CCP Virus has anything to do with “The Science.” And don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, longtime director of the federal National Institute of Allergy and Chief Medical Advisor to the President.

As the President insisted emphatically, and even angrily, in his speech Thursday, “This [now] is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” and this situation is entirely the fault of Americans who aren’t “doing the right thing” to protect themselves “and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love”; and of “elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against COVID-19.”

So in order to prevent vaccine hesitancy for whatever reason “to stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have done their part and want to get back to life as normal,” he decided to impose a series of sweeping vaccine mandates for both federal government workers and large numbers of private sector employees.

As I pointed out this past Wednesday, the (big) problem with this strategy is that it completely ignores the huge numbers of Americans who don’t need vaccines because their exposure to the virus has left them immune. I should have added that, consequently, they can’t spread it to others unless they themselves get reinfected. As a result, the Biden strategy threatens to deprive tens of millions of Americans of their livelihoods, and the U.S. economy of production and demand that it still urgently needs, for no good medical reason at all.

And guess what? Fauci clearly agrees with me (and the others who have made the same point). Yesterday, during a CNN appearance, he was asked about

“a study that came out of Israel about natural immunity, and basically, the headline was that natural immunity provides a lot of protection, even better than the vaccines alone.

“What do people make of that? So as we talk about vaccine mandates, I get calls all the time, people say, I’ve already had COVID, I’m protected. And now the study says maybe even more protected than the vaccine alone. Should they also get the vaccine? How do you make the case to them?”

Fauci’s answer?

“You know, that’s a really good point….I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that. That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response.

“The one thing that paper from Israel didn’t tell you is whether or not as high as the protection is with natural infection, what’s the durability compared to the durability of a vaccine? So it is conceivable that you got infected, you’re protected, but you may not be protected for an indefinite period of time.

“So, I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously, because you very appropriately pointed out, it is an issue, and there could be an argument for saying what you said.”

But it seems Fauci didn’t “sit down and discuss seriously” this complication with Mr. Biden. Or maybe the President decided to ignore input from someone who’s supposed to have personified “The Science” lately, and steam ahead anyway.

Of course, this would be a great subject for the Mainstream Media (MSM) to investigate. (Forget about Congress as long as it’s controlled by the Democrats.) But that’s not where the smart money is. After all, if you Google some obvious search terms like “Fauci” and “a really firm answer” and as of this writing (a little after 3 in the afternoon today, EST), and no MSM hits come up. But searchers are told that “It looks like these results are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.” Oh.

Speaking of “reliable sources, however, Fauci’s admission isn’t even featured on CNN’s own website! Here’s what its search engine tells you: “Your search for Fauci ‘a really firm answer’ did not match any documents.” I was only able to find the transcript because I’d read about Fauci’s remarks on a decidedly not mainstream news site, and as the link above shows, finally came across it on the RealClearPolitics.com news aggregator site.

Maybe Fauci himself will speak up, before the vaccine mandates actually begin, or before they beging inflicting real economic damage on unvaccinated Americans and an entire economy that relies heavily on them? After all, he felt pretty free to contradict or correct President Trump when he felt the need. (Google “Fauci contradicts Trump.”)  But I wouldn’t bet on that, either, since he was already praising Mr. Biden even before the election.

In all, this information loop seems to be closed, at least till the 2022 Congressional elections, which could create the possibility of at least one house of Congress checking and probing the Executive Branch. For now, though, what word describes the fix in which this leaves the country better than “sickening”?           

Im-Politic: Never-Trumper Evidence That the Feds Haven’t Worsened Portland’s Violence

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Chris Cillizza, CNN, Im-Politic, Josh Campbell, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, Oregon, peaceful protests, Portland, protests, riots, Trump, violence

I’ve long believed that one of the best ways to confirm or at least support a claim made by someone else isn’t to present evidence from a source that’s sympathetic to that point of view. It’s to present evidence from a source that’s not the slightest bit sympathetic.

That’s why I’m focusing today on a CNN post from yesterday and what it says about the charge that the presence of various federal law enforcement units (some allegedly not identified) is mainly responsible for the upsurge in violent protests in Portland, Oregon – not the activities of at least some of the protesters themselves. In two noteworthy ways, it compellingly reinforces that case that the protesters and not the federal units dispatched by President Trump actually are the ones at fault.

The post is from Chris Cillizza, an Editor-at-Large with a clear Never Trump worldview at a news organization that’s unmistakably hostile to the President. (Just take a look at CNN‘s home page at any given moment if you doubt me.) Moreover, the reporter-on-the-ground who Cillizza interviewed to find out “What the heck is going on in Portland?” – Josh Campbell – seems to have made up his mind on the subject, too. How else can you explain his contention that

“Portland is now witnessing a standoff between protesters and an administration that continues to ratchet up its heated rhetoric to (falsely) describe the city as being in a state of total chaos and anarchy. While there have been incidents of rioting at night, including people launching fireworks at the federal building, setting fires outside, and allegedly attacking federal agents, the focal point of that activity largely centers on the city block housing the federal building. Despite the President’s descriptions, Portland is not a city under siege.”

In other words, “Nothing unusual to see here – except maybe on one city block.” And of course not a chance that this violence would spread if not actively resisted.

That’s why I found so noteworthy these two statements by Campbell – based, it’s important to remember, on his eyewitness observations. First:

“As I was interviewing the mayor Wednesday night among a crowd of hundreds of peaceful protesters, a group of rioters gathered near the fencing outside the federal building and began lobbing projectiles at the building and setting fires. In a pattern we have seen over and over, when federal agents in the building are provoked, or a fire set by rioters risks destroying the building, tactical officers will come out in full force and launch tear gas to disperse the crowd.”

Second:

“[Y]ou have a mixture of federal agents from different agencies serving as guards and riot control officers at the downtown courthouse. At night, when a portion of the crowd turns violent, agents will often line up and push protesters back blocks away from the building using tear gas, rubber bullets and batons.”

On the one hand, I’m grateful that bias hasn’t distorted Campbell’s senses enough to prevent him from recounting events in a way that plainly undercut this bias. On the other, I can’t help but wonder: If someone evidently inclined to blame President Trump for most of Portland’s latest troubles is (however unwittingly) making clear that the violence has (at least often) been started by the federal police, isn’t it possible that the protesters’ activities have been even more provocative – and less excusable – than Campbell and CNN are reporting?

Im-Politic: ‘Tis the Season – for Immigration Double Standards

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Associated Press, Chuck Schumer, CNN, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media. Nancy Pelosi, migrants, Open Borders, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump

All reasonable participants in the often angry national debate about American immigration policy surely agree that the deaths of migrant children in U.S. custody and the killing of a police officer at the hands of an illegal alien are comparably tragic. Why, then, have the Open Borders supporters treated them like night and day, focusing intently on the former and literally ignoring the latter? And why has President Trump so needlessly fed his own critics’ charges of cruelty, racism, and xenophobia on immigration policy with some double standards-setting of his own on these matters?

The discrepancy on the part of Open Borders advocates has been especially dramatic when it comes to Congress’ leading Democrats – who will assume control of the House of Representatives in January. House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, and other major figures in the party (including its likely presidential candidates) have uniformly expressed outrage at the deaths this month of two Guatemalan children held by the U.S. immigration authorities after being brought to the border by parents on long, arduous trips from their home country.  (See, e.g., here and here.)

But the early morning December 26 killing of a Newman, California police officer (and an immigrant himself) by a suspect identified as an illegal alien by local law enforcement officials has elicited no response at all – even from Pelosi, who represents a California district.

The same pattern marks the coverage of these incidents by the Mainstream Media, which has made its Open Borders sympathies abundantly clear in recent years. For example, the Washington Post this morning was still highlighting on its front page the controversy over the children’s deaths. But the police officer’s death didn’t even make the print edition. The killing was mentioned on the paper’s website three times yesterday and today. But all three items were taken from the wire services, meaning that the Post hasn’t as of now assigned one of its own reporters to investigate.  (See, e.g., here.)

The New York Times did cover the policeman’s killing with one of its own correspondents – and ran the story on page 15 of the news section today. But an article on the children’s deaths, which are no longer breaking news, received front page coverage.

Visit the website of the Associated Press, the world’s largest bona fide news agency, and you’ll see an article on the most recent Guatemalan child’s death right near the top of the home page. But you need to scroll way down to find a piece on the police officer’s killing.

CNN also featured a follow up on the most recent child death prominently on its home page. But its coverage of the police killing doesn’t appear anywhere. You need to look for it with the search engine.

In my view, President Trump has dropped the ball here as well. It’s true that his administration has expressed regret over both migrant children’s deaths, is investigating these events, and seeking ways to handle the new flood of migrants more effectively. It’s also true that the administration has blamed the children’s parents in part for putting them in dangerous situations to begin with – and I agree. I also fully support the administration’s insistence that the U.S. government’s responsibilities to its own citizens are qualititatively different – meaning greater – than to citizens of other countries.

But although Mr. Trump has tweeted about the shooting (without condolences for his family or his colleagues) he’s made no comment at all about the children’s deaths. And just as the Open Borders folks exhibited a major blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special shame surrounding the death of a public official who risked his life every day on behalf of others by an individual who commonsense immigration policies likely would have kept out of this country, the President has exhibited a blind spot in failing to acknowledge the special sorrow surrounding the death of a minor who bore no responsibility for his circumstances. And he could so easily have done expressed such sentiments without conceding a single inch of ground in his campaign for the most stringent border security regime.

Im-Politic: Judging Kavanaugh’s Latest Accusers

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alcohol, Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, CNN, Deborah Ramirez, Democrats, Im-Politic, Jane Mayer, Mark Judge, Michael Avenatti, prep schools, Ronan Farrow, sexual assault, Supreme Court, The New York Times, The New Yorker, U.S. Senate, Yale University

Once more, I started a day determined to blog about something other than the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination mess, and once more, I realize that there’s no point (until the hard economic data flow resumes – which will be soon – unless some globalist and/or free trade extremist writes something beyond even the pale of their increasingly loopy standard; or until something equally nutty happens with the Rod Rosenstein Justice Department mess).

Here, therefore, is a scorecard approach to where we stand in terms of Kavanaugh’s accusers, their credibility, and the related subject of his credibility – and why some points matter to varying degrees, and some points don’t matter at all, or hardly at all.

The first group of developments is pretty easily disposed of, and concern attorney Michael Avenatti’s claim that a client of his is a third Kavanaugh accuser (in addition to Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez) who is “100% credible.”

That she may be. But having initially promised that she would come forward by tomorrow night, the outspoken lawyer, who initially burst into the spotlight by representing porn star Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against President Trump, may be backtracking. Yesterday morning, he tweeted that the accuser would reveal her identity and her allegations “only when SHE is ready and we have adequate security measures in place.” He added, “it is her choice and hers alone as to when to surface bc it is her life. We expect it within the next 36 hrs.” So keep clock-watching.

At the same time, it looks as if the accuser is not a victim. In a email to the Senate Judiciary Committee (which is considering Kavanaugh’s suitability for a Supreme Court seat), Avenatti certainly never described her as such. Instead, he insisted that she was

“aware of significant evidence of multiple house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the early 1980s during which Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge [the Kavanaugh friend who has denied Ford’s charge that he was present during the sexual assault she’s charged the federal judge committed against her as a high school senior] and others would participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them.”

Avenatti also contended that multiple witnesses could corroborate these facts.

Examined closely, however, it’s not clear at all how conclusive her revelations will be, and whether they are even facts. After all, Avenatti isn’t saying that his client saw Kavanaugh and Judge participate in these rape gangs. He isn’t even saying that his client saw any such activity herself. Apparently she’s simply “aware of” some evidence. And aware how? Is there any documentation? Will it really be “significant” – whatever Avenatti thinks that means. At this point, who knows?

Further, although it’s true that many women have attested to the frequency of abusive behavior by Kavanaugh’s peer generation in this particular Washington, D.C.-area prep school scene, that’s not to say that this behavior amounted to gang rapes, or – as I noted last Saturday – that Kavanaugh himself was personally involved in any of it. These rebuttals also need to be kept in mind whenever the “multiple witnesses” testify in support of Avenatti’s client.

Comparable problems – and then some – plague Deborah Ramirez’ allegations of sexually abusive Kavanaugh behavior during their freshman year at Yale, the year after Ford claims the judge assaulted her. These charges appeared in a New Yorker article on Sunday, and Ramirez, like Ford, has put her name behind them. But you can believe (as I do) that it’s as difficult as it is courageous for any victim to make a sex crime accusation public; that because of the cruel reactions often generated by these charges, even victims who go public often understandably do so only after many years; that for similar reasons, victims often don’t confide even in close family or friends; and that memories of even such traumatic events can age badly, and still be legitimately troubled by Ramirez’ story – and The New Yorker‘s decision to publish it and role in developing it.

First, as widely noted, New Yorker reporters Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer acknowledge that they could not confirm

“with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party [where the incident allegedly took place]. The magazine contacted several dozen classmates of Ramirez and Kavanaugh regarding the incident. Many did not respond to interview requests; others declined to comment, or said they did not attend or remember the party.”

Two other major news organizations made the same kind of effort – The New York Times and CNN. Both failed. And neither has been accused of shilling for Republicans or for the Trump administration.

As a result, it’s legitimate to wonder why Farrow and Mayer, and their editors, at the least didn’t decide to wrap the article up at that point – excepting some basic background information about the Kavanaugh battle, and the story of how Ramirez’ experience came into the public domain (which might be crucial, as will be explained below). After all, every other piece of evidence they serve up is either hearsay or opinion that rarely even qualifies as plain gossip.

The most convincing support for Ramirez comes from the first Yalie presented by Farrow and Mayer:

?A classmate of Ramirez’s…said that another student told him about the incident either on the night of the party or in the next day or two. The classmate said that he is ‘one-hundred-per-cent sure’ that he was told at the time that Kavanaugh was the student who exposed himself to Ramirez. He independently recalled many of the same details offered by Ramirez….”

The big problem – this person insisted on anonymity.

Not quite as strong, but deserving to be taken seriously: “Ramirez told her mother and sister about an upsetting incident at the time, but did not describe the details to either due to her embarrassment.” So that looks like contemporaneous corroboration. But it’s disturbingly vague.

Falling into the literal hearsay category – the account of another classmate. Richard Oh did agree to be identified. But he simply “recalled overhearing, soon after the party, a female student tearfully recounting to another student an incident at a party involving a gag with a fake penis, followed by a male student exposing himself. Oh is not certain of the identity of the female student.”

Classmate Mark Krasberg told Farrow and Mayer that “Kavanaugh’s college behavior had become a topic of discussion among former Yale students soon after Kavanaugh’s nomination.: In addition, “In one e-mail that Krasberg received in September, the classmate who recalled hearing about the incident with Ramirez alluded to the allegation and wrote that it ‘would qualify as a sexual assault,’ he speculated, ‘if it’s true.’” In other words, he sounded much less sure about the charges’ veracity in the email than he did when speaking with the New Yorker reporters – quite some time later.

And if you closely examine the rest of the Yale student statements presented in the article, you see that whether they’re anonymous or not, they amount to nothing more than general endorsement’s of Ramirez’ (or Kavanaugh’s) candor and/or character, or lack thereof (in Kavanaugh’s case); expressions of confidence that Ramirez would have told them of the incident had it happened; and various descriptions of some of the Yale undergraduate social scene at the time as an alcohol-drenched zoo where women were often “sexually tormented” (according to then-roommate James Roche), and “victimized and taunted” – including by “male students in [Kavanaugh’s] social scene” (the reporters’ words).

Also fishy: How Ramirez decided to tell her story on a for-attribution basis. To begin at the beginning, Ramirez didn’t initiate the process at all. At one point, Farrow and Mayer write:

“As Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings became a national story, the discussions among Ramirez and Kavanaugh’s classmates took on heightened urgency, eventually spreading to news organizations and to the Senate. Senate aides from Ramirez’s home state of Colorado alerted a lawyer, Stanley Garnett, a former Democratic district attorney in Boulder, who currently represents her. Ramirez ultimately decided to begin telling her story publicly, before others did so for her. ‘I didn’t want any of this,’ she said. ‘But now I have to speak.’”

The role of the classmates is at least an orange flag. Remember: None of them professes to have been present when Ramirez says she was abused. Some of them have been just fine with conveying hearsay and evidence-free speculation to the media. But once the confirmation hearings “became a national story” (not, apparently, once Kavanaugh was first appointed, but possibly once his confirmation looked certain?) they were engaged in urgent discussions among themselves. And then, their discussions “spread” (like an oil slick?) to “news organizations and to the Senate.”

At that point, moreover, the fingerprints of Democratic operatives are everywhere to be seen. As Farrow and Mayer tell readers at the start of their article, “The allegation was conveyed to Democratic senators by a civil-rights lawyer” (presumably Garnett, a prominent Colorado Democrat). The reporters go on to write that Ramirez “was at first hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident.”

To me, as suggested above, that’s perfectly understandable on all counts. As Ramirez has confessed, she was “embarrassed” – even though there is no reason to believe she did anything wrong, unless you count getting sloshed.

But contrary to the Farrow-Mayer description above, Ramirez didn’t simply decide to go public merely because some time had passed (“ultimately”) or even (mainly?) because she knew it would leak and wanted – again, understandably – to prevent her story to be distorted, at least according to her recollections. And she didn’t make the decision autonomously.

Instead, as the reporters themselves say, “The New Yorker contacted Ramirez after learning of her possible involvement” in the incident in question. Can anyone doubt that the aforementioned Democratic Senators gave her name to Farrow, whose dogged reporting was central to unmasking serial predator Harvey Weinstein, the former King of Hollywood (and major funder of Democrats) and Mayer? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But it was this move, not anything that Ramirez initially said, that guaranteed she would lose her anonymity.

Further, her decision to go public-for-attribution evidently wasn’t made autonomously, either. As Farrow and Mayer put it:

“In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.”

It’s difficult to finish these sentences and avoid the conclusion that Ramirez was prompted – including by a former Democratic public official.

Yet Ramirez may have been more than an entirely moldable piece of clay. In its own aforementioned investigation of the story, The New York Times also reported, “Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.” So Ramirez’ confidence in her recollections may be anything but confident.

Not that Kavanaugh is home free on the merits (as opposed to the politics) by any means – mainly for two reasons. First, although he has categorically denied all allegations, the judge’s efforts to portray himself as a near choirboy in private school who may have occasionally had a few too many beers don’t square well with some compelling counter-evidence. And it’s not just that the early-1980s social landscape surrounding Kavanaugh’s alma mater and similar Washington, D.C. area institutions of learning sounds like a coed Lord of the Flies-type scene on steroids. It’s that several Kavanaugh peers have depicted him for attribution as a problem drinker in college, and that according to his close high school buddy Mark Judge (the alleged first-hand observer of the attack Ford claims) called their circle of friends “Alcoholics Anonymous.”  

The point is not how much of a boozer Kavanaugh was or wasn’t, particularly since an alcohol problem wouldn’t by itself prove that he committed any sexual assaults or engaged in harassment in high school or in college. It’s that if his credibility is convincingly challenged on this score, his blanket denial of the sex crimes looks a lot dicier.

Second, the charges of Kavanaugh’s first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, have been called into question because aside from the judge, three of the five total individuals (including herself) that she’s stated attended the party where the alleged attack took place deny any memory of the evening. (One, a close friend, added, however, that she believed Ford.) Nonetheless, Ford is not completely lacking for corroborating witnesses.

As mentioned in my post last Saturday, Ford told a therapist of the incident in 2012. The therapist has no record of Kavanaugh’s name being mentioned. But Ford’s husband says that it was. (They were in couples therapy.) In addition, just this morning, her attorneys submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee four sworn affidavits supporting her charges. They included one in which her husband restated his claim that Kavanaugh’s name was mentioned at the therapy session, and one in which self-described “close friend” Keith Koegler professed that Ford identified Kavanaugh as her assailant in an email in June, 2016 – right after the judge was listed as a likely Supreme Court nominee.      

As a result, it seems clear that a cloud is going to remain over Kavanaugh’s head no matter what happens at the upcoming hearing – a cloud much like that which the uproar and its fiendish complexity has formed over the nation’s entire politics.  

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Trump Metals Tariffs Coverage has Just (Again) Been Exposed as Largely Fake News

Tags

ABC News, aluminum, Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, durable goods, Financial Times, Jobs, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, Marketwatch.com, metals, metals-using industries, NBC News, PBS, private sector, Reuters, steel, tariffs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, Washington Post, {What's Left of) Our Economy

In case you still think that President Trump’s charges of fake news-peddling by the national news media are fake news themselves, consider this: For the second time in two months, if you decided to hold your breath till you found a Mainstream Media item reporting that the America’s metals-using industries have been major job-creation leaders, not laggards, you’d have died.

Such omissions are especially important because since the Trump administration began imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports (in March), the media has been filled not only with predictions of massive employment and production losses in metals-using manufacturing (because the prices of two noteworthy inputs for these industries was bound to rise), but with accounts of actual economic damage that numerous companies in these sectors have already suffered. (See here and here for just two examples.) 

Last month, I noted that, for all these accounts, authoritative government data (through June) showed that the metals-using industries’ performance by both measures had both generally improved, and had indeed both generally improved more than job creation and output in the rest of manufacturing.

Since then, more steel and aluminum tariffs were put in place (mainly because some major U.S. trade partners initially exempted from the tariffs were subjected to the levies). And what did we learn from the newest jobs report, which was released last Friday, and took the story through July (on a preliminary basis)? That the metals-using industries continue to set the national job-creation pace for the entire economy, not simply for manufacturing.

Here are the percentage gains for employment in some major sectors of the economy from April (the first month during which any metals tariffs effects would have been felt) through July except for the industries noted:

entire private sector: +0.53 percent

overall manufacturing: +0.73 percent

durable goods: +0.96 percent

fabricated metals products: +1.10 percent

non-electrical machinery: +1.43 percent

automotive vehicles & parts: +1.06 percent

household appliances (thru June): -0.63 percent

aerospace products & parts (thru June): +1.05 percent

Unfortunately, it was not possible to learn any of this from America’s leading news organizations. For these figures were completely ignored.

To their credit, some leading media mentioned that Trump tariffs and trade war fears in general seemed to be having no effect on manufacturing job creation overall despite industry’s exposure in principle to the fall-out. These included the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Financial Times, CNN, ABC News, and NBC News. Yet the metals-using sectors were never mentioned.

As for The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and CBS News, they made no connection of the tariff/trade war-manufacturing job connection whatever.

And several news organizations actually tried to rationalize the unexpected results. Reuters, for example, claimed that “With manufacturing payrolls increasing by the most in seven months, the moderation in hiring reported by the Labor Department on Friday likely does not reflect the rising trade tensions between the United States and other nations including China.”

According to PBS, “Economists say it is too early to tell whether the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum are having a significant effect on manufacturing jobs.”

Bloomberg and Marketwatch.com weren’t as disingenuous, but still felt compelled to contend that rising trade tensions continued to cast a long shadow on the job markets’ future – without reporting that, if anything, new U.S. policies and statements were so far having exactly the opposite effect on parts of the economy most exposed to existing metals tariffs.

But no account of press coverage of these Trump trade policies would be complete without observing an equally weird development: Neither the President nor anyone else in his administration has pointed to the outperformance of the metals-using industries, either.

In a little over a week, the nation will get its next major opportunity to gauge the impact of metals and other tariffs, and future possibilities thereof – when the Federal Reserve releases the July industrial production data, which includes detailed statistics on inflation-adjusted manufacturing output. Will the Mainstream Media finally zero in on the sectors where the tariff rubber hits the road? At this rate, Americans should be grateful if they simply ended the string of job loss and other Chicken Little metals tariff impact stories.

Im-Politic: A Neglected Russia Disinformation Objective?

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2016 election, Barack Obama, Central Intelligence Agency, China, CIA, CNN, collusion, cybersecurity, Director of National Intelligence, disinformation, fake news, Im-Politic, intelligence community, James R. Clapper, John O. Brennan, Matthew Rosenberg, MSNBC, NBC, North Korea, Putin, Russia, The New York Times, Trump

Well then. Two passages in a New York Times article from this morning’s print edition were sure conversation-stoppers when it comes to the ongoing uproar about charges that President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia to boost his election odds and ensure soft treatment from his administration. That is, if you read far enough into the long piece to encounter them. In fact, they’re so important that they should have been the main angle – or at the very least, the main theme of front-page stories from now until we ever find out what’s really happened.

The passages (which make the same critical point):

First, according to Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg, by some point last September (at the latest), American intelligence officials were worried that Russia had developed an “operation to create discord inside the American government.”

Second, and more specifically, the intelligence agencies viewed one key part of this operation as feeding information suggesting that Vladimir Putin’s regime could blackmail the President (and/or the candidate) to “United States intelligence agencies and pit them against Mr. Trump.”

And here, in Rosenberg’s words, is the context:

“American intelligence agencies believe that Russia’s spy services see the deep political divisions in the United States as a fresh opportunity to inflame partisan tensions. Russian hackers are targeting American voting databases ahead of the midterm election this year, they said, and using bot armies to promote partisan causes on social media. The Russians are also particularly eager to cast doubt on the federal and congressional investigations into the Russian meddling, American intelligence officials said.

“Part of that effort, the officials said, appears to be trying to spread information that hews closely to unsubstantiated reports about Mr. Trump’s dealings in Russia, including [a] purported video [depicting him in compromising sexual situations], whose existence Mr. Trump has repeatedly dismissed.”

In plainer English, if Rosenberg has it right, the Russians have not only been trying to put Mr. Trump over a barrel and make sure that he defeated his main rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton. They have not only been trying to shake Americans’ confidence in their democratic institutions by hacking into them and unleashing a flood of fake news onto its media platforms, social and conventional. They have not only been trying to cover their tracks by using such fake news and other tactics to discredit the Congressional investigations into election meddling and related reported outrages.

They have also – separately – been trying to whip up antagonism between the President and the intelligence community. Achieving this goal of course would both tend to hamper America’s own intelligence operations and broader foreign and national security policies, as well as undermine the nation’s political system and its underlying social and cultural unity. And the tumult engulfing the capital and the nation as a whole suggests that the Russians are succeeding with this disinformation campaign, and that the intelligence agencies are playing their hoped for role.

Not that this possibility lets Mr. Trump and his aides totally, or mainly, or partly off the hook when it comes to their Russia ties either before or after his election.  For this objective could well have been sought on top of an effort to turn Mr. Trump into a Manchurian Candidate and President, not instead of it. But it does raise the question of how many of the allegations have stemmed from simple, and completely fictitious, plants.

Something else noteworthy about this article: If it’s accurate, then the potentially disastrous loss of America’s cyber-weapons to Russia and perhaps other adversaries that keyed Rosenberg’s piece was just the latest disclosed possibly catastrophic intelligence failures that occurred during Barack Obama’s presidency, and on the watches of the former intelligence agency chiefs, like his Director of National Intelligence (the complex’s top job) James R. Clapper, and one of his Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director John O. Brennan – both of whom have been particularly sharp Trump critics.

Two others? China’s penetration of the CIA’s operations in the People’s Republic, which reportedly resulted in the assassination or capture of “more than a dozen sources” (according to press accounts, the breach began in 2010, under Brennan’s predecessor, former General David Petraeus) and the failure to anticipate the speed of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development (which can be laid directly at Clapper’s feet, and which Brennan apparently missed as well).

Clapper, incidentally, is now a “national security analyst” for CNN. Brennan has just joined NBC and MSNBC in the same capacity. Good luck to you if you think there’s any chance these networks’ weekend talk shows tomorrow will raise any of this, including the Rosenberg article, with them?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So You Think Trump is a Dangerous Nut on North Korea?

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Alex Ward, alliances, allies, Ana Fifield, Ankit Panda, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Cold War, Council on Foreign Relations, David J. Rothkopf, David Jackson, deterrence, Diane Feinstein, Ed Markey, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, Kim Jong Un, media, Nicole Gaouette, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Peter Baker, political class, Rick Gladstone, Stewart Patrick, The Atlantic, The Diplomat, The New York Times, Trump, United Nations, USAToday, Vox.com, Washington Post

Weird as it sounds, the North Korea nuclear crisis has created two significant benefits – though unfortunately neither has yet created either establishment or popular pressure to change an increasingly reckless American approach.

Still, it’s promising that dictator Kim Jong Un’s rapid development of nuclear weapons that can reach the U.S. homeland is not only revealing that America’s longstanding approach to defense alliances is now exposing the nation to the risk of nuclear attack even when its own security is not directly at stake. It’s also more recently begun exposing America’s many foreign policy and other elite mainstays either as ignoramuses or (much more likely) shameful hypocrites.

The reason? They profess to be shocked, just shocked (Google “Casablanca” and “Louis Renault”) that President Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea in order “to defend itself or its allies.” As if they’ve never heard of “nuclear deterrence.” And don’t know that such saber-rattling has been U.S. policy for decades.

To review briefly, since fairly early in the Cold War, and especially since the former Soviet Union developed its own impressive nuclear forces, American leaders have overwhelmingly concluded that the only reasonable uses of these weapons was preventing a nuclear attack on the United States itself, or a similar strike or conventional military assault on one of the countries it was treaty-bound to protect. The idea was that even nuclear-armed potential aggressors the Soviets and Chinese (and the North Koreans, once they crossed the threshhold) would think at least twice before moving on targets if they had reason to fear that the United States would launch its own nukes against those countries.

From time to time, some politicians and analysts suggested that the effects of such nuclear weapons use could be restricted to efforts to take out the enemy’s remaining nuclear weapons or otherwise fall short of “totally destroying” that adversary. But for the most part, the idea of limited nuclear war has been rejected in favor of vowing annihilation. And except for disarmament types on the Left and super-hawks on the Right (who supported the aforementioned “counterforce” approach), the political class comprised of office-holders and journalists and think tankers was just fine with the nuclear element of U.S. alliance strategy.

It’s completely bizarre, therefore, that almost none of the press coverage – including “experts'” analyses – of Mr. Trump’s September 19 statement evinces any awareness of any of this history. Instead, it’s portrayed the “totally destroy” threat as appallingly monstrous, unhinged rhetoric from an unprecedentedly erratic chief executive. Just as bad, President Trump is accused of playing right into Kim’s hands and shoring up his support with the North Korean populace.

For instance, here’s how Washington Post reporter Ana Fifield yesterday described the consensus of of North Korea specialists she had just surveyed:

“Kim Jong Un’s regime tells the North Korean people every day that the United States wants to destroy them and their country. Now, they will hear it from another source: the president of the United States himself.

“In his maiden address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” Analysts noted that he did not even differentiate between the Kim regime, as President George W. Bush did with his infamous “axis of evil” speech, and the 25 million people of North Korea.”

Here’s the New York Times‘ take, from chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and foreign policy reporter Rick Gladstone:

“President Trump brought the same confrontational style of leadership he has used at home to the world’s most prominent stage on Tuesday as he vowed to ‘totally destroy North Korea‘ if it threatened the United States….”

Similarly, USAToday‘s David Jackson described the Trump speech as “a stark address to the United Nations that raised the specter of nuclear warfare” and contended that “Trump’s choice of words on North Korea is in keeping with the bellicose rhetoric he’s already used to describe the tensions that have escalated throughout his eight months in office.”

As for the Associated Press, the world’s most important news wire service, it was content to offer readers a stunning dose of moral equivalence: “In a region well used to Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons generating a seemingly never-ending cycle of threats and counter-threats, Mr. Trump’s comments stood out.“

CNN‘s approach? It quoted a “senior UN diplomat” as claiming that “it was the first time in his memory that a world leader has called for the obliteration of another state at the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly], noting even Iran’s most fiery leaders didn’t similarly threaten Israel.”

For good measure, reporter Nicole Gaouette added, “The threat is likely to ratchet up tensions with North Korea while doing little to reassure US allies in Asia, said analysts who added that the President now also runs the risk of appearing weak if he doesn’t follow through.”

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Stewart Patrick, who served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under former President George W. Bush, told the BBC that the Trump threat is implausible, and that “I think the folks in the Pentagon when they look at military options are just aghast at the potential loss of life that could occur with at a minimum hundreds of thousands of South Koreans killed in Seoul.”

For David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and protege of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who went on to edit FOREIGNPOLICY magazine (where I worked many years before), the problem is much simpler: “The president of the United States chose, in a forum dedicated to diplomacy, to threaten to wipe another nation — a much smaller one — off the face of the earth in language that was not so much hard-line rhetoric as it was schoolboy bullying complete with childish name-calling.”

Many members of the U.S. Congress were no better. Said California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein: “Trump’s bombastic threat to destroy North Korea and his refusal to present any positive pathways forward on the many global challenges we face are severe disappointments. He aims to unify the world through tactics of intimidation, but in reality he only further isolates the United States.”

Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey brought up a war powers angle: “The more the president talks about the total destruction of North Korea, the more it’s necessary for the country and the Congress to have a debate over what the authority of a president is to launch nuclear weapons against another country.”

What’s of course especially ironic about Markey’s words is that such a U.S. policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons would effectively destroy the American alliances that liberals like Markey have become enamored with lately, and that President Trump is often charged by these same liberals as attempting to dismantle.

Some other news organizations and websites have behaved even more strangely – lambasting the Trump threat but then acknowledging deep inside their accounts that the President said nothing fundamentally new.

For example, the viscerally anti-Trump Vox.com website predictably led off one of its accounts with, “On September 19, President Donald Trump gave his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly. His harsh rhetoric toward North Korea stood out — mostly because he threatened to obliterate the country of 25.4 million people.”

Six paragraphs later, writer Alex Ward got around to mentioning that “A few [specialists] noted that it was similar to what other presidents, including President Obama, have said before.”

And in an Atlantic post titled, “A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence,” author Ankit Panda of The Diplomat newspaper accused President Trump of using “apocalyptic rhetoric” and threatening “to commit a horrific act expressly forbidden by international humanitarian law….”

But then he immediately turned around and admitted,

“The remarks echoed similar, countless deterrent threats levied against North Korea by past U.S. presidents with more subtlety and innuendo, perhaps allowing for a more calibrated and flexible response. But ultimately vowing to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea if America or its allies come under attack is, in fact, not all that sharp a break from existing U.S. policy.”

If these treatments of the North Korea crisis were simply efforts to demonize President Trump by abusing history, that would be contemptible enough, but what else is new from America’s too often incompetent and scapegoat-addicted elites?

But something much more dangerous is at work here. Individuals who, for good reasons, have not been regarded as kooks are using Never Trump-ism to foster a genuinely kooky idea. They’re suggesting that the alliances so central to America’s foreign policy making for decades should be viewed as little more than kumbaya symbols, and that anyone speaking frankly about their possibly deadly and indeed horrific implications is beyond the pale – even though the proliferation of nuclear weapons has unmistakably rendered these arrangements far more perilous.

In other words, they’re spreading the worst, and most childish, of all canards about foreign policy, or about any dimension of public policy – not that a particular set of choices is sound or not (that’s almost always legitimately debatable), but that hard choices never need to be made at all.

Im-Politic: Fakeonomics on Illegal Immigration From CNN

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California, CNN, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Octavio Blanco, Sanctuary State, taxes, welfare

When I was learning the journalistic ropes, one of the first lessons taught was never to present a piece of information totally devoid of context. So, for example, if you were writing about how much a national economy grew during a given time period, you’d also include something about how that growth compared with that country’s past performance, or with the performance of other countries. How else could the reader take anything useful away from such a report?

Apparently, however, CNN doesn’t always follow this practice. Or maybe more accurately, it doesn’t follow this practice when it covers immigration issues, and especially when even minimal context would cast doubt on widespread claims that America’s illegal immigrants are so valuable that Trump-like restrictionist policies are tantamount to economic suicide. How else could one interpret the May 18 post by Octavio Blanco on new legislation aimed at establishing California as a sanctuary state?

Blanco, for example, properly reported the claim of the bill’s sponsor that the illegal workforce “contributes some $180 billion to the state’s GDP.” I’d have liked some verification of this figure, or even a source, but at least Blanco associated the contention with a figure who’s clearly taken one side of the issue.

Other omissions are less justifiable. Is this a net figure? That is, does it include any costs resulting from the state’s illegal workforce, or families of these workers? The author doesn’t say. And what about some perspective about that $180 billion figure? Obviously the legislator who fed it to Blanco hoped to convey the impression that it’s a staggering sum. Yet it begs the question of how big that state GDP actually is. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, last year, it was a little over $2.6 trillion (unadjusted for inflation – and that took me four seconds to look up.) So if the $180 billion is unadjusted for inflation as well (something else the author doesn’t tell us), the illegal immigrant share is about 8.2 percent.

That still sounds like a lot. Except as the author also notes, another source pegs illegals as nearly 10 percent of the California workforce. So even if the $180 billion figure is accurate, that would mean that the state’s illegal workers are punching below their weight in terms of productivity.

That, however, wouldn’t be the last word, either. The $180 billion figure would be more impressive if it was a growing share of state output, and less impressive if it was shrinking or stagnant. But Blanco’s article gives readers no way to know.

Another statistic cited by Blanco sheds a little light on these questions, but not nearly enough, because it suffers the same shortcomings. The author reports that a “Washington, D.C.-based research group,” the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), has determined that “In 2014, almost $3.2 billion of California’s state and local taxes came from undocumented immigrants….”

Again, that “billion” word sounds like a major sum – but sharp-eyed readers might notice something that’s apparently eluded Blanco. If both ITEP and the lawmaker who introduced the Sanctuary State bill are right, then the tax revenue generated by California’s illegal workers amounts to about 1.78 percent of their contribution to the state economy. That looks distinctly unimpressive.

Just as unimpressive: the share of the state’s total annual tax haul represented by illegal immigrants, if ITEP is right. For according to the state government, the $3.2 billion claimed by ITEP for 2014 would come to 4.83 percent of personal income tax revenue. Remember – this is from nearly 10 percent of the state’s workforce, so that’s disproportionately low.

A least as important, when talking about illegal immigrants – the $3.2 billion figure is clearly not a net figure, in terms of the impact of this population on the state’s resources. Specifically, it omits illegal the use of state services by illegal immigrants and any family members who are legal (e.g., anchor children). This issue will keep looming larger and larger as the state pushes to extend eligibility for welfare and other state resources to illegals – which has already happened with in-state tuition to and financial aid for California public universities.

It’s true that income tax revenue isn’t the sum total of state tax revenue. The state government says the share was 65 percent in 2014. The remainder comes from corporate income taxes, sales taxes, and an “other” category. Illegal workers (and their families) are probably paying some of those types of taxes, too, but the article doesn’t provide any information on that score, either.

Give Blanco some credit: He reports that “not everyone agrees on the sanctuary state bill.” If only his article focusing on the legislation’s economic impact gave readers any sense that not every fact portrays it as an economic winner, either.

Im-Politic: Mainstream Media’s Pro-Open Borders Bias Remains Widespread

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assimilation, civil religion, CNN, Donie O'Sullivan, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Irish-Americans, Mainstream Media, national identity, National Public Radio, Open Borders, Samuel P. Huningtom, Seymour Martin Lipset, The Washington Post, Tom Gjelten

The pro-Open Borders slant of the Mainstream Media has become so pervasive that the last few days alone have served up no less than two major instances by leading news organizations. One should be painfully obvious – at least to anyone familiar with the history of immigration in the United States and the nation’s (until unquestionably successful) approach towards assimilating newcomers. The other is more difficult to detect. Both also entail telling failures of professional judgment by writers and editors alike. You decide which (if either) is the most worrisome.

The obvious example of bias came from a Washington Post piece Sunday by National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten. If you ignore the lessons Gjelten claims flow from that American immigration history, you can learn a lot from his article about (or be usefully reminded of) the various efforts made from the early 19^th to the mid-20^th century to address the various social and cultural issues large inflows from regions outside Britain (though still mainly from Europe) in particular posed. Of course, far too many were products of simple bigotry.

But Gjelten then ventures deeply into a dangerous fantasyland when he discusses those lessons and what they mean today. He all but explicitly states that, given the more recent waves of immigrants, now dominated by non-Europeans, Americans should not only reject race and ethnicity or religion the bases of their national identity. They should also reject using what’s long been called a “civil” or “political” religion – a group of political beliefs and values that can surely be argued over around the edges, but that surely closely approximates a formula developed by political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset. As Gjelten summarizes it: “liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and a laissez-faire approach to governance and daily life.”

Since I’d add separation of church and state, another common definition of Americanism – advanced by another political scientist, Samuel P. Huntington – is more problematic. “Anglo-Protestant culture and political values.” But if you think about it, it’s not that much more problematic, especially since the overlap between Lipset and Huntington is so substantial.

Moreover, look at the matter from the opposite perspective. How many other peoples and contemporary regions have created political values in particular (“cultural values” is a concept that’s much too sweeping and much too prone to intolerant abuse for me) that most Americans today would want to live under? Latin America? East Asia? The Middle East? Please. So if you employ a little common sense, and substitute something like “European Enlightenment” for “Anglo-Protestant,” you arrive at a basis for American identity that not only should offend no one, but that, more important, has underlain much of the nation’s extraordinary success.

But Gjelten seems not to agree. In response to Huntington’s (poorly formulated) contention that successful assimilation has entailed “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants [becoming] Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values,” he maintains:

“Whether that had really happened or was even possible was debatable. ‘A nation of more than 130 cultural groups cannot hope to have all of them Anglo-Saxonized,’ argued Molefi Kete Asante in his book ‘The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism.’ Trying to do so, he argued, would only alienate minorities and deepen disunity.”

Yet having apparently dismissed civil religion as well as (rightly) race and ethnicity as the source of America’s national identity, does Gjelten come up with any viable alternatives? None that I can see. In fact, at this point, his article dissolves into an endorsement of concepts like “nondiscrimination,” “diversity,” and “multiculturalism” that are not only gauzy but lacking in any particular content.

The author maintains that what he terms “nondiscriminatory immigration” based on these empty principles has succeeded in America by making it “more resilient.” But his evidence can’t possibly impress: that “In comparison with Western European countries that have also received large numbers of immigrants, America has proved to be more capable of absorbing and successfully integrating a diverse population.” Of course, this observation practically defines “low bar.”

It’s Gjelten’s right to believe in a definition of national identity evidently distinguished only by what it isn’t – though he sure didn’t provide any examples of countries that have been held together adequately simply by ideals such as multiculturalism and diversity. It’s also his right to believe – as actually seems to be the case – that the idea of a national identity is either pointless or undesirable. But he should have the intellectual honesty to say so. Further, his editors should have had the competence to challenge his case more than they obviously did.

The other troubling instance of journalistic failure by a reporter and editors alike – this CNN post noting that a significant chunk of America’s illegal immigrant population is Irish. That’s unquestionably useful information. But neither author Donie O’Sullivan nor his editors had anything direct to say about the real significance of the article: It powerfully undercuts claims that President Trump’s immigration policies, and even his focus on illegal immigration, stem largely from racism.

Starting with its headline, the article does point out that the illegal Irish have a major advantage over much of the rest of the nation’s illegals – their ability to pass more easily for native-born since they’re white. So obviously, enforcement of immigration law nowadays will inevitably be affected to some extent by race and ethnicity. (At the same time, the article helpfully observes that there are many fewer Irish illegals than Mexican illegals in particular.)

O’Sullivan makes abundantly clear how much fear the administration’s policies have struck among the illegal Irish, and even presents some evidence that these fears have some basis in reality, their physical appearance edge notwithstanding. He quotes an official at an organization providing support services for all Irish newcomers as stating that “it seems that the ICE [immigration law enforcement] agents are using their discretion in a much greater capacity now than ever before.”

But it’s absolutely astonishing (or is it?) that the author says absolutely nothing about the screamingly obvious implication of this claim: It’s a sign that immigration law is being enforced in a race- and ethnicity-blind way. And even though the racism charge has deeply colored the national immigration debate especially since President Trump’s harsh description of some Mexican immigrants when he declared his candidacy for the White House, it’s equally astonishing (or is it?) that none of O’Sullivan’s editors at CNN apparently noted this fact’s omission or importance, either.

Bias-free journalism admittedly is difficult to produce, and the challenge is made all the more formidable by the numerous forms bias can take, and how difficult many can be to spot. All the same, these Washington Post and CNN offerings stand as vivid reminders of how far the Mainstream Media that still dominate news dissemination in our democracy remain from meeting it.