And today, the NYT gave Rich Lowry prime real estate to tell us all that this whole indictment thing must go away via a nonsensical John Kerry hypothetical, and the lie - now a classic! - that the Russia investigation uncovered nothing. He avoids telling us what the upside of the indictments going away would be, besides making Trump & the GOP happy, because why bother; just leave us alone, Democrats, because we said so.
It’s staggering the NYT would supplement the reach of a man *with his own publication* to make such a non-argument, but they did.
The Russian investigation discovered that the Russians bought some Facebook ads and that the Clinton campaign and later members of the FBI and the media spent considerable effort trying to fraudulently paint Trump as a Russian stooge.
For God's sake, the man tried to overturn an election that he lost and cocked a snook at the Justices Department over his illegal retention of classified documents. There are actual, real crimes to charge Trump with. You can stop trying to puff up the fake ones.
Erm, he brought up the Russia thing. That’s why I mentioned it. I’m not puffing it up at all. Maybe you mean that Lowry is implying the Dems have made too much of it, but I can’t tell. In any event, it’s a ridiculous article that accomplishes nothing.
"And the lie - now a classic! - that the Russia investigation uncovered nothing."
That is a direct quote of what you said, and it is, putting this is gently as possible, grossly inaccurate.
The Russian investigation didn't find anything on Trump. It found a late fall smear campaign by the Clintons given legs by senior FBI personnel who were hostile to the incoming Trump presidency and by a compliant media. (It also found that the Russians spent a few hundred thousand dollars on Facebook ads. In an election in which some of the brightest minds in America spend a billion dollars.)
As I said, there are plenty of real crimes with which to charge Trump. Stop trying to legitimize fake ones.
The only hard evidence of Russian intervention in the election was the proof that the Clinton campaign had false information presented to sympathetic media. I think Trump is deranged but as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
OK I stand corrected when I wrote earlier that Andrew McCarthy is "tolerable." Here, he is emphatically intolerable! Thanks for the revealing homework, Ken. Sounds like McCarthy and National Review are looking for a constituency.
He is not stupid and has written some good things in the past. Based on what you wrote, the inaccuracies are amateurish and therefore almost certainly intentional.
In future, please do not be polite. As my profile says, I love to be proven wrong!
Didn't the Weekly Standard crash when they were too critical of Trump? I suspect National Reviews editorial policy is if it' good for the Dems were against it. (If I already said this, blame it on age . . .)
The ironic thing is that the MAGA crowd already dismisses anything that National Review says as lies because they were insufficiently supportive of Trump in 2016. They are never getting those readers back.
If you are doomed anyway, it is much better to die with your back straight, your honor intact, and at least a little of your dignity left.
The Weekly Standard's owner decided to kill it to fold it into the Washington Examiner. (Which, to be fair, does take a more wishy-washy approach than the Standard did.)
While the Henry V reference in the first piece on this topic was as far over my head as the English arrows over Agincourt, I AM HERE FOR THE LEBOWSKI REFERENCE.
You're not the only lawyer or legal pundit whom God built that way.
Mr. McCarthy has a sad history of missing something, having it pointed out to him, and then doubling down without admitting error. He engaged in a multi-month rant against Rod Rosenstein on the genuinely stupid assumption that since Mueller's original appointment didn't include jurisdiction over all the matters on which Paul Manafort was charged, Mueller was running a lawless, outlaw special counsel's office. I emailed him repeatedly to point out that while 28 CFR § 600.9 obliges the AG to notify the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees when a special counsel is appointed or removed, or overridden by the AG, there's no requirement at all that supplemental notice be given when the AG enters an order pursuant to 28 CFR § 600.4(b) determining to include additional matters within the special counsel's jurisdiction. I also left comments to this effect on his columns at NR.
"Aha!" sez Andy when Manafort makes a motion to dismiss based on Mueller's supposed lack of jurisdiction. "Aha yourself," sez Mueller when he attaches the supplemental order that Rod Rosenstein had signed months and months before (but hadn't notified Congress about because the reg doesn't require that kind of notice). Did we hear, "Mea culpa maxima, Acting Attorney General Rosenstein and special counsel Mueller, I've been falsely accusing you for months?" No, McCarthy published an incoherent, mouth-frothing column insisting that this all just proved (somehow) he'd been right all along.
It was an exercise of spectacular intellectual dishonesty compounding a stupid mistake. I can't respect Andy McCarthy's opinion on ANYTHING having to do with Donald Trump after that.
1. Ken, I am concerned about your blood pressure (one 54 year old man to another) - because you are a treasure.
2. Its past time to let go of the expectation of careful, honest commentary from many people and institutions we previously thought were principled actors. Its more sad and pathetic than vexing.
since last week i essentially said you were too generous about the possibility of good faith from the national review it's only fair to say that this week i can no longer say that.
to be sure, it's a bad thing that the national review is a bad faith enterprise, but it's a good thing you're about there in acknowledging.
Hammerschmidt seems to be disturbingly broad and I doubt that the Supreme Court would interpret it as broadly today (and so long as the Petitioner’s name wasn’t Trump, I would expect it to be Gorsuch, Kagan, Sotomayor and two others leading the narrowing charge). But that’s an argument that only works at the Supreme Court. Do courts sometimes ignore Rodriguez De Quijas if the question is close and the recent precedent really really really calls into doubt the old precedent? Yes. But do it think this is close enough? Yeah, no.
That McCarthy and the Review have chosen this course just confirms the degree to which Trump and his cult have poisoned the discourse, by pushing someone who- agree with him or not- knows better, to come out and underhandedly advocate for a position he damned well knows doesn't hold legal water.
It's all about power, Colin. There's no power for a right-leaning publication that questions Trump. The decline of the Weekly Standard showed that. NR is just trying to stay relevant. Like Lyndsey Graham. See The Bulwark's Will Saletans's pod on "The Corruption of Lindsey Graham (https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast-episode/ep-1-the-corruption-of-lindsey-graham-2/). He says Graham explains his backtrack on Trump because "He wants to be in the room where it happens".
Even so, you’d think they could see the writing on the wall. Watching 90% of Conservative Inc continue, after all this time and all the crap the New Right pulling, to cover for them just to spite the left is rather astounding. Even the far right doesn’t hate the left as much as people from NR seem to (granted neo Nazis typically only have common cause with that old-style leftism like Bolshevik sympathizers but still).
It’s like they’re terrified that if they concede a point to anything left of Reagan, his ghost will come back and personally haunt them with old campaign slogans until a retraction is issued.
Absolutely- and it's about Trump and his followers' absolute unwillingness to admit any point of view other than their own; you're either *vocally* with them or you're against them.
As for Lindsey, he's got the same problem James Baker and many other prominent conservatives have, of being too afraid of having their conservative credentials questioned to speak out against someone they *know* is destructive to their party.
WTF happened to Alan Dershowitz? CNN needs to do a deep dive on him as they did on Giuliani (Giuliani: What Happened to America's Mayor? https://www.cnn.com/videos/title-2418941). The only thing I can see is he hates the government because all he's ever been is a defense atty and highly suspicious of the representatives of The People. Has never been a prosecutor, never had to prove a case, only had to cut it down to get reasonable doubt. All the legal eagles I follow, like Ken, have worked both sides. All lawyers are trained to work both sides. He had to do that to pass the MA Bar, but that was very long ago. Maybe he's losing cognitive capacity.
This has been McCarthy’s MO for the past 8 years - concocting legal mumbo-jumbo and claiming how Trump is being unfairly prosecuted (or why a specific Dem SHOULD be prosecuted).
He’s a hack, and he’s NR’s “legal shield” for their hackery.
Re: Morosco’s snarky tone: That’s Judge Thompson’s writing style. I knew who wrote the opinion before I got more than two sentences into it. She literally always sounds like that. (Very derisive to the client).
How to build credibility: Years of covering Trump antics, calling out both liberal and conservative wish casting. That is way I listen to Serious Trouble:).
I don't take the National Review seriously. Rothman is the only writer there that I know of who has some credibility. Lowry and McCarthy are clearly totally partisan and are wholly untrustworthy.
I find Nordlinger’s posts to be worth the read, they help keep me mindful of the number of human rights activists persecuted overseas. He also seems to be far less anti-anti Trump than almost everyone else on the site, though I think that’s because he’s expecting to be long gone by the time Reaganism is fully buried. He still waves the partisan flag but it doesn’t come up very often.
Is he worth having to sift through Kearns repeating the same line on transgenderism for the 30th time, Dougherty pretending that the historically Catholic FBI is deciding to arrest TLM goers for no reason, or Armond White being the most contrarian film critic to ever live? Probably not.
Yes, Nordlinger seems as though he is not highly partisan and is simply an old-school conservative. a remnant of the Buckley days, I guess. At least the NA does still publish a few such voices, but it certainly seems to favor the reactionary-trumpist line now.
And today, the NYT gave Rich Lowry prime real estate to tell us all that this whole indictment thing must go away via a nonsensical John Kerry hypothetical, and the lie - now a classic! - that the Russia investigation uncovered nothing. He avoids telling us what the upside of the indictments going away would be, besides making Trump & the GOP happy, because why bother; just leave us alone, Democrats, because we said so.
It’s staggering the NYT would supplement the reach of a man *with his own publication* to make such a non-argument, but they did.
The Russian investigation discovered that the Russians bought some Facebook ads and that the Clinton campaign and later members of the FBI and the media spent considerable effort trying to fraudulently paint Trump as a Russian stooge.
For God's sake, the man tried to overturn an election that he lost and cocked a snook at the Justices Department over his illegal retention of classified documents. There are actual, real crimes to charge Trump with. You can stop trying to puff up the fake ones.
Erm, he brought up the Russia thing. That’s why I mentioned it. I’m not puffing it up at all. Maybe you mean that Lowry is implying the Dems have made too much of it, but I can’t tell. In any event, it’s a ridiculous article that accomplishes nothing.
"And the lie - now a classic! - that the Russia investigation uncovered nothing."
That is a direct quote of what you said, and it is, putting this is gently as possible, grossly inaccurate.
The Russian investigation didn't find anything on Trump. It found a late fall smear campaign by the Clintons given legs by senior FBI personnel who were hostile to the incoming Trump presidency and by a compliant media. (It also found that the Russians spent a few hundred thousand dollars on Facebook ads. In an election in which some of the brightest minds in America spend a billion dollars.)
As I said, there are plenty of real crimes with which to charge Trump. Stop trying to legitimize fake ones.
The Russia investigation uncovered plenty. I think it obsolete and largely irrelevant now, but your characterization of it is inaccurate.
Name something meaningful.
(Perjury traps don't count.)
There’s no such thing as a perjury trap.
Paul Manafort, Micheal Cohen, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulis, Rick Gates, all tried and convicted.
I'm surprised Lowry could pull himself away from crying about Bud Light long enough to write about the indictment.
I started reading that and was too angry to finish it. I did enjoy the comments section.
The only hard evidence of Russian intervention in the election was the proof that the Clinton campaign had false information presented to sympathetic media. I think Trump is deranged but as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Well put. I didn't see your comment until I posted mine, which just linked to the Lowry piece without your succinct analysis.
Lol, yeah. The progressives bench is so deep that Rich just had to be drafted for balance 😂
OK I stand corrected when I wrote earlier that Andrew McCarthy is "tolerable." Here, he is emphatically intolerable! Thanks for the revealing homework, Ken. Sounds like McCarthy and National Review are looking for a constituency.
I was going to respond when you said that but decided to try being polite for the novelty
He is not stupid and has written some good things in the past. Based on what you wrote, the inaccuracies are amateurish and therefore almost certainly intentional.
In future, please do not be polite. As my profile says, I love to be proven wrong!
What did he write well...about bass fishing in the upper reaches of New Hampshire?
He wrote some anti-Trump pieces from a conservative perspective a while back.
that's a good standard - amateurish and therefore certainly intentional.
Good standard when such "oversights" come from people with the experience and background of Andrew McCarthy.
Yes!
Didn't the Weekly Standard crash when they were too critical of Trump? I suspect National Reviews editorial policy is if it' good for the Dems were against it. (If I already said this, blame it on age . . .)
The ironic thing is that the MAGA crowd already dismisses anything that National Review says as lies because they were insufficiently supportive of Trump in 2016. They are never getting those readers back.
If you are doomed anyway, it is much better to die with your back straight, your honor intact, and at least a little of your dignity left.
UH-gree.
Luckily for them, the NR never had any honor to preserve, just the respectability born of expensive clothes and doing what you're paid to do.
The Weekly Standard's owner decided to kill it to fold it into the Washington Examiner. (Which, to be fair, does take a more wishy-washy approach than the Standard did.)
"Plus, he’s very pro- the National Review being kept alive and relevant."
I'd wish him luck, but my insincerity would be showing.
TNR has not realized the Conservatism they falsely portrayed became a reality when the Defendant-In-Chief came to power.
While the Henry V reference in the first piece on this topic was as far over my head as the English arrows over Agincourt, I AM HERE FOR THE LEBOWSKI REFERENCE.
You're not the only lawyer or legal pundit whom God built that way.
Mr. McCarthy has a sad history of missing something, having it pointed out to him, and then doubling down without admitting error. He engaged in a multi-month rant against Rod Rosenstein on the genuinely stupid assumption that since Mueller's original appointment didn't include jurisdiction over all the matters on which Paul Manafort was charged, Mueller was running a lawless, outlaw special counsel's office. I emailed him repeatedly to point out that while 28 CFR § 600.9 obliges the AG to notify the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees when a special counsel is appointed or removed, or overridden by the AG, there's no requirement at all that supplemental notice be given when the AG enters an order pursuant to 28 CFR § 600.4(b) determining to include additional matters within the special counsel's jurisdiction. I also left comments to this effect on his columns at NR.
"Aha!" sez Andy when Manafort makes a motion to dismiss based on Mueller's supposed lack of jurisdiction. "Aha yourself," sez Mueller when he attaches the supplemental order that Rod Rosenstein had signed months and months before (but hadn't notified Congress about because the reg doesn't require that kind of notice). Did we hear, "Mea culpa maxima, Acting Attorney General Rosenstein and special counsel Mueller, I've been falsely accusing you for months?" No, McCarthy published an incoherent, mouth-frothing column insisting that this all just proved (somehow) he'd been right all along.
It was an exercise of spectacular intellectual dishonesty compounding a stupid mistake. I can't respect Andy McCarthy's opinion on ANYTHING having to do with Donald Trump after that.
1. Ken, I am concerned about your blood pressure (one 54 year old man to another) - because you are a treasure.
2. Its past time to let go of the expectation of careful, honest commentary from many people and institutions we previously thought were principled actors. Its more sad and pathetic than vexing.
since last week i essentially said you were too generous about the possibility of good faith from the national review it's only fair to say that this week i can no longer say that.
to be sure, it's a bad thing that the national review is a bad faith enterprise, but it's a good thing you're about there in acknowledging.
Hammerschmidt seems to be disturbingly broad and I doubt that the Supreme Court would interpret it as broadly today (and so long as the Petitioner’s name wasn’t Trump, I would expect it to be Gorsuch, Kagan, Sotomayor and two others leading the narrowing charge). But that’s an argument that only works at the Supreme Court. Do courts sometimes ignore Rodriguez De Quijas if the question is close and the recent precedent really really really calls into doubt the old precedent? Yes. But do it think this is close enough? Yeah, no.
I meant Jackson, not Kagan.
That McCarthy and the Review have chosen this course just confirms the degree to which Trump and his cult have poisoned the discourse, by pushing someone who- agree with him or not- knows better, to come out and underhandedly advocate for a position he damned well knows doesn't hold legal water.
It's all about power, Colin. There's no power for a right-leaning publication that questions Trump. The decline of the Weekly Standard showed that. NR is just trying to stay relevant. Like Lyndsey Graham. See The Bulwark's Will Saletans's pod on "The Corruption of Lindsey Graham (https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast-episode/ep-1-the-corruption-of-lindsey-graham-2/). He says Graham explains his backtrack on Trump because "He wants to be in the room where it happens".
Even so, you’d think they could see the writing on the wall. Watching 90% of Conservative Inc continue, after all this time and all the crap the New Right pulling, to cover for them just to spite the left is rather astounding. Even the far right doesn’t hate the left as much as people from NR seem to (granted neo Nazis typically only have common cause with that old-style leftism like Bolshevik sympathizers but still).
It’s like they’re terrified that if they concede a point to anything left of Reagan, his ghost will come back and personally haunt them with old campaign slogans until a retraction is issued.
Absolutely- and it's about Trump and his followers' absolute unwillingness to admit any point of view other than their own; you're either *vocally* with them or you're against them.
As for Lindsey, he's got the same problem James Baker and many other prominent conservatives have, of being too afraid of having their conservative credentials questioned to speak out against someone they *know* is destructive to their party.
WTF happened to Alan Dershowitz? CNN needs to do a deep dive on him as they did on Giuliani (Giuliani: What Happened to America's Mayor? https://www.cnn.com/videos/title-2418941). The only thing I can see is he hates the government because all he's ever been is a defense atty and highly suspicious of the representatives of The People. Has never been a prosecutor, never had to prove a case, only had to cut it down to get reasonable doubt. All the legal eagles I follow, like Ken, have worked both sides. All lawyers are trained to work both sides. He had to do that to pass the MA Bar, but that was very long ago. Maybe he's losing cognitive capacity.
How old is he? 84. He's older than Biden!!!
This has been McCarthy’s MO for the past 8 years - concocting legal mumbo-jumbo and claiming how Trump is being unfairly prosecuted (or why a specific Dem SHOULD be prosecuted).
He’s a hack, and he’s NR’s “legal shield” for their hackery.
Re: Morosco’s snarky tone: That’s Judge Thompson’s writing style. I knew who wrote the opinion before I got more than two sentences into it. She literally always sounds like that. (Very derisive to the client).
"He’s not pro-Trump. But he’s anti-anti-Trump."
Yep, that's it. Better to let the country go down in flames than to ever admit the Democrats might have a point.
How to build credibility: Years of covering Trump antics, calling out both liberal and conservative wish casting. That is way I listen to Serious Trouble:).
Thanks for being you.
I don't take the National Review seriously. Rothman is the only writer there that I know of who has some credibility. Lowry and McCarthy are clearly totally partisan and are wholly untrustworthy.
I like Noah and shuddered when he went over to NR, I feared it would not end well.
I find Nordlinger’s posts to be worth the read, they help keep me mindful of the number of human rights activists persecuted overseas. He also seems to be far less anti-anti Trump than almost everyone else on the site, though I think that’s because he’s expecting to be long gone by the time Reaganism is fully buried. He still waves the partisan flag but it doesn’t come up very often.
Is he worth having to sift through Kearns repeating the same line on transgenderism for the 30th time, Dougherty pretending that the historically Catholic FBI is deciding to arrest TLM goers for no reason, or Armond White being the most contrarian film critic to ever live? Probably not.
Yes, Nordlinger seems as though he is not highly partisan and is simply an old-school conservative. a remnant of the Buckley days, I guess. At least the NA does still publish a few such voices, but it certainly seems to favor the reactionary-trumpist line now.