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anonymous NYT op-ed

Rubes can’t tell opinion from fact. Makes sense that can’t tell an op-ed from a guy named Ed.
 
This is one of the better reads on the op-ed.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-...trumpian-corruption-of-language-and-the-media

The Times, however, does know who the person is, which also changes the position the newspaper occupies in this democracy. The Op-Ed section is separate from the news operation, but, in protecting the identity of the person who wrote the Op-Ed, the paper forfeits the job of holding power to account. An anonymous Op-Ed is a very rare thing. The editors at the Times faced a tough choice. They evidently concluded that the information contained in the piece was important enough to justify sidestepping normal journalistic practices and principles. I don’t doubt the editors’ serious intentions, though I happen to disagree—the content of the Op-Ed does not strike me as newsworthy. But that’s not the point. The thing about autocracies, or budding autocracies, is that they present citizens with only bad choices. At a certain point, one has to stop trying to find the right solution and has to look, instead, for a course of action that avoids complicity. By publishing the anonymous Op-Ed, the Times became complicit in its own corruption.
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Yes, it’s complicated. We are, as a nation, grateful that James Mattis actively muffles Trump’s outbursts, but we should also be aware that he is laying the groundwork for Defense Secretaries to act against the wishes and possibly even the orders of future Presidents. This is part of the degradation that the author describes in this passage, while failing to acknowledge that he has been an active perpetrator of that degradation, not a passive victim.
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In the last paragraph, the author uses a sleight of hand that has become so common that it is barely noticeable. He conjures “everyday citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.” This familiar sentiment seems utterly unrelated to the rest of the piece, but it is serving a purpose here. The author is claiming common ground with people “across the aisle”—perhaps the people behind the very resistance that he put in condescending scare quotes earlier in the piece. He is also inveighing against politics. In doing this, he is lying twice. A person who works for probably the most aggressively partisan Administration in American history has no business asking anyone to reach across the aisle, and his implied claim of common cause with bipartisanship is a lie. His other lie is juxtaposing “common ground” and politics. Politics is not the opposite of common ground; politics is the very process of finding common ground and making it inhabitable. Trump has been waging war on politics itself for more than two years. The anonymous member of his Administration who is bragging about his membership in a secret government has just opened a second front in this war.
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This op-ed is nothing new. Multiple people have said the same thing. Hell, months ago, Corker said the WH crew was an "adult day care center".
 
Newenglanddeac said:
Great read. Thanks for sharing.
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Lost me when she said the content of the op-ed is not newsworthy. It definitely is. Also lost me when she said the times is complicit in it's own corruption. No, it might be complicit in the corruption at the White House though.
 
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Could the WH staff be the passengers on the Orient Express?
 
Geez. What possessed her to write that rather than just keep her mouth shut?
 
We Are Trump’s Hostages by Andrew Sullivan


And that complicity remains. If anything, it is intensifying. As Jim Fallows constantly points out, any single Republican senator — Sasse, Corker, Collins, Graham, Paul, Murkowski — could check this president by voting against him, on any number of issues, including the protection of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Instead, they are now happily supporting a Supreme Court nominee whose deference to executive power is near-total, whose partisanship is profound, and who will reliably back Trump in any constitutional crisis the Supreme Court may find itself having to resolve in the near-future. In the looming conflict between Trump and the rule of law, the GOP has already told us whose side it is on. For good measure, it is now openly preparing to acquiesce in the appointment after the midterms of a new attorney general whose primary goal will be the complete politicization of the Justice Department, as an instrument for the president to punish his enemies, real and imagined, and, more importantly, to protect his criminal friends and allies. And in this situation, Kavanaugh won’t even commit on a president’s ability to pardon himself!

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Sometimes I think it’s useful to think of this presidency as a hostage-taking situation. We have a president holding liberal democracy hostage, empowered by a cult following. The goal is to get through this without killing any hostages, i.e., without irreparable breaches in our democratic system. Come at him too directly and you might provoke the very thing you are trying to avoid. Somehow, we have to get the nut job to put the gun down and let the hostages go, without giving in to any of his demands. From the moment Trump took office, we were in this emergency. All that we now know, in a way we didn’t, say, a year ago, is that the chances of a successful resolution are close to zero.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...?utm_medium=s1&utm_source=fb&utm_campaign=nym
 
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