Thursday, September 6, 2018

Karma just ran over the New York Times' dogma

The NYT is actually taking a lot of flak from fellow lefties over publishing an anonymous Op-Ed against Trump:
An op-ed written in the New York Times by an anonymous "senior official in the Trump administration" has drawn harsh rebuke from both sides of the aisle and beyond - after everyone from President Trump to Glenn Greenwald to the Los Angeles Times chimed in with various criticisms.
Their Dogma, of course is to get Trump by any means, fair or foul.  Whatever - it's a free country after all.  But Karma has just bit them in their butts.

Specifically, the Times did not take a stand against the whole NSA/PRISM spyapooloosa back when their guy was resting his loafers on the Resolute Desk.  Back then, enormous and unaccountable power to track all Americans' communications was no big deal.

Well, guess who has all the metadata of everyone who works for the New York Times?  It is likely a morning's work at Fort Meade to pull together a traffic analysis map of everyone in the White House who has communicated with the fine folks at the Grey Lady.

Will they do it?  Who knows.  Maybe they've already done it.  Maybe the Op-Ed was a three dimensional chess media leak from the Trump Administration that suckered the Times.  Maybe it's something else entirely.

But some of us spent eight years warning about the danger of increasing government power and just how difficult it is to hide from that.  It would sure have been nice to have had a free press fighting that fight with us.  There's some schadenfreude in watching the Press get caught by what they thought was No Biggie under Obama, but that's cold comfort.  And so Leviathan stirs.
Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance.
- Lord Acton

6 comments:

Glen Filthie said...

Meh.

I can pull stories out of my arse and attribute them to senior inside officials too. Or they are telling the truth for once - and confirming that Americans have a Deep State problem.

Why are you boys reading that crap for anyways? If you want to read tripe written by untrustworthy cretins there any number of blogs out there for you!

Not mentioning any names of course...
:)

SiGraybeard said...

I find I have the never-reported condition of Inverse Gell-Mann Amnesia Syndrome.

The actual Gell-Mann Amnesia is to read an article in a paper like the Times that happens to be something you know a lot about and realizing "this is a load of crap - they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground", but when turning to the next article, amnesia about that stunning lack of credibility hits and you attribute credibility to that new page.

With my Inverse GMA, I never think anything in the Times is credible. If they get something right, I assume it's simply an accident. To butcher the statistics of the Chi Squared significance test, if something happens less than 5% of the time it's probably a random event. That's about how often the Times is right.

The less wordy to say Inverse GMA is the old redneck saying, "fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me".

mac.mcgovern said...

I believe Q said that DJT shut down the metadata collection last week

LSP said...

Nice little reflection -- my 1st instinct runs to Trumpist plant:

It cross-aisle trashes the loathsome NYT.
Opens the gate to firing traitors.
Sets stage for declassification.

All in the lead up to the mid terms. EPIC GENIUS TROLL.

Heck, maybe "Lodestar" Pence wrote it after all.

Then again, maybe it's just some idiot traitors who stupidly gave the president they hate a nifty boost.





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