Category Archives: Politics

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Journolism: Even now, the credentialed media try to blame their laziness on Joe Biden’s staffers

At 2:55 PM EST on December 17th, I asked the question to which The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal admitted the answer on the 19th: “Why didn’t the press play its ‘adversarial role’ when it came to Joe Biden?”

How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge

Aides kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The administration denied Biden has declined.

By Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes | Thursday, December 19, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

During the 2020 presidential primary, Jill Biden campaigned so extensively across Iowa that she held events in more counties than her husband—a fact her press secretary at the time, Michael LaRosa, touted to a local reporter.

His superior in the Biden campaign quickly chided him. As the three rode in a minivan through the state’s cornfields, Anthony Bernal, then a deputy campaign manager and chief of staff to Jill Biden, pressed LaRosa to contact the reporter again and play down any comparison in campaign appearances between Joe Biden, then 77, and his wife, who is eight years his junior. Her energetic schedule only highlighted her husband’s more plodding pace, LaRosa recalls being told.

The message from Biden’s team was clear. “The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad,” LaRosa said.

The small correction foreshadowed how Biden’s closest aides and advisers would manage the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office.

My good friend William Teach had several stories, before the 2020 election, noting how former Vice President Biden’s aides put him to bed early called an early end to his campaign days.

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

That’s an important paragraph. The badly botched final withdrawal from Afghanistan occurred on August 30, 2021, when Mr Biden had been president for only 222 days, or just 32 weeks. The newspaper just told us that President Biden was known by his staffers to have diminished capacity in his first year in office.

The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his re-election bid—which unraveled spectacularly after his halting performance in a June debate with Donald Trump made his mental acuity an insurmountable issue. Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the Democratic ticket and was decisively defeated by Trump in a shortened campaign—leaving Democrats to debate whether their chances were undercut by Biden’s refusal to yield earlier.

The White House kept things secret until the secret couldn’t be kept anymore. But it raises the obvious question: why did President Biden decide to try for a second term? Was he unaware of his own condition? And who among the people with vested interests in him staying in office, including First Lady Edith Wilson Jill Biden, pushed him to run for a second term?

But here’s the money line:

This account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50 people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of the operations.

Think of all of the journalists and journalism students who’ve had dreams of being the next Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who investigated a President while that President was in office, and ferreted out the story that drove Richard Nixon from office, including finding sources within the White House. In this story, reporters Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes also found sources inside the White House . . . but only after the horse was not only out of the barn, but had burst through the field gates and was galloping down the road.

There is, of course, a major difference: the Washington Post reporters, Messrs Woodward and Bernstein, Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, and publisher Katharine Graham didn’t like President Nixon, while the vast majority of today’s credentialed media hate former and future President Donald Trump, and support any and every Democrat, including President Biden, who defeated Mr Trump in 2020 and they hoped could defeat him again in 2024.

Where was what the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer called “the adversarial role the press plays in a healthy democracy” when it came to Joe Biden?

“Democracy Dies in Darkness” was the tagline the Post added in 2017, widely seen as a dig at then new President Trump and his disdain for the credentialed media, but didn’t the Post contribute to, didn’t the newspaper promote the darkness by not doing its journalistic duty? “All the News That’s Fit to Print” proudly proclaims The New York Times, but apparently news about the condition of the President of the United States, a man playing nuclear patty-cake with Vladimir Putin, just wasn’t fit to print.

We had a situation in which either none of today’s aggressive journalists were interested in pursuing the stories of Mr Biden’s decline, or, if any of them did investigate, their editors spiked the stories.

But, we’re not to worry: the credentialed media will be on the case now, and investigate every word, phrase, policy, stumble, and gaffe by incoming President Trump. If he stubs his toe, it will be on the front pages of the Post and the Times, with fresh video on CNN and MSNBC. The media have learned their lesson, or at least they’ve learned it until the next Democrat takes office.

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Why didn’t the press play its “adversarial role” when it came to Joe Biden?

Our regular readers — both of them — know that I am very much attached to the idea of print newspapers, despite them being slightly updated 18th century technology. I delivered newspapers as a teenager, and with my seriously degraded hearing, watching the news on television is difficult for me; even with close captioning, which is usually poor on live broadcasts, I can miss things. With the printed word, even though by printed I mean words on my computer monitor, not actual paper, I don’t miss much, and if there is a point on which I was confused, I can go back and read it again, to make certain I understood what was written.

So, quite naturally, I was reeled in by this story, that Rob Flaherty, the former deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, claimed there was “just no value” in candidates speaking to mainstream newspapers like The New York Times or Washington Post. Naturally, my mind went to the complaints by people like The Philadelphia Inquirer’s hard left columnist Will Bunch that newspapers specifically, and the credentialed media in general, were not hard enough on former and now future President Donald Trump.

But then came a second paragraph, which destroyed my preconceived notion of what the article was going to say: Continue reading →

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President Trump needs to roll back the ATF’s regulations over the last four years

The old saw is that Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms should be a convenience store, not a government agency, but now New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush tells us that former and future President Trump might not nominate anyone to head it. The article headline, “A.T.F. Braces for a Likely Rollback of Its Gun-Control Efforts,” certainly caught my eye:

A.T.F. Braces for a Likely Rollback of Its Gun-Control Efforts

President-elect Donald J. Trump is almost certain to choose a gun-rights advocate as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or to simply leave the job vacant.

by Glenn Thrush | Saturday, December 14, 2024 | 1:25 PM EST

Many federal agencies are bracing for the Trump era — but few are likely to face the powerful backlash that awaits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which pursued an aggressive gun control agenda under President Biden. Continue reading →

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Is it possible that our friends on the left prefer journolism to journalism?

It isn’t that much of a surprise, I suppose, that the heavily politicized cable news networks would lose viewers after the political season and elections are over, but it seems that our good friends on the left are giving up in droves on the hard-left journolists of MSNBC.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid loses roughly half her viewers since the election, primetime hosts also struggle

MSNBC lost a whopping 53% of its total viewerership in primetime since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Friday, December 6, 2024 | 6:52 PM EST

MSNBC host Joy Reid and her primetime colleagues have faced a brutal decline in viewership since the election. Continue reading →

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No matter how much you hate the credentialed media, you do not hate them enough! The legacy media rarely lie outright, but their biases can be seen in their editorial choices of what to cover, and what to ignore

One thing I saw frequently on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — in the weeks before the election were claims, unsourced claims, that Kamala Harris Emhoff’s campaign had internal polling which was showing that she was losing to former President Donald Trump. Those were cheering, no doubt about that, but I am heavily biased toward verifiable claims, claims that I can back up on The First Street Journal. I make no claim that my site should be considered part of the credentialed media, nor do I claim it to be unbiased; my occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, and I are both definitely politically conservative, even though we have some disagreements on a few issues.

But while the credentialed media have long told us that the contest between Vice President Emhoff and Mr Trump was a close one, one thing I never saw, in any of the credentialed media sources I do check — The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, to name just a few — was any hint that the Emhoff campaign knew they were behind. Yet someone, at the very least, was leaking that information, leaked it well enough that some conservative sites heard it. Continue reading →

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Yet another liberal blames Democrats’ loss on Freedom of Speech

I saw Michael Tomasky’s whining article in The New Republic on Friday, and mused about commenting on it, but Robert Stacy McCain beat me to it. It’s a good article, and I recommend it.

Mr Tomasky blames Kamala Harris Emhoff’s defeat on those poor, ignorant, unedumacated saps who don’t get their information exclusively from the mostly liberal credentialed media, The New York Times, The Washington Post — which lost over 250,000 subscribers when owner Jeff Bezos cancelled the upcoming endorsement of Mrs Emhoff — ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the other approved credentialed media outlets. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t have included the much more conservative New York Post!

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on. Continue reading →

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Schadenfreude!

While it was not the reason that I voted for former, and now future President Donald Trump, I will admit to hoping for some major schadenfreude concerning the left if Mr Trump won. Well, he did win, winning the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote, and not that narrowly. As of 8:15 AM EST Friday, Mr Trump had 73,407,735 votes (50.7%), while Kamala Harris Emhoff had 69,074,145 votes (47.7%). Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — is chock-full of people wondering when Steven King and the rest are going to emigrate, and when Rob Reiner, best known as “Meathead” on All in the Family, is going to set himself on fire.

Neoconservative and warmonger Bill Kristol, net worth $5 million, who once founded and later destroyed the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, because too many conservatives were not on board with his #NeverTrump obsession, apparently believes that free Americans somehow need an “excuse” for voting as they do. He tweeted that there’s “No excuse for the American people voting to make Trump president again.”

While in a free country, you can take your voting decisions any way you choose. The supporters of Mrs Emhoff even pushed the notion that yes, it’s a secret ballot, so women don’t have to tell their husbands or boyfriends how they voted, apparently not realizing that trying to estrange men and women could only push more men to vote against the Vice President.

The New York Times gave us some of those reasons people voted for Mr Trump:

‘An Earthquake’ Along the Border: Trump Flipped Hispanic South Texas

Donald J. Trump’s biggest gains anywhere were along the Texas border, a Democratic stronghold where most voters are Hispanic. He won 12 of the region’s 14 counties, up from five in 2016.

By J. David Goodman, Edgar Sandoval, and Robert Gebeloff Friday, November 8, 2024 | 5:04 AM EST

Nowhere in the United States have historically Democratic counties shifted so far and so fast in the direction of former President Donald J. Trump as they have in the Texas communities along the Rio Grande, where Hispanic residents make up an overwhelming majority.

In recent elections, the region’s mix of sprawling urban centers and rural ranch lands that had been reliable Democratic strongholds for generations were beginning to turn red.

Then on Tuesday, Mr. Trump brought South Texas and the border region firmly into his column, taking 12 of the 14 counties along the border with Mexico, and making significant inroads even in El Paso, the border’s biggest city. In 2016, Mr. Trump carried only five of the counties.

The support for Mr. Trump along the Texas border provided the starkest example of what has been a broad national embrace of the Republican candidate among Hispanic and working-class voters. That shift has taken place in rural communities as well as in large cities, like Miami, and in parts of New York and New Jersey.

A few of the reasons given:

Fabiola Rodriguez, 28, a single mother of two children, said just going to the grocery store had become a painful experience. When Mr. Trump was president, she said, she was able to fill her shopping cart for about $250. Now, she spends $300 for a cart that is less than half full. . . . .

She also feared that Vice President Kamala Harris would be unfriendly to the oil and gas industry, which draws many workers from places like Roma. She blamed the Biden administration’s policies in support of renewable energy for cuts to her father’s and her brother’s working hours in the oil fields.

Here’s what the Democrats missed in their push for the First Woman President: Miss Rodriguez was worried about the jobs held by two men, her father and brother. The left, in their tremendous concern for women’s empowerment can’t quite understand that women and men depend on each other. If you hurt a husband or boyfriend, you also hurt a wife and a girlfriend.

“Honestly, I never heard Kamala say any definitive response to anything,” (Rodrigo Burberg, a 32-year-old software engineer from Brownsville) said. “Democrats are saying the economy is really strong. But really, the metrics are not there to reflect what people are feeling. Who cares about G.D.P. if everything is spent on Ukraine?”

The economy is strong . . . if you happen to already have money. If you have a 401(k) or other retirement plan, the strong increase in stocks has significantly increased your retirement savings. But your retirement savings do not put food on your table now, do they?

“I’m in awe,” said Adrienne Peña-Garza, a former Democrat turned Republican activist in the border city of McAllen. “A lot of those people who used to attack us now say, ‘Y’all were right.’ The price of eggs, border security,” she said. “Hispanics, they’re at their heart conservative.” . . . .

“We were talking about prosperity and hope while the Democrat Party was talking about pronouns,” said Representative Monica De La Cruz, who in 2022 became the first Republican member of Congress elected to a district that stretches from the border to the suburbs of San Antonio. She was re-elected on Tuesday. “The Republican Party has become the party of the blue-collar voter,” she said.

Also read: Don Surber, “Drinking Liberal Tears“

Some have tried to say that Vice President Emhoff was a kind of moderate Democrat, but she never really came across as such.

For decades, the Democrats were the party of the working class, the party of labor, and of labor unions. Now most of the unions, other than those of government workers have dramatically contracted, and the left tout themselves as smarter and more highly educated and basically Our Betters. Republican voters, they tell us, are those who never went beyond high school.

But about 73% of adult Americans don’t have college degrees, and disparaging them doesn’t seem like a mathematically good idea; telling people that they’re stupid if they don’t vote the way the left tell them to vote might not be a winning strategy.

For all of his faults, and they are many, former and future President Trump, though never working class himself, understands the working class in a way that today’s Democrats simply no longer do.

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The college educated elites are at a loss to understand why the working class don’t obey Their Betters

I almost never watch MSNBC or CNN, but I had to yesterday, and this morning, to see the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth following Grover Cleveland 2.0’s electoral win. Joe Scarborough and his fellow travelers were talking, mostly in amazement, at the multi-racial working-class coalition that former and future President Donald Trump put together in winning not just an electoral college but popular vote majority.

Naturally, most of the ‘panelists’ were in the nice MSNBC studio, but one was remote, from home.

And what a nice home it is! A home library, with a green marble surround fireplace, and fire going, plus carpets, deep windows, a nice sofa plus chairs around it for gatherings, and my immediate thought was how we were being lectured by the elites on who and what the working class are.

But there was half of a point made, in which Mr Scarborough said that the Democratic Party was run by the Washington elites. What he doesn’t get, and the left may not ever be able to understand, is that, right now, the Republican Party is a populist party, run by GOP voters themselves. The Democrats combitch that Republican Party leaders are in some sort of fealty to Mr Trump, but that isn’t the case at all. What the party leaders are doing is trying to catch up with the voters, and not all of them do that very well. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney and their like all think that the educated elites should be running the party, and the voters go along with their wishes. Perhaps it was that way, when the Bush family were ascendant, but not anymore.

The Republican Party leadership were aghast in 2015, when Donald Trump began his first campaign. He just wasn’t going along with the program, and he was financing his primary campaign himself. People like Scott Walker and Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina were trying to play nice, but Mr Trump was not: he was his bombastic self, and the Republican Party primary voters chose him.

Of course, he was going to get stomped by Hillary Clinton in the general election, so yeah, the GOP would lose that election, but everything would be back to normal after he was gone.

Oops!

Today’s Democrats still don’t understand. They’ve spent the past couple of years telling us how the economy was booming, unemployment was low, and everything was peaches but the cream. And they were shocked, shocked! that the peons didn’t see things that way. Yes, inflation is now, at least supposedly, lower than the rate of wage increases, but that didn’t account for the heavy inflation during President Biden’s first two years, which left Americans far behind, and they haven’t caught up.

Jeff Stein of The Washington Post tweeted:

Roughly *67%* of voters rated the economy as “not so good/poor,” per Washington Post exit polls A shockingly poor number amid a hot labor market, booming stocks, much lower inflation, growing GDP But widespread voter dissatisfaction w/ the economy been clear for years

I was reminded of Heather Long’s article, back when she was with CNN, on September 6, 2016, reporting that Americans didn’t really seem to believe that unemployment was down around 5%, seeing it as a lot higher.

The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

As it happened, that “9% or higher” was pretty much in line with the U-6 unemployment number, people who have jobs, but which were only part time, because that’s all they could find.

Back to Mr Stein, I ask: What hot labor market? Yeah, you can get a job at Starbucks or McDonald’s anytime, but manufacturing jobs are now few and far between. You can get a job in construction, though you might have to commute, if you have skills and a strong back and are willing to do something really radical like actually work.

Booming stocks? Yeah, that’s true, too, and that means that people’s 401(k)s and other retirement accounts are doing well, for the roughly half of the population which have them, but for the vast majority of Americans, surging retirement plans don’t put food on the table this evening.

From The New York Times:

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

by David Brooks | Wednesday, November 6, 2024

We have entered a new political era. For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.

Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees. The financial and consulting sector mushroomed while manufacturing employment shriveled.

Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys. Schools are not set up for male success; that has lifelong personal, and now national, consequences.

Yeah, perhaps Mr Brooks understands, but he was raised in intellectual privilege, with a father who taught English literature at New York University and a mother who pursued 19th British history at Ivy League Columbia University. When he was 12, the family moved to the wealthy Philadelphia Main Line. Does he really understand?

The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation. Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.

Here’s where Mr Brooks comes close, but just doesn’t quite get it. Yes, Mr Trump is a billionaire, and born the son of a millionaire. He, too, received an Ivy League education, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. But somehow, some way, Mr Trump actually understands the working class, in ways that the Democratic Party elite just do not. The left may think it all hucksterism, but if Mr Trump’s understanding of the working class is fake, he’s good enough at it to make it real enough to be believed.

Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” The Democrats used to be the party of the working class, the party of labor unions. But, as Mr Brooks tells us, the Democrats, led by their hard left wing, abandoned working Americans, to go for all of the crazy social policy stuff. The labor union leaders are still mostly hard-core Democrat supporters, but the union members are increasingly abandoning what their leadership tell them.

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The butthurt children on the left.

I’ve never read Stephen King’s books. While he’s obviously a talented writer, to judge from the enormous sales he’s earned, it’s not that I am somehow boycotting his books due to his well-known liberal opinions, but simply that his particular niche, horror novels, just doesn’t appeal to me.

So, what has led to Mr King’s fit of pique?

The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president

Publisher William Lewis explained the decision as a return to the newspaper’s roots.

By Manuel Roig-Franzia and Laura Wagner | Friday, October 25, 2024 | 1:09 PM EDT | Updated: 8:17 PM EDT

The Washington Post’s publisher said Friday that the paper will not make an endorsement in this year’s presidential contest, for the first time in 36 years, or in future presidential races.

The decision, announced 11 days before an election that most polls show as too close to call, drew immediate and heated condemnation from a wide swath of subscribers, political figures and media commentators. Robert Kagan, a longtime Post columnist and editor-at-large in the opinion department, resigned in protest, and a group of 11 Washington Post columnists co-signed an article condemning the decision. Angry readers and sources flooded the email inboxes of numerous staffers with complaints.

In a column published on The Post’s website Friday, publisher and CEO William Lewis described the decision as a return to the newspaper’s roots of non-endorsement. The Post did not begin regularly endorsing presidential candidates until 1976, when the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time,” Lewis wrote.

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

There’s more at the original.

Naturally, the left waxed wroth, as the newspaper’s Editorial Board already had a draft endorsement of Kamala Harris Emhoff in hand, and the order came down from on high: owner Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, ordered the change. Only two days earlier, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, blocked a planned endorsement of Mrs Emhoff, which led to the resignation of editorials editor Mariel Garza, editorial writer Karin Klein, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Greene. The Post’s editor-at-large Robert Kagan quit, and other resignations are expected. The Spectator mused:

Of most interest to Cockburn, however, were the remarks of fellow columnist and MSNBC mainstay Jennifer Rubin to the LA Times resignations earlier in the week. In response to Sewell Chan’s resignation from the Times, she wrote, “Bravo. All respect.” Followed by, “and where are the rest of them?”

LOL! Mrs Rubin has now put herself in the position of either having to resign, or proving herself what we already knew she is, a total hypocrite. From Wikipedia:

Rubin has been one of the most vocal conservative writers to criticize Donald Trump, as well as the overall behavior of the Republican Party during Trump’s term in office. Rubin denounced Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement as “a dog whistle to the far right”, and designed to please his “climate change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy.” Previously, after Barack Obama had approved the agreement, Rubin characterized it as “nonsense” and argued that it would not achieve anything. Rubin described Trump’s 2017 decision to not implement parts of the Iran nuclear deal as the “emotional temper tantrum of an unhinged president.” She had previously said that “if you examine the Iran deal in any detail, you will be horrified as to what is in there.” Rubin strongly supported the United States officially recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Early in his presidency, she criticized Trump for not doing so, saying that it was indicative of his tendency to “never keep his word.” She concluded that Trump “looks buffoonish in his hasty retreat”. In December 2017, after Trump announced that he would move the embassy, she said it was “a foreign policy move without purpose.”

Also read: Robert Stacy McCain, “The Schadenfreude Smorgasbord“

Fourteen opinion columnists of the Post wrote that the decision not to make an endorsement — meaning: an endorsement of Mrs Emhoff — “is a terrible mistake,” but that, to me, brought a smile to my face. In all of this, I mused that perhaps Dr Soon-Shiong and Mr Bezos had devised a nefarious plot to reduce expenses at their newspapers, as some veteran columnists have, and might still, leave their jobs, without the owners having to fire them.

Does the Post really need fourteen opinion columnists?

Semafor reported:

One person familiar with the figures told Semafor that the decision already seemed to be impacting subscriptions. In the 24 hours ending Friday afternoon, about 2,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions, an unusually high number, an employee said.

So, Stephen King and “Meathead” Rob Reiner and a bunch of other people have cancelled their subscriptions. Yet, had conservatives announced a bunch of subscription cancellations following the newspaper’s endorsements of Democrats — every presidential endorsement the Post has made has been for the Democratic candidate — the left would have called it childish petulance. The Philadelphia Inquirer just endorsed Mrs Emhoff, but I’m not going to cancel my subscription over that. It was something that everyone who reads the Inky expected.