I've Finished American War

That's why blogging's been light today.

I watched some baseball and finished reading this book.

At Amazon, Omar El Akkad, American War: A Novel.

I'd definitely recommend the book. It's a fairly quick read, for one thing. But mostly I find the premise of the novel --- a new civil war in this country --- extremely fascinating. Akkad's a good writer, and while some of the personal story-lines were too long and detailed for me, they do tend to link back nicely together in subsequent episodes. There's no loose ends. Some initial details are left out, though, or I skimmed over them in my reading. For example, the Southwest United States is now a Mexican protectorate --- basically, exactly what the radical leftists Reconquista types are always agitating about. But there's no discussion of a war with Mexico, where the U.S. gives back the land. Also, the leftist ontology of the entire book will turn off some conservatives. The new "American war" --- which takes place in 2075 --- is the result of the North being taking over by radical environmentalists who ban fossil fuels. Climate change has left parts of the country underwater by this time, like all of Florida. Even the most hardcore leftist climate alarmists don't make such preposterous arguments, however. We're talking hundreds of years from now before the very worst effects of the doomsday climate scenarios would come into effect. Florida's not going to be washed into the sea 55 years from now.

Still, readers will identify with the rebels in the South, especially the main character Sarat, who becomes an assassin after both her parents are killed. Akkad's to be praised for his realism throughout. And while the book makes the Southern rebels extremely sympathetic, in reviews I've read critics have identified with the North, even going so far as demonizing Sarat's character. That's not how I read it all. I read this as if it could be me. I could be fighting against the North as if I was fighting against all that's evil in the world. And since I see this country currently breaking up --- we're in a cold civil war now --- it's easy to become invested in the outcome in the book.

But that's all I'll say, since I don't want to spoil it for anyone.

Check out the book, at Amazon.

The Palestinian Mountain of Hate

Following-up, "Omar al-Abed, Hamas-Allied Terrorist, Murders Three Israelis in Jihad Knife Attack in West Bank's Halamish Settlement (VIDEO)."

From Liel Leibovitz, at the Tablet, "How the Noble Sanctuary, sacred to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount, was transformed into a megaphone for bigotry, murder, and genocide":

Tens of thousands of faithful Muslims pack Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque every week. Things have been particularly tense in the holy site this week, after Palestinian terrorists murdered two Israeli police officers last Friday. Israel responded by putting up metal detectors, an act that led thousands of Palestinians to riot and assualt Israeli soldiers with rocks, bottles, and clubs.

What could make folks gathered for prayer so rowdy? Listen in on some of the mosque’s sermons, and the answer becomes painfully obvious.

“The Israelites,” roared Khaled al-Mughrabi, one of al-Aqsa’s top preachers, in the summer of 2015, “have a holiday, Passover. Every holiday, each group would look for a small child. They would kidnap the child, steal him, and put him inside a barrel, called ‘the barrel of nails.’ They would put the small child inside the barrel, and his body would be pierced by the nails. At the bottom of the barrel they would put a faucet, and that faucet would run with the boy’s blood. This is because Satan demanded of them, in return to doing everything they want, that they eat bread kneaded with the blood of children.”

When they’re not ritually slaughtering babes, Mughrabi said on other occasions, the Jews have a full agenda of evil: they’re the real culprits behind the 9/11 attacks, are planning to take over the world, and are actual blood-drinking vampires, which is why the industry they control, Hollywood, loves making so many movies about the Jew Dracula.

Not to be outdone, Ekrima Sa’id Sabri, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, is fond of using the mosque to talk about one of his favorite topics, the Holocaust. Which, to hear the renowned sheikh tell it, never happened. “Six million Jews dead? No way, they were much fewer,” he told an interviewer. “Let’s stop with this fairytale exploited by Israel to capture international solidarity. It is not my fault if Hitler hated Jews, indeed they were hated a little everywhere.”

 Still more, but you get the idea.

Omar al-Abed, Hamas-Allied Terrorist, Murders Three Israelis in Jihad Knife Attack in West Bank's Halamish Settlement (VIDEO)

This is horrific.

It's reminiscent of the massacre of the Israeli Fogel family by a so-called "Palestinian" terrorist in 2011.

At Israel National News, "Halamish terrorist identified with Hamas: Before carrying out murderous attack in Halamish, terrorist wrote on Facebook: There's no life after what you see at Al-Aqsa."

And at Ynet, "Palestinian terrorist murders three family members during Shabbat dinner: A terrorist infiltrated a house in a settlement in the West Bank and stabbed its occupants who were having a Shabbat dinner; he murdered a 70-year-old grandfather and his son and daughter, in their thirties; the grandmother, aged 68, was badly wounded; he was then neutralized":

The attack took place when about 10 members of the family sat for a Shabbat dinner. When the terrorist burst into the house, the wife of the son who died hid the children in a room, and from there she called the police and screamed that there was a terrorist in the house who was stabbing the occupants.

A neighbor of the family—an IDF Oketz Unit soldier—heard their screams, rushed to the scene and shot the terrorist, moderately wounding him.

More at the Times of Israel, "Terror at Halamish: When a family’s Shabbat celebration turned into a bloody massacre."

And from the IDF on Twitter, "Warning: Graphic Content - This is the scene of the Sabbath massacre which killed 3 Israelis and wounded 1 other," and "Before killing 3 Israelis and wounding a 4th tonight in a heinous act of terror, the terrorist posted this message on Facebook."

Also, "While Israelis mourn the death of 3 Israelis killed in last night's massacre, Palestinians in Gaza took to the streets to celebrate."

Nicole Kidman for LOVE Magazine

Well, since I was trolling around looking for Ms. Emily photos, I came across this.

At LOVE, "'I thought about this shoot afterwards. I was like, what was I doing!?' THE Nicole Kidman for #LOVE18."

More, "LOVE 18: Nicole Kidman by Carin Backoff and Sally Lyndley."

And at the Express U.K., "Nicole Kidman, 50, flashes NIPPLES in red hot skintight swimsuit for sexy LOVE cover."

Still more, at IBD Times, "Nicole Kidman stuns fans by flaunting nipples in a sexy red swimsuit: 'She gets better with age'."

Emily Ratajkowski by Patrick Demarchelier for LOVE Magazine

On Instagram here.

And at London's Daily Mail, "Emily Ratajkowski shocks fans as she poses completely naked for LOVE Magazine."

It's not "shocking," actually. It's just what she does.

Here too, at the Scottish Sun, "Emily Ratajkowski poses completely NAKED for LOVE magazine."

Also at Drunken Stepfather, "RAT COW TITS AND OTHER TITS BECAUSE TITS FOR LOVE MAGAZINE OF THE DAY."

Gregory D. Miller, The Shadow of the Past

At Amazon, Gregory D. Miller, The Shadow of the Past: Reputation and Military Alliances before the First World War.

Protesters Crash Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges' News Conference (VIDEO)

At iOWNTHEWORLD Report, "“Bye Bye, Betsy!” Minneapolis: Chaos Erupts As Protesters Disrupt Mayor Hodges’s News Conference."



Also, at Pamela's, "VIDEO: Protests ERUPT: DEMAND MAYOR BETSY HODGES’ RESIGNATION, shut down press conference."

It’s All Russia, Russia and Trump, Trump -— All the Time

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "Mueller Expands His Probe Again":

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is yet again expanding the scope of his off-the-rails investigation into the Left’s wacky Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory by examining financial transactions even vaguely related to Russia involving President Trump’s businesses and those of his associates, Bloomberg News reports.

Honest observers recognize that with the election of Donald Trump, the longtime Russophiles of the morally flexible Left flipped on their traditional friends in Moscow faster than you can say Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or Operation Barbarossa. Ignoring its own history of rampant seditious collaboration with Russia, the Left has now managed to convince many that any past or present connection a Republican has or had to Russia, however trivial, is somehow now retroactively evidence of treason against the United States.

There is still no evidence that Trump covered up a crime, or even that there was an underlying crime to be concealed but that hasn’t stopped the Left’s witch-hunt from growing and the goalposts from being shifted.

Remember that it was just a month ago as the bizarre collusion allegations got stuck in the mud that Mueller expanded his investigation to include allegations that Trump tried to obstruct justice by firing FBI Director James B. Comey on May 9. The claim is that Trump did this to end Comey’s investigation into National Security Advisor Mike Flynn’s ties to Russia. Of course, as Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz has pointed out repeatedly, the president has authority under the Constitution to fire the FBI director for any reason or no reason at all. Comey himself has freely acknowledged he served at the pleasure of the president.

That said, “FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development in New York with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008,” Bloomberg reported an anonymous source saying.

The report continues, elaborating that:

Mueller’s team is looking at the Trump SoHo hotel condominium development, which was a licensing deal with Bayrock Capital LLC. In 2010, the former finance director of Bayrock filed a lawsuit claiming the firm structured transactions in fraudulent ways to evade taxes. Bayrock was a key source of capital for Trump projects, including Trump SoHo.

The 2013 Miss Universe pageant is of interest because a prominent Moscow developer, Aras Agalarov, paid $20 million to bring the beauty spectacle there. About a third of that sum went to Trump in the form of a licensing fee, according to Forbes magazine. At the event, Trump met Herman Gref, chief executive of Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank PJSC. Agalarov’s son, Emin, helped broker a meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer [i.e. Natalia Veselnitskaya] who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Another significant financial transaction involved a Palm Beach, Florida, estate Trump purchased in 2004 for $41 million, after its previous owner lost it in bankruptcy. In March of 2008, after the real-estate bubble had begun losing air, Russian fertilizer magnate Dmitry Rybolovlev bought the property for $95 million.

As part of their investigation, Mueller’s team has issued subpoenas to banks and filed requests for bank records to foreign lenders under mutual legal-assistance treaties, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

In addition, a federal money-laundering probe of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has reportedly been subsumed into the larger investigation headed by Mueller. Mueller’s office is also reportedly looking at Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s tenure as vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus and at presidential advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s efforts to obtain financing for his family’s real estate investments.

Newt Gingrich said yesterday that Mueller “has so many conflicts of interest it’s almost an absurdity,” but all of this seems above-board to Bloomberg.

“The Justice Department’s May 17 order to Mueller,” the media outlet reports, “instructs him to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign’ as well as ‘any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,’ suggesting a relatively broad mandate.”

Trump lawyer John Dowd disagrees. He said examining the president’s business dealings should be out-of-bounds for Mueller.

“Those transactions are in my view well beyond the mandate of the Special counsel; are unrelated to the election of 2016 or any alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and most importantly, are well beyond any Statute of Limitation imposed by the United States Code,” he told Bloomberg in an email.

Meanwhile, the Left is digging in its heels.

In a defamatory, overheated column, the buffoonish purveyor of partisan drivel Jonathan Chait claims:

New reports in the Washington Post and New York Times are clear signals that Trump is contemplating steps – firing Mueller or issuing mass pardons – that would seem to go beyond the pale. Except Trump’s entire career is beyond the pale, and in his time on the political stage, the unthinkable has become thinkable with regularity.

Chait pontificates that:

Trump’s actions are best understood in the context of the overwhelming likelihood he, his family members, and at least some of his associates are guilty of serious crimes. The investigation might not produce proof of criminal collusion with Russia’s illegal hacking of Democratic emails. (Though reasonable grounds for suspicion already exists in abundance.)

Except there is no “overwhelming likelihood” that Trump, his family members, or associates are “guilty of serious crimes,” at least not based on publicly available evidence. Chait is engaging in pure speculation precisely because there is no proof of wrongdoing.

Chait shrieks that Trump’s New York Times interview this week and other news reports citing unidentified sources are proof that the president is a threat to the republic. “The ominous threats emanating from the White House are an administration mobilizing for war against the rule of law,” he wrote.

But what did Trump actually tell the Old Gray Lady?

"I have done nothing wrong,” he said. “A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case.”

One interviewer asked the president, "Last thing, if Mueller was looking at your finances and your family finances, unrelated to Russia, is that a red line?" Another then chimed in with, "Would that be a breach of what his actual charge is?"

Trump responded, probably correctly, with “I would say yeah. I would say yes."

"Would you fire Mueller if he went outside of certain parameters of what his charge is?" an interviewer asked.

"I can't answer that question because I don't think it's going to happen," Trump replied.

It is horrifying to Chait that Trump is daring to defend himself in an interview.

Then there is that anonymously-sourced Washington Post article that claims Trump is considering firing Mueller and issuing mass-pardons – kind of like when Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) unilaterally re-enfranchised felons by the hundreds of thousands to help Hillary Clinton during the last election cycle – in order to put himself and those close to him above the law.

It’s the kind of juicy, implausible story that the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” crowd has been known for since Trump was elected. The claim that the president’s legal team is examining the backgrounds of Team Mueller – as these attorneys are perfectly entitled to do – is much more plausible, though, according to Chait, such actions mark Trump as a budding dictator.

As left-wingers like Chait see it, the president isn’t allowed to defend himself from scurrilous, malicious allegations when he’s a Republican.

Confusing matters is the fact that the straight-shooting president delivered an extraordinarily unusual public flogging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, upbraiding him behind enemy lines in the New York Times interview. Trump said it was a mistake for Sessions to recuse himself from the Russia probe and that he may not have nominated him for the post if he had known beforehand that the attorney general would make the recusal decision.

It is true that with the benefit of hindsight, Sessions’ recusal, hailed at the time by the media and the rest of the Left as a noble, unifying gesture after a very, very nasty, hard-fought election, now looks boneheaded. Sessions is a good man and an outstanding public servant but he may have been in too much of a hurry to be liked by the Washington swamp. Appointing a special counsel calmed the Left down only briefly. Appeasing the radicals of today’s Democratic Party doesn’t work.

Although the unusual rebuke of Sessions may suggest the former Alabama senator’s days at the Justice Department may be numbered, White House Deputy Press

Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said yesterday the president “still has confidence” in Sessions despite the high-profile criticism...

Still more.

Mary Habeck, Storm of Steel

At Amazon, Mary Habeck, Storm of Steel: The Development of Armor Doctrine in Germany and the Soviet Union, 1919–1939.

Evelyn Taft's Modest Cooling Forecast

I mentioned earlier that I went to the doctor's today, for an update on my blood work.

So, my regular reading schedule was thrown off, as well as my dieting and exercise. I've lost 10 pounds this summer. I'm eating less and walking more. And except for Fourth of July, I've been abstaining from the beers lol.

I feel good. I want to go down another 10 pounds, so I'll have lost 20 pounds over the summer months. Then I can go easy on myself when school starts and I'm teaching. I'll be naturally increasing my metabolism then, especially Monday through Thursday.

In any case, very mild today for the most part.

Here's the lovely Ms. Evelyn with the forecast, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe.

Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismark, Bleichroder, and the Building of the German Empire.

William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty That Armed Germany at War.

James Jones, From Here to Eternity

If you've never read it, wait no longer.

Sheesh, what a spectacular, timeless novel.

I've gotta read it again soon. That's my beat-up used paperback copy at the photo, heh. [Added: I just bought this copy today. I read the book in mass-market paperback in the 1980s, but who knows where that thing is now?]

And at Amazon, From Here to Eternity: The Complete Uncensored Edition (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)."

Mass-market paperbacks are here.

Majority of Republicans Say Colleges Have Negative Impact on the U.S.

At Pew Research, "Republicans skeptical of colleges’ impact on U.S., but most see benefits for workforce preparation":

Currently, 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, while just 36% say their effect is positive, according to a survey conducted last month by Pew Research Center. Just two years ago, attitudes were the reverse: a 54% majority of Republicans and Republican leaners said colleges were having a positive effect, while 37% said their effect was negative.

Noah Rothman writes about this, at U.S.A. Today, "Conservatives are increasingly hostile to higher ed. Who can blame them?":

The collapse of GOP support coincides with the popularization of a militant brand of liberal political activism that gestates on college campuses.

The Pew Research Center has a new survey confirming that, as you'd expect, Republicans have little love for institutions such as media and labor unions. What's surprising, however, is the extent to which Republicans have grown hostile toward colleges and universities, and how quickly their attitudes have changed.

Pew found that 58% of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that colleges and universities have a negative effect on “the way things are going in the country.” Only 36% disagreed. As recently as 2010, 55% of the GOP viewed colleges positively.

The shift Pew observed is too uniform to be random. This is a response to external conditions. The collapse of Republican support for colleges and universities coincides with the popularization of a militant brand of liberal political activism that gestates on campuses. Take, for example, the University of Missouri-Columbia.

In 2015, Mizzou students sparked a firestorm by rallying in defense of a student who claimed that the campus was plagued by people in pickups chanting racist slurs. That accusation reopened the still festering wounds resulting from clashes that had erupted between peaceful protesters, rioters and police in Ferguson just months earlier. The popular narrative in the news media and on the left — that a righteous protest against injustice had been summarily crushed by the heavy hand of law enforcement — led to disruptions across the country in 2015.

As The New York Times observed, the protests soon became typified by the Marxist ideal of “intersectionality,” which contends that all discrimination is rooted in class, gender and race and is therefore linked. The demonstrations swelled, a series of administrators resigned, and the intersectional student movement appeared victorious.

It was, however, a video featuring communications professor Melissa Click that turned the campus controversy into a national story. She was filmed attempting to prevent a student journalist from taking pictures of the protests and calling for “some muscle” to be deployed...

More.

RELATED: At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Details on University of Missouri cuts: 474 jobs cut; Mizzou takes the biggest hit."

Yeah, keep it up "intersectional" leftists. Just keep it up. Nothing hurts your movement more than destroying the life chances of everyday Americans. So keep it up. Overreach will destroy radical leftism. We need to see more of it.

Violent Antifa Leader Yvette Felarca Arrested

She's a middle school teacher. I wrote a letter of complaint last year, although I never heard back.

She should be behind bars, as I've said many times on Twitter. At least we're seeing some movement toward that effect.

At Legal Insurrection, "Antifa Leader Arrested for Inciting a Riot."

She should have been arrested for assault and battery at the time. Multiple videos were posted of those "battles" in Berkeley, and she was inciting and participating in mob violence against so-called "fascist" protesters.

Watch, at CBS News 5 San Francisco:



More at the Daily Californian, "BUSD teacher, activist Yvette Felarca arrested Tuesday."

Louise Mensch's Donald Trump Russian Collusion Conspiracy Theories

Interestingly, I posted this one almost one year ago today: "Louise Mensch Implores Me to Come Back to the Light."

Well, who has lost touch with the light? I don't think it's me. But Louise is extremely self-sure of her "truths," to say the least.

She asked me to write for her during her short-lived editorship at Heat Street (a publication whose days are numbered, it turns out), but nowadays she never responds when I say hello on Twitter. She's ensconced herself in a cocoon.

In any case, the very sharp Charles C.W. Cooke has a new essay on Louise's "investigations," at National Review, "Louise Mensch’s Destructive Fantasies":

Mensch, a former British MP, is now the purveyor of fantastical conspiracy theories about Donald Trump and Russia.

A few years back, my father and I voluntarily submitted ourselves to an episode of Question Time, a long-running program on the BBC on which sundry British politicians try to sound as indignant as possible while expressing nothing whatsoever beyond the day’s conventional wisdom. On the panel that evening was one Louise Bagshawe, a Tory MP from London who had a gig on the side as a writer of teen-girl books.

“That woman,” my dad said to me about half-way through the show, “is one of the dullest people I’ve ever seen. Even for Question Time.” So much for plus ça change.

Today, Louise Bagshawe is Louise Mensch, a show-woman and a fantasist of world-class ability. No longer a member of Parliament, Mensch now lives in the United States, where she spends at least 18 hours a day filtering current affairs through the mind of Edward Lear. Over the last six months, Mensch has unleashed her unfiltered stream-of-consciousness on the denizens of her new country — both in short-form on Twitter, which she uses in much the same way as a woodpecker uses a wall, and in longer episodes on her Patribotics blog, which describes itself as “Pro-America, pro-democracy, pro-NATO, pro-Russia, anti-Putin,” but which seems most consistently to be pro-clicks. In both arenas, she has made sure to set herself at the thriving center of a hive of unfastened theorizing and molten-hot dudgeon. If a hot topic can be linked to Donald Trump or to Russia, Louise Mensch will manage it. And if it can’t, she’ll manage it too.

In theory, Mensch represents the fact-checker’s deepest-held fantasy — the moment for which all that training was contrived and intended. In practice, she is uncheckable and unaccountable in precisely the same manner as is a primal scream. Mensch reads like a woman who speaks civics as a third or fourth language that she lost touch with long ago. She has a pidgin grasp on the American settlement, and an ersatz, bastardized relationship with reality. One part novella-fantasy, one part hallway-hearsay, Mensch’s world is one in which an ethereal “they” are omnipresent and omnipotent. “They,” she tells us, are considering executing Steve Bannon, though he hasn’t been charged with so much as speeding in a school zone. “They” have already “sentenced” Rudy Giuliani — to what fate we will presumably find out when someone next mentions his name on television. “They” will soon overturn the election results, and are on the verge of making Orrin Hatch president. Donald Trump, in turn, is perennially but a few steps from the gallows. On the 13th of April, Mensch promised that the “first arrests may be as soon as next week.” Yesterday, she related that the president faced imminent “federal execution.” Presumably, “they” just needed some more time.

Usurpation abounds, at home and abroad, and seems never to be walled in by anything as prosaic as the law. Mensch’s Supreme Court has proactive police powers and a Bruce Willis–esque “marshal” who chases down helicopters and colludes heroically with the rogue justices. Her Congress acts primarily in camera, and may already have informed Trump that he is no longer permitted to use his legal powers. Her FISA courts issue indictments they have no authority to present. And the rules? They’re suggestions, really. The America of Mensch’s imagination is a place in which the entire Republican party is imminently going to jail — on RICO charges, no less — because Paul Ryan is a partisan. What the Da Vinci Code was to Christian theology, Louise Mensch is to James Madison’s handiwork. See how the symbols line up in the moonlight?

It is on the subject of Russia, however, that Mensch has really hit her stride...

Keep reading.

What Media Elites Care About Isn't the Same as What Regular Americans Care About

Jon Gabriel's gotten a lot of attention with his recent article at Ricochet, and especially the graphic he put together.

See, "What Americans Care About vs. What the Media Cares About":

Despite the American people caring far more about health care than any other issue, the media has swamped the airwaves with Trump/Russia conspiracies to the detriment of nearly everything else.

The difference between the people and the press was so jarring, I created a chart comparing the two studies [Bloomberg and MRC]. Granted, these studies were conducted by two different organizations using very different methods, but the juxtaposition was remarkable.

I totaled the time in [this] MRC study (469 min.) and calculated the percentage of time each issue was given. I then compared the percentage of media coverage on each issue to the percentages shown as Americans’ top issues:

Jon's been a little perplexed, if not pissed off, in how his graph's been swiped by major media outlets, including Fox and WSJ, without attribution.

Very well done.

PREVIOUSLY: "Why the Media's War on President Trump is Doomed to Fail."

Why the Media's War on President Trump is Doomed to Fail

From Thomas Frank, at the Guardian U.K., "The media's war on Trump is destined to fail. Why can't it see that?":

These are the worst of times for the American news media, but they are also the best. The newspaper industry as a whole has been dying slowly for years, as the pathetic tale of the once-mighty Chicago Tribune reminds us. But for the handful of well funded journalistic enterprises that survive, the Trump era is turning out to be a “golden age” – a time of high purpose and moral vindication.

The people of the respectable east coast press loathe the president with an amazing unanimity. They are obsessed with documenting his bad taste, with finding faults in his stupid tweets, with nailing him and his associates for this Russian scandal and that one. They outwit the simple-minded billionaire. They find the devastating scoops. The op-ed pages come to resemble Democratic fundraising pitches. The news sections are all Trump all the time. They have gone ballistic so many times the public now yawns when it sees their rockets lifting off.

A recent Alternet article I read was composed of nothing but mean quotes about Trump, some of them literary and high-flown, some of them low-down and cruel, most of them drawn from the mainstream media and all of them hilarious. As I write this, four of the five most-read stories on the Washington Post website are about Trump; indeed (if memory serves), he has dominated this particular metric for at least a year.

And why not? Trump certainly has it coming. He is obviously incompetent, innocent of the most basic knowledge about how government functions. His views are repugnant. His advisers are fools. He appears to be dallying with obviously dangerous forces. And thanks to the wipeout of the Democratic party, there is no really powerful institutional check on the president’s power, which means that the press must step up.

But there’s something wrong with it all.

The news media’s alarms about Trump have been shrieking at high C for more than a year. It was in January of 2016 that the Huffington Post began appending a denunciation of Trump as a “serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, birther and bully” to every single story about the man. It was last August that the New York Times published an essay approving of the profession’s collective understanding of Trump as a political mutation – an unacceptable deviation from the two-party norm – that journalists must cleanse from the political mainstream.

It hasn’t worked. They correct and denounce; they cluck and deride and Trump seems to bask in it. He reflects this incredible outpouring of disapprobation right back at the press itself. The old “liberal bias” critique, a minor deity in the pantheon of Republican paranoia since the days of Trump’s hero Richard Nixon, has been elevated to first place. Trump and company now use it to explain everything. And the news media’s reputation sinks lower and lower as they advance into their golden age.

What explains this dazzling disconnect? Yes, Trump is unpopular these days, but not nearly as unpopular as he deserves to be (among other amazing things, he is now reported to be more popular than Hillary Clinton). How can our opinion-leaders believe something so unanimously, so emphatically, and yet have so little success persuading their erstwhile opinion-followers to get in line?

One part of the explanation is the structural situation of the news media. As newspapers die off, their place in the American consciousness is taken by social networks of both the formal and informal variety. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, these days we read only that which confirms our biases. Once upon a time, perhaps, the Washington Post could single-handedly bring down a president, but those days have passed.

But there’s also a second reason, one that is even more fundamental. The truth is that the unanimous anti-Trumpness of the respectable press is just one facet of a larger homogeneity. As it happens, the surviving press in this country is unanimous about all sorts of things....

This is the key to understanding many of their biases – and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.

What do I mean? Consider Politico’s famous email tip-sheet, Playbook, which is read religiously every morning by countless members of the DC press corps, including myself. About two-thirds of the publication consists of useful summaries of the day’s news stories.

The rest, however, is a sort of People magazine for the Washington journalist community, in which the reader is invited to celebrate leading journalists’ (and politicians’) birthdays, congratulate leading journalists (and politicians) for their witty phrase-making, learn which leading journalist (and politician) was seen at which party and anticipate which leading journalist (and politician) is going to be on which Sunday program.

Nor is Playbook the only entry in this genre. Before there was Politico there was ABC News and The Note, a similar email newsletter that also celebrated what it called the Gang of 500, the happy and hard-partying political and journalistic insiders who supposedly made Washington tick.

These things seem innocent and fun, of course. But there is an unwritten purpose to these daily honor rolls of journo/political friendship and that is to define the limits of what is acceptable.

Like the guestlist at Lally Weymouth’s party in the Hamptons, which was described so salaciously in Playbook a little while ago, a tiny handful of people and publications and ideas are in; everyone else is out.

It’s about legitimacy, of course, and what’s left of the respectable press is utterly captivated by the theme. It completely defines their war on Trump, for example. They know what a politician is supposed to look like and act like and sound like; they know that Trump does not conform to those rules; and they react to him as a kind of foreign object jammed rudely into their creamy world, a Rodney Dangerfield defiling the fancy country club.

I believe that the news media needs to win its war with Trump, and urgently so. But as long as they understand that war as a crusade to reestablish the old rules of legitimacy, they are going to continue to fail. Until the day they get it right, the world will burn while the in-crowd parties obliviously on.

Click on the link above to read the article and check the links therein, but here's this one, at Politco, "Out and about in the Hamptons at Lally Weymouth's annual party."

Claudia Galanti on the Balcony in Porto Cervo, Italy

At Taxi Driver, "Claudia Galanti on her Hotel Room Balcony."

And at Elite Girls Squad, "Claudia Galanti on the Balcony of a Hotel in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, Italy (07/19/17)."