AVENUE VIET

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URL: https://www.gq.com/story/michael-wolff-white-house-trump-access

GQ
Michael Wolff Did What Every Other White House Reporter Is Too Cowardly to Do
Drew Magary
January 5, 2018

Why is Fire & Fury having such an impact? Drew Magary writes it’s
because Wolff was willing to throw decorum away and torch his access —
and more journalists should do the same.

I’m gonna begin this post with the same disclaimer that needs to come
with every post about Michael Wolff, which is that Wolff is a fart-sniffer
whose credibility is often suspect and who represents the absolute worst
of New York media-cocktail-circuit inbreeding. But in a way, it’s
fitting that our least reliable president could finally find himself
undone at the hands of one of our least reliable journalists.

All of Wolff’s excerpts from Fire & Fury so far (the book was rushed
into stores today) read like jayvee fan fiction. They read like a pilot
that Steve Bannon himself wrote, pitched to Hollywood, and had rejected 17
times over. They read, in short, like bullshit. And yet…Wolff has audio.
He’s got hours upon hours of audio. Not only that, but the book has
already caused legitimate upheaval in the administration, opened a
permanent rift between President Trump and Bannon, AND it confirms what we
have all always known to be true: that the president severely lacks the
cognitive ability to do this job, and that he is surrounded at all times
by a cadre of enablers, dunces, and outright thieves. As much as I wanna
discredit Wolff, he got receipts and, more important, he used them. Wolff
got it all. Wolff nailed them.

And look how he did it. He did it by sleazily ingratiating himself with
the White House, gaining access, hosting weird private dinners, and then
taking full advantage of the administration's basic lack of knowledge
about how reporting works. Some of the officials Wolff got on tape claim
to be unaware that they were on the record. Wolff denies this, but he's
very much up front in the book's intro about the fact that he was able to
exploit the incredible "lack of experience" on display here. In other
words, Wolff got his book by playing a bunch of naive dopes.

Thank God for that. Wolff has spent this week thoroughly exploiting Trump
and his minions the same way they've exploited the cluelessness of others.
And he pulled it off because, at long last, there was a reporter out there
willing to toss decorum aside and burn bridges the same way Trump does.

Everyone around Donald Trump is too polite to Donald Trump. Democrats,
foreign dignitaries, underlings… all of them. And the White House press
is perhaps the worst offender. From the media pool playing along with
Sarah Sanders during press conferences—conferences where Sanders openly
lies and pisses on democracy—to access merchants like Maggie Haberman
doling out Trump gossip like so many bread crumbs, too many reporters have
been far too deferential to an administration that is brazenly racist,
dysfunctional, and corrupt. And for what purpose? It’s clear to me that
Haberman and the like aren’t saving up their chits for just the EXACT
right time to bring this Administration down. No, the only end goal of
their access is continued access, to preserve it indefinitely so that the
copy spigot never gets shut off. They are abiding by traditional wink-wink
understandings that have long existed between the government and the press
covering it.

But Wolff didn’t do that. He did not engage in some endless bullshit
access tango. No, Wolff actually USED his access, and extended zero
courtesy to Trump on the process, and it’s going to pay off for him not
just from a book sales standpoint, but from a real journalistic impact. I
am utterly sick to death of hearing anonymous reports about people inside
the White House “concerned” about the madman currently in charge of
everything. These people don’t deserve the courtesy of discretion. They
don’t deserve to dictate the terms of coverage to people. They deserve
to be torched.

Trump ascended into power in part because he relied on other people being
too nice. It’s fun to rampage through the china shop when the china shop
owner is standing over there being like, “SIR, that is not how we do
things here!” If Trump refuses to abide by the standard (and now
useless) “norms” of the presidency—shit, if he doesn't even KNOW
them—why should ANYONE in the press adhere to needless norms of their
own? They shouldn’t, and it appears that Michael Wolff was one of the
few people to instinctively grasp that, and I hope more White House
insiders follow his lead. Sometimes you need a rat to catch a rat.
_________________

[Whomping Willow]

Inkling7, this is not Fox News, it's ABC News.

Sen. Tom Cotton on Wolff book: Trump has 'been active, engaged and effective leader'
[ABC News Videos]
Trump ally Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark), responds to the new book "Fire and Fury" and discusses border wall funding on "This Week."

View video:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-one-arkansas-sen-tom-122101114.html
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Oh bury me beneath the willow
Beneath the whomping willow tree

[inkling7]

Oh Whomping Willow then why did the video proudly display the Fox News logo? Hmm? I had one of my grandkids double check it for me and he are not blind either but couldn't understand why I needed him to double check this and even rolled his eyes...lol Mind you he is a hormonal young teenager who questions everything and clashes with us most of the time....
_________________
The Grumpiest Old Woman on Ave Viet.....

[Whomping Willow]

[Doan_Du]

“Fire and Fury” Is a Book All Too Worthy of the President
Michael Wolff’s instant best-seller is part old news, part bad reporting. Its success is symptomatic of our degraded sense of reality under Trump.
By Masha Gessen

The President of the United States is a deranged liar who surrounds himself with sycophants. He is also functionally illiterate and intellectually unsound. He is manifestly unfit for the job. Who knew? Everybody did.

So why has a poorly written book containing this information, padded with much tedious detail, become an overnight sensation, a runaway best-seller, and the topic of every other political column, podcast, and dinner conversation? It seems we are in bigger trouble with reality perception than we might have realized.

A year in, the Trump Presidency remains unimaginable. To think that a madman could be running the world’s most powerful country, to think that the Commander-in-Chief would use Twitter to mouth off about whose nuclear button is bigger or to call himself a “very stable genius,” verges on the impossible. If the word “unthinkable” had a literal meaning, this would be it. It also brings to mind the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s definition of a related word: “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud,” she once wrote. “This is the meaning of the word unspeakable.” The Trump era is unimaginable, unthinkable, unspeakable. Yet it is waging a daily assault on the public’s sense of sanity, decency, and cohesion. It makes us feel crazy.

At the end of the day, we sit down in front of the screen and watch the late-night comedians state the obvious: they imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable, and speak the unspeakable. There is nothing funny about it, but we laugh with relief. However briefly, the comedians free us from the nagging sense that we are crazy. It’s not us, it’s him. The laughter becomes hysterical.

This is the appeal of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” As Virginia Heffernan writes in the Los Angeles Times, Wolff has always specialized in “cartoonish power dynamics among insufferable old men”—the sort of spectacle that others rarely find worth a second look. But, she writes, “because the world finds itself at their mercy, we’d do well to hear their fetid locker room talk interpreted by a writer who can stomach it.”

The problem is that Wolff’s approach is too well-matched to his material. As Andrew Prokop explains on Vox, Wolff’s writing is a rehashing of gossip. What the Times’ and Washington Post’s White House teams have been doing through painstaking reporting—producing stories in which the account of every absurd incident in the life of the Trump Administration is based on conversations with several different sources—Wolff accomplishes by absorbing the ambient noise, the self-aggrandizing statements, the overheard (or surreptitiously recorded) conversations, and reshaping them as a narrative all his own. This tone, more than the substance, is what gives the book the flavor of a peek behind the curtain, the sense of someone finally putting words to an “open secret.”

Early tidbits, released ahead of the book itself, have, predictably, proved to be the tastiest morsels. Trump didn’t expect to win! Trump is semi-literate! Ivanka wants to be the first female President! Samantha Bee has done segments on all three of these topics. Anyone with access to Twitter or a television has also been able to observe the President’s uncertain relationship to the English language and his daughter’s unbounded political ambition.

Unlike Bee and the other comedians, who are forever balancing on the angry edge of disgust, Wolff appears to relish observing Trump the Terrible. If the comedians bring reality into sharper focus, Wolff just slaps on broad, sloppy strokes. His writing is comically bad: “a crooked real-estate scam” is a typical phrase; one four-sentence paragraph contains four instances of the word “likely” and six of “unlikely.” His logic is ridiculous: he includes, for example, a rumination on why real-estate entrepreneurs have never before become Presidents, and concludes that this is because real estate often involves questionable monetary relationships—and not, say, because the business does not offer the policy, legal, moral, or intellectual training that is usually expected of high-level politicians.

Read more:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/fire-and-fury-is-a-book-all-too-worthy-of-the-president
_________________
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Trên đời dễ có mấy ai!
Khà khà khà

[Doan_Du]

As Trump Stands Exposed, Republicans Rally Around Him
The same Republicans who like to posture about standing up to the president are predictably, pathetically, falling in line.
BY Michael Tomasky

You might have thought, if you were from Ulaanbaatar and didn’t have internet and didn’t know anything about these people, that the Republicans would have responded to credible allegations that their leader was a vain and clueless idiot by signaling, however subtly and slyly, that they understood the gravity of the situation.

Or even if they didn’t want to do that, at least have hidden for a few days. Try not to draw attention to themselves or their embarrassing president.

But you don’t live in Ulaanbaatar and you do have internet and you know these people all too well, so you know just what they’ve done.

First, the Republican National Committee mocked up a fake cover of Michael Wolff’s book with quotes from other journalists questioning Wolff’s grasp of certain facts, changing the title from “Fire and Fury” to “Liar and Phony.”

Last Friday, the office of Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, one of the few Republicans who’s actually had the stones from time to time to opine somewhat honestly about the clothes-less emperor, announced that Corker would be joining Trump today as the president travels to his state to speak in Nashville to a convention of the Farm Bureau. Yes, this is customary, a senator from the president’s party accepting an invite to hop on Air Force One for a trip to his state. Still, it’s striking that one of Trump’s most prominent intra-party critics—who is also by the way a leading Republican recipient of Trumpian abuse, a man the president said with his usual taste for the most obvious cliché “couldn’t get elected dog catcher”—is going along for the ride at this particular moment.

But the biggest move of all, also last Friday, came when GOP Sens. Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham referred British intelligence officer Christopher Steele for criminal investigation. They said it was not about “the veracity of claims” in the famous and much-disputed (by Republicans) Steele dossier and “is not intended to be an allegation of a crime.” Well, then what exactly is it intended to be?

As it happens, I have some ideas. First of all, it’s intended to assure Dear Leader that he is loved, that his leadership is still “exquisite.” Because, it’s clearly emerging, that Republican job number one in this warped era is telling Trump how great he is.

Second, it sets up an obstacle to the possibility of Steele coming to the United States to testify at a public hearing or a trial. Or it might, depending on how things play out, do the exact opposite and set up an extradition fight between the United States and the United Kingdom. That is, suppose one day House Republicans want Steele to testify—want to grill him. Now, maybe the U.K. would refuse to send him. That would be a lovely development in the history of the “special relationship.”

Third, it sends a signal to Robert Mueller and his team. We’re playing a very serious game of hardball here, it says. If your final report leans too heavily on the Steele dossier, we will move heaven and earth to rip it, him, and you to shreds.

Fourth, it gives Fox something to bang on about for a while; from last Friday forward, “journalists” can note whenever Steele’s name comes up that is he “under investigation.”

It’s a staggering move. Think about it. Trump is being killed in the press on Wolff-book coverage. Republicans sit around and think, what can we do to push back? And they come up with this. Turn the story back on the other side.

I admit, I give them points for creativity. If Watergate happened today, Republicans would get to work digging up dirt on Frank Wills, the Watergate security guard who that summer night in 1972 discovered that strange piece of duct tape over the door lock to the Democratic National Committee headquarters. After all, he was a high school dropout, and black to boot. Imagine what Fox could have done with that. It’s not for nothing that John Dean said last week that if Fox had existed during Watergate, Nixon might have survived.

I haven’t read Wolff’s book yet. I’m getting it probably today. But I’ve known his work, and him, for years. It’s quite possible he got some small stuff wrong. But it’s very likely he got the big stuff right. Republicans know this. That anecdote about Trump asking why Medicare couldn’t just cover everybody? Of course they know very well that that’s 100 percent plausible. It’s kind of touching, that one. It shows Trump in a rare moment of normalcy, because that is precisely what any normal person, sitting through explanations for the first time in his life about our convoluted health care system, would ask.

I hope I don’t sound like a broken record (how much longer can we use that metaphor, anyway?), but I’ll say it again: The central question of this era is when Republicans will acknowledge that the president is a dangerous and dangerously uninformed and dangerously immature person who has no business whatsoever sitting in the Oval Office.

The Wolff episode provides an answer. It’ll be a long, long time.

Sorry for posting such a depressing article...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/as-trump-stands-exposed-republicans-rally-around-him?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
_________________
Ta đây chớ ai
Trên đời dễ có mấy ai!
Khà khà khà

[Whomping Willow]

[Le NewYorkais]

The Dam Is Going To Break On Trump White House

The president spent much of the weekend pushing back against the controversy surrounding Michael Wolff's new book on the Trump WH, 'Fire and Fury.' Axios' Jonathan Swan also discusses new reporting on Trump's schedule.

https://youtu.be/1OQlk7v1vxU


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I ♥ NewYork!

[Le NewYorkais]

Michael Wolff on Bannon statement: 'This is not true'
Author Michael Wolff tells CNN's Christiane Amanpour that Steve Bannon's recent statement backing away from his criticism of Donald Trump Jr. is "not true."

https://youtu.be/Xi5ggCm-QuM


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I ♥ NewYork!