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The Screaming Moderate

The media world, according to Trump

2/28/2017

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PictureKellyanne making herself at home
Events in the area of the media were making news the last few days:

Couch-gate. Kellyanne Conway was captured with her feet up on an Oval Office couch which caused an Internet sensation. Looking at it in context, Ms Conway was angling her telephone camera to get a a picture of the assembled crowd and apparently putting her feet up helped to get the angle. Sorry, you don’t put your feet up on a couch in the Oval unless you’re the President of the United States or you’ve fainted and are being attended by medical folks.

Dinner-gate.  President Trump announced he will not attend this year's The White House Correspondents Dinner, or
the “nerd prom” as it’s called in DC.

With the war going on between the White House and the press, probably a good decision and a way to avoid being called a hypocrite over this issue. I’ve been fortunate enough to attend many of these dinners during my time in Washington. In those days it had not yet transformed itself into Hollywood on the Potomac. In fact, it was during my years in DC that the first “celebrities” began to be invited. But it was maybe one or two. These days, the bold-faced Hollywood names seem to outnumber the ink-stained wretches of the press. There’s even a red carpet before the dinner that Wolf walks down!

I view Trump’s decision not to attend as an opportunity to hit the reset button on the dinner. It served for many years as the one night reporters and government representatives sat down and broke bread, albeit dressed in black tie. Maybe it seems too chummy a night for some, but I enjoyed it. I got to see reporters who covered my bosses and we got to know each other in a different environment. It made the relationships better.

It’s even more important today when reporters do a lot of their work via texting or email, and aren’t live and one-on-one with the government types in a personal way.

Similar to the Congress. Used to be senators and congressmen stayed in DC. Now they need to be home to raise money every free day. Many of their families remain in their home states so they go home to visit them.

It all leads to not developing relationships that would allow us to talk with each other, not at each other.

Leak-gate. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is investigating his own staff for leaks. He held a meeting and confiscated phones to see what was on them in texts or encrypted chat apps that would mask their identities so they can communicate with reporters. Repeat: the White House press secretary is pulling surprise checks on his own staff to see if they are leaking. I thought I woke up and Richard Nixon was president again (then again..).

This is not normal, people. Sean likely will never determine who, if anyone, on his staff is leaking to reporters. And his boss won’t find them either.

And that, for us, is a good thing. Because that is what the media are for: to keep an eye on our government and make sure we the public know what’s going on – even if those we elected prefer not to tell us.

Reports are that the president himself approved this method of investigation and also approved Spicer barring some media outlets from a “gaggle” the other day. Today, they deny those charges. Frankly, I have no inside info but in this particular White House, I can’t imagine there’s a lot of free-lancing going on.

So, the potential for a reset on the correspondents’ dinner, a good thing. Spicer paranoid enough to check his own staff for leaks, a bad thing.

Show him the gate? As an old political friend of mine, Rich Galen, wrote yesterday, as enticing as it is to get the White House press secretary job, you have to know when to leave it to maintain the only coin you have in that world: your credibility and reputation. Sooner or later, Spicer, should, leave to maintain his credibility, and some sense of decency.

If I thought he was keeping the President from doing things Spicer and his direct boss, Reince Priebus, know are just dumb, I’d say hang in there, you have an obligation to your country.

But no one is changing a 70-year-old man, especially when his Rasputin, Steve Bannon, is always whispering sweet “deconstruction” in his ear to get Trump the main thing he loves – attention.



 
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The man behind the curtain steps out

2/24/2017

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I want to thank Steve Bannon for coming out of the White House closet yesterday to give those of us who aren’t familiar with him a closer look. After all, he’s playing maybe the central role in this Administration.

I noticed that before coming out he changed from his presumed White House daily garb of shirt, tie and suit to a sport coat and open-collared black shirt, which I assume is to reinforce the  image he wants as a maverick or anarchist, I’m not sure which. Of course, he didn’t mention the millions he made working for Goldman Sachs or getting in on the Seinfeld corporate money machine earlier in his career so he could have the luxury of being an anarchist later in life.

During his presentation with his apparent BFF Reince Priebus, he said that as of August 15th, when he and Kellyanne Conway took over the Trump campaign, they “knew” Donald Trump would win the election putting him not only among the few people in the world who knew that, including I’m guessing Mr. Trump, but, in my view, one more alternate fact he created to further the image of Trump leading a “movement” which very few others believe.

He also, of course, made the obligatory reference to the media covering his appearance as the “opposition party” even though the cable stations were carrying his appearance live and unfiltered before the second friendliest crowd (the other being employees of his former employer Breitbart News)  he could find.

He also referred to Trump’s agenda which he apparently prefers to think of as a way to “deconstruct the administrative state.” (according to Wikipedia, the administrative state is: “Dwight Waldo’s classic public administration text based on a dissertation written at Yale in which Waldo argues that democratic states are underpinned by professional and political bureaucracies and that scientific management and efficiency is not the core idea of government bureaucracy, but rather it is service to the public.”

I don’t believe that’s what Trump voters voted for – tearing down the government, the way I take it. They voted for more jobs and more participation and recognition in the system. They want more money in their pockets. Or, according to that other great thinker, James Carville who did not attend Yale, “it’s the economy, stupid.”

Priebus, whose last job was chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), along with making kissy face and nicely nicely bro-hugging Mr. Bannon, announced that he and Bannnon “hate politics.” That was not Priebus’ campaign slogan when he ran the RNC for five years. It likely would have hurt his chances at winning the job.

In short, the bromance we saw at the CPAC convention was another alternate fact – I’m sorry, I do not believe these guys are so cumbaya in their behind closed doors lives, though I don’t blame them for trying to display that.

To me, it was just like Bannon changing into a more anarchist costume for his appearance. A nice image but not reflective of the reputation they have – which is not knowing how to run a government effectively because neither has any experience at being in government, nor do many of Trump’s cabinet members.

Maybe that’s what Bannon means by deconstructing the government – making it a chaotic mess that serves no one’s interests. Maybe deconstructing the government means the President saying one thing in the morning (as happened yesterday regarding using “military” force to remove illegal immigrants) while his Cabinet appointees say the opposite in the afternoon.

So, while the first 30 days of the Trump administration seemed to be chaos to many of us, Trump, Priebus and Bannon maybe are correct that it all went according to plan. The plan being the deconstruction of our government.


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Return of the Oy!Yo!

2/8/2017

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Picture
Candidates for the Oy! award are easy to come by. Yos! not so much. That’s why the delay in an Oy!Yo! update. But here goes:

A big Yo! for those in and around the legitimate media who are struggling with how to cover a Donald Trump presidency. With his labeling anything he doesn’t like “fake news,” we don’t know what he thinks real news is, unless it’s something positive about himself (hmm, mystery solved). But back to fake news in a second. What we all should be most concerned with is the strength and reputation of our mainstream media – be that your local paper, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or ABC, NBC and CBS. Re the cable stations, Fox does give a rightward view. MSNBC is left-leaning and CNN tries to be in the middle (at least I think they do). Media need to stay focused on doing their job – presenting the news in an unbiased fashion, even in the face of a President who calls them scum, garbage and worse. And they need to point out misinformation and lies coming from the White House. The media have just a bad enough standing with the general public that Trump actually gets away with his insults. But the more the media stick to a down the middle, fact-based approach, the better off they and, more importantly, we will be. To the news media for standing up and doing their jobs in the face of presidential insults and pressure five Yos:  Yo! Yo! Yo! Yo!Yo!

 A special five Yos! to Jake Tapper of CNN for his interview yesterday of chief White House propaganda meister Kellyanne Conway. If you haven’t heard about it here’s a link -- http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/politics/kellyanne-conway-jake-tapper-interview-cnntv/index.html. It’s 25 minutes of a fair yet aggressive interview by Tapper who pushes Conway on the lies that come from her and her boss and a strong defense of the media as not being the “scum” President Trump claims. Yo! Yo! Yo! Yo! Yo!.

Back to the fake news. My Facebook feed shows more truly fake news than real most times. They want you to click to get to their page and advertising. It’s about the dollars, not the facts. Facebook is working on fixing that and they deserve a yo or two for taking that on.  Yo! Yo!

Back to Kellyanne Conway. She deserves a bunch of Oys! for her performances on television.  She slipped up (twice) and said there was a Bowling Green massacre and the media didn’t cover it. She’s right. The media did not cover it. Because it didn’t happen, Kellyanne!!  She did what she does, immediately pointed her finger at the legitimate media as also making mistakes. They do, they will. And so will you, Kellyanne, so point your finger inward and deal with that which you control. Oy! Oy! Oy! Oy!

I’m not sure if it’s an oy or a yo that Ms Conway deserves for introducing a new phrase into our language:  “alternative facts.” But she did. Maybe she meant to say “other facts” that maybe the media wasn’t focused on? Or maybe she was speaking the truth while pointing to the fact that her colleague, White House press secretary Sean Spicer, gave “alternative facts” when trying to get to the size of Donald Trump’s, uh, inaugural crowd. I paid close attention to her. And her hands are about as small as her boss’. Oy! Oy! Oy! (Yo!)



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Trump passing the buck

2/7/2017

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Picture
Forget about “the buck stops here,” the saying Harry Truman had on his desk while President of the United States.

Donald J. Trump will have none of that. He’s said that if a terrorist strikes the homeland, we should blame the judge who ruled against his ban on travel by Muslims.

He may say it isn’t a ban on Muslims, but it is. And, if he loses his appeals, it likely will be because he laid out during his campaign, repeatedly, that he would ban Muslims from the United States. His not so fancy footwork to change his story since taking the oath - claiming he's banning people from countries tied to terror - is not so fancy. We know what his intent was and is.

It’s hard to imagine a President of the United States blaming, before or after the fact, anyone else for an attack on the United States. It’s the president’s job to keep America secure. And, even if the appeals courts uphold the lower court saying that his ban is unconstitutional, that responsibility is still on the president.

To blame the courts? Lord, has he no respect for our Constitution? Did he ever wander into a civics class to learn about the separation of powers? We know he doesn't read so he hasn't read about our history and customs or, by the way, our Constitution.

I can’t put into words how angry it gets me that this bully, this coward, this man who pretends to be a strong leader can’t accept the responsibility that he spent more than a year seeking.

You wanted this responsibility, Mr. Trump. The voters awarded it to you. You are the president. You cannot pass the buck. Presidents make mistakes. History is riddled with them. Americans tend to forgive mistakes, it's part of our custom, if you've paid any attention. We depend on the president to be the strong one in the face of threats, and he always has been for the 44 men who preceded you in that office.

That’s partly because we want to trust our president to make good decisions …. for us, not himself.

You are our leader and are supposed to be the leader of the free world. The example for other leaders. Grow up, you asked for this job and you have it. Do it.



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    B. Jay Cooper

    B. Jay is a former deputy White House press secretary to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He also headed the communications offices at the Republican National Committee, U.S. Department of Commerce, and Yale University. He is a former reporter and is the retired deputy managing director of APCO Worldwide's Washington, D.C., office.
    He is the father of three daughters and grandfather of five boys and one girl. He lives in Marion, Mass.

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