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White House Says Anonymous 'Coward' Behind New York Times Op-Ed Should Resign (freerepublic.com)
Earlier today, The New York Times published an op-ed from an anonymous staffer in the Trump administration, who has "vowed to thwart parts of [President Trump's] agenda and his worst inclinations," citing the president's amorality. The staffer writes: "We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump's more misguided impulses until he is out of office." An anonymous [coward] shares the response from the White House: White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders ripped the anonymous senior White House staffer who wrote an op-ed for The New York Times slamming President Trump's conduct. "The individual behind this piece has chosen to deceive, rather than support, the duly elected President of the United States," she said in a statement. "He is not putting country first, but putting himself and his ego ahead of the will of the American people. This coward should do the right thing and resign," she added. Trump himself called the op-ed's author "gutless." He tweeted: "Does the so-called 'Senior Administration Official' really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!"
The New York Times op-ed page editor Jim Dao described the process behind publishing the op-ed, telling CNN that the official contacted him "through an intermediary." He said that the New York Times also spoke with the anonymous individual but there are only a "very small number of people within the Times who know this person's identity." Dao didn't provide a gender for the person, but the author was described in a New York Times tweet as a "he" earlier Wednesday. [The Times later said that the tweet was a mistake and that it "was drafted by someone who is not aware of the author's identity."] Furthermore, Dao "said there was no special effort to disguise the person's writing style, for example by rewriting the piece in some fashion," reports CNN. "'There's editing in everything we do,' he said, but it's based on making the person's views 'clearer' and adhering to style standards."
A separate CNN article highlights 12 senior Trump administration officials who may be behind the op-ed.
The New York Times op-ed page editor Jim Dao described the process behind publishing the op-ed, telling CNN that the official contacted him "through an intermediary." He said that the New York Times also spoke with the anonymous individual but there are only a "very small number of people within the Times who know this person's identity." Dao didn't provide a gender for the person, but the author was described in a New York Times tweet as a "he" earlier Wednesday. [The Times later said that the tweet was a mistake and that it "was drafted by someone who is not aware of the author's identity."] Furthermore, Dao "said there was no special effort to disguise the person's writing style, for example by rewriting the piece in some fashion," reports CNN. "'There's editing in everything we do,' he said, but it's based on making the person's views 'clearer' and adhering to style standards."
A separate CNN article highlights 12 senior Trump administration officials who may be behind the op-ed.
I'm all for the "stuff that matters" part, but this is political minutiae.
A manifesto of a conspiracy of deep-state moles in the White House, allegedly composed of or including multiple Trump appointees, sabotaging the policies and decisions of the duly-elected President of the U.S., rather than implementing them? Reported by the New York Times, who claims to know the author and the work is genuine?
Sounds like "news for nerds, stuff that matters" to me. Because it matters to me, and my nerd credentials are some of the strongest here.
They might not like his decisions. But he IS the President. And a large part of what he was elected for was to clean out ("drain") the running-roughshod-over-the-citizens bureaucrats.
If the citizens can't bring the government to heel by electing their preferred executive and representatives, it's no longer a republic - it's an out-of-control tyranny. With the soapbox and the ballot box no longer functioning, you're on the verge of a civil war. If we go there, and our "democratic institutions" suffer or die, it will be the fault of the oh-so-self-righteous cabal claiming to be working to "preserve" them.
(I'm reminded of a Vietnam era quote: "We had to burn the village in order to save it.")
A little hint: To be effective at negotiation (especially when heading off a nuclear World War, but also down the scale to trade negotiations, promoting legislation, or exerting control over an entrenched bureaucracy), a President has to be competent at brinksmanship. That includes looking "crazy enough to do it" when he threatens something bad for his opposite number's interests.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
that is detrimental to the health of our republic."
You don't get to decide that.
Regardless of your opinion of Trump's policies, he is the democratically elected representative of the people of this nation. Sabotage from within by an unelected, anonymous staffer is the antithesis of a representational republic. If the president is a danger to the nation, present your evidence and plead your case for impeachment to the nation and to congress.
On a related note this is a new low for the NY times. They seem determined to hasten the death of old media by burning any journalistic integrity they have left.
So, if anyone had any doubts that the deep state exists, this should pretty much put an end to them. This attempt at circumventing the elected government is incredibly harmful. You want to know the endgame of this? Pakistan. Pakistan is run not by the elected government, but by its intelligence community. They take actions that are in their own interest, not in the interest of the country, and as a result Pakistan is a shithole and will never get any better.
A better way to approach the problem might be to ask what does America's deep state think of you?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30027384-what-washington-gets-wrong
They would very much like the Pakistani model, where there is an elected figurehead, but they rule us. For our own good, of course.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Honestly the most disconcerting thing about this is that the author cites some of the worst things this administration has done as their few "successes" and says they were accomplished despite, not because of, Trump. I think Trump is an amoral buffoon and a disgrace to the nation as much as the author seems to, but I'm honestly a little glad to hear that that buffoon is gumming up the plans of those who want to rape and pillage our country for their own profit, instead of Darth Pence streamlining that process.
That might be only half true, I think a lot of politics is people coming in saying "I want to do X, Y, and Z!" and then they're confronted with all the potential consequences to they end up saying, "Fine, I'll only do x and y". That was one of the big complaints with Obama, where a lot of his policies fell short of his rhetoric. But I thought that was just a consequence of a responsible leader moderating their ideas.
In the US I think the President is the one who's supposed to play that role, they're the one with the legacy and they're the one who's supposed to be responsible for the entire country, not just a particular region or base. But Trump doesn't really care about that other stuff, so when someone comes up saying "I want to do X!" he lets them do "X!" without thinking about the consequences.
For instance, on the tax bill I think a lot of GOP types really wanted to do a big massive corporate tax cut, both for ideological reasons but also to pay back their donors, and they went into the room trying to write a massive tax cut.
A President worried about their legacy and feeling personally accountable for the country's long term welfare probably would have pushed for a more moderate bill, even a President Rubio or Ryan would probably have made a more moderate bill if they were the President and their deficit and long term fiscal situation was their problem. But it wasn't their problem, and Trump didn't consider it his problem, so the tax bill went through as is because no one in power was worried about the consequences.
That's one of the problems with this Shadow Presidency, they have a lot of the power but none of the accountability, and power without accountability leads to really bad decisions.
I stole this Sig
Please remember the Steele Dossier and it's vaguely cited anonymous sources. Please remember how accurate it has turned out to have been.
The worth of an anonymous source is close to zero beyond maybe telling you where to look to dig for real information or maybe telling you where the misinformation lives as it distracts you from the real stuff. Off hand this pile on of anonymous sources has the ring of a Soviet Union misinformation propaganda campaign. "They say....", "They all say....", "A highly placed source says....", and its all lies.
{^_^}
If enough of them sign their name to it, it will force the hand. I happen to agree with David Frum's take on this. Zontar, despite being mindless, is echoing some of what David Frum also says.
What's it got to do with tech? Please don't tell me that even /. is now reduced to posting clickbait?
Um, I think you are referring to the electoral college, because the people of America by a majority voted for a different candidate. But the electoral college doesn't always reflect the will of the people and it was not designed to do so. Being a republic or not is unrelated to this issue.
To be fair though, the candidates presumably campaigned with the assumption of winning the electoral college vote and not to win the majority vote. So Hillary lost fair and square according to the agreed upon rules, even if it did not agree with will of the people of America.
I had fully expected the Republican party to start fracturing after Trump won the primaries and then the presidency. I was surprised when the majority of his Republican critics turned around and started toadying up to him. I wonder if after the midterms and their jobs are safe for awhile longer if they dare to criticize again, but as unpredictable as things have been I'm probably wrong.
And you can't fix the first-past-the-post system without changing the constitution, and that's highly unlikely. What you want is a change in the electorate to start favoring more moderates and centrists even in the primaries. California has a system now where the top two winners of primaries advance to the general election, even if from the same party. Hasn't been around long though so it's unclear if this will make a clear difference in the long run. Given that both major parties bitterly opposed it, it's probably a good idea.
And I have come to the conclusion after several decades, that loyalty to a political party is the biggest vice in America.
And what were the consequences of the tax bill other than a huge economic upshot in the last few months? You may not like a particular policy but there is more at stake than simply giving "rich people a break". Per Bernie Sanders and others on the left, rich people and corporations don't pay taxes, so the logical conclusion is that you can't increase or decrease their tax load because they have none.
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I'm uncertain here. It would normally seem to be the right thing to do, however in the present state of affairs it won't do anything. The senate will never vote to impeach, that's a pipe dream. Congress won't cooperate with any invocation of the 25th amendment, it will just be a bit of theater. So stepping up and resigning will not accomplish anything except to go and get a better job (not in politics, the political career will be over). And after resigning, Trump will just appoint someone else who's more compliant.
So I can imagine that 'anonymous' does believe that more good can be done within the administration than from outside. However by writing this letter all it's likely to do is make Trump even more paranoid and more insistent that everyone swear personal loyalty (especially when he's already upset at so many former BFFs).
We've already had plenty of senior officials resign and publicly claim how bad the president is, and this has not accomplished anything. Everyone who isn't a fan of Trump already knows he's a moron and incompetent, and everyone who is a fan refuses to believe it.
Overall it might have been better if 'anonymous' just kept quiet.
On the other hand, if this is accurate, this IS evidence of the Deep State and if true, staffers in the WH that are more powerful than the President.
I think regardless of the rhetoric around this op-ed, I think it's a carefully constructed message which is either by the Trump camp himself to drum up support for their cause or the Deep State trying to warn a sitting President not to mess with them "or else".
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This is what the Russians were going for with their information warfare campaign, although they were not necessarily interested in getting Bernie voters to flip for Trump (that's hard to achieve) as they were to get those voters to stay home and not vote at all (easier to achieve). Quoting the link:
By the radical groups there they mean both the Trump and Bernie camps, both because those groups had the largest existing online reach (and thus, were they easiest to target) but also because you could pretty effectively use the same kind of anti-Clinton messaging to target both. So they wanted at the same time to get people who don't usually vote but are pissed at the status quo ('Drain the swamp', 'Lock her up', etc.) to go out and vote for Trump and to get people who usually vote for the democrats to stay home ('Bernie or bust', 'Walk away', etc,).
Whether or not it made a definitive difference to the election results is not really knowable at this point, because the effectiveness of such campaigns is hard to measure, but keeping in mind that the amount of votes in the key states that flipped the result to Trump was what, around 30 000 it's definitely a possibility.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
My suspicion is that the high approval among Republicans of Trump is because many of the normal people have left the Republican Party. Name one policy the Republican Party stands for beside more guns and pollution for everybody?
The only thing he validated is the utter stupidity of our president. Anyone that votes for the GOP based on this is a fool, and yes the GOP is populated by fools. Anyone else will flee the Republican Party.
"There is no Republican Party. There's a Trump party. The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere."
-- John Boehner
Easier, just close the early primaries. The first half dozen or so Primaries set the race. To get the nomination you have to get the early momentum.
In the early elections Trump won the early primaries in Open primary states and Lost big time in closed Republican only primaries.
As a primary election is for the members of a party to choose the candidate they want to represent him it makes no sense at all to ever have an open primary. It should be those registered as members of that primary, and those willing to register (even on election day) as part of the party, but it should not be open to the general voting populace.
Voter tallies in early states indicate that many Democrats crossed party lines to vote for Trump in the open primaries. The opposing party voted for the worst candidate in large numbers in those open primaries.
That gave Trump the crucial early wins that gave him the momentum towards nomination. By the time most primaries remaining were in closed primary states it was a three man race between Trump, Cruz (who was hated even more by the establishment GOP) and Idiot boy Kasich (who never stood a chance but stayed in to deny Cruz votes that could have swung the nomination to him or at least to a contested convention at which he likely would have won the nomination).
We don't need to redo the voting system so drastically, just close the primaries to registered members of the parties. The left managed to swing the GOP nomination to the worst of the candidates, but their own was still so bad he beat her easily. I certainly didn't vote for him in the Primaries, but in the general election, he was the far better option and I had no qualms about voting for him.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Please mod parent UP. I don't know about the numbers, but this is a nice concise explanation of our voting system.
Every election someone brings up the "popular vote" BS. It's a total waste of time that the ants run all over. Shame on the media for lighting and fanning the topic each election.
I can name seven:
Outlawing abortion
Gutting all social services
Spending more on the military
Lowering corporate taxes and reducing fiscal oversight
Large scale reduction of the federal government and removal of a majority of federal policies, rules and regulations
Reduced education spending
Privatization of former government projects including infrastructure building, military operations, spaceflight. education, etc.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
"Deep state" is just a newfangled term for bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists quietly agreeing to cooperate to preserve their own fiefdoms while screwing over the rest of us. This is not a newfangled problem.
Seems to be a person who is a republican in the traditional sense - small government, free market etc. and is exasperated by the idiot at the helm. Writing an op-ed, even anonymously comes with a great deal of personal risk so I have to assume they're sincere in what they wrote. Although to be honest, I don't get the "adults in the room" argument unless the person is ex-military and feels honorbound to do what they can to blunt the stupidity coming from the top.