Tag: rich lowry
Conservatives Admit ‘Quid Pro Quo’ — But Insist That’s Not ‘Impeachable’

Conservatives Admit ‘Quid Pro Quo’ — But Insist That’s Not ‘Impeachable’

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

As Democrats are preparing to begin public hearings in the House of Representatives laying out the evidence of President Donald Trump’s misconduct, his more intellectually inclined defenders head toward consensus on a key fact: The White House did, indeed, propose a quid pro quo with Ukraine, leveraging military aid in exchange for investigations of the president’s political opponents.

Andrew McCarthy, one of Trump’s breathless propagandists when it comes to the Russia investigation, recently wrote a piece for the National Review telling fellow defenders of the president: “Stop Claiming ‘No Quid Pro Quo.’” Rich Lowry, also writing in the National Review, similarly wrote:

The line that there was “no quid pro quo” has become steadily less plausible as more testimony has emerged suggesting that Trump withheld security aid to Ukraine in the hopes that Ukraine would announce an investigation into the 2016 election and the gas company Burisma and/or Joe and Hunter Biden.

Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire also argued Friday: “The White House should stop saying there was no quid pro quo. There was a quid pro quo.”

The idea we’re now supposed to accept, these right-wingers argue, is that despite the fact that there was, undeniably, a quid pro quo, it wasn’t impeachable. Never mind that this may amount to one of the biggest goal-post moves in history. Trump himself has been proclaiming “no quid pro quo.” Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, after having clearly admitted that there was a quid pro quo a couple weeks ago, immediately denied that he had said what he said and blamed the media for reporting on his comments. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who has argued on Oct. 3 that the improper request for an investigation into former Vice president Joe Biden was wrong, had then claimed that it wasn’t impeachable in part because “The president did not, as was first reported, offer a quid pro quo to the Ukrainians.”

But now that a quid pro quo is expected to be demonstrated before the American people beyond a shadow of a doubt, don’t expect Trump and company to admit defeat.

They’ll likely adopt the tactics of Shapiro, McCarthy, and Lowry, who all say, for various reasons, that Trump nevertheless shouldn’t be impeached.

One move proponents of this argument like to make is to argue that Democrats were always looking to impeach Trump, and Ukraine is just an excuse, as McCarthy argued:

They have never accepted the voters’ election of Trump. They are not seeking to deduce unfitness from impeachable offenses. They predetermined the unfitness finding and have spent three years looking for some misstep — any misstep — that might pass the laugh test as an impeachable offense.

This is a common refrain, but in many ways, it is obviously false. Democrats were not committed to impeaching Trump no matter what. Were that true, they could have begun impeachment proceedings much earlier on any number of counts, or right after Special Counsel Robert Mueller released his report. Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — to much criticism — held back her party from embracing impeachment. She didn’t change her mind until September when the scale of Trump’s misconduct in the Ukraine affair became clear, and a wave of moderate House Democrats began vocally supporting an impeachment inquiry.

Trump Gets Testy After ‘National Review’ Editor’s Remark

Trump Gets Testy After ‘National Review’ Editor’s Remark

Donald Trump’s war against Fox News and other conservative media outlets has just been kicked up to a whole new level — and it doesn’t look like it’ll get fixed any time soon.

Last night on The Kelly File, whose host Megyn Kelly has been a particular target of Trump’s insults since she grilled him at the first GOP debate, National Review editor Rich Lowry made a rather, well, incisive remark about Trump’s campaign feud with rival Carly Fiorina.

“I think part of what’s going on here is that last debate,” Lowry said. “Let’s be honest, Carly cut his balls off with the precision of a surgeon — and he knows it.”

This got Trump angry. The mogul tweeted out immediately that Lowry should be fined by the government and taken off the air. (Hmm, sounds like socialism to us.)

Note that the FCC’s jurisdiction doesn’t actually extend to cable channels when it comes to indecent programming — and even if it did, the phrase “cut his balls off” probably wouldn’t even warrant a punishment. But never mind: The Donald was on a roll.

Thursday morning, Trump appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, and continued this new fight.

“I get treated very fairly by some of the media — and some of the media does not treat me fairly. Fox does not treat me fairly,” Trump said. “Megyn Kelly! I mean, you had this loser on last night, this guy Lowry. I never even heard of him. He was so out of control — he lost control of himself. It was actually sad, he lost control of himself last night with what he said. And I guess you gotta take a guy like that off the air.”

After Scarborough raised the issue of Trump, a candidate for the Republican nomination, now going to war with not only the biggest conservative TV outlet, but also with the most prominent conservative magazine in the country, The Donald opened up a new front — against National Review itself.

“I don’t think anybody reads it, Joe,” he said. “I think it has no power whatsoever, I’ll be honest, I think it has no power whatsoever. And he’s [Lowry] not a respected guy.”

“I read it,” Scarborough objected.

Trump immediately responded: “You’re the only one.”

This afternoon, National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke posted a piece on the site titled simply, “Trump the Thin-Skinned Wimp,” with such belittling statements about Trump as: “How quickly was the great hard man reduced to sterile indignation”; “In an instant, the whining began”; “an embarrassing display of frailty”; and, “What matters is that Donald Trump feels hurt, and that he doesn’t like it one bit.”

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that Fox News chief Roger Ailes will be meeting with Trump next week in order to try — yet again — to patch things up.

“Mr. Trump believes he has been treated unfairly in certain instances,” a Fox News spokesperson told the paper in a statement. “FOX News has held every candidate in this race to the highest journalistic standards throughout our coverage. We believe a candid meeting about our differences is required and that any misunderstandings can be handled without compromising those standards.”

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the crowd at the South Carolina African-American Chamber of Commerce in North Charleston, South Carolina, September 23, 2015. REUTERS/Randall Hill

<em>National Review</em> Is In Deep Trouble

National Review Is In Deep Trouble

The late William F. Buckley’s journalistic baby, National Review, is in deep legal trouble.

This week it asked subscribers like me for donations to pay lawyers fending off a libel suit. Those legal bills, even before a trial it may well lose, could sink the leading right-wing journal in America, The Weeksays.

Progressives, liberals, conservatives and middle-of-the-roaders should all care about this, but not for the reasons National Review cites.

The magazine’s January 27 issue asserts “at stake most narrowly is the question of whether [climate scientist Michael] Mann’s work can be vigorously criticized, and more broadly is the fate of free speech in an increasingly politically correct society.”

Nonsense. Not to mention bad writing and editing.

National Review mischaracterizes both the facts and the import of the issues in a way that has come to define the magazine since 1997 under editor Rich Lowry.

All that is at stake here are the business interests of National Review, Lowry, writer Mark Steyn and the other defendants — as well as, of course, the wrongly maligned Dr. Mann.

Libel lawsuits are notoriously difficult to win, as they should be.

But Mann has powerful allies: facts, independent investigations that found “no basis” for any accusation of intellectual dishonesty and, perhaps most significantly, the studied refusal by both the magazine and Steyn to acknowledge error and correct the record.

In a 2012 post still available at National Review Online, Steyn reprinted an already discredited quote that compared Mann, who teaches at Penn State, to assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, the serial child rapist who was protected by college administrators.

The quoted language included this:

Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of political science, except that instead of molesting children he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.

Steyn then slightly distanced himself from this quote before writing that Mann was “behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus” and musing that “if an institution is prepared to cover up systemic statutory rape of minors, what won’t it cover up?”

Lowry refused Mann’s request to take down the post, writing a month later that rather than suggesting criminality, Steyn was “savagely witty and stung poor Michael” by exposing “intellectually bogus and wrong” research reports.

If Mann filed suit against National Review, Lowry concluded, he “risks making an ass of himself.”

We all make mistakes. When journalists err our duty is prompt, forthright and candid correction, not piling on.

National Review is in trouble because its minimalist “reporting” combined with lightweight analysis was compounded by Lowry’s conduct.  Not owning up to these mistakes was not just unprofessional. It was stupid.

Would that Lowry and his writers attended any of my frequent lectures on how to report. They could learn not just interviewing and fact-gathering techniques, but what I call the first three rules of journalism:

Rule One: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Rule Two: Crosscheck and crosscheck until the facts are bolted down solid.

Rule Three: Put those facts in their proper place in the universe.

National Review’s assertion that “the state of free speech” depends on the outcome of Mann’s lawsuit is ludicrously out of proportion.

And Mann’s lawsuit is not about being “vigorously criticized,” but National Review’s disregard for facts.

I have been reading National Review since my teens, one of more than 40 magazines I take that provide a vast array of perspectives on many subjects.

Now and then over the last half-century I agreed with National Review. But, sadly, ever since editor Lowry took charge, it’s mostly laughter — derisive laughter.

When the online version got facts about me wrong years ago I called seeking a correction. No one who answered knew what to do or had authority to correct. Eventually I got Lowry on the phone, who promptly made clear that no correction would be made. He told me he saw no contradiction between that stance and his (and his magazine’s) frequent criticisms of other journals over their facts.

So why should those who see the world through a different lens care?

Well, not because National Review could go out of business. Should that happen a new publication would spring up to replace it. Many very wealthy Americans of all political stripes give money to make sure the marketplace of ideas includes viewpoints they favor.

Nor does any reason exist for those who care about integrity in journalism, be it straight news or opinion, to mourn.

But that is exactly the point.

The problem is that National Review is so lightweight that it’s easy to mock. And the same holds true in varying degrees for Fox News, Paul Gigot’s opinion pages in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, Emmett Tyrell’s conspiratorial American Spectator and the nutty reports on Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network.

Thankfully there exist The American Conservative and the libertarian monthly Reason, with its provocative substance.

America needs first-rate publications that articulate conservative perspectives by marshaling hard facts and sound logic. It needs right-wing publications as steeped in reporting, and just as political, as The Nation and Mother Jones.

Instead, we get an array of conservative outlets worthy mostly of ridicule. (There are, to be clear, plenty of loonies on the left and with ambiguous perspectives, but they are sideshows, not dominant.)

Those not on the far right need quality conservative publications against which to develop, refine and test their own ideas.

Just as Toyotas and Hondas made Americans aware of how much better inexpensive cars could be, forcing Detroit to do better, serious right-wing journalism would produce better political ideas from the majority of the political spectrum. Journalistic Yugos and Gazelles don’t improve the competition.

One result of intellectual vacuity on the right is that too many progressive ideas for a better America are not thoroughly vetted.

The flint-eyed scrutiny that Charles Peters has campaigned for since launching The Washington Monthly in 1969, and which has influenced my work, needs a counterpart on the right.  Conservatives need a journalist with a Peters-like skepticism to criticize allies so they do their best.

The path to a better America will never be drawn with the smoothness of the Laffer curve. The struggle to make tomorrow better will always be a story of ups and downs. But without a real contest of ideas America will never fulfill its promise of enabling the human spirit to flourish.

So, no, I will not be sending a check to help save National Review from its own folly. My money is better spent supporting the tiny San Francisco Public Press, which does the revealing investigative journalism that the Chronicle has never provided the city of my birth.

But I will donate to a serious, well-run and conservative magazine equal to what Charles Peters gave us. I hope you will, too. And I’ll renew my National Review subscription, if only for the laughs.

Photo: Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington D.C., accepting the “Robert Novak Conservative Journalism Award” on behalf of Jonah Goldberg. (Gage Skidmore via Flickr)