There are 4 comments.

1. Coolidge
   Texmoor

   @Texmoor

   1:52 PM EDT ⋅ Sep 3, 2019

   I would go easy on John. Everyone relapses on Twitter.

2. Inactive
   Jeff Hawkins

   @JeffHawkins

   3:06 PM EDT ⋅ Sep 3, 2019

   It’s now sport to try to get conservatives fired.

   I moderated a politics section on a message board and someone sent screenshots of me talking about voter groups by race as “racist” and the notion of wanting legislatures or referendum deciding gay marriage as “homophobic” to my job, saying I had shown a history of bigotry.

   When that didn’t work, they cloned my email, wrote racist things, attributed it to me and did the same.

   When I banned the user from the board their response was “why don’t you stand by the things you believe” with no comment about selective editing or the cloning.

   Ends justify the means, it’s the new normal.

    

3. Member
   The Gold Tooth

   @

   8:39 AM EDT ⋅ Sep 5, 2019

   JPod mentions his 1993 book about his experiences in the Bush 41 White House but modestly refrains from giving its title, Hell of a Ride. It’s one of my two favorite WH memoirs, the other being Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution. It’s both funny and enraging to accompany JPod on the downward slide from 41’s near universal approval after the Gulf War to his defeat by Clinton in the 1992 election. The envies, the jealousies, the turf wars, the conspiracies, the victories, the defeats, who’s up, who’s down … all seen and reported by a relatively low-level administration aide with an eye for detail and harboring certain resentments toward the incompetent and clueless operatives who took Reagan’s magnificent inheritance and ran it into the ground.

   Here’s Suzanne Garment reviewing the book in Commentary:

   Hell of a Ride is serious and comic by turns. Half the chapters are more or less chronological, taking the reader from the end of the Gulf war in 1991, when President Bush’s popular-approval rating stood at a seemingly invincible 91 percent, to his humiliating defeat a mere year-and-a-half later in the election of 1992. More originally, Podhoretz alternates these chapters with eight “Freeze Frames,” as he calls them, each written from a point of view inside the head of a slightly disguised Bush staffer. Some of these relatively junior staffers he interviewed, while others were friends who had been confiding in him and/or crying on his shoulder as they watched Bush slipping and their own future prospects growing dimmer and dimmer. […]

   The serious part of the book is illuminating. Podhoretz, with great vividness, describes a White House that was, in part, like every other White House. Lower-ranking officials felt privileged to be inside the charmed political circle but were keenly aware of how far they sat from the true centers of influence. Junior staffers, insulated from the political mood of the country as a whole, occupied their time waging their bosses’ power struggles. Instead of sharing information about what was going on, they used what they knew as weaponry in the bureaucratic wars. As for the “ideas” people, such as the speechwriters, they were locked in poisonous combat with other officials who believed that not words but money, media, and organization were the keys to politics.

   And here’s the book’s author discussing the work on C-SPAN’s Booknotes in 1993: https://www.c-span.org/video/?53222-1/hell-ride-backstage-white-house.

   JPod kindly signed my copy of Hell of a Ride at a Ricochet gig in D.C. in 2015 so it’s not available for lending, but if you’d like a short, fun, and instructive read I’m sure you’ll be able to find a used copy.

4. Member
   The Gold Tooth

   @

   8:41 AM EDT ⋅ Sep 5, 2019

   Someone (I think it’s Noah) repeatedly uses the word “expurgate” to describe attempts to destroy an individual based on their historical thought crimes. I suggest “extirpate” is the verb he’s looking for.