This is just a flabbergasting quote.  

Look, I spent 13 years in newsrooms. I made mistakes. I worked with people who made mistakes.  

I’d have never made up a story. No one I worked with did it. But even if I or they did, the repercussions would have been harsh. 

You’d be screamed at, ordered to gather up your things and sent out the door. You’d lose friends. You’d have no future in the business. 

But the admissions here about the Seth Rich story that FOXnews cravenly sold to its audience are horrifying. 

While working at five Newspapers, I worked alongside people of all political stripes. Liberal, conservative, pro-life, pro-choice, libertarians and socialists. We’re there agenda’s? Yes. But they usually weren’t the agendas people assume. 

One paper did more stories on historic places and such. One paper spent more resources reporting on crime than the others. The biases came from the type of reporting the staff or editors were interested in. We’re there decisions I didn’t agree with? Of course. 

Rarely did I see a story done to push an agenda.  I’d argue lack of coverage was a more prevalent issue.  But that’s another post for another day.  

I worked with many conservative journalists. I read several reputable conservative outlets. But FOX is a disgrace to all of them.  

When we were hiring at one of the papers, I had to do the phone interviews with applicants.  One interview shocked me. A kid recommended to me by a colleague started off impressing me. Then I asked him. A softball question. “What does journalism mean to you.”

His response horrified me. “It’s a way for me to get my opinions out there.” 

Look, a real journalists answer is something along the lines of “I like telling other people’s stories.”  

Anyway, I knew I didn’t want to hire the kid.  I ended our interview pretty quickly.  I checked out his social media pages just to do a follow up. 

Every now and then someone from the right of center – or right of the vast right of center – will tell me how a newsroom works. How it’s full of liberals pushing agendas. When they describe how this fantasy newsroom works, it’s essentially what FOX news looks like when you see stories like this. 

Any journalist with their salt would question the circumstances and narrative surrounding Rich’s murder.  But they wouldn’t manufacture a story.  And if they did, they’d be held responsible. 

Last I checked Sean Hannity was still selling the bullshit and had yet to be reprimanded.  

I heard two songs today that took me back to my childhood. I hadn’t heard either of them in at least a decade. 

The first was Chicago’s “Will You Still Love Me.” At some point I had the band’s greatest hits album and that was on it. I can remember listening to it while doing my homework or running on the treadmill.

The second was “I Want a New Drug” by Huey Lewis and the News. It’s probably my least favorite of their hits.  Even though Ray Parker clearly ripped them off with Ghostbusters, I, of course, think he improved on it. I also owned this song on their Hits album. 

Hearing them back to back, two songs I wasn’t particularly fond of by bands whose other music I liked, I had a bizarre thought. 

If I could only listen to one of these band’s which one would I choose.  I could be trite and say both bands are terrible, but I do actually like a lot of their offerings. 

I think I like Huey Lewis better, overall. I have “The Heart of Rock And Roll,” downloaded on my phone and I can listen to their songs from “Back To the Future” anytime. But they don’t have a gigantic catalogue. 

Meanwhile, Chicago has a much larger catalogue. But good god are some of the band’s songs from the mid-to-late 80s awful. For every “25 or 6 to 4” you seem to have “When A Long Comes a Woman.”

I’m not sure which one I’d pick. Probably Chicago. At the end of the year, they’d be a habit I’d be more than willing to break.  

In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliant “Hamilton,” there’s a moment when, after they’ve won the first election and are trying to set up the government, George Washington turns to an exasperated Hamilton with some sage, pithy advice. 

“Winning is easy, young man. Governering is harder,” the father of the country states. 

It’s a lesson that has proved more true over the centuries.  As the country grew and solidified, as technology changed the game, and as the capabilities of government expanded, that axiom has deeper meanings. 

Then we got Trumped. A lazy, purposefully ignorant malcontent surrounded himself with likeminded troglodytes and was given the opportunity to govern. 

Well, Michael Lewis over at Vanity Fair has quite the story. 

It’s one that every trump voter should have to read. Maybe they’ll realize how much they’ve broken the country. How much they’ve put our safety at risk. Many, likely, aren’t smart enough to care. Many, clearly, aren’t patriotic enough to see the consesquences they’ve wrought. 

Some of the nuggets in here are deeply worrying in how much nihilism they show. 

After Pyle’s list of questions wound up on Bloomberg News, the Trump administration disavowed them, but a signal had been sent: We don’t want you to help us understand; we want to find out who you are and punish you. Pyle vanished from the scene. According to a former Obama official, he was replaced by a handful of young ideologues who called themselves “the Beachhead Team.” “They mainly ran around the building insulting people,” says a former Obama official. “There was a mentality that everything that government does is stupid and bad and the people are stupid and bad,” says another. They allegedly demanded to know the names and salaries of the 20 highest-paid people in the national-science labs overseen by the D.O.E. They’d eventually, according to former D.O.E. staffers, delete the contact list with the e-mail addresses of all D.O.E.-funded scientists—apparently to make it more difficult for them to communicate with one another. “These people were insane,” says the former D.O.E. staffer. “They weren’t prepared. They didn’t know what they were doing.”

Or bizarre. 

But there was actually a long history of even the appointees of one administration hanging around to help the new appointees of the next. The man who had served as chief financial officer of the department during the Bush administration, for instance, stayed a year and a half into the Obama administration—simply because he had a detailed understanding of the money end of things that was hard to replicate quickly. The C.F.O. of the department at the end of the Obama administration was a mild-mannered civil-servant type named Joe Hezir. He had no particular political identity and was widely thought to have done a good job—and so he half-expected a call from the Trump people asking him to stay on, just to keep the money side of things running smoothly. The call never came. No one even let him know his services were no longer required. Not knowing what else to do, but without anyone to replace him, the C.F.O. of a $30 billion operation just up and left.

A reminder that we’re just seven months into this thing and these types of stories are already leaking out. 

This is not a trivial exercise, and to do it we rely entirely on scientists who go to work at the national labs because the national labs are exciting places to work. They then wind up getting interested in the weapons program. That is, because maintaining the nuclear arsenal was just a by-product of the world’s biggest science project, which also did things like investigating the origins of the universe. “Our weapons scientists didn’t start out as weapons scientists,” says Madelyn Creedon, who was second-in-command of the nuclear-weapons wing of the D.O.E., and who briefed the incoming administration, briefly. “They didn’t understand that. The one question they asked was ‘Wouldn’t you want the guy who grew up wanting to be a weapons scientist?’ Well, actually, no.”

Sweet Jesus, what the hell is going on?

Look, I don’t think it’s possible for a president to be as bad as James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson. 

Until now, I really wasn’t sure a president could be as bad as Warren Harding. Seven months in and we’re there folks. We’re there.