Your kind of analysis helps teach your readers and listeners to think better and to notice more, to start to see the structure of what is happening. Thank you for your many good contributions to understanding!
Additionally, the MSM is no different—they live in structured environment that allows Trump and his minions to run circles around them. They create false equivalencies to justify the administration’s actions—or just distract us with the outrage of the day because they don’t know how to handle this administration or any administration committed to destroying our democracy and rule of law. It’s that, or they are complicit, or worse: They’re afraid!
All the while, the real work is being conducted behind the scenes by Vought, Miller, The Heritage Society, Federalist Society, DOGE and all of the tech bro’s who have attained all of our social security, IRS and Treasury records.
Sarah Isgur is a hack. She’s very smart but can’t allow herself to notice the moral difference between the parties. Republican politics - her politics - always led to MAGA. Democrats were always better. What would this party do if it were in charge?
With Democrats, we have seen that and it’s clearly better both in terms of policy but also in terms of process. Her arguments are very ignorant.
John Dean finally said “no” to Nixon. He chose loyalty to the law and to the Constitution over loyalty to the president and the party. Why aren’t there any John Deans now? Is it because what Dean then diagnosed as the cancer on Nixon’s presidency was not successfully treated by the revelation of the cover-up, the House voting articles of impeachment, Nixon’s resignation, the convictions and jailing of Dean, Mitchell, Haldeman, Erlichman, et al.? Ford’s pardon aborted that treatment and allowed the cancer to seemingly disappear from view while it actually submerged and insinuated itself in the body politic, only to subsequently metastasize. This actually happened to someone I know. They were successfully treated and pronounced “cancer free” after seven years. But when they died, thirteen years later, the autopsy revealed that it was the very same original cancer that had killed them. Thus there was something amiss with Dean’s initial diagnosis. It wasn’t a particular cover-up that was the cancer. That was only a symptom of the underlying disease. It is not for nothing that Roger Stone has a tattoo of Nixon on his back, and has been gainfully employed since 1972.
Great point about the real deep state at work (not the administrative state that is being dismantled by Trump)! This person is a shady operator but at least we can kind of infer the truth about some of the coverups and leaks 😏😡
Soooo good and careful and helpful to me. I see lawyers up above quibbling from their prof’l points of view. But I am not a lawyer, I’m just one of the hundreds of millions of citizens being snookered and silenced and ill-served by this professional class of dissemblers — on Right and Left. Isgur is one I had clocked years ago, who bothered me in very particular ways. But I didn’t know much about her, it was her manner & personality that drove me nuts. So smug and self-certain, but never seemed like she was speaking *to* humans, *in* human language. She was a prime reason I did not last long as a Dispatch subscriber. It was easy to predict Jonah & Steve would go with the money & the institutions they’d helped build. Kevin Williamson, though, is a real disappointment. I genuinely thought him to be more like you, capable of as honest an investigation as you have done here, Mike. He did not seem to be from inside the compound, but I guess he’s an inmate now.
The Republican attitude for decades has been it’s ok if we cheat because the Democrats are doing it. (Whether the democrats are actually cheating or not is irrelevant. The Republicans just assume they are because they assume that the Democrats are like them.) Isgur’s response is the same, the democrats would have done the same in this situation so what’s the problem.
Trump steamrolled the Republican Party with his attitude that cheating is smart. Cheating investors and declaring bankruptcy is smart. He doesn’t need an excuse that the other side is cheating. If they are too stupid to cheat effectively then they deserve to lose. If he can cheat better than his opponent then he deserves to win. If he can use the presidency to enrich himself and his family, then everything is how it should be in his world.
The people who went to Trump University knew he was a conman. They thought he was going to teach them how to be conmen (or conwomen). Instead he conned them. I think something similar is going on with MAGA supporters. They knew Trump was a scumbag but thought he would be working to screw over their joint enemies. They are slowly coming to realize that he is screwing them over too.
Isgur is a right wing Streberin—nothing more, nothing less. You doth protest too much about Lisa Page. How a once excellent lawyer could be so stupid as to trade prejudicial texts with her lover Strozak about the subject of an ongoing investigation is beyond me. Operation Crossfire Hurricane, especially the role played by CIA bad penny Stephan Halper, is a national embarrassment. In the end, Page has done just fine. Not only did she get paid 800k from the DOJ (Strozak got 1.2m), Page also got gigs at NBC/MSNBC, and the top DC law firm ZwillGen PLLC. She and Strozak paid a very small price for their unprofessional, amateur hour conduct.
I agree the Lisa Page/Strozak debacle was foolish and stupid. How can such intelligent people do such stupid things? It undermined the investigation into Trump much to his own personal advantage. That situation reminds me of the stupidity of Fani Willis in Fulton County with her boyfriend/co-prosecutor which ended up blowing apart all of her carefully investigated indictments against Trump involving election interference, conspiracy to commit fraud and racketeering, where she had a good chance of prosecuting Trump in the end. But the end didn’t end as it ought to have. It was a mixture of overly self- confidence on her part and assuming she was above reproach. (She was accused of having a personal/sexual relationship with her partner in the investigation which ended the investigation faster than a brick can hit the ground). Her weaknesses from those traits set up Trump to attack and attack hard (through his sycophants) who would do anything to take her down which he succeeded at doing rapidly.
Don’t get me wrong, I was on Willis side and thought the whole accusation was BS. But anyone taking on trump must have a clean nose 24/7 and neither Fani nor Lisa nor Peter used good judgement which we all are now paying the price of those decisions.
We are in heated agreement. 21st century American politics is a bare knuckle arena--you slip you fall. Fani, Leticia et al made Trump into a martyr for the second time and exhumed what should have been his corpse from the graveyard of American politics.
He needed to be prosecuted. No one is above the law as John Locke reminds us. The problem is when a cult believe their leader is the Jesus of our moment, then he does become a martyr. What’s the option? Let the powerful run ram shod over the law?
You treat this as a fact like the weather when it's actually a consequence of Isgur's behavior. Her texts have been read aloud by Trump and a hundred other grifters, leading to death threats.
The only person to not suffer consequences in that affair was Sarah Isgur.
It is a fact like the weather. 21st century American politics is a bare knuckle arena. Page knew the rules—you slip you fall. Embarrassment, humiliation and death threats are the price of admission. Lisa and her lover Strozik are not shrinking violets, they have landed on her feet. As for the odious Isgur, her circle of the sun has only just begun.
He knew the rules of a normal DOJ. Trump made it abnormal, so now we have the FBI director on calls in the Situation Room about how to suppress the Epstein files.
Contrast with James Comey. He spoke with Obama once -- at the announcement of his nomination -- and never again thereafter.
Isgur is a regular on Left,Right, and Center on public radio. She is a Beltway pundit and full of herself. I find her extremely disagreeable. She seems intelligent enough to know that she could use her skills to better the Country for all of us. She chooses otherwise.
Lisa Page filed a civil rights suit the DOJ and got a settlement. Isgur is protected because she was acting as a political advisor, not an attorney before the court.
Good try but this is a completely wrong take on what Sarah was saying on the Dispatch pod. She wasn’t speaking as a lawyer discussing the constitution, she was attempting to explain how a crisis communications meeting works. There’s a difference.
This is overthought and overwrought. There aren't two definitions of loyalty. Loyalty (loyal) requires the preposition "to," so one can know who's loyal to what/whom. Conflicting loyalties is an old idea, been around for ages. There's also nothing new in a defined hierarchy of loyalties. What is new is the overt presentation of self-benefit parading as either somehow moral, and if not that, than merely conforming to standard practice. Isgur's loyalties are to herself, not anything else.
Isgur is a cynic. It's absurd to think she didn't know what was going on. She did what any good lawyer would do: she reframed the issue, otherwise known as shifting the standards to those which benefit her client. Her actual argument, implied rather than stated explicitly, is standards don't matter if political exigencies require it. Then she acted as if standards do matter. She became a Never-Trumper because she saw that as in her best interest. That's another way of saying Isgur understood the shame of staying within Trump's orbit would be more costly than abandoning it.
Your kind of analysis helps teach your readers and listeners to think better and to notice more, to start to see the structure of what is happening. Thank you for your many good contributions to understanding!
Excellent. We need more knowledge and principle like this.
Excellent newsletter and quite revealing.
Additionally, the MSM is no different—they live in structured environment that allows Trump and his minions to run circles around them. They create false equivalencies to justify the administration’s actions—or just distract us with the outrage of the day because they don’t know how to handle this administration or any administration committed to destroying our democracy and rule of law. It’s that, or they are complicit, or worse: They’re afraid!
All the while, the real work is being conducted behind the scenes by Vought, Miller, The Heritage Society, Federalist Society, DOGE and all of the tech bro’s who have attained all of our social security, IRS and Treasury records.
And yet, here we are!
Sarah Isgur is a hack. She’s very smart but can’t allow herself to notice the moral difference between the parties. Republican politics - her politics - always led to MAGA. Democrats were always better. What would this party do if it were in charge?
With Democrats, we have seen that and it’s clearly better both in terms of policy but also in terms of process. Her arguments are very ignorant.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
~Upton Sinclair
John Dean finally said “no” to Nixon. He chose loyalty to the law and to the Constitution over loyalty to the president and the party. Why aren’t there any John Deans now? Is it because what Dean then diagnosed as the cancer on Nixon’s presidency was not successfully treated by the revelation of the cover-up, the House voting articles of impeachment, Nixon’s resignation, the convictions and jailing of Dean, Mitchell, Haldeman, Erlichman, et al.? Ford’s pardon aborted that treatment and allowed the cancer to seemingly disappear from view while it actually submerged and insinuated itself in the body politic, only to subsequently metastasize. This actually happened to someone I know. They were successfully treated and pronounced “cancer free” after seven years. But when they died, thirteen years later, the autopsy revealed that it was the very same original cancer that had killed them. Thus there was something amiss with Dean’s initial diagnosis. It wasn’t a particular cover-up that was the cancer. That was only a symptom of the underlying disease. It is not for nothing that Roger Stone has a tattoo of Nixon on his back, and has been gainfully employed since 1972.
Great point about the real deep state at work (not the administrative state that is being dismantled by Trump)! This person is a shady operator but at least we can kind of infer the truth about some of the coverups and leaks 😏😡
Soooo good and careful and helpful to me. I see lawyers up above quibbling from their prof’l points of view. But I am not a lawyer, I’m just one of the hundreds of millions of citizens being snookered and silenced and ill-served by this professional class of dissemblers — on Right and Left. Isgur is one I had clocked years ago, who bothered me in very particular ways. But I didn’t know much about her, it was her manner & personality that drove me nuts. So smug and self-certain, but never seemed like she was speaking *to* humans, *in* human language. She was a prime reason I did not last long as a Dispatch subscriber. It was easy to predict Jonah & Steve would go with the money & the institutions they’d helped build. Kevin Williamson, though, is a real disappointment. I genuinely thought him to be more like you, capable of as honest an investigation as you have done here, Mike. He did not seem to be from inside the compound, but I guess he’s an inmate now.
The Republican attitude for decades has been it’s ok if we cheat because the Democrats are doing it. (Whether the democrats are actually cheating or not is irrelevant. The Republicans just assume they are because they assume that the Democrats are like them.) Isgur’s response is the same, the democrats would have done the same in this situation so what’s the problem.
Trump steamrolled the Republican Party with his attitude that cheating is smart. Cheating investors and declaring bankruptcy is smart. He doesn’t need an excuse that the other side is cheating. If they are too stupid to cheat effectively then they deserve to lose. If he can cheat better than his opponent then he deserves to win. If he can use the presidency to enrich himself and his family, then everything is how it should be in his world.
The people who went to Trump University knew he was a conman. They thought he was going to teach them how to be conmen (or conwomen). Instead he conned them. I think something similar is going on with MAGA supporters. They knew Trump was a scumbag but thought he would be working to screw over their joint enemies. They are slowly coming to realize that he is screwing them over too.
Isgur is a right wing Streberin—nothing more, nothing less. You doth protest too much about Lisa Page. How a once excellent lawyer could be so stupid as to trade prejudicial texts with her lover Strozak about the subject of an ongoing investigation is beyond me. Operation Crossfire Hurricane, especially the role played by CIA bad penny Stephan Halper, is a national embarrassment. In the end, Page has done just fine. Not only did she get paid 800k from the DOJ (Strozak got 1.2m), Page also got gigs at NBC/MSNBC, and the top DC law firm ZwillGen PLLC. She and Strozak paid a very small price for their unprofessional, amateur hour conduct.
I agree the Lisa Page/Strozak debacle was foolish and stupid. How can such intelligent people do such stupid things? It undermined the investigation into Trump much to his own personal advantage. That situation reminds me of the stupidity of Fani Willis in Fulton County with her boyfriend/co-prosecutor which ended up blowing apart all of her carefully investigated indictments against Trump involving election interference, conspiracy to commit fraud and racketeering, where she had a good chance of prosecuting Trump in the end. But the end didn’t end as it ought to have. It was a mixture of overly self- confidence on her part and assuming she was above reproach. (She was accused of having a personal/sexual relationship with her partner in the investigation which ended the investigation faster than a brick can hit the ground). Her weaknesses from those traits set up Trump to attack and attack hard (through his sycophants) who would do anything to take her down which he succeeded at doing rapidly.
Don’t get me wrong, I was on Willis side and thought the whole accusation was BS. But anyone taking on trump must have a clean nose 24/7 and neither Fani nor Lisa nor Peter used good judgement which we all are now paying the price of those decisions.
"How can such intelligent people do such stupid things?"
In humans, the traits of high intelligence and good judgement are unlinked.
We are in heated agreement. 21st century American politics is a bare knuckle arena--you slip you fall. Fani, Leticia et al made Trump into a martyr for the second time and exhumed what should have been his corpse from the graveyard of American politics.
He needed to be prosecuted. No one is above the law as John Locke reminds us. The problem is when a cult believe their leader is the Jesus of our moment, then he does become a martyr. What’s the option? Let the powerful run ram shod over the law?
"she get paid 800k from the DOJ"
You treat this as a fact like the weather when it's actually a consequence of Isgur's behavior. Her texts have been read aloud by Trump and a hundred other grifters, leading to death threats.
The only person to not suffer consequences in that affair was Sarah Isgur.
It is a fact like the weather. 21st century American politics is a bare knuckle arena. Page knew the rules—you slip you fall. Embarrassment, humiliation and death threats are the price of admission. Lisa and her lover Strozik are not shrinking violets, they have landed on her feet. As for the odious Isgur, her circle of the sun has only just begun.
He knew the rules of a normal DOJ. Trump made it abnormal, so now we have the FBI director on calls in the Situation Room about how to suppress the Epstein files.
Contrast with James Comey. He spoke with Obama once -- at the announcement of his nomination -- and never again thereafter.
Isgur is a regular on Left,Right, and Center on public radio. She is a Beltway pundit and full of herself. I find her extremely disagreeable. She seems intelligent enough to know that she could use her skills to better the Country for all of us. She chooses otherwise.
If she has acted improperly, file a formal complaint with the bar.
Lisa Page filed a civil rights suit the DOJ and got a settlement. Isgur is protected because she was acting as a political advisor, not an attorney before the court.
Good try but this is a completely wrong take on what Sarah was saying on the Dispatch pod. She wasn’t speaking as a lawyer discussing the constitution, she was attempting to explain how a crisis communications meeting works. There’s a difference.
This is overthought and overwrought. There aren't two definitions of loyalty. Loyalty (loyal) requires the preposition "to," so one can know who's loyal to what/whom. Conflicting loyalties is an old idea, been around for ages. There's also nothing new in a defined hierarchy of loyalties. What is new is the overt presentation of self-benefit parading as either somehow moral, and if not that, than merely conforming to standard practice. Isgur's loyalties are to herself, not anything else.
Isgur is a cynic. It's absurd to think she didn't know what was going on. She did what any good lawyer would do: she reframed the issue, otherwise known as shifting the standards to those which benefit her client. Her actual argument, implied rather than stated explicitly, is standards don't matter if political exigencies require it. Then she acted as if standards do matter. She became a Never-Trumper because she saw that as in her best interest. That's another way of saying Isgur understood the shame of staying within Trump's orbit would be more costly than abandoning it.