The End of the Liberal World? Hans Köchler March 27 2019

The End of the Liberal World?

Hans Köchler

History has not come to an end. The self-appointed enforcers of the existing order have triggered a chain of unintended consequences. After the failure of Western liberalism, a multi-polar balance of power seems to emerge with new centers of gravity on all continents that will not anymore accept ideological hegemony by whichever global player.

Entering the long list of false prophets, Francis Fukuyama, in the summer of 1989, emphatically announced the “end of history,” suggesting that the progressive collapse of the Communist bloc and the supposed victory of its erstwhile adversary marked the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” and that there existed a “remarkable consensus concerning liberal democracy as a system of government.” Nothing could have been further away from the truth: While history has continued unabated, it is “liberal democracy” that – 30 year’s after its apotheosis as cornerstone of a “New World Order” – seems to approach a premature end. Even in the countries that propagated it at the global level since the end of World Word II, and even more so after the end of the Cold War, its foundations are gradually being eroded and its legitimacy is increasingly questioned as paradigm of a just and equitable political order.

However, this turn of history (unexpected in the eyes of the apologists of the supposedly permanent new order) should not surprise those who analyze the deep structure of politics. From the outset, “liberal” democracy has been a shallow concept. Contrary to Fukuyama’s analysis, it is not “free from fundamental internal contradictions.” In the countries that practiced and propagated it as epitome of dignity and human rights, “democracy” effectively meant élite rule in the form of representation, often in its plutocratic version. Direct participation of the people was in most cases excluded. In the name of freedom, this model of politics – in spite of its internal contradictions – was aggressively enforced worldwide. Under euphemisms such as “humanitarian intervention” or “régime change,” the Western policy of liberal hegemony, under the leadership of the United States, created a number of “failed states,” profoundly destabilized geopolitically sensitive regions such as the Middle East and undermined the very idea of the international rule of law.

The values of the self-proclaimed liberal order were enforced on the basis of the national interests of its dominant actors. For the sake of realpolitik, the legitimate rights and interests of weaker states “on the periphery,” i.e. in the developing world, were subordinated to those of the guarantors of that order. Free trade was propagated as cornerstone of a free world – as long as it suited the interests of the major player. If this was not the case, punitive (unilateral) sanctions made the slogan of free trade – and, with it, economic freedom – virtually meaningless. The practice of double standards has become the rule, rather than the exception, of this essentially imperial strategy.

Under euphemisms such as “humanitarian intervention” or “régime change,” the Western policy of liberal hegemony, under the leadership of the United States, created a number of “failed states,” profoundly destabilized geopolitically sensitive regions such as the Middle East and undermined the very idea of the international rule of law.

The “rule-based international order” that was portrayed as the essence of a liberal world was not in any way liberal either. From the outset, since the foundation of the United Nations Organization after World War II, it has meant a system of power sharing among five states, the permanent members of the Security Council. Because of their veto right, the norms of international law, including the prohibition of the use of force, did effectively not apply to those countries. However, granting a special privilege to a small number of states, and on a permanent basis, is in no way compatible with democracy and fairness among nations. The much-regretted policy of double standards was systemic. When, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the power balance among the five veto-wielding powers in the Security Council collapsed, it was ultimately the military power of the United States and its Western allies that shaped the contours of world order and that determined when and under what circumstances the values of freedom and democracy would be enforced.

This “liberal order” is now unraveling. The consequences are felt domestically as well as globally. They are related to the unrestrained exercise of power, including resort to military force, by the hegemon who tried to exploit the power vacuum – after the end of global bipolarity – in order to make its new order permanent. The aggressive assertion of supremacy, in the name of an ill-defined idea, not only undermined the very notion of liberty, but also triggered a blowback effect. An increasing number of states realized that this “liberal order” was in fact a realm of hegemony, and began to organize themselves in new groupings and alliances in order to avoid marginalization. (The formation of BRICS, including Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a case in point.)

The rule-based international order that was portrayed as the essence of a liberal world was not in any way liberal. From the outset, it has meant a system of power sharing among five states, the permanent members of the Security Council.

The imperial instrumentalization of the liberal idea discredited the concept in the eyes of the large majority of nations. Instead of a rule-based order in which the norms are set – and violated – by the dominant player, it is now again understood that more than international law it is the laws of realpolitik which determine the fate of nations – and that relations between states are unavoidably conducted within a system of self-help.

Realpolitik trumps a false idealism that has become a tool of power politics and has undermined the very idea of the rule of law between nations. Thus, inadvertently, the dominant West, paying lip service to democracy and human rights, has triggered a development towards a new multi-polar architecture of the globe that may be essentially different from that after World War II.

Domestically, the liberal interventionism of the West has undermined the very fabric of society and eroded the normative foundations of the state system not only in the targeted countries (particularly in the Middle East), but also in the regions where it originated, namely the United States and Europe. An arrogant and shortsighted policy of “régime change,” implemented under humanitarian pretext, produced a number of failed states. This, in turn, triggered long-term destabilization in the targeted and neighboring regions, including Europe. What has become known as “migration crisis” is a direct result of these policies. Causing a split not only among member states, but also among civil society in each state, it has profoundly weakened the political system of the European Union and undermined its very legitimacy.

Instead of a commitment to the co-operative European project, European society has witnessed a return to identity politics that puts at risk Europe’s role as a global actor.

In tandem with the liberalization of the labor market as result of unfettered globalization (that has eroded social standards in the industrialized world and created a feeling of insecurity also among the middle class), the European Union’s inability to manage mass migration has caused a major backlash in terms of social cohesion and political stability in Europe itself. The idea of a liberal world order has become discredited in the eyes of the public.

Instead of a commitment to the co-operative European project – as basis of dialogue with other regions including the Muslim world, European society has witnessed a return to identity politics that puts at risk Europe’s role as a global actor. The most acute expression of this trend is the wave of Islamophobia, in fact anti-Islamic hatred, which is fast entering the political mainstream in key countries of the continent, but also in the United States and other countries. These developments, accompanying the West’s “liberal” interventionism, have effectively undermined the politics of multiculturalism and seem to have made Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rise of what is described as populist nationalism has become a major challenge to the West’s propagation of and commitment to liberal values such as human rights and democracy. In view of increasingly arrogant claims to civilizational superiority, this commitment has lost all credibility.

History has not come to an end, however. The self-appointed enforcers of the existing order have triggered a chain of unintended consequences, which are increasingly beyond their control. After the failure of Western liberalism, a multipolar balance of power seems to emerge with new centers of gravity on all continents that will not anymore accept ideological hegemony by whichever global player.

From the Archives: "Defeated by Democracy" Seth Ackerman JUNE 1, 2005

In the months before the January 30, 2005 elections in Iraq, gloom and dissension began creeping into the media’s usual cheerleading for the war. Casualties were mounting, Iraqi resentment was growing, and the Army was facing an alarming shortage of manpower. In a December column (12/27/04), Washington Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt—a staunch supporter of the invasion—lamented “the deteriorating conditions in Iraq” and warned that “the insurgents . . . are succeeding.”

But with the impressive outpouring of Iraqi enthusiasm over the January 30 elections, the “purple revolution,” captured on film and broadcast around the world, caused a sea change in the mood of the press. Not only did perceptions of the war effort improve, but the elections themselves were widely portrayed as a vindication of the administration’s “forward strategy of freedom” in Iraq and beyond.

Coming just 10 days after Bush’s inaugural address (1/20/05), in which he announced that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” the Iraq balloting, with its inspiring images of ordinary voters braving violence and intimidation, struck many in the press as a sign that Bush’s long-term strategy just might be working.

“Simplistic but effective”

“For the moment, Bush’s instincts . . . seem to be paying off,” wrote Time pundit Joe Klein (2/28/05). “Look at those Shiites vote! . . . The foreign-policy priesthood may be appalled by all the unexpected consequences, but there has been stunned silence in the non-neocon think tanks since the Iraqi elections.”

According to the New Republic’s Martin Peretz (4/11/05), the recent Palestinian elections—which were held two weeks before the Iraqi vote—were “a tribute to the inked purple fingers of Iraq, which is to say, a tribute to Bush and his simplistic but effective trust in the polling place.”

Foreign affairs columnist Jim Hoagland enthusiastically pointed to the wide participation of women in the Iraqi elections and concluded that “not even [Bush] fully appreciates the forces of change that he may have unleashed” (Washington Post, 2/24/05).

When asked what precipitated February’s anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut, Charles Krauthammer, Fox News Channel’s warlike all-star panelist, explained (Special Report With Brit Hume, 3/4/05): “Everybody saw on Al-Jazeera, among the Arabs, the free elections in Iraq under American auspices. It showed that we were sincere in the invasion in not being after oil or hegemony, but in bringing liberty.”

But beneath the layers of encomia to the Bush administration’s commitment to Iraqi democracy lies the buried history of how the first free elections in Iraq’s modern history actually came to be. From the very start, the administration was determined to install its handpicked favorites in positions of power in Baghdad and to exclude Iraqis with broader public support. For nearly a year, it watched helplessly as that strategy gradually came unglued. Only after its preferred game-plan decisively collapsed—in the face of an armed Sunni insurgency, the popular rejection of U.S.-supported Iraqi exiles, and crucially, the threat of a massive Shiite uprising—did the Bush administration reluctantly bow to pressure from Islamists and allow a free vote.

Many of those commentators now hailing Bush’s historic push for Iraqi democracy had spent earlier months commenting pointedly on the administration’s refusal to permit elections—some approvingly, others with frustration. Yet once the Bush team resolved to put a brave face on a policy U-turn they had in effect been compelled to undertake (and then sanctify it with ever-grander rhetoric about freedom and democracy), the pundits treated it not as a reversal, but as the triumphant culmination of the administration’s heartfelt democratic “vision” for the Middle East.

“Unilateral control”

Some of the most informative reporting on Bush’s original plans to dictate the terms of the new Iraqi political order came, ironically, from neoconservative journalists with sources in the Defense Department. As planning for an invasion intensified in late 2002, Pentagon hawks circulated the idea of declaring a “provisional government” of handpicked Iraqi exiles before Saddam was toppled (New Republic, 2/17/03). Such a government was to be based on a grouping of opposition leaders led by Ahmed Chalabi—“among the truest” Iraqi friends of America, according to a Weekly Standard editorial (3/24/03)—whose Iraqi National Congress (INC) had been bankrolled by the U.S. for almost a decade.

About a month before the invasion, however, the administration shelved that approach after it “decided that the exiles do not command sufficient popularity within Iraq to lead a liberated nation” (New Republic, 2/17/03). The new plan, leaked to the Washington Post in February (2/21/03), called for “the Bush administration . . . to take complete, unilateral control of a post Saddam Hussein Iraq.” A U.S.-appointed Iraqi commission would be entrusted with writing a new constitution—but “officials emphasized that they would not expect to ‘democratize’ Iraq along the lines of the U.S. governing system. Instead, they speak of a ‘representative Iraqi government,’” the Post reported.

Yet the Pentagon was not yet ready to give up on Chalabi. In April, it airlifted him, along with several hundred fighters from the Free Iraqi Forces (FIF), a Pentagon-trained exile militia loyal to Chalabi, into the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, where he sought to rally the local population behind him (Financial Times, 4/12/03). In Baghdad, an FIF “general” and Chalabi aide called a press conference to declare himself mayor (Financial Times, 4/17/03). And in Najaf, a mysterious group called the Iraqi Coalition of National Unity rode into town on U.S. Special Forces vehicles and briefly took over the local administration, commandeering private homes and cars and “looting and terrorizing their neighborhood with impunity, according to most residents” (Financial Times, 4/9/03).

All of this was explained later, by a U.S. official critical of the Pentagon, as the result of a Defense Department planning process that had envisioned “a 60-90 days, a flip-over and hand-off, a lateral or whatever to Chalabi and the INC. . . . And there would be a democratic Iraq that was amenable to our wishes and desires left in its wake” (Financial Times, 8/4/03). Other reporting largely confirmed this account of the Pentagon’s Iraq planning (e.g., Knight Ridder, “Pentagon Civilians’ Lack of Planning Contributed to Chaos in Iraq,” 7/13/03).

Priority: privatization

This early history of the occupation—a “hand-off” to a favored exile politician who would then lead a regime “amenable to our wishes and desires”—offered little support to the media portraits that attributed a grassroots democratic vision to Pentagon neoconservatives. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson (3/22/05), for example, spoke of the Iraq war as in large part “a product of Paul Wolfowitz’s grand idea to democratize the Middle East,” while the New York Times’ William Safire penned a column last year (5/24/04) contending that unlike the Arabists in the State Department, the Pentagon passionately desired “a democratic Iraq to cut off the incubation of terror in the Middle East.”

Yet the Bush administration’s lofty democratic ideals became even less evident as the next phase of the occupation began. In May 2003, Ambassador Paul Bremer, a Kissinger protégé, assumed his post as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority—or, as he was sometimes called, the U.S. viceroy in Iraq.

Taking firm control of Iraq’s governance, Bremer quickly laid out his agenda. Speaking to reporters in June aboard a U.S. military transport plan, he insisted—“with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold,” the Washington Post reported (12/28/03)—that opening Iraq’s state-run economy to foreign investors was among his most urgent priorities. “We have to move forward quickly with this effort,” he said. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.”

But nothing went smoothly for Bremer. His economic plans, rammed through by U.S.-appointed Iraqi ministers, were bitterly opposed, both by Iraqi trade unions and by business leaders who faced the prospect of ruin at the hands of better financed multinational corporations. The head of the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce called them “a recipe for disaster,” while a major Iraqi business leader, Walid Hafidh, labeled the policies a “world occupation” that would render Iraqis “immigrants in their own land”—sentiments “echoing the thoughts of many businesspeople in the Iraqi capital, some of whom appeared on Arab satellite television . . . to air their grievances,” according to the Los Angeles Times (9/23/03).

“Potemkin Shia”

Still more ominous was the growing popularity of Islamist political parties among Iraq’s majority Shiite sect. Before the war, neoconservative pundits, such as the ubiquitous Iraq expert Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute, had argued that there was no contradiction between excluding these groups from power and fostering an Iraqi democracy, since the Islamists would prove unpopular anyway, once Iraq was liberated.

“It is by no means clear that a return of political activism among the Shia . . . would lead to fundamentalism,” Gerecht wrote (Weekly Standard, 3/24/03). “Nor is it clear that the radical Shia groups that defied Saddam’s rule—principally the clandestine guerrilla Dawa organization inside Iraq and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) headquartered in Tehran—will have significant followings in Iraq once Saddam is gone.”

The New Republic’s Lawrence Kaplan (5/12/03) was assured by “members of the Bush team” that followers of SCIRI were actually just “Potemkin Shia”—“bought, paid for, and exported by Iran.”

This was the gamble on which the war was based. And once the Bush administration saw itself in danger of losing that bet, it resorted to repression. Across Iraq, SCIRI’s offices were raided by U.S. troops and its leaders arrested (Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, 6/24/03). When a SCIRI candidate was expected to win local elections in Najaf, the vote was shut down by U.S. troops on Bremer’s orders (New York Times, 6/19/03).

This soon became a pattern. “U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq,” the Washington Post reported the following week (6/28/03), “choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators.” The problem with free elections, Bremer explained, was that “it’s often the best organized who win, and the best organized right now are the former Baathists and to some extent the Islamists.”

Over the next six months, the Bush administration found itself locked in a tenacious rearguard action to prevent democratic elections and ensure that political power would be wielded only by its trusted Iraqi lieutenants. In June, the leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah al-Sistani, issued a fatwa against Bremer’s plan to have U.S.-appointed Iraqis write a constitution and insisted only freely elected Iraqis be involved.

“Partial elections”

According to a Washington Post reconstruction of what followed (11/26/03), the Bush administration first assumed it could ignore the fatwa by seeing to it that “secular former exiles backed by the U.S. government would push Bremer’s plan.” When that didn’t work, “they talked about recruiting other ayatollahs . . . to issue statements warning about the dangers of immediate elections.” But none materialized.

To mollify Sistani, Bremer’s advisors came up with a new idea, which they marketed as a “partial election” (Extra!, 3-4/04). When Sistani declined to endorse the idea, Bremer refused to give up. He set up a committee of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, hoping it would recommend his own “partial election” plan.

When the committee voted 24-0 to endorse Sistani’s call for free elections, Bremer instructed his allies on the Governing Council to disregard the report and ask for a new one. “We told them to come up with other ideas,” one councilmember said (Washington Post, 11/26/03). “We told them to consider partial elections.”

Bremer made one last-ditch effort to enlist Shiite politicians to change Sistani’s mind. In response, the cleric issued a written statement to the Associated Press (10/19/03), insisting there was “no substitute” for direct elections. That statement caused nothing less than a crisis for the Bush administration. Bremer flew back to Washington for emergency consultations. A U.S. official, speaking anonymously to the Washington Post (11/26/03), articulated the fundamental truth about U.S. policy toward Iraqi self-government that few in the media have been willing to acknowledge: “Once it became clear we couldn’t get around the election, we knew we had to do something else.”

“Worst-case scenario”

That “something else” was initially a cosmetic change, envisioning a speeded-up transfer of sovereignty to Iraq but a permanent constitution still to be written by Iraqis selected through “caucuses.” Although U.S. officials adamantly insisted that their opposition to elections was motivated solely by logistical concerns, it emerged that they had quietly vetoed a detailed Iraqi technical plan to hold an early vote (Extra!, 3-4/04). In more candid moments, some, like Noah Feldman, Bremer’s advisor on constitutional issues, admitted the real motive: “Simply put, if you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected,” Feldman told the New York Times(11/29/03).

But Sistani wasn’t fooled. He declared the new U.S. plan illegitimate in “its totality and its details.” In the largest demonstrations in Iraq’s modern history to that point, 100,000 Shiites marched in Baghdad and 30,000 in Basra to support the ayatollah’s demand (AP, 1/19/04). Aides to Sistani hinted that if nonviolent protest failed to bring genuine elections, armed resistance could follow (Washington Post, 1/17/04). With U.S. casualties already mounting from the armed Sunni insurgency further north, the Bush administration finally realized it had no other option. Over the next few months, it gradually conceded that elections would be held and the date was set for January 2005.

That wasn’t, of course, the end of the administration’s efforts to install its favorites in positions of power. It settled on a new proxy—Iyad Allawi, a former Baathist with close ties to the old Iraqi Army—and strong-armed the United Nations into appointing him interim prime minister, instead of Hussein Shahristani, a respected Shiite physicist close to Sistani (Newsweek, 2/5/05). During Allawi’s tenure, Shahristani later complained, “nothing could be done without U.S. approval.” The U.S. then spent the next year not so subtly backing Allawi’s election campaign; U.S. officials fed journalists a steady stream of confident off-the-record predictions of Allawi’s impending electoral victory (New Republic Online, 3/24/05).

But the results of Iraq’s first free elections demonstrated more clearly than anything else why the administration had been so opposed to them in the first place. The winning slate was a coalition led by the two Shiite parties, SCIRI and Dawa, that had been most feared by the Bush administration. “Within the Bush administration, a victory by Iraq’s religious parties is viewed as the worst-case scenario,” reported the Washington Post’s veteran Middle East correspondent, Robin Wright, a few months before the vote (10/22/04).

The Shiites’ likely victory apparently led some administration officials to doubt whether the whole Iraq adventure was even worth it: “After all the blood and treasure we’ve spent and despite the occupation’s democracy efforts, we’re in a position now that the moderates would not win if an election were held today,” Wright quoted a U.S. official.

“Fanciful illusion”

Yet in the aftermath of the elections, almost no pundits were willing to acknowledge this reality. Instead, many wholeheartedly swallowed the administration’s lofty rhetoric about Iraqi democracy while in many cases ignoring their own earlier reporting on Bush’s steadfast rejection of free elections.

Because of Iraq’s vote, the Wall Street Journal editorial page rejoiced in February (2/25/05), “President Bush’s vision of spreading democracy—of getting to the ‘tipping point’ where tyrannies start to crumble—seems not only to be working but also winning some unexpected converts.” Just a year earlier, it ran a puzzled editorial (“Why Not Elections,” 2/5/04) wondering why the administration was “in the anomalous position . . . of opposing elections” in Iraq.

But before that, the Journal (11/14/03) had offered its own curious ideas about democracy, blasting what it claimed was a “State Department attempt to re-create the Philadelphia of 1787 in Baghdad, and to provide a perfectly level playing field between exiles and indigenous Iraqis.” Instead, “we’d be happy if the U.S. simply selected somebody and got behind him,” the paper wrote.

Washington Post foreign affairs columnist Jackson Diehl (2/28/05) recently mocked those who spoke of “Bush’s fanciful illusion that democracy would take root in Iraq and spread through the region.” He pointed to recent popular protests in the Middle East against unelected autocrats, noting that “within weeks of Iraq’s elections, Mubarak and Assad are tacking with panicked haste between bold acts of repression . . . and big promises of reform.”

Yet his own editorial page had just a year earlier (12/2/03) sided with those in the Bush administration who were staunchly resisting Ayatollah Sistani’s call for an elected government in Baghdad—the rationale being that Iraqis, if allowed to choose freely, “could empower Shiite politicians effectively controlled by the clerics.”

Martin Peretz, editor of the New Republic, penned a sarcastic editorial (3/31/05) chastising administration critics for failing to credit Bush’s sweeping democratic vision (the piece’s subhead was “Giving George W. Bush His Due on Democracy”), yet his own magazine had been reporting doggedly for more than a year on the administration’s determination to dictate Iraq’s leaders and forestall elections. One TRB column on Sistani’s call for elections (2/9/04) was headlined “Panic Room” (in a reference to the administration terror at the prospect of a free vote) and noted Sistani’s “justifiable fear” that Iraq’s Shia majority “will be disenfranchised yet again, this time at the hands of the United States.”

Looking at the Bush administration’s strategy since the invasion, designed to keep power in U.S. hands while marginalizing Islamist parties, the elections can only be considered a massive defeat for the administration. Yet the press has been all too willing to accept its disingenuous declarations of victory. As news reports roll in of autocrats from Cairo to Damascus to Teheran quaking in their boots at the prospect of democratization in the Middle East, one more capital should probably be added to that list—but Washington will likely remain absent.

Brecht’s Poetry: Angry or Evil? Michael Wood THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS March 21, 2019

Brecht’s Poetry: Angry or Evil?

An extended ode to the revolutionary German playwright-genius Bertolt Brecht, whose exhaustive new collected poems exalt combating injustice while keeping faith in his fidelity to dissent.

March 21, 2019 Michael Wood  THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Bertolt Brecht,

Your spectator is sitting not only
In your theatre, but also
In the world.

‘I live in dark times,’ Brecht said, but he liked to believe the darkness would end. In the poem containing those words, written in the 1930s, he apologises to ‘those born after’, saying that

Hatred, even of meanness
Makes you ugly.
Anger, even at injustice
Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly

‘Could not be friendly’ is a discreet but painful understatement, a too amiable hint at horrors. Dark times mean not only that terrible things happen to the world and to us but also that we have had a hand in the terrible things. In a remarkable late poem Brecht imagines a loved landscape has changed, suddenly let him down. But it hasn’t changed. He has remembered where he is in moral time.

The white poplar, a famous local beauty
Today an old hag. The lake
A bowl of slops, don’t touch it!
The fuchsias among the snapdragon cheap and showy.
Why?
Last night in a dream I saw fingers pointing at me
As though at a leper. They were worn by work and
They were broken.
There are things you don’t know! I cried.
Knowing I was guilty

The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine
W.W. Norton, December 2018; 1312 pages 
Hardcover:  $49.95
December 4,2018
ISBN  978-0-87140-767-2

We don’t have to apologise for our times. We can gloat over their darkness, become the pointing fingers. This, I take it, is the implication of a much earlier epigram:

In the dark times
Will there be singing?
There will be singing.
Of the dark times.

Or there could be silence. Brecht covers this ground too.

They will not say: when the nut tree shook in the wind
But rather: it was when the housepainter trampled the workers.
They will not say: when the child skimmed the flat pebble over the rapids
But rather: when the ground was being prepared for great wars.
They will not say: when the woman walked into the room
But rather: when the great powers united against the workers.
But they will not say: the times were dark
But rather: why were their poets silent?

There is something clunky and too correct about the party line here – the house painter was far more ecumenical in his trampling – but the prophecy of the final question is eloquent and looks forward to the title of a Heinrich Böll novel: Where were you, Adam? Where were we when the unfriendliness got out of control?

‘Is there no grace, no credit,’ Brecht writes in a 1921 diary entry, ‘is there no one who does not believe in our sins, who thinks better of us than we ourselves do?’ The answer is probably no, but one implication of the cry is that we might try to be this person for others. Brecht’s plays and poems perform this role with a kind of stealthy splendour. Surely no other writer was ever so patient, funny and astute about human frailty. There is a sort of puzzle here, though, that we need to dispose of. Isn’t he just letting everyone else off the hook so he won’t have to hang there himself? There are moments when this seems to be what is happening. Brecht’s announcement that ‘in me you have someone you cannot count on’ sounds like a blank ethical cheque, an advance abolition of the need for forgiveness. But these moments are remarkably rare. Hannah Arendt says one of Brecht’s ‘great virtues’ was that he ‘never felt sorry for himself – hardly ever was even interested in himself’. The person he called ‘poor B.B.’ feels like a character in one of his plays, and we hear the confessional note only in poems like the one I quoted, about the altered white poplar, and the last but one piece in the Collected Poems:

And I always thought the very simplest words
Would be enough. If I say what is
Every heart will surely be lacerated.
That you will go under if you don’t fight back
Surely you must see that?

It is perhaps worth having Michael Hamburger’s version here, just to hear a slightly different lilt:

And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.

Brecht is attentive to all kinds of weakness and forms of helplessness that he doesn’t have, and the ones he does have tend to make him an expert rather than a hypocrite, the man who will never cast the first stone. We remember too that the cry in the diary was not an address to an individual conscience but a dream of other, kinder minds.

‘The Infanticide Marie Farrar’ tells us that the sentenced woman shows ‘the frailties of all creation’ and the poem’s refrain, repeated nine times with very slight variations, runs: ‘But you, I beg of you, contain your wrath for all/God’s creatures need the help of all.’ The chorale that ends The Threepenny Opera – the music is Kurt Weill’s affectionate parody of Bach – makes the same recommendation: ‘Combat injustice but in moderation.’ In these and many other lines we hear the voice of the Protestant who grew up in a largely Catholic world, and who kept not the faith of his parents but his own form of fidelity to dissent. Brecht always knew how to catch the fakery in religious and social piety, but also knew what a genuine, secularised care for others might look like. ‘Don’t give up on your own kind’, he says; and praises doctors and nurses ‘who/Remember their obligation to those who/Have a human face.’

Brecht was born in Augsburg in 1898 and grew up there. He moved to Berlin in 1924, already something of a celebrity. The huge success of The Threepenny Opera in 1928 was not anticipated by anyone, but was unmistakable. Lotte Lenya, writing later about those days, said ‘Berlin was swept by a Dreigroschenoper fever. In the streets no other tunes were whistled.’ There were other fevers around, though, and in 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, as Kuhn and Constantine tell us, Brecht and his Jewish wife, Helene Weigel, left Germany. Several years of exile followed, principally in Denmark and the United States, and it is possible that exile didn’t really end when both of them returned to Berlin. Brecht was a devout communist but not much of a party man, and famously mocked the East German government’s response to a 1953 revolt in these terms:

            would it not
Be simpler if the government
Dissolved the people and
Elected another one?

And although he regularly defended the workers against all their enemies, his deep sympathy was with a certain kind of heroic disorder, as evoked in the wonderful poem ‘The breaking up of the ship, the Oskawa, by her crew’. The ostensible argument concerns the poor wages of the sailors, but what is shown is their recklessly reprehensible behaviour, the glorious slack they allow themselves. ‘Since the wages were bad’, we read,

We felt the need to drown
Our troubles in alcohol, so
Several cases of champagne found
Their way into the crew’s quarters.

The ship gets lost a few times but finally makes it from Hamburg to Rio. It sets off again with a new cargo (of meat) and the old crew. Negligence causes a fire, the dynamos won’t work, the meat goes bad, the engines are ruined by an inept use of salt water, various attempts at repair fail and the ship limps back to Hamburg – it has to be towed from Holland – and is scrapped. The last words of the poem are

      Any child, we thought
Could see that our wages had
Really been too niggardly.

Kuhn and Constantine tell us that ‘less than half of [Brecht’s] output of poems was published by the time of his death in 1956,’ and every description of the opus sounds dizzying. The 1976 selection of translations edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim contains ‘roughly five hundred poems’, while a German collected edition of 1967 has ‘approximately one thousand items’. The new book tells us that the latest complete works includes ‘more than two thousand poems’, of which ‘over twelve hundred’ are translated here.

I don’t know whether these numbers in themselves suggest variety or the possibility of a lot of repetition. Brecht’s style and diction are pretty consistent, witty, idiomatic, often close to ordinary speech, never far from the song or the ballad. The literary forms he uses are very diverse, though, and I’m not sure I can name them all. Among them are narrative poems, lyrical meditations, fables, aphorisms, maxims, instructions, polemics, parodies, satires, handbooks, elegies, songs from plays, sonnet sequences, prose reflections and an imitation of a book of devotions. I was delighted to see in this book a connection I didn’t know Brecht had made: one of the lines from the song celebrating the dark skills of Mack the Knife (‘Is not asked and does not know’, in Eric Bentley’s version) is attached to Göring.

In the house …
Lived a certain Mr Göring
Who knew nothing, or wasn’t asked.

There is a lot of formal travel between a cryptic, slightly self-mocking portrait like this one:

Wandering this way and that
Kept no note of my hither and thither
Don’t know where I left my hat
Nor the previous seven either

and the unprotected sweep of

Everything was beautiful on that sole evening, ma soeur
After it never again and never before –
True: all I was left with then were the great birds
That in the dark sky when evening comes are hungry.

Similarly, it’s good stretch from the quiet anger of this image of support for the Nazis:

Knowledge is cultivated too. Out from the libraries
Step the slaughtermen.

to this intimate evocation of the grief of mothers for their soldier sons:

And the years go by. He is not dead.
He will never die. It is only that he’ll never come back.
A coffee pot stays full and empty a chair.
And they save him a bed and they save him bread
And they pray for him and when they lack
Always they entreat him to come home here.

Haunting narratives include that of the dead soldier who is dug up and sent back to war on the grounds that when recruits are needed death is only a form of malingering, and that of the children’s march in Poland which ends in their disappearance, their only legacy a message tied around a dog’s neck:

Please help us, we are lost.
We can’t find the way anymore.
We are fifty-five, the dog will lead
You to where we are …

The writing was a child’s.
Peasants read it aloud.
That was a year and a half ago.
The dog hungered and died.

Brecht was a great believer in doubt; it was a form of faith for him. But he could be harsh on easy doubters:

Their only action is vacillation.
Their favourite phrase: it’s not yet certain.
So granted, when you praise doubt
Do not praise
The doubt that is despair!

What use is doubting to him
Who cannot make up his mind!

This example leads us to what is perhaps a good place to end these illustrations. Brecht loved the idea of reversible logic, because it leaves the reader or spectator with no option except thinking. In one poem he mentions a shelter for the homeless in New York:

The world is not changed by this …
But a few men have a bed for the night

The next stanza says

A few men have a bed for the night …
But the world is not changed by this

A later poem, this time quoted in full, repeats the move:

Everything changes. You can
Begin anew with your very last breath.
But what has been, has been. And the water
You once poured into the wine, you can
Never drain off again.

What has been, has been. The water
That you poured into the wine, you can
Never drain off again. But
Everything changes. You can
Begin anew with your very last breath.

*

Kuhn and Constantine rather sniffily say they are not ‘fond of translation theory and leave it to others to describe our practice, as they wish’. Of course any established academic pursuit is fair game for scepticism, but it seems a little defensive to suggest you don’t care how your work is described or couldn’t find any such description interesting. In fact these new versions hold up very well to close study, especially in matters of rhyming, usually the downfall of translators. Where there are questions they concern not correctness or fidelity but intriguing matters of interpretation. One of the tasks of the translator, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, apart from helping us to read texts we couldn’t otherwise approach, is to show what different languages allow their speakers to do with words – and also what those languages do not allow.

A good case arises with Brecht’s short poem ‘The mask of the angry one’, or is it ‘The mask of evil’?

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving
Mask of an angry demon, lacquered in gold.
Feelingly I observe
The swollen veins at his temples, hinting
What a great strain it is to be angry.

Here is what H.R. Hays (1947) has:

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.

The German text is:

An meiner Wand hängt ein japanisches Holzwerk,
Maske eines bösen Dämons, bemalt mit Goldlack.
Mitfühlend sehe ich
Die geschwollenen Stirnadern, andeutend
Wie anstrengend es ist, böse zu sein.

We might say, if we are being theoretical, that ‘feelingly’ is a bit too literal for mitfühlend, which is just the Germanic form of ‘sympathetically’; but that ‘hinting’ gets us closer than ‘indicating’ does to the indirection of the idea. Still, the real point of division (and of this comparison) obviously lies in the word böse, which also appears in the poem’s title. It signifies ‘mean’ or ‘naughty’ or ‘cross’ or ‘evil’, depending on context and intention. When Kafka uses it in his aphorisms (‘Evil is what distracts’; ‘Evil knows about good, but good knows nothing of evil’) ‘evil’ clearly works best, and we can back up this sense with the memory that ‘Der Böse’ is also a name for Satan, the Evil One. The proximity of the word in the poem to ‘demon’ might lead us to prefer Hays’s version. But then with Brecht we may not want the theological dimension of Kafka’s claim, and if we’re in an atheistic mood, we can think he just means ‘very very bad’. In any case, the word certainly also means ‘angry’.

The situation becomes more delicate when Rilke, in the ‘Fourth Duino Elegy’, uses the word to say what he doesn’t understand about the mild manners of children who die young.

                    Murderers are easy
to understand. But this: that one can contain
death, the whole of death, even before
life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart
gently, and not refuse to go on living,
is inexpressible.

                        Mörder sind
leicht einzusehen. Aber dies: den Tod,
den ganzen Tod, noch vor dem Leben so
sanft zu enthalten und nicht bös zu sein,
ist unbeschreiblich.

For the phrase ‘nicht bös zu sein’ we need something that catches the sulkiness the children don’t have, and the literal ‘not to be angry’ used by C.F. MacIntyre, for example, won’t do the trick. I think Stephen Mitchell’s ‘not refuse to go on living’ is too metaphysical for these youngsters, but it does give a measure of what Rilke is getting ordinary language (and behind it the image of the behaviour of ordinary children) to do.

So with Brecht, angry or evil? We can guess at what Brecht meant, and if he was around, we could ask him. His response might settle things for some of us. But there is no way of making the word on the page not have, for a given reader, any or all of its meanings in current (or even ancient) usage. Kuhn and Constantine speak eloquently of the ways in which Brecht’s poems ‘are never just the servants of his politics … they exceed his engagement in the particular and necessary cause.’ And they are not entirely the servants of Brecht himself. As the above examples show, translators have to make choices on the behalf of writers, and even in the original language the reader may have a long sliding scale of options.

[Essayist Michael Wood is a editorial board member of, and a regular contributor to, the London Review of Books, He says he lives in dark times, but tries to shine a little light here and there.]

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD Matt Taibbi on the failures of the press in the Russia-gate hysteria.Mar 23 2019

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD

The Iraq war faceplant damaged the reputation of the press. Russiagate just destroyed it

Mar 23

Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete, I’m releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top.

Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

As has long been rumored, the former FBI chief’s independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no “presidency-wrecking” conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman’s definition of “collusion” with Russia.

With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by the New York Times:

A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.

The Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. Nobody even pretended it was supposed to be a fact-finding mission, instead of an act of faith.

The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing “All I Want for Christmas is You” to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.”

The Times story today tried to preserve Santa Mueller’s reputation, noting Trump’s Attorney General William Barr’s reaction was an “endorsement” of the fineness of Mueller’s work:

In an apparent endorsement of an investigation that Mr. Trump has relentlessly attacked as a “witch hunt,” Mr. Barr said Justice Department officials never had to intervene to keep Mr. Mueller from taking an inappropriate or unwarranted step.

Mueller, in other words, never stepped out of the bounds of his job description. But could the same be said for the news media?

For those anxious to keep the dream alive, the Times published its usual graphic of Trump-Russia “contacts,” inviting readers to keep making connections. But in a separate piece by Peter Baker, the paper noted the Mueller news had dire consequences for the press:

It will be a reckoning for President Trump, to be sure, but also for Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, for Congress, for Democrats, for Republicans, for the news media and, yes, for the system as a whole…

This is a damning page one admission by the Times. Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting “We don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”

The paper was signaling it understood there would now be questions about whether or not news outlets like themselves made a galactic error by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020.

Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population, a group that (perhaps thanks to this story) is now larger than his original base. As Baker notes, a full 50.3% of respondents in a poll conducted this month said they agree with Trump the Mueller probe is a “witch hunt.”

Stories have been coming out for some time now hinting Mueller’s final report might leave audiences “disappointed,” as if a President not being a foreign spy could somehow be bad news.

Openly using such language has, all along, been an indictment. Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants.

There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…

Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.

For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute.

The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.

The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.

The betrayal narrative was not reported at first as metaphor. It was not “Trump likes the Russians so much, he might as well be a spy for them.” It was literal spying, treason, and election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump “will die in jail.”

In the early months of this scandal, the New York Times said Trump’s campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence; the Wall Street Journal told us our spy agencies were withholding intelligence from the new President out of fear he was compromised; news leaked out our spy chiefs had even told other countries like Israel not to share their intel with us, because the Russians might have “leverages of pressure” on Trump.

CNN told us Trump officials had been in “constant contact” with “Russians known to U.S. intelligence,” and the former director of the CIA, who’d helped kick-start the investigation that led to Mueller’s probe, said the President was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” committing acts “nothing short of treasonous.”

Hillary Clinton insisted Russians “could not have known how to weaponize” political ads unless they’d been “guided” by Americans. Asked if she meant Trump, she said, “It’s pretty hard not to.” Harry Reid similarly said he had “no doubt” that the Trump campaign was “in on the deal” to help Russians with the leak.

None of this has been walked back. To be clear, if Trump were being blackmailed by Russian agencies like the FSB or the GRU, if he had any kind of relationship with Russian intelligence, that would soar over the “overwhelming and bipartisan” standard, and Nancy Pelosi would be damning torpedoes for impeachment right now.

There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”

Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.

---

#Russiagate debuted as a media phenomenon in mid-summer, 2016. The roots of the actual story, i.e. when the multi-national investigation began, go back much further, to the previous year at least. Oddly, that origin tale has not been nailed down yet, and blue-state audiences don’t seem terribly interested in it, either.

By June and July of 2016, bits of the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, which had been funded by the Democratic National Committeethrough the law firm Perkins Coie (which in turn hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS), were already in the ether.

The Steele report occupies the same role in #Russiagate the tales spun by Ahmed Chalabi occupied in the WMD screwup. Once again, a narrative became turbo-charged when Officials With Motives pulled the press corps by its nose to a swamp of unconfirmable private assertions.

Some early stories, like a July 4, 2016 piece by Franklin Foer in Slate called “Putin’s Puppet,” outlined future Steele themes in “circumstantial” form. But the actual dossier, while it influenced a number of pre-election Trump-Russia news stories (notably one by Michael Isiskoff of Yahoo! that would be used in a FISA warrant application), didn’t make it into print for a while.

Though it was shopped to at least nine news organizations during the summer and fall of 2016, no one bit, for the good reason that news organizations couldn’t verify its “revelations.”

The Steele claims were explosive if true. The ex-spy reported Trump aide Carter Page had been offered fees on a big new slice of the oil giant Rosneft if he could help get sanctions against Russia lifted. He also said Trump lawyer Michael Cohen went to Prague for “secret discussions with Kremlin representatives and associated operators/hackers.”

Most famously, he wrote the Kremlin had kompromat of Trump “deriling” [sic] a bed once used by Barack and Michelle Obama by “employing a number of prostitutes to perform a 'golden showers' (urination) show.”

This was too good of a story not to do. By hook or crook, it had to come out. The first salvo was by David Corn of Mother Jones on October 31, 2016: “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.”

The piece didn’t have pee, Prague, or Page in it, but it did say Russian intelligence had material that could “blackmail” Trump. It was technically kosher to print because Corn wasn’t publishing the allegations themselves, merely that the FBI had taken possession of them.

A bigger pretext was needed to get the other details out. This took place just after the election, when four intelligence officials presented copies of the dossier to both President-Elect Trump and outgoing President Obama.

From his own memos, we know FBI Director James Comey, ostensibly evincing concern for Trump’s welfare, told the new President he was just warning him about what was out there, as possible blackmail material:

I wasn’t saying [the Steele report] was true, only that I wanted him to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold [sic].

Comey’s generous warning to Trump about not providing a “news hook,” along with a promise to keep it all “close-held,” took place on January 6, 2017. Within four days, basically the entire Washington news media somehow knew all about this top-secret meeting and had the very hook they needed to go public. Nobody in the mainstream press thought this was weird or warranted comment.

Even Donald Trump was probably smart enough to catch the hint when, of all outlets, it was CNN that first broke the story of “Classified documents presented last week to Trump” on January 10.

At the same time, Buzzfeed made the historic decision to publish the entire Steele dossier, bringing years of pee into our lives. This move birthed the Russiagate phenomenon as a never-ending, minute-to-minute factor in American news coverage.

Comey was right. We couldn’t have reported this story without a “hook.” Therefore the reports surrounding Steele technically weren’t about the allegations themselves, but rather the journey of those allegations, from one set of official hands to another. Handing the report to Trump created a perfect pretext.

This trick has been used before, both in Washington and on Wall Street, to publicize unconfirmed private research. A short seller might hire a consulting firm to prepare a report on a company he or she has bet against. When the report is completed, the investor then tries to get the SEC or the FBI to take possession. If they do, news leaks the company is “under investigation,” the stock dives, and everyone wins.  

This same trick is found in politics. A similar trajectory drove negative headlines in the scandal surrounding New Jersey’s Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who was said to be under investigation by the FBI for underage sex crimes (although some were skeptical). The initial story didn’t hold up, but led to other investigations.

Same with the so-called “Arkansas project,” in which millions of Republican-friendly private research dollars produced enough noise about the Whitewater scandal to create years of headlines about the Clintons. Swiftboating was another example. Private oppo isn’t inherently bad. In fact it has led to some incredible scoops, including Enron. But reporters usually know to be skeptical of private info, and figure the motives of its patrons into the story.

The sequence of events in that second week of January, 2017 will now need to be heavily re-examined. We now know, from his own testimony, that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had some kind of role in helping CNN do its report, presumably by confirming part of the story, perhaps through an intermediary or two (there is some controversy over whom exactly was contacted, and when).

Why would real security officials help litigate this grave matter through the media? Why were the world’s most powerful investigative agencies acting like they were trying to move a stock, pushing an private, unverified report that even Buzzfeed could see had factual issues? It made no sense at the time, and makes less now.

In January of 2017, Steele’s pile of allegations became public, read by millions. “It is not just unconfirmed,” Buzzfeed admitted. “It includes some clear errors.”

Buzzfeed’s decision exploded traditional journalistic standards against knowingly publishing material whose veracity you doubt. Although a few media ethicistswondered at it, this seemed not to bother the rank-and-file in the business. Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith is still proud of his decision today. I think this was because many reporters believed the report was true.

When I read the report, I was in shock. I thought it read like fourth-rate suspense fiction (I should know: I write fourth-rate suspense fiction). Moreover it seemed edited both for public consumption and to please Steele’s DNC patrons.

Steele wrote of Russians having a file of “compromising information” on Hillary Clinton, only this file supposedly lacked “details/evidence of unorthodox or embarrassing behavior” or “embarrassing conduct.”

We were meant to believe the Russians, across decades of dirt-digging, had an emptykompromat file on Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of human tabloid headline Bill Clinton? This point was made more than once in the reports, as if being emphasized for the reading public.

There were other curious lines, including the bit about Russians having “moles” in the DNC, plus some linguistic details that made me wonder at the nationality of the report author.

Still, who knew? It could be true. But even the most cursory review showed the report had issues and would need a lot of confirming. This made it more amazing that the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, held hearings on March 20, 2017 that blithely read out Steele report details as if they were fact. From Schiff’s opening statement:

According to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who is reportedly held in high regard by U.S. Intelligence, Russian sources tell him that Page has also had a secret meeting with Igor Sechin (SEH-CHIN), CEO of Russian gas giant Rosneft… Page is offered brokerage fees by Sechin on a deal involving a 19 percent share of the company.

I was stunned watching this. It’s generally understood that members of congress, like reporters, make an effort to vet at least their prepared remarks before making them public.

But here was Schiff, telling the world Trump aide Carter Page had been offered huge fees on a 19% stake in Rosneft – a company with a $63 billion market capitalization – in a secret meeting with a Russian oligarch who was also said to be “a KGB agent and close friend of Putin’s.”

(Schiff meant “FSB agent.” The inability of #Russiagaters to remember Russia is not the Soviet Union became increasingly maddening over time. Donna Brazile still hasn’t deleted her tweet about how “The Communists are now dictating the terms of the debate.” )

Schiff’s speech raised questions. Do we no longer have to worry about getting accusations right if the subject is tied to Russiagate? What if Page hadn’t done any of these things? To date, he hasn’t been charged with anything. Shouldn’t a member of congress worry about this?

A few weeks after that hearing, Steele gave testimony in a British lawsuit filed by one of the Russian companies mentioned in his reports. In a written submission, Steele said his information was “raw” and “needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified.” He also wrote that (at least as pertained to the memo in that case) he had not written his report “with the intention that it be republished to the world at large.”

That itself was a curious statement, given that Steele reportedly spoke with multiple reporters in the fall of 2016, but this was his legal position. This story about Steele’s British court statements did not make it into the news much in the United States, apart from a few bits in conservative outlets like The Washington Times.

I contacted Schiff’s office to ask if the congressman if he knew about Steele’s admission that his report needed verifying, and if that changed his view of it at all. The response (emphasis mine):

The dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and which was leaked publicly several months ago contains information that may be pertinent to our investigation. This is true regardless of whether it was ever intended for public dissemination. Accordingly, the Committee hopes to speak with Mr. Steele in order to help substantiate or refute each of the allegations contained in the dossier.

Schiff had not spoken to Steele before the hearing, and read out the allegations knowing they were unsubstantiated.

The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail, the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc. In metaphorical terms, we were unable to independently produce Steele’s results in the lab. Failure to reckon with this corrupted the narrative from the start. 

For years, every hint the dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast on Steele’s revelations, the press was quiet. Washington Post reporter Greg Miller went to Prague and led a team looking for evidence Cohen had been there. Post reporters, Miller said, “literally spent weeks and months trying to run down” the Cohen story.

“We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague, through all over the place, just to try to figure out if he was ever there,” he said, “and came away empty.”

This was heads-I-win, tails-you-lose reporting. One assumes if Miller found Cohen’s name in a hotel ledger, it would have been on page 1 of the Post. The converse didn’t get a mention in Miller’s own paper. He only told the story during a discussion aired by C-SPAN about a new book he’d published. Only The Daily Caller and a few conservative blogs picked it up.

It was the same when Bob Woodward said, “I did not find [espionage or collusion]… Of course I looked for it, looked for it hard.”

The celebrated Watergate muckraker – who once said he’d succumbed to “groupthink”in the WMD episode and added, “I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder” – didn’t push very hard here, either. News that he’d tried and failed to find collusion didn’t get into his own paper. It only came out when Woodward was promoting his book Fear in a discussion with conservative host Hugh Hewitt.

When Michael Cohen testified before congress and denied under oath ever being in Prague, it was the same. Few commercial news outlets bothered to take note of the implications this had for their previous reports. Would a man clinging to a plea deal lie to congress on national television about this issue?

There was a CNN story, but the rest of the coverage was all in conservative outlets – the National Review, Fox, The Daily Caller. The Washington Post’s response was to run an editorial sneering at “How conservative media downplayed Michael Cohen’s testimony.”

Perhaps worst of all was the episode involving Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff. He had already been part of one strange tale: the FBI double-dipping when it sought a FISA warrant to conduct secret surveillance of Carter Page, the would-be mastermind who was supposed to have brokered a deal with oligarch Sechin.

In its FISA application, the FBI included both the unconfirmed Steele report and Isikoff’s September 23, 2016 Yahoo! story, “U.S. Intel Officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.” The Isikoff story, which claimed Page had met with “high ranking sanctioned officials” in Russia, had relied upon Steele as an unnamed source.

This was similar to a laundering technique used in the WMD episode called “stove-piping,” i.e. officials using the press to “confirm” information the officials themselves fed the reporter.

But there was virtually no non-conservative press about this problem apart from a Washington Post story pooh-poohing the issue. (Every news story that casts any doubt on the collusion issue seems to meet with an instantaneous “fact check” in the Post.) The Post insisted the FISA issue wasn’t serious among other things because Steele was not the “foundation” of Isikoff’s piece.

Isikoff was perhaps the reporter most familiar with Steele. He and Corn of Mother Jones, who also dealt with the ex-spy, wrote a bestselling book that relied upon theories from Steele, Russian Roulette, including a rumination on the “pee” episode. Yet Isikoff in late 2018 suddenly said he believed the Steele report would turn out to be “mostly false.”

Once again, this only came out via a podcast, John Ziegler’s “Free Speech Broadcasting” show. Here’s a transcript of the relevant section:

Isikoff: When you actually get into the details of the Steele dossier, the specific allegations, you know, we have not seen the evidence to support them. And in fact there is good grounds to think some of the more sensational allegations will never be proven, and are likely false.

Ziegler: That’s...

Isikoff: I think it’s a mixed record at best at this point, things could change, Mueller may yet produce evidence that changes this calculation. But based on the public record at this point I have to say that most of the specific allegations have not been borne out.

Ziegler: That’s interesting to hear you say that, Michael because as I’m sure you know, your book was kind of used to validate the pee tape, for lack of a better term.

Isikoff: Yeah. I think we had some evidence in there of an event that may have inspired the pee tape and that was the visit that Trump made with a number of characters who later showed up in Moscow, specifically Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone to this raunchy Las Vegas nightclub where one of the regular acts was a skit called “Hot For Teacher” in which dancers posing as college Co-Ed’s urinated – or simulated urinating on their professor. Which struck me as an odd coincidence at best. I think, you know, it is not implausible that event may have inspired...

Ziegler: An urban legend?

Isikoff: ...allegations that appeared in the Steele dossier. 

Isikoff delivered this story with a laughing tone. He seamlessly transitioned to what he then called the “real” point, i.e. “the irony is Steele may be right, but it wasn’t the Kremlin that had sexual kompromat on Donald Trump, it was the National Enquirer.”

Recapping: the reporter who introduced Steele to the world (his September 23, 2016 story was the first to reference him as a source), who wrote a book that even he concedes was seen as “validating” the pee tape story, suddenly backtracks and says the whole thing may have been based on a Las Vegas strip act, but it doesn’t matter because Stormy Daniels, etc.

Another story of this type involved a court case in which Webzilla and parent company XBT sued Steele and Buzzfeed over the mention their firm in one of the memos. It came out in court testimony that Steele had culled information about XBT/Webzilla from a 2009 post on CNN’s "iReports” page. 

Asked if he understood these posts came from random users and not CNN journalists who’d been fact-checked, Steele replied, “I do not.” 

This comical detail was similar to news that the second British Mi6 dossier released just before the Iraq invasion had been plagiarized in part from a thirteen year-old student thesis from California State University, not even by intelligence people, but by mid-level functionaries in Tony Blair’s press office. 

There were so many profiles of Steele as an “astoundingly diligent” spymaster straight out of LeCarre: he was routinely described like a LeCarre-ian grinder like the legendary George Smiley, a man in the shadows whose bookish intensity was belied by his “average,” “neutral,” “quiet,” demeanor, being “more low-key than Smiley.” One would think it might have rated a mention that our “Smiley” was cutting and pasting text like a community college freshman. But the story barely made news.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step three (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication.

That’s been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the “retraction” process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences.

This is a major structural flaw of the new fully-divided media landscape in which Republican media covers Democratic corruption and Democratic media covers Republican corruption. If neither “side” feels the need to disclose its own errors and inconsistencies, mistakes accumulate quickly.

This has been the main difference between Russiagate and the WMD affair. Despite David Remnick’s post-invasion protestations that “nobody got [WMD] completely right,” the Iraq war was launched against the objections of the 6 million or more people who did get it right, and protested on the streets. There was open skepticism of Bush claims dotting the press landscape from the start, with people like Jack Shafer tearing apart every Judith Miller story in print. Most reporters are Democrats and the people hawking the WMD story were mostly Republicans, so there was political space for protest.

Russiagate happened in an opposite context. If the story fell apart it would benefit Donald Trump politically, a fact that made a number of reporters queasy about coming forward. #Russiagate became synonymous with #Resistance, which made public skepticism a complicated proposition.

Early in the scandal, I appeared on To The Point, a California-based public radio show hosted by Warren Olney, with Corn of Mother Jones. I knew David a little and had been friendly with him. He once hosted a book event for me in Washington. In the program, however, the subject of getting facts right came up and Corn said this was not a time for reporters to be picking nits:

So Democrats getting overeager, overenthusiastic, stating things that may not be [unintelligible] true…? Well, tell me a political issue where that doesn’t happen. I think that’s looking at the wrong end of the telescope.

I wrote him later and suggested that since we’re in the press, and not really about anything except avoiding “things that may not be true,” maybe we had different responsibilities than “Democrats”? He wrote back:

Feel free to police the Trump opposition. But on the list of shit that needs to be covered these days, that's just not high on my personal list.

Other reporters spoke of an internal struggle. When the Mueller indictment of the Internet Research Agency was met with exultation in the media, New Yorker writer Adrian Chen, who broke the original IRA story, was hesitant to come forward with some mild qualms about the way the story was being reported:

“Either I could stay silent and allow the conversation to be dominated by those pumping up the Russian threat,” he said, “or I could risk giving fodder to Trump and his allies.”

After writing, “Confessions of a Russiagate Skeptic,” poor Blake Hounsell of Politicotook such a beating on social media, he ended up denouncing himself a year later.

“What I meant to write is, I wasn’t skeptical,” he said.

Years ago, in the midst of the WMD affair, Times public editor Daniel Okrent noted the paper’s standard had moved from “Don’t get it first, get it right” to “Get it first and get it right.” From there, Okrent wrote, “the next devolution was an obvious one.”

We’re at that next devolution: first and wrong. The Russiagate era has so degraded journalism that even once “reputable” outlets are now only about as right as politicians, which is to say barely ever, and then only by accident.

Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia “bombshells” being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. As has been noted by Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept and others, if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way.

In some cases the stories are only partly wrong, as in the case of the famed “17 intelligence agencies said Russia was behind the hacking” story (it was actually four: the Director of National Intelligence “hand-picking” a team from the FBI, CIA, and NSA).

In other cases the stories were blunt false starts, resulting in ugly sets of matching headlines:

“Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility”

Washington Post, December 31, 2016.

“Russian government hackers do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility”

Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2017.

“Trump Campaign Aides had repeated contacts with Russian Intelligence,” published by the Times on Valentine’s Day, 2017, was an important, narrative-driving “bombshell” that looked dicey from the start. The piece didn’t say whether the contact was witting or unwitting, whether the discussions were about business or politics, or what the contacts supposedly were at all.

Normally a reporter would want to know what the deal is before he or she runs a story accusing people of having dealings with foreign spies. “Witting” or “Unwitting” ought to be a huge distinction, for instance. It soon after came out that people like former CIA chief John Brennan don’t think this is the case. “Frequently, people who are on a treasonous path do not know they’re on a treasonous path,” he said, speaking of Trump’s circle.

This seemed a dangerous argument, the kind of thing that led to trouble in the McCarthy years. But let’s say the contacts were serious. From a reporting point of view, you’d still need to know exactly what the nature of such contacts were before you run that story, because the headline implication is grave. Moreover you’d need to know it well enough to report it, i.e. it’s not enough to be told a convincing story off-the-record, you need to be able to share with readers enough so that they can characterize the news themselves.

Not to the Times, which ran the article without the specifics. Months later, Comey blew up this “contacts” story in public, saying, “in the main, it was not true.“

As was the case with the “17 agencies” error, which only got fixed when Clapper testified in congress and was forced to make the correction under oath, the “repeated contacts” story was only disputed when Comey testified in congress, this time before the Senate Intelligence Committee. How many other errors of this type are waiting to be disclosed?

Even the mistakes caught were astounding. On December 1, 2017, ABC reporter Brian Ross claimed Trump “as a candidate” instructed Michael Flynn to contact Russia. The news caused the Dow to plummet 350 points. The story was retracted almost immediately and Ross was suspended.

Bloomberg reported Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank accounts; the subpoenas turned out to be of other individuals’ records. Fortune said C-SPAN was hacked after Russia Today programming briefly interrupted coverage of a Maxine Waters floor address. The New York Times also ran the story, and it’s still up, despite C-SPAN insisting its own “internal routing error” likely caused the feed to appear in place of its own broadcast.

CNN has its own separate sub-list of wrecks. Three of the network’s journalists resigned after a story purporting to tie Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund was retracted. Four more CNN reporters (Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper and Brian Rokus) were bylined in a story that claimed Comey was expected to refute Trump’s claims he was told he wasn’t the target of an investigation. Comey blew that one up, too.

In another CNN scoop gone awry, “Email pointed Trump campaign to WikiLeaks documents,” the network’s reporters were off by ten days in a “bombshell” that supposedly proved the Trump campaign had foreknowledge of Wikileaks dumps. “It’s, uh, perhaps not as significant as what we know now,” offered CNN’s Manu Raju in a painful on-air retraction.

The worst stories were the ones never corrected. A particularly bad example is “After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” from the New York Times on Feb 18, 2018. The piece claimed Russians were trying to divide Americans on social media after a mass shooting using Twitter hashtags like #guncontrolnow, #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting.

The Times ran this quote high up:

 “This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”

About a year after this story came out, Times reporters Scott Shane and Ann Blinder reported that the same outfit, New Knowledge, and in particular that same Jonathon Morgan, had participated in a cockamamie scheme to fake Russian troll activity in an Alabama Senate race. The idea was to try to convince voters Russia preferred the Republican.

The Times quoted a New Knowledge internal report about the idiotic Alabama scheme:

We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet…

The Parkland story was iffy enough when it came out, as Twitter disputed it, and another of the main sources for the initial report, former intelligence official Clint Watts, subsequently said he was “not convinced” on the whole “bot thing.”

But when one of your top sources turns out to have faked exactly the kind of activity described in your article, you should at least take the quote out, or put an update online. No luck: the story remains up on the Times site, without disclaimers.

Russiagate institutionalized one of the worst ethical loopholes in journalism, which used to be limited mainly to local crime reporting. It’s always been a problem that we publish mugshots and names of people merely arrested but not yet found guilty. Those stories live forever online and even the acquitted end up permanently unable to get jobs, smeared as thieves, wife-beaters, drunk drivers, etc.

With Russiagate the national press abandoned any pretense that there’s a difference between indictment and conviction. The most disturbing story involved Maria Butina. Here authorities and the press shared responsibility. Thanks to an indictment that initially said the Russian traded sex for favors, the Times and other outlets flooded the news cycle with breathless stories about a redheaded slut-temptress come to undermine democracy, a “real-life Red Sparrow,” as ABC put it.

But a judge threw out the sex charge after “five minutes” when it turned out to be based on a single joke text to a friend who had taken Butina’s car for inspection.

It’s pretty hard to undo public perception you’re a prostitute once it’s been in a headline, and, worse, the headlines are still out there. You can still find stories like “Maria Butina, Suspected Secret Agent, Used Sex in Covert Plan” online in the New York Times.

Here a reporter might protest: how would I know? Prosecutors said she traded sex for money. Why shouldn’t I believe them?

How about because, authorities have been lying their faces off to reporters since before electricity! It doesn’t take much investigation to realize the main institutional sources in the Russiagate mess – the security services, mainly – have extensive records of deceiving the media.

As noted before, from World War I-era tales of striking union workers being German agents to the “missile gap” that wasn’t (the “gap” was leaked to the press before the Soviets had even one operational ICBM) to the Gulf of Tonkin mess to all the smears of people like Martin Luther King, it’s a wonder newspapers listen to whispers from government sources at all.

In the Reagan years National Security Adviser John Poindexter spread false stories about Libyan terrorist plots to The Wall Street Journal and other papers. In the Bush years, Dick Cheney et al were selling manure by the truckload about various connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, infamously including a story that bomber Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague.

The New York Times ran a story that Atta was in Prague in late October of 2001, even giving a date of the meeting with Iraqis, April 8, or “just five months before the terrorist attacks.” The Prague story was another example of a tale that seemed shaky because American officials were putting the sourcing first on foreign intelligence, then on reporters themselves. Cheney cited the Prague report in subsequent TV appearances, one of many instances of feeding reporters tidbits and then selling reports as independent confirmation.

It wasn’t until three years later, in 2004, that Times reporter James Risen definitively killed the Atta-in-Prague canard (why is it always Prague?) in a story entitled “No evidence of meeting with Iraqi.” By then, of course, it was too late. The Times also held a major dissenting piece by Risen about the WMD case, “C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports,” until days after war started. This is what happens when you start thumbing the scale.

This failure to demand specifics has been epidemic in Russiagate, even when good reporters have been involved. One of the biggest “revelations” of this era involved a story that was broken first by a terrible reporter (the Guardian’s Luke Harding) and followed up by a good one (Jane Mayer of the New Yorker). The key detail involved the elusive origin story of Russiagate.

Mayer’s piece, the March 12, 2018 “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier” in the New Yorker, impacted the public mainly by seeming to bolster the credentials of the dossier author. But it contained an explosive nugget far down. Mayer reported Robert Hannigan, then-head of the GCHQ (the British analog to the NSA) intercepted a “stream of illicit communications” between “Trump’s team and Moscow” at some point prior to August 2016. Hannigan flew to the U.S. and briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original FBI investigation.

When I read that, a million questions came to mind, but first: what did “illicit” mean?

If something “illicit” had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If they had something, why couldn’t they tell us what it was? Why didn’t we deserve to know?

I asked the Guardian: “Was any attempt made to find out what those communications were? How was the existence of these communications confirmed? Did anyone from the Guardian see or hear these intercepts, or transcripts?”

Their one-sentence reply:

The Guardian has strict and rigorous procedures when dealing with source material.

That’s the kind of answer you’d expect from a transnational bank, or the army, not a newspaper.

I asked Mayer the same questions. She was more forthright, noting that, of course, the story had originally been broken by Harding, whose own report said “the precise nature of these exchanges has not been made public.”

She added that “afterwards I independently confirmed aspects of [Harding’s piece] with several well-informed sources,” and “spent months on the Steele story [and] traveled to the UK twice for it.” But, she wrote, “the Russiagate story, like all reporting on sensitive national security issues, is difficult.”

I can only infer she couldn’t find out what “illicit” meant despite proper effort. The detail was published anyway. It may not have seemed like a big deal, but I think it was.

To be clear, I don’t necessarily disbelieve the idea that there were “illicit” contacts between Trump and Russians in early 2015 or before. But if there were such contacts, I can’t think of any legitimate reason why their nature should be withheld from the public.

If authorities can share reasons for concern with foreign countries like Israel, why should American voters not be so entitled? Moreover the idea that we need to keep things secret to protect sources and methods and “tradecraft” (half the press corps became expert in goofy spy language over the last few years, using terms like “SIGINT” like they’ve known them their whole lives), why are we leaking news of our ability to hear Russian officials cheering Trump’s win?

Failure to ask follow-up questions happened constantly with this story. One of the first reports that went sideways involved a similar dynamic: the contention that some leaked DNC emails were forgeries.

MSNBC’s “Intelligence commentator” Malcolm Nance, perhaps the most enthusiastic source of questionable #Russiagate news this side of Twitter conspiracist Louise Mensch, tweeted on October 11, 2016: “#PodestaEmails are already proving to be riddled with obvious forgeries & #blackpropaganda not even professionally done.”

As noted in The Intercept and elsewhere, this was re-reported by the likes of David Frum (a key member of the club that has now contributed to both the WMD and Russiagate panics) and MSNBC host Joy Reid. The reports didn’t stop until roughly October of 2016, among other things because the Clinton campaign kept suggesting to reporters the emails were fake. This could have been stopped sooner if examples of a forgery had been demanded from the Clinton campaign earlier.

Another painful practice that became common was failing to confront your own sources when news dispositive to what they’ve told you pops up. The omnipresent Clapper told Chuck Todd on March 5, 2017, without equivocation, that there had been no FISA application involving Trump or his campaign. “I can deny it,” he said.

It soon after came out this wasn’t true. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Carter Page. This was not a small misstatement by Clapper, because his appearance came a day after Trump claimed in a tweet he’d had his “wires tapped.” Trump was widely ridiculed for this claim, perhaps appropriately so, but in addition to the Page news, it later came out there had been a FISA warrant of Paul Manafort as well, during which time Trump may have been the subject of “incidental” surveillance.

Whether or not this was meaningful, or whether these warrants were justified, are separate questions. The important thing is, Clapper either lied to Todd, or else he somehow didn’t know the FBI had obtained these warrants. The latter seems absurd and unlikely. Either way, Todd ought to been peeved and demanded an explanation. Instead, he had Clapper back on again within months and gave him the usual softball routine, never confronting him about the issue.

Reporters repeatedly got burned and didn’t squawk about it. Where are the outraged stories about all the scads of anonymous “people familiar with the matter” who put reporters in awkward spots in the last years? Why isn’t McClatchy demanding the heads of whatever “four people with knowledge” convinced them to double down on the Cohen-in-Prague story?

Why isn’t every reporter who used “New Knowledge” as a source about salacious Russian troll stories out for their heads (or the heads of the congressional sources who passed this stuff on), after reports they faked Russian trolling? How is it possible NBC and other outlets continued to use New Knowledge as a source in stories identifying antiwar Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian-backed candidate?

How do the Guardian’s editors not already have Harding’s head in a vice for hanging them out to dry on the most dubious un-retracted story in modern history – the tale that the most watched human on earth, Julian Assange, had somehow been visited in the Ecuadorian embassy by Paul Manafort without leaving any record? I’d be dragging Harding’s “well placed source” into the office and beating him with a hose until he handed them something that would pass for corroborating evidence.

The lack of blowback over episodes in which reporters were put in public compromised situations speaks to the overly cozy relationships outlets had with official sources. Too often, it felt like a team effort, where reporters seemed to think it was their duty to take the weight if sources pushed them to overreach. They had absolutely no sense of institutional self-esteem about this.

Being on any team is a bad look for the press, but the press being on team FBI/CIA is an atrocity, Trump or no Trump. Why bother having a press corps at all if you’re going to go that route?

This posture all been couched as anti-Trump solidarity, but really, did former CIA chief John Brennan – the same Brennan who should himself have faced charges for lying to congress about hacking the computers of Senate staff – need the press to whine on his behalf when Trump yanked his security clearance? Did we need the press to hum Aretha Franklin tunes, as ABC did, and chide Trump for lacking R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the CIA? We don’t have better things to do than that “work”?

This catalogue of factual errors and slavish stenography will stand out when future analysts look back at why the “MSM” became a joke during this period, but they were only a symptom of a larger problem. The bigger issue was a radical change in approach.

A lot of #Russiagate coverage became straight-up conspiracy theory, what Baker politely called “connecting the dots.” This was allowed because the press committed to a collusion narrative from the start, giving everyone cover to indulge in behaviors that would never be permitted in normal times.

Such was the case with Jonathan Chait’s #Russiagate opus, “PRUMP TUTIN: Will Trump be Meeting With his Counterpart – or his Handler?” The story was also pitched as “What if Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987,” which recalls the joke from The Wire: “Yo, Herc, what if your mother and father never met?” What if isn’t a good place to be in this business.

This cover story (!) in New York magazine was released in advance of a planned “face-to-face” summit between Trump and Putin, and posited Trump had been under Russian control for decades. Chait noted Trump visited the Soviet Union in 1987 and came back “fired up with political ambition.” He offered the possibility that this was a coincidence, but added:

Indeed, it seems slightly insane to contemplate the possibility that a secret relationship between Trump and Russia dates back this far. But it can’t be dismissed completely. 

I searched the Chait article up and down for reporting that would justify the suggestion Trump had been a Russian agent dating back to the late eighties, when, not that it matters, Russia was a different country called the Soviet Union.

Only two facts in the piece could conceivably have been used to support the thesis: Trump met with a visiting Soviet official in 1986, and visited the Soviet Union in 1987. That’s it. That’s your cover story.

Worse, Chait’s theory was first espoused in Lyndon Larouche’s “Elephants and Donkeys” newsletter in 1987, under a headline, “Do Russians have a Trump card?” This is barrel-scraping writ large.

It’s a mania. Putin is literally in our underpants. Maybe, if we’re lucky, New York might someday admit its report claiming Russians set up an anti-masturbation hotline to trap and blackmail random Americans is suspicious, not just because it seems absurd on its face, but because its source is the same “New Knowledge” group that admitted to faking Russian influence operations in Alabama.

But what retraction is possible for the Washington Post headline, “How will Democrats cope if Putin starts playing dirty tricks for Bernie Sanders (again)?” How to reverse Rachel Maddow’s spiel about Russia perhaps shutting down heat across America during a cold wave? There’s no correction for McCarthyism and fearmongering.

This ultimately will be the endgame of the Russia charade. They will almost certainly never find anything like the wild charges and Manchurian Candidate theories elucidated in the Steele report. But the years of panic over the events of 2016 will lead to radical changes in everything from press regulation to foreign policy, just as the WMD canard led to torture, warrantless surveillance, rendition, drone assassination, secret budgets and open-ended, undeclared wars from Somalia to Niger to Syria. The screw-ups will be forgotten, but accelerated vigilance will remain.

It’s hard to know what policy changes are appropriate because the reporting on everything involving the Russian threat in the last two to three years has been so unreliable.

I didn’t really address the case that Russia hacked the DNC, content to stipulate it for now. I was told early on that this piece of the story seemed “solid,” but even that assertion has remained un-bolstered since then, still based on an “assessment” by the intelligence services that always had issues, including the use of things like RT’s “anti-American” coverage of fracking as part of its case. The government didn’t even examine the DNC’s server, the kind of detail that used to make reporters nervous.

We won’t know how much of any of this to take seriously until the press gets out of bed with the security services and looks at this whole series of events all over again with fresh eyes, as journalists, not political actors. That means being open to asking what went wrong with this story, in addition to focusing so much energy on Trump and Russia.

The WMD mess had massive real-world negative impact, leading to over a hundred thousand deaths and trillions in lost taxpayer dollars. Unless Russiagate leads to a nuclear conflict, we’re unlikely to ever see that level of consequence.

Still, Russiagate has led to unprecedented cooperation between the government and Internet platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, all of which are censoring pages on the left, right, and in between in the name of preventing the “sowing of discord.” The story also had a profound impact on the situation in places like Syria, where Russian and American troops have sat across the Euphrates River from one another, two amped-up nuclear powers at a crossroads.

As a purely journalistic failure, however, WMD was a pimple compared to Russiagate. The sheer scale of the errors and exaggerations this time around dwarfs the last mess. Worse, it’s led to most journalists accepting a radical change in mission. We’ve become sides-choosers, obliterating the concept of the press as an independent institution whose primary role is sorting fact and fiction.

We had the sense to eventually look inward a little in the WMD affair, which is the only reason we escaped that episode with any audience left. Is the press even capable of that kind of self-awareness now? WMD damaged our reputation. If we don’t turn things around, this story will destroy it.

Image by Mike Maguire