This goes rather too far for me (it depends on the author!) but I do think the value-added from good reported political books is more often about added detail, depth, context, and an eye toward posterity rather than scoops
I have no idea what the "scoops" were in Woodward's "Obama's Wars" at this point but I referred back to it recently because it's a detailed, meeting-by-meeting reconstruction of the policy process that simply couldn't be done in ordinary reporting
But I do tend to be more skeptical of the headline-grabbing, big scoops that get spotlighted to sell the books.
George Tenet had a strong case that "Plan of Attack" exaggerated the significance of the "slam dunk" comment in convincing Bush to go to war newyorker.com/magazine/2007/…
I also had some questions about the public presentation of Trump's Covid comments to Woodward — that they prove "he knew the truth."
A fuller look at his comments shows Trump was saying a lot of contradictory and semi-coherent things to Woodward, like he was saying in public.
Bill Casey's alleged deathbed confession was before my time so I don't have a strong view of what happened there but including it for completion: politico.com/story/2012/04/…
And of course all these books have to be viewed with skepticism about sourcing, and especially the heroic self-presentation of the sources that tends to be included.
I don't yet have the book but I am certainly curious whether all this context is included, which makes the reality seem somewhat different from the summaries we've gotten so far: axios.com/mark-milley-wo…
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The tangled, nearly 7-year saga of the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal and investigations that has resulted in Trump now being on the verge of indictment, explained
THE PAYOFF: The month before the 2016 election, Stormy Daniels prepared to come forward alleging a consensual sexual encounter with Trump 10 years prior — but let it be known she'd accept payment for her silent.
Michael Cohen sent the payment, $130,000, on October 27, 2016.
INVESTIGATION 1 (FEDS): When SDNY prosecutors investigated Cohen, they argued the $130,000 payment violated federal campaign finance laws, since it was meant to help Trump win the election.
Cohen pleaded guilty to this and other charges. But the theory was never tested in court
Hunter Biden has filed a countersuit against the computer repair store owner who provided his emails and files to Trump allies.
It's interesting to look very closely at which claims Hunter explicitly denies and which he claims not to have knowledge sufficient to confirm or deny
Hunter denies he was referred to the repair store.
Hunter says he lacks the knowledge to confirm or deny whether he asked the repairman to recover info from damaged computers and whether he himself returned to the shop the next day
So this is not an outright denial that Hunter dropped his laptops off at the repair store. Instead it seems to point to a "I don't remember" (implicitly: "I was too wasted" defense)
Here we have the same exercise, "Whom to Leave Behind," but with different identities. Race is only explicitly mentioned for one person on the list. It's dated 1998 at the bottom.
Thoughtful @henrygrabar piece on how the city-dwellers worrying about a "crime" problem seem to actually be worrying about a "public disorder" problem.
You can imagine a spectrum from “total anarchy” to “authoritarian clampdown."
Current debate is between those who think cities have gotten too disorderly and need more order, vs. those suspicious attempts to enforce more order will inevitably be discriminatory & authoritarian
Another installment of the debate here.
The reason the tide seems to be turning somewhat toward the "more order" camp, it seems to me, is that the "less order" camp doesn't seem to have a solution, focusing instead on denying there's any problem
I wrote about the most consistent throughline to Ron DeSantis's career — his enthusiastic self-reinventions toward whichever political cause is in vogue and whichever persona could help him achieve his next ambition.
This tendency of DeSantis’s was evident back in 2019 when @reihan pointed out that he had shifted from a spending-cutting Tea Partier to a Trump superfan to (early in his governorship) a surprisingly uncontroversial pragmatist. But he wouldn't stop there.
Tucker Carlson and other right commentators play a game where they try to leave the impression that they agree the 2020 election was stolen, without ever quite saying that.
Instead they claim it was in some abstract sense rigged, unfair, or implausible
Per Carlson's revisionist history, the real story about January 6 is that Democrats and the media were mean to Trump supporters.
Not Trump's then-ongoing attempt to steal the election, not the ample violence that did take place, not the disruption to the transfer of power
"I hate him passionately," Carlson texted about Trump on 1/4/21.
But publicly Carlson is all about convincing Trump supporters that he's their champion against their enemies. So he taps into grievance and tells them how they're the true victims. vox.com/politics/2023/…