Thank Goodness I Was Never A News Writer
It was Obama who orchestrated the FBI and CIA to create what is now understood as the “Russia Collusion Hoax” and used it in attempts to destroy his political rival President Donald Trump. He set them like attack dogs on the American presidency, to rip it apart after the American people had elected Trump as their president.
This may be true, but we're a long, long way from seeing it proven, and to write this sort of stuff now is pure wishful thinking. But he's also behind the curve in equating what's coming out with the "Russia Collusion Hoax". There was actually a multifaceted effort, in and out of government and across diverse government agencies, to deflect attention from Clinton and Biden scandals and cook up false accusations against Trump, from the pee dossier to the Ukraine impeachment to January 6 to the Mar-a-Lago raid. It's far from certain that Obama was at the center of everything.Farther down, he namechecks and teases an upcoming column about basically nothing:
I tried out my theory [which he hasn't really outlined] on the great NY Post columnist and best-selling author Miranda Devine. She will appear soon as a guest on the Chicago Way podcast that I co-host with WGN radio executive producer Jeff Carlin and send free as a bonus to subscribers of johnkassnews.com.
Well, what did she say?
“Barack Obama is finding relevance right now, probably not the relevance he’d planned, because he’s now fingered as the ringleader as Donald Trump now calls him, of the whole Russiagate Russia Collusion hoax (I’m linking to a recent column of hers on ‘Bumbling Obama Aides Actually Admit Russiagate was a smear campaign against Trump). Wait a moment. She didn't actually answer anything, he just linked to something she's written in a column days earlier. And note that he doesn't have a close-quote at the end of that link, but in the following paragraph, he's somehow implying that words from Devine, possibly in person now, are anextension of the same conversation:
“It’s very fitting that Mamdani would try to set himself up as some sort of national figure by being ‘mentored’ by Barack Obama and setting himself against Donald Trump because he’s of course “too important” to battle against the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams,” Devine told us.
At minimum, Kass badly needs a copy editor to straighten this mess out. Exactly what did Devine say, and where did she say it? The open-quotes and close-quotes, single quotes and double, are all stirred up in a soup. I guess Kass had an editor who'd fix this at the Tribune, but no longer. He goes on,
Originally I had planned to write a different column about Obama, a light piece with the former president on the psychiatric couch being psychoanalyzed, worrying about the crease in his trousers, complaining about the conservative media, about his wife’s podcast, complaining about disloyal Democrats and the Federal Grand Jury examining his actions and those of his Deep State intelligence dogs and so on.
Who knows? I might return to it.
But I was trained as a newspaperman. And Miranda Devine is a hard news person, though she liked the idea of Obama on my comfy couch.
I think Devine was being polite. This is all fluff, mixed with self-promotion. I don't think I could live with myself knowing I had to do this to make money.The odd thing was that as an Ivy undergraduate, I got the same feeling reading the opinion pieces in the campus newspaper. In freshman comp, the professors were on my case for things like vagueness, poor puncutation, sweeping generalizations, and all the usual other stuff, but the writers in the campus rag were doing exactly the same things and getting away with it. And since this was an Ivy, within a few years, you'd see those same bylines in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Chicago getting away with esactly the same thing.
Somehow I don't think this was a mistake. The people who ran the planet wanted it this way. They still do. They want writers to be obtuse, lazy, and narcissistic. Just look at John Kass.
