More From The New Deep Throat!

The image above is W Mark Felt, the Watergate Deep Throat, from his glory days as FBI Director wannabe. As I said yesterday, it sounds like we have a new Deep Throat, apparently just as highly placed, who's beginning to leak about Biden's classified documents. So far, nobody seems to be getting the point.

The news yesterday evening was that another half-dozen classified documents had been run down in a new search of the Wilmington home, this one conducted by people from the Justice Department, not Biden's personal attorneys, after those attorneys had insisted everything had been found.

Biden’s lawyers immediately tried to get out in front of the revelation, releasing a statement claiming cooperation with the DOJ. But while the administration continues to talk about transparency, one bombshell detail from the search has left the president’s lies fully exposed. Namely, the fact that documents were found that were taken during Biden’s years in the Senate.

I just don't see a "bombshell" here. It's an indication that Biden has operated the same way for pretty much the whole time he's been in public life, but that's nothing new. What's more interesting is this story in the UK Daily Mail:

The long and winding document trail that leads classified documents from Joe Biden's vice presidential office to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. and now back into the hands of the government, includes yet another stopover: a temporary facility in the nation's capital, a source tells DailyMail.com.

"A source". We don't know if this is the same leaker who told CBS News about the November document tranche and then leaked that there'd been a deal to keep that discovery secret, but it really doesn't matter. Nobody knew who the original Deep Throat was for more than 30 years, and it was (and for that matter still is) reasonable to speculate that it may have been more than one person. Mark Felt was a narcissistic guy who'd felt underappreciated, after all; he was fully capable of claiming more credit for Watergate than he deserved. What's interesting is that somebody's leaking, not his precise identity.. Here's the substance:

The documents were moved in the summer of 2017 after spending about six months at a government transition office near the White House once Biden left the vice presidency.

The space, in DC's Chinatown neighborhood, was overseen by the Penn Biden Center while its prized location near the Capitol was being readied. The office had its formal opening, attended by Biden, in 2018.

'Everything was just moved en masse to temporary space, then moved to Penn Biden,' the person told DailyMail.com.

So OK. The White House narrative continues to be that these were just piles of random stuff gathered up in a last-minute frenzy as Biden left the vice presidency, nothing to see here -- but again, that's been the story Trump's people have been telling about how his docs turned up at Mar-a-Lago, with more credibility. The main complaint from the Trump detractors has been that the National Archives should have received that material, it shouldn't even have gone to Florida, and Trump was violating the law even to try to negotiate over it.

The story continues,

The woman who oversaw the packing and shipping of Biden's documents in 2017 was former administrative assistant Kathy Chung, who secured the position with a well-placed recommendation from Hunter Biden, who touted her capabilities to his father.

. . . The former assistant helped oversee the packing of files during the busy tail end of Biden's second term as VP. That was a time that featured a flurry of activity by Biden himself even in his final days in office. It required keeping his office functioning even while things were being put away for safekeeping.

Wait a moment. This is the vice presidency, an office about which no statement is more repeated than John Nance Garner’s observation that “the vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Of classified matters, back in the day, the Manhattan Project "was so secret that FDR did not even inform his fourth-term vice president, Truman, that it existed". But for Joe Biden, "That was a time that featured a flurry of activity by Biden himself even in his final days in office." Color me skeptical, especially given what we've learned about Obama's opinion of Biden's ability.

Whatever the flurry of last-minute activity was, my guess is that it had more to do with keeping up an income stream of baksheesh than anything to do with national business. And I'm still intrigued by all the use of terms like "transition", as in "government transition office" in the link above. We hear of a "transition team" for an incoming administration, but now we're learning of a "transition office" for a departing vice president, whom we would normally expect to be boarding a Southwest flight to fly home coach a la, say, Dan Quayle.

Not Joe Biden. He had to "transition" into a quasi-official headquarters-in-exile at the Penn Biden Center, and it's hard to avoid thinking he felt entitled to quasi-presidential perks there, including continued access to classified material. But why did all this stuff go first to a "transition office" and then, after six months, to the Penn Biden Center? Much was said about how all of Trump's White House detritus should have gone straight to the National Archives, not Mar-a-Lago, but Biden had some sort of special carveout that exempted his stuff.

That's just one queston nobody's asked. Let's just leave aside, at least for now, the whole question of how Biden seems to have been able to represent himself to putative insiders as the president-in-waiting throughout that whole four-year interregnum.

Sounds Like There's A New Deep Throat

A lot has come out over the Biden classified docs over the past few days, but nobody seems to be making much sense of it. I think the key is here:

White House officials are reportedly suspicious about how President Joe Biden’s classified document scandal was leaked to the press after only a select group of White House and Justice Department officials knew about the violation.

The plot to hide the scandal, initially designed by eight of Biden’s closest confidants with apparent approval from the Justice Department, was suddenly leaked to CBS News 68 days after Biden’s personal attorney unearthed the classified documents at the Penn Biden Center. It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations.

There's the whole thing in a nutshell, at least so far. The discovery of the classified docs was a byproduct of some other project that we don't know much about, except that well before any stray docs were involved, some high-priced, well-placed, highly connected lawyers were on the case. But now there's a leaker, when the whole thing was supposed to have been kept very quiet -- and let's reiterate, the docs in the Corvette garage are a byproduct, a footnote, a bagatelle that are connected only in some remote way to something bigger that's still under wraps.

The new Deep Throat seems to have put this additional information about:

The Justice Department (DOJ) reportedly sent a secret letter to President Joe Biden’s personal attorneys to search his multiple residences for classified documents after the trove at the Penn Biden Center was unearthed on November 2.

. . . The New York Times reported Friday that “[t]he quiet cooperation continued for weeks” between the aides and the DOJ. This not only tried to obscure the scandal from public view but reportedly refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents was already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents stored at the Biden Penn Center.

It was then, during the plot to keep the scandal concealed from the public, the DOJ sent a letter to Biden’s personal attorneys and asked them to confirm that no other classified documents existed apart from the trove already unearthed, the Times reported.

It is unclear why or what Biden’s personal attorneys were originally seeking at the center funded in part by anonymous Chinese donations.

It looks to me like the source of the leak is from the Justice Department, not the White House, and at a high enough level that they have knowledge of a "secret letter". The New York Times article, behind a paywall but excerpted here, goes into detail on the White House strategy to keep quiet on the docs until the whole thing would go away:

The handful of advisers who were aware of the initial discovery on Nov. 2 — six days before the midterm elections — gambled that without going public, they could convince the Justice Department that the matter was little more than a minor, good-faith mistake, unlike former President Donald J. Trump’s hoarding of documents at his Florida estate…

The discussions on how to deal with the matter, at least at the start, were confined to the husband-and-wife pair of Bob Bauer, the president’s top personal attorney, and Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser; Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime confidant and speechwriter; Mr. Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens; Stuart F. Delery, the White House counsel; and Richard Sauber, a White House lawyer overseeing the response to investigations, according to people familiar with the situation.

One thing I'm starting to notice is how much Biden relies not just on Hunter, but assorted siblings, Frank, Jim, and Valerie, to manage his affairs. And this family seems dysfunctional even by presidential standards: Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, Tony Rodham, and Neil Bush all fade in comparison with the whole Biden clan. These people are going to turn into a major liability. And somebody, maybe multiple people, is now taking notes and talking to the New York Times.

Also yesterday, we got a small hint of what the real search at the Penn Biden Center was about:

Joe Biden’s name was mentioned prominently in an October 2017 email seeking to firm up a controversial, multimillion-dollar deal to ship natural gas from the US to China, the communication, found on first son Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, reveals.

In a missive dated Oct. 27 of that year, Louisiana attorney Robert W. Fenet told Hunter and his uncle, first brother Jim Biden, that he had secured a contact for them at Houston energy company Cherniere, the Daily Mail reported Friday.

“I confirm I have requested [the contact] to be available for a call from Joe Biden and Hunter Biden on Monday morning,” Fenet wrote.

My current surmise is that the Biden legal team has been reviewing Hunter's laptop in great detail and scrubbing any corroborating evidence in other records, including those at the Penn Biden Center and Biden residences. That random new e-mails keep surfacing from the laptop, more than two years after its October 2020 discovery, suggests there's a great deal more to find.

Unanswered Questions

Over the past few days, there have been questions about classified documents found in at least two places at the Biden Wilmington home, apparently dating from the big guy's tenure as vice president. Nobody seems to know what they were doing there, but the little bit we've glimpsed looks like it's just the tip of the iceberg.

One big unresolved question is Hunter's role in the Biden family businesses during the interregnum between his dad's departure as vice president in 2017 and his inauguration as president in 2021. As I noted in this post, Hunter was involved in setting up the Penn Biden Center as early as 2016, which as described in e-mails on his laptop was meant to be a "wealth creation" effort for the family, but discussions about which were meant to be highly confidential. During this same period, he was divorcing his first wife, Kathleen Buhle:

[S]he said she began to understand the extent of their financial woes once she initiated their divorce in 2016. She found they had no savings, double mortgage and no equity in their two homes, credit card debt and medical bills.

“The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me," she wrote. "We were underwater.”

. . . Buhle started to notice Biden's substance abuse problem "spiral from social to problematic" about eight years into their marriage, according to People's excerpts of the book.

She described a number of stints Biden spent in rehab, including in November 2012 after he showed up drunk to a fundraising event following the reelection of his father and President Barack Obama.

His affair with his brother Beau's widow, Hallie, began in 2015 and lasted through his divorce from Kathleen until 2019. This period also coincided with his extended binges in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, famously documented on his laptop. But during this period, he also lived off and on at the Biden Wilmington house:

Disgraced first son Hunter Biden lived off and on at the Delaware home where classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as vice president were found last month — giving him unrestricted access to America’s secrets while he was addicted to drugs, hammering out shady foreign business deals and under federal investigation.

The now-52-year-old began listing the Wilmington home as his address following his 2017 divorce from ex-wife Kathleen Buhle — even falsely claiming he owned the property on a July 2018 background check form as part of a rental application.

Hunter also listed the home as the billing address for his personal credit card and Apple account in 2018 and 2019, respectively, Fox News Digital reported Friday after reviewing emails from his abandoned laptop.

During the same period, the now-first son was in the grip of a crack cocaine addiction costing thousands of dollars. At one point in August 2018, Hunter was recorded begging his sister-in-law-turned-lover, Hallie Biden, to let him use his credit card points to pay for a stay in rehab.

Another former girlfriend of Hunter’s, Zoe Kestan, testified to a federal grand jury in February of last year that the couple stayed for a month in 2018 at the notorious Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, where — the younger Biden wrote in his 2021 memoir — he “learned how to cook crack” before being “blacklisted” from the property over complaints tied to his drug use.

Elsewhere, the Washington Examiner reported,

President Biden wired his 52-year-old son $100,000 to help him pay bills from December 2018 through January 2019, the Washington Examiner reported, citing records from a laptop Hunter Biden left behind at a computer repair shop in Delaware.

Hunter Biden, meanwhile, had spent more than $30,000 on sex workers between November 2018 and March 2019, records show — including many linked to Russia-based email addresses and connected to an “exclusive model agency” called UberGFE, the outlet reported.

In another instance, Joe Biden wired Hunter $5,000 less than three hours before he filmed a dispute with an escort regarding a $10,000 payment at a cottage in Boston, the Washington Examiner reported.

The picture that emerges is that Hunter, during much of Biden's term as vice president and especially during the post-Obama administration interregnum, was desperately addicted to drugs and prostitutes while also conducting business related to the Biden family, and even living off and on at the Wilmington home.

Tony Bobulinski told Fox News that, contrary to Joe Biden's statements that he had nothing to do with his son's business affairs, Hunter had "frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals" in China.

Mr Bobulinski, who is reportedly a US Navy veteran, separately told Fox News' Tucker Carlson that he had met on two occasions with Joe Biden to discuss business deals with China, the first time in May 2017 when Barack Obama's former vice-president was a private citizen.

He says he asked Joe Biden's brother, James, whether the family was concerned about possible scrutiny of the former vice-president's involvement in a potential business deal with a Chinese entity. Mr Bobulinski told Fox News that James Biden had replied: "Plausible deniability."

I think this suggests some explanation for the stories that in May 2022, the White House brought Richard Sauber over as Special White House Counsel, apparently to scrub records at the Penn Biden Center, while by July, White House Counsel Dana Remus left, apparently to work as a personal attorney for President Biden. She then surfaced a few months later in October as a partner at Covington & Burling, where she has since been working with two other Covington partners on matters related to the classified material found at the Penn Biden Center and the Biden Wilmington home.

In fact, that whole affair was apperently meant to be kept quiet, with the leak of the November document discovery not at all in the plan:

Not only did the White House and DOJ try to obscure the scandal from public view, but they also refused to divulge that the second trove of classified documents were already unearthed at Biden’s home in Wilmington when CBS News first contacted the White House about the initial leak of classified documents apparently illegally stored at the Biden Penn Center, according to the Washington Post[.]

This suggests to me that Mr Sauber and Ms Remus were put on the case well before the November discovery because troubling issues had emerged by last spring that we still haven't heard about. Indeed, if Mr Sauber and Ms Remus were hired to keep the classified document matter under wraps, they haven't done a very good job. That in turn makes me wonder if what they've actually been working on is even more sensitive, and the classified document leaks are just collateral damage, or possibly a sleight-of-hand distraction.

Heck, Nixon had miscellaneous hard guys like the Plumbers to deal with stuff like petty burglaries. The current leak control team with Biden is a whole lot more expensive. Why should this be?

Southwest Pilots Union Schedules Strike Authorization Vote

When I was racking up free flights on Southwest traveling for work in the 1990s, it was still the old Southwest with "party seating", peanut snacks, cheap drinks, and singing flight attendants. I was drawn to that sort of culture, and I followed stories about it in the Wall Street Journal, which I got for free at my door every morning at my hotel. I learned at the time that its relations with its unions were unique. The airline was succeeding as a discount carrier, and its workers were willing to work for a little less to have secure jobs. Its unions were less adversarial and more inclined to look at win-win opportunities. If Southest prospered, so did its workers.

The last time I flew Southwest, maybe 15 years ago, things had changed greatly; they'd gone corporate, the peanut snacks, party seating, and singing flight attendants were long gone, while the company style had turned to talking down to the public like children. As far as I could tell, though, the unions had stuck with the program. Apparently the holiday-season meltdown has changed even this. Via Epoch Times,

Southwest Airlines pilots have set a “historic” strike-authorization vote, following a lack of progress in contract negotiations and a massive operational meltdown.

In a Jan. 18 announcement, the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) said a vote has been set “beginning on May 1, and will ultimately give pilots the ability to strike.” The union, which represents about 10,000 pilots, said this is the first time in the airline’s 51-year history for such a vote.

The union’s vice president, Capt. Michael Santoro, in a SWAPA Facebook post, said the union is exasperated. He called the vote is “a tool we must employ to wake up management.”

All of a sudden, the pilots are playing hardball:

The union said it picked the May 1 date because it “allows our union time to prepare and gives our customers time to book elsewhere, so that they can have confidence that their summer vacations, honeymoons, and family outings are assured.”

The votes will be counted at the end of May, SWAPA said.

In the past, Southwest's unions would never have implied that Southwest's customers -- who were also their customers -- should maybe think about scheduling flights with more reliable carriers. You plan to fly this summer? Maybe think now about booking cheap tickets in advance with Delta, because we may be on strike here at Southwest.

But things changed over the holidays.

During negotiations, the union has been pushing the company for contract language to address “scheduling work rules and information technology,” SWAPA said.

Those were two of the major factors the union blamed after a winter storm touched off problems that led to 16,700 canceled flights during the holiday rush of the last 10 days of 2022.

As I noted the other day, Southwest management has backed off even the minimal acknowledgement it made during the meltdown that its outdated scheduling software was even partly responsible, although the specific triggering event, the memo from the vice president for ground operations to the Denver ramp workers requiring a doctor's note for any claimed illness, suggests Southwest's labor relations had been deteriorating prior to the meltdown as well,

I'd also noted that another vice president of the Southwest pilots' union wrote an open letter to Southwest's CEO on December 31 strongly suggesting the implicit deal with Southwest's unions was over. After all, the pilots, flight attendants, gate agents, and ramp workers were suffering just as much as the passengers. Some had to sleep at the airport, while they were also the ones who bore the brunt of customer dissatisfaction.

I was actually astonished at the time of the meltdown that Southwest employees appeared to be as supportive of the company as they were. I wrote it up to the fact that, especially among those who'd been with the company since the days of peanut snacks and singing flight attendants, they'd built up seniority and benefits that they'd forfeit if they went to another carrier, although there's a shortage of pilots generally.

But it looks like factors are changing. I knew the old Southwest was gone quite some time ago, and the old-time workers are going to retire very soon.

Right Wing Media Is Still Coasting On the Biden Documents

What puzzles me about right-wing media is that the Biden classified document puzzle is a story that's a potential career maker. Just look at what Watergate did for Woodward and Bernstein, who were at least portrayed before the scandal broke as underperformers in the Washington Post newsroom, but soon enough they had Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman playing them on the silver screen. I bet they both scored big time after that. But if all they did was find themselves in the right place at the right time for Deep Throat, even that took some minimal level of enterprise -- they had to get up in the morning and show up, after all.

The current right-wing writers, as far as I can see, aren;t even doing that. All they're doing is cribbing from each other and mostly not even going to Wikipedia. Let's take one data point that as far as I can see was covered by just one obscure YouTuber, a South Florida radio host named Brian Craig. He actually went to Wikipedia to look somebody up and discovered Dana Remus:

Dana Ann Remus is an American lawyer who served as White House counsel for U.S. President Joe Biden from January 2021 to July 2022. Prior to her appointment as White House counsel, Remus was general counsel for Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. Earlier in her career, she was deputy assistant to the president and deputy counsel for ethics during the presidency of Barack Obama, was general counsel for the Obama Foundation from 2017 to 2019, and was counsel to Michelle Obama.

Wikipedia, though, doesn't cover Ms Remus's career after July 2022. The Hill noted of her departure:

White House counsel Dana Remus will leave the administration next month, the latest in a string of key officials to depart their posts ahead of the midterm elections.

Remus has served as President Biden’s top lawyer since he took office in early 2021. Remus previously worked as general counsel on the Biden campaign and in Obama White House. She also worked as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

In October, she joined white-shoe Washington law firm Covington & Burling:

Dana Remus, most recently Assistant to the President and White House Counsel to President Biden, has joined Covington as a partner. She will practice in the firm’s Congressional Investigations, White Collar Defense and Investigations, Public Policy, and Election and Political Law practices.

Brian Craig says in his commentary that Ms Remus left the White House in July to become a personal attorney to President Biden. This is not completely clear in the public record, but CBS News had this to say about Bob Bauer's appointment as Biden's personal attorney last week:

Longtime Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer is serving as the personal attorney for President Biden in the classified documents matter now before a Justice Department special counsel, the White House confirmed Friday.

Bauer has been the primary point of contact between the Biden camp and the Justice Department during the initial investigation, which began in November, CBS News has learned.

CBS news notes, though, that Dana Remus and two other Covington partners have also been involved in the document inquiry:

Recent filings with the National Archives name three partners at D.C. law firm Covington and Burling as Biden's representatives to the Archives for his vice presidential records: Dana Remus, former Biden White House counsel, Biden campaign attorney Robert Lenhard and James Garland, a former Obama-era Justice Department official.

Their roles in the documents matter is unclear. Multiple calls and emails to Remus, Lenhard and Garland since Monday have gone unanswered.

Both Mr Bauer and Ms Remus have had connections with the Democrat Party and the Biden White House at a very high level and have a history of working closely together for both Presidents Biden and Obama. According to CBS, Mr Bauer

served as White House counsel for President Barack Obama and as a top attorney in the 2020 Biden campaign. His wife, Anita Dunn, is a senior adviser to Mr. Biden and widely considered inside and outside the West Wing as poised to become the first woman to be White House chief of staff.

Brian Craig cites Steve Bannon's show to claim that Ms Remus was the attorney who actually found the November 2022 tranche of classified documents, not White House Special Counsel Richard Sauber. and he also claims that Ms Remus left her job as White House Counsel in July to become Biden's personal attorney. Whatever the actual circumstance, what seems to be very close but unacknowleged cooperation among Mr Bauer, Ms Remus, other Covington partners, and Mr Sauber suggests that very highly placed and expensive attorneys are now working behind the scenes on the Biden documents and the circumstances that led to their discovery.

In fact, as Brian Craig implies and the record suggests, the White House appears to have recognized as early as last May, when Mr Sauber was brought in to perform unspecified cleanup work on the Penn Biden Center, and last July, when Ms Remus left her position as White House Counsel to perform unspecified duties apparently related in some way to the Penn Biden Center, which she is now undertaking with other Covington partners, there are potentially very serious issues that could potentially emerge at the Penn Biden Center.

I continue to note that Hunter Biden appears to have been closely involved in setting up the Penn Biden Center, which e-mails on his laptop suggest was developed as a "wealth creation" opportunity for the Biden family but also functioned effectively as an administration-in-exile for the future Biden White House, employing key people including Secretary of State Blinken. Hunter's involvement was also during the peak of his binge years from 2017 to 2019, which suggests some part of the classified document problem might be traced to his access to such materials while he was engaged in Biden business-related activities.

But even this doesn't really explain why such highly connected lawyers are now on the cleanup detail, except to suggest this is a potentially very important issue.

It's hard to avoid thinking important business was done at the Penn Biden Center which it's now in the White House's interest to minimize, to the extent that very high level people with very high level connections have been pulled off other work and are now on the case. You'd think the writers at Breitbart, Red State, Hot Air, The Daily Wire, and elsewhere might find it in their interest to work a little harder.

Southwest Circles The Wagons

Yesterday I noted that in the wake of Southwest Airlines's Christmas meltdown, Mahogany Row gave themselves promotions and almost certainly bonuses. And over the recent long weekend, CEO Bob Jordan backed off the airline's own mea culpas at the time of the crisis:

Southwest Airlines' CEO said aircraft engines froze and jetways wouldn't move after a storm caused an operational meltdown that led to thousands of flights being canceled, The New York Times reported.

. . . The CEO's comments come a day after a group of shareholders filed a class action lawsuit against Jordan, its CFO, executive chairman and the airline, claiming that it hid problems that caused its meltdown.

. . . Jordan denied that its technology failed and told the Times it had just experienced an "overwhelming volume." He added that it hired Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, to independently investigate the event, per the report, and reiterated that he was responsible for what happened.

We may assume that Oliver Wyman will echo those views in its final report. But this is a turnaround from Southwest's own version of events as the meltdown happened last month. As of December 27, this was the story:

Southwest Airlines has blamed its operational meltdown on the busy holiday weekend and the powerful winter storm but said on Tuesday its antiquated scheduling system also played a role.

. . . Since its original statement last updated on Tuesday, Southwest has added to its reasoning for the chaos, telling Insider, "we have had issues with our scheduling tools, causing a scheduling issue."

"We were fully staffed and prepared for the approaching holiday weekend when the severe weather swept across the continent, where Southwest is the largest carrier in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the US," the carrier said in a statement. "These operational conditions forced daily changes to our flight schedule at a volume and magnitude that still has the tools our teams use to recover the airline operating at capacity."

Reports at the time noted that the delays and cancellations at Southwest were far worse than those at other airlines. The December 27 story at the link continues,

Other airlines, like United Airlines and American Airlines, largely avoided this. This is because their systems are more modern and can handle the workload quicker than Southwest's can. The latter's systems failed to keep up because flight attendants use a system largely reliant on phone lines, [Southwest flight attendant union president Lyn] Montgomery told KHOU. That system can get clogged up, forcing crews to wait on hold for hours waiting for a new assignment.

Since the meltdown, Southwest has worked on restoring customer and employee loyalty by offering credits for future travel. The story linked in yesterday's post pointed out,

The airline has also given customers some free frequent flyer points to make them feel better about daring to fly Southwest again. I even received an email from Southwest this week that announced: "Big Sale, itty bitty fares."

I wonder whether any customers were ittily bittily annoyed by the enticement of $49 flights from an airline that has so let them down.

Please, though, let's not forget Southwest's employees. The airline gave them $400 worth of bonus points to compensate for the "physical and emotional toll" of a mess caused by management's refusal to invest in crew scheduling software from this century.

From the start of this whole episode, I couldn't help but be reminded of the "courtship" or "honeymoon phase" in the cycle of abusive relationships.

In many cases, the person who committed the abuse will try to make things right by offering gifts and being overly kind and loving. The reconciliation period is often referred to as a "honeymoon stage" because it mimics the beginning of a relationship when people are on their best behavior.

When the person who experienced the abuse is in this phase, the extra love and kindness from their partner triggers a reaction in their brain that releases feel-good and love hormones known as dopamine and oxytocin. This release of hormones makes them feel closer to their partner and as if things are back to normal.

What's intriguing here is that Southwest grew by relying on employee cooperation and goodwill to build a unique corporate culture that customers found appealing, especially in the days of peanut snacks, cheap drinks, and singing flight attendants. Those days ended a decade ago and more, but customers stayed due to low fares and a generous rewards program, while employees had built up seniority and benefits and were reluctant to leave.

Business Insider as of last Friday, before CEO Jordan''s New York Times interview over the weekend, quoted him as follows:

Last week the airline's CEO, Bob Jordan, took responsibility in an interview with Reuters, saying that there were a lot of reasons that this happened "but it's on me at the end of the day."

He added that "it just can't happen again."

But that was apparently still back in the honeymoon phase. Of course it's going to happen again. The question is whether it will happen again and again and again.

Southwest Update

In covering Southwest's holiday-seasom meltdown, I've got to say I expected at least some management heads to roll. So far, not a bit of it.

[I]n an announcement that flirts with humor and attempts to defy it, the airline this week promoted five of its senior executives to even more senior roles.

Why, the vice president of Network Planning, Adam Decaire, was promoted to senior vice president of Network Planning and Network Operations Control. He's going to need a wider business card, isn't he? And please don't worry, he went to Ohio State and didn't study accountancy.

Then there was Tony Roach. He was promoted from vice president of Customer Experience & Engagement to senior vice president of Marketing & Customer Experience. He's going to have some fun over the next few months. And no, he didn't go to the University of Texas. His alma mater is Abilene Christian University.

All hail, too, Whitney Eichinger, ascending from vice president of Culture & Engagement to senior vice president of Culture & Communications. She was at TCU and, oh, the University of Texas. But wait, it's OK. She studied "communications, journalism, and related programs."

The references to educational background refer to a letter from the Southwest pilots' union that traced the airline's problems to an in-group of executives who had accounting degrees from the University of Texas. The article suggests, though,

I feel entirely sure these are extremely competent people. By my rough calculations they have, between them, a total of 100 years working for Southwest. But is that actually a good thing? Or does it reflect the pilots' view that Southwest management is a rather closed cabal?

So now, dear Southwest customer, you must decide how you feel. Is it really a good look to react to an act of utter incompetence by promoting five longtime executives in the aftermath?

. . . Might you be slightly skeptical when Southwest insists these promotions "will strengthen our operational execution and better serve our People and Customers"?

What intrigues me is what the new executive titles reveal about current corporate culture. They all contain gaseous, jargony, interchangeable words like "Experience", "Culture", "Communications", and "Engagement", which suggests none of them is actulally in charge of anything at all. I assume that their position descriptions all read something to the effect of "maximize effective corporate cultural engagement with key stakeholder experience" or some such, and they're all paid upwards of half a million plus bonus to do it, whatever it might be.

Meanwhile, there doesn't appear to have been any change in the status of Chris Johnson, the Vice President of Ground Operations, whose memo to the Denver ramp workers telling them that if they claimed frostbite in the job, they'd need a doctor's note or be fired, started the whole meltdown. There may be some justice here, since he's clearly well below the various senior VPs of Communications Engagement and Cultural Experience in the food chain and no doubt did nothing other than he was told.

But the whole set of circumstances does provide, like what we saw at Starbuck's last week, a vignette of the new corporate gentry, farther and farther isolated from people who actually do the work or buy the product, and indeed, the current state of standardized corporate language that conceals resposibility while trivializing and even infantilizing both customers and employees.