I had never heard of Noam Dworman before today. Apparently he is the owner of a comedy venue in New York and he does podcasts. I had vaguely heard of the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, and I had certainly heard of the Washington Post. Woodward. Bernstein. Watergate. Like thousands of others, after seeing ‘All the President’s Men’, I dreamed of being an investigative reporter.
The WaPo is not what it was, judging from Bump’s performance on this edition of Dworman’s podcast. When Dworman called it “Live From The Table: Philip Bump Battles Hard on Hunter Biden” he was too charitable. The main thing Bump battles to do is not acknowledge the steaming great news story in front of his nose and to extricate himself before someone asks a reporter at the Washington Post to investigate the President.
I often think it is a valuable exercise to type out extracts from videos so that what is in them has a better chance to reach the quite large number of people who don’t watch videos. So I tried to transcribe what was said in the last few minutes of this podcast, starting at 1:10:25. There were several places where Bump and Dworman talked over each other, so forgive me if I didn’t get every word. All the bold type was added by me.
NOAM DWORMAN: What do you take from the text message to his adult daughter where Hunter says, “I have to give 50% of my income to Pop”?
PHILIP BUMP: I have no idea what that means. I don’t. I have no idea what that means.
I would have thought it was clear enough.
NOAM DWORMAN: Well, it’s, it’s –
PHILIP BUMP: I know it’s circumstantial evidence and you’d prefer that…
NOAM DWORMAN: What – what could it be?
PHILIP BUMP: I have no idea.
NOAM DWORMAN: Well does it – ?
PHILIP BUMP: I appreciate your asking-
I could not hear whether Bump then says that he appreciates Dworman asking the question or that he appreciates Dworman asking him to be on his podcast, but judging from his repetition of the line later, it was probably him trying to end the session.
NOAM DWORMAN: Has anybody asked her?
PHILIP BUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know.
NOAM DWORMAN: Don’t you think that somebody should ask her?
PHILIP BUMP: “OK, like I’m – I just said I don’t know what to make of it, so I have nothing to say. What do you want me to say?
NOAM DWORMAN: Yeah, but you say, ‘There’s no evidence, no evidence’ but then there’s a text message where he says, ‘I give Pop 50% of my money. That’s – that’s evidence.
PHILIP BUMP: Okay, well, what, fine, fine. It’s evidence.
For a very brief moment I thought that Mr Bump was about to say that the Washington Post would fearlessly grab the story and not let go.
NOAM DWORMAN: So…
PHILIP BUMP:. I appreciate you having me on.NOAM DWORMAN: It doesn’t…? That something like that…?
PHILIP BUMP: I feel you want me to leave, like just walk out in the middle of this so you can…
NOAM DWORMAN: You can go, but is this the standard, really, is this the way, that the Washington Post handles people who disagree with them?
PHILIP BUMP: When I agreed to be on for 45 minutes and then I get on for an hour and fifteen, then, yeah, after a while I go. Thanks for having me on. [He leaves.]
When Mr Bump was a little boy, did he watch All The President’s Men like I did? Did he dream that one day he would be a journalist at the very same newspaper as Woodward and Bernstein, and that he too would have evidence of Presidential malfeasance put before him, and that he would see it for what it was, and that he would…
…complain that he’d been sitting in the same seat for half an hour more than he was booked for and say, “Yeah, after a while I go.”
He’s a columnist, not a journalist.
Not so much a different species as a different phylum.
Can’t think of a single reason why anyone is surprised at this. It’s been in the media since back in the 1970s. Think of how many times you see “Democrat” in any story about an indicted Democratic Party politician, as opposed to how many times you see “Republican” plastered all over the story when you see a Republican criminal brought to justice. How many Democrats have been tried the way they went after Senator Stevens in Alaska? Or, the various Republican party politicians they destroyed in Texas, only to have the entire case thrown out?
Didja note how many of those were prosecuted by the corrupt and venal ass they set on Trump? Ever see his track record, for prosecutorial misconduct, and lost cases?
Face it: The Democratic Party is a criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party, and that’s what they’ve been for the majority of their history. What’s particularly bad these days is that they’ve infiltrated and suborned the opposition party to a degree that is truly incredible to observe… Trump brought the Republicans a clear majority in the House, the Senate, and the Executive branches. What did the Republicans do with that…? Absolutely nothing. Why? I would propose that it’s because they’re the “controlled opposition”, merely existing to serve as a foil for the Democratic Party criminals that run the show. Did any of them seek the truth about Ukraine, with regards to what they impeached Trump over? Is anyone in the media now noting that everything they impeached him for has now come out into the light of day, and nobody is saying “Huh. Trump was right to press Zelensky for the evidence…”
We live in an era of mass psychotic delusion. The evidence of Biden family corruption and malfeasance is right out there in the open, and everyone just averts their eyes. The man is on video boasting about firing Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor that was investigating Burisma (which was a Russian oligarch-owned enterprise, BTW…), and everyone just acts like that tape doesn’t exist. He boasted that the Democrats had put together the biggest vote fraud organization in history, and everyone just giggled at the malapropism, his “mis-speech”. Yeah. Right. Sure.
I think Joe Biden is another Vincent Gigante. There’s no way he’s as senile and mumblingly stupid as he plays; my guess is that the game is that he does this in public, and will get away with it when he leaves office, because of his “obvious mental incapacity; he couldn’t have known he was doing wrong…”
All except for the minor fact that he’s been doing this all of his life. This ass has been in office as a senator, yet is a multi-millionaire, along with the rest of his family. Anyone care to explain that, for me?
It’s been like this forever. Newsmen have always carried water for the parties, politicians have always been corrupt and lined their pockets at our expense, voters have always been morons, pork has always been more important than integrity.
I just got done reading 1876:The Year Of The Gun by Steve Wiegand. The book is about how the year 1876 basically solidified our idea of what the Wild West was because of a few events like Custer’s Last Stand, Wild Bill Hickock getting his head canoed in Deadwood, Wyatt Earp cleaning up Dodge City, Buffalo Bill Cody taking his show on the road, stuff like that. But there’s a few other things going on in America at the time, not the least of which was the 1876 election. The author makes the point that with the exception of being stuck in overseas wars in one capacity or another every one of the things we complain about now they complained about then. Federal overreach, big business buying off Congressmen, immigration skewing demographics, crooked politicians pandering, backroom deals deciding elections, the loss of our rights. Everything old is new again.
A hundred and fifty years from now, the voters in what’s left of the United States will be saying the same things. We’re not voting our way out of this and we’re not going to break out Madame Guillotine for DC and Wall Street, so nothing is going to change.
I wouldn’t count on that, Steven. When the idjit class finally manages to break everything so thoroughly that it’s undeniable, the repercussions are going to come due.
I used to live near Portland, Oregon. I’m pretty familiar with the culture down there, and I still know people. The majority of the BS that’s gone on down there stems from the people who migrated there and made it “Portlandia”, and they’re all fairly recent transplants. The actual natives? They ain’t happy. Not. At. All.
We used to have a bunch of semi-serious humor out there about keeping outsiders out of Oregon. “Happiness is a Californian headed south…”, that sort of thing. What I’m hearing now is a lot more like “Happiness is a deep hole with a Californian in it…”
I don’t think that the “Boni”, the great and the good, the supposedly wise technocrats of the region really realize just how much animosity they’ve raised up in the former local population. They’re not at all happy; some of them are reaching the point of “This far; no further…”, and they’re not going to put up with it for much longer. The eastern counties of Oregon are already looking at secession at least semi-seriously. Where do you suppose that ends?
All of this crap only lasts so long as they can keep the wheels on; with them coming off? I don’t think it’s gonna go on for much longer. It’s never, ever been this bad before. You mention the 1870s; do you see any equivalents in the homeless crisis in that decade? Do you think that the average middle-class person would have put up with the BS that the numpties are forcing down everyone’s throats in the name of DIE?
Yeah, if you listen closely, you can hear the Gods of the Copybook Headings warming up off-stage. They’re coming, and they bring hell with them.
The Media was interested in ‘reporting’ while it was a tool of the insurgency.
Woodward and Bernstein, were after all, just willing agents of the putsch.
The activity they exploded upon the then innocents of the USA, now laughably innocuous.
Now, the insurgency has succeeded, the media are the junta’s ‘firefighters’.
Kirk:
In the 1970s a dollar was a nice big silver coin. Now that it is nothing, and can be created at will by the Federal Reserve, this nonsense can continue for far longer than it could have in 1876. Back then, the money really could run out. Now, it can never “run out”, but it can become worthless, and that day is coming.
As to Watergate, Mark Felt first tried hawking the “scoop” to the New York Times, but they were not having it. Eventually the Washington Post took the bait, and were spoon fed the story which got rid of Richard Nixon.
The whole “break in” was down to men with strong links to Dallas in 1963. It was another way to get rid of a president. They probably thought that two lone nuts in ten years would have been a bit too much for even the American people to swallow.
Before we judge, I think we should investigae whether or not that chair was comfy.
Kirk:
Just realised I wrote 1970s, not 1870s. By the 1970s, the dollar was of course worth nothing (apart from the men with guns).
@ JohnK,
Yeah, the whole “Woodward and Bernstein wuz heeeroes…” thing has always been a bit of a stretch. Reality? They never realized they were being played, and if they did, they were part of the whole corrupt “Let’s get rid of Nixon” thing.
You’ll note that Woodward is the only one of the pair who seems to think he’s actually a reputable journalist, as opposed to an ignorant hack. How many lies has he been involved with selling, again…? The crap that weasel has put out, right up until the present day, along with his other greasy peer Seymour Hersh? Unknown, but if you read anything they write, you know it got its start somewhere in the regime structure.
The media in the United States is a huge part of the problem. They were corrupt in a small way, before; today? They’re structural venality, vital to the success of the whole shady enterprise.
One of these days, they’re all going to wake up and realize two things: One, that they killed the Golden Goose, and two, that Nemesis has left her warm-up area off-stage, and is coming for them.
Can’t say I’ll be particularly surprised or interested in helping any of them, when the time comes. Let just deserts come due.
The Woodward and Bernstein thing always struck me as odd. They were investigating political corruption by the Nixon administration…. hold on, the burglry was in January 1972, they started investigating in June 1972, but, counts fingers, NIXON WAS RE-ELECTED IN NOVEMBER 1972. The way it’s always been presented it sounds like halfway through Trick Dicky’s second term he gets brought down by illegal activity. But this was in his first term, how did he get to even get to a second term? W&B seemed to have dragged things on and on dripping things into their echo chamber of non-Republican-voters, re-inforcing those non-Republican-voters’s determination to not vote Republican. Why was none of this dogging Nixon during the party nomination and the election campaign? Surely constant “Mr Nixon, what is your response to the Watergate accusations?” would have eroded into his campaign. The timetable of everything just doesn’t seem to match reality. It’s as though the plan was “let him get elected, and *then* we’ll bring him down!” Not /stop/ him getting elected, no that’s too easy, been done before, but kill him off a /sitting/ president.
Mr Hunter Biden is a bribe taking criminal – but he was only ever the “bagman” for his father Mr Joseph “Joe the Big Guy” Biden.
The American “Progressive” establishment (both Democrats and “RINOs” such as former Attorney General Barr) have historically covered up the massive corruption of the Biden family because Mr Joseph Biden has always been a servant of the Progressive establishment – and the Progressive establishment (both government and corporate) is also itself sickeningly corrupt.
The American Progressive establishment rigs elections (in several States), and covers up other very serious crimes – covering up the financial corruption of Mr Joseph Biden is nothing to the Progressive establishment – including the media.
The Progressive government and corporate establishment will only turn on Mr Joseph Biden when they decide he is no longer useful to them.
How many Vietcong massacres did the Washington Post “posted” ?
@lucklucky,
Zero. The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were all Boy Scouts helping little old ladies cross streets while they were getting bombed by evil American sky pirates…
The cognitive dissonance that should have occurred to a huge swathe of people after everyone and their brother left Vietnam on anything floating to get away from the Communists? Didn’t happen, ‘cos it was studiously ignored. I literally had people telling me that the Boat People were all leaving Vietnam because the collapse of South Vietnam ended the American embargo on emigration for them, and that the generous North Vietnamese were letting all the refugees the US had created leave…
I watched one of those idiots saying that have a close encounter with a Special Forces veteran who was trying to help his Montagnard strike force veterans get into the US. There was nearly a killing in front of me, and I’m pretty damn sure that the only thing preventing it was the number of witnesses. If you’ve ever seen literal “murder in someone’s eyes”, you’ll know what I mean.
The idiots see what they want to see, no more, no less. They live in their own minds, with zero contact with reality.
If Nixon had been a Democrat, Woodward would have said the same thing.
Kirk – yes the support the establishment left (and the Rothbardians) show for the Marxist forces in relation to the conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, is sickening.
In the late 1970s I hoped the “Boat People” would enlighten minds in the West – but, no, the education system and the media just carry on with their pro Marxist lies and general agitprop.
There, fixed it for ya’.