{"id":2230,"date":"2018-02-09T09:14:42","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T15:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2018-02-09T09:14:42","modified_gmt":"2018-02-09T15:14:42","slug":"finding-parallels-in-two-biographies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/finding-parallels-in-two-biographies\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Parallels in Two Biographies"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I read Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House<\/em> by Michael Wolff recently, and followed immediately by reading Kingfish<\/em>, a biography of Huey P. Long, written by Richard D. White, Jr. This was intentional. I bought the former on Amazon as soon as it was released and recently picked up a lightly used copy of the latter at Gladewater Books, my new favorite used bookstore.<\/p>\n

My first impression of Fire and Fury<\/em> is that the copy editors at publisher Henry Holt and Company clearly were on holiday. The book is riddled with typos that made me cringe: \u201cpubic\u201d instead of \u201cpublic,\u201d \u201cdiffered\u201d instead of \u201cdeferred,\u201d to name a couple. This might be akin\"\"<\/a> to living in a glass house and chunking rocks, since typos creep into my writing. The difference is that Holt is a national publisher, presumably with people employed to catch the gremlins. I am a one-person show when it comes to these columns. The only saving grace is that I can always fix mistakes later, since the work appears online. That wasn\u2019t the case when my columns appeared in a newspaper, the mistakes recorded for posterity \u2014 as they are in Wolff\u2019s book, at least in the initial printing.<\/p>\n

Worse than the typos are the errors in fact. PolitiFact is a highly respected fact-checking site and a Pulitzer Prize winner. As PolitiFact reports, Fire and Fury<\/em> \u201cportrays an infighting senior team at each other\u2019s throats, and a president too narcissistic and distracted to be capable of governing.\u201d OK, that rings true, based on myriad stories during the past year. This is a presidency governing by chaos, with no end in sight. Well, there\u2019s always 2020.<\/p>\n

The factual errors, as they always do, diminish the credibility of Wolff\u2019s reporting. For example, as PolitiFact notes, Wolff inaccurately writes that then-Speaker John Boehner resigned in 2011 when actually it was 2015. One can Google that. Wolff claims Trump didn\u2019t know who Boehner was in 2016, when Trump tweeted derisively about Boehner the previous year. Wolff writes that Wilbur Ross was Trump\u2019s pick for labor secretary, when actually it was commerce secretary. He misidentifies a couple of folks, and his sourcing at times is thin at best.<\/p>\n

Forthcoming accounts of the Trump presidency, and there will be many, especially as administration officials resign and look to rake in loot with tell-all accounts of their time inside the White House, should provide a more fully sourced picture. Former Washington Post<\/em> publisher Phil Graham is credited with saying, \u201cJournalism is the first rough draft of history.\u201d In Wolff\u2019s case, it is a mighty rough draft.<\/p>\n

|\u2014\u2014\u2014|<\/p>\n

Then, there is Kingfish<\/em>. Huey P. Long was governor and U.S. senator in Louisiana from 1928 until his assassination in 1935, in the lobby of the new capitol in Baton Rouge \u2014 a 34-story monument to the despot who ruled Louisiana with an iron fist until his demise. The author of Kingfish<\/em>, a highly respected professor at Louisiana State University, has written the definitive biography of Long. He clearly demonstrates that the Kingfish, as he loved to be called, proved Lord Acton\u2019s dictum that, \u201cAbsolute power corrupts absolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n

The breadth of Long\u2019s corruption, even for Louisiana, is stunning. One aspect that especially interested me concerned his attempts to control the state\u2019s large newspapers, all of which were aligned against him. Long was quick to spew insults and attack his enemies in the most personal way (sound familiar?), but he was awfully thin-skinned when newspapers criticized him. To that end, he declared, \u201clying newspapers should have to pay for their lying. I\u2019m going to help these newspapers by hitting them in the pocketbooks. Maybe they\u2019ll try to clean up.\u201d After several attempts, the Kingfish succeeded in getting the Legislature \u2014 a puppet body by 1934 \u2014 to pass a 2-percent tax on the gross revenues of the largest newspapers. It was ruled unconstitutional several months later.<\/p>\n

The Kingfish, while drunk, once ordered the National Guard to march to downtown New Orleans, take over the Times-Picayune<\/em> and wreck its presses. Fortunately, his aide told the commanding general to wait until he could get Long sobered up, after which the raid was called off. The Kingfish even started his own newspaper, The Progress<\/em>, which once proclaimed, \u201cWatch out for the lying newspapers!\u201d<\/p>\n

Sound familiar? I thought so. The current occupant of the Oval Office is waging his own war against the mainstream media, handing out \u201cFake News\u201d awards to CNN, the New York Times<\/em>, Washington Post, Time<\/em>, Newsweek<\/em>, and ABC. He has called the media the \u201cenemy of the American people,\u201d prompting a cottage industry in T-shirts with line drawings of old newspaper presses and the slogan, \u201cEnemy of the American People Since 1791.\u201d That\u2019s the year the Bill of Rights was ratified.<\/p>\n

I have the T-shirt.<\/p>\n

Trump has called for loosening of libel laws, presumably so he could more easily go after media organizations. Luckily, that is going nowhere, but the Kingfish doubtless would approve.<\/p>\n

We live in uneasy times<\/p>\n

Print this entry<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Print this entryI read Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff recently, and followed immediately by reading Kingfish, a biography of Huey P. Long, written by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[55,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-55","category-columns"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2233,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions\/2233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/garyborders.com\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}