There’s so many of them this could become a series.

As President-elect Trump (I’m still enjoying writing that) announces a steady stream of picks for his cabinet the Democrat opposition is gearing up to destroy each one of them in the hope they’ll get people more pliable to the system – and by “opposition” I mean the politicians, activists, operatives and almost all of the MSM (just like in the elections of the last decade).

They’ve already had one easy scalp in getting Matt Gaetz to withdraw his nomination to be Attorney General, but that was more because he’d previously pissed off so many Republicans in the House, with blowback up into the Senate.

But the current shitstorm at this time of writing rages around Pete Hegseth, nominated for Secretary of Defense and facing the almost impossible task of reforming the Pentagon at whose direction he fought in combat in Iraq not twenty years ago. He, Vance and others, are the first of the graduates of GW’s “War on Terror” to reach positions of power and their lessons do not bode well for TPTB.

Within days of his nomination rumours began to spread of a “hit job” coming via the pages of the Highly Respected magazine, The New Yorker and it dropped a couple of days ago. I’d wondered who the author would be and I should have guessed:

Pete Hegseth’s Secret History

A whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.
By Jane Mayer

The article is classic Mayer, one of the most hardline Democrat partisan hacks working in America today, who has never let a dishonest smear of a Republican pass her by. The article is packed with anonymous sources from the DoD and Fox attesting to the truth of the sub-heading, but Mayer did show some investigative grunt by tracking down emails that Hegseth’s mother had sent to him castigating him for his love-’em-and-leave-’em approach to women.

Luckily within twenty four hours many people – including his mother – appeared in public to denounce the claims specifically. We will see whether Mayer can pull of the hit job she’s doing for free on behalf of her beloved Democrat Party. So far it seems the initial shock-and-awe has been blunted by the response of those who know him and the fact that this lands on the back of the complete failure of the MSM to dent Trump and company over the last eight years, and especially the last four.

But I figure this is a good moment to specifically look at this POS Democrat operative with a byline with three of her Greatest Hits.

Reagan 1983 v Obama 2012

Not long before the 2012 US election a group of Islamic Jihadists attacked the US embassy in Benghazi, killing the Ambassador and others. It turned out that the State Department, reporting directly to Hillary Clinton, plus the CIA, had received plenty of warnings that something bad was about to happen. Moreover, all of them, from Obama on down, had badly dropped the ball in responding to the attack in real time. Investigations, both internal and Congressional, cranked up.

Two years later Mayer responded with an article, Ronald Reagan’s Benghazi, that looked all the way back to the bombings of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 to argue that:

When militants struck American officials in Beirut under Reagan, Congress pointed fingers at the perpetrators, not at political rivals.

First up, the approach of successive US Presidents towards ME terrorism prior to the 9/11 attacks was to treat them as one-offs that were not worth countering in any coordinated way outside of an FBI crime investigation. Reagan dealt with the Marine bombing as Bush 41 and Clinton would with other terrorist attacks over the next two decades. He withdrew troops and relied on the CIA to counter the likes of whatever groups might have pulled it off. The same with embassy attacks.

Secondly, the reason for all that cosy bi-partisanship back in 1983 was that Islamic Jihadism was a complete afterthought for the FBI, CIA and US politicians. So much so that they still weren’t thinking along those lines a decade later when the first WTC attacks occurred (I suggest you read Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad for the detail on this). Only in the wake of that attack were suspicions aroused in some parts of the Intelligence groups and even then the status quo of not taking Islamic Jihad seriously continued right through the 1990’s. That’s why there was no outrage or massive investigations from GOP politicians into the terrible bombings of US Embassies in Africa in 1998, or even after the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Everybody – Intelligence, Democrat, GOP – continued to assume that it was just another terrorist crime that needed to be doggedly tracked down.

That’s a very different world to the one of the Obama-Clinton security lapse in Benghazi. The quite natural reaction of their opponents then was to ask how the hell an Administration could be so dismissive of Islamic Jihadist threats and so slack securing against them in the year 2012? The anger was real and deserved.

But because Jane Mayer is a hideously partisan creep she chose to ignore all of that subtle history from a completely different age and compared apples and oranges – and she can get away with it because she’s appealing to the brain-dead bigotry of Democrat Party shills reading The New Yorker, who will swallow it hook, line and sinker.

Art Pope (R), North Carolina

Three years earlier, following the 2010 drubbing of the Democrats in the Mid-Term elections, Mayer needed to push another narrative about how it wasn’t really crap policies or governance by the Democrats or Obama but those evil Republicans and all their money, starting with a 2011 article about a North Carolina Republican named Art Pope.

“State For Sale”  claimed that Pope “bought” the 2010 elections in the state by contributing to conservative organizations and candidates. The artwork of the article, showing Pope with wads of cash in his pocket, told you everything you needed to know about the article.

But Mayer never bothered mentioning that Pope was not the largest donor to all those “affiliated” groups. Far more importantly, Mayer never bothered revealing that the $2 million (“three-quarters of the outside money!”) was merely one-fifteenth of the total political spending for those races. While breathlessly repeating every number she could find about Pope and his friends’ donations, she didn’t tell her readers the more important numbers, all much larger than $2 million:

  • That the total political donations in those races from all sources was $30 million.
  • That the Democrats outspent the Republicans by $16 million to $14 million.
  • The even greater spending done by left-wing versus right-wing public policy groups.

Mayer’s portrait of Pope was sharply defined and ugly while her portrait of the left-of-center donors was almost nonexistent.  The kicker is that Mayer lacked any excuse for not providing the numbers – other than the fact that they made her thesis laughable – because Pope and various staffers at organizations he funds spent many hours submitting to interviews, phone calls, and emails from Mayer and The New Yorker, during which they repeatedly presented her with all the data.

She just chose to cherry pick it.

Clarence Thomas’s Wife

Thomas’s wife, in online messages on January 6, 2021, cheered on those who thought the 2020 election was crooked. Mayer was interviewed by NPR, the US equivalent to RNZ, and used the platform to argue that Thomas’s wife was influencing him and that he therefore needed to recuse himself from any related cases that might come before SCOTUS – just like a Democrat politician or activist would. Thomas laughingly told such critics to get stuffed, knowing the law as he does:

I will absolutely leave the Court when I do my job as poorly as you do yours.

A “reporter” who was willing to make those arguments about Pope and Thomas is a reporter more than willing to tell half-truths about the distant past of Reagan and terrorism in the 1980’s in order to defend her ugly Democrat friends clusterfuckups years later. But she knows that her readers don’t know and don’t care about any of this.

Bias does not even cover all that sort of deception. Mayer habitually uses the standard approach of telling half-truths in order to advance left-wing causes. But given how consistent she has been with this approach she should simply be considered a outright, baldfaced, liar – not a reporter but simply a Democrat operative with a byline, spinning a narrative as any such minion would.

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Which brings us up to the Pete Hegseth story. She actually stepped down further into the gutter when another combat veteran stepped up to deliver the receipts on Hegseth’s resignation from a veterans advocacy group several years ago, revealing Mayer and company as liars. This was her response:

Wow. Just… Wow.

Mayer’s smear against Parnell came from an ex-wife during a contentious divorce, with no evidence that it ever happened. Parnell fired back at Mayer: “Yeah of course I’m defending Pete. I know exactly how it feels to be falsely accused with zero corroborating evidence by soulless hacks like you. But I’m through it now & Pete will get through it too.”

Parnell’s wife entered the fight as follows, making the specific point that Mayer has shown no interest in similar allegations against about Democrats Doug Emhoff, Keith Ellison, Raphael Warnock, and others

It would be good if, the next time Mayer launches one of these smear jobs, that Trump or some other senior Republican, unloaded her history on her in public.