As a writer and editor, I am appalled that WikiLeaks decided to publish Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury. If you want to do the right thing, you’ll go buy it rather than stealing it from the WikiLeaks link. It isn’t a suppressed piece of government information of vital interest to the public. It’s a book that is for sale, and offering it to everyone for free is not Julian Assange’s decision to make. He’s a crook, and he should be prosecuted for doing this.
This is a way for Assange and his patrons to strike back at Wolff and send a message to any publisher who thinks they’ll make a lot of money paying for tell-all books from inside TrumpWorld. But it’s also petty and basically pointless. Wolff’s book sales will be robust and adequate even with this sabotage, and now many more people will get a firsthand account of its contents than would have been the case otherwise. On the whole, I think this decision will do Trump more harm than good.
As for the quality of the book, I don’t think John Podhoretz is too far off:
I've read half of Wolff's book. It is as unprincipled and cartoonish and full of fancies masquerading as facts as I thought it would be. It's the work of a journalistic malefactor.
But it doesn't strike me as false.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) January 7, 2018
Assessing individual scenes in the book can be difficult and it often comes down to whether or not you agree with Wolff’s judgment. Wolff’s main advantage over every other journalist is that he was there in the West Wing of the White House every day, immersed in the pulse and pace of the place, talking to people in real time before they’d come up with their stories and rationales and excuses to present to the outside world. If a lot of what he writes with authority is still mostly a matter of opinion, it’s still a very informed opinion.
It’s a better read because it doesn’t expend much energy with caveats and conditional statements, but it isn’t more credible for taking that kind of shortcut. In other words, it appears to be a mostly accurate appraisal and retelling of Trump’s first months in office, but one told with shoddy journalistic standards. Historians will find it unreliable, but the rest of us can probably rest easy that he’s captured the essence of what we need to know. You’ll probably want to read it for free, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy the book, too, just to be a decent person who doesn’t reward WikiLeaks for their criminality.
Assange is an unprincipled piece of shit? Who would have guessed? I mean, you can’t have Assange without “ass.”
Or Trump without rump! :0)
Assange isn’t helping Donald Trump by disseminating Wolff’s book widely. Now everyone can read it and post passages on facebook. I think this hypes the story, which leads me to wonder if Julian’s first loyalty isn’t to Moscow and it’s desire to foment discord in the West. Putin uber alles!
All this does is bring up the book’s profile, doesn’t it?
Certainly there are many avenues to piracy that don’t necessarily go through Wikileaks.
I bought the book and read it. Finished last night. And I’ve watched Wolff a number of times since its publication. He equivocates, sure. There is a sense that he’s making the 3 is a crowd conflict a bit dramatic by selectively choosing anecdotes. But I found nothing in the book to be beyond belief. And that isn’t wishful thinking against Trump. The gestalt is, I find, correct and the criticisms are nit-picking. I also think that the drama is tabloidal (if that’s a word), which means that it might reach some folks who are curious what all the hubbub is about who otherwise would never read a book like this.
Sure makes it easier for the folks interviewed by Wolff to have their lawyer draw up defamation actions without adding to Wolff’s sales. Or appreciably against their legal costs.
Sure positions Wikileaks in a different space. Stealing government documents is one thing; stealing intellectual property is a another.
Being stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy likely puts Julian Assange in a bad mood. He’s not likely to to consider US intelligence or anyone related to the allegations brought by the Clinton campaign with equanimity.
Wikileaks has evolved into a distributor of other peoples property….that is thief. Time for the dems to ask Beauregard to charge Assange with the unlawful receipt of stolen property.
When I read that they had published a copy of the book, I thought they had put it on their servers. They haven’t, they have tweeted a link to a Google drive document. Unless they also put it there, they didn’t publish it any more than anyone else – including a lot of media sites and this site – who has spread the link.
I find it unlikely that Wikileaks put it there, because no matter the reason someone would upload it, anyone who knows anything about the internet would know it wouldn’t stay up on Google drive once the link had spread. And it’s gone now, but it can probably be found on file-sharing sites.
The speculation into motive seams to range from “wanting to hurt Trump” to “wanting to hurt Wolff”. I think the Verge is probably right with wanting to insert themselves into the conversation. Which in that case has succeeded.
Google Drive has taken it down. (I wasn’t going to read it, I’ve got the e-book, just curious on Fjallstrom’s point.)
I bought mine last week and am waiting for it to arrive. It will be the first book that I’ve read in a long time (typically I just read workpapers, newspapers, and blogs these days).
Trump is making reading great again.
Appalled at Fake News? Good idea to wait a few beats before letting by one’s knee-jerk emotions rule. Helps to avoid getting egg on one’s face (remember Louise Mensch?).
Print and TV journalists seem to be stealing all the best (or most salalacious) stuff in the book; so, that reduces the incentive for those not inclined to buy and read the whole thing. Considering that little I’ve seen so far didn’t first appear over the past couple of years in writings by other observers (most of which seemed true enough to me), have to wonder how much Wolff stole from them. Is Bannon – a principle source for Wolff – a good and credible source? How far down the food-chain are the other 200 sources he cites?
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or first hand observations to see that Trump isn’t very bright and is both ignorant and a liar. (Has anybody, even those in Trump’s small circle, ever experienced him as being intelligent? As long as not biased/prejudiced in some way and regardless of their own intellectual abilities, people are damn good at perceiving smarts.)
What are you talking about? Nobody’s “stealing” anything from the book — the material you’ve seen is either fair-use review/commentary excerpts or paid first-serial reprints arranged by the publisher. Nobody just reprints portions of a book without permission.
fact or fiction, copyright law applies. The violation appears obvious to everyone except you.
It’s simply passing on what Greenwald, and therefore Putin, wants you to believe.
It’s exactly what a stooge does.
.
How dare you say that about Greenwald? The man’s sagacity and rectitude exceed even those of Noam Chomsky, and if you don’t believe me, just ask him.
I don’t need to ask HIM, I get told on this site at least 5 times a week.
.
Assange, Putin, and Trump are the true neo-progressives. They have all the best principles, ethics and morals. They just want to drain the swamp and usher in 1000 years of true progressivism.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, they that appropriate from the appropriators, and giveth to thee that believeth, hath everlasting progressive bonafides, and shall not enable the worst evils; but is passed from fascism unto Democratic socialism.*
*paraphrased from the original
Considering that Trump is trying to force the Publisher to withdraw the book, and pirating makes that futile even if it succeeds, I would not say Assange is helping Trump here.
Booman quotes John Podhoretz on Wolff’s little attack book:
Say what!!!???
Full of fancies masquerading as facts?
But it apparently didn’t strike Pohoretz as false???
Hmmmmm…
Nevermind.
This is too ridiculous to even dignify with further comment.
Instead, I’ll post Podoretz’s record of “achievements”:
To sum all of this up: He is a second generation, right wing, pro-israel member of the DC Swamp’s “intelligentsia.” Anyone who can write those several, totally conflicting things about a book…let’s face it, about a book written about one half a level higher than the usual supermarket scandal rags…should at the very least be thoroughly ignored, especially by the owner and sole front-pager of a “progressive” blog and writer for a fairly well-regarded liberal media outlet, The Washington Monthly.
But NOOOOoooo…here he is on the front page of said blog, being used as a “reason” to give the contents of that book some credit.
Gimme a break!!!
Next recommendations from John McCain and Sarah Palin will be invoked.
Sorry…
Sad shit.
Neocentrism sure makes for some strange bedfellows.
Don’t it.
AG
P.S. You know what I’d like to know?
I’d like to find out who leveraged Wolff into a position of presence in that fucked up White House in the first place. Why was he there? Had he promised to write some sort of Trump hagiography? Is it a double cross? Did he say one thing and do another all by himself or was he placed there with the full intent and knowledge of whomever sponsored him, a ticking little time bomb that might come in useful in the months to come.
There would be some news!!!
But…again…NOOOOoooo…
Won’t happen.
All of that has been exhaustively covered, both in the book itself and in several detailed interviews — print and television — that have run in the week since the book’s first appearance.
Yeah?
Who, then?
(All false news versions excepted, of course. Prove it.)
AG
Well, why don’t you take the time and go to the trouble to inform yourself, like the rest of us, rather than proudly trumpeting your total ignorance as some kind of virtue?
Do you really think that “the news” and that rancid little book are going to ‘fess up to any kind of truth in this matter?
Please!!!
That’s like believing in Santa Claus or the Warren Commission.
WTFU.
AG
You don’t even know who I am, do you?
You don’t realize that I’m the one who did the parody of you last week, or what my opinions are about Trump or Wolff or anything else. Telling me to “WTFU” is based on nothing I’ve ever said beyond this one moment of scolding you for your belligerent ignorance.
Your solipsism and self-absorbtion are exceeded only by your puerile need for attention.
. . . frequency here) . . . Trump!
Very, very much like.
Isn’t that special? Booman Tribune has its very own Trump.
Assange hasn’t played the role of hacker before so the question arises, who hacked it?
And when they hacked the manuscript, whose idea was it and did they convey directions over a wiretapped phone? Enquiring minds want to know.
I got the audiobook version of it. It’s a very entertaining 12 hours. They got a really good narrator for it so I didn’t get bored and couldn’t stop listening.
At this point I actually feel sorry for Trump. If he has medical issues, then he really cannot be held responsible for his actions. He is going to go down in history as the most pitiable President ever. A situation that would mortify someone with his ego – if he was able to comprehend it.
And his base? It is easy to look at them as “deplorables”, devoid of any compassion for their fellow man, full of hypocrisy, anti-science, anti-fact and because of Reagan anti-US government.
An enlightened person might say “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
But here’s why PBO said that: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.”
Anyone want to refute that this is: Truth?
Can you really blame them for latching on to someone who hates the same people they hate? (a la Davis X…) In their eyes, what alternatives have they had?
The real villains are the conservative elites – the greedy capitalists, the dishonest media barons, the sycophant lobbyists, the GOP Congress, John Roberts, and the White House cabinet and staff. They are in a position to intervene. My personal opinion is that many of these folks are in truth traitors and should be dealt with in kind…party of responsiblity – my ass.
<eom>
He can be held accountable for his inherent assholitude, dishonesty, and incompetence, which those medical issues certainly exacerbate, but didn’t cause.
Why, yes, yes I can. In fact, I do. You might even call doing that “deplorable”. And you’d be right!