Atlantic editor admits major claim on Trump hit piece could be wrong

Atlantic magazine Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a 2019 interview with

Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen said women and people of color are few and far between when it comes to writing cover stories for his magazine. And when he got pushback on Twitter for his words, he blamed the woman journalist who published the story. The theme of the interview was about recent diversity achievements of the Atlantic, the fakest of fake news magazine in America. 

Goldberg agreed that the writers of the Atlantic print edition's most important pieces are overwhelmingly White male written and it was pointed out by Nieman Lab that of the 15 issues published that year, eleven had cover stories written by men.

Here’s what Jeffrey Goldberg said:

It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going! 

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

So there's that about Goldberg.

A recent anti-Trump hit piece in the Atlantic claimed that President Trump referred to soldiers who died in World War One as "losers." The piece claimed that Trump didn't want to make the helicopter trip to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 and "he blamed the rain for the last-minute decision, saying 'the helicopter couldn't fly' and the Secret Service wouldn't drive him there."

The hit piece even claimed that he rejected the idea of the cemetery visit because his hair would get messed up in the rain "and because he didn't think it was important to honor the American war dead," Goldberg wrote, citing only anonymous [likely make-believe] sources.

After the article was published, Goldberg went on to say that there was going to be a lot more shade thrown on Trump to follow.

But people who were with the President when the remarks were allegedly made denied he ever said them. Even John Bolton, an avid Trump-hater who wrote a book about the President, said that he never heard those words and he agreed that the reason was due to the weather:

“Marine One’s crew was saying that bad visibility could make it imprudent to chopper to the cemetery. The ceiling was not too low for Marines to fly in combat, but flying POTUS was obviously something very different. If a motorcade was necessary, it could take between ninety and a hundred and twenty minutes each way, along roads that were not exactly freeways, posing an unacceptable risk that we could not get the President out of France quickly enough in case of an emergency,” Bolton wrote. 

“It was a straightforward decision to cancel the visit but very hard for a Marine like Kelly to recommend, having originally been the one to suggest Belleau Wood… Trump agreed, and it was decided that others would drive to the cemetery instead.”

Let's not pretend if Bolton heard Trump make those remarks that he would not put it in his book. In fact, he'd probably put it on the book jacket with a cartoon bubble over Trump's head stating those words.

On Sunday, Goldberg finally admitted the White House’s account that President Trump’s trip to a cemetery of fallen World War I soldiers in France in 2018 was modified due to bad weather is probably accurate.

Probably accurate.

“I’m sure all of those things are true,” Goldberg told CNN in an interview on Friday when asked to respond to evidence a story he published saying otherwise is false.

The Atlantic's major stockholder is Laurene Jobs, the billionaire heiress to the Steve Jobs fortune and the largest Biden donor for his election campaign. So even she had a dog in this race, or in this case, a 77-year-old guy whose mental capacity has declined to the level of cabbage.

Despite conceding that the cancellation due to weather might be true, Goldberg stood by his story about President Trump’s trip to the cemetery, claiming that “the public’s interest in meeting this information outweigh the ambiguities or the difficulties of anonymous sourcing” and that he will “be continuing to make that effort to move this material directly onto the record.”

When you have a story supported only by anonymous sources in contrast to denials of the story by known sources, even some who would hope it was true, you should not go ahead and print it.

But we're just a few weeks out from the election and the mud [if that's what that funny smell is] is flying.

Yet it isn't as if The Atlantic has refused to published false stories before this one. If you believe Trump would be crazy enough to make a statement that he knows would go public and destroy his reelection hopes, then nothing could convince you otherwise, even if you were there.

President Trump denied the claims by Goldberg and his anonymous sources, saying that other people on the trip such as the Secret Service and Gen. Keith Kellogg can “refute” the allegations.

“I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes. There is nobody that respects them more. So I just think it’s a horrible, horrible thing,” he told reporters as he deplaned from Air Force One. “We made a great evening into, frankly, a very sad evening, when I see a statement like that. No animal, nobody — what animal would say such a thing?” 

Seriously, you have to be stupid to believe this story.

C'mon, man. You know you want to follow Brain Flushings--it's free and worth every penny. And remember, every time you click on an ad, an angel gets its wings and a liberal sheds a tear.






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Chesty Puller: a Marine's Marine

"Our country won't go on forever, if we stay soft as we are now. There won't be any America--because some foreign soldiery will invade us and take our women and breed a hardier race." Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller

Most Marines only know him as Chesty Puller, or just plain Chesty. He was born June 26, 1898 in West Point, Virginia to Matthew and Martha Puller and his father died when Chesty was ten years old. Chesty was only one of two people, and the only Marine, to be awarded five Navy Crosses; and if you don't know who he was, you were definitely never a member of "Uncle Sam's Misguided Children."

One of Chesty's idols was "Stonewall" Jackson and due to Jackson's war record, Chesty's first instinct was to enlist in the Army to fight the Border War in Mexico in 1916. But he was underage and his mother refused to give her parental consent.

Of course that changed the following year when Chesty attended Virginia Military Institute. He planned to go into the Corps as an officer, but left the following year to fight in World War One. He wanted to "go where the guns are." So he enlisted in the Marines after becoming inspired by the 5th Marines at Belleau Wood, one of the bloodiest battles in the war--a battle where the first Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded to then Gunnery Sergeant Ernest A. Janson.

Chesty went to boot camp at the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. (If you were an enlisted man, you might have referred to that great state as "Suck Carolina" because the sand fleas were unforgiving and if you killed one as it munched on your ear as you stood at attention in front of the Mess Hall, you would have to bury it in a hole 6'x6'x6'. Officers didn't go to boot camp at PI, but we had our own problems.) 

By the time the Second World War came about, Chesty Puller was a Colonel and led the 1st Marines in the battle on Peleliu, code name "Operation Stalemate II, perhaps the bloodiest battle in all of Marine Corps history. Of his 3000 men who fought on this small coral island in the Pacific, 1749 were lost.

The landing on Peleliu was at 08:32, 15 September, 1944. The 1st Marines landed to the north on "White Beach 1 and 2" and the 5th and 7th Marines to the center on "Orange Beach 1,2, and 3." Chesty's guys were almost immediately bogged down by heavy fire from their left flank and Chesty barely escaped death when a dud artillary round struck his landing craft (LVT).  In all, the Japanese destroyed 60 LVTs and DUKWs with their 47 mm guns and 20 mm canons.

 For his action, Chesty was awarded two Legion of Merits.

Chesty was once again assigned to the 1st Marine Regiment at the outbreak of the Korean War and was at the landing at Inchon on September 15th, 1950. He racked up another Legion of Merit and a Silver Star Medal and the Army awarded him with a Distinguished Service Cross for action from November 29 to December 5th. 

His fifth Navy Cross came during the fighting at the "Frozen Chosin" from December 5-10, 1950 where he made his famous quote: "We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things." He might have also been the one to have said: "Great. Now we can shoot at those bastards from every direction."

Another famous Chosin Reservoir quote from Chesty: "Remember, you are the 1st Marines! Not all the Communists in Hell can overrun you!"

In a letter to his wife while fighting in Korea, Chesty wrote of the Air Force: "The mail service has been excellent out here, and in my opinion this is all that the Air Force has accomplished during the war."

I know of one story in Marine Corps lore where a Marine, up on a mountain, was cold and scared during the night. There was a lull in the action and the Marine was worried the enemy was about to attack. (I believe it was in the Second World War but not 100% certain.) 

Chesty saw the young Marine's rifle barrel shaking and went over to his position, stood in front with his back to the Marine, facing out toward the night. "Prop the barrel against my leg to hold it steady," he said, exposing himself to the enemy. "If I see any of them, I`ll let you know and you can shoot the bastard."

They say that kid would have followed Chesty through the gates of hell, but Joe Biden already stole that line.

Finally, I know of one more story where an Army captain asked Chesty for the line of direction of retreat, if things got too dicey. 

Chesty called his Tank Commander and gave him the coordinates of the Army troops the Captain was referring to. Then he told the Tank Commander: "If they start to pull back from that line, even one foot, I want you to open fire on them." 

Chesty then turned to the Captain and said, "Does that answer your question?"

If Chesty were still in command today, I predict there would be beer dispensers in all Marine Corps Mess Halls and, if he were allowed to command the war against ISIS, there would be a lot of dead camel jockeys.

They don't make 'em like that anymore.



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