While scanning Yahoo news, I ran into an article by Sonam Sheth (pictured above) of Business Insider about Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff accused of challenging one judge’s definition of the amorphous abstraction of “racial profiling”. What was presented as a straight-up news piece was essentially a stitched together product of lefty wish-fulfillment. The article went along a boozy path from the pardon to Trump-as-mafioso. Journalism isn’t journalism any longer. It’s fevered imaginations run wild.
To grasp the pitiful state of journalism, let’s go on a journey through Sheth’s personal profile. It will illuminate a lot about her unconscious – or conscious – mingling of bits of hard news with barnstorming lefty politicization. This will be brief.
Her’s is a compressed odyssey from a Rutgers University classroom to a couple of extensions of the classroom in internships and a “columnist” for the college newspaper. While in the college cocoon, she had a 3-month layover with Citizen Action of New York. Currently, Citizen Action is one of the lefty activist groups in the vanguard of The Resistance. Check out these gems of left wing boilerplate from the website:
“Build the Movement. Add Your Name to the Restistance Rapid Response: We’re building the statewide movement we need to take on Trump and make health care for all a reality. Build it with us.”
“Gov. Cuomo: Stop Trump’s Climate Attack! While we fight the Trump administration every step of the way in D.C., New York must lead on climate change by transitioning to 100% renewable energy. It’s up to Governor Cuomo.”
There’s more, but you get the idea.
What would attract a future Business Insider staffer to an organization of politically strident lefty activism? Hmmmm.
Oh well, from there she dropped into a short internship with CNBC and was picked up by Business Insider. I’m sure that the Rutgers econ degree drew attention with the HR departments, but with the degree comes a load of ideological fixations. They make it easy to leap from assumption/premise to disjointed fact to conclusion, all in a surreal and dreamy narrative landscape. It would make Salvador Dali cringe in envy.
Now to the article. The title says it all: “Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”. A person could stop with the title and be just as informed.
The article was riddled with so much bounding from point to point that my wife could only hear, as I was reading, my repeated refrain of “This is bull@#$&*!”. The bravo sierra begins with the grasping for a link between the pardon and hoped-for proof of obstruction of justice.
First, right out of the gate, she constricts Arpaio’s sin as “criminal contempt in July for violating a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos”. “Racial profiling” is one of those politically loaded terms that are bandied about like a frisbee. It’s become so expansive that a victim might shy away from using the word “black” to describe a black assailant.
Besides, Arpaio’s tough illegal immigration stance, and his use of “racial profiling”, might have something to do with the overwhelming type of illegal that a sheriff might confront in a state that shares a border with the Latino world south to the Strait of Magellan. In effect, the judge is either ordering the sheriff to ignore the rule of law – immigration law that is – or pretend the obvious doesn’t exist as he does so. Either way, it’s a court-ordered charade. Trump’s pardon put an end to the judicial lunacy.
For our budding journalist, it may never have occurred to her that an immigration hawk of a presidential candidate has a natural affinity for a sheriff thinking, and doing, the same. It’s not proof of criminal intent and conspiracy to clear a sheriff from the clutches of an activist judge for carrying out policies in line with the policies and constitutional authority of the president of the United States. But no, Sheth’s surreal potboiler must take precedence.
From the pardon, she builds the edifice. In quoting a single source, Renato Marriotti, she tries to weave a story of criminal intent from, once again citing Marriotti, Trump hypothetically “ending investigations as to his friends”. The presence of “friends” is not evidence of “intent” of criminal conspiracy to “obstruct justice”. Arpaio isn’t an example of the kind of cronyism typical of the Clintons. If viewpoint sympathy can be strung into the kind of relationship most typically found in criminal conspiracies, then most assuredly Bill Clinton should be dressed in striped livery for the pardoning of Marc Rich. There was much more evidence of illicit behavior in that whole unseemly affair.
As for Sheth’s insinuation of “obstruction of justice”, where’s the underlying crime? You know, the criminal conduct that a person seeks to hide. For Bill Clinton, it was perjury in Federal District Court in Arkansas and his subsequent dissembling testimony before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC. For Trump, as the constitutionally ordained chief executive officer of the United States government, he simply asked about the possibility of ending the investigation of Michael Flynn. Even here, Sheth can’t present proof of an order by Trump do so. She’s only got Comey’s “feelings” of pressure.
I’m reminded of my discussions with my teenage sons after they came home late. Certainly they felt “pressure”. Am I guilty of “obstruction of justice” simply because they felt “pressure” … but I’m hiding no crime for which the “pressure” is applied? Sheth’s pseudo-logic enters the realm of the ludicrous.
Of course, lurking behind the curtain is the fantasy of all denizens of the left: the Trump/Russian criminal conspiracy, the philosopher’s stone of explanations for the 2016 election results. There’s been no evidence of “criminal conspiracy” … up to now. But, then again, there’s no evidence of an underlying crime in my sitdowns with my clock-challenged sons … up to now. I can only hope and pray that they never discover Sheth-logic.
Possibly Sheth could benefit from 2 doses of reality. First, the president is the federal government’s alpha law enforcement officer. In essence, he’s the chief DA of the federal government. He can inquire into any investigation under his purview. It may prove to be embarrassing to his supporters and much fun to his detractors, but voters can deal with that at the next election. Alan Dershowitz, no card-carrying member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, said as much in June of this year (see 6 below).
Furthermore, the president’s pardon power is near absolute. If Trump so wished, he could pardon the entire roster of inmates in the federal penal system. He doesn’t even have to wait for convictions to fling the power around. It may not enhance his electoral viability, but he could do it.
Sheth’s story is a mess. It is more lefty wish-fulfillment than it is journalism. It doesn’t even make for good commentary, and more resembles a bad term paper. As per the old cliché, there’s no there there. For the Sheths of the world, it’s as if they want to overturn an election with smear-mongering and an endless manipulation of the criminal justice system. The more appropriate venue for their angst is the ballot box … which, by the way, they have difficulty in winning.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
-
“Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”, Sonam Sheth, Business Insider, 8/27/17, https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trumps-decision-pardon-joe-arpaio-160000939.html
-
Sonam Sheth Linkedin page, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sonam-sheth
- Sonam Sheth Twitter page, https://twitter.com/sonamsays
- Citizen Action of New York website, http://citizenactionny.org/
- Sonam Sheth’s brief profile at Business Insider website, http://www.businessinsider.com/author/sonam-sheth
- “Alan Dershowitz: History, precedent and James Comey’s opening statement show that Trump did not obstruct justice”, Alan Dershowitz and contributor, Washington Examiner, 6/8/2017, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/alan-dershowitz-history-precedent-and-james-comeys-opening-statement-show-that-trump-did-not-obstruct-justice/article/2625318