the portrait that has emerged of Fox News as a geriatric frat party where the rewards for being a top dog included ogling, propositioning, and groping the women who worked there, from clerical temps to news producers to star anchors like Megyn Kelly.
.. five women who had accused O’Reilly, now sixty-seven years old, of harassment that included “verbal abuse, lewd comments, unwanted advances and phone calls in which it sounded as if Mr. O’Reilly was masturbating.”
.. More than one said that O’Reilly had threatened to wreck their careers
.. Fox producer Andrea Mackris told the Times that O’Reilly vowed that if she complained about his behavior, he’d make her “pay so dearly” that she’d “wish she’d never been born.”
An internal Fox investigation turned up still more accusations
.. O’Reilly’s self-aggrandizing temper, his fondness for the phrase “shut up” when he’s speaking to or about people he deems insufficiently patriotic or submissive.
.. someone with a personality not unlike our President’s—thin-skinned and pugnacious, with a tendency to treat women as chattel.
.. The book, which my colleague Jia Tolentino recently wrote about, recounts, in gory detail, the murderous rampage unleashed by a pugnacious Irish-American news anchor after he is fired.
.. You’re either Old School or you’re a Snowflake—no in-betweens
.. “Instead Mr. O’Reilly blamed others, embracing the victimization he so ridiculed of the American left.”
.. Bosses who treat their workplaces as their harems are, among other things, lazy. They can’t be bothered with taking the time and effort to get to know someone well enough to, for example, tell whether that person might at all be interested in having sex with them. They crudely leverage their power over people’s livelihoods rather than courting them
.. his new mode regarding the sexual-harassment allegations against him—to drop cryptic little references that create a sense of persecution and of the supposed silencing of conservative voices.
America Becomes a Stan
We are, after all, about to hand over power to a man who has spent his whole adult life trying to build a cult of personality around himself;
.. Meanwhile, one look at his Twitter account is enough to show that victory has done nothing to slake his thirst for ego gratification. So we can expect lots of self-aggrandizement once he’s in office. I don’t think it will go as far as gold-plated statues, but really, who knows?
.. Some prominent Republicans are already suggesting that, rather than enforcing the ethics laws, Congress should simply change them to accommodate the great man.
.. Some Trump apologists have even taken to declaring that we needn’t worry about corruption from the incoming clique, because rich men don’t need more money. Seriously.
.. Not incidentally, James Comey, the F.B.I. director whose intervention almost surely swung the election, had previously worked for the Whitewater committee, which spent seven years obsessively investigating a failed land deal.
.. Indeed, America botched the occupation of Iraq in part thanks to profiteering by politically connected businesses.
I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.
I found her to be prepared, detail-oriented, thoughtful, inquisitive and willing to change her mind if presented with a compelling argument.
.. her understanding that diplomacy can be effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary
.. During the early debates about how we should respond to the Syrian civil war, she was a strong proponent of a more aggressive approach, one that might have prevented the Islamic State from gaining a foothold in Syria.
.. When some wanted to delay the Bin Laden raid by one day because the White House Correspondents Dinner might be disrupted, she said, “Screw the White House Correspondents Dinner.”
.. the character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief.These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law... President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated...ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States...This position, which so clearly contradicts the foundational values of our nation, plays into the hands of the jihadist narrative that our fight against terrorism is a war between religions... Our nation will be much safer with Hillary Clinton as president.