There's a second wave of media reaction to John Durham's latest filing on the origins of the TrumpRussia investigation. The first wave was silence, hoping somehow the whole story would vanish. Now the second wave is "Explainers," which attempt to hem and haw defensively through the whole business. The Associated Press "Explainer" was headlined "How the latest Trump-Russia filing generated buzz." This article was sent to me on Twitter by a fellow who apparently hates Donald Trump with the energy of a thousand suns, so that illustrates the type of people who eagerly share these dismissive articles. The AP reporter on this was Eric Tucker. He channeled all the rebuttals of Michael Sussman, the Hillary Clinton-connected lawyer who Durham had indicted for lying (omitting his ties to Hillary). Tucker helpfully tweeted the Democrat line: "Sussmann's lawyers struck back at Durham team's over its inclusion in the court filing of allegations they said were false and 'intended to further politicize this case, inflame media coverage, and taint the jury pool.'" Get out the laugh track. This is the threat that Durham represents. He is exposing that everything the Clinton campaign did here was to politicize national security agencies, sharing their smears with the FBI and the CIA to spur spying on Trump advisers, to inflame media coverage, and then to taint the judicial process through the Mueller team, where 11 of 16 prosecutors were Democrat donors. Five of them were Clinton donors. Tucker also had to pounce on the S-word. It's not spying! They were "mining information" to establish an "inference" tying Trump to Russia. "The researchers were not 'spying' on the Trump campaign in 2016 but were instead working at the request of federal officials to investigate Russian malware attacks that had targeted the U.S. government and the White House." A similar spin came from taxpayer-subsidized NPR, under their internet headline "The John Durham filing that set off conservative media, explained." Their online summary of the "All Things Considered" story blatantly editorialized, "The political right is making hay out of a recent filing in special counsel John Durham's investigation into the Trump-Russia probe. We break down the truth behind their outlandish claims." Outlandish? Fill-in host Elissa Nadworny asserted, "Fox News even said Clinton had, quote, 'infiltrated Trump Tower and the White House.' But is that what Durham actually said?" Reporter Ryan Lucas replied, "No. Durham never said in his filing that Clinton paid operatives to spy on Trump or his campaign. He never used the word 'infiltrate.'" All this parsing sounds like saying Bill Clinton never had "sex" with Monica Lewinsky, since he claimed it was all oral sex. Nadworny implied this was ancient history: "So all of this is tied up in events that happened five or six years ago. Why does it matter now?" Lucas explained, "Trump had hoped that Durham would deliver a report before the 2020 election that could help Trump's campaign. That, of course, didn't happen. But the battle over shaping perceptions is still very much raging." NPR is aggressively "shaping perceptions" that conservative media manufactures "outlandish" claims that mangle the truth. This is also how The New York Times and The Washington Post climbed on the bandwagon, ranting about conservative "conspiracy theories watered with fresh misinformation." So the media that pushed a phony dossier with "pee tapes" and implied regularly that Trump was either happily colluding with the Russians or being blackmailed by the Russians is lecturing the rest of us about empty conspiracy theories. The largest fraud in everything now unfolding is that there's a conservative media and then there's a "realitybased press." Tim Graham The Sun Bay Paper Page 18 February 25, 2022 - March 3, 2022 National News 'Explainer' Articles Insist Nobody 'Spied' Don't Go to the Head of the Class If there's one group the education establishment wants to stop, it is parents, many of them Asians, who push their students to excel. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, is the best high school in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report. Sadly, its percentage of African Americans admitted during the 2020-2021 school year was 1.77%, even though Blacks represent 10% of students in Fairfax County Public Schools. One school board member called the dearth of Black students "completely unacceptable." I agree. The question is: What do you do about it? Improve elementary and middle school learning, or change the rules? In 2020, the Fairfax County School Board proposed changing the standards to get into the prestige institution by developing a "merit lottery," which sounds a tad Orwellian to me. According to the nonpartisan Pacific Legal Foundation, the district's new policy would reduce a different minority group -- Asian Americans who composed 72% of TJ's student body, but 20% of the district's student population. By capping the percentage of students allowed from each of the district's 23 middle schools, PLF argues, the TJ class of 2025 would have 42% fewer Asian American students. No other racial group would lose coveted slots. The new formula is unconstitutional, Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Erin Wilcox, who is representing parents in a lawsuit to stop the change, told me. Under the new admissions policy, TJ no longer can get "the most highly qualified students." Under the status quo, white families (18% of the TJ student body, but 37% of the district) are underrepresented, as well as Hispanics (3% of TJ students, but 27% of the district.) Among other changes, the new policy eliminated the standardized test. "Testing drained merit from the pool, and it has drained talent from the pool," Superintendent Scott Brabrand said, according to the school's online magazine, TJ Today. "The admissions test hasn't just been a barrier, it has been a wall. A wall that's prevented access of opportunity for our students and it is time today to tear down this wall." It's as if top educators think there's something unfair about students who excel. Former Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni compared students who prepared for the test as having a "leg up," almost as if they were athletes who took "performance enhancing drugs." The Fairfax board pushed the change in 2020 in anticipation of the passage of a state law to require top schools to reflect the diversity of their districts within 5%. But the law never passed. That's what a botched rush job the whole scheme is. Thing is, former Fairfax Superintendent Daniel A. Domenech told me that "there should be no exclusivity in education" and "every citizen should have the opportunity to get a highquality education, but it can't happen because districts generally don't have the resources to do that." Domenech added, "If you come from an Asian culture, you are driven to succeed, you're driven to study." Domenech said that by changing the criteria, you give students in less prestigious feeder schools an opportunity they otherwise never get. "Yes, some of them will fail," he said, "because they haven't had the preparation that others have had. But at least more than now would have the opportunity to succeed." But really, the focus should be on preparing more students of all backgrounds to embrace academic rigor -- not to punish Asian American kids for giving their all. Debra J. Saunders
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