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Sunday, February 14, 2021

UPDATED: Michael van der Veen Speaks--And How!

Perhaps many readers have already seen this CBS interview with Trump attorney Michael van der Veen. He doesn't give an inch to the liberal reporter, and when she attempts to diminish the significance of the House Dems falsifying evidence in a Senate trial, he totally unloads on her. I like the touch at the end when he identifies himself as "citizen"--watch for that. 

You may, like me, find his talk of "Left and Right" finding a "middle" to be hopelessly naive, but for the rest his righteous outrage was refreshing:



UPDATE: I'm not sure, but when van der Veen says that there were other examples of House Dem misconduct he may have been referring to the Raskin statements about Beutler's claims re the McCarthy phone call with POTUS. Jonathan Turley points out that Raskin claimed the Beutler statements were breaking news from "last night" that couldn't have been presented at the trial during the past few days. In fact, of course, Beutler's statement had been known for weeks:


The statement quoted Beutler as saying that she had previously discussed the call in public. Keep in mind Raskin just claimed that this was new evidence from “last night” and  the Senate needed to call witnesses on this “additional critical piece of corroborating evidence."

 

46 comments:

  1. Heartwarming, he ate her alive. She wasn't expecting it. Otherwise she would have cut off his mike. Did you see where the shock troops vandalized his home outside Philadelphia? That has to stop.

    It's long past time that these DNC vandals are met with countervailing force. The law is useless. Vandals need to face serious risks when they break windows, especially on a private home, belonging to a "citizen."

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    1. Yeah, I'm not sure how the vandalizing of his home fits into his "middle ground" narrative.

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    2. Recall that Trump had a big Philly law firm on retainer set to into action right after the election. Once they were named it only took a day or so for them to announce they were reneging on their contract after coming under this same sort of assault

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  2. Conservatives have never left the "middle ground".

    mso

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  3. so the current headline in Daily Mail is that he put on a "whiny voice" during this interview...the story was written by a Katelyn Caralle who apparently came to DC in 2016 as an intern at the Heritage Foundation, if my research serves me correctly. If so, sheesh, what has happened at Heritage? My kid was also an intern there in 2014 and had a great time, but all "conservative" institutions are now suspect as far as I'm concerned (of course, I realize that the writer of the article doesn't always craft the headline, but...)

    Along those lines, I got a call from the Media Research Center to thank me for a recent contribution and I unloaded on the hapless guy - I said that I am carefully watching all of my longtime favorite conservative causes and if I detect ANY anti-Trump rhetoric or movement in that direction, I'm gonna cut them off tout de suite and I let him know that I am beginning to unwind my "fortune" in my dotage and I have decent amount to unload so they better toe the line if they want some of my largesse. BTW, the guy responded in agreement and said that MRC was not going in that direction, but we shall see...

    Bottom line at the moment is that I am pi$$ed at all of them and how they treat Mr. Trump in "retirement" will be the litmus test going forward...and I hope others more wealthy than I feel the same

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    1. By now I would think that everyone would know that the Daily Mail is a UK tabloid. The blurbs and photos in the right hand column should give away what a tabloid is. A gossip sheet long on clickbait headlines and photos (which it buys from others) and the merest patchwork of articles, also picked up from other sources and cobbled together. Brits don’t take its “reporting" seriously - for that they look to the Telegraph or Times of London. Why on earth do any of us?

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    2. Doesn’t the Buetler story amount to double hearsay? McCarthy purportedly recounting to her his version of what President Trump said, and her recounting it to - apparently - anyone who would listen? If they were going that route, why not call McCarthy and put him under oath, cutting out one layer of hearsay? Not likely that the Raskin Mafia would risk that. But you can bet Van Der Veen would have.

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    3. At a real trial the Beutler story would not have been permitted as direct testimony--only as purported impeachment if McCarthy or Trump had testified. My understanding.

      Is it OK to say: the Beutler did it?

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    4. I’m glad you said it. I thought the Buetler thing was a piece of grandstanding rubbish. First, by her. And then by that creep Raskin. So there!!!

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    5. While I doubt anyone who reads here takes the Daily Mail seriously, many others do and we ignore the effect such a tabloid has on their thinking at our peril, sigh...(of course, now that Harry's wife is preggers again, the world could end tomorrow and the DM would report it below the fold, so to speak, but I digress).

      Heck, I wouldn't read anything from Fleet Street if I was looking for "serious reporting"...I think Jim Hacker nailed it here:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCrnmya0xFw

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    6. Hotlanta Hipplie -"Heck, I wouldn't read anything from Fleet Street if I was looking for "serious reporting"...I think Jim Hacker nailed it here."

      Trouble is that the British papers are much better than the U.S. papers. I tell people if I want to know what is going on in America I read the British papers. That was pretty much true until about Q2 2020 when you could see a distinct change of tone. It shifted from a bemused anti-Trump to a strident anti-Trump tone.

      I foresee another change in tone with the full impact of Biden's er. Obama foreign policy becomes apparent.

      Spartacus

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    7. Some have a fascination with all things British, as though they are somehow superior to us. I got along quite well for decades without being imperiled by not paying attention to what the Daily Mail said. I didn’t even know that it existed. I was taught by my parents to read numerous publications (there were three newspapers in the house every day) and we discussed the news, much as we do here at Mark’s blog.

      At some point we must trust our own minds to find our way through the “news”. We actually have an advantage now when the lines between liberal/progressive and anything conservative are pretty well drawn. That doesn’t mean we must live in an echo chamber, but that we should be sufficiently savvy to spot propagands when we see it. And then we get on with our lives.

      When I see people having fits about what someone said on MNBC or CNN or on Jimmy Kimmel or any other late night prog programs, I shake my head and wonder why they were there in the first place? What did they expect? Ditto those who incessantly drag in propaganda quoted from CNN or Politico or its spinoff Axios with an outraged “ain’t it awful!” attitude. Of course it is. It’s what they do. No secret. Why keep picking at that scab?

      The only thing I ever found to be “better” in the Times of London were the obituaries. Some are absolutely priceless. Other than that, there is an anti-American slant to almost everything the Brit media publish. It may be subtle or not so, but it is there. They have never gotten over the Revolution when we upstarts broke away from them, sent them packing when they tried to take us back, and went on to not only great success, but saving their bacon in WWII.

      I came very close to living there. A close call on many levels.

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    8. It's true re Euros generally--so many feel able to speak about the US without basic information. I suppose they see the effect of some of our policies on the rest of the world and extrapolate to what they think people here are like. Big disconnect. Understandable in some respects because the US is a far more difficult country to come to grips with than outsiders realize. Well, some of us who have lived here all our lives are only just now coming to that realization.

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    9. My wife is a French country girl whom I met & married during my 10 year Cold War stint in Europe "protecting our country", sigh. She converses regularly with her siblings who are deluged with nothing but anti-Trump "news" such that they cannot understand why any of us deplorables would actually vote for such a dummkopf, so to speak. And, when I visit there, the "conversations" are passionate in English, French & German as I try to bring them a different point of view from what they are being fed, sigh, to little or no avail (but I do plant tiny seeds of doubt, methinks).

      It will be interesting to discuss Herr Biden when the time comes...no chance he will receive the hagiography dished out to Obama so we will have to see, but he's not Trump so he's got that going for him...but, hey, what do I know?

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    10. I was an American teenager living in Belgium the 1970s. Dinner with a Belgian family, including their 20-something son in the Belgian Air Force. The guy wanted to debate the relative skills of American vs Belgian pilots with me (an ignorant 13-year-old American boy), and then he wanted to arm-wrestle me in the living room. My dad interrupted before I got my arm broken.

      There you have the Brit & Euro attitude toward America. We were and still are occupying their countries with our military. How emasculating is that? The resentment that creates among boys & young men is palpable.

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    11. "It's true re Euros generally--so many feel able to speak about the US without basic information."

      I spent 10 years in Western Europe and its generally true. But we have millions of "Coastal" progressives right here in the US who are functionally illiterate about their own country and about 10s of millions of Americans in 'flyover' states.

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  4. I haven't heard anybody mention that in the reported phone conversation, Trump's first response was that he believed Antifa was causing the trouble, which was the first thought that a lot of people had since his supporters are not usually violent. This reaction clearly tells us his state of mind. He thought his people were not causing the riot, which is also evidence that he did not intend to cause it. It is commonly reported that he made a false claim, but even if his belief was false, it showed his state of mind and his lack of "intention" to incite violence.

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    1. Beutler's account was quite tendentious and disputed by others--including McCarthy himself. In fact, Trump had a number of calls with Reps on the Hill at the time, which confirmed what you're saying.

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    2. And it is yet another example of looking at one comment out of context and "reading" intention into the words (if they are even true), while ignoring the other part, which more clearly shows his state of mind.

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    3. sawadika, according to the secondhand, thirdhand version of the phone conversation… Unless Trump’s conversation was recorded, we have no record of what he really said. All we have heard is what Buetler told a number of people that McCarthy had told her that Trump had said.

      Lawyers, would that stand a chance in court?

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    4. Yes, of course that is the bottom line. I am just curious why no one has noted that the first part of his statement would have been a more direct clue into his state of mind, namely that he didn't believe that his supporters were engaging in violence. I haven't heard anyone raise that point. Instead, all of the focus was on the second part, which was much more open to interpretation, even if we stipulate that it's what Beutler believed she heard about some else's conversation. For me, the first part of the alleged statement would show his lack of intent. As for the second part, it lacks context and thus credibility for me and it is also second or third hand.

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  5. I watched the whole interview. The CBS spokesmodel seemed in over her head. At the same time, Michael van der Veen could use some media coaching.

    The interviewer did call the January 6 events an "insurrection," and she went on to claim (falsely) that van der Veen had characterized those events in the same way. Because the interviewer gave voice to that lie, I have no doubt that she also considered the House impeachment managers' doctoring of evidence to be no big deal.

    But she actually did not say that. What she said, repeatedly, is that she wanted van der Veen to clarify what he was talking about with respect to doctored evidence, for the benefit of low-information viewers.

    Instead of doing that, he flew off the handle and came off looking semihysterical. When the interviewer introduced the topic of doctored evidence, she began by saying, "To be clear, . . ." but van der Veen claimed a few minutes later that she had said, "To be fair, . . . ," and he persisted in building a case against her on the basis of that mishearing, or misremembering, or misinterpretation.

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    1. I think what got van der Veen going was the reporter's statement about the House Dems "doctoring evidence, AS YOU SAY." He immediately reacted to that by saying "They didn't deny it." He again reacted angrily when she repeated that phrase "you say" regarding the "selective editing." I think he felt that he was being asked to justify his previous characterization of "altering" and "selective [i.e., dishonest] editing" and he responded preemptively.

      I agree he may have read too much into this specific reporter's words, but his reaction probably should be seen in the context of repeated badgering and misrepresentation by the rest of the media, the defacing of his house, death threats, etc. Beyond that, I think what rankled with him was that he had won his case and thought the focus should have been forthrightly on the clear insufficiency and dishonesty of the House case.

      For example, what preceded the angry outburst regarding the doctored evidence was the whole tenor of the reporter beginning of the interview. She led with a point blank characterization of Jan 6 as an "insurrection" followed by a mischaracterization of his own words. She next wanted to know if he was shocked by McConnell's words about Trump--obviously he was being placed on the defensive. He offered a terse response: I'm never shocked by a politician's statements. I suspect, from what he later said at length, that he felt the question that should have been front and center was: Were you shocked that the House managers altered evidence? It may seem like a small difference in emphasis, but it's the difference in emphasis that he said is at the heart of all the media coverage of the faux impeachment.

      Again, I agree that he could have handled it more smoothly, but in fairness he'd been through a lot and his reaction had been building. Granted he may have misunderstood the reporter's intent, I think he was right in believing that the interview would have gone differently if she'd been talking to House managers--she wouldn't have inserted those "as you say" "you say" interjections.

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    2. It seemed such genuine shock and anger at her tone, treatment, and words, that I'm guessing he might be reassessing more things based on this week's experience. I don't believe he would be used to this type of treatment by the media.

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    3. He was listening blandly until she mentioned McConnell's "impassioned speech about Mr. Trump's involvement," and throughout the interview her choice of words and what what to focus the question on further showed her bias. Although she said she was just trying to make it clear for the viewers, instead of arguing she should have just let him clarify it. She should have used more open-ended questions. So many of their questions have false assumptions built into them. That's what I got out of it.

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    4. Trump's lawyer treated the CBS Democrat activist as his enemy, as just another lieing Democrat he had to deal with all week, just another Democrat who incited the vandalism of his home last week.

      He treated her honestly, as "the enemy within" to use Pelosi's own words.

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    5. Van Der Veen did just fine. Righteous indignation. He cut loose with it during the trial arguments when Raskin’s absurd lying was transparent, yet Raskin stuck with it. You cannot fairly and appropriately judge Van Der Veen’s talk to the media without having seen and heard what went on during the trial. We watched and listened - you don’t pussyfoot around with those mendacious types, whether they are congresspersons or reporters.

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    6. Just read your comment, dfp….yes, exactly. Why is everyone suddenly and expert on what he should have or should not have said, or how he voiced his remarks, bla bla bla. He is authentic to the core. The reporterette was being beyond impertinent. Trying to push her own activist narrative. He let her have it. Bravo!

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  6. In O/T Orrin Hatch has a nice opinion piece in Newsweek. Surprised Newsweek allowed this:

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/reining-in-the-techno-oligarchy-opinion/ar-BB1dzdnt

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    1. Actually NOT OT if you go here:

      https://meaninginhistory.blogspot.com/2021/02/briefly-noted-when-corporations-are-big.html

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  7. Many have faulted the President’s use of twitter for his communication with the people. The Buetler thing is a perfect example of why he found he had to do it. From Day One he would have been misquoted, or his remarks taken out of context and pretzeled into some opponent’s propaganda against him. His own words were pretty clear. Spare. Blunt. (Blunt: uncompromisingly straightforward, according to my dictionary) (I’d say blunt Van Der Veen was the perfect lawyer for him…)

    I’m not sure why bluntness and authenticity are so scary to some people...

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    1. Not only is he blunt and authentic but he is very very smart. That surely scares the Dems.

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  8. Van Der Veen’s middle ground comment came when he was telling the media that they were at fault for keeping the temperature up too high. That things had to cool down. That there were many very important things that the Congress had to accomplish for the good of the country, things that of necessity required a lowering of the temperature so there could be an attempt to find middle ground. He blamed the media for keeping the rancor going, the divisiveness. He was right. Order is not a big media seller. Chaos is. The media love chaos. If it doesn’t exist, they stir it up.

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  9. Van Der Veen’s mentions a middle ground. Maybe someone here knows on what subject a middle ground can be found, I can't think of any. Mark does it ever cross your mind that your blog would be one of the sites monitored for wrong speak?

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    1. Does it cause you sometimes to not say things you would like to say? It does me.

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  10. I think it is pointless to understand anything that transpires on CBS or any other media outlet for that matter as anything other than a rhetorical battle. DC wants you to believe this political rhetoric, these narratives somehow describe or are concerned with reality but they do not. The most telling moment was when Mr. Van der Veen called out the CBS flak on her "fact pattern". Right there is the key. She's spewing a narrative (lies in common parlance) and wanting him to accede to it, simply by not objecting. And she had every reason to expect that he wouldn't object, that he would attempt to answer her slanted question and thereby assuring her of success regardless of his answer, because that is what happens almost every time in every "interview". He refused to go along with the charade. Same when she tried to "narrate" the significance for us rubes of Mitch's post acquittal speech, that a REPUBLICAN was agreeing with DEMOCRATS, oh isn't that so significant! It's all phony made up rhetorical BS to cow the masses into to believing these political partisan games are reality. Reality is that guy passing that usb stick to that poll worker in chicago. That's reality, what Mitch McConell says on the floor of the Senate is something else.
    Mark A

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    1. What I can't understand is how they are shown the deceptive editing side by side and it doesn't matter to them. They simply repeat their claims. How can we get to a middle ground when we have such different ways of representing basic reality?

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    2. I don`t understand why R Senators or Reps continue to go on CNN etc, as long as there are no ground rules. Why don`t they insist on being allowed to speak without interruption, or they won`t go on?

      Surely the exposure is not worth the hassle of being treated so contemptuously?

      Do they get a big sum of money for going on? What else is in it for them?

      Frank

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  11. In case anyone is wondering--slow comment enabling--we're having big internet problems today.

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  12. I am so glad that someone can speak with clarity and forcefulness . The Dems have been yelling over the conservative viewpoints for years. I am ready for some of their impolite kind of speech on my side.

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    1. Until Donald Trump came along, we didn’t see much passion on our side. He was not afraid to be passionate about our country. Van Der Veen was passionate about what he had to say. What he had seen in the “trial”. The lies, the absence of investigation, the manipulation of so-called “evidence”. The use of “reports” and “reportedly” as “facts”. The House manager shenanigans that would never make it in a courtroom. It was pretty clear that he didn’t think much of the politicians he encountered. Including those who voted to convict. They disregarded the real facts. He was livid.

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  13. Van der Veen spoke of NPR as being the paragon of virtue in the news business. Since when? They seem every bit as biased against Trump to me as any of the others.

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    1. @Bentwood
      I think he misspoke. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. :-)

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    2. Maybe he's remembering back when NPR dumped Garrison Keillor for being caught doing what Democrats almost always do to people when they have power.

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    3. @dfp21
      Yes, or maybe back to the MacNeil Lehrer Report (when we didn't know any better...)

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    4. Using npr as an example is Rhetoric.

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