(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

WASHINGTON — All in all, you'd have to say that picking a fight with the richest American who ever lived, and a guy who also owns a major newspaper that's already got its teeth in your neck, wasn't the smartest career move that American Media Inc. and the National Enquirer ever made. In fact, it's the kind of gargantuan dose of stupid that you'd take only if you thought a very influential person—like, say, a President* of the United States—had your back on it.

From, what the hell, the Washington Post.

In an extraordinary post to the online publishing platform Medium on Thursday, Bezos said the Enquirer and its parent company, American Media Inc., made the threat after he began investigating how the tabloid obtained text messages that revealed his relationship with former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez. Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, wrote that the Enquirer wanted him to make a false public statement that he and his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, “have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.”

After Bezos published his statement, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Ronan Farrow said that he “and at least one other prominent journalist” had received similar blackmail threats from the Enquirer’s parent company over their reporting. Farrow had written about the Enquirer’s “catch and kill” practice — in which stories are squelched by paying off sources — that benefited Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. Farrow, like Bezos, said he refused to cut a deal with the National Enquirer or AMI.

This story effectively blotted out the sun in Washington as soon as it broke on Thursday night. ("No Thank You, Mr. Pecker" is a Dickens title for the dick-pic age. It's fun to be in fifth grade again.) The second stage ignited when WaPo reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia went on Lawrence O'Donnell's MSNBC show and speculated that "a government entity" may have accessed the Bezos texts in question, which would kick this scandal almost all the way up the scale to impeachable offenses.

Jeff Bezos Matt Winkelmeyer Getty Images

Since then, it has been rumored that the blackmail against Bezos was aimed at killing the Post's coverage of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of agents of the Saudi government. People also are quick to point out that the Enquirer has been known to engage in so much private-sector ratfcking on behalf of Donald Trump that the publication, and its parent company, already have cut a cooperation deal with prosecutors back in New York. This, of course, would throw that agreement right into the woodchipper. My lord, it's grifters, bagmen, cheap gunsels, and pure, rancid sleaze, all the way down.

The feeling here is that Bezos has called the bluff so successfully that, once it unravels, this scandal may be the fatal one. I'm less sure about that than some people are, but Bezos has all the time—and most of the money—in the world, and his powerful newspaper is run by Marty Baron, who does not let go of a story until he's turned it upside down and shaken all of the facts out of its pockets. Ever since this administration* took office, it's been plain that the towering arrogance of its leader, who knows more about everything than anyone else, has infected the rest of the government.

They believe in the myth of their own power. They're about to find out what real power looks like. In Washington, you can hear the great wheels grinding again.

Copies of the National Enquirer Getty Images

As Senator Professor Warren gets ready to announce formally that she's running for president—she's doing it up in Lawrence, the proud labor history of which is the reason why—and as the elite political press continues to forget everything it allegedly learned in 2016 (On Friday, apparently, it was the Boston Globe's turn.), I thought it would be a good time to re-up this terrific 2018 piece by the Los Angeles Times about House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy.

A company owned by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s in-laws won more than $7 million in no-bid and other federal contracts at U.S. military installations and other government properties in California based on a dubious claim of Native American identity by McCarthy’s brother-in-law, a Times investigation has found. The prime contracts, awarded through a federal program designed to help disadvantaged minorities, were mostly for construction projects at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in McCarthy’s Bakersfield-based district, and the Naval Air Station Lemoore in nearby Kings County. Vortex Construction, whose principal owner is William Wages, the brother of McCarthy’s wife, Judy, received a total of $7.6 million in no-bid and other prime federal contracts since 2000, The Times found.

Kevin McCarthy NBC NewsWire Getty Images

The Bakersfield company is co-owned by McCarthy’s mother-in-law and employs his father-in-law and sister-in-law, Wages said. McCarthy’s wife was a partner in Vortex in the early 1990s. Vortex faced no competitive bids for most of the contracts because the Small Business Administration accepted Wages’ claim in 1998 that he is a Cherokee Indian. Under the SBA program, his company became eligible for federal contracts set aside for economically and socially disadvantaged members of minority groups, a boon to its business. Wages says he is one-eighth Cherokee. An examination of government and tribal records by The Times and a leading Cherokee genealogist casts doubt on that claim, however. He is a member of a group called the Northern Cherokee Nation, which has no federal or state recognition as a legitimate tribe. It is considered a fraud by leaders of tribes that have federal recognition.

Just sayin'.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Frame For The Blues" (Ben Patterson): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's Joe Valachi, on his way to a congressional committee in 1962 to explain to its members that there actually is organized crime in the United States. Don't understand why this one came to mind. I'll have to look into why some day.

This is just glorious.





Cardinal Timothy Dolan SOPA Images Getty Images

Cardinal Dolan from New York, the former money-burying prelate in Milwaukee, is raising hell with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over Cuomo's having signed an abortion-rights bill. It apparently has escaped the notice of Dolan from New York and the rest of the Clan of the Red Beanie that whatever slim credibility the institutional church had on the subject of human sexuality in general, and abortion in particular, has evaporated completely over the last week. From The New York Times:

An article last week in Women Church World, the women’s magazine of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, blamed the abuse on the outsize power of priests. “The abuse of women results in procreation and so is at the origin of the scandal of imposed abortions and children not recognized by priests,” wrote the article’s author, Lucetta Scaraffia, a feminist intellectual and the editor in chief of Women Church World.

For the love of god, shut up and do penance, the lot of you. If most of you would quit, that would be helpful, too.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, Fox News? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Scientists have dubbed the new dinosaur, “Bajadasaurus,” an herbivore that lived 140 million years ago, according to the scientific journal Nature, which first revealed the findings. Its name is an amalgam of Spanish, Greek, and Latin, meaning “lizard from Bajada with forward-bending spines.”The dinosaur's unusual "spines" have fueled a wave of speculation about what purpose they may have served. Pablo Gallina, a paleontologist who first came across a set of its teeth in 2010, said the “long and sharp spines,” were likely used to “deter possible predators.” Had it not been for the sharp spines, Gallina said, the dinosaur’s structure “could have been easily broken or fractured with a blow or when being attacked by other animals.”

They certainly would have deterred me. That's one freaky looking critter and it certainly lived then to make us happy now.

The Committee loves being educated by Top Commenters, who know more about subjects than The Committee does. So it chose Top Commenter Kate Underwood as this week's Top Commenter of the Week because of her careful explanation of how Oklahoma geneology works.

Membership in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is complex. I have a distant cousins who share common ancestors who are members by virtue of marriage. It doesn't matter that my Great Great Grandmother and her father's family were on the 1851 Census of Eastern Cherokee East of the Mississippi (Siler Roll) Gilmer County, GA or 1852 Chapman Roll or the Guion-Miller Roll Adair County, I.T. (Oklahoma)

They couldn't get on the Dawes Roll and that's that. Marriage could get you citizenship. Whereas that branch of my family was deemed ineligible because they were Eastern Cherokee, the cousin who shares the same ancestors, his side of the family gained citizenship by marrying into the Watie family. His wife, who is Polish-American brags of her pride in being a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

She has no Native American ancestry. As for myself. I have never stated I was Native American by virtue of of that branch of my family.

But there's nothing wrong with expressing pride or interest in a shared heritage. Busting Sen Warren's chops is disingenuous.

Thank you, Top Commenter Leatherwood for dispelling some of the "clouds" and brightening some of the "shadows" allegedly surrounding SPW's campaign, and 90.11 Beckhams to you, good lady.

I'll be back on Monday with more of the ongoing chaos and delight. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and don't start fights you can't finish, especially with billionaires.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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