NYT: Can you believe Nikki Haley’s state-funded residence is getting $52,000 curtains?*
I mention all of that to help you understand the logic of
this hit piece on Nikki Haley in the Times. It’s not perfectly analogous to the Twitter phenomenon I described: The truth is mentioned right here in the story itself. But it’s buried six paragraphs in, treated as an afterthought in a piece that’s clearly designed to buttress the narrative that Trump’s team of alleged swamp-drainers is running up exorbitant tabs on the taxpayer dime. Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, now Nikki Haley:
The State Department spent $52,701 last year buying customized and mechanized curtains for the picture windows in Nikki R. Haley’s official residence as ambassador to the United Nations, just as the department was undergoing deep budget cuts and had frozen hiring…
“How can you, on the one hand, tell diplomats that basic needs cannot be met and, on the other hand, spend more than $50,000 on a customized curtain system for the ambassador to the U.N.?” asked Brett Bruen, a White House official in the Obama administration.
Then there’s this in the sixth paragraph, the subject of the asterisk in my own headline:
A spokesman for Ms. Haley said plans to buy the curtains were made in 2016, during the Obama administration. Ms. Haley had no say in the purchase, he said.
Ah. That’s the Paper of Record’s concession that its own story is garbage, but garbage that’s too useful to Democratic talking points to be spiked completely. They’re sufficiently ethical that they’ll let you know that Haley’s not actually to blame for this supposedly shocking example of wasteful spending. In fact, the last Democratic administration is. But they’re sufficiently
unethical when it comes to promoting their ideological interests that they’ll run it anyway and trust that many readers won’t notice that detail.
“But wait,” say critics, “it’s not like the Times saved that information for the very end of the story. It’s in paragraph six, towards the top. Readers are going to see it once they get past the headline.”
Are they? What if they …
don’t want to get past the headline?
There were starving children in America during the Obama administration too, when the curtains were ordered. Don’t expect this Young Leader of Tomorrow to be too bothered about that. And before you say “He’s just a dumb kid,” note that the lefty attack dogs at
Think Progress are also flogging the NYT story today, aghast that Trump’s State Department would slash diplomatic budgets while fulfilling the order for Haley’s curtains. It’s now a moral outrage, it seems, for a Republican administration not to reverse the worst examples of profligate spending ordered by a Democratic administration which Think Progress ardently supported. (This is strike three for TP this week, by the way. They breathlessly
promoted the dubious Feinstein letter yesterday, then got
dinged even by fellow liberals for whining when the Weekly Standard caught them dead to rights on another lie about Kavanaugh.) One thing it would have been useful for them or for the Times to address is whether the State Department could have canceled the order for the curtains even if it wanted to. The contract was signed in 2016; backing out now because the price was too high would be an actionable breach, one would think. Would it have been better if Team Trump reneged on a deal Obama had bound them to, then got sued and had to pay up anyway?
One more thing. The chief defender of the curtains purchase in the Times story isn’t Haley or one of her mouthpieces, it’s Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy was appointed as a top management official in the State Department at the end of the Bush administration and spent the entirety of the Obama administration in the same job. Presumably he signed off on the purchase in 2016 when it was made, but either way he’s happy to defend it now. They’ll be used for years, he told the paper of the curtains, and it’s important to have a mechanized device so that the ambassador can close them quickly in case of a security threat. The State Department uses the building for entertaining foreign diplomats too; the decor isn’t a pure luxury for the ambassador herself. It’s much ado about nothing
according to an Obama-era official, yet people like Hogg and TP are lunging at it because the premise of Republican budget-slashers being spendthrifts for their own creature comforts is irresistible to their prejudices. If they want to hammer Trump on profligacy, may I
interest them in this instead?
