She can dish it out.

Here are two more press related things.

First up, Michelle Wolf gets even at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Some of her jokes landed, like the ones about Trump’s wealth, some of them didn’t, like the ones about Sarah Sanders. I think of Sanders as the robotic experiment that crossed all the qualities of a refrigerator with the worst DMV clerk you have ever had to interact with. But what was missing in that image of SSDLX18 was her underlying religious zeal and dominant humorlessness. Wolf nailed it when she called Sanders “Aunt Lydia” after the sadistic capo in charge of the Handmaid’s training facility in the Handmaid’s Tale. (Season 2 is streaming on Hulu and it gets really dark this season. IKR?)

Wolf goes on to ping Sanders even more but probably no worse than how Trump treats everyone he doesn’t like. Remember how he made fun of Hillary and how he would never hit on “that!”? How about when he called Kim Jun-Un “little rocket man” and made fun of his “nuclear button”. Wolf was only settling the score since she was the most visible member of the Trump White House on the dais. Yep, called her a liar too. Calling someone a liar is never funny but she deserved it.

Wolf is not generally a political stand up. But after a year of the Trump administration, we’re all on our last nerves. Check her roast out here:

Second, I found another interview with Amy Chozick and one of the Slate group podcasts. This time, it’s I Have To Ask with Isaac Chotiner. I don’t want to put a Trump target on Slate but they’re flying under the radar as having some of the best and most biting commentary and analysis about the Trump era.

Isaac shreds Amy head on about the frothy, mean girl chatter that made up the bulk of the Clinton Campaign coverage in 2016. I don’t know whether Amy thought she was going to be interviewed by her own side or what exactly but this interview was even more revealing than Heffernan’s. It’s like someone gave Chozick truth serum but forgot to tell her to put a lid on her conspiratorial glee. You have GOT to listen to it to believe it. Here is part of the transcript:

When it comes to the issue of the emails, and the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s handling of it, you say about the Times that “there was an insatiable appetite for email-related stories. I can’t explain it exactly except to compare it to a fever that spread through every newsroom and made us all salivate over the tiniest morsels.” You say you regret and resent this, but what role do you think the Times had in how big a story it became? And do you connect the way you describe the “salivating over the tiniest morsels” to your description of Ryan and the type of political stories the Times wanted?

I don’t say that it spread through the Times. I say it spread through every—the insatiable appetite is clearly across all media. It’s not specific to the Times in the book.

You say it “spread through every newsroom and made us all salivate over the tiniest morsels.” That presumably includes the Times.

“Us,” the media, yeah, the media including the Times. I think a lot of the furor over the emails came from cable news and what was feeding cable, so I want to make clear that that section wasn’t just about the Times. Look, I understand Hillary’s supporters complaining about the veracity and volume of stories around the email server. But I think it’s hard to say that the leading candidate for the presidency of the United States being under FBI investigation is a nonstory, which seems like what some of her supporters have argued. You can debate the legitimacy of the FBI investigation, but it was definitely a big story. There is an easy sense of comparing it to the scandals on the other side, on Trump’s side, and saying, “Well, compared to what Trump has done, it’s nothing.” I think it’s a dangerous proposition to say, well, because the other guy is beyond the pale, we are going to ignore this other big story.

That said, I do write in the book that I regret and even resent that it became the only story. We would go to see these press conferences when Hillary did them—because she rarely did—and reporters would just scream at her about emails. There would be people trying to get other questions in and it just got completely drowned out. My best example of this is that I spent a year trying to talk to this woman Sarah Ehrman, who was this feminist firebrand Democrat who Hillary lived with after law school when she was working on the Watergate committee and she was moving down to Arkansas to marry Bill Clinton. And Sarah Ehrman offered to drive her down and on the three-day road trip she tried to talk her out of it. She said, “You are throwing your life away. You are the most gifted woman I have ever met. You could do anything you want to do.” So I had wanted to re-create this road trip to show readers this vulnerable, different side of Hillary, and it took me a year to convince Sarah Ehrman to speak on the record. I had to bring her babka and wine, and finally I get the story together, and it posts [online] and three hours later Comey sends his letter to Congress, so the story never even made it into the paper. It was impossible to get other sympathetic stories to break through in the environment we were in.

“Yeah, it’s so strange how this environment got created. I have no idea how that happened. So, you know, we went for it because, what could we do??”

{{Oh my god}}

There’s more in that interview about the reason why they blew Hillary’s email story all out of proportion. She just wasn’t corrupt enough and the disparity between her and Trump was so big and glaring that it felt imbalanced. So they HAD to play up the email story because it was all they had. You’ve got to ask why it never occurred to the NYTimes that THAT was their story. She was squeaky clean and he was corrupt as f*ck. That was the story, Amy. You could have plumbed the depths of Trump’s corruption and compared it to Clinton. We had a right to know how corrupt he was in comparison to Clinton. Your job is to report reality, not distort it to sell papers.

By the way, Comey set the record straight about the “investigation”. It was more of an inquiry. There was never anything even the least bit criminal about her server and he anticipated from the beginning that the FBI wasn’t going to find anything. If the NYTimes had really been doing their work, they would have known all this from the beginning and they probably did. But just like Comey, they were afraid of looking like they were too soft on Hillary. Their audiences demanded blood in the water. Who were their audiences? Well, they were ALL of us. But they both overlooked that because… why exactly?

[It should be noted that Heffernan and Jacob Weisberg of Trumpcast reviewed Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, as well. Their review of his book was much more favorable. They think Comey is a good writer, and even though they didn’t always agree with his decisions, they understood what it was in Comey’s character and background that lead to them. Comey’s actions are explainable because they come from a core of a well defined personality.]

Comey is showing signs of definite remorse. He is painfully aware of what damage his letter did to his country and he reflects on his part in it. You can see him become more and more aware of this in his book tour interviews. He initially put aside his culpability but starts acknowledging it. Not so with Amy. For her it was all a big mean girl free for all where she played the more than witting. She knew what she was doing and loved every minute of humiliating Hillary.

I just want to know who put Amy up to writing this book in the first place. She comes across as the biggest ass kissing flying monkey to her editors. Or maybe she’s the sacrificial offering. Yeah, let’s make the overly eager wannabe from Texas the face of the NYTimes mean girl. She served her purpose. Amy acts like the Trump years are all going swimmingly as far as the Times is concerned or thinks everyone else in the media is kind of on its side. Turns out, not so much. Slate seems to have an excess of resistors at the moment and they are pulling back the dirty underside of the New York Times kimono. Amy is going to have to eat by herself when she gets back to her desk.