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In Putin’s Circle, Obama Was the ‘N-Word’

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Book Cites Contempt From Both Russian, Trump

A School Shooting Deserving of More Coverage

Golden Age of Rap Writing Gave Way to Blog Culture

Paying Tribute, a Morning Anchor Raps the News

Short Takes

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Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and President Donald Trump, shown in Hamburg on July 7, 2017, shared contempt for former president Barack Obama, a new book says. (Credit: Stephen Crowley/New York Times)

Book Cites Contempt From Both Russian, Trump

Russian President Vladimir Putin was so contemptuous of Barack Obama that Putin’s aides, if not Putin himself, would refer to the United States’ first black president using the N-word, according to a just-released book by two investigative reporters.

Michael Isikoff, now chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, and David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, also cite information indicating that Donald Trump, who had claimed that Obama was not born in the United States, vied with Putin in his hatred of the 44th president. They report on a controversial dossier that said Trump hired prostitutes to defile space where the American president and first lady had slept.

“Putin and his inner circle had nothing but utter contempt for Obama and his administration — much of it cast in racist terms,” Isikoff and Corn write in “Russian Roulette: : The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.”

“Putin and his top advisers routinely denigrated Obama and his national security team as ‘weak’ and ‘indecisive’ — and then, contradictorily, blamed him for meddling in Russia’s internal affairs. In Putin’s presence, Obama would be called a ‘monkey,’ and it was not uncommon for the American president to be referred to as the N-word.”

The book has been No. 1 on the Amazon best-sellers list for the past two days, Brian Stelter reported Wednesday for his “Reliable Sources” newsletter.

Corn and Isikoff continued, “The small number of U.S. officials privy to the reports from this source wondered if Putin and his crew truly viewed Obama in such crude terms. But the source’s credibility was bolstered by a recent episode.

“Months earlier, Irina Rodnina, a Russian figure skater, posted a racist tweet showing a doctored photo of Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama looking like monkeys and admiring a banana. The U.S. Embassy lodged a protest, and Rodnina claimed on Twitter that her account had been hacked. When the Sochi Olympics opened, Putin selected Rodnina, a member of his United Russia Party in the Duma, as one of two Russian athletes to light the Olympic torch. This seemed like a not-too-veiled message. . . . ”

“Russian Roulette,” released Tuesday and accompanied by a blizzard of media appearances by its authors, repeats information from a dossier put together by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Steele had headed Britain’s intelligence Russia desk, then started his own private investigative agency.

Quoting the dossier, the authors write, “Source D, described as ‘a close associate of TRUMP who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow,’ claimed that ‘TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs. OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. . . .”

Russian figure skater Irina Rodnina tweeted this doctored photo of Barack and Michelle Obama, then said she’d been hacked.

The Steele dossier was published in full in January 2017 by BuzzFeed, which stated that the claims were all unsubstantiated and unverified but deserved to be made public. Other media outlets accused BuzzFeed of being irresponsible. However, the material in the dossier was said to have been shown to both Trump and Obama.

The authors write that Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, had encouraged James Clapper, director of national intelligence, during the daily intelligence briefing to tell Obama about the “golden showers” allegation.

“Obama turned to Rice and said, ‘Why am I hearing this?’ He was incredulous,” Isikoff and Corn write. ” ‘What’s happening?’ he asked. Rice said the intelligence community had no idea if this story was true but that Obama needed to be aware the allegation was circulating. ‘You don’t really expect to hear the term “golden showers” in the President [cq] Daily Brief,’ a participant in this meeting later said, ‘or that the guy who is going to become president may be a Manchurian candidate.’ . . .”

The reporters also write, “When [Vice President Joseph P.] Biden was briefed about intelligence reports on the connections between various players in the Trump orbit and the Kremlin, he had a visceral reaction. ‘If this is true,’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s treason.’ . . .”

“Russian Roulette” has a larger focus than Obama and race, as Steven Lee Myers wrote in a review published Wednesday by the New York Times. Myers notes that its “subtitle promises to reveal ‘the inside story of Putin’s war on America and the election of Donald Trump,’ but adds, “Alas, it does not — at least so far as offering foolproof evidence of Putin’s involvement, or his motives.”

Still, an excerpt published in Mother Jones touches on Trump’s posture toward women of color. The setting is a 2013 visit to Moscow to support the Miss Universe pageant, which he owned.

“Frequently, Trump would toss out finalists and replace them with others he preferred. ‘If there were too many women of color, he would make changes,’ a Miss Universe staffer later noted.

“Another Miss Universe staffer recalled, ‘He often thought a woman was too ethnic or too dark-skinned. He had a particular type of woman he thought was a winner. Others were too ethnic. He liked a type. There was Olivia Culpo, Dayanara Torres [the 1993 winner], and, no surprise, East European women.” On occasion, according to this staffer, Trump would reject a woman ‘who had snubbed his advances.’

“Once in a while,” Paula Shugart, the president of the Miss Universe Organization, ” would politely challenge Trump’s choices. Sometimes she would win the argument, sometimes not. ‘If he didn’t like a woman because she looked too ethnic, you could sometimes persuade him by telling him she was a princess and married to a football player,’ a staffer later explained. . . .”

 

A School Shooting Deserving of More Coverage

“ It was a moment of sheer terror that surely none of the hundreds of kids flooding the corridors for the end of the school day will ever forget,” Will Bunch wrote Tuesday for the Philadelphia Daily News.

“One moment, 17-year-old Courtlin Arrington — already accepted to college for the fall, with dreams of becoming a nurse — was seen with another teen student, a wide receiver on the football team. Then came a loud pop as a bullet went right through Courtlin’s heart, ending her life way too short of adulthood.

‘ ‘The last thing I told them was “I love you” and have a blessed day at school,’ Courtlin’s mom, Tynesha Tatum, who has another son and daughter in the same high school, told the Birmingham News. ‘That was at 7:45 a.m…At 3:45 p.m., I got a call that my baby got shot.’

“On Wednesday, Courtlin’s schoolmates — her murder still ringing in their ears — are planning to walk out of school and protest the lack of safety for teenagers trying to grow up in the most gun-crazed nation on the planet. [They did so.] If you follow the news, it’s almost certain that you’ve already heard about the National School Walkout Day, which has become — rightfully so — a huge story from coast to coast. But it’s almost a lock that you haven’t heard at all about the loss of Courtlin Arrington.

“This isn’t Parkland, Florida, where the mass shooting of 17 kids in the upscale Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School upended the world of students who’d been raised to expect the best things in life — and thus triggered a social revolution that is only starting to grow. No, Courtlin Arrington was killed by a handgun inside Huffman High School in Birmingham, Ala., in the kind of struggling urban district where kids have grown all too accustomed to hardship, even to violence.

“Even so, it was somewhat shocking that a shooting inside a school classroom received virtually no national coverage . . .

“Of course, one death may seem less impactful than one of the 10 largest mass shootings in U.S. history, but tell that to Courtlin’s classmates who will be traumatized by the sound of that fatal gunshot for the rest of their lives. There’s no definitive way to know how much of the ignoring of her story was simply fatigue, in a nation where gun deaths remain off the charts, and how much is because both Courtlin and her alleged killer are African-Americans. . . .”

Vintage covers of the Source, Vibe, and ego trip magazines. (Credit: Pitchfork.com)

Golden Age of Rap Writing Gave Way to Blog Culture

“Michael Gonzales found himself locking horns with Damon Dash in 1997,” Dean Van Nguyen wrote Monday for Pitchfork.com under the headline, “How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement: Looking back at the golden era of rap writing.”

“The Roc-A-Fella co-founder wanted a Jay-Z feature pulled from The Source when it was decided that rap supergroup the Firm was going on the cover instead. When his request to have the Jay story cut was refused, Dash pulled up outside the magazine’s office looking to speak to the piece’s writer. ‘I’m not getting in your car,” Gonzales remembers telling him. ‘I’ve seen that movie and it didn’t end well.’ In the end, The Source ran two covers.

“The drama with the artists was reflected within the offices of The Source too. Most of the tension arose from co-founder David Mays and his complex relationship with rapper and entrepreneur Ray ‘Benzino’ Scott. A staff walkout occurred in 1994, when Mays secretly slid an article into the magazine about Benzino’s group the Almighty RSO — a clique Mays just happened to be managing — behind the backs of his editorial team. . . .”

Van Nguyen also wrote, “The golden age of rap journalism probably ends with the decline in both music sales and print media — less money for expensive album launches and 4,000-word artist profiles — as well as the rise of blogging culture and social media. ‘I don’t think people are curious they way that they used to be,’ laments Amy Linden. ‘How can we expect thoughtfulness when we’re interested in hashtags and tweets and fast thoughts?’ ” He referred to Sacha Jenkins, creative director of Mass Appeal, which began as a magazine but now has a website, label and creative agency.

“As Jenkins puts it, ‘If I had to depend on writing about hip-hop, I’d be fucked right now.’ . . .”

WSB-TV anchor Fred Blankenship took lines from the late Craig Mack and worked them into his news and traffic reports. (Screen shot)

 

Paying Tribute, a Morning Anchor Raps the News

In Atlanta, “WSB morning co-anchor Fred Blankenship and traffic reporter Mark Arum spent this morning’s show rapping the news,” Chris Ariens reported Tuesday for TVSpy.

“Why?

“Well, it was a tribute to rapper Craig Mack, who died yesterday at age 46.

“Mack shot to fame with the 1994 platinum hit Flava in Ya Ear.

“So this morning [Blankenship] and Arum took lines from[the] song, working it into news and traffic reports. WATCH: . . .”

Short Takes

 

 

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