E-MAIL DAMNS BAM CAN’T ‘COUNT’ ON TIMES

“Don’t let up,” a friend living abroad wrote a few weeks ago about corruption at the FBI. “Trump has them all on the run.”

The note came to mind when I saw the weird e-mail Susan Rice wrote to herself on Inauguration Day last year.

At first glance, the e-mail, which purports to recount remarks President Obama made two weeks earlier to Rice, FBI head James Comey and others about the Russia probe, makes no sense. But ask yourself why Rice repeated that Obama wanted everything done “by the book,” and it smells as if she’s preparing a last-minute defense for Obama, and maybe herself.

Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham, pit bulls on government misbehavior,, wrote to Rice about the e-mail while noting that there were lots of doubts ts about whether the FBI actually ally did proceed “by the book.”

Hopefully, she’ll have to give her answer under oath, as should Comey and anybody else in the room.

As for Obama, I always assumed the corruption hunt would end up on his doorstep. I didn’t assume it would get there so quickly. Corrections in The New York Times can obfuscate as well as reveal, and yesterday was a case in point. One began this way: “An OpEd essay on Saturday about the dangers da of being a sanitation worker misstated the number of such workers killed on the job annually. It was 31 in 2016, not one a day.” Wait, what? Instead of 365, the number of deaths was 31? That’s a helluva error, and it sent se me to find the essay, where it quickly quic became apparent that the mistake was hardly incidental. The inflated number was the basis of an original headline — “A Waste Worker Dies Everyday” — and author Carl Zimring used it to invoke Martin Luther King Jr. and his support for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., the day before he was assassinated.

Having established an aura of death and the moral high ground, Zimring claimed that current working conditions “aren’t at all unlike those in Memphis in 1968.”

It’s a silly argument made possible only by the grossly inflated death totals. Once the actual numbers are known, the central claim of the entire piece makes no sense. But don’t hold your breath waiting for The Times to admit that.