Good morning. It is December 9th. It is a cloudy and mild day in New York City. And this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

The big news with two columns of headline and four columns of photograph spanning the whole top of this morning's print New York Times is the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.

“Al-Assad toppled by Syrian rebels after 13-year war.” Two stories run below that side by side. “Citizens erupt in joy tempered by loss,” and,  “Reported in Moscow as Damascus falls.” Just the plain, straight news of a major and unexpected event happening. Not at all transformed into discourse. “The government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, which had kept rebel forces at bay for more than a decade, with Iranian and Russian military support, collapsed with astonishing speed on Sunday morning after an advance by opposition forces on the capital, Damascus. An authoritarian leader who had gassed his own people during a 13-year civil war, Mr. Al-Assad fled the country as rebel forces closed in on Damascus.” 

The strong man is strong until all of a sudden, he's not. People are wandering through the presidential palace. The prisons are flung open. The exiles and refugees are coming home. And mass murder is not rewarded with endless control and endless impunity after all. 

Next to that is the story of how Russia washed its hands of Syria. Too busy invading Ukraine to keep helping the Assad regime maintain its grip. 

And then, speaking of strongman politics, the left-hand side of the page above the fold is “Test of Loyalty for Applicants to Trump Jobs.” Specifically the test of loyalty administered to people applying to be in Donald Trump's new administration by a mix of Silicon Valley investors and innovators and a team of the MAGA faithful is a set of questions that “went further” the Times writes “than just affirming allegiance to the incoming administration. The interviewers asked which candidate the applicants had supported in the three most recent elections, what they thought about the events of January 6th, 2021, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. The sense they got was that there was only one right answer to each question.”

These were always the only choices on the table to take Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election and especially the January 6th attack seriously, with immediate criminal and constitutional efforts to disqualify and imprison Trump and his fellow leaders of the insurrection, or to redraw the bounds of American politics so that coup attempts, past and future, are simply normal partisan self-expression. 

On the jump page for that story, inside the paper on page A15 is a write-up of Trump's appearance on Meet the Press yesterday. Under the headline, “Trump promises aggressive first day in office,” the story clarifies that by aggressive, the Times means, “vowing to move immediately to crack down on immigration and pardon his most violent supporters while threatening to lock up political foes like Liz Cheney. In his first sit down broadcast network interview since being reelected, Mr. Trump said that on day one of his new administration next month, he would extend clemency to the hundreds of his backers who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and try to ban automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to immigrant parents.” Three columns later, the story notes that “most legal scholars have said the president has no power to overturn the right to citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, which says that all persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States.” I might personally find a way to put the incoming president's pledge to violate the black letter text of the constitution on page one, but if these morning readings have done anything, they've established that my personal preferences are not the Times' institutional preferences. 

Also there on page A15, “Musk put over $250 million into Trump's presidential bid. Among all that spending,” the Times writes, “one of Mr. Musk's most brazen moves, which emerged only on Thursday, was spending $20 million to prop up a super PAC that was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late liberal Supreme Court justice, but that sought to help Mr. Trump by softening his anti-abortion positions.” How close does an election have to have been before it stops being unsophisticated to talk about whether billionaires bought the result? 

Speaking of money and influence, back on page one, down at the bottom right, there's a look at New York political power broker John Chan under the headline, “a criminal with ties to China and political sway in New York,” which recounts Chan's quite open loyalties to the Chinese Communist Party and his much less open history of having pleaded guilty to a charge of racketeering that included human smuggling and trafficking more than three kilos of heroin, and another charge of operating illegal gambling parlors as part of a deal where he ratted out the person The Times describes as a “murderous Chinatown crime boss named Frank Ma,” whose hitman had once forced two men to kneel in front of a gravestone before he shot them in the head. Now Chan spends his time and money taking down local politicians who show too much support for Taiwan, including Yuh-Line Niou in the 2022 Democratic primary for the 10th congressional district. She lost to the more centrist Dan Goldman, whose first name The Times somehow lost in the editing process, in a race that was interpreted in terms of the left's ability to organize against more moneyed moderates. Mark that one down next time someone tries to draw any lessons about the national political picture from the results of particular local races. 

And rounding out page one, the Times continues its exploration of how many other activities, especially military activities, may produce the same sort of cumulative brain trauma as football, with a look at Top Gun Navy pilots. “For years,” the Times writes, “the Navy has quietly sent pilots to civilian brain injury clinics and has funded research suggesting that the conditions crews experience in jet cockpits could cause brain injuries.” The story also says that in the past 18 months, three experienced Super Hornet pilots have died by suicide. According to their families, all had symptoms consistent with brain injuries. 

On page A22, the Times has the newest photos of the suspected CEO shooter caught on a taxi cab camera, still hooded and masked. 

Next to that is an extremely weird story attempting to establish context by comparing the hunt for this shooter to the 2022 hunt for Frank James, who the Times writes, “set off smoke grenades inside a crowded subway car in Brooklyn and opened fire. This suspect,” the Times writes, “used methodical planning, including wearing a mask and a hood during nearly all of his time in New York City, and paying with cash everywhere, along with using a fake driver's license.” He also fled the scene quickly, and, the Times writes, “appears to have left the state long before the police could possibly have begun to track his movements.” This contrasts with James, who, the Times writes, “left behind a credit card with his name on it and keys to a U-Haul van that had been rented under his name.” For expert commentary in the current case, the Times turns to Kenneth E. Corey, a former chief of department in the New York Police Department, who told the paper, “I don't think I've seen this level of operational pre-planning in any crime, never mind in a murder.” Which, really? The guy didn't drop through a sidewalk grate and escape New York through a custom-dug tunnel. He took a bike to a cab and a cab to the bus terminal and got out of town. Has the NYPD never before seen someone duck into town, keep a low profile, commit a crime and then scoot? The crime itself is unusual, but, the getaway just sounds like a reasonably well-planned getaway. 

Incredibly though, what the Times doesn't report in defining anything beyond dropping your ID at the scene as the work of a criminal mastermind is that the cops didn't catch Frank James. He called himself in to the Crimestoppers tip line and asked them to come get him. After a store owner had also identified him and tried to call it into the cops, while the cops were preoccupied busting up a homeless encampment a block away. Even the Easy Case was beyond their crime-solving capabilities. 

And in sports, after the print deadline, 26-year-old super slugger Juan Soto, after carrying the New York Yankees to the World Series, is hopping across town to take a 15-year, $765 million contract with the Mets. Best of luck to everyone involved, except the Yankees. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep our podcasting going with your subscription and tip dollars, which we very much appreciate. So please keep those coming if you can. And if nothing unexpected happens, we will talk again tomorrow.