Did you catch it, ladies and gentlemen, the exact moment when Nixon, sorry, I mean Trump, confessed his crimes on tape to the world's best-known political reporter, just as (remember that we spent three years pretending to believe this!) he once initiated the hacking of email accounts associated with various sordid personalities involved in Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign during a live television interview in the middle of a political convention? As far as I can tell, the only noteworthy thing about it is President Trump's mistaken impression that the virus, whose average victim is older than the life expectancy, poses a meaningful (as in greater than influenza, which killed nearly 2,000 Americans aged 17 or younger in its 2017-18 season) risk to younger persons. Here is an exact transcript of the exchange that has already given rise to to hundreds of thousands of words of meaningless commentary. If reports are to be believed, this fragment from Woodward's 'explosive new book' (the exact phrase that has been used to describe very nearly every book the man has published in my lifetime) is evidence of a - get this - ' cover-up' of the not exactly secret virus that emerged in Wuhan last fall. Hence my inability to get worked up about the 52-second snippet of conversation between two septuagenarians released amid a great deal of manufactured outrage on Wednesday afternoon. (Who now can remember a single thing 'reported' in the vast shelf of books he wrote about the administrations of Bill Clinton, the two Bushes, and Barack Obama?) The second is Woodward himself, who can somehow never get over his luck at finding a vindictive FBI agent passed over for promotion willing to give him the time of day. In these circles Rage will be feverishly and uncritically discussed and tweeted out in snippets - all five or so pages of a total 480 capable of arousing even minimal if still largely feigned enthusiasm - until it is promptly and inexorably forgotten. The first is the only class of persons likely to be aware of the book's existence, namely Woodward's fellow journalists and the rapidly aging subset of upper-middle-class white liberals who will purchase and perhaps even read parts of it.

New book by bob woodward