Democrats are still anguished over Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the polls, and that includes the Democrats at the Associated Press. Today’s complaint is that Donald Trump isn’t doing enough to unify the country: “On victory lap, few signs Trump focusing on unified nation.”
President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday was wrapping up his postelection victory tour, showing few signs of turning the page from his blustery campaign to focus on uniting a divided nation a month before his inauguration.
At each stop, the Republican has gloatingly recapped his Election Night triumph….
Remember the beginning of the Obama administration, when Obama said “I won,” and “elections have consequences”? And when the Democrats rammed Obamacare and the ill-fated “stimulus” bill through Congress with zero Republican input and zero Republican support? Remember how the AP criticized Obama for not doing more to “unite a divided nation”? No, I don’t remember that either.
…reignited some old political feuds while starting some new ones, and done [sic] little to quiet the hate-filled chants of “Lock her up!” directed at Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Hate-filled! A bit of editorializing there by the AP, along with the suggestion that Trump “did little to quiet” the chants.
The AP doesn’t like Trump’s appointments, either:
Also Saturday, he announced the nomination of South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney to be his budget director, choosing a tea partyer and fiscal conservative with no experience assembling a government spending plan.
Sounds like a knuckle-dragger, right? And what is that shot about having “no experience assembling a government spending plan” supposed to mean? The only way Mulvaney could have that experience is if he had already been the budget director, or else served on the House Budget Committee.
Congressman Mulvaney’s web site describes his experience:
Mick attended Georgetown University where he graduated with honors in International Economics, Commerce, and Finance. After college, Mick attended law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his formal education at Harvard Business School’s OPM program in 2006.
Mick is a serial entrepreneur, having started four businesses. He has private sector experience across many fields, including law, real estate, homebuilding, and restaurants. …
He currently serves on the House Financial Services Committee as well as the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He previously served on the Committee on Small Business and the Budget Committee.
So the AP is not just unfair, but dead wrong in characterizing Mulvaney’s experience. The AP’s smearing of Trump goes on and on:
In Pennsylvania, he launched into a 20-minute recap of his Election Night win. The crowd cheered as the president-elect slowly ticked off his victories state by state. He mixed in rambling criticisms of pundits and politicians from both parties.
It would be fun to search the AP’s archives to try to find an instance where that organization described Barack Obama as “rambling,” even though such a characterization would often be accurate.
Trump also thanked African-Americans who didn’t vote, saying “They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary. They didn’t come out. And that was a big — so thank you to the African-American community.” Such rhetoric raised new questions about his ability to unity [sic] the country.
I don’t think Trump has to worry about achieving unity with the Associated Press.
Decades ago while in high school I read John Dos Passos’s USA. It was published in the 1930s before television or cable news. But it presaged well the strange mixture of important and ridiculous news we receive today. News today is largely fashioned into narratives by mostly young, unworldly reporters and biased news editors, repeated on TV by well-coiffed, fashionably garbed and cosmetically buffed up news readers, jazzed up by often highly biased photo editors and presented on a plate to passive consumers.
When I read USA, my hometown had — like most larger cities — two major newspapers, one liberal, the other conservative, and like most homes we got both and read both so we had a fairer picture of what was happening in the world. The reporters were often grizzled veterans of the world who drank hard, smoked a lot, and believed no one or nothing without evidence.
With the advent of television and the monopolization of print markets it seems to me we lost the ability to forensically analyze the news; we have become passive consumers and got what we deserved — propaganda, largely megaphoning the increasingly leftward tilt of the Democratic Party and various “nonprofit” organizations who promote scare stories about food, health, and the weather and challenge wars only when a Republican is in office. To be sure, there are some fine people (operating largely online) who take the time to read the accounts with a critical eye. Among the best are James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, bloggers Don Surber, Glenn Reynolds, Sheryl Attkisson, and Tom Maguire. If you read them daily you may reacquire this lost, but important art.
This week the clash between fake and real news became even more obvious.
Sharyl Attkisson who has sued the Department of Justice and the U.S. Postal Service for matters relating to intrusions on her computer and who is known for her outstanding reportage, took aim this week at the Obama-Clinton suggestion that Clinton lost because of fake news reports. Obama called “fake news” a “dust cloud of nonsense” and Clinton dubbed it “an epidemic”.
My online friend Matt Holtzmann has some questions about this:
So the president lectured the media and the masses on fake news during his press conference today. Does that include the Journo-List? Does it include enlisting the National Endowment for the Arts to engage in a propaganda campaign for Obamacare? Does it include the video that Hillary Clinton broadcast on Pakistani network television blaming an obscure video? Does it include “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’? Does it include his visits to the fake news shows? [ed: Like the Daily Show and Colbert]
Wednesday on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” while discussing the 2016 presidential election’s fake new controversy, “Full Measure” host Sharyl Attkisson said fake news is a “propaganda campaign” to censor truth started by politicians like President Barack Obama and Clinton ally the founder of Media Matters Democratic operative David Brock.
Attkisson said, “Before about September 13, if you searched the news you won’t find many or any mentions of fake news. But as soon as there was, in my view, a propaganda campaign to put this on the plate of the American public, the news media and politicians including President Obama went hog wild with the term and it started making headlines every day. It wasn’t a new invention.”
“And yes, fake news exists but the idea that there is this huge campaign behind it to controversialize certain reports and censor, in my view, certain views is a propaganda campaign,” she continued. “And I think when David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s ally from Media Matters, announced that he would be the arbitrator, or help be the arbitrator, of so called fake news, that sort of sealed the deal that the whole thing is a propaganda effort and a political effort, not really an honest effort to seek out facts, but more to determine for other people what truth they should hear.”
Right on cue, Facebook announced it was empaneling a group of outsiders, including Politifact, Snopes, ABC, AP, the Washington Post and Poynter’s IPCN to announce to readers which sites are fake and to jiggle with the news feed to spare the readers from seeing them often.
Obviously, this is intended to shield Facebook from liability for news posted on the site, but it appears ill considered. The far left manipulator George Soros, for example, funds Poynter. AP regularly shades its stories, as my editor friend in upstate New York, Steven Waters, keeps noting, and the Washington Post just admitted this week it had posted a fake list of fake news sites.
As for the news organization fact checkers, James Taranto has regularly exposed them as – well — fakes, the way he nailed Politifact years ago:
PolitiFact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year” was the central ObamaCare fraud: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” As this column noted at the time, the site had previously certified the promise as “true” (2008), then equivocated and labeled it “half true” in both 2009 and 2012.
Everyone’s entitled to his own opinion, but “fact checkers” think they’re entitled to call their own opinions facts. As the president perpetrated a fraud on American consumers, journalists have often helped him along. They would never dream of doing the same for an unscrupulous CEO of, say, a beer company.
This week, he covered more of the “fact checkers” and reminded us of Politifact’s song and dance on ObamaCare:
To be sure, in 2008 and 2009 the claim was not yet a lie, merely a promise; and in 2012 it was not a demonstrable lie, or at least not as clearly demonstrable as it was when policyholders had in fact started losing their plans. But it is difficult to understand how a categorical promise could be “half” true at any stage. (Maybe ObamaCare should be renamed Schrödinger’s Care.) And a promise is not a factual claim at all, so its truth or falsity is purely a matter of opinion.
Others have noted that PolitiFact has often given different ratings to what were substantively the same statements from different sources, usually with Democrats getting the benefit of the doubt when compared with Republicans.
Take the concession he got from Matt Cooper, Newsweek’s editor, that the commemorative issue of Hillary’s electoral victory, accidentally shipped out before the returns came in, was ridiculous and had never been seen by Newsweek’s editors, and Carlson’s mind-boggling interview with the wacky Newsweek reporter who claimed out of thin air that Trump had once been institutionalized for mental illness.
Iowahawk could not contain himself at the news AP was going to be on the prowl for fake news and tweeted:
“In related news, Anthony Weiner announces he will be working with Ashley Madison to stop online adultery.”
The award for fake news purveyors of the year has to go to the Washington Post and New York Times for peddling the sore loser Democratic fable that the Russians hacked the Clinton and DNC emails, passed them off to Julian Assange who published them in Wikileaks to help Trump. Why the Russians would want to hurt “Reset” Clinton — who was certain to follow Obama’s ineffectual –policies toward Russia and who, among other things, as Secretary of State in a clear pay-to-play move let them buy up 20% of the U.S. uranium supplies — is an obvious, unspoken flaw in that argument. But there is much more to discount this story.
In the first place, her email server was insecure; in March of 2015 Don Surber showed how anyone could hack into her system.
The RNC was not so clueless and stopped attempted hacks. So the suggestion that Russia hacked both sides but only slipped to Assange the Democrat’s is poppycock.
In the second place, the Washington Post and NYT accounts claim that all the intelligence agencies and the head of the FBI concur that the Russians did it. These largely unverified and mostly anonymously sourced pieces conflict with earlier stories that the agencies are in disagreement.
Comey and Clapper have not responded to these latest accusations, whose only named source is the CIA’s Director John Brennan, but prior to these accounts Comey had a conversation with president-elect Trump in which he discounted the theory that Russia had provided the information to Wikileaks:
In telephone conversations with Donald Trump, FBI Director James Comey assured the president-elect there was no credible evidence that Russia influenced the outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election by hacking the Democratic National Committee and the e-mails of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
What’s more, Comey told Trump that James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, agreed with this FBI assessment.
The only member of the U.S. intelligence community who was ready to assert that the Russians sanctioned the hacking was John Brennan, the director of the CIA, according to sources who were briefed on Comey’s conversations with Trump.
“And Brennan takes his marching orders from President Obama,” the sources quoted Comey as saying.
In Comey’s view, the leaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post alleging that the Russians tried — and perhaps even succeeded — in tilting the election to Trump were a Democratic Party effort to delegitimize Trump’s victory.
During their phone conversations, Comey informed Trump that the FBI had been alert for the past year to the danger that the Russians would try to cause mischief during the U.S. presidential election.
However, whether the Russians did so remains an open question, Comey said, adding that it was just as likely that the hacking was done by people who had no direct connection to the Russian government.
This account is in accord with those from members of Congress who had interviewed Comey and reported that he disagreed with Brennan, and with the New York Times‘ own account in October:
Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump.
Hillary Clinton’s supporters, angry over what they regard as a lack of scrutiny of Mr. Trump by law enforcement officials, pushed for these investigations.
The most damaging of the leaks involved the DNC’s work to knock Bernie Sanders out of the running. Isn’t it more likely that someone inside the organization was angry and provided the damaging emails?
Today, news organization, as the Nation notes, “do overtly what the CIA has paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it.”
When the Democrats lose a presidential election, they work harder at delegitimizing the winner than they do respecting the democratic process. When Gore lost, it was “selected not elected” and Bush “lied us into war” — all fake. This time — as a result of the fecklessness of Clinton-Obama and Kerry – president-elect Trump faces a far more dangerous world than they found. The Chinese just stole an underwater drone of ours in off of the Philippines, Russia is continuing to threaten Europe, the EU is crumbling, and the Democrats’ childish nonsense, fed by the big-time fake newsmakers, is an even greater threat to us all.
Media Bias: Not surprisingly, the media take seriously and support Jill Stein’s and Hillary Clinton’s excellent vote-recount adventure, despite there being no indication a recount is needed. Heck, even President Obama agrees — Donald Trump won, period. But when Trump dares to suggest in a Sunday tweet that illegal aliens voted in the election, the media respond with massive denial.
“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted to the barely concealed contempt of many in the media.
Typical was the utterly dismissive headline in The Nation, the flagship publication of the progressive movement: “The President-Elect Is An Internet Troll.”
The Washington Post’s “The Fix” blog site did a little better: “Donald Trump’s new explanation for losing the popular vote? A Twitter-born conspiracy theory.”
There are many more, too many to put here. Most follow the same theme: Trump foolishly followed the faulty analysis of Gregg Phillips of True The Vote, an online anti-voter-fraud site and app. Phillips estimates that illegals cast three million votes in the 2016 election. He’s wrong, say the media. Heck, even the liberal fact-checking site FactCheck.org says so.
But, in fact, it’s almost certain that illegals did vote — and in significant numbers. Whether it was three million or not is another question.
While states control the voter registration process, some states are so notoriously slipshod in their controls (California, Virginia and New York — all of which have political movements to legalize voting by noncitizens — come to mind) that it would be shocking if many illegals didn’tvote. Remember, a low-ball estimate says there are at least 11 million to 12 million illegals in the U.S., but that’s based on faulty Census data. More likely estimates put the number at 20 million to 30 million.
What’s disappointing is that instead of at least seriously considering Trump’s charge, many media reports merely parrot leftist talking points and anti-Trump rhetoric by pushing the idea that Republicans and others not of the progressive left who seek to limit voting to citizens only are racist, xenophobic nuts.
“We find that some noncitizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes including Electoral College votes, and congressional elections,” wrote Jesse T. Richman, Gulshan A. Chattha, both of Old Dominion University, and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.
More specifically, they write, “Noncitizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.”
Specifically, the authors say that illegals may have cast as many as 2.8 million votes in 2008 and 2010. That’s a lot of votes. And when you consider the population of illegal inhabitants has only grown since then, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that their vote has, too.
Critics note that a Harvard team in 2015 had responded to the study, calling it “biased.” But that report included this gem: “Further, the likely percent of noncitizen voters in recent U.S. elections is 0.”
Really? That’s simply preposterous, frankly, as anyone who has lived in California can attest. Leftist get-out-the-vote groups openly urge noncitizens to vote during election time, and the registration process is notoriously loose. To suggest there is no illegal voting at all is absurd.
What’s appalling, as we said, is not the media’s skepticism, but its denial. But why? Illegal votes shouldn’t be allowed to sway U.S. elections. So why tolerate them?
When the far left began insinuating that the Russians had hacked the election, the media treated the nonsupported claims with the utmost of respect. They still do. But not Trump’s suggestion that illegals voted, and in large numbers, mainly for Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton.
And, yes, Trump is right: Illegal votes may in part explain why Hillary now has a nearly two-million-vote lead in the popular vote, even though she lost convincingly in the Electoral College. A Pew Research Poll earlier this year found that 53% of the Democratic Party supports letting illegals vote, even though it’s against the law. It’s pretty clear why.
Yes, there is room for skepticism of any claim that’s made. But every vote cast by someone who isn’t by law permitted to vote disenfranchises American citizens. The charge should at least be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, we will expect the media to continue to give its fawning attention to the spurious challenges of nonexistent vote tampering leveled by Hillary Clinton and Jill Stein, on behalf of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
While the media savage Trump and his motives, please recall what Hillary said in the debates: that the idea a defeated candidate wouldn’t recognize the results of the election was “horrifying.” And she has also agreed there is no “actionable evidence” of either hacking or outside interference, despite joining with Stein to seek recounts.
So what about Clinton’s motives?
As for Stein, who barely registered a blip on the 2016 electoral screen, the $5 million or so she has raised to pay for recounts really seems more like a ploy to bail out her failed campaign than a serious attempt at a recount. But the media continue to treat her like a serious political operator — not the far-left kook she is.
The press is in a pout just now because Donald Trump is not supplying a new Cabinet officer on demand. He’s taking his time choosing his team, and this is reported as if a national tragedy. Time magazine calls the Trump transition “chaotic,” and The New York Times asserts that the Donald’s team is plagued by “discord” and stalled in “disarray.” A reporter at Politico, the political daily, says the transition team is having “a knife fight,” which demonstrates mostly that the reporter has never been to a knife fight, and is probably covering his first transition.
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What we used to call “the press,” before the newspapers aspired to be part of the professional class with its inflated titles and airs, is never happy. Nor should it be. The press is a demanding and cranky lot by definition, and now they’re something called “the media.” Marshall McLuhan, who invented the concept if not the word, must never be forgiven.
This invited television, which is an entertainment medium, to share a definition with newspapers, and soon newspapermen (including women) wanted to be seen as well as heard, and there went the neighborhood. Megyn Kelly is Hollywood gorgeous, but she wouldn’t be happy working on a newspaper where nobody could see her.
The press is in a pout just now because Donald Trump is not supplying a new Cabinet officer on demand. He’s taking his time choosing his team, and this is reported as if a national tragedy. Time magazine calls the Trump transition “chaotic,” and The New York Times asserts that the Donald’s team is plagued by “discord” and stalled in “disarray.” A reporter at Politico, the political daily, says the transition team is having “a knife fight,” which demonstrates mostly that the reporter has never been to a knife fight, and is probably covering his first transition.
“The president-elect will be announcing specific Cabinet positions,” says Jason Miller, a spokesman for the transition, “as well as key position staff, when those decisions are made. The focus of the administration is putting together the best team. It is not an arbitrary timetable. It’s about getting it right.”
The wiseheads in the Trump camp understand that the press/media will never think he’s “getting it right.” The notabilities of press and the twinkles of the tube should be pleased with a slow pace that spreads their misery. A wise man awaiting the hangman never complains if he can’t remember where he put the rope.
But the pace this time is not unusually slow, and it’s faster than in many incoming administrations. George W. Bush, bedeviled by all those hanging chads, did not name his first Cabinet officer until early December. President Obama was eager to get moving to deal with the financial crisis in 2008, but nevertheless did not make his first Cabinet appointment, the Treasury secretary, until Nov. 24. The press was so busy swooning it never noticed. Donald Trump beat that date with four such appointments.
Mr. Obama did not reveal his next appointments, secretary of State, attorney general and director of homeland security until Dec. 1. By that time, Richard Nixon had named his entire Cabinet, and see where that got us.
The chattering about discord, disarray and knife fights is neither unprecedented nor unexpected. Chattering is what magpies do, and December announcements are the rule not the exception. The smarter magpies might usefully aim their hysteria elsewhere.
David Axelrod, a senior adviser in the early Obama administration, says he has “lots of reasons” to be concerned about a Trump administration but the pace of announcements isn’t one of them. “We hadn’t made any major announcements at this point in 2008,” he says, “and I don’t remember being criticized for it.”
But criticizing is what Washington does well, and sometimes it’s all that Washington does well. Criticisms are the fleas that come with the dog. Changing governments is a big job, and nowhere as big as in the United States. Ronald Reagan’s transition was marked by fits and starts. Bill Clinton’s path was not strewn with rose petals (though he was always on the scout for rosebuds), and John F. Kennedy’s transition to Camelot was difficult, particularly after he appointed his brother Robert as the U.S. attorney general.
The pace of appointments may be giving the Donald’s critics a headache now, and the headache will become a bellyache when all appointments are made, and the Democrats have chosen the subject of the execution. That might be Jeff Sessions, the attorney general-nominee. He’s white and a Southerner, and the hangman only needs to find the third strike.
The transition to president of the United States is never easy because it’s unique. There’s nothing remotely like the presidency; nothing can prepare man or woman for it. Harry Truman said on assuming the office in the final days of World War II that he felt like “the sun, the moon and the stars fell on me.”
He never expected the star shower, and apparently never did Donald Trump. Unlike some other presidents, he wouldn’t talk about a transition during the campaign. “I don’t want to talk about this,” he told his inner circle. “I don’t want to jinx this.”
With the jinx defeated, he can get on with choosing his side. Life will go on. Our friends on the left will survive, too.
U.S. President elect Donald Trump reacts to a crowd gathered in the lobby of the New York Times building after a meeting in New York, U.S., November 22, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson – RTSSUB4
If the only thing Trump accomplishes in office is giving the GOP some lessons in handling the derelict, irresponsible MSM then he will have given the party a lasting gift that will reap rewards for it far into the future.
If some feelings are hurt along the way, they probably needed to be.
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Thanksgiving week started off with some wonderful drama between President-elect Trump and various members of the mainstream media. The latter have spent eight years more or less on vacation. All they’ve really done since January 20th, 2009, is slightly modify White House press releases then release them as “news.” MSNBC didn’t even do that, opting instead for simply repeating administration talking points verbatim every night.
Two weeks ago, the laziness of the narrative mongers was fully exposed. Rather than pay attention to what was going on around them throughout the campaign, they clung harder to a story that they’d written and, just like in every Dan Brown novel, they didn’t have much of an ending planned. In fact, they were so invested in that story that it never occurred to them that their reality would be uncomfortable should their fairy tale ending not pan out.
Let me insert a disclaimer here for the perpetually obtuse: I am in no way advocating for government power over the press. A free and responsible press is essential in this country. Unfortunately, the responsibility train left the station long ago.
It had all the trappings of a high-level rapprochement: President-elect Donald J. Trump, now the nation’s press critic in chief, inviting the leading anchors and executives of television news to join him on Monday for a private meeting of minds.On-air stars like Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos and Wolf Blitzer headed to Trump Tower for the off-the-record gathering, typically the kind of event where journalists and politicians clear the air after a hard-fought campaign.
Instead, the president-elect delivered a defiant message: You got it all wrong.
Mr. Trump, whose antagonism toward the news media was unusual even for a modern presidential candidate, described the television networks as dishonest in their reporting and shortsighted in missing the signs of his upset victory. He criticized some in the room by name, including CNN’s president, Jeffrey A. Zucker, according to multiple people briefed on the meeting who were granted anonymity to describe confidential discussions.
Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sitdown on Monday, sources told the Post.
“It was like a f−−−ing firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.
“Trump started with [CNN chief] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed,’ ” the source said.
“The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they would be discussing the access they would get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump-style dressing-down,” the source added.
A second source confirmed the fireworks.
“The meeting took place in a big boardroom and there were about 30 or 40 people, including the big news anchors from all the networks,” the other source said.
“Trump kept saying, ‘We’re in a room of liars, the deceitful, dishonest media who got it all wrong.’ He addressed everyone in the room, calling the media dishonest, deceitful liars. He called out Jeff Zucker by name and said everyone at CNN was a liar, and CNN was [a] network of liars,” the source said.
“Trump didn’t say [NBC reporter] Katy Tur by name, but talked about an NBC female correspondent who got it wrong, then he referred to a horrible network correspondent who cried when Hillary lost who hosted a debate — which was Martha Raddatz, who was also in the room.”
If the “source” is accurate in recounting what Trump says then I do see a real problem…with anyone who thinks he was out of line.
Katy Tur was especially awful, so if Trump was referring to her he wasn’t being mean, he was being honest. Most of her reporting was about how Trump’s rally crowds and the campaign were affecting the reporters. It was one one of the most tedious and prolonged cases of journalistic navel gazing in history, if not the longest. On Election Night, Tur was visibly distraught and did little more than repeat the list of reasons that the media thought people shouldn’t vote for Trump every time she was on air. That was annoying earlier in the evening, and maddening in the hours after the election had been called. It seemed that she thought she could undo the results if she just whined enough. She was filled with angst-ridden complaints. She wasn’t reporting at all.
That’s just one example. I could fill a book with what I watched on Election Night alone.
Trump moved on to the print media Tuesday, scheduling a meeting with The New York Times. Before the meeting, something happened that he didn’t like and he called it off, announcing it on Twitter in very Trumpian fashion:
He could have left it at that and let his people get to work on ironing things out, but he’s still the same guy from the campaign, so he got in a couple more digs.
What all of this means is that the media’s days of operating in a biased, knee-capping fashion towards a Republican president with impunity are over, at least while Donald Trump is that Republican. Hopefully, the GOP will learn some lessons along the way and start calling out the media when they are lying. Prior to Trump the only Republican who consistently rejected false premises and biased questions was Newt Gingrich. The rest of the GOP pretended to be above the fray, not willing to engage hostile adversaries, which is precisely what most of the press who cover the White House and Capitol Hill are.
Trump got into the fray and it ruffled the delicate sensibilities of people on both sides who were used to the game being played a certain way. That game’s rules don’t favor Republicans though, and it was well past the time when the party needed a candidate who didn’t play by them.
The media complaints about being called out by the president-elect, as well as the implication that it’s unprecedented are just more disingenuous behavior. If anyone out there has a recent total of the number of times President Obama has singled out Fox News I’d like to have it, as I lost count years ago. When he isn’t complaining about them, he’s leveling an accusatory gaze at talk radio. Here he is in a post-election interview with The New Yorker reminiscing about his Senate win and presidential campaign in ’08:
“People didn’t see me coming,” Obama said as we drove through the night. “In southern Illinois, in those counties I won, I was at V.F.W.s and fish fries hearing people’s stories and talking to folks, so that they knew me. They weren’t getting me through Fox or Rush Limbaugh or Breitbart or RedState.“In ’08, they saw me coming, but I was a guy named Barack Hussein Obama coming up against the Clinton machine, so no way! So they weren’t focussed on me, and I established a connection. Then came the stuff: Ayers and Reverend Wright and all the rest. What I’m suggesting is that the lens through which people understand politics and politicians is extraordinarily powerful. And Trump understands the new ecosystem, in which facts and truth don’t matter. You attract attention, rouse emotions, and then move on. You can surf those emotions. I’ve said it before, but if I watched Fox I wouldn’t vote for me!”
Grudge list much, Mr. President?
The fears of heavy-handed government involvement in the press are laughable too, given that the press got into bed with the Democrat side of government years ago, and has practically operated as a de facto wing of the White House Office of Communications for the past eight years.
Trump’s social media habits scare them the most, because as we saw with the New York Times meeting, he can take his case directly to the public. That connection has a lot of people freaked out because it seriously upsets the old order. No longer is everything filtered through the MSM. I’ve been saying since the beginning of the campaign that political science students will be studying Trump’s use of social media in this election for years to come.
Republicans who were uncomfortable with Trump’s rough style during the campaign and longed for Mitt Romney’s class and decency seemed to have forgotten that Romney’s fortunes turned on a dime because Candy Crowley ran interference for President Obama during a debate, fact-checking something Romney had asserted. One small problem, her fact-check was a lie. He essentially lost the election to a CNN reporter.
But, hey, above the fray and whatnot, right?
If the only thing Trump accomplishes in office is giving the GOP some lessons in handling the derelict, irresponsible MSM then he will have given the party a lasting gift that will reap rewards for it far into the future.
If some feelings are hurt along the way, they probably needed to be.
Remember when Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory? The fake news media which predicted it in order to depress pro-Trump voter turnout certainly does. And so they’re out to fight “fake news.”
By fake news, they don’t mean their own raging torrent of misinformation and lies.
The media has gone to war against Facebook. While various supporters have blamed Hillary’s loss on everything from the FBI to internalized misogyny, the media has decided that Facebook is to blame.
Why Facebook?
Cable news is dying. Newspapers struggle online and offline. The mainstream media’s profitability lives and dies by social media. But the essence of social media is that it allows communities to shape what they see. That’s a terrifying idea if you’re a media conglomerate that depends on its megaphone.
But it’s also scary if you’re a leftist running for office in a country that doesn’t agree with your views.
Obama blamed “messaging” for the election results. But messaging requires being able to reach people. And that means clearing competitive voices out of the social media space by banning conservatives.
The war on conservative media is being conducted under the guise of banishing “fake news” from Facebook. But the fake news devil is in the details. Fake news can mean satire sites like the Onion or the Daily Currant. It can mean foreign clickbait sites that invent fake news. But it can also mean sites from outside the mainstream media whose stories are contested by the left for partisan reason.
The war on fake news is a smoke screen for a campaign against conservative media. And it’s easy to see that it’s conservative sites that are the real target of the Facebook book burners.
Buzzfeed, which depends heavily on Facebook traffic , has fed the “fake news” hysteria. Its list of “fake news” sites includes “hyperpartisan” sites. Its story contrasting “legitimate” mainstream media outlets, a category that somehow includes the Huffington Post, with a variety of right-leaning sites is a major piece of supporting evidence used in the fake news crusade.
Considering BuzzFeed’s history of fake news stories that fit its political narrative, it has no credibility fact checking anyone else. Examinations of BuzzFeed’s own methodology for its fake news article tore it into tiny little shreds. Its claim that fake news outperformed real news turned out to be… fake.
But what’s more important is how quickly the goal posts have been moved from fake news to conservative news, from fraudulent sites to fighting “clickbait” or “hyperpartisan” sites. And it’s clear that these are largely a euphemism for sites on the right that are outperforming the media.
USA Today and the Los Angeles Times promoted a list of “fake news” sites that included a variety of mainstream conservative sites including RedState, IJR and the Blaze. BuzzFeed targeted RightWingNews.
Fake news, like fact checking, has very obviously become a euphemism for attacking the politics that the left disagrees with by dressing up partisan agendas in fake concerns about journalism and civic virtue.
This goes far beyond namecalling. The goal is to ban conservative sites from social media. Or at least to penalize them in ways that will make it difficult for them to compete with the mainstream media.
There are obvious ideological and financial motives behind this war on “fake news”. The financial motives are grossly blatant. The loudest media voices in this war, BuzzFeed, HuffPo and Vox, depend heavily on social media traffic for their own hyperpartisan factually challenged clickbait.
If anyone is in the business of purveying fake news, it’s this bunch of hoax clickbait sites.
Vox claimed that everyone in Boulder, Colorado had 102 toilets and that there was a giant bridge connecting Gaza and the West Bank. But somehow that doesn’t qualify as fake news.
Then in a further demonstration of how the war on “fake news” was itself fake news, media outlets ran stories headlined, “Fake news threatens democracy, Obama says” from USA Today, “Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News “ from the New York Times and “Barack Obama: Fake News On Facebook Hurts Democracy” from the Huffington Post.
But Obama hadn’t said anything about the media’s fake news crusade. He had specifically complained aboutthe way that the United States and Russia were being equated and objected to “misinformation” on television and Facebook that made both countries seem just as bad. The German context of his remarks strongly suggests that he was talking about the old NSA controversy. But the “fake news” crusaders briefly quoted him before recapping the same old attacks on “fake news”.
The irony was that their “fake news” war was being waged with very fake news.
This isn’t about the integrity of information. No one can look at the fake polls promising a Hillary win and believe that the media is concerned about “fake news”. Instead it’s trying to clear out competitors by bullying Facebook into banning or marginalizing news stories from the right that compete with theirs.
The outrage over Hillary’s loss is being monetized by left-wing clickbait outlets into a pressure campaign against Facebook. Google News has already partly folded by rolling in the media’s fake fact checks. Twitter went full social justice a while back. But Facebook is the biggest prize. Nearly half of Americans get their news through Facebook. Shape its feed and the narrative gets more power than ever.
Social media allows people to form their own communities and become their own gatekeepers. That’s a potent power. The crusade against fake news is about putting the media gatekeepers back in charge.
There’s no question that there is a lot of garbage circulating on social media, but just as much of it comes from Vox, Slate, the Huffington Post or even more mainstream media outlets, as from “fake news” sites. The mainstream media is hyperpartisan, its headlines are clickbait and while it’s eager to fact check political opponents, it doesn’t make much effort to fact check its own narratives.
The whole “fake news” crusade managed to show how true that was all over again.
The internet can be empowering when it liberates users to find their own answers. The media’s fake news outrage insists that it should be the only ones empowered to supply those answers. But, in the old hacker credo, information wants to be free. The media has been struggling and failing to dam the flow.
Banning conservative news from Facebook won’t create a safe space for media lies. Instead it will lead to an exodus of conservatives from Facebook. Just as conservatives left behind the media for the web.
The evolution of clickbait and hyperpartisan journalism was a media response to the collapse of its central authority. But the media is panicking because its tactics can be copied and imitated by anyone. If it’s become hard to tell fake news from real news, it’s because the media dived headfirst into the fake news business. It chooses narratives, shapes stories around them and lies constantly.
That’s not just a conservative critique. Take it from Obama’s own people.
“We created an echo chamber,” Ben Rhodes, the Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications, boasted. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” he said. “They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes was talking about the Iran Deal and how easy it was to convince the media to repeat back White House lies. The media lied to Americans. Its fake news outlets continue to cheerfully talk up the disaster while demanding that dissenters be purged from Facebook. That’s where fake news really comes from.
If the media really wants to fight fake news, it can start in its own studios and offices. Its crusade to clear space for its fake news by banning conservative sites cannot and will not succeed.
Greg Gutfeld brutally calls out the Left and the fake cable news shows that push out the false narratives and refuse to investigate the veracity of the claims that pass over their air waves.
Remarkable is the stream of claims that America is now tainted by the Trump supporters and their hateful antics. Case after case is blurted across the left leaning cable shows. But is seems there is never a corroboration or proof of the incidents so claimed.
“It doesn’t matter if it is false because it is bound to be true somewhere.”
“Do the fakers go to jail for wasting our time?”
Is this not akin to pulling the fire alarm switch in the high school hallway?
In this video, Greg gives a monologue that calls out these fabricators and their enablers.
The real punishment must come to the cable shows that push out these falsehoods. Turn them off. Hit them on the bottom line, and tell them why.
When they have to make it up, it must be near the end. When they must castigate the Vice President elect when he has a night out with the family, it must be near the end.
(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)
Democrats, the lamebrain media (but I repeat myself), academics (Opps! I repeated myself again) and others who should know better are protesting — often violently — against Trump’s victory. Trump Derangement Syndrome is upon us.
Trump won fair and square. He did not rely on non-citizens or others who are barred from voting. As President, he intends, with the help of Congress, to make changes in U.S. policy. Horrors!
Reflections via Gilbert and Sullivan
Thank Zeus that Hillary won’t be the Monarch of the Sea President of the United States. The Monarch of the Seas, as depicted by G&S, certainly behaves and sounds like Hillary.
Here is Hillary on the day after her defeat.
Here’s how less-than-normally-judgmental Hillary supporters and Never Trumpers see Trump:
So much for Gilbert and Sullivan.
Here are Hillary’s supporters:
Here’s another meltdown. The linked article had a video, but YouTube says “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.” I wonder why. Oh well. This is how Jonathan Turley describes it:
In an appearance on MSNBC (which seems at times to be moving through the stages of grieving of Kübler-Ross), McInstosh insisted that the problem was with sexist, self-hating women: “Internalized misogyny is a real thing and this is a thing we have to be talking about as we go through and see.” She added “We as a society react poorly to women seeking positions of power. We are uncomfortable about that and we seek to justify that uncomfortable feeling because it can’t possibly be because we don’t want to see a woman in that position of power. As we go through these numbers, as we figure out exactly what happened with turnout, it seems to be white college-educated women . . . We have work to do talking to those women about what happened this year and why we would vote against our self-interest.”
And then there are these no less delusional “feminists.”
#NotOurPresident on Twitter quickly gave way to riots in major cities. Democrats in the affected cities decided that the riots were a great idea even though it was their own police that were being attacked.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City’s radical leftist boss, claimed that “more disruption… will change the trajectory of things”. Even though the only trajectory that the protests have changed thus far is New York City traffic. “The more people fight back, the more it takes away his power,” he insisted.
Wiser heads on the left recognized that messing up Manhattan traffic wouldn’t stop Trump from taking office. Instead they decided to abolish the Electoral College. Senator Boxer will introduce a bill to that effect. Bernie Sanders mumbled that it’s time to rethink it. Michael Dukakis fired off an angry email insisting that Hillary Clinton had won and that abolishing it should be a top Democratic priority.
Since Hillary lost, the Electoral College is, according to Slate, an “Instrument of White Supremacy—and Sexism”. And probably Islamophobic and Homophobic too. Time Magazine defaulted to the default lefty attack on anything by accusing the Electoral College of being racist. But if Hillary had won, then any attack on the Electoral College would be racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and claustrophobic.
Rank and filers weren’t interested in waiting to abolish it tomorrow. They skipped right to trying to rig it today. Over 4 million people have signed a petition titled, “Electoral College: Make Hillary Clinton President on December 19”. Because that’s just how they think elections should work.
Efforts were made to contact Electors directly urging them to hijack the election. Idaho Secretary of State Lawerence Denney said that the Electors were being harassed with “insults”, “vulgar language” and “threats”. One Elector reported that his cell, home phone, email and Facebook were targeted.
“They’re just trying to steal this thing,” he said.
The Electoral College is undemocratic. Unless you’re a Democrat asking it to undemocratically hijack the results of a state election while depriving its voters of political representation.
Some Democrats despaired of stealing the election and tried to steal the Supreme Court instead. There were revived calls for a Supreme Court recess appointment. There’s a petition, a Saturday Night Live punch line and a bizarre effort by Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley to move the nomination forward.
Merkley claimed that Trump has “no right to fill” that seat and that the Supreme Court seat was stolen. “We need to do everything we possibly can to block it,” he insisted.
What does that mean? How about a permanently deadlocked Supreme Court?
A Slate writer urged that, “the only way to answer nihilism is with nihilism of our own.”
“Obstruct the nomination and seating of any Trump nominee to fill Scalia’s seat,” she urged. “We will lose. But that’s not the point now… If Democrats can muster the energy to fight about nothing else, it should be this.”
A permanently deadlocked Supreme Court doesn’t sound like much of a plan. But Trump Derangement Syndrome means embracing nihilism. And it’s downright rational compared to the celebrity meltdowns as TMZ’s finest cope with the blow to their egos of an election that showed they didn’t matter.
Lady Gaga has been yelling at Trump on and off Twitter. Constitutional scholar George Takei demanded that Obama just appoint Garland. Honorary feminist Joss Whedon declared, “This is simple: Trump cannot CANNOT be allowed a term in office. It’s not about 2018. It’s about RIGHT NOW.”
What does that mean? It’s a tantrum. It means that baby wants his power and he wants it now.
And it only gets crazier from there.
The outer reaches of Trump Derangement Syndrome include calls to boycott three brands of toilet paper because they’re allegedly made by the Koch Brothers. Never mind that the Koch Brothers weren’t supporting Trump. Facts, like democracy, only matter when they happen to be on your side.
Then there are the ritual burnings of New Balance sneakers on YouTube and Instagram. Not to mention support for the secession of California from the United States of America.
A man has sued Donald Trump for $1 billion for having inflicted “great emotional pain, fear and anxiety on Election Day and beyond.” Students at Cornell held a “cry-in” to mourn the results of the election. The University of Kansas offered students therapy dogs. At the University of Michigan’s multi-ethnic student affairs center students took comfort in regressing to childhood with coloring books and Play-Doh.
John Hopkins recommended a healing circle. Stanford urged students to “take care of yourselves and to give support to those who need it.” Vanderbilt encouraged them “to take advantage of the outstanding mental health support the university offers.”
At the University of Maryland, an astronomy test was canceled to help students cope with “a personally threatening election result.” A Yale economics professor made his test optional because students were “in shock” over losing an election. A dozen midterms were rescheduled at Columbia.
One student complained, “Instead of studying for my exam, I was glued to the election update. It’s not fair to have a test the following day when something so monumental is taking place, especially when this event is threatening so many groups of people in our country.”
Under all the outraged rhetoric is a narcissistic sense of entitlement. Frustrate it and tantrums happen.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is the tantrum that happens when that sense of entitlement bursts. It’s not a new phenomenon. We saw it with Bush and with previous Republican presidents before him. But as the left’s power has grown, its insular ivory towers have become unable to imagine ever losing it.
Obama maintained the illusion that the opposition didn’t matter by ruling unilaterally. Then in one election the illusion collapsed. The left wasn’t really in charge. There were millions of people across the country in places they had never visited or even heard of who got to decide on all these issues.
That warm comfortable safe space of John Oliver and Samantha Bee viral videos, Buzzfeed stories and social media feeds filled with carefully curated people who agreed with them wasn’t reality. It had been an illusion all along. It was an elitist island that had little in common with that vast geography of people who get their say through the Electoral College. After two terms of getting their way on everything, they woke to a world in which they didn’t matter and which was suddenly no longer catering to their whims.
They don’t really want to abolish the Electoral College, to put Garland on the Supreme Court or to burn New Balance sneakers. What they really want is to get rid of democracy and replace it with a dictatorship. Trump Derangement Syndrome is the tantrum of tyrants.
It’s a real threat to democracy. But that’s what the left has always been.
The hysteria of Trump Derangement Syndrome is the flip side of Obama worship. Both reject democracy and embrace power. They are the illiberal attitudes of a totalitarian movement at odds with America. [Emphasis added.]
“A world is collapsing before our eyes”, tweeted the French ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, as it became clear that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election. Although he later apparently deleted the tweet, the sentiment expressed in his tweet encapsulates the attitude of the majority of the European political establishment.
Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, described the reaction to Trump’s victory across Germany’s political spectrum as “shock and uncertainty.” Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen described Trump’s win as a “heavy shock.” German Justice Minister Heiko Maas tweeted: “The world won’t end, but things will get more crazy”.
Green party leader Cem Özdemir called Trump’s election a “break with the tradition that the West stands for liberal values.”
“Trump is the trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international movement. … They want a rollback to the bad old times in which women belonged by the stove or in bed, gays in jail and unions at best at the side table. And he who doesn’t keep his mouth shut gets publicly bashed.”
In a fine touch of irony, EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, who recently referred to the Chinese as “slanty eyed,” told Deutschlandfunk radio that the U.S. election was a “warning” for Germany: “Things are getting simplified, black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. You can ask simple questions, but one should not give simple answers.”
In France, the media reaction was summed up by the left-leaning newspaper, Libération:
“Trumpocalypse… Shock… The world’s leading power is from now on in the hands of the far-right. Fifty percent of Americans voted in all conscience for a racist, lying, sexist, vulgar, hateful candidate.”
Critics omitted, however, the runaway lawlessness, divisiveness and corruption that American voters declined to reinstate.
President François Hollande described Trump’s victory as marking the start of “a period of uncertainty.” Previously, Hollande had said that Trump made him “want to retch.”
On a very different, but related note, Nigel Farage speaks about the Trump and Brexit revolutions:
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a reformist Muslim, agrees with Trump’s much-maligned — and grossly distorted by the media — plans for deciding which Muslims will be allowed to enter the United States.
Conclusions
I engaged in a bit of Schadenfreude while writing this, but the problem has its serious aspects.
Many people wanted “feminist” Hillary to continue Obama’s feckless foreign and domestic policies; not enough to win the election for Hillary, but enough to make them believe that they should and would win hands-down. Since they didn’t, they concluded that something serious — they don’t know what, beyond the idiocy of American voters and a “corrupt” electoral system — must have caused “racist, antisemitic, misogynist bully” Trump to win.
Why? Academia — from kindergarten through graduate school — are one big part of the problem and the lamebrain media are another. Most of those placed in charge of them doubtless agree with Obama’s position that His world vision is right and that Populism is dangerous.
[I]nstead of laudatory songs that praise the new president, a sick new anti-Trump lesson plan that demonizes President-elect Trump and his supporters has already been offered to teachers in the San Francisco area. High school social studies teacher Fakhra Shah apparently drew up the lesson plan in a fit of spite and rage in the wee hours of the morning of November 9, right after Trump was elected. The school district reportedly has no problem with the plan, which characterizes the new president and his supporters as racist and sexist bigots.
. . . .
[Ms. Shah] warned teachers that some students may lash out at the new president using foul and obscene language. She even encouraged this because it is how kids living under white supremacy lift themselves up and fight oppression at school. Or something.
“I know that they might curse and swear, but you would too if you have suffered under the constructs of white supremacy or experienced sexism, or any isms or lack of privilege,” she wrote.
This is not “empowering” or “uplifting.” It is seriously deranged and destructive. The songs of Obama praise were disturbing and inappropriate, but this kind of propaganda is just plain evil. Instead of helping students deal with an election that maybe didn’t go the way they wanted, they are encouraging them to wallow in anger and self-pity and branding over 60 million Americans as racist and sexist bigots.
At the end of 2008, I worried that the Obama administration would do great damage to America–correctly, as it turned out. But no one considered my misgivings to be newsworthy.
The case is different with respect to the incipient Trump administration. Criticisms by his opponents–the ones who just lost the election–dominate the news. The Associated Press, once a respected news organization, headlines: “Trump’s staff picks alarm minorities: ‘Injustice to America.’”
Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s choices for leadership posts threaten national unity and promise to turn back the clock on progress for racial, religious and sexual minorities, civil rights leaders and others said Friday after his nomination of Alabama U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general.
That’s a remarkable beginning for a purported news story!
Sessions, a Republican, was denied a federal judgeship in 1986 after hearings in which he was accused of making racially charged remarks as a U.S. attorney. According to transcripts, Sessions was accused, among other things, of joking that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was OK” until he learned its members smoked marijuana and of calling a black assistant U.S. attorney “boy.” During the hearing, Sessions denied making some of the comments and said others were jokes taken out of context.
Is it too much to expect them to come up with something within the last 30 years? Apparently so.
Black Lives Matter activist and Campaign Zero co-founder DeRay Mckesson said Sessions’ “documented racism and previous ineligibility for public office make him unfit to be the standard-bearer for the nation’s justice system.”
The AP cites one extreme left-wing source after another, as though they were reputable experts whose judgments are worthy of credence. In addition to the Black Lives Matter activist, the AP turns to unindicted terrorist co-conspirator CAIR for comment:
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said, “Unfortunately, these very important picks in his administration send a troubling message indicating that the bigotry we saw expressed in the campaign will continue.”
The Associated Press deems representatives of a pro-terrorist group and a violent, racist movement to be mainstream commentators, while Jeff Sessions–former U.S. Attorney, Attorney General of Alabama and Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a Senator so respected that when he ran for re-election in 2014, the Democrats did not field a candidate against him–is portrayed as an outlier, a marginal, suspect figure. That gives you a good idea where the Associated Press lies on the ideological spectrum.
The AP retails the usual nonsense against Trump adviser Steve Bannon:
Bannon led the Breitbart website, which has been widely condemned as racist, sexist and anti-Semitic.
Really? By whom? Why? This is the lowest form of smear.
The AP goes on to quote someone named Daniela Lapidous, as though her views were particularly noteworthy:
Daniela Lapidous, a 22-year-old Jewish woman who works to fight climate change…
I am sure the humor is unintended.
…called Bannon a “misogynist and anti-Semite and an anti-climate extremist.” She said she never before felt the need to fight anti-Semitism but now thinks that she must.
“I’ve been somewhat convinced that anti-Semitism isn’t a thing in the United States anymore, but this past year, with Trump and Bannon, it’s made me scared about that for the first time in my life,” said Lapidous, who lives in San Francisco.
Why does the AP inform many hundreds of thousands of readers about Ms. Lapidous’s opinion of Steve Bannon? Has Lapidous ever met Mr. Bannon? Not as far as we know. Does she cite any basis for her opinion that Bannon is an anti-Semite? No. In fact, while Bannon likely does disagree with Ms. Lapidous about global warming–I certainly hope so!–the assertion that he is anti-Semitic is disgusting. Andrew Breitbart was strongly pro-Israel; our own Scott Johnson once toured Israel with him. Breitbart News, under Bannon’s leadership, has continued to be enthusiastically pro-Israel.
This is not hard to understand: a person who is anti-Israel is not necessarily an anti-Semite, although a great many are. But no anti-Semites are strongly pro-Israel. That combination simply doesn’t exist. Which means that Ms. Lapidous is ignorant, and raises the question: why is the Associated Press sharing with us the uninformed opinion of a foolish left-wing ideologue who is all of six months removed from college? Has the AP called you lately to ask for your opinion about prominent Democrats? Probably not.
I could go on for a long time; this AP story is a target-rich environment. Instead, let’s add just one more observation. The AP pretends that it would be a terrible thing to have a racist Attorney General. Jeff Sessions, of course, would be no such thing. But we have had a racist Attorney General, just recently: Eric Holder. Holder made it the policy of the Department of Justice to enforce federal anti-discrimination laws in favor of some ethnic groups, but not others. That is textbook racism. Did the Associated Press protest? Of course not. Holder was of their party, and shared their agenda.
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