Posted tagged ‘Trump and fake news’

At the Orgy of Self-Righteousness

August 19, 2017

At the Orgy of Self-Righteousness, American SpectatorGeorge Neumayr, August 18, 2017

(Please see also, Anti-Israel Academics Launch Campus Antifa Group for Faculty. — DM)

The press had grown accustomed to Republican presidents who suffered under what might be called a conservative inferiority complex. Trump, fortunately, isn’t touched by it and is willing to call the self-appointed ruling class on its propaganda and lies. As phony Republicans and conservatives chase after the mob headed for Lee’s statue, there stands Trump like a stonewall.

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Out of this week’s orgy of self-righteousness has come toppled statues in the South, a vandalized Lincoln Memorial in the North, a Democratic state senator in the Midwest calling for the assassination of President Trump, and numerous other examples of “progressive” barbarism. It tells you everything you need to know about the rancid condition of “higher education” that the scenes of the greatest irrationality in America today take place in university towns.

In Durham, a cradle of ruling-class liberals at Duke, demonstrators put down their copies of Malcolm X’s memoirs long enough to take off Robert E. Lee’s nose in the school’s chapel. How will Duke respond to this vandalism? By expelling the students? Or by expelling the Lee statue?

Naturally, “conservatives” and members of the stupid party are joining the lynch mob instead of stopping it. By the way, what exactly do “conservatives” conserve anymore? It is difficult to say, except maybe their seats on Meet the Press and Morning Joe. Turn on the TV and you are likely to hear some “conservative” rebuking Trump for his ban on transgendered troops, extolling the glories of gay marriage, and casting Robert E. Lee as a traitorous dirtbag. Rich Lowry wants to see the Confederate monuments “mothballed.”

One wonders what entitles this generation to speak so confidently about past evils given its inability to recognize present ones. Modern America is awash in the blood of millions of aborted children — a monstrous evil we’re told is as central to the modern lifestyle as slavery was to the ancient one.

Can anybody imagine the “conservatives” heard this week lecturing Trump on his comments ever refusing to appear in the company of abortion advocates? No, the Bill Kristols are only too happy to belly up to the smugfests of the pro-abortion liberal elite. They consider their pro-abortion peers very fine people indeed. They will often lecture social conservatives on the need to lighten up and accept the “Big Tent.”

Of course, it is an enormous lie that Trump ever called white nationalists very fine people. He explicitly condemned them. His comment was obviously referring to the non-racist protesters dismayed by the removal of Lee’s statue. Notice that nobody in the press actually quotes Trump’s statement, since that would expose their “reporting” as despicable propaganda worthy of a Soviet show trial.

The fake news has never been faker, as puffed-chest “anchors” instruct their audiences to trust their dishonest paraphrase of Trump’s remarks. And of course here too the “conservative” press joined in the journalistic malpractice. The politically correct weenies at the New York Post, for example, ran outrageously dishonest headlines about Trump calling the white supremacists fine people.

A parade of “conservative” prognosticators and effete Republicans say that this controversy will inflict permanent damage on Trump. Before you take their comments seriously, go back and look at what these cocky jackasses said about Trump’s chances in the Republican primaries. If any of these frauds ever tried to run against Trump, he would crush them. Pundits on stations with anemic ratings, and pols who couldn’t win their own states, claim that they speak for the “country.”

These dolts still don’t get it. Trump won the presidency not in spite of his defiance of conventional wisdom but because of it. And he will win re-election for the same reason. If anything, the hidden Trump vote will increase. Trump’s strength is that he refuses to go wobbly in the face of fashionable lies — a trait no Republican president since Reagan has displayed.

One can only laugh at the fatuousness of the Bushes, who so desperately want to be seen as “enlightened” on matters of race. In what the press reported as an implicit rebuke to Trump, they issued a joint statement on Tuesday from Kennebunkport against “hatred.” I recall George W. Bush saying that one of the most troubling moments of his presidency was when Kanye West accused him of not giving a damn about the stranded people of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. That criticism hurt deeply, an anxious Bush acknowledged. Bush’s imprudent decision to invade and occupy Iraq, causing thousands of collateral deaths, didn’t keep him up at night. No, he was worried about the self-indulgent carping of a celebrity rapper. And the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. When Bush’s daughter made the utterly minor and innocent mistake of confusing the titles of two black movies, she quickly popped up on the Today show to offer an abject, tears-streaming-down-the-face apology to the black community.

The press had grown accustomed to Republican presidents who suffered under what might be called a conservative inferiority complex. Trump, fortunately, isn’t touched by it and is willing to call the self-appointed ruling class on its propaganda and lies. As phony Republicans and conservatives chase after the mob headed for Lee’s statue, there stands Trump like a stonewall.

Trump on Charlottesville: Why he’s right and media is wrong

August 17, 2017

Trump on Charlottesville: Why he’s right and media is wrong, Rebel Media via YouTube, August 16, 2017

 

Who Rules the United States?

February 17, 2017

Who Rules the United States? Washington Free Beacon, February 17, 2017

(Update re President Trump’s EPA nominee, Scott Pruitt: He was approved by the Senate 52-46. — DM)

President Donald Trump pauses while speaking during a news conference, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

President Donald Trump pauses while speaking during a news conference, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Donald Trump was elected president last November by winning 306 electoral votes. He pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., to overturn the system of politics that had left the nation’s capital and major financial and tech centers flourishing but large swaths of the country mired in stagnation and decay. “What truly matters,” he said in his Inaugural Address, “is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.”

Is it? By any historical and constitutional standard, “the people” elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

There is, of course, the case of Michael Flynn. He made a lot of enemies inside the government during his career, suffice it to say. And when he exposed himself as vulnerable those enemies pounced. But consider the means: anonymous and possibly illegal leaks of private conversations. Yes, the conversation in question was with a foreign national. And no one doubts we spy on ambassadors. But we aren’t supposed to spy on Americans without probable cause. And we most certainly are not supposed to disclose the results of our spying in the pages of the Washington Post because it suits a partisan or personal agenda.

Here was a case of current and former national security officials using their position, their sources, and their methods to crush a political enemy. And no one but supporters of the president seems to be disturbed. Why? Because we are meant to believe that the mysterious, elusive, nefarious, and to date unproven connection between Donald Trump and the Kremlin is more important than the norms of intelligence and the decisions of the voters.

But why should we believe that? And who elected these officials to make this judgment for us?

Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year’s election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this,” a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.

Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women’s March.

But here’s the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.

The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the “least dangerous branch,” now presume to think they know more about America’s national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.

For some time, especially during Democratic presidencies, the second system of government was able to live with the first one. But that time has ended. The two systems are now in competition. And the contest is all the more vicious and frightening because more than offices are at stake. This fight is not about policy. It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an exclusive class.

“In our time, as in [Andrew] Jackson’s, the ruling classes claim a monopoly not just on the economy and society but also on the legitimate authority to regulate and restrain it, and even on the language in which such matters are discussed,” writes Christopher Caldwell in a brilliant essay in the Winter 2016/17 Claremont Review of Books.

Elites have full-spectrum dominance of a whole semiotic system. What has just happened in American politics is outside the system of meanings elites usually rely upon. Mike Pence’s neighbors on Tennyson street not only cannot accept their election loss; they cannot fathom it. They are reaching for their old prerogatives in much the way that recent amputees are said to feel an urge to scratch itches on limbs that are no longer there. Their instincts tell them to disbelieve what they rationally know. Their arguments have focused not on the new administration’s policies or its competence but on its very legitimacy.

Donald Trump did not cause the divergence between government of, by, and for the people and government, of, by, and for the residents of Cleveland Park and Arlington and Montgomery and Fairfax counties. But he did exacerbate it. He forced the winners of the global economy and the members of the D.C. establishment to reckon with the fact that they are resented, envied, opposed, and despised by about half the country. But this recognition did not humble the entrenched incumbents of the administrative state. It radicalized them to the point where they are readily accepting, even cheering on, the existence of a “deep state” beyond the control of the people and elected officials.

Who rules the United States? The simple and terrible answer is we do not know. But we are about to find out.

The Russian Conspiracy Theory Boils Over

February 17, 2017

The Russian Conspiracy Theory Boils Over, Front Page MagazineMatthew Vadum, February 17, 2017

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The so-called scandal involving former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn is 9/11, Pearl Harbor, Iran-Contra, Watergate, proof of presidential fascism, a cynical money-making scheme, and a pro-Russian spy thriller all rolled into one, according to the increasingly deranged rants of howling left-wingers and their truth-adverse confederates in the mainstream media.

Despite this relentless barrage of fake news and smears, President Donald Trump pushed back against the orchestrated campaign against him yesterday at what is sure to go down in history as The Best Presidential Press Conference of All Time as he gave the mainstream media the beat-down it deserves. (See transcript.)

“To give you an idea how Trump’s press conference went, afterwards, the press corps demanded a safe space,” Ann Coulter tweeted of the 77-minute long White House event, Trump’s first solo presser as president. “I wish this press conference could go on all day.”

“The public doesn’t believe you people anymore,” a ferocious, animated Trump told the assembled press corps. “Maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you.”

“This whole Russia scam that you guys” are pushing on people is “so you don’t talk about the real subject which is illegal leaks.”

“The public sees it,” he said. “They see it. They see it’s not fair. You take a look at some of your shows and you see the bias and the hatred. And the public is smart. They understand it.”

“I didn’t do anything for Russia,” he said. “I have done nothing for Russia. Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium. Hillary Clinton did a reset, remember with the stupid plastic button that made us look like a bunch of jerks.”

A mewling Chuck Todd of NBC was offended by the president’s conduct at the press conference and tweeted, “This [is] not a laughing matter. I’m sorry, delegitimizing the press is un-American[.]”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have signed on to the effort to delegitimize President Trump.

Todd, of course, is one the members of the media out to get Trump.

He recently said the invented Flynn-Russia crisis is “arguably the biggest presidential scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra.”

Disgraced former anchorman Dan Rather, the poster child for journalistic malfeasance who humiliated himself a decade ago with his proven lies about George W. Bush’s military service record, couldn’t resist hopping on the bandwagon in order to create the illusion he is relevant.

He gravely pontificated that “Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now. It was the closest we came to a debilitating Constitutional crisis, until maybe now.”

This manufactured mass hysteria directed against Trump, a democratically elected president, in order to drive him from office continues. It feeds on itself. It infects. It multiplies. It smothers.

This un-American mobocracy threatens to snuff out American democracy itself if not contained.

Calls for President Trump’s impeachment, removal from office by the Senate or by military coup, and assassination are growing on the Left as it comes to grips with the fact that the Chief Executive is deadly serious about protecting America and rolling back President Obama’s poisonous legacy.

No claim or statement is too crazy, lawless, undemocratic, or barbaric for the Left as it desperately tries to keep the borders open to Muslim terrorists, Americans groaning under the chains of Obamacare, businesses buried in red tape, and the welfare state ballooning.

Exhibit “A” from the magical land of fairy dust and unicorns is communist mockumentary director Michael Moore.

In the complete absence of evidence, Moore called Trump a “Russian traitor” and said he should vacate the White House. “We can do this the easy way (you resign), or the hard way (impeachment).” He also called for Trump to be arrested.

Todd, Rather, and Moore are far from alone.

On Fox News Channel, Sean Hannity held up an interview CNN’s Wolf Blitzer did with Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) as an example of the media’s “abusively biased coverage, this false narrative.”

“If members of the administration are essentially conspiring with Russia either through the campaign earlier or now in the administration itself, I mean, look, Wolf, that’s the definition of treason,” Moulton said. “This is a very, very serious affair.”

From his perch at a glossy, content-free fashion magazine, MSNBC reject Keith Olbermann huffed and puffed. “I call for the immediate indictment of Michael Thomas Flynn on charges of and his immediate arrest on suspicion of violation of the Logan Act,” he said invoking a long-forgotten statute from 1799 under which no one has ever been convicted. Trump should be named as Flynn’s “unindicted co-conspirator,” he added.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) conspiracy-theorized that Trump is using the Flynn saga to privatize intelligence-gathering and help his friends on Wall Street make money off it. Trump plans to ask Stephen A. Feinberg, a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, to conduct “a broad review of American intelligence agencies,” the New York Times has reported.

“Now what he’s doing is naming another Wall Streeter to go in like a corporate takeover of the intelligence community, clearly with the intent of creating a chilling effect upon these intelligence professionals, who are trying to help America to understand how our security may have been compromised in our relationship with Russia,” Markey said.

Riot-cheerleading Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who claims the Reagan administration flooded the nation’s inner cities with crack cocaine, was overjoyed at Flynn’s ouster, describing him as “a liar and someone who cannot be trusted.”

“I’ve always believed that there has been collusion between the Trump outfit here, and Russia and the Kremlin. So I believe this is the tip of the iceberg … the strategy and the plot, to defend Russia and to work with Russia, is part of who Trump and his organization is,” Waters said.

New York Times columnist and hyperbole junkie Thomas Friedman accused Flynn and Trump of participating in some weird, ill-defined international conspiracy. “After the Russians did not respond harshly to the eviction of their spies and diplomats, Trump actually tweeted out some positive encouragement of this. Did the two of them cook this up all along?”

“And it gets … to two other issues,” Friedman continued. “The first is, we have never taken seriously from the very beginning Russia hacked our election. That was a 9/11-scale event. They attacked the core of our very democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor-scale event.”

Radical kook Chauncey DeVega, who calls Trump a “fascist authoritarian,” hyperventilated at Salon that the president is “a traitor to the United States” and so are all who back him.

Trump’s “voters and other supporters who do not denounce him are also traitors, and any Republican officials who continue to back Trump are traitors as well,” he wrote, as visions of sending patriotic Americans to die in forced labor camps danced in his head.

PJMedia’s Michael Walsh calls what’s happening in the country “a rolling coup attempt” and he’s right.

Make no mistake about what’s happening here: this is a rolling coup attempt, organized by elements of the intelligence community, particularly CIA and NSA, abetted by Obama-era holdovers in the understaffed Justice Department (Sally Yates, take a bow) and the lickspittles of the leftist media, all of whom have signed on with the “Resistance” in order to overturn the results of the November election.

This escalating offensive against Trump kicked up a few notches after Flynn, an arch foe of Islamofascism, was forced out of his critically important advisory role Monday night by what is shaping up to be an East German-style Ben Rhodes-centered deep state cabal.

Flynn, a retired lieutenant general in the U.S. Army, fell on his sword reportedly for allegedly making contact with a Russian envoy. The White House claims Flynn resigned after admitting he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.

It’s not as if we know what actually happened with Flynn and the Russian or Russians at this point, or if there was any contact at all. News reports don’t quote any on-the-record sources.

And despite the lunatic ravings of NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bill Kristol, David Frum, Sally Kohn, Joan Walsh, Hollywood celebrities, and many others, there is no credible evidence whatsoever that Trump had anything to do with the hacking of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee or that Trump colluded with Russia in whatever may or may not have transpired.

Without proof all of this screaming about Flynn and Trump and their supposedly nefarious connections to Vladimir Putin is just noise.

It could be (and likely is) completely made up.

Fiction is, after all, what Ben Rhodes, now identified as a major player in the plot against the president, specialized in when he worked in the Obama White House. Rhodes bragged to the New York Times about duping Americans by creating a media “echo chamber” to promote the botched, unenforceable nuclear nonproliferation agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran that will actually end up helping the mad mullahs who want to kill us all get the bomb. Rhodes became a misinformation-manufacturing servant of a hostile power while betraying his fellow Americans to help an Islam-loving president cozy up to the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.

But as we keep learning more and more about Rhodes and Obama’s post-presidential sabotage apparatus, there was a small victory for common sense as the FBI announced it sees no reason to do anything about the Flynn case because there’s nothing there.

The FBI is still investigating the Russian saga but won’t pursue charges against Flynn “barring new information that changes what they know,” CNN reported last night. Although Flynn stumbled at times during FBI interviews, investigators believe Flynn was “cooperative and provided truthful answers.”

And that can’t be bad.

Not Satire? | Liberals in Global Outrage That Professional Attire Is Expected at the White House

February 4, 2017

Liberals in Global Outrage That Professional Attire Is Expected at the White House, Washington Free Beacon, February 4, 2017

(Either this is satire or the world is even crazier than I had thought. — DM)

US President Donald Trump walks toward Marine One as he departs the White House on February 3, 2017. Photo by Olivier Douliery/Abaca(Sipa via AP Images)

US President Donald Trump walks toward Marine One as he departs the White House on February 3, 2017. Photo by Olivier Douliery/Abaca(Sipa via AP Images)

“[I]n just two weeks he has already set back women’s rights dramatically,” the magazine wrote. “He has restricted women’s reproductive rights, cut funding to international organisations who promote, provide and advise on abortions, and just yesterday it was revealed that he’s planning an executive order to declare pre-marital sex, same-sex marriage and abortion to be wrong.”

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Liberals are outraged across the globe because employees are expected to dress professionally in the White House.

Donald Trump has “angered feminists all over again,” this time for comments he did not make. The outrage originated from an Axios report Thursday that quoted an unnamed source who claimed to have worked for the Trump campaign who said, “Trump likes the women who work for him ‘to dress like women.'”

“Even if you’re in jeans, you need to look neat and orderly,” the source added. Men also should be “sharply dressed.”

Dozens of outlets from Australia to Ireland celebrated women who took to Twitter to express their displeasure with Trump over the anonymous comment that women can wear jeans to work. Users began using the hash tag #DressLikeAWoman to show that many women wear uniforms at their jobs, as do fictional characters.

“Trump prefers female employees to ‘dress like women’, because of course he does,” wrote the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Irish Examiner said the “internet’s response” to the report was “gloriously badass.” The Indian Express and Refinery 29 noted the “amazing Twitter responses.” The Huffington Post found 21 women who tweeted about the comments.

BBC News, TIME, the Telegraph, the Guardian, and Yahoo! had write ups, as well.

The UK edition of Marie Claire magazine used the occasion to incorrectly report that President Trump will “declare pre-marital sex” “wrong” via an executive order.

“[I]n just two weeks he has already set back women’s rights dramatically,” the magazine wrote. “He has restricted women’s reproductive rights, cut funding to international organisations who promote, provide and advise on abortions, and just yesterday it was revealed that he’s planning an executive order to declare pre-marital sex, same-sex marriage and abortion to be wrong.”

The magazine said the comment on women’s clothing, which they wrongly attributed to Trump directly, made Marie Claire “disheartened,” because it had the effect of “cementing a general feeling that a Trump presidency is setting us back by about 50 years.”

The Axios report was unclear on the dress attire for men at the White House. The report suggested that Trump demands his male staffers wear Trump Ties, or at least Armani.

“If it’s not a Trump tie, you can get away with Brooks Brothers,” the unnamed source said. “But I’d suggest Armani.”

The dictate must not be too strictly enforced. “Regarding Trump’s rakish policy adviser Stephen Miller, the source adds: ‘I’ve always been surprised about how Stephen Miller survives with those thin ties,'” the report says. Counselor to the president Steve Bannon often forgoes a tie.

Obama’s White House, 2009: ‘Don’t Pretend’ Fox News Is a ‘Legitimate News Organization’

January 12, 2017

Obama’s White House, 2009: ‘Don’t Pretend’ Fox News Is a ‘Legitimate News Organization’, PJ MediaDavid Steinberg, January 11, 2017

trumpnewsconfPresident-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2017, in New York. The news conference was his first as President-elect. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Now, here’s a more insightful take: since Obama’s done it since it his first year in office; since Obama went two entire terms without taking more than a handful of questions from any center-right outlet, never mind singling out just one; and since not being one of the lucky dozen or so people out of 300 million Americans who gets to ask the president-elect a question does not infer that your rights have been violated . . . .

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Donald Trump refused to take a question from CNN reporter Jim Acosta today, labeling Acosta’s employer as “fake news.” Since then, mainstream media and celebrities are hyperventilating over Trump as if he bears the same viciously totalitarian impulses as, say, Fidel Castro — and that Trump is SCARY and GOING TO GET THEM.

As comforting as tweeting one’s victimhood status to millions appears to be to today’s left — and as ironic as exercising one’s free speech to millions via Twitter to claim the death of the First Amendment is to everyone else — this reactionary response sure doesn’t look good for the left in terms of ideological consistency.

Or sanity. For example, here’s one-percenter Patton Oswalt, who I’ll assume is tweeting from an in-home hyperbaric chamber:

Did the New York Times fear freedom of the press had been eradicated? No, the headline was simply that “Fox’s Volley With Obama” was … “Intensifying.”

Ironically, current CNN host and Trump critic Brian Stelter wrote the article. It begins:

Attacking the news media is a time-honored White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration has narrowed its sights to one specific organization, the Fox News Channel, calling it, in essence, part of the political opposition.

We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” said Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

In 2009, the White House’s position on Fox News was that it was “an opponent,” at “war(!)” with the White House. And that they were not, in fact, a legitimate news organization.

They were to be treated as fake news. It was White House policy.

Here’s Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post:

John Harwood of NBC:

Mother Jones:

Media Matters:

Here’s George Takei:

Now, here’s a more insightful take: since Obama’s done it since it his first year in office; since Obama went two entire terms without taking more than a handful of questions from any center-right outlet, never mind singling out just one; and since not being one of the lucky dozen or so people out of 300 million Americans who gets to ask the president-elect a question does not infer that your rights have been violated, this tweeter brings some sanity whether you’re a Trump supporter or not:

Much better.