Category Archives: Media
We’re All Weasels Now
Not that anyone asked, but Director Comey assured us the FBI is not overrun by weasels.
Members of Congress needed assurances after last Friday’s FBI document dump. The dumped documents revealed that Clinton consiglieri Cheryl Mills sat in on Hillary Clinton’s FBI interview. Mills listened along with eight other lawyers while Hillary was questioned about her private email server. Mills is also a witness in that case. Legal experts say that’s unusual because it gives attorney/client protection to her communications with Hillary.
And the Justice Department gave her immunity anyway.
No Weasels Here
Committee Chair Trey Gowdy, a respected former federal prosecutor himself, says this isn’t the FBI he remembers.
When you have five immunity agreements and no prosecutions, when you are allowing witnesses who happen to be lawyers who happen to be targets to sit in on an interview — that is not the FBI that I used to work with.“
Comey sputtered that it is so.
“I hope, someday, when this political craziness is over, you’ll look back again on this, because this is the FBI you know and love,” the Bureau’s director told Gowdy. “This was done by pros, in the right way. That’s the part I have no patience with.”
And he insisted “We are not weasels.”
Matt Lauer Not One Of The Boys on the Bus
The Boys on the Bus was a best seller about the reporters who covered the 1972 presidential campaign.
It’s unlikely those boys would think much of today’s Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. But they probably wouldn’t have been too uncomfortable in his “locker room“.
Bus Bust
Now many of the boys on the bus covering the 2016 campaign are girls. And they threw Matt Lauer under the bus for asking Hillary Clinton tough questions and taking The Donald seriously.
They implied that Lester Holt would get the same treatment if he moderated the first Clinton/Trump debate in an even handed way.
Elephant In Debate Room
CNN says Hillary Clinton won the debate. Donald Trump disagrees but most other polls aren’t backing him up, so far.
Trump seemed to get the best of Hillary in the first 30 minutes when they tangled over trade rules. He caught her on the wrong side of President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Trade Deal, pointing out that she had called it the “gold standard.” Hillary denied this and then replied it wasn’t her responsibility and that she had changed her mind. So Trump insisted that she say it was Obama’s fault:
TRUMP: You called it the gold standard of trade deals. You said it’s the finest deal you’ve ever seen.
CLINTON: No.
TRUMP: And then you heard what I said about it, and all of a sudden you were against it.
CLINTON: Well, Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts. The facts are — I did say I hoped it would be a good deal, but when it was negotiated…
TRUMP: Not.
CLINTON: … which I was not responsible for, I concluded it wasn’t. I wrote about that in my book…
TRUMP: So is it President Obama’s fault?
CLINTON: … before you even announced.
TRUMP: Is it President Obama’s fault?
CLINTON: Look, there are differences…
TRUMP: Secretary, is it President Obama’s fault?
CLINTON: There are…
TRUMP: Because he’s pushing it.
CLINTON: There are different views about what’s good for our country, our economy, and our leadership in the world. And I think it’s important to look at what we need to do to get the economy going again. That’s why I said new jobs with rising incomes, investments, not in more tax cuts that would add $5 trillion to the debt.
At that point Trump seemed to be mopping the floor with her. But Hillary quickly got under his skin by trashing his business acumen and ethics.
She took a page from the Harry Reid playbook to claim Trump doesn’t pay income taxes. Incredibly, The Donald seemed to agree by saying, “it makes me smart.” For the record, PolitiFact doesn’t agree. It rates her claim mostly false.
But after that Trump seemed Low Eenergy.
Elephant In Debate Room
The elephant in debate room was the fact that Immigration, Benghazi, and the Clinton Foundation didn’t make the cut. Those issues were never brought up by moderator Lester Holt or Trump.
Unburdened of that baggage, Hillary dragged her prey off into the tall grass. There she dismembered the small handed one with accusations of racism and sexism.
She claimed the Stop and Frisk law was ruled unconstitutional and moderator Holt backed her up. She also insisted the murder rate continues to decline. In truth, Stop and Frisk was never ruled unconstitutional. And the FBI released a report the next morning showing the murder rate had surged 10.8% in 2015.
Hillary went on to back up her racism charge using Tulsa and Charlotte as “tragic examples.” Trump lacked the energy to point out that Black people rioted in Charlotte where a black man was killed by a black police officer who worked for a black police chief.
Hillary’s Alt-Right Conspiracy Theory
In a speech on Thursday, Hillary updated her Vast Right-Wing conspiracy theory to an Alt-Right conspiracy theory. As a result The NYT reports the actual Alt-Right is thrilled.
Race Card
The speech was an attempt to trump Trump with the race card. She also accused The Donald of subscribing to dark conspiracy theories.
Putin Card
Then she played the Putin card by theorizing that Vladimir Putin is the “Godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism.”
By Friday afternoon the news was focused back on the Clinton Foundation. Paul Joseph Watson has a great YouTube sendup of Hillary’s speech, tinfoil hat and all, here.
Never Trump Media
A common thread among the elite media seems to be that Trump is so bad anything goes to stop him. Which is interesting, since The Donald brags that his electoral success so far comes from free media coverage.
Howard Kurtz picked up on the NeverTrump media movement in his August 9 Media Buzz column titled Media justify anti-Trump bias, claim he’s too dangerous for normal rules. Howie says some in the media “are flat-out making the case for unfairness—an unprecedented approach for an unprecedented campaign.”:
Liberal investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald recently told Slate that “the U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president”…
Now comes Jim Rutenberg , in his first season as media columnist for the New York Times. He’s a good reporter and I give him credit for trying to openly grapple with this bizarre situation.
But Rutenberg is, in my view, trying to defend the indefensible:
“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”
Then there’s Michael Goodwin in this New York Post column titled American Journalism Collapsing before our eyes:
The largest broadcast networks — CBS, NBC and ABC — and major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post have jettisoned all pretense of fair play. Their fierce determination to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has no precedent.
And here’s historian Victor Davis Hanson:
The media somehow outdid their propaganda work for Barack Obama and have signed on as unapologetic auxiliaries to the Hillary Clinton campaign — and openly brag that, in Trump’s case, the duty of a journalist is to be biased.
NeverTrump Media
Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic isn’t having it. He explains why it’s difficult to cover Trump. Trump says provocative things like “Obama founded ISIS”. That’s not literally true – you can look it up. So what did Trump mean by it? That answer involves judgement and interpretation:
His strategic gambit was always and precisely to have things both ways.
By insisting that Barack Hussein Obama “founded” ISIS, knowing full well that his use of the word was unusual, inapt, and likely to mislead, then doubling down again and again when asked to clarify, Trump—who began in national politics by questioning Obama’s birth certificate—could again appeal to the part of his base that believes America is led by a secret Muslim foreigner who is allied with America’s Islamist enemies. And as even Trump acknowledged at the end of his interview with Hewitt, Trump willfully chose less accurate, more outrageous words to generate attention.
Having deliberately provoked with the repeated false statement that Obama founded ISIS, and deliberately inflamed with his reluctance to say he was speaking figuratively when asked to clarify, one Trump objective was achieved; having had things one way, he could move on to pretending, at the end of his Hewitt statement, that he was really just saying Obama had lost the peace all along, though he had directly rejected that notion moments earlier when Hewitt presented it.
Then, the next day, Trump sent out a Tweet with yet another contradictory explanation: He didn’t literally think Obama was the founder of ISIS; nor was he simply trying to express that Obama’s policies gave rise to ISIS; rather, when he said Obama founded ISIS, he was being “sarcastic,” but the media doesn’t get sarcasm.
All this deliberate, mendacious gamesmanship puts journalists in a very tricky position. If they merely report what Trump literally says, they’re accused of hyper-literalism. If they report what he reallymeans, judgment and interpretation are required.
Trump the Gardener
Another rich guy with “rice pudding between the ears” comes to mind. Maybe Trump is really Chance the Gardener (Peter Sellers character in the 1979 movie Being There):
President “Bobby”: Mr. Gardner, do you agree with Ben, or do you think that we can stimulate growth through temporary incentives?
[Long pause]
Chance the Gardener: As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden.
President “Bobby”: In the garden.
Chance the Gardener: Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.
President “Bobby”: Spring and summer.
Chance the Gardener: Yes.
President “Bobby”: Then fall and winter.
Chance the Gardener: Yes.
Benjamin Rand: I think what our insightful young friend is saying is that we welcome the inevitable seasons of nature, but we’re upset by the seasons of our economy.
Chance the Gardener: Yes! There will be growth in the spring!
Benjamin Rand: Hmm!
Chance the Gardener: Hmm!
President “Bobby”: Hm. Well, Mr. Gardner, I must admit that is one of the most refreshing and optimistic statements I’ve heard in a very, very long time.
[Benjamin Rand applauds]
President “Bobby”: I admire your good, solid sense. That’s precisely what we lack on Capitol Hill.
I like to watch.
