RUTHFULLY YOURS

The name “All Things Considered” would suggest a wide-ranging survey of viewpoints on today’s issues. That’s the name of the taxpayer-subsidized nightly evening show that National Public Radio broadcasts to a national audience. So it is particularly maddening when NPR broadcasts yet another segment featuring a discussion among three anti-Trump pundits who seem unable to consider anything that doesn’t help NPR’s quest to take down the president.

Before turning to impeachment, the segment began with NPR host Ari Shapiro, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Vox writer Matthew Yglesias finding something nasty to say about the president visiting the troops in Afghanistan for Thanksgiving. (A heartwarming video of the event can be seen here.)

It was a perfect little echo chamber.

“President Trump is back in the U.S. after just a few hours on the ground in Afghanistan, and the trip was not the only surprise,” Shapiro said. “He also unexpectedly announced that peace talks are back on between the U.S. and the Taliban.”

All three agreed Trump wanted to end the Afghanistan war too quickly. Of the never-ending war that just turned 18-years-old, Brooks said: “Usually, the Middle East touches us in some way, often in an unpleasant way, when we’re not there to try to stabilize things as best we can. So to me, the overall withdrawal, which has been Trump’s policy, is incredibly shortsighted.” Brooks, who publishes in one of the most inexplicably prestigious newspapers in the United States, didn’t seem to know that Afghanistan is in South Asia, not the Middle East.

In any event, Brooks contends American soldiers need to stabilize the Middle East (or wherever) permanently because, if they don’t, something might happen. Maybe he should run for president if he doesn’t agree with voters’ desire to scale back these wars.

But Afghanistan was not what they really wanted to talk about. The trio quickly pivoted to impeachment. They used the segment to reassure listeners that the president had absolutely no defense against the charges against him. Brooks repeated a variation of this same assertion three times.

The case is so strong, Brooks said, the president shouldn’t even bother to show up. “They ought to not send anyone, unless they found Perry Mason or Clarence Darrow or some legal genius that we’ve never met because they have no case.”

He added: “But I don’t see how they [the president’s legal team] can possibly make a credible case within the [impeachment] process of what is essentially a trial,” and that the president’s team, “should rail as much as they can on every subject other than the one that’s at the core.”

Neither Shapiro nor Yglesias pushed back. A casual consumer of the news relying on NPR would be left with the impression that the case was already closed with nothing left but a few formalities and some paperwork to remove Trump. All three believed the Democrats have the president dead to rights on the Ukraine scandal. None even bothered to re-examine the facts that led them to this conclusion. And they certainly made no mention of the many articles poking holes in the accusations.

None discussed whether Trump had a legitimate law enforcement purpose for asking Ukraine’s president about the Bidens’ apparent pay-for-protection arrangement with Ukrainian energy giant Burisma. John Solomon, a journalist who has become a target of the Democrats’ impeachment efforts, has carefully documented the unshakable facts of the Bidens’ corruption. But “All Things Considered” hadn’t considered Solomon’s reporting.

None of them asked why U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is in charge of the inquiry. Nobody discussed how his hearsay and opinion witnesses in the two weeks of hearings presented any evidence of wrongdoing by the president. The trio expressed zero curiosity about why the next round of hearings would involve constitutional experts who will Dem-splain how we shouldn’t believe our lying eyes about what the Constitution says. In fact, these NPR pundits failed even to recap or define what the president was accused of—probably because the charges change from day to day as the focus group results pour in.

The November 29 edition of “All Things Considered” reminds us that taxpayers are being forced to pay for the deep state propaganda organ that NPR has become.

An otherwise unremarkable radio segment perfectly represents the transformation of NPR from a left-of-center news source to a daily infomercial for the Democrats’ effort to impeach, remove, or at least defeat the president in the 2020 election. It’s certainly their prerogative to espouse those views if they hold them—but why are taxpayers subsidizing them?

Beyond the moral culpability of forcing taxpayers to pay for free negative advertising for the Democrats, NPR makes itself redundant by simply adding to the choir of CNN, NBC, the New York Times, ABC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and so forth. Even formerly pro-Trump outlets such as the Drudge Report and Fox News find themselves sliding into the anti-Trump hive. Do we really need taxpayers to supplement the already bountiful feast of get-Trump propaganda?

A Washington Post column recently asked “Why are Republicans in Congress sticking by Trump on impeachment?” The author offered four possible theories—none of which involved Trump’s factual innocence.

But Trump is innocent of bribery. A “bribe” would require a showing that he took something of value and put it in his pocket. Neither an investigation into the Bidens or the 2016 election could possibly qualify.

He’s innocent of “extortion,” which requires a threat of physical harm. That never happened. NPR and the Washington Post seem intellectually incapable of examining whether Trump might be innocent. Extreme confirmation bias is the hallmark of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

And so America appears destined to weather a trial in the Senate because the impeachment advocates have failed to see how absurd their own case is.

The NPR segment is a microcosm of the whole thing: An echo chamber of Trump derangement through which reality cannot penetrate. There’s no careful weighing of the risks or sensible internal debates in which somebody points out the gaps in their arguments. The Democrats’ impeachment strategy is very simple: The get-Trumpers can’t be wrong if nobody is allowed to disagree.