RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week, a major news story broke. A 2-year-old girl was photographed looking at a really terrible painting of Michelle Obama.

“‘A moment of awe’: Photo of little girl captivated by Michelle Obama portrait goes viral,” the Washington Post cheered. “Little girl awestruck by Michelle Obama’s portrait believes she’s a queen,” urgently reported CNN. The sum total of this story is that a little girl looked at a portrait of Michelle.

Eat your heart out, North Korea. Our fake news propaganda is even tackier than yours.

Recently, a photo was released of Barack Obama meeting with Louis Farrakhan. The photo had been suppressed all these years to protect Obama’s career. Farrakhan was the racist leader of a hate group who had praised Hitler and described Jews as “satanic”. And yet he had met with the future president at a Congressional Black Caucus event. A CBC member, Rep. Danny Davis, had even praised Farrakhan.

You might think there’s a story in all that. And you would be wrong.

There isn’t a single Washington Post story on the photo. Not one. The same paper that believed its readers needed to be informed that a little girl had been photographed looking at a bad painting of Michelle Obama hasn’t found the time to report on the cover up of a meeting between top Democrats, including a future president, and the leader of a racist hate group that had once allied with the KKK.

It’s not that the Washington Post can’t report on Farrakhan. Or use Farrakhan to attack a president.

In ’15, the Post ran, “The bigotry of Trump and Farrakhan” and in ’16, “Why the Nation of Islam is praising Donald Trump”. Its stories about Obama and Farrakhan insist that the two men hate each other. A ’15 piece even attempted to link Farrakhan to Clarence Thomas, instead of Obama.

President Trump in his first year has succeeded at realizing many long-time conservative goals like tax reform and deregulation, to name a few. But for NeverTrump grumps, these achievements seem to intensify their bitter-ender anger at a political parvenu. Puffed up with self-regard about the purity of their “principles,” many have doubled-down on their criticisms of Trump’s brash, vulgar demeanor, coming off like the pompous Judge Smails sputtering over Al Czervik’s trashing of the Bushwood Country Club.

The latest outburst came from columnist Mona Charen after she lectured the CPAC attendees about their hypocrisy over the recent sexual harassment disclosures. Writing for The New York Times––the premier gate-keeper of “correct” opinion –– Charen reprised her scolding of Trump supporters that signaled to progressive monitors she is free from the Trump pox. But all she achieved beyond a pat on the head from progressives was to remind Trump voters why they rejected over a dozen establishment Republicans and then the deplorable Hillary Clinton in favor of an insurgent bulldozing his way through the stale received wisdom of those Republican politicians and pundits who’d rather be liked than win.

Most of Charen’s column comprises her self-congratulation about her “bravery,” and her claim that she and other NeverTrumpers “built and organized this party,” but now have been turned into “interlopers.” She criticizes as cowards Republicans who don’t trash Trump, and who have let “bad actors take control of the direction of our movement.” It’s interesting how Charen let slip the NeverTrumpers’ anger at the “Trumpified” common people who have crashed the elite’s private soirée, as though a political party is a swanky country club rather than a mechanism for mobilizing support for policies that serve all party members rather than a narrow political class.

This is the same thinly veiled snobbery, by the way, regularly indulged by arch-NeverTrumper Bret Stephens, who has joined David Brooks as another Times house-conservative. Stephens was delighted with Charen’s performance, and in his own column delivered perhaps the most useful explanation for why millions of Americans turned against the establishment and its mouthpieces:

Liberals tend to admire NeverTrumpers, because they see them as conservatives with a moral sense and, perhaps, a brain. By contrast, MAGA Republicans — whether of the fully or merely semi-Trumpified varieties — detest NeverTrumpers with an animus they can scarcely extend to liberals or progressives.