RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/27/three-poll-results-on-trump-the-press-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about/

How do you cover a poll that shows satisfaction with the economy, despite all the harrumphing about an impending recession, is much higher than it ever was under President Barack Obama? Or reveals that views on race relations are actually better today than three years ago? Or shows that most think the political system is being shaken up in a good way?

Answer: You don’t. That is, if you’re a mainstream media outlet and the poll is your own.

Here’s the scary headline NBC News ran on the poll it conducted with the Wall Street Journal and published over the weekend: “’A deep and boiling anger’: NBC/WSJ poll finds a pessimistic America despite current economic satisfaction.”

The really important finding, according to NBC, was that “70% of Americans say they’re angry at the political establishment.”

But it turns out that this anger level is unchanged since October 2015. That means the “deep and boiling anger” was happening under Obama. Why isn’t that the headline?

Sure, you can say that the anger has continued under Trump. But the story we’ve been told repeatedly for two years is that Trump is responsible for the current climate of hatred and discord. The fact that the poll debunks this narrative is newsworthy.

The NBC reporters covering their own poll ignore another newsworthy finding. More people feel good about race relations today than they did under Obama.

amgreatness.com/2019/08/26/our-tawdry-untrustworthy-fourth-estate/

The ongoing affair between the nation’s top law enforcement agency and the news media resulted in another hookup last week when CNN announced the hiring of Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI.

McCabe, a vocal Trump foe who opened a criminal investigation into the sitting president of the United States in May 2017 during his short stint as acting director, was fired by the FBI last year for lying to federal investigators.

He played a key role in concocting the Trump-Russia collusion hoax; wrote a book filled with animus toward the president; and remains under a grand jury investigation. Last week, McCabe’s lawyers met with federal prosecutors who are deciding whether to indict him for perjury.

So, of course, CNN hired him last week.

“They Literally Know Nothing”

Once upon a time in America, journalists embraced their role as the nation’s whistleblowers; the so-called Fourth Estate could usually be trusted to expose government corruption and name names. A generation of J-school graduates strived to be the next Carl Bernstein or Bob Woodward, digging for their own Watergate moment. 

But that all changed in 2008 with the candidacy of Barack Obama. The press served as a bodyguard for the 44th president, overlooking major abuses and failures during his tenure; suggesting that any legitimate criticism of Obama or his policies was rooted in racism; and regurgitating any administration-fed talking point as fact.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s “mind-meld” advisor, admitted as much when he told a reporter how the White House brainwashed the media: “The average reporter we talk to is 27-years-old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes bragged to the New York Times magazine in May 2016.  “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Then along came Donald Trump. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274740/ny-times-1619-project-puts-slavery-center-americas-bruce-thornton

Last week the New York Times embarrassed itself twice. First, a transcript was leaked of editor Dean Baquet’s exhortation to reporters that the Russian-collusion fiction having been exploded, they now needed to focus on the endemic “racism” and “white supremacism” of Trump and his supporters in order to defeat the president. Next, as the “theory” behind this partisan journalistic “praxis,” the self-proclaimed “paper of record” announced the “1619 Project,” a series of articles and essays showing “that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

Both incidents definitively reveal that the cultural bacilli that erupted during the Sixties have at last destroyed the minds of some of our most prestigious and powerful institutions. More important, such a degradation of history is one of the preconditions for the plague of tyranny.

The first point to make is that neither the blatant bias of the Times––nor its aim “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 [the year the first black slaves came to America] as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story”––is new. Like most of progressivism, both are manifestations of the zombie ideology that for nearly a century has been attacking our political and social order.

The political bias of the media, especially the New York Times, was apparent even before the Sixties.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_shabby_depravity_of_cnn_nbc_msnbc_the_nyt_et_al.html

Everyone paying attention to current events and the political wars that bedevil us all knows that CNN, NBC, and MSNBC are not honest brokers in any sense of the word.  For the eight years of the Bush administration, they verbally assaulted the president all day, every day.  George W. ignored their dishonest, calculated attacks in an effort to remain above the fray.  Bush gave these alleged news outlets a pass by refusing to take them on.  This was a mistake that Donald Trump learned not to repeat.  He has fought back from moment one, with a quick retort or tweet.  The same media and their mouthpieces slavishly idealized Barack Obama and overlooked and or covered up his many crimes and egregious errors in judgment.  For the left media crowd, Obama could have ordered a genocide, and they still would have idolized him.  Obama effectively did sanction the slaughter of Christians throughout the Middle East during his administration; he welcomed many thousands of Muslim refugees and refused refugee status to displaced Christians who were targeted by ISIS.  Christians have been effectively erased from the entire region.

The same media employed all the same tactics to candidate Trump even before he became the candidate.  They mocked him; late-night comics devoted their programs to deriding the man.  Once he became the candidate, they all doubled down and became downright vicious.  When it comes to venomous cruelty, no one tops the Left, in the media and in the entertainment sector.  When focused on a perceived enemy of their regressive progressiveness, they toss aside any sense of decency and go for the jugular.  They become everything we teach our children and grandchildren never to become: contemptible, intolerant snobs.  That is exactly who these persons with a media platform have become: malignant reprobates.  Nothing proves this more than their campaign to convince voters that Trump is unfit for office, mentally ill, etc.  They are dragging out the most Trump-deranged people to diagnose a man they’ve never met.  Obviously, every one of these so-called experts should have his license revoked for malpractice.  For example, Dr. Allen Frances’s guest spot on CNN suggests he may well have been dispatched from Duke for displaying severe mental health problems himself.  Physician, heal thyself!

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/26/journalists-meltdown-journalism-done/

After years of doxxing innocent Americans for their political views, mainstream media journalists are now upset that their own racist and antisemitic tweets have been complied by conservative allies of President Trump.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Wright-Piersanti’s archived social media posts were part of the White House’s “aggressive operation to discredit news organizations.”

The Times report decried this tactic, arguing that targeting individuals is acceptable when journalists do it to other people, but not when other people do it to them.

“But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” wrote reporters Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel.

The New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger said in a statement to the paper of record’s staff that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.

“The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

Sulzberger’s concern over the intimidation of journalists fails to address and even excuses the racist and antisemitic views of his own staff, but also fails to acknowledge the mainstream media’s aggressive history of intimidating private individuals because they support the president or hold conservative political views.

Last February, a CNN crew showed up on an elderly woman’s lawn in Florida to publicly shame her for unknowingly sharing a “Russian-coordinated event” on her Facebook page. Consequently, the woman received waves of violent threats, abuse, and harassment online.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274742/cnn-guest-trump-responsible-millions-more-deaths-daniel-greenfield

CNN calls this segment, “Two psychiatrists discuss coverage of Trump”.

Most sane people call this, “Two crazy people spew pure insanity on CNN.”

The stars of this circus are Bandy X. Lee, a dubious figure who keeps claiming that she has a duty to warn that President Trump is mentally ill.

But on Twitter, Bandy X. Lee explained that she had been “licensed on two continents,” has “excellent credentials,” a “flawless ethics history” and speaks “four languages.” On Vox, Lee claimed that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem was a “pathological” example of him “resorting to violence”.  Then she blamed him for “an increase in schoolyard bullying.” Appearing on MSNBC, she warned that Trump “could be the end of humankind.”

All this craziness didn’t stop Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Jamie Raskin from inviting her for briefings.

With Bandy in the studio, CNN decided it needed someone even crazier to balance her out.

The former chair of psychiatry at Duke University said Sunday during an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter that President Trump may be responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. 

“Calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him,” Allen Frances, the author of “Twilight of American Sanity,” said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.” “And even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist. Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many million more deaths than they were. He needs to be contained, but he needs to be contained by attacking his policies, not his person.”

That ending has literally nothing to do with any of the sentences that care before it.

Frances was the chair of the DSM IV task force. Which is the opposite of reassuring. He’s also the author of TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN SANITY, A PSYCHIATRIST ANALYZES THE AGE OF TRUMP’.

It’s in all-caps because that’s how sane Frances is.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/opinion/sunday/trump-jews.html

On Aug. 11, more than 1,000 people marked Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, by occupying an Amazon Books store in Manhattan, protesting the technology behemoth’s technical support for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sitting on the floor, they read harrowing accounts of people in immigration detention and recited the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. One of their signs said, “Never again means never again.”

According to organizers, 44 people, including 12 rabbis and a member of New York’s City Council, were arrested. It was one of over 50 Jewish-organized demonstrations against ICE held across the country that day.

A few days later, a corrections officer drove a truck into a row of Jewish protesters who were blocking the entrance to a private prison in Rhode Island where migrants are being detained. Two of the protesters were hospitalized. That demonstration was one of at least 38 organized this summer by Never Again Action, a decentralized group formed two months ago to engage in nonviolent direct action against immigrant detention.

Donald Trump might have thought he was going to lure Jewish voters to the Republican Party with his lock-step alliance with the Israeli right. Instead, by attempting to use American Jews as mascots for an administration that fills most of them with horror, he has spurred a renaissance on the Jewish left.

New progressive Jewish groups are forming. Older ones, like New York’s Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, one of the forces behind the Amazon action, are growing; once-sleepy organizing meetings have become standing room only. Jewish Currents, a left-wing Jewish publication founded almost 75 years ago, was reborn last year with a new cadre of writers and editors who speak to the millennial socialist zeitgeist.

Obviously, American Jews have long leaned liberal, and have always been overrepresented in progressive movements. But there’s a difference between leftists who happen to be Jewish and explicitly Jewish left-wing activism. “People who may not have been that close to Jewishness, they feel suddenly like it’s very important to express who they are as Jews in the context of their activism and in the context of their collective memory,” said Arielle Angel, the editor of Jewish Currents.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/smearing-steven-menashi-11566761235

The Trump Administration is nominating more federal judges, and right behind comes the character assassination. The latest target is Steven Menashi, a highly regarded appellate lawyer who was acting general counsel in Betsy DeVos ’ Department of Education and now works in the White House counsel’s office. He was tapped this month for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Progressive groups have been orchestrating a smear campaign in coordination with their media allies. Rachel Maddow opened the assault this month with a MSNBC monologue suggesting Mr. Menashi is a white nationalist. Her evidence? A 2010 article Mr. Menashi wrote for a University of Pennsylvania international-law journal that defended Israel as a liberal democracy and Jewish state.

Some on the left argue that Israel’s “right of return” immigration law for Jews is illegitimate because it excludes other groups. Mr. Menashi disputed this by describing comparable laws in Germany, Greece and Finland, which have welcomed back displaced nationals. He noted countries like India and Ireland take a special interest in their ethnic diasporas, and that this doesn’t diminish their democracies.

Ms. Maddow said this amounts to a “high-brow argument for racial purity.” After all, Mr. Menashi drew on that noted herrenvolk theorist Hannah Arendt, the Jewish chronicler of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, who once wrote that human rights “has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights.”

Nation states often have an ethnic, linguistic and cultural basis. But Ms. Maddow said Mr. Menashi is on the “fringe of racial thinking.” If Senators take her seriously, they will confirm how far they have drifted to the anti-Israel fringe.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tragedy-of-the-times-11566596465

Thank you, Dean Baquet. Readers who complain about articles they don’t like, and who assume they are written under pressure from advertisers, could do worse than to study recent comments of the New York Times executive editor.

Mr. Baquet was secretly recorded at a staff meeting. A transcript was posted at Slate.com. But he has made similar points publicly. The gist: It’s readers nowadays who pressure newspapers to toe a line. Publishers pine for the era when advertising dollars insulated us from such pressures.

Under fire from its public for an anodyne and accurate headline about Donald Trump after the El Paso shootings, which the paper later changed, Mr. Baquet almost pleaded with his crew: “We are an independent news organization, one of the few remaining. . . . Our readers and some of our staff cheer us when we take on Donald Trump, but they jeer at us when we take on Joe Biden. They sometimes want us to pretend that he was not elected president, but he was elected president.”

If he meant a newspaper’s job is to report the facts and arrange them in a logical fashion regardless of the howling winds of reader prejudice, he’s right. Unfortunately it’s not clear this is what he meant.

To his credit, the Times has been one of a few news organizations that have refrained from labelling Mr. Trump a racist, as if this quality can be factually determined between the lines of his tweets. What Mr. Baquet is up against was illustrated by one of his own reporters, quoted in the Slate transcript saying, “I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/leftwing_institutions_mainstreaming_hatred.html

The contrasting reactions of conservatives and liberals to the news that libertarian philanthropist David Koch died and that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is suffering from a serious health problem highlight a fundamental difference between them.

Liberal Reaction to Death of Koch

Prominent liberals exploded in vicious joy at the news that Koch had died.  Perhaps the worst reaction was Bill Maher, who said, “F‑‑‑ him…I’m glad he’s dead, and I hope the end was painful.”  An outlier?  Hardly.  His audience roared its approval.

Bette Midler got in on the act, wishing his brother were also dead.  She echoed Maher’s profanity-bomb language and directed it at Kay Cole James, the black American leader of the Heritage Foundation, showing once again that no insult directed toward a minority is too vile when it comes from a liberal.

Social media are on fire with these types of screeds from these tolerant Americans who regularly lecture and project at Republican lack of civility. 

Whatever you think of his policy positions, David Koch should not have been a particularly controversial figure.  He was a successful business leader who gave billions to charity.  He was neither hateful nor petty.

He once said, “I really want to put my money to work making the world a better place.” 

His primary crime?  He supported Republicans, the one offense that still infuriates the Left.

Conservative Reaction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg News

Saturday also broke the news that Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suffered from a malignant tumor on her pancreas.  President Donald Trump’s reaction to this terrible news about someone who has been a fierce critic?  He said, “I hope she does really well.  I’m hoping she’s going to be fine.  She’s pulled through a lot. She’s strong, very tough.”