RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/07/who-elected

“That is why, for the past decade, Americans have been doing all that can be done at the ballot box to shake this class off their backs. In 2016, Donald Trump was the likeliest instrument available for this. Today, we see this class rejecting the election’s outcome. The “resistance” has done so in practice. Anonymous’ idea of the “steady state” has now done so in theory as well. The Times’ and the Journal’s approbation of that theory attest to the sad fact that the revolution now ongoing among us has passed the point of no return.”

The New York Times’ Anonymous, proud to be saving the country from the president he is sworn to serve, dismisses fears of an unaccountable “deep state.” Rather, he argues, Americans should appreciate that, as he and other officials surreptitiously thwart President Trump’s inappropriate impulses, they are supplying a beneficent, steadying effect. He and other officials who share right thinking people’s judgments on Donald Trump are not the bad “deep state.” They are the good “steady state.”

Essentially that is the position of the Wall Street Journal as well. Without explicitly crediting Anonymous’s (un)specific claims of successful subversion or the specific ones that Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, Fear, makes on behalf of Gary Cohn and Generals James Mattis and H. R. McMaster, the Journal’s lead editorial praised as “heroes” “the Mattises and McMasters, the Kudlows and Cohns, the McConnells and Ryans, who’ve worked for the good of the country amid the tumultuous personality in the Oval Office.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271265/trump-vs-sleeper-cell-op-ed-matthew-vadum

President Trump is absolutely right to be furious about the treacherous New York Times op-ed by a fifth-columnist in his administration trashing his leadership and portraying him as a feebleminded would-be dictator.

The essay titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” is vicious Trump-hating propaganda by a cowardly member of a sleeper cell in the White House. Nothing less. Nothing more.

This op-ed that has been dominating media coverage is a catalog of piddling complaints against a spectacularly successful Chief Executive who is easily the most conservative American president since Ronald Reagan.

It is part of what Michael Walsh some time ago termed a “rolling coup attempt” by those who refuse to accept the judgment the American people rendered on Election Day 2016. The same people who push the kooky, utterly unsubstantiated Trump-Russia electoral collusion conspiracy theory, are pushing this tripe.

The author is a traitor, if not to the country, certainly to this president who ought to be able to count on senior government officials – especially his own appointees – to help carry out his policies, not sabotage them.

Although the essay could easily have been written by almost any articulate backstabbing RINO or NeverTrumper inside the Beltway, the Times has referred to the author both as “a senior official in the Trump administration” and in an explainer as a “White House official.” There are, conceivably, thousands of individuals who could be considered senior officials in the Trump administration but there are maybe fewer than 400 individuals working in the White House.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/06/take-salena-zito

Intramural food fights about journalistic practices normally don’t attract my attention. The journalists I know, right and left, have their biases but are mostly honest and good at what they do. But the recent assault on Salena Zito’s integrity is different.

That’s because Zito’s reporting chops aren’t what’s really at issue. What’s really at stake is her narrative, that Trump’s victory was due to millions of fed-up, blue-collar Americans angry at coastal elite condescension and the failed policies that flowed from that conceit. Strike her down, and the most prominent advocate of that explanation for 2016 gets removed from the conversation—and with her, perhaps the narrative itself drops by the wayside.

See, NeverTrump resisters—Left and Right—still don’t want to admit this is why he won. They would prefer to chalk it up to Russian hacking or to misinformation, the political nerd’s version of Area 51 and Roswell. Or they contend it’s all a matter of latent racism, which somehow never expressed itself when Barack Obama twice won in these same areas or when two Hispanics and a black man won majorities of the votes in early GOP primaries and caucuses. Anything—anything—but that Americans who have different cultural interests than coastal or suburban college graduates were mad as hell and didn’t want to take it anymore.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/The-White-House-is-at-war-with-reporters-but-13199382.php

President Trump’s sustained war on the news media is loud and destructive and surely must be the worst, most unprecedented attack on the Fourth Estate in modern history.

Not so fast. On a few significant fronts, Trump is following a trail blazed by President Obama in undermining openness and press freedom. And Trump’s newfound willingness to use the Justice Department to surveil journalists and sniff out their sources is right out of the Obama playbook.

Meanwhile, the tweets keep coming. “If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all,” Trump tweeted recently.Since taking office, Trump has had only one, full-length press conference at the White House. His own legal and administrative headaches probably preclude a repeat performance any time soon.

Drawing the most attention are Trump’s darker pronouncements — journalists are “nasty,” they are “enemies of the people,” and maybe some should see their licenses revoked. Journalist Ken Vogel of the New York Times is one of several to receive chilling death threats, apparently from Trump supporters.

“You are the enemy of the people,” a caller said on voicemail shared by Vogel last week. “And although the pen might be mightier than the sword, the pen is not mightier than the AK-47.”

Trump recently escalated from trash-talk to legal action, deploying the Justice Department to seize without notice six years’ worth of email and phone records from four reporters in order to smoke out a source whose information reflected badly on Trump.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271221/iran-orders-7-journalists-flogged-media-yawns-daniel-greenfield

Remember all that media outrage over President Trump’s criticism of its fake news operation?

That’s the same media that is constantly doing unpaid ads for Iran’s nuclear program and its plot to take over Yemen (every story attacking US participation in the “Saudi coalition” and fake news claims about “atrocities” committed against the Shiite Jihadis of the Houthis).

The media claims that Trump’s criticism endangers it. Meanwhile it seems far less interested in Iran’s abuses of journalists.

Iranian courts in July and August sentenced at least six journalists affiliated with Majzooban-e-Noor, a news website that focuses on the Gonabadi Dervish religious order, and a journalist from the state-run outlet Ensaf, to prison terms of between seven and 26 years, and ordered them to be flogged publicly and forced into exile and banned from political and social media activities on their eventual releases, according to news reports and rights organizations.

“These horrifying sentences lay bare Iranian authorities’ depraved attitude toward journalists, as well as the hollow center of President Hassan Rouhani’s promises of reform,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour from Washington, D.C. “Iran should end its vicious campaign against journalists, and allow them to report freely.”

Imagine if the media covered this the way it fulminates over Trump’s criticisms of CNN. But of course it doesn’t. Its claims that it cares about journalism (and its even more bizarre claims that Trump’s criticisms endanger journalists abroad) have always been as fake as its news.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/you-are-not-going-to-believe-this-list-of-cnns-bungled-reporting/

Donald Trump has been on a tear against the media in recent days, calling out most major media outlets for “lies,” “fake news,” and “phony news.” But the president has reserved his worst venom for CNN, which has been caught in what he is calling a “lie” that the network won’t retract.
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

CNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake. Sloppy @carlbernstein, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country! Fake News

Last month, CNN reported based on anonymous sources that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was willing to testify that Mr. Trump knew in advance that Donald Trump Jr. was going to meet with Russians to get dirt on Hillary Clinton — a claim that the president and his son both vehemently deny.

However in the past week, one of the sources — Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis — admitted that he didn’t know that this was true, and his client told federal prosecutors under oath as part of a plea deal that he didn’t know that, either.

In addition, Mr. Davis was identified by name in CNN’s story as having no comment on the report — a lie given what he now says.

Seems pretty cut and dried. If Bernstein isn’t lying, why won’t he admit his error?

CNN has had plenty of other opportunities to admit they made mistakes. The Daily Caller compiled 20 of them:

CNN retracted a story in June of 2016 claiming that former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation by Congress for his alleged ties to Russia.

The story relied on one anonymous congressional source and CNN apologized to Scaramucci for the error. Three CNN reporters ended up resigning from the company over the botched report.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271169/banned-twitterstan-mark-tapson

Bosch Fawstin is an Eisner-nominated cartoonist, the creator of The Infidel series featuring his anti-jihadist superhero Pigman, and the winner of the 2015 AFDI Mohammad Cartoon Contest organized by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer which took place in Garland, Texas. Muslim fundamentalists have issues with artistic representations of the Religion of Peace’s warlord prophet, so two armed jihadists tried to disrupt that event and slaughter the participants but were killed in the attempt. Especially since then, social media attacks and death threats have become a way of life for Fawstin, whose artwork has graced many David Horowitz Freedom Center pamphlets and FrontPage Mag articles (including this one).

I asked my friend and colleague Bosch recently about being targeted for his defense of free speech and about his perspective on the social justice agenda dominating the comics world.

Mark Tapson: Earlier this year Dutch freedom fighter Geert Wilders announced that he was organizing a “Draw Muhammad” contest similar to the Texas event which you won, to be held in his party’s offices in the Netherlands, and that you would be the judge. Quite an honor. It’s already drawing condemnation, if you’ll pardon the pun; an op-ed in The Economist, for example, argues that it should not be allowed to go forward and that legislation should be drafted against “speech which is grossly offensive, menacing or false.” How do you respond to that?

Bosch Fawstin: I think The Economist’s estimation is grossly offensive, menacing and false. Muslims have MURDERED cartoonists over cartoons. The time for anyone to be offended by cartoons – and not by those who murder over cartoons – is over, at least in reality. In the unreality that leftists and Muslims demand that we observe, cartoons cause terrorism, with some Muslims even calling cartoons themselves terrorism. This is mad, and it has to be pushed back against and mocked, and that’s partly why I continue to draw Mohammad cartoons.

MT: The Southern Poverty Law Center, the news media’s go-to source for so-called “hate groups” even though the SPLC itself is a leftist-funded smear organization, included you in an “anti-Muslim roundup” in May. The left insists on using this demonizing label “anti-Muslim” rather than anti-Islam. Can you talk about the distinction?

BF: “Anti-Muslim” is a smear which requires our own cultural values to be used against us, as our culture values people, individual human beings, unlike Islamic culture, and so to call Islam critics “anti-Muslim” is to defame them as anti-people, not as critics who are fighting evil ideas. And it works, to an extent, as the weaker among us don’t want to be associated with those who are [considered to be] against people. As for the SPLC, the first thing they did right after I survived a jihadist attack was to list me as a one-man “hate group,” and they did an interview right after the attack in which they said that they were trying to find my location, and that they had whittled it down to one area. Think about that: an American citizen almost dies in an attack by the Islamic enemy, and this American arch-hate group, SPLC, acted as if they were working with the Islamic enemy, trying to find my location (to what end?) and defaming me, while saying nothing about those who had just tried to kill me and everyone else at the Garland event.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/who_coordinating_the_sudden_looney_leftist_lionization_of_stormy_daniels.html

Stormy Daniels is big and getting bigger. The left-wing press all of a sudden just can’t get enough of her.

They’re slathering the two-bit porn “star” with heroicism these days, with several more major media outfits positively lionizing her in what looks like a bizarrely coordinated campaign.

On the surface, it goes to show just how desperate they are to Get Trump. But the timing suggests something more organized.

It started a few days ago, when the New York Times ran an op-ed calling Daniels a “new feminist hero.” According to the Times:

She is a vastly imperfect person by any standard, at times brave and at times venal, obviously admirable and obviously self-interested. These complications, of course, exist in most human beings. But most human beings could not survive the scrutiny she is under, nor so deftly dodge efforts at simplistic caricature. What’s incredible is to see Ms. Daniels embody so many human extremes – so much boldness, so many flaws, and so many taboos broken – and to see her story nonetheless believed and acted upon.

Now it’s spread to CNN, which is lionizing the raddled old pornie in its broadcasts with a straight face.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/29/why-conservatives-dont-trust-media-cnn/

On July 27, CNN reported that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, would be willing to tell Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the president knew in advance of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his campaign and a Kremlin-linked lawyer who was allegedly selling dirt on Hillary Clinton. This revelation not only contradicted Trump’s denials, but also Cohen’s testimony to Congress. It was quite the exclusive—the closest we’ve come to ferreting out “collusion” since the last time CNN botched a big scoop.

The story, bylined by Carl Bernstein, Marshall Cohen, and former Obama administration political appointee Jim Sciutto, cited numerous “sources” with knowledge of the supposed bombshell. The Washington Post, chasing the same story, soon outed Cohen’s lawyer, the preternaturally mendacious Lanny Davis, as the source of the contention.

But Davis was forced to walk back the claim, first conceding that he “should have been more clear” and that he “could not independently confirm what happened,” and then he sort of apologized. (It’s worth noting that anyone who trusts Davis as a primary source for any story is likely to be either consciously allowing themselves to be duped or irreparably incompetent.)

Well, on Monday BuzzFeed ran another article in which Davis admitted to being CNN’s source as well, even though the network had initially claimed that Davis had declined to comment for the article—which turns out not only to be untrue but a ham-fisted way to hide the story’s origin.

“We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it,” the network responded. Brian Stelter, CNN’s sometimes censorious media reporter, argued that “pro-Trump web sites are claiming that the CNN story was a ‘lie,’ and that it’s been ‘debunked.’ They might want it to be ‘debunked,’ but it’s not. The critics don’t know who CNN’s sources were.”