RUTHFULLY YOURS

Seemingly out of nowhere, a shock wave hit South Vietnam on Jan. 30, 1968. In a coordinated assault unprecedented in ferocity and scale, more than 100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers stormed out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They went on to attack more than 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam.

The following 77 days changed the course of the Vietnam War. The American people were bombarded with a nightly stream of devastating television and daily print reporting. Yet what they saw was so at odds with the reality on the ground that many Vietnam veterans believe truth itself was under attack.

The Tet Offensive had ambitious objectives: cause a mass uprising against the government, collapse the South Vietnamese Army, and inflict mass casualties on U.S. forces. The men in the Hanoi Politburo—knowing the war’s real center of gravity was in Washington —hoped the attack ultimately would sap the American people’s will to fight.

A key component of this strategy was terror. Thousands of South Vietnamese government officials, schoolteachers, doctors, missionaries and ordinary civilians—especially in Hue City—were rounded up and executed in an act of butchery not often seen on the battlefield.

Despite their ferocity, by most objective military standards, the communists achieved none of their goals. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces held fast, regrouped and fought back. By late March they had achieved a decisive victory over the communist forces. Hanoi wouldn’t be able to mount another full-scale invasion of South Vietnam until the 1972 Easter offensive.

But in living rooms across America, the nightly news described an overwhelming American defeat. The late Washington Post Saigon correspondent Peter Braestrup later concluded the event marked a major failure in the history of American journalism.

Braestrup, in “Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington” (1977), attributed this portrayal to television’s showbiz tradition. TV news editors put little premium on breadth of coverage, fact-finding or context.

The TV correspondent, Braestrup wrote, like the anchorman back home, had to pose on camera with authority. He had to maintain a dominant appearance while telling viewers more than he knew or could know. The commentary was thematic and highly speculative; it seemed preoccupied with network producers’ insatiable appetite for “impact.” CONTINUE AT SITE

If you need an example of what The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway described as “panic and fear out there in official D.C. in response to dramatic lack of substance underlying Trump-Russia collusion,” look no further than the latest propaganda coming from the cabal of anti-Trump commentators on the Right.

After 18 months of helping the media and Democrats frantically sell every tweet, phone call, meeting, email, and sideways glance between Trump and his team and any person with a Russian last name as proof of election collusion, they are getting desperate. Self-righteous pundits who have staked their credibility and their careers on the failure of Trump’s presidency are slowly realizing they are on the losing end of this gambit.

Not only did Trump not destroy the Republican Party as they predicted, he galvanized the party during a surprisingly active and successful first year—cutting taxes, eliminating federal regulations, appointing conservative judges, and strengthening America’s hand abroad. Each day, a company announces its plans to raise wages or give bonuses due to the dramatic drop in the corporate tax rate, subsequently exposing the modern-day Democratic party’s contempt for the working class as party leaders mock those windfalls as “crumbs.” Hell, he even brought Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to his knees and guided the GOP to its first government shutdown victory since the invention of shutdowns.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has yet to produce any meaningful charges and is bordering on farcical. (The latest big news is that Mueller’s staff recently interviewed “at least one member of a Facebook team” associated with the Trump campaign. Maybe they’ll interrogate the yard-sign coordinator next.) In an unexpected twist, it is now evident that the DNC, Clinton campaign and possibly top officials in the Obama Administration conspired to orchestrate the Trump-Russia scheme starting in April 2016. As new evidence to support this shocking prospect emerges on a near-daily basis, Republicans—and even non-political Americans—have responded, as Hemingway said on Fox News, in an “appropriate range of reaction [from] calm determination to get to the bottom of this, to absolute outrage about what has happened at the FBI.”

Those of us who have known and worked with Bill Kristol have been stunned by his behavior since Donald Trump cinched the Republican nomination for President. While Kristol isn’t the only longtime conservative thinker to exile himself to #NeverTrump island, his scorched earth diatribes against any conservative who sees a confluence of interest between Trump’s populism and movement conservatism have no equal in the conservative media.

In an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Kristol launched at Fox News’ Tucker Carlson his latest, and perhaps most vicious assault against those advocating a conservative – populist philosophy and agenda.

Saying that Carlson’s top-rated primetime Fox News show was close to “racism” Kristol delivered this astonishing monologue:

…I do feel now we’re in a different world. I mean, now you look at — Tucker Carlson began at The Weekly Standard. Tucker Carlson was a great young reporter. He was one of the most gifted 24-year-olds I’ve seen in the 20 years that I edited the magazine. He had always a little touch of Pat Buchananism. I would say, paleo-conservativism. But that’s very different from what he’s become now. I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don’t know if it’s racism exactly — but ethnonationalism of some kind, let’s call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people’s emotions in a very unhealthy way.

And Kristol wasn’t done attacking Fox News in his appearance on John Harwood’s show. He also took to the air on anti-Trump flagship “Morning Joe” to offer this commentary on Fox News in general:

I mean, it’s funny, but it’s sad… I mean the Joe McCarthy clip you showed earlier — it’s sort first time, tragedy, second time, farce in a way, right? It’s not a farce, I mean — what really strikes me is Bannon is gone, the alt-right is sort of discredited. But Bannonism is winning. Look at the Hill Republicans, look at the conservative commentators, many of them — they are now in the possession of serious conspiracy theorizing, paranoia, hostility to basic American government institutions in a way that I would have a year, 18 months ago would have been impossible.

Tucker Carlson for his part offered this mild-mannered rebuttal:

I’m not even sure what he’s accusing me of. He offers no evidence or examples, just slurs, and then suggests that I’m the demagogue. Pretty funny. Kristol’s always welcome on my show to explain himself, though I assume he’s too afraid to come. What a shame. It would be revealing.

Tokyo Rose was the infamous American-born Japanese woman Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino whose voice was heard by Allied troops in the South Pacific during WWII. Iva Ikuko Toguri was born in Los Angeles on July 4, 1916. She visited Japan after college and was stranded there after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Toguri renounced her U.S. citizenship and worked in radio. Radio disinformation was the fake news media propaganda tool of its time. Tokyo Rose broadcast from Radio Tokyo on the Zero Hour radio show to demoralize Allied soldiers by telling them that their girlfriends back home were seeing other men. She returned to the U.S. after the war and was convicted of treason. She was released from prison after six years and pardoned 20 years later by Gerald Ford. Tokyo Rose died in Chicago in 2006.

The Democrat Party subversively refuses to accept the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the election of President Donald Trump. They continue to deny the legitimacy of Constitutionally elected President Donald Trump with seditious attacks against him. In flagrant violation of our American Constitution ex-president Barack Obama is leading the lawless anti-American Resistance movement attempting to overthrow the sitting government of President Trump. It is truly shocking.

America is a country of freedom because it abides by its laws. Political opponents are bound by election outcomes to insure the peaceful transition of power – it is what separates America from the bloodshed of third world coups. So, what is the purpose of Obama’s seditious Resistance movement? What is being resisted?

The coverage adds up to nothing more than Mueller is looking at every possible angle … which is his job.

That doesn’t absolutely rule out the chance that the prosecutor is on a witch hunt. After all, he did bring a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters onto his team. On the other hand, he was hiring from a pool of DC attorneys that strongly tilted that way.

But none of his actual actions so far show any such bias. Of course he was going to indict Paul Manafort and his partner over egregious (but Trump-unrelated) sleaze, and pin down Mike Flynn, George Papadapoulos and so on.

But the public record shows no reason to think any of them has anything on the president: e.g., the campaign rejected Papadapoulos’ push for a Trump-Putin sitdown.

This still leaves the theoretical possibility of obstruction-of-justice charges. But that seems beyond dubious when there’s no underlying crime to cover for — and Trump 1) had every legal right to fire Jim Comey and 2) never tried to shut down or impede the investigation.

It looks like Mueller is close to wrapping up, since he’s moving to interview the president — and talking to the central figure is pretty much always the final step in such investigations. (Whether Trump should talk is another matter: His lawyers surely worry that his sloppy way of talking could land him in trouble when he’s otherwise already in the clear.)

According to members of the Fourth Estate, Donald Trump is a fascist or something close to it. As yet unreported is the charge that he roasts puppies over a slow fire, but given the media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome — a virus especially virulent at the ABC — it is only a question of time.

President Trump’s “fake news” awards last week inspire me to make some Trump Derangement Awards on our local scene. It was only last night (Jan 23), for starters, that the ABC’s $400,000-plus woman Leigh Sales on 7.30 was fawning over Michael Wolff, author of a hatchet-job book on Trump, Fire and Fury, purporting to be an inside account of the presidency. Sales’ questions were as soft as a week-old puppy’s tummy.

LEIGH SALES: What is Trump like in private? When staff attempt to brief him on issues that he needs to know about, what is he like in those moments?

For heaven’s sake, Ms Sales! The White House says Wolff never got one interview with President Trump. Wolff never claims he did. In a typical obfuscation, he says he has had three hours of conversation with Trump including during the election campaign.

And in terms of the ABC’s impartiality charter, how’s this for a smug, insulting question from Sales about the American President, our most powerful ally in a rapidly-shrinking free world?

LEIGH SALES: How did Trump’s advisers work out what policies he wants and what he wants to do?

It’s almost beyond belief, except that this is indeed the ABC. Trump is such a total moron, Sales suggests, that he’s just a puppet of nameless advisers. Trump himself, Sales imagines, has had nothing to do with turning the US into an energy superpower, driving home the biggest US tax cuts in 30 years, and sending the Dow Jones soaring 30% in the year to date.

Lester Holt’s travels in North Korea have given a favorable view of that dictatorship. This is unfortunate.

NBC’s Lester Holt traveled to North Korea in advance of the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea in order to inform the American public about the situation there. North Korea is possibly one of the most tragic examples of what 21st-century despotism is capable of. The Human Rights Watch World Report 2017 claimed, “North Korea remains one of the most repressive states in the world.”

Holt’s report can be described only as despicable. He follows a long line of Western reporters who have been willing tools of leftist dictators. They were and are accomplices in the mass murder of millions of people. Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Duranty is perhaps the best example of this, as he tried to minimize the impact of Stalin’s policies in Ukraine. These policies led to the deaths of millions of people.

Holt reported from a Potemkin ski resort as apparently happy North Koreans were enjoying their time on the slopes. Holt also interviewed “people on the street.” To everyone’s surprise, they all mimicked the party line. Had he interviewed someone with suicidal tendencies who wanted to tell him the truth, the tape would never have gotten out of the North. Holt claimed, “It’s impossible to know what people on the street really think.”

Holt’s report covering the Olympics has the added benefit of attacking President Trump. It was an opportunity to portray North Korea in a favorable light while accusing the U.S. president of giving an adolescent response to the North Korean dictator’s threats.

In response to Kim Jung-un’s threat Trump tweeted, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times. Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” This “mine is bigger than yours” technique may sound undiplomatic, but it might just be a language Kim Jong-un understands.

Ya can’t make it up.

Here’s the headline in the Washington Post from the Post’s Erik Wemple.

Staffers at The Hill press management about the work of John Solomon

The story reads, in part:

A group of newsroom staffers at The Hill have complained to management about stories written by John Solomon, the publication’s executive vice president of digital video. The complaints were launched in December when Solomon and reporter Alison Spann broke a story under this headline: “Exclusive: Prominent lawyer sought donor cash for two Trump accusers.”

The gist of Solomon and Spann’s story: Prominent California lawyer Lisa Bloom worked to secure payments for women who “made or considered making sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump during the final months of the 2016 presidential race.” The story cited “documents and interviews,” plus the on-the-record explanations by Bloom herself.

The story impressed the conservative media world. Fox News host Sean Hannity called it a “bombshell report,” while conservative websites aggregated away.”

And then there was this, also from the Post’s Wemple on Solomon. The headline:

Sources: The Hill’s John Solomon offered money to Bill Clinton for an interview series

In which the Post’s Wemple attacks Solomon for pitching David Frost-Nixon style interviews with the former President in which Clinton, like Nixon before him, would get paid for his historical reflections.

The death of a dynamic and independent free press begins when the mainstream media becomes a propaganda organ for a government. And it was during the Obama regime’s eight long years that this process reached its present nadir.

Perhaps the media was once considered a respectable and trusted purveyor of objective news. But for too long now, the mainstream media in America has shed that belief and become instead a disseminator of leftwing Democrat Party propaganda.

The dread examples of disinformation and misinformation were seen during the last century of Fascist, Nazi, and Communist authoritarian regimes, but it now increasingly pollutes our own mainstream media (MSM).

The alphabet houses – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN – are unapologetic shills for an increasingly leftwing Democrat party. Newspapers share the same guilt. The New York Times and the Washington Post leading the way in a baleful charge.

It was our 18th century President, Thomas Jefferson, who presciently saw the peril a future America might face in what has now become the present demise of a free and vital press. He said:

“If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter.”