RUTHFULLY YOURS

For more than a year and a half, the media have gone all-in on reporting every possible angle of President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. No story update has been too small, no encounter with a Russian too inconsequential, and no anonymous source too sketchy to generate outsize coverage and histrionic claims from major media.

But as the Russian collusion story disintegrates, another interesting story ascends. Investigations by multiple congressional committees as well as an investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Justice have shown irregularities in the handling of the most politically sensitive probes in recent memory: the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information while secretary of State and the investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged nefarious ties with Russia to meddle in a U.S. election.

These investigations have resulted in the firing, demotion, and reassignment of at least six top officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice. And all of those personnel changes were made before even the first official reports and memoranda from these investigations were made public.

In recent weeks, however, some official documents have come to light. These are statements made by elected members of the U.S. government on the record, not selective and political leaks from anonymous sources. So how have the media responded to these official statements regarding wrongdoing? Mostly by downplaying, mocking, and ignoring them.

When the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s majority memo was made public last week, many journalists highlighted Democratic talking points against it or otherwise rushed to defend the agencies credibly accused of abuse of power. As soon as they could, they dropped the story, despite the dramatic claims in the memo.

The media and Democratic spinmeisters think we are stupid. Wait, check that. Not just stupid—illiterate.

How else to explain their latest attempt—to borrow a promo from CNN—to tell us an apple is a banana? More specifically, how could they twist media reports that do not say the Justice Department informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the infamous Steele dossier was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign into reports that say they do?

A few hours after the Nunes memo was released Friday afternoon, the Washington Post rushed to dispute one of the missive’s most explosive claims: That none of the FISA applications “disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts.” As anyone who is not living off-the-grid knows, the DNC and Clinton campaign paid millions for the shady dossier that was leveraged to win FISC approval to spy on Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page months after he left the campaign.

On Friday night, the Post reported that two U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity claimed “ample disclosure of relevant, material facts” were made to the court that “revealed the research was being paid for by a political entity.” The sources went on: “No thinking person who read any of these applications would come to any other conclusion but that [the work was being undertaken] at the behest of people with a partisan aim and that it was being done in opposition to Trump.”

Even though the Post attempted to create a phony plotline that of course the court must have known the dossier was paid for and peddled by the same party of the sitting president, as well as by the campaign of his former secretary of state and the Democrats’ presidential candidate, the paper had to fess up that “the application did not specifically name the Democratic National Committee or the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.” I mean, duh, don’t FISA court judges read Yahoo News?

This column is trying to imagine how an editor at The Wall Street Journal would treat a draft article alleging a political campaign adviser was secretly working for a foreign government if the story featured uncorroborated opposition research paid for by a rival campaign. If the writer of the draft article assured the editor that readers would not be told where the information originated, it’s a safe bet this would not increase the chances of publication.

This column is also trying to imagine the conversation that would ensue if a reporter or writer then tried to persuade the editor by appealing to the authority of Yahoo News.

Of course the Journal isn’t the only media outlet that enforces standards. Many organizations strive to ensure basic accuracy and fairness. Can it possibly be true that the evidentiary standards for obtaining a federal warrant allowing the government to spy on the party out of power are significantly lower than in a professional newsroom?

Today the American people are finally able to see the memo from the majority staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence alleging abuse of government surveillance powers during the last presidential campaign. Many will be appalled that, at least according to the memo, on October 21, 2016 the Department of Justice and the FBI obtained a court order authorizing electronic surveillance on a Trump campaign volunteer without telling the court that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee had paid for at least some of the research presented.

Suppose Quadrant Online were to suggest a certain TV presenter secured her prime-time slot by sleeping with the editor-in-chief. Scandal! Outrage! Misogyny! But when a sleazebag author levels the same groundless smear at a female US diplomat and Donald Trump … silence.

On January 23 the ABC 7.30’s star Leigh Sales conducted a reverential interview of American sleaze artist Michael Wolff. He is author of Fire and Fury (see Geoffrey Luck’s Quadrant Online review), a salacious insider account of alleged goings-on at the White House under Donald Trump. Not once did Sales ask any question pertaining to Wolff’s admitted disregard for truth and authorial integrity. Her only interest was in allowing Wolff to vent his anti-Trump bile on her taxpayer-funded platform, for which she is paid some $400,000 a year.

On Friday, January 26, three days after the Sales interview, Wolff was publicly accusing Trump and his UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, of having an extramarital affair. Wolff, who didn’t name Haley outright, dropped such blatant hints about the identity of Trump’s alleged lover that her identity could not be in doubt. The “facts” that he cited in the book in an allusion to Trump and Haley’s meetings were wrong. In a word, Wolff is disgusting. So is the ABC and 7.30, for giving this Wolff creature prime-time and unchallenged exposure. Then again, given the ABC’s relentless anti-Trump narrative, what more could viewers expect?

The sisterhood’s commentariat at the ABC has shown no interest in Wolff sliming the UN ambassador as a woman who supposedly owes her job to Trump’s casting couch. My search of the ABC today turned up no reference to Wolff’s Trump/Haley sexual fantasy. It is another example of the ABC’s most effective propaganda device of all: news that doesn’t fit the narrative is ignored.

Here’s how the Wolff smear evolved. He was interviewed by HBO’s Bill Maher, a leftist with a gleeful leftist audience :

Maher: I want you to tell me something that people have not noticed in this book. Is there something (there), ‘Why don’t they ask me something about this that I put in there, that they are not talking about?’

Wolff: There is. But I can’t tell you what it is. (Audience laughter)

Maher: F—k you Mike, teasing us like that (laughter)

Wolff: There is something in the book I was absolutely sure of but it was so incendiary that I just didn’t have the ultimate proof that…

Maher: Considering what he (Trump) has done, was it a woman thing?

Wolff: Well yeah, I didn’t have the blue dress. [Wolff was referring to Bill Clinton’s ejaculate stain on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress]. (Laughter).

Maher: Was it about a woman?

Wolff: Yes it is, it is someone he is f—king now. (Laughter). You just have to read between the lines.

Maher: What lines? Tell us the lines. You say it is in the book.

Wolff: It is at the end of the book. You just have to…you will know it, now that I have told you, when you hit that paragraph you are going to say, ‘Bingo!’[i]

The paragraph referred to is necessarily this one:

“By October, however, many on the president’s staff took particular notice of one of the few remaining Trump opportunists: Nikki Haley, the UN ambassador. Haley – ‘as ambitious as Lucifer’ in the characterization of one member of the senior staff – had concluded that Trump’s tenure would last, at best , a single term, and that she, with requisite submission, could be his heir apparent. Haley had courted and befriended Ivanka (Trump’s daughter), and Ivanka had brought her into the family circle, where she had become a particular focus of Trump’s attention, and he of hers.”

Wolff adds that Trump “had been spending a notable amount of private time with Haley (below) on Air Force One and was seen to be grooming her for a political future.”

Conservatives already knew reporters at the New York Times were a joke, but their fact-checking article on President Trump’s first State of the Union address deserves to be held up to special ridicule.

The spectacle of a State of the Union address – especially a wildly successful one that seems to be boosting the standing of the one who delivered it – gave the Times the opportunity to conveniently deny Trump credit for his accomplishments all in one place, instead of spreading the niggardly naysaying out over days of articles.

Whether Trump, or any sitting president for that matter, deserves credit for an event happening in the country on his watch is one thing – maybe the practice is valid in some areas but not others – but the tradition in this country has been to give the president credit for good things that happen during his term in office (and conversely, to blame him when things go wrong on his watch). The buck, as President Truman said, stops there.

The leftist worldview is especially susceptible to president-as-heroic-figure thinking, giving its exaltation of the power of government, and journalists are overwhelmingly left-wingers, which makes understanding the newspaper’s unintentionally comical “2018 State of the Union fact-check” feature easier.

The piece borders on self-parody as reporters sweep Trump’s statements into the unofficial, “True, but it’s Trump, so we’ll still find a way to trash him,” category.

First off, let’s look at reporters Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt who won’t give Trump his full due as Commander-in-Chief of the nation’s armed forces.

It was embarrassing to watch.https://amgreatness.com/2018/01/31/jimmy-kimmel-hits-new-low/

In what might be a new low for broadcast television, as well as in the entertainment industry’s ongoing attempt to undo a sitting U.S. president, ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel interviewed porn star Stormy Daniels on Tuesday night following President Trump’s State of the Union address. Daniels’ alleged sexual encounter with the president in 2006 was the subject of a recent exposé in the tabloid magazine, InTouch. And she’s more than earning her 15 minutes of fame thanks to anti-Trump garbage-peddlers like Kimmel.

Before I get into the depraved details, let me say this: I feel sorry for Mrs. Jimmy Kimmel. Not only does her husband routinely exploit their ill child to score political points, Kimmel humiliated her with this lewd interview, where Daniels openly flirted with him as he asked her degrading questions about sex. If my husband behaved this way in any setting—let alone on national television for the purpose of feeding the sick voyeurism of millions of people—he’d arrive home to find a nine iron aimed at his windshield.

Kimmel will use anyone as a prop to vent his uncontrolled Trump-rage and agitate his like-minded viewers. Just before the Daniels segment, Kimmel hosted a weird Oprah-like panel where several Americans who oppose amnesty for so-called Dreamers came face-to-face with a woman named Esmeralda, a woman brought to the U.S. from Mexico as a child, who is engaged and has a child with an American citizen. When one DACA foe told Kimmel, “We live in a most loving, compassionate and exceptional country,” Kimmel cut off the woman and said, “No, I don’t agree with that. I think this country has become cruel.” (Kimmel suffers from what I call the “I-just-started-paying-attention-to-politics-after-Trump-was-elected” syndrome. He must not be aware that deportations have been occurring for decades, and even accelerated during President Obama’s tenure.)

But the one-time comedian smoothly pivoted from angst-ridden immigrant champion to creepy middle-aged man in an instant as Daniels appeared on the set. Dressed in a tight blue dress to emphasize her humongous breasts (seriously, how do these women not fall over?), she played coy with Kimmel as he asked one raunchy question after another. She appeared nervous as Kimmel read aloud the letter that circulated on social media yesterday, purportedly signed by Daniels, that again denied the affair. He pointed out the signatures didn’t match previous autographs as he held up photos of her wearing a bikini: “Did you sign this letter that was released today?” Daniels replied, “I don’t know, did I?” She gave the same response when Kimmel asked if she has a non-disclosure agreement with Trump. “Do I?”

Even if judgements against some of these websites might be overturned in courts, doing so is clearly an enormous financial burden, as the would-be censors doubtless know. But what a handy way not to have one’s policies questioned — especially, one assumes, during elections.

Attempts to censor “competing narratives” is probably just a tip-off that certain individuals are afraid their political ideas will be unable to withstand the questions asked or the test of time.

“If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society.” — Natan Sharansky, The Case for Democracy.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,” George Orwell wrote in his ant-totalitarian novel, 1984. He would probably have frowned upon the latest UK Government blueprint to create a regulatory agency that will ultimately strangle freedom of expression.

Scrutiny against “Fake News,” is undoubtedly a positive development. It means that at least people are questioning the news they are consuming. Yes, it is a problem that so much disinformation and misinformation exists. It is, however, a far bigger problem if they do not. The public’s resolve should be that disinformation is not combated by a regulatory body controlled by Government. Individual arguments, with evidence, is what belongs in a democracy, which can only survive if it is a marketplace of ideas.

If having a Government body decide what can and cannot be published – thereby creating a culture of both official censorship and self-censorship — is not enough to concern you, the briefest glance at what this newly created British body would consider “Fake News” should send you running into the street.

This new UK Government body would deem worthy of censorship “Satire or parody which means no harm but can fool people”. According to these geniuses, satire and parody are “Fake News.”

Satire often relies on mixing believability and absurdity — not necessarily to fool people but to point out serious problems in a more approachable way. This can be done to draw people’s attention to take a harder look at what they are consuming, or to make a wider political point humourously. The idea that satirical publications would be possibly removed and censored because people might believe them sounds disingenuous at best, and at worst autocratic.