RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/08/democrats

The world is divided into two classes of people: those who think that CNN’s Jim Acosta is “rude” and a “terrible person” and Jim Acosta.

Supporting the former opinion are episodes like Wednesday’s press conference at the White House at which Acosta once again played his version of charades, acting out the word “obnoxious.” He does it well, even if the routine has become tiresome through ceaseless repetition. It wasn’t all tedium, however, since Acosta this time earned himself a suspension of his White House press credentials by pushing away a female staffer who endeavored to take the microphone away from him after the president attempted to move on to another reporter. Your time was up, Jim. You should have sat down and behaved yourself.

I should explain that in the latter group, small but vocal, I include not just the excitable Jim Acosta himself but also that moist band of preening scribes who believe that by being rude and editorializing at press conferences they are somehow reporting the news. Let’s call that whole group “Jim Acosta” in scare quotes.

To be frank, I would have preferred that the Republicans had held the House on Tuesday. But the president was right: Tuesday was a great victory, not for Republicans, exactly, but for Donald Trump and his robust vision of a vibrant, free, and prosperous America. This election was a referendum on the “principled realism” that the president has articulated as the pivot of his approach to both foreign and domestic policy.

As the president observed, Tuesday’s vote, with a net gain in the Senate of three or four seats (as I write, the good people of Arizona are still doing their sums) was the largest Senate gain in a first midterm election since 1962. The losses in the House—currently 28—were, by historical standards, very modest, giving the Democrats only a slim majority of five. This is what that unhappy professional NeverTrumper Gabe Schoenfeld described as a “drubbing.” I am thinking of getting Gabe an English dictionary for his birthday.

Donald Trump famously likes making “deals.” In the world of diplomacy, the word “negotiation” is preferred, not least because it has five syllables rather than just one.

What it boils down to is this: Donald Trump likes agreeing with all parties to an issue on arrangements that will benefit everyone. Hence his cheeriness about the fact that the Democrats narrowly took the House on Tuesday. (His pleasure depended on both elements, the victory and its narrowness.) There are a lot of issues that the country faces which require bipartisan participation to solve. Serious infrastructure problems, for example, as well as health care, immigration, and taxes.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/04/cnns-existential

It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of “fake news.” And the constant refrain “enemy of the people” should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN.

Yet Trump’s obsessions with CNN are largely reactive, not preemptive.

After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative. Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics. No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition.

In his serial pushbacks against CNN, if Trump has perhaps surpassed the invective of Barack Obama’s own periodic dismissals of Fox News, he has clearly not ordered his Justice Department to monitor the communications of any CNN reporter, in the manner of Eric Holder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Associated Press journalists are not being monitored by the administration as they were during the Obama years. That difference is oddly never cited by CNN reporters who are want to decry their own treatment by the administration, but who were not particularly vocal when their professional colleagues were once placed under electronic surveillance.

Naming Names
But most importantly, both Chris Cillizza and White House correspondent Jim Acosta are quite mistaken in their most recent denials of CNN reporters as purveyors of fake news, and, even more so, in dismissing such accusations as “just empty rhetoric.”

Cillizza complains without irony that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “can’t name specific outlets or specific people who are enemies of the people or purveyors of fake news because the whole thing is just empty rhetoric solely designed to motivate base voters.” Acosta went further, challenging Sanders to “have the guts” to “state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people.”

Didn’t CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 falsely assert that Donald Trump, Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents? Such a false charge smeared Trump, Jr. and it may have spawned all sort of subsidiary rumors that he was on the verge of a Mueller indictment. What were Raju’s sources for such an inaccurate charge?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271853/democrat-activist-charged-vandalizing-new-york-lloyd-billingsley

On Friday, just days after 11 people were murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue, New York City police arrested James Polite, a Democrat, for vandalizing a New York synagogue with anti-Semitic messages.

“Die Jew rats we are here,” read one message, along with “Jews better be ready,” and “Hitler.”

The next day, CNN failed to report that Polite, 26, was a Democrat activist who had worked on the Obama campaign in 2008. CNN described him as a “Brooklyn man” arrested and charged with a hate crime for the anti-Semitic messages and “criminal mischief and making graffiti.” Other reports found more background on the Democrat, who had been identified through surveillance footage.

The Daily Caller found that the New York Times had profiled Polite last year, noting that he had been the “adopted child” of Manhattan Democrat Christine Quinn, then speaker of the New York city council, and the entire city council staff. Polite worked on Quinn’s reelection campaign in 2009 and pitched in with Quinn’s mayoral bid in 2013. Polite’s Facebook profile was more revealing.

On November 1, a day before the synagogue vandalism, he posted a photo of a burning American flag captioned “Sometimes things take a lil heat to grow.” CBS reported that police believed Polite had “set fires outside seven shuls and yeshivas in Williamsburg overnight,” and also captured on security cameras. In other Facebook posts, the Daily Caller reported,

“Polite rails against Israel and posts about Palestinian causes.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/01/no-pence-not-invite-messianic-jew-pray-pittsburgh/
In this time of genuine coming together to mourn and stand in solidarity against hate, more hatred and division are simply unwelcome.

On Oct. 29, two days after the breathtakingly tragic terrorist attack against Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue, Vice President Mike Pence spoke at a campaign rally for several Republican candidates in Michigan. At the speech, a religious leader gave a prayer for the victims of the attack and prayed for the Republican candidates.

This gesture should have been taken as a kindness and show of respect. Outrage, however, centered around the fact that the religious leader, Rabbi Loren Jacobs of Shema Israel temple in Detroit, Michigan, is a Messianic Jew (a Jew who believes Jesus is the Messiah, so a Jew who is a Christian).

ThinkProgress quoted Daily Kos’ David Nir as saying, “Pence could not possibly have done something more offensive to Jews.” The article cited the progressive website Eclecta Blog, which, after incorrectly stating in its title that Pence had invited the rabbi, began its commentary by saying: “I don’t know how to describe this exactly. It may be the most insulting thing anyone in the Trump administration or campaign has done to Jewish Americans.”

Bend the Arc — a self-proclaimed progressive Jewish organization that stated in an open letter to President Trump he was unwelcome in Pittsburgh until he “denounced” white supremacy — responded by saying, “11 Jews were killed while praying, and this is how the Vice President responds??? Another attack on us from this administration.”

A local rabbi stated, “The only rabbi they could find to offer a prayer for the 11 Jewish victims in Pittsburgh at the Mike Pence rally was a local Jews for Jesus rabbi? … That’s pathetic!” Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg tweeted, “Dear Pence, please give up the pretense of Jewish presence. You are a Christian supremacist. We know that, you know that. Also we will defeat you. But in the meantime, just stop pretending and appropriating my people.”

https://pjmedia.com/video/don-lemon-we-have-to-stop-demonizing-people-but-biggest-terror-threat-is-white-men-on-the-right/

On Tuesday night, CNN’s Don Lemon urged people to stop demonizing “any one group or any one ethnicity” and, in the very same breath, stigmatized “white men … radicalized to the right” as “the biggest terror threat in this country.” So, conservative white men are not “any one group or any one ethnicity”? Oh, right, according to “intersectionality,” we’re not people!

CNN’s Chris Cuomo was discussing the horrific shooting of two black people at a Kroger in Kentucky. The suspect reportedly targeted a black church first, but could not get in, thank God. Ironically, the same CNN commentators who would avoid rushing to judgment if a shooter were a different race or Muslim immediately rushed to stigmatize white men.

“I keep trying to point out to people not to demonize any one group or any one ethnicity, but we keep thinking that the biggest terror threat is something else, some people who are marching towards the border like it’s imminent,” Lemon said.

“So, we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right,” Lemon declared.

“And we have to start doing something about them,” he added. “There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban — they had the Muslim ban — there is no ‘white guy’ ban.”

What exactly is Don Lemon suggesting? Should government go after conservative white men?

Furthermore, forcing both of the most heinous terrorism attempts in recent weeks into this narrative proves quite a strain. The man who killed 11 people at the Pittsburgh synagogue hated Donald Trump — because Trump is a friend to Jews. The man who attempted to send bombs to Democrats was half-Filipino and self-identified as a Native American. If liberals want to stigmatize “whiteness,” they’re going to run into the same problem white supremacists do — defining “white” is far from easy.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/26/the-real-news

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? That should be the Democrats’ midterm motto.

Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be a modest, self-effacing family man with a lovely wife and two daughters. He’d devoted his career to the law and taught at Yale where he had earned the respect of colleagues. But really, he’s an especially promiscuous satyr who had somehow managed to avoid detection for decades. So committed was he to his disguise that he managed to live his entire adult life as a model of personal piety and family devotion.

Then there is Trump’s war on the media that makes it unsafe to be a journalist in America. How do we know this? Because these intrepid journalists brave their way to the studios of CNN and MSNBC to tell us about how repressed they are. They tell us about the unprecedented violence brought on by President Trump’s incendiary language. For most of this week, the media couldn’t find time to talk about how the Senate Judiciary Committee referred creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti and his client Julie Swetnick to the Justice Department for criminal investigation for lying to Congress about Kavanaugh.

They couldn’t be bothered to cover the House interview with George Papadopoulos which Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) said showed “the blatant double standard for the politically connected” like Andrew McCabe, who lied to the FBI and not only walked free but got a full pension. Nor was there any interest in new polls showing Republicans gaining ground in congressional races across the country.

A few weeks before an election that should be big news. But it wasn’t. Instead there was wall to wall coverage of a dozen packages sent to prominent Democrats containing devices that look like a particularly inept third grader’s approximation of a bomb. Not even the recipients thought they were in danger as evidenced by the fact that the folks at CNN took the time to unwrap theirs and lay it out on the counter in the office kitchen, photograph it, and send some indignant tweets about it, before going outside and telling each other how brave they were.

In the meantime though there has been a rash of political violence. Against Republicans. Kellen Michael Sorber has been charged with setting fire to the Albany County Republican headquarters in September. On October 11, the windows of the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City were smashed and a message was left stating, “Our attack is merely a beginning.” The Nebraska Republican Party’s headquarters had their windows smashed and “Abolish ICE” was spray painted on the wall [say when]. The windows at House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield office were also broken.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/fun-killing-donald-trump/

It goes without saying the mainstream US media would immediately blame the wave of letter bombs on Donald Trump, whose words are said to have whipped some right-wing loon into action. But when the Times imagines the assassination of the president, that’s fine and dandy.

In the United States just now, a spate of what appear to be rather amateurish letter bombs has been turning up in the mailboxes of prominent Trump critics. These have been widely bemoaned, not least by CNN, which blamed the evacuation of its New York office on — yes, you guessed it — the coarsening of public life for which the low-rated cable network blames — yes, you guessed that too — Donald J. Trump.

Even as Lower Manhattan came to a halt yesterday, when another of the bombs arrived at the TriBeCa eatery of actor Robert DeNiro, who famously expressed a desire to punch Trump in the face, the Times handed a slice of its op-ed page to Alexander Soros, son of the infamous George, for another Trump-bashing. In a further op-ed prompted by the pipe bombs, author and abortion advocate Eyal Press writes:

… it is Mr. Trump who has called journalists “scum” and “enemies of the people” … These are just words, some would say…

Accept as a given that anything Trump says or does will be the butt of criticism. Were he to cure cancer, the Times could be expected to lambast him for putting nurses out of work. Thus are the pipe bombs his doing because, as Press suggests, “just words” aren’t just words at all.

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2018/10/26/nolte-nbc-news-hid-info-wouldve-cleared-kavanaugh-avenatti-rape-allegations/

On September 16, Kavanaugh and his loved ones were dropped into a pit of hell due to allegations of sexual assault from Christine Blasey Ford. Although her story quickly fell apart during public testimony, for the three-plus weeks that would follow, in an effort to derail his confirmation, Democrats and their allies in the establishment media did everything in their power to personally destroy this man as a drunken serial rapist.

NBC News and Avenatti played a huge role in this obscene smear campaign. One notable example was NBC breathlessly publishing and airing an assault allegation against Kavanaugh that was quickly exposed as a hoax. NBC did not even bother to independently corroborate this allegation prior to airing it. A Democrat handed NBC the smear, and NBC ran with it.

To make matters worse, we now know NBC News withheld crucial information that undermined the allegations made by Swetnick, the Avenatti client who accused a high school-aged Kavanaugh of spiking punch bowls at house parties so he and his buddies could engage in serial rapes.

And we know NBC deliberately withheld this crucial information because NBC is now admitting it had this information all the way back on September 30.

On September 30, a week prior to Kavanaugh’s confirmation, during the most intense days of this scandal, when Kavanaugh’s confirmation was still very much in doubt, here is what NBC did not want the public to know…

If you recall, although he withheld the name, Avenatti tweeted out a sworn statement from a woman who backed up Swetnick’s outrageous rape allegations. In her statement, this second woman swore that she, too, had witnessed Kavanaugh spike punch bowls and take sexual advantage of girls.