RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/11/media-needs-to-stop

The American news media is quick to blame President Trump for their current woes, but they have no one to blame but themselves. A revealing poll issued Tuesday shows how much the public’s trust in the news media has tanked over the past ten years: Nearly 70 percent of Americans and 95 percent of conservatives have lost faith in the media since 2008.

This year’s collective and shameful performance by the Fourth Estate will erode that trust even more. We have endured the silent acquiescence of the press as a vulgar comedian insulted the president’s press secretary; public tantrums by the White House press corps; numerous corrections to articles and cable news segments that oddly always must walk back an anti-Trump angle; the revelation of unethical and possibly illegal quid pro quo between reporters and federal law enforcement officials; the publication of a petulant opinion piece authored by an unnamed Trump official clearly miffed that Trump and not he is president; and the ongoing insane, unjustified obsession with the bogus Trump-Russia collusion plotline.

It’s hard to imagine how the press could restore its lost credibility any time soon.

One way to clean house would be to stop populating the newsrooms and green rooms of the top media outlets in the country with young, inexperienced, and vulnerable reporters. Ben Rhodes, one of President Obama’s top aides, bragged of how easy it was to manipulate news coverage: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. They literally know nothing.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271296/washington-insider-%E2%80%93-media-resistance-daniel-greenfield

The oldest institution in Washington D.C. isn’t the White House (1817), the Smithsonian Castle (1855) or the Old Ebtitt Grill (1856): it’s government insiders conspiring with friendly reporters against their rivals and superiors. Even when Washington D.C. was uninhabitable during the summer months, the telegraph wires still burned with smears, innuendos and leaks even with no one around to leak.

When the Washington press corps isn’t firing stupid questions at press secretaries, it’s lunching at places like the Old Ebtitt Grill while jotting down gossip, innuendo and talking points from government insiders. The only industry with a more incestuous media than Washington D.C. is some 2,700 miles away in Hollywood. But lately the forbidden affairs between reporters and insiders make Hollywood seem tame.

Take James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, where the thirty year difference between the Senate Intelligence Committee security director and the 26-year-old Pulitzer nominee (the most disgraceful Pulitzer jorno who hadn’t actually colluded in Communist genocide) and his marriage didn’t obstruct trigger the scruples of media outlets getting the inside scoop between the sheets.

The New York Times verbally shrugged it off. “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Or as Harvey Weinstein called it, business as usual.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271299/facebook-bans-frontpage-editor-jamie-glazov-911-frontpagemagcom

To best understand why Facebook would ban Jamie Glazov on 9/11 for his article on how to best prevent more 9/11s, pre-order Jamie’s new book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us: HERE. The book illustrates how the Jihadist Psychopath has successfully built his totalitarian plantation — on which many in the West are now enslaved and dutifully following his orders. Jamie outlines the frameworks of this tyrannical plantation and how those who are trapped on it, and yearn for freedom, can best escape.]

Facebook’s Unholy Alliance masters are, without doubt, accelerating their totalitarian suffocation of free thought and expression. it is no surprise, therefore, that Frontpage’s editor, and host of The Glazov Gang, was suspended from Facebook for 30 days yesterday, on September 11, after posting his article, 9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad. Glazov believed that the article was more relevant and urgent than ever due to the skyrocketing Jihadist stabbings in Europe — and to the 17th anniversary of 9/11 that was approaching the next day.

But it appears that daring to give suggestions on how our civilization can stop Jihadist attacks and another 9/11 is against Facebook’s ‘community standards’. Frontpage’s editor posted a screenshot of the reprimand that Facebook sent him and then tweeted about it. (See Below).

The article itself outlined nine ways in which Jihad can best be countered. The steps include:

1. Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment, 3. Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups, and 5. Launch Our Own Counter-propaganda Campaign.”

Glazov’s advice also involves the promotion of supporting moderate Muslims — a move that is, clearly, horrifying to Facebook’s masters and therefore also violates their “community standards.”

No doubt, Glazov’s consistent campaigning on behalf of Muslim women and girls in his efforts to protect them from FGM, Honor Killings and other Sharia barbarities, has gained him the anger and hatred of Facebook’s guardians — who are clearly on the side of the Sharia enforcers and oppressors of Muslim women and girls.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-top-five-ways-obama-attacked-the-free-press/

It’s been over a year and a half since Obama left office, but it still bothers me hearing him speak. Between his trying to take credit for the Trump economy or his claim that he, unlike Trump, didn’t “threaten the freedom of the press,” it’s hard not to get angry when he speaks because virtually everything he says is a lie. His trying to take credit for Trump’s economy was pathetic, but his claim that he was not an enemy of the free press deserves to be called out.

“It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t threaten the freedom of the press because — they say things or publish stories we don’t like,” Obama said during his speech at the University of Illinois. “I complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them ‘enemies of the people.’” Obama certainly had his issues with Fox News. Newsweek actually described the conflict between them as “a war.” But, Obama’s war with the media wasn’t limited to Fox News. Obama’s treatment of the media as a whole was so bad that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan criticized the Obama administration in 2013 for its “unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.” David E. Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, said of the Obama administration in 2013, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” According to a report on press freedoms by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists, “In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.”

It’s hard to imagine, given how positive the media was toward Obama, that his administration could be so antagonistic toward them. But the evidence that Obama was an enemy of the free press is astounding. The left-leaning media today may be calling Trump’s attacks on the media unprecedented, but they pale in comparison to what happened during the Obama years. Here are five examples of Obama’s attacks on the free press.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-scarborough-says-donald-trump-more-threatening-than-terrorist-attacks/

We shouldn’t be talking about Donald Trump today.

It’s been 17 years since the gut-wrenching terrorist attacks that stole the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans in New York City and in our nation’s capital and in that field in Pennsylvania. Today, we should be talking only about them, about the horror of that day, and about what our nation has done since to curb terror around the world.

We shouldn’t be talking about Donald Trump.

And yet that’s what Joe Scarborough would like us to do, today of all days. The Morning Joe host — whose Twitter bio proudly proclaims “with malice toward none” — has chosen September 11 to publish an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “Trump is harming the dream of America more than any foreign adversary ever could.”

His evidence? The GOP is creating record levels of debt, China is projected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, and Trump himself “has savaged America’s vital alliances, provided comfort to hostile foreign powers, attacked our intelligence and military communities, and lent a sympathetic ear to neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe.”

Scarborough concludes the op-ed by implying that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was somehow less of a threat to our nation than our current president is:

Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team 6 before he accomplished that goal. Other tyrants who tried to do the same were consigned to the ash heap of history. The question for voters this fall is whether their country will move beyond this troubled chapter in history or whether they will continue supporting a politician who has done more damage to the dream of America than any foreign adversary ever could.

Shameful, indefensible hyperbole at best. But at worst, this is a brazen use of an American tragedy to castigate a political enemy. It’s cry for attention, at the expense of the memories of those who died and all of those who lost loved ones that day.

The sheer inanity of Scarborough’s “argument” is compounded by the fact that, not very long ago, he didn’t view Trump as an enemy at all. He treated him like a close friend. At NRO last year, Sarah Quinlan skillfully chronicled the full history of the Morning Joe host’s over-the-top love for Trump, which carried on well into the Republican presidential primaries — until the sands of public opinion shifted and it became disadvantageous to do so.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/11/joe_scarborough_hypocrite_138043.html

September 11 should not be about politics, nor about Donald Trump, and surely not about Joe Scarborough. Only 17 years separated from that incredibly painful day, the solemnity of our national remembrance should remain particularly poignant and reservedly reverent. After all, there are many thousands of still-school-aged young Americans who lost parents on that fateful day or in the global military struggle that followed.

But MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” callously used the calamity of 9/11 to take cheap political shots at President Trump, writing in a Washington Post op-ed that he “is harming America more than any foreign adversary every could” and declaring on-air that Trump presents a “graver threat” to America than the 2001 attacks did. Such hyperbole would be ridiculous and disqualifying coming from some anonymous troll on Twitter, but is jaw-dropping from a former congressman and prominent cable news morning host.

Imagine, for comparison, a major television host in the 1950s, like Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, declaring that President Eisenhower presented a “graver” threat to America than Tojo and the Imperial Japanese Army did at Pearl Harbor?

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/a-modest-proposal-for-anonymous/

As a means of spreading mistrust, confusion and distraction within the Trump administration, last week’s New York Times op-ed by “Anonymous” was a master stroke. Vladimir Putin himself could hardly have done better. Suspicion is rife and the administration has been left to rummage through its own ranks for this incognito writer who claims and lauds subversion of the president by his own high-level staff. Relays of senior officials have been left to deny authorship, without being able to prove the truth of their denials unless the real author is discovered.

As Ambassador Nikki Haley accurately summed it up in a Sept. 7 op-ed in the Washington Post, this anonymous writer, described by the Times as “a senior official,” has sowed mistrust among thousands of government workers, who had nothing to do with this article. Anonymous has encouraged America’s adversaries to, as Haley puts it, “promote their hostile claims about the stability of our government,” and unfairly cast doubt on the president himself “in a way that cannot be directly refuted because the anonymous acccuser’s credibility and knowledge cannot be judged.”

The Times tells us this op-ed escapade required anonymity because the author, if identified, would be in jeopardy of losing a federal job. That alone suggests the Times is willing to vouch for an author with an odd set of priorities. But surely there’s more to it. The titillating use of “Anonymous” has brought a gush of extraordinary attention to the Times, and one might wonder if there will be special credit inhouse for anyone on its editorial staff who had a hand in ferrying the op-ed from the anonymous writer — this erstwhile conservative champion of “free minds, free markets and free people” — to the public page. While the contents of the op-ed brought nothing new to the rumor mills or furor of America’s political debate, the tease of anonymity, combined with the label of “senior official,” has become clickbait galore. In effect, the platform of a government job has been leveraged here to serve the personal agenda of an individual within the administration. When the medium for this sort of behavior is money, it’s called corruption.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/09/mawkish-hooey-thats-unfit-print/

The New York Times has long considered itself the acme of journalistic integrity and resolve. That self-serving appraisal was a stretch but, until Trump Derangement Syndrome set in, worth no more than a wry smile. An anonymous op-ed confirms how deep the malady has taken root.

So-called investigative reporters rely a lot, so far as I can tell, on anonymous sources. What then happens is that they file a story under their own name and earn the fame or bear the consequences depending on whether the story turns out to be true or false. There is now a more novel approach which cuts out the middleman. The anonymous source is given prime space in a mainstream newspaper to speak for himself, or is it herself, or is it, perhaps, someone in gender transition. Think of the traitorous Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning as an apt role model.

That some nameless person would be given space to write an op-ed in The New York Times is surely beyond extraordinary and unethical. A senior official in the Trump administration (so claims the newspaper) was given the opportunity on September 6 to spread dirt on Donald Trump behind a veil of anonymity. And vague, non-specific, dirt at that. Put yourself in Trump’s position. Put yourself in the position of anyone besmirched in general terms by Mr or Ms or Mx Anonymous. How do you effectively defend yourself?

Let me give you some quotes from the op-ed.

“Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” Note the ‘we’. No examples were provided of these misguided impulses; not one. Just suppose it is true for the sake of the argument. Have you ever had a misguided impulse? I have had too many to count. Luckily, I haven’t acted on absolutely all of them. But that is why it is a good idea for presidents, any leaders, to surround themselves with competent people. Does anyone think, for example, that Mike Pence, Generals Kelly and Mattis, Mike Pompeo and Steve Mnuchin are not competent.

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.