RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

For far too long, I was convinced that the media were, on the whole, reliable purveyors of the news. For nearly three years I freelanced happily at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Music and Public Affairs, never suspecting that the Mothercorp was a hive of Liberal propaganda and an artesian fount of scandalously disingenuous broadcasting. It took 9/11 and the generally extenuating media reports over time, faulting the U.S. and exempting Islam, to shake up my thinking and turn me into a sceptical fact-finder.

The media are especially adept at creating villains out of whole cloth for public consumption to advance a particular and often dubious purpose. How else explain the transformation of significant political figures into synonyms for perfidy and opprobrium. I’m thinking in particular of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and Enoch Powell, all of whom considered themselves patriots and enunciated unpopular or anti-establishment truths, costing them their reputations both in their lifetimes and for posterity.

As Diana West writes of McCarthy, “after more than 60 years of ‘McCarthyism’—the perpetual slander of Joseph McCarthy as a ‘witch-hunter,’ as opposed to an honest accounting of this fearless investigator of deep and widespread infiltration of the US government by Stalin’s secret agents…Americans have been conditioned to…hate, loathe and revile McCarthy…The slander of ‘McCarthyism,’…has had the dire effect of bludgeoning our abilities to detect or even acknowledge the existence of any constitutional enemies, especially ‘domestic.’ ”

Favorable commentators will admit that McCarthy may have been guilty of exaggerations and errors, but as the Venona transcripts have verified, he was right overall. He may have manifested as vindictive, yet he was remorseless in his campaign to isolate Communist sympathizers in government circles who worked to subvert the country. This, of course, made him anathema to a treasonous press and a political establishment that had much to hide, whether their complicity or their negligence.

Barry Goldwater has fared no better. When asked in a July 9, 1964 interview in Der Spiegel about his advocating the use of nuclear weapons to defoliate the jungles in Vietnam, Goldwater replied “About a month‐and‐a­ half ago on a television show I was asked a technical ques­tion, how could you get at the trails through the rain forests of North Vietnam. Well, I served in the rain forests of Burma and I know that the only practical way to get at them is defoliation so an answer to a technical question like this—one pos­sible way of doing it even though I made clear this would never be done, would be the use of low‐yield nu­clear devices” (emphasis mine). As the Daily Mail History section pointed out, “Democrats painted Goldwater as a warmonger who was overly eager to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.” And, of course, with few exceptions like the Daily Mail, the MSM was all over it, painting Goldwater as a nuclear warhawk, a kind of Dr. Strangelove. (The film appeared on January 29, 1964, 10 months before the Johnson-Goldwater election. The writing was already on the wall.)

Josef Goebbels called it the Big Lie, the deliberate misrepresentation of facts and reality in order to achieve a political objective. It’s been part and parcel of the New World Disorder we’ve lived under for the past century, ever since Vladimir Lenin first used a Big Lie to disguise his seizure of power from Russia’s post-czar provisional government in November 1917, by telling the Russian people he was preventing a coup not perpetrating one.

America’s first major encounter with the Big Lie, with all its disastrous consequences, started 50 years ago today, when the American mainstream media — CBS and the other networks, plus the New York Times and the Washington Post — decided to turn the major Communist Tet offensive against U.S. forces and South Vietnam on January 30, 1968, into an American defeat, rather than what it actually was: a major American victory.

We’ve all lived in the disorder and chaos that campaign set in motion ever since.

By the end of 1967, the Communist cause in the Vietnam War was in deep trouble. The build-up of American forces — nearly half a million men were deployed in Vietnam by December — had put the Vietcong on the defensive and led to bloody repulses of the North Vietnamese army (NVA), which had started intervening on the battlefield to ease the pressure on its Vietcong allies.

Hanoi’s decision to launch the Tet offensive was born of desperation. It was an effort to seize the northern provinces of South Vietnam with conventional troops while triggering an urban uprising by the Vietcong that would distract the Americans — and, some still hoped, revive the fading hopes of the Communists. The offensive itself began on January 30, with attacks on American targets in Saigon and other Vietnamese cities, and ended a little more than a month later when Marines crushed the last pockets of resistance in the northern city of Hue.

It not only destroyed the Vietcong as an effective political and military force, it also, together with the siege of Khe Sanh, crippled the NVA, which lost 20 percent of its forces in the South and suffered 33,000 men killed in action, all for no gain. By the end of 1969, over 70 percent of South Vietnam’s population was rated by the U.S. military as under government control, compared with 42 percent at the beginning of 1968.

Having been one of the early targets of social media censorship on Facebook, YouTube et al, I have advocated for anti-trust action against these bullying behemoths. It is good to see establishment outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and National Review coming to the same conclusion, or at least asking the same questions.

Just this week, Facebook launched its latest of many attacks on my news site, the Geller Report. It labeled my site as “spam” and removed every Geller Report post — thousands upon thousands of them, going back years – from Facebook. It also blocked any Facebook member from sharing links to the Geller Report. The ramping up of the shutting-down of sites like mine is neither random nor personal. The timing is telling. The left is gearing up for the 2018 midterm elections, and they mean to shut down whatever outlet or voice that helped elect President Trump, the greatest upset in left-wing history.

In fighting this shutdown, we had to go back to the drawing board in our lawsuit against these social media giants. The basis of our suit was challenging Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) under the First Amendment, which provides immunity from lawsuits to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, thereby permitting these social media giants to engage in government-sanctioned censorship and discriminatory business practices free from legal challenge.

Facebook and Google take in roughly half of all Internet ad revenue. According to the Wall Street Journal:

In the U.S., Alphabet Inc.’s Google drives 89% of internet search; 95% of young adults on the internet use a Facebook Inc. product; and Amazon.com Inc. now accounts for 75% of electronic book sales. Those firms that aren’t monopolists are duopolists: Google and Facebook absorbed 63% of online ad spending last year; Google and Apple Inc. provide 99% of mobile phone operating systems; while Apple and Microsoft Corp. supply 95% of desktop operating systems.

Both companies routinely censor and spy on their customers, “massaging everything from the daily news to what we should buy.” In the last century, the telephone was our “computer,” and Ma Bell was how we communicated. That said, would the American people (or the government) have tolerated AT&T spying on our phone calls and then pulling our communication privileges if we expressed dissenting opinions? That is exactly what we are suffering today.

Ma Bell was broken up by the government, albeit for different reasons. But it can and should be done.

It’s not a little ironic that, according to Breitbart:

AT&T has called for an “Internet Bill of Rights” and argued that Facebook and Google should also be subjected to rules that would prevent unfair censorship on their platforms.

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.”