RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

This week’s press conference featuring the White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, ostensibly was about President Trump’s health. In reality, it was a physical and mental check-up on the White House press corps, whose jejunity, mental impairment, and ideological blindness bespoke a dangerous warning sign for both the White House and the nation. These people are sick, and getting sicker. And until they’re all in quarantine, we’re all in danger of catching what’s obviously now a deadly communicable disease.

According to Dr. Jackson, the president’s health is excellent, especially for a 71-year-old man who subsists on little sleep and an old-fashioned American diet. But that wasn’t what the media was there to hear. In fact, they weren’t there to hear much of anything at all, or indeed even to listen (since they had already mentally discounted anything the doctor was going to say). Rather they had come to speak, using Dr. Jackson as the foil for “questions” that stated and restated the same Leftist-narrative talking point: that Trump is physically and mentally unfit to lead the nation that elected him—much to their shock and anger—fifteen months ago.

You can watch the whole thing here. But do note a few things going in, including the relative youth of the media folk, especially the women—who seem to be, like the Eloi in The Time Machine, chosen for their freshness and beauty rather than the penetrating quality of their minds. The men, meanwhile, skew slightly older, although no less primped and blow-dried.

Their “questions”—which were not phrased to elicit information but to score political points—almost all contained an underlying premise: that the president is manifestly unsuited to his high office, and the burden of proof is on the doctor to prove otherwise. Even when he stated in unequivocal terms that there is nothing physically or mentally wrong with Trump, the press corps practically sneered in his face, like small children demanding to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the sun will, in fact, rise in the east tomorrow. “Some people just have great genes,” said Dr. Jackson. But in the mechanistic world-view of “progressivism,” there can be no mysteries; everything must have a cause and effect, tied directly to diet, exercise, sex, race, and climate change. Things cannot simply just be.

Twenty years ago, no one had heard of either Facebook or Google, neither of which existed yet. For that matter, no one knew much about social media or search engines in general.

Cell phones were still simply mobile, small, and expensive telephones. There was no concept of a phone as a handheld computer.

Today, five companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) — have a collective worth of more than $3 trillion. Yet such transnational companies remain mostly exempt from the sort of regulations and accountability faced by most other industries.

Major corporations understandably fear product-liability laws. Oil companies are hectored by class-action lawsuits and headline-grabbing attorneys badgering them to pay up for supposed climate change brought on by commuters filling up each week. Tobacco companies have paid out billions of dollars due to cigarettes’ contribution to lung cancer. Pharmaceutical corporations are often forced to pay millions in fines when their prescription drugs cause dangerous side effects.

Yet every year, nearly a half-million Americans are injured in traffic accidents due to distracted driving involving a cell phone. No one knows how many millions of people worldwide are addicted to the apps on their smartphones — a habit that can be harder to break than an opiate addiction and can leave addicted users in a similar zombie-like condition. Yet unlike Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Tobacco, Big Tech is rarely held responsible for the deleterious effects of its products on millions the world over.

In most states, public boards and commissions regulate companies that provide public utilities. The theory is that such corporations use public spaces — from power poles to underground pipelines — to serve a captive public domain and provide an essential need. Radio and television stations are likewise regulated by the federal government on the similar assumption that the airwaves are not private property.

At 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, President Donald Trump tweeted the winners of his “FAKE NEWS Awards.” His tweet directed followers to a page on the Republican Party website (GOP.com), and the page crashed shortly after.

Here is the list:
1. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman

“The New York Times’ Paul Krugman claimed on the day of President Trump’s historic, landslide victory that the economy would never recover,” the article, written by the GOP team, reported. Trump’s victory was not a “landslide.” He won 304 votes in the Electoral College to Clinton’s 227 votes, and he took key states by razor-thin margins. Clinton won the popular vote 48.2 percent to Trump’s 46.1 percent, but Trump still won fair and square, by the rules of the game.

As for the economy, it did not take a hit from Trump’s win, so Krugman’s prediction was “fake news.”
2. ABC News’ Brian Ross

“ABC News’ Brian Ross CHOKES and sends markets in a downward spiral with false report,” the GOP team reported. Ross gave his report on December 1, saying that retired General Michael Flynn would testify that Donald Trump had ordered him to make contact with the Russians about foreign policy while he was still a candidate.

Indeed, the Dow Industrial Average dipped shortly after Ross’s report, until it was proven false.
3. CNN

What? CNN in third place? Now, that’s “fake news.” The network won the bronze trophy for “FALSELY” reporting “that candidate Donald Trump and his son Donald J. Trump, Jr. had access to hacked documents from WikiLeaks.”

Indeed, CNN reported that Donald Trump Jr. received an email with links to the WikiLeaks archive from the hack on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on September 4, 2016 — before WikiLeaks published the emails. In reality, the email was sent on September 14, after the story went public. A well-deserved “fake news” award.