RUTHFULLY YOURS

The idiocy of the hard left is in full display in a Huffington Post article by Jessica Schulberg entitled: “Sebastian Gorka, Who Has Downplayed Threat of White Supremists, Still Teaches Marines About Terrorism.” Ms. Schulberg claims that Sebastian Gorka, an adviser to President Trump, has been overly critical of Islam, yet dismissive of a white nationalist threat.

What makes Ms. Schulberg’s article particularly poignant is Gorka’s recent removal from the White House. Gorka does argue that Islam is an inherently violent religion that encourages its adherents to engage in acts of terrorism. What many consider inappropriate, others embrace. For example, President Sisi of Egypt, a pious Muslim, contends that there is violence within Islam and, as a consequence, he has called for a revolution from within. This comment was echoed by the King of Bahrain, also a pious Muslim.

It is not coincidental that most terrorist attacks worldwide have been committed by Muslims, notwithstanding the obvious fact that most Muslims are not terrorists. This distinction is made by Professor Gorka, but conspicuously overlooked by Ms. Schulberg.

By comparison white supremists, hateful as they are, do not represent a comparable threat to national security. The evidence is clear, aside from the bombing in Oklahoma City, there isn’t evidence these neo Nazis and skinheads are prepared to launch terror attacks against the nation. In fact, instead of exaggerating their number and influence, it should be noted that they represent .0001 percent of the American population. That said, these people are loathsome and potentially dangerous, but they are not at present a challenge to national security.

The fact that these groups are conflated suggests more about the alt left than Sebastian Gorka. The planned assaults on the erstwhile president’s adviser was designed to undermine President Trump, now a pin cushion of the Left, and the sensible view that within Islam are prescribed activities for terrorism. One need not be a lecterer at Marine University to recognize the global jihad and what it means for the United States.

This article at Huffington Post is – to put it politely – simply ugly propaganda. In the days that passed we have grown accustomed to this kind of piece on the pages of various blogs and news outlets. I doubt it will affect Sebastian Gorka’s reputation, except for a few who are persuaded by left wing group think. But it is yet another step in the on going culture war. Mischaracterization, exaggeration, deception are the tactics in this battle. It is sad but true that George Orwell lives in “newspeak” where war is peace, truth is lies, tolerance is intolerance and the enemies of this democratic republic can make indefensible claims with impunity.

For many Republicans, what matters most about Donald Trump is that he’s demonstrated resolve against the enemy — not the Islamic State or the Taliban, but the media.

The media has become for the Right what the Soviet Union was during the Cold War — a common, unifying adversary of overwhelming importance. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, religious conservatives and libertarians could agree that, whatever their other differences, godless communism had to be resisted. This commitment was the glue of the GOP coalition, and the basic price of admission to conservatism.

Now, a policy of containment, preferably rollback, of the mainstream media occupies that central role. Trump may not be delivering on his agenda, but he’s a righteous, unyielding warrior against the media. And this is the one nonnegotiable. To put it in terms of the famous Isaiah Berlin essay, the fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one thing — CNN sucks.

The Right’s hostility toward the media is long-standing. In fact, no one has improved on what Spiro Agnew said in a famous speech in Des Moines, Iowa, in November 1969, or even really said anything new.

Agnew complained that after President Richard Nixon gave a televised speech, his words were instantly subjected to “querulous criticism.” He pointed out that the media is in a bubble, living “in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City.” And he wanted to limit the power of this “small and unelected elite.”

Newt Gingrich demonstrated the transformative potential of theatrical attacks on the media in his show-stopping performances at two South Carolina primary debates in 2012. He wouldn’t have won the state without them.

Trump’s insight was basically, “What if every day were like that?” After witnessing the fate of two candidates who got savage coverage in the general election, despite being a media darling in the case of John McCain and being an earnest, well-meaning man in the case of Mitt Romney, Republican voters were ready for harsher stuff.

Trump had long had his own problems with the media, namely that it wasn’t nearly favorable enough to Donald Trump. With his talents as a showman, his taste for combat and his instinct for what energizes an audience, he was ideally suited to transfer his long-developed personal sensitivity to slights from reporters to the ideological realm of Republican presidential politics. In large part, he rode his mutual enmity with the media to the White House.

It remains a lifeline. Most commentators saw Trump angrily saying indefensible things about Charlottesville at the news conference last week; most Republicans saw him gamely standing his ground in front a group of braying reporters. At his rally in Phoenix, Trump upped the rhetorical ante and used the media’s lack of credibility to try to undermine the critique of his Charlottesville remarks.

It helps him that the press is, indeed, worse than ever before. As the media environment has fractured, organizations feel less obligation to try to cultivate a broader audience. And as politics becomes more culturally charged, the divide between the heartland and the coasts where the media lives and works becomes important.

Earlier this week the Village Voice—the weekly paper that gave me my start in the writing business—announced the end of its print edition. The paper that invented the counterculture will now live on the Internet alone.

Over the last half-century, digital technology has driven many publications into bankruptcy, or deported them to the cloud. But the sad fate of the Voice’s print edition has special irony: early computers played an accidental role in transforming a struggling neighborhood paper into what author Kevin McAuliffe called “the Great American Newspaper.”

On December 8, 1962, Local 6 of the International Typographical Union (ITU) called a strike against four New York City dailies; three others shut down in solidarity, effectively leaving New York without daily papers. Because it was the Christmas season, advertisers were desperate to find other outlets. Some of them discovered a thin Greenwich Village weekly called the Voice.

At first it looked like the strike would be resolved quickly and the Voice’s advertising gold rush would be temporary. But insiders knew the main issue was not salary or hours, or even job security. The real issue was automation.

Throughout the 1950s, Bert Powers, head of Local 6, had been following the steady development of automated typesetting. It was still a feeble technology, a whisper of things to come, but Powers could already see that automation was faster, cheaper, and easier to use. His union’s lumbering hot-type machines were direct descendants of Gutenberg’s fifteenth century printing press. If the new system was allowed into newsrooms and printing plants, ITU typesetters would lose their jobs. And so, in a kamikaze attack that wrecked the newspaper business in New York City, Powers kept the Local 6 picket lines up.

As the newspaper strike stretched into weeks, and the weeks to months, competitors grew fat on diverted ads. Radio and TV coverage expanded rapidly. New publications, such as the New York Review of Books, sprang to life. For the Village Voice, which had been balanced on the edge of insolvency for years, the long strike was a godsend to ad revenue and newsstand sales.

That the Voice had made it to 1963 was already something of a miracle. When they started the weekly in 1955, the paper’s three founders—Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer—knew that Greenwich Village was an international symbol of cool. Since the early 1900s the neighborhood had been famous for creative oddballs, free thinkers, and sex: a reputation like that should be easy to market.

Trouble is, they had no idea how to publish a 12-page paper. Fortunately, their friend Jerry Tallmer had worked on the student paper at Dartmouth and knew the ropes. Tallmer came on board as associate editor and, along with writers like John Wilcock and photographer Fred McDarrah, helped the Voice build a small but loyal readership, at an attractive price—an annual subscription (52 issues) cost $3.00.

Is the New York Times botching its legal defense against Sarah Palin’s libel claim? In June the Times published an editorial containing fake news about the former Alaska governor and GOP vice-presidential candidate. Now the newspaper is seeking to have her lawsuit dismissed. But Mrs. Palin’s legal team says that Times lawyers are demanding a legal standard that would effectively make it impossible for any public official to win a libel case.

In the June editorial, which followed the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise and others, the Times recycled a bogus claim that Mrs. Palin had incited Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011. The false allegation hinged on the publication of a map targeting swing congressional districts that was published by a political organization tied to Mrs. Palin. The smear had been debunked years ago—including in the pages of the New York Times. There was no evidence that Loughner had ever even seen the map.

The day after the editorial first appeared online in June, the Times posted a correction saying that it had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.”

As for the Times’ publication of the initial flawed story, to win her case Mrs. Palin will need to prove “actual malice” on the part of Times staff, meaning they knew the story to be false or they published with reckless disregard for the truth. This is a very high legal bar, as it should be. When people enter the political arena, they should expect that a free press will vigorously seek to hold them to account.

The Times had several options in mounting a defense. Two months ago Callum Borchers described a few of them in the Washington Post. Perhaps the most obvious was to argue that Times writers had mistakenly consulted initial false media accounts from 2011. “The Times could argue that its editorial writers were aware of these reports but, in their rush to publish quickly after the shooting of Scalise, committed an honest oversight and missed the follow-up reports — including the ones in their own paper — that debunked the notion of a link between Palin’s committee and Loughner,” wrote Mr. Borchers. He further described other potential defenses:

The Times also might contend that, although it got the particulars wrong, it was right to say that the map produced by Palin’s committee contributed generally to a toxic political climate that many people believe makes violence more likely….

Alternatively — and despite the correction — the Times could argue that the factors which motivated Loughner are matters of opinion, not fact, and that an opinion of what inspired the shooting is protected free speech, however dubious the conclusion.

But now along comes another argument from the defendant. Last week, the New York Times reported:

The editor of The New York Times editorial page testified on Wednesday that he did not intend in an editorial to blame the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for a 2011 mass shooting, but was instead trying to make a point about the heated political environment. The editorial is the focus of a defamation lawsuit brought by Ms. Palin against the news organization.

The editor, James Bennet, said he had wanted to draw a link between charged political rhetoric and an atmosphere of political incitement after a gunman opened fired in June on a baseball field where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. But Mr. Bennet said he was not trying to make a direct connection between a map of targeted electoral districts that Ms. Palin’s political action committee had circulated and the 2011 shooting in Arizona by Jared Loughner that severely injured Representative Gabby Giffords. CONTINUE AT SITE

CNN hit a new low – and that‘s saying a lot – Tuesday night in its coverage of President Trump’s speech in Phoenix. The former news channel is now little more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the Deep State. On Tuesday, it used a half dozen anti-Trump panelists, with no one representing a counter view, to introduce a new fake news meme: Not only is the 45th POTUS a racist and a Nazi-sympathizer but an imminent national security threat to the United States.

To reinforce this spin, CNN’s Don Lemon, who outed himself as a Trump hater in an out of control alcohol fueled on camera appearance last New Year’s Eve, trotted out CNN’s new contributor, former Obama regime Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Don Lemon live on CNN New Year’s Eve 2016

Clapper’s incendiary comments about Trump’s speech immediately went to the top of CNN’s Web site, and led many other mainstream news reports as well. Clapper’s and the other CNN commentators’ tirades eclipsed any coverage of what Trump actually said in his 80 minute speech to an enthusiastic crowd of over 19,000 at the Phoenix Convention Center..

CNN.com home page screenshot August 22, 2017 11 P.M. P.D.T.

Speaking of President Trump, Clapper said:

I really question his ability, his fitness to be in this office and I also am beginning to wonder about his motivation for it. Maybe he is looking for a way out.

In its article about Clapper’s appearance, CNN reported:

Clapper said he found the President’s rally “downright scary and disturbing.” Clapper denounced Trump’s “behavior and divisiveness and complete intellectual, moral and ethical void. How much longer does the country have to, to borrow a phrase, endure this nightmare?”

Clapper on CNN

Clapper continued to pile on. With his patina of national security expertise (and notwithstanding his obvious lie to Congress in 2013 while testifying under oath), he was accorded high expert status by program host Lemon.

Clapper also said he is worried about the President’s access to the nuclear codes. “In a fit of pique he decides to do something about Kim Jong Un, there’s actually very little to stop him,” Clapper said. “The whole system is built to ensure rapid response if necessary. So there’s very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary.”

Lemon continued to refer to Clapper’s comments after his appearance ended. The one-sided echo chamber panel members tried to one up each of their in their disdain for the president. It was only 12 days ago that CNN fired its last conservative commentator and Trump defender, Jeffrey Lord, citing as an excuse his use of a politically incorrect tweet. On Tuesday, the “Republican” on the CNN panel, a NeverTrumper named Rick Wilson, did his part to bash Trump. Wilson, by the way, revealed way back in March 2016 to the delight of the left wing media that he planned to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Now it can be told. A CNN host named Brian Stelter confided to his audience this week about conversations occurring off-camera and off the record across the media landscape. According to Mr. Stelter:

President Trump’s actions and inactions in the wake of Charlottesville are provoking some uncomfortable conversations, mostly off the air if we’re being honest. In discussions among friends and family, and debates on social media, people are questioning the president’s fitness. But these conversations are happening in news rooms and TV studios as well.

Usually after the microphones are off, or after the stories are filed, after the paper has been put to bed, people’s concerns, and fears and questions come out. Questions that feel out of bounds, off limits, too hot for TV. Questions like these: Is the president of the United States a racist? Is he suffering from some kind of illness? Is he fit for office? And if he’s unfit, then what?

These are upsetting, polarizing questions. They’re uncomfortable to ask.

It’s not clear why Mr. Stelter wanted to raise the question of whether he and his colleagues are being honest. But there is certainly a question of just how uncomfortable CNN has been about raising issues related to President Trump’s health and character. “My impression is that since President Trump’s inauguration, there’s been a lot of tiptoeing going on,” added Mr. Stelter.

Perhaps he was referring to the program he hosted a month into the Trump presidency. Mr. Stelter called Mr. Trump’s words “a verbal form of poison” and said the President instills “fear in many people.” Then, appearing above a CNN headline saying, “TRUMP’S NIXON-ESQUE PRESS BASHING,” Mr. Stelter invited Carl Bernstein to tiptoe into the story. The former Washington Post reporter pronounced that Mr. Trump’s attacks on the press “are more treacherous than Richard Nixon’s ” and proceeded to reference Stalin and Hitler.

Mr. Bernstein has had plenty more to say on Mr. Stelter’s program, even before the inauguration. Here’s a transcript from a CNN appearance by Mr. Bernstein in March of last year:

STELTER: Carl, I want to come to you. You’re in Los Angeles this morning. You’ve been talking about this, talking about Trump for months as a neo-fascist. I want you to tell me why and how you view this current moment.

BERNSTEIN: Well, it’s a difficult term and the word “neo” meaning “new”, has a lot to do with it, a new kind of fascist in our culture, dealing with an authoritarian, demagogic point of view, nativist, anti-immigrant, racism, bigotry that he appeals to, and I think we need to look at the past. And I’m not talking about Hitlerism and genocide, and I’m not making a direct parallel to Mussolini — but a kind of American fascism that we haven’t seen before, different than George Wallace who was merely a racist. This goes to authoritarianism. It goes to despotism. The desire for a strong man who doesn’t trust the institutions of democracy and government. And my point is that we now need on cable news to have a debate, a historical debate about what fascism was and is and how Donald Trump fits into that picture, because it is something very foreign to our political culture in terms of a major presidential candidate in the 20th, or 21st century. And that debate is going on in print, online, but it is not part of our debate on cable.

As many have pointed out, since about 4 p.m. on August 12, the media coverage of Charlottesville has been much more about President Trump’s statements than about James Fields, Heather Heyer, an auto ramming, a riot, a white supremacist rally, or a statue of Robert E. Lee.

Talking heads, Capitol Hill pontificators, CEOs, and ordinary folks on Facebook have criticized the president’s Saturday remarks as inadequate at best and an oblique expression of complicity with the Ku Klux Klan at worst. For one erstwhile supporter they necessitated a clean break with the president. Julius Krein explained to Slate that he was forced to revise his views of Trump by “the simple and obvious fact that somebody died, and it was obvious that there was some neo-Nazi psychopath who killed that person. To not state the obvious, to fail to ‘tell it like it is,’ I thought was pathetic.”

It’s easy to see why Krein would think that President Trump was expected to address one simple and obvious fact—that a neo-nazi murdered someone in Charlottesville—because Krein, like virtually everybody, acquired his information about the president’s statement from the media. For example, the report about the events of August 12 on NPR’s website indicates, with respect to Trump’s statement, that the “obvious” facts about Charlottesville were exactly those mentioned by Krein, and it even notes that although President Trump approached the microphone about an hour after the car ramming, his remarks somehow overlooked both the ramming and its victims. Sure sounds like the president flunked a no-brainer, or was up to something odd.

Unfortunately for the president’s critics, what was obvious to them whenever this completed narrative reached them could not have been obvious to President Trump when he began to speak at 3:35 p.m.. Why? Because at that moment it was not obvious to anybody. The hospital where the victims of the car ramming were being treated announced that one person was dead and 19 were wounded at 3:53, more than 10 minutes after the president finished his remarks.

It is true that the mayor of Charlottesville had tweeted information about an unspecified death at 3:16, but the tweet did not link the fatality to the car ramming or to any specific cause. So when Trump was preparing his statement, and while he gave it, he did not know the “obvious fact” that Krein and so many others now insist he ought to have addressed, that a person had been killed. And he also did not know that her killer was a neo-nazi psychopath, because the driver’s identity was not announced by the police until 9:46 pm.

In fact, when President Trump addressed the cameras on the afternoon of August 12, he was not there to share with the nation his views of a terrorist attack, as many with 20/20 hindsight suppose. He was there to offer reflections on a disturbing riot which had been going on in Charlottesville since about 11:00 a.m., and about which he had already commented in a tweet at 1:19 p.m., when the simple and obvious fact that now summarizes Charlottesville to everybody was as unobvious as it could possibly be, because it hadn’t happened, and nobody imagined that it would (except possibly James Fields). From about 11:30 a.m. to 1:42 p.m. (when the ramming occurred) the obvious fact of Charlottesville was an ongoing riot, and this continued to be the case at 3:35 p.m. when the car ramming, its effects, and its causes were still subjects of unconfirmed report and speculation.

The president did not choose the time of his statement because it was opportune with respect to the status of the events in Charlottesville, but because a media appearance about a different matter was already scheduled for that hour. If his schedule had been free, then within about 20 minutes of 3:35 he likely would have learned part of what is now so crystal clear to Krein and others, and his eventual statement would probably have been very different. But at 3:35 he could not craft a statement around an event, the facts of which were not yet established and confirmed, much less obvious to everybody.