RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/buyers_remorse_lets_blame_the_press.html

In his first week in office President Asterisk has done his old boss proud.  In just six days, lunch bucket Joe has signed 36 executive orders and put tens of thousands of jobs at risk.  He’s cancelled major construction projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and the border wall — resulting in lost jobs for the very unions who endorsed him.  He is reestablishing a moratorium on energy exploration on federal lands and rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change.  These orders will cause further job losses in the energy sector and lost revenue in states that supported him.  If that were not enough, his relaxation of border control and immigration enforcement will result in an influx of illegal immigrants competing for the remaining jobs.  Luckily, Joe has also thoughtfully issued and order expanding food assistance programs.  Thousands of unemployed workers may need it.

Even though the Harris/Biden administration is in its infancy, it has already triggered a flood of complaints of “buyer’s remorse.”  It seems many who voted for Joe weren’t expecting this.  In the immortal words of Rahm Emanuel, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”  I say we help those with “buyer’s remorse” get over it.  We should give them a scapegoat.  Let’s blame the press.  It wasn’t the voter’s fault — they were misled.

Biden voters were victims of a four-year propaganda campaign to smear Donald Trump and drag the Democrat nominee  — any nominee — across the finish line, truth be damned.

Mark Twain once said, “If you don’t read the papers you’re uninformed.  If you do read the papers you’re misinformed.”  I submit that in this case, the voters have been subjected to both.  Evidence of legacy news media propaganda during the four years of the Trump administration are legion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/rand_paul_pushes_back_against_stephanopoulos_narrative.html

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.  The latter tried to bully Paul into accepting the Democrat narrative that Joe Biden, a corrupt, debauched old man who periodically emerged from the basement to “campaign” for president, won more votes than any candidate in presidential history, including Obama, the first sort of Black president, and Hillary, the first genetically female presidential candidate.  Sen. Paul not only refused to be bullied, but he pushed back, exposing to viewers the fact that Stephanopoulos is not a journalist but is, instead, a Democrat party activist.

Stephanopoulos entered politics early, working for Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign when Stephanopoulos was in his mid-20s.  In 1992, he was back again working for Bill Clinton’s campaign, making his name as a spokesman for Clinton both during and after the election.  Beginning in 1996, Stephanopoulos left the White House for ABC, and he’s been there ever since.

Although technically a “journalist,” Stephanopoulos is famously partisan, routinely serving as an attack dog for the Democrat party.  He certainly showed that side of himself in the interview with Sen. Paul.

What Stephanopoulos hadn’t counted on is that Paul has an advantage compared to many of the elected officials, bureaucrats, and assorted famous people whom Stephanopoulos bullies…er, interviews on his show.  Paul is a principled man.  His values do not change depending on where he sees an advantage to himself.  That gives him a moral clarity that makes it impossible to bully him, as Stephanopoulos discovered to his cost.

In the clip that’s making the rounds on the internet, Stephanopoulos opened by demanding that Paul recite the current leftist catechism, which is that Slow Joe, AKA Basement Biden, won the election fair and square: “Ah, Sen. Paul.  Let me begin with a threshold question for you.  This election was not stolen.  Do you accept that fact?”

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/535584-five-examples-of-medias-sycophancy-for-biden-on-inauguration-week

Coverage of presidential inauguration week underperformed already-low expectations, with the usual measured accolades and sober analysis for the incoming president mostly sidelined for fawning praise and outright activism.

The overall theme centered on the premise that President Biden is in essence the second coming of George Washington, who, according to popular lore, vowed never to tell a lie. Anchors and pundits returned to this theme again and again with Biden, who famously dropped out of his first presidential run due to a plagiarism scandal.

Biden also claimed multiple times – including once during last year’s presidential campaign – to have been arrested or jailed when he attempted to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa at the height of Apartheid. After being fact-checked, Biden “clarified” his remarks instead of apologizing, saying he was merely “stopped.” The 78-year-old also told a Black audience in 2012 that then-GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney wanted to “put y’all back in chains,” without any evidence, as many in the media chuckled over the outrageous comment. 

Space limitations make it impossible to share all the examples witnessed this week, so here are the top five examples of the media’s slobbering sycophancy: 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/national_review_and_all_its_many_ways_of_insulting_conservatives.html

The writers and columnists at National Review just had a great week.  Joe Biden was inaugurated, President Trump is gone, and their writers can scratch off their calendars the upcoming rush week at the Lincoln Project frat house and get back to pretending they are conservatives.  It’s been four years since they last parroted the Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell if-only-we-were-in-power shtick, and they made up much lost ground with a slew of articles critical of Biden’s first days in office. 

But prior to that, they collectively unloaded on the Trump presidency in a manner that dropped all pretense of detached objectivism (implausible as it was) and chortled with unrestrained glee. 

Here is a recap of some of last week’s articles:

1) Dan McLaughlin calls Biden’s inauguration a “day of liberation” for “conservative thinkers, planners, advocates, and policy-makers.”  Great.  Now they can finally get back to successfully promoting and implementing conservative ideas just like they did back in…back in…remind me again? 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/01/24/the-washington-post-just-proved-how-desperate-it-is-to-be-kamala-harris-pravda-n1406583

The Washington Post attempted to throw an embarrassing story about now-Vice President Kamala Harris down the memory hole but reversed course after Reason and others exposed the paper’s attempt to become Kamala Harris’ personal Pravda. How embarrassing.

Back on July 23, 2019, when Harris was a lowly senator from California and one of the many 2020 Democratic candidates for president, the Post dared to run quotes from an unflattering interview. How impertinent!

In the original version of the article, Harris compared life amid the rigors of the campaign trail to living behind bars and pleading for food and water.

Here are the first seven paragraphs of the original article, written by Ben Terris and preserved by Reason‘s Eric Boehm:

It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and Kamala Harris was explaining to her sister, Maya, that campaigns are like prisons.

She’d been recounting how in the days before the Democratic debate in Miami life had actually slowed down to a manageable pace. Kamala, Maya and the rest of the team had spent three days prepping for that contest in a beach-facing hotel suite, where they closed the curtains to blot out the fun. But for all the hours of studying policy and practicing the zingers that would supercharge her candidacy, the trip allowed for a break in an otherwise all-encompassing schedule.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-echo-chamber-era

“It’s bad that trust in media is down, but even worse that so few in the business seem to think it’s a problem. ”

A day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, the headline in Axios read: “Trust in media hits a new low.” Felix Salmon wrote that “for the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media.” The Edelman survey showed overall faith in the press dropping to 46%.

The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that Republicans hate the press a lot, but Democrats just a little. The Axios story bore this out somewhat, as only 18% of Republicans reported trusting media, versus 57% of Democrats.

Still, 57% of half your potential audience is nothing to brag about, when you’re in the trust business. Other numbers, like 56% of respondents believing journalists are “purposely trying to mislead people,” or 58% thinking that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology… than with informing the public” are more ominous.

Media critics who work in the corporate press, like Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post, seem determined to look everywhere but inward for solutions. The dominant legend in our business is that if Republicans believe in fairy tales like Q and “Stop the Steal,” the traditional press can do nothing but stand its ground.

Sullivan’s reaction to at-times “embarrassing” Inauguration Day coverage was an injunction to reporters to resist the temptation to try to appear more balanced by showing “toughness” with regard to the incoming Biden regime. If anything, Sullivan said, the press should stand even taller in its opposition to red-state lie merchants like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, “without fearing that they’d be called partisan.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/22/a-cleansing-moment/

“The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part. Cleansing the movement he commands, or getting rid of what he represents to so many Americans, is going to be something else.” 

So said Rick Klein and MaryAlice Parks of ABC News. They later changed the wording to “cleaning up,” but the “cleansing” cat was already out of the bag. This calls for more reflection than Klein and Parks were willing to indulge.  

As the late George Carlin observed, America boasts more than 50 brands of breakfast cereal but when it comes to major political parties, the nation is pretty much down to two. That forces some hard choices, as Ted Rall explained in “Hey Lefties, Hillary Clinton is Not Your Friend.”  

In 2016, Marcella Aburdene, then a 31-year-old market researcher with a Palestinian father, told Slate that Clinton “is disingenuous and she lies blatantly,” and would not get her vote. Songwriter Margo Guryan Rosner was irritated by Hillary’s quip about staying home and baking cookies.  

Not all those who rejected Hillary voted for Trump, but here are some Democrats who did: New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, former CIA director James Woolsey, and former Justice Department lawyer Adam Walinsky, who also wrote speeches for Robert F. Kennedy. Trump would not have been elected if many other Democrats had not joined them. 

The Trump movement has a diverse side, so before they call for “cleansing,” Klein and Parks might interview someone like Walinsky, who could explain his decision. Klein and Parks betray no effort to engage any Trump supporter before calling for “cleansing,” a euphemism for deadly violence, as in the Balkans, Rwanda, and other places. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/jawdropping_contempt_for_trump_and_his_voters_from_national_review_star_columnist_kevin_williamson.html

It is sad, but perhaps inevitable that contemptuous, raw class-hatred for Trump voters would be featured so prominently in the National Review almost immediately after the swearing-in of Joe Biden yesterday.  National Review, after all, produced the infamous “Against Trump” issue in January 2016, assembling conservatives from many publications in an effort to derail the nomination of the man who became our 45th president.

The chief complaints about Trump centered on style…and class.  But graciousness in victory apparently is not an element of civility that appeals to Kevin Williamson, a talented wordsmith and star at what was once the flagship publication of the conservative movement.  You may recall that  roughly half a year before the February 15, 2016  “Against Trump” issue appeared, Williamson descended to vitriol with a June 16, 2015 column on Trump’s announcement of his candidacy in the Trump Tower lobby titled, “Witless Ape Rides Escalator,” explicitly dehumanizing him.

Yesterday, he bookended his Trump coverage by returning to an insult that, if he had applied it to Trump’s predecessor, would have gotten him deplatformed and condemned to ignominy (ask Roseanne Barr).  In “Witless Ape Rides Helicopter,” Williamson broadened his contempt for Trump into an attack on the voters who dared to reject Williamson’s views and voted Trump into office, and then added millions to their ranks and voted for his re-election.  They are all morons, you see, toothless, rural semi-humans whom Williamson calls “Cletus,” no doubt after a character on The Simpsons, described by Fandom as “a stereotypical redneck[.]”

As ratings tank amid hostile coverage of former President Donald Trump, Fox News is purging its newsroom in an attempt to salvage the network’s fading brand. Political editor Chris Stirewalt, a NeverTrumper, and several digital editors were fired Tuesday; on Election Night, Stirewalt defended the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden, a move that infuriated the president and Fox News viewers. (The outcome of Arizona’s election wasn’t finalized until late November.)

“Though the network never backed off its Arizona call, and followed other major news outlets in calling the entire election for Biden days later, Stirewalt soon apparently found himself on the outs at Fox News,” the Daily Beast reported Tuesday. Fired staffers attempted to spin the purge as higher-ups ridding the network’s digital arm of “real journalists” who don’t hold a political agenda. Anonymous ex-employees told the Beast it “was part of the network’s larger effort to pivot its website from straight-news reporting to right-wing opinion content in the mold of Fox’s primetime programming.”

Fox News has been bleeding viewers since November, quickly losing its perch in the cable news rankings. Conservatives have long viewed Fox News as the only channel to offer a counterbalance to the biased cable and network news channels that overwhelmingly mimic the Democratic Party’s company line while vilifying conservatives and Republicans. But its tone and coverage dramatically shifted during Trump’s presidency making it almost indistinguishable from left-leaning competitors such as CNN and MSNBC.

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace is widely disliked; Martha MacCallum just lost her 7 p.m. show to a rotating cast of hosts. A few days after Election Day, Bret Baier deleted an innocuous tweet promoting his 6PM p.m. show after more than 22,000 people responded to the tweet with harsh criticism of Fox News’ election coverage. Anchor Sandra Smith was forced to clarify an off-mic moment whenafter she mocked one of Trump’s lawyers who correctly pointed out that networks don’t decide presidential elections.

Even the network’s marquee names such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity now trail the evening lineups at CNN and MSNBC for the first time in years. Conservative competitors One America News and Newsmax are vying for Fox’s disgruntled viewers.