The Media’s No Good, Really Bad, Terrible Two Weeks
Click over to read the whole thing. I highly recommend it.

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Click over to read the whole thing. I highly recommend it.
STEPHEN KRUISER:
“…The first thing is a carryover from yesterday. Impeachment fever is getting hotter in the Dems’ brains every day and they are not just going to overreach, they are going to WAY overreach. There’s a prime example of the lunacy in Tuesday’s New York Times. An op-ed titled “Trump Has Disqualified Himself From Running in 2020” is the most hysteria-riddled nonsense they’ve posted yet.
The beauty of that is that none of the coastal media bubble people understand how off-putting their ravings are to at least half of the country. It’s a gift that keeps on giving and won’t be going away anytime soon.
An even bigger boon to Trump is Elizabeth Warren’s rise in the polls. Ultimately, she’s the best-case scenario candidate for the president to face next year. While many in the media are convincing themselves that progressivism is where all of the Democrats are now, that is far from true. A nominee from the fringe won’t win back any of the heartland voters that they lost in 2016…
…Perhaps the best thing working in Trump’s favor at the moment is the fact that Hillary Clinton is on another book tour, constantly in front of cameras and reminding normal people of the bullet America dodged in 2016…
…There are many days now when it seems as if the Democrats and their media monkeys are doing more to get the president re-elected than he is doing for himself…”
It is one thing to make 300 pizzas in an hour. It is another thing to sell them to humans who are willing to eat them.
My personal review of articles and commentary over the last few weeks confirms again, and without any doubt, that we have the worst media and political class since the American Civil War.
Biased, self-centered, without discipline, dumb.
“…last week. On a single day, in New York, President Trump signed an historic trade deal with Japan.
Across the pond in Geneva, Switzerland, I led a White House delegation. We were able to get the most sweeping reform of an international organization in our history.
And it was crickets in the media despite the fact that those two deals alone — those two Trumpian victories — will generate billions of dollars for farmers, ranchers, workers, manufacturers — and really create thousands of jobs.
Instead, we got the second impeachment circus in three years. And — and make no mistake about this, Maria, make no mistake about this — this is nothing less than an attempted coup d’etat, an end run around the ballot box.
And I see all these polls out there. Here’s — here’s like the poll question. Maybe Fox can do a poll on this. It’s to the American people. Should the impeachment process be used to depose a duly elected president when they can’t beat him at the ballot box?
I’d call that the Al Green question…”
Sean Davis:
“…On Monday, the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) admitted that it did alter its forms and policies governing whistleblower complaints, and that it did so in response to the anti-Trump complaint filed on Aug. 12, 2019. The Federalist first reported the sudden changes last Friday. While many in the media falsely claimed the ICIG’s stunning admission debunked The Federalist’s report, the admission from the ICIG completely affirmed the reporting on the secretive change to whistleblower rules following the filing of an anti-Trump complaint in August.
The ICIG also disclosed for the first time that the anti-Trump complainant filed his complaint using the previously authorized form, the guidance for which explicitly stated the ICIG’s previous requirement for firsthand evidence for credible complaints. The Federalist reported last week that it was not known which form, if any, the complainant used, as the complaint that was declassified and released to the public last week was written as a letter to the two chairmen of the congressional intelligence committees.
In its press release, the ICIG also explicitly admitted it changed its policies because of the anti-Trump complaint, raising significant questions about whether the watchdog cooked its own books to justify its treatment of the anti-Trump complaint…”
You can’t make this stuff up! Cost of an education at UI? Your child’s mental well being.
Jason Chaffetz:
“…He wasn’t supposed to release the transcripts. Or the whistleblower report. He was expected to do what any president would have done – what President Obama always did. Hide the evidence.
As House Democrats rolled out their latest meticulously choreographed, perfectly timed, and broadly coordinated attack on President Trump, they weren’t counting on the president’s unprecedented transparency. Nobody releases a transcript of calls between heads of state. But Donald Trump did.
In the process, he screwed up the narrative. Again…
…Having been on the House Oversight Committee during the duration of the Obama presidency, I can attest that the administration fought every document request every time, releasing only the bare minimum. No excuse was too thin to withhold documents or testimony.
In contrast, President Trump did the unthinkable: he actually waived both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege for the Mueller investigation. What other president would allow his general counsel to be interviewed for more than 30 hours?
Donald Trump does. He should be winning awards for his openness and transparency. We’ve never seen anything like it before. And it’s messing with the Democrats’ narrative…”
Wacky lefties are everywhere!
Brexit Derangement Syndrome. The new BDS.

Jon Gabriel:
“…Following political news on Twitter is often compared to drinking from a firehose. This is true on a slow day let alone the past week-plus of impeachment fever. Since the first Ukraine story hit, major media outlets have torn into Trump like piranhas on an ox carcass.
Reporters have declared “we’ve got him this time” every day since 2015; they don’t want to miss their latest chance, damn the facts. And there are so many, ahem, “facts.” Each hour, another blockbuster hits. It takes about 90 minutes to prove many of these scoops false or at least questionable. By then, another blockbuster has hit, and another, and another.
It’s a firehose, alright. A firehose of … a word Ricochet’s vaunted Code of Conduct does not allow me to post on this family-friendly website. Let’s just say the media uncorked a hydrant spraying taurine excreta throughout the Beltway and beyond. The fountain of feculence is hitting everyone in Trump’s orbit, from staffers to foreign leaders.
The torrent of sewage is so intense, it’s splashing back on Trump’s accusers in the media and politics. Before Adam Schiff can shake the night soil off his too-tight suit, reporters uncap new firehoses showering more steer stool in every direction.
No one’s even holding the hoses at this point; they’re spasmodic snakes, spraying dung in every direction from Kyiv to Canberra. Everyone will come out looking awful; Democrats, Republicans, pundits — you name it. Instead of a logical impeachment roll-out to win support among moderates and a few errant Republicans, the common voter will likely damn everyone involved.
Yes, Trump’s Ukraine call was questionable but it certainly doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment. Hunter Biden’s cashing in on his dad’s name is obviously corrupt; most Democratic voters would agree with that. Investigating foreign influence on our elections is a good thing, whether it’s coming from Democrats or Republicans.
Impeachment has been the left’s goal since December 2016 — before Trump took office. Ukraine is just another bite of the apple after the Mueller report failed so spectacularly.
The media hysteria over Ukraine feels a lot like the recent Greta hysteria. There’s no time to absorb facts, discuss options, or weigh pros and cons. We need to act now or else!
Hysteria is a poor strategy. It didn’t work for climate change or Kavanaugh or the many other panics we’ve been subjected to since Trump took office. How Trump’s detractors think this will end well is beyond me…”
“…The mission of the CIA is to investigate outside this country, activities that are detrimental to this country, not inside this country,” Rollins said on ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight.’ “The role of the investigation here is the FBI. The whole idea of putting DNI (a Director of National Intelligence) together was to make sure to coordinate. There is a National Resource Division of the CIA that follows up. If there’s a spy network somewhere, they coordinate with the FBI. That’s the only ones who do domestic work. Then they have to have permission by the attorney general or the DNI head…
…What the president needs to do is pull his CIA director tomorrow and FBI director and his DNI, acting, and say who signed off on this. Someone signed off on this in order for this person to move this thing forward. If they didn’t, then let’s throw them in jail for falsification of a document…”
“…Obama let this happen. When that article appeared in the ‘Times,’ any honest president would have called his vice president in and say Joe, what are you doing? I sent you there to straighten out corruption and you have your son who has no capabilities getting millions from a crook in the Ukraine or they may have said because of ‘The Washington Post’ and all of the swamp media allow us to commit crimes and go after them for nonsense, we can get away with it. And I believe that’s true. These people are enablers. That’s why yesterday they actually put out a document demanding that their co-conspirators, the press, silence me. Why do you think they are silencing me? Because I’m not making any points?
They are silencing me because I showed up with an affidavit yesterday and an accuser who is willing to stand up and point the finger at Joe Biden and say you’re a crook. And I have the proof and I have the documents and I’ve got — the witness will say the corroboration because there are more witnesses where he came from and they are not going to escape this, Sean.
The American people are fair people and they don’t like what they see which is a family, the Biden family, that has been using as an asset for themselves, his public office, going back to his brother who was selling his Senate office when he was a lobbyist in health care. It’s scandal after scandal covered up by a compliant crooked press…”
Conrad Black:
“…There has not in modern American history been such a preposterous excuse for a threat to the presidency as the Ukraine affair. The “favor” the president sought from President Zelinsky of Ukraine was that he reopen his inquiry into corruption so there would be more support in Washington for aid to Ukraine’s self-defense against Russian territorial intrusion.
About 500 words later in the transcript, President Trump asked that the question of the Bidens’ involvement in Ukraine be scrutinized too, without indicating a desired response, (though he said, correctly, that it looked “horrible”). If, as they claim, the Bidens are innocent of any wrongdoing or impropriety, the Ukrainians presumably will say so and the Bidens should then thank President Trump for eliciting that answer. If the Bidens, or at least Hunter Biden, were taking bribes, the United States, and the Democratic Party first of all, should wish to know that also…
In either case, President Trump was right to raise it with his Ukrainian analogue. To say otherwise is to assert that the Democrats, and the whole country, don’t want to know if the Bidens committed improprieties in Ukraine, and to add that Trump’s question was only inappropriate because Joe Biden may be running against him for president. If Biden had dropped out of the race before the whistle-blower intervened, or had only entered the race after the call with the Ukrainian president, there would have been no problem. The Democrats raced desperately for the recording studios of the Trumpophobic television echo chamber before they could even be precisely sure of why they were falsely screaming there are grounds for “Impeachment!”
The same Democratic candidates had shrieked for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh ten days before in the brief window between the New York Times publishing its story alleging Kavanaugh committed sexual assault 30 years before and the revelation that the alleged victim herself did not believe such an incident happened. The Times then admitted that the story was unfounded. It is scurrilous group-hypocrisy. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates, including Senators Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (D.-Vt.), accused Trump of conducting a “shakedown” on Zelensky to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election, while simultaneously going into transports of thinly veiled glee at the likely elimination of Biden’s presidential candidacy…
…The administration wisely took the lead in releasing the transcript and the whistle-blower report, full cooperation while opening fire on the irregularities that soon surfaced. This Ukraine allegation has all the earmarks of a Democratic hit-job, and the whistleblower’s chances of retaining anonymity for the hearsay-based complaint that was lodged, are, and deserve to be, zero. The idea that a U.S. president can be shaken in his legitimacy by anonymous unsubstantiated charges that, even if true, don’t add up to a real impropriety, is the destruction of constitutional democracy…
…Much of the problem is the shocking and disgraceful unprofessionalism and dishonesty of most national political media, but some of it also is the fact that the media love an impeachment crisis. It is constant news and high drama, confected or otherwise…”
That’s okay, they’re Democrats!
AARON KLEIN:
“…A staffer for Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took a trip to Ukraine last month sponsored and organized by the Atlantic Council think tank.
The Atlantic Council is funded by and routinely works in partnership with Burisma, the natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
The Schiff staffer, Thomas Eager, is also currently one of 19 fellows at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Congressional Fellowship, a bipartisan program that says it “educates congressional staff on current events in the Eurasia region.”
Eager’s trip to Ukraine last month was part of the fellowship program and included nine other House employees. The bi-partisan visit, from August 24 to August 31, was billed as a “Ukraine Study Trip,” and culminated in a meeting with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
The dates of the pre-planned trip are instructive. Eager’s visit to Ukraine sponsored by the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council began 12 days after the so-called whistleblower officially filed his August 12 complaint about President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky…”
Margot Cleveland:
“…After President Donald Trump released the transcript of his July 25, 2019, telephone conversation with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, the left’s “whistleblower” plot began to crumble. No, Trump didn’t condition foreign subsidies on Ukraine investigating Hunter Biden, son of the former vice president and presidential candidate Joe Biden. And no, Trump didn’t raise the question some eight times.
Then came the declassification of the “whistleblower’s” actual complaint against the president, which made clear the still-unnamed intelligence officer was peddling nothing but gossip and hearsay, seasoned with several factual falsehoods. This further exposed the Ukraine Purse Strings Hoax as the Resistance’s sequel to the failed Russia collusion hoax.
While the whistleblower’s plot to manipulate the ICWPA is obvious from the complaint, and so is his inaccurate partial quote of the statutory definition of “urgent concern,” the change in the form suggests complicity in the ICIG’s office. The director of national intelligence, who oversees the ICIG, should immediately investigate the investigator and determine whether there was a change in policy, when it occurred, why it occurred, and who initiated the change…”
Victor Davis Hanson:
“…Aside from the emotional issue that Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and celebrities loathe Donald Trump, recently Representative Al Green (D-Texas) reminded us why the Democrats are trying to impeach the president rather than just defeat him in the 2020 general election.
“To defeat him at the polls would do history a disservice, would do our nation a disservice,” Green said. “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach the president, he will get re-elected.”
Translated, that means Green accepts either that Trump’s record is too formidable or that the agendas of his own party’s presidential candidates are too frightening for the American people to elect one of them. And that possibility is simply not permissible. Thus, impeachment is the only mechanism left to abort an eight-year Trump presidency—on a purely partisan vote to preclude an election, and thus contrary to the outlines of impeachment as set out by the Constitution…”
and
“…Be prepared for a half-dozen Christine Blasey Ford-type witnesses to pop up, and 20 or so unhinged Cory Booker-esque “I am Spartacus” performance acts, along with a whole slew of new Steele dossiers—all interspersed with breathless CNN bulletins announcing new fake news developments with “the walls are closing in” and “the end is near” prognostications. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is already reading fantasies to the House Intelligence Committee and passing them off as the text of Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s new president. Only after he was called on such absurdities did he describe his performance as a parody…”
Conrad Black:
“…Trump’s offence, and his strength, is that he doesn’t make much effort to disguise the fact that he is a fierce, tough and often ruthless alumnus of the very tough schools of American capitalism, entertainment and politics.
The Globe and Mail headline implies that he has ridden his luck to where he is now. In fact, in making billions of dollars in (principally) Manhattan real estate, inventing a television concept and pulling in 25 million viewers every week for 14 seasons, devising a concept of levering celebrity, through being a boxing and wrestling impresario, a tabloid star and a reality TV icon, and then changing party affiliations seven times in 13 years and using social media to end-run the national press, seizing control of one of the great political parties and gaming the electoral system into the White House, he achieved more prior to his inauguration than any of the 43 preceding U.S. presidents except Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Grant, Eisenhower, and possibly Hoover. He is the only person elected president of the U.S. who never sought or held a public office or high military command and only the sixth to win the office with fewer votes than his chief opponent. This wasn’t luck; it was ambitious calculation and flawless execution…”