By Florida Correspondent Jenny Herk
with Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – This week we saw the inevitable outcome of the Republican policy of allowing hundreds of millions of high powered assault rifles to remain in the hands of anyone who wants one, including angry white male losers seeking to go out as a celebrity.
After what might have been another attempted assassination of the Tangerine-Faced Felon, he and his henchmen now doing business as the Republican Party immediately opened up their two page playbook and put in place both steps:
1. Schnor for money; and
2. Lie about and smear Democrats by claiming this deranged white man's desperate act was motivated by entirely legitimate criticism of the Tangerine-Faced Rapist.
Sofa-bangin' running mate Jimmy Don Vontz lost no time in spreading the malignant talking point:
Mr. Vance said that Mr. Trump’s political opponents had crossed a line with their language, which he suggested had played a role in what the authorities are investigating as an assassination attempt directed at Mr. Trump while he was golfing in Florida on Sunday.
 |
| 1932 Germany: why couldn't both sides tone it down? |
“Look, we can disagree with one another, we can debate one another, but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and, if he’s elected, it is going to be the end of American democracy,” Mr. Vance said at a Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner.
Even if it's true?
To its credit, The New York Times gagged on this one, pointing out
Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a “fascist” on at least five occasions, including at a rally on Thursday in Arizona and during a news conference on Friday near Los Angeles.
“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” Mr. Trump said in Tucson, Ariz.
At the dinner on Monday, Mr. Vance said that “no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months.” The vice president has been the target of violent threats while in office.
Sometimes an invariable both-side lens actually focuses the discussion.
But more often putting on the both-sides specs distorts the picture out of all recognition. Just yesterday, on WAMU's 1A, a writer for one of DC's most reliable fountains of lukewarm conventional wisdom, Axios, said (this is a verbatim transcript):
Yeah. I think we're basically walking into a tinderbox these next 6 weeks. And I think what you saw from the reaction of both Democrats and Republicans after the second, second attempt with an AK 47, is that there is no sense that the temperature is going to be taken down. Democrats basically responded either saying, that we need to, like, beef up Secret Service, but a lot of Democrats basically said, you know, it's Trump's fault, for increasing the dangerous rhetoric in the first place. And then Republicans countered that it was Democrats' fault for, you know, amping up the heated rhetoric in the first place. So that all that's to say and, you know, we can have a much longer conversation about who is, more responsible than what. But the the but the upshot is that we are headed in the last 6 weeks of presidential election, and neither side looks willing to actually, you know, bring down the temperature. And there is a lot of kindling here for political violence to really erupt and, you know,
disrupt this election and the country.
Those dangerous Democrats – they're going to continue to say inflammatory stuff like the Republican candidate for President is a danger to democracy and the rule of law just because it happens to be, well, true.
The reliably useless Washington Post applied the same both-sides concealer to the current crisis:
Isn't it more dangerous to democracy to fail to point out that the Republican candidate if elected has already promised to end it? Isn't that something an informed electorate has the right to know? How can Democrats allow themselves to be bullied into not telling the truth about the Tangerine-Faced Fascist?
Republicans are so good at this kind of incendiary intimidation because they've had so much experience using it to their political advantage. Was it already 20 years ago when the Democratic nominee, a Vietnam War hero named John Kerry, was vilely smeared as a traitor who did not merit the medals he had won for his combat service while his Republican opponent defending the skies over Waco, Texas and refused Vietnam service. Yep:
Even leading Republicans said yesterday that things went a little too far when they had to publicly repudiate the actions of a delegate who was handing out adhesive bandages marked with Purple Hearts to mock Mr. Kerry's war wounds.
The bandages, distributed by Morton Blackwell of Arlington, Va., included a message that read, "It was just a self-inflicted scratch, but you see I got a Purple Heart for it." Mr. Blackwell said he was only trying to have fun, but the Military Order of The Purple Heart, an organization that says it represents wounded veterans, was not amused.
...
The Bush campaign and the party said they had nothing to do with the bandages and did not approve.
But even as they sought to distance themselves from the bandages, leading Republicans reprised a central accusation from the Swift boat group, which has said Mr. Kerry's testimony before the Senate in 1971 hurt American troops.
See the Republican two-step? Launch a vile false attack (immigrants eat kitties) and then back away to an equally false but more respectable position (Kerry's brave testimony about the futility of Nixon's war was somehow a betrayal of the troops).
You ll be unsurprised to know that the Democrats were intimidated out of attacking Bush's feckless failure to protect the nation from 9/11 because doing so in wartime would be “unpatriotic.”
Perhaps the rankest pre-Tangerine Faced Felon Republican smear was articulated by Republican hellhound Newt Gingrich, who pioneered the trick of tossing out incendiary lies while complaining that he was the victim of unfair attacks. He led the scorched-Earth opposition to Bill Clinton, who had the nerve to win a Presidential election.
In 1994, Gingrich linked Democrats to Susan Smith, a woman who had murdered her two children in 1991.
"I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things," he said. "The only way you get change is to vote Republican."
Democrats support a mother killing her children? That's gotta be worse than eating kitties for dinner in Ohio!
When Vice President Gore suggested this comment was de trop, the New York Times gave it a few paragraphs on page A21 and then forget about the whole thing, because, well, when you're The New York Times you don't have to give a reason.
(The Gingrich smear campaign worked. The next day, the Republicans won the midterms and permanently crippled Bill Clinton's Presidency.)
Speaking of the Times and its terrible coverage of Republican lies and smears since at least 1994, its brightest expositor of conventional wisdom and whatever, Maggie Haberman, has responded to the drum beat of criticism of their terrible work with an exciting scoop of her own.
According to her reporting, it's not that media critics are motivated by dread over the threat to American democracy posed by the Tangerine-Faced Fascist and the unwillingness of the media to report the objective truth that democracy and the rule of law are on the ballot this year.
That's not it.
The reason that critics are giving hacks like Maggie a hard time is because they are part of a vast industry which is apparently raking it in by daring to judge the quality of media coverage of the crisis of American democracy.
How did she know?
Here at the Spy, we have been cashing huge checks from this industry. In fact we were thinking of using our winnings to pick up a little vacation property.
John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, has listed his beachfront Caribbean mansion for $29.5 million https://t.co/zHUMAXfiTj
— Businessweek (@BW) September 20, 2024
By the way, it was nice of Maggie to admit in an interview that the old demented Republican nominee speaks “incoherently.” It would be even nicer if that obvious truth made it into her published coverage. It seems like an objective fact that voters might be interested in.
Another fact: repeating the kitties-on-the-grill smear without aggressively pointing out both its falsehood and the underlying bigotry works great – for Republicans.
According to the latest CBS News poll, 69% of TFF voters believe that immigrants are frying up both Tweety and Sylvester:
We'll submit that such insane results are strong evidence that Maggie and her brothers and sisters aren't doing their jobs.
No comments:
Post a Comment