Kevin D. Williamson:
The problem with the man currently leading the Republican party is that he is, as the Washington Post puts it, a hostage to the “fanatical policies of the extreme right.” His administration “insults women” and his unwelcome presence in public life “insults us all.” And, because the Republican party is all about the winning these days, the GOP establishment is “ready to forgive” . . . what? . . . “just about anything — as long as he wins.”
So says the Post, which is not alone in this estimate: Extreme on economic issues, extreme on the so-called social issues, he even has had an “extreme foreign-policy makeover,” according to The Atlantic. His views on immigration, MSNBC says, represent the Republican party “shrinking down to its most extreme elements.” One cable-news panelist insists he was the most extreme Republican presidential candidate ever. Paul Krugman laments that he has forsaken all serious policy thinking for “dangerous fantasy.” Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is also alert to the “dangers” he presents, the “most dangerous of all” being his views on Iran, though Kristof also worries that he is too buddy-buddy with that awful, scheming Benjamin Netanyahu. Predictably, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow dogpiled him for his perplexing relationship with Moscow. Vice calls him a “sociopath” and Maureen Dowd dismissed him as “an out-of-touch plutocrat” who keeps “his true nature . . . buried where we can’t see it,” a devious figure who is so awful deep down inside that he “must hide an essential part of who he is” from the public.
President Mitt Romney sounds like he would have been a riot. Alas, his presidency never came to pass, thanks in no small part to the hysteria chronicled above. Every Republican president is “the most extreme ever,” or so Democrats and their media friends insist.
(“We do always say that,” one Democratic friend acknowledged. “And it is always true.” Well . . . )
In this corner, the American Press; in the opposite corner, the American President. The time has come for choosing sides — or so do many of our friends on the left and in the media (there is some crossover in that group) insist, as do more than a few of our friends on the right.
On Friday, I was scolded by Joe Hagan of New York magazine (he must have taken a break from the vital service he is offering to the republic at the moment, composing a biography of Jann Wenner) for daring to criticize my media colleagues in the age of Trump, “since you are supposedly a journalist.” It is, he insisted, “as if you, as a conservative, can’t see objective reality along with somebody you assume is a political opposite.” No, it is as if the American news media is predictably biased and incompetent, and would be writing almost precisely what it is writing about Donald Trump if the election had been won by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, or Pat Sajak. Or, as the example above shows, Mitt Romney, who is a great many things (some of them admirable) but hardly an “extremist” or a “danger” to the republic.
It is possible, if you are not mentally crippled, to hold your mind two non-exclusive ideas: Donald J. Trump stinks, and the press stinks. Trump’s spat with the press is a bloodless Iran–Iraq war, and I myself am cheering for (metaphorical) casualties. If you find yourself only able to focus on which party stinks worse, then you have adopted the pre-kindergarten “binary choice” rhetoric of the campaign, in which both Trump and Clinton supporters insisted that we must ignore the obvious character defects, financial shenanigans, lies, and foolishness of A or B on the theory that B or A is so much worse that we simply cannot acknowledge any shortcomings on the other side.
Those of us who have not entirely surrendered our neocortices to one cable-news tribe or the other are perfectly capable of criticizing Trump and criticizing the media.
Of course the American media is terrible. Everybody knows this. Everybody who follows the public debate about guns, taxes, or abortion knows this. Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, knows this, which is why he sheepishly acknowledged that the so-called Newspaper of Record and its editors “don’t get religion.” And that is just a little bit of what they don’t get. Other senior editors at major media outlets know this, too. The people who run the Washington Post know this. The reflexive Democratic affiliation of most of the major media is a simple fact of life that you’d have to be foolish or dishonest to deny: Hell, I got the business about being a conservative when I was being considered for a copy-editor’s job a million years ago at the Philadelphia Inquirer—working in the sports section.
IRONY ALERT:
Marjorie Merriweather Post had Mar-a-Lago constructed in Palm Beach in the 1920s as a magnificent mansion, which she bequeathed to the U.S. government to serve as a winter retreat for the president.
Jack Kennedy spent many a weekend at the mansion in Palm Beach during his sadly brief presidency.
But Carter nixed that, and put the mansion on the market.
Donald Trump bought it and now — lo and behold — it is a retreat for the president.
NPR does not like that. Not one bit.
Why, The Donald is holding up traffic in the tony resort town.
NPR existed in the ’60’s.
Did we hear such criticism back then?
No.
Liberals are complete hypocrites.
We all know by now the main stream news media are in the pockets of the demacrat party why else do they always support the demacrats in every election and their obamas bootlickers and appologists
The Republicans will be in big trouble if the Democrats ever could tell the truth. Right now, they are the party who cried wolf too many times.
If the mired swamp media were so useful, where is their honest reporting? I watch the same news events that they do. I am not a journalist. But I certainly see things very differently than the MSM. Where they see division, I see re-uniting. Where they see blatant discrimination, I see a man who wants to uphold the law. Where they see bias, I see a man judging on competence.
It is really about a different set of eyes. As the old saying goes, “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
John Nolte is swamped. Poor guy is trying to keep track of the lies. He just can’t do it. There are too many. Where is the Hercules to chop off all the heads of the Hydra? His name is Trump, Donald J.
He is from New York.
@Randy: Then obviously they have nothing to worry about.