Columnist.
The election has passed, and the American people gave the spoiled celebrities of Hollywood the heave-ho. Despite all of their earnest YouTube lectures and pro-Hillary Clinton concerts and campaign appearances, the next president is Donald Trump. Little did they realize that John Q. Public is done with these multi-multimillionaires positing themselves as champions of the working class, or even more remarkable, the downtrodden.
CNN's Brian Stelter sent around an Election Day email declaring "This is the year of the fact-checker." He joked, "Trump made fact-checking great again." "It's really remarkable to see how big news operations have come around to challenging false and deceitful claims directly. It's about time," said Brooks Jackson, the director emeritus of FactCheck.org. PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan said, "All of the media has embraced fact-checking because there was a story that really needed it." She was singling out Trump: "(T)he level of inaccuracy is startling." PolitiFact founder Bill Adair boasted: "Is this the post-truth election, as people have claimed? No. It's actually the thank-goodness-there-are-fact-checkers election."
While most of America was transfixed by Game 7 of the World Series, Fox News Channel was doggedly pursuing a new story: The FBI's probe into pay-for-play schemes at the Clinton Foundation and the State Department has been far more expansive than anyone reported so far and has been going on for more than a year. FBI sources even warned there could be indictments down the road.
Rush Limbaugh found just the right analogy for the CNN cheating scandal, where (now) former CNN analyst Donna Brazile fed "town hall" questions to Hillary Clinton. It's the quiz-show scandal of the 1950s, where Charles Van Doren was given the questions on the NBC game show "Twenty-One" in advance and looked like a genius on national television. Van Doren later apologized to America, saying, "I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them."
The liberals at Esquire magazine asked a question almost no one else is asking in the last weeks of this campaign: "Why Are Influential Celebrities Remaining Silent This Election?" As if anyone is thirsting for more political utterances from people who are best known for their acting or singing or joking. Esquire's Mark Miller was overtaken by panic: "A shockingly large number of Americans are prepared to make a reality TV star the ruler of the free world. Celebrities literally have the attention of millions of adoring fans at their fingertips, and it's hard to deny these people's influence."
The WikiLeaks email trove is revealing more than the servility of "objective" reporters trying to please Hillary Clinton and her aides. It's revealing the press strategy of Clinton and her aides — how they seek to praise reporters, even as they arrogantly stonewall them. One internal campaign email exchange is salient. It discusses Clinton speaking at a Syracuse University event for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, which is so named for the deceased liberal New York Times political correspondent Robin Toner. Clinton had been invited as a keynote speaker.
In the aftermath of the final presidential debate, some pundits were struck dead that Donald Trump would be so rude as to describe Hillary Clinton as a "nasty woman." Would you like a lesson in the meaning of hypocrisy? Let's see what their colleagues said about Trump after the debate. On Comedy Central, "The Daily Show" host Trevor Noah described Trump as a "giant novelty dildo ... on stage behind the podium." On CBS, "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert mocked Trump's rear end, saying, "I guess we're all going to have to wait until Nov. 9 to find out if we still have a country — if Donald Trump is the mood for a peaceful transfer of power, or if he's just gonna wipe his fat ass with the Constitution."
On Oct. 16 on his CNN show "Reliable Sources," host Brian Stelter took the denial of liberal media bias to a new level. In the wake of hundreds of emails underlining media-Democrat collusion, he insisted that every American should deny the evidence: "In Trump's world, journalists are really just (Hillary) Clinton campaign workers in disguise, collaborating with her in an attempt to rig the election. This is not just false. It's ludicrous, and it's damaging." On what planet does this man live? Even by Clinton News Network standards, this is ridiculous.
We once scoffed at the suggestion there was some form of a liberal media conspiracy against conservatives. Do liberals meet for breakfast and plan attacks on their ideological foes? Of course not, we'd answer. It's not a conspiracy. It's a mindset wherein what is liberal is good, and what is conservative is in opposition to what is good. Apparently it was a conspiracy after all. The latest emails emerging from WikiLeaks have brought in the evidence. There is an unquestionable collusion between "objective" journalists and the Clinton campaign. Leaked emails show that her operatives discuss which reporters were the most pliant recyclers of their narratives (they picked Maggie Haberman of The New York Times). But reporter Mark Leibovich — also from the Times — gave Clinton's communications director, Jen Palmieri, veto power over quotes to be included in a Clinton profile in July.
In the election cycle dominated by Donald Trump, it should not be much of a shock that the first October Surprise came from "Access Hollywood." In a 2005 outtake, Trump told then-"Access" co-host Billy Bush how he could rudely grab women's genitals and get away with it because "when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." They say it was a recent discovery. No media October Surprise there. No, siree. Smelling Trump's blood in the water, the Clinton-enabling press sprung into action. None of them seemed to reflect for 5 seconds about how Trump could be describing Bill Clinton's modus operandi. Trump talked as Clinton did. The press' moral outrage was as phony as Hillary Clinton's. "This is horrific," Clinton shamelessly tweeted. "We cannot allow this man to become president."
Staff Sgt. Chad Robichaux is a Marine who developed post-traumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of eight tours in Afghanistan. After years of suffering, he now runs a counseling program dedicated to helping veterans avoid suicide, divorce and other attendant problems. He knows from his own experience that a faith-based approach works. Our government — allergic to faith-based programs — isn't really interested, especially under President Barack Obama. So when Donald Trump came to a meeting of the Retired American Warriors PAC on Oct. 3, Robichaux asked a question: "Spiritual fitness works on these types of problems. The government is not taking advantage of these programs and services. So my question for you is, when you become president, will you support and fund a more holistic approach to solve the problems and issues of veteran suicide, PTSD, TBI and other related military mental and behavioral health issues?"
On Oct. 2, The New York Times published an admittedly "fragmentary" front-page story about Donald Trump's taxes. Just three pages were cited: the first page of the state tax returns Trump filed in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut in 1995. The Times reported that Trump claimed a $916 million loss, which could — emphasis on "could" — have allowed him to avoid paying federal taxes for "up to 18 years." The story was stuffed with speculation about what Trump may have potentially done. The Times was typically harsh in tone. The tax records "reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind" with his financial "mismanagement." A tax expert declared that Trump "has a vast benefit from his destruction" in the early 1990s, like he was Hurricane Donald.
ABC debuted the sitcom "Modern Family" in 2009 in part to push a broader acceptance of same-sex couples. But the cultural deconstructionists cannot rest until the mission is complete, so then they pushed it even further, agitating for a broader acceptance of same-sex marriage as just as sacred as traditional marriage. Now, the deconstructionists are doing it again, this time pushing transgender acceptance...with a transgender child actor. This new initiative came just a few weeks after transgender actors became the latest social justice cause pushed at the Emmy Awards. When he accepted a highly politicized Emmy award for the second year in a row, Jeffrey Tambor of "Transparent" pleaded that he should be the last "cisgender" actor — an actor who "identifies" with his or her biological sex — to play a transgender on television. He said: "Please give transgender talent a chance. Give them auditions. Give them their story."
Washington Post reporter Callum Borchers should win some kind of award for the worst pre-debate spin. He tried to defend NBC anchor and presidential debate host Lester Holt: "It turns out Holt is actually a registered Republican. Trump still might find things to complain about Monday night, but a case for partisan bias against him will be tough to make." Right after the debate, despite all evidence, the Post's Chris Cillizza doubled down, saying: "Want a testament to how well Holt did? I guarantee you no one is talking about him tomorrow. That's a win."
The Sept. 26 issue of Time magazine cover featured the heads of comedians Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel, and the headline "We Joke. You Decide." The allusion to the Fox News tagline was deliberate. The subheadline declared that they would report on "The seriously partisan politics of late-night comedy." Finally, liberals are acknowledging what conservatives have claimed for years. Inside, the headline was "The New Politics of Late Night." And writer Richard Zoglin began the article saying, "In a wild election with a ripe orange target, comics are ditching balance and taking sides." Zoglin started with a collection of Bee stingers, calling her description of the Republican convention a "poorly attended rage-athon of hemorrhoidal has-beens."
The latest Gallup poll confirms that the level of trust in the media has reached another new low. The percentage of Republicans who hold a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in the press has dropped precipitously to 14 percent, begging the question: Who are the 14 percent who are comfortable with the nonstop tirade against them? It's no accident these numbers emerge while the liberal press slams the GOP nominee as too dangerous to be allowed to win. Public trust is on the line when moderators line up for the presidential debates. Will they be fair, or will they decide "history" is too important, and pound on Donald Trump before a national audience? Some won't.
Any American who has sought refuge from politics by escaping into the world of sports realizes now that there is no escaping politics. In the last few months, it has become completely impossible to follow sports without being lectured about the oppressive ways of the United States, and its failures to achieve the highest of today's cultural goals: "inclusion." Leave that word in quotation marks because in the guise of "inclusion" people will be most righteously excluded. In the name of "tolerance," those condemned for intolerance will be boycotted and punished, unless they genuflect to ever-evolving "anti-discrimination" dictates.
The CNN screen graphic at 6 p.m. on Sept. 12 was blunt: "PENCE REFUSED TO CALL DAVID DUKE 'DEPLORABLE.'" Donald Trump running mate Mike Pence had granted Wolf Blitzer a 30-minute interview, and what he received in return was a reckless leftist smear. Let's be clear about this interview. Blitzer offered 39 hostile questions or interjections about Trump's tax returns, medical records and charities, and made offensive remarks before asking a single question about policy. In the middle of this contentious exchange, Blitzer arrived at Hillary Clinton's recent gaffe of calling Trump backers a "basket of deplorables." Blitzer obnoxiously underlined that some Trump backers were truly deplorable: "David Duke, for example, (and) some other white nationalists, (would) fit into that category of deplorables. Right?"
Imagine a miniseries that has at its center a cynical, corrupt President Obama who arrogantly tells a minister, "I don't have any sins to confess." Standing in front of an adoring crowd, the president says: "I am a contradiction. I am God." He tells an enemy, "I am willing to wage war against you without end!" Then Obama proclaims, "They chose a president they didn't know, and today, they begin to understand!" An interlocutor asks, "What do you intend to do?" He responds, "Revolution!" This miniseries casting Obama as an evil schemer and a revolutionary with a God complex has never been made, and it would certainly never air on a powerful American channel. So, consider all the quotes you just read. In fact, this plot is reminiscent of a trailer for an HBO miniseries about the first American pope.
NBC "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd began his pundit-panel segment on Sept. 4 by remarking: "Nobody cares about the damn emails. That's what Bernie Sanders famously said. I couldn't believe when I looked at the time stamp, October of 2015. ...We are now at September of 2016. Somebody cares about them." Apparently the political director at NBC News isn't in that "somebody" camp. When it comes to Clinton scandals, he has what Donald Trump calls "low energy."
