Friday, October 18, 2019

Mulvaney "Bombshell" And Walkback Again Shows Media Problem In Covering Trumpies




"The most striking thing I heard is that this was the White House's defense, not the prosecution talking.  The defense was 'Hey, I did it! The President did it! So what?'  We've never heard this before. We never heard the White House confess to a high crime and misdemeanor. Because that's what this is, make no mistake about it. You go back to the Founders and ask what's the quintessential definition of an impeachable offense it's going an asking a foreign government o muck around in your elections. That's what the  Founders, Madison and others, were so worried about.  That's exactly what Mulvaney confessed to today."  -  Neal Katyal, former Acting Solicitor General in Obama White House, on 'Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell' last night.


House Intel Chair Adam Schiff had to leave a deposition he was getting from Gordon Sondland - another Trumpie in up to his eyeballs with the Ukraine incident - to see for himself Mick Mulvaney openly admitting more impeachable offenses in a White House news conference.  For 39 minutes this pissant slime  turned the press briefing room into a confessional openly admitting that Trump cut off funding to Ukraine in a quid pro quo move to shake down that nation unless it played ball to get dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.  Then the odious pig had the nerve to respond after his admission that "There is always going to be political influence in foreign affairs, get over it!"

Sorry pig, you just committed another impeachable offense on behalf of your master!  Why 'another'? Because earlier Mulvaney had announced that the site of the 2020 G7 meeting would be at Trump's Doral Country Club site - a fully owned Trump property. That means all the dollars pouring into that property from that meet will go into Trump's pocket, in violation of the domestic emoluments clause in the Constitution.  But to read some of the namby-pamby press coverage it was almost as if the upcoming meet at a Trump establishment had been normalized. The outrage? Next to zero, except on putatively liberal sites like MSNBC. 

Indeed, when the SC Republican bootlicker  reversed course a few hours later on the Ukraine admission, much of the media treated it as a simple correction.  Mulvaney had issued a statement that said the opposite of what he had said on camera earlier that afternoon, e.g.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Thursday walked back comments he made earlier in the day suggesting that President Donald Trump held up military aid to Ukraine until it moved to investigate a conspiracy involving the 2016 U.S. election.
“There was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election,” he said in a statement contradicting remarks he made during an earlier press briefing.

Again, as per usual with the Trumpies, the need for the humiliating “clarification,” for lack of a better word, was obvious. Mulvaney announced that the White House deliberately crafted a scheme in which it delayed military aid to a vulnerable ally in order to force the foreign country to participate in a political scheme for Donald Trump. His chief of staff not only confessed, but Mulvaney insisted the White House’s misdeeds were unimportant.  But then he tried to walk it all back after the initial media blowback and hullballoo.

This gave many of the less percipient - and of lower  intelligence-  an excuse  to again attack the media and cheer the most disgusting excuse for a president in history.  For example,  The Financial   Times header  yesterday evening had been: "Mulvaney Admits Quid Pro Quo in Ukraine Conversation"  but after the  Mulvaney walkback several FT commenters barked:  "The headline is wrong! It ought to read: 'White House issues confusing mixed messages!"

No, imp, the headline was correct, and there was no  need to dignify a lie by reporting it as news.  This again gets to the heart of why the press-media has so many problems covering Trump and his disinformation, propaganda cabal.  That includes, as Janice put it this  a.m. - after seeing a news clip- "making false equivalence between what Obama did in Syria in 2014 and what Trump just did in betraying the Kurds."

In another case, at a Trump rally in Big D,  we saw the depraved orange baboon reducing the Turks slaughter of the Kurds - in response to his wholesale withdrawal of U.S. forces - to a school  yard brawl.  Let us note hundreds of Kurds have already been slaughtered, many by use of white phosphorus. many dozens of them innocent kids.  Despite the fact we know Trump opened the door to this mayhem, e.g.


Trump bellowed to his crowd of raving zombies:

"It was unconventional what I did.I said sometimes they have to fight a little while.Like two kids in a lot you gotta let 'em fight, then pull 'em apart."

Rather than condemn this appalling analogy most media outlets (like CBS this morning) simply played it with no commentary as to its depraved nature in the context of what was unfolding before our eyes in Syria.  The least they could have done is played Sen. Mitt Romney's condemnation immediately after,

"The decision to abandon the Kurds violates one of our most sacred duties. It strikes at American honor. What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a blood stain in the annals of American history."

To compound this the press also left Trump off the hook by repeating his claim of a "ceasefire" with the Turks holding up their attacks for 5 days. In fact, they've done no such thing and they themselves refer to the "ceasefire" as a pause, though as Charlie Dageta reported this morning no one knows what the exact terms are or conditions only that later today "Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will meet with the region's  real power broker, Vladimir Putin."

The media's lukewarm  kid gloves coverage of Trump and his collaborators  bodes ill for next year and the media coverage of likely impeachment proceedings as well as the general election.  Will they get it right or normalize Trump's every tweet,  toxic remark, accusation or claim?  We shall have to wait to find out.



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Excerpt:

Gaslighting for Beginners


"The standard GOP gaslighting on Ukrainegate is beautifully exemplified by the columnist Marc Thiessen, a regular contributor to the Washington Post and a living rebuttal to the canard that the media leans left. Thiessen writes: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking foreign heads of state or intelligence officials to cooperate with an official Justice Department investigation.”

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