Peggy Noonan Uses "Godfather Pt. II" Script To Claim Trump's Insult Of the Fallen Was Merely A Case Of "Family Loyalty"

As I noted in previous posts,  WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan can no longer be trusted to provide a rational or halfway objective take on Trump.  Noonan, in a misfire last month ('The Democrats Miss The Meaning' Aug. 22-23, p. A13):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-miss-the-meaning-11597980333

claimed that the Dems at their convention "beat the crap out of the country" -   which was a gross misinterpretation.   As I had to point out in my Aug. 27 post, they in fact,  beat the crap out of what TRUMP has let the country become. As Tim O'Brien  aptly pointed out (Bloomberg News):

"Trumpism has fostered a cult of personality around Trump, allowing him to posture as the final arbiter of truth and guardian of the downtrodden. But division, chaos an disrepair - and the corruption of the American experiment - are the long term consequences."

Hence, no good thing can really be said of our nation until and unless the Trump pestilence  is totally eliminated. Only then can we rebuild the nation to what it was,  what it could be.  Even now as I write this Trump is soiling more of the office of the presidency with his lies and flouting of norms, including saying (yesterday at an ABC Town Hall) "I didn't downplay the virus, I upgraded it!"  in answer to an undecided voter's question.  WTF?  Does this walking turd think voters are stupid?  They already heard him admit to downplaying it on tape!  (Thanks to Bob Woodward, author of 'RAGE' - which I am now reading.)

A day earlier, at a California forum in the midst of the state's wild fires, the little orange fucktard actually said: it "will get cooler, wait and see"  and also that the fires were from poor forest management.   Then having his deranged mutt and henchman Michael Caputo troll about "left wing hit squads"  threatening Trump's zombies near the election.  Oh yeah, and CDC scientists committing "sedition" against Trump.

 Then you also have the spectacle of a notorious criminal like Roger Stone (whose sentence was commuted by Trump, i.e.  for Stone's nefarious involvement in the Russia conspiracy). No surprise Stone is now  demanding Trump declare martial law for the election and lock up Dems.  And let's not forget a toady like Bill Barr fouling the DOJ and about to let another lackey - John Durham- release a twisted and bogus "report" on the Russia probe.  By 'twisted' I mean going after the investigators (FBI, Mueller, etc.) when in fact the Trump campaign's cooperation with the Russians was masterfully exposed in the  recently released  966 page final instalment of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, entitled :  “Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities,”

But all that isn't enough for the hare-brained Noonan (who temporarily mustered enough brain power  6 weeks ago to say Trump ought to resign) reverting to blind Trump love in her latest twaddle

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-loyalty-and-the-godfather-11599779600

 Therein seeking to defend Trump's mocking of the fallen by appeal to the "family" script for The Godfather Pt. II.  Before that, Peggy trots out friends of hers who confide in her they still plan to vote for Trump despite acknowledging - as one did that:

"Donald Trump is a boorish, narcissistic, self aggrandizing, petulant child who has sown significant discord among my fellow citizens.  He has little knowledge of his current job description or limitations.”

No, you can't make this shit up.  But one supposes Peggy is happy to expose friends even dumber and less insightful than she is.   It's all relative in Trump World, after all. This turkey she quotes then has the absolute temerity to assert one reason for his misgivings about Biden is that he "does exhibit a degree of obvious cognitive impairment".   Which is choice given Trump - aka the Dotard- can barely pass a basic test for  early Alzheimer's patients.  And who, in the real realm we live in, actually believes the California wildfires  aren't from climate change,  adding, "Yes it will get cooler you'll see."    For which any thinking citizen would instantly award an IQ of ....10.  Biden, the supposed mental slacker, at least had the insight, awareness and gumption to refer to Trump as a "climate arsonist" which is what he is.  Give him four more years and watch the remainder of the country either burn up or be flooded out - as he trashes even more environmental regulations and puts more toadies into agencies - like he just  did at the NOAA.   See  e.g.

As The West Burns, Trump Appoints a Climate Science Denier to NOAA

But Noonan outdoes herself for pure stupidity, nonsense and gullibility when she devotes an entire fourth of her  WSJ column to the Godfather  II script to provide fictional support for Dotard denigrating troops.  I reproduce the relevant section below for readers directly from the paper.   I do this because it has more impact than reading the words from the link above.   Again she is using this as counterpoint to the Atlantic piece by Michael Goldberg, e.g.

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are 'Losers ... - The Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/

She is resorting to this pathetic ploy to try to make the specious case that - like Sonny's family loyalty emphasis in the Godfather II movie-   Trump is also about family loyalty which trumps any military service, or higher respect for the military. 

Read her words carefully, and you will see she takes this fictional script seriously and as a worthwhile template to defend (or at least justify)  Trump's deplorable words in referring to active military (and fallen military) as "suckers" and "losers".   Indeed, Noonan ends her idiocy writing this:

"Mr. Trump would know that scene well. Perhaps it gave him a higher rationale for claiming bone spurs in his deferment during Vietnam. It wasn’t selfishness, disagreement with the war, cowardice. It was loyalty to family."

Again, this is verbatim from this WSJ harpy's loopy piece.  Oh no, it wasn't cowardice, despite the fact that Trump got his "bonespurs"  I-Y exemption from a note written by a quack. Not from actually having to undergo a full  4 ½   hour draft physical as I did in March, 1965 (sent the notice to report -to the shock of Biever Hall dorm mates -  while in the middle of my 2nd semester as a Loyola University freshman.)

And lordy be, it wasn't selfishness that led to his calling the fallen at Belleau Wood "losers" and "suckers" - it was merely "loyalty" to his family.  If Noonan really believes this she ought to resign her columnist position instantly.  Oh wait, she is in the op-ed pages of the WSJ -  which editorial board Joe Scarborough unleashed a classic rant against barely a week ago.

The country is going to hell in a proverbial hand basket thanks to Trump and his gangsters, and Peggy Noonan prefers we worry more about Joe Biden and the Dems being "socialists".   While giving cover to Trump's abominable dismissing of military war dead,  using  a fictional Mafia movie script.

Pardon me while I barf.

See Also:

Cody Fenwick

7 Ridiculous Moments from Trump’s Town Hall Train Wreck

by Cody Fenwick | September 16, 2020 - 8:01am | permalink

— from Alternet


AND:

Trump's Big Lies Reveal a Truth: Right-wing Science Denial Was Never about Ignorance, Just Cruelty

by Amanda Marcotte | September 16, 2020 - 7:39am | permalink

— from Salon

Battling The Excesses Of An Authoritarian Demagogue? Don't Look To FaceBook's Mark Zuckerberg

"You did GOOD, Mark! Defending my lies from those nannies at Twitter!"

"This order is a reactionary and politicized approach to a landmark law. It threatens the future of online speech and internet freedoms"
 - Twitter response to Trump's executive order designed to regulate existing law toward authoritarian ends

"President Trump  said Twitter is trying to censor him and he wants to use his presidential  power to crack down on them.":  - CBS reporter Paula Reid this morning

"I see this order as just a distraction intended to divert attention from the devastation of Covid 19"- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi


What is Trump's game and why is he really so furious at the prospect of mail voting?  It is because he's been exposed as the shameless con man he is for trying to manage perceptions about the virus and he knows a majority of citizens aren't buying his act. Hence, with the economy cratering too (40 million now unemployed) he has nowhere to go but down - and certainly will be blown out in November. That is, unless he can get enough states to back off mail ballots using his fulminations and "terrible twos" -style  of  tantrums

In his latest con, Trump issued an "executive order" yesterday in retaliation for Twitter putting flags on his lying tweets about  voting, e.g.

.

The flag simply read:  'Get the facts about mail voting'  

Simply a heads up to those who gobble Trump's tweets with zero discrimination.  Certainly not "censorship" as the Right's crybabies are trying to portray.  But leave it to Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook honcho, to try to offer his absurd two cents.  Likely terrified of Trump's twitter fulminations, Zuckerberg and his other spokesmen tried to defend their own cowardly stance by saying (WSJ yesterday,  p. A4):

"We prefer not to be an arbiter of truth"

But given Trump's outrageous lies about mail voting, it's clear Zuckerberg has no problem being an enabler of lies.   What else could he be? Because if you're not prepared to at least flag lies when they appear - irrespective of the source- then you and your platform are useless. Worse,  you're contributing to the ongoing national polarization.

Zuckerberg and his ilk have always taken the position of laissez faire social media speech and they just assume FB users are grown up enough to engage in "robust debate" and recognize falsehoods when and where they appear. But that is a helluva ask, especially after Russian bots overloaded Facebook's boards back in 2016, playing no small part in Hillary's narrow electoral college loss. Oh, and seeing a record for retweets of the bots' anti- HRC balderdash.   As per a WSJ piece from Oct. 17, 2017 (p. B2):

 "470 Russia-backed Facebook accounts including Blacktivist and Secured Borders quietly infiltrated communities on social media. The issues they targeted spanned the U.S. political and social spectrum, including religion, race, immigration, gun rights, and gay rights. "

Adding:

"Facebook said the accounts were created by Russian entities to exploit tensions among Americans and interfere with U.S. elections

 Yep, Markie, there's a lot of insight for truth there! 

According to one FB spokesperson quoted in the WSJ piece:

"We have crafted our policies to focus on misrepresentations that would interfere with the vote."

Well, if Trump's deranged tweets against mail ballots aren't doing that, I don't know what would qualify.  The scumball is blatant and aggressive in his  single-minded campaign and even had the temerity to screech Wednesday:

"Clean up your act NOW!"

This from a Turd  whose own act has been one prolonged exercise in authoritarian depravity and irresponsibility. This is the same president who on Thursday Tweeted out a video of a supporter saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”  A  classless degenerate who's hurled the office of  the presidency further  into the gutter in the last week with his attacks on Joe Scarborough  for allegedly killing a woman.(Lori Klausutis)  when she worked as part of Scarborough's staff when he was a FLA congressman.   This despite a medical examiner's report that Lori had a heart condition which caused her to lose consciousness,  fall and hit her head.  

Thus, Trump is using her as his own political football  against perceived enemies as he causes the family no end of grief and pain.   But why be surprised when he's directly responsible for tens of thousands of  COVID 19 deaths for not acting in a competent and responsible manner? For initially calling the virus a hoax, wasting a valuable 2 weeks before acting,  which a Columbia University study disclosed probably resulted in 54,000 more deaths.

As for his executive order to try to punish Twitter, don't make me laugh.  Incredibly before signing his order yesterday the fool blabbed (WSJ, p. A1 today) :

"We're here today to defend free speech from  one of its greatest dangers."

Failing to have the self-awareness or intellect to grasp that HE   - as an autocratic demagogue -  is the singular greatest danger to liberty and that his lies are a perversion of  free speech.

 Here it is useful to go to the Wikipedia entry:

"There is no constitutional provision nor statute that explicitly permits executive orders. The term executive power in Article II, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution refers to the office of President as the executive. They are instructed therein by the declaration "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" made in Article II, Section 3, Clause 5 or face impeachment. Most executive orders use these Constitutional reasonings as the authorization allowing for their issuance to be justified as part of the President's sworn duties, the intent being to help direct officers of the U.S. Executive carry out their delegated duties as well as the normal operations of the federal government: the consequence of failing to comply possibly being removal from office"

In other words, these more comport with a wish list based on appeals or pleas from a president to the legislative branch to formalize into law what he seeks to do. In Trump's case, most legal experts note his scribbles on fancy paper are "essentially toothless" - they don't change existing federal law- nor can they without formal legislative input. Hence, only congress has the power to curtail Twitter's legal protections.

As Mike Masnick of Techdirt explained:

To be clear: the executive order is nonsense. You can’t overrule the law by executive order, nor can you ignore the Constitution. This executive order attempts to do both. It’s also blatantly anti-free speech, anti-private property, pro-big government — which is only mildly amusing, given that Trump and his sycophantic followers like to insist they’re the opposite of all of those things.

As for Zuckerberg's act and the insipid claims of supporting "free speech" I was gratified to see one professor (Bridget Barrett) call  it out in the WSJ piece.  As she aptly noted:

"To give a less kind reading of that, they (Facebook) want to stay friends with the folks who are regulating them."

As for the two Trump tweets that were flagged, they were:

"There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent"

And then: "This will be a Rigged Election!"   

Both hysterical expulsions I'd more expect from a high school sophomore who flunked his Government class.  And as Ms. Barrett of UNC Chapel Hill pointed out:

  "The posts appeared to violate two of Facebook's own rules around voter interference which bar posts that  misrepresent methods for voting and whether votes will be counted."

Again, that makes Zuckerberg a liar enabler, as well as a punk for Trump, to help spread his bunkum.   In the meantime, kudos to Twitter for continuing to courageously flag Trump's most outrageous tweets - including beckoning "shooters"  to fire at the "thugs"  in Minneapolis.   While  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has taken some heat for being too mild in response to Trump's flagrant speech crimes, he is at least doing something!  That's more than can be said for Mark Zuckerberg and his "clown car" of Trump enablers and sycophants at Facebook.

See Also:
Anything to get reelected: Trump once more stokes violence 

And:

• White supremacists are thriving on Facebook, despite its promises to crack down 

And:

Donald Trump

Twitter Put up a Fact-check — so Trump Threw a Tantrum

by Cody Fenwick | May 29, 2020 - 7:11am | permalink

— from Alternet

More Reasons Why The U.S. Media Is Incompetent In Covering Trump, Impeachment, Or The Republicans

Other takes on why the press isn't up to the job of covering the impeachment, Trump or the Repugs:

Media

Donald Trump | Media

2019, the Year the Press Tried—and Failed—to Stand up to Trump

Excerpt:

With Donald Trump becoming the first American president to be impeached in his first term, while holed up in the White House tweeting endless attacks around the clock like some internet troll, 2019 should have been the year the Beltway media finally shed its signature timidity and forcefully stood up to him. This should have been the year the press worked up the courage to disband the pointless protocols newsroom had established for covering Trump (he's not a "liar," he's not a "racist"), and simply started telling the hard truths about him. And while there were some welcome flashes of truth-telling, especially surrounding the Ukraine scandal and impeachment, for the most part the D.C. press still hasn't signaled that's it's ready, or willing, to take the necessary steps needed to cover Trump.

There continues to be a collective reluctance to grapple with today's difficult reality. Unfamiliar with covering authoritarian regimes or how to respond to them, many news outlets remain committed to treating Trump's spectacle as a reality TV show.

Media

The Media Is down in the Gutter with Trump

Excerpt:

So much has been written about Donald Trump’s debasement of rhetorical norms and his gleeful contempt for truth that there is no need to cite examples or quote studies that count the profligacy of his lies. Trump’s attacks on journalists—“fake news,” mocking a disabled reporter’s body movements—are contemptible. They undermine citizens’ trust in news media, a serious menace to democracy and civil society.

Less noticed is how major news organizations, incensed by the president’s trolling, have debased themselves to Trump’s moral level. American journalism used to adhere to strict standards. Though impossible to achieve, objectivity was paramount. At bare minimum, reporters were expected to project an appearance of political neutrality.

Truth only derived from facts—verifiable facts. Not conjecture and never wishful thinking. Sources who wanted to be quoted had to go on the record. Anonymous sources could flesh out background but could not be the entire basis for a story.

From the start of Trump’s run for president—before the start—Democratic-leaning media outlets abandoned their own long-cherished standards to declare war on him. Every day during the 2016 campaign The New York Times led its coverage with its forecast of Hillary Clinton’s supposed odds of defeating Trump. Setting aside the fact of the Times’ embarrassing wrongness—the day before Election Day they gave Clinton an 85% chance of winning—it cited odds rather than polls. Maximizing a sense of Clintonian inevitability was intended to demoralize Republicans so they wouldn’t turn out to vote. The two figures might mean the same thing. But 85-15 odds look worse than a 51-49 poll.

It’s downright truthy. And when truthiness goes sideways it makes you look really, really dumb. 51-49 could go either way. 85-15, not so much.

The impeachment battle marks a new low in partisanship among media outlets.

Eric Boehlert

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Media | Republicans

The Press Doesn't Have—or Won't Use—the Proper Language to Describe Today's Radical Republican Party

by Eric Boehlert | December 9, 2019 - 8:12am | 

Excerpt:

Extreme times call for extreme measures, but the Beltway press just isn't willing to make that move in the Trump era. As a consequence, the news media fail to accurately capture the radical changes now underway in the country, and how today's Republican Party has become purposefully untethered from reality.

Donald Trump remains a resolutely radical player who has eviscerated decades of protocols and traditions. Yet so much of the press refuses to cover him that way, opting instead to cling to Beltway traditions for how presidents are normally covered (i.e. We can't call him a liar!). But as the high-profile impeachment hearings confirm (along with Trump's recent disastrous and embarrassing trip to the NATO summit), new and bolder language is needed to accurately describe what's transpiring.

Under Trump, we're all in uncharted territories, and that includes the press. We have never had a major political party in this country, for instance, that openly condones seeking help from foreign powers in order to win domestic elections, the way Republicans now do. We've never had a political party that essentially absolves the president of the United States of all crimes and misdemeanors, simply because he has an 'R' next to his name. Meaning: The press has never before faced the challenge of how to cover and describe what was once a mainstream political party but has since evolved into a deeply radical one. For now, much of the news media is simply pretending that historic GOP shift hasn't taken place, and therefore there's no need to dramatically adjust the coverage.

But it has, and there is.

The media's stubborn failure to adjust is now advertised daily. For instance, last week CNN's John King and a roundtable of Beltway pundits expressed complete shock at a new poll that found 53% of Republicans said that Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln was. If those pundits had closely followed the radical evolution of the GOP in recent years and been honest with news consumers about its descent into cult worship, there's simply no way they would be utterly bewildered at Republicans' belief today that Trump's a better president than Lincoln. But if you've strained mightily to pretend Democrats and Republicans are mirror opposites of each other and advocate equally mainstream, fact-based positions, than yes, you'd be shocked by the Lincoln finding.

It's the same reason that the percentage share of Republicans who say presidents could operate more effectively if they didn't have to worry about Congress and the courts increased 16 percentage points over the past year, according to the Pew Research Center. 

.......The impeachment saga poses the most obvious challenge for the press as virtually the entire Republican Party now backs absurd lies about Ukraine. "The inchoate and unproved nature of the Republican case against Ukraine has not prevented several GOP leaders from taking up the cause," The Washington Post recently reported, as the paper examined the Republican Party's embrace of the "incendiary conspiracy" that Ukraine worked to try to get Hillary Clinton elected in 2016.

With "inchoate and unproven," the paper clearly tried to convey the sense that Republicans were peddling untruths— without unequivocally stating that Republicans now lie about almost everything, including the garbage Ukraine claim, which has been pushed publicly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Fact: No U.S. intelligence community report has ever accused Ukraine of interfering in the election. Trump, of course, is accused of using $400 million in United States military assistance to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden.

"Some Republican lawmakers continue to misleadingly say that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election on the same level as Russia, despite the GOP-led committee looking into the matter and finding little to support the allegation," CNN's Jake Tapper recently wrote. But again, we're not talking about Republicans trying to artfully spin a story in their favor by being "misleading." We're talking about Republican making stuff up, plain and simple. And the press should say so. 

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John Atcheson

Media

The Missing Stories: Three Big Issues the Media Is Missing

Excerpt:

If journalism is the first draft of history, the press is missing three of the biggest stories of our time. Of course, the Democrats’ inability to articulate anything like a coherent message doesn’t help. Let’s take a look at what they’re missing.

Republicans’ blockade of legislation

Mitch McConnell’s legislative blockade has gotten some attention, although nowhere near as much as it deserves. As of July of this year, the House had sent over 49 major bills, including such popular measures as lowering the cost of prescription drugs, protecting people from being dropped by insurance companies for preexisting conditions, insuring fair elections, requiring background checks for gun purchases, climate legislation – the list is extensive and important. Yet each of these – which are supported by the vast majority of Americans – has been blocked by McConnell and his Republican Senate.

As bad as McConnell’s do-nothing Senate has been, it is only a symptom of a much more serious disease. Specifically, Republicans know little about governing, and care less. This is because they are essentially anti-government.

One of the most dangerous failures of the press is to label as extreme, that which is merely prudent, particularly when the majority of Americans support it. Indeed, one wonders how things like the Green New Deal or Medicare for All or increased taxes on the rich can be called extreme when they are supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans. An extremist position is defined as an outlier – as furthest from the center -- so who, exactly is it that gets to define ideas with 60, 70 or more percent support – the very definition of the center -- as “extreme?”

The answer, of course, is corporations, the rich, and the politicians and mainstream media who are owned in whole or in part, by them.  The absurdity and extremism of America’s “wealth not health” care system is best captured by the reaction of British folks of all stripes when they learn of the costs of that system to real people.

But the press ignores both McConnel’s malfeasance, and the larger issue of a significant portion of the country electing anti-government extremists to …well … govern.

2020 Elections | Democrats | Media

Corporate Media's Mantra Is 'Anyone But Sanders or Warren'

Excerpt:

Anyone who’s been paying attention should get the picture by now. Overall, in subtle and sledgehammer ways, the mass media of the United States—owned and sponsored by corporate giants—are in the midst of a siege against the two progressive Democratic candidates who have a real chance to be elected president in 2020.

Some of the prevalent media bias has taken the form of protracted swoons for numerous "center lane" opponents of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The recent entry of Michael Bloomberg has further jammed that lane, adding a plutocrat "worth" upwards of $50 billion to a bevy of corporate politicians.

The mainline media are generally quite warm toward so-called "moderates," without bothering to question what's so moderate about such positions as bowing to corporate plunder, backing rampant militarism and refusing to seriously confront the climate emergency.

The disconnect between voters and corporate media is often huge. Meanwhile, with fly-on-the-wall pretenses, media outlets that have powerfully distorted proposals like Medicare for All are now reporting (with thinly veiled satisfaction) that voters are cool to those proposals.

The Washington Post, owned by one of the world's richest people Jeff Bezos, has routinely spun Medicare for All as some sort of government takeover. In a prominent Nov. 30 news story that largely attributed Warren's recent dip in polls to her positioning on healthcare, the Post matter-of-factly—and falsely—referred to Medicare for All as "government-run healthcare" and "a government-run health plan."

Such pervasive mass-media reporting smoothed the way for deceptions that have elevated Pete Buttigieg in polls during recent weeks with his deceptive "Medicare for All Who Want It" slogan. That rhetoric springboards from the false premises that Medicare for All would deprive people of meaningful choice and would somehow reduce coverage.

In late September, with scant media scrutiny, Buttigieg launched an ad campaign against Medicare for All that has continued. Using insurance-industry talking points, he is deliberately confusing the current "choice" of predatory for-profit insurance plans with the genuine full choice of healthcare providers that top-quality Medicare for everyone would offer.

Mainstream media outlets are ill-positioned to refute such distortions since they're routinely purveying such distortions themselves.

And:

Eric Boehlert

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CNN

CNN Has yet Another GOP Problem

Excerpt:

Last winter, CNN for weeks stood by its extraordinary and inexplicable decision to hire Sarah Isgur Flores, a career Republican Party operative with absolutely no journalism experience, to be the network’s political editor. A hardcore partisan, Isgur spent her career spinning for Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, and Carly Fiorina. Until last year, Isgur worked as a spokesperson for then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice. CNN staffers were reportedly demoralized by the Isgur move—and for good reason, since CNN political editors should be journalists, period.

If CNN wants to hire conservatives like Isgur to go on camera and bolster Trump talking points, that's the network's choice. But to hire someone with Isgur's resume to work behind the scenes and oversee campaign coverage remains a baffling decision to this day. "Her Twitter includes fact-free invectives against liberals and repeatedly rails against the ‘abortion industry,’" The Daily Beast noted at the time.

By March, CNN acknowledged the controversy and announced that Isgur "is no longer taking a job as a political editor in the Washington bureau. Instead Isgur will be a political analyst at the network, sharing her insights through television segments like many other commentators do."

But now, more questions are being raised about why CNN ever even considered hiring an openly partisan operative for a key campaign coverage position. The questions come as CNN continues to struggle with trying to balance its desire to employ conservative voices for political balance while also maintaining common-sense standards at the network.