Posts Tagged ‘Eric Kessler’

LinkSwarm for April 19, 2019

Friday, April 19th, 2019

Happy Good Friday! Yesterday was a very good Thursday for President Donald Trump, and a very bad one for the media outlets that lied about the Russian Collusion fantasy for two years.

  • After the Mueller Report release, Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says that impeaching President Donald Trump is not worth pursuing. Take that, hard left base and Democratic House freshmen! (Hat tip: Sean Davis.)
  • Orange Man Bad!

    For approximately 3 million people, nothing in the Mueller report could exonerate President Trump of “Russian collusion,” obstruction of justice, and various other high crimes and misdemeanors of which they are certain he is guilty. For those 3 million people (a number reflecting the combined average weekday primetime audience of CNN and MSNBC) Trump’s guilt is an indisputable fact, his presidency an ongoing crime against humanity, his 2016 election a fraud. In a nation of 325 million people, of course, 3 million is less than a single percentage point. However, that hard-core audience of obsessive Trump-haters includes every Democrat in Washington and the vast majority of our nation’s journalists, university faculty, and other such members of the intelligentsia. Therefore, their deranged idée fixehas enormous influence, calling into existence a sort of anti-Trump industry that manufactures a constant output of rage-inducing propaganda. The CNN/MSNBC bubble is the cable-TV equivalent of a cult compound, where dissent from their political religion is forbidden. For the past two years, the fanatics have been told every night by Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, et al. that the final destruction of Trump was at hand — “the walls are closing in!” — and the left-wing faithful awaited their deliverance from the evil man in the White House.

    “Orange Man Bad” — that’s a shorthand label for the anti-Trump mentality, coined by an anonymous contributor on a Reddit forum in 2017, mocking the robotic mindlessness of the president’s enemies. No fact that might contradict their Trump-hating beliefs has any validity to them, because Orange Man Bad. By obverse principle, anything done to harm Trump or his supporters, including libel and violent assault, is considered legitimate, because Orange Man Bad. Living inside a media-generated echo chamber where everyone shares their simplistic worldview, the Trump-haters tune in nightly to their MSNBC/CNN religious revival and are catechized, so to speak, with the latest reiteration of the Orange Man Bad gospel.

    What else can explain what happened Thursday, after Mueller finally delivered his 448-page “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.” The delivery of the special counsel’s report was preceded by a press conference at which Attorney General William Barr summarized the result of the investigation. Barr “made clear that, after two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and endless media speculation, the ‘Russian collusion’ story was, as some of us had noted all along, a story about nothing,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds observed. “No member of Trump’s campaign — and in fact, no American anywhere — colluded with the Russians to influence the campaign.” Contrary to what MSNBC and CNN viewers had been told night after night for month after month, Trump is not a Kremlin stooge and yet: “Orange Man Bad!”

    Proven wrong on the matter of “Russian collusion,” the anti-Trump media sifted through the Mueller report in search of evidence of other wrongdoing by the president, who of course must be guilty of something. The Twitter feeds of media types filled up with excerpts of the report proving… what? Well, Trump was very angry about being falsely accused of “collusion,” and he didn’t enjoy watching his former associates being investigated and prosecuted as part of what he considered a partisan witch hunt, inspired in large measure by the phony Steele dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign. But we already knew that. Trump’s animus toward the Mueller investigation was certainly no secret, but being angry is not a crime and, however angry he was, nothing Trump did amounted to obstruction of justice. Because there was no “collusion,” and thus no crime to conceal, it would be hard to figure out how or why justice could be obstructed in such a case. The innocent don’t fear justice, and if Trump was innocent of “collusion” (as Mueller concluded) why should he engage in obstruction? Never mind basic logic, cried the Trump-haters, because Orange Man Bad!

    “Their minds are made up, and mere facts cannot penetrate their ironclad certainty about Trump’s maliciousness.”

  • Watch Democrats move the Mueller goalposts.
  • Editorial in the New York Times: “Barr Is Right About Everything. Admit You Were Wrong.”

    The American political and media elites that spent the first two years of the Trump administration promoting the Russian collusion hoax have some explaining to do. And not merely explaining: They owe the president an apology.

    As Attorney General William Barr said on Thursday before releasing the Mueller report, “After nearly two years of investigation, thousands of subpoenas, and hundreds of warrants and witness interviews, the special counsel confirmed that the Russian government sponsored efforts to illegally interfere with the 2016 presidential election but did not find that the Trump campaign or other Americans colluded in those schemes.”

    And yet nearly the entire complex of elite media was actively complicit in promoting the biggest political conspiracy theory in American history: that Hillary Clinton lost the election because Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to — well, that was always a moving target — but to somehow deprive Mrs. Clinton of victory. What we now know definitively is that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and a team of very accomplished, mostly Clinton-supporting, prosecutors were unable to find evidence of a conspiracy that had been taken as an article of faith by Trump haters.

    Journalists don’t like being called “fake news,” but too many of them uncritically accepted the Trump-Russia narrative, probably because of their strong distaste for Mr. Trump himself. But that lack of objectivity represents a major professional failure, and it’s Exhibit A in why Mr. Trump’s taunt resonates with so many Americans. Gallup polling shows that for 69 percent of Americans, trust in the media has fallen over the last decade. Among Republicans, it’s 94 percent; for independents, it’s 75 percent and for moderates it’s 66. Only among self-identified liberals and progressives does a majority continue to trust the media. They like what they hear.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • “CNN Ratings Continue To Plummet To All-Year Low.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • CNN: God Allowed The Mueller Report To Test Our Unshakable Faith In Collusion.
  • Related:

  • “Prosecutors Ask To Present Evidence That NXIVM Sex Cult Leaders Illegally Bundled Money For Hillary Clinton Campaign.” Good points: Juicy! Bad points: The use of “sex cult” and “Hillary Clinton” in the same sentence. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Details on a Democratic dark money network under Arabella Advisors founded by Clinton Democrat Eric Kessler.
  • Leftists express respectful disagreement with Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw over his criticism of Ilhan Omar. Ha, just kidding! They mocked him as “captain shithead, “Nazi,” and “eyeless fuck.”
  • What happens when the government turns your apartment building into public housing. “The SWAT team, the overdose, the complaints of pot smoke in the air and feces in the stairwell — it would be hard to pinpoint a moment when things took a turn for the worse at Sedgwick Gardens, a stately apartment building in Northwest Washington.” Bonus: they’re handing out vouchers for up to $2,648 a month, which is more than my mortgage payment. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • “The Trump administration on Wednesday imposed new sanctions and other punitive measures on Cuba and Venezuela, seeking to ratchet up U.S. pressure on Havana to end its support for Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro.” Good.
  • Journalist shot to death in Northern Ireland, in an incident police are blaming on the New IRA.
  • Six MS-13 members charged in two murders.
  • Four truths that will get you banned from a college campus in 2019. Including: “To pretend that a man is a woman if he believes he is a woman…[is] objectively untrue.”
  • Shocker: University head doesn’t cave in to Social justice Warrior pressure, refuses to fire Camille Paglia.
  • Change your gut flora, change your thoughts. (Hat tip: Jordan Petersen’s Twitter feed.)
  • Black immigrant MAGA hat wearer beaten by thugs. Washington Post: “Meh. Somebody did something to somebody.”
  • Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot says he will no longer prosecute theft cases under $750. Governor Greg Abbott is mighty pissed.
  • Related:

  • CDC: “Hey, our guidelines didn’t mean ‘Screw you, pain sufferers.'”
  • Apple, Qualcomm settle their patent dispute. Immediately after that was announced, Intel announced they were exiting the 5G modem business. Apple continues to be something of a monopsony in the space.
  • “Federal Judge Tosses Defamation Lawsuit by Teachers’ Union Leader Against Project Verita.”
  • Don’t California my Texas:

  • The Postal Service took away the doughboy’s gun.
  • Only in New York: Hermit gets $17 million to move out of his tiny dilapidated hotel room. (Hat tip: Baseballcrank.)
  • Gene Wolfe, RIP.
  • Ouch! (Consider yourself warned.)