Mike Huckabee
I told you yesterday about the New York Times’ publisher accusing the White House of organizing a “coordinated campaign” to slander media outlets like the Times as biased just for covering this Administration “like any other: fairly, aggressively and fearlessly, wherever the facts lead.”
Are you through laughing yet?
Western Journal (recently the target of a biased and misleading Times hit piece accusing them of being biased and misleading in their news coverage) took the front page of the Sunday edition of the Times where that diatribe appeared and circled 10 – count ‘em, TEN – stories, all negative about Trump. Click the link to see it, along with an analysis of how each story was professionally slanted, with great care going into the choice of wording for maximum derision.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/ny-times-complains-bias-10-anti-trump-stories-sundays-front-page/
To be fair, I should note that the entire front page isn’t all anti-Trump propaganda. There’s also a puff piece about how Elizabeth Warren “went from pro-business to consumer advocate.” How fair, aggressive and fearless of them!
Sorry, Mr. Sulzberger. When you make your bias that obvious, there’s no need for a “coordinated campaign” to point it out. We have eyes, you know.
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More bad headlines for the New York Times: it was reported Monday that their offices in New York are infested with bed bugs. That prompted George Washington University associate professor David Karpf to joke on Twitter that "The bedbugs are a metaphor” for op-ed columnists like Bret Stephens.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/nyt-columnist-bret-stephens-bed-bug
That caused Stephens to react (some might say “overreact”) by contacting Karpf, who’s never even met him, accusing him of setting a new standard for incivility and inviting him to come to his house, meet his wife and children, and call him “bedbug” to his face. Ironically, while hardly anyone saw Karpf’s initial tweet, Stephens’ over-the-top reaction prompted widespread comment, many of them pointing out that this was the type of reaction you’d expect from someone who’s crazy as a bedbug.
Want to hear something even more ironic? By show of hands, when I wrote that the New York Times offices were infested with bedbugs, how many of you immediately thought I was talking about their editorial writers?
All of you? Yeah, that’s what I thought…
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Joe Walsh, who is launching a quixotic (that’s a fancy word for “insane”) challenge to President Trump in the GOP primaries, announced that he’s lost his national radio show. Apparently, this came as a surprise to him, for some reason. He told CNN:
"I don't know why. I just got a notice before I came into the studio. I'm running for President. I oppose this President. Most of my listeners support the President. It's not an easy thing to do to be in conservative talk radio and oppose this President."
https://www.foxnews.com/media/joe-walsh-says-hes-lost-radio-show-since-launching-trump-challenge
I’m sure that CNN was happy to give viewers the impression that Walsh is the victim of some sort of conspiracy to deprive him of his show, backed by eeeeeevil Trump supporters. But let me provide Mr. Walsh and CNN with a reality check:
In 2016, I decided to launch a second run for the White House. This was a very hard decision because I knew that immediately upon announcing, I would have to give up my top-rated Fox News show, my appearances on Fox as a guest commentator, and my national radio show, “The Huckabee Report,” which was heard three times a day on over 500 stations nationwide.
Poof: all gone! And I knew it would be because under federal election law, you can’t host a TV or radio show while running for office. When some on the left accused me of running just because it was somehow going to make me more money, I knew that their political views weren’t the only thing about them that was crazy. I had to get by on savings and other income from non-broadcast sources, such as books and speeches.
Meanwhile, many of my rivals for the office had no worries: they held political offices and continued getting a paycheck from the taxpayers, even though they were spending more time trying to get the next job than doing the current one. That’s why I’ve long advocated that if you want to run for higher office, you should have to resign from any office you currently hold. I can’t think of any field other than politics where you can continue to be paid even when you’re not only not showing up to work, you’re publicly spending all your time trying to land another job somewhere else.
I had to give up a lot to run in 2016, but I thought the issues were so important that I made the sacrifice. The voters went in a different direction, but at least I had a chance and I was able to inject some important issues into the national discussion. As to what Mr. Walsh hopes to achieve, and why he thinks it was worth it to throw away his radio show on an endeavor that’s pointless and doomed from the get-go, you’ll have to ask him. Maybe he just didn’t look into the election laws closely enough before he announced. If I were him, I’d reconsider before Salem Media finds a fulltime replacement.
And no, I’m not hinting around for the job. Although if Salem wants to call me, I’ll pick up the phone.
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I try not to cover every ridiculous statement made about the President by people suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome for the same reasons I don’t cover every Joe Biden gaffe and every dumb quote from AOC: I have limited time and space, and at some point, it just starts to seem mean to point it out.
But this one was so beyond the pale, I have to take note of it, particularly because CNN not only allowed it to go out over the air but host Brian Stelter did nothing to correct it. And bear in mind, this show is called “Reliable Sources,” so even the title of the show was a lie:
This guest claimed that Trump may be responsible for “many more million deaths” than Hitler, Mao and Stalin. Really? Would you like to show us the bodies? Because I’d think that would be pretty noticeable, considering Hitler was responsible for the deaths of about 20 million people, Mao for 20-45 million, and while estimates of Stalin’s death toll vary, it’s well up in the millions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
Considering that Trump once called off a planned attack on Iran because he was told it might kill 150 people and he thought that wasn't proportionate to Iran downing a US drone, I think he has a way to go before he rivals Hitler, Mao and Stalin in the mass-murdering department.
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We’ve been hearing a lot of scary stories in recent weeks about the record number of wildfires destroying the Amazon rain forest. That would be terrible, but is it really true?
At the link, Reason magazine reports that NASA says it’s not unusual to see a lot of fires in Brazil this time of year, and it’s impossible to say yet whether this year is record-breaking or within normal limits. Even the New York Times reports that the majority of the fires seen in satellite photos are not old-growth rain forest but already-cleared land that’s being cleared again by farmers using routine controlled burns. And while deforestation is up slightly, it’s still way below its peak in the early 2000s.
https://reason.com/2019/08/23/dont-panic-amazon-burning-is-mostly-farms-not-forests/
So why is this suddenly being covered as if it’s an unprecedented apocalypse that will doom attempts to stop climate change? If you don’t keep up with international politics, maybe it’s because Brazil recently elected as President Jair Bolsonaro, a conservative who’s been compared to Trump.
In fact, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff said Brazil would reject $20 million worth of fire-fighting aid offered by the G7 nations, saying it would be better used to reforest Europe and that Brazil didn’t need lectures on how to prevent fires from French President Macron, who couldn’t even avoid a preventable fire in Notre Dame Cathedral.
You know, they’re right: I can see the resemblance to Trump!