Soundbites August/September 2018
FAIR
By a ‘Lot Like Trump,’ WaPo Means ‘Could Not Be Less Like Trump’
 Andrés Manuel López Obrador
“Mexico’s Could-Be President Is a Lot Like Trump,” went the headline of a Washington Post editorial (6/17/18) that went on to say that Andrés Manuel López Obrador—then the frontrunner in Mexico’s July 1 election, now the president-elect—“bears more than a passing political resemblance” to US President Donald Trump.
Lopez Obrador was the mayor of Mexico City, one of the largest, most complex cities on the planet. He left with an 84 percent approval rating. His tenure was marked by fighting corruption and championing the dispossessed—subsidizing subway fares and giving stipends to senior citizens and single mothers. He got his start in politics setting up protest camps at the state-run oil company to force it to compensate campesinos and indigenous communities whose lands it had polluted (Guardian, 5/7/18).
How any of this resembles Donald Trump in any way, you’d have to ask the Post.
CNN Welcomes Pundit Who Called for Killing Journalists
Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters was treated as a hero of the #Resistance after quitting his gig as a military consultant on Fox News and giving an interview with Anderson Cooper 360 (6/7/18) in which he said:
For years, I was glad to be associated with Fox. It was a legitimate conservative and libertarian outlet. And a necessary one. But with the rise of Donald Trump, Fox did become a destructive propaganda machine. And I don’t do propaganda for anyone.
That’s a lot of self-congratulation to take from someone who wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “Civilian Casualties: No Apology Needed” (7/25/02), and who called for “military attacks on the partisan media” in the Journal of International Security Affairs (5/24/09).
Maybe Racist Senate Candidate Really Means It
Virginia Republican Senate candidate Corey Stewart has described Wisconsin politician and avowed “pro-White Christian” Paul Nehlen, who promotes the ethnic cleansing of all Muslims, as “one of my personal heroes.” After making several joint appearances with Jason Kessler, organizer of the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, Stewart declared there was “no reason to apologize” for the white supremacism and violence at that march. A self-described “proud Southerner” born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, he insists that the Confederate flag is “what makes us Virginia, and if you take that away we lose our identity.” He describes children crying for their parents at the border as “leftist terrorism props.”
The Washington Post‘s editorial (6/15/18) after Stewart’s nomination was headlined “Corey Stewart’s Win in Virginia Means Further Degradation of Civic Discourse”—as if “discourse” were the main thing threatened by the candidate’s style of politics. But the Post, based on no apparent evidence, seems to think Stewart’s embrace of racism is a put-on: He’s not white supremacist, he just “courted white supremacists”; he’s not a racist, he merely sees “pandering to racism [as] a valuable tactic.”
Billionaire Criticized by Media Likes Media Criticism
Elon Musk, the billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX, has a new brainstorm (Twitter, 5/23/18): a website to be called Pravda, or perhaps Pravduh, “where the public can rate the core truth of any article and track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication.” The caliber of the media criticism Musk has publicly engaged in does not bode well for this endeavor: After Reveal (4/16/18), an outlet connected to the nonprofit Center for Investiga-tive Reporting, reported that Tesla was underreporting injuries, Musk and Tesla released an official statement calling Reveal an “extremist organization...working directly with union supporters to create a calculated disinformation campaign,” while Musk (Twitter, 5/20/18) accused the website of publishing “carefully constructed propaganda with a name that would make Orwell proud.”
Healthcare, Education, Roads Remarkably Popular
The Economist (6/7/18) ran a column by its pseudonymous US correspondent, Lexington, arguing that Sen. Bernie Sanders is “the most popular politician in America” only because of his “crotchety-great-uncle charisma,” not for such policy proposals as “universal healthcare...free college and massive public works”:
If Democrats picked Mr. Sanders, it would not be for his ideas, which have little support within their party, let alone America. It would also be delightful to Mr. Trump, who fancies his chances of destroying “crazy Bernie.” If only for that reason, it is good that Mr. Sanders’ moment in American politics has probably passed.
This willfully ignores polling that shows Sanders’ policies are actually extremely popular among Democratic voters, and quite popular with “let alone America”: Medicare-for-All maintains support from 79 percent of Hillary Clinton voters and 63 percent of all registered voters; tuition-free public college has the support of 80 percent of Clinton voters and 63 per-cent of voters at large. Public works spending is just generally popular, with 87 percent of respondents telling Quinnipiac (2/2–5/18) that they support “increasing federal spending for roads, bridges, mass transit and other infrastructure.”
Don’t Worry, Rate Hike Won’t Do What It’s Supposed To
After the Federal Reserve raised interest rates a quarter of a percentage point, the New York Times (6/14/18) assured readers, “US officials express confidence that raising borrowing costs now won’t hurt growth.” Which is odd, as economist Dean Baker (FAIR.org, 6/15/18) pointed out, since the only reason to raise interest rates is to prevent inflation by slowing growth.
|
