AM Golden invades the realm of Ethics Alarms long-form historical ethics commenter Steve-O-In NJ with an epic Comment of the Day, and a thing of beauty it is indeed. The post also brings back many memories I would rather have left buried. Here it is, in reaction to the essay, “Return of the ‘2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck'”:
***
This is a 60-plus year process in the making. Barry Goldwater ran a fairly incompetent campaign but he absolutely had the news media biting at his heels the entire time. They gushed about Bobby Kennedy in ’68, they took potshots at Nixon. By the time Reagan came along, he faced hostility from a large segment of the press and Hollywood. In the meantime, Brain Trusters infiltrated the universities and encouraging the student protest movements instead of explaining how our Constitution was designed to work, culminating in a culture 50 years later that understands its country so poorly that it gets its news from Jon Stewart who is able to ignorantly proclaim that the Constitution doesn’t say that protests have to be peaceful.
In the election of 1992, Arsenio Hall ranted in his monologue when President George H.W. Bush said he probably wouldn’t appear on Hall’s show after Gov. Bill Clinton did, yelling about what made Bush think Hall wanted him on his show. Open hostility over who may or may not be a guest on Hall’s show paved the way for the venom spewed on every Late Night show today.
Believe all women? Not if they accused the first “black” President, Bill Clinton, of sexual harassment and even rape. “Anyone can drag $100 through a trailer park,” right? Bubba was caught with his pants down and allowed us to be caught with ours down on 9/11/2001 when he blew off an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the culture wars were heating up and Americans were becoming concerned about the country’s direction.
George W. Bush – faced with a supremely hostile news media and entertainment industry – endured screeds about stolen elections, fake Presidencies and two mocking cable television shows (“That’s My Bush!” and “Lil Bush”) before he gained some respect after 9/11, but never really got the credibility he deserved. In pop culture, far too many Bush-deranged Harry Potter fans believed they saw the myopic Ministry of Magic’s denial that the evil Voldemort had returned in the efforts by the Bush administration to urge vigilance in watching out for terrorists. Ah, remember when J.K. Rowling was the voice of truth? The damage to the American public’s understanding of the Constitution, particularly the Judicial branch, continued apace
Bob Dole and John McCain were treated as racist, sexist old men who would put this country into a Nazi theocracy; Mitt Romney was framed as a racist, sexist and religious nut who would send this country into a weird Mormon Nazi theocracy. All three were all virtually Hitler.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama was the be all and end all of existence. He who could do no wrong—and could not be touched because he had black skin and anyone who criticized him was a racist—took full advantage by damaging America on the world stage and inciting racial divisiveness on a scale that hadn’t been seen in 50 years.
When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, the news media covered him incessantly. It now appears that they wanted him to be the nominee because, in the words of Stephen Colbert on the day my family and I sat in his audience in NYC on a hot July day as he did a riff on how corrupt Hillary Clinton was, “Hillary so corrupt the only candidate she can beat is Donald Trump!”
It turned out she couldn’t even do that.
So the forces that had been coming together for 60 years—the biased news media, the leftist entertainment industry, progressive-dominated academia and other elite, corrupted professions coalesced into a single so-called Resistance Movement. Trump says people coming through our border with Mexico aren’t all angels, they accuse him of saying all immigrants are criminals. Trump says not everyone protesting in Charlottesville was a racist Nazi, he’s accused of “bothsidism” and pestered endlessly about condemning white supremacy even though he did condemn it. Trump is falsely accused of colluding with a foreign power, leading a big chunk of the population to believe his Presidency is the result of another stolen election.
These narratives and others are repeated ad nauseum long after they are proven false and still persist to this day. There are efforts to bribe and threaten electors to change their votes, celebrities are threatened with cancellation if they appear at his inauguration, competent politicians are threatened if they join his administration. Members of Congress treat him with open derision, argue for impeachment because they have the number of votes to do it and arrange two contrived impeachments just because they could. The news media treats gossip as fact, reports rumors based on anonymous sources and makes sure to flood the internet with articles criticizing the way the President walks, talks, dresses, looks, eats, drinks from a bottle of water and, yes, compares his wife’s choice of Christmas decorations to Nazi Germany. They call him antisemitic even though his son-in-law is Jewish, his daughter converted to Judaism and they’re raising his grandchildren as Jewish. Even though he declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
In the meantime, Late Night TV and, well, let’s face it, all of mass media go on the warpath. Conservative celebrities are fired for comparing abortion to the Holocaust while liberal celebrities get away with comparing the detention of illegal immigrants to the Holocaust. Fictional antagonists and villains are made into Trump avatars so the audiences can nod knowingly (Pedro Pascal’s character in “Wonder Woman ’84” was so obviously based on Trump, it was a huge distraction).
Every Trump victory in the SCOTUS is treated as a sign of the apocalypse. The decades-long attempt to make Americans ignorant of their nation’s form of government and their founding document is nearly complete.
I still cannot pick up a book written after 2016 without getting anti-Trump propaganda. Case in point: I started reading “True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America” by James Traub today (published 2/2024). I got three page in before running into this: “In 2016, the United States elected its first avowedly illiberal president; Donald Trump treated tolerance, compassion for our fellow citizens, and faith in an active government and the liberal world order as laughable. Despite his loss in 2020, Trump left behind a poisonous contempt for all those who do not share his view.”
And…AND…the next paragraph goes on to read, “Yet liberalism is not dead. President Joe Biden, who overlapped for a term in the Senate with Humphrey, shares the liberal temperament as well as much of the liberal agenda both at home and abroad.”
Fantastic.
And now we have citizens who are boycotting CBS, not because it tried to help its favored candidate, but because they think Trump sued it for interviewing his opponent and CBS caved by settling and and because a show bleeding money is being cancelled with a year to go.
Remember when Roseanne, hopped up on pills, called Valerie Jarrett a monkey and got her show cancelled within hours?
We have citizens who watched the Democratic party use every trick in the book and then some to keep Trump from running for office, much less winning re-election, and yet somehow believe he’s on a client list of a sexual predator – a client list that somehow never managed to get leaked, to say nothing of being gleefully revealed with glee at any point during the Biden administration.
Remember all the leaks during the first Trump administration? They didn’t have enough Dutch boys to plug them.
Still no Trump revealed on a client list when Joe Biden crashed during the debate and his party had access to the supposed list? After Trump survived an assassination attempt? When Kamala Harris got put in the magic slot without a single vote? The best they could do was beg Hollywood celebrities to endorse her and let CBS chop up her word salad into a side dish?
We have unreconstructed Hippies in academia encouraging students to riot, vandalize, and attack anyone who disagrees with them and, like their predecessors 50 years ago, don’t understand or appreciate their system of government. They’ve been indoctrinated to hate America, its history, its culture, its achievements and its traditions. They are clueless about how our system of government is supposed to work and, even when they’re told, they don’t care.
That’s why nothing will happen to Obama. The King’s Pass rules! He’s black, Hillary is a woman, and Evil Trump is petty and vindictive. The news media and the other Democratic party allies are in the party’s pocket so the Democrats will just try their well-worn smear tactics again with the next Republican. After all, isn’t the narrative that Republicans are Nazis? When all of them are Nazis, the identity of Hitler is fluid and applicable to the party’s leader, whoever that may be at any given time, which means any means necessary can be employed to stop them.
_________________
Brief notes from your host:
- That chart above is from 2017. Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias! You can see the whole thing here.
- The only story I would add to AM’s account is how the mainstream media news media savaged Sarah Palin as being unqualified for the Vice Presidency (she was a mother of a special needs kid: no time! She had only been a mayor and short-time state governor!) while their favored candidate for President had less executive experience than she (so did Abe Lincoln), and his running mate was widely known as a dolt—and the allege feminists in Obama’s party stood by and let Palin be the victim of open sexism. I’m still furious about that, and I was not a Sarah fan.
- I love the fact that the Axis is citing the SCOTUS ruling about Presidential immunity as protecting Obama. Is deliberately trying to sabotage an elected President within an outgoing President’s official duties? I can’t wait to read that brief.
- I have resolutely refused to unfriend Facebook friends in the throes of Trump Derangement, but I must say those who are writing that Trump sued CBS because “60 Minutes” interviewed “someone he didn’t like” are so dishonest, so vile, or so stupid that I’m not sure I care to have anything to do with them.
- I might argue that the news media’s efforts to control our Presidential elections started four years earlier than Goldwater, in 1960. Nixon was arguably the most qualified first-time Presidential candidate of either party in our history and Kennedy had little but a World War II moment of valor and a ghost-written book to his credit, yet the bulk of the news media pushed for JFK to lead the U.S. at perhaps the most dangerous period in its history since the Civil War. And the novice executive indeed almost started World War III!
Ethics Alarms 
“The only story I would add to AM’s account is how the mainstream media news media savaged Sarah Palin as being unqualified for the Vice Presidency”
This is true. The double standards employed by the Democrats never cease to amaze me. We need more women in government! Unless they’re Republicans! Female Republicans constantly vote against their best interests! This kind of thinking is the same tribal worldview that says that African-Americans can’t be conservative or they’re not really black. Republican women are apparently not real women. Or something.
“I might argue that the news media’s efforts to control our Presidential elections started four years earlier than Goldwater, in 1960.”
No question about it, but I had to start somewhere and Goldwater was fresh on my mind. Frankly, I think the beginnings were much sooner during FDR’s administration when all those liberal Ivy Leaguers got put into government to teach the minions to leave governing to their betters. The Democrats’ treatment of Republicans during that time wasn’t much to write home about and they most certainly took their cue from FDR’s treatment of Hoover. And, of course, there was the whole court-packing nonsense which even Democrats opposed. My! How times have changed!
But to your point about Nixon, I do think that the media’s traditional respect for the Presidency began to devolve into partisanship around 1960. Prior to that, even if they didn’t like the President, they were generally willing to ignore rumors, innuendo and irregularities. But they just didn’t like Nixon. Their treatment of him while VP contributed to his massive insecurities.
The worship they heaped on JFK, the complicity in promoting the Camelot myth, the burying of facts detrimental to Kennedy, such as his health problems, his womanizing and his overall opportunism did a number on the country. JFK is like James Dean. James Dean did probably 1 decent movie but people consider his others classics because there are so few of them. JFK was POTUS for less than three years, but he’s heralded as the ultimate in leadership because he died young. It’s less about what he did than what people assumed he would do. There’s no evidence he would have done any more than he did.
The media most certainly began openly taking sides during LBJ’s administration. His domestic policies appealed to him; his foreign policy did not. It certainly didn’t help that he was probably bipolar. Nevertheless, they didn’t report on his bullying, his womanizing, his crude and vulgar humor. In an age when Donald Trump is rumored to have referred to the governments of some third world countries in a derogatory manner and it becomes nightly news fodder for weeks, who would believe that there was a time when Johnson pulled out his manhood right in front of reporters and nary a peep was heard?
Of course, they hated Nixon and it showed. I don’t excuse Nixon’s behavior, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Then Ford came along and so did “Saturday Night Live”. SNL was supposed to be a satirical sketch show. At first, it was. It also began influencing what people thought of the Presidents. My aunt once laughed and told me how, “Ford was always tripping and falling down”. Actually, no, he didn’t. He did it once, it became a running gag on SNL and that’s what people remember. Just like they “remember” that Sarah Palin said, “I can see Russia from my house!” when she didn’t say that at all. In between, we got sketches about Carter, Reagan and Bush I and their opponents. Bush I was a dainty old lady; Dan Quayle was literally played by a little boy. Clinton was comedy gold during the ’90s (Phil Hartman in jogging clothes, stopping at a McDonald’s and telling the Secret Service that “There’s a lot of stuff we’re not going to be telling Mrs. Clinton” and other candid skits that didn’t gloss over Clinton’s reputation. I loved the one in which they did a “Cops” parody with video of Governor Clinton riding along with the Little Rock police and giving them a thumbs up from the car when they pulled over an attractive female driver). SNL’s episode prior to the 2000 election featured both Gore and Bush II in segments introducing the best of the political sketches (“Strategery.” “Just two words. Lock. Box”). Something changed around the Obama years, though. Sure, they got a guy with big ears to play Obama but he was largely off-limits (Though I admit to laughing my head off when they had Obama pushing “I’m Just a Bill” off the Capitol steps in order to introduce the cigar-chomping, gravely-voiced “Executive Order”). And John McCain’s hosting of the show was a hoot – McCain does a order-by-mail record commercial of him singing – badly – all of Barbra Streisand’s songs because “she’s spent years trying to do my job so I thought I’d trying doing hers!”
All bets were off by his second term. By that time, Jon Stewart had been doing “The Daily Show” for a few years and Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report” was on. Young people were getting their news, for worse, from these guys. So, Obama was untouchable on SNL, Late Night TV and on every mainstream news station. Sarah Palin wasn’t. Jon Meacham, in his biography of George H.W. Bush, points out that there was a team of reporters that followed Dan Quayle everywhere to report every time he made a verbal gaffe. I would be surprised if the same procedures weren’t followed for Palin, too, during the campaign.
And, of course, I’ve already covered a small amount of the treatment Candidate and, then, President Trump has received for the past 9 years much of which has been documented in detail on this site. In this time, Trump has never been treated fairly by SNL. They hosted Kamala Harris before the election and fawned over her for free publicity. For alleged balance, they gave Trump a commercial at the end of a NASCAR race when viewers were hitting the bathroom.
I realize this comment has expanded beyond where I began but the thoughts kept coming. To me, this history demonstrates that there’s been a long-term process by the liberal media and its colleagues in entertainment to promote the politics of the Left, undermine conservatives and change what we think of as news. If we had a population educated on how our system of government was designed to work, the antics of the news/entertainment industry (which basically melds together at this point so there’s little difference between the two) would be obvious to all. Unfortunately, we don’t.
Anyway, thanks again for the CotD.
Ugh, I read this thing twice before posting it.
A M Golden,
I read my short comment below about a dozen times, randomly correcting small things I found, and I still have errors. Tunnel vision of writers is the nature of the human beast, we know exactly what we’re trying to say and that’s what we tend to read when we self edit. We do the best we can but perfection is unachievable.
It’s for this reason that people don’t edit their own books before they’re published.
Sometimes the eye that can’t read along inside the writer’s head is best. Thanks for pointing that out.
This is a worthy sequel.
Re James Dean: Bingo! I decided to re-watch his films, and a more self-indulgent, annoying method actor it would be hard to find. He’s the worst think in “Giant,” even considering Rock Hudson. His histrionics in “Rebel Without a Cause” are embarrassing.
What’s very clear to me is that the progressive political left’s morally bankrupt mob will do and say anything they can to demonize and silence those they oppose. Much of the main-steam media complex will openly promote the mob’s twisted propaganda and far too many in corporate America are cowards that kowtow to the brainwashed mob to keep the mob’s drooling attack dogs at bay in their effort to maintain their bottom line. The progressive left’s mob will present flagrant lies that are so in-your-face that only complete morons would believe them. What’s apparent is the left’s blindly willful biased sheep swallow the lies whole, parrot the lies, then figuratively bend over and say, “thank you sir, may I have another”. This mob influence is NOT just happening at a national level in regards to President Trump and prominent Republicans, it’s happening right in your own back yards and you might be a part of it. The immoral social manipulation tentacles of totalitarian minded mob rules have worked their way into all corners of your life and you might not be aware that many people, like you, could be actively participating in it.
The progressive left’s mob rule totalitarians have presented the public with an array of absolute democracy tools that the mob actively uses to control what the public can and cannot see and “We the People” are willfully falling in line. What’s happening is indoctrination.
Indoctrination: the process of systematically instilling beliefs, ideas, and values in people with the expectation that these will be accepted without critical evaluation, thus developing a very strong commitment to a particular beliefs creating absolute conformity.
Absolute conformity is the ultimate goal of progressives.
Many years ago there was a cry across the United States to “Remember the Alamo”, well folks I’m here to tell you that there should be a new cry across the USA that represents opposition to the morally bankrupts mob rule tactics that’s still going on…
“Remember Twitter!”
Really good comment of the day.
We must actively remember the following…
In my opinion; the shameless political left, their Pravda-USA media, and their blind sheeple supporters keep proving me right. The Democratic Party has removed their false “liberal” facade and fully revealed the illiberal totalitarian, morally bankrupt, and blatant cancel culture liar core of their anti-American party.