It’s fun watching CNN talking heads cover the events in the Middle East looking as if they are dying of some kind of painful abdominal parasite because they have to say positive things about President Trump. The only time I have seen them look more miserable was on election night last November. Every time these hacks play the moving footage of Israeli families reacting to seeing their loved ones again after being released from Hamas’s tunnels, their expressions look more appropriate for someone who has just watched a beheading than a joyous reunion.
None of them are mentioning the effect today will have on the Democratic Party’s desperate (and stupid) shutdown gambit, but they should. For President Trump is rising into positive territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale. When that happens, it will necessarily push those things that he opposes down the scale, for that’s how cognitive dissonance works. Except for the hopelessly Trump Deranged, the members of the public who are inclined to be sympathetic to the Democrats in the shutdown will be less so the more the President rises, even though the Hamas-Israel deal he brokered is completely unrelated to it.
The politics of the shutdown are ultimately a PR battle, and the more popular Trump is, the worse the Democrats’ prospects of winning it becomes. The Trump-Hate/ Israel Hate town meeting CNN is about to host featuring AOC and Bernie Sanders could not be timed more horribly for Democrats, foes of Trump, and anti-Israel activists.
True, foreign policy triumphs usually create only temporary bumps in Presidential popularity. Remember that the first Iraq war pushed George H.W. Bush into the 90s for a while. President Trump’s approval will start to fall again, but Democrats were already losing the PR battle over the shutdown. Trump’s big day can only make the situation worse. They ignore the cognitive dissonance scale at their peril.
Addendum: WordPress tells me that this post should have a “Joe Biden” tag. That’s smoking gun evidence that WordPress is tainted with Axis bias: the Left’s current myth-making, along with “Antifa? What Antifa?” is that Biden deserves any credit for the Gaza breakthrough at all.
Ethics Alarms 
For grins and giggles, I switched between the first five minutes of the lead shows on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. Fox, not surprisingly, led with the hostage release. Fox supports Trump, ’tis true, but anyone who has truly followed the Israel/Hamas situation, and its many threads, is aware that this is the most important world story today.
I am not as optimistic as Trump – or Fox – that this truly marks a turning point in the Middle East. But it DOES mark a significant rejection, or at least a temporary stay, in the progress of radical Islam. That’s incredibly important stuff. Socialism may be a blight on human progress, but it’s got nothing on a rapidly-growing religion founded 1500 years ago – and which has been embraced by so-called “intelligentsia” who combine the Dunning-Kruger Effect with a hefty dose of antisemitism. A toxic combo, that.
Did either CNN or MSNBC at least recognize what just happened? Nopety-nope. They’re all about the “threat to democracy” related to Letitia James and James Comey. It’s as if the hostage release never happened.
As I’ve noted numerous times here, media bias isn’t just reflected in the tone with which a given media outlet covers a story. It’s reflected far more powerfully in how they position the stories they DO cover – or don’t cover at all.
And how pathetic that obtaining the release of twenty live hostages in return for thousands of convicted terrorists and POWs is celebrated. These fucking medieval, bloodthirsty savages take hostages. Who does that? Islamists, that’s who. Let’s not lose sight of that.
Will the Saudis really put their foot down on Hamas and the Palestinian authority and the Iranians and all their puppets and all their fellow travelers in the Islamic world so that anything will change? That’s the question.
One of the Palestinian prisoners released: Palestinian who raped a 13-year-old boy then beat him to death with an iron bar is among prisoners freed under hostage deal | Daily Mail Online
Nice. Praise Allah.
Great description of the axis broadcasters eating crow live and late breaking. I always go back to the morning after the 2016 Trump victory and the faces of the broadcasters.
The 2016 election eve is my favorite. Surely they were more distraught then than this past election. They had to know deep down in their black souls that there was a very real chance that “they” would not win. (I was going to say “that Kamala wouldn’t win”, but why not acknowledge that the media views itself as part of the D team?)
Jack, I assume you meant “shutdown” when you wrote about “lockdown” above. If you renamed it in an earlier post, I apologize for being pedantic. If you meant something else, please correct me.
Anyway, to your point — The Democrats are clearly hoping for some kind of PR benefit from a planned protest and the upcoming Obamacare deadline on Nov 1 to produce pressure on the GOP.
This agreement (and I am very skeptical it will actually turn out to be “peaceful”) comes at a good time for the GOP. All they have to do is not be stupid to “win” this little tiff, but I don’t believe they are truly capable of that. Trump can’t shut his mouth, and too many of his cabinet are incapable of doing anything but damage when they speak. The RINOs in the Senate are even now trying to find some way to sabotage the GOP. All it would take to flip the script is enough votes to force a Republican filibuster rather than the current Democrat one.
How long this agreement remains in the news cycle without Israel and the Palestinians returning to killing each other will largely determine its impact. The media will try to kill the agreement story by the weekend when the protest arrives.
Definitely shutdown. I just fixed it. Thanks. I have “lockdown” on the brain since I’m still furious about it. When I hear all the moaning about firings at the CDC, all I can do is silenty chuckle like Muttley.
From an employer employee standpoint the current situation is more akin to “lockout” which is the employer equivalent of a strike. For the life of me I cannot fathom why we will give these employees back pay at the end of this budget debate if they are not actually working and if the law says they must be paid then put them back to work. If you will be paid then you should be required to work for it. No one will actually go without being paid.
The government is not shut down. Taxes are being collected, nondiscretionary payments are being made and laws are being enforced. The national parks do not govern us they are a service and I would bet that every animal at the national zoo is still being fed and cared for. Shutdown’s are simple theater designed to make those wanting to reign in spending the bad guys and we would be fools to fall for it. “Those who govern least govern best” is just as relevant today as it was when it was first uttered.