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Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Donald Trump fusses with long time supporter ABC over Roseanne Barr

Early this morning @realDonaldTrump tweeted out this in response to the ABC cancelling of "Roseanne," after Roseanne Barr tweeted that Valerie Jarrett, an African American and former Obama adviser, was like the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes, although she didn't give "Muslim" its deserved capital "M." She was saying that Valerie Jarrett wasn't a human being, in racist Donald Trump parlance, she was calling her an "animal." So naturally, Trump had to tweet to her defense:


This Roseanne Barr fracas has nothing to do with Donald Trump, and still he has to try to put himself at the center of it, but he shows a lot of gall by complaining of bad treatment from ABC. Over 2 years ago, well before he had even won the Republican nomination, I wrote about how the capitalist media, and ABC News in particular, was not only weighting their coverage in favor of a Trump presidency; in the best Trump tradition, they were telling outright lies to help him win. That post had the title: Bourgeois media resorting to sleight-of-hand to put Trump in the White House, 21 December 2015. It is a reminder of how far we have come that he can even make his claims of unfair media treatment these days. I began by warning:
There have already been many media surveys that have shown that the most racist US presidential candidate of the 21st century, Donald Trump, has received an overwhelming coverage advantage from the bourgeois media. Now we are starting to see a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts and even use sleight-of-hand to favor Trump that goes beyond Fox News. In the Democratic debate on Saturday, Hillary Clinton made the statement that:
"We also need to make sure that the really discriminatory messages that Trump is sending around the world don't fall on receptive ears. He is becoming ISIS's best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists."
People knowledgeable about the subject matter will conclude this statement is true based on logical deduction: Are there videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims? Check! Could these videos be useful recruiting tools for ISIS? Check! Is ISIS a media savvy organization that uses videos from western media for recruitment? Check!
Then, after critiquing a misleading PolitiFact article, No evidence for Hillary Clinton's claim that ISIS is using videos of Donald Trump as recruiting tool, I torn into the ABC News coverage:
This is bad enough, but ABC News has taken it one step further by employing a bit of sleight-of-hand in their manipulation of this story. I first heard about this controversy on ABC's Good Morning America show this morning. Their coverage of this controversy led with Trump's demand for an apology, has a video clip of Clinton at the debate saying "They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists." [0:40 in this video] Then the ABC narrator says "Clinton's campaign unable to prove such a video exists." This is how and when the sleight-of-hand shift is made. Clinton made the claim that videos of Trump had been used by ISIS, she didn't say they had used them in one of their videos. This is an elaboration that ABC has added so they can demand that Clinton produce this video which she never claimed existed. You can see how they do the same thing in this posting on their website:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made up her claim that ISIS uses videos of him to recruit new members, said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

"Knowing the Clintons and knowing Hillary, she made it up," Trump said today on ABC's "This Week." During Saturday's Democratic debate, Clinton said ISIS is "going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”
Trump said many fact checkers have "vetted" the claim of Trump being used in ISIS videos and have proven it to be false.
ABC News has adopted Trump's distortion of Clinton's statement and you can't get more mainstream media than ABC News. Even if Trump's or ABC News' "fact checkers" have a complete inventory of the latest ISIS videos, which I doubt, not finding Donald Trump in them doesn't mean his anti-Muslim statements aren't being used by Daesh to argue their case. Every thinking person knows this already, but ABC News, in its rush to ride roughshod over the facts in support of Trump, has distorted a rather banal statement of fact by Hillary Clinton into a demand that she produce a video that she never claimed existed.

If this is an example of the presidential election year that is coming, we have a big problem. As ridiculous as it seems, it looks like a rather large section of the US bourgeois wants Donald Trump to be our next president.
On a related matter, I am so sick of hearing leftists that failed to fight Trump in 2016 say that "nobody thought he could win." Maybe, nobody on the white-Left thought that, just as they didn't think Donald Trump's overt racism didn't make him anymore evil that Hillary Clinton, while his "anti-intervention" opinions made him less evil.


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