Commentary

I recently wrote of watching Democrats criticizing each other, like the members of the radical squad – Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Talib and Pressley – attacking Sen. Joe Manchin over his lack of support for the massive Build Back Better legislation.

It isn’t new. In December, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote a piece, “Democrats’ Dangerous Appetite for Eating Their Own.

You may recall how then presidential candidate Kamala Harris shredded front-runner Joe Biden in a nationally televised debate confrontation over Biden’s past record on segregation.

Word recently leaked out that Jill Biden was not happy when Ole Joe picked her as his running mate.  Turns out that she was prescient about Harris.

“Liberals are no longer liberals, they are progressives or social justice warriors or anti-Trumpers, whatever they call themselves.  They are still eating their friends as well as their enemies,” wrote Michael Goodwin of the New York Post. 

Ocasio-Cortez has openly threatened to “primary” Democrats who don’t fall in line with the Caucus.

Even anti-Trumper Bret Stephens has written a column critical of Biden in the New York Times, quoting his Times colleagues’ reporting that Biden is “flailing” and “failing,” and adding that his “legislative agenda is in shambles.”

Blaming “political incompetence,” Stephens wrote of Biden’s winning office as a trusted steward of American power.  “He hasn’t been,” says Stephens.  He also suggests that Biden announce that he isn’t running for reelection.

Then there’s Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, who writes that “Biden’s difficulties were due to a dreadful alliance with reckless left-wingers in the party.”

Leftist Media are Eating Their Own, too

In my December 15, 2021 post, I wrote of Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank having a cow over journalists’ treatment of Biden versus Trump, reporting that coverage of Biden has been bad.  Milbank went so far as to accuse his media colleagues of “serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.”

So-called public servants turned talking heads in the mainstream media have become fair game, too.  Former director of national intelligence James Clapper and CIA directors Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden and John Brennan, all of whom questioned the legitimacy of the 2016 election and supported the accusation that former President Trump was colluding with the Russians.  They bought into the hoax, based on a fabricated dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign.  Discredited and disgraced, they’re now silent on their stands that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.

A host of journalists, most of them with names you wouldn’t recognize as they write for leftist publications, were recently called out for falling for the Steele dossier, but have remained silent on their culpability.

Glenn Greenwald, a reputable journalist who often appears on Fox for comment, has been a leading critic of them for lying about the New York Post’s reporting on the Bidens in order to manipulate the American electorate.

Some years ago, I became familiar with a writer Matt Taibbi, who was a frequent guest on the Don Imus Show, simulcast on Fox early in the morning.  He was the editor of the controversial Rolling Stone magazine at the time, but I found him to have some interesting views.

I recently began reading his thoughts online in TK at Taibbi.Substack.com.  Earlier this month he wrote a stinging rebuke of a handful of neoconservatives who have “spent most of the last twenty years trying to set the Bill of Rights on fire,” like Bill Kristol, who I, too, have identified as a GOP turncoat.

On March 25, 2022, Taibbi attacked the media for protecting Joe Biden, referencing the Hunter Biden laptop.

Amusingly, he wrote, “In confirming that federal prosecutors are treating as “authenticated” the Biden emails, the Times story applies the final dollop of clown makeup to Wolf Blitzer, Lesley Stahl, Christiane Amanpour, Brian Stelter, and countless other hapless stooges.”

“There is no real evidence of that,” said Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes just days before the 2020 election in response to President Trump’s insistence that his campaign was spied upon. Now we know it to be true.

All cooperated with those intelligence officials to dismiss a damaging story about Biden’s laptop at the time his “old man” was running for president.

Taibbi lambasted former CIA chief Michael Hayden, too.  In his book, Hayden boasted about how intelligence officials “killed” damaging stories, and ripped media figures who didn’t respect the “social contract” that bestowed the CIA with “trust.”

Commenting that the line between the intelligence community and the media had blurred to the point of being meaningless, he writes, “They know that everyone knows they screwed up and are long past pretending to care.”

For example, Jim Clapper told the New York Post there would be no apology coming from him, claiming to “stand by the statement he made at the time.”

“His government service and post government career as a talking head on CNN has been marked by a brazen willingness to deceive the American people,” wrote James W. Carden, in his Epoch Times piece, “James Clapper is still a shameless liar.”

Though regrettable, it’s one thing for a politician or a bureaucrat to lie, even when they become a media talking head, but when a journalist lies, he puts the trust in his profession at stake. And that’s shameless, too.

Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.