By DEXTER DUGGAN
Back in the days of Franklin Roosevelt in the White House, it’s said, the president would gather a few favored reporters around his desk and decorously dispense his news for the next day’s papers.
Mass-circulation metropolitan papers in the 1930s may have had multiple daily editions with screaming headlines from the wider world — Nazis, Reds, Mobs, Scandal, Sex — but manipulative Washington politicians managed their own news pipelines, better to control the flow for them back then.
It was more like feeding the fish with a few worms in a rippling stream, where fish practiced etiquette in eating, as compared to today’s 24-hour news cycle of throwing chunks of bloody meat into a turbulent shark tank, then doing it all over again two hours later, then adding more meat for dinner time. And now the sharks have birthed babies to join the brawl.
When the news cycle is unending, the search for angles and updates only intensifies the environment. If six deadlines through the night were demanding for a big-city paper’s printed editions, from the early state edition to the late-city final, what about online days where the battle is to hit the web faster than anyone else, at all hours?
Moreover, today’s communications world has us familiarly watching multiple nations’ eruptions and elections in ways that used to be accessible only to the mind of God. We don’t know billions of other people’s individual thoughts and souls as only He can, but we’re seeing acres of their faces up close like never before.
People are still way over on the other side of the world from us, but electronics puts them immediately next to us in pixels. They may not be able to place their fists or their flower bouquets right in our faces at the moment, but perhaps the next best thing anyway: getting our attention.
Getting attention right at home is even more important, in the unending political publicity wars to subjugate the citizenry so government can keep growing.
Don’t let a serious crisis go to waste when it gives you the opportunity to do things you thought you couldn’t do before, said Barack Obama’s Democratic capo Rahm Emanuel on their way into the White House just over eight years ago.
That includes the opportunity to turn on a dime so fast and hard that it makes the coin split into shards.
Just about everyone would have thought Democrats would be delighted if FBI Director James Comey were given his walking papers. For months they — including no less than failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — deluded themselves that Comey (or Russians, or lunar eclipses) had caused her defeat in the election last November by reawakening the topic of her obvious serious, calculated lawbreaking.
However, people already were plenty aware of Hillary’s hiding and destroying countless emails that showed her greed and illegal foreign favor-trading as secretary of state. People didn’t need Comey to make them chant “Lock her up” at Donald Trump rallies last year.
When President Trump unexpectedly fired Comey on May 9 for his erratic job performance, a political observer initially might have thought Trump truly had made a bipartisan move. Politicians on both sides of the aisle had voiced their displeasure with the FBI director, so Trump did a win-win, and that’s all behind us now.
After all, powerful, left-wing Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) was among national Democrats having sharply criticized Comey.
But calculating Dems quickly decided this was a new serious crisis they wouldn’t allow to go to waste. Hooray that Comey is gone, but now reframe this as an unconstitutional horror, providing another tool to battle the president. Peace is war and war is peace.
The conservative Washington Free Beacon quickly posted a video of left-wing television comedian Stephen Colbert on May 9 telling his faithful audience the breaking news that Trump had just fired Comey. The audience spontaneously whooped and cheered in delight, as one might expect.
Oops, this wasn’t according to Colbert’s script. Didn’t the dumbo audience suddenly understand that as of this minute, firing Comey became awful?
Colbert beneath the bright lights tut-tutted that the recommendation to fire Comey came from Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Suitably rebuked, the studio audience began booing instead. They’ll howl however they’re told by a big mouth up front.
Political theater, ain’t it great?
National radio host Rush Limbaugh thought that Colbert’s trained-seal audience act was so interesting that he led off his program with it the next day.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders on May 10 pointed to Dem leaders’ “hypocrisy,” saying Hillary would have fired Comey “immediately” if she’d been elected. The Free Beacon posted a video of Sanders reacting to a reporter saying Trump widened a “divide” by the firing.
Sanders said: “Frankly, I’m surprised that it did create a divide since you’ve had so many Republicans and Democrats repeatedly calling for Director Comey to be gone. Frankly, I don’t think it matters what this president says. You’re going to have Democrats come out and fight him every single step of the way.”
Pressed as to whether Trump had anticipated this “backlash,” Sanders replied: “How could he have, considering the fact that most of the people that are declaring war today were the very ones that were begging for Director Comey to be fired?”
If Hillary could have fired Comey, Sanders added, “the very Democrats that are criticizing the president today would be dancing in the streets celebrating.”
Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova told the Laura Ingraham national radio program on May 10 that Comey had given a “nutty,”‘ “self-indulgent” performance testifying before a Senate committee on May 3, where he mistakenly said a Hillary aide improperly forwarded “hundreds and thousands” of emails.
The FBI sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee May 9 saying Comey had been in error on this.
DiGenova said that although President Trump gets the credit for earlier allowing Comey a chance to redeem himself, the FBI head “was irredeemable” and needed to depart.
Ingraham wondered if Comey is a person who can’t take the pressure.
Difficulties Ahead
As for the president, Trump seems to eat pressure for lunch and spit it out after extracting the juices. But that doesn’t prevent missteps from inexperience.
Getting used to presiding at the White House presents problems for the star resident of Manhattan’s Trump Tower. A businessman who’s more used to signing deals where both parties think they come out ahead now faces foes who want to rip him out of his new place of business in Washington and shred any contracts he wanted to sign with them.
It turns out to have been a lot easier to have campaigned successfully for the presidency on the very popular issue of repealing disastrous Obamacare than actually achieving that goal with the agreement of the increasingly unpopular opposition party that chained and nailed this goblin to Americans’ backs at Obama’s orders.
While some politicians speak hopefully of moving a repeal rather soon through the Senate, where the GOP has only a two-vote majority, others see months of difficulties ahead. It was hard enough to have the House approve a reform bill in a modest amount of time, where the GOP has a much larger majority.
The reform task is made no easier, of course, when the dominant media are the propaganda organ of the Democrats.
And recall that the bill narrowly approved in the House on May 4 wasn’t the simple elimination of Obamacare. In Washington’s ways, unneeded new complexities were devised that would have better been left out.
Freshman conservative Cong. Andy Biggs (R., Ariz.) explained in a May 4 news release why he voted no on Trump’s American Health Care Act:
“Unfortunately, the American Health Care Act . . . leaves the basic framework of Obamacare in place and continues to commit Republicans to an ill-considered, ill-defined, and an almost certainly ill-fated three-stage plan to completely repeal Obamacare at an unspecified later date. Even worse, I have seen no compelling evidence that the AHCA will offer substantive relief to Arizona families who have been crushed by devastatingly high health-insurance premiums. . . .
“Some of my colleagues claim that by passing the AHCA we are eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars in Obamacare taxes. There is some truth to this argument,” Biggs said. “But the AHCA does not do anything to eliminate the costly ACA (Obamacare) subsidies already in place, and it continues the dangerous precedent established by the ACA of granting the federal government the power to regulate our nation’s health-care system.
“I did not come to Washington to give unelected bureaucrats the authority to dictate health-insurance options to me, my family, or the residents of the East Valley. This is not a fight I am prepared to surrender,” he said.
And national talk-radio host Mark Levin said on May 4, “Spin as they might, this Republican bill is about 90 percent Obamacare.”
Trump says premiums and deductibles will come down, but Levin said it wouldn’t be by much.
Was all the pushing and shoving in the House little more than an exercise in futility?
If immediate prospects for overturning Obamacare turn glum, perhaps Trump should plan to take the health-reform issue directly to the voters for the 2018 mid-term elections, campaigning around the nation on the issue that he needs blockades removed so voters can get the medical transformation they want and need, before the quicksand starts sucking away their chance to escape the bog.
Delay is on the Big Government Democrats’ side.
One Chance
British Conservative Party politician Daniel Hannan warned at the Washington Examiner on May 8 that once an evil is imposed on people, they start getting used to it, until they fear losing it. That’s the principle of keeping “the devil we know.”
Britain’s state medical system was designed during WWII, at a time of rationing and conscription, Hannan wrote, but for all the frustration it causes today, “We grumble about it, but we oppose any fundamental change.
“America is just starting down that road,” he added. “It has one chance to turn back. That chance is now.”
Of course, Big Government Democrats kept burrowing away for decades before Obama finally could shove through the crime named for him in 2010. These transformations don’t happen overnight. But giving secularist government power over your very ability to take breaths can’t end happily. Look where it has gone once leftists got the power to slaughter human infants nationally in 1973.
A century ago, developing an animal-husbandry method for a superior breed of humans was an enthusiasm of progressives, who finally were shocked out of that when forced to face the results taken to the extreme by the utilitarian science-admiring German National Socialists.
But progressives’ contempt for human life as divinely in the image of God didn’t sink too far below the surface, and after a few decades, hostility to birth and affinity for euthanasia spread out from the usual precincts to the usual pod people with printing presses.
Extra, Extra! They’re not talking now about printing a special edition, but excess human life that needs to be snipped away. Like billionaire businessman and population controller Warren Buffett, the fewer customers the better, they seem to think.
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