Media
October 23, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Someone could write a classic book on things only Democrats are allowed to say. The word “lynching” is one such word, as we learned in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing. We were reminded of this immortal truth again yesterday when President Trump used it in a tweet alluding to the procedural irregularities in the impeachment “inquiry” to which he is now subject. There is a larger lesson here. Only Democrats
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October 22, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I have been even busier than usual lately with my day job among other things, so I apologize for not posting more over the last few days. I did take time out last Friday night to spend some time with my friend Dave Sussman on his Whiskey Politics show, which now is also broadcast on America’s Voice News. Dave and I had a wide-ranging conversation about up to the minute
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October 22, 2019 — Scott Johnson
FOX News has posted full video of Sean Hannity’s interview with President Trump yesterday (below). Impeachment is more or less the focus of the interview for the first 30 minutes. The interview begins with the infamous phone call of congratulations to the president of Ukraine, a garbled account of which was somehow instantly converted by Nancy Pelosi into the ground of her so-called impeachment “inquiry.” Trump fights back as he
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October 21, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The Daily Mail has devoted substantial resources to documenting Ilhan Omar’s tabloid life apart from her husband and children. In today’s installment the Daily Mail reports “EXCLUSIVE: ‘She’s not fooling anyone.’ Ilhan Omar lives a double life of secret hookups and romantic vacays to Jamaica with her married aide, as they live together ‘on and off’ and even talk of MARRIAGE (once their divorces are finalized).” To the tabloid aspect
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October 21, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In “The Chuck Todd Experience” I wrote about Todd’s manhandling of Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and linked to the NewsBuster post “Call Him Spike? Chuck Todd Vows NOT to Show Trump Attacking Omar, Hunter Biden.” It was a “Purple Haze” kind of a deal. Now NewsBusters has posted two clips of Mark Levin’s fantastic interview of Senator Johnson on Levin’s FOX News show last night. I have posted the first
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October 21, 2019 — Scott Johnson
What really happened when the president met behind closed doors with congressional leaders in the White House last week and Nancy Pelosi wagged her finger at President Trump? In his remarks to the press immediately following the meeting, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did not go into detail. McCarthy subsequently gave an account that contrasted with the one touted by the Democrats and faithfully disseminated by their media adjunct. In
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October 18, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Like many local newspapers, Minneapolis’s Star Tribune purports to present an institutional voice serving as something like the political conscience of the community. Its recent editorial disapproving of the year-old video depicting President Trump mowing down the media — with which President Trump himself had nothing to do — is a sort of classic of the genre. And yet they weren’t done with the subject. They returned to it a
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October 16, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Why Not Minot? is the motto adopted by proponents of North Dakota’s fourth largest city (a/k/a “Magic City”). By the same token, Ilhan Omar’s overflowing campaign war chest seems to be operating under the motto Why Not Mynett? Tim Mynett is the principal in Omar’s extramarital affair and in the E Street Group firm that works for Omar’s campaign. Mynett is a partner in the firm. Having reviewed the Omar
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October 15, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In the adjacent post I discuss Vox’s coverage of the Trump rally in Minneapolis last week. Tim Graham chronicles Chuck Todd’s old-fashioned approach to the rally in the NewsBusters post “Call Him Spike? Chuck Todd Vows NOT to Show Trump Attacking Omar, Hunter Biden.” Citing Todd’s MSNBC show this past Friday, the day after the rally, Graham notes that “Todd offered a pompous commentary on how he was refusing to
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October 15, 2019 — Scott Johnson
It’s difficult to predicate a claim of defamation on a statement that can be characterized as opinion, but I think Vox’s Aaron Rupar crosses the line in his account of the Trump rally in Minneapolis last week. Referring to Power Line last week, Rupar wrote: “Citing articles from a fringe right-wing Minnesota-based blog, Trump called Omar ‘a disgrace to our country’ and pushed unfounded conspiracy theories about her marital history.”
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October 15, 2019 — Scott Johnson
If you’ve caught CNN at a random moment during the Trump administration — voluntarily or involuntarily — you know that the network has turned itself into a perpetual Trump hatefest in its political coverage. It is not exactly earth-shattering news that a whistleblower has stepped forward to reveal that the hatefest is run from the top of the executive ranks — CNN President Jeff Zucker — to the troops below.
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October 11, 2019 — Scott Johnson
On Wednesday night I got a call from the White House asking if I planned to attend last night’s rally at Target Center. I wanted to avoid the unpleasantness the left had planned for the president and his supporters, so I had not. I was invited to attend as a guest of the president and given the impression he wanted to discuss my work on Ilhan Omar with me. I
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October 10, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In advance of President Trump’s rally at Target Center in Minneapolis tonight, Esme Murphy invited MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to appear on her Sunday morning WCCO TV show and talk about his support of President Trump. Esme is a pillar of the liberal Minnesota media establishment. You can’t mistake where Murphy is coming from, but Lindell is able to make his case in this terrific segment. Lindell prefaces the tale
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October 7, 2019 — Scott Johnson
TMZ broke the news this morning that Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar has filed for divorce from husband Ahmed Hirsi, whom she just got around to marrying last year. Hirsi is the father of her three children. The Star Tribune caught up with the news this afternoon in a story by Patrick Coolican. Omar’s petition for dissolution of her marriage has been posted online here. Omar was previously married
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October 7, 2019 — Scott Johnson
In Molière’s Bourgeois Gentleman, Monsieur Jourdain famously discovers that he has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. Like Monsieur Jourdain, I find that I have been following the rules for reading formulated by cartoonist Scott Adams (Dilbert) without knowing them. In the Wall Street Journal column “Trump and Ukraine: What We Know,” Adams writes: If you’ve followed the Ukraine phone-call news, you might have noticed reality branching
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October 4, 2019 — Scott Johnson
What does it mean to disparage the case that Ilhan Omar married her brother in 2009 as a “conspiracy theory”? We saw in part 1 that the Daily Beast, the New Yorker and others have dismissed it by resort to this term or term. Benjamin Wallace-Wells characterizes it as such in his New Yorker profile of Omar. Perhaps nothing more about the profile of Omar need be said than this:
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October 1, 2019 — Scott Johnson
To the limited extent that news of Ilhan Omar’s curious marital arrangements has seeped into the national press, it has been disparaged as a “conspiracy theory.” I take this personally because it has been used to defame me. New Yorker staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells (hereinafter “W-W”), for example, provides a disgusting example in his hagiographical profile of Omar this past March. Wallace-Wells put it this way: Omar managed to embody
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