Over there at the New York Post the other day, the venerable journalist Seth Lipsky headlined this:
Liberal attacks on Trump are so unhinged, it might get him killed
Lipsky’s point was as simple as it was blunt:
“Leftists are accusing Trump of trying to incite an attack on Hillary Clinton from “Second Amendment people.” They have been using such intemperate language that it wouldn’t be surprising if someone took a shot at The Donald. (Feds suspect a British national tried to do so at a rally in June after attempting to grab a police officer’s gun to carry out the assassination.)
…..Instead of a reasoned debate on guns, though, the Democrats have offered only ad hominem attacks on Trump. This is the argument that he’s racist, unstable and inherently unfit to be president.
Clinton has been making this argument, as has President Obama, to a degree unsurpassed by his predecessors. But it will be a frosty Friday before anyone descends to the kind of incitement being issued daily by the New York Times.
Its foreign affairs columnist, Tom Friedman, goes so far this week as to liken Trump’s remarks to the kind of talk that Israel’s leftists insist got Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. “His right-wing opponents just kept delegitimizing him,” Friedman writes (libeling, by the way, many decent Israeli and American critics of Rabin’s peace drive).
“Forget politics,” the Timesman says of Trump. “He is a disgusting human being. His children should be ashamed of him. I only pray that he is not simply defeated, but that he loses all 50 states so that the message goes out across the land — unambiguously, loud and clear: The likes of you should never come this way again.”
What in the world could he mean by that?
What could Friedman mean, indeed?
The startling fact here is that Donald Trump has succeeded in magnificent fashion to rip the mask of rationality off the liberal media. To illustrate simply by existing that the facade of rationality always pretended to by liberals (as in those lofty lectures about their devotion to “science” - as in climate change debates) is in fact a facade. A facade that hides the politics of emotion - raw, unstable, get-in-your-face emotion that is totally unmoored from reality. (Remember here, it was none other than Senator Obama himself who asked of his allies 2008: 'I want you to argue with them and get in their face’.)
It is still August, and yet the river of vitriol that has been directed towards Trump is a remarkable sight to behold. Some samplings - and samplings they are. They overflow the Internet.
The New Yorker, August 31, 2015: In which much care is taken to associate Trump with Nazis, white supremacists and the Klan. In a mark of exceptional effort at propaganda were these two sentences in the story by Evan Osnos: “As the climax of events in Las Vegas and Phoenix, Trump brought onstage Jamiel Shaw, Sr., whose seventeen-year-old son was killed, in 2008, by a man who was in the country illegally. Trump stood by while Shaw told the crowd how his son was shot.” Notice anything? In a lengthy article devoted to picturing Trump as a racist and white nationalist sympathizer, the descriptive of Mr. Shaw leaves out an…um…very relevant point: Jamiel Shaw is a black man. Shhhhhhh!
The New York Daily News, August 27, 2015: In which the story begins: “Donald Trump’s not looking for the Nazi vote.” Well, duh.
The Washington Post, December 1, 2015: The headline in a column by the Post’s Dana Milbank:
Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist
Milbank begins:
“Let’s not mince words: Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.”
The New York Times, May 28, 2016: In which the headline reads:
Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism
This jewel of a story begins this way:
“WASHINGTON — The comparison was inflammatory, to say the least. Former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts equated Donald J. Trump’s immigration plan with Kristallnacht, the night of horror in 1938 when rampaging Nazis smashed Jewish homes and businesses in Germany and killed scores of Jews.
But if it was a provocative analogy, it was not a lonely one. Mr. Trump’s campaign has engendered impassioned debate about the nature of his appeal and warnings from critics on the left and the right about the potential rise of fascism in the United States. More strident opponents have likened Mr. Trump to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.”
One could go on - and on and on with this kind of garbage that regularly appears in both the Times and the Washington Post, not to mention countless other liberal outlets. The essence of this great unhinging of America’s Establishment and Liberal Media: Trump is a racist-sexist-bigoted-Nazi-wannabe Hitler-fascist-would be Mussolini. If not worse. (Leftist heroes Stalin and Mao?) As Seth Lipsky notes well, the language used is “such intemperate language…ad hominem attacks….(and filled with ) incitement.”
Take a close read of that Thomas Friedman New York Times column that captured Lipsky’s attention. Among other things it said this:
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin got assassinated.
His right-wing opponents just kept delegitimizing him as a “traitor” and “a Nazi” for wanting to make peace with the Palestinians and give back part of the Land of Israel. Of course, all is fair in politics, right? And they had God on their side, right? They weren’t actually telling anyone to assassinate Rabin. That would be horrible.
But there are always people down the line who don’t hear the caveats. They just hear the big message: The man is illegitimate, the man is a threat to the nation, the man is the equivalent of a Nazi war criminal. Well, you know what we do with people like that, don’t you? We kill them.
And that’s what the Jewish extremist Yigal Amir did to Rabin. Why not? He thought he had permission from a whole segment of Israel’s political class.”
Gee. The description Friedman gives here of opponents who “just kept delegitimizing” Yitzhak Rabin as “a traitor” and “a Nazi” and more, resulting in Rabin’s assassination because the shooter “thought he had permission from a whole segment of Israel’s political class”? Who does that description most fit in today’s American political scene?
Exactly. Just as Seth Lipsky points out, and as seen in the examples provided above, it is Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News - and they are far from alone - who have come unhinged at the very mention of Donald Trump. It is they, to borrow from Friedman, who are giving “permission from a whole segment of America’s political and liberal media class” to kooks out there to do whatever - no matter how dangerous, despicable or out of bounds - to Donald Trump.
And “unhinged” doesn’t even to begin to describe them. Perhaps Friedman ought to take his own advice so that, journalistically speaking, people as emotionally overwrought as Friedman and others in the liberal media appear to be “never come this way again.”
