Since President Trump criticizes US journalists for propagating fake news, it's incomprehensible that he would care if a foreign country murdered a journalist. That's the kind of twisted, bizarre logic that Ali Velshi employed while guest hosting Joy Reid's MSNBC show this morning.
Velshi put it to Amy Kremer of Women Vote Trump PAC that it was difficult to square Trump's criticism of the media with the concern he expressed over the possible murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of the Saudi government.
Kremer patiently explained to Velshi that the two matters are entirely different:
AMY KREMER: You can’t compare the two. You are talking about the alleged murder of somebody . . . And you are talking about [Trump] just talking about the press is the enemy of the people. What he’s talking about is all the inaccurate and false news that’s reporting. When you are talking about the murder of somebody, versus the reporting done by the press, I don’t think you can compare the two.
Velshi's noggin was impervious to Kremer's crystal-clear logic, as he repeated: "You say the president’s attack on journalists is because of inaccurate and fake news reported. That’s the same excuse the Turks use, the Chinese and the Saudis use, right?...You can see the connection I’m making, right?"
Even after Kremer again clearly described the glaring difference between criticizing journalists and murdering them, Velshi feigned an inability to distinguish the cases: "I’m not sure why the comparison is so difficult."
None is so blind as he who will not see, Ali!
Note: Looks like Al Jazeera is NBC's farm team. We noted this past week that NBC's Morgan Radford used to work for Al Jazeera. Turns out, Velshi did, too.
