If you can tell the difference between NPR “news” and DNC messaging, we’d love to know.
On Friday’s Morning Edition, NPR anchor Rachel Martin brought on a “Republican” from "Republicans for the Rule of Law," a group founded to get Trump impeached and removed from office. Now the same gang is spending $10 million in television ads as “Republican Voters Against Trump” – in other words, Republicans for Biden. But none of this was disclosed to the NPR listener. They were presented as typical Republican opinion.
RACHEL MARTIN: We’re going to talk about Republican reaction to the president’s suggestion with Sarah Longwell. She’s the executive director of Republicans for the Rule of Law. Good morning. Thanks for being back on the show.
Then Martin read part of this tweet out loud:
She only read the prediction about the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history. Get a load of the "question" she posed to Longwell: “You have said everything in his tweet is a lie. Walk us through that.”
Walk us through that??
This is one of the most frustrating uses of the word “lie” in journalism. You cannot call a prediction of the future a “lie.” It hasn’t happened yet! That's like calling Al Roker's morning weather forecast a "lie."
But Longwell was given the floor, spouting off for a minute and 43 seconds without interruption. It’s not true that Trump could delay the election – that’s in the Constitution – but what followed was a pile of boilerplate liberal punditry about Trump's "low cunning" in "generally sowing distrust in the outcome of the election, and laying the potential groundwork, to either dispute the result, or claim it was rigged, so he can, you know, be perpetually aggrieved if he loses."
As if the Left hasn't acted perpetually aggrieved about the last election...and as if they haven't sowed distrust in the outcome of the 2020 election by routinely talking about the perils of Russian interference and racist voter suppression.
Then Martin tossed a second softball, touting the New York Times mini-freakout by self-proclaimed longtime Republican law professor Steven Calabresi insisting "this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again." Longwell lauded this "strong message to the conservative legal community that no one should be defending this kind of behavior."
PS: Longwell is a "lesbian feminist Republican" who told the gay site AfterEllen.com “many of us who choose to stay in the party do so because we believe it’s the best way to push the party toward change. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
So Republicans are cannibals who want LGBT Fricassee? How offensive.
Later in that interview, Longwell admitted “I don’t align myself with a political party as much as I do a set of core beliefs” – like the free market....and yet she’s pushing Republicans for Biden. The whole thing sounds fraudulent, but it’s very convenient messaging for the NPR/DNC squad.
Some transcript is below:
LONGWELL: The president is trying to change the subject from yesterday’s historically bad GDP numbers... The president’s always had kind of a low cunning when it comes to understanding how to control narratives. So this looks like a classic case of calculated misdirection.
But the bigger goal, I think, is about generally sowing distrust in the outcome of the election, and laying the potential groundwork, to either dispute the result, or claim it was rigged, so he can, you know, be perpetually aggrieved if he loses. We saw the president do this in 2016, and he really only has a few plays in his playbook, and he tends to run them over and over again.
But I think that it’s – you know – everybody sort of reacted to the idea that he was talking about delaying the election, but I think what’s most concerning is just this general, trying to undermine, you know, confidence in the upcoming election, because that’s scary at a time when the election is going to look different to people because we’re in the midst of a pandemic, because there’ll be so many mail-in ballots
