September 11, 2016

ABC's Sunday Morning both-sides-are-equally-bad program, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, features an occasional liberal on the round table panel, offset by a slew of centrist pawns (aka Right Wingers) who parrot arguments that are designed to spin this 2016 race into a real close contest.

The only liberal today was Baltimore Mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake who was outnumbered by the rest of the primarily right leaning panel comprised of: Bloomberg's both-siderist Morning Joe favorite, John Heilemann, semi-liberal, EJ Dionne from the WaPost, the ultra far-right wing Congresswoman/pathological liar, Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and lastly, the consummate 'outsider,' Bloody Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard.

Hillary Clinton spoke the truth when she asserted that 'half of Trump's supporters could be lumped into a basket of deplorables.

You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites…He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.

When most of the This Week panel finished clutching their pearls, they had a field day trying to create a false equivalency which identifies Clinton as just as much of a bigot as Herr Drümpf. Calling out Trump supporters, many of whom are intolerant, racist, homophobic misogynists, does not make one a bigot. Unfortunately, those facts are irrelevant on Sunday Morning GOP-TV.

Thanks to ABC News for the transcript:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is this comment going to matter a month from now?

HEILEMANN: Well, I think it could matter a little bit. I think she actually did apologize relatively cleanly, again, particularly if you compare the -- the reluctance of Donald Trump to ever kind of apologize any...

(CROSSTALK)

RAWLINGS-BLAKE: He never does anything wrong.

HEILEMANN: Comparatively speaking, her apology was relatively clean.

I do think it's -- it violates the kind of fundamental campaign tenet, which is it's fine to attack your opponent, but you should really stay away from attacking the electorate.

The other thing that's problematic about it is this...

BLACKBURN: It's cynical.

HEILEMANN: -- is that Donald Trump has attacked her as a bigot over and over again, right?

And there's no real -- there was never before this moment, there was never a time in which you could -- you could kind of justify that, where she had said anything that actually kind of met the dictionary definition of bigoted.

This comment kind of gets very close to the dictionary definition of bigoted, so it gives Trump a talking point that he will go back to again and again.

Sadly, E.J. Dionne agrees with this nonsense and legitimizes Heilemann's convoluted logic.

DIONNE: Could I say the real cost of this is, if she hadn't said that, we might now be talking about Donald Trump's love affair with Vladimir Putin or a million other subjects today. That's where the news was going and all the dissent in Bill's party over what he's saying about Putin. And, instead, we're talking about this.

Sorry John Heilemann, you've demonstrated less maturity since your Monday Morning Quarterbacking days of covering the McCain-Palin fiasco. In fact, Heilemann is more of a tool of the right-wing spin machine that is hell bent on irresponsibly creating false equivalencies among two very disparate candidates. His follow-up book to Game Change showed us that he's become only more sensationalistic, more of a tool for the media to create false narratives.

This need to sacrifice truth in the interest of ratings is something we will see much more of in the upcoming weeks, so get used to it, America. This is our sickeningly irresponsible and inept MSM hard at work in the infotainment business.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon