October 11, 2017

Charlie Sykes, former conservative squawk radio host, went on CNN's Reliable Resources with host Brian Stelter to sell his book, trash Trump, sell his book, blame conservative media and sell his book.

First the Trump-bashing:

STELTER: Remember, Corker came out a little while ago and questioned the president's stability?

SYKES: Yes.

STELTER: We have seen President Trump Corker on Twitter today, claiming that Corker lacks the guts for reelection.

And Corker just responded on Twitter and said the White House has become an adult day care center and clearly I believe he is suggesting someone didn't show up for their shift to baby-sit the president today.

Do you think this is only worsening on a daily basis, this idea that there are some Republicans like Corker who believe the president is not stable and we see this war of words on a daily basis that just confirms that is the case?

SYKES: I think what you're seeing is people willing to say what people have known for a long time.

Look, Brian, anyone who has paid any attention to Donald Trump over the last two years should not be actually surprised by any of this. He is an erratic narcissist, a serial liar, somebody who went through a campaign mocking women and the disabled, thin-skinned, vindictive, all of those things that we saw during the campaign that for whatever reason the conservative movement decided to embrace, enable, or rationalize.

Now we are seeing it playing out in the White House. And guys like Bob Corker I think have reached the point where it's like can we not pretend that the emperor is not naked? Can we not pretend that the emperor is not unstable, in a way that we should have understood very, very quickly more than a year or two years ago?

Sykes went on to blame the conservative media - or corporate media, if you will, for enabling Trump:

STELTER: Why are there then so many conservative media heavyweights willing to defend Trump at all costs, not willing to admit the stability problem?

SYKES: I think this goes back to the nature of the conservative media.

And, again, one of the surprises to me was the willingness of many people in the conservative media to roll over, to abandon long-held conservative principles and to embrace Donald Trump. Whether they did it because they were playing some sort of eight-dimensional chess, like Rush Limbaugh, or whether they were doing it like FOX News, because they had blundered into it, look, frankly, at this point, Brian, this is the business model of the conservative media, that they understand that conservatives are still behind Donald Trump.

And a lot of people on the right just simply -- they look to conservative media as -- and I mentioned this before -- as their safe space. They don't want to hear things that rattle their confidence in this administration.

And I think that it's very, very difficult. I'm a former conservative talk show host. And I try to imagine what it would be like to be doing the show now with an audience that frankly does not want to hear it.

So, I do think there are true believers out there. There are the orange Kool-Aid drinkers out there. But there are some people who I think have just cynically made the decision that if they want the clicks, if they want the rating, if they want to be able to stay within that conservative tribe, there's only route. And that is to be a Trump rationalizer and defender.

Hmm, Sykes apparently forgot his role in helping in the creation of this orange Frankenstein's monster. How he could forget more than 20 years as a squawk show host, I don't understand, but I guess he did.

Sykes also forgot how similar he and Trump really are. They're both on their third wives. They both cheated on former wives. They both are racists and misogynists.

Sykes' appeared to sound so reasonable on the show, like he is truly distraught over what the conservative media, of which he was a willing participant, had done. He should get an Oscar for that performance.

He was on the show for two main reasons.

First, which was painfully obviously since both Sykes and Stelter plugged it about a dozen times, was to sell his book. Sykes hadn't come to see the light and atone for his sins but to profit from them.

The second reason is why he might have sounded so genuine. He has been part of the #NeverTrump movement for a couple of years. Oh, it's not because he's bothered by the racism, the misogyny, the hurtful policies or any of that.

No, the reason is so dead set against Trump is because Trump is a loose cannon and not part of the cabal that has been trying to take over the country for a very, very long time.

You see, Sykes sold his soul a long time ago to the Bradley Foundation.

Sykes' current, and third, wife is Janet Riorden, who is the Director of Community Programs for the Bradley Foundation. Without her money from them, he wouldn't be able to live the lifestyle he's been accustomed to.

Sykes also profits more directly from the Bradley Foundation. He is former editor and currently a senior fellow at Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a right wing propaganda group funded by the Bradley Foundation.

In other words, he's not upset about the things Trump is doing except that Trump is single-handedly ruining all that the right wing dark money groups have spent so long in building. The Bradley Foundation, the Kochs and the rest of them wanted one of their meat puppets, someone they could control, like Scott Walker or Ted Cruz, in the White House, not the renegade Trump who is ruining the Republican trademark better than anything the left could have hoped to ever have hoped to achieve themselves.

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