WhatFinger


Which don't appear to actually exist, despite the lurid fantasies of the Timesmen

While a lunatic threatens to nuke us, the New York Times wants you focused on 'deep divisions' in the White House



When is the right time for partisan politics? Wrong question if you're asking the American left. The right question would be, "Is it ever not the right time?" The answer? Of course not. When a nuclear-armed madman is threatening to strike U.S. territories and possibly even the U.S. mainland, that would seem to be an obvious time to clamp down on the partisan B.S. Maybe the time to sell Americans on the contrived notion of a White House in total chaos is not when the nation could really use a united front against a very dangerous and unstable enemy. Let the crisis pass and then you can go back to stories about alleged dysfunction that rely entirely on cowardly turncoats too afraid to give their names.
Seem reasonable, with the lives of millions potentially hanging in the balance? What do you say, Associated Press and New York Times? Ha. Not a chance. Behold this breathless nonsense, headlined "Deep Divisions Emerge in Trump Administration as North Korea Threatens War":
Senior American officials sent mixed signals on North Korea on Wednesday as President Trump’s “fire and fury” warning rattled allies and adversaries alike, a sign of his administration’s deep divisions as the outcast state once again threatened to wage nuclear war on the United States. The president’s advisers calibrated his dire warning with statements that, if not directly contradictory, emphasized different points. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson stressed diplomacy and reassured Americans that they could “sleep well at night,” while Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said North Korea risked “the end of its regime and the destruction of its people” if it did not “stand down.” North Korea gave no indication that it would do so. In a statement late Wednesday, the North Korean military dismissed Mr. Trump’s fire-and-fury warning on Tuesday as a “load of nonsense” and said only “absolute force” would work on someone so “bereft of reason.” The military threatened to “turn the U.S. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war” and added that any American strike on North Korean missile and nuclear targets would be “mercilessly repelled.”

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The statement also said that the North Korean military would finalize a plan by mid-August to fire four midrange missiles into the waters off the Pacific island of Guam, a United States territory used as a strategic base, to create a “historic enveloping fire.” The spiral of fighting words left the Trump administration debating how to handle a standoff that has defied three presidents and only grown more ominous in recent weeks as North Korea successfully tested intercontinental ballistic missiles for the first time. Neither Mr. Tillerson nor Mr. Mattis had reviewed in advance Mr. Trump’s threat on Tuesday, when he said North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” And the dissonance in their own follow-up statements reflected the struggle inside the Trump administration.
This one is truly a team effort in journalistic nonsense, with the AP reporting the story and the Times running it and writing the headline. Yet even the AP's own reporting doesn't come close to backing up the assertion made in the headline. For one thing, the story doesn't even cite anything going on inside the White House, not even offering anything based on the word of anonymous leakers. The story is totally dependent on public statements made by Trump, and the followup statements of key cabinet members like Tillerson and Mattis. And let's consider those. I don't know if the AP and the Times have been paying attention for the past several decades, but it's quite normal - especially during Republican administrations - for a president to make bold pronouncements on matters concerning foreign affairs, only to see their own Secretaries of State swoop in with statements that appear to throw cold water on what the president said. George Schultz did it to Ronald Reagan. Evil piece of garbage James A. Baker III did it to George Bush. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice did it to George W. Bush.

I'm sure a lot of this is by design. The Secretary of State's job is diplomacy. When other diplomats from around the world are calling him up expressing their nervousness over whatever the president said, he's the one who assures them that surely everything will be fine. Frankly this has always irritated me, and led me to suspect that the permanent State Department bureaucracy calls the shots on a lot of these things. If we have a president who's serious about standing up to bad guys, I don't know why the Secretary of State can't simply affirm that and be done with it. But what Tillerson is doing here is consistent with the behavior of every Secretary of State in recent memory. It doesn't show that the Trump Administration has "deep divisions." It shows that it's normal. That said, there is nothing in Tillerson's statement that inherently contradicts what the president said. If Trump has the situation well in hand, then that's a good reason to sleep well at night. The possibility that we might turn North Korea into a sheet of glass isn't going to keep me awake. I don't want that to be necessary, but I'd rather see Trump strike Pyongyang than Bowl Cut Jr. strike Guam. I'll sleep better knwoing we don't have a wimpy president who will do nothing in the face of these threats. Anymore.


As for the statement from Mattis, I'm not sure where the AP or the Times sees a division of any kind. How does the destruction of the North Korean regime and its people do anything abut affirm 100 percent what Trump said? No matter what happens, the mainstream media think its their job to convince you that the Trump White House is a mess of nonstop dysfunctional chaos, and they'll even go so far as to portray perfectly normal public statements as evidence of this, when anyone who knows even a little history can see it provides no such evidence whatsoever. It should really tell you something that, at a time when our nation faces a serious threat of nuclear war, these people are more interested in using the occasion to continue their attacks on President Trump than they are in apprising you of just how serious this situation really is. The media are a disgrace.

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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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