On Tuesday night's Rachel Maddow Show, the MSNBC host's usual elongated lecture contained a few seconds of easily identifiable falsehood. In attempting to underline just how badly Trump negotiated with the North Koreans, she claimed the communists "gave up nothing. They promised nothing." This at the very least left out three American hostages released.
RACHEL MADDOW: So, in order to get this summit last night with the American president, the North Korean dictator and the North Korean government appeared to have not promised change of any kind in their nuclear program or in any other policy. Literally, they gave up nothing. They promised nothing.
In exchange for that generous offer, President Trump gave North Korea this royal wedding-style summit in which North Korea was billed as a nation equal in stature to the United States and the North Korean dictator was billed as an international leader equal in stature to the president of the United States. As a bonus, the president also threw in literally hours of unwavering, over-the-top praise for the North Korean dictator and his repeated insistence that it was his honor as president of the United States to have the opportunity to meet with the dictator.
Not only did Maddow exaggerate the so-called North Korean "jackpot" from Trump, during the Obama years she exaggerated the wonders of his Iran arms deal in July of 2015:
MADDOW: We don’t know if the Iran deal is going to work. If it does, it will be the major foreign policy achievement, not only of this presidency, but of this American generation. At which point, people in the not-too-distant future will look back at this presidency, they’ll look back at this President and they’ll say, "Of course they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize. Of course they did.”
The American Thinker points out that Maddow literally got out the patriotic music to hail Obama's dealing with Cuba on March 21, 2016:
MADDOW: When the Castro brothers die and when Cuba opens and becomes a new iteration of itself, no longer trapped in the politics of the 1950s and before, nobody knows who will get to write the history of this moment in Cuban history, but in American history, we know, that President Barack Obama will be forever the American leader who got done what every other Democrat since Jack Kennedy tried and failed to do. He got it done.
(Band playing "The Star-Spangled Banner")
MADDOW: If I don't do that, the symphony doesn't sound quite right.
There's nothing wrong with skepticism about North Korea's seriousness in keeping promises about limiting its armaments. Maddow is right to point out previous administrations (starting with Bill Clinton's) made deals that the North Koreans cheated on. There's also nothing wrong with pointing out the horror of North Korea's human-rights record.
But the audacity of Maddow's partisanship is amazing, to sound this alarm in 2018 as a sign that Trump is a world-class sucker, but the last president pandered to dictators and it was the historical achievement of a generation, a Nobel Peace Prize moment or two. This is history as opportunistically written by the Democrats.
