Europe
Though not as hyperbolic or inconsolable as CNN and MSNBC were earlier in the day, Thursday’s Hardball still featured host Chris Matthews revolting over the President’s last-minute decision to cancel Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s overseas trip, dubbing it a “cheap shot” letter that “doesn’t look good for the country.” Beyond that, Matthews speculated without evidence about what would happen “if something goes wrong” with government workers furloughed and stressed.
File this one as yet another instance in which the liberal media took President Trump’s bait, hook, line, and sinker, launching into apocalyptic meltdowns and illustrating for the American public how, for those on the right not in The Resistance, they’re the opposition party. On Thursday afternoon, CNN suffered a network-wide meltdown over Trump’s letter canceling Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s overseas trip less than an hour before take-off, calling the President a “childish” and “cranky” schoolboy who’s only concerned about “pure politics.”
Breaking into live coverage of the Senate confirmation hearing for President Trump’s Attorney General nominee William Barr, on Tuesday afternoon, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams informed viewers about the Brexit deal being rejected by Parliament in the UK. He insisted that Britain’s decision to leave the European Union was the result of Russian “election meddling.”
A New York Times reporter travels to a small town in Finland billed as the happiest place on earth, and determines that its secret to happiness is . . . multitudinous government programs and high taxes.
New York Times Berlin bureau chief Katrin Bennhold managed to make a shocking case of German media malpractice all about Trump, and fretted about how the “far right” in Europe would pounce on the controversy to tar the media, in “German Reporter Made Up Stories and Now Critics Are ‘Popping the Corks.’" Bennhold classlessly dragged the Nazis into the mix, putting the genocidal dictatorship in the same paragraph as the democratically elected Donald Trump.
One easily demonstrable way that secular media outlets underline their secularism is on issues like euthanasia, or as they like to call it, the "right to die." Reuters reporter Sabela Ojea issued a very one-sided dispatch from Spain with a hope-and-change headline: "As Spain readies euthanasia law, dying sclerosis victim senses hope." Nowhere in the Reuters dispatch is there an opposing view, just the note that the country's traditional Catholic influence has been on the wane for 40 years.
A recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation survey found that 51 percent of American millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist country. Only 42 percent prefer the latter. Twenty-five percent of millennials who know who Vladimir Lenin was view him favorably. Lenin was the first premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Half of millennials have never heard of Communist Mao Zedong, who ruled China from 1949 to 1959 and was responsible for the deaths of 45 million Chinese people.
France’s increasingly violent “yellow vest” protests began as grassroots, working-class opposition to a fuel tax hike that was promoted by the government as climate change action. But network stories about the protests ignored the environmental motivations most of the time.
As Americans begun celebrating the holiday season, almost 300,000 French people took to the streets to protest a massive fuel tax hike proposed by President Emmanuel Macron to fight climate change. The protests turned violent Saturday as the now-rioters began digging up the streets of Paris and trying to construct barricades as police fought back with tear gas and water cannons. Despite this ongoing battle, ABC News had not reported one word about it on air. Not even on Saturday’s World News Tonight.
In the age of Trump, the American media insist that freedom of speech is in danger because they somehow consider mocking journalists a suppression of free speech. Yet these First Amendment worshipers were missing on October 25 when the European Court of Human Rights upheld an Austrian court verdict that a woman should be punished for casting aspersions on the Islamic biography of Mohammed, the prophet, who married a child bride named Aisha.
Joe Scarborough thought he was being so cute. No fewer than six times during his little spiel this on today's Morning Joe, while reading from the US government's WWII psychological profile of Adolf Hitler, Scarborough stressed that he was not intending to refer to anyone else. Joe never uttered the President's name, but coming from this world-class Trump hater, there was no doubt what parallel he wanted viewers to draw.
Sexual scandals and inappropriate behavior are as old as the Bible. I give you (1 Corinthians 5:1) in which Paul writes: “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father's wife.” In more modern times, there have been sex scandals involving TV evangelists from Aimee Semple McPherson in the '20s to Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart in the '80s. And there have been more recent examples, too, Ted Haggard, Bob Coy, Bill Gothard.