“Use the right words or you are a terrorist-lover!” (Just don’t use the word “assassination”)
Check out Meghan McCain turning herself into Lindsey Graham before out eyes:
On Monday morning, during The View’s first new show of 2020, Meghan McCain defended President Donald Trump’s targeted killing of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani. “For me, when a big, bad terrorist gets blown up, I’m happy about it,” she said.
The fatuous nonsense spewing out of these apologists’ mouths is enough to make you sick:
“You issued a statement calling Soleimani a murderer. Later, you issued a second statement saying that he was ‘an assassination of a senior foreign military official.’ Now, this is a man who is obviously responsible for hundreds of American troops’ deaths, carnage that we can’t even imagine… I don’t understand the flip-flop. I don’t understand why it was so hard to call him a terrorist, and I would just like you to explain the change.”
Meanwhile, they’re having a tantrum when anyone says the assassination of Suleimani is an assassination.
You can see in the video above that Warren handled that idiocy with dispatch.
But I want to give a big shout-out to Chris Cillizza for spreading this bullshit yesterday.
Warren, Jan 2: Soleimani is a “murderer”Warren, Jan 3: U.S. “assassinated” Soleimani
Warren, Jan. 5: Soleimani is “a government official, a high-ranking military official” https://t.co/Bz8Squds0c
— Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) January 6, 2020
Warren’s spokesperson tweeted back:
“I rarely tweet about stuff like this but I can’t hold back here. Chris, this is embarrassing. Every statement is true & consistent. The reason you were able to cherry-pick her many comments is b/c she’s the only candidate who’s done multiple interviews & media avails about it.”
There was a huge pile-on on twitter as well.
Jesus Christ, ESL courses are available on line.— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) January 6, 2020
cilizza, upon walking outside at the end of the day and being unable to find the sun, which he knows he saw mere hours ago: pic.twitter.com/EuxJdOLgJP— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) January 6, 2020
He says his name is “Chris Cillizza” but his handle is “CillizzaCNN,” how do you explain the contradiction??! It can’t be both!— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) January 6, 2020
There were many, many more. Thankfully. Maybe he’ll stop.
Cillizza was one of the most responsible for dogging Hillary Clinton with the email story day in and day out in 2016. One day when I asked him how many times he was going to re-tweet one particularly snotty tweet on the subject (he’d done it at least four times in one day) he blocked me.
He was one of the very worst offenders hammering the email flap and he got a fancy new job not long after on CNN.
Chris Hayes said this about the 2016 campaign in a recent Columbia Journalism Review article:
To me, the biggest sin of 2016 was proportionality. Particularly vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton and the email story, and then the Wikileaks story. When you look at the word cloud of what people heard from the news, there’s one huge word in the middle and that’s (Hillary Clinton’s) emails. There’s no justification whatsoever for the proportion of coverage devoted to that story.
And sometimes I think people want to defend the coverage by using the strawman of, it was news. Yeah, it was news. It was a news story when it turned out Ivanka Trump was using unsecured communications at the White House, it was a news story when it turned out Nikki Haley was using unsecured communications as UN Ambassador, in some senses. The president uses unsecured communications. Those have all been news stories. Then everyone moves on to something else because it’s not that big of a story. The proportionality is one of the key challenges here.
Chris Cillizza always finds something snotty like this to use as a punch line to entertain his fellow journalists and it’s one of the reasons we have Donald Trump today.
.