The Morning Rant

The Atlantic, which, incidentally, is owned by a big-time Biden donor/supporter, ran a piece last week claiming that Donald Trump made disparaging remarks about the military, including declining to go to a ceremony at a military cemetery, referring to U.S. war dead as "losers" and "suckers."

How do we know this is true? Because, according to The Atlantic, there are 4 witnesses who say they heard Trump say those things in some sort of meeting or off-hand conversation.

And who are these witnesses? Well, that's the problem: we don't know. The Atlantic refuses to say who they are. The Atlantic claims that they want to remain anonymous. Why? Because they're afraid of mean tweets. No, I am not making this up. Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic actually said this and expected to be taken seriously.

So the story smells bad from the get-go.

The smell gets worse, though, as other witnesses in that meeting came forward denying that Trump said anything remotely like what is being claimed. And one of those witnesses is John Bolton, certainly no Trump fan.

And adding to the stench is a commercial put out by the liberal veterans group, Vote Vet, based on the Atlantic article, obvious aimed at members of the military and their families. It appeared within 12 hours of the publication of the Atlantic piece.

And now it smells like a DNC/MSM coordinated attack.

It could be that this was supposed to be their big "October surprise", but somebody high up in the DNC gave the order to release the kraken early because their internal polling told them Biden was cratering badly. But this is only speculation.

There waa a lot of silly talk on social media over the weekend that the story has been "confirmed" by various news agencies, i.e the AP, Washington Post, and even Fox News. But what does "confirmed" mean in this context? See, it's starting to sound a lot like the Ukraine hoax where some anonymous whistleblower said something which was attested to by some other guys who, as subsequent questioning revealed, weren't first-hand witnesses at all. So their "confirmation" was pretty much worthless.

So basically what we have are news agencies "confirming" the story by pointing at other reporting the same thing. This is not reporting. This is a circle jerk.

Whatever value there was in the past in anonymous sources, the political climate has become so degraded, they really can't and shouldn't be used any longer. So many journalists put out such garbage that any credibility the expect from sourcing anonymously should be rejected. That goes for stuff on our side, too. For example, this Breitbart story about Jake Tapper trying to meddle in an election is based on unnamed "sources familiar with..." Sorry, no sale. I mean, I would *like* to believe Tapper would do something like this, but Breitbart is going to have to do exert a bit more effort to convince me.

My new rule for media: name your sources or piss off.

Oh, and one more thing. Journalists who get burned by an anonymous source should burn the anonymous source. The fact that I never see this happen leads me to believe that journalists aren't the fearless towers of integrity they like to portray themselves as.

(h/t Physics Geek and AlextheChick).

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I'm trying to reduce the embedding of tweets in my rant posts because some of you are having problems when the page refreshes, but I think I should include this Trump commercial. It's not one of those "awesome RNC commercials" some of you were complaining about last time that run for 2 or 3 minutes and so won't be seen on TV, just social media and YouTube, so who really cares? But I think this one is pretty good. It's 30 seconds long, appears to be an actual campaign commercial for TV, and it hits pretty hard:

pic.twitter.com/P8bokc3wEU

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2020

Here is another one that is 15 seconds of brutality. But I don't know if it's an "official" commercial because it doesn't have the "I approved this message" boilerplate.

Want to Laugh Your Ass Off?

The getaway that failed.
Here's some Proud Boys vs. Antifa.
Antifa ambush is a craptastic failure.

Who Dis:

For the 'Ettes:

Friday's Who Dis: The cinematic career of Israeli beauty Haya Harareet spanned little more than a half-dozen movies, but she did play Charlton Heston's love interest in the blockbuster epic 1959 production of Ben Hur with the Irish-born actor Stephen Boyd, whose career was cut short by a massive heart attack that caused his death at age 45.

Today's Edition Of The Morning Rant Is Brought To You By The Classic Banana Split:

Banana split recipe here.

posted by OregonMuse at 11:35 AM

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