Total humiliation of the media

Zach Schonfeld writes at Newsweek,

the biggest media trend of the year: total humiliation.

...For lots of high-profile media personalities, from Nate Silver to Nick Denton, 2016 dealt an enormous reckoning. Michael Moore made some startling predictions, but few other liberal commentators saw what was happening. Much of the pundit industrial complex spent the calendar year standing athwart history, yelling “It can’t happen here” or “Trump is going to pivot any day now.” Clinton lost. Pundits ate crow, took the L—choose your preferred cliché. One columnist ate his newspaper column, as he had promised to do if Trump became the GOP nominee. Some who got it wrong showed a capacity for self-reflection. Others, like Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, doubled down on their myopic pontificating or continued howling into their social media echo chamber of choice.

It was the year we realized that a lot of Very Important People who get paid a lot of money to know about U.S. politics have little more insight to dispense than the cab drivers they quote in their columns. Granted, plenty of normal people were wrong, too. But their faulty predictions weren’t recorded in national newspapers. Pundits who look back on their work might find a 16-month archive of headlines like “Dear Media, Stop Freaking Out About Donald Trump’s Polls.”

For Trump fans, it is thrillingly apt that the candidate whose rise to power blindsided the media is the same candidate who staked his entire campaign on bald contempt for journalists. Trump’s bone-deep loathing of the “dishonest media” might be his only coherent ideology. The president-elect routinely denounces the “failing” New York Times or CNN on Twitter and occasionally humiliates individual journalists by name.

...“A Trump presidency would represent a threat to press freedom in the United States,” the Committee to Protect Journalists warned in mid-October. One month later, Trump strode into the White House to meet for the first time with the 44th president, whose own aggressive war on whistle-blowers could enable Trump’s vindictive actions toward journalists.

Read more here.

Five emails showing coordination between the media and the Democrat National committee.

Aaron Bandler reports at Daily Wire,

Co-nservatives have alleged for years that the media is slanted in favor of Democrats, a charge that is normally met with scorn and eye rolls from the elitist left. But the Democratic National Committee emails exposed by WikiLeaks have proven that the DNC did in fact collude with the media.

Bandler then proceeds to give five examples here.

Gosnellian Silence on Planned Parenthood's Baby Organ Harvesting

Ace of Spades writes,

All Democrat Candidates Embrace Gosnellian Silence on Planned Parenthood's Baby Organ Harvesting

You don't have to answer a difficult question when the media is stocked with rabidly-pro-abortion allies and fans.

Read more here.

Update: Rush Limbaugh has grabbed this story and run with it as only he can:

We have 3,300 children in the womb being murdered every day, but now we know that there's a lot more going on at Planned Parenthood than just collecting money for performing abortions. We now know that Planned Parenthood is harvesting body parts from the aborted babies and selling them.

Trump marches on

I heard the brash, outspoken Donald Trump on the Laura Ingraham show today. My fifteen-year-old son asked me incredulously, "Do you like him?" I answered, "If he does what is right for this country, I don't have to like him." Trump bragged to Laura, "I know how the system works. You give them money, and they do what you want!" Then he quickly added, "I'm using my own money. I don't need anybody else's money."

Ann Althouse, a Wisconsin blogger who has followed Governor Scott Walker's actions in Wisconsin more closely than any blogger I read, tells us that even Walker's worst enemies characterize him as "pleasant." Do we want "pleasant," or someone whose personality is anything but "pleasant," but who leads the country back to strength, and does the right thing about securing our borders?

Who could put an end to political correctness faster than Donald Trump?

Althouse points out that

"Nearly six in 10 — 57 percent — Republicans now have a favorable view of Trump, compared to 40 percent who have an unfavorable one."
"That marks a complete reversal from a late-May Post-ABC poll, in which 65 percent of Republicans saw Trump unfavorably."

Of course, the media brings us only the most outlandish things Trump says. For example, he said we are letting rapists from Mexico stay in the country. He also said, "I love the Mexican people." My son knew about the first quote, but not the second.

Removing bumps on the road to Hillary's coronation

Mark Steyn writes about former House GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert's sex scandal,

The feds don't actually have jurisdiction over Hastert's high-school sex life and, in the state that does, the statute of limitations has kicked in. But that's no reason for them not to dispatch another couple of dozen investigators to go crawling over Illinois. I mean, it's not like they've got anything else to do, like investigating Lois Lerner or Hillary's server...

...As the story unfolds, only one thing can be said for certain: We're never gonna hear another word about Hillary's Clinton Foundation scandals ever again, not even if ISIS paid $2 million for Bill to deliver a 20-minute speech on climate change at the Sword of the Beheader Elementary School in Ramadi and they decapitated ten Christians as the warm-up act.

So far, The New York Times has five reporters on the Hastert story, The Washington Post nine ...so there's no one left in the newsroom to look into Hillary - even though Bill's been flying around with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on a plane called the Lolita Express. Couldn't that just sort of get mentioned in paragraph 37 of the Hastert stories, maybe with Josh Duggar, as part of a general pedophile trend among the powerful?

So now all three Republican House Speakers from the Impeachment Era have been destroyed. And Slick Willie will be able to say that he was impeached for having consensual relations with a 21-year-old woman by a House led by a guy who had non-consensual relations with underage boys. That would be Impeachment Redemption at a most convenient time. When's the trial scheduled for? September 2016?

If that's where we're headed, it would be too much to expect the Democrat-media complex to forgo the pleasure of making the third most powerful Republican of the century the poster boy for his party.

I've been wondering what it would take to get Bill and Hillary over this awkward little bump on the road to her coronation. They've always been lucky like that...

Read more here.