07/25/16

Trump’s Journalistic Weapon Now Targets Hillary

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Clinton

The supermarket tabloid National Enquirer can’t be laughed at any more. It was Donald J. Trump’s effective weapon against Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and now it’s been unleashed against Hillary Clinton. The issue currently on newsstands reveals “The Explosive 7-Step Plan to Destroy Hillary,” and predicts the demise of the Democratic candidate.

Don’t laugh. In 2007, the National Enquirer broke the story of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards’ “love child.” Edwards was caught visiting his mistress and secret love child in a Los Angeles hotel. Edwards denied the affair, but the truth came out. The National Enquirer was vindicated.

The New York Times reported, “By being the first and, largely, the only publication pursuing the Edwards story through his denials of the affair and of fathering a child out of wedlock, The Enquirer is under consideration for a Pulitzer Prize, and it has strong support for its bid from other journalists.” The Enquirer’s staff became eligible for the Pulitzer in two categories, “Investigative Reporting” and “National News Reporting.” It fell short, however.

The National Enquirer became Trump’s favorite media weapon to smear Cruz. Here is a list of assaults on the rival Republican from the tabloid:

  • April 4: “Cruz’s 5 Secret Mistresses” and “Their Shocking Claims”
  • April 11: “Furious Wife Confronts Cheating Cruz!”
  • April 18: “Ted Cruz Named in Madam’s Black Book”
  • May 2: “Ted Cruz Father Linked to JFK Assassination”
  • May 16: “Ted Cruz, Go Home”

The attacks on Cruz, especially the attack on his father, Rafael Cruz, took their toll. The Texas senator cited Trump’s use of the smear in explaining why he wouldn’t endorse the New York billionaire for president. “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” Cruz said. Trump had tweeted a bad photo of Cruz’s wife Heidi next to a flattering picture of Trump’s supermodel wife.

On “Fox & Friends,” Trump had cited the Enquirer story about Cruz’s father as believable. Trump said, “Nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”

By the time the patriotic July 4 issue of the National Enquirer had appeared, Trump had won and the publication ran the story, “Trump: How I will Save America From Terror.”

The publication had really moved on from attacking Cruz to going after Hillary by the June 27 issue, with the story, “Hillary Will Never Be President,” citing an alleged indictment of the candidate over her use of emails. It didn’t pan out. The FBI director didn’t recommend an indictment.

But the August 1 story, “How Trump Will Win,” explains how lesbianism and lies will eventually cause the campaign collapse of the former secretary of state. Among the revelations:

  • Hillary’s “lesbian shenanigans.”
  • Bill Clinton has a secret son.
  • Hillary spent time in a mental hospital.
  • Bill and Hillary have a secret $100 million divorce pact.

Don’t think the National Enquirer doesn’t have high-level sources. The former Clinton aide Dick Morris, who once worked for Fox News, now has a regular column in the publication, under the headline, “The most feared voice in politics.” His most recent column, concerning the former secretary of state’s dealings with Russia and Vladimir Putin, is actually quite good. He notes that the emails released by Mrs. Clinton conveniently omit details about a deal Russia made to buy American uranium. The deal came after Bill Clinton was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by a Russian firm for speeches.

Morris did have a column in The Hill newspaper, which is distributed in Washington, D.C. But that paper dropped him when he signed on with The National Enquirer. Enquirer Editor-in-Chief Dylan Howard said his hiring was proof of the publication’s “commitment to investigative journalism.”

Morris told the New York Post, “I enjoyed writing for The Hill for 20 years and I had a wonderful relationship with them, but the Enquirer’s circulation is many times The Hill’s. I think this move makes sense.”

The National Enquirer is part of the American Media, Inc. (AMI) empire and also includes Star, OK!, Globe, National Examiner, Soap Opera Digest, Men’s Fitness, Muscle & Fitness, Flex and Muscle & Fitness Hers. Chairman and CEO David Pecker is considered a close friend of Trump.

Ironically, as The New York Times pointed out, The Star, the sister publication of The National Enquirer, revealed Morris’s affair with a prostitute who claimed he had a penchant for sucking her toes. “The National Enquirer followed that bombshell with news of another mistress and a love child in Texas,” it said.

At the time, the paper reported that Morris had responded, “I will not subject my wife, family or friends to the sadistic vitriol of yellow journalism. I will not dignify such journalism with a reply or an answer. I never will.”

He later admitted the stories were true, the Times said.

His personal life aside, Morris is the author or co-author of some 20 books, including Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race, about a match-up that did not occur in 2008.

In 2012, Morris, then a Fox News commentator, had predicted a Mitt Romney win. Morris’s prediction was Romney winning with 325 electoral votes, versus Obama’s 213. “That’s right,” Morris said. “A landslide for Romney approaching the magnitude of Obama’s against McCain.” Obama beat McCain 53-46 percent.

But Morris was not alone. Karl Rove, Fred Barnes, and Michael Barone had alsopredicted a Romney win.

This time, Morris has another book, Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary, described by Newsmax as “powerful and timely.”

But on the Dick Morris website, one person responded to the new book with the comment, “How Trump can beat Hillary? Well, the same way Romney and McCain beat Obama, I guess. Dick, you keep singing the same song over and over again.”

The trouble with the current anti-Clinton strategy, “The Explosive 7-Step Plan to Destroy Hillary,” is that people probably won’t believe it when they see it, since the information will be coming from a source that even Cruz has denounced.

However, in contrast to how the major media picked up the tabloid’s charges against Cruz, it’s doubtful that any controversial charges against Clinton, even with substantial evidence to back them up, would get the same kind of sympathetic coverage or traction.

In any case, Trump clearly has a journalistic weapon to use against Hillary. It would help, in his war against the Democrat, if he has what the tabloid had when it exposed John Edwards — eyewitnesses, photos and evidence.

Time will tell.


Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected].View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

07/14/15

Listen to Dick Morris. Really. ‘(Why) Bush Says Work More Hours’

By: Arlen Williams
Gulag Bound

Morris-Dick-fuhrer-IMF

Dick Morris’ past is checkered. Not having scoured his autobiographical works, I would hope he’s admitted that and, being a master at public relations, has not attempted to defend his former life as a chief political advisor to Bill Clinton.

So… everybody past that?

Good.

Currently, he’s not perfect, but I listen to him often for some of the most clear-eyed political analyses (and anti-globalist, anti-pseudo-elitist perspectives) of the more conventional pundits.

Bush-Jeb-Obama-Winning-Future-unknown-sourceI suggest hearing this, which (after the rather piercing fanfare — okay, he could use some equalizing on the audio) begins…

When, last week, Jeb Bush said the solution to income inequality, or one solution, was for Americans to work longer hours, he wasn’t just committing a flub. He was showing his fundamental lack of understanding of what’s going on in America with the American worker. It was a mistake born of his elitism and his wealth, just as much as Mitt Romney’s “47%” line was — and the results could be just as catastrophic, if he ever gets the Republican nomination to run for president.

Listen to the rest here, and catch Bush’s ominously telling lost opportunity to nail Obamacare for its destruction of full-time work. (We are not granted an embed of his brief comments.)

Of course that doesn’t mean a Jeb Bush presidency would not be “just as catastrophic.”

04/22/15

Obama and the Media Still Hiding Immigration Agenda

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Once again, the Obama administration is deceiving the courts, and the American people, about its plans for amnesty for millions of current and future illegal aliens. And to make things worse, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty, for which President Obama is seeking fast-track authority, would, according to Dick Morris, writing in The Hill, “override national immigration restrictions in the name of facilitating the free flow of labor.” And in this instance, whether wittingly or otherwise, Republicans are lining up to support the President in the name of free trade.

The proposed free trade agreement would undermine Congressional oversight over immigration, adding more power to the presidency, Morris argues. Pair this development with President Obama’s push to legalize illegal immigrants as U.S. residents, and this could become a dangerous policy combination.

Immigration reform is often presented by the media in terms of the human cost, and the alleged inhumanity in not allowing these persons to stay in the United States. The liberal media therefore, delight in pointing to any evidence they can find suggesting hypocrisy on the right on this issue and ignore the blatant abuses by the Obama administration in pursuit of his amnesty agenda.

News coverage of the recent hearing before the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ignores the fact that the Obama administration misled a lower court judge, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, about the implementation of the Department of Homeland Security’s, and therefore President Obama’s offer of “temporary legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, along with an indefinite reprieve from deportation.” The administration claims it is acting with prosecutorial discretion, and that it should be able to prioritize the removal of illegal immigrant criminal elements.

The reality is that illegal immigrant rapists and murderers are being released by this administration, and that arrests and deportations of that group have declined, as well.

The administration has acted deceptively. “For three months while the lawsuit was pending and Judge Hanen was reviewing briefs and holding hearings and conference calls with the parties, [Department of Justice] lawyers were telling him that none of the president’s announced new policies were being implemented,” wrote Hans A. Von Spakovsky for National Review on March 20. “However, on March 3, Justice suddenly filed an ‘Advisory’ notifying the court that the administration had, in fact, issued three-year deferrals to more than 100,000 aliens.”

The Department of Justice apparently “knew all along that the administration had started issuing three-year terms of deferred action and work permits” in November 2014, even though “it knew the states’ lawsuit challenged the entirety of the DHS Directive,” he reports.

When Judge Hanen realized what he had been told was false, he told Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kathleen Hartnett: “When I asked you what would happen and you said nothing, I took it to heart. I was made to look like an idiot,” He added, “I believed your word that nothing would happen. . . . Like an idiot, I believed that.”

During the April 17 hearing, Benjamin C. Mizer, Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued that “For an employer to employ an individual who does not have work authorization, that employer has engaged in a crime. So giving the deferred action and giving the employment authorization actually reduces crime by reducing the third party employer crime.”

In other words, the administration wants to ignore the alleged illegal acts of one favored group in order to reduce crime by another less favored one.

On April 16, the day before this Fifth Circuit hearing, CNN’s Ariane de Vogue characterized illegal immigrants as the victims of political forces. She reported that President Obama’s unilateral executive policies were “announced with great fanfare” and would “shield” up to “5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation.”

Similarly, Politico’s Josh Gerstein, the day of the hearing, expressed his concern that “If the administration can’t get its new moves underway sometime this year it may have difficulty getting them done before Obama leaves office” and called Obama’s plan a “legacy agenda item.”

Clearly, the media are more interested in the success of programs such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) than holding the administration accountable.

“It will be an uphill climb for the programs’ supporters, made worse by the fact that two of the judges are Republican appointees who may be hostile to their position,” wrote De Vogue in advance of the hearing—revealing her transparent concern for the administration’s success.

Pundits in the Hispanic media community also continue to mislead their audience by running segments which promote a culture of fear.

MSNBC’s biography of Jose Diaz-Balart lists him as “one of the most respected voices in Hispanic journalism in the United States.” During his April 16 show, he brought on two Democratic Congressmen and asked them softball leading questions all about the climate of fear and uncertainty for those “waiting” in “legal limbo.”

Diaz-Balart asked, “What do you tell them when there’s so much uncertainty about these programs?”

“That fear is not going to go anywhere while this legal limbo continues, and really nothing is being done in Washington as far as immigration reform,” he said.

“But you know there are a lot of families that are being separated that do qualify right now under DACA or DAPA and nothing’s being done,” he commented. In other words, President Obama should act more, not less, to shield illegal immigrants from the consequences of breaking U.S. laws.

An El Paso Intelligence Center report using Obama administration data released last year indicated that “Of the 230 total migrants interviewed, 219 cited the primary reason for migrating to the United States was the perception of U.S. immigration laws granting free passes or permisos…”

Diaz-Balart’s Congressional guests spoke about how illegal immigrants can protect themselves and that lawyers will be provided to them, and the show featured pictures of people rallying to the cause.

One must ask, however, whether lawyers, rallies, and endless sympathetic media coverage will also be provided for the potential victims of the dangerous criminals who are currently being released by the administration.

“…both arrests and deportations of criminal aliens are down about 30 percent through the first six months of fiscal year 2015, signaling that agents, who have been told to stop focusing on rank-and-file illegal immigrants, have not been able to refocus on criminal illegal immigrants instead,” wrote Stephen Dinan for The Washington Times on April 14.

A hearing with “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah Saldana, also showed that the 30,558 criminal aliens ICE knowingly released back into the community in 2014 had amassed nearly 80,000 convictions, including 250 homicides, 186 kidnappings and 373 sexual assaults,” reports Dinan.

These predators released back into the American community are very likely to strike again.

But the media are not concerned about reporting on the facts which might sully the administration’s reputation or harm the left’s illegal immigration agenda.