{"id":37088,"date":"2017-02-09T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37088"},"modified":"2017-01-29T13:20:44","modified_gmt":"2017-01-29T18:20:44","slug":"qotd-the-president-has-a-persecution-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/02\/09\/qotd-the-president-has-a-persecution-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The president has a persecution complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve noticed, but our president has a persecution complex. He thinks any inconvenient but truthful<\/em> coverage of him is an unfair criticism and any unfair criticism is a lie. What makes this complicated is that sometimes Trump is right. Some of the coverage has been ridiculous and desperate nonsense, as Mollie Hemingway ably chronicles<\/a>. And some of the coverage has been merely accurate-but-hypocritical. Howard Kurtz ran through a list last night on Special Report<\/em>. When Bill Clinton lied, it was called \u201cmisleading\u201d or \u201cless than candid\u201d but when Trump lies, it\u2019s a \u201cLie!\u201d in the headline. (One can make the argument \u2014 as I have<\/a> \u2014 that many of Trump\u2019s lies are less offensive because he just glandularly blurts them out, while Bill Clinton lied like an artisan whittling a ballerina out of a block of wood, with loving, expert attention to every detail.)<\/p>\n

But you know what? When I say Trump is lying about something, I\u2019m not guilty of any double standard. I called Bill Clinton and Barack Obama liars all the time. You know why? Because they lied all the time. And yet every day, if I criticize Trump about anything, the cultists scream at me some version of \u201cOh yeah! Why weren\u2019t you this critical of Obama?\u201d or \u201cWhat about Bill Clinton!?\u201d It\u2019s like they don\u2019t know who they\u2019re talking to. If Trump plays Baron-and-the-Milkmaid with an intern, I will make a big deal out of it and so will the New York Times<\/em>. Their hypocrisy will not apply to me.<\/p>\n

When conservatives \u2014 I\u2019m not referring to Republican political hacks, that\u2019s their job; I\u2019m referring to actual conservative writers \u2014 go out and respond to the negative coverage solely by attacking the MSM messengers, they are in effect condoning \u2014 or at least providing cover for \u2014 Trump\u2019s behavior and feeding the idea that he\u2019s a victim whenever anyone does anything other than applaud. Steve Bannon wants to demonize and delegitimize the mainstream media. Given his record at Breitbart<\/em>, that\u2019s some odd casting for Champion of Journalistic Integrity, but whatever. That\u2019s his fight, and shame on the mainstream media for making his job so easy.<\/p>\n

Jonah Goldberg, “Week One”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2017-01-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve noticed, but our president has a persecution complex. He thinks any inconvenient but truthful coverage of him is an unfair criticism and any unfair criticism is a lie. What makes this complicated is that sometimes Trump is right. Some of the coverage has been ridiculous and desperate nonsense, as Mollie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41,13],"tags":[1037,299],"class_list":["post-37088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-donaldtrump","tag-paranoia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9Ec","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37088"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37089,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37088\/revisions\/37089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}