MTG lies; Chinese spy balloon is back; Trump is on his way to indictment in New York
Quite a day, and it’s not over yet!
It wasn’t surprising that the CBS signature show, 60 Minutes, interviewed Marjorie Taylor Green last night. She is, God help us, a major figure in Republican politics and one of the most visible of the clowns in the Republican clown car currently running the United States House of Representatives.
What was disgraceful was Lesley Stahl’s abject unpreparedness when she lobbed Greene a slow-pitch question about Democrats being the party of pedophiles: “I would definitely say so,” Greene responded flatly.
“They are not pedophiles. Why will you say that?” Stahl asked. Greene answered, "Democrats support – even Joe Biden, the president himself – children being sexualized, having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children."
To this, Stahl rolled her eyes and said, “Wow. Okay,” before moving on to her next question. Stahl listened to Greene’s lies and screwed up her face in distaste, but she just looked helpless.
Stahl’s response was unacceptable. She simply let Greene tell an outrageous lie without fact-checking her in real time. Where was the logical follow-up question: What evidence do you have for such a baldfaced lie? Can you cite even one statement by President Biden or any other Democrat that advocated “sexualizing children?” Democrats are the party of pedophiles? What about the Republican political operative from Minnesota who was just found guilty on seven counts of sex trafficking underage girls? Plenty was known about Anton Lazzaro before Stahl asked the question about Greene’s charges that Democrats are pedophiles. Why didn’t Stahl show this picture of then President Trump posing with the Republican pedophile sex offender?
There is no excuse for being so utterly unprepared for an answer like that from a known purveyor of lies about everything from LGBTQ rights, to Black Lives Matter, to charging that a mass shooting in Highland Park was “designed” to embarrass Republicans, to asserting that “carbon is healthy for us; it keeps people alive,” to proclaiming that “I don’t believe in evolution; I believe in God.”
CBS News had a major story on the air last Friday, before the 60 Minutes interview with Greene ran, about Anton Lazzaro being found guilty on all counts of sex trafficking teenage girls. CBS reported that “FBI agents raided Lazzaro's downtown Minneapolis condo in December 2020. Inside his $875,000 place at the luxury Ivy high rise, investigators seized nearly $400,000 in cash, along with foreign currency and bars believed to be gold. They found a GPS tracker, thumb drives, laptops, tablets, and more than a dozen cell phones. Agents also confiscated his Ferrari.” Pretty much everything you’d need to sex traffic teenage girls.
NBC News was on this air this morning with a report about how the Chinese spy balloon that flew across the United States in January and February was able to gather “signals” intelligence from top-secret American defense sites. “China was able to control the balloon so it could make multiple passes over some of the sites (at times flying figure-eight formations) and transmit the information it collected back to Beijing in real time,” NBC reported. The U.S. military responded by making “efforts to move around potential targets and obscure the balloon’s ability to pick up their electronic signals by stopping them from broadcasting or emitting signals.” Defense sources told NBC they had no idea how much top-secret intelligence the Chinese balloon gathered before it was shot down by Air Force jets off the coast of South Carolina on February 4. The Biden administration justified allowing the balloon to continue to traverse the country after it was discovered because they were afraid falling debris might do damage on the ground.
Our government knew about the balloon for days, having discovered it while it was crossing Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. The balloon crossed long stretches of Canadian wilderness before it was picked up on radar near Billings, Montana. That sparsely populated state, with 1.1 million people spread out over 147,000 square miles, would have been a reasonable place to shoot down the balloon before it was able to perform figure-8’s over missile launching sites.
And now, as I write this at 12:40 p.m., the Trump motorcade is making its way across a causeway from Palm Beach to the airport in West Palm Beach. Just as unacceptable as the Leslie Stahl “whatever” interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene last night is the MSNBC and CNN coverage of Trump’s departure from Florida. The mainstream media is making the same mistake they made in 2016 when by covering Trump’s every utterance and live-streaming his rallies, they effectively donated more than $2 billion in free coverage to his campaign for the presidency.
Trump’s 10-vehicle convoy of black SUV’s with a white SUV leading the way at low speeds on the way to the airport resembled the O.J. slow-speed-chase on the day he was arrested for the murders of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
The cable networks have already picked up their bogus “coverage” in New York, even before Trump has landed at LaGuardia airport and begun his transit to Trump Tower. They’ve got reporters on the street outside of both Trump Tower and the Criminal Courts Building, babbling away about basically nothing as they stand alongside crowd-control barriers. They are, however, mentioning the name “Donald Trump” in practically every sentence that spills out of their eager mouths.
There were only a few well-wishers along the route in Florida, and sadly, Trump won’t need much of a crowd in New York, either, with all the free publicity he’s getting from MSNBC and CNN – not to mention Fox News, of course, which is doubtlessly bracketing the entire day with news of Trump’s travels and the “witch hunt” awaiting him in a New York courtroom tomorrow.
CNN just showed Trump’s plane with its American flag-emblazoned tail as it climbed out of the West Palm Beach airport, something we needed to watch, because apparently CNN didn’t want to leave us wondering if the engines would start and the Trump plane would achieve lift-off. Now the TV chryons are telling us that Trump will be “speaking” at Mar a Lago when he returns to Florida tomorrow after the indictment. I’m willing to bet the networks will treat us to the whole OJ slow-speed-chase in reverse, blanket-covering Trump’s trip back to Florida and his speech.
There are reports that Trump has raised as much as $5 million since his indictment last Thursday. If the cable networks continue to shower him with wall-to-wall coverage as they’re doing today, he won’t need the money. Five million dollars couldn’t buy him a tenth of the free publicity he’s getting on television today.
I’d like to see Joe Biden’s every move covered like this, but hey, indicted former presidents are bigger news than serving presidents, according to the suits who run CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.
Heaven help us.
Boy, Lucian, you hit the nail on the head. I have been upset with the mainstream media for a long
time regarding their coverage of tRump . Deplorable. And to think that an old timer with all this
experience, like Leslie Stahl, can't handle someone like MTG ! Pathetic!
I boycotted watching that segment on 60 Minutes last night. Why? Because I will not listen to a big mouth neo-Nazi, white supremacist, seditionist, and habitual liar, take space in my head. I blasted CBS for allowing Stahl’s report to air on Twitter because I felt they wanted attention and bigger ratings. Guess what? Their rating was like 32% which means lots like me didn’t watch. I also told CBS they slapped every Jew and black person in the face. I am the daughter of Holocaust victims.