If you were liberal, you’d love The New York Times, too. Amid the national disgrace Democrats are facing over their continuing caucus de...
If you were liberal, you’d love The New York Times, too.
Amid the national disgrace Democrats are facing over their continuing caucus debacle in Iowa, it takes a writer with the reputational weight of The New York Times behind her to come up with an interpretation of events that somehow tries to reflect badly on President Donald Trump.
A more honest publication might shrink back from the mental gymnastics entailed in blaming a Republican incumbent president for the public relations fallout from an opposition party’s demonstrable incompetence in organizing a caucus contest.
But honesty hasn’t been a hallmark of the Times for some time now, and certainly not in since Trump became prominent in politics.
So a tweet Tuesday by The Times’ Maggie Haberman, an unapologetic liberal, was just what the doctor ordered for bruised liberal egos.
And Haberman’s prescription for recovering from what should be crippling embarrassment?
A heaping dose of blame on Trump – for somehow making Democrats look worse than they would have anyway.
“One thing to consider amid the caucuses snafu — the president has thrown accelerant on distrust of institutions, and this is another one,” Haberman wrote. “He has highlighted the Dem party ills around this caucus in tweets. It is in contrast to Obama silence on the Romney/Santo mess in 2012.”
One thing to consider amid the caucuses snafu - the president has thrown accelerant on distrust of institutions, and this is another one. He has highlighted the Dem party ills around this caucus in tweets. It is in contrast to Obama silence on the Romney/Santo mess in 2012.
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(The 2012 reference was to a dispute over the Republican delegates won by former Sen. Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, as Fox News reported at the time. It wasn’t a complete meltdown of the entire caucus-counting system. If what happened to the GOP in 2012 was a “mess,” what happened to the Democrats on Monday was armageddon.)
Now, a tweet like this from another Times writer – say a member of the insipid staff of the paper’s oh-so-progressive Arts section – might have been understandable.
But Haberman is the White House correspondent for the Gray Lady.
That means that an actual “reporter,” with an actual “beat” – and a fairly important one at that – is capable of not only dreaming up this sort of nonsense, but arrogant enough to publish it for the world to see.
The Trump tweets Haberman was referring to — which she’s claiming constituted an “accelerant of distrust” on institutions like the Iowa caucuses — were pretty standard fare for Trump, and pretty much what most sane Americans were probably thinking when they woke up Tuesday morning and found out what a fiasco had taken place in the Hawkeye State overnight.
“The Democrat Party in Iowa really messed up, but the Republican Party did not,” Trump wrote.
The Democrat Party in Iowa really messed up, but the Republican Party did not. I had the largest re-election vote in the history of that great state, by far, beating President Obama’s previous record by a lot. Also, 97% Plus of the vote! Thank you Iowa!
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And there was this one, too — calling the caucuses an “unmitigated disaster.” Not many would disagree.
The Democrat Caucus is an unmitigated disaster. Nothing works, just like they ran the Country. Remember the 5 Billion Dollar Obamacare Website, that should have cost 2% of that. The only person that can claim a very big victory in Iowa last night is “Trump”.
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And of course, it wouldn’t be Trump without some mockery, but still well within the bounds of normal political discourse in 2020.
When will the Democrats start blaming RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, instead of their own incompetence for the voting disaster that just happened in the Great State of Iowa?
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There’s no need to defend Trump’s tweets because they were, for the most part, statements of fact, with a little Trumpian bragging and some perfectly understandable ribbing.
Besides, anyone who followed the caucuses Monday night knew Trump had been declared the winner within about a half an hour of the caucuses beginning, as Politico noted.
Given that the GOP results were known before “The Bachelor” was over on the East Coast, and the results of the Democratic caucuses were still an utter mystery by the next morning, it’s a pretty good bet that anyone who cared would have known the Democrats had screwed up royally without any help from the White House.
And there were plenty of respondents to Haberman’s tweet who didn’t mind pointing out how inane her post was, considering The Times has done little throughout the Trump years but build up scorn toward the institution of the presidency and any lawmaker who supports the current president.
Oh boy that’s a stretch for blaming Trump. The Iowa Dem party did this all on their own thanks.
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Thanks, Maggie. And you and your paper does it every damn day too. Gawd look in the mirror ..
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No. This is the inevitable result of the Dems deciding in 2016 to reject election results when they lose.
They're the ones who undermined elections and they're proving it now.
Hillary was right about the threat of people who do not accept election results.
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And then there was this one:
I think what is hurting our trust in institutions more is when we find out supposedly objective journalists are working with one party to plant stories in the news. Like you do.
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The reference was to Haberman’s being implicated in the WikiLeaks scandal surrounding the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
As Glenn Greenwald wrote at The Intercept in October 2016:
“One January 2015 strategy document — designed to plant stories on Clinton’s decision-making process about whether to run for president — singled out reporter Maggie Haberman, then of Politico, now covering the election for the New York Times, as a ‘friendly journalist’ who has ‘teed up’ stories for them in the past and ‘never disappointed’ them.”
Think about that for a second.
A reporter for a supposedly mainstream news organization was known to a political campaign as “friendly journalist” who has “teed up” stories for the relevant a political party.
And now, after having been exposed as a partisan hack before the world, this same so-called “journalist” has the arrogance to blame Trump for the fact that the party she favors is a laughingstock after making a shambles of a crucial step in the primary process.
That’s a willful suspension of disbelief that seems only possible among avid liberals and the journalists who protect their worldview.
If you were a liberal, you’d love The New York Times, too.
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