Monday, May 30, 2016

The WSJ Staff Told to Be ‘Fair’ to Mendacious Demagogue Because ‘Serious People’ Support Him

An anonymous insider at The Wall Street Journal has shared the following anecdote with Politico: During a recent morning meeting at the paper, editor-in-chief Gerry Baker reminded his staff to be “fair” to Donald Trump, because “no matter what people think of him, Trump’s a serious candidate and lots of serious people are going to get behind his White House bid.”
This seems like a rather roundabout way of saying, “Rupert supports Trump now, so it’s time to pretend that he’s a normal Republican nominee.” Still, it’s worth taking Baker’s directive at face value since it illustrates two dangerous fallacies that are bound to plague the next five months of political coverage.
First, there’s the implication that being “fair” to Trump means portraying him as a “serious candidate.” Certainly, the Donald is a serious political figure in the sense that he commands a significant following and has a serious chance of becoming the next American president.
But he is – by his own account – not serious about many of the policies he proposes and ideas that he expresses. This is a candidate who centered his primary campaign on denying people entry to the United States on the basis of their religious faith — and dismisses criticisms of that proposal on the grounds that it was merely “a suggestion.” He’s a politician who derided a primary rival as incurably “pathological,” just like “a child molester” — then explained months later that he only said that because “it was part of the game."
Read the rest of story HERE.

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1 comment:

cimbri said...

Good article by John OSullivan in NRO, explaining that nationalists have always been one of the 3 legs of conservatism. The WSJ represents just one leg, the financial conservatives. This year a nationalist conservative has gotten the nomination, and that should be acceptable to the other legs, assuming they want to keep everyone in the coalition, for the foreseeable future.