For the second year, President Trump has declined to perform self-mortification by attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in favor of a rally. This year it was in Green Bay, WI. And while he was there he had some yuks at the expense of the media.
While Trump was taking the path not traveled by Hillary Clinton, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, a guy named, improbably, Olivier Knox was wallowing in self pity. Here is his speech. By the end of it you will want to drink yourself into oblivion out of boredom.
OLIVIER KNOX: I don’t want to dwell on the president. This is not his dinner. It’s ours, and it should stay ours. But I do want to say this. In nearly 23 years as a reporter, I’ve been physically assaulted by Republicans and Democrats, spat on, shoved, had crap thrown at me. I’ve been told by senior administration officials of both parties that I will never work in Washington again.
And there was a brief moment in Afghanistan when I thought a soldier not quite old enough to shave would shoot me dead for the crime of taking a picture inside the presidential palace.
And yet I still separate my career to before February 2017 and what came after. And February 2017 is when the president called us the “enemy of the people.” A few days later my son asked me, “Is Donald Trump going to put you in prison?” At the end of a family trip to Mexico, he mused if the president tried to keep me out of the country, at least Uncle Josh is a good lawyer and will get you home.
I’ve had to tell my family not to touch packages on our stoop. My name is on a statement criticizing the president for celebrating a congressman’s criminal assault on a reporter. I’ve had death threats, including one this week. Too many of us have. It shouldn’t need to be said in a room full of people who understand the power of words but fake news and enemies of the people are not punch lines, pet names or presidential. And we should reject politically expedient assaults on the men and women whose hard work makes it possible to hold the powerful to account.
I don’t even know what to think about a pseudo-man who is so emotionally fragile that he can actually believe this crap. First off, “Olivier” should know that he’s telling a lie in his introductory paragraphs. Trump never called “us” the “enemy of the people.” He called “Fake News” the “enemy of the people.” Either “Olivier” is knowingly spreading a falsehood (most probable) or he’s owning the fact that he’s a member of Fake News. And what kind of intellectually stunted conversations go on in a home that has a kid thinking that Trump was going to put journalists in prison…this is sort of a rhetorical question because no sane person believes this crap. How many reporters have been blown up by package bombs? And how many people who have been the subject of media stories have received death threats? On this latter issue, my feeling is that if you work in an amoral organization that will destroy reputations for sh**s and grins and cause other people to receive death threats you have no right to be surprised or offended when the same happens to you.
The whole claim that reporters “hold the powerful to account” is unadulterated bullsh**. The carry on a jihad against Republicans and against conservatives but they could give a fat rat’s ass what the Democrats do. How much coverage was given of Bernie Sanders’s wife driving a small college out of business by illegal land speculation? How many articles were written downplaying Hillary Clinton keeping several thousand classified documents on a server that had no security measures? Was Eric Holder ever held accountable by the press for Fast & Furious and lying to Congress? No. They weren’t. On the other hand, did the media knowingly flog a totally bogus story–that would be the collusion hoax—for 670 days and then act like it had acted properly. In fact, the media, virtually all of them, ran story after breathless story of bogus stories of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and none of them bothered to examine the provenance of the documents involved or talk about who was paying the bills.
The nation owes Donald Trump an immense debt of gratitude for revealing the Washington media game for the incestuous Democrat plantation that it is. At least now we can see them in their natural element. They aren’t glitzy and glamorous. They are pathetic, petty, and irrelevant little people who are living sorry, worthless piss-ant lives trying to tear down people who are much better than they will ever aspire to be.
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