Kellyanne Conway joined Donald Trump adviser Stephen Bannon in demanding that pundits who criticize their Glorious Leader should be fired. We should all be worried.
In case you missed it, the New York Times reported last week (my emphases added):
“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday.
“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
[…]
"The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: They were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.)
To his credit, when Fox host Chris Wallace asked Conway about this today, he made it clear he is not on board with this assault on a bedrock American principle. (Transcript excerpts below via FoxNews.com, with my emphases added):
WALLACE: Let me get if I may to the real point, politicians complain about bad press. I think you have some legitimate complaints about bad press. The First Amendment protects the press. We are in the Constitution.
And it’s offensive, quite frankly, that have folks—any politician, but folks who have been in the White House for a week lecture us about what we should and shouldn’t do and that we should keep our mouth shut.
Conway started bobbing and weaving. First, she accused the media of not understanding America the way Trump does. Of course, she didn’t mention that what Americans understand, they don’t like. Trump is the most unpopular president in modern history.
CONWAY: The media failed to learn America. Donald Trump prove something that the media failed to do, which is he understood America.
She also tried to argue that biased media coverage is a plus for Trump:
CONWAY: And let me just say something else happens. It’s the way that everything is cherry picked. Bias media coverage it’s easy to detect. It frankly helps us because this was such an elite rejection of election, where the establishment, the elites were all rejected by the voters.
It turns out they’re a heck of a lot more of them than us, Chris. And that’s how we won.
Conway continued by complaining about the coverage of her infamous “alternative facts” statement last week. She sounded like she was a lot more angry at having looked foolish than over any supposedly false reporting about Trump. It also sounded like she thought those who highlighted her attempt to gaslight lies with "alternative facts," rather than highlight what she wanted covered, should be fired for it.
CONWAY: Why is that relevant? It’s relevant because people—who is cleaning house? Which one of the first network to get rid of these people who said things that just weren’t true.
Talk about fake news, talk about alternative facts, what happened last week? I went on three network Sunday shows. I spoke for 35 minutes on three network Sunday shows. You know what got picked? The fact that I said alternative facts, not the fact that I ripped a new one to some of those hosts for never covering the facts that matter to America’s women, 16.1 million women in poverty as we sit there, the 12.4 million who have no health insurance. Everybody should feel outraged.
Then she began demanding that heads should roll if they “talked smack” about Trump:
CONWAY: Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go. They are on panels every Sunday. They’re on cable news every day.
Who’s the first editorial—the first blogger that will be left out that embarrassed his or her outlet? We know all their names. I’m too polite to call them by name. But they know who they are, and they’re all wondering, will I be the first to go?
The election was three months ago. None of them have been let go. If this were a real business, if the mainstream media were a thriving private sector business that actually turn a profit, which is not true of many of our newspapers, Chris, 20 percent of the people would be gone. They embarrassed, they failed to protect their shareholders and their board members and their colleagues.
And yet we deal with him every single day. We turn the other cheek. If you are part of team Trump, you walk around with these gaping, seeping wounds every single day, and that’s fine. I believe in a full and fair press.
I’m here every Sunday morning. I haven’t slept in a month. I believe in a full and fair press. But with the free press comes responsibility. And responsibility is to get the story right. Biased coverage is easy to detect. Incomplete coverage impossible to detect. That’s my major grievance, is the media are not—they’re not giving us complete coverage.
President Trump has signed all these executive orders this week. He’s met with these heads of states. He’s done so many things to stimulate the economy, to boost wages, to create jobs. Where’s the coverage?
At that point, Wallace ended the interview with Snowflake Conway.
Watch Conway suggest that only favorable coverage of the Trump administration should be reported, below, from the January 29, 2017 Fox News Sunday.
#OrangeHitler and his merry gang of neo-fascists are completely full of themselves and doing an all-out assault on any media asset not kissing their asses. I predict this paranoid pursuit of the right-wing liberal msm meme won’t end well for the Trumpets.
“I ripped a new one to some of those hosts for never covering the facts that matter to America’s women, 16.1 million women in poverty as we sit there, the 12.4 million who have no health insurance. Everybody should feel outraged.”
Yeah, I’m outraged too. Trump plans to dump ~20 million Americans off health insurance per his ignorant opposition to ACA and now we’re hearing Kellyanne claiming she’s an advocate for an addtional ~12 million. I say ‘liberal msm’ hosts please take Kellyanne’s advice. Let’s discuss at length the Trump administration’s plans to cover these 32 million Americans since she’s in such a moral skit. Despite what Trump’s Minister of Propaganda says here, I expect it’d be a very short conversation ending with Kellyanne whining the liberal msm is preoccupied with health insurance and should just let Trump f**k tens of millions of Americans over.
I have total confidence that the Mounties will get the perps and won’t be at all surprised should they turn out to be from south of the border. Will Twitler slam an order barring Canadians and Mexicans from crossing the border as well? How about barring all those EU member countries that have criticised him? Will the USA end up accepting only penguins from Antartica? Anyway, the vetting workload will be uuuuuuge allowin him to keep his promise with regard to job creation.
Unless thinking and truly patriotic Americans succeed in stopping the idiocy that is being done in their name, it will take generations for the USA to recover from this uuuuuuge loss of dignity and credibility. The shining beacon on the horizon is still flickering only because people are mobilising to say “NO! oh no, you don’t”.
- Twitler for the Dear Leader
- Trumplicans for the Dear Leader’s followers who will never abandon him regardless of what he does to America’s values (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness).
- I feel the need for one inspired by “traitor” or “treason” because these people are using a bulldozer to bury everything that America used to stand for.
Right, Conway. Why the fuck should the media cover any of that since your boss doesn’t seem to have any problem throwing millions (including those poor “women” about whom you whine) off the health insurance they’ve currently got through “Obamacare.” Furthermore, you vicious whore (let’s not forget that Kellyanne, during the primary campaign, was vehemently ANTI-Trump—she backed Cruz until Cruz ended his campaign, then got hired by Chump, so I think “whore” is more than accurate a description), what is your boss planning to do to, you know, HELP all those women in poverty? All we hear is “tax cuts,” but those NEVER go to the poor (after all, it’s a given to the GOP, that the “poor don’t pay taxes”) and whatever minimal Federal tax cut they might get, they’re going to wind up spending that, and probably more, in LOCAL taxes doing their grocery shopping, etc.
As for your faux concern over “the facts that matter to women,” you might want to ask yourself about YOUR concern over your boss’s grossly offensive discussion about his “behavior” towards women. Of course, since YOU"RE a whore, you don’t really give two shits about other women as long as you’re getting yourself taken care of.
Oh. And maybe if YOUR boss had spent some time ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL talking about “the facts that matter to women,” rather than bragging about how he could “grab a woman by the pussy” (and you might remember he NEVER denied making the comment—his only complaint was that it was made public), the media might feign some interest in whatever bullshit you chose to spew about “the facts that matter to women.”
(Note to anyone who’s offended by some of the language, I’m not apologizing. These Republicon Deplorables are all happy that the “speaks his mind” Chump is in charge so they can spew whatever racist and sexist shit they want, so I’m going to give back what they so freely want to dish out themselves. Believe me, there were some other choice terms I wanted to use in reference to Kellyanne but refrained from doing so in deference to the hosts of this site. Believe you me, though, if I were to send a copy of this to Kellyanne herself, she would be complaining about the language for years, further proving the Republicon hypocrisy regarding goose and gander.)
I find it interesting that her response to multiple judges finding serious legal problems with this weekend’s door slam at the airports was to dismiss the first judge for being an Obama appointee. As though that would dismiss the whole problem.
I find it interesting that her response to the issue of Trump offending the President of Mexico enough to cancel his scheduled visit was to immediately interject “We cancelled it first.” She must have missed the part where the Mexican President openly discussed cancelling the meeting, followed by Trump tweeting out a tantrum of suggesting he go ahead and cancel it. After which, the meeting was toast. We’re looking at a serious situation here – either a trade war with Mexico or worse. If the Pence White House doesn’t figure this out quickly, we could easily be looking at a cutoff in relations until competent people get back in the White House in 2020. And Conway’s focus is on whether Trump tweeted about cancelling first? Seriously?
I find it interesting that Conway is complaining that the press didn’t cover all of the EOs Pence cooked up for Trump to sign this week, when we had a non-stop barrage of coverage of exactly that. CNN has a running counter of everything they’ve done. Maybe Conway could spend five minutes looking at the CNN website before making these embarrassingly false claims.
And I’m not even going to get into the pandering Conway did to the anti-choice crowd, or the truly scary way she referred to all abortions as murder of innocent babies.
Make no mistake – these are cruel and vicious people and Conway’s attempts to justify their viciousness only makes a sour situation go rancid.
