Confrontations between good guys and their adversaries are the stuff of Hollywood box office legend.
For example, there’s a great scene in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight where Batman (essayed by Christian Bale, an immigrant from Wales who has happily raked-in millions in American films but who felt compelled at the recent Golden Globe awards to thank Satan as his inspiration for portraying Dick Cheney) comes face-to-face with Heath Ledger’s evil villain The Joker.
BATMAN: “Why do you want to kill me?”
THE JOKER: (Wildly cackling) “I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? No. No, you….complete me.”
Substitute Donald Trump for Batman and replace The Joker with alleged journalists like CNN’s comical Jim “I see no Crisis” Acosta or MSNBC’s Kristen Welker (whose erratic screaming and wild facial gestures on the White House lawn really couldn’t be more hysterical if the late Heath Ledger had created them) and it pretty much sums up the depressing state of what passed for “news” coverage of President Trump and his administration.
And like the Nazis raiding art museums during World War II to steal treasures of the past, MSNBC is now attempting to legitimize the bias and scandalous, agenda-driven twisting of the truth by Joy Reed, Katy Tur, the vile Lawrence O’Donnell and others by regularly showing montages of each of them…with a voice track by the late, respected NBC News anchor Chet Huntley intoning that “This land contains an incredible quantity and quality of good common sense, and it is in no danger of being led down the primrose path by a journalist.”
Of course, the key to Huntley’s optimism is that word “journalist.” And men and women currently covering the White House rarely live up to that respected title. Instead, we are force fed reports from opinionated loudmouths whose anti-Trump bias is depressingly obvious to most Americans. Media elites continue to disseminate an unending menu of lies (including blatantly false claims of Donald Trump “calling all Mexicans rapists”—he didn’t, or Trump praising White Supremacists in Charlottesville as “very fine people”—he didn’t, etc.)
The national media jackals haven’t succeeded, of course, because—as Chet Huntley observed decades ago—we Americans are imbued with that “incredible quality and quantity of good common sense.” We instinctively know who is lying, and it isn’t Donald J. Trump.
Which leads us to Monday’s confrontation. After a spurious New York Times report that FBI agents—upset over President Trump’s firing of James Comey as the bureau’s director—had supposedly launched a counterintelligence investigation into the absurd possibility that President Trump was “working” for Russia. His response to a Saturday night question about that speculation (the President, stating the obvious, called the question “insulting”) was the buzz of Sunday’s incestuous TV talk shows, all breathlessly stumbling over each other because Mr. Trump “didn’t DENY he was a Russian spy.”
So Monday morning—responding to the screeching of Kristen Welker as to “Yes or no, are you now or have you ever worked for Russia???”—the President turned and responded: “I never worked for Russia. Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it’s a disgrace that you even asked that question.”
He’s 100% right, of course. But his response to Kristen Welker’s bottom-of-the-barrel, disgraceful question to the duly elected President of the United States—the leader of the Free World—did not go far enough.
He should have stopped…looked her square in the eye…and then directed one of his Secret Service agents to bring him a low-tech pair of scissors. The President should have then walked over to her, used the scissors to cut her White House press pass off her lanyard, and told her: “Get off my lawn and don’t come back.”
If the courts ordered Welker reinstated, the President should refuse. If the Associated Press or the White House Correspondents Association issue protests, he should ignore them.
Enough is enough. When “journalists” think they can with immunity demand the 45th President of the United States answer whether or not he is a Russian mole, we’ve finally crossed the last line of American civility and this must not stand.
James Kallstrom, who worked for the FBI for 27 years and was senior advisor on Counterterrorism to then-New York governor George Pataki during and after the 9/11 attacks, asked SRN talk host Mike Gallagher on Monday to “Look what President Trump has done for this country. Does he need the aggravation of being pilloried 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the past two years? The media just lies. They’re like Pravda.” How ironic that reporters who are obsessed 24/7 with Russia have—in Kallstrom’s opinion—morphed into the political propaganda arm of that nation.
Later in The Dark Knight, The Joker admitted: “You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.”
Kristen Welker has now caught a car. A big, powerful one with the Presidential seal on its doors. Let’s see how the car reacts.