Trump Claims That the Media Covers Up Terror Attacks

Each new day one sees another - or, in some cases, a half dozen or more - new lies emanating  from the White House and its sociopath occupant.  Worse yet, the scale and dangers posed by the lies continues to escalate.  Seemingly, there is no limit to what lies Der Fuhrer, his Minister of Propaganda, Kellyanne Conway, and others like the White House Press Secretary will spew either to confuse or confound average Americans not to mention citizens of other nations. Perhaps most chilling are the lies told about the media where anything displeasing to Der Fuhrer becomes "fake news" and the media is accused of covering up news stories - that actually do not exist - that play to support Trump's paranoia and narcissism.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this very scary trend. Here are excerpts:

The Donald Trump who arrived at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa on Monday was subdued and dark, promising to keep the United States against “radical Islamic terror” through a strong defense, and accusing the press of willfully refusing to report on terrorist attacks.

But first, as he is wont to do, Trump let his mind drift back to a happier time, . . . . “We had a wonderful election, didn’t we?” the president said as he began his remarks. “And I saw those numbers, and you liked me, and I like you. That’s the way it worked.”

That was about as sunny as things got, although Trump has great praise for U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, both of which are housed at MacDill. Trump did boast about pressuring Lockheed Martin to knock nine figures off the cost of the F-35, and he took a moment to boost his nominee for a vacancy on the Supreme Court, Judge Neil Gorsuch—though, weirdly, he did not mention Gorsuch’s name.

The threat to the U.S. is great, in Trump’s telling.

“The challenges facing our nation nevertheless are very large. Very, very large,” Trump said. “We’re up against an enemy that celebrates death and totally worships destruction. You’ve seen that. ISIS is on a campaign of genocide, committing atrocities across the word. Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our nation as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino and all across Europe.”

He continued: “You’ve seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening. It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in may cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

The last few sentences there are staggering: Trump’s assertion that there are attacks that the press is not reporting, and furthermore is not reporting for political reasons. In fact, the media love reporting on terrorism stories, following the old news adage that “if it bleeds, it leads.”

But never mind that: Just what attacks is Trump claiming have not been covered? He did not name any, and a request to the White House for a list was not returned. It’s a safe bet there are not any. Trump might prefer more frequent, or more salacious, coverage of European attacks, but that’s a different complaint.

Then there is the accusation that the press is intentionally covering up, for some nefarious reason that his audience will understand but need not go stated, a classic example of dogwhistle politics. That’s in keeping with his longstanding assault on the press, though when combined with the implication that they are doing so to undermine the nation’s security, it takes on an even darker shade. 

Once again, the nation is left to ask whether Trump’s wild deviation from reality is intentionally misleading or simply sloppy and careless. The natural comparison is to comments last week by senior Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, who claimed that Trump’s immigration executive order would have prevented the “Bowling Green massacre” that was not covered. There was, of course, no such massacre, . . . 

Why Is Congress Hiding the Truth About Saudi Arabia's Involvement in 9-11?

Chimperator George Bush with Saudi buddies

I usually do not buy into conspiracy theories and leave such lunacy to members of the GOP base.  But the continued refusal to declassify 28 pages of the investigation of congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks makes one wonder what is being hidden.  This question is fanned by the reality that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Bush/Cheney regime allowed  only one flight to take off from America's airports and it was loaded with Saudis fleeing America.   The New York Times looks at the continued controversy over denying the American public all of the information compiled by the congressional committees.  If there's nothing to hide, then why act like there is some damning information.  Here are article highlights:

A still-classified section of the investigation by congressional intelligence committees into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has taken on an almost mythic quality over the past 13 years — 28 pages that examine crucial support given the hijackers and that by all accounts implicate prominent Saudis in financing terrorism.

Now new claims by Zacarias Moussaoui, a convicted former member of Al Qaeda, that he had high-level contact with officials of the Saudi Arabian government in the prelude to Sept. 11 have brought renewed attention to the inquiry’s withheld findings, which lawmakers and relatives of those killed in the attacks have tried unsuccessfully to declassify.

“I think it is the right thing to do,” said Representative Stephen F. Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts and an author of a bipartisan resolution encouraging President Obama to declassify the section. “Let’s put it out there.”

Mr. Lynch and his allies have been joined by former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee was a leader of the inquiry. He has called for the release of the report’s Part 4, which dealt with Saudi Arabia, since President George W. Bush ordered it classified when the rest of the report was released in December 2002.

Mr. Graham has repeatedly said it shows that Saudi Arabia was complicit in the Sept. 11 attacks. “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier,” Mr. Graham said last month as he pressed for the pages to be made public.

Proponents of releasing Part 4, titled “Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain National Security Matters,” have suggested that the Bush and Obama administrations have held it back for fear of alienating an influential military and economic partner rather than for any national security consideration.

But there seemed to be little appetite for declassification among the Republican leaders of the intelligence panels. Senator Richard M. Burr, the North Carolina Republican who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was skeptical of the value of releasing the pages, calling them more of a historical document in a fight against terrorism that has shifted substantially since 2002.

A side piece to the article notes as follows:

Three of the Saudi princes accused by the Qaeda member Zacarias Moussaoui have strong diplomatic and business ties to the United States. 

Prince Bandar bin Sultan was known as “the toast of Washington” who had an “aura of charming roguishness” when he served as Saudi ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005. He is a nephew of King Salman and King Abdullah, who died last month. Prince Bandar, 65, had been close to President George Bush and his son, President George W. Bush . . . 

Prince Turki al-Faisal, 69, is another of the king’s nephews. He replaced Prince Bandar as the Saudi ambassador in Washington in 2005 and served in that post for two years. He was the head of Saudi intelligence from 1977 until Aug. 31, 2001. . . 

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, at 59 is a grandson of Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdulaziz, and is chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company and the wealthiest member of the royal family. . . .  He owns Rotana, the Arab world's largest entertainment company, and holds significant investments in Citigroup, TimeWarner, Twitter and Apple, among other companies.

Obviously, if the Bush/Cheney regime acted to protect those who financed the attacks, it makes perfect sense why Congressional Republicans don't want the classified section of the report made public. It would not help the GOP cause in 2016.

The GOP's Hypocrisy on France

Remember how Republicans used to malign France and "Old Europe"?  Everything from France's health care system - one of the most cost efficient in the world - to liberal ideas to the decline of religiosity was open to attack and parody.  Now, a vast case of amnesia has seemingly set in as Republicans attack Obama for not attending the weekend march in Paris or at least not sending a high ranking American as a representative.  Perhaps it was a mistake, or maybe it was better not to give Islamic terrorists a chance to say America orchestrated the whole thing.  That's something open to debate.  What's not open to debate is the hypocrisy of suddenly French loving Republicans.  A column in the Washington Post takes deserved note of the hypocrisy overload.  Here are highlights:

There is a certain je ne sais quoi in conservatives’ criticism of the Obama administration over last week’s terrorist attack in France. 

A decade ago, Republicans in Congress were renaming French fries “freedom fries” and French toast “freedom toast” because of that country’s refusal to support the Iraq war. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld belittled the “old Europe” French, President George W. Bush mocked an American reporter for speaking French to the French president, and conservative critics called the French “weasels,” “appeasers” and worse. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, was ridiculed by the Bush administration for being “too French” and looking French, and his fluency in French was a liability in the campaign.

And now, that very same Monsieur Kerry, the secretary of state, and his boss, President Obama, are being condemned by conservatives for . . . not being nice enough to the French.
Quelle horreur!
 
The cause célèbre this time is the failure of the Obama administration to send anybody of higher rank than the U.S. ambassador to attend Sunday’s march in Paris showing solidarity against the terrorists.

“Our president should have been there, because we must never hesitate to stand with our allies,” proclaimed Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican agent provocateur from Texas.

Fox News’s Greta van Susteren said the absence was “embarrassing” and that “Obama should not have snubbed Paris.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — like Cruz a would-be presidential contender — declared it “a mistake not to send someone.” (For the record, neither Cruz nor Rubio attended the march.)

Largely absent from this condemnation of the American government’s slight of the French were the French themselves. French President François Hollande said Obama had been “very present” in the response to last week’s attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish market. 

Officials I spoke to said it was a simple screw-up: They didn’t understand how significant the event would be, with leaders of some 40 countries in attendance.

But the notion that Kerry, of all people, was slighting the French is a bit incroyable. The son of a diplomat, Kerry has close family in France and learned the language at a Swiss boarding school. After the initial massacre in Paris last week, he addressed the shooting at an appearance with the Polish foreign minister, in both English and in French. French TV channel TF1 said that Kerry’s “poignant statement in French” would “go down in history.”

Not too long ago, Kerry’s Francophilia earned him ridicule. Tom DeLay, a House Republican leader, would greet crowds by saying, “Hi. Or, as John Kerry would say, ‘Bonjour.’ ”

But now Kerry is being called insufficiently pro-French . . . The conservatives are guilty of a bit of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in criticizing the Obama administration for snubbing a people they not long ago called cheese-eating surrender monkeys.