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Rick Burns's avatar

Calling Trump's behavior quixotic is like calling the Watergate break-in a prank. The press, and the rest of us, watched with little real worry as McConnell blew a permanent hole in the way the senate did business by abusing the filibuster, using budget shutdowns as a regular component of politics, and blocking supreme court nominations simply by not allowing them to be considered. Seeing Trump's contemptible behavior following the election as quirky risks eventually seeing this sort of behavior as normal politics. I share Eric's concerns on this one.

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Theodora30's avatar

The media should also be making it clear that Republicans set the stage for Trump. They should be saying things like “after decades of Republicans undermining faith in our elections the Republican base has been primed to believe Trump’s claims” instead of just focusing on what Trump is doing. The GOP has been pushing the voter fraud fairytale for a long time. Bush’s DOJ even fired Republican district attorneys who had refused to bring phony voter fraud cases. And instead of expressing sympathy for Republicans who won’t take the risk of losing their jobs, the media should repeatedly make the point that these are people who have no problem making other people risk their lives in war.

I have recently seen a perfect example of the media ignoring Republican wrongdoing and incompetence. Several times I have heard discussions of how the delayed Bush transition may have been partly responsible for 9-11 as if those attacks happened shortly after Bush took office. The media has completely buried the facts. The incoming Bush administration was given strong warnings by the outgoing Clinton administration about the danger Bin Laden posed. Clinton personally briefed Bush and Sandy Berger personally warned Condi. For months after that Richard Clarke repeatedly warned Condi Rice and others. Their response was to demote him. Starting in the spring Bush’s top national security people started warning about a coming attack by Bin Laden. On July 10 Tenet’s team was so worried that he demanded an immediate meeting with Condi and her team. They were told that Bin Laden would attack us soon and those attacks would be “spectacular”.

https://www.politico.eu/article/attacks-will-be-spectacular-cia-war-on-terror-bush-bin-laden/

(That article is from the EU edition of politico not the US one.)

A few days ago I heard Lawrence Wilkerson make the argument that the delayed transition affected Bush’s ability to protect us, citing the fact that they didn’t even have a meeting of top level officials from different departments until mid August. The person interviewing him didn’t bother to ask how the delayed transition had prevented them from having that meeting in the early weeks of Bush’s term. The Clinton administration had had these kinds of meetings several times a month.

The media was outraged when they learned that Trump ignored warnings from his national security people but they are trying to give Bush an excuse for ignoring warnings that we were going to be attacked. By allowing Republicans to get away with outrageous behavior they have lowered the bar for judging all Republicans. By the time Trump was on the scene Republicans were already both extreme and incompetent but had paid no consequences. I think it is really dangerous that the media is not only downplaying what Trump is doing but that they acting like Trump is an aberration, not the result of the path Republicans chose a long time ago. I strongly believe that years of the media normalizing Republicans’ outrageous behavior.

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