Whose fault was it that the Senate's session was disrupted by a bunch of knuckleheads who believe President Trump's delusion that the election was stolen? President Obama's statement on "today's violence at the Capitol" said, "for two months now, a political party and its accompanying media ecosystem has too often been unwilling to tell their followers the truth—that this was not a particularly close election and that President-Elect Biden will be inaugurated on January 20." The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, returning to the Senate floor after the disruption, denounced what he called "a demagogic president, the people who enable him, the captive media that parrots his lies."
It doesn't quite rise to "enemy of the people" level. I don't mind press criticism. There certainly have been some outlets that milked, or investigated, Trump's stolen election claim past where I would have. Even so, a reality check is in order. Front page New York Post editorial and headline, published online December 27: "The Post says: Give it up Mr. President—for your sake and the nation's." Wall Street Journal editorial, published online December 13: "Trump's Challenge Is Over; After losing at the Supreme Court, he has no legal alternatives and ought to concede." My own column in the New York Sun, published December 15, was headlined unambiguously, "Why Trump Lost." Fox News Channel called the election for Biden on November 7.
A November 30 National Review editorial, "Trump's Disgraceful Endgame," said, "make no mistake: The chief driver of the post-election contention of the past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of the American people. The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president's aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted. Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny." The National Review editorial went on, "Getting defeated in a national election is a blow to the ego of even the most thick-skinned politicians and inevitably engenders personal feelings of bitterness and anger. What America has long expected is that losing candidates swallow those feelings and at least pretend to be gracious. If Trump's not capable of it, he should at least stop waging war on the outcome."
Speaking of captive media parroting lies, what liberal or "mainstream" press outlet will point out these facts by way of challenging the false Obama-Schumer attempt to blame conservative media for the Capitol debacle? What of the "media ecosystem" accompanying Obama and Schumer? Leave it to the Democrats to stoop to using a disruption of Congress as a chance to score points against the few press outlets that dare from time to time to deviate from the Democrat Party line. Anyway, at FutureOfCapitalism, at least, Obama's terminology notwithstanding, we don't have "followers," we have readers with independent minds of their own.