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The BBC’s top story all day, and on its World page and of course on the US page, was its ‘Obama’ hatchet job on Trump on the Today show…following on from George Osborne [anti-Brexit] being the guest editor’s apparent choice of interviewee [for the life of me can’t think why a Spanish dancer should want to talk to Osborne]….guess the guest editors get some ‘guidance’ from the Today show on who to pick and what questions to ask.
As well as his less than subtle attack on Trump he gave us an extraordinarily patronising attack on people whom Obama thinks are rather stupid and live in echo chambers with no contact with the outside world…he suggest they must get out more and meet other people.
“Social media is a really powerful tool for people of common interests to convene and get to know each other and connect.
“But then it’s important for them to get offline, meet in a pub, meet at a place of worship, meet in a neighbourhood and get to know each other.
“Because the truth is that on the internet, everything is simplified and when you meet people face-to-face it turns out they’re complicated.”
Gosh, really? Who’d a thunk? Life is complicated!
Rather think it is lefty liberals like himself who create these echo chambers with the deliberate creation of identity politics and the ghettoisation of whole communities and thus the resultant antagonism and conflict that arises from that as each group is encouraged to demand more and more ‘rights’ and privileges for themselves…naturally at the cost of other groups.
Trump may tweet undiplomatic and strongly worded criticisms and messages but he didn’t run from Iraq and let ISIS take over and allow Assad to force millions of refugees to flee into Europe, he didn’t hand Iran billions of dollars, let them start trading again [thus raising more cash for weapons] and allow them to keep their nuclear programme on track whilst promising everyone they had stopped it, he didn’t preside over an increasingly divided and racially tense America, something that Obama helped create.
Obama was invited onto the Today programme deliberately to attack Trump….just the usual shallow, partisan rubbish that passes for news at the BBC.
Remember James Cook’s highly opinionated attack piece on Trump? There was another similar hatchet job a month earlier from the BBC’s Nick Bryant…The time when America stopped being great.
If America ever did stop being great apparently it is all the Republican’s fault as Bryant can barely find a word of criticism for the Democrats…and indeed dismisses Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky affair as merely a ‘frivolous distraction’…and an ‘ostensible’ one at that….does the BBC doubt the affair?
He can though find much to criticise Reagan for…apparently he, like Trump, is a racist who played to the racist white southerners to get elected….and of course if you are white and southern…you’re definitely a racist….
Reagan’s sunniness was sullied by the launch of his 1980 campaign with a call for “states’ rights”, which sounded to many like a dog-whistle for denial of civil rights. His chosen venue was Philadelphia, but not the city of brotherly love, the cradle of the Declaration of Independence, but rather Philadelphia, Mississippi, a rural backwater close to where three civil rights workers had been murdered by white supremacists in 1964. Reagan, like Nixon, pursued the southern strategy, which exploited white fears about black advance.
Trouble is, not only are Bryant’s facts wrong his interpretation is wrong also….the speech was not in Philadelphia but 7 miles away, nowhere near the murder site and at the Neshoba County Fair which attracted 10’s of thousands of visitors in a state that was closely contested by the two parties….and immediately afterwards Reagan spent a week pitching his case to black voters in the North stating…
“I am committed to the protection of the civil rights of black Americans,” Reagan told the Urban League. “That commitment is interwoven into every phase of the programs I will propose.”
Why does Bryant not accuse him of pro-Black racism as he targets black voters? Why does Bryant not mention that Carter opened his election campaign in the KKK’s homeland…
Meanwhile, President Carter opened his general election campaign in Tuscumbia, Alabama, then the national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan (there was a Klan rally the day Carter came to Tuscumbia).
Reagan in fact launched his campaign nine months earlier from the Mississippi speech and he made almost exactly the same comments about taking back power for the states as he did in Mississippi….Here’s that part of his speech on national TV...absolutely nothing to do with race….
The 10th article of the Bill of Rights is explicit in pointing out that the federal government should do only those things specifically called for in the Constitution. All others shall remain with the states or the people. We haven’t been observing that 10th article of late. The federal government has taken on functions it was never intended to perform and which it does not perform well. There should be a planned, orderly transfer of such functions to states and communities and a transfer with them of the sources of taxation to pay for them.The savings in administrative would be considerable and certainly there would be increased efficiency and less bureaucracy.
Here’s his words from Mississippi…read the speech….I defy you to find anything racist in it….
I believe that there are programs like that, programs like education and others, that should be turned back to the states and the local communities with the tax sources to fund them, and let the people [applause drowns out end of statement].
I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.
Bryant is peddling Democrat black propaganda about Reagan which is easily disproven…if one can be bothered to look, which Bryant obviously didn’t feel inclined to do…why let the facts spoil a good fake news story about a ‘racist’ right-wing politician?
Where is Bryant’s claimed ‘exploitation of white fears of black advance’ in the speech? There is none, it’s a lie. Bryant bases his claim that Reagan was racist on this…‘a call for “states’ rights”, which sounded to many like a dog-whistle for denial of civil rights.’ As we can see ‘state’s rights’ had nothing to do with race [essentially just like devolution here], and who is this ‘to many’?….does he mean to Democrat propagandists? Once again the BBC adapting their stock phrase, ‘many might think’, to create the false idea that it was widespread amongst all right-thinking folk that they thought a particular way about an issue…such as in this case Reagan was a racist….which is a lie.
Bryant then goes on of course to trash Trump, the real aim of this piece…Obama is excused any blame….he inherited a terrible situation and the Republicans, of course, created a level of dysfunctional government unprecedented in US history…a ‘crisis of governance’…poor old Obama…just how did he cope?….
Barack Hussein Obama. His improbable success story seemed uniquely American.
Although his presidency did much to rescue the economy, he couldn’t repair a fractured country. The creation of a post-partisan nation, which Obama outlined in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, proved just as illusory as the emergence of a post-racial society, which he always knew was beyond him.
During the Obama years, Washington descended into a level of dysfunction unprecedented in post-war America.
“My number one priority is making sure President Obama’s a one-term president,” declared then-Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, summing up the obstructionist mood of his Republican colleagues. It led to a crisis of governance.
Not only that but all opposition to Obama was due to racism…a ‘whitelash’…
Beyond Capitol Hill, there was a whitelash to the first black president, seen in the rise of the Birther movement and in elements of the Tea Party movement.
Bryant dismisses Trump’s success as down to his TV appearances…thus doing what Obama does, labelling voters stupid, shallow and unthinking…
Norman Mailer once said of Reagan, that the 40th president understood “the President of the United States was the leading soap opera figure in the great American drama, and one had better possess star value”. Trump understood this, and it explained much of his success, even if his star power came from reality TV rather than Hollywood B-movies.
Nothing to do with his policies then?…Oh wait….his campaign was one based on grievance and identity….a dark campaign…
His politics of grievance, and the fist-shaking anger it fed off, struck a different tone than the Gipper’s more positive pitch. It played on a shared sense of personal and national victimhood that would have been alien to Reagan.
In the space of just three decades, then, the United States had gone from “It’s morning in America again” to something much darker: “American Carnage”, the most memorable phrase from Trump’s inaugural address.
Actually it is the Left that campaigns on such identity politics…Trump spoke to the whole nation about ‘America’ and making it ‘great again’….the BBC likes to say Trump only talks to his ‘base’ [white supremacists of course] but that is far from the truth.
Bryant set out to attack Trump….the whole piece is about setting Trump up as the bad guy who has betrayed America….
Few countries look anymore to Trump’s America as a global exemplar, the “city upon a hill” Reagan spoke of in his farewell address to the nation.
Hmmm…since when has the US been a ‘global exemplar’? The BBC et al have hated the US and everything it stood for for decades….South America? Plenty of states there that hate America, and what of the Middle East, Russia, China? Did they all love America pre-Trump?
Bryant’s interpretation is based upon his own prejudice and how he thinks the world should be. This is just another of these anti-Trump opinion pieces that BBC journalists churn out at regular intervals channelling their own bigotry and ignorance and pretending it is news.