I used to wonder why in the heck right-wing commentators on Fox News kept repeating the same mantra over and over again: sitting through the Republican debates, my eyes glazed over when I heard each and every candidate denounce the Obama administration for refusing to say the Sacred Words: ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ What are these people talking about, I thought to myself: they’re obsessed!
In short, I wrote it off as Fox News boilerplate, until the other day when, in the wake of the Orlando massacre, Donald Trump said the following on Fox: ‘Something is going on. He doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands. It’s one or the other.’ Reiterating this trope later on in the same show, he averred that the President ‘is not tough, not smart – or he’s got something else in mind.’
The Beltway crowd went ballistic. Lindsey Graham had a hissy fit, and other Republican lawmakers started edging away from the presumptive GOP nominee. The Washington Post ran a story with the headline: ‘Donald Trump Suggests President Obama Was Involved With Orlando Shooting.’ Realizing that this level of bias was a bit too brazen, the editors changed it an hour or so later to: ‘Donald Trump Seems to Connect President Obama to Orlando Shooting.’ Not much better, but then again we’re talking about a newspaper that has a team of thirty or so reporters bent on digging up dirt on Trump.
In any case, Trump responded as he usually does: by doubling down. And he did it, as he usually does, on Twitter, tweeting the following:
‘Media fell all over themselves criticizing what Donald Trump ‘may have insinuated about @POTUS.’ But he’s right:’
This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner on June 17, 2016.
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