Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m willing to take the short odds that if Russia invaded Ukraine on Monday and if Trump announced the same day that he would not answer a subpoena issued by New York State AG Letitia James, that the Trump story would run ahead of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the evening news.
Talk about making mountains out of mole hills. Who cares if Trump has been lying about how much his Doral golf course is worth over the years? What difference does it make if he phonies up the value of his real estate in order to stay on the Forbes richest-people-in-the -universe list?
So, a couple of banks will have to take it up the ass when Trump defaults on money he owes them in the next couple of years. So what?
And to show you how ridiculous the whole thing has become, Trump puts out a statement yesterday in which he ties the decision by a New York judge to deny his refusal to testify to – ready? – Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign!
So, we’re not even going to listen to Trump complain about how the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from him. We’re back to ‘crooked Hillary’ in 2016.
And this statement gets reported as ‘news?’
To put this whole nonsense into perspective, let’s drop back for a minute not to 2016 but to August 7, 1964. This was the day that the Congress passed a resolution giving President Johnson authority to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression” by the Government of North Vietnam.
This Resolution, which effectively got us into a military conflict that only cost the United States the lives of some 60,000 young soldiers along with maybe a million peasants in Vietnam and Cambodia, was in response to an alleged attack on two U.S. naval destroyers that were floating around off the coast of Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin.
How many members of the House of Representatives voted against the Resolution? None.
How many members of the Senate voted against the Resolution? Two: Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse.
There was only one little problem. There was no North Vietnamese attack on either destroyer. Johnson just wanted to make sure that Congress wouldn’t do anything which might result in him being ‘the first American President to lose a war.’ That’s a direct quote from LBJ.
I was in college in 1964 and I knew that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was going to get us into a long and totally unjustified war. But don’t think for one second that my refusal to accept LBJ’s bullshit about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin was based on anything I read in The New York Times or saw on The CBS Evening News.
I don’t recall reading any negative editorials in The New York Times about our involvement in Vietnam until 1967. I don’t recall Walter Cronkite raising his eyebrows even once when he ran stories about Vietnam until 1968.
How was it that some schmucky college kid knew more about a war in Southeast Asia than the President, the Members of Congress and the Joint Chiefs combined?
I don’t know how I knew. But what I did know was that I couldn’t trust the so-called news ‘media’ to tell me what was going on.
The funny thing is that Trump is the first politician who uses the idea that the mainstream news media can’t and shouldn’t be trusted to report the news. The problem is, however, that he wants everyone to learn what’s going on by believing him. Which would be fine if anything he said was even remotely close to the truth.
But its’ not and frankly, we don’t need Letitia James or The New York Times to point this out.
The good news is that more than fifty-five years after the Gulf of Tonkin, we will finally have a news network entirely devoted to the ‘truth.’
And who will own this network? Take just one guess.