THE LIB'RUL MEDIA HAVE THEIR MARCHING ORDERS

The corporate media is OK with fascism because they think it will make them more money if Trump comes back. And the on-air talent proved this morning that they saw what happened over at CNN to Brian Stelter and John Harwood, and took the lessons to heart.

On ABC’s “This Week” show this morning, Martha Raddatz went after White House senior advisor Keisha Lance Bottoms, accusing President Biden of using “hate speech” against Republicans in his Philadelphia speech Thursday night.

RADDATZ (on camera): Good morning and welcome to "This Week." Labor Day weekend traditionally marks the unofficial kickoff of campaign season, but President Biden got a head start Thursday. In a primetime address in Philadelphia, he not only took on former President Trump but his supporters as well, warning that the upcoming elections will be a stark choice between extremism and democracy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law, they do not recognize the will of the people.

RADDATZ (voiceover): In his harshest criticism yet, President Biden directly confronting Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters, calling them a real and dangerous threat to American democracy. Saying November’s midterm elections will be nothing less than a battle for the soul of this nation.

BIDEN: The Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans. And that is a threat to this country.

RADDATZ (on camera): And let's bring in President Biden’s senior adviser and the former mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms. Good morning, Mayor.

Ahead of the president's speech, The White House was insistent the speech would be optimistic, was about bringing people together yet in it, Biden said President Trump's MAGA supporters are a danger to democracy. How is that a unifying message?

KEISHA LANCE BOTTOMS, PRESIDENT BIDEN SENIOR ADVISER: Well, what the president did was that he reminded the American people of who we are as a country. We are a democracy that’s been built on the rule of law. We are a democracy that values the peaceful transition of power. We are a democracy that values the right of people to go and vote safely and in peace.

And so, what the president has done as our commander-in-chief is he’s remind -- he has reminded us that democracies are fragile. You know this. You’ve been across the globe. And if we are not intentional about preserving who we are as a country, if we are not intentional about reminding ourselves that there is a rule of law in this country, then we will be in danger.

So, the president spoke optimistically about who we are as Americans. We are the greatest nation in the world. But also a reminder that we have to be intentional about being the greatest nation in the world and that we have to call out hatred. We have to call out this balance and that if we don’t, our democracy is in danger.

RADDATZ: It’s a sharp turn from the healing and unity Biden promised after taking office, Republicans now argue that it's President Biden fanning the flames of division.

RADDATZ: Whatever you said, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks hate speech, said after the Biden speech, there was a surge online in conversations that said Biden’s remarks singling out MAGA Republicans were interpreted as a declaration of war against conservatives and all the Trump voters.

(If there was any “hate speech” it was MAGAts erupting against the president for calling them out as the seditious threat they are.)

BOTTOMS: Well, what I would say to that is that this is what this MAGA agenda has been all about. It’s been about distorting the truth. It’s been about misleading people. It’s been about putting out information that inflames (ph) people.

And I just encourage people, go to The White House website, WhiteHouse.gov, and read the speech for yourself.

I’ve read it multiple times and what I see in the speech, I see words of encouragement. I see optimism. I see a commander-in-chief who was calling out to all of us, no matter our political affiliation.

(CROSSTALK)

RADDATZ: All of us? He wasn’t calling out to the MAGA supporters certainly. He mentioned them more than a dozen times and — as a threat to democracy.

Has the president essentially given up on those MAGA Republicans, some 70 million people?

Here Is What Biden Said During His Speech

This is a direct quote from the transcript of President Biden’s speech:

“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.

“Now, I want to be very clear — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.

“I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.”

(Biden specifically said that not every Republican is a MAGA Republican, and not all Republicans embrace the extremist ideology, but Raddatz asked if Biden was giving up on every single Trump voter. It’s as if she didn’t read the speech and got a summary from watching Fox News.)

Over at CBS’ “Face The Nation,” host Major Garrett ran into a buzzsaw in the form of Contressman and former law professor Jamie Raskin when he tried to take the same road Raddatz did:

MAJOR GARRETT: So, former President Trump says that MAGA Republicans are trying to save democracy, they want to be taken seriously on this issue. So let’s review what the former president said this week earlier. He said the 2020 election should be rerun, or he should be reinstated in office, and that if reelected in 2024, he would provide apologies and full pardons to those charged and or convicted for storming the Capitol on January 6, evaluate that.

REP. RASKIN: Well, first, if he’s saying that the election should be rerun, which is something he’s been asserting from the beginning, that’s totally outside of the Constitution. There is no procedure for the military just to seize the election machinery and run a new election, which is one of the things that his disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was pushing and we know was part of the January 6 plot. And look, more than 60 courts rejected every claim of electoral fraud and corruption which Donald Trump advanced. He’s had the benefit of more than 60 courts, including eight courts, where he appointed the judges to office, look at all those claims, and they were all rejected. It was rejected in the states and he lost the election. Two of the hallmarks of a fascist political party are one, they don’t accept the results of elections that don’t go their way and two, they embrace political violence. And I think that’s why President Biden was right to sound the alarm this week about these continuing attacks on our constitutional order from the outside by Donald Trump and his movement.

Good on both Kiesha Lance Bottoms and Jamie Raskin for not letting the bullshit artists get away with their bullshit.

Why Is The Corporate Media Supporting Trump’s Fascist movement?

As Jeff Zucker famously said in 2016 when he was called out as the head of CNN for approving the news channel carrying Trump’s rallies live and uninterrupted by commercials, “He brings us great ratings.”

And it’s not news that cable news ratings are down 20-30% from where they were while Trump was in office. Of course they were! We had to go get the news every hour to find out what new assault on decency, intelligence, simple manners he’d committed. Trump elevated corporate media outlets, and a majority of the country living in fear and terror was very good for the nation’s largest media companies and their bottom lines.

These companies need to bring Trump back. Trust me, I’ve been across the desk from the ancestors of the current crop of conscienceless pinstriped pimps, and they would all sell their mothers and sisters if there was a dime’s worth of profit in the deal.

The thirst for higher profits is why the broadcast networks like ABC, CBS and NBC didn’t cover the president’s speech on Thursday and deemed it “political.” They couldn’t run four minutes’ worth of advertising every five minutes if they put the speech on.

What they’re too fucking stupid to get is that there is nothing they can do, no distance they can go, no principle they can toss aside, that is going to ever get the Thousand Year MAGA to like them.

The Thousand Year MAGA wants to dance on their graves, and to hell with the First Amendment for anythinng other than giving the fundamentalist fuckwits the power to religiously harass everyone else. (Give the fundiescum credit where credit is due: when they do this, they really are marching in the shoes of the good Pilgrim Fathers, who got their religiously-bigoted asses booted out of the then-and-now most tolerant society in Europe: Holland, which is how they ended up at Plymouth Rock.)

But if the First Amendment goes away, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post do too.

Corporate media could be both enabling the destruction of democracy and their own demise.

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