#bothsiderism

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Karoline Leavitt Makes Galling 'Both Sides' Comparison

The White House press secretary essentially equated Russia’s slaughter of civilians, including children, with Ukraine’s strikes against oil

S.V. Dáte at HuffPost:

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s White House is now “bothsidesing” – literally ― Russia’s bloody and ongoing attacks on Ukraine. In one of her periodic briefings, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Thursday essentially equated dictator Vladimir Putin’s near-nightly slaughter of Ukrainian civilians in their homes with Ukraine’s retaliatory strikes against Russia’s oil production infrastructure. “Perhaps both sides of this war are not ready to end it themselves,” she said. Leavitt had been asked whether Trump had a response to Russia’s massive attack Wednesday night, using hundreds of drones and missiles, on residential areas of Kyiv, which killed some 20 civilians, including children.

By mid-afternoon, Trump’s lack of a statement condemning Putin stood in stark contrast to those coming from the leaders of Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, the European Commission and others. “Six-hundred twenty-nine missiles and drones in a single night over Ukraine: this is Russia’s idea of peace. Terror and barbarism. More than a dozen dead, including children,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on social media. “Full support to the Ukrainian people, and deepest compassion for all the grieving families.”

“The intense attacks on Kyiv this night demonstrate who stands on the side of peace and who has no intention of believing in the negotiating path,” added Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Leavitt, though, did not join in that chorus. “He was not happy about this news, but he was also not surprised. These are two countries that have been at war for a very long time. Russia launched this attack on Kyiv. And likewise, Ukraine recently dealt a blow to Russia’s oil refineries. They have taken out, as a matter of fact, 20% of Russia’s oil refinery capacity over the course of their attacks throughout the month of August,” Leavitt said. “The president wants it to end, but the leaders of these two countries need it to end and must want it to end as well.” Her comments echoed Trump’s own statements in recent weeks that once again blame Ukraine for being invaded.

“You know, [Ukrainian President Volodomyr] Zelenskyy is not exactly innocent either, OK?” the president said during Wednesday’s marathon Cabinet meeting. “They go in, I’m sure that Ukraine thought they were going to win. There’s going to be ― you know, we’re going to win, you’re going to beat somebody that’s 15 times your size.”

WH Press Spokesliar Karoline Leavitt plays her bothsiderist games regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

[porterdavis]

[agoodcartoon]

actually a perfect example of why south park style centrism is such complete horseshit, good going kirschen you fuck

[justinspoliticalcorner]

The real cover-up is of Trump's disordered mental state

Sanewashing didn't end with the 2024 campaign.

Stephen Robinson at Public Notice:

Donald Trump is consistently incoherent these days, but even when he makes sense, he’s unhinged and malicious. Last week, Trump posted an absolutely deranged Memorial Day message, wishing a “Happy Memorial Day to all, including the scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds.” Despite the commander-in-chief seemingly suffering an all-caps mental breakdown, the media reaction was muted. A headline from The Washington Post read, “On Memorial Day, Trump honors fallen soldiers and celebrates political wins.” From CNN: “Trump honors veterans at Arlington National Cemetery after lashing out at political opponents in Memorial Day post.” And The New York Times: “Trump Praises Military, and His Return to Office, in Memorial Day Remarks.”

Over the weekend, Trump turned the insanity up to 11. On Saturday night, he shared a Truth Social post from a conspiracy theory account claiming that Joe Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by some sort of robot. Needless to say, if Joe Biden posted anything close to that nuts, Sean Hannity and Jake Tapper would be roused from bed to anchor special coverage on their networks. But for Trump, this level of compete and utter batshittery is just another Saturday night. The president spreading bonkers conspiracy theories and unleashing vicious personal attacks against his political opponents is certainly more newsworthy than when he manages to read prepared remarks. But major media also ignored how he often fails to execute that bare minimum task. [...] The media not only didn’t ignore that Biden was old, they never shut up about it. There was exhaustive coverage when Biden fell off his bike in 2022 or tripped over a sandbag in 2023. Neither of those stories were buried within larger coverage of Biden performing normal presidential duties or even successfully behaving like a functioning adult. Falling off a bike could signal more serious health issues, but it might just mean the president is no different than people decades younger who suffer mishaps or trip over things. Despite the endless handwringing about Biden Old, a sitting president acting like a cross between a 4Chan thread and Q truly is a major concern — one the mainstream media actively minimizes. [...]

Asymmetric coverage

Biden’s age was an easier target for the media because it was something they could criticize him for without opening themselves up to accusations of bias. Although Trump’s extreme instability is more relevant, especially now that he’s president, stating the obvious might seem partisan. Who are they to tell voters that perhaps they should worry about middle-of-the-night hate rants from the guy with the nuke codes? Democrats are also more willing to take seriously criticism of their leaders. Sure, they might push back or resort to talking points, but in Biden’s case, no one ever pretended he was 40. Democrats acknowledged he was old but argued that he was still up for the job, or at least more up for it than Trump. Voters might have disagreed, but Democrats still engaged with reality. Republicans, by contrast, insist their Dear Leader is the world’s greatest dealmaker even as he makes no deals, personally enriches himself while in office, and singlehandedly hobbles the economy with tariffs. And yet the media continues to demand more accountability from Democrats who defended Biden than Republicans who actively support and enable a criminal president. Fresh off turning CNN into a QVC-like informercial for his book about the alleged Biden cover-up, Jake Tapper went on Piers Morgan’s show last week and described it as “worse than Watergate” because “Richard Nixon was in control of his faculties when he wasn’t drinking.”

While much of the media was fixated about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline episodes, they largely brushed off Donald Trump’s, who was in much worse shape than Biden’s.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump. They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment. Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits. Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference. [...] Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict). We are deciding whether this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian on why the pundit class is calling for Joe Biden to suspend his campaign but not Donald Trump to also do the same (07.06.2024).

Rebecca Solnit's opinion column at The Guardian regarding the pundit class's demands for Joe Biden to end his campaign over a bad debate performance but not for Donald Trump to do the same over his 34 felonies is a masterclass.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

How Axios rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity

The biggest lie in media is the one that it tells about itself.

Judd Legum at Popular Information:

The biggest lie in media is the one that it tells about itself. Journalists at many mainstream media publications insist that their coverage is objective and unbiased. This isn't true. Two of the biggest purveyors of this lie are Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, the co-founders of Axios. The Axios audience "Bill of Rights" promises that "all employees are asked to refrain from taking/advocating for public positions on political topics." The document also pledges that Axios will "never have an opinion section." Axios seeks to garner trust by positioning itself as neutral on all political topics. VandeHei has promoted this view repeatedly in his public commentary. In a December 2024 speech, VandeHei advocated for a "clinical" approach to journalism, one that is detached from any ideology. In a May 2024 CNN interview, VandeHei said that the best way for reporters to restore trust is to keep their opinions to themselves and "stop popping off in ways that make people distrust the work that you do."

John Harris, who started Politico with Allen and VandHei, wrote that the pair "cleave to a scientific ideal of journalistic detachment, the way a surgeon cannot tolerate even the slightest bacteria on his instruments." So, how did Allen and VandeHei cover the first six months of Trump's presidency? "President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways," the pair wrote in a piece published last Wednesday. Allen and VandeHei listed Trump's "wins": "Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation." They describe the last six months as "the very best chapter of his presidency." But Allen and VandeHei are puzzled that, despite all this success, Trump's approval ratings are very low. They offer this explanation: Americans "seem tired of all the winning." Ultimately, they blame Trump's unpopularity on the fickleness of voters who can't figure out what they want. "[V]oters demand change," Allen and VandeHei argue, "then flinch when it arrives too fast or too hard."

[...] Indeed, VandeHei and Allen have political opinions and express them publicly. VandeHei simply redefines his right-wing ideology as patriotism. "The American miracle rests on untamed democracy, the animal spirits of capitalism, the magic of unrestrained innovation, and the soft power of a vigilant and vibrant free press," VandeHei wrote in a December 2, 2024, Axios column. "I'm a believer in — and beneficiary of — all four."

[...] VandeHei and Allen have beliefs, but claim to be objective because they consider their right-wing beliefs, particularly on economic issues, to constitute fundamental truths. People with differing conceptions about the role of the free market and the regulatory state, on the other hand, are dismissed as biased or misguided.

Axios, founded by Politico co-founders Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, have pushed a conservative agenda under the guise of being “unbiased”, not to dissimilar to NewsNation.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Elon Musk Has the Worst ‘Both Sides’ Take on Latest Trump Assassination Attempt

“And they say this site has advertising problems,” one observer noted.

AJ McDougall at The Daily Beast:

Elon Musk, the billionaire king of bad takes, came up with a new one to cement his reign on Sunday night. Responding to a second potential assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life, the X owner questioned why no one was trying to kill the Democratic president and vice president.

“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” he posted, adding a thinking-face emoji. A near-instantaneous firestorm of criticism predictably followed, with several people telling him to “delete your account” and others tagging the U.S. Secret Service’s X account. “This is literally incitement,” the grassroots action group DemsMight wrote, while others pointed out that the post was grounds for the revocation of Musk’s government contracts, including a pair of NASA contracts worth roughly $4 billion that his company SpaceX won in 2021. [...] The incident in question began Sunday afternoon when a gunman, named in reports as Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, allegedly snuck onto the grounds near Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, with an AK-47 style rifle.

Despicable right-wing assclown Elon Musk crassly responded to the 2nd assassination attempt against Donald Trump with “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”

Seems like he and other right-wing media agitators want to incite assassination attempts against President Joe Biden and Vice President/2024 Dem nominee Kamala Harris.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

CNN’s commentary after Kamala Harris’ town hall demonstrates “the divergent planes upon which this election is being waged”

Kayla Gogarty at MMFA:

In their discussion after Vice President Kamala Harris’ October 23 CNN town hall, the network’s anchors admitted — but then dismissed — that mainstream media are holding Harris to a “different standard” than her Republican opponent Donald Trump.  Trump and Harris held one debate on September 11, after which Trump refused further debates. Due to this, CNN invited both Harris and Trump to participate in individual town hall events, an invitation Harris accepted but Trump declined. On October 23, Harris participated in a CNN town hall with undecided Pennsylvania voters. Following Harris' town hall, CNN anchors engaged in what journalist Aaron Rupar called “theater criticism” of Harris' performance without even acknowledging that Trump refused to even show up to take questions from voters until roughly 10 minutes into their post-event discussion. While a focus group CNN gathered overall had positive reactions, CNN immediately criticized Harris’ performance, even admitting — and dismissing — that they are holding Harris to a “different standard” and “it's inherently unfair.”

CNN’s post-Kamala Harris town hall coverage was the same old bothsiderism.