The Greatest Scandal in American History
In a Twitter tirade the other day, Agent Orange (I guess I’m thinking of his “personal Vietnam”) spent the evening on his throne watching his favorite propaganda outlet, and then immediately tweeting favorable quotes about himself from all his talking baboons.
I do not watch Fox News, and have no respect for anyone who would be hired there, let alone anyone who would accept a job there. One uncomfortable exception to all of this, however, is poor Mark Levin, who recently stepped fully into the world of compromised careerism by accepting an offer to host his own show on the network he himself had long dubbed “the pom-poms.”
So it was with a combination of annoyance and sadness that I noticed one of Trump’s Fox tweets quoting Levin:
Mark Levin “When they had power they didn’t stop the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, they funded the Iranians & are responsible for the greatest scandal in American history by interfering with our election & trying to undermine the Trump Campaign and Trump Presidency.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2018
Did Mark Levin really utter those words: “responsible for the greatest scandal in American history by interfering with our election & trying to undermine the Trump Campaign and Trump Presidency”?
Seriously? The greatest scandal in American history? Sigh…how the Great Ones have fallen. Money, money, money. It’s beyond sad what the Trump era has done to American conservatism. (And behind the curtain, Mitch McConnell — whose wife was the Fox News board member who personally demanded Levin’s new employers favor Trump in 2016 — grins a happy grin.) Say it ain’t so, Mark.
I have seen some defend Levin’s remark by trying to qualify and circumscribe what kind of “scandal” Levin was referring to in this statement, in order to have their cake and eat it too — that is, to join the hyperbolic pom-poms for Trump while saving themselves and Levin from looking utterly ridiculous in their cheerleading skirts. In other words, just as they defend Trump himself, the apologists are trying to cover for Levin’s nonsense by explaining what he “really meant,” in blithe defiance of what he actually said.
But artificially circumscribing what kind of “scandal” Levin was referring to is tantamount to saying, “It’s the greatest scandal in American history — IF we stipulate that we are only talking about party politics scandals involving behind-the-scenes electoral influence by a sitting administration in an effort to undermine a particular candidate of the opposing party in the upcoming election.”
Is that all Levin meant? I doubt it, for if it were, it would make the phrase “greatest scandal in American history” sound absurd, like saying, “This is the greatest dinner I’ve ever eaten — not including all those fantastic dinners my mom cooked, and of course the wonderful restaurants we visited last year in Spain, and so on.” So I think we are stuck with Levin suggesting that no federal government scandal in U.S. history tops the attempts, such as they were, by a bunch of Democrats, to harm the electoral chances of a Republican candidate by sullying his name and associations.
Is this categorically worse than Benghazi, when Obama and Hillary sat (or slept) and knowingly did nothing for seven and a half hours while an American ambassador and three other U.S. government agents were slowly surrounded, attacked, and killed by terrorists, and then subsequently created and disseminated an elaborate set of lies to hide their knowledge and deliberate inaction?
What happened to Trump was worse than that? Really? Or is it just that Trump is more important than an ambassador and a few unknown American government agents stationed in a faraway land?
What about “Fast and Furious,” for that matter? “You can keep your coverage”? “We have to pass it to find out what’s in it”?
The latest thing always seems like the worst. But Obama alone has been involved in uglier scandals than this. And then we could go back to the Wilson and FDR eras and find equally impressive scandals, on an even wider scale — backroom deals with corporate elitists and propagandists that would completely transform American society, setting it irrevocably on the path to progressive soft despotism.
The income tax law; the Federal Reserve Act; compulsory schooling laws and propaganda supported by J.D. Rockefeller and a handful of other corporate elites secretly working with the federal government to create an underclass of compliant workers in the name of “universal education”; Wilson-era internationalist propaganda; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on black men (which continued for 40 years); FDR stacking the Supreme Court to protect the New Deal, etc.
But a little pre-election chicanery and duplicity from Democrats to undermine poor Donnie, and all that transformative history goes out the window. Greatest scandal in American history!
Fox News history, that is. In other words, Trumpland History.