On Aug. 27, NPR veterans affairs reporter Quil Lawrence lit into former President Donald Trump for bringing cameras to a section of Arlington National Cemetery with some families of soldiers killed during President Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The entire manufactured controversy is perverse. It's obvious NPR is exploiting the cemetery for a political goal, and it then spread to the rest of the national media. Trump is showing support for grieving Gold Star families, while Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would not appear. They were MIA. But Trump was singled out as the one with grotesque political optics – not the no-shows whose negligence cost American lives.
They weren't seriously considering the Biden-Harris disaster on "All Things Considered." They could call it "All Democrats Defended." Conservatives quickly found snapshots from private photographers of Biden in the same sacred section of the Arlington cemetery. That thing cannot be "considered."
In a different segment of this evening newscast, Lawrence and NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman reviewed the third anniversary of the Abbey Gate bombing, which led to the death of 13 American service personnel. The segment was headlined: "The chaotic U.S. exit from Afghanistan in 2021 had stems from four administrations." NPR felt compelled to spread the blame around on everyone.
Bowman spun furiously: "It's important to note that it was the Trump administration that signed this peace deal that was basically a quick exit plan." Lawrence added, "There is a lot of failure to go around to the four presidents over the 20 years of war."
Lawrence was back the next morning to add another layer of reheated Democrat spin to the mix: "You know, Trump has a controversial history with comments about disabled veterans, though, and about fallen soldiers. Some of his former staff have said Trump called fallen World War II troops losers and suckers for fighting and dying when they had no personal gain at stake. Trump denies these comments, but even this year, he mocked the late John McCain for not being able to raise his arms fully."
One of the most annoying problems with this story is using anonymous cemetery officials to attack Trump's optics. This leads the public to assume only Trump is being political, that it's impossible that the people seeking to block Trump and the Gold Star families are partisan Democrats doing damage control.
Democratic journalists should be accused of hiding Democratic activism with an undeserved veil of anonymity. Why grant anonymity here? They're supposedly nonpartisan public officials.
Lawrence said they stopped talking: "They've told NPR and other media outlets that they're no longer going to answer any questions about this because they want to protect the identity of the official who confronted the Trump campaign." Then Lawrence closed with one last insult: "But our source told me that they have never seen this level of disrespectful behavior at Arlington, ever."
This sounds vaguely reminiscent of the anonymous "nonpartisans" at the National Archives that hated Trump so much it eventually led to an armed raid on Trump's home at Mar-a-Lago over some presidential papers. Trump is always the loutish supervillain, and the people heaping negative press on him are painted as patriotic anonymous bureaucrats.
This is the corrupt nature of public broadcasting, loaded almost entirely with partisan Democrats, subsidized by Democratic politicians to provide mudslinging campaign ads disguised as "journalism." It's not "public" radio. It's for the socialist half of the public.
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