Erick-Woods Erickson
The mental gymnastics being displayed by members of the mainstream press over the past 48 hours is truly a sight to behold.
They are characterizing flippant statements Trump made about forcing Liz Cheney in front of rifles as an overt call to put Cheney in front of a firing squad. If they cared to listen to the full clip, they would see that Trump was more broadly referencing the Cheney family’s penchant for supporting wars and the larger military-industrial complex.
The literal treatment of Trump’s Cheney comments stands in stark contrast to their judicious interpretation of Joe Biden’s garbage statement. Biden quite literally called Trump supporters garbage and the media willfully accepted the generous interpretation from the White House spin team that inserted an inaudible apostrophe. It wasn’t until the non-political White House stenographers revolted that the media began to question the Biden team.
When you understand this background, the scant coverage of the devastatingly poor jobs reports makes sense. With four days before an election, a historically atrocious jobs report showed the US economy added a paltry 12K jobs in October, missing analysts’ expectations of 100K positions. When you dig into the numbers even more, the only employment growth came from government jobs while the year-long trend of revising previous months downward continued again. The trendlines in the final week of the race are favoring Trump, but the media is doing its best to distract you. But there’s hope.
