Tag: Republican spin

The latest Trump defense: If it swims and quacks like a duck, it’s a piano

Washington Post logoWalk to the back of the impeachment hearing room, into the Republican cloakroom where lawmakers huddle during proceedings, and you’ll find a closed double door with a sign taped to it announcing:

“This is not a door. Thank you.”

Pay no attention to the latch, the push bar, the light visible through the crack, the wood panels: This is not a door.

It’s the perfect distillation of the defense of President Trump in these final days of the House impeachment proceedings. This is not a quid pro quo. This is not an abuse of power. This is not an obstruction of justice. It doesn’t matter if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck. This is not a duck. Thank you.

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Fox News has created an ‘alternative reality’ to spin even damning testimony against Trump: report

AlterNet logoAfter Wednesday’s testimony from Ambassador Gordon Sondland in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, CNN and MSNBC were full of legal and political analysts who found Sondland’s testimony to be terrible for the president. But Fox News, a report by Media Matters’ Matt Gertz demonstrates, generally had very different coverage of Wednesday’s hearing — coverage that was overtly favorable to Trump and his allies.

Not everyone at Fox News has been consistently critical of the impeachment inquiry: Judge Andrew Napolitano (a legal analyst at Fox) and Chris Wallace, despite their conservative leanings, have not hesitated to be critical of Trump at times. But Gertz’ report shows a major contrast between how CNN covered Wednesday’s hearing and how most at Fox News covered it.

The impeachment witnesses on Wednesday, Gertz notes, included not only Sondland, but also, Laura Cooper (a U.S. Defense Department expert on Russia and Ukraine) and the U.S. State Department’s David Hale. Cooper, Gertz points out, testified that as early as July 25, Ukrainian officials were inquiring about a hold being placed on U.S. aid to Ukraine — and Sondland, Gertz explains, testified earlier “that he had, at the president’s behest and with the knowledge of senior members of his administration, pressured the Ukrainians to publicly commit to investigating former Vice President Joe Biden as well as the conspiracy theory that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 presidential election.”

View the complete November 21 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.