Sean Spicer speaks for the president.
So why does anyone in the news media suggest Spicer was ignorant or careless in his word choice when he compared Hitler favorably to Syria’s Assad at a press briefing?
Talking about Assad’s gas attack on civilian villagers, Spicer offered these jaw-dropping alternative facts:
“Someone who is as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons. … (Hitler) was not using the gas on his own people in the same way that Assad is doing.”
Forget that Spicer speaks for the same administration that acknowledged the annual Holocaust commemoration but didn’t mention Jewish victims.
Forget that Spicer speaks for the president whose campaign was marred by antisemitism.
Forget Hitler’s Austrian birth; that would be an alternative fact when Spicer says Hitler didn’t sink to gassing “his own (German) people.”
But remember that Jews gassed in Hitler’s death camps included Germans (and Austrians) and other millions included German (and Austrian) Communists and Christian resisters, gays, gypsies, etc., who weren’t Jews.
Spicer crawled back from his deception, admitting he was wrong on the facts and apologizing.
Cheap grace. In the case of Assad/Hitler, Spicer did just what his master required. He represented Trump perfectly as Trump reportedly told a working lunch recently, “That guy gets great ratings. Everyone tunes in.”
• Ann Coulter is a provocative right-wing author and speaker. Last week, she joined the Honor Roll of conservatives whom college and university officials deemed so dangerous they could not be allowed to speak on campuses.
UC-Berkeley — which initially banned her student-sponsored appearance — is the 1960s home of the modern free speech movement.
Officials, possibly with straight faces, said the university could not assure public safety if she appeared.
They lied, just as officials on other campuses have lied when they canceled conservative speakers or failed to control aggressive, hostile audiences.
There may be no place in America where political speech — entitled to the highest degree of protection — is more threatened than on campuses.
However, after a day or so, the fearful, deceitful UC-Berkeley bosses found a “protected venue” on campus that presumably existed when they said none existed.
• Experts who offer nuanced responses to reporters’ questions risk deletion from journalists’ Rolodexes.
Voluble certainty and flame-throwing are greater predictors of return engagements, although neither demonstrate any correlation with insight.
Instead, we get dire assessments and predictions on whatever is the subject de jour.
(I always tried to avoid calling anyone an expert; “knowledgeable,” “specialist” or the like said more about them and me.)
• “Never been worse” is common among reporters and their purported experts on Russian-American relations. It’s click bait, not reporting or evidence-based history.
Maybe they don’t know about the 1918-1920 U.S. invasion to overthrow the embryonic Soviet state, the 1948-1949 Berlin Blockade, 1960 U2 fiasco or the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
In 1960, I saw the remains of the U2 in Moscow’s Gorky Park. It was shot down by the Soviet surface-to-air missile weeks before and Gary Powers, the American civilian pilot, was captured.
Three years later, it was missiles again. JFK was threatening war over Khrushchev’s missiles in Castro’s Cuba. Protesters I interviewed outside our embassy in London seemed to know what Americans didn’t: Khrushchev was responding to our supposedly secret missiles aimed at him from Turkey.
It was so tense that many Brits assumed one or the other Super Powers would nuke their independent V Bomber nuclear force in any Soviet-American first strike or counter strike. We all were frightened. It was the beginning of the era of Mutually Assured Destruction.
• British journalists operate under a plethora of laws limiting what they can report. In turn, they find workarounds that don’t provoke the Crown Prosecution Service to interrupt their after-work pints.
One way of reporting sensitive information without unduly contravening Britain’s Official Secrets Act is to use the phrase, “It is understood…”
That came up in the recent report by the Guardian that Britain’s Government Communications Head Quarters — their NSA and more — provided the initial alert about Trump campaign workers’ contacts with Russian intelligence operatives.
“It is understood that GCHQ was not carrying out a targeted operation against Trump or his team, but picked up the alleged conversations by chance,” the Guardian said.
• I’ve lost track of broken promises that seduced so many Americans into voting for Trump and against their common sense and economic needs. Even national news media seem exhausted by daily fact-checking and the latest retreat or reversal of some promise: NATO obsolete; NATO not obsolete. China, currency manipulator; China not currency manipulator; overturn Obamacare; Obamacare still rules. Putin good. Putin bad. Etc.
• Even Brits, accustomed to strong and frequently derogatory comments about public figures, can be driven off the rails. A columnist for the Sun, a Rupert Murdoch tabloid, described soccer player Ross Barkley as “one of our dimmest footballers” and the writer added, “I get a similar feeling when seeing a gorilla at the zoo.”
The writer, Kevin MacKenzie, has been accused of racism although he says he didn’t know that Barkley had a Nigerian (read “black”) grandfather. Neither did many of Mackenzie’s critics who fumed about another comment, this one about Liverpool where Barkley lives.
Critics want Mackenzie sacked. Murdoch’s editors suspended him and said they’d investigate further.
And to add to the silliness, the Liverpool mayor reported the comments to police and the Independent Press Standards Organization.
The Guardian reported that Merseyside police said they were investigating Friday’s column headlined, “Here’s why they go ape at Ross.”
I call it silliness because Brits increasingly criminalize thought, acts and speech that offends anyone. Bad taste? Possibly. Criminal? You gotta be kidding.
• The Enquirer still is burying recent homicides where victims were white and accused killers are black. In at least the lynching of Jamie Upton on Kenton Street in Walnut Hills, after his car struck and injured a child, race was a motive.
According to prosecutor Joe Deters, the accused shooter told the driver’s African-American passenger, “Get out of here, you’re black.”
Police are seeking the accused shooter, Deonte Barber.
The child darted from between parked cars. “In that neighborhood, I wouldn’t have stopped,” the Enquirer quoted Deters as saying. “I would have driven to the police department.”
The Enquirer quoted Deters as saying Kenton Street — where a lawyer was shot when he drove into a gunfight on Jan. 1 — that it is a bad neighborhood.
In the more recent death, police have not said race was an issue, but images of the two young women, black driver and white pedestrian victim resolved that suspicion. Whether the confrontation that preceded the homicide was racial was not clear.
The Enquirer was late on the story about Dan Hofheimer, the white lawyer shot as he drove down Kenton Street. And he’s all but vanished as a victim. I haven’t heard of any arrests but given the place. Is it racist to consider the possibility the shooters weren’t white?
• Melania Trump settled her defamation suits against London’s Daily Mail tabloid and website for a cringing retraction and an undisclosed amount.
You have to wonder, WWTT — What Were They Thinking — at the fact-challenged Daily Mail? My answer: click bait and a circulation builder for a tabloid with a history of Trumpian disregard for facts.
Daily Mail and its website suggested Melania was a pricey escort despite her denials and no evidence to support the accusation. Here’s the published recantation:
“The Daily Mail newspaper and the Mail Online/DailyMail.com website published an article on 20th August 2016 about Melania Trump which questioned the nature of her work as a professional model, and republished allegations that she provided services beyond simply modeling. The article included statements that Mrs. Trump denied the allegations and Paolo Zampolli, who ran the modeling agency, also denied the allegations, and the article also stated that there was no evidence to support the allegations. The article also claimed that Mr. and Mrs. Trump may have met three years before they actually met, and ‘staged’ their actual meeting as a ‘ruse.’
“We accept that these allegations about Mrs. Trump are not true and we retract and withdraw them. We apologise to Mrs. Trump for any distress that our publication caused her. To settle Mrs. Trump’s two lawsuits against us, we have agreed to pay her damages and costs.”
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in May 3-10, 2017.