Media is doing the World a Disservice by ignoring Trump's substantive issues

Courtesy of The Atlantic

Hat tip to Real Clear Politics who published an article called "Russian Expert Stephen Cohen: Trump Wants To Stop The New Cold War, But The American Media Just Doesn't Understand."

Stephen F. Cohen is a contributing editor at the progressive publication The Nation, which also ran the story.

The premise of the story is that Trump's substantive issues get totally ignored because the media focuses on Trump's more colorful sayings.

From the Real Clear Politics article:

Cohen says the media at large is doing a huge disservice to the American people by ignoring the substance of Trump's arguments about NATO and Russia, and buying the Clinton campaign's simplistic smear that Trump is a Russian "Manchurian candidate."

"That reckless branding of Trump as a Russian agent, most of it is coming from the Clinton campaign," Cohen said. "And they really need to stop."

"We're approaching a Cuban Missile Crisis level nuclear confrontation with Russia," he explained. "And there is absolutely no discussion, no debate, about this in the American media."

"Then along comes, unexpectedly, Donald Trump," he continued, "Who says he wants to end the New Cold War, and cooperate with Russia in various places... and --astonishingly-- the media is full of what only can be called neo-McCarthyite charges that he is a Russian agent, that he is a Manchurian candidate, and that he is Putin's client."

What Cohen is saying about the media is true.

For instance, as I sit here, less than an hour ago CNN ran a story on television on the fact that Donald Trump eats KFC with a knife and a fork. This is a story that shouldn't make the Food Network. But here we have a channel -- remember, a CNN executive declared that they are "no longer a news network" -- that spends most of the day covering political happenings talking about how Donald eats fast food in his private jet. This is ridiculous.

As I visit Yahoo minutes ago, there the editors published a story called "Trump at rally: ‘Get the baby out of here’" -- and it's the top story when you first get on the page.

It took three words for the mainstream media to use a buzzword to try to scare voters away from Trump. It begins: "In a bizarre..." -- there's really no need to finish the rest of the article, because it focuses on the least serious part of the speech, which I listened to most of, if not its entirety. The Yahoo News article doesn't even focus on any thing else said in the speech.

One hundred and fifty words wasted...

...one hundred and fifty words-sized bullet to try to take down Trump.

Yahoo News leading story. This is serious journalism, folks.

Here's a more serious part of the August 2, 2016 speech in Ashburn, Virginia, that aligns with the topic at hand:

TRUMP:  I want to get along with China. By the way wouldn't it be great if we got along with Russia? Wouldn't that be great?

(APPLAUSE)

If we actually had a relationship with Russia, instead of all the fighting and money and the problems and if we could get Russia and others to partner up and go and knock the hell out of ISIS, wouldn't that be a good thing? Wouldn't that be a good thing?

Now, I don't think we should even be getting involved with ISIS in that way. But here we have Donald Trump saying that he wants to get along with China and he wants to restore relations with Russia. "Wouldn't that be great?"

At the August 2 rally in Ashburn, Virginia, Trump also said of Hillary Clinton:

Hillary Clinton will be worse. She'll be worse. OK? Hillary Clinton will be worse.

She has bad relationships with people like Putin. I'll give you an example. She has terrible relationships with Putin. This is a nuclear country we're talking about. Russia, strong nuclear country.

And so are we. But their stuff is newer. Their stuff is newer. So she's looking at -- they have more -- I don't even want to say it -- they have a lot more, OK? So you know, she wants to play the tough one. She's not tough. She's not tough.

I know tough people, she's not tough. I mean she's -- she's just -- she's doing the handlers, they push her from place to place that's all it is. You saw her speech the other night. 

I mean they talk about presidential, do you think she looks presidential? I don't think so.

I don't think so. So -- so you know, she wants to play the role of the tough guy against Putin and Russia and she wants to play not tough, not tough. She should be tough on trade, OK?

Meanwhile, can you guess which Democrat said this about Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump last week at the 2016 Democratic National Convention?

"We cannot elect a man who belittles our closest allies while embracing dictators like Vladimir Putin."

Look who's shooting from the hip now: the man one spot away from the presidency, the #2 man in the Obama administration, Joe Biden, is here recklessly calling "world leaders" dictators, even though his administration won't confirm that designation. Again, if Hillary Clinton is going to "continue Obama's agenda," then we can expect more "fool rush in" status quo foreign policy from Hillary Clinton.

As Donald says in many rallies, the media is totally corrupt. He said it today in Ashburn, Virginia.

I agree with Cohen. As I wrote to a friend recently:

That said, Trump definitely says a lot of interesting and agreeable things on foreign policy. He raises very serious questions about our priorities that gets drowned out because of the media. The media is good at shutting off serious debate whenever they find something disagreeable about him...and there is a lot to disagree.

Additionally, I wrote:

I like the idea of an "America first" foreign policy because we haven't had an America first foreign policy for about 50 years, even though it was our policy at least 150 years, according to one expert .

I meant 60 years, per Ivan Eland's numbers.

Read the article and transcript here

Vladimir Putin learns the wrong lesson from the Soviet Union's collapse

As I was watching the opening ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a commentator said that Vladimir Putin thought the collapse and break-up of the Soviet Union was devastating, or something to that effect, and that Russia lost a lot of "good Russians." 

Bizarreness of that statement put aside, it deflects from real analysis of the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991.

What we should make of the Soviet Union's collapse was that we saw the complete and utter collapse of a nation based on an idea: Socialism. 

The "former glory of the Soviet Union" was no glory at all because socialism -- no matter how many years and decades it will take -- always plants the seeds for economic destruction. So going back to it would be like a "dog going back to its vomit" (Proverbs 26:11), and fool repeating his folly.

One other point here.

We are not unlike the Soviet Union.

As Thomas Woods explained in his 2009 book "Meltdown": "[the U.S. Federal Reserve System] is dedicated to central economic planning, the great discredited idea of the twentieth century. Except instead of planning the production of steel and concrete, as in the Old Soviet Union, it plans money and interest rates, with consequences that necessarily reverberate throughout the economy."

We are in the midst of a grand experiment that will end in nothing less than devastation for a lot of people. As I explained in previous statuses**, the time for a "soft landing" was over a decade ago. We should end our foolishness now to avoid an even harder landing later.

**Originally written as a Facebook status