On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about how the media creates Republican scandals, but also tries to distract you from Democratic scandals. Video and partial transcript below:
I’m sure you’ve heard about this scandal by now. It’s just a ridiculous kerfuffle … I talked about it before, Trump said this Hurricane Dorian might hit Alabama. That’s one of the places it might hit, and everybody said, Oh we just said nothing about it! We said nothing about Alabama. What are you talking about! Foolish! Trump is an idiot! He must be insane! Let’s invoke the 25th! Let’s get him out of office now! Impeachment!
I mean, it was nuts. Let me show you a little bit of this. When Trump then put up a map, and he was talking about it, somebody had taken a Sharpie and made it so the hurricane looked like it was going to hit Alabama. This is a tremendous scandal.
Let’s look at, what’s his name? Brian Stelter. He’s on top of this, man. He has got this thing covered. Brian Stelter, really getting into the meat of this incredible scandal.
STELTER: Here’s how I would frame it: This Alabama story was about the president failing a basic geography test. At the time he warned Alabama that Alabamamight get hit, at the time of that tweet, this is the forecast his own government released at 11:00 A.M. This is the most up-to-date forecast at the time of Trump’s tweet. And look at this track. It turned out to be spot on with Hurricane Dorian right up the coast just as forecast. Fantastic work by government forecasters at the National Weather Service. Anyone who can read a map knows what this shows. No one looked at this and thought that Alabama was going to be at risk.
Nobody looked at it, but Alabama was going to be at risk. Here, also on CNN is Don Lemon, reporting on the hurricane as it approaches.
LEMON: How many states that are under threat right now?
WEATHER MAN: At least six, from the Carolinas right through Georgia coastline into Florida certainly, and then also even into the Gulf of Mexico: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, you need to be on the lookout.
So Trump was right. So they actually are writing articles now that say, well, Trump is right but he was wrong because he took it seriously. In other words, what the press doesn’t like is [that] the press is so used to lying about Republican presidents, and presidents who have policies they don’t like, they’re so used to it without being challenged — especially because George W. Bush never fought back against them, which he later said or at least Karl Rove, his adviser, later said was a mistake. They’re just not used to having people fight back.
So Trump fights back … funny thing: He doesn’t like being called a liar. He’s constantly pointing it out, and he’s constantly, constantly in the right. I know the scandal itself has nothing, but it’s indicative of the fact that this is the way every word out of Trump’s mouth is taken. Everything he says is looked upon like it’s a problem. At no point does anybody ever say, well, wait … let’s stop for a minute. I know Trump said it — evil Trump, demon Trump, Adolf Hitler Trump — but maybe it’s true. …
James Mattis has this new book called “Call Sign Chaos” and now people are going through it and they’re … trying to get it this thing where Mattis quit and he must hate Trump and Mattis won’t criticize Trump. And that’s the big story. But buried in this is a story about a foiled bomb plot against a Washington, D.C. restaurant that was planned by the Iranians.
It was supported by the Iranians and Mattis writes in his book: “Had the bomb gone off, those in the restaurant and on the street would have been ripped apart. Blood rushing down sewer drains. It would have been the worst attack on us since 9/11. I sensed,” Mattis says, “that only Iran’s impression of America’s impotence could have led them to risk such an act within a couple of miles of the White House absent one fundamental mistake. The terrorists had engaged an undercover DEA agent in an attempt to smuggle the bomb. The Iranians would have pulled off this devastating attack. Had that bomb exploded, it would have changed history as under the Obama administration.”
Right, so he wanted to respond. He thought we should respond. This was going to be an attack — just the fact that it was foiled doesn’t mean the attack didn’t exist it did attack. He says, “I wanted calculated actions to restrain the regime so it couldn’t thrust us into a war. If you allow yourself to be goaded and trifled with, one of two things will happen. Eventually a harder, larger fight will explode or you will get moved out of the neighborhood.”
In other words, either the Iranians would destroy us or we’d have to go to war in a much bigger way. He says: “In my view, we had to hold Iran to account and strike back when attacked. But there was a reason for the administration’s restraint. The Obama administration was secretly negotiating with Iran, although I was not privy to the details at that time.” In other words, just like Obama closed down a DEA investigation into Hezbollah drug trafficking in America because he wanted to get his idiotic Iranian nuclear deal. In the same way he did that, he would not respond against an attack that would have been devastating to the United States of America and he would not show Iran what’s what, because he did not want to get his deal.
This guy was a terrible president and he was an incompetent president. It has nothing to do with him being a “secret Muslim” or “from Kenya” or hating America. Nothing to [do with] it. He was incompetent because his ideas were untrue, and he was too big a narcissist to acknowledge it and change his ideas. And once he realized that everything was going bluey under Obama, Once you realize that was what was happening, he just fell back on the old Democrat playbook of [dividing] people into identity groups and setting them against each other.
When he started talking about, oh the police are killing black people — untrue, but he sold it because the press helped him sell it. When he started talking about, oh poor little children who think they’re girls can’t go into the girls room because they’re really boys — that whole identity playbook, that’s what it’s about, it’s to distract you from the fact that their policies do not work, and that was the Obama presidency in a nutshell. Yet, when Trump comes along and does a good job and does things that might work, some of which do work — even if they do work — he is held to a totally different standard.
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