Tuesday, May 16, 2017

What Conservative Outlets Spoke about Today


While this side of the aisle lives and breathes Trump's incompetence and the risk that poses on not only to the United States but to the world, the other side of the aisle, in that other reality, has totally different news and people are worried about something quite different:

The murder of Seth Rich.

I had to Google the name to learn about Seth Rich*.  He was brutally killed in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2016.  At the time of his death he was a Voter Expansion Data Director at the DNC.  The police interpreted his death as robbery gone wrong:

Rich was shot about a block from his home in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C.[9][10][11][12] Police were alerted to gunfire at 4:20 am by an automated gunfire locator called ShotSpotter.[12][13] Rich was found conscious but later died in the hospital.[10] Newsweek reported that police said he may have been killed in an attempted robbery and that the neighborhood had recently been plagued by robberies. Although Rich's watch strap was torn, nothing had apparently been taken from him.[9]

The conservatives, or some cells inside that wide organism, believe that the DNC or some Democratic politician killed Rich.  Why?

Because the conservatives believe (or want others to believe) that Rich was the source which provided Wikileaks with thousands of DNC emails.

Why write about this now?  Because a private investigator working for Rich's family had stated that he had found evidence of contact between Rich and Wikileaks.

Thus we get today's headlines in many right-wing newspapers and Internet sites:

"NOT RUSSIA, BUT AN INSIDE JOB?" asked Breitbart, the far-right website previously led by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, which said that "if proven, the report has the potential to be one of the biggest cover-ups in American political history, dispelling the widespread claim that the Russians were behind hacks on the DNC."
"DEAD DNC STAFFER 'HAD CONTACT' WITH WIKILEAKS," declared the headline of the Drudge Report, the highly-trafficked conservative news destination.
Fox News on Tuesday morning joined in the chorus, publishing a lead story on its website about the "DC MURDER MYSTERY." The story said Wheeler had made the claim Wikileaks had been in contact with Rich. It added that a federal investigator, who it said had spoken on the condition of anonymity, corroborated it.

Here's the next twist.  The private investigator later stated that he had found no such evidence.  Instead, he had heard about the evidence from the reporter he spoke to for that Fox News story in the above link.

That sounds a little circular, don't you think?

Anyway.  If you live in the conservative bubble, you will believe that the Washington Post and other liberal media are making such a hullabaloo about Trump's innocent slips and slides only to cover up these new findings which probably show that Hillary was out there last summer, killing people.  Or if not the bitch herself, then one of her henchmen or henchwomen.**

The impact of our news bubbles can be fatal for democracy.  If one half of Americans believe that the main event in recent domestic politics has been Trump's leaky mouth and the other half believes that it would have been the cover-up of the source of Wikileaks or even the cover-up of a murder by the DNC, well, we might as well not vote in the same reality, never mind the same country.

Something must be done about this new fashion where we don't only have our own opinions, but where facts are whatever you prefer them to be, without evidence needed.

-------

*  I feel awful about the heartless way I discuss the tragic death of a young man who had his whole life ahead of him.  His family must be greatly hurt by the politicization of his death.  My sincere apologies for any extra pain I am causing.

**  I got those ideas from various conservative comments threads where people believe that an evil deep state is going to take the brave and innocent champion of small people, Donald J. Trump, down.  Just because it is evil.