The Los Angeles Times published an article Sunday accusing Republican presidential nominee of dividing America with what it called “scorched-earth campaign,” objecting to Trump’s rhetoric on the campaign trail.
Citing an amorphous “Many who have watched Trump’s campaign,” the Times‘ Noah Bierman alleges: “The scorched-earth strategy Trump has adopted risks creating a lasting and bitter divide in American society.” He also worries that Trump’s rhetoric will be imitated by others.
The word “Obama” does not appear once in Bierman’s article — a significant omission, since the 44th president has done more to divide Americans than any of his recent predecessors. Obama has a history of violent rhetoric, telling supporters in 2008 to “get in their faces” and that “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” As president, he rammed Obamacare down the throats of the American people and repeatedly defied the Constitution — most recently, and brazenly, on the Iran nuclear deal.
Obama has also used race to divide Americans, most recently in his support for the Black Lives Matter movement. He has also exploited class divisions, praising the Occupy Wall Street movement and adopting its “99% vs. 1%” rhetoric in his re-election effort in 2012. It was Obama who accused his Republican rival in that contest, the strait-laced Gov. Mitt Romney, of killing a former employee’s wife. Dividing the country and demonizing opponents has been the rule in Obama’s presidency.
Bierman also lets Clinton off the hook. Nowhere does he mention her comment that half of Trump’s supporters are a “basket of deplorables” — a comment for which she never actually apologized. Clinton has also used racial rhetoric throughout her campaign in an attempt to appeal to Black Lives Matter and its supporters. The day after five police officers were murdered in Dallas, Texas at a Black Lives Matter rally, she spoke about “systemic racism” and the need for white people to make amends. Clinton has also adopted Obama’s divisive class war, running explicitly on a promise to soak the “one percent” with tax hikes.
Laughably, Bierman cites — with horror — a Trump supporter who says she is willing to join a “revolution” if he loses. Yet Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ran an entire presidential campaign on the promise of a “political revolution,” which the Times does not see fit to mention. Bremen also claims Trump “casually threatened to jail his political opponent” — omitting, like many others in the mainstream media who feigned outrage at the second presidential debate, that Trump was referring to appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s email scandal, which would have put any other American else in jail.
Whenever a Republican candidate, or a movement, is effective, the mainstream media claim that the country is being divided, as it did after the Tea Party sweep of 2010.
We are already a divided nation — and the biased media have themselves to blame.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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