Media Preps Battlefield To Attack GOP On Border Crisis

According to Wednesday’s edition of NBC’s  First Read and MSNBC’s “Daily Countdown,” it seems pretty clear that Chuck Todd, NBC’s Chief White House Correspondent, and his colleagues are busying themselves in laying the groundwork to take some of the border crisis heat off of Obama and turn it on the GOP.

According to Todd, any GOP reluctance to blindly hand Obama close to $4 billion — with a “B” — will result in an “optics” problem for Republicans every bit as bad as the one Obama’s facing for choosing to shoot pool in Colorado and raise money in Texas while refusing to visit the border:

As he travels to Texas today, President Obama has a clear optics problem: He’s in the Lone Star State to raise money at two different fundraisers (in Dallas and Austin), but he won’t be coming to the U.S.-Mexico border to inspect what his administration has called a humanitarian crisis. Indeed, the White House is digging in its heels to NOT bow to pressure to visit the border. …

But if Obama has an optics problem, the Republican Party might have a much bigger one if they reject the White House’s request for $3.7 billion to respond to the crisis at the border.

NBC’s Mark Murray is a co-author of that left-wing spin disguised as analysis,  so I used Twitter to ask if he or anyone at NBC News had done any actual reporting to find out how exactly that $3.7 billion will be spent:

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Any pork in the $4b immigration request, @mmurraypolitics. What does your reporting show?

— John Nolte (@NolteNC) July 9, 2014

–Here’s Murray’s response:

@NolteNC Depends on one’s definition of “pork,” of course. But here is our breakdown of the $$$ — so far http://t.co/6IMuk5yQrK

— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) July 9, 2014

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Check his link. That’s not reporting, that’s faithfully copying, pasting, rewording and believing without question what’s been handed to you by your government.

In other words, this is all political maneuvering on NBC’s part. They have no idea if the spending request is legitimate, necessary, or going to end up in some bureaucratic black hole — and they don’t care.

The goal here isn’t journalism or good government — the goal is a political one to prep the battlefield as a way to try and pull Obama out of this mess by pulling the GOP into it. NBC News is intentionally giving the GOP no space for the possibility that waste, fraud, and pork in that $3.7 billion might make it bad policy.

Todd has used this dishonest “pox on everyone’s house” defense to protect Obama before. That’s how he recently summed up the IRS scandal. His logic there is that people (conservatives, naturally) applying for a tax status Todd disagrees with are every bit as horrible as a powerful federal government singling Obama’s citizen political opponents out for harassment and politically paralyzing audits during a presidential election year.

And now Todd and company are outright threatening the GOP.  

Claiming the GOP will have an “optics problem” if they don’t immediately hand over $4 billion (that NBC News has no idea how it will be spent) to Obama, is just a nice way of threatening that if they don’t, NBC News will give them an image problem.  

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC