Huffington Post blogger Jason Linkins tried, but ultimately failed, to smear real estate mogul Donald Trump and Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Steve King (R-IA) in a hit piece published on the leftwing website on Sunday.
“This week, ‘This Week With George Stephopoulos’ kicked off with a question: ‘Why is Donald Trump stumping in Iowa?'” Linkins wrote. “This answer to that question is that Trump is an orange-skinned huckster-clown who wants to pretend to be a big deal in politics and a perennial presidential contender, running on such policies as ‘Why do the Iraqis still have oil? We should take that for ourselves.’ He is the sort of buffoon that the Republican Party opted to keep far, far away from their convention — and this was in spite of the fact that they nevertheless chose to allow Clint Eastwood to do the weird things that he did.”
Linkins’ accusations that Trump is not serious about conservatism strain credulity, as evidenced by Breitbart News’ reporting this weekend–and by the mere fact that Trump has been overly political active speaking at various events and helping conservative groups for the past several months. He recently headlined Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition dinner in Washington, D.C., for example.
Trump, too, recently told the National Review that he put $1 million of his own money to explore a presidential bid. He also told Breitbart News in a phone interview on Saturday as he boarded his plane for Iowa’s Family Leadership Summit to give the keynote address that he is seeking to help conservative candidates across the country in the upcoming crucial 2014 midterm elections. “It’s really too early to think about that,” Trump said of a potential presidential run in a phone interview with Breitbart News. “I’m thinking about 2014 first of all and I’m helping a lot of people. I’m thinking about 2014 first.”
“My whole message always is making America great again,” Trump added, saying the way to do that rests in the entrepreneurial capitalist spirit of competition. “We have to compete much better with the rest of the world because we’re not doing a good job of that,” he said. “They’re taking our jobs, they’re taking our money, they’re taking everything.”
As Citizens United president David Bossie, an original co-sponsor of Bob Vander Plaats’ Family Leadership Summit, said in an interview with Breitbart News from the scene of the event, about 2,000 people showed up to see Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and other conservative leaders speak. “They like Donald Trump because of his honest talk, because he digs right to the heart of the issues to try to cut through it,” Bossie said of the iconic businessman.
Linkins continued his diatribe against Trump for several paragraphs, eventually accusing The Apprentice star of “horseshit” and argued that ABC News should not have even aired the interview with the newsmaker. Even though he did not include any of these facts in his piece, Linkins still thinks he “just took care of the matter” of why Trump is politically relevant, “and put it to bed in a paragraph.”
Linkins then shifted abruptly into an attack on Gohmert. He said Gohmert “also made things terrible for everyone” on ABC News’ Sunday program This Week because Gohmert advocated conservatives in the House and Senate stand strong in their fight to defund Obamacare in the upcoming Continuing Resolution (CR). “Right now, the GOP leadership is trying to tamp down the idea that they’d be willing to shut down the government unless they get an agreement from Democrats to defund Obamacare,” Linkins wrote. “At the end of last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor — no weak-willed compromiser! — was strongly signaling that everyone needed to take a chill pill.”
Then Linkins argues that “ABC went out and got a guy that they knew would say” there is a possibility that enough House Republicans would band together to make House GOP leadership side with them. Linkins apparently tries to cast Gohmert as a representative of some kind of far-flung wing of the House GOP, but fails to mention that there are 138 of his fellow House Republicans who have cosponsored the legislation from Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA) to defund Obamacare in the upcoming CR in September. A member of Cantor’s and Speaker John Boehner’s House GOP leadership team, House Republican conference vice chair Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-KS), is a cosponsor as are several House committee chairmen and the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX).
Linkins turned his attention to King after that, and argued that Meet The Press host David Gregory should not have allowed the Iowa congressman on the program to defend himself from the attacks on his remarks about how some illegal aliens who qualify as DREAMers are actually in the country because they were used by Mexico’s drug cartels as transporters for drug trafficking. As Breitbart News has already demonstrated, the White House, Cantor and Boehner ignored the facts in that attack on King. A series of news reports and statistics from the federal government prove he was correct in the remarks he made, and the Huffington Post’s Linkins seems to agree, calling it a “weeks-old matter.” Nonetheless, Linkins argued it was not “important to journalism or immigration reform” for King to be able to defend himself on Gregory’s program, and said that the program and the GOP power structure should not have allowed the congressman on to talk about the issue.
“Meanwhile, over at the Meet The Press, King was on, defending his remark, ‘For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,'” Linkins wrote. “There was never a moment that Gregory gave any suggestion that resolving this weeks-old matter was important to journalism or immigration reform or anything. King was doing so, just because David Gregory wanted him to come on ‘Meet The Press’ so that everyone could watch King flop his gob over this matter one last time.”
The whole point of Linkins’ argument seems to be that Republicans, and media outlets, should somehow keep certain conservative voices from speaking to media on Sunday news programs, all because “[i]t would make my life better” and because, as a liberal blogger, he wants to help the GOP maybe “even make your jobs easier as well.”
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