Right-wing hypocrites

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Nigel Farage, who has spent his entire career arguing for Brexit, and slagging off the European parliament from his seat in the … European parliament, has announced that, no, he will not be giving up his £73,000 per annum EU pension. Because, as he understandably explained: “Why should my family suffer?” Quite right. The rest of our families, bracing for an economic hit, a shortage of NHS staff to take care of us, a possible destruction of relationships and a narrowing of travel options, can suck it up. Then again, Farage is not new to hypocrisy. A privately educated former banker who rails against the establishment. An anti-immigration, anti-free-movement politician who has a German wife, and two of whose children have German passports. (Oh, and letting a French politician stay in his London home.) I half expect him to come out against tweed suits and pints of beer..

Where to start with Arron Banks, who told us last week that he found Brexit “exhausting”. After screwing the future of the country, he is exhausted. Bear in mind this is also the guy who said the working class was being mugged off, while presiding over offshore tax companies. Perhaps if he had put the minimum £6m he spent on Brexit into paying more tax, he might have helped the “left behind” rather better, whose lot is about to get worse. Still not entirely sure where he gets his money from by the way – it’s like he just found it down the back of the sofa. Which almost certainly is a disgusting white leather number. Oh, and Banks is another anti-immigrant one married to a foreigner (Russian, obvs) living in the UK..

Remember MEP Dan Hannan’s “nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”? Because that seems like a rather big threat at the moment. Remember how, Boris Johnson, a lead Brexiter, actually drafted two versions of a Telegraph article – one for remain, one for Brexit – because he was so on the fence about which side would be better for his career. Does he really believe Brexit is better for the country? Who knows what Johnson really believes in, except himself. Here’s what he wrote in the pro-remain piece that went unpublished: “Shut your eyes. Hold your breath. Think of Britain. Think of the rest of the EU. Think of the future. Think of the desire of your children and your grandchildren to live and work in other European countries; to sell things there, to make friends and perhaps to find partners there.””

The Brexit hypocrites: from Farage's EU pension to sellout Corbyn | Hannah Jane Parkinson | Opinion | The Guardian

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Remember Gowdy, from the endless Benghazi inquiries..

During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) pleaded with Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to bring Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump campaign to a prompt conclusion, citing the purported damage it is doing the country. “There’s an old saying that justice delayed is justice denied. I think right now all of us are being denied,” Gowdy said. “Whatever you got — finish it the hell up, because this country is being torn apart.”

Gowdy’s comments might be defensible in a vacuum. But when he was chair of the House Benghazi Committee, Gowdy oversaw an investigation of Hillary Clinton that lasted more than two years. When it finally ended in the summer of 2016, Gowdy told the Washington Post he had no qualms about how long it dragged out because “my job is to report facts.” But Gowdy — who isn’t running for reelection — is now clearly motivated by a desire to protect his party’s president.

Trey Gowdy proves he is a complete fraud – ThinkProgress

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The chair of the Republican National Committee complained on Friday morning that conservatives are being censored by Silicon Valley, citing the debunked conspiracy theory that Twitter and other net platforms are intentionally targeting voices on the right. But even if the problem were real, her party has done everything in its power to make that sort of Internet censorship possible.

Back in the Obama years, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) enforced a 2015 regulatory policy called “net neutrality,” aimed at protecting an open Internet.  Under those rules, service providers were prohibited from throttling or blocking Internet sites. “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” then-President Barack Obama explained as his administration implemented the protections.

McDaniel’s party was outraged. In their 2016 Republican National Committee platform, they vowed to repeal the protections and to allow companies to censor content as they saw fit. In an Orwellian “Protecting Internet Freedom” section of the platform, they wrote “The survival of the internet as we know it is at risk. Its gravest peril originates in the White House, the current occupant of which has launched a campaign, both at home and internationally, to subjugate it to agents of government. The President ordered the chair of the supposedly independent Federal Communications Commission to impose upon the internet rules devised in the 1930s for the telephone monopoly.”

When Donald Trump came in and appointed a new majority on the FCC, it moved quickly to kill net neutrality, calling the deregulation a return to “the light-touch regulatory scheme that fostered the internet’s growth, openness and freedom.” Freedom, in this case, meant freedom for companies to decide what Internet content users can access and what content they cannot.

RNC Chair complains about internet bias on Fox News after Republicans killed net neutrality – ThinkProgress

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The feud between Fox News and MSNBC has taken a personal turn, with Fox News host Tucker Carlson accusing “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd of being aware of NBC’s decision to kill a story by Ronan Farrow detailing sexual harassment charges against movie producer Harvey Weinstein. Carlson offered no evidence in asserting that Todd, the political director of NBC News, knew about an NBC decision to not run Farrow’s story, but argued it was implausible to think that he was not aware of internal network talks surrounding the story.

Chuck Todd, Tucker Carlson turn up rhetoric in latest cable news tussle | TheHill

Uuhhmm..

So have we ever heard Tucker Carlson about Fox people Bill O'Reilly, Eric Bolling, Roger Ailes? 

Tucker Carlson has covered sexual-harassment allegations about Democratic-leaning figures while remaining quiet about accusations against his former Fox News colleagues. "It's been thoroughly covered — those aren't secret stories," he told Business Insider.

Tucker Carlson on why he hasn't covered harassment stories about Fox - Business Insider

Those without sin throw the first stone..

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Fox News referred to Stormy Daniels's attorney Michael Avenatti as a "creepy porn lawyer" in a series of on-screen graphics Thursday night during his appearance on Tucker Carlson's show. The lower-third chyrons on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" came as the host asked Avenatti about the adult-film actress's lawsuit against President Trump and the president's former lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Fox News' Tucker Carlson uses 'creepy porn lawyer' tag during Avenatti interview | TheHill

Sooo, the lawyer who defends her is a creepy porn lawyer, what does that make the President, who slept with her (whilst he was married) and bought her silence...

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“Democrats have become the party of crime,” President Donald Trump declared on Thursday night at a rally in Missoula, Montana. At the same rally, Trump praised as “my kind of guy” a member of Congress who violently attacked a reporter, choked him, and then lied to the police about his crime.

Just a week before, Trump had praised his party as the party of “law and order and justice.” And only a week before that, The New York Times had published a huge, meticulously detailed report alleging decades of deliberate financial and tax fraud by Trump and his family.

It’s not just the president. In July, Donald Trump Jr. seemed extremely concerned about the potential for political rhetoric to incite violence. He condemned threats against Rand Paul, speculating that they had been incited by Maxine Waters, the California representative who had said, at a political rally, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” On October 18, Donald Trump Jr. campaigned in Michigan alongside Ted Nugent, the NRA board member who has delivered death threats against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whom he called a “subhuman mongrel.”

Trump's GOP Moves Beyond Hypocrisy - The Atlantic

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When BuzzFeed News broke a major story Thursday night finding that Special Counsel Robert Mueller reportedly has evidence that President Donald Trump criminally directed his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, one nagging question emerged: How low will the right wing sink to defend this kind of behavior? On Fox News Friday afternoon, host of “The Five” Greg Gutfeld answered that question. While his co-hosts rightly pointed out that the report itself merits due skepticism, Gutfeld dismissed the importance of the president committing a federal crime. “It doesn’t matter! Right? It doesn’t matter!” he said. “It doesn’t matter if the story’s true or not because it was originally about collusion and it’s not even about that anymore!” “Exactly!” another host chimed in. “So now it’s just throwing what — if we can get one thing to stick! And that’s all it is. Getting something to stick on the wall,” he said.

‘It doesn’t matter!’: Fox News host argues it’s fine if Trump committed a federal crime – Alternet.org

Soo, even if the Buzzfeed story (about Trump directing his lawyer to lie to Congress) is true, it doesn't matter to some right-wingers. The same right-wingers who impeached Clinton for doing exactly this (and the Star investigation was about Whitewater, not whether he lied about an affair).

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Since then, Stone and conservative media commentators have complained about these tactics. They’ve argued there were too many armed agents, and that Stone — who’d long been expected to be indicted — should have been offered the opportunity to surrender voluntarily. (Investigators claimed that the reason for the early-morning arrest was to prevent Stone from potentially destroying documents.)

On Wednesday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to the FBI demanding they justify their tactics — “so that the American public can be reassured this arrest followed established methods and procedures.” President Trump weighed in too, saying he “thought it was very unusual.”
It fits with a pattern of the president and his allies being outraged by how the criminal justice system works when it affects Trump’s friends — and notably silent or even downright encouraging of aggressive law enforcement action aimed at others.

The selective outrage on the right about Roger Stone’s arrest - Vox

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The point, of course, is that we should hold people to the same standard, regardless of political party. It's a good, solid principle. And it seems almost impossibly quaint, because the search for the truth in the Trump investigations is breaking down along partisan lines. During Michael Cohen's testimony, Republicans focused more on attacking the witness than questioning his serious allegations. And on CNN's "New Day" this week, Republican Sen. Mike Rounds suggested Trump made hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to protect his family. "I honestly think this president loves his family," Rounds said. The new standard seems to be that allegations of lies and obstruction of justice don't matter to Republicans when it's about a president from their party. We know that this is situational ethics because 20 years ago, some of the same senators were singing a very different tune. 

Here's Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell talking to CNN in 1999 about impeachment proceedings against then-President Bill Clinton: "The problem is lying under oath and obstructing justice. The subject matter is not what is significant here; it's lying under oath and obstructing justice." McConnell voted to find President Clinton guilty on both counts -- lying and obstruction of justice.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, who stepped down as chairman of the judiciary committee last year, told CNN the importance of leaving partisanship behind during the impeachment trial in January 1999. "We are miraculously transformed from politicians to people who leave their Republican and Democrat labels at the door...We're there to seek the truth and to find out whether the president is guilty or not guilty, and no stone should be left unturned to make that determination." Poetic stuff.

But today, the search for the truth seems secondary for Senate Republicans. Trump's former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, took a strong stand against lying from the oval office. After Clinton was acquitted by the Senate on two articles of impeachment in February 1999, Sessions spoke out about the impact it could have on the culture of the country. "It is crucial to our system of justice that we demand the truth. I fear that an acquittal of this President will weaken the legal system by providing an option for those who consider being less than truthful in court," he said.

A look back at Clinton's impeachment reveals the GOP's searing hypocrisy (opinion) - CNN

LOL

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The hypocrisy and bad faith is simply breath taking in the following video:

What If Fox News Covered Trump the Way It Covered Obama? | NowThis

What If Fox News Covered Trump the Way It Covered Obama? | NowThis - YouTube

It is amazing..