This Doesn’t Deserve The Attention It Is Getting

Yesterday John Podhoretz posted an article at The New York Post about some unfounded allegations against President-elect Trump reported by Buzzfeed. John Podhoretz is not by any stretch of the imagination a Trump supporter, and these are his comments about the allegations:

So the website BuzzFeed decided to publish a series of memos that have been floating around for months alleging all kinds of terrible things about Donald Trump.

Some of those terrible allegations have to do with efforts to influence the American elections and Trump. Some of them have to do with Trump’s personal sexual conduct.

…There is literally no evidence on offer in these memos or from BuzzFeed that any single sentence in these documents is factual or true. What’s more, we know most major news organizations in America had seen them and despite their well-known institutional antipathy toward Trump, had chosen not to publish them or even make reference to them after efforts to substantiate their charges had failed.

…“Publishing this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017,” Smith (Ben Smith, editor of Buzzfeed) writes. This is an amazing thing to say, because if you think it through, it means publishing open libels and slanders is the job of reporters in 2017.

Fake news will become more sophisticated, and fake, ambiguous, and spun-up stories will spread widely,” warned an important American editor at the end of December 2016. His name: Ben Smith. His publication: BuzzFeed.

Every day we see new evidence of the threat Donald Trump as President poses to the status quo in Washington. It is amazing. It is not just Democrats–some high level Republicans would also like very much to discredit President Trump before he takes office. If he can be stopped before he takes the oath of office, President Trump won’t be able to interfere with the cushy lifestyles that Washington politicians have acquired through insider trading, rewarding large donors, and exempting themselves from the laws that they have passed. The Buzzfeed story has been claimed as a hoax (story here). However, this won’t be the last story we hear reporting horrible things about Donald Trump. I would love to be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am.