Cable news is an alternate reality where thoughtful analysis goes to die, like when CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash and CNN contributor Timothy Naftali argued Friday that recent tweets by President Trump were as bad, if not worse, than McCarthyism.
On Friday, Trump rage-tweeted at the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine as she testified for the House’s impeachment investigation.
“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors,” the president said.
He added, “They call it ‘serving at the pleasure of the President.’ The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.”
Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2019
Pundits and politicos, including House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-California, responded immediately to the tweets, characterizing them as a blatant attempt by the president to intimidate a congressional witness.
It is “witness intimidation,” Schiff said Friday during the hearing. Yovanovitch agreed, telling the congressional panel that Trump’s tweets were indeed “very intimidating.”
Not to be outdone by members of Congress or by peers in the press, Naftali said later during a CNN panel, “We have not seen a climate of intimidation of public servants like this since the McCarthy period. … Innuendo, false accusations, [and] conspiracy theories to take down career professionals.”
Bash took things a step further, arguing that Trump’s tweets are actually worse than McCarthyism.
“You talked about this being like McCarthyism,” CNN’s chief political correspondent said. “It’s almost worse, in that McCarthy used horrible tactics, but he had a very clear ideology, a policy goal which is to get rid of Communism.”
She added, “Here, there’s no policy goal. It’s a political goal. It’s the president of the United States trying to further his political future, full stop.”
Except why stop with McCarthy? Why not Hitler?
Members of the press appear to be caught in a seemingly never-ending game to see who can come up with the most overwrought, hyperbolic characterizations of things said and done by members of the Trump administration. Shoehorning in great buzzwords like “McCarthyism” makes sense, even if the comparison seems ill-fitting or even silly.
What is surprising, and what I never expected to see from a major newsroom, is a mainstream commentator putting down Trumpism by lauding the ideological merits of McCarthyism. That’s a new one on me. But I guess that is where we are today, what with impeachment hysteria reaching a fever pitch in our nation’s leading newsrooms.
I don’t know about you, but I am getting some really, really bad flashbacks to the media-promoted Russian “collusion” hysteria, which saw CNN contributors throwing around overemotional analyses and words like “treason.” If we are lucky, maybe there will at least be a point to this impeachment business.
