How to lie while sort of telling the truth
By stepping lightly over the real cause of the hostage release deal, New York Times temporarily wins its ongoing deceit battle with the Washington Post
There’s a reason trust in reporters keeps plunging. Take a look at this paragraph from today’s NYT story (emphasis added):
A deal to free Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners could be finalized days before President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. The scenario is reminiscent of 1981, when American hostages held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for more than a year were freed just as Ronald Reagan became commander in chief.
Let’s try that second sentence again:
The scenario is reminiscent of 1981, when American hostages held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for more than a year were freed just as a cowardly fool of a President was about to be replaced by someone Islamic terrorists could not count on to sit there and do nothing except bark at Israel.
The hostage release is the story of the year so far, but I guarantee you the MSM will continue to pretend with all its might and mendacity that the hostage-freeing arrangement apparently agreed upon within the last few hours had zip to do with Donald Trump’s personality and, in particular, his promise last month that there would be “hell to pay” if the terrorists did not start freeing hostages before he assumed power. To the contrary, when the NYT reported that promise, it sniffed, “It was not clear what tactic Mr. Trump might take that has not already been taken already by Israel, which has killed many of Hamas’s leaders and thousands of its fighters, while leveling much of Gaza.”
It might not be clear to the NYT, but it’s plenty clear to those who think it’s a bad idea to watch month after month while the United States (yes, there’s at least one American hostage, if he hasn’t been tortured to death) and its allies are humiliated on the world stage. We could, for example, put a horse’s head in Supreme Leader’s bed and tell him that, unless the hostages were released, he had 24 hours before it’s his head.
And no, let’s not hear (again) that it wasn’t really Iran, it was some proxy bunch of terrorists not under Iran’s control. If Iran had wanted the hostages released, it would have happened on October 8, 2023. To pretend not to know this is either foolishness or some flimsy cover for cowardice or both. It’s brought to you by the same crowd the American people decided to kick out on election day — i.e., the Wise Furrowed Brows who kept warning about a “wider war;” hectoring Israel to act more “humanitarian” toward Gaza, the most flagrant terrorist encampment on earth; and whose anti-Semitic impulses at home and abroad became so apparent in recent years that even the mainstream press started to have trouble hiding them.
As Paul and I have often said, Trump’s sometimes irresponsible, erratic and unpredictable character is pregnant with trouble, starting (again) in five days. But what the Left is either too stupid to realize or, much more likely, simply refuses to realize, is that those very qualities are also trouble for America’s enemies. At the root of their refusal is their poorly concealed sympathy for those enemies, a sympathy at the core of their ideology: That America is the Cesspool of History — little more than a long, disgusting footnote to slavery (hence their embrace of “1619” and their obsession with race), and — to the extent there’s anything else — a cruel, violent, misogynist blight on the world.
This is why a Democratic administration is inherently incapable of dealing effectively with the dangers facing our country, most vividly and grotesquely illustrated by the hostage crises: To put it oversimplistically, they halfway hope those posing the dangers will succeed, because, in the Leftist version of our history, they deserve to succeed, while we deserve the shame and the stern “reckoning” (as in the name of this newsletter) they’re going to hand us.
Trump, for all his failings and flaws, is the real reason any of these hostages is going to see freedom again. The MSM can massage this all it wants, but it can’t make it untrue.
UPDATE: I have just now seen Paul’s thorough and insightful post, and agree with it in toto. The deal is appalling (in my view, essentially any deal with hostage-takers is appalling, because it’s immoral per se and produces perverse incentives for the terrorists to do it again, but the present deal is especially awful). My points here are, by contrast, limited but, I think, important: First, just as with Reagan’s then-approaching inauguration in 1981, absent the imminence of Trump’s return to power, there would be no deal at all; second, that the MSM is going to walk around this fact as best it can; and third, that there would be a much better outcome if Israel had been able to hold out until Biden and his group were out of town, which, as Paul notes, it might have found difficult to do because of its own non-frivolous doubts about Trump’s reliability.