Tucker Carlson: Media Will Escape Reckoning and Consequences They Deserve, Will Get Rich From Failure – RealClearPolitics

TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” End quote. That is Robert Mueller’s conclusion after nearly two years of investigating the matter. The attorney general repeated versions of that sentence four times in his summary of Mueller’s report, released yesterday. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, it is now factually established that he did not collude with Vladimir Putin to steal the presidential election. Period. That case is now closed.

This is the point in the story where applause breaks out. Not just cheers from Trump and his family and campaign staff, and all those who were told they were going to be indicted, but weren’t. But gratitude from the country itself, from all Americans. For years, we have been told our government was being controlled by a foreign power. There were spies in our midst. The president of the United States was disloyal, a quisling. An agent of a nation that hates us and seeks our destruction. That man was at the helm of our country. Destroying democracy. Undermining our values. Poisoning this nation from within. It was terrifying. And millions of Americans were indeed terrified. Some wept as they talked about their fear and helplessness. Now we know that none of it was true. You would think the relief at learning this would be overpowering, like finding out that a terminal diagnosis was just the flu. A long and bitter war has ended. We are safe.

But that is not how most of the left is responding. They are not celebrating tonight for their country. They are not grateful. They are angrier than ever. To them, the Mueller investigation has proved nothing and exonerated no one. Russian collusion is as real as it was the day Hillary Clinton first alleged it. Progressives have not surrendered. The vast robot army of the Democratic Party fights on as if nothing has changed:

Joy Reid: But the fact that this investigation takes place within the Justice Department, which Donald Trump essentially controls and he got rid of the problem Jeff Sessions, who the one decent thing that he did was recuse himself. This guy is not recused, it feels like the seeds of a cover-up are here.

A cover-up. And not just a cover-up, but a cover-up being perpetuated with the help of Mr. Robert S. Mueller, the very man you thought you trusted and loved, the one whose report you looked forward to like Christmas. The grey-haired avenging angel of truth, who was going to deliver you from the orange scourge. Our friend Robert Mueller. It turns out Mueller was part of this conspiracy too. It was a conspiracy so brilliant and complex that he and other 18 federal prosecutors conducted a two-year Potemkin investigation in order to shield the plot from discovery. Diabolical. Why would Mueller do that? Come on. You know the answer, because it’s always the same answer: Robert Mueller is a racist. Obviously:

Elie Mystal: Look if I’m the Trump children tonight, I’m having a party. They won the white privilege regatta. There’s not an African-American person in this country that could have been investigated for 22 months, had their family investigated for 22 months and come away scot-free.

If this sounds like a far-fetched claim, keep in mind that you’re the wacko. They’re always telling you that. You’re a conspiracy nut, they’ll say. You believe in crazy things on the basis of zero evidence, you and Alex Jones. You think the left is coming for your guns. You think mass immigration is hurting the country. You think illegal aliens are voting in elections. You imagine the tech companies are censoring political speech. You don’t trust the media. And by the way, you don’t believe in science, which is why you’re hesitant to give a 29-year-old freshman member of congress complete control over the US economy. You’re a lunatic. You should be ignored.

So should Trump. Go ahead and ignore his complaints about being persecuted. He’s just whining. Here’s NBC suggesting that it’s actually Donald Trump — the guy who’s been falsely denounced for betraying his country as a Russian agent — who owes the apology. An apology to the prosecutors who hounded him:

GUTHRIE: Did Robert Mueller deserve better than this kind of behavior and language from the president than this kind of language and behavior? (edit) He trashed him for two years and in the end, Mueller just did an investigation that ultimately the president considers a total exoneration of him. Does he owe Robert Mueller an apology for that kind of rhetoric?

If goes without saying that Democratic members of congress echoed these sentiments. Or maybe it was the other way around, the media aping the Democratic party. Suddenly it’s hard to tell who’s taking cues from whom. Any remaining distinctions between journalists and the country’s ruling class have long since disappeared. Reporters used to boast about holding the powerful to account. Now they scramble to do their bidding. The Washington Post is owned by the richest progressive in the world. They’re all one interest group now. You can’t tell one from another. Politicians and prosecutors and intel agency heads told us implausible lies about Russian collusion. Reporters didn’t push back. Instead, they welcomed those lies, and amplified them. They were proud to do it. They’re not apologizing for it now.

In their first statement after the Mueller report’s summary became public, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leaders in congress, didn’t mention the fact that Trump had been cleared of collusion. Neither did any Democratic politician appearing on cable news Virginia Congressman Don Beyer insisted this morning “that there was a lot of collusion within the Trump campaign,” even though Robert Mueller, whom Democrats has told us many times is the final word on the question, had himself already said otherwise.

Nobody was fooled by any of this. Mueller’s summary is on the internet. You can read it yourself. By lying about the obvious, Democrats merely revealed themselves to be everything they claim Trump is: stupid, irresponsible, reckless, corrupt, buffoonish. They had to know their talking points weren’t working. They repeated them anyway. They didn’t know what else to say. Over on CNN, Jeff Zucker dispatched his eunuch to address the channel’s viewership, meaning those Americans trapped at the airport waiting for flights. You may think CNN has been lying to you relentlessly for the last two years, the eunuch explained. Not at all. CNN has done a fantastic job. None of this is our fault. We’re amazing. Listen to him squeak:

STELTER: Reporting is what adds the most value. Finding out something new, putting out new information into the world is the best feeling in journalism. It is the greatest value-add. That’s what hundreds of journalists have been doing, trying to solve pieces of this Trump- Russia puzzle. (edit) So, don’t be fooled by the partisans who cherry-picked the worst mistakes of individual journalists or the craziest ideas from commentators and claim that’s the entire media. It’s not. We are waiting for the facts, because here is what I know. I mean, you’re going to hear it from the right for the next days and weeks to come, that the press is basically made all this up to take down President Trump. But the press is just following a trail that Trump created.

“The greatest value-add.” That’s how CNN sums up its role in the Russia story. Does a single person believe that? Of course not. Not one. Zucker himself doesn’t believe it. That’s why he sent his marionette to lie. Jeff Zucker is an anxious man right now. He’s been caught doing the one thing journalists aren’t allowed to do. He intentionally mislead his audience. In a fair world, Zucker would be running a car wash, or selling time-shares in Cancun. He wouldn’t be in the news business. Zucker himself knows that. He knows he’s an imposter.

In a fair world, CNN wouldn’t call itself a news network. It’s far less than that, and has been for a long time. In 1996, CNN blamed the Olympic bombings in Atlanta on an entirely innocent security guard named Richard Jewell. In the end, CNN paid Jewell a settlement for slander, but Jewell never recovered his life. Just two years later, CNN falsely accused the United States military of murdering american defectors during the Vietnam War with sarin gas. It was a ludicrous story, based on obvious lies. CNN ran it anyway, because it confirmed their world view. Three years after that, CNN implied, again on the basis of no evidence, that a California congressman called Gary Condit had murdered one of his interns. CNN’s relentless coverage helped drive Condit from office. Condit turned out to be innocent. Too late. His life and family were destroyed.

You’d think a news network might learn from debacles like this. Yet under the leadership of Jeff Zucker, CNN’s recklessness and dishonestly have only accelerated. In September, CNN told us that Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavanaugh was a serial gang rapist alcoholic who targeted underage girls. In January, they told us that a group of boys from a Catholic school in Kentucky were dangerous bigots, who’d threatened a revered tribal elder Vietnam veteran, purely because they hated American Indians. Every part of that claim was a lie. CNN is now facing a $275 million dollar lawsuit for repeating it. Yet CNN kept going. Just days after its Covington Catholic fraud, CNN decided to amplify yet another racially divisive hoax, Jussie Smollett’s manufactured hate crime. And now this. Exactly two weeks after Smollett was indicted for telling the same lies that CNN uncritically repeated, we learn that the Russian collusion narrative — which has formed the backbone of CNN’s entire programming schedule for two years — is fake. It’s a hoax. It never happened. CNN responded by congratulating itself. Jeff Zucker still runs the network. His job apparently is safe. CNN’s anchors wonder aloud why Americans don’t trust the news media. “Must be that propaganda from Fox News!” Must be. It has absolutely nothing to do with coverage like this:

CNN: ANDERSON COOPER: Potentially big news questions in the Russia investigation and the corresponding lack of answers from the White House,

JIM ACOSTA: Any kind of collusion with the Russians,

DON LEMON: And then there’s the Russia investigation,

PHIL MUDD: We know the Russians were involved in interfering in the election,

CNN’s CUOMO: How do you explain the Manafort allegations as anything but collusion?

CNN’s CARL BERNSTEIN: It’s on the question of collusion. Possible collusion with Russia,

DON LEMON: Fact. It’s Russia.

“Fact. It’s Russia.” Ok. Thanks for that, Mr. L’Mon. So what are these voices of authority on CNN saying now that the facts have arrived? Have they apologized or corrected themselves or even acknowledged their role in perpetuating a hoax? Let’s see. Here’s Carl Bernstein, whose sloppy Watergate reporting from half a century ago somehow keeps him on television to this day. Carl has thought a lot about this question. He’s decided that, in his august and seasoned opinion as a celebrated newsman, CNN did a remarkable job here:

Bernstein: “And I think we’ve done – the media, the press – has done one of the greatest reporting jobs in the history, especially of covering a presidency, by the most news organizations. And let’s look where the disinformation and mistakes and lying have come from. It hasn’t come from the press. It’s come from the President of the United States and those around him.”

In case you’re wondering why Donald Trump got elected, you just saw it. Trump may be flawed, but the people in charge are just absurd. The Washington Post and The New York Times don’t know that. They still believe they’re more accurate than Alex Jones. They have no idea why Donald Trump won the election. They wholeheartedly agree with their friend Carl Bernstein. Both of those newspapers won Pulitzer Prizes for their Russia coverage. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee commended the reporters for their quote, “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.” End quote.

Read that again. You might want to print those words, as a keepsake memento, like that “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline from the Chicago Tribune. A monument to human absurdity. Your grandchildren can read it and snicker. The Times and the Post don’t get the joke. They have no plans to return their prizes. They think they did a great job.

The rest of us can keep laughing, but there’s ominous lesson here too. Our leaders aren’t fit to lead. They have no idea what they’re doing, and they won’t admit it. They are hysterical children, cruel and stupid and vain. They care only about themselves. They learn nothing from their mistakes. And so, their self-regard undiminished, they march on to the next disaster, full of self-righteous confidence.

The next battle, they tell us, is over obstruction of justice. It doesn’t occur to them that justice is precisely what we got yesterday. Nineteen federal prosecutors spent nearly two years investigating the Democratic Party’s claim that Donald Trump stole the Presidential election. Investigators had a limitless budget or no restrictions of any kind. They hired dozens of FBI agents, intelligence analysts and forensic accountants to help them. The issued nearly 3,000 subpoenas. They received hundreds of search warrants, and hundreds more surveillance orders. They showed up at people’s homes with automatic weapons. They spied on American citizens, read their texts and downloaded their emails. They interviewed at least 500 separate witnesses. Not since September 11th have federal investigators dug more deeply into a case. In the end, they proved the charges false. Democrats have decided to ignore the findings. Instead, they say, they want “justice.” By which, of course, they mean revenge. Punishment. Power. That’s what they’ve always wanted. The rest of this, the Mueller investigation included, was staged purely for show. Shame on the rest of us for falling for it.

You’d like to believe the people who did this will be held accountable. They hurt our country. They poisoned our public sphere. They distorted our foreign policy. They terrified our population. They should be punished. It’s not like we don’t punish people here. We live in a society where people lose their jobs for believing in biology, where college students risk having their lives ruined for telling the wrong joke. America is suddenly an extremely punitive place. But these people will escape what they deserve. You know they will, because they so often have before. The very same people who’ve pushed the Russia collusion conspiracy are the ones who told us Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in 2003. A few years later, they assured us the housing market was absolutely solid, no problem. Go ahead and invest. Just the other day, they informed us that we’ll have to stay in Syria and Afghanistan forever because of threats only they understand. Tomorrow, they’ll be telling you to take the bus to work because of global warming.

They will never take the bus. They won’t have to. They’ll never face the consequences of their disasters. They’ll keep getting rich from failure: another TV contract, or committee chairmanship, or fat grant from a Soros-funded foundation. And as they prosper, they’ll keep lecturing you from Twitter about your imaginary moral failings: “Shut up, racist. Obey.” That’s what’s likely to happen in the aftermath of this hoax. That’s what’s always happened. How long do they think this can continue?