Four Years After Trump Inauguration, CNN Host Admits Network's 'Dirty Little Secret'
Oh, thanks for telling us now, CNN.
While there will be a challenge to the Electoral College vote lodged by a group of Republican legislators on Wednesday, the odds are very much against that succeeding — and if it doesn’t, unfortunately, the reins of government are put in the hands of one Joe Biden, a man old enough to have worked actual systemic racists like arch-segregationist Sen. James O. Eastland of Mississippi and to spend at least one beautiful moment of this electoral cycle telling parents to fight primarily fictive systemic racism by leaving the record player on at night.
It’s a wonder that anyone thinks Biden is the man the country needs to stand up to our adversaries like China or North Korea. (Heck, he’s probably having trouble standing up at the moment, period, given that he broke his foot in early December in a bizarre manner involving his dog and his shower that didn’t get any clearer when you heard him expound upon it.)
But at least he’ll stand up to Russia.
Sure, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The Steele dossier, which was paid for in part by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to link Trump to Russia, has been debunked.
The special court warrants that dossier was used to secure, which allowed the FBI to surveil Trump campaign members, were flawed and came up with nothing, anyway.
Not a single person was convicted of colluding with Russia — and none of the opportunistic, ancillary charges and convictions the investigation secured in the hopes of breaking open what was supposedly the biggest electoral scandal of our lifetimes yielded one speck of information that proved President Donald Trump was the Muscovite candidate.
But you could see it, according to the liberal narrative: He’s been Russian President Vladimir Putin’s puppet. He’s acquiesced to Russian wishes. He’s turned America away from our traditional alliances and has been hard at work turning America into the most famous Russian satellite since Sputnik.
Except none of that is true — and now, at least, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is willing to admit that, yes, the Trump administration has been harder on Russia than the Obama administration was in many ways. Not that CNN talked much about that for four years or anything. In fact, Zakaria called it a “dirty little secret.” Sorry about that, America. What was that about democracy and what happens to it in darkness again? I can never remember that newspaper slogan.
Zakaria, host of CNN’s weekly “Fareed Zakaria GPS” was on Friday’s “New Day” — the show for the kind of person who can stand waking up with CNN. He was asked what the difference would be in terms of foreign policy between a Trump administration and a Biden administration.
For starters, Zakaria repeated banalities about Biden telling the world America is “back in the game” and will “help organize cooperative solutions around the world [and] get engaged with problem solving.”
How did Zakaria, a highly respected political commentator and journalist who became the managing editor of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs at age 28 come to this conclusion?
Mostly by repeating the messaging Joe Biden’s team puts out, almost word-for-word, just like the rest of CNN:
When I’m speaking to foreign leaders, I’m telling them: America is going to be back. We’re going to be back in the game.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) November 10, 2020
In practice, telling the world we’re “back in the game” seems to consist of nominating the same establishment foreign policy “blob” members like secretary of state pick Antony Blinken, who gives the impression of a man who conceivably came out of the womb already with a position on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Then, however, Zakaria was asked about “the dynamic with our perceived enemies, like Iran or Russia.”
The answer as at least somewhat accurate:
“I think in general, there isn’t going to be as much difference as people imagine. The Biden folks are pretty tough on Russia, Iran, North Korea,” Zakaria said.
“You know, the dirty little secret about the Trump administration was that while Donald Trump had clearly had a kind of soft spot for Putin, the Trump administration was pretty tough on the Russians. They armed Ukraine, they armed the Poles. They extended NATO operations and exercises in ways that even the Obama administration had not done. They maintained the sanctions. So I don’t think it will be that different.”
While Democrats were debating whether the Trump administration had a quid pro quo regarding military aid and the sale of weapons to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation into the Bidens’ links to the energy company Burisma, what we forget is there was, under the Obama administration, no “quid” to “pro quo” with.
Whereas the former administration refused to give military aid to Ukraine as a bulwark against further Russian aggression in the country, the Trump administration gave aid and approved the sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. Trump also agreed to shifted more American troops to Poland, as the New York Post reported — a move that angered the Kremlin, which has long sought to consolidate whatever influence it has over the country.
Oh, and don’t forget President Trump’s air strikes on Syria after they used chemical weapons against their own people, something Putin didn’t just shrug his shoulders at.
In the meantime, CNN built years of coverage off of “did-he-or-didn’t-he?” stories about President Trump and Russian collusion that assumed he did. For liberals, the Mueller Report was always supposed to be the deus ex machina that saved us all from this nightmare — and when it didn’t pan out, there were still the innuendoes.
In the meantime, though, the Trump administration was no friend to Russia. There was no “reset button” with Putin like under the Obama years. On the rare occasions that was mentioned on CNN, it was buried under the Trump-Russia innuendoes. And now we got a sentence or two from Fareed Zakaria about it almost four years after Trump was inaugurated.
Thanks, I guess.
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